Category Archives: Movies

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.

Who resurrected the electric car?

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As part of my continuing quest to stay within shouting distance of at least a passing acquaintance with recent film, I watched the following three (on DVD of course):

  • "All the King’s Men."
    Fairly entertaining, but bizarre. I don’t
    think there was a single Southerner in it, much less a Louisianan, and
    the accents were all over the place. Why couldn’t they have gotten
    James Carville to play Sugarboy? Of course, Stark’s boys wouldn’t have been Cajun. He could have been Tiny Duffy, then, instead of Tony Soprano filling that part. It didn’t really disappoint, but my expectations weren’t high.
  • My expectations were very high for "The Departed," and I’m happy to report that they were exceeded. This may be Scorcese’s best, and that’s say a LOT. Yeah, it’s another gangster film, but it’s as different from "Goodfellas" as "Goodfellas" was from "Mean Streets." And it completely deserves to be mentioned alongside them. I’ll say no more about it; I don’t want to spoil anything. See it.
  • "Who Killed the Electric Car." Maybe not as great esthetically as "The Departed," but still a must-see. The conspiracy of interested parties that together ended California’s experiment in creating a market for electric cars is enough to turn the most sensible person into Oliver Stone. To see the wonderful vehicles GM and other major automakers created to meet that demand, then to see them crush the movement, then round up every one of the vehicles for destruction — even though the leaseholders (they never let anybody buy one) desperately wanted to keep them — is pretty powerful stuff.

But imagine my surprise, after seeing that, to go down to party on St. Patrick’s Day in Five Points and find — an electric car.

Not a mere hybrid, mind you, but a car that you can plug in anywhere, a car that uses NO fossil fuels whatsoever. (At least, not unless your electricity is provided by coal, which is too often the case.) Hybrids have their advantages, of course, with their unlimited range. But there’s such an inspiring purity about the electric car. If we could all drive those, with electricity provided by nukes, the Energy Party dream would be here.

In case you’re interested: The vehicle is called a Zap car (ZAP stands for Zero Air Pollution), and are being promoted locally by Dr. F. Steven Isom. His Website is EVCarolina.com, and the phone number on his business card — which proclaims "Electric Vehicles NOW!" — is (803) 233-1700.

Cool stuff.

Pelosi column

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The deep, dark secret of politics:
They’re all just people

BUSH: Is this movie gonna be called “George and Alexandra”; is that the name of this movie?
PELOSI: I don’t know. What do you think it should be called?
BUSH: Uhh… I don’t know — “Geourneys with George?” Pretty good one, huh? You can spell it with a G?
PELOSI: G, yeah! (laughs)

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
CONSIDER this to be a last kind word before the madness begins. OK, so it’s already started. But it’s never too late for a kind word.
    Joe Biden’s been hanging out here a year or two. I’m not sure John McCain ever left in 2000. We’ve seen Christopher Dodd, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Tom Vilsack. I haven’t actually seen Bill Richardson, but he spoke to one of my colleagues on the phone, so I know he’s thinking about us. Mitt Romney was here last Wednesday. Then Barack Obama on Friday and Saturday, and the other media darling, Hillary Clinton, Monday.
    Rudy Giuliani today, ex-Gov. Romney back on Thursday, and some guy named Duncan Hunter Friday.
    With 18 contenders between the two major parties, I know I’m forgetting somebody. Oh, yeah — John Edwards was down in Charleston the other day, and his experience was a good example of the madness I’m talking about.
    He came to talk about health care. The State’s reporter actually wrote about that. But the traveling press corps only wanted to know about a couple of kids he had hired to blog for him. Really. Not that it was in any way important, but that was The Story of the Day, as decreed by 24-hour cable TV “news” and the always-on-message partisan blogs.
    Brace yourself for a lot of this. Gather your strength. Sit back, relax. Rent a movie, and watch it. Specifically, this one: “Journeys with George,” a documentary about George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign for president, made by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
    No, really, it’s good. I was worried, too. I had ordered it from Netflix in late November, thinking it was something I ought to see. Then I let it sit on top of the TV until last week.
    Bush according to Pelosi, I thought each night. Too much like work. Tired. Watch “House” episode for third time instead.
    I broke down last week, at the behest of one of my daughters. Two minutes into it, I called another daughter who was upstairs, told her she had to see this, and started it over. It was that good.
    What was so good about it? Well, certainly not the production values. It was shot with a camcorder by Alexandra Pelosi as a home movie of her year as an NBC producer, traveling with the Texas governor as he sought the presidency. You’ve seen YouTube? Like that, only longer.
    What was good about it was that everybody in the film came across as a human being. If you don’t find that surprising, you need a quick unreality check: Put this down, watch a couple of hours of TV “news,” then visit a few of the more popular blogs.
    See what I mean?
    In this movie, the president-to-be is neither the warmongering demon nor the stalwart defender of all that’s right and true.
    He’s just this guy. The joshing, never-serious, somewhat condescending uncle to the young woman who keeps sticking a camcorder in his face for reasons that aren’t entirely apparent. A little on the goofy side, but no idiot.
    And Ms. Pelosi is neither the Spawn of the Liberal She-Devil nor what you think of when you say “NBC Nightly News” either. She’s not the former because, brace yourself, Nancy Pelosi is actually a human being, too. She’s not the latter partly because she’s a producer, not the on-air “talent” you’re used to. Producers are the ones behind the scenes who get actual work done — arranging travel, lining up interviews, soothing hurt feelings — while the ones you know are checking their hair. Think Andie MacDowell to Bill Murray’s weatherman in “Groundhog Day.”
    She comes across as what she apparently is — a bright, friendly young woman who is very tired of getting up at 6 a.m., herded to airplanes and fed turkey sandwiches all day.
    The two of them are practically friends. When she gets interested in a smiley guy from Newsweek (who later turns out to be a cad), Gov. Bush teases her, then offers semiserious advice. When she reports a little too accurately on her fellow media types and they all refuse to speak to her, George steps in to make peace.
    In other words, they act like people. Likable people, no matter what you think of their politics. So do the others on the bus, including some familiar faces. Nobody took the camcorder girl seriously, so they forgot to put their masks on. Sure, the candidate is deliberately trying to charm the press. What will surprise his detractors is that he’s so good at it. Karl Rove still comes across as a creep, but that’s because it’s real life.
    This brilliant little ditty of a film reveals a deep, dark secret: Like Soylent Green, politics is actually made of people. Real people, whom you are not required by law either to hate or to love. You just hang with them, and see them as they are in the tedium of daily coexistence. People, living their lives. Not symbols, not abstractions, not caricatures.
    I ordered the movie because Columbia attorney Jim Leventis, a perfectly normal guy who belongs to my Rotary Club, is Alexandra Pelosi’s godfather. He describes the speaker of the House as “just a wonderful mom and just a wonderful friend.” Really.
    You should see it if you can, and remember the lesson it teaches. It might ground you enough to preserve your faith in people over the next 12 months.
    I’ll try to remember it, too, as those 18 candidates posture for the extremists in their respective parties. If I forget, remind me.

Worst recent war movies

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Tell you what: To relieve the tension a bit (there’s a lot of angry back-and-forth in the last few days, and poor Mary keeps reposting her deleted posts, and is increasingly COMMUNICATING IN SHOUT MODE), let’s take a frivolous digression.

bud attaches great importance to Joe Lieberman having been seen cheering and pumping his fist when the Americans strike a blow against the Serbs in "Behind Enemy Lines." He sees this as reflective of a deep character defect.

Rather than our getting into a really angry back-and-forth about whether one should cheer for Americans or not (I come down on the "yes" side of that), I’m looking for common ground. bud says I don’t see flaws in my heroes. I say that cheering at any part of a movie as bad as "Behind Enemy Lines" is at least indicative of lousy cinematic taste.

Unlike the characters in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity; I don’t consider tastes unlike my own to reflect a deep character defect.
But I do unconsciously give extra points to people who appreciate the "good" stuff — "good" as define by my own proclivities.

So let’s make like Rob, Dick and Barry and construct a Top Five Worst War Movies (post-Vietnam era only, just to limit the field):

  1. "Behind Enemy Lines" — This was done so very much better in "BAT*21," so you know we can’t blame Gene Hackman, since he was in both of them. I was about to blame John Woo, but he didn’t direct this one. It just looks cheesy enough to be one of his.
  2. "The Thin Red Line" — Such a horrible disappointment, by comparison with James Jones’ novel, that I wrote a whole column
    about it.
  3. "The Great Raid" — Another disappointment from a perfectly good book. Hollywood tried to turn a remarkable, true story about rescuing hundreds of Allied POWs from the murderous abuses of the Japanese into a sappy romance. Why, I don’t know, but it failed on all levels.
  4. "Pearl Harbor" — More sappy romance, but that wasn’t the worst thing (you want romance done right, see "From Here to Eternity"). The worst thing was the use of special effects for special effects’ sake. In fact, it seemed the entire excuse for the film. Worst moment: When two fighter aircraft, locked in a dog fight, fly between two one-story buildings, turning onto their wingtips to negotiate the narrow alleyway.
  5. "Enemy at the Gates" — This one almost didn’t make the list, but it did for a reason it has in common with Nos. 2, 3 and 4: Sheer disappointment. Finally, I thought, Hollywood was going to pay proper, respectful acknowledgement to the horrors of the Great Patriotic War. Up until then, you’d have thought the Americans and British won the war by themselves; talk about ethnocentric. But the titanic, genocidal struggle between Teutons and Slavs that was the Siege of Stalingrad was reduced to the level of a personal feud between Ed Harris and Jude Law (Jude Law! As the emblematic New Soviet Man!) Really, really disappointing.