Given the ambivalence I feel toward the first two Star Wars prequels — not to mention the sour taste left in my mouth by the Great “Original Versions on DVD” Debacle — one would think that I wouldn’t be too interested in the upcoming third prequel, Revenge of the Sith.
One would be wrong.
The recent Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx vehicle Collateral looks and feels very much like an episode of the old Miami Vice TV series. That’s not surprising, considering the film was directed by Michael Mann, who executive produced Vice and is widely credited for giving that series its striking visual style. It’s also not a flaw, in my estimation, because Vice is one of my all-time favorite TV shows (I’m eagerly awaiting the DVD release of the first season in January). In many ways, the show was a conventional “buddy-cop” police procedural, but the scripts often displayed a lot more meat than I think most people remember today, and certainly more than was common to most ’80s cop shows. There was also an appealing undercurrent of weirdness in Vice, a sense that this seemingly mundane story of cops vs. drug dealers could spin off into The Twilight Zone at any moment, and I believe that the times when this current was allowed to surface directly influenced the most popular crime shows currently running on TV, the assorted C.S.I. properties, which traffic in weirdness all the time.
Comic book writer Peter David commented today on his blog about some remarks fellow comic writer John Byrne made on his website about Christopher Reeve. Byrne said, essentially, that it is inappropriate for people to be thinking of Reeve as a hero because he did nothing heroic following his accident. Byrne says (and I’m lifting this quote off of David’s site, so apologies if it is taken out of context), “I do not wish to take away one iota of the courage he must have needed not to wake up screaming every single day, but the hard truth is there was nothing ‘heroic’ in what happened to him, or how he dealt with it. In fact, as far as how he dealt with it, he didn’t even have a choice. We could imagine he spent every hour of every day (when not in front of the cameras) begging family members to simply kill him and get it over with — but none of them did, so he had no choice but to deal with each day as it came. Heroism, I believe, involves choice.”
John Byrne, I believe, is an idiot.
Well, this is it. D-Day. Zero Hour. The Iceman Cometh. As I type this, Michael Moore is addressing a packed house at UVSC. And as far as I can tell by looking out my office window, the world has not — repeat NOT — come to an end. Oh, sure, it’s cold and rainy, and I can’t see the Wasatch Mountains through a low-hanging raft of gray clouds, but I’m pretty sure they’re still there. You wouldn’t know it from the nonsense that continues to swirl because of Moore’s visit, though. Before I left the house this morning, I caught a live broadcast from the parking lot of the McKay Events Center showing the police department’s mobile command center — basically a big RV, no doubt fitted out like a technophile’s best dream on the inside — set up and waiting to control any riots that may break around lunchtime today. I can’t wait until the evening news tonight to see if this precaution was needed or if the ravening mobs managed to restrain themselves from tearing the guest speaker limb-from-limb.
In case you couldn’t guess from my snarky delivery, this whole “controversy” continues to rankle me. I am simply appalled at how the people of this state, and of Utah County in particular, have reacted to the “threat” of hearing one man’s opinion. From the news segment this morning I learned that a number of donors to UVSC have made good on their threats to pull their money because of Moore’s visit, and there’s even been a last-ditch effort to cancel the appearance by means of a lawsuit. It’s all such nonsense.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need dissent in this nation. You can argue about Moore’s methods or the accuracy of his views, but many of those who would silence him aren’t concerned with these issues so much as the fact that he dissents at all. They want him to shut up and go away because he says things they disagree with. And that’s not right. That’s not America. I only hope that someday things calm down enough for people to start to realize that again…
Although I grew up during the 1970s and ’80s, it sometimes seems as if I spent more time in the ’30s and ’40s. No, I didn’t have a time machine in my closet, nor am I the sort that claims to have recovered memories of past life experiences (although I do have an unusually healthy sense of deja vu sometimes…) What I mean is that during my childhood, through some quirk of timing and the cyclical nature of popular culture, I was often immersed in stories and forms of media that had first entertained my grandparents.
Johnathan Chait writes today about Bush’s misleading claim that Kerry voted to raise taxes 98 times. I always cringe when candidates on either side start throwing around specific numbers like this without any further elaboration. In the case of “raising taxes,” it’s especially egregious because most bills that Congress votes on are conglomerations of many different “action items,” some of which a Congressman may support while others are harder to swallow. Oftentimes, a member of Congress is forced to hold their nose and vote on a bill that has portions they dislike in order to make sure something they do like passes. It’s lesser-of-two-evils time, something I think that few “civilians” understand. Politicians use that ignorance to their advantage when making this sort of attack. Yeah, a candidate may have voted on a bill that raised taxes or cut a particular defense program — but that same bill most likely also funded a school or provided disaster relief or trimmed fat out of a bloated budget or any of a thousand other positive results that taxpayers and voting citizens would likely approve. It’s the same scenario in reverse when a president is forced to veto a largely popular bill because someone managed to tack an unfavorable amendment on to it.
Attacking an opponent with this sort of claim is the worst possible case of taking something out of context.
Striking paragraphs in the Chait piece:
Kerry’s campaign has a detailed list of 642 Kerry votes to reduce taxes. (Maybe Bush should be painting Kerry as a crazed tax-cutting zealot totally unconcerned about fiscal responsibility.)
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney as a member of Congress from Wyoming voted to raise taxes 144 times. If 98 tax-hike votes make Kerry a far-out liberal, than Cheney would have to be placed somewhere in the ideological vicinity of Che Guevara.
I’m still working on those movie reviews I promised the other day, but in the meantime I want to share a very astute op-ed piece I ran across during my morning surfing. It’s the first of two-part analysis of the seemingly intractable cultural divide that is currently crippling our political process, our national discourse, and, in a very real sense, our national identity. The author doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to the flaws of the Bush administration, but he also lays the blame for this deadlock on everyone, including the Naderites who condemn both of the more mainstream parties.
Here’s a vital paragraph that nicely crystallizes the problem:
The polarized atmosphere, the abandonment of compromise, the triumph of extremism, and the collapse of even any attempts at moderation may have achieved primacy during the Bush administration, but the groundwork was laid as a truly bipartisan effort. Over the past three or four decades, both Democrats and Republicans have gerrymandered congressional districts to serve their political parties rather than citizens, society, or community. There are now so few truly contested districts left that there is not only almost no demand for compromise, but an almost explicit mandate against it. Ignoring constitutional ideals and basic democratic tenets, politicians have gutted this country’s established operating principles. We are paying for it now, but the real hell is just around the corner, when we find this country electorally unable to face the problems created.
I’ve been seeing TV ads in the last couple of days that accuse Utah Representative Jim Matheson — the only Utah Democrat currently serving at a national level — of being a flaming liberal in the Ted Kennedy mold. However, an article in today’s Tribune indicates that Matheson has more often than not sided with House Republicans in his voting. Interesting…
I guess some people think that being “a little bit liberal” is kind of like being “a little bit pregnant.”
They say that celebrity deaths always come in clusters of three. I have no idea why this would be so, but it certainly does seem that way if you follow the Hollywood obituaries. A former girlfriend once called me morbid because I follow them. All I could tell her by way of explanation was that the deaths of people who’ve done work I care about matter to me. True, I may not know these people on any kind of genuine personal level, but I feel like I do know at least an aspect of them through their work, and I mourn the fact that there will be no new work from them once they are gone.
Few celebrity deaths, however, matter more to me than the one I learned about late this evening: Christopher Reeve, the man who was Superman for the children of my generation, died Sunday of heart failure, following a cardiac arrest and resulting coma the previous day. This one really hurts, kids…
[Ed. note: I’ve been pretty lax about the movie reviews lately, so I’m going to try and make up for lost time over the next few entries. FYI, I’ll be talking about films I’ve seen over the course of the last month. I mention this only because I don’t want you to think I’ve spent the last three days sitting in a darkened theater. Not that that’s a bad way to spend one’s time, of course…]
I must be honest before beginning this review: prior to Shaun of the Dead, I’d only seen one other zombie movie in my whole life, namely the seminal Night of the Living Dead. I suppose you could count Sam Raimi’s delirious Evil Dead trilogy, which has certain similarities to “traditional” zombie flicks, but if you’re rigidly defining the genre as “armies of shuffling corpses moaning for ‘braaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnnnsssssssss’ and getting shot in the head,” well, then, there’s only ever been the one. Nevertheless, I feel quite secure in proclaiming Shaun to be, as The Simpsons‘ Comic Book Guy would say, the best zombie movie… EVER! Certainly it’s the funniest film I’ve seen in a good long time. And, in an odd way, it’s the most touching, too.