A History of Violence (A Movie Review)

Viggo Mortensen has an impressive range. Having recently seen him as the no-good brother in Sean Penn’s INDIAN RUNNER, you would think he would be forever typecast as the loser. Here he plays the mild-mannered husband, father and small businessman and he plays it note perfect. When his restaurant is invaded by gunmen, his defeat of those thugs is a great heroic movie moment. As the rest of the movie unfolds, Viggo’s range is tested as he reveals more of his true self. He should have been nominated.

Unlike other movies based on graphic novels such as Sin City, and The Road to Perdition, a History of Violence doesn’t have that overly stylized art direction that takes you out of the realness of the story. Cronenberg makes up for this by inventing his own things to take you out of the story. For instance, Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen by their actions do not seem to have been together long enough to have produced a high school aged son. There is some sort of excitement between them that exists in the world of newness. It seems like he is just recently in her life or he just returned from war.

When the violence heats up, we expect as an audience to see some gore, but sometimes the gore we see is stylized in the slasher movie mode instead of the cops and robbers mode. It draws too much attention to that style and leads you away from the act.

But the only truly groaning preposterous part of the film is the affectedness of William Hurt’s performance. Of course, Hurt made his career playing the driest of leading men and his attempt to give a character some spice is so offbeat and comic it just doesn’t match the action happening simultaneously.

The last thing, though minor, is that the son overcomes a bully we're to believe because he is the son of Viggo and inherited the same prowess. The only problem is that the actor that plays the son isn't quite right for the kind of transformation and it seems forced rather than natural.

For all I know maybe these are elements of graphic novels that fans have long ago forgiven or even expected, but this was actually a good idea and a more decent story than the average movie and I think that those certain elements detract from the overall result.

It’s a bubble film for me. Sometimes I watch these movies again and they grow on me enough that I forgive the imperfections. Other times, the imperfections scream louder subsequent times and I write them off. I’m wondering where this one will take me.

I've seen FORREST GUMP on TV a few times in the last couple of years, and though it was a movie that I critical of the time, especially Hanks voice choice for the character, I have since come to admire and enjoy it. Go figure.

PCU - Politically Correct University (1994) - A movie review

Puritanism has never been dead in America. It just takes different forms at different times. It’s an attitude more so than a belief system. It lives in people that insist the world be fashioned to their own pure standard. In Salem, women were burned as witches for not adhering. In New York City men cannot smoke a cigar in a tavern without the threat of arrest. In college campuses, students are expelled for holding affirmative action bake sales. Larger forms are the drug war and the Kyoto Treaty.

Those on the left that abhor Salem and even liken it to McCarthyism have no insight into their own Puritanism. Because what is Political Correctness other than an insistence of a pure adherence to today’s version of enlightenment? The reason you cannot smoke in a New York City bar comes from the same thinking that made the colonials dress modestly, both were designed to protect the body, although from different things. The students expelled for holding an affirmative action bake sale were performing a sacrilege against the latest tenant of secular divinity. So brings us to the slight and mostly forgotten movie, PCU.

Trish remembered this movie fondly from college and although I never had any interest in it, I was busy cooking and didn’t squawk when she put it on. I tried to simply ignore it, but I found myself laughing more than once. It was in some ways typical, but in other ways it showed a boldness.

It’s the only movie I have ever seen that treats the self-important PC groups as the intolerant and self-righteous creeps that they are. All the usual complaint groups are marching around campus as you’d expect they would be while a group of good-time Charlies led by Jeremy Piven do everything they can to disrupt these pretentious bastards. Piven and Co. are the heroes we already know from Animal House. They care little about school, but they like a good time and these PCers are ruining the fun around campus. The first act of rebelliousness is early on when the vegetarians are marching against the evils of meat and Piven’s gang lies waiting at the top of a building and then flings raw hamburger meat upon them, gross and yet not unappreciated by the audience.

Another explanation for the rebelliousness is that Piven’s one-time girlfriend is a member of the marching anti-men feminists. She’s lambasted early by another fem for having a relationship with that pig, but you can tell that she still likes him and is only going through the motions of sanctimoniousness. We know that Piven will win her back amidst the other chaos that is soon to follow.

Jessica Walter (Play Misty for Me) is the Dean of students that is trying to kick Piven’s crew out of school ala Animal House. And this is where the movie takes a Hollywood turn. David Spade leads the group of prep school types. He’s singled out as a “Republican” and he plans to help Walter get the Pivens kicked off campus. Not once in the film do Spade and his Republicans ever comment on the PC nature of the campus, instead they are solely designed to be the arch enemy of “libertarian” Piven and Co. I suppose this was the trade-off for getting the movie made. You can make fun of all the excessive PC groups as long as the real villain is still a Republican. That the Republicans and Piven would rather fight among themselves than find alliance against the totalitarians of correct thought is funnier than flinging the meat, because it's such a twister stretch for a writer.

Peter Biskind wrote a book about the politics of 1950s cinema that is quite fascinating. He looks at classic films, but also at popular films and cult films. He analyzes the different kinds of approaches taken by authority figures and places those attitudes into groups. If I were to write a movie about cinema in the 1990s, I would certainly include this movie because it gets to the heart of the era. Not only does it capture the shrillness of PC groups in a way that will probably never be tackled again, but it exposes the knee-jerk anti-conservative response of Hollywood on any subject.

PCU ends with the PC groups coming to their senses as Piven and Co. share in a George Clinton concert. The PC groups just needed to find their fun inner child, while the conservatives will never be fun. It’s significant because it shows that modern Hollywood values are less based on beliefs than attitudes. Anything conservative must be suspect, even their own conservative inclinations. Reaching out to the most anti-social liberals is more favorable than making common cause with those that they actually agree with.

The late Dick Schaap was on Crossfire in the early 1990s. The topic may have been what to do with Tonya Harding following the Kerrigan incident. Schaap and Buchanan agreed that Harding should be kicked off the team, but Schaap was so upset that he agreed with Pat, he kept insulting Pat by the way he kept saying he can’t believe he’s agreeing with him on anything and implying that Pat was a fool. I remember more about Schaap’s embarrassment than I do anything else. The same emotion was present here and therefore resolved in a most unrealistic way.

CLEARING THE BASES by Mike Schmidt – (A book Review)

Bob Costas had a great HBO special in May about Steroid use. While his panel of Tim McCarver, Joe Margan and Bob Gibson each had varying sympathies for the players, they all admitted that steroids were bad for the game. Costas thinks that steroids are the second biggest blight on the history of the game following the pre-1947 segregation, because both factors resulted in baseball not having the equal and honest competition that it deserved.

Schmidt’s book is here to take advantage of the controversy by allowing a clean player to weigh in on the happenings. Like most jock books we get a synopsis of his career as a platform to lay his inside opinion on. I remember the 1980s Schmidt from the Pete Rose and Tug McGraw era. I knew little about his beginnings and I was glad he caught me up.

As well as giving a career capsule, Schmidt also explains early free agency starting with Curt Flood on into Catfish Hunter and Dave McNally. On the one hand, Schmidt says the players deserved their freedom of movement and the ability to earn as much as the market would bear. But he also thinks the frequent player movement has been a negative for baseball. This duality of thought is a common thread through the book. Now a lot of people have ambiguous emotions about the way baseball has changed over the years and you can’t fault Schmidt the person for not being sure which is the greater good, but the point of writing a book is to make a stand on the issues not just say that you’re torn between them. Which is better Mike, free movement or guys staying put?

He was on record as saying in the past that if steroids were available in his day he would have used them. He now says that the comment was off the cuff and he wouldn’t have. Steroids are ruinous to the game, he says. But then he explains that the increase in home run production is just as much a result of a tighter wound and fresher balls, and smaller ballparks. So the real culprit can be whatever we want it to be.

The most interesting story is Schmidt’s relationship with Pete Rose. Schmidt started intervening with Bud Selig a few years back and even brought Rose to Selig so that Rose could admit he bet on baseball. Schmidt says that Selig was happy for the admission, but less than impressed with Rose’s lack of emotion over the confession. Selig wanted Rose to feel badly, I guess. Though Rose still had a shot with Selig, his chances were ruined around the time Pete’s book was due to come out. The early leak of the book coincided with the HOF announcements where the Rose news overshadowed Selig’s buddy Paul Molitor being enshrined. DOOM!

I suppose the title is Schmidt's play on clearing the air with his thoughts, but I think Schmidt shouldn't have written the book until he could make some more definitive value judgements.

These are the kinds of books I grew up on, and the ones that taught me a love of reading, although they were mostly written by the likes of Sparky Lyle and Graig Nettles. They usually leave me less than excited these days. The only one from the last few years that stands out is the one written by Jim Kaat.

MUNICH (2005) – A Movie Review

Steven Spielberg’s great downfall is that he has sold his own talents too short and has spent too much of the latter part of his career trying to make “important” message pictures. Thank God Alfred Hitchcock never fell for such trappings. Spielberg doesn’t seem to understand that yes message pictures win Oscars, but that hacks can make message pictures. What other director could have made JAWS or RAIDERS as well as Spielberg? And when he makes these pictures he never seems to want to let them stand on their own. Even his better “important” pictures are ruined by Spielberg’s comments. The schmaltz that works for ET or Close Encounters is just a part of Spielberg and it winds up in everything. For instance, the real life ending of Schindler’s was a kick in the suit pants to say look this is important just in case you didn’t figure it out already. The opening of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN begins in modern-day Normandy so that we can later reflect on the importance of the saving. Give us some credit. Both were needless and became a substitute for the viewer’s ability to add his/her own importance to the events. In Munich the DVD allows you to watch a special introduction by Steven Spielberg. I could not even stomach the idea. If he made the movie correctly then it wouldn’t need a special introduction.

The two main drawbacks for me going in were the slow pace I read about and the source material “Vengeance” that’s factual content is widely disputed. It didn’t help either that Spielberg gave the impression in a number of interviews that the Palestinians haven’t been heard enough, followed later contradictory comments that he himself would die for Israel. The good news is that it’s a very human story and the pace is somewhat slow but not terrible. And although the Israeli hit squad members come away shaken by the act of vengeance, I didn’t stop rooting for them. Yeah some members may question their own actions and that is supposed to make us think about “what hast vengeance wrought,” but you are still allowed to make up your own mind. The Israeli government official played by the great Geoffrey Rush is sort of a heavy in his bureaucratic way, but I didn’t hate him either. I enjoyed the planning and execution of the retribution and the way the human elements were sprinkled within. Spielberg waits the whole movie to finally show us how the Israeli Olympic Team is murdered and he does it inter cut with our hero Eric Bana is flagrante delicto. Some may see that as artsy, but I found it disturbing when you think about how the victims were real people with living relatives. There were more subtle ways I think to show Bana breaking down. Do you think the parallel action is described that way in the book?

So, in short, I liked Munich more than I thought, but Spielberg’s pretentious phase still irks me.

GRIZZLY MAN (2005) – A Movie Review

One of the recurrent themes in Werner Herzog’s work is extreme obsession. The Klaus Kinski characters in AGUIRRE and FITZCARRALDO are good examples. Herzog’s own documentary MY BEST FIEND about his troubled relationship with Kinski the actor demonstrates some sort of an obsession of Herzog’s to risk the dangerous fire of Kinski to produce a greater work of art. That said, I don’t know how the 100 hours of videotape shot by grizzlyman Timothy Treawell wound up in the hands of Herzog, but there is hardly another filmmaker could have gotten more out of it.

A lot of documentaries try to refrain from editorializing the lives of their main characters with their own voice. They usually do so through their use of footage. Herzog is different. He develops strong opinions of what he’s seen and he delivers those thoughts at the end as if he were just another audience member watching these things unfold with us.

I think the typical and weaker choice with this material would have been to paint Treadwell as a misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time outsider. If portrait documentaries fall into any particular cliché then this is it. The filmmakers are so many times dying to tell you why their subject is enlightened and unusual in the ways of the world as we know it. Even if we don’t like their subject, we’re made to admit that he is a mad genius at the least. Herzog makes the stronger choice here of plainly saying that Treadwell read benevolence and reciprocal caring into an indifferent animal that only saw him as food. He does so over a close-up shot of a bear giving us a blank stare. Treadwell loved the Bears and the bears merely tolerated him until the fish ran out.

I also like that Herzog traces Treadwell back to his acting ambitions and failures that seem to leave the man as a wannabee Marlin Perkins soap boxing to save animals that aren’t really in the kind of danger he suggests. It removes any myth that the guy was any kind of singular phenomenon, but a regular guy driven by an obsession that costs him the ultimate price.

Herzog has in his possession a video tape of Treadwell and his girlfriend being mauled and eaten by the bear. He tells us that the attack happened so quickly that Treadwell gets the camera turned on, but he doesn’t remove the dust cap in time so that all you can hear is the yelling and the girlfriend pounding the bear with a frying pan before she too succumbs to his appetite. Instead of playing the audio, Herzog plays this tape wearing headphones in front of Treadwell’s friend and heir. He gives her play by play of what he hears and then gives her the tape and suggests that she never listen to it and that she should destroy it. Even if the tape was hard to understand, hardly a filmmaker would have missed the exploitive choice to play it for us. Herzog instead inserts himself into the drama and puts the moral question to Treadwell’s friend. It’s troublesome because it seems a bit staged, but what he tries to do dramatically by passing the dilemma to her is an interesting idea.

One running theme from Treadwell’s discussion with the camera is that he loves the bears to the point that he would never hurt them and he’s prepared to die for them. He’s obsessed with anyone else who comes within his sphere and when some men do, he convinces himself that he is all that stands between the man and the animal. And as Treadwell fails to become the martyr from hunters after years in the attempt, he begins to suggest that he’ll be just as much a martyr if he dies at the hand of the animals themselves. It’s just the kind of illogical and obsessive idea that must have drawn Herzog to the project. Treadwell’s obsession with martyrdom means he will get there anyway he can. So Herzog uses interviews and the footage to show how Treadwell changed his mind and returned to the wilderness in 2003 past his usual time into the fall where the bears that knew him were in hibernation and strange bears fighting for a short food supply would be even more dangerous. He then gives us Treadwell’s last standup hours before his death in which he alludes to his possible death and kind if lingers on camera past his purpose like a man might stare one last time at his wife before going to war.

Instead of falling into the dramatic trap that it all has to have some meaning, Herzog goes to lengths to show us that his death was probably purposeful and entirely meaningless or just the opposite of the obsessive plan. Herzog does not let stand any pretense that the mauling had meaning outside of his friends that are sad that he is gone. His choice as a filmmaker made me re-evaluate how other people’s stories are fed through the documentary machine to create heroes and strange charming characters. GRIZZLY MAN, if nothing else, will change the way I examine other nonfiction films.

CAPOTE (2005) (A Movie Review)

The trick in bringing a biography to the screen is getting the human being right and using the real details to interpret motivation and events. I lately criticized TUCKER because the over-the-top style served as a mask for the real man, a charlatan. Coppola decided to remove any complexity or ambiguity from the character so that Tucker is idealistic and harmless and the real villains could be the powerbrokers. In lesser hands, CAPOTE could have centered on the wit and charm and New York nightlife and Truman could have been simply a cartoon like Tucker with ability for prose. Writing IN COLD BLOOD could have simply been Capote finding his soul, a dual struggle of the homosexual and the criminal trying to find a place in backwards America. Those were the easy and usual choices and about what we could expect from a typical Hollywood film.

Luckily, these filmmakers find a much better central conflict in the story. Is Capote and artist or a humanitarian? George Clooney’s famous Oscar speech in March addressed this issue and told us of all the great humanitarian things Hollywood is responsible for. Clooney didn’t say that Hollywood chose humanitarianism over artistry. He doesn’t think the two are exclusive. But Hollywood is more comfortable being humanitarian, because you get quick credit for that while being a real artist mostly goes unnoticed.

Truman Capote's first struggle in CAPOTE is simply writing the story. The locals are less than helpful and the murderers won’t talk with anyone. He has no qualms about keeping the murderers alive long enough to get their story on paper. He has no qualms about wanting them to die once he does. The climax is the realization that his lack of effort contributes to kiler's ultimate execution. How much this bothered the real Capote, I don’t know. But the filmmakers do a great job of making this the doing of Capote’s fame as an artist and the undoing of Capote as a human being. It’s a much bolder choice than we expect from the average Hollywood film that often times create super villains that our heroes either defeat (ala James Bond) or succumb to (ala CONSTANT GARDENR).

It don’t mean to say that they nailed the real Truman Capote. I think don’t think any movie every fully nails a real person, even documentaries only show you the impressions that the filmmakers want to display. For instance unlike Normal Mailer who has spent most of his life trying to outdo his most important work, Capote didn’t try. Capote instead settled into celebrity and socialite. He spent his last years on the talk show circuit drinking himself to death. The written epilogue at the end of the movie suggests that this experience is what “ruined” the artist. That’s an interpretation and wholly valid within the known facts. It fits the theme rather than a party-line.

In contrast, George Clooney brings Edward R. Murrow to life in an amusing and interesting way, but he’s not really interested in honestly exploring Murrow’s motivations behind his exposure of McCarthy. He just uses McCarthy to make his point that the red scare of the 1950s was bogus and people were terribly ruined for nothing. In fact, the real Murrow’s exposure of McCarthy wasn’t about the validity of the communist threat, but about demagoguery alone. Whatever his politics, Murrow was an anti-communist himself to the point that he later regretted making a documentary about the plight of rural America that the Soviets would later use as their own anti-American propaganda. Only a few years after Clooney’s events, the real Murrow went to work for the U.S. government and helped craft pro-American messages. Instead of choosing an interesting man bites dog angle, Clooney stops at the point his intended message is disseminated. The Clooney movie turns with the subplot of the colleague who is beleaguered by the Times Columnist and eventually commits suicide. I don’t know the real history here, but I know by the way it’s presented that something is being left out. Whether the character is fiction, a composite or whether the co-worker had other mitigating issues, no healthy and innocent person commits suicide because of unfair press. This is the only hinted at motivation for Murrow and it's weak pillar once you examine it.

In contrast, whether true or not CAPOTE's conclusion that suggests that the harrowing experience of writing IN COLD BLOOD ruined Capote is consistent with his self-destruction, even if Capote’s demise can be read by others as a result of ego, hubris, and alcoholism. Here’s a guy who alienated many of the people he once included as friends after he published some magazine excerpts from a book he was writing society-life. In contrast, it’s very hard to think that the Murrow at the end of Clooney’s movie could become a spokesman for anti-communism or regret what the Soviets would do with his work. Therefore, the movie rests simply as a message vehicle that arrives at its intended destination but can nary drive 2 feet forward from there.

One of the illusions that Hollywood falls for is that comedy is entertainment and drama is art. Many would say that OCEANS 11 is entertainment and GOOD NIGHT is art, but in actuality both films are aimed at entertainment, the difference is that OCEAN'S is designed for box office and GOOD NIGHT for recognition. Both are directed squarely at a specific audience and they both hit their target. The popcorn movie fan responded exactly the same with his dollars like the leftward leaning Academy member did with his vote. If you don't enter GOOD MIGHT with the idea that the red scare was bad, you are given two reasons to start thinking so, Murrow's co-worker was driven to suicide and McCarthy was overbearing. So you are either already converted to that thought or you're supposed to use your emotions to climb aboard. I don't know how that's any different than responding to OCEAN'S with the emotion of momentary happiness that laughter brings.

Maybe it’s possible to begin as an artist and by accident unleash a trendy message along the way, but for the true artist it should be akin to digging rocks out of a yard and happening upon a $10 bill. I cannot say that CAPOTE is art itself, but it’s certainly on a path to art if nothing else, and the lesson it teaches about art is a minority voice in the community from which it comes. Although my viewed list from 2005 is hardly exhausted, I think it’s the best film of the year.

PHOENIX

I was there once as a kid. Trish has two college friends that live there now. One is married. The other was married this past weekend. We went. She left early in the week and I went late Thursday on Southwest with a stop in St. Louis. We were supposed to stay on the plane and pick up more passengers. They made us exit our week-old plane for a non-specific reason and another plane flying in from Omaha took us to Phoenix. The first plane smelled a lot newer.

Although we were sent to another plane, we kept the stewardesses. They were funny. When we landed near 11pm, the PA stewardess said that if we were connecting to another flight that we should fire our travel agent. The pilot kept giving us updates from game 6 between the Lakers and Suns. During the flight I read this book about a guy who runs super marathons. He once ran a relay race where he was all ten teams. It was 150 miles long. He consumed 27,000 calories during the run. His wife puts up with it.

Phoenix has grown since I was a kid. They have things like Borders bookstores these days. After I won some money playing poker at the Indian Casino in Scottsdale (see The Nuts), I almost bought Barry Greenstein’s book, but then I remembered that it was nearly $10 cheaper online. Waste not, want not. I read a little about Barry while Trish bought a new dress for the wedding. The one she brought was too light for a windy day on top of a mountain. Barry said some things I have never heard a poker player talk about, good common sense things. The one that sticks out most is that poor poker players aren’t necessarily stupid, the ones playing the bigger stakes were smart enough to make their money some other way but they just aren’t poker savvy. I don’t know how that is supposed to help me win, but it made me want to buy the book anyway.

The rehearsal dinner was at a local Italian pizza joint and the food was very authentic. We sat next to a groomsman from Milwaukee. We had the same question for the waitress, what is Italian Beef? She didn’t know either. It was put on the menu especially for the rehearsal dinner. She left for the kitchen and returned to tell us that it was beef with Italian seasoning. I still wasn’t sure what that meant, but ordered it anyway. Turns out that Italian beef on this particular night was filet Mignon with squash and asparagus. Those who ordered the spaghetti marinara missed out. The groomsman from Milwaukee said he had to give the best man speech or that all the groomsmen were teaming up to do so. He didn’t know what to say and asked advice. I told him to start off with a funny story about his friendship with Bill and then end with something more heartwarming. We joked about it for a while although he took the advice the next night. I wish I remembered what he said.

After dinner we went to this old restaurant for martinis. It reminded me of Chasen’s of Hollywood that I saw in the documentary THE LAST DAYS OF CHASENS. You entered from the back through the kitchen like in Goodfellas or Swingers. The kitchen staff was welcoming albeit busy. Empty tables everywhere but we couldn’t sit. In fact, they were a little peeved that we just came to drink. They made us give up our barstools to dinner guests.

I woke up at 6am the day of the wedding. My body clock screamed 9am. I got a paper and checked out the American League East Standings and Real Estate. Homes are priced at about the same rate as Orlando. Trish and I drove to Taliesin West, the winter home of Frank Lloyd Wright during his last 20 years. The property began as a camp and his apprentices built the entire compound from Wright’s plans. Apprentices still today live on the property and graduate with an accredited degree in architecture. They live in tents their first year as they construct their own dorm rooms. We could have toured their houses, but instead chose to see the Wright private quarters.

After our 90 minutes of Wright, we met Tricia’s cousin Amy, her husband and two boys for lunch. The 4-year old Caden had already been to tee-ball and swim lessons that morning. The year old Jase had already thrown up all over the kitchen. They were good people and the boys were spirited and sweet. Caden did not want any part of chips and salsa and he didn’t like the menu choices. The kid needed a hot dog. I was a hero for pointing out the grilled cheese on another part of the menu remembering that I lived off of them as a kid. The light-eating Caden ate half of it. His mother told us he weighs 27 pounds. Brother Jase, a week from his first birthday weighs 17 pounds and all 17 of those pounds were pounding the rice they ordered for him. He would ball it up in his hands and put one in his mouth and the other on the floor. What our dog would have given to spend one supper at their house. After lunch and that aforementioned shopping trip, I needed a nap before the ceremony.

The wedding was at the Hilton on a Hilltop. The chosen spot looked straight through the valley and onto Downtown with the mountains sitting gladly behind like they were built by a Hollywood set director to finish the picture. It was windy. It was hot. The ceremony was short and very American. The Anglo groom marrying the Asian bride with a black minister, a mariachi band playing background and Navaho poem read for good measure. E Pluribus Unum. I should say that Trish was also a reader on this day and although she hates speaking in public, she gave it real heart.

A great many of the guests were lawyers and one guy told me flat out that Bush should be impeached for the wiretapping business.

What about Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus or FDR interning the Japanese? Our lawyer said that history has concluded that they were both wrong. Ah, but wouldn’t Congress have been equally wrong to impeach either of them considering their importance to history? But Bush isn’t important to history says my lawyer. Iraq was a mistake and Clinton or Gore would have invaded Afghanistan after 9-11.

How can you be so sure, I say? We were attacked 4 times during Clinton’s presidency and he did little in the way of response. Even so, Bush lied about why we were going into Iraq, said my lawyer. I remember he said that Saddam was a bad man and was terrible to his people. That’s not enough of a reason to invade a country he replied. Then why did we send troops to Haiti and Bosnia?

Bush lied about the weapons of Mass Destruction, the lawyer tells me. Do you mean the sarin gas they found that would kill 500,000 people or the British intelligence report that they were trying to buy Yellow Cake in Africa? Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11 says the lawyer. Like Hilter had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor says me.

Bush should have gotten permission from a judge to tap people’s phones, he continues. I ask what makes an unelected judge so special. It’s the checks and balances system in the constitution, he says. But I ask why a judge is the last word. Why not the equally un-elected CIA official?

He says that judges stand up for the constitution. Like they stood up for the first amendment when the Campaign Finance Laws were passed, I enquire. Ruling on constitutional points is their job according to the constitution, he tells me. According to the constitution or according to John Marshall, I ask. Well thank god for Marshall, he says. Or otherwise we’d need fewer lawyers, I quip.

Take this gay marriage proposal, he continues. It’s unconstitutional to not allow gay marriage.

What about polygamy then? Is that unconstitutional?

Well that’s a different case, he says. You can’t have guys marrying their sisters. Or is that something else?

It’s when you have more than one wife, I say.

Well, I’m not sure about that, but I’m sure gay marriage is constitutional because you can’t legislate morality, he concludes.

Whose morality? The war on poverty or giving free prescription drugs to old people and ultimately universal health care is a morality question that doesn’t bother the Left. And both sides of the capital punishment debate cite morality as well. Without morality, which laws would be left standing?

It went on like this for a while as a mental exercise simply to see how well I could debate a member of the bar. It was good fun and he seemed like a decent guy, although I think it took enough out of the both of us.

Trish and I made our way outside after sunset and the cool breeze and night sky were glorious. The mountains beyond downtown had mostly disappeared but the lights gave the valley a whole new look. I noticed that mountain to our East had a few houses lit up. A local told us that you weren’t really allowed to build on those mountains anymore, but a few people were grandfathered in. It looked like a nice view and a pain-in-the-ass commute. Oh, don’t worry she said. I don’t think anyone that lives up there has to work.

A bridesmaid’s husband said that he interned for Senator Kyl years back though he didn’t share his politics. He did admire Kyl for being an honest and direct man. The guy was worth a good deal of money and still drove a 1989 Chevy suburban that must have been leaking gas. He hated riding with Kyl because the gas smell bothered him. He would complain to John about buying a new car, but Kyl said he liked the way the Suburban rode.

I asked if he had ever met Barry Goldwater and he said that Goldwater spoke to his 6th grade class. He personally asked Goldwater if he would ever run for President again and Goldwater said no. He said that Goldwater lived along Camelback road and pointed in the general direction. He said McCain’s house was in the dark patch between us and downtown. He was invited there once for some event maybe it related to his work for Senator Kyl. Kyl, everyone thought, lived in or near Tucson.

Why did a city such a Phoenix grow up in the middle of the desert, I asked someone that night. I was the told the Salt River was probably the reason. I never got to see the river. It’s thought that Phoenix is now the 5th largest city in America having surpassed Philadelphia since the last census, though the metropolitan area alone is outside the top ten. This is especially interesting since Phoenix is a post Civil War phenomenon, the city is not even 150 years old.

I could have sat out on that balcony in the cool breeze and looked at the Phoenix valley all night long, alone or in conversation. The desert sometimes seems desolate and lonely, but I know what Glenn Fry meant by the Peaceful Easy Feeling. At night and with the lights down below it isn’t so bad.

A cheer to Patty and Bill and the memory of a short jaunt to Phoenix.

MARCH/APRIL MOVIES

I don't hand out the coveted Stamper (+) this month. I think my expectations were too high.

THE LONGEST YARD (1974) – I saw this as a kid, but after Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper and the other good ole boy films. It’s a comedy early on with some of the same kinds of scenes, but Eddie Albert’s warden character is a lot more serious than the way they try these things today. It sets up the movie as the smart-ass versus the bad-ass as Burt Reynolds glib manner puts him deeper and deeper into trouble. The basic plot is Reynolds was once a pro-bowl quarterback who punches a few cops and winds up in the pokey. He plans on doing his short stretch with minimal effort. Eddie Albert wants Reynolds to help him coach his football team of prison guards. After one thing and another Reynolds puts together a team of inmates to give the guards a warm-up game and that game becomes the resolution to the film. Seeing it today, I realize that it’s not as realistic as I once remembered, but it’s certainly one of Reynolds better roles and films.

EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU (1996) – Only Woody Allen could make a 30s musical with modern day actors and locales. He puts together a great cast with Goldie Hawn, Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton joining himself and frequent player Alan Alda. You even get young Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts for good measure. The movie centers around the conventional romance between Barrymore and Norton and how bleeding heart Goldie Hawn helps get hoodlum Tim Roth released from jail. Of course, Roth proceeds to woo Barrymore away from Norton, much to even the bleeding hearts dismay. Lucas Haas plays the son of Alda and Hawn who is a staunch conservative to the surprise of both parents, luckily it turns out that he has a brain tumor that is causing this. Roberts is Allen’s love interest. Though he has a few sparks with ex-wife Hawn too. The plot is silly, but the song selection is great. The title comes from a tune the Marx Brothers used as a running gag in MONKEY BUSINESS (1932). We even get a scene of guys dressed as Groucho doing a number on New Year’s Eve.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965) – John Le Carre as an author is a great representation of a liberal democracy so assured of itself that it allows contrarians to question the legitimacy of the cold war and western intelligence gathering techniques. I wonder if it ever bothered Le Carre that Soviet Writers attempting to make the same moral equivalence would have wound up in the Gulag? Here Richard Burton plays a British spy that pretends to go off the reservation in order to be recruited as a double agent. He winds up in the East Germany where an ex-Nazi and a Jew have their own inner-communist political battle that Burton becomes a part of. Le Carre’s point seems to be that we’re no better than them because we’ll use ex-Nazi’s as our agents inside East Germany even if those Nazis are trying to kill Jewish commies. I appreciate the efforts that a Le Carre must labor in order to make the Soviets our moral equals, but it’s mischievous to convolute such a plot while ignoring what a Soviet writer like Solzhenitsyn went through for expressing the reality of the USSR. I can imagine the fun that Le Carre had preaching the people’s paradise as he sat in his quiet English garden.

CONSTANT GARDNER (2005) Hey, look. Old Le Carre is back post cold war with a story about “evil” corporations. Now let’s remember that Le Carre spent a career equating us with the Soviets, a regime that killed people wholesale at a much greater number than the Nazis. But at least they weren’t making a profit. Now, I think I read the book was actually about the tobacco industry or some other liberal hobby horse, but since pharmaceutical companies have really yet to take their knock in Hollywood, this story was re-made so that their good acts wouldn’t go unpunished. Despite the politics, I was ready to give the movie a chance because Ralph Fiennes is always good and Rachel Weiss won the Oscar and I would have enjoyed a suspense film if at least the action was pulled off properly. But this movie was as thin as the soup that Stalin served the prisoners. Fiennes who can play alpha male or doddering fool gets to be the fool here and we get to think his hippy wife (Rachel Weiss) married him just to further the “cause.” It’s told in flashback, despite Syd Field’s warning, with Fiennes using the past to try and figure out if Weiss’ death was foul play. I suppose the conclusion of the film is just another chapter in how the little guy is punished severely and the big boys are given just a mild scolding. But the biggest mystery is not what happened to Weiss on screen, but off. I can’t figure out why she was even nominated, let alone won an Oscar for this routine performance. Can anyone name even an eye twitch or chin shift that Weiss hasn’t already shown us in ABOUT A BOY, THE MUMMY or ENEMY AT THE GATES? They show her naked pregnant, but it had to be makeup because she’s currently pregnant. Was that so daring that it was worth an Oscar or did they just love it that Merck was taking it on the chin? Now you’d think that a group such as Hollywood that probably uses VIAGRA like Pez might find some sympathy with Pfesier or maybe they blame such companies for their own addiction. Poor oh Amy Adams that gave a really plucky performance in JUNEBUG, one that should be longer remembered. Anyway, I’m 0-4 with Le Carre. I first saw the RUSSIA HOUSE with Connery and Pfeffier and it was a yawn. I rented the BBC mini-series “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and there wasn’t much entertainment value there either. Maybe Le Carre is just a rightwing hoax masquerading as a progressive in order to see if liberals will applaud even the thinnest attempts at entertainment if they’re in the name of “the cause.”

WALK THE LINE (2005) –I haven’t been out to a movie since last June and the movies like this I would have normally seen at release are starting to trickle into NetFlix. Of all the things I read about this movie, the most obvious point I never heard. This is simply a movie about Johnny chasing June all over creation until she consents to marry him. Even the obligatory childhood scene has J.R. (Johnny) listening to ten year old June on the radio singing with her family. The music is there, of course, and we even get an Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings, Roy Orbison, and I think a Carl Perkins along for the ride. I can’t fault the Academy for giving an Oscar to Witherspoon, she plays it with an array of emotions, distractions and conflicts while being strong and feminine. It’s the exact opposite of Rachel Weiss’ one-note effort in GARDNER. Jaquin Pheonix doesn’t look like Johnny Cash, but he is such a likable actor and so committed to any role that you certainly forgive this pretty early on. Trish noted how mean Cash’s father (Terminator II ala Robert Patrick) is portrayed and I told her that Johnny is really nice about his father in the auto-bio saying they were tough times and he had the strain of trying to feed his family during the depression. Patrick gives a really strong performance as the old man, especially if you saw his turn a couple of years ago on the Sopranos as an everyman who gets into gambling debts with the mob. The movie was about what I thought it would be, a standard enough biopic that rises above the genre with good music and strong performances.

SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005) – The Squid and Whale is a horrible title and heavy handed symbolism, but the film plays much more nuanced. I’m a big fan of Noah Baumbach’s debut effort the 1995 comedy, KICKING AND SCREAMING. While that was his part autobiographical look at college life, this movie goes further back into childhood and explores the breakup of the marriage and the effect on the kids who witness it. Laura Linney was a great choice for the mother, because she has that pretty and yet plain quality simultaneously. She becomes whatever her facial expression is. Jeff Daniels is one of those overlooked second-tier actors that can usually find an interesting thing about any character with nonverbal reactions. I always think back to his portrayal as Joshua Chamberlain in GETTYSBURG. Chamberlain was the least interesting character in the book and yet Daniels makes him the equal of Longstreet and Lee. In this film, Daniels is the professor once up and coming that drifted into has been or never was. Laura Linney is the wife that becomes a writer under the shadow of Daniels and a more successful one. If the competition between writers wasn’t enough, Linney’s constant cheating makes him even more bitter and vindictive. The opening scene has the couple playing doubles tennis with their two kids. Daniels tells his oldest son to take advantage of his mother’s weak backhand and the match is won with three straight points hit to her weak side, one of which hits her person. You begin thinking Daniels is a creep, but when you learn that he has been living with her cheating you are more sympathetic. But then Daniels behaves terribly toward the kids and you don’t know who to root for. The point, I guess, is that it’s hard to know whose fault these things are, which lets everyone off the hook in the end.

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (2005) – Making my way through the list of 2005 award winners brought the acclaimed George Clooney offering. Clooney decided to shoot the film in that period black and white to resemble the way we may have seen clips of Edward R. Murrow on TV. The point of the movie is to drive home for the umpteenth time that Joe McCarthy was a louse and he nearly ruined America. Thankfully, Clooney assumes we already know this about McCarthy so here we simply see Murrow take issue with wild and unsubstantiated statements made by McCarthy. It was a hell of an idea that Murrow had, really. I suppose Clooney was dismayed that John Kerry’s many misstatements about his war record weren’t fully covered during the 2004 campaign and he wanted to remind the press that they have duty to uncover the real record. When McCarthy claimed that 200 people in the state department were agents of the Soviet Union, I kept thinking about John Kerry claim that he was on an illegal mission to Cambodia sanctioned by the Nixon Administration during the Christmas of 1968. It was seered in his memory, was it not? Where was Murrow to ask Kerry why President-elect Nixon wielded such power? Good job, Clooney, you made your point well. My favorite part of the film were the nuances that captured the flavor of 1950s culture and corporate life. That Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. must pretend not to be married in order to retain their CBS jobs provides a few laughs. The smoking commercials add nice flavor as well. The shame of Joe McCarthy is that he has become the goat that the Left uses to stain the entire anti-communist era in America. It’s the equivalent of summing up the whole Civil Rights struggle based on Jesse Jackson’s race-pimping and corporate shakedowns. Every big cause has its opportunists and that the Left continues to return to McCarthy would suggest that he was the last powerful man to try those tactics when they themselves have learned to use them oh so sweetly. If Clooney must make a point about the red scare, I’d like to see him tackle the Chambers/Hiss case which was actually a much bigger deal back when the intelligencia pegged Hiss as an innocent man. That outrage has quietly faded since the release of the Venona Papers. Coincidently, the release of the Venona Papers showed that McCarthy's claim of numerous communists in the state Department was just about right although he never knew it. It's to Clooney's credit that he'd let the real McCarthy speak. Clooney's issues with that aspect of the cold war are honest enough that he doesn't need the Randy Quaid to play up all the caricatured aspects that the Left would have loved. The result was that we were able to decide how much of a menace he really was and the real McCarthy hardly seemed dangerous compared to the monster we always hear about. He seems about as opportunistic as any current guy on Capitol Hill. It's a shame that Clooney is mired in bugaboos when he is such a talented and engaging screen personality with a great eye for directing. Movies last forever while fashionable causes gently fade away. I, for one, am glad that Cary Grant didn't spend his time making a film about FDR's court packing scheme or his supposed foreknowledge of Pear Harbor.

UP AT THE VILLA (2000) – What’s Sean Penn doing with all of these ex-pat Brits living in Tuscany? They needed a tough rouge that’s what. Kristen Scott Thomas spends the movie with other men to simply keep herself from Penn. Therefore we have to wait the whole movie to feel like Penn “earned” her when we really know he had her at “ciao.” Early on we get to see some Florentine exteriors, and all through we see some countryside shots, but you get the feeling that a London soundstage hosts the most. Derek Jacobi turns up as the flaming Brit all bitchy like heroine’s generally flock to. Edward Fox plays the too old suitor that Thomas should and won’t marry. Anne Bancroft plays a princess of some sort all full of eccentricities and gossip. Without giving away the plot, Thomas denying the rogue Penn sets her on a course that only Penn can rescue her from. There’s a nice shot early on from a church across the Arno River that Trish and I found last year. That probably had more to do with us finishing the film than anything else. It was all based on a novella by M. Somerset Maugham of Razor’s Edge fame.

TUCKER (1988) – I was suckered into Tucker when I saw it in the theatre. It has a funhouse style and some winning performances from the likes of Jeff Bridges and Martin Landau. But looking back, the style is really a subtraction to a bio piece, but I suppose it was necessary when the bio part if so removed from reality that reviewers might point it out. History sees Tucker as more con man than visionary, while Coppola portrays him as a victim of corporations and crooked politicians. You’re allowed to, I think, when anyone is the “little guy.” Now I’m not trying to be too harsh on what is a fun movie, but I’m just mad at myself for falling for the mythology the first time around.
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If I had to name the top 3 of the month they would be:

SQUID AND THE WHALE
WALK THE LINE
EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU

GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK (2005) (A Movie Review)

Making my way through the list of 2005 award winners brought the acclaimed George Clooney offering. Clooney decided to shoot the film in that period black and white to resemble the way we may have seen clips of Edward R. Murrow on TV.

The point of the movie is to drive home for the umpteenth time that Joe McCarthy was a louse and he nearly ruined America. Thankfully, Clooney assumes we already know this about McCarthy so here we simply see Murrow take issue with wild and unsubstantiated statements made by McCarthy. It was a hell of an idea that Murrow had, really. I suppose Clooney was dismayed that John Kerry’s many misstatements about his war record weren’t fully covered during the 2004 campaign and he wanted to remind the press that they have duty to uncover the real record. When McCarthy claimed that 200 people in the state department were agents of the Soviet Union, I kept thinking about John Kerry claim that he was on an illegal mission to Cambodia sanctioned by the Nixon Administration during the Christmas of 1968. It was seered in his memory, was it not? Where was Murrow to ask Kerry why President-elect Nixon wielded such power? Good job, Clooney, you made your point well.

My favorite part of the film were the nuances that captured the flavor of 1950s culture and corporate life. That Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. must pretend not to be married in order to retain their CBS jobs provides a few laughs. The smoking commercials add nice flavor as well.

The shame of Joe McCarthy is that he has become the goat that the Left uses to stain the entire anti-communist era in America. It’s the equivalent of summing up the whole Civil Rights struggle based on Jesse Jackson’s race-pimping and corporate shakedowns. Every big cause has its opportunists and that the Left continues to return to McCarthy would suggest that he was the last powerful man to try those tactics when they themselves have learned to use them oh so sweetly.

If Clooney must make a point about the red scare, I’d like to see him tackle the Chambers/Hiss case which was actually a much bigger deal back when the intelligencia pegged Hiss as an innocent man. That outrage has quietly faded since the release of the Venona Papers. Coincidently, the release of the Venona Papers showed that McCarthy's claim of numerous communists in the state Department was just about right although he never knew it.

What a shame that Clooney is mired in bugaboos when he is such a talented and engaging screen personality with a great eye for directing. Movies last forever while fashionable causes gently fade away. I, for one, am glad that Cary Grant didn't spend his time making a film about FDR's court packing scheme or his supposed foreknowledge of Pear Harbor.

PS: Dude's comment about using the real McCarthy made me realize another point. It's to Clooney's credit that he'd let the real McCarthy speak. Clooney's issues with that aspect of the cold war are honest enough that he doesn't need the Randy Quaid to play up all the caricatured aspects that the Left would have loved. The result was that we were able to decide how much of a menace he really was and the real McCarthy hardly seemed dangerous compared to the monster we always hear about. He seems about as opportunistic as any current guy on Capitol Hill.

DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT

25 years ago today. I was in the 6th grade. I don't remember if the teacher had told us or if it came over the loudspeaker. It had only been 2 months since his swearing in and I got into trouble for hanging out in the music room watching it with the 5th grade instead of returning to class after recess. It was certainly one moment of civil disobedience I don't regret. The teacher gave me a stern look when I returned, but later asked me what Reagan said in his speech.

Just a few night ago I watched THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT on DVD. It was produced by Oliver Stone so the basis was how Alexander Haig put us on the brink of nuclear war with his pompous attitude. Whatever. Richard Crenna plays Reagan and quite well. He doesn't give that characatured James Brolin impersonation act. Richard Dreyfuss plays Haig crazier than you've ever seen him. I remember the "I'm in charge here" commnent by Haig and even as a kid thought it anything but a power play despite the media's tizzy. Dreyfuss's Haig is like some sort of inquisition cardinal arguing with the rest of priests.

The good news is that with Haig taking all the heat, Ron, Nancy, Howard Baker, George Bush, Cap Weinberger and company all come off as decent people. It made the thing quite compelling despite the conspiracy theories.

REMEMBER BACK IN 1992?

I bought a stand-alone DVD burner a few weeks ago and have been in the process of turning the old VHS tapes into DVDS. I threw away about 80% of my VHS in 2001, but kept the things that I couldn't ever buy on DVD.

Tonight I'm recording the 1992 Republican Convention and it's notable for a number of things, Pat Buchanan's infamous speech, Reagan's last major address, and Dan Quayle's last major address. I didn't remember that Bob Dole gave a pretty good speech between Quayle and Bush. These days it seems that VPs and Presidents give their speeches on different nights. George W. Bush can be seen with a full head of brown hair sitting next to Barbara in the box.

Everybody is using the "I didn't inhale" line as part of their shtick, at varying degrees of effectiveness. Reagan even refers to Clinton using the now clichéd "slick." Both Quayle and Reagan make plays on Bentson's 1988 line, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." I have already forgot Quayle's, but Reagan took issue with Clinton's likening himself to Thomas Jefferson. "I knew Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson was a friend of mine. Sir, you are no Thomas Jefferson." Great re-use of the line.

I noticed that Quayle's oldest son doesn't clap for anything, even his own father, despite the fact that Marylin and the other kids seem to be enthusiastic. Kay Bailey Hutchison shows up as a state office holder in Texas. Condoleza Rice shows up and speaks earlier that night listed as a former assistant NSA person under Bush 41. Even the new people are older than we think.

A bunch of speakers kept calling for term limits, the line item veto and a Republican congress. Little did they know that Bush's defeat would lead to all of this just two years later. Though, of course, Republicans forgot term limits and the court struck down the line item veto. Yeah the only thing we seemed to have gotten was guys with an (R) next to their name that spend a lot of money. I was so idealistic in 1992.

Leading into Bush 41's speech was a little documentary narrated by Robert Mitchum. Always a fan of Mitchum, I forgot this detail and confirmed it on IMDB. I also learned that Mitchum was one of the few Hollywood guys who supported the war in Vietnam and yet was named as one of the coolest guys in Hollywood in the 1960s by the youth. He was so underrated. When you see what he did with Max Cady in the 1962 CAPE FEAR it makes you realize what an over-the-top performance that DeNiro gave in the 1990 version. NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, OUT OF THE PAST, CROSSFIRE etc. The guy was a minor legend.

Speaking of Hollywood and 1992, I have another tape of Bush speaking around the country the day before the election. On one tape standing behind Bush is Bob Hope and Charlton Heston. We always think of liberal Hollywood, but even 14 years ago, there was still an old-time portion of Hollywood somewhat conservative. By the time Reagan's funeral came around in 2004, I can only remember seeing Mickey Rooney and Scot Baio.

The 1992 convention became notorious in the media, especially because of Buchanan. The media spent two years talking about how it split the party and what not. But this ineffective convention that lead to defeat really set the stage for the 1994 Congressional takeover based on ideas over personalities. The 1992 loss was a blessing in disguise in that we wound up with a decent sized tax cut. But much of what could have been done hasn't been done and since this is the first year where there majority seems to be in trouble, it's criminal how they wasted such an opportunity.

Anyway, 1992 is a classic. I'm glad I didn't throw it away.

FEBRUARY 2006 MOVIES

Not much action this month. Too much poker and reading

BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970) - Sam Peckinpah’s follow-up to THE WILD BUNCH packs just one blood-letting scene and that’s the death of a large dessert lizard intended for food. Jason Robards is his usual solid as the title character and some decent characters actors like Slim Pickens and David Warner help too, but I don’t understand this movie’s reputation as a classic. The overly broad comedy coupled with the overdone death of the west theme doesn’t bring any freshness to either. The great MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE was savaged by critics for much less than this. Of his films I have liked THE GETAWAY most followed by RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY and then the WILD BUNCH, but I didn’t love any of them. I saw STRAW DOGS last year and was pretty disappointed. Either his films are too dated or I just don’t respond.

JUNEBUG (2005) – After torturing Trish with some of my recent art house choices, she was quite happy that I selected this film. The story of a city sophisticate returning to his rural North Carolina roots could be full of Doc Hollywood gags and Hee Haw references but it was instead a very human picture. Amy Adams is getting the buzz because she plays the most hyper of the characters and steals most scenes, but a lot can be said for the rest of the cast that lets her do it gracefully. The underrated Scott Wilson plays the father as a typical southern patriarch dealing with an overbearing wife. Wilson was the other killer in the 60s docudrama IN COLD BLOOD. He was also a victim of Charlize in MONSTER, the one that made me want to see her fry post haste. What’s exceptional about the film is the way Alessandro Nivola’s son character has mixed emotions throughout about family and obligation. Most movies would simply give him anger or cowardice or some simply emotion to play off for 90 minutes. Here we get to see him make the struggle that probably led to his leaving in the first place. Celia Weston is the mother character that you’ll recognize from other movies and TV shows.

+METROPOLITAN (1990) – It was finally released a few weeks ago on DVD, Criterion Collection even. I wonder if that was the holdup, they needed to dig up some extras. It’s a story about some college aged Manhattan kids who are back for Christmas holidays participating in the debutante season. A kid less rich is befriended by the group and he’s in a sense the audience’s eyes and ears to that world. I didn’t even like it when I first rented it in 1995. I thought it was slow and without much point. The following year it came up in conversation at work and I was surprised how many lines I had remembered. I decided that it was deceptively witty and when I revisited it soon after I became a big fan and still am. For all the times I’ve seen it, this was the first time in letterbox. Director Whit Stillman gave commentary joined by the editor and actors Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols. The film was made super low budget and they detail that process in the commentary. One of the most interesting things is that these kinds of rich kids are usually the villains in movies. Here they’re quite human despite the money.

LORD OF WAR (2005) – It begins as a comedy on the arms industry and it’s quite effective, but midway through Nick Cage develops a conscience of sorts and this turns the film into a sermon. Shortly after the reform, Cage snaps out of his worry and becomes just as numb as before. You realize later that Cage has a moment of clarity simply because the audience likes him too much and the political points are being lost. But since the movie has no where to go with a reformed Cage he simply reverts. Ethan Hawke shows up as the federal agent assigned to bring Cage down and boy does that guy need a hamburger. The way Cage bounces from concerned husband and father to indifferent crook is a major flaw and the ending doesn’t pack the intended punch. If the filmmakers simply had the guts to make Cage aloof all the way through with no consequences, this could have been a classic black comedy. Otherwise they should have simply made another Syriana.

HIDE AND SEEK (2005) – That horror film where DeNiro’s little girl seems eerie is alright for the genre, but not entirely satisfying. They do a decent enough job of fooling the audience for a spell, but the movie only has one way to end once you guess it. I suppose most will do so somewhere before we’re supposed to be surprised.

PROBLEM WITH THE MOVIES

When movies began to shift to the left it wouldn’t necessarily bother you to see a businessman or corporation as a villain. It was still a fresh idea. Fred MacMurray played a great cad in THE APARTMENT. Steve McQueen managed to be the hero and the villain in the THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR.

The Military Industrial Complex was also ripe for satire and villainy. After so many heroic World War II film, DR. STRANGELOVE was a nice dose of balance.

And who didn’t like to see Sidney Poitier give it to the man in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT after so many blacks in film history were subservient to whitey?

Wasn’t it fun to watch Katharine Hepburn outsmart and out-lawyer Spencer Tracy in ADAM’S RIB?

Wasn’t it interesting to see Al Pacino play a non stereotypical homosexual in a mainstream movie like DOG DAY AFTERNOON?

None of the above movies were offensive and they were all believable and progressive at the same time. The intention may or may not have been to push the political dialogue to the left, but they didn’t hit you over the head with social policy, they just showed you characters behaving rationally in the context of good storytelling.

From what I’ve read, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN could fit into the same tradition of the aforementioned films. The problem is that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was stale before it was even made. Although it’s in some ways very original, it’s not surprising. We already know that society is the villain in this one without reading any further than the premise.

Remember when Jonathan Demme stuck to the novel of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and let his psycho be a homosexual? He was so in danger of losing his liberal card that he was made to atone by making PHILADELPHIA. And his movies have been right on the PC plantation ever since.

PASSION OF THE CHRIST was ignored by the Academy and called anti-Semitic on the basis of a line or two while others simple dismissed it as too violent. But suicide bomber movies like PARADISE NOW are nominated in all their glory.

The problem with movies isn’t that they’re liberal, but that they’re so reliably liberal that they have nothing original left to say. Given a list of characters and their situations and you can almost write the movie yourself.

A few months ago we were playing poker and I was in the minority defending the war in Iraq. The same guys that talk in the familiar center-left talking points concerning that issue have been relentless in their lampooning of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. There was debate as to whether KK, JJ or KJ should be referred to as a Brokeback Mountain hand. Lately in another game I’ve been playing in, a player has been quoting “I don’t know how to quit you” when he’s on a draw and faces a tough bet. He’ll use the accent and he always gets a big laugh. It’s not insignificant that when I first knew him in the late 1990s he invited us all to his birthday party at a pizza joint that he was also using as a charity event for Aids. And the same guy has two gay brothers for crying out loud.

When Ang Lee accused the Christian Right of calculated silence on his movie, he was simply too self-involved to realize that the people offended by movies like his are the least likely to watch movies anyway. The average parent is probably more offended by the kids cussing in BAD NEWS BEARS.

The reason so many people are teasing BROKEBACK is that we’ve been given such a steady diet of the same PC tribulations that they cease to be tribulations anymore. Issue movies are no longer stories with complex heroes and villains, but too often the same black and white good guys and bad guys that the Left has always ridiculed in the old rightwing movies.

The result for people like me who like movies is that I wind up seeing them on DVD or HBO if at all. It’s not a boycott, but casual indifference.

Some people in Hollywood understand this enough that they make more even-handed movies. For as much as a Bolshevik as Tim Robbins is personally, he does a good job of making his rightwing characters real people. Bob Roberts was a much more appealing character than we could have expected even if he was the bad guy. I thought DEAD MAN WALKING was so even-handed that I was surprised to find that the intent was for me to feel sorry for Sean Penn. Even CRADLE WILL ROCK makes Bill Murray’s anti-communist character more human and sympathetic than any others I could name.

Now maybe Robbins is so secure in his beliefs that he doesn’t think he needs to create cartoon villains or obvious heroes to make his points. That so many others do so is maybe a sign of insecurity in those beliefs. One of the Greeks maybe Aristotle said that all ideas should be freely expressed among the educated even those ideas that seem obviously wrong because experience shows that so many seemingly wrong ideas turned out to be right and without discussing bad ideas it’s hard to remember the merits of the good ideas in the first place. In other words, the biggest champion of the truth is an open dialogue.

I don’t mind political movies, even ones I disagree with. I admire someone like Clooney for tackling political subjects although I think his postulating that this act is noble, dangerous, and somehow career threatening is overstated to the point of comedy. What the movies lack is an open-dialogue that doesn’t even need to seek the truth, but it just needs to provide some variety.

JANUARY 2006 MOVIES

GOING IN STYLE (1979) – I remember seeing some of this movie as a kid and I don’t know why I remembered it as a comedy except that the trailers tried to paint it as one. It’s sometimes funny but more drama than anything else. Three old men George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg decide to rob a bank out of sheer boredom. All three pull off their roles well, but I was especially impressed with Burns who rose above the schmaltz of Oh God franchise among other things. To ruin the plot, Strasberg becomes ill and dies. Burns and Carney decide to give most of the money to Carney’s nephew and they take the rest to lose in Vegas. Instead of losing they come away with a bigger stack than they got out of the bank. The whole thing is handled in a very unsentimental way and I came away enjoying it for its quiet tone and interesting performances.

SPAGHETTI WEST (2005) – A documentary about Spaghetti Westerns is quite interesting when the subject is Eastwood, but wanes when they talk about Klaus Kinski and the myriad of films with the title Django. The period of filmmaking didn’t last long, but it produced a whole lot of celluloid and it influenced the American westerns that followed.

MYSTERIOUS SKIN (2004) – The movie was described as a missing time recollection and how a teenager studies UFOLOGY to learn what happened to him that day years ago when his little league game was rained out and he woke up in his basement with a bloody nose. There was also a second little leaguer that became a gay prostitute after getting a little too cozy with the baseball coach. Despite the review I read, the other kid is the one that actually dominates the film, and though I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, I’m sure it’s tame compared to the gratuitous graphic nature of this movie. Men come off pretty lousy in the piece; they are poor fathers, absentee fathers or pedophiles while the women are all long suffering.

THE CLEARING (2004) – Robert Redford shows up so infrequently these days you have to wonder what he looks for in a script to finally do a film. Here Redford is kidnapped in the first 5 minutes by Willem Dafoe and it’s easy to see that he isn’t a professional at such jobs. The men begin to have pretty normal conversations about their wives and their regrets and although one is rich and the other is poor, both wish they could have been better husbands. Redford has another woman on the side, but he still loves Helen Mirren the most and he comes to realize that during the snatching. The movie is told in separate action with Mirren and the kids learning things days after they happened inter cut with Redford on the day of the incident. I thought the movie was compelling enough but maybe the device of good guy/bad guy parallel lives has been done a bit too much. HEAT may have had the classic take on that issue.

ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930) – I’ve seen it countless times and I decided to start the new year with a Marx film to remind me that life is pretty great. I think it’s the best of the early talkies, because although it has the same technical limitations, and it’s nothing but a filmed version of their long-running stage play complete with Groucho’s asides, it still brings laughs in buckets. Groucho’s intro speech was my standard audition monologue for years. The “I shot an elephant in my pajamas” got a laugh every time. I don’t think it ever got me any parts, but it was fun to deliver. I auditioned for Disney once in college and one guy on the panel laughed all the way through. He must have been familiar with the movie.

+LOVE ACTUALLY (2004) – WHEN HARRY MET SALLY was a clever and unique film when it debuted in 1989, but it spawned so many half-assed imitators and created such an obnoxious sub genre that I have little patience for what Americans do with romantic comedies. In fact, I think that the resurgence of witty teen comedies is a direct result of creative minds tired of the adult genre. A minor teen comedy like TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU was more interesting than any romantic movie comedy that Meg Ryan has made since 1989. One romantic comedy that I liked was the Julia Roberts vehicle, NOTTING HILL. I don’t know whether it was the mostly British cast or just the fact that it didn’t try to be too cute. And now the British film, LOVE ACTUALLY takes the British version of these films one step further. It was one of the best films of 2004 and I’ve seen it twice again this month and it just plain works on every level. It finds a very honest way to deal with the subject using humor, sadness and even some sentimentality. It also helps that the cast is amazing, using about half the British actors any American could name, and some you recognize and can’t name. A few interesting Americans show up too. Like any movie with a big cast, there is a little too much of people running into one another randomly in a big town like London, but I can forgive SHORT CUTS ands MAGNOLIA for this so why not forgive this worthwhile effort too.

PIE IN THE SKY (1995) – I had no business watching this movie except that it came on when I was writing email and it had a couple of laughs and I wound up seeing too much of it to turn it off. Josh Charles stars as a guy obsessed with the traffic and his idol, John Goodman, the traffic reporter on the radio. He meets Anne Heche during college and although they have a decent spark, they lose touch until a few years later when he happens to run into her in a Los Angeles diner. The audience gets to wait around for Josh to have his big shot as traffic reporter and reconciliation with Heche. Films shown on TV are a great study of the economics of time. Why is it that we’re more likely to sit and watch something on TV, when we wouldn’t watch the same thing on DVD if it sat right in front of us? Or why is it that we’ll be held captive by some movie that comes on that we enjoy when we own the same DVD and never bother to put it in? I don’t fall victim to it as much as some I know, but now that we have HBO again, I notice that it happens with greater frequency than I would have predicted. I won’t sit and watch films on commercial networks no matter how much I like them, but I know many that will wade through the commercials instead of putting in the same DVD.

THE GREAT RAID (2005) – A war movie based on real events that lacks the rightwing Rambo heroism or the leftwing cynicism and gore. It’s simply about a group of American soldiers tasked with liberating a Japanese prisoner of war camp. The men in the camp are leftover from the Bataan death march years earlier and if disease doesn’t kill the last 500 of them, then the Japanese will probably execute them as they retreat in order to leave no war crimes witnesses. The mission holds no strategic value, but saving the men is the right thing to do. The value of honor is summed up when Benjamin Bratt tells James Franco that the mission is the most important thing any of them will ever do in their lives. Success will lead to an inner glory that the men will carry with them forever. It has a quiet sort of tone and a slow pace, the kind you might expect for a movie made for HBO. It could have been 20 minutes shorter maybe, and the subplot of the beautiful woman in the underground helping the prisoners is too movieish, but the characters mostly seem like real people. And if you consider it an ode to the old fashioned 40s era war movies, then it’s downright restrained.

+WAGES OF FEAR (1952) French film and winner of the Cannes film Festival. A group of streets bums are given the task of taking some explosives to an oil field over bumpy terrain. They’ll be risking their lives but making so much money they can’t pass up the offer. Theirs great suspense and more challenges along the way than one screenwriter generally imagines realistically. We even get the pining French girl for our hero to return too.

OCEANS 12 (2004) – It’s been on a lot this month and although preposterous it’s so much fun that I keep on in the background. Like the first, the music is good all the way through and the dialogue delivery funny in a dry sort of way. The Clooney/Pitt banter is always fun and the little things with Bruce Willis showing up and the Sixth Sense jokes are worthwhile too.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER MOVIES

I had little time for movie watching in November and December. I can usually watch this many films in a single month. I did get to watch 18 episodes of YOU BET YOUR LIFE on DVD. I never tire of Gorucho.

FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975) – Robert Mitchum plays Philip Marlow in Raymond Chandler’s third novel. Unlike Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE made two years earlier, FAREWELL sets Marlowe back in the 1940s where he belongs. The shame is that the producers felt compelled to inject the material with 1970s sensibilities. Whereas Chandler always treated his fictional cops as a nuisance, the filmmakers decide to make them corrupt. And unlike the books, Marlow is using his share of swearwords to toughen up his character. They also play up the racial element a bit too much. Mitchum himself is good despite the distractions, but the same material was filmed much better as MURDER MY SWEET (1944) with Dick Powell playing a surprisingly effective Marlowe. Powell may have been the best screen Marlowe in film history, being that Bogart was great in THE BIG SLEEP (1946), but his iconic image tended to overpower the character. You can’t imagine anything bad really happening to Bogart while Powell always seemed to be in the middle of danger. Like Bogart, Mitchum doesn’t ever really seem to be in much danger, but that is mostly due to the studio’s reluctance to stick to the actual storyline from the book. John Huston knew that he couldn’t write better dialogue than Hammett and he instead just filmed the book when he made THE MALTESE FALCON. If someone ever wants to try to make a really good Marlowe movie they should consider doing the same.

MONA LISA’S SMILE (2003) – I remember being given a lecture in 1989 about how little boys need to find their inner poet rather than take to heart the rat race of commerce and career. Like DEAD POETS SOCIETY, MONA LISA’S SMILE is set in the same confines of anal 1950s America. But this movie has a different take on the same system. Instead of praising the society that allowed women the leisure to remain in the home reading Keats and Whitman while their husbands play cutthroat on Manhattan Island, this movie wants women to experience all the negatives things that come with the dog eat dog reality of career. Don’t these film makers know that the option of a career outside of the home will become an expectation of society and sooner or later women will be forced to jump off the roof of their dorm room because their parents scorn their decision to pursue the soft arts instead of Wall Street? PLEASANTVILLE did an excellent job of taking the 1950s cliché setting and finding humor to go along with it. Too many other movies present this time as dire instead of hokey. Hopefully someday there will be a slew of movies about our uptight politically correct society of today masquerading as enlightenment. MONA LISA seems like it was written in a screenwriter’s workshop with the characters of DEAD POETS put into female form. Remember that crazy before-his-time bastard from POETS named Nuwanda? Here we have Maggie Gyllenhall playing that character running around with older men and in possession of, get this. . . a diaphragm and I don’t mean the kind you speak from. Remember the character that wanted to date the cute blonde girl, but couldn’t get past the boyfriend? Here you have the chubby girl who pursues the geeky guy all sweetly before she realizes that he’s engaged to someone else. You also have Kirsten Dunst who blindly follows her mother’s demands to the point of misery which I suppose is Robert Sean Leonard from POETS. The climax of POETS was Ethan Hawke’s Beau Gest at the end of film showing his independence from the authorities. Here we have Julia Stiles and she gives up her chance to attend Yale Law School despite the wishes of Julia Roberts. She’ll no doubt spend her time reading Whitman and Keats instead. DEAD POETS worked chiefly because it made you feel the confines of that school and it assumed the greater confines of society as a whole. There was no room for the individual in that universe and it touched our deepest human desire to be free. Knowing that the characters had to conform to make a living in that world was enough to give us pain. Everyone has to eat. Maybe just a little bit of poetry would help the medicine go down. Here the rat race is painted much more realistically as an opportunity rather than a burden and it’s great fun to see Hollywood have to acknowledge that before shaming that culture for its insensitivity.

RUNAWAY JURY (2003) I understand the book was about a tobacco suit, but the storyline was dropped after THE INSIDER vilified that industry to death. So screaming right out of the headlines is litigation about gun manufacturers responsible for the people who shoot innocents. The movie lets the advocates for the 2nd amendment say their peace in the most practiced and lukewarm manner so that the real heroes can speak their opposition to guns with passion and conviction. We’re supposed to believe Dustin Hoffman as the New Orleans lawyer bringing the case to trial. I know I couldn’t keep a straight face. The plot is basically John Cusack and his girlfriend Rachel Weiss conspiring to get him onto a gun jury in order to extort money from the lawyers. It wasn’t a bad idea for a book and maybe it worked alright in the book, but the movie resolution is such that everything that came before it made little sense. The only real positive is getting to see Gene Hackman play his umpteenth Grisham villain.

THE ISLAND (2005) – The problem with science fiction movies is that they need to start with an interesting premise and sometimes create an entire alternate universe. Both of these can be done successfully and yet the filmmakers can still fail at putting a good human drama into that setting. That’s the struggle here. THE ISLAND begins as a decent mystery, but as you try to unwind the universe you come across the derivative elements from movies like LOGAN’S RUN and THE MATRIX. Casting Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson was a good idea because they are both talented enough to bring the right kind of audience empathy, but once the movie evolves from psychological drama to action film, they cease being human as they trade up for super hero capes. I did enjoy the movie all the way through, but I don’t think it’s as watchable a second time. Being one step ahead of characters is a movie like this spoils the fun.

BAD NEWS BEARS (2005) Walter Mathau has never been acknowledged for the true greatness he brought to these kinds of roles. Put him into the part of amiable schmuck who is a little smarter than he initially seems and you have screen magic. Billy Bob Thorton is an actor with decent range if you compare SLING BLADE, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, THE ALAMO and INTOLERABLE CRUELTY. But Thorton doesn’t have the magic in his eye that Mathau had and he suffers by comparison. Mathau’s character in the original was simply a lazy bum not too far from his Oscar Madison while Billy Bob’s Buttermaker is decidedly sleazy. But the real problem with the movie is opportunity for realism is squandered for cheap laughs. I laughed at this film several times, but no more than I did the original. The difference is that the 1976 version took time to create real human moments with seemingly real children. The fat Englebert and the feisty Tanner were funny and yet real in the first film. You could laugh and yet feel for them at the same time. Here, they are just cartoon characters. And it’s not the actor’s fault, because they seem to pull off their scenes just fine. The usually reliable Richard Linklater just doesn’t bother to show us the quiet moments. He also makes these kids seem too self-aware, confident and cool. In the first film they would put on acts with guts and tough talk, but they were still scared kids underneath who needed re-assurance from their coach. It made scenes like the opposing coach’s tirade real and you felt real empathy for them. I read a review that said that Vic Morrow portrayal of the Vince Lomardi coach was intended as parody, but I played little league in the 1970s and though it may have been stronger than anything I personally witnessed, it wasn’t a terrible stretch. Greg Kinnear’s character doesn’t retain any of the inner menace. I think the main problem is that the original wasn’t trying to be a blockbuster. It was happy to take its time with the struggle of the team and the personal growth of the individual players. By the end you felt that you knew them in a real way. From the trailer it was evident that this movie was made for a big opening weekend and little more. I implore anyone who has seen the remake or wants to see it to go back and watch the original and see the difference. What I most noticed was the way both movies ramped up the final game with the coaches getting a little too serious. The difference is that when you see the kids react to the Morrow incident, it’s also when you see Mathau realize that he too has gone too far. It’s a very simple thing to show us and yet Linklater skipped right over it. The original film also shows you how movies were made in the pre-politically correct era. The original kids were foul-mouthed even sputtering occasional racial epitaphs and Buttermaker let them drink real beer. Billy Bob has to settle for O’Douls which like the movie offers some flavor at first, but little long term effect.

SKY HIGH (2005) – I groaned when I saw this as the next choice on the plane coming back from Rome. I wanted to see THE ISLAND and I was happy enough to watch BAD NEWS BEARS for free, but I felt that this was just too kiddy to bother with. Thankfully, I decided to give it ten minutes rather then be bored with more reading. Here is a movie aimed at kids that is clever enough to entertain adults too. I think one of the chief strengths is the affability of Kurt Russell as the superhero dad wanting his son to follow in his footsteps. The movie is about the son attending the special high school for superheroes and how the coach breaks the kids down into heroes and sidekicks. The movie has fun with political correctness by having the sidekick’s teacher refer to them as “Hero Support.” The plot is nothing special, but the laughs are decent and that made it surprisingly better than you might expect.

FINDING NEVERLAND (2004) – Johnny Depp is maybe the best actor of his generation and yet I never seem to want to see any Johnny Depp films. Looking through his list of roles I find quirky characters and oddball stories. Ed Wood is probably my favorite Depp film because for as kooky as Ed Wood was, he’s a real person by comparison to many of the others. I don’t know much about JM Barry, but Depp comes off quite naturally in this role, although I struggled to find anything interesting in how Depp’s character develops Peter Pan through his personal experiences. I suppose this movie is an descendant
to SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, but it lacks the humor and theatre in-jokes that made SHAKESPEARE fun entertainment. Peter Pan probably wouldn’t even be iconic had Disney not made the animated film years after Barry died. So the whole thing comes off as an attempt at importance without anything interesting enough to sustain attention.

INDIAN RUNNER (1991) – Sean Penn’s first directorial effort has some very interesting qualities though it already seems a bit dated. David Morse (underrated) and Viggo Mortensen play brothers, Morse a Sheriff and Viggo the hellion just back from Vietnam. Viggo wants nothing of this small town life and has to see both of his parents, Sandy Dennis and Charles Bronson die before he decides to return. The question is whether Morse can convince Viggo to give in to Middle American values. Penn’s politics answer the question before you see the movie. The Indian Runner symbolism is a bit much and some of the rambling dialogue in the latter half reminds me of Penn’s incoherent interview on Larry King following his Iraq trip. Still, it’s interesting in the way all of Penn’s films are interesting although you probably wouldn’t want to see any of them a multiple times.

CLINT EASTWOOD: OUT OF THE SHADOWS (2000) – Morgan Freeman narrates this Eastwood Documentary that spans just the right amount of time without shirking his days on Rawhide or some of his lesser films. But I still think it’s difficult for any documentary to capture Clint Eastwood fully, because Hollywood doesn’t really understand him. They know he’s an artist and therefore his work is up for serious consideration, but what to make of films like Dirty Harry where getting the bad guy means violating his Miranda rights. I think the filmmakers would appreciate if Clint just apologized for the whole film, but since he hasn’t, they let the half-ass sequel Magnum Force be the apology. That’s the movie where Hal Holbrook runs a secret vigilante cop squad and Eastwood brings the operation down. MAGNUM FORCE is preposterous and if it’s really a repudiation of DIRTY HARRY then how do you explain SUDDEN IMPACT, where Harry lets Sandra Locke get away with shooting those who raped her sister? Hollywood loved UNFORGIVEN too and they made a point of rewarding Clint not for the art alone but some sort of perceived growth in his overall character. But Eastwood’s heroes were always more ambivalent than John Wayne’s. William Munny shoots down Little Bill at the end much like Callahan kills Andy Robinson or Josey Wales got the men that did that to his family. What’s different except that Eastwood reflects on the realness of the killing with poetry like “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man, taking all he has and all he ever will have”? I think Hollywood either doesn’t understand Eastwood or just refuses to accept him on his own terms. Just the same, you can enjoy this documentary if you don’t mind their bumbling.

TIN STAR (1957) Anthony Mann Western with Henry Fonda stepping into the James Stewart role as a bounty hunter bringing in a fugitive for money. The town hates Fonda and the anarchy he represents, but the young sheriff, Anthony Perkins seeks Fonda's mentorship because the job has a lot of nuances that that no maual can teach. We learn that Fonda too was once a lawman and he left the profession after becoming disenchanted with the way things really are. Therefore, Perkins gets to mentor Fonda in the importance of social order while he's learning what it takes to wear a badge. It's an entertaining enough film, but slight seeming in the context of other psychological westerns of the time.

SIN CITY (2005) – You have to admire Robert Rodriguez who seems to be the hardest working director in film. And when you read about how he gave up his DGA card so that he could work quickly in his own way without union trouble and in the comforts of his own home, he’s revolutionary. Here he somehow seems to capture the graphic novel nature by making the film both cartoon and live action. Despite the first-rate cast and great look, it takes a lot out of you. The heroes don’t always meet the ends you’d wish and it makes the end result a little less satisfying. Still, days later I remember more scenes than I thought I would.

NOBODY KNOWS (2005) Japanese film about neglectful mama more interested in running around with men than taking care of her four kids. It begins with small lapses and then becomes long absences. The oldest son that can’t be more than ten becomes the man of the family scrounging food and trying to keep the kids together. In some ways, it’s an adventure for the kids, and they deal with it in different ways at different times. You expect everything to work out in a conventional way, but it doesn’t. It’s not quite Lord of the Flies, but it isn’t Culkin fighting Pesci either.

ITALY - Florence

BACK FROM ITALY

In Florence for the First Three Days

Delta showed every reason why they are going belly-up. The plane seemed ancient with scattered movie screens with everyone watching the same thing. The headset audio was wretched. The people on the plane were nice and helpful, but the check-in staff in Rome coming back was horrible and we never did get any kind of explanation for our two-hour delay going over. I might fly Delta again if the travel time is under two hours, but I’m probably through with them for good.

We had a great location in Florence. We were by the river with a five minute walk to the Duomo which is the skyline landmark of the city.

(Photo Courtesy of the German couple that loved headroom.)

I saw a great documentary on the Medici family a year or so ago and this was the city they owned for 300 years. They were the patrons of Leonardo and Michelangelo and Raphael and they even produced a few Pope’s, one of which hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel.

I was first aware of Florence when I saw the 1960s Disney film ESCAPADE IN FLORENCE. It wasn’t much of a movie, but I was a kid and they were riding motor scooters all through the city and the plot wrapped around some art thefts and it always stuck in my mind that I needed to see Florence to see these paintings. Their main Museum is the Uffizi and we could walk there in 5 minutes. All the big Renaissance artists were present as were a bunch of medieval painters, but it was a big disappointment to me.

Medieval art is not much to look at, with its flat surfaces and endless unidentified saints with their not too subtle halos overhead. But the renaissance work only seemed to add a third dimensional quality and little to the plot line. One of the few exceptions was Leonardo’s “Annunciation.” His use of lines and distance was very captivating.

Much of the rest played out like an art class where every painter of the day gave us his version of Madonna and Child with a 5 year-old midget posing as the baby Jesus. The other assignment seemed to be creating the most tortured looking Christ either on the cross or on his way to calvary. It’s not like they didn’t have enough material from the New Testament to choose from. Some of this art was literally made for headboards and given to lucky couples as a wedding gift. It would certainly spoil the mood to put it politely.

On the last day we made the obligatory trip to the Academia to see Michelangelo’s “David.” I’m not a big sculpture fan and it’s not a very big museum despite the fact that it’s priced like an all-day ticket. I’ve seen so many replicas of David that I already knew what it looked like. Mom even had a small one in the living room when I was a kid. There were two big replicas of David around town, one in the place where the original one use to stand near the Uffizi and one on a hill across the river. I’m here to say that no replica does the thing justice.

(We weren't allowed to shoot the original, but here is one of the duplicates.)

The original is 12 feet tall and made of the cleanest whitest marble. You first see it at a distance and it’s beautiful. As you walk closer you start to notice details and it loses none of its magic.

The Academia also housed the “prisoners” statues that Michelangelo never finished or decided they were better undone. They really look like people trying to escape the marble. Michelangelo is a genius that lives up to the hype. It was just as evident looking at the Sistine Chapel ceiling later in Rome and comparing it to the Sistine chapel walls painted by others. His work seems to tell a story with action whereas his contemporaries were posing people for a picture.

We also toured the Medici palace that is currently used as a government building. Not worth the price or time really. We went to the church where Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, and Machiavelli are buried. It was like an Italian version of Westminster Abbey.

Just walking the city was fun and we shopped at a nearby market for breakfast and Trish enjoyed Buffalo Mozzarella every morning for a fraction of the U.S. cost. I bought an Italian leather hat the first morning so as not to give myself away as an American with the baseball cap. Nearly everyone made us for Americans anyway what with my non-Italian leather bomber jacket. They’d start speaking English to us from 15 feet away.

We saw “David” on a Friday during the first of two general strikes we witnessed in Italy. It has something to do with the upcoming election and it was a great example of the European love of socialism. The Galleria closed at 1:45 that day because of the strike and we would have missed “David” entirely if we had not showed up early. We happened along a demonstration in the square behind the Galleria and it was right out of some movie from the 1940s with the old fashion platform speakers and guys shaking their fists and speaking like the revolution was on its way. We saw peace flags all over the place and even red hammer and sickle flags. It was kind of disturbing to think that they could get a rally up for communism after their history of fascism. It goes to show that any segment of the population is ready to trade liberty for the iron boot promising a bowl of warm gruel.

(Standing in the cold rain beats working I suppose.)

These people were so much like the fringe element that could be seen protesting on C-Span right before the Republican convention in 2004. On a positive note, the rally didn't bring a big crowd and the audience didn’t respond to any of the speakers despite the obvious pauses looking for it. I didn’t even have to know Italian to know the crowd wasn’t engaged enough to care. It seemed kind of funny that day as you can see by my mocking photo. It was less funny the second time in Rome.

I’m not sure what the Italian tax rate is to support the welfare state, but the taxes aren’t coming from alcohol sales. You can buy a decent bottle of red wine at any market for less than 3 Euros. Hard liquor was cheap too. I wasn’t surprised that the European spirits like Scotch and Vodka were cheaper, but even Kentucky Bourbon cost less than here. Only beer seemed to be about the same price.

In Rome the following Friday I saw a woman pushing a stroller and complaining to her husband that he had put the Soviet flag in the stroller instead of carrying it himself. It seemed to be in her way. Anything for the revolution, but wives must carry the instruments of protest. You’d be hard pressed to find a picture of a Soviet citizen pushing a stroller through Red Square in the 1980s, a wasteful luxury to the Bolsheviks. Just having to carry that baby would probably turn that lady into a counter-revolutionary. I might have told her so if I spoke Italian.

Next Time . . . Venice

ITALY PART II

Venice Calls

We were lucky that we decided to travel to Venice on Saturday. If we had chosen Friday we may have thwarted because of the general strike. Our train was delayed over an hour on Saturday morning and I had to wonder if it was due to the late night boozing the general strike no doubt brought about. The train trip to Venice was nice especially since it was snowing outside and it gave me an opportunity to read Raymond Chandler’s THE LITTLE SISTER. It was the last Philip Marlowe novel that I hadn’t read and I’ve been saving it for years for a special time. Chandler only wrote seven altogether and I squandered the first four in a month back in 1993. I also took along a Travis McGee and a Nero Wolfe having started the tradition of reading American detective books on the 2003 trip when I brought the Dashiell Hammet Omnibus and read RED HARVEST AND THE DAIN CURSE.

It couldn’t have been more miserable when we arrived. The snow had turned to rain meaning that we got all of the cold along with the moisture we could have done without. Venice only has 60,000 residents, I read. Everyone else commutes into the city each day. A greater number of tourists sleep each night on these small islands than do Venetians. It makes the whole thing more like a theme park and less like a community.

I wasn’t surprised by the architecture or the canals. They are well documented in movies and TV. I wasn’t prepared for the sidewalks and little squares in and around the smaller canals. It gave the city a real intimate feel. Our hotel was located in a maze of such little alleyways and the directions on the website to the hotel were incorrect. One of the hotel reviews stated that it was worth taking the 50 Euro taxi rather than the 4 Euro waterbus because the Taxi got you to a private little landing in front of the hotel. I just couldn’t see paying 40 more Euro when I would probably get lost anyway the first time we left the hotel.

Their directions hinged on locating a square that was actually on the opposite side of our hotel. Luckily we had the DK Italy book with a street by street breakdown of Venice. It didn’t have our street but we were able to head in a particular direction and eventually find a landmark. It was like an old video game I use to have where you are inside the maze without benefit of the bird eye view.




















Nighttime came to Italy about 5pm each evening and with our delayed train trip it was almost dark by the time we were settled into our room. The greatest thing about being in Venice is that it’s small enough that you can walk to the important places in little time. We could get to the Rialto Bridge and cross it in about 3 minutes. It took another 10-15 to get to the famed San Marco Square.

From the time we crossed the Rialto Bidge the path to San Marco square became a shopping mall. Every upscale and medium scale and even cheap store was located on either side of these narrow sidewalks. Put everyone’s umbrella into the equation and you have a comic picture of “excuse me” and duckings. We were warned that Venice was flooding with all the rain and my sneakers got soaked enough that I bought the 12 Euro pair of boots before the night ended.


I was told and read many places that Italian food in Italy was different than Italian food in America. I suppose that is true, but it wasn’t to the degree that I was expecting. This may have been because I was only in the bigger cities that were more likely to cater to tourists. It may also be because many American Italian restaurants have slowly introduced more authentic Italian cuisine to the point where the difference is becoming blurred. When I was a kid Spaghetti and Meatballs were Italian. Now I can get Chicken Florentine at Carrabbas and Pasta Milano at Macaroni Grill. One dish that was new to me was Gnocchi. Tiny dumplings served with the same sauce that you’d put on pasta. I liked it enough that I vowed to make it from scratch if I could find a recipe. Trish even brought a package back from the Italian market in Rome. The punch ine was seeing two varieties for sale in Publix on Sunday morning when we returned. Sometimes the exotic is right in front of your face if you bother to look.

The Italian dinner breaks down into courses.

AntiPasto – Appetizers like Brushetta

First Course – A pasta of some kind or Gnocchi or Rissoto

Second Course – Fish, Steak or poultry

After that on the menu were sections labeled Salads, Desserts and pizzas. I would order from these and try to guess where in the meal they would show up.

We found after a while that you could skip the second course. Meat was not only the most expensive but also the most boring. The food at the restaurants was all the same quality whether you paid $10 or $30 for dinner. When we got to Rome we just started eating at the same restaurant near the hotel every night. They had a big menu and plenty of variety to keep it fresh. The couple who owned the place saw enough of us that we went from getting the formal “arrivederci” to the friendly “ciao” by the end of our trip.

Some highlights were the spaghetti and tomato sauce from the first night mixed with a hint of pepperocini powder. It wasn’t too hot and yet gave the dish a distinctive kick that I intend trying to duplicate. The bruschetta in Rome was the best I have ever had, seasoned tomatoes and uncooked mozzarella on the top of Texas-like toast. If I could figure out the seasoning it will be a great party dish.

And although I criticized the meat for being over-priced the Italians cook steak just right. They don’t ask you how you want your steak they just bring it medium rare and it tasted perfect the three times I tried it.

The pizza was hit or miss. We found a place near the hotel in Venice that spread the dough by hand and the pizzas were the best we tried. It tasted like good ole New York Pizza. Other locations seemed to buy the pizza offsite and microwave it into a rubbery mess. None of it tasted like Pizza Hut, thank the good lord. And I think that is why people say the pizza in Italy is different. I don’t like to eat that fast food pizza if I can help it, so I think I was more at home with the Italian variety.

We skipped the Venetian art Academy after our disappointment with the Uffizzi in Florence. Instead we saw the Peggy Guggenheim museum of Modern art just down the way. Modern Art has its hits and misses as much as any period, but the variety of subject matter was welcome and her museum had some very interesting pieces including a Salvador Dali and a few Picassos.

We did the Gondola ride on Sunday morning and it was touristy and overpriced, but a must none-the-less. Our boat was run by a father and son team and since most boats were solo, I surmised that the son may hang out with his dad on weekends to learn the family business.

We also saw this old Byzantine looking church on Sunday and the palace that housed the Venetian government during the years it was an independent city-state. The palace was connected to a prison that would allow tribunals to send guys right to the can after sentencing.













I often times pay the extra money to get the audio tour to different museums, but the experience is hit or miss. It worked out best at the Guggenheim, but I nearly passed out listening to the painstaking detail of how the old government of Venice worked. The dramatic voice would explain what happened in every room and constantly speak of “The Doge” who was some sort of magistrate ruler of the city. I like history and this was just plain dull.












San Marco square also had a healthy bird population that would make Hitchcock shudder.


On Sunday night Trish and walked about 25 minutes to get back to the train station area so that we could visit the casino. Located upstairs from some sort of hotel, the once casino in Venice looks like it could rolled into a hidden room if the cops came to bust the place up. The roulette tables, and slot machines were authentic, but nothing else in the rooms said casino. You could imagine the whole thing packed up and tomorrow the place was some sort of suite for visiting royalty. Trish played slots and won 40. I lost about 20 playing roulette. No poker, of course.






I took the first photo of Trish and I couldn't quite decide how I wanted to frame it. How much head room did I want versus how much of the buildings did I wants to see? Looking at the verticals gave me the idea for the second photo where Trish gets a Hitchcock cameo.

BACK TO ROME

Since Rome was ending our trip, I thought we should try a nice B&B and Trip Advisor pulled up 69 Manin Street. The good news was that all of the reviews loved it. The only drawback was that it was a few blocks from the Train station which is a faster part of town and not in the center of the activities. Since I liked the reviews and really didn’t know which part of town was best since the activities themselves are spread out I took a chance.

They had a great selection of breakfast food and an upscale coffee vending machine that offered most of what you’re use to from the Starbucks menu. The room had satellite TV and since no more than 2 channels spoke English, they had over 100 DVDs that did. The only negative was that they misunderstood our email and were late is meeting us to check in.

The place was owned by a couple our age, though we only met the female end. Her “man” as she called him had a regular job and she worked the business. She was very meticulous and although she was rated 2nd or 3rd out of 80 places on Trip Advisor (currently ranked #12 – she must be having a fit) it bothered her that someone complained that she didn’t have a breakfast area and had to eat in their own room. She told me that she was leaning toward gutting one of the guest rooms to provide a breakfast place. I tried to talk her out of it. Why give up the revenue of the extra room. I bet most people don’t care and would rather pay less than subsidize the breakfast nook.

She asked me on the second day if I like George Bush and I said yes. She said that I was the first American to stay in her place that said so since she bought the place two years prior. I have to figure that at least one other traveling American likes Bush, but they were just afraid to admit it to a European. It turned out that she actually likes Bush a great deal as well as the then current Prime Minister Berlusconi whom she predicted correctly would lose re-election. She said that most people are just ignorant about terrorism and the world was lucky to have Bush to lead the fight. She and “her man” wanted to sell the B&B in a few years and move to California. They want to be Americans.

On our first Friday in Florence we witnessed the General Strike that closed down most attractions and featured little socialists roaming the streets some with Soviet flags. It seemed like a funny thing. The second Friday in Rome was bit less so, especially when we were packed in a Roman subway station and some Bolshevik set off a firecracker. I saw a woman yelling at her husband because the commie flags and signs were littering the stroller and the wife was tired of carrying the baby. I also saw a guy parading around with one of those nude blowup dolls. I’m not sure if that was some sort of counterculture statement or just the option of quick relief in the restroom. The overall effect of seeing this really bothered me. Here’s a country that embraced the fascism of Benito and was now embracing Lenin. Also troublesome was that every newsstand had a copy of a recent Che biography and that Che shirts and signs were everywhere even in non-strike days. It seemed that the main point was an anti-American one which I expected somewhat, but I didn’t see any of this sort of thing in 2003 in Amsterdam, Belgium or Germany. I felt like a character from the movie Barcelona.

Rome was an overall disappointment, especially since I have wanted to go there my whole life. It’s dirty almost everywhere, the gypsies are a bother and the attractions were mostly underwhelming. The touristy things like the Spanish Steps, and Trevi Fountain were actually fun little places to visit if you don’t mind the sideshows.





Not far from either attraction were guys dressed up as gladiators that will pose with you for a price and Bangladeshis trying to sell you wilted roses and Polaroids.

The historical things were a mixed bag. I enjoyed the Coliseum the most. It had a good audio tour and you could really imagine the action back in the day.















Palatine Hill, The Forum, the Circus Maximus were an education but redundant. The Pantheon was mostly interesting for how old it looked. McSorely’s Old Ale House in New York City has been opened since the 1850s and has the look of a place where grime has just absorbed into every crevice. The Pantheon looked like that to the extreme. Parts of the Tower in London are 1000 years old and look fresh and new compared to the Pantheon.



Although I had always wanted to see the Sistine Chapel our earlier ventures into Italian art in Florence made me less excited when the time came. The Chapel lets in only a select amount of people and they make you wander through hall after hall of less interesting artwork to get there. When we got into the actual chapel part every seat around the perimeter was taken and my sore back felt the pressure as I listened intently to the audio tour. The Michelangelo ceiling looked as great as in the photos and the drawings on the walls from lesser art figures couldn’t live up to it. It really looked like teacher and student. Even the well-respected Raphael didn’t impress me compared to Michelangelo. And to think they guy considered him self a sculptor and had to be bribed into painting the thing. At the same time, the greatness of the work didn’t surprise me like David back in Florence. They were what I expected.



A pleasant surprise was visiting this castle after we left the Vatican. There wasn’t much of a crowd and it offered great views of the city. We stayed up there for a while drinking Italian beer and looking over the side. There were some people on the ground just enjoying the day. Some young men were kicking around a metric football and another family was playing fetch with their dog. At some point the dog returned the fetch ball to one of the footballers and he kicked it out of his way not paying attention and the dog took it as the game continued. We both laughed when we saw it happen and those on the ground stopped and looked up at us which made it funnier.



Wine is so cheap everywhere. In the grocery store some wine could be had for Coca Cola prices. They had Grappa for as much a 30 Euro and as little at 4. I bought a bottle for 6 and it tasted like turpentine. I bought some Spumante for 4 Euro and it tasted great. Cheese was a lot cheaper too and we ate it plenty. Funny thing was the Peroni beer was no cheaper there than here. When you ordered it from a bar they usually included a bowl of potato chips and a dish of olives. I bought a 3 Euro draft and I think I ate 3 Euro worth of olives.

Although I grew tired of German food in 2003, I never got tired of Italian cuisine. The best part as we learned was that it was all good and the price you paid mostly had to do with location and view. So after the first night in Rome eating by the Pantheon, we spent the next 4 nights supping in the restaurant 2 doors down from the hotel and it was the least expensive place we went in Italy and no disappointment. It was a Mom & Pop called Ristorante Santi. We tried the pasta, pizza, bruschetta, steak, risotto, and it all met the test. By the end of the week they were treating us as old friends to boot.

The most bizarre situation happened on the last day when we were sitting in the Coliseum area and a Bangladeshi approached us to buy some silver Jewelry. I didn’t have a lot of cash left and didn’t want to make another ATM stop before the plane home and kept trying to shoo him away. He began by trying to sell us 1 piece for 25 Euro and ended with 3 for 10 Euro and Trish rationalized that she could maybe give them as Christmas gifts (I don’t think she did) so I said okay and gave the guy a Ten spot.

That was no sooner done and this lady started screaming at us for buying the stuff. She had a little flea market like table setup not far away trying to peddle miniatures of the Coliseum, David and such. She was tall and looked a little gypsy-like. The man with her was short and reminded me of an Italian Bob Hoskins. She went on about how they paid for their spot and the Bangladeshis had no right to trespass, but instead of taking it out on those guys, she was yelling at us and demanded that we leave or she’d call the cops. Now while I don’t know every Italian law I surmised that no cop is going to harass a paying tourist for buying a piece of silver jewelry and I refused to move. She and the runt were yelling and screaming at us to leave and we yelled back and stayed put. It was surreal to say the least and for the hell of it I decided to snap a photo of the little guy who didn’t like it one bit as shown.



We probably sat around ten minutes longer than we wanted simply to see if they would actually call Polize which they didn’t.

Earlier in the week we had another brush with gypsies when a mother and her two preteen daughters walked up to me trancelike as I was reading a tourist map. The girls each tugged on either arm of my jacket and the mother was holding the box, I suppose for the loot, but Trish who saw this before me was the hero and yelled at them harshly to leave and they cowered away with not a penny for their troubles.

We also saw a gypsy in a grocery store paying with change and it reminded me when I broke my penny bank to buy the Star Trek action figures in 1976, the only difference was that she paid mostly with pennies.



A great thing about the trip was that it was so relaxing that I read the five books I brought before we made it to Rome and I had to find an English language bookstore to re-stock. My mind had been so cluttered for months that I was having trouble concentrating enough to read and here I was flying through pages on the trains and just before bedtime.

On the plane trip over we sat next to an Italian girl from Naples which was interesting because the plane was actually connecting in Atlanta and she was probably the only other person on the plane heading to Rome. She worked at Alfredo’s restaurant in Epcot and she told us that the original one is in Rome and it would be the only place in the country that we’d find Alfredo sauce. She said Americans all think it’s typically Italian, but that they never eat it. She was dead right. Not one place on the whole trip offered Alfredo. We did stumble upon the original restaurant heading to the Pantheon our first night, but we didn’t venture in understanding it to be overpriced and not even authentic.

One thing that I wanted to do is get Trish and I posing in front of the Mouth of Truth as seen in Roman Holiday.


















I wonder if Wyler made the choice of darkening the eyes for the movie. It makes the thing come alive like a monster. It doesn't read at all in our photos















On both our European trips I have found that I am good and ready to come home by the 9th or 10th day. I don’t know how John ever lasted 6 weeks on that tour he took in 1995. The biggest mistake I made was 5 days in Rome. 3 days would have been enough. We could have spent the other 2 in Bologna, Parma and Tuscan countryside vineyards. Trish planned the prior trip and she had us moving city to city much better than me. I hope to learn from her example in the next trip. Our preliminary goal is to see Prague and I think that trip would offer an excellent chance to see Budapest too. We can’t decide if we should visit Salzberg, Vienna and Bavaria in that trip too or head north instead to Berlin and Warsaw and make it an Iron Curtain theme.