Thank You for Voting

I was the fifth person to vote early this morning in my polling station: a charming fire station, even more charming for being two blocks from my house and along my normal route to work.

That's one doodle that (hopefully, probably, since I didn't see the name "Diebold" anywhere) can't be undid, home-skillet. Fingers crossed till tonight—and probably for weeks after, but we'll see how this goes!

A Weekend at the Races

Quick SAG Awards reactions. Bardem and Christie look all locked up. Day-Lewis is 90% of the way there. Okay, 95%, but he wasn't competing against Johnny Depp here, and the sentimental hook to give Depp an Oscar outweighs any need to give him an Actor (one of which he already owns, anyway). Things look great for No Country for Old Men, too, which also picked up the DGA Prize this weekend, but Juno wasn't the force among SAG nominators that it apparently is among the Oscar crowd. Then there's the Ruby Dee thing: yep, she's the one "surprise" winner of the night, but Lauren Bacall won here, too, and Gloria Stuart tied. Sentiment hasn't carried the day at the Oscars quite so much, and I just don't think voters will see this as an "Oscar" performance. Still, I think anyone in that category who isn't Saoirse Ronan could win. Will be fun to watch.

Shifting from the essentially trivial to the profoundly important, after much hemming and hawing, a fair amount of reading around, and continued tracking of the primary trail, I'm officially casting my lot with South Carolina victor Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President. I don't think Hillary Clinton is the Machiavellian demoness that she's sometimes (read: often) made out to be, but I have been extremely unimpressed with her rhetoric and her mystifying decision to afford her husband such a prominent (and increasingly aggressive) role in her own campaign. Beyond the distastefulness of their behavior this week, I just don't like the omens of insecurity, recklessness, and swift reflexes toward antagonism that these choices embody. (I'm also talking about that cynical and retroactive "Let's count those Michigan delegates after all" announcement that she made last week.)

What these behaviors say to me is, she's panicked about whether she's going to be elected, and therefore highly provoked... while, for all of Hillary's "Day One" allusions to preparedness and pragmatism, Barack is the one who (to me) speaks, debates, and operates as though he's thinking about holding the office as much as obtaining it. I appreciated that Guardian article that ModFab linked to as yet another index of why neither Hillary nor Barack wins the Flawless Liberal Award, and his voting record should be scrutinized as thoroughly as hers or anybody else's. But as much as I still believe that Hillary is for change and Barack is experienced, and as hard as I'm working to avoid succumbing to mass-media pitches, I trust more in his longer view than in hers, and my old doubts about the Clintons as tacticians and as judges of character have resurfaced. Hearing Frank Rich spell out with galvanizing force and precision what a lot of us have worried about for weeks or months was also a big kickstart in finally getting me to commit.

What I think about John Edwards holding on is still less clear to me. Frankly, I don't understand the protocols of a Democratic Nominating Convention without a pre-given anointee well enough to grasp the mechanics of "leverage" or "king-making" that Edwards might be affording himself if he can actually recruit enough delegates in the remaining primaries to be any kind of a force. But meanwhile, I'm so convinced that, given the choice, Edwards voters would flock to Obama over Clinton that I kind of wish he'd bow out while he can still accomplish something big for the rival he clearly prefers. A thought that considerably exceeds my own credibility or wisdom, but if I'm not going to speak off the cuff here, where am I going to do it?

In (Envious) Praise of Australia

Tomorrow, I'll be back on my usual beat, joining the party for another Supporting Actress Smackdown over at StinkyLulu's, and shortly afterward spilling the beans about a major surprise in my filmgoing routine. Consider, for now, that one of these things is true — which do you think it is?:

• Oscar nom be damned, Days of Glory confuses itself into a failing grade
  
• Everything works in Enchanted except Amy Adams' ballyhooed performance
  
• Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams, now on DVD, trumps all comers as the year's best film
  
• I'm Not There reveals itself as an interesting but maddening letdown
  
• The Mist sets a new bar as the best movie of the holiday season

I'm not telling, but I'll fess up soon enough.

Meanwhile, however, the news from the real world is simply too good to ignore. Read this and tell me if you can even imagine the day when an American politician will commemorate a moment of victory with such a cascade of progressive priorities, responding to climate change, refusing the war, insisting on the maintenance of national education and health care for all. The grass looks extremely green from this barren side of the fence, and I'm sure it's all more complicated and ambiguous than it looks, but THREE CHEERS TO AUSTRALIA! May you set the standard for more of the world's democracies! (Stale Popcorn is celebrating in his new digs, with beautiful art on the walls... go drop by and share in the Aussie joy of it all.)

Inspirations and Holy Encounters

Maybe it's the onset of cold or the early darkness of autumn evenings, or maybe it's all the tremors of terrible news coming from the Fed and from Wall Street, or maybe it's every single article in the newspaper: for whatever reason, I keep talking to close friends about seeking inspiration and about how we're all keeping ourselves going amid busy jobs and worries about money and anxieties about how to find the time for the relationships, hobbies, and down time that do inspire us. I'm struggling as much as anyone to keep up with what I need to do and what I want to do, and to do it all without neglecting the people who are important to me. Amidst all of this, I've been lucky to stumble upon some unexpected jolts of pure inspiration lately, and if you'll pardon me, I'd like to write about them so I can hold onto them and also share them—and to invite you to share what inspires you, either lately or perpetually.

It warms my heart that a living genius like playwright Adrienne Kennedy is enjoying a revival in New York City, and that Charles Isherwood reviewed it so lovingly. I don't live close enough to New York anymore to see it, but knowing that it's happening and reading this review inspires me.

It warms my heart that another living genius, Todd Haynes, is rolling out his new film to such a rich and ardent reception by critics and early audiences, the kind of reception that should have greeted his last musical-fantasia masterpiece. This article about Haynes from the New York Sun, written by a good friend of mine from college, enlivens me both because of Haynes' candor and eloquence within the piece and because of the eager support and articulate admiration that the article extends to him. I'm Not There opens in Chicago a week from today, and I simply cannot wait.

In an added and wonderful wrinkle, which began as a frustrating wrinkle, I had to work during the Chicago preview screening that happened last week, where Haynes appeared in person for an audience Q&A. Thankfully, the work itself was invigorating that evening—I am lucky to have a job that gratifies and inspires me—but I was still feeling sorry for myself about missing a one-to-one encounter with a personal hero. So, calling on my inner Eve Harrington, I took a bus after work to the cinema where he was finishing his Q&A, bought a ticket for a movie I wasn't going to see so I could get past the usher, planted myself outside Auditorium #9 as people started filing out, and totally cornered him at the escalator, long enough to tell him that he is a personal hero to me, that I teach queer cinema classes at a university, and that my students invariably love Dottie Gets Spanked and Safe and Velvet Goldmine and Superstar and admire his hard work in creating them. The ensuing handshake was maybe my favorite handshake in my whole life. (And afterward, because I am a cheap rat, I got my unused ticket refunded. Sorry, Michael Clayton.)

A few weeks ago, as the Chicago Film Festival wound down, I had comparable luck (and comparable Eve-ishness) and managed to introduce myself to (The Lovely) Laura Linney at the closing-night screening of The Savages. I was initially so caught-off guard by my good fortune that I couldn't think of anything to say to her, though I did geek out and realized a dream of double-hand waving at her in the same way she does to Mark Ruffalo from inside the restaurant at the beginning of You Can Count on Me. If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. She was wonderfully cordial and approachable—she even started the conversation, since I was so obviously unable, and she signed my DVD!—but I was even more moved by her response to a question I put to her during the post-screening Q&A. I prefaced to her, so I'll preface to you: I am so touched and gratified by how devotedly this actress commits herself to stories about unique, complicated, reorganized, fractious but tender families that aren't the families we typically see on screen—in You Can Count on Me, in The Squid and the Whale, in Jindabyne, and now in The Savages—and by how adept and precise she is at communicating entire and unbelievably specific histories with her screen siblings and children and relatives. I truly don't understand how she conveys all this depth of information, these lifetimes of mutual knowledge and bonding, so I asked her whether she prefers to spend more rehearsal time than normal with actors to whom she will have to relate persuasively as family, or whether she likes instead to be surprised by these actors (since her screen families do tend to be full of surprises). I also wanted to know whether she likes to collaborate with the actors or the screenwriter or director on forming articulated, comprehensive backstories for these characters or if it's more creatively exciting for her to go only on the evidence of the script, to hold in mind whatever makes sense to her about the characters' histories, and to assume that her fellow actors are doing the same thing. Here's what she said, and I love it:

I do think some actors have a particular process that they prefer to use and that works for them on every project. I don't. I like that each piece of work is different. Sometimes, my process is completely textual, and I can do the exciting job of sitting down with every line and every action and saying, 'Okay, why this? Why does that make sense? How does that fit?' And as you probably know, sometimes the answer is in another line, but it might also be in an action the character takes earlier or later in the script, or it might be somewhere else between the lines. Sometimes the process is textual because it's all you've got; I've been on projects where maybe I haven't liked the actor so much who I have to have a family relationship with, but it's okay, because the writing has enough to go on. [Ed.: !] But at other times, things do happen collaboratively or spontaneously on the set, or you engage in a different back and forth process based on the people you're working with and the mood of what you're doing.

Because you mentioned those movies, I do want to tell you that I am very, very lucky, because my two fictional brothers [Mark Ruffalo and Philip Seymour Hoffman] truly are two of my favorite people in the whole world, and if you knew them you would see why. And now I feel like you do in a family, like you have a sort of invisible string connecting you to that person wherever you are and whatever you're doing. And I love that audiences for those films think of us that way, too. It can actually be dangerous for the acting: I felt like they were my brothers, and you can sort of fall into that easy relationship and just relate with them as people instead of keeping it about who you're playing. So you need to be vigilant.

And really, despite what I said earlier, all of those four movies you named were wonderful experiences for me, and the scripts were so great that I'm sure that's why everyone chose to do those projects, including this one [The Savages]. So – thank you!

Of course I was thrilled to be "talking" with her, even across a stage/house divide and from within a huge public audience, but I was also inspired by the generous length and detail of her answer; by the idea that people I admire really do interact and take care of each other with the kind of sensitivity and mutual joy that I feel when I watch those movies; and, too, by her willingness to take each experience as it comes and bend her own rules rather than sticking to comfort zones or insisting on A Way To Do Things. It's a lesson I've thought about a lot in the weeks since, and I'd love to emulate the flexibility and adventure of her work life as well as her personal grace and the evident blend of seriousness, responsibility, playfulness, and passion that she brings to what she does.

This is as gushy and fanboyish as it gets around Nick's Flick Picks, but like I said, 'tis the season when a little gush won't hurt anybody. In response to another recent conversation, I don't agree with the conventional wisdom that critiquing movies or artworks entails a contempt for them or an air of superiority toward them; I think if you love movies, you take it personally when they're shoddy or misused, and more than being entertained, you are grateful and rejuvenated when they're good, and you want to be able to say why, specifically, this is so. Still, having said that, it's true that I don't always make the time (and do any of us?) to express that feeling of giddiness and awe and eager impressionability that we feel in front of our role models or in front of work that stirs up our spirits.

Setting aside, then, what's been "good" or "bad" in the movies lately, when have you felt encouraged, gratified, enthused, appeased? Who has said something, in print or on air or in person, or stuck with a project, or nailed a role, or challenged themselves in a way that resonated with you and made you glad, gave you energy? Who or what do you read for this kind of inspiration? (For example, the abundance and detail and inclusiveness of the posts at GreenCine are a constant spark to me to learn more, see more, think more carefully, and share more broadly.)

Chime in below: we can all use the tips. And go see The Savages! And be there for I'm Not There, though I expect I'm preaching to the converted on both points.

(Photos © 2007 New York Times/Gerry Goodstein; © 2003 WireImage/Jason Nevader; and personal archive)

Condolences

As someone who mostly grew up in Virginia and who once upon a time knew lots of people who went to Virginia Tech, and also as someone who works on a college campus, I'd like to take a moment to express my condolences to the students, faculty, staff, and administration of Virginia Tech, and also to the community of Blacksburg. I hope they will all be able to support each other through the severe and baffling aftermath of yesterday's devastating losses.

I am also saving thoughts for the families of yesterday's victims, and in a distant but important way for everyone who attends a college, or works at one, or in any way supports a student or a university service. We all deserve each other's sympathy, fellowship, and compassionate attention. We can always stand to remind ourselves of the precious value of a campus, and of the depth of our commitment to ideas, to the ideal of improved understanding, and to each other. For some of us, the impact of yesterday's violence was very immediate. For most of us, we shudder to realize the arbitrariness of that violence: how easily our own selves or our own communities could have woken today to the scale of mourning that Virginia Tech is experiencing, and how much we have in common with the mourners. How abruptly and profoundly yesterday's events may have diminished our sense of safety, but hopefully awoke our spirit of camaraderie.

I ask us all, on any campus, to remember to be solicitous of each other, and to be grateful for our various privileges, our protections, and our civility, for the care we extend to others and for that which we receive. From the Gwendolyn Brooks poem on my office door: "We are each other's harvest: / We are each other's business: / We are each other's magnitude and bond."

'Apocalypto' Now

A commenter rightly observed below that I had skewered Apocalypto without properly articulating my position. I hope this review counts.

Edited to add: My review has been up for less than 24 hours at Rotten Tomatoes, where it is currently receiving a much worse response than the movie is. (Currently Apocalypto is hanging in there with a 63% Fresh rating, with very few precincts reporting, and a significantly lower 40% approval from major print critics.) Note that I'm getting docked all around for writing a long review (guilty) and for invoking Gibson too often (though surely it's fair to scrutinize a filmmaker's history of images and past body of work in light of a new release?). Note also that it took less than a day for somebody to ask, "Are you a Jew?" Creepy.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, and as you'll learn on the website, the occasion was always intended to honor the local, "ordinary," and culturally anonymous women who sustain countries, families, institutions, communities, farms, banks, schools, churches and temples, archives, traditions, and ideas the world over. In this way, the event is not primarily designed to honor the women we usually honor—although certainly no quota should ever be imposed on how often or how much we express our admiration, cultivate our knowledge, and combat our ignorance about all the women in the world, even the most famous of them, and all of the work that they do.

My heroes have always been women, and on an occasion like today's, I still can't help but think back on the three great heroes of my childhood, not counting little yellow bears from the Hundred Acre Wood: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Madonna. I know, I know, one of these things is not like the others. But these are the people that I read about, talked about, thought about, gave book reports and school presentations about over and over. Sojourner Truth because the "Ain't I a Woman" speech is a clarion call for justice that even a third-grader could understand, and because she showed so clearly how women's rights and the abolitionist cause were really one in the same struggle, and because the fact that it was always hard to know such simple things about her as when she was born and how old she was made me realize, at age nine, that history risked omitting some of its greatest people, and I wanted to know why that was.

Harriet Tubman because her acts were so simple and yet so herculean in their bravery (again, something that even a small child can understand), and because even her name was not her own, and because her story was my single-handed introduction to the world's complexity: I also admired Thomas Jefferson when I was little, and one day it occurred to me that admiring them both was a difficult and somewhat contradictory thing to do (and yet, in both cases, an impossible thing not to do). This Friday is the 93rd anniversary of her death. Save a thought.

Madonna because even when I didn't understand what she was singing about, her creativity with her music and with her own image, and her obviously total devotion to everything she did, and the fact that she got a rise out of people I know in every generation, set a real example for me about following one's own path and insisting on your own voice, even in ways that didn't look like conventional "leadership." And you could dance to it!

Side by side with these fantastic and humbling and utterly improbable women were the women in my own life whom I treasured, and who gave so much to me and to other people: my mother, who always gave love so fully and freely, and who taught me from a very early age without ever talking down to me; my maternal grandmother, who graduated from college in the 1940s when no woman in her family had ever done this, and most women still didn't; my paternal grandmother, who was a constant wellspring of affection and mischief; my aunt Lisa, who seemed so well-read and did everything her own way; my first-grade teacher Rachel Simmons, who saved me from shyness and self-consciousness at such an early age, and who shaped my personality so hugely that my dissertation is dedicated to her; my elementary-school math teacher Becky Salp, who would give me extra games and challenges because she knew how much I liked them; my fourth-grade teacher Judith Ward, who sang the same songs in the hallway and under her breath that I did, and who always asked what I was reading, and who reamed out a fellow teacher who laughed at me when I showed up on Halloween dressed in clip-on earrings and a jean skirt, and didn't let it rest until the other woman apologized to me.

Spotted in and around the culture, as I grew up: Rosa Parks, Christa McAuliffe and her shuttle-mate Judith Resnik, Geraldine Ferraro, Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Corazon Aquino, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Nancy Drew, Clarice Starling, Claire Huxtable, Ellen Ripley, Cokie Roberts, Roseanne Barr, the actresses, the writers, the artists. Discovered at the library: Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, "Lemonade" Lucy Hayes, Queen Elizabeth, Shirley Chisholm, Jane Austen, Jane Addams, Abigail Adams, Florence Nightingale, Hester Prynne, Harriet Jacobs, Laughing Water in The Song of Hiawatha, the suffragettes, the abolitionists.

Today, most broadly: women worldwide who work, nearly always for less, very often for pennies; women who nurture and raise, which is work; women who teach; women who do; women who agitate, for labor laws and justice and better government; women who work and collectivize from the literal ground up, like Vandana Shiva; women who use literary celebrity as a platform for articulate protest, like Arundhati Roy and Edwidge Danticat; women who are the lifeblood of local banks, volunteer health-care, and so many of the local-politics movements that are bandaging desperate communities around the world; women who pose the toughest questions in the Senate, like Barbara Boxer; women who are scrutinizing and challenging the machinery of politics, both figuratively, like Cindy Sheehan, and literally, like Bev Harris; women who write, create, perform; women who love women; women who counsel; women who are still disproportionately our teachers, social workers, and non-profit volunteers; women who are my most recent mentors, like Elaine Scarry, Hortense Spillers, and Amy Villarejo; women who are my friends and colleagues and students; my landlady and best friend in Hartford; the women who run the entire department at my bank; the women who organize and ensure my health benefits; the women who find time to do everything else they do while they're already doing all of this. All women, give or take Ann Coulter.

You can find a list here of worldwide events tied to International Women's Day. Trinity is selling T-shirts and raising awareness of the day around campus. Many places are doing something similar or something more. Even if it's just a thought or a thank-you: have it, and say it, and pass it on! And pass it on here, too—leave a comment, tell us all about a woman we should know about.

Almost There!

I know this is just a horrible thing to talk about period, much less on a blog, but I know I'm not the only 20-something out there with a big old Beloved-sized credit-card haint haunting my house and my life, and I was getting to the point of thinking these balances are impossible to beat. Now I've wiped out two out of three. I feel about this the way some people feel about their food diets or their course grades or their, um, painkiller addictions. You really can quit with a little determination each day! What's worked for me:

1) Sign up for an Account Protection or similar service through one of your credit cards that includes, as a complementary feature, free quarterly credit reports. Admittedly, this can backfire—credit-raters don't like to see that you've requested too many reports, because it makes you look skittish, even alarmist about your own standing. But I think I needed to see a real-world document and a little line graph that was coming closer and closer to Touching the Void in order to really snap to. (Note: my quarterly credit rating has actually gone down as I've paid off the cards, which has been a blessing in disguise, albeit, to steal from Lucia DeLury, a fucking good disguise: my incentive to spend less didn't dissipate the first time I saw a bump in the right direction.)

2) Keep focused on how little you really need to shop. Frankly, I've never been much of a spender, I just spent more than the pittance I made as a grad student (hard to avoid). Coming into a real salary was a huge relief, but can also be a real lure into upping your spending to match your new means. Just don't. If you're a grad student, read all those books you already own, and which sunk you into debt in the first place: you save money and feel like you're finally making some intellectual headway.

3) Fewer restaurants. It's more fun, healthier, and cheaper to cook anyway. Even with friends or guests, making food together is a blast. I was so lazy for a long time about buying too many meals instead of walking to the grocery store, even though I like making food. Bad scene.

4) Strictly categorize what you'll charge. Trying to go totally cold-turkey on the charge cards didn't work for me, so instead, I confined their use to a) travel expenses, or similarly big one-time expenses, b) store-bought groceries, and c) movie tickets, which I refuse to feel bad about buying, but which also have a reliable ceiling: you're not going to spend more than $10 at a pop, ever.

5) Write more checks to charities and NFPs. Another good idea with the added bonus of helping on spending. If I write a check, I know the money is "gone" in a way it doesn't feel "gone" on a card, and it keeps me more alert to my spending. (I'm a rigorous checkbook-balancer.) If you send the money to someplace that really needs it and that you care about, instead of just acquiring some more stuff you don't need, you still feel the nagging pinch to spend less afterward, but feel good about where your money has gone, and you get used to making donations a regular part of a monthly budget that's well within your means.

Thus ended the post from your uncouth and presumptuous financial advisor, who has no business being anybody's financial advisor, but when you and all your friends are broke, sharing money-saving tips is just a gossipy version of swapping coupons. If you've got more advice, post it below (comma) yo.

World AIDS Day

I know that this blog needs a spiritual lift as soon as it can get one, and no I haven't abandoned my countdown (I've just been refreshing my memory of #s 68 and 69, neither of which I had seen in a while). And yes, I do still plan to see some new movies: I've cleared a massive swath in my weekend schedule of grading to see Walk the Line and Rent and Bee Season all back-to-back-to-back at the local 'plex.

But still, December 1 is World AIDS Day, and I feel it's important to acknowledge that—especially since your friend and mine at Queering the Apparatus wrote such a heartfelt, detailed, and eloquently angry commemoration of this grim but hopeful day. Please read it, and then consider donating money or absorbing the information at the websites for AmFAR, Avert.Org, Stop Global AIDS, the African Health Crisis Intervention Project, or The ONE Campaign.

Denis, the Menace?

Denis O'Hare is a name that movie fans should care about, even though in terms of Denis' career, the play is really the thing. A Tony winner for Take Me Out and a standout in revivals of Cabaret, Assassins, and Sweet Charity, Denis was most prominently featured on screen as one of the annoyed neighbors in Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming's wonderful ensemble dramedy The Anniversary Party and as the guy at the bottom of the ravine in Garden State. (He also played the doctor studying Sean Penn's heart in 21 Grams, so imagine how much secret knowledge he has about me!)

Anyway, you may have read about Denis and his boyfriend Hugo getting arrested and detained this week as terrorist suspects at a Virginia airport. And, reading the article, even setting aside the implied inanity of the charges, you may have wondered how come boyfriend Hugo is the one who got handcuffed and dragged around even though Denis is saying that he's the big-mouth, and how come Hugo is still the one being hauled into court. Perhaps looking at this picture of the happy, longtime couple clarifies something about their pairing, and something about Hugo in particular, that goes unmentioned in the newsbyte but somehow makes all the details cohere in a sad, infuriating, but recurringly American way. <SIGH>

A Barbara Ehrenreich Moment

Forgive me for airing the dirtiest possible laundry, but I'm a bourgeois little Flick Picker in a reverse-earnings profession at a salary-frozen institution with six years of graduate school very recently under my belt. You might have noticed that Nick's Flick Picks shares a monogram with Not For Profit, and there's a cosmic, karmic rightness to that. All of which means that I am a classic gimp of the Credit Card machine, so it is with satisfaction that I announce I have finally lopped off one of the heads of the thin, plastic Cerberus that hounds me through life. The two surviving heads still bark and bite like some fierce motherf****rs, but yo: one small step for Visa International™, one giant leap for Oliver Goddam Twist. (How far I've come to get to $0 on that balance is too scary a tale to tell, especially now that Halloween is over.)

Debtors of the world, you've got a friend in me!

R.I.P. Rosa Parks

First August Wilson and now Rosa Parks, all in one month? No one can say that this 92-year-old hero didn't live a full life—an indispensable life, that is, indispensable to the entire history of her country. Rosa Parks was a legend whether or not Oprah ever invited her to lunch. (That's for you, Summer.) The world will miss her, especially since I wonder if there's a single public figure on the current U.S. stage who is worth the salt on one peanut in Rosa Parks' kitchen.

I knew I'd be sad when this day came, but why is it making me so angry? Why are we saying goodbye to so many of our best?

Hopefully, TV stations will program Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks into their schedules post-haste. A wonderful, Oscar-nominated short documentary from 2002, the film features two devices that should never work under any circumstances—a large, rotating cast of child narrators, and reenactments of famous episodes from Parks' life using lookalike actors on stock footage—but the whole thing is polished, informative, and unsentimental in recalling Rosa Parks' leadership as a civil rights worker, the Montgomery Bus Boycott she so famously ignited, and other legacies of protest and justice-crusading that she joined, inspired, and stood in solidarity with. By all means, convince your local library to buy a VHS copy if they don't own it already. It couldn't be a better tribute to Ms. Parks. (Hartford locals are luckier, since Real Art Ways was already planning to exhibit the film for school children later this fall; I feel sure they'll find room for a regular showing now, too.)

I met Rosa Parks once, in the summer of 1995, and wasn't she a spitfire in a wheelchair. Speaking to a clutch of four or five American students, all of us freshly graduated from high school, she said, "If you ever hear anybody say that I just happened to be on that bus that day, or I was tired and didn't want to get up, or that I was in the white section, or that I was this little lady at the right place at the right time, it is your job to set them straight!" Rosa Parks knew what she was doing. Rosa Parks had been working for the NAACP and for other, local civil-rights groups for quite some time. Rosa Parks was in the "Colored" section of that bus, and balked at the bus driver's demands that she give up her seat to a white person. Rosa Parks had mettle. She had RIGHT on her side. She had actual courage, not that kind people talk about in speeches, the real kind, she HAD THAT.

One more thing that makes it less sad that Rosa Parks is gone: no one is ever, ever going to forget this woman.

Notes from Underground

So, while Nick's Flick Picks has been in another two-week hibernation, plenty has been going on above ground. In the Glass Half Full category, Tom DeLay finally got indicted, Lynndie England got sent to prison, Rita din't wreak what Katrina wrought, and residents of New Orleans started making their way back home. As for the Glass Half Empty, many of those same New Orleanians got sent back out again, Rita was bad enough for what it was (and only augurs the gloomy future of global weather), Cindy Sheehan got arrested outside the White House, John Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice, and reports are running wild that Bush's top contender for the open Rehnquist slot is Lord Voldemort.

In local Trinity news, two weekends ago, as Wesleyan started pulling ahead of us at a home-field soccer match, a loud clutch of Trinity undergrads began taunting Wesleyan athletes, fans, and fellow Trinity students as "fags" and "homos." So, no, that chill you're feeling in the air isn't just the autumn weather. Thankfully, in the Newtonian universe of Equal and Opposite Reactions, this truly disgraceful incident has sparked campus conversation about homophobia, public letters and Campus Conduct indictments from both the Dean's and President's offices, and a rally tonight called "Don't Commit It, Don't Permit It." In an extremely mature and impressive move, one of the targeted Trinity students published an open letter to the campus citing not the homophobic taunters but the silent majority of deniers and tongue-cluckers as the real problem.... Real change happens when compassionate people act on their outrage rather than commiserate about it in private, so tonight's rally and the very public, very concerted response to this flare-up marks a huge change in Trinity's social life, and I'll be thrilled to go.

Meanwhile, at the movies—you knew I was getting there!—September combined still more extremes, including the two best movies I've seen in 2004 as well as the absolute worst (paging Mr. Gilliam). Here's a September recap, in partial compensation for the recent paucity of reviews. Keep checking back over the course of the weekend for updates!

And yes, if you do the math, 18 movies in 30 days means I was in a movie theater 3 out of every 5 days in September. Welcome, all over again, to my world.

The Brothers Grimm F
Ever heard of saving the best for last? Now let's try dispensing with the worst first. It's not that absolutely everything fails in The Brothers Grimm: Heath Ledger saves many of his own scenes with a kooky, Depp-in-Pirates delivery, and occasionally the film coughs up a decent if slightly mean-spirited image, like Monica Bellucci's glassy face shattering into shards. Still, the vortex of suckage is enormous, and it swallows the whole enterprise, even the stuff that works. The hiring and firing of key technical talent during production is plainly visible in the schizophrenic switches in light and palette, which are nothing to write home about even in the individual set-ups. Costume changes seem to happen mid-scene, Lena Headey seems stuffed with sawdust as the Amazonian pseudo-love-interest, and the overall narrative lacks any kind of clarity or motivation. Dozens of millions of dollars down the toilet, ten of which were mine.

The Constant Gardener C
A rather stentorian exercise in stating the obvious, Fernando Meirelles' political epic is also rather less than the sum of its schizoid parts. For a while, it's easy to resent the pasty romance between Fiennes and Weisz while the gears of corporate machination start (read: keep) grinding away at the developing world. At some point, largely due to Weisz's thistly and exciting demystification of her somewhat preciously conceived character, the romantic strain gets a helluva lot more interesting. But around the same time, the multinational plot boils down to the usual suspects of isolated baddies, both believable (Nighy) and intolerable (Huston). Frenetic editing and slick direction dissolve the ligaments of the film's political as well as its emotional arguments. The finale still works pretty well, but it's the film, not just the protagonist, that finds itself feeling a little weary and overspent.

Corpse Bride B
A macabre little delight that manages the durably difficult task of squatting its hero between two romantic options and making them both quite appealing. Deft voice work from Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson helps make the worm-ridden Corpse Bride and the moon-faced Victoria such endearing creatures, but the film is already plenty endearing with its cheerfully Guignol mood, its terrific verbal zingers ("Little Miss Living," grouses the Corpse Bride, "with her rosy cheeks and her beating heart!"), and its hilariously elongated character designs—Victoria's mother with her towering, knobby upsweep is a stand-out in all senses. The songs feel a little wispy, and the film eventually feels the same, nailing the coffin shut after only 77 minutes, but it's a merry dose of early-autumn fun so long as it lasts.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose B–
A film that I enjoyed probably more than I had reason to. As I try to articulate in my full-length review, Emily Rose's variable quality in narrative and technical terms has a weird and surely inadvertent way of clearing space for its thematic centerpiece, which is a surprisingly involving standoff between faith and doubt, explored in legal as well as theological contexts that harmonize in darkly fascinating ways. Sure the plot is full of holes, but spiffy actors like Laura Linney and Campbell Scott help to plug a lot of them, and the B-grade thrills of arbitrary auto-crashes and diabolical body-contortions carry their own weight. Both a guilty pleasure and an anatomy of guilt, The Exorcism of Emily Rose has dry runs of pure, risible silliness until it snaps awake at more than reasonable intervals with some real frights and honest questions.

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Dawn of the Desperate

As my dismay and horror at Katrina's aftermath linger, and in many ways keep building, I'm bothered by how many of the images emanating from the disaster rhyme with those of our most sickening horror films. Last year's Dawn of the Dead remake, which so powerfully distilled feelings of abandonment, of terror at one's own neighbors, and of desperately fragile, ramshackle communities under siege, keeps coming back as a visual framework for the Katrina photos, particularly those in and around the Superdome. With the exceptions that...



1. The dozen holdouts in Dawn of the Dead had a cavernous mall to themselves; the horror wasn't compounded by stepping in each other's shit or waking next to corpses.

2. The Dawn crew was trying to keep the dangers locked out, rather than being themselves locked in by an unimaginably backward "rescue" effort.

3. Less than half of the strandees in Dawn were people of color, virtually all of them skewing middle- or upper-middle-class, and so there was nothing systematic or socially determined about their plight.



4. The people who might have rescued them were actually, presumably, dead, rather than being so tardy in arriving and so flippant in public comportment that you'd think they were dead (paging Mr. Bush and the upper Administration).

5. The horror in Dawn was compounded by the omnipresence of guns, which some of the desperate survivors started turning on each other. (Wait, there's no difference there.)



6. No one knew what caused the rising up of the dead in Dawn. Anyone paying attention knew exactly where Katrina was coming from, not just in the context of days of climatological forewarning, but in the longterm context of telltale signs: virtually unchecked anti-environmentalism and global warming; slashed budgets for levee upkeep; massive drainage of resources by an unnecessary war and a re-elected administration with socially destructive priorities; willful discounting of the many scientific, governmental, and journalistic Cassandras who saw this coming; and entrenched social schisms that simmer away and erupt in such an emergency. Even our national surprise comes tinged, at least among people I'm talking to, with a strong sense that something like this has been coming for a long while. Too many roads all leading in the same direction. Who needs a Bible when prophecy is this harrowingly easy?

7. The terrifying nihilism that consumes Dawn results in death for almost everyone. The terrifying nihilism that has been catalyzed in and around New Orleans is a hot thing, geysering to the social surface the deficiencies in our government and the prejudices in our own society—as though these things were ever less than obvious to begin with. Living in a country where all of this inequity and lethal stratification has been crystallized for everyone to see is going to be no mean feat. What figure, even in art, do we have for how a society moves on or recombines after something like this? Who will lead us?

Katrina and its aftermath are more terrifying than even the fictional and impressively terrifying scenario of Dawn, much more terrifying than 9/11 if you ask me (not to indulge in the morbid act of sizing up grotesque tragedies), and, however unwanted, as with the worst horror movies, the sequels to Katrina—social, emotional, fiscal, medical, even natural—will be multiple and awful.

More on Urban Submersion

Even from as far north as Hartford, I am having a hard time shaking my reactions of fear, sadness, and sympathetic outrage as more and more reports and images arrive from the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Reuters posted the above photo on the New York Times website in order to contrast these identically scaled aerial photos of New Orleans taken, respectively, on March 9 and August 31. That's not a color tint, or at least not for the most part. The chromatic scales of the photos do seem a little different, but what you're really seeing is side-by-side evidence of this cataclysm.

Obviously, and by my own admission, I am never prejudiced in our president's favor, but the fact that it took him two days to get back to the White House after Katrina hit land (consumed as he was by dopey and redundant public appearances and grinning photo ops) strikes me as putrid presidential behavior, even worse than those nine minutes or whatever he spent reading My Pet Goat in 2001. To compare his demeanor and the tenor of his remarks from Washington with the visibly, palpably stricken Tony Blair we all saw after the London subway bombings is a study in character discrepancy as glaring in its juxtaposition as are the photos above. When Tony Blair is KO'ing you in contests of emotional accessibility and tangible fellow feeling, you're really scraping the bottom, George.

But here I am letting myself get distracted by symptomatic scapegoats and the kind of political rhetoric that has only fed our national sense of helplessness for years... when what we need to do is actually help, or at least feel like we can help. Money. Phone calls. Places to stay. More money. If I can find addresses to send care packages of food, diapers, toiletries, clean clothes, etc., I'll post them—if you already know of reliable destinations for these things, please make them available in the Comments section below.

P.S.: Okay, the Red Cross would know, and they say that sending individual shipments of clothes, food, and other buyables is usually counter-productive, because the costs and labor of organizing and moving all this stuff make it much more practical to collect locally. (Though, if you live locally, look alive.)

Meanwhile, what are we supposed to make of Reuters reports that people are rising up angrily at gas station attendants, demanding to know why gas has passed $3/gallon? Haven't these people been watching the news? What is with this modern capacity (or is it simply American?) to be aware of massive tragedy but still be shocked, shocked, in the words of Captain Renault, when the traces of that tragedy show up at your own doorstep? Or, as it were, in your filling station. Here is someone thinking a little more clearly, and a little more long-term. I'm not trying to stoke hysteria here, but this shit is scary. And frankly, it's especially scary because so many of us, however much we feel grateful and self-conscious for what we have, are nonetheless spoiled beyond belief into the illusion of inexhaustible plenties.

If You Can Handle It...

...this piece from the October '04 issue of National Geographic offered an extensive and poignantly before-the-fact profile of the extreme risks to the wider New Orleans/delta region and, indeed, the whole country in the event of a Category 3 storm. Keeping in mind that Katrina was a Category 4 by the time it hit the Delta, and a Category 5 only hours beforehand, read the article and bear in mind that the scenarios and ramifications it describes, heart-sinking as they are, may actually not be as bad as what the region will have to face.

As so often, my source for this article is the terrific and mad-as-hell blog Brilliant at Breakfast, which is indispensably story-rich and wide-angled all the time, but it really shines in times of crisis like the one we're heading into now. (Check, too, the updates on French, Canadian, and German programs to assist the decimated Gulf region.)

Anecdote of things to come: a friend of mine walked into a grocery store yesterday in upstate New York, noting that gas at the station outside was selling at $2.85/gallon. He walked out 30 minutes later with his groceries, and gas had already risen at the same station to $2.99. Looks like I might be having some more company on the sidewalks and crosswalks for a while.

Again, my heart and my money are going out to everyone in the Gulf region. Meanwhile, lest we forget, almost 1,000 people died in that false-alarm stampede in Iraq at the beginning of the week, and as heavy as all of our hearts are, I hope we're all finding room for everyone who needs it.

Hurricane Relief

There's no time at the moment, and probably no need, to summarize all the terrible updates about the losses of life, the destruction of landscapes, resources, and property, and the onset of major health hazards along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. As we all keep abreast of the news, please make room even if your personal budget is meager to donate to the Red Cross fund for Hurricane Relief. With major hospitals and airports underwater, critical-care patients being roughly transported to faraway sites, and other cataclysmic obstacles to the caretaking initiative, the Red Cross will need all the help it can get, and quickly.

The Hottest State

First, my fabulous new home-state of Connecticut became the third state in the country to legalize gay marriage, and the first to do so through the pure initiative of the state legislature (i.e., without responding to any lawsuit or institutional pressure). Today, Connecticut becomes the first state to challenge President Bush's ridiculous No Child Left Behind edicts, which every public-school teacher that I know finds crippling, excessive, and misplaced in its emphases. If you live in Connecticut, but even if you don't, feel free to contact State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and thank him for his proper and active advocacy for teachers who know how to do their jobs.

While Bush languishes away with a 36% job approval rating from the American public (thanks, Brilliant at Breakfast), let him eat Blumenthal's dust. Meanwhile, raise a glass to Connecticut today, or at least eat something with nutmeg in it. (Props, Shirleen!)

Gothic Nightmares

Ever hear the one about the deranged movie star who clung with Apollonian vanity to the fading vestiges of stardom, imprisoning a tender young up-and-comer in a desperate final bid to win back a fickle public?

If you haven't, you can hear it now. Twice. First, Glenn Close has signed to reprise her role as Norma Desmond in a film musical of Sunset Boulevard. The musical, of course, was based on one of the greatest American movies of all time, though considering the adaptation is by Andrew Lloyd Webber, I have a feeling that it is not one of the greatest American musicals of all time. True, Norma's signature track, number, "As Though We Never Said Goodbye," is pretty enough, and Glenn's performance at the Tonys in 1995 was memorable. I love Glenn. I'm excited that she's been crawling back into the spotlight with the current arthouse release Heights, even though I'll be stunned if the movie is better than mediocre.

Perhaps, however, someone can explain to me how Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman have both signed on as co-stars? Assuming the musical is reasonably close to the film, I can't think of who the second younger man could be....

Meanwhile, also ready for their closeups are the increasingly ghoulish Tom Cruise, his zombie betrothed, and her "Scientology chaperone." Whaaa?? The indomitable Safire tipped her readers off to this hot-off-the-press W Magazine interview with the brainwashed ingénue itself. I swear, the photo you see at left is a still from the W photo spread, not from the upcoming Tim Burton animated opus The Corpse Bride. Seriously. I wouldn't lie about this.

How did Katie Holmes go so quickly from being the interesting upstart making smart, durable choices—Go, Wonder Boys, The Ice Storm—into this empty-headed vessel of pre-teen bubble-gum babble? How is anyone gon' sign up for a "religion" in which it is a recognized practice for the most devoted worshippers to commit themselves to the church for a period of a billion years? Seriously, read the article.

TomKat is more than a celebrity flare-up. It is genuinely grotesque, a real-life invasion of the body snatchers, except that "real life" doesn't really seem to play into it, anywhere. I continue to maintain that Tom Cruise is not gay, and I had George Michael pegged back in the days of Faith, so listen up, scouts. The 'dar is not pinging. Actually, that pinging sound you keep hearing is just the echo that results when a gust of air blows into Tom Cruise's ear.

So that is the big state secret: Tom Cruise isn't gay, he's just monumentally cocooned inside a narcissistic mental matrix of his own making, and now he has kickstarted the solenoids inside his greatest creation, a woman who says nothing except "I love you, Tom," in the manner of a parrot...which, come to think of it, was the same manner in which Katie delivered her performance in Batman Begins. Maybe that's the secret nature of their blood pact: she won't tell anyone that he's crazy like a platypus, and he won't fess up that she, under all the makeup, is not a humanoid at all, but a trained bird.

If Tom® and Katie™ want to go make sweet, naïve, plasticine, new-money, mumbo-jumbo, Mattel-style love under the polestar of L. Ron Hubbard, then let them have at it. But so long as they're chilling in outer space, could they send us back one of those cool memory-wipers from Men in Black? I'm trying to forget that I ever took either of them seriously. And as for the future, Katie, when you pen your Little Girl Lost tell-all book about how you just had, like, no. idea. what it would feel like to have the whole Cruise® PR Machine crashing down on your every move, shadowing every flick of your diamond jewelry and every maniacal cackle emitted by your daddy-substitute, I. am. not. buying. it.

I don't even think this relationship is a "hoax," per se. I think it's what happens when dumb people fall in love, loudly, in front of microphones. It doesn't even count as a fatal attraction, or a dangerous liaison, and it's more than a reversal of fortune, and more than a big chill. To use the only Glenn Close title that applies in this context, this is what it looks like when Mars attacks. Or, to plunder Katie's own filmography, this is straight-up Disturbing Behavior.

Your Perfect Post-G8 Film Rental

One of the best movies I saw in all of 2004, and easily one of the most extraordinary documentaries I have ever watched, was Flora M'mbugu-Schelling's 1992 film These Hands. Africa and its struggling economies have recently received an uncharacteristic boost in the attention of global media, but now that the G-8 conference and the Live 8 panoply have both come and gone, I can't help but wonder how long this well-intentioned media campaign will survive. If you're trying to keep learning, keep considering, keep caring about African poverty, no document has ever made a more lasting impression on me than this one did.

Combining the class consciousness of Harlan County U.S.A. with the expressive minimalism of Night and Fog, These Hands is a 45-minute movie that lacks any whiff of exposition for the first 35 of those minutes. All you are watching are huddles of women sitting or crouching in the open sun, orbiting rubble-piles of fist-sized stones and using tiny hammers and chisels to break them down into smaller and smaller shards. This, ladies and gents, is how construction-grade gravel is produced. M'mbugu-Schelling, the film's German-Tanzanian director, doesn't resort to any aestheticizing tricks, and she doesn't intrude any leering overseer or flagrant abuse into the scene. She needn't: the pure fact of this hard form of labor speaks for itself. These Hands is weirdly fascinating—the montage suggests, quite rightly, the tedium of the work, but it's smartly edited to prevent that tedium from dulling our own sensitivity or our intellectual responses to what we are watching. But what are we watching? Again, the spectacle is so foreign and yet so self-evident that it compels our rapt attention, but we can't help wondering about contexts and backgrounds.

With 10 or 15 minutes to spare, These Hands drops a pretty big bomb, as one of the toiling women puts down her hammer and begins a remarkably jubilant dance on top of the stone pile. Her fellow workers begin clapping hands and singing along with her gyrations, and this continues, uninterrupted, for several beats. No one comes to bother the women; nothing further explains this sudden swerve in tone. Eventually, having gotten whatever it was out of their system, the dancer and the singers resume their tasks. A quick worker's meal is had. The work continues, and the end of the day draws nearer.

At the literal last minute, These Hands rolls its first expository captions. These women, it turns out, are self-employed; this is not a labor farm or a rock plantation, per se. The quarrying they perform by hand pays roughly $6/week, and this salary, like the autonomous working conditions, counts as an enticing extravagance to workers, many of them refugees, who would be hard-pressed to find any better deal. In fact, the film implies, for Tanzanian women and Mozambiquean refugees this deal is pretty good. Could there be a more heartbreaking truth, and could it be delivered with more rigor, less sentiment, greater clarity than These Hands achieves? The yakkety-yakking and back-patting of the G-8 crowd suddenly comes into focus, as does, miraculously, an entire economic order—perhaps the hardest thing in the world to evoke within an image, but Flora M'mbugu-Schelling does it.

If you're curious to see These Hands, and I hope you are, you'll definitely want to visit the absolutely priceless trove of African and African-American film and video art at California Newsreel. I've got a leg up because my university library and the progressive library in my town both carry several titles apiece, but consider ordering some copies for yourself, your school, or your organization. (On a much more chipper but still politically illuminating note, Djibril Diop Mambéty's The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun is an absolute charmer.)

African movies, like African hunger, African poverty, African medicine, African politics, African genocides, and African everything, get next to no attention in this country; when they do, the scale of the continent's crises is rendered so vast that you wonder where to even start. Here is a place to start. Here, here, and here are places to continue.

Photo © 1992 California Newsreel. Though this still from the film has been rendered in black & white, the film itself is in color.

Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Spielberg

In 1993, Spielberg re-conquered the popular cinema and its surrounding sea of media with an extremely high-profile, extremely munificent, and extremely canny double-header: the straightforward pop entertainment Jurassic Park, bowing in June 1993, followed by Schindler's List, his most overt bid for political relevance and cultural seriousness, in December of the same year.

Always one to hope lightning will strike twice (Ray Ferrier's wisdom be damned), Spielberg rather cynically opted for the same trick in 1997, but the law of diminishing returns overtook him. The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a big hit but an instant irrelevance, and Amistad was sloppy, mawkish, and alarmingly willing through story structure, photography, and erratic screenwriting to turn Joseph Cinque into a visual and narrative object rather than a man. You practically needed a machete to hack through all the unnecessary characters and dramatic clutter interceding between the audience and Cinque, whom this whole, confused film was supposed to be about.

Stevie went for a third double-whammy in 2002, with weirder, inconclusive results. Both Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can were sizable hits, but from an aesthetic standpoint, neither of them reversed the growing, damaging strain of inconsistency in his most recent movies. If anything, the "commercial" half of this double-bill did better with critics than the self-consciously larkish Catch, though neither is likely to be the centerpiece of any future Spielberg retrospectives. (They'll probably screen at 9:30pm or 10:00pm on the second half of some double bill that starts with something truly interesting, like Empire of the Sun or A.I. Artificial Intelligence.)

With the coarse and insincere War of the Worlds out to rule the box office this weekend, you can smell in the air that Spielberg, like a boxer with all-too-predictable moves, is about to throw that second punch. Indeed, currently slated for a December 2005 release is his untitled drama about Israeli hitmen who were commanded in 1972 to assassinate the Palestinians who had murdered Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. I was just belly-aching over at the Cinemarati discussion about War of the Worlds that it's probably the right time for DreamWorks to start farming out the sort of fawning, falsely humble press materials that always seem uncannily well-timed to make Spielberg look media-shy, guileless, and artistically unparalleled just at the moment when he is, in point of fact, saturating the media with a pandering movie replete with aesthetic demerits.

And wouldn't you know it, not an hour after I posted these gripes, I click over to the New York Times and find this article by David M. Halbfinger, which embodies the customary Spielberg PR recipe to a tee. What a cheap manipulator he has become, offscreen as much as on. At the moment, I feel like reviewing (and panning) this absurd article even more than reviewing War of the Worlds itself.

With a straight face, Halbfinger pays tribute to "Mr. Spielberg's preference for secrecy." That's Spielberg, all right, always under the radar, despite the fact that you are reading about his agoraphobia in a lengthy article in the frigging New York Times on the very weekend his name and his movie are plastered onto every available surface in the American entertainment conglomerate... at least, every surface still available now that his primo narcissisto star is gobbling all the headlines.

Spielberg demurely refuses an interview for this article, but wait, the article only exists because he personally mailed his own press-release to the Times and to Israeli and Arab media outlets. How nice that Spielberg's ad copy memo found such a sympathetic ear in Halbfinger. Intent on portraying Spielberg as an ever-braver risk-taker, the article even congratulates him for having "gambled successfully on audiences' tolerance for prolonged and bloody combat scenes" in Saving Private Ryan. Wait, the moviegoing public didn't balk at massive blood and gore? Who'd've thunk?

Seemingly immune to any suggestion that the movie he'll make about Munich and its aftermath might just be a movie, for crying out loud, Spielberg has been hobnobbing with diplomats, government officials, and even Bill Clinton (another who hates to see his name in the papers, as we know) for reassurances and pats on the back. Amidst all the name-dropping, a marvelous sentence combines passive-voice construction with portentous apposite clauses in order to let us know who will really be at fault if the picture sparks World War III or if, like Spielberg's appalling 2004 film, it simply fizzles:

Mr. Spielberg is tackling material delicate enough that he and his advisers are concerned about adverse effects on matters as weighty as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if his project is mishandled—or misconstrued in the public mind.

Translation: Stevie is losing sleep about the possibility that his movie, which only just began filming, will shake the entire world and impede a peace process that's been well enough fucking impeded by much bigger matters for, depending on how you want to look at it, anywhere from decades to millennia. And he's especially worried in case his project is mishandled (obviously he personally would not mishandle the project) or in case we dumb-asses in the aisles who fail to perceive his lofty intentions and unimprovable technique get the wrong idea and bring on World War III ourselves through our own unfortunate thick-headedness. The article proceeds to hit all the customary touchstones of press coverage on Spielberg, including his philanthropy and activism. Then, apparently having learned nothing from the debacle whereby Amistad's script refused to acknowledge any lineage in Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel, Spielberg seems once again to be filming a project significantly premised in a well-known book that he is attempting to "distance the movie from." In the interest of being fair and balanced, Halbfinger includes some quotes from people who challenge the very premise of ambivalence among the Mossad, but none of them actually have anything remotely agnostic to say about Spielberg himself.

Like Oprah Winfrey, who owes her celebrity to Spielberg, the director compulsively stamps his name on things but still wants to be seen as everyday people, only trying to do what's best for the planet and for all of us. In an even more damning analogy, Spielberg's machine has mastered, and perhaps even prefigured, George W. Bush's PR machine, which has an uncanny knack for circulating leaks, tidbits, and policy trends in which Bush pretends to keep out of the fray while famous names and decoy sources do all the talking on his own behalf. You may have noticed that War of the Worlds is structured much like the speech Bush delivered to the nation on Tuesday evening, the night before War of the Worlds bowed: like the speech, the movie's screenplay and images repeatedly babble out "9/11, terrorists, 9/11, terrorists, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11," in hopes that audiences will succumb to its false grandeur and its cynical attitude of hollow, opportunistic knowing.

The posture of the hypocrite grows increasingly familiar on Spielberg. I recall 1998 and 1999, when I was initially impressed at the director's post-Cannes public comments about the dismaying frivolity and historical unseriousness of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, only to recant later when Life became a big Stateside hit, and Spielberg was invited to share a stage with Benigni on many occasions. Watch the Oscar broadcast from March of '99, and look who's cheering vehemently as Roberto aerobicizes his way to the podium. The day after the same Oscars, our same Stevie, who is in this business for the sakes of truth and art, not for recognition or silliness, pouts to the press (again triumphing over his Emily Dickinson-like reticence) about the unfairness of Shakespeare in Love beating his film for Best Picture.

The inevitable third-act compromises within Spielberg's films need to stop being taken as disappointments or surprises, no matter how much ingenuity is devoted to recuperating them, and especially given how he's barely waiting for the third act of anything anymore to immediately start compromising it. I really would love for the Munich film to be a good one, coming from a director who made at least three early masterpieces (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.) before straying into ever-denser thickets of hyperbole, dispersed thematics, compromised trajectories, and inspired images marooned by vague connections. But the kind of PR that's already being drummed up for this film, at a point when it's barely more than a gleam in Janusz Kaminski's eye, seems designed to turn me against it.

Spielberg has profoundly neocon tendencies, convinced that he's the underdog despite his mountainous fortune and limitless reach, abetted by a network of associates who tacitly lend fuel to articles like Halbfinger's, with its avalanche of name-dropping, its blush of coy bashfulness, and its utter evacuation of any divide between his creative ventures and the wellness of the world. (The celebrity puff piece may soon emerge as the final frontier of anonymous sources.) I realize Halbfinger may be a more immediate and even appropriate target of my irritation than Spielberg, but the longstanding and ever-evolving tradition of Spielberg's false positions re-asserts itself every time he goes and does it again, albeit, as in this case, by proxy. If he'd get back to being a real director, instead of a self-glorifier and self-congratulator, or perhaps if his profilers resisted the reflex of adulation and willing, bare-faced co-optation, I might be feeling more generous.

Photo © 2005 Mike Segar/Reuters, reproduced from the New York Times website.

Save NPR and PBS

Even amidst the busiest day of my academic life, there is time for a cause like this: NPR and PBS go on the Congressional chopping block tomorrow. I hope you agree with me that these are absolutely indispensable programs, particularly amidst the increasingly corporatized and meretricious mainstream media culture. Please read here for more news about what's at stake and then, pretty pretty please, sign the Congressional petition here.

P.S. on the Empire Magazine List

In which the news gets worse. Because the list gets longer.

Turns out ol' Ingmar does make the roster after all, down at #36, and Charlie's right above him at #35. Let's not get carried away, though. These pipsqueaks ain't got nothing on Robert Zemeckis (#22), Tony Scott (#28), George Lucas (#31), or Ron Howard (#33), and they're both huffing and puffing to keep ahead of M. Night Shyamalan (#37). Non-Anglophone directors merit a whopping 5 out of 40 berths (Kurosawa, Leone, Truffaut, Lang, and Bergman). Jesus.

It has been pointed out to me that this list is a poll of Empire's readers, not an editorial edict, but I still blame the editors. Remember when people used to read a magazine to learn something, instead of using it as a wicked-queen mirror to reflect whatever it is we already think? Empire can now sell a bunch of copies with a list that's even more wack than I thought, when, at least presumably, they might have had an opportunity to teach their large audience something about film instead of assuring them that they have little or nothing left to learn. (How do I know that Kevin Smith is just bubbling under at #41?)

Anyway, as I suspected, the people at Cinemarati are generating much more interesting alternate ballots.

(Anybody think I got the Dwarf-o-Meter wrong today? Maybe it's 90% Grumpy and 10% Bashful after all.)

Straight Ignorance at Its Finest

I don't know from Empire Magazine, but I don't mind admitting it. Now, how come they can't admit that they don't know from movies? IMDb reports that Empire just published a list of the 10 Greatest Film Directors of all time, and despite the total and instant irrelevance of this list, this is the kind of thing that drives me crazy. Y'all know that Nick's Flick Picks likes nothing better than a good movie list, debatable and unsatisfying as they always are. But what is the point of circulating some nonsense? Here were Empire's anointed:

1. Steven Spielberg
2. Alfred Hitchcock
3. Martin Scorsese
4. Stanley Kubrick
5. Ridley Scott
6. Akira Kurosawa
7. Peter Jackson
8. Quentin Tarantino
9. Orson Welles
10. Woody Allen

Now, let's not even get started on the sentence in the IMDb clip that says, "Surprisingly, acclaimed film-makers such as Star Wars director George Lucas, Charlie Chaplin, and Tim Burton, fell short of inclusion." And let's not even deal with the "Sir" I'm apparently s'posed to affix to Ridley Scott's name. (Surely they'll rescind that in the wake of Kingdom of Heaven?)

What is the point of publishing a list like this? I know I'm up on my high horse, but seriously, this is like me making a list of the 10 Greatest Basketball Players of all time, i.e., the 10 Basketball Players I Have Heard Of, Because Everyone Has Heard of Them. I can only judge based on celebrity, 'cuz I have no sense of basketball history, the finer techniques of the game, or how to discern an excellent player who isn't a spotlighter or a showboater. I have no grasp of subtlety or tradition, much less of women basketball players, or of basketball players outside the USA. What I know about basketball players is about a fraction more than I knew in the delivery room.

As I tell my students often, just because I know how to turn on a light-switch doesn't make me an electrician.

I'm'a take this list over to the Cinemarati Roundtable and see if we can come up with some ballots that are at least a li'l bit respectable. I'm not saying none of the 10 names above should qualify, but for all of them to qualify is just kind of embarrassing, and they fill such obvious quotas (#6 = "Foreign Director We Have Heard Of," #7 = "Man of the Moment," #9 = "He Directed Citizen Kane"...)

I don't know how you make a list like this without factoring in historical importance and factors of influence, but even leaving out the gigantic innovators (Porte