Category Archives: Movies

How did he do that?

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So I was sitting in a hotel room too tired to move, and on the TV is a movie I’ve never particularly cared to see: "Kingpin," with Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid.

Anyway, there was this scene in which Harrelson’s character had a big bet on whether he could pick up the 6-7-10 split. Of course, you know he’s going to do it. (I did it myself once when I was really into bowling back in high school.) But what floored me is that the scene wasn’t cut. You see Harrelson turned toward the camera, and you see him turn and bowl, and you see the ball roll all the way down the lane, and pick up the spare, and Harrelson turns back to the camera.

So how did they do that? Was what happened with the ball and the pins faked with CGI? Was there a magnet under the ball controlling it? It looked legit. But how many takes would that have, uh, taken?

Consider this to be a test of my new theory that you can ask any question, however esoteric, on a blog, and from somewhere out there, someone will have a relevant and accurate answer. We’ll see.

Will these fare better than ‘Nailed?’ Let’s hope so

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As you may recall, we have questioned whether the money  S.C. spends trying to lure movie productions here is well spent. The Commerce Department does not question it, however, even after "Nailed" had to leave town after running out of money several times. You have to wonder whether an employer that keeps failing to pay its employees is the kind of business you want in town, even if one of the employees it brings in is a total babe.

But the Commerce Department doesn’t wonder. Here’s a release I got today:

S.C. Department of Commerce Announces Two New Feature Films Approved to Shoot in the Palmetto State

COLUMBIA, S.C. – June 25, 2008 – The South Carolina Department of Commerce today announced two new feature films have been approved to begin filming in South Carolina in 2008.  Both productions are quality family entertainment that will offer a positive reflection of South Carolina.
     “Band of Angels” is a Hallmark Production directed by Bill Duke.  The film traces the history of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers from their roots as a struggling opera company to their early success as gospel and spiritual singers.  It is set post Civil War and will be shot primarily in and around Charleston.
     “Dear John” was written by Nicholas Sparks and is a New Line studios production with Production Designer Sarah Knowles.  New Line studios and Knowles both worked on “The Notebook,” which was filmed in South Carolina in 2003.  “Dear John” will be directed by Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Julia Roberts, Dennis Quaid and Robert Duval in “Something to Talk About,” which was also shot in South Carolina in 1995.
     “Dear John” is the story of a soldier who falls in love with a conservative college girl who he plans to marry, but time and distance take their toll on the fledging relationship.  If the production company opts to move forward, the film will be shot in multiple locations along the South Carolina coast.
     “Both of these productions were recruited under the incentive guidelines revised by the Department of Commerce and the Coordinating Council for Economic Development.  As a result, the state did a much better job of utilizing our crew base in South Carolina. The film recruitment success this spring should end the debate that South Carolina needs to pay more to recruit more films to the state. The goal relative to film recruitment should be to lower the negative fiscal impact and create jobs for South Carolinians.  The productions recruited since the first of the year are a step in the right direction to achieve both goals,” said Joe Taylor, Secretary of Commerce.
     “Even with the national writers’ strike slowing productions around the country in the fall of 2007, South Carolina enjoyed its strongest spring of film recruitment ever.  With four feature films and a television series, our resident crew base has been virtually fully utilized.  The focus of film recruitment should be employing South Carolina residents and keeping the South Carolina crew base working is the strongest measure of film recruitment success,” said Daniel Young, Executive Director of the Coordinating Council for Economic Development. 
     “The New Daughter” completed filming along the coast in May and “Nailed” has completed production in the Columbia area.  “Army Wives” is still in production filming in Charleston.
     “Band of Angels” is currently in preproduction and is scheduled to begin filming in South Carolina soon.  Individuals interested in applying for work on the production should contact the South Carolina Film Commission or visit www.filmsc.com.
     “Dear John” has been approved for film incentives by the Coordinating Council for Economic Development.  The production company is still finalizing details concerning the production including the exact schedule.
                -###-

Notice how Commerce worded that: “Nailed” has completed production in the Columbia area.

That’s a funny way of putting it, in light of the facts.

Of course, I’m sure that there was some positive economic impact while the production lasted. I hear, for instance, that a certain underground bar across from the State House got so much business from cast and crew — including at various times Paul Rubens and a guy who was in "X-Men" — that they recently they had to shoo out some of the "Nailed" folks so they could close the place.

But as much as I love movies — and I do — we on The State‘s editorial board remain unconvinced that money spent in this sector is worth it.

What’s a ‘Good Old Boy’ to you?

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
MORE THAN THREE decades ago, I saw a “B” movie that was a sort of poor cousin to “In the Heat of the Night.” It was about a newly elected black sheriff in a racially divided Southern town, and the white former sheriff, played by George Kennedy, who reluctantly helps him.
    At a climactic moment when the two men seem to stand alone, a group of white toughs who had earlier given the sheriff a hard time show up to help. Their leader gruffly says that they’re doing it for the sake of the old white sheriff, explaining that, “You always was a good old boy.”
    Or something like that. Anyway, I recall it as the first time I heard the term “good old boy.”
    It got a good workout later, with the election of Billy Carter’s brother to the White House. But the first time I recall hearing it used prominently as a pejorative by a Southerner was when Carroll Campbell ran against the “good old boy system” in the 1980s.
    The usage was odd, a fusion of the amiable “good old boy” in the George Kennedy/Billy Carter sense on the one hand, and “Old Boy Network” on the other. The former suggests an uncultured, blue-collar, white Southerner, and the latter describes moneyed elites from Britain or the Northeast, alumni of such posh schools as Cambridge or Harvard. Despite that vagueness, or perhaps because of it, the term remains popular in S.C. politics.
    Which brings us to Jake Knotts, who represents District 23 in the S.C. Senate.
    Jake — pronounced “Jakie” by familiars — could have been the prototype for that George Kennedy character, had Hollywood been ready for something with a harder edge. He is a former Columbia city cop who by his own account sometimes got “rough.” He offers no details, but a glance at his hamlike hands provides sufficient grist for the imagination. According to a story said to be apocryphal, he once beat up Dick Harpootlian for mouthing off to him. (The mouthing-off part gives the tale credibility, and longevity.)
    After Jake was elected to public office, he further burnished his “rough” reputation with a legislating style seen as bullying by detractors, and tenacious by allies.
    This newspaper’s editorial board has always been a detractor. You see, we are high-minded adherents of the finest good-government ideals. Jake’s a populist, and populism is common, to use a Southern expression from way back. In our movie, we’re Atticus Finch to his Willie Stark. (See To Kill A Mockingbird and All the King’s Men.)
    We were against video poker; Jake was for it. We were against the state lottery; Jake was for it. We were for taking the Confederate flag off the State House dome; Jake was against it.
    We were for giving the governor more power over the executive branch; Jake was against it.
    In 2002, we endorsed a candidate for governor who agreed with us on restructuring, and didn’t seem like anybody’s notion of a good old boy. He styles himself as the antithesis of back-slapping, go-along-to-get-along pols, to the extent that he doesn’t go along or get along with anybody.
    That’s fine by the governor, because his style is to set forth an ideological principle, see it utterly rejected by his own party, and then run for re-election as the guy who took on the good old boys.
    Jake’s notion of the proper role of a lawmaker isn’t even legislative; it’s helping — he might say “hepping” — constituents on a personal level. This can range from the unsavory, such as helping out a voter charged with a crime, to the noble, such as paying out of his pocket for an annual skating party for kids who’ve gotten good grades.
    Jake’s slogan is “for the people,” as simple an evocation of populism as you will find. To him, theJake_sign
proper role of the elected representative is to make sure government “heps” regular folks rather than working against them.
    That means he will take a bull-headed stand against the concerted effort to undermine the one aspect of government that does the most to help regular folks — public schools.
    This brings us to what caused us to do something we thought we’d never do — endorse Jake Knotts, the sentinel of the common man who doesn’t give two figs for what we think the proper structure of government should be.
    We’re endorsing him because he stands against the Old Boy Network (see how different these terms are?) of wealthy out-of-state dilettantes who don’t believe in government hepping folks at all, and want to make our state a lab rabbit for their abstract ideology.
    We are not comfortable with this. We’ve had some terrific arguments about it on our editorial board. It was not one of your quick decisions, shall we say.
    Occasionally, when we have a really tough endorsement in front of us, I quietly call a knowledgeable source or two outside the board, people whose judgment I trust, to hear their arguments.
    On this one, I talked to three very different sources (one Democrat, two Republicans) who shared values that had in the past caused us to oppose Jake. All three said he had won their respect over time. All said he was a man you were glad to have on your side, and sorry to go up against. All three said that between Jake and his opponent who is backed by the governor and the Club for Growth and the rest of that crowd, they’d go with Jake.
    Not that they were proud of it. All three spoke off the record — one got me to say “off the record” three times. I complained about this with the last one, saying it was all very well for him to urge us off-the-record to endorse somebody on-the-record, and he said all right, he’d go public.
    It was Bob McAlister, Carroll Campbell’s chief of staff back in the late governor’s glory days of fighting “good old boys.”
    “I don’t agree with Jake on a lot of issues,” Mr. McAlister said, but “at least you don’t have to wonder where he stands on anything, because he’ll tell you.” In the end, “There’s a place in politics for his kind of independent thought…. I think Jake Knotts has served his constituents well.”
    In his own staid, doctrinaire-Republican kind of way, I think Bob was saying he thinks Jake is a good old boy.

Knottsjake_001

Top Five movies adapted from TV (original cast)

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This is a category that kept popping into my head back when I was doing this post and this one. With "Sex and the City" fans all atwitter about their gal pals being back, I thought first, "would a Sopranos reunion on the big screen be a good thing?" I decided not, as a large part of its appeal was its serial, episodic nature, day-in, day-out, life goes on (except for those who are whacked).

But this raises the question, "Can any TV series yield a movie worth the price of the popcorn (which, when you think about it, is a pretty high standard)?"

And the answer is yes — just look at "Serenity." So I compiled this list. Admittedly, it’s a pretty restrictive list, and doesn’t contain any movies that would make even a Top 100 list from among films in general. And I’m not allowing movies inspired by TV series, but with a different cast — a la "The Untouchables," or "The Addams Family." So the list is what it is. And what it is is an excuse to urge you to see "Serenity" if you haven’t. The rest is just a nod to the Top Five art form, in keeping with the Nick Hornby standard:

  • "Serenity" — I saw this without having ever seen "Firefly," upon which it is based, which means I was like most people in the known ‘verse. "Firefly," probably the best sci-fi series ever, lasted less than a season. I now own the whole catalog on DVD, including several episodes never aired. How to describe it? Basically, it’s a classic western translated to outer space (in the vein of the "Outland" remake of "High Noon," only wittier), complete with the residual tension of the Civil War thrown in. The protagonists are a motley ship’s company built around a captain and exec who were Browncoats (rebels) back in the war. Their side lost to the Alliance, which rules all the core planets in the settled universe, and their ship (a Firefly-class relic named "Serenity," after the pivotal battle in which the Browncoats lost the war) bounces around the frontier fringe planets (where Alliance authority is shaky), making an iffy living off of smuggling and other shady enterprises. There are all sorts of cool little side notes in this future world, including the fact that their Old West diction is laced with Chinese-derived profanity — when they’re not resorting to such everyday epithets as "gorram," and "ruttin’". The characters are a lot of fun, especially Jayne the mercenary, and Kaylee the mechanic. And the best news of all is that you can see and enjoy "Serenity" without ever having seen the series, and it gives nothing away. But after you see the movie, you’ll want to see the series. Oh, one more thing — the Browncoats are essentially libertarians who just want the authoritarian Alliance to leave them alone. But I enjoyed it anyway. It was shiny.
  • "The Simpsons Movie" — It lived up to the standard set by the series, which is all you can ask.
  • "The Blues Brothers" — This one’s kind of obvious, to the point that I’m almost embarrassed to include it. Everybody picks this one.
  • "The Naked Gun" — A fitting translation of "Police Squad," it is what it is (just to thoroughly overwork a phrase).
  • "Batman (1966)"  — Give me a break on this, too. I was 12 years old, and it was everything I expected.

As you can see, a very restrictive category. I would have included "Wayne’s World," but I wasn’t going to allow more than one SNL spinoff (and as long as I’m being absurdly pedantic, I probably shouldn’t have included either of them, since a skit is not a series). "Star Trek" fans would probably have included one or more of those films, but I was never really into that ‘verse.

Top Five Harrison Ford flicks

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Lost_ark

We had a list in the paper Friday, compiled by someone with Newsday, that purports to be of Harrison Ford’s 10 best movies (among which, sadly, I hear his latest would not be a contender). The list had its good points and bad points. Basically, it lacked discipline. With Harrison Ford, you only get serious when you try to come up with a Top Five List. Here’s mine, unranked:

  1. Blade Runner — The one de rigueur item on the list, for aesthetic reasons if none other. The film buff’s Harrison Ford movie, if not his most popular (and not my favorite).
  2. Star Wars — A.K.A. "Episode IV: A New Hope." Note that I include this rather than The Empire Strikes Back. Sure, the plot of the latter is built more around Han Solo, but he defines the character in the first film. After that, the freshness, and the fun, is gone. Han is at his best before he becomes heroic, when he is the brash rogue who had not yet decided to do the right thing.
  3. Air Force One — My kind of president, with my kind of foreign policy set out in the "Be Afraid" speech: "Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from
    doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not
    political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over.
    We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no
    longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid." And don’t forget Gary Oldman’s villain — his best line is when he says "smart bomb." Like many action movies, this requires suspension of disbelief, but Wolfgang Petersen makes that easy and pleasurable.
  4. Witness — In this one, Ford represents Modern Man with all his violent foolishness, the "English" among the Amish, and this is what he’s good at — Regular American Guy out of water. Also featuring Danny Glover as a bad guy, which was running against type, but he carries it off.
  5. Raiders of the Lost Ark — The Regular American Guy resplendent, letting it all hang out in a story based in an All-American story-telling form — the old-style adventure cliff-hanger serial. East meets West in a most stark fashion — Indy comes up against the masterful scimitar-wielding opponent, gives an "I don’t have time for this" shoots and shoots him. He’s scared of snakes, and just making it up as he goes along. As regular as a guy gets.

Close contenders for the list: "The Fugitive" and "American Grafitti" But the former is more a showcase for Tommy Lee Jones’ talents, and his part in the latter just isn’t big enough. I also liked "Regarding Henry."

Let It Be

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There has long been a significant hole in the catalogue of Beatles films available on video — "Let It Be."Let_it_be

My son brought to my attention a few days ago the fact that you can watch it — in its entirety — at MilkandCookies.com. Here’s the link.

Admittedly, it’s not the polished work of cinematic art that is, say, "A Hard Day’s Night." And it’s rather sad, since it’s an unvarnished portrait of The Beatles at the moment they were breaking up. Finally, the music is far from finished form (I’ve got it playing as I type this, and my wife in the other room is providing commentary on its harmonic shortcomings).

But any true Beatles fan should see it at least once…

Arrgghhh! It was painful enough the first time

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Among those who lived through the Florida Long Count in 2000, who would want to live through it again? Not me. But HBO is betting I’m in the minority:

REVISIT
THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN U.S
HISTORY

AS
KEVIN SPACEY LEADS AN ENSEMBLE CAST IN RECOUNT

PREMIERING
SUNDAY, MAY 25TH AT 9 PM ET/PT ONLY ON
HBO

Two-time
Oscar® winner Kevin
Spacey (“American Beauty,” “The Usual252x190_synopsis01
Suspects”) leads the ensemble
cast of HBO Films’ RECOUNT, debuting
SUNDAY, MAY 25 (9:00-11:00 p.m.
ET/PT) on HBO.

Shot on location in Jacksonville and Tallahassee, RECOUNT revisits one of the most dramatic moments in U.S. history, portraying the turmoil of the 2000 presidential election in Florida

.  The film also
stars Bob Balaban (“For Your
Consideration”), Ed Begley, Jr.
(“Living with Ed”), Laura Dern
(“Year of the Dog”), John Hurt
(“The Elephant Man”), Denis Leary
(“Rescue Me”), Bruce McGill
(“Cinderella Man”) and Tom
Wilkinson (“Michael Clayton”).

RECOUNT follows the Florida recount from Election Day in November 2000 through the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of George W. Bush over Al Gore five weeks later.  This illuminating, hugely entertaining film pulls back the veil on the headlines to explore the human drama surrounding the most controversial presidential election in U.S. history.

Kevin Spacey portrays Ron Klain,
Vice President Al Gore’s former Chief of Staff.  Tom Wilkinson portrays James
Baker III, who was previously Secretary of State to President George H. W.
Bush.  Denis Leary plays Michael
Whouley, national field director during the Gore campaign.  Laura Dern portrays
Katherine Harris, Secretary of State of Florida.  Bob Balaban portrays Ben Ginsberg, national counsel to the
Bush-Cheney campaign in the 2000 election.  John Hurt plays Warren Christopher,
former Secretary of State to President Bill Clinton.  Bruce McGill plays
Republican lobbyist Mac Stipanovich.  Ed Begley, Jr. portrays attorney David Boies, who represented
the Gore campaign before the Supreme Court.

For more details on the film and to
view the trailer go to: http://www.hbo.com/films/recount/

252x190_synopsis02_2
Laura Dern as Katherine Harris?!?! Have mercy! Please, let me remember her as she was in "Wild at Heart
" — or almost anything else you can name…

Tell you what — why don’t y’all watch it, and tell me about it…

Eagerly awaiting ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt’

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When I was looking for a link for this post, I ran across some really good news I had not previously heard. Martin Scorcese is making a movie based on Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which I happen to be reading.

Now folks, this is what we call exciting movie news! Why didn’t the Real Message Center send me a pop-up about this one?

I’m so pumped — or DEE-lighted, as Morris tells us Ted would have said — that I don’t even mind that young Mr. Roosevelt will be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind anyway, after the excellent job he did in "The Departed." And "The Aviator," for that matter. Sure, he may not be Harvey Keitel, but then who can imagine Keitel as TR?

Basically, Scorcese has turned DiCaprio into a highly respectable entity, "Titanic" notwithstanding. It even strikes me now that they teamed up to do a movie about New York from the days when TR was police commissioner there, and police HQ was on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. OK, so, it was a generation before, but it was the right century.

I haven’t looked forward to a film production this much since I heard HBO was going to do Band of Brothers…

Somebody’s Big, Stupid Second Cousin

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There was an intriguing piece today in the WSJ applying the principles of The Wisdom of Crowds to predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The logic of it was persuasive when it invoked Wikipedia, which I find to be far more useful and reliable than detractors claim (when people say it’s inaccurate, I want to know, Compared to what source of such breadth and depth?)

It was less persuasive in the preceding sentence, when it said,

This collective intelligence also accounts for why Google results,
determined by an algorithm reflecting the popularity of Web results
matching a search, are so relevant….

Today, wearing my vice president hat, I heard a presentation on new vistas of user-specific smart online advertising that the presenter described more than once in “Big Brother” terms — not as a bad thing, but in terms of Big Brother’s storied effectiveness and, I suppose, intrusiveness into private thinking patterns.

But you know what? So far, I’ve been hugely unimpressed by the effectiveness of software that is supposed to get to know me well enough that it can predict what I want. Take Netflix, for instance. I have freely given Netflix more than its share of info on my preferences. I have, for instance — and I’m embarrassed to admit this — rated 1,872 movies on the one-through-five-star system. Yes, that’s one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two. Any time Netflix has said I need to “rate more movies” — and it seems to have an insatiable appetite in this regard — I have taken a few moments (in the evenings, of course) to oblige.

I have done this in a vain attempt to give Netflix enough info to at least make a wild guess as to what sort of movies I like. It still doesn’t seem any deeper or more intuitive than what a clerk at an ’80s-style video store might have guessed after less than a dozen rentals. Or so it seems to me.

For instance, Netflix is convinced I’ve got a fierce hankering to watch “Classics” — you know, movies with Clark Gable or Myrna Loy or whatever. Apparently, this is based on the fact that I’ve given high ratings to, for instance, “It Happened One Night” and “The Thin Man.” But of course I give those high ratings! Any literate movie fan would! That doesn’t mean I want to see them again, or that I want to see lesser films with the same actors in them! I don’t have a black-and-white jones here, people. I just acknowledge quality, and I think my judgments along those lines are fairly conventional, really. What I need you to do is extrapolate what I might like among films I haven’t seen or heard about…

Whatever. Anyway, this sort of software hasn’t figured me out, even when I’ve wanted it to. It’s more like somebody’s stupid second cousin than Big Brother.

Strange moments in cinema

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This being Sunday, I’m not going to go to all the trouble of compiling a full Top Five List on this subject. But if I did, I think this one would make the list.

Have you seen the recent Will Smith vehicle, "I Am Legend?" I did, and I suppose it was OK. But having seen it, I recalled that I had not seen the 1971 flick of which it was a remake — "The Omega Man," which in turn was a remake of Vincent Price’s "The Last Man on Earth," which was based on the 1954 Richard Matheson sci-fi novel, I Am Legend.

So in honor of the recently departed Charlton Heston, I ordered "The Omega Man," and watched it last night. It was OK, although it’s cheesy production values were approximately those of the average made-for-TV movie of the period. Overall, the Will Smith version was better, although more maudlin.

But in one respect, "Omega" beat the more recent version all hollow. In term of evoking sheer weirdness, Will Smith watching "Shrek" and maniacally reciting all the line along with the DVD doesn’t accomplish much. To get that full, apocalyptic, world-has-already-come-to-an-end feeling, you have to see the scene in which Charlton Heston goes into a movie theater, cranks up the projector and watches "Woodstock," and recites the dialogue from that. You know at that point that everything that can happen in this world has happened, and then some.

You just haven’t seen "out of character" until you’ve seen the man who was both Moses and head of the NRA channeling  a blissed-out flower child asking, "If we can’t all live together and be happy… if you have to be afraid to smile at somebody… what kind of a way is that to go through this life?"

It’s a grabber in the same league as the last scene of "Planet of the Apes." It will leave you muttering, "Charlton, we hardly knew ye."

And if you don’t believe me, here’s the video. You can skip the rest of the flick; this is the good part.

Next, I’m going to order "Touch of Evil."

‘I know you are but what am I?’

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Being the sophisticated sort that I am, I had remained aloof from the "excitement" of having yet another motion picture being shot here in our fair city — although I admit that perhaps even my pulse would speed up a bit if I were to run into that Jessica Biel person, assuming of course that I were half my current age (ahem). I believe I did see her in something once, and as I recall she was rather symmetrical and pneumatic and so forth.

But that hasn’t happened. However, brother blogger Adam Fogle has experienced the next best thing (if you’re willing to reach far afield) — he bumped into ‘Pee-Wee Herman’ himself.

He wrote about the experience here. From his account, he’s still holding out hope of encountering Ms. Biel, so the lad still has his priorities straight.

Name that tune — please!

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Someone sent me a copy of that video about how fast the world is changing, and about how China has more economic growth in its little fingernail than we’re likely to have in a billion years and stuff. I’m not sure whether this was an update of the video or what (I know there are several versions of it floating out there); there was no accompanying information.

Anyway, while it was very interesting once again, it left me with a maddening question: What is that background music?

It’s from a movie, a movie I’ve seen. I’m even willing to go so far as to say I might have liked the movie. But I can’t place it.

For some reason, the music suggests something about the Scottish highlands. I picture characters running about on the heath in kilts — maybe something out of a remake of "Kidnapped" — with a wide, moving shot taken from a low-flying helicopter.

But I’m almost sure that image has nothing to do with this music. Maybe I’m thinking of a similar shot of the wilds of New Zealand from the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. But I don’t think that’s it, either.

Normally, I can place things like this immediately, which is what is so crazy-making about this instance.

Where is it from?

Jimmy Breslin is a Moustache Pete

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This morning on NPR, Jimmy Breslin was talking about his new book, The Good Rat. It was, of course, an interview replete with his raspy assertions that he knew what the real mob was all about, and that stuff in the movies is a lot of hooey.

Yeah, I know Breslin knows more about the mob than I do, but as an enthusiast of mob flicks, I find his attitude kind of irritating. Sure I know "The Godfather" wasn’t for real — it was less about the Mafia and more a sort of grand American morality play centering around the questions of which is right and good: a society built on laws or one on personal relationships between men. Sure, I know that The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight was probably closer to the truth, but it’s a parody, and I suspect "Mean Streets" is even closer. And "Goodfellas" closer than that.

What about "The Sopranos?" the interviewer asked. He copped a plea: "I was working doing columns on… Sunday nights. I never saw it."

Never saw it? Come ahhhn! Who, in the 21st century, is dependent on watching something when the network (is HBO technically a network? maybe not) shows it? It’s better on DVD. I, who didn’t have HBO anyway, am currently in the middle of the fourth season. Somehow, you get the idea that Mr. Breslin is so Old School, he doesn’t own a DVD player, and still lives life in real time.

But I think he’d like it if he watched it. Don’t you?

Anyway, he did admit that DeNiro is really good at playing a wise guy, so that’s something.

Meanwhile, back on the dusty trail…

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    This blog post takes place between 11 p.m. and midnight on the day of the California primary…

…And even though I haven’t shot anybody or been wounded even once myself today, I’m starting to feel a little tired. So you can imagine how Jack Bauer feels.

Anyway, while we wait to see whether Sen. Palmer — I mean, Sen. Obama — wins the Democratic primary way out yonder where even time itself is distorted, I’m thinking on popular culture again. By a coincidence, both Warren Bolton and I saw "3:10 to Yuma" over the weekend, which I felt gave me all the excuse I needed to talk about that in our last two days’ morning meetings, instead of the state budget and stuff like that that Cindi likes to talk about.

Good cowboy flick, despite the violence being somewhat over-stylized in the modern mode. Two points stuck out:

  • When you saw it, weren’t you ready for that scuzzy yellow-bearded fella with the crazy eyes to get shot about an hour before the final shootout? He was just beggin’ for it.
  • Speaking of that climactic scene — wasn’t it amazing that the protagonist was suddenly able to run just as fast as Russell Crowe, despite the inconvenient fact that, supposedly, he only had one leg? But I surmise that was in keeping with the unities of the Western. Just as the action must never stop for Gene Autrey to reload, it can’t be inconvenienced by a main character missing a leg; he’ll just have to sprint for cover like everybody else.
  • The credits confused me. If this was indeed based on a Glenn Ford Western of the same name, how was it based on a short story by Elmore Leonard? Well, interesting thing about that. Seems ol’ Elmore was writing stories WAY before I knew he was, and certainly before Quentin Tarantino ever thought about teaming up with him.

In short, not a bad shoot-em-up. Now, back to the primaries…

Huckabee gets shave and haircut, Capone-style

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Shave3

We’ve all heard about John Edwards’ tycoon-priced haircuts. But no one would ever think Mike Huckabee would make such a big deal about getting his ears lowered. With his regular-guy persona,Shave
you sort of picture him sitting, unnoticed, reading dog-eared copies of "Field and Stream" while he humbly waits his turn to sit in Floyd’s chair.

Who’da thunk we’d ever see Huck holding court like a king as he is shorn and shaved, like Robert DeNiro in Brian DePalma’s "The Untouchables?" (These photos were taken at the Executive Forum Barbershop — how’s that for a Ritzy-sounding name — in Des Moines, Iowa, on Dec. 31.)

Shave2
You remember that scene, early in the film (sorry, I’ve tried to find a clip on the Web without success, and I don’t know how to get it off my DVD, but I did find this photo). It was meant to show Capone as the master of Chicago — the barber coming to him in his hotel room, and the Boss holding court with a fawning press that chuckles at his thuggish witticisms. It was a scene meant to show Capone as being everything Mike Huckabee is not supposed to be.

So I thought these pictures moved by The Associated Press a bit incongruous. Maybe they should just go back to moving snaps of the (New) Man from Hope grinning with his Fender bass.

But given his success in Iowa, paired with the press’ guilt over having neglected the man heretofore, I guess we’ll have to get used this this sort of wall-to-wall coverage of every instant of the candidate’s daily life. I just hope I’m looking somewhere else when they move the pictures of him holding court in the bathtub.
Shine

The elves are restless

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On Thanksgiving, after the turkey, I accompanied my family — or the portion able to join us to visit my youngest up in Pennsylvania — to see "Fred Claus." (Vince Vaughan cracks me up, OK?) Anyway, we enjoyed it for the light entertainment it was.

The next day, we bopped up to NYC because my youngest had never been there. Yes, we visited the shopping capital of the world on the busiest shopping day of the year. We weren’t buying; looking was overwhelming enough. And it turns out that, while "Fred Claus" exposed certain problems with Santa’s toy production process, it failed to reflect the deep unrest among some of the elves — or at least, the elves we found on the sidewalk outside Macy’s. (Like an explorer drawn into the heart of darkness, I couldn’t resist leading the kids that way in awe and fascination, after we got off the New Jersey Transit train across the street at Penn Station.)

They were very angry — and unexpectedly tall, I found. Maybe they were Middle Earth elves, rather than the kind from the North Pole. In any case, they didn’t seem to have the ol’ Santa spirit.

In case you went shopping on Friday and think it was hectic, I share with you this video, which still doesn’t quite show what it was really like to be in that bedlam. As one of my daughters said looking over my shoulder at the portion of the video inside Macy’s (the part right after the angry elves), "You had to be there." A very different scene from during the parade the day before, but just about as crowded.

I really spoiled the hectic effect by throwing in some restful parts — the skaters at Rockefeller Center, for instance — because I’m a big believer in giving The Full Picture.

The coward that roared

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We should always be on guard against harboring inaccurate stereotypes — not because it’s unPC, but because it interferes with our ability to perceive things as they are.

For instance: A blog tends to draw a lot of people who post outrageous statements, angry provocations and a whole lot of Big Talk under pseudonyms. Lacking other information, you tend to picture people who are either jerks all the time — and I don’t want to think that of them — or they are these Caspar Milquetoast types who get frustrated all day saying "Yes, sir; no, sir" to the world, or being bossed around by their wives, or whatever, and this is their dirty little outlet.

I’m picturing someone who, in "Brad Warthen’s Blog: The Movie," would best be played by someone like the late character actor John Fiedler. You don’t know the name, but you might recognize the photo, or remember him from some of his roles. (I didn’t know his name either; I had to figure out who played timid, squeaky-voiced Juror #2 in "12 Angry Men.")

But either the stereotype is completely wrong, or there are some fascinating departures from the type. Turns out that even brash, openly obnoxious, Big Shot CEOs like to hide behind fake names. This story is priceless:

UNRAVELING RAHODEB
A Grocer’s Brash Style
Takes Unhealthy Turn
Were Posts by Mackey,
CEO of Whole Foods,
A Case of Ethics, or Ego?
By DAVID KESMODEL and JONATHAN EIG
July 20, 2007; Page A1
    John Mackey has never needed the anonymity of the Internet to speak bluntly.
    "I’m going to destroy you," the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. shouted at Perry Odak, CEO of Wild Oats Markets Inc., the first time the two men met six years ago at a retailing conference in Manhattan, according to Mr. Odak.
    At that time, Mr. Mackey had already established a reputation as a maverick, whose growing chain of upscale natural-foods stores was shaking up the way traditional grocers did business. Officials at Whole Foods say Mr. Mackey tells a different version of the story — with milder language — but the confrontation has nonetheless become part of his food-industry legend. Mr. Mackey’s combativeness became even more widely known with the revelation last week that he used an alias for nearly eight years to post messages on Yahoo Finance message boards, bashing competitors and praising everything from his company’s quarterly financial performance to his own haircut…

Get your mind right, Luke

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Assuming I wanted to make a movie about the S.C. prison system, even if I had a sort of magical, all-time, dead-or-alive set of actors to choose from, I don’t think I would have thought of the late Strother Martin to play Corrections chief Jon Ozmint.

But there’s an eerie similarity between what Mr. Ozmint had to say about denying food to rule-breakers…

"Our rule is simple … any inmate is allowed to decline the opportunity (to eat, exercise, shower or have visitors) by failure to comply with our reasonable requirements," Ozmint wrote in the e-mail. "Eating is a voluntary activity and any inmate may refuse to eat."

… and what the legendary character actor said as the "Captain" in "Cool Hand Luke:"

"What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. Some men you just
can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he
wants it… well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men."

You see, as the Captain so clearly explained, Luke didn’t have his mind right. He could have followed the rules, but he chose to spend the night in the box and wear those chains and get whupped up ‘side the head. He chose all that when he back-sassed a free man (the Captain himself, no less) and when he kept gettin’ rabbit in his blood.

If you don’t understand that, then you don’t got your mind right, and maybe you’d best start gettin’ all of your dirt off Boss Godfrey’s yard, boy.

‘love me some fred’

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Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against Fred Thompson. I like that ol’ Tennessee boy just fine. But I can’t help marveling at the extent to which others get excited about him.

Sometimes, they achieve a sort of frenzy that positively cracks me up.

Compared to a staid forum such as, say, an editorial page, the comments on this blog may seem wild and woolly to some — despite my occasional attempts to encourage decorum. But when it comes to sheer intellectual rigor, this is the Algonquin Round Table set against some other places out there on the ‘net.

Such a place is the comments feature on YouTube. I glanced today at one of the video clips I had posted of Sen. Thompson earlier this week, having noticed that it had already joined my top ten most-watched videos. (It had even bumped my least-watched Thomas Ravenel clip, so Mr. Ravenel now occupies only four of the top ten slots.)

There were only three comments so far, but one respondent had gushed:

For Gods sake Fred!!! Please annouce your candicacy!! We are all ready to support you anyway we can. I’d go along with that flat tax too igloo54! GO Fred GO!!!!!!

My absolute favorite, though, was the one before it:


Love me some fred

That’s it. No punctuation. This literary innovation allowed the beholder multiple interpretations. I assumed it meant, "Love me some, Fred!" A colleague took it as saying, essentially, I’m really loving that Fred! Either way, the tension created by its very sparseness, the fact that this writer is excited beyond the ability to articulate, is what strikes me: Don’t have to make sense! Doesn’t matter! I’m just so excited!

Increasing my enjoyment was a movie that I watched as much of as I could stand last night: "Idiocracy," starring Luke Wilson. I had rented it just because Mike Judge was behind it, and I really loved "Office Space."

It was, after a while, hard to take. But the premise was hilarious, and painfully true-to-life. It was based in the idea that in this generation, we have started reversing the evolutionary principle of the fittest surviving, at least in intellectual terms. With high-I.Q., educated people making a fetish of delaying having children, often until it’s too late, and everybody else fully attuned to a culture that increasingly spurs them to copulate like rabbits, the species is bound to get dumber and dumber.

So it is that Owen Wilson, as average a guy as you could find, wakes up from a frozen state 500 years in a post-literate future, and finds himself easily the smartest man in the world. In that new world, "Love me some fred" would pass as Shakespeare.

Unfortunately, "stupid" jokes do get old very quickly. And… well… some of the hyperbole wasn’t all that far beyond today’s reality — especially today’s reality TV. That made it it sort of painfully close to home. Is a show called "Oh, my Balls!," consisting entirely of some poor schmuck getting hit repeatedly in the yarbles, all that much dumber than today’s fare? I fear not.

Her majesty had it right

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Having been too busy lately to so much as watch a DVD from Netflix (I’ve really been wasting that money), I overindulged over the weekend. My younger son and I went to see "Next," then I went straight home to watch the rental that had come of "The Queen." Brief thoughts:

  • Next was better than expected, but it had this problem — if a guy can see his own future for two minutes out, how can he change it? If he changes it, that means it doesn’t happen, which means it isn’t actually his future, so how can he see it? What he should be seeing is himself changing it, and what happens instead as a result. But how could he act to change it if he didn’t see it, because it was never going to happen? I could see him winning at cards, because all he has to do is bet differently, knowing what cards are coming, but not changing the cards that are coming. In that case, he would probably see himself winning, because that’s his actual future. But dodging bullets? Preventing his girlfriend from getting blown up? I don’t think so. My son told me that this wasn’t a problem, that if I read more comic books I’d get it, but I don’t know. The whole time paradox was treated better in "The Final Countdown" (although what that title had to do with the actual film, I don’t know). It was very satisfactory right up until the time that — WARNING: PLOT SPOILER — the Nimitz was about to fight off the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, then they got snatched back to 1980. I guess they didn’t have a big enough budget for more than two Mitsubishis, or the writers just got too confused to go on.
  • The Queen was more or less as good as I had expected, which was quite. I don’t know about you, but I cheered for Her Majesty’s position all the way through. I will never, ever understand the tears and flapdoodle that seemed universal over the death of her ex-daughter-in-law. I understand it no better than I do the appeal of reality TV, or the idiots who bit their fingernails hoping Michael Jackson would be acquited. Of course, it’s all the same thing. Diana was a lovely young woman — graceful, sweet-looking. But give me the I-grew-up-during-the-war, stiff-upper-lip approach every time. Grief should be private, and what business do total strangers have grieving anyway? Lowering a flag at Buckingham, when the queen wasn’t even there, meaning there should be no standard anyway? It was idiocy, and she shouldn’t have been compelled to give in to it. I was much bothered by the way his role made Tony Blair look like a shallow twit through much of the film — the pandering apologist to celebrity-soaked, trashy sentimentalism — but when he got a little backbone and defended his sovereign from first his wife, then his churlish press aide, he seemed more like the Tony I admire so. Elizabeth was bound to lose her battle for a little dignity, of course, especially with her whiny scrub of a son undermining her, but I admire her for holding out as long as she did.