A George W. Bush Movie in Theaters in 2008?

Oliver Stone's planned biopic of George W. Bush is moving forward at lightning speed. Word is it will be "available for distribution" before the November elections, and will definitely be released before Bush goes out of office, so this one's going to happen quick. Yesterday Stone's choice for the role of Laura Bush was announced, and today the actors who will play George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush were announced.

First, here's W:


















A choice Bush ought to be flattered by, but not much in common physically. It'll be interesting to see whether Brolin opts to do an immersive, quasi-Method approach to the role a la Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Nixon, or more of a version of Bush that will be recognizable enough for audiences to suspend disbelief -- kinda like Travolta playing a Clinton-like character in "Primary Colors." That inevitable first photograph of Brolin in his W getup is going to be very telling on this score.

Now, the long-suffering Laura:

















If it were anyone but Laura Bush, I might wonder whether Elizabeth Banks had enough range to portray a living person, but I don't think there's a whole lot going on beneath the surface with Laura Bush, so hiring a Meryl Streep-quality actress to take on the role doesn't seem necessary. Banks should do fine.

And no Bush family would be complete without its matriarch. Here's Barb:

















Ellen Burstyn is, for my money, the best actress of her generation. Her performance in "Requiem for a Dream" is all heartbreaking and tragic and scary and all that stuff that makes acting good. The only thing I don't think she can do as an actress is a southern accent (for evidence, please review "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." On second though, don't do that.) This is great casting. Almost as good as...

Stone's choice for Bush the Elder:

















James Cromwell's played a version of H.W. Bush in "The Sum of all Fears" (and he also happens to bear a distinct physical resemblance to the guy), and he's accustomed to playing cranky patriarchs, so this is a natural choice. I'm sure he'll be great.

Here's an excerpt from an interview Stone gave to Variety about the movie, which actually does shed light on some of the questions I asked above:

"It's a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to 'Nixon,' to give a sense of what it's like to be in his skin," Stone told Daily Variety. "But if 'Nixon' was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone. People have turned my political ideas into a cliche, but that is superficial. I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison and Alexander the Great."

Stone declined to give his personal opinion of the president.

"I can't give you that, because the filmmaker has to hide in the work," Stone said. "Here, I'm the referee, and I want a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world? It's like Frank Capra territory on one hand, but I'll also cover the demons in his private life, his bouts with his dad and his conversion to Christianity, which explains a lot of where he is coming from. It includes his belief that God personally chose him to be president of the United States, and his coming into his own with the stunning, preemptive attack on Iraq. It will contain surprises for Bush supporters and his detractors."

Sounds like Stone understands something about what makes Bush's story interesting, but "Frank Capra territory" seems way too whimsical a way to describe a film about a guy's rise from coddled trust-fund manchild to president and war criminal; I know Stone's trying to be careful not to get the wingnuts telling people to avoid the movie before he's even shot a foot of film, but seriously. Frank Capra?

Obviously I'm hoping the film (tentatively titled "W") is closer in quality to "Nixon" than "Alexander," but I think it's going to make big money at the box office no matter what. As much as the guy repulses about 3/4 of the country, I think most Americans, whether they care to admit it or not, find him fascinating. Repugnant, yes, but fascinating.

Indiana Jones Trading Cards

From time to time I like to just straight up steal blog posts from other blogs. Today is one of those times. So feast your eyes on some cool Indiana Jones trading cards Topps is putting out. If you follow that link you'll find 4 sheets of cards. From the illustrator's blog: "They are one of a kind original sketches that will be inserted in every box of cards (one per box), along with autographed cards by Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and others who worked on the films." I'm not a 12-year old kid, so I'm not going to drop any money on these things, but what is impressive is how perfectly the artist, Patrick Schoenmaker, captures the essence of these characters with just a few well-placed lines.

My personal favorite: Melty-Face Nazi at the top.

Even Chris Wallace Thinks "Fox and Friends" Is Creepy

Sometimes, Fox News is so nakedly a propaganda arm of the Republican party, it even makes other Fox News employees uncomfortable. One of them anyway. Watch as an uncomfortable Chris Wallace, moderator of Fox News Sunday, takes the Republican mouthpieces that host "Fox and Friends" to the woodshed for spending two hours bashing Obama on the basis of a quote they'd misleadingly truncated.

It's squirmy but also hilarious. Chris Wallace comes on to tease his show tomorrow, tells the hosts they're being bad, and then each of the three hosts has to explain themselves to Wallace. Like children. Awesome. It's clear Steve Doocey (or however you spell it) is the worst of the lot, but the lady host is the most embarrassingly defensive, saying, and I'm paraphrasing, "if [Obama] wants to have conversation about race, then let's talk about the double standard for certain phrases and words." I'm not sure what she's talking about here, but it sounds like she's one of these white people who still don't quite get why they can't use the n-word. For her, that's what a "real discussion of race" is all about.

Best moment: Doocey at the end saying, "You sure got a weird way of showing it."

Shai-Hulud Will Not be Denied--Will Get Big-Screen Treatment Again in 2010; Also, Mighella; Also, Obama and Race

Frank Herbert's epic science-fiction novel "Dune" is once again getting the big-budget studio treatment. The director who's been lobbying hard behind the scenes for many a month to get the gig is Peter Berg, the actor/director who brought us "Very Bad Things," "Friday Night Lights," and, most recently, "The Kingdom." I haven't seen most of Berg's oeuvre, so admittedly I'm not the best guy to judge whether or not he's got the chops to remake "Dune," but you can color me hopeful about the result, though not really optimistic. I'm hoping his apparent passion for the novel will translate to the most faithful adaptation of Herbert's classic yet, but I have my doubts that the guy who made the execrable "Very Bad Things" can pull off an epic science-fiction film based on a beloved novel.

I love Lynch's 1984 adaptation. The little idiosyncrasies that drive some people crazy about it--the voice-overs, the over-the-top costumes, the new ending--make it a better, more interesting film to me. And even though I believe Lynch's "Dune" is one of the best science-fiction films ever made, it is not, strictly-speaking, a faithful adaptation. The miniseries produced by the SciFi Channel in 2000 hewed more closely to the novel, but it's limited budget prevented the filmmakers from truly realizing the scope of Herbert's novel. Berg has a chance here to make the definitive "Dune," which would be a boon to him personally, of course, but also to fans of Herbert's six "Dune" novels, some of which may get the same big-budget treatment by Paramount if Berg's adaptation clicks with audiences. If Berg and Paramount find a way to make "Dune"--a geopolitical novel laden with political intrigue, environmental science and philosophy--resonate with a mass audience, then they could have something resembling the "LOTR" franchise on their hands. Obviously, that's the best-case scenario. Worst-case, Berg goes back to making disappointing movies and "Dune" reaffirms its reputation as a hard-sell for mass audiences.

In other news, Oscar-winning writer and director of "The English Patient", Anthony Minghella, died today of a brain hemorrhage. He was 54.

And in political news, Barack Obama made a speech today intended to speak directly to some sermons given by Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor, and the larger issues of race in America. You can find the full text here. If you want a more stark contrast between Democrats and Republicans, look no further than this speech. Where Mitt Romney, the right-wing Republican golden child, was exclusionary in his big "Mormon speech," saying that non-religious people had no place in American life, Obama was inclusive in his "race speech" today, speaking frankly about where America stands right now on the issue of race. Here's a short excerpt:

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

Viable politicians rarely (if ever) discuss these issues frankly, which is, in part, why this speech is so fascinating. I don't know if this speech will be enough to counter the impact those grainy videos of Jeremiah Wright thundering away at the pulpit had on some voters, but I hope this thoughtful and inclusive speech will go some way in doing that. Definitely read it.

"The Comfort of Strangers" and a Recent Change in Status

I finished a novel Saturday morning and it's been stuck in my head since. It's called "The Comfort of Strangers" and it was written by Ian McEwan. He published it back in 1981 but it carries nothing between its covers that would distinguish it as a work written during that decade. At best one could place it as occurring sometime during the late 20th century, but it's difficult to get more precise than that. Not only are there no references to times or dates, McEwan never precisely identifies the city the story is set in. The city he describes is a stylized Venice, Italy, but McEwan has wrung it of all of its storied charms and infuses it instead with a dreamy quality in which dread and a kind of genteel hostility are pervasive. The result is unsettling. While some writers compose books that amount to love letters to various cities and countries, with "The Comfort of Strangers" I think McEwan has composed a hate letter to Italy.

Briefly, the plot follows Mary and Colin, two beautiful Britons, not quite married, on vacation in the aforementioned city of quasi-Venice. As the novel opens we find them cultivating mutual resentments in their lavish hotel room with passive aggressive silences and banal small talk freighted with meaning. That night they venture forth into the city to find a suitable restaurant, knowing full well they'll probably get lost in the city's twisting streets and narrow alleys. Hours later, lost and frustrated in their search for an acceptable eaterie, they happen upon a local man named Robert, who leads them to a bar patronized solely by locals. (During the extended bar scene, Robert tells them a story from his childhood that is one of the most sustained pieces of long-form dialogue I've read in fiction.) There's something off about Robert. He shares inappropriately. He's more familiar with them than is appropriate, touching them in ways that willfully ignore the conventions of personal space. Colin and Mary dismiss these faux pas as nothing more than a difference in culture, but to their detriment. Soon Robert demonstrates his peculiar gregariousness, tinged as it is with menace, is an exaggeration of the surrounding culture, but particular to him.

The novel builds in suspense as Robert manages to insinuate himself more and more into the lives of the two tourists. Much of the feeling of dread that characterizes "Comfort" emanates from what is unspoken and what is only hinted at; rarely do the characters even acknowledge the strange things they witness or the moments of probable insanity they encounter in others. It's as though the hapless tourists are sleepwalking through a nightmare for which the reader is intolerably awake. So little happens in an overt sense during the story, that the ending, which is as overt as it gets, is so shocking I read it over three times to make sure I was reading it correctly. I was, and boy is it a doozy.

And I say that "Comfort" amounts to a hate letter to Venice (and, more expansively, the country of Italy), because when we finally discover what's wrong with Robert, it's clear McEwan is making a larger statement about his views of Italian culture, namely their preoccupation with the notion of manliness and the acceptance of a role of subjugation for women (in one scene, a woman tells Mary that if a man is known for beating his wife, it gains him some measure of notoriety among his friends and acquaintances). When one adds in McEwan's characterizations of the mise en scene, this city that is and is not Venice, one gets the sense of a dying, useless city filled with malignantly self-involved people. If McEwan ever visited there (and it would appear he has), after reading the book it seems doubtful he'd ever willingly return.

(If you'd like to read a negative take on the book, read this 1981 review of the novel by John Leonard of the New York Times. Though be warned: the reviewer gives away far too much of the plot in an effort to be cruelly dismissive. With the benefit of 27 years of hindsight, howeverm I think this reviewer seems a tad short-sighted on the subject of Ian McEwan.)

This is the sixth novel I've read by him, and though I don't think it's his best, (I still think "Atonement" carries that title) I do think it's his most tightly controlled work, and one of the most successful attempts by a writer to depict in a work of fiction that intangible quality called "atmosphere". As I read through it chapter by chapter, I recounted its plot to my wife and sister -- they were as weirded out by my retelling as I was by reading it. My wife says she doesn't even want to know how it ends, which I'll chalk up to her discomfort with the lurid subject matter rather than her being bone-tired of the sound of my voice.

Interestingly, in 1990, Paul Schrader made a film of the book. Rupert Everett stars as winsome, beautiful tourist Colin, and none other than Christopher Walken plays the role of Robert. I can't wait to see it.

Anyway, sorry I've been slack on the updates of late, but I think I have an okay excuse this time.

I got a job. I started it on the 10th of this month.

It's one of those hourly-type things that spit out paychecks every couple weeks. My job title is "copy editor/proofreader"and I work for a small company in a suburb of Atlanta just north of Marietta. I wanted to be sure I managed to STAY employed for a full week before I posted up about it, and since I accomplished that, I feel fine to announce it here.

So anyway, if I'm remiss in posting up blog entries (or in returning calls), it's because I'm still adjusting to the whole working stiff thing. I'm going to try to post up an entry at least once a week to begin with. Hopefully they'll get more frequent as the weeks go on.

Also, you should know that my being a "proofreader" will not make me any more careful with the entries I post up on here than usual. Rest assured, they will be of the same slapdash quality you've grown to love.

"Tropic Thunder" Teaser Teaser, and the Writers of "The Wire" Have A Final Thought on the War on Drugs

A couple things on this Sunday.

First, a teaser for a teaser for Ben Stiller's upcoming film, "Tropic Thunder." NCSA's own Danny McBride (a.k.a Fred Simmons), co-stars in this film along with Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black, and gets his name in big letters (as well as a line) in this teaser-teaser. This from Moriarty's aintitcool post:

"I’ve been hearing great things about this script ever since last year’s now-legendary round-table reading, where guys like Bill Hader and Danny McBride were destroying with regularity, and where I hear this thing really came to life."

So "Thunder"'s got Robert Downey Jr. playing a self-absorbed actor doing blackface, Danny McBride "destroying with regularity", and what looks to be a hilarious cameo by Tom Cruise. Should be a lot of fun. The full teaser is supposed to be released a week from Monday. Teasing teasers teaser.

Second, the fifth and final season of "The Wire" wraps up tonight on HBO. The show's writers put out a statement this week which is, in part, an attempt to turn the questions they've asked, the angst they've felt, and the anger they've carried in researching and writing the show into political action. You can read the entire statement here; the most pertinent snippet is below:

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens."

After having seen read what I've read about the failed drug war, and after watching four seasons of David Simon's deeply-researched show, this declaration of "jury nullification" for non-violent drug offenses makes a lot of sense to me. Though some drug policy folks in Washington might sniff at the idea of TV writers sticking their nose into this complicated problem, I think they'd do well to listen closely. What these TV writers have done for the plight of the American inner city with five seasons of this show, is not dissimilar to what Dickens did for the plight of the poor in Victorian London with his many novels. For that Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and David Simon (the "Wire"'s writers) have a right to weigh in on the issue, and their protest against this wrongheaded and unjust war deserves, I think, consideration.

New "Watchmen" Publicity Stills

Aintitcool.com put up some sweet new publicity stills for the cast of Zach Snyder's upcoming "Watchmen" movie, each actor photographed in full costume. (Pictured above is an actor named Jeffrey Dean Morgan who plays The Comedian.) Snyder's casting unknowns for the main cast (with the exception of Carla Gugino and, possibly, Jackie Earle Haley), which is fantastic because it encourages audiences to view the actors solely as the characters they're playing and not merely as celebrities of varying wattage who all just happen to be starring in a movie together. As with everything I'm seeing come out of this production, I'm heartened by these new images. So far, no missteps. And because it's Snyder helming this thing, I'm not expecting any.

Some Constructive Criticism for the Clinton Campaign

In an earlier draft of my previous post, I wrote of a second option Hillary might decide to use to beat Barack, but decided to delete it because it didn't a.) help her win the nomination, and b.) didn't really suspect of her of being this Machiavellian. Turns out I probably should have included it.

This is what I almost included: "Hillary may attempt to weaken Obama so badly that McCain defeats him in the general election, thus leaving Hillary as the Democratic heir-presumptive in 2012."

As of today, an argument can be made that this crazy, scorched earth, throw the Democratic party under the bus game-plan is now part of the Clinton campaign's new strategy. Evidence, you ask?

This is what she said today:

“I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into a bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “[Both McCain and I] will be on that stage having crossed that [commander-in-chief] threshold."

So when Obama's the nominee, does anyone think the McCain campaign won't be sending out talking points to all of the right-wing pundits use saying, "Even Hillary Clinton, a member of his own party, thinks John McCain's more qualified to be commander-in-chief then Barack Obama." This statement, along with her fear-mongering 3 a.m. phone call ad, her calculated "as far as I know" on the question of whether Obama is or isn't a muslim, is doing real damage to the party, and I think Hillary and her campaign need to dial it back and find others ways to claw their way to the nomination. In my view, the path they're on now is the worst possible route to get there.

Where the Democratic Race Stands Now

If you're an Obama supporter, Tuesday night was kind of depressing.

As you've no doubt heard ad nauseum for the past 36 hours or so, Hillary won Texas and Ohio as well as Rhode Island. Obama won Vermont.

If you're a Clinton supporter, simply watching the news is enough to keep your hopes up. But if you're an Obama supporter, then I think you'll be heartened to read this article from Newsweek. No matter how you look at it, the math is very tough for Hillary to overcome. If this thing gets decided solely on the basis of elections and caucuses, Obama will win the nomination. Here are some scenarios in which Hillary could win.

1.) Obama's involvement with Tony Rezco blows up. If Obama is seen to be much less than forthright about his involvement with Rezco (who's currently on trial in Chicago for corruption) or worse, Obama is found to have actually been a party to unseemly business, Clinton could make a case to the superdelegates that she's got less to hide than he does and would make a better nominee.

2.) Hillary goes after Obama with a scorched earth negative campaign. If she or her surrogates sully Obama badly enough among those Dem voters inclined to believe rumors about Obama's Muslim upbringing and his lack of patriotism, then she can try and make the case to the superdelegates that they should go against the will of the voters and caucusers and pledge themselves for her.

I'm doubtful that either of these scenarios is going to happen. I don't think Obama had much to do with Rezco's crimes, nor do I think Hillary's going to go overtly negative to try and game the election. If Jonathan Alter (who wrote the Newsweek piece) is right, then Hillary may be angling for a V.P. slot. I'm ambivalent about the prospect of an Obama-Clinton ticket -- I'd like to see someone running with Obama who more strongly neutralizes McCain's appeal -- but if that's what it takes to get this race settled before the convention, then it ought to happen.

Obviously, the worst-case scenario is that the Democrats find a way to blow the general election in a year when we ought to have it handed to us.

Now You Can Add Yet Another Name to the List of Fake-Memoir Writers

So the big Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island primaries start up in about 15 minutes, but before I glue myself to CNN, I wanted to direct your attention to something completely non-political.

Last week I read this review in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani for a new memoir entitled "Love and Consequences." The review is accompanied by a disorienting photo of the author, Margaret P. Jones (pictured left) taken, no doubt, from the book jacket. I say disorienting because the woman pictured is white (actually half-white and half-Indian), and the memoir describes a rough-and-tumble childhood as a foster kid on the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Her experience runs the gamut on the issues one might expect to find in a memoir set in this milieu: gangs, racism, poverty, drugs, etc.. According to Kakutani, the memoir is "amazing." Jones "write[s] with a novelist’s eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist’s eye for social rituals and routines." She also said the book was "deeply affecting" and "humane."

Turns out, as the New York Times reported today, Margaret B. Jones, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer, made it all up.

"Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed."

As a result of Seltzer's "mendacity", her book tour, which was to start today, is no longer happening, and all copies of her book have been recalled.

After Seltzer had been profiled in the Times' House & Home section last Thursday, Seltzer's older sister called the publisher to say the author of "Love and Consequences" had made the whole thing up. To make it all the sweeter, Gawker had some choice quotes from an interview Jones/Seltzer gave prior to her outing. Here's a taste:

"Q: How did this book originate?

A: During my senior year of college one of my professors told me a friend of hers was working on a book and wanted to interview me. I declined. I wasn’t interested in the whole “South-Central-as-petting-zoo” thing. Then my home girl said the teacher might mess around and fail me for rejecting her friend, so I ended up calling the author and doing the interview. She was real nice and asked me if I had ever written anything. I ended up giving her one of a number of short stories I had written for my brothers’ kids and for the kids of my homies serving life sentences."

Wow. Seltzer sounds egregiously white. It's a wonder that her agent heard Seltzer slinging those "homies" and "home girl"'s around at lunch meetings and thought to herself, "she is completely authentic and her story is perfectly believable."

I think the fact that this book hasn't been out for more than few days makes this fake memoir scandal less impactful than the James Frey debacle a couple years back, or the J.T. Leroy/Laura Albert brouhaha last year. Frey, as you'll remember, fooled Oprah and millions of readers, and Albert conned dozens of cool "indie" writers as well as thousands of readers, myself included. But where Frey exaggerated to the point of lying, and Albert created a dreamily horrific hard-luck life out of whole cloth and then wrote stories supposedly informed by that life, Seltzer imagined a hard-scrabble childhood that, one might safely assume, is actually being lived/endured in cities all over the country by, mostly, minorities. Of course she's not the first privileged white person to invent a poorer, more ethno-centric past for themselves to lend themselves a little "street cred" (Vanilla Ice, anyone?), but it's just as off-putting in this instance as it's ever been. It's like the rich stealing the character they lack from the poor.

But the publisher of "Love and Consequences", Riverhead Books, is also, I think, equally culpable in this half-perpetrated con. One would think that after James Frey was exposed as a fabulist, and after Oprah shamed the industry (or attempted to shame) into fact-checking their would-be memoirists, that the least publishers could do was verify the most easily-verifiable claims made in the memoirs they publish. A fact-checker could easily find out, for example, whether or not a woman named Margaret B. Jones graduated from the University of Oregon in the year Jones claims she did. Jones/Seltzer did not go to that school, but because no one asked this question (or any other), Seltzer managed to string her agent, her editor, and her publisher along for 3 years while they all worked on "Love and Consequences." With their help, Seltzer very nearly duped thousands of readers.

If publishers continue to insist that fact-checking is not their responsibility, the credibility of memoirs as authentic and reasonably truthful works of art is diminished, and this in turn hurts those memoirists who aren't making up the facts of their lives for the sake of book sales. But some of these more outlandish memoirs don't seem to require a lengthy and exhaustive fact-checking to find those first telling cracks in their stories. Like the woman who recently admitted her memoir, in which she is raised, in part, by wolves, was made up. How hard is it really to guess that that lady's whole goal was to tell lies? And when a white, 33-year old, U. of Oregon alum says she was a drug-runner for gangs in South Central Los Angeles when she was growing up, don't you, the publisher, at the very least, make a phone call? If the corporations who own all the publishers don't want to employ fact-checkers, that's one thing, but when agents and editors won't even use their own god-given common sense to separate the talented liars from the merely talented, then maybe the publishing industry's doomed to be forever disconnected from the readers they're supposed to be selling to. And they wonder why they're not selling more books.

Admittedly, I'm not a big memoir guy, but reading about Seltzer's fabrications so soon after Frey and Albert were exposed for theirs, makes me think the publishing industry needs to address what looks like a growing problem sooner than later.

Fred Simmons is "King of the Demo"

Click here to see Danny McBride on Conan O'Brien's show Tuesday night. Unlike most film actors who come on talk shows to promote an upcoming movie, usually to trot out some "funny" stories from the set, Danny came out completely in-character as Fred Simmons, the "hero" of the upcoming "Foot Fist Way," and did some exceptional work. The movie's hilarious, and Danny's brilliant in it (ditto Jody and Ben), but what I was most impressed/surprised by when watching his appearance on Conan, was how subtle and in-the-moment he could be on what is essentially a live show. For instance, when Conan uses the word "Mecca" in a question, Danny, abashed, leans over to ask what the word means. There were a lot of obvious ways to sell the character's ignorance, but Danny, fully committed to selling the reality of Fred Simmons, a hapless Tae Kwon Do instructor from Concorde, North Carolina, goes for complete naturalism First he considers answering the question without knowing the meaning of the word, thinks better of it, then leans into Conan and, with a little laugh, asks him what the word means. When Fred arrives at his own understanding of the word as "where my business is at," it just kills.

Some other highlights:
1.) Fred telling Will Farrell to be quiet during "his time."
2.) Will Farrell trying to hide a smile during the interview.
3.) Fred's preoccupation with which cameras are recording what.

Anyway, it's a lot of fun to watch. Check it out.

Democratic Debate, The Resurgence of an Old Word, and Thoughts on the 80th Academy Awards

The debate's about to start, and I thought I ought to post up a blog post while it's going on. You only really have to pay attention to the questions and the first parts of the candidates' answers to know what's going on.

[Holy cow, Tim Russert's got what looks like a passel of moles on his face. Jeez. Is he unwell? Maybe it's just bad lighting.]

Anyway!

While puzzling through a re-reading of "Moby Dick" late last year (yeah, I have some time on my hands), I encountered a word that stumped me: counterpane. I'd never seen it before. Through context and repeated usage, I discovered the word is a nineteenth-century word for a comforter, as in a thick, bed-covering blanket. For dorks like me, that's kind of fun to know. Seeing it again in another book written during the same time period, I figured it was an obsolete word, relegated to a bygone age, and so set to annoying my wife and others by using it when using the word "comforter" would be the less-annoying choice. But it turns out I was mistaken about the word "counterpane." It's not a relic after all. While reading Stephen King's new book, "Duma Key," I discovered King using the term. Looking it up on dictionary.com, the word "counterpane" is classified as "older use"; just short of obsolete, I guess. Well, maybe King's a closet word-nerd. But finishing the very short new book by Ian McEwan, "On Chesil Beach" this evening, I came across it again. So it's official: "counterpane" has either made a comeback in the 21st-century, or, more likely, novelists have been using it forever and I'm only now catching on. Anyway. My wife thought I should bore all of you with this; you know, share the pain.

And no, you can't have that minute back.

So, the Oscars! What a dreary show, first off. I guess uncertainty about whether or not the strike would be over in time for the Oscars ultimately wrecked the show more than I'd predicted. I would figure 10 days would be more than enough time to write and film one of those great filmed intros with all the requisite celeb cameos and in-jokes, but, as it turns out. Nope. Ten days is just enough time to write a short okay-ish monologue and a bunch of patter for the stars to read off a teleprompter. But complaints about the broadcast aside, I was happy to see "No Country for Old Men" do so well in the major categories. For the last couple years the Academy's done an admirable job of handing the Best Picture Oscar to the film that I thought was actually the best picture of the year. I was similarly pleased to see that the irrational exuberance over "Juno" didn't result in a lot of hasty Oscars a la "Crash" or "Million Dollar Baby." It was a good movie and all, but not, I thought, one of the top five movies of the year.

Some other thoughts about the show: I really liked the Best Song award-winner and the couple singing it did an excellent job performing it live. [I'm trying to find it on iTunes now and I discover the track is an 'Album Only' purchase. Oh well.] I'm thinking I'm going to have to check that movie out. Tilda Swinton gave a weird and surprisingly earthy, funny speech, which is in total contrast to the characters she's always asked to play, which are usually cold and remote. Her giving Clooney shit for being in "Batman and Robin" in front of millions of people was ballsy and hilarious. And I also liked seeing the cutaway to Cormac McCarthy standing up and cheering when Denzel read out the Best Picture award winner. Looking at the awards altogether, I think it's a little disheartening that in 2007, a year widely-considered one of the best years for movies in recent memory, that only one of the top five nominated films made more than $100 million dollars. Hopefully next year we can look forward to a few movies that turn out to be both commercial and critical successes in the same vein as "The Godfather," "Jaws," and "Silence of the Lambs."

And, totally unrelated, take a look at this. Kinda fun. It's Jimmy Kimmel's response to girlfriend Sarah Silverman's video, "I'm F#%king Matt Damon." It's a little over-wrought, maybe a little overdone, and not as funny as Silverman's, but it had me grinnin'.

[So the debate's over. I thought, and this is no surprise coming from me, Obama won, but I did think that Hillary's probably not being paranoid when she says the media's giving Obama an easier time than they've been giving her. I think that the debate moderators, and Russert in particular, seem to enjoy throwing hardballs at Hillary where Obama rarely sees anything trickier than a curveball when he's up to bat. I don't know for sure whether that's a function of media bias (as Tina Fey and the SNL writers seem to think) or just that reporters and debate moderators don't have as much to go after Obama with as they do with Hillary on account of her longer record. Anyway, an interesting debate, but at this point, I'm not sure how illuminating these things are anymore. The issues they've decided to "differ" on have been hashed out endlessly over these 20 Q&A's and I don't think there's any new information to be gleaned in by having more "debates" in this kind of format. I think Tuesday's primaries in Texas, Ohio, and Vermont will end up being decisive. Needless to say, I'm very excited about where this race is headed.]

Drawing is Fun, But Also Serious

I'm nearly finished reading Stephen King's latest novel, "Duma Key." Maybe I'll do a review of it once I'm done with it, but for now I'll just briefly say this: after an excellent first half, the plot has begun to unravel a bit. Events that happen in the second half weren't set up very well in the first, and the supernatural universe in which "Duma Key" is set, seems to expand conveniently to suit the needs of the plot. Not totally unlike how some have characterized my own book. Maybe having read and absorbed everything the guy's written over all these years has influenced my own work in ways I hadn't realized; right down to mimicking his weak endings. Ah well.

Anyway, another effect of reading the book is that it's given me a drawrin' itch. And not the kind you can get rid of with various ointments and creams. The hero of the story, Edgar Freemantle, has an accident, loses an arm, and moves to Florida to decide whether or not he wants to keep house on this mortal coil. He soon discovers a latent artistic ability in himself that produces masterpiece after masterpiece. Whether his medium is pencils or paint, he can do no wrong. Of course something else might be at work, but that's for another blog post. King's glowing, some might say overheated, descriptions of the ecstasy of production and the cheering crowd-inducing quality of the finished products incite a kind of "art longing" in me. So, in addition to a few drawing table misfires, I've been daydreamily perusing some websites and blog featuring oodles of fantastic artwork, much of which seems deceptively simple to execute, and saying to myself, "I could do something like that." Well, as Hillary's been saying a lot of late, there's a difference between saying and doing. Here are a couple of sites I've been looking at that you might like to check out.

1.) "The Perry Bible Fellowship." I haven't done much reading on the artist behind it, Nicholas Gurewich, but I've gone through nearly all the comics posted on his site, one by one, and with the exception of Larsen's "The Far Side", I know of no more consistently hilarious comic strip. Many are done in an artistic style specific to the content of the strip, almost always wittily employed to heighten the comic effect. For instance, take a look at this strip entitled "Utter Pig." It's style -- suggesting a children's fable -- smashes up brilliantly with it's dark and subversive content. He makes it look so easy, and he makes it damn funny.

2.) A how-to blog by Mad Magazine caricaturist Tom Richmond. He makes sitting out at amusement parks and drawing bad caricatures of sweaty kids driving tiny cars day all day seem worth it if doing so means that one day you can draw caricatures this funny and this spot-on. He goes through the basics of caricature drawing, talking about the five shapes, head, eye one, eye two, nose and mouth, and that the heavy lifting in caricatures is done when the artist gets the relationship between these shapes right. To the left is Richmond's caricatures of Ben Emerson, the guy who plays villain Ben Linus on "Lost," and Jake Gyllenhaal, he of "Brokeback" fame. Richmond goes on to say that one of the three components of a good caricature is "Statement", or editorializing on the part of the artist. I think I know what editorial comment Richmond's making with the Gyllenhaal caricature. No one said the Mad guys were subtle. Funny, yes. Subtle, no.

And then there's this guy:

3.) Craig Thompson's blog. As anyone who's read Thompson's excellent "Blankets" knows, Thompson has a very unique, very clean style that manages to cut right through all the tricks of technique and style to get to the heart of whatever emotion he's trying to convey. Thompson hasn't put anything out since "Blankets" that comes close in size or scope or ambition (just a couple of his travel journals filled with coffee-shop sketches excellent enough to give any artist sketchbook-envy), but if you're interested to see what he's been up to, and a good sampling of his post-"Blankets" artwork, his blog's a good place to go.

Anyway. I should go and draw something.

A Link to A Big Teaser Becomes a Rambling Diatribe Against the Writerly Impulse to Overexplain

On the campaign trail of late, Obama's been telling crowds "we're the one's we've been waiting for." That's a great phrase, inspiring and all of that. But also, as it turns out, totally wrong.

Here's the one I've been waiting for.

The montage of the previous movies in this teaser didn't do anything for me, but the footage of the new film makes "Crystal Skull" look like, at the very least, a good time at the movies. Harrison seems to wear his 60's well, Shia doesn't annoy me right off the bat, and the action looks suitably Indiana-Jonesy.

I do worry, though, that this movie is going to try and tie together the other three movies in a deeply stupid and unnecessary way, and from what I've gleaned in these months of pre-production, I think they might be.

When a franchise goes on for more than a few movies, the temptation is always there to explain itself. Look at the Hannibal movies. The fourth movie takes us into Hannibal's childhood to explain why Hannibal eats people. No one was clamoring for that answer. Take, for another example, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." I know it's a comic book, but it's a good example of this bad impulse in otherwise good writers. In the first few installments of "League", we follow a bunch of 19th-century literary characters as they fight baddies who threaten Victorian England. However, when we get to the most recent "League", titled "Black Dossier," Alan Moore decides that no reader can possibly tolerate not knowing for even one more "League" story how a bunch of totally fictional characters can jump outside the books from whence they came and be actors in the real (although still fictional) world. So instead of non-stop comics fun, we get a long and needlessly obscure explanation of some inter-dimensional Valhalla (rendered in pages which require the wearing of 3-D glasses) in which all things and all people and all characters live together in harmony. So my point is this: if Lucas and Spielberg and whomever else decide to tie the mythos of the three Indiana Jones-film artifacts together so as to tie them to a neat macro-mythos, then I worry they'll be doing a lot of hard work for no good reason, and will be misallocating resources away from just making another entertaining Indiana Jones movie. I know that's a lot to infer from a teaser and some early promotional tidbits I've seen on movie gossip sites, but it's all I have to go on. So we'll just have to see this summer.

Anyway. If anyone can pull off goofy over-explanation and needless tying-together, it's Little Stevie Spielberg.

Anyway. Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.

"Pineapple Express" Slams into the Internet

Thanks to everyone for their happy birthday wishes. I did indeed turn 31 on Monday, the 11th. I am now officially in my 30s. Yeah I know, I was 30 for a whole year, but thirty itself is kind of a novelty. Not so with 31. Thirty-one is deadly serious. But anyway, I did have a very nice birthday, and thanks for asking. You guys are great.

On Wednesday of last week, friend (and blog reader!) Peter Fedak, accompanied by his lovely wife Daniele, flew south from the wilds of suburban D.C. to visit my wife and I here in Marietta. Fun was had. Though we didn't get to spend a whole lot of time with Daniele -- she was the Matron of Honor at her friend's wedding, after all, and had to attend to her matronly duties -- we got a lot of time to hang out with (sigh) Peter. In addition to playing LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga all the way through the "Attack of the Clones" section, we toured many of Marietta's big box outlets in search of video games and, later, video projectors. Actually pretty fun. Anyway, it was great seeing them.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting today is because a good friend emailed me a link to a leaked NSFW R-rated trailer for David Green's "Pineapple Express" this morning, and I just had to post that goodness up on the blog. The trailer's great all by itself, but the movie looks like something really different and good. I don't know too much about "Express", but I'm definitely interested in seeing it this August. And by the way, the song they use in the trailer, M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes", is damn catchy. I downloaded it the second I finished watching the trailer and I've been listening to it all day. Anyway, check out the trailer.

Votin' Day!

I voted today!

It was on an electronic voting machine, so my vote will probably go to Mitt Romney, but, who cares! It's great to finally get my chance to cast an actual vote. So Obama, who's leading here in Georgia by, according to the most recent polls 49% to Hillary's 41%, will, thanks to me, be one vote closer to winning one of the larger states in contention today. My polling place wasn't crowded, and there were plenty of voting machines, all of which were in working order. How was voting in your various necks of the woods? Drudge was reporting that some Los Angelenos were having problems voting. Has this been anyone's experience?

Like a lot of you, I'll be watching the returns tonight. It'll be interesting to see how California, the biggest prize of the night for both parties, breaks down between the major candidates. If it's close, we won't know the winner until well into the morning hours of tomorrow. It's a crazy election, and nothing seems certain.

Here's another example of the craziness going on during the primary season:

On my way to my polling place, I listened to Glenn Beck trash McCain on the local right-wing crazy AM station. On my way home from lunch after voting, I listened to Rush Limbaugh trash McCain on the same station. The Republican party is unabashedly self-cannibalizing on nationally-syndicated radio, which makes me think that the vote I cast for the Democratic nominee I vote for today will help determine who the 44th President of the United States will be. If "conservatives", or at least those who feel guys like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Ingraham, and Coulter represent their views, are really up in arms over the prospect of John McCain being the Republican nominee, then a lot of them will stay home this fall. Pit that demoralized segment against an energized Democratic electorate, and I like our odds in November that much more. BTW: where the hell were all these newly energized Dems back in '04? The prospect of another four years of Bush wasn't sufficiently terrifying? Damn fickle voters.

Anyway. Also: thanks for all the good comments on my "There Will Be Blood" post. I feel like I actually understand the movie a bit better after reading your takes on the film. Finally, this blog is starting to pay off!

"Cloverfield" Is the Best Film Released So Far This Year!

Before I went to see "There Will Be Blood", the wife and I took in a showing of "Cloverfield," Matt Reeves and JJ Abrams' New York monster movie. It was much better than I was expecting. This was what I liked about it:

[SPOILERS AHEAD!!]

1.) Massive Wish Fulfillment. The first 20 minutes were deeply annoying to me on account of being forced to "meet" all of these pretty, winsome, upwardly mobile white New Yorkers and subjected to their "lives"and "personalities." But just when my seething resentment was reaching critical mass, a giant monster able to read my mind and feel my feelings, blew his top, (doubtless over the same things that pissed me off), and began to systematically destroy not only these yuppie bastard's lives, but their entire ecosystem: the island of Manhattan. Because I'm a dork, I thought of "weird fiction" writer HP Lovecraft throughout this movie. He despised New York City and I enjoyed imagining his reaction to seeing a movie in which a monster, not entirely unlike those of his own creation, leveling its skyscrapers to rubble and reducing its inhabitants to, first, tears, and then, monster-tooth plaque.

2.) No Explanation. No one ever finds out where the monster came from. Which is great, because within the conceit of the film -- that the mid-catastrophe exploits of a bunch of the aforementioned young and pretty are all being filmed by one of their friends who happens to have a videocamera -- it's unlikely that a viewing of this sort of video document would afford an explanation of the monster's origins. There are no answers to the mystery of "Where did It come from?!" in this movie because there were no scenes that took place in the Pentagon, or the White House, or wherever else you might think Michael Bay would set a scene if he had done this movie. I really liked that about it. And they never explained the title either. How cool is that?

3.) No Happy Ending. Abrams and Co. didn't kowtow to execs (or their own demons) who probably thought the movie might do better if Jeff Goldblum could find a way to upload a virus into the monster at the end. This movie is a document of the demise of Manhattan, and that's what it's going to show. Hell, a title at the beginning of the "video" states the ending clearly before we see even a single frame of the actual movie, and they stay true to the premise. I think "The Mist" could have learned something from the ending of this movie.

4.) An Honest Attempt at a Romantic Storyline. The tape that comprises the bulk of what becomes "Cloverfield" is taped over a day at Coney Island that the one white guy, Rob I think was his name, spends with some pretty girl who he spends the entire movie trying to rescue. I don't remember her name. I didn't buy them as characters or as a couple for a second, but technically, the way Reeves and Abrams manage to weave their story into the larger story was cleverly done. After they're both dead and they cut to the final Coney Island clip, their happy smiling at the camera and earnest remarks about this being a "really good day" manages to be almost touching.

5.) Massive Carnage. When the mohnshtuh demolishes the building way down the street, and the smoke comes billowing toward the camera at lightning speed, whew. Gripping, scary stuff. I thought the way these guys pulled off the effects in this movie was brilliant. I was on the lookout throughout the movie for false notes and fake-looking CGI, but I wasn't pulled out for a second. They did a really good job.

6.) An Apocalyptic Nightmare That Never Lets Up. Aside from Hud making some goofy jokes throughout the movie, Reeves and Abrams don't let up on the tension for a minute. This movie goes fast and doesn't stop. And this movie gets the proper tone just right. Throughout "Cloverfield" the feeling that we're really watching something cataclysmic and earth-shaking while it's happening, is palpable. And as implausible as it all is, they make it seem real. Quite an accomplishment.

7.) It's a Damn Monster Movie. "Cloverfield" isn't high art. It isn't a movie about something that's really about something else. (Well, that's mostly true.) This is a monster movie, and Reeves and Abrams made a great one unapologetically.

And if you'll indulge me, I have a little pet theory about the origin of the monster. As some of you may know, Stephen King (of COURSE his name was bound to turn up!) and JJ Abrams have gotten to be kind of buds. King loves Abrams' show "Lost", and Abrams loves all things Stephen King. At some "Lost" symposium which King attended, Abrams and King go to talking about how it would be if King adapted "The Dark Tower", King's epic Western/Fantasy, for the movies. King thought that'd be fine. Which brings us to "Cloverfield."

When the little beasties that come off the monster's back end up in the subway tunnel with our little gang, we get a brief close up of their heads and "faces." To me they look like slightly smaller versions of the monsters that populate the broad swaths of Mid-World that Blaine the Monorail travels over, as depicted in Ned Dameron's illustrations from King's "The Waste Lands." I know, I know, kinda obscure. The creatures sparked the memory while I was watching the movie, but just now, to confirm for this blog post, I checked the illustration on the book and the resemblance is real, if not uncanny. I'm just saying, it's not a stretch to think that Abrams has tied, even if only in secret, "Cloverfield" into King's "Dark Tower" universe. A distant prequel, if you will. (And some of the weird meta-marketing Abrams and Co. did, like the weird Japanese soda which may be the Japanese version of Nozz-a-La, the soft drink referred to often in the "Dark Tower" universe, may support that idea.) Anyway. Just a theory.

So anywho! If you haven't seen it, check it out before it slithers out of theaters. I think it's worth your time. At least for a matinée.

My Ramblings on "There Will Be Blood"

I saw "There Will Be Blood" over the weekend, and I had a reaction to it I did not expect: incomprehension.

In this post I'm going to float some ideas I had about the movie and maybe get a conversation going with some of you who saw the movie. I think there's a lot of stuff going on in this film, a lot of themes and a lot of layers even, and I think there is more than one way to interpret the film. Of course, for those who have not yet seen the movie and still wish to, probably best not to read this post because I'll be dealing in spoilers indiscriminately. To you people I say go see the movie or just check back for the next post. So let's get into it.






[SPOILERS AHEAD!]





Okay. Just us now.

First, let me say I really liked the movie. I haven't been able to get it out of my head since I saw it Friday night. Daniel Day Lewis is fantastic as the megalomaniacal Daniel Plainview. I liked in particular the first dialogue-free sequence leading up to the first oil strike. We know everything we need to know about Daniel Plainview in that sequence. The cinematography (which was also nominated for an Academy Award) is striking. The shot of Plainview hunkered down and munching on some bit of food while a twilight thunderstorm flashes in the distance behind him was probably the best shot I saw all year. And the music by Radiohead guitarist Brian Greenwood got me right where I lived by sounding exactly like a lost track from the "Shining" soundtrack. I could go on about what's great about this movie, but I'm more interested right now in what the hell it all meant.

I've been very careful not read anything about this movie -- no reviews, no actor interviews, none of the source material, etc. -- so I came to this movie absolutely fresh. When the end came, I was caught short. My reaction to the film's final line, "I'm done!" and the immediate cut to black following was a lot like my initial reaction to seeing "The Big Lebowski" back in Winston. I didn't quite know what to make of it. I suppose that puts "Blood" in good company. But I felt pretty dumb as the credits rolled. "There Will Be Blood" tied "No Country for Old Men" (another movie with an ambiguous ending) for the most nominations, so in addition to all the critics who loved this thing, there are a whole lot of Academy members who loved it and seemed to get it right away. I felt left out. So what was P.T. Anderson saying in this film?

Is it that capitalism is, at its core, a dehumanizing entity? After a few days thought, this is the best I've got for this. But there are some moments and throughlines in the film that muddy the waters a little. I think this movie defies any short and sweet interpretation.

The film starts with Daniel Plainview on his own. He lives by himself and works by himself. He is a man with a pick-axe working at a hole in the ground. Making it bigger. And though he seems so much a part of the earth as to be elemental in these first scenes, he doesn't seem unhappy. Or even exhausted. He seems deeply absorbed and even contented in his self-sufficiency. You can see a smile of pride when he manages to drag himself, broken-leg and all, over miles of rocky terrain to sell the bit silver (or was it gold?) he'd just mined. This sequence also establishes nicely Plainview's later hostility to God and religion. Clearly Plainview's never asked anyone, including a deity, for help with anything, and so distrusts those who would depend on anyone or anything besides themselves and their own hard work to get them through.

Some years later we see Plainview doing well enough to hire others. But even though Daniel now has others to interact with, hardly any words are spoken. One gets the impression that, perhaps, Plainview views his employees as units of work rather than people. Has the dehumanizing effect of Capitalism already begun to show in Plainview? Or is that Plainview is already an avowed Capitalist and we just see it more clearly the richer he gets?

An accident gives him a son and an heir. There are a few storylines and overarching conflicts in the film, but the primary one is between Daniel Plainview and his son. In these first scenes of Plainview with the infant and then the toddler (in that great scene in the train), we watch Plainview begin to question the wisdom of his solitary existence. When we see Plainview and his son twelve years on trying to buy more land to drill, we see a couple of things at once: 1.) Plainview's grown prosperous and is more articulate and savvy than we might have first suspected watching him whacking rocks in his makeshift mine, and 2.) his son has deepened his passion for work and making money because now he has someone he loves to pass it down to.

Plainview takes great pains to mentor the boy and include him in his work, even when he's making his son a party to the impending swindle of the Sunday family. After the accident at the derrick that results in the son going deaf, Plainview's attitude towards the boy changes. His feelings of powerlessness are alien to him and he begins to take the resentment he feels out on the boy by widening the gulf his son's deafness and Plainview's inability to fix that deafness has opened between them. Is this distance between them meant as a comment on how Capitalism has shaped Plainview's worldview so deeply that when his son ceases to be viable as an asset, Plainview ceases to love him?

When the long-lost half-brother arrives, Plainview's hopes for a viable familial partner are renewed. The son sees how his father has taken a shine to this interloper and sets their shack/house on fire in wordless protest. Speaking directly to the main theme of the film, does Anderson intend the son to represent the worker lashing out at the injustices inherent in the system?

And when the half-brother is proven false, Plainview brings the son back. Does he do this because he is as repentant as he proclaims in church, or is it because, in the absence of a trustworthy family member, a broken one will do? Do Plainview's nebulous relationships with his son and false half-brother speak to his interest in an heir and a buying into the traditional Capitalist ideas of creating wealth and finding ways to perpetuate it, or is it more simply a quest for some idealized vision of family? And if that's the case, how does this central character arc tie neatly into some expression of the director's meaning?

In the penultimate scene, the son, now grown, visits his father, now slightly bonkers, in his father's mansion, to announce his intention to break off from his father's company. Plainview's reaction is cruel and pitiless. He disowns his son, tells him he's adopted (which was news to him), and says "now you're a competitor," as if to say, "You're no longer my son."

Which brings us to the long final scene, which takes place in Daniel Plainview's two-lane private bowling alley. Eli, the faith-healing Reverend that Plainview disliked so, returns. He's gotten into radio and has become one of the first televangelists (a radiovangelist?). But he's also lost everything in the Crash, and wants to sell Plainview a plot of land with oil beneath it. Plainview agrees but only if Eli renounces God and himself as a vessel for His message. In a reversal of an earlier scene where Eli forces Daniel to admit he "abandoned [his] boy" in front of his congregation in exchange for the pipeline rights to the same plot of land, Eli does as instructed. In a cruel twist, Daniel then informs Eli that he already got all the oil out from beneath the plot of land in question, and then proceeds to twist the knife in all the deeper. The scene culminates in Daniel bludgeoning Eli to death with a bowling pin. His servant comes on the scene and, apparently undisturbed by the carnage, asks after his employer. To which Plainview says, "I'm done!" And that's the end of the film.

Of course this has to do with Daniel's son, but how? Yes Daniel hated Eli for what Eli made him do, admitting to the sin of abandoning his son, but what does it mean that Daniel killed Eli for it? That Daniel never brooked any disrespect? This seems to bear out. Take, for instance, the scene where the Standard Oil man tells Daniel how sorry he is for what happened to his son. Daniel takes this as a commentary on his parenting skills and threatens to cut his throat over it. The false half-brother disrespected Daniel by lying his way into Daniel's confidence -- Daniel kills him for it. Eli humiliates him at the Baptism and, years later, Daniel kills him for that.

Or are we supposed to take Daniel's murder of Eli more symbolically? Perhaps Daniel, the Capitalist, made insane by his devotion to greed, kills Eli because he discovers that, in his heart, Eli, the embodiment of Religion, is just another capitalist. And does Daniel kill the Capitalist in God-fearing clothes because Daniel has a "competition in [him]" that incites his primal urge to do literally what Capitalists do metaphorically, or does he kill Eli because he suddenly sees in Eli what he hates most in himself, and lashes out? By portraying two of Capitalism and Religion's most skillful practitioners as corrupt beyond all reckoning, is Anderson implicitly equating the two as irredeemably evil institutions? But if so, doesn't this idea fail to account for Anderson's emphasis on the relationship between Plainview and his son, a relationship that seems to exist outside of the larger concepts of Religion and Capitalism? For one, religion doesn't really play a role in that relationship, and two, the idea that Capitalism alone (i.e. Plainview's driving ambition) was the primary force behind the poisoned relationship between Plainview and his son doesn't quite encompass what was portrayed on-screen.

Does Plainview's quest for his elusive idea of "family" indicate a larger quest for meaning? Does his failure to find that meaning sour him on life? Does he distrust Eli and ultimately murder Eli because he sees how Eli cynically uses man's search for meaning for monetary reward?

Anyway, enough of all that.

I think I absorbed the film, and felt what I was meant to feel, but to comprehend it, something's missing for me. Some way of reading it that will make form, content and meaning all gel in my mind. I guess I'm just excited to hear what you all thought of it, and what you thought the movie meant. Like what did the line, "I'm done!" really mean, for example. I think "There Will Be Blood" is dense and its rewards not altogether apparent on a single viewing, but I think it's definitely worth thinking and writing about to get at the film's meaning. Which feels pretty rare for an American film. I'm not sure I liked "Blood" more than "No Country", but I felt like "Blood" drew from a much deeper well than did "No Country," and that's in its favor.

Sad News

Word is coming down the wire right now that actor Heath Ledger has died.

These are very preliminary reports that don't speak to the circumstances surrounding his death, so there's a chance they're not true, but if they are, this is a real tragedy. The guy's a great actor and the early footage of his work in the upcoming "Dark Knight" looked good enough to put him even more securely onto the A-list of Hollywood talent.

Ledger was 28 years old.

[Late Update: The New York Times has more information, including how Ledger was found, and a clue as to the sad cause of death. How depressing.]

Obama Needs to Get Smart

If Obama wants people to stop calling him a closet conservative, he's got to stop saying stuff like this:

"The Republican approach I think has played itself out. I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time over the last 10 or 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies, when they're being debated among the presidential candidates, it's all tax cuts. Well, we've done that, we've tried it."

(sigh) And this the day after I defend his seemingly neutral Reagan comments.

Taken altogether, it's clear he's saying in the above statement that the Republicans had their shot to try out their crazy ideas for 10-15 years, and their ideas all failed, so now let's give the Democrats a turn. Which is hard to argue with. And he's careful not to characterize the ideas because he doesn't want to offend anyone old enough to vote. But to say that Republicans have been the "party of ideas" is to imply that the Democrats haven't had ideas during that same time, which is patently false. I think Obama's looking ahead to the general election, knowing he's going to have to defend a pretty liberal voting record and trying to soften it with some non-offensive statements about Republicans and Republican icons (i.e. Reagan), but this doesn't make good political sense. He's got to win the nomination first, and anything that even smacks of admiration for Republicans is death in a close primary fight. Hillary and Edwards have been beating him over the head with his recent spate of lofty, almost disinterested-sounding statements and, leaving aside for a moment whether the statements are true or not, it's just not good politics. It's dumb politics and he's got to be smarter to win this thing.

Of course, Hillary mischaracterizes what he said, saying, incorrectly, that Obama said Republicans had "better" ideas, which he did not say, but one can hardly blame her for taking the club Obama gives her and beating him over the head with it. She's trying to win too.

The Obama campaign responds to Hillary's response, some might say lamely, here.

Also: further developments on the Ron Paul newsletter story. Apparently, Ron Paul was close to naming who he believed was responsible for writing some of the more unsavory items in those newsletters, but opted not to. Even if it becomes clear that Paul was responsible for writing exactly none of those racist articles, I think he needs to come out and explain why he let those newsletters go out under his name for decades and decades without a lawsuit, or even a word of protest.

And fellow blogger Peter Fedak has seen "Cloverfield." His teaser review is quite brief.