Hit her, baby, one more time
In response to yesterday’s post, Anonymous writes —
“Why would Britney”… is already the wrong approach and question. Why do you see an individual reasoning? This is no play. “Britney”, as one can see from Moore’s film, is an idiot, in the real sense of the word. Really, nothing personal, she is. How many interviews and subsequent white-trashtastic failures does it take to show over the YEARS, the chances to prove after her mother-managed first years that she understood anything, are gone. We talk about a “poor” girl who is rumoured to make 700thou a MONTH without doing anything. Such is the sublime banality of the U.S. media culture.
This comment interests me. Anonymous’s anger here is palpable, and reflects some of the strong feelings I’ve been hearing about Ms. Spears’s attempted comeback (including another long piece in the New York Times today). Any artist who makes people this angry must be worthy of some kind of attention.
So let’s examine this comment a little more closely.
Spears’s individuality, in Anonymous’s opinion, hinges on the fact of her supposed idiocy. If I’m reading this correctly, what Anonymous seems to be saying is that Britney is too stupid to have a successful career on her own, that she has been managed and packaged and handled and promoted and, if left to her own devices, would be unable to string two words together or feed herself properly.
Well, let me just say that I have no problem with that. I don’t demand that artists be scholars, or even particularly bright. I don’t care if they are drooling morons, as long as they have something to contribute to our culture. Elvis Presley had trouble with food, drugs and sex, Frank Sinatra was an alcoholic, woman-beating psychopath, Chuck Berry was a pathetic degenerate and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin. None of these guys would ever make it at the Algonquin round table, but each one of them is a sublime, significant American artist.
So what is eating Anonymous? Spears’s “idiocy” is related, in the poster’s mind, to her “white-trashtastic failures.” So it’s a class thing then perhaps, Anonymous is upset not because a pop-star is a failure, but because she is betraying her “class.” I personally don’t know Spears’s background so I don’t know if she’s reverting to her white-trash roots or not. But let’s bring up Elvis again, since Spears decided to the other night it seems fair game. Elvis Presley was renowned for what Anonymous would call “white-trashtastic failures.” In Elvis’s mind, he was always and forever a white-trash truck-driver who got lucky, and his subsequent actions reflect that. He had terrible taste in clothes, food and manners, and behaved in the most garish, uncouth and barbaric ways, so much so that, by the end of his life, his personal tastes had completely overshadowed his substantial musical legacy. So I, for one, am still unconvinced by Anonymous’s argument — I don’t need my artists to be refined sophisticates any more than I need them to be scholars.
Next, Anonymous is outraged by Spears’s alleged income. This I can reject out of hand — you sing a super-hit song, you get millions of dollars. That’s the way it goes. I may like the song, I may not (and in the case of Spears, I couldn’t even hum it for you), but if people bought her music, she deserves the money. Lots of popular artists make art I don’t cotton to that other people do — I see nothing wrong here.
But now, Anonymous’s argument gets interesting. “The sublime banality of the US media culture.” Ah, so, it’s a national problem — Spears is a symptom of some sort of larger national disgrace.
Anonymous has, I think, hit on something here. We here in the US have been living through six years of utter bullshit, not unlike the England of Orwell’s 1984. We have been told, day after day, for six years, things that everyone can plainly see are untrue. This has produced a kind of national nausea, we’re like a nation of abused children being ruled by bullies who want to punch anybody who wears glasses, and a media culture who will snigger along with the bullies as they beat up the nerds and laugh at all their pranks. We know the Bush administration was wrong in their response to 9/11, we know they lied to us about Iraq, we know they abused the darkest moment of our recent national history in the most cynical and heartless way possible to gut our constitution and ransack our national treasury. We took five years of that and then elected a Democratic congress, who has, so far, done precisely nothing that we asked them to do. We, as a people, feel powerless and bitterly, bitterly frustrated after six years of being ruled by cruel, brutal monsters who are aware of every moment of our agony and laugh to each other about it, slap each other on the back and say “Heckuva job.”
We feel like we can’t do anything about Bush or the media who writes down every stupid lie he utters as though it is truth and common sense. We can, however, do something about Britney Spears, who, as Anonymous says, is, like Bush, an idiot, a puppet controlled by a machine, raking in cash, promoted by our national media, made famous for her embarrassing “white-trash” pratfalls while the rest of us suffer. We can’t get Bush out of office, but we can destroy the career of Britney Spears.
I must admit, I was baffled by the Times headline today — “Spears’s Awards Fiasco Stirs Speculation About Her Future.” I thought, really? Speculation about her future? From who? Why? Who cares? Why is this in the New York Times?
And I realized, this isn’t about Spears at all, this is about Bush, or rather, it is about our national health. Spears, we have decided, no longer deserves the fame and wealth we heaped upon her — she has betrayed us. Given the perfect context and opportunity for a “comeback,” she flubbed it — took the TV time and the money, stumbled as badly through her routine as Bush stumbles through a simple declarative English sentence, and said “now give me my career back.” We’ve had six years of this bullshit and we’re not going to take it any more.
(The timing could not have been worse, putting on this non-show so close to the anniversary of 9/11, and with the Petraeus testimony looming the next day. We as a nation were at our highest level of shame, disgust and anger toward our elected officials that night. What if Spears had triumphed? She could have truly “come back” in the Elvis sense, been a truly popular artist who does what a truly popular (that is, “of the people”) artist does — she could have taken the anxieties, hopes and dreams of a nation and crystallized them into a pure pop moment of power, hope and, sure, why not, sex — man, what a show that would have been! Why, that would have been like Elvis Presley getting his act together and proving himself for his Christmas special in — what year was that again? oh yeah, 1968, the high-water year of Vietnam and the year the entire world rioted. See, that’s what was riding on Elvis in 68, that’s why he closed the show with “If I Can Dream” — his message was “Hey, World, I pulled it together, I lost the weight, I regained my focus, and I deeply care — why can’t you?”)
What was the name of Spears’s song on Sunday? Oh yes — “Gimme More” — the chant of the Bush administration. Why wasn’t the song called “Four More Years?” Britney demanded more, just as Bush has demanded more — more of the middle-class’s money, more of the poor’s children, more of our national dignity, all without giving us anything in return. We cannot rebel against a grinning moron who controls the courts, the Congress and the media, but by gum we can certainly rebel against a stumbling buffoon who demands that we watch a lame, three-minute dance routine. Not to sound too much like the hysterical young man now, doubtless, famous on Youtube for his impassioned defense, but I suspect that Britney is now dying for the sins of Bush.
If you’re looking for trouble…
It is not the goal of this journal to engage in cheap gossip. However, it has come to my attention that Britney Spears has, apparently intentionally, crossed over into an area of my interest.
I know almost nothing about Britney Spears, except that she was a music star a while back and has since gone on to a career in gossip headlines. Her appearance the other night at MTV’s VMAs was front-page news on, of all things, The New York Times, which got my attention, but when one of my favorite comics bloggers Occasional Superheroine devoted a column to it, I had to see what all the fuss was about.
First, I know nothing about the music of Britney Spears, except that she probably doesn’t make enough of it. It seems to me, if everyone talks about you being washed up, the answer to that is to work more. Maybe the work will suck, maybe it won’t, maybe it will take you in strange new directions, but if you don’t go away sooner or later they have to take you seriously. If Bob Dylan or Elvis Costello or Madonna packed it up every time critics said they sucked, our musical landscape would have a much different shape today.
So okay, maybe Britney Spears doesn’t have that kind of ambition or talent. So fine. But then, here she is, making her “comeback.” Now then, the thing about “comebacks?” You don’t call it a “comeback.” You don’t get to decide you’re making a “comeback,” it’s for other people to say when you’ve made a “comeback.”
Now then: Ms. Spears, for reasons that utterly baffle me, chose for her “comeback” appearance an homage/parody/whatever to the opening of Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special (and please note that the ’68 Comeback Special was originally known as something like “Singer Presents Elvis” or some other godawful corporate title). She has cleverly changed the words of “Trouble” to the words from “Woman” (both songs were written by Leiber and Stoller, and have the same melodies).
(I, for one, do not criticize Ms. Spears for gaining weight. If “hotness” is what she was after, she looked plenty “hot” to me (although her spangled bikini did not seem to fit her well). HOWEVER, if you’re going to go out on stage like that, perhaps it’s best not to open with a song that contains the lyrics “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan.” Because all I could think of after that was “And then eat it.”)
The question is, WHY, oh why, would Britney Spears choose to honor/parody/whatever one of the true diamond-hard everlasting moments of Pop Greatness for her “comeback?” The “Trouble/Guitar Man” number at the top of the ’68 Comeback Special is still electrifying and flabbergasting 40 years later — and Britney Spears makes a deliberate allusion to it, hoping to compare herself to — what now? Elvis? Twelve years after he changed the face of American culture, ten years after being drafted, eight years after starting his string of never-ending soul-crushing movies? Britney is inviting us to compare her years in the wilderness to that?
All would have been forgiven, of course, if she had then delivered. But she did not. Her performance of the number is abysmal — she shuffles around the stage as though she just woke up, not bothering to lip-sync, much less sing, pacing through the dance routines as though practicing in front of the TV instead of performing in front of millions of viewers.
Anyway, there’s my two cents.
Harry Potter and the Big Zipper
I’m working on a project for some people, a family movie that deals with fantastical goings-on. The producers have politely requested that I create a script that will make for a series of movies as popular as Harry Potter. Problem is, there’s something missing from the source material, some nugget of narrative drive that isn’t allowing the material to cohere in the way we’d like.
In the room, the producer and I struggle to define this missing element. The source material has many fine, delightful moments but lacks a focus, a sturdy structure that would make them fly like eagles instead of puttering around like pigeons. It’s a spine, I offer, the story needs a strong spine to hang its muscles and organs on. But that’s not exactly right. Later on I think it’s more like a clothesline, a strong cord that stretches from beginning to end, and the different set-pieces hang on it like colorful clothes snapping in the breeze. But that’s not quite it either.
Then I hit on the idea of a zipper. There are multiple plot-lines in the source material and we need to see that they’re not random events that somehow add up to a story, but rather they’re the teeth of a zipper and the slider needs to move along, gathering them up and placing them in mesh with each other to form a tightly-knit bond to a water-tight narrative.
If the Harry Potter movies have a problem, it’s that they, too, have many wonderful set-pieces that aren’t necessarily related to the main story (and the books, from what I’m told, dramatically more so). And yet, they are phenomenally popular. So I thought I’d take another look at the Harry Potter movies to see what their zipper is.
Early on in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it is revealed that Harry Potter is the sole survivor of a child massacre (they don’t call him The Boy Who Lived for nothing). He Who Cannot Be Named was wiping out infant wizards (and their parents) in an attempt to destroy the child who one day will grow up to destroy him (that is, HWCBN). When that little narrative tidbit flew by the first time I thought “yeah, sure, standard-issue hero’s journey stuff, what happens next?”
UPDATE: It seems I am incorrect in the particulars of Harry’s beginnings. In the movie, it is stated that Voldemort rose up and became evil, and killed anyone who stood in his way, including Harry’s parents. No one, we are told, survived this assault, except Harry. I put two and two together and mistakenly believed that they had shown Voldemort slaying an innocent child, when what the movie shows, apparently, is Voldemort leveling his wand at the young Harry’s forehead. I thought they were showing another child’s slaughter instead of Harry’s failed murder. I maintain that a child would not get the nickname “The Boy Who Lived” if there had not been Boys Who Died, but there is no specific child massacre mentioned in the movie.
This changes, slightly, the viewpoint of the observations below, but I don’t think completely devalues them. There still exists the threat of child sacrifice by the unnamed (or, in this case, unnamable) evil and the assault on education by the oppressor (which I hope to get to in more detail in upcoming posts).
Now then, I’m reading David Mamet’s recent book on anti-Semitism (spoiler alert: he’s against it) and I come across this observation:
“The memory of absolute wrongs causes absolute trauma in a race, just as in the individual. Incalculably ancient race memory of dinosaurs persists to this day, transformed as an affection for the dragon. Memory of the most traumatic of cultural acts, child sacrifice, can be seen, hidden in plain sight, as ceremonies of transformation, redemption, and, in fact, of jollity. Like the Santa Claus myth, the Akedah, the Crucifixion, are ineradicable race memories of infant sacrifice, and of the deeply buried wish to resume its practice, so racism must be the unresolved race memory of slavery.”
(In a footnote, Mamet explicates on his Santa Claus reference: “The Santa Claus myth is a straightforward account of child sacrifice. It must, however, be read in the mirror. Children can be good or bad. They put their stockings out, and, in the middle of the night, a man comes into their home with a bag. If the child has been bad, the man puts the child in a sack and takes him away. All that is left of him is his stocking, hung on the foot of the bed…It is no great stretch to see, here, the anguish of a family in antiquity, knowing the tribe will choose, at the winter solstice, some child to be sacrificed and to see the parents wish to extend the child’s period of exemption from terror for as long as possible.”)
To the Akedah (that is, the story of Isaac), Santa and the Crucifixion, I will add the Ten Plagues of Egypt, Herod, Noah and King Arthur. JK Rowling has tapped into one of the grandest, most disturbing themes of human history, and that she did so within the context of a “children’s book” about magic and wizardry counts as a stroke of true genius. For, as Mamet notes later in the same book:
“There is an aesthetic quality in fundamentalism, in jingoism, in jihad — a pure joy in the rejection not only of reasoned religion but also, indeed, of science.
“‘Belief’ is such a potent force that it may replace logic: we may burn the heretic books that speak of ‘evolution,’ and we may say the cost is huge: the loss of scientific method, but this is not a loss at all but a gain, the repeal of the taxing concept of cause and effect.”
And I’m going to go ahead and add here that a lot of humanity’s modern anxiety comes from the fact that science, for all its given us, has not satisfied our need for myth, for magic, for surrender to mystery. For tens of thousands of years, the sun came up and went down and waxed and waned and we didn’t know why and there was nothing we could do about it — crops would die, animals would freeze and the big bright circle up in the sky seemed to periodically hate us to death, when the other big circle in the sky wasn’t trying to drown us with swollen tides and the big puffy things in the sky weren’t trying to strike us with bolts of lightning. The mystery of the elements is so deeply ingrained in our ancient psyches that we secretly long to return to the days of paganism and helplessness before Sol Invictus.
Rowling has smushed together magic and science at Hogwarts to come up with something altogether revolutionary. Harry Potter was born to be the savior of his people, the only survivor of a child massacre. He gains knowledge (that is, science) through his education at Hogwarts, but his science is expressed as magic (and, lest we forget, Asimov [or Clarke, see below] once observed that any science, sufficiently developed, is indistinguishable from magic) and through his education he fulfills his destiny. Fundamentalists are always in an uproar against Harry Potter, and now I can finally see why — he needles them from both directions. He’s a wizard, which is heretical, but he’s also a scientist, which is even more heretical. He spends his narrative gathering education about magic, education and magic being two things no fundamentalist can stand. No wonder they want to destroy him.
Placing is protagonist at the center of some of our most powerful anxieties surely counts as a very big zipper indeed and I suggest is a strong reason for Harry Potter’s popularity.
As a postscript, anyone out there know What Voldemort Wants? Aside from power, I mean? What’s his Monday Morning plan? When all the threats against him are destroyed, what is his plan for ruling the wizard world?
The more you know
Long-time reader and Confidante-Of-Alcott The Editor points me toward today’s book review.
Well, this is certainly worth a look.
Movie Night with Urbaniak: Black Narcissus
Not Richard Roundtree.
I’d never seen Black Narcissus before, but it’s come up a number of times in conversations lately (as in “You’ve never seen Black Narcissus?!” or “Well, if you’re interested in Michael Powell, the place you should start is Black Narcissus.“).
I don’t know why I’ve put off seeing it, but for some reason I always thought it was another “hip,” updated retelling of a Greek myth a la Black Orpheus. Either that or a gritty 1970s Harlem crime thriller starring Richard Roundtree. (“Narcissus is back, and this time — he’s black!“)
Anyway, it’s neither of those things. It’s an early Technicolor masterpiece about a bunch of nuns who try to open a convent on a mountain redoubt in the Himalaya. It’s photography was about ten years ahead of its time and its sexual tension was at least thirty.
Essentially an allegory about British colonialism, a group of uptight, sexually repressed British nuns (are there other kinds?) led by Sister Clodagh decide it’s a good idea to open a franchise in a “wild,” “simple” land where “the men are men, the women are women and the children are children.” The free, “childlike” ways of the locals and the clear mountain air conspire to drive all the nuns a little crazy as they struggle to reign in their desires and neuroses. English civilization crash-lands on the rocks of local superstition, the local prince falls in love with the local slut, and man trouble erupts in the form of local shirtless handyman Mr. Dean. Eventually the story devolves into a horror movie as one of the nuns, Sister Ruth, proves herself to be even more tightly wound than Sister Clodagh and becomes Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Deborah Kerr is measured and nuanced as Sister Clodagh and Kathleen Byron is appropriately high-strung as Sister Ruth, but otherwise the acting in the movie is about as broad and hysterical as it gets. British stage actors play Indians (talk about a director missing his own metaphor!) so big it’s as if they’re waiting for the applause to follow their most outrageous moments. Jean Simmons plays the Paris Hilton of the Himalaya with teeth-baring, hip-swiveling gusto. David Farrar should smolder and seduce as Mr. Dean, but instead he just kind of stands around and poses. As
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
notes, it doesn’t help that he looks like Kevin Nealon, if Kevin Nealon underwent plastic surgery to look more like Daniel Day-Lewis.
Attention World
I am now cool.
How, you may ask, has this improbable event come to pass?
The explanation is devilishly simple — I have recorded a voice for an upcoming episode of The Venture Bros. Yes, it’s true, I made the trek from Santa Monica to a sound studio in Burbank, a sound studio cleverly concealed within the converted garage in the back yard of a non-descript fake-Craftsman house on an anonymous street in an anonymous neighborhood in Southern California’s most anonymous city, not far from the Bob Hope Airport and beneath a row of enormous power lines. It was here in these secret surroundings that my transition from Fool to Cool was made complete. The lines were recited, the tape rolled and magic was created.
Needless to say, the details of the plot are highly confidential and cannot be revealed, even to me. In fact, I was not even given a script to read. Rather, for security purposes, I simply recorded a series of phonemes that will later be edited together by Mr. Publick to form words and sentences.
But Todd! you will gasp in disbelief. You suck! You suck, and voices for The Venture Bros. are only recorded by the coolest of the cool! Stephen Colbert does a voice on The Venture Bros.! Can I get a sweet gig like that?
It turns out yes, you can! The process, it turns out, is startlingly simple.
First, befriend Venture Bros. star voice-actor James
for 18 years. Then, ingratiateyourself with
by writing and publishing long, detailed, in-depth analyses of all 26 episodes of his TV show. If your analyses please him, before long, you will be invited to meet with Mr. Publick.
Your first meeting with Mr. Publick will be in a public (pun intentional) place, a bar or a restaurant in a crowded urban area. Mr. Publick will sit with his back to the wall (assassination attempts are, sadly, a daily event in his life). You are advised to bring Mr. Urbaniak along as a pacifier, a kind of racetrack goat — Publick is a true thoroughbred and is prone to irrational fears and sudden outbursts of paranoid frenzy. Bring plenty of cash — Mr. Publick has the appetite of several lions and can consume six chickens and a roast suckling pig at one sitting — and he will expect you to pick up the tab.
To keep up your end in conversation, you are also advised to research the darkest, dustiest corners of popular culture — no reference is too obscure, no quip too knowing to stump the fiery and provocative Mr. Publick, whose brain weighs over sixteen kilos (counting the one he has in his upper thigh to control his lower half).
This process may need to be repeated. Mr. Publick has many enemies with false faces and more than one shape-changing alien has tried, and failed, to get close to him in the past.
Once you’ve impressed him with your knowledge of The Eiger Sanction and Colossus: The Forbin Project, you will be required to submit a highly personal cv: allergies, fears, dislikes, loves and lusts, embarrassing anecdotes from birthday parties long past. Mr. Publick requires absolute loyalty to his cause and needs to know every single aspect of your private life in order to make sure there are no skeletons in your closet that he has not put there himself. This will require the presentation of an autobiography, a minimum of six hundred pages, which Mr. Publick will have read by the scores of Korean children who draw his cartoon show.
Then there are some sexual acts you will required to perform, which I will not recount here. Suffice to say, you will know what to do when the time comes.
Then, if all goes well, you too may be chosen to do a voice for an episode of The Venture Bros. And then you, too, will be cool.
The Killers vs The Killers
Two films based on the same story (by Ernest Hemingway), released in 1946 and 1964. Textbook examples of how different approaches to the same narrative yield substantially different results.
THE STORY: Two bad guys show up and kill a guy. Someone wants to know why, and an investigation is launched. We learn about the life of the deceased, Citizen Kane-style, through the dead guy’s friends, enemies and associates. A tragic tale of downfall and redemption, crawling with noir characters — ruthless hitmen, big-hearted lugs, fiery-eyed femmes fatale, honest cops and cold-hearted Messrs Big. In both cases, the utterly predictable plot is rescued by the unconventional presentation. Criterion (who else) has helpfully put them in the same box for you.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY: The 1946 movie is filled with enough inky shadows and expressionistic lighting to make Frank Miller go weak in the knees. The 1964 version is lit like an episode of Marcus Welby, MD. (No wonder, it was shot, for TV, on the Universal lot. So when the killers pull up to a house, it’s literally next door to Marcus Welby’s and Beaver Cleaver’s, etc, etc.) It has other things going for it, but is also flat, bright and desperately uncinematic.
THE BIG TWIST: In the 1946 version, the investigation is launched by a tough-talking, hard-knuckled insurance investigator whose brief is to make sure his company’s money is being handed over to the proper beneficiaries. This task is accomplished around the end of Act I, which leaves the insurance investigator with a good half-hour of pointless investigation to go before he stumbles onto a second reason to be doing any of this — the dead guy was also a robber of another one of his company’s clients! By investigating the robbery, he’ll be saving his company’s clients up to a fraction of a penny on their future premiums! Apparently, the insurance industry was big, exciting news back in the 1940s — the subtlety’s and vicissitudes of the insurance game also form the spine of Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity. “Grab your coat honey, there’s a new insurance thriller playing at the Bijoux!”
The big idea for the 1964 remake is that the investigation of the dead guy’s murder is undertaken by the hitmen themselves — they know there’s money to be found somewhere in this mystery and they’re going to find it, even if it means killing the guy who hired them. This is a brilliant innovation that plunges an already amoral story into darker, uglier territory and does a lot to ameliorate the fact that it looks like an episode of Marcus Welby, MD. It also opens with a startling sequence involving the hit men bullying their way through a school for the blind, which has to be new record for hit-man bullying.
THE KILLERS: The dialogue between William Conrad and his accomplice in the 1946 version is just smashing as they taunt the utterly helpless inhabitants of a small New Jersey town. The moment one realizes the movie isn’t going to be about the hit men is a sad moment indeed, especially when their sneering thuggery is replaced by the adventure of a foursquare insurance investigator. So it makes perfect sense to replace the investigator with the killers themselves in the remake. And Lee Marvin is utterly Lee Marvin-like in the William Conrad part. The problem is that he’s been paired with TV mainstay Clu Gulager, who grabs the part of “second hit man” in his teeth and shakes it into a kitten. He sneers, he giggles, he plays with toys, he glowers, he menaces, he’s got his engine firing on all cylinders. Thing is, he’s miscast, looks like he should be playing the nice young doctor on Medical Center, and he’s cast opposite Lee Marvin, who gets out of bed looking like he’d kill you for stealing his newspaper. So a typical hit-man scene will be Clu Gulager chuckling and giggling and sneering and pouncing around the room, and Lee Marvin just sitting there commanding attention.
THE BIG LUG: The Killers is a tragedy about a sports figure who loses his touch and is forced into a life of crime in order to keep his femme in furs. A young Burt Lancaster is a boxer in the 1946, and he’s just amazing. Not bright at all, completely baffled by the world he’s entered into, sweet and meaty and un-clued as to why he’s so unhappy, he’s like Lenny if Of Mice and Men had been a gangster picture. For the 1964 remake, the producers had the idea to make the big lug a racecar driver who falls from grace and ends up as a getaway driver. The character arc is still the same but the casting is disastrous — John Cassavetes is obviously far too intelligent and canny to play a man in over his head. To compensate, the screenwriter has given him drive (get it?) instead of brawn as his motivating factor, but still the viewer has no choice but to sit there and say “Hey, you’re John Cassavetes, why you makin’ these bonehead choices?”
THE DAME: Ava Gardner smolders and seduces indelibly in 1946, but you know what? the surprisingly fierce Angie Dickinson kicks ass in the remake. A-plus in both cases.
THE BIG CHEESE: Perfectly okay Albert Dekker serves as an adequate Big Cheese in 1946, and for reasons unrelated to acting talent is overshadowed by Ronald Reagan in 1964, who at the time was a genial b-list lead on the downhill side of a long career. The part requires him to be cold, heartless and cruel, qualities he would go on to effortless personify in American politics, but to which he is utterly unsuited as an actor. The producers must have suspected that hewasn’t going to quite hit the mark as a ruthless gangster, so they have made his right-hand man hapless weasel Norman Fell, whose job seems to be making his boss look tough in comparison. “We gotta blow this joint babe, Ronald Reagan is here, and he’s got Norman Fell with him!”
Fred Thompson
Fred Thompson: good actor.
Look. I like Fred Thompson. I liked him in Marie, I liked him in Die Hard 2, I liked him in Cape Fear, I liked him on Law & Order. I know nothing about his political career, but all it takes is a sentence like this to allow me to completely write him off as any kind of serious candidate:
“Republican Fred Thompson said Friday that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else” as the presidential hopeful warned of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.”
Got that? Osama bin Laden is not a criminal, or a terrorist, or a person, or a freedom fighter, or a psychopath, or the leader of a terrorist organization, or the murderer of 3000 Americans on our own soil, or any other concrete appellation you could give him — he’s a symbol. He’s a symbol instead of a person.
Why would Fred Thompson characterize him thus? Because you can fight a symbol forever and never win, while a person you could hunt down and capture and bring to trial. Which, by the way, Bush failed to do.
(Why did Bush fail to do this? Conventional wisdom says he could have captured bin Laden but “got distracted” by Iraq at a crucial moment and let him go. Personally, I don’t think Bush ever wanted to capture bin Laden — that would be accomplishing something, and would make a lot of his Arab friends angry. Better to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is not a theocracy — the better to create his world of endless war and profits.)
Now then, that’s just the first part of the sentence. Bin Laden is “more symbolism than anything else,” not a big deal, not worth going after, not worth thinking about, nothing to see here, move along, move along. But then, without even pausing for a breath, Thompson goes on to “warn of possible greater al-Qaida threats within the United States.” Yes, exactly. No, we’re not going to pursue bin Laden because frankly, who cares, he’s not important, he’s just a symbol, but for god’s sake YOU MUST ELECT A REPUBLICAN, OTHERWISE AL- QAIDA WILL KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!
The fact that this blatantly deceptive, manipulative crap is reported without comment, of course, is another matter altogether.
Waiting for Godot, the Classic Comic edition
click for readable view.
I have no idea who created this. I found it here, with no explanation.
I post this primarily for the edification of
, who studies comic adaptations of classics (and who’s probably already seen it). The weird thing is, based on the Classics Illustrated comics R has shown me, this doesn’t even seem like too far a stretch, more like a loving tribute.