My ballot:
Picture: Argo
Director: Steven Spielberg
Actor in a Leading Role: Daniel Day-Lewis
Actress in a Leading Role: Jennifer Lawrence
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Walz
Actress in a Supporting Role: Sally Field
Original Screenplay: Django Unchained
Adapted Screenplay: Argo
I saw it last night, prepared not to like it after I was turned off by the violence porn of the projection booth scene in Inglorious Basterds. That scene was sex via pistol, and I could just see Quentin Tarantino getting off on it. This was different. From the opening credits, I knew Quentin had lightened up. Django was more in the spirit of the final scene of Basterds, a giddy bloodbath in which the evildoers were splattered in cartoonish violence. The music helped, too, setting the spaghetti western tone from the start.
Jamie Foxx was great, but Chrisoph Walz was better. I even liked Leonardo Decaprio, who has never resonated for me. Leo was fantastic in a total asshole role, playing against pretty nice guy type in a way that didn’t work in the Howard Hughes movie. And Samuel L. Jackson was also brilliant playing a self-loathing black man with nuance and total hilarity. It all just jelled. The violence was jokey, clearly an homage to Peckinpah, down to the almost fluorescent stage blood that exploded with each gunshot. All in all, a great pleasure.
The last act of Christopher Hitchens’ life, his terminal illness, provided Hitchens with perhaps his greatest opportunity to make his case for atheism and against religion. He would face the end happy in his certainty that there was no god, and his very comfort in facing death with no prospect of an afterlife made many of us think and rethink the biggest questions of our existence. Not a bad legacy at all for a man who wanted nothing more than to generate thought. We should all be so lucky.
That Hitchens died slowly also provided believers with a chance to show a spectrum of religious thought. Sadly, a good many made Hitchens’ case for him by hoping or praying that Hitchens’ looming mortality would finally win him over. As he incisively put it:
[I]t seems to me a bit crass to be trying to talk to people about conversion when you know they are ill. The whole idea of hovering over a sick person who is worried and perhaps in discomfort and saying now is the time to reconsider strikes me as opportunist at the very best.
Hitchens did, however, express appreciation for the many people who told him they were praying for his recovery. He called these gestures “a kindness” and a show of solidarity, but he pointed out he was certain the prayers did no good. On this last point, both Hitchens and his intercessors got it right and wrong at the same time. Indeed, the prayers had no effect on Hitchens’ health, and he died. Moreover, is praying for a given outcome even consistent with faith? Many certainly think so, but I don’t believe in what I call transactional prayer, in which one asks for something and treats the outcome as a response from god. I’m not making a theological argument, because I’m ignorant of theology, but an argument about what I believe faith and god and prayer are about: love, compassion, wonder, and the ability to feel them. Roger Ebert did a nice job of summing it up for me in his review of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life:
Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.
I’ll go further: acceptance of “what will be” is a prerequisite for prayer of the kind that Ebert describes. I don’t know if the people who prayed for Hitchens, and who pray for him now, really expected to change the course of his disease. I did not. I left it at compassion, of feeling for him. For those of us who still feel awe, who seek and cherish the ineffable, who seek love and compassion, this approach may help bring us into communion with our atheist brothers and sisters. As brilliant as Hitchens was, he was never going to win over a person who has felt a greater reality than this one, and no religious person was going to persuade Hitchens of the intangible. So why try, when in the end no one gets the answer until they die? Until we die, the one thing I see common to the major religions and ethical systems is a call to embrace our lack of control over the world, over the future, and in doing so free ourselves to love. To the extent that we can answer that call, atheists and believers could have precious little left to fight over.
My best friend is getting married, the last holdout among my childhood gang. His mother’s admonishment, “Don’t get married until you’re 30…and then think twice!” definitely stuck with him. But even if he had wanted to get married before now, he couldn’t have, because my best friend, Josh Moss, is gay. Because Josh lives in New York, as of last night, he has the same rights under the law as the rest of us. No better, no worse, certainly not a “special” right. Yes, Josh and his partner Wilson will now be free to share property and make decisions about their lives as the rest of us do, and yes, they’ll be free to screw up and have bad marriages and divorce as the rest of us do. Josh can tell you about the beauty of this most prosaic and yet fundamental of civil rights in his own words, in a beautifully written article on Portfolio.com, where he is the editor.
The remarkable victory in New York provided a striking window into where we are as a nation when it comes to respecting the rights of our fellow citizens. On the one hand, we had the increasingly strained and hypocritical complaints from Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who somehow feared that a secular, legal contract was more of a threat to civilization than the nightmare of child abuse in the church allowed by his brothers of the cloth. On the other hand, we had the plain-spoken truth of Republican State Senator Roy McDonald, who reacted to the pressure from Dolan and other social conservatives by saying “Well, f— it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
For me personally, aside from looking forward to an epic wedding ceremony and reception, I think about what got me past my own, mistaken moral reasoning, many years ago. I was raised to believe that being gay meant you were “disordered,” as the Catholic Church still teaches, or otherwise abnormal. In freshman year of college, when Josh and I were roommates and I didn’t know that he was gay, I glibly came home from a psych 101 class and pronounced to Josh that homosexuality was simply abnormal psychology. That Josh still managed to come out to me a short time later was a testament to his love for me as a friend, and to his moral courage. I spent a day lining up my abstract moral and “scientific” judgment on one side, and the fact that Josh as a gay man was the same person who had been my friend through thick and thin, a person who was so like me that people sometimes mistook us for one another. At the end of that day, the abstract fell away to reality, and I never looked back. People who still cling to the idea of homosexuality being some kind of perversion or disease can only be so lucky as I was. Or, more elegantly, they could just take a look at it, listen to others’ stories, and do the right thing, as Sen. McDonald did.
When the news broke yesterday morning about an NPR fund-raiser being caught on tape saying bad things about Republicans and the Tea Party, I immediately thought about how just last month, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker had also been caught on tape saying bad things about Democrats. Walker had also been caught on tape possibly indicating he had considered disrupting peaceful protests with “troublemakers” but had decided against it not because of any legal or ethical concerns, but because it might backfire politically. Walker also appeared to indicate he was open to accepting a free trip to California from someone claiming to be a political donor.
I was puzzled at the time by the lack of coverage of the Walker incident by journalists. The New York Times, for example, focused on the fact that Walker had been tricked by a liberal blogger, referring frequently to the incident as a “prank.” The Times consistently downplayed the substance of Walker’s taped comments, beginning with the first piece on the subject, “Walker Receives Prank Call From Koch Impersonator,” which appeared in the Caucus Blog of the Times. The headline makes Walker passive, a victim, the direct object of the subject in this passive voice construction, “Koch Impersonator.” Thus, the focus of the story is the impersonator and not Walker. In fairness, the blog piece included most of the important substance of the call, but the “troublemakers” comment is not mentioned until the eighth paragraph. The story later made it out of the blog and into the U.S. section of the Times web site, but only as part of a larger wrap-up of the political conflict in Wisconsin, “Standoffs, Protests, and a Prank Call.” As the headline indicates, the piece dealt with Walker’s comments last (in the 17th paragraph), and then in the context of the governor as the victim of a hoax. And that was pretty much it. The Times seemed to have decided that the fact that Walker’s comments shouldn’t be taken seriously, even though he is an elected official saying things privately at odds with his public statements, because a) he was duped by a prankster into making the comments, and/or b) because they were inconsequential. Fair enough.
So I figured that the coverage of NPR “fund-raising executive” Ronald Schiller’s comments to people posing as Muslim donors but actually confederates of “Republican provocateur” James O’Keefe, would portray Schiller as the victim of a “prank.” Oddly, this is not the case. Instead, the headline to the first piece in the Times was “NPR Official is Taped Criticizing Republicans” (the original headline has been replaced in the article itself, but if you look at the headline at the top of your browser, this original remains). The passive voice is there, but the NPR official is all alone. He is the sole actor, and the action is his criticism of Republicans. No prank mentioned. This could be an oversight of the headline writer, however, as indicated by the soon changed headline, which as of this writing reads, “Facing Lawmakers’ Fire, NPR Sees New Setback.” The new headline only reaffirms the Times’ take: how the information got out doesn’t matter, what matters is the substance. Schiller said something politically offensive, regardless of how or under what circumstances he said what he said. A closer read of the Times article makes the point clear, as the first sentence in the piece asserts that “NPR was forced into damage control mode on Tuesday after the release of a video that showed one of its fund-raising executives repeatedly criticizing Republicans and Tea Party supporters.”
Why the difference? The episodes are about as similar as you can get, except that the NPR “official” (can you be official when you’re a private employee?) was on his way out the door and was a fund-raiser, and Scott Walker is the governor of a state and is charged with enforcing the law. Is it because the Times is defensively self-censoring to somehow refute right-wing critics like Bill O’Reilly, who calls the Times “about as über left as you can get?” Or do Times editors really see a journalistic reason to treat these two incidents so differently? I can’t find one.
This cool book asks 30 directors to name a film that changed everything for them. I cheated and came up with two. My answers are Jesus Christ Superstar and Star Wars. The former was the one that told me “I can do this.” I only saw the movie once, in a theater in Mexico, but I had the soundtrack and played it to death. Since it was a rock opera, the records ran the entire length of the movie. That allowed me to visualize the movie in real time, and my young imagination led me to start planning a shot-for-shot remake that I would film with my friends. Never got further than that, but the experience made the idea of making movies real for me. In the following years I started reading books about how to make movies. Two years later, Star Wars was the movie that changed everything, that made me burn to make movies. I read about it in Time magazine’s cover story the week it came out. I clearly remember each publicity still, because they were so alien, so unlike anything I had ever seen in a movie. I hounded my dad to get me the novelization, and I tore through it. I was spending the summer with him in LA, and insisted that he and my brothers see the movie in the biggest theater I could find near his office in Westwood. I stood in line outside the theater, holding places for them. Once the lights went down, the Fox fanfare hooked me, the silence of the blue letters on screen hushed the audience, and then a massive star field filled my view. The blast of the theme’s first chord grabbed me in the chest as I watched “STAR WARS” fly away and finally fade into infinity. I had just finished reading the prologue, when the camera suddenly tilted down and my jaw dropped as this giant wedge of a ship filled the screen and I heard the hot, cracking sound of what would come to be known as pew pew pew. From that point on, I didn’t dare blink for fear of missing something amazing. Things would never be the same.
Yes, as the NYT reports, the Shanghai students did better than the Americans, and we are shamefully, tragically behind our competitors in investing in education. But the idea that this was a valid test of Chinese–or even Shanghai–student performance is absurd. The article notes that the PISA testers “worked with Chinese authorities” but doesn’t question why they would or should have to. It also allows that the Shanghai kids were told the test was important and would reflect on their country. No other kid in the world taking this “standardized” test, and certainly no American, was treated in this way. The author tried to bring some balance by comparing performance by kids in highly educated Massachusetts in 2007, but that says more about the weakness of PISA’s approach than it does about US kids’ performance. How about this: give the test to kids in the most expensive Manhattan private schools, and tell the parents and the kids well ahead of time that the outcome will determine the prestige of their school (and thus the kids’ chances of getting into the best Ivy League schools). That might be comparable to the motivation the Shanghai test subjects, under the eye of Chinese authorities, would have felt.
American students and teachers have enough problems, and we are falling behind. We need to change our culture so that teachers are respected as we respect, say, investment bankers. We need to understand that education is a strategic investment, as the Chinese do. But that doesn’t mean journalists should believe the hype.
Iron Man 2 isn’t better than the original, but considering it doesn’t have an origin story to drive it, the film more than satisfies in moving the franchise forward. The film does suffer from a proliferation of characters, a common mistake of sequel producers who think they have to provide more of everything, and Mickey Rourke is surprisingly flat as the new villain, Ivan Vanko. Scarlett Johansson is beautiful but deadly dull and completely unbelievable as a super spy/martial arts expert. She gets so many great movie roles yet does so little with them. Nonetheless, these weaknesses don’t bog the movie down because Robert Downey is so fun to watch. He makes it look effortless, but it’s important to note how much better he does compared to others who have tried out the superhero mantle. More than Tobey MacGuire or Christian Bale, Downey has made Tony Stark into a believable human being. This is in good part because Downey is so well suited to play a brilliant, charming, wealthy man with deep flaws. He knows it and makes it work, bringing real sparkle and personality that keeps the movie from becoming a total cartoon, a job was made harder by overblown and overlong action scenes.
Bottom line: if you liked the first one, you should like the sequel. It’s a fun way to start the summer movie season.
…you purport to represent Jesus but you sound increasingly like the Chinese Communist Party. Seriously. Take a look:
“With this spirit today we rally close around you, successor to (St.) Peter, bishop of Rome, the unfailing rock of the holy church.” –Cardinal Angelo Sodano to Pope Benedict, 5 April 2010”
…let us rally closely around the Party Central Committee and work with one heart and one mind in a joint and unyielding effort to advance the cause of building socialism with Chinese characteristics and create a happier life and a better future for us all!” –Chinese President Jiang Zemin, 8 November 2002
Notably, the Vatican is also taking a page out of the CCP style book in claiming unsubstantiated victimhood at the hand of 
nameless attackers. Just as criticism or disagreement with Beijing policy necessarily “hurts the feelings of the Chinese people,” so questioning the Vatican’s handling of the most vile of crimes is an anti-Catholic “hate” campaign, an organized “vile defamation operation.”
The faithful deserve better than the brittle spin of the Chinese Politburo, but that’s what they are getting. The similarities speak volumes about what’s wrong with the Vatican.
The republic did not dissolve last night. We had a vote, and the majority ruled. Moreover, by the yardstick currently in vogue, we became “socialist” as early as the 1930s or as late as the 1960s. I remember communism and totalitarianism. I spent a long time studying them. Using such terms to describe American politicians cheapens the suffering of people who lived and often died under such systems. Unless and until you are willing to cast the least of your brothers and sisters into the street to die without medical attention, you have bought into “socialism,” American style. If you are not personally prepared to pull that plug, to watch people die without medical intervention, make peace with the fact that you will pay a tax to provide universal health care, either in the form of higher insurance premiums to pay for emergency room care, or in the form of government subsidies to help people buy insurance. Pick your poison.
While we’re on the subject, how did the move to take the country to war in Iraq, and subsequently to fund that war off-budget for years, elude all of us who are now so concerned about the deficit?
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Loungecreature 