MOVIES- Synecdoche, NY

Spoilers? Oh yeah.


We love a competition. Winners, losers, that makes simple enough to understand. Takes all the complexity and difficulty out of things. A bunch of amateurish tone-deaf singers who if they were performing in a bar you’d walk out on ‘em. But call it American Idol and make it a competition… A bunch of assholes that would make you ask for a new table in the restaurant if you were sitting close enough to hear their inane blather while waiting for their meal, but call it Big Brother… Watching people eat bugs is entertainment for kindergartners, but call it Survivor… So to try to entice you into a challenging film that is well worth your time even if there are no car chases or explosions, I’ll mention that the Rotten Tomatoes score for this movie is 62 and that two of the first half dozen blurbs include one from Chris Carpenter of the Orange County and Long Beach Blade which says “one of the worst films of 2008” and Robert Roten from the Laramie Movie Scope who writes, “This might be the best film of 2008”. Any time you have that kind of disagreement among critics, the movie is almost always worth seeing.

SYNECDOCHE, NY is about a middle-aged writer-director trying to make sense of the existential issues of being a human being through his art as the clock both winds down and speeds up. That’s also the plot of the movie. Charlie Kaufman builds a wildly complex artificial world in which we see everyone from both the outside, inside, and in the interpretation of the other characters. That’s also what the protagonist does. The movie is about a play within a play. The play in the movie is too. The movie is an attempt by an artist to make something real and true through his art. That’s also the background for the story of the movie. SYNECDOCHE, NY is the movie equivalent of both a hall of mirrors and a Russian nesting doll. It is simply the most demanding and rewarding and deep movie made in the last several years.

If you finish this movie and don’t immediately want to watch it again then you’ve missed the boat. If a movie has ever demanded repeated viewing to mine its depths, this one does. This isn’t new territory for Kaufman. Every one of his movies throws so many unexpected twists at the audience that, like a good book, they can’t all be digested in one sitting. The movie follows the life of a man, who could be any man or woman, through the last half of his life. To begin to follow what is happening you have to face both the idea that the second half of a life is profoundly affected by the reality that you have less time ahead of you than you have behind you and that, as my high school band director once warned us when we were far to young to understand, every summer is shorter. Over the hill is an apt metaphor because not only are you past the mid-point, but things are accelerating in an uncontrollable fashion. So you start with the abandonment of the classic three act structure in favor of the kind of subjective time sense that causes you to say “my god, is it Thursday already?” and leads to “my god, are you already 50?” and then add the juxtaposition of objective reality, subjective reality, memory, real people, your perception of people, your perception of events, how your memory differs from actual events. This is a movie where looking away from the screen for a couple of minutes might cause you to lose the momentum of the story the same way waking in the middle of the night causes you to lose contact with the dream you were living in just a moment before.

“Knowing you don’t know is the most essential step to knowing, you know?”

The first scene in the movie sets the tone and tries to ease you in to what is about to happen. Caden Cotard wakes to his clock radio telling him that it’s the first day of fall. On the radio a literature professor is being interviewed about the melancholy of autumn. She quotes part of Rilke’s poem, Autumn Day:

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters into the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

The scene continues, superficially having the slice-of-life feeling of many independent films. But little things are happening on the periphery that tell us what is really going on. Caden wanders downstairs to get his first cup of coffee. His wife passes him in the hall. We see his daughter and wife discuss her morning bowel movement. Something has changed with it- it’s green. Perhaps it is a symptom that there is something wrong. The phone rings. Caden doesn’t answer and his wife leaves his daughter to talk to her friend as he gets his coffee. The radio, which continues to play in the background as we eavesdrop on the wife’s telephone conversation, tells us it is October 8. Caden mentions that he doesn’t feel well as he goes out to get the morning paper. As Caden fetches the paper we see a man watching him from the other side of the street. We don’t know it at the time but this is Caden’s alter-ego, watching him from a slight distance in the same way you watch yourself in dreams, apart yet connected. Along with the morning paper, Caden gets the mail, which includes a magazine called “Attending to Your Illness”. He seems puzzled why he has a subscription to this. As he opens the newspaper at the breakfast table we see that the date is October 14 at the same time the radio tells us that it is October 15. Time continues to compress. The newspaper, now dated Oct. 15, 2005, says famous American Playwright Harold Pinter is dead. However, Pinter did not die on that date. The “mistake” does mirror Pinter’s own obsession with ambiguity and the unreliability of personal memory, which further leads us to believe this narrative is subjective and perhaps a memory rather than any kind of objective set of events. On the television (again a background item touched only briefly by the camera) is a cartoon where two talking farm animals are discussing viruses. All of these clues occur in the first five minutes of the movie.

SYNECDOCHE, NY is so dense that it requires a lot from the viewer but that attention is rewarded with the kind of real insight into the human condition that only the best books can provide and few movies even attempt. Everyone’s perception of the world is forced through the funnel of their understanding, and, like Jorge Luis Borges realization that any truly accurate map would require that the map be the same size as the area it represents, we realize that our understanding of events around us is basically reductionist to the point of uselessness. In perhaps one of the most poignant and troubling scenes in the movie, Caden Cotard finds the daughter than was taken from him at five years old. She was taken to Germany when her mother left Caden with a female friend who would later becomes the daughter’s lover. Caden sees his daughter again when she is ten years old, featured in an art magazine, naked and tattooed from head to foot. But in spite of searching for years he only is rejoined with her as she lies in her death bed, dying from an infection caused by the tattoos that had outraged him years before. When he finally meets her she asks him to beg for forgiveness for him abandoning her and being homosexual. He tries to explain that he isn’t homosexual and that he didn’t abandon her, she was taken from him. Her reply is that the lover that she shared with her mother said that he would say that. Trapped in a situation where he has no choice but to put his daughter’s needs ahead of his own, he asks for forgiveness for leaving her (which he didn’t) and for being homosexual (which he isn’t). Then, she refuses to forgive him with her dying breath. It’s a powerful scene and disturbing in a number of ways.

Which is the bottom line on the whole movie- powerful and disturbing. I can’t actually say it’s a great movie because it is so relentlessly unhappy. There are funny turns of phrase and funny situations but they are small and things never stop being uncomfortable. I realize this is what Kaufman was going for, but it’s hard on the audience. I don’t know what the feel good movie of 2008 was, but I’m pretty sure this was it’s antithesis. Yet, it is so unique and affecting that is simply must be seen by any fan of film.

POLITICS- The Court Jester (still not Danny Kaye) part two

As I said in the previous post, last night Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the scene of the best television interview on the boob tube perhaps since Frost sat down with Nixon. The Blogosphere has been buzzing, a few of the large corporate news outlets have mentioned it (Moneyweek, for instance had an article that missed the point so far that you would think it was a NASA Mars shot), and the television media completely ignored it. The last is especially telling about the corporate media and their love of whoring themselves out when a story means nothing
but their complete timidity to report any story where us dumb old Americans might actually hear a little truth. As the TVNEWSER article linked above mentions, one of the foremost apologists for anyone with money and power, Joe Scarborough, was happy enough to play “lets you and him fight” when he thought that Stewart was going to be nice and funny. But when our national Court Jester said what so many of us have been thinking (no matter which side of the aisle you sit on), that the national media is nothing but a conglomeration of whores who will say anything as long as it pleases the people leaving money on the nightstand, he literally proved the point by not mentioning the conclusion of something he had been yapping like the dog he is about for the past week.

So, goodbye, NBC networks. You have showed your true colors and spent your credibility for the sake of a quick buck. Joe Scarburough needs to go on his show Monday morning and felaciate a goat as a visual representation of his “journalistic integrity”. ABC is owned by Disney (the biggest purveyor of child porn in the history of the world- fifty years of enabling middle aged men to ogle pubescent girls since Annette Funicello through Brittany Spears to their current sex slave Miley Cirus. (And Billy Ray, I never believed that people should burn in hell for their mistakes but selling your daughter into sex slavery for another lousey 15 minutes of fame sure qualifies your more that a thousand lifetimes of consensual sex with the same gender ever could. And that excuses you for writing and singing that shitty Achey Breaky Heart song.) CBS emasculated the story that our previous president dodged the war in Vietnam and didn’t even fulfil his National Guard service by doing such a crappy job of investigation that they missed the fact that the documents they “exposed” used laser printer fonts rather than typewriter fonts which would have been time appropriate (and crucified their news reader, Dan Rather, making their penance a joke). And now, finally, NBC has laid to rest any concept of journalistic integrity by being caught with their pants down, in bed with the very Wall Street theives that have literally wrecked the world’s economy, and then hoping nobody noticed rather than facing their shame. They say their job is to report the news. Instead they have all made it obvious that their job is to be the propaganda arm of the plutocracy that runs this country.

Take it from Memphisto, Hell's gonna be packed with so many "journalists" that you won't have to worry when the coffee break is over.

POLITICS- The Court Jester (not Danny Kaye)

The court jester, or court fool, was a unique character in the medieval royal administration. Perhaps this is best evidenced in Shakespeare’s plays where often the role of the fool was exemplified as the one person able to comment on the action, on the follies of the characters around him that were driving the drama with their own seriousness and failure. Only the character of the fool could say what everybody in the audience was thinking. Only he had liberty to speak the truth because no one had to take him seriously. After all, he was just a clown, meant only for amusement.

In a world where everyone is participating in the drama by saying whatever they think is to their advantage and all proclamations must be parsed for the actual aims of those making them, it’s easy to question whether you have been overwhelmed by cynicism (which is ABSOLUTELY NOT pessimism, as I often hear it mis-described). The professional cynics in a free society are supposed to be the news media. The “fourth estate” as Thomas Carlyle put it in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship. Since then it has come to mean almost a fourth branch of government. The one without civil power but with ultimate oversight on the other three. The final check and balance of power in a system where, ultimately, the people are expected to rule. But since our democracy has become a plutocracy the actually government has been bought and paid for by the rich and the fourth estate is outright owned by them, the only people left to tell the actual truth are the fools, the jesters.

Witness this last night.

Part one

Part two

Part three

Those three videos, in a form only slightly longer than the actual program as aired, are perhaps the most shocking news interview I’ve seen in the last decade if not longer. And that’s saying a lot when you consider how often the GOP vice-presidential candidate was allowed to show her true colors on network TV over the last several months. But it’s one thing to turn on the camera and have someone show themselves as an idiot in response to a few innocuous questions. Republicans chided the “media” for attacking Sarah Palin when in fact they hardly asked a question harder than “has your stupid ass even heard of any Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v. Wade?” Last night we saw what the press might be like if they took their adversarial role with the government seriously. And it wasn’t from some bloviating anacephalic bully’s self proclaimed “No-Spin Zone”, or from some pretentious Edward R. Murrow wannabe’s “Special Comments”. It wasn’t from a nightly network news broadcast or a (gag) serious newsmagazine. It was a simple case of a court jester asking an expert who claims to be a journalist why he didn’t say anything about a situation that anybody with half a brain saw coming. I’ve mentioned several times on this blog before that if you think people can own homes that cost half a million dollars with a mean family income of a tenth of that, you aren’t a financial expert, you are an idiot. And I’m sure as hell no expert. I just had basic math in school.

Thank you, Jon Stewart. You’re gonna get heat for this. The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes has a fake ending. If it had been truthful it would have ended with the loud-mouthed child beaten to death by the crowd for being unpatriotic. A few years ago you called out Tucker Carlson for being a lying, fatuous douchbag and if it hadn’t been for the internet no one would have known. So far I haven’t seen the reaction from the media but it’s going to be even more telling than your one man stand for speaking the obvious truth. (I don’t watch Joe Scarburough in the mornings because I have better ways to start my day that to have fat, rich, white guys wake me up by screaming at me about how fat rich white guys aren’t the problem. And I think that Mika Cadillac, daughter of Zibignew Cadillac, doesn’t even have the qualifications for being a woman who reads aloud on TV in the morning. If I wanted a horse-faced idiot to greet me every morning with a combination of superiority and stupidity I wouldn’t have thrown my ex-wife out of the house a couple of years ago.)

But thank you, Jon Stewart, you motley fool. Here is one insignificant Diogenese who appreciates that there is at least one honest man left.

MOVIES- Watch the Watchmen

This is what it might have been...



Thirty years of comic book evolution in one year of superhero films. Unbelievable.

In the 1960s, Stan Lee decided to take the ridiculous idea of superheroes and try to give them a little more veracity by having them live in real places, like New York, and deal with real problems, like having to pay rent or getting the flu. Last spring IRON MAN was perhaps the perfect cinema translation of that idea. It was fun and funny and had just enough veracity to keep you from being reminded every minute that it was patently impossible.

In the 1970s, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams upped the ante on realism by making superheroes deal with the limitations of the actual world. They turned Batman from a campy joke into a criminologist, gymnast, and marshal artist. They had two second tier heroes, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, deal with problems like race relations, Native American angst, Appalachian poverty, women's issues, and overpopulation. Believable politics and social situations entered the world of superheroes for the first time. Last summer THE DARK KNIGHT showed us that a man might dress up in a costume and fight for justice and it was so layered with psychology, sociology, politics, and terrorism that it never occurred to you that this man wasn’t affected by the world around him.

In the 1980s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons finally wrote an actual novel in comic book form that centered around superheroes. Not only did they interact realistically with a realistic world, they had all the complexity of characters in a novel- moral ambiguity, self-deception, motivations such as lust, hunger for power, greed, cynicism, obsession. These superheroes were anything but paragons of virtue. They were the kind of people who were screwed up and egomaniacal enough to think that they should change the world to suit themselves. Or they were just sadists. Or they were just crazy. And the world they populated was just as complex, with societal decay, threats of nuclear war, government interference, and popular opinion all affecting their self endowed missions. In addition to these important pieces of verisimilitude, the novel had complex structure, layered narratives, allegory and metaphor, and not a small amount of science fiction. It was widely considered the best superhero comic book ever made. It’s still widely considered the best superhero comic ever made over twenty years later.

And in the late winter of 2009 the cinematic adaptation of WATCHMEN hit theaters. Unlike IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT, this movie is a straight adaptation. And considering the place the source material holds in the history of the genre it is perhaps one of the most literal adaptations of a book into a film ever made by Hollywood.

And it may be the best superhero movie ever made.

Zach Snyder has followed his last comic book movie, the literal adaptation of Frank Miller’s superficial and stylized 300, with a film noir with superheroes in it. The movie is complex, sexy, exciting, cynical, and incredibly violent at times. The movie is almost three hours long and never slows down for a minute. I can only imagine how overwhelmed any viewer must feel if they expected Superman or Iron Man, or even the Dark Knight. Many of the best scenes are lifted directly from panels of the comic. Much of the best dialog is verbatim from Alan Moore’s original work.

Of course, there are going to be detractors. Some will be like this critic for The Hollywood Reporter who seems to think the movie’s financial prospects have something to do with it’s artistic accomplishment (to be sure, it seems to be The Hollywood Reporter’s editorial policy to equate artistic success with profitability). The real irony in the review is that at one point he says, “It's all very complicated but not impenetrable” apparently unaware that his review has at least a dozen mistakes in it relating to either the movie or source material. He doesn’t even get the name of the group right. This isn’t completely unexpected. Many a comic fan has given a copy of Watchmen to someone as an example of the best of the format, only to have them be completely unable to understand the complexity of the story.

The other side of the coin is the fatuous fanboys who will pick the movie apart because it isn’t their biblical interpretation of the source material. There is a legitimate complaint that the ending of the story has been changed, but even the author has said that the original ending was weak and, while I won’t give anything away, the new conclusion is logical and flows from the story. In fact, for fans of the original story it may be the only point of suspense in the whole film. Needless to say, while I loved the original graphic novel, my opinion is that anyone who thinks this isn’t a reverent and excellent adaptation is missing a real opportunity to love something that has turned a fan favorite that almost everyone agreed was unfilmable into an enjoyable and exciting cinema experience.

In addition to Snyder’s obvious reverence for the original story and art, there are several other aspects of the movie that rise to the level of excellence that even rabid fans should be able to find no fault with. Casting comes immediately to mind. There simply isn’t a discordant piece of casting or a bad performance in the bunch. In fact, the performances are amazingly spot on. I was going to wax poetic about each actor and how much they were dead ringers for their comic counterparts, but every single one is so outstanding that it would just be a laundry list. If you could cast Rock Hudson as Superman or Clint Eastwood as Batman from the Dark Knight Returns then you might approach the bulls-eye that this movie hits with every single role. The special effects are just as seamless. I can’t remember a single scene where my (admittedly obsessive-compulsively cynical) willing suspension of disbelief was challenged.

Even the music is impressive. Dylan, Hendrix, and the inspired use of an abridged version of Phillip Glass’ score for Koyaanisqatsi during the section that covers my favorite of the original twelve comic series (a look into Dr. Manhattan’s Einsteinian POV) makes the movie one of the best to use popular music since American Graffiti.

Yes, even at close to three hours there is a whole lot left out. But to call that a fault of the movie is almost on the same level of criticism as saying the movie is flawed because the characters don't have heavy black ink lines around them and that you can't see the color dots from the original printing if you look closely.

There’s nothing left to say. Comic book fans have been gifted with a remarkable adaptation of the most exceptional and complex work ever done in the genre. We should all go to our graves knowing that nothing we’ve ever done in our lives is worthy of the last year in comic cinema.

Go see this movie. Take everyone you can drag to the theater. Give it a standing ovation when the credits roll. Thank God that you were lucky enough to live to see it. Nobody thought it could be done.

UPDATE: The line from the Hollywood Reporter review that originally read " The opening murder happens to a character called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who was once a member of a now-banished team of superheroes called the Masks." now had been corrected to " The opening murder happens to a character called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who was once a member of a now-banished team of superheroes called the Watchmen." And the chocolate ration has been increased too!

MOVIES- Mamma Mia

While I watched MAMMA MIA I couldn’t help but think of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS. They all fall into the same genre- fantasy. They’re just gender specific. There is nothing less implausible about Hobbits, Jedi, Elves, and space battles than there is about 60 year old women with 20 year old daughters they had 40 years ago finding true love with ancient boyfriends while whole villages or people break into spontaneous choreographed dance numbers and sing in perfect harmony. Hell, there are even magic rings in two out of the three.

I have to say that MAMMA MIA is a fitting tribute to the music of Abba. In case you don’t know, Abba was a Swedish pop band in the 1970’s that had several hits in America. They didn’t speak English, so all their songs had to be learned phonetically, and the artistry and production was top notch for the disco era. An era that replaced wood with woodgrain plastic, sugar with high-fructose corn syrup, and music with highly produced plastic high-fructose corn syrup. Compared with Abba, the Monkeys were musical geniuses on par with Beethoven and Mozart. Likewise, MAMMA MIA is a classical musical the same way that the band on the Free-Credit Report dot Com commercials are a driving force in music today. (With the exception that the Free-Credit band is a whole lot better.)

The first problem is the plot. A twenty year old girl is getting married and she uses the occasion to steal and read her 60 year old mother's diary, only to discover that mom apparently slept with every boy who could find his way to their secluded Greek island home during the summer of love. Not being too bright, she assumes she is the product of one of these many liaisons rather than the far more probable likelihood that she is the bastard child of one of the smelly sponge fishermen that are indigenous to the island. Pretending to be her mother, she sends a letter to every man mentioned in her slutty mom’s diary inviting them to the wedding. Of course, none of these men have been able to find happiness since visiting her mother’s well trod cooze in the forty years hence, so each of them drop what they are doing to rush to the island in an attempt to revisit their long lost teenage lives (since everybody knows that the joys of career, marriage, child-rearing, and emotional stability are just a sham that replaces the true joy of momentary teenage sexual fumbling). In addition to these three male infants, her mother invites her two childhood girlfriends to the island for the wedding. These two old friends have found happiness in the intervening four decades through pursuing a succession of vapid but rich male Peter Pan syndrome types, and have learned that the true fulfillment is measured by the bulge in a man’s pants. Not the one in the front, but the one over his wallet. All female reunions are measured by how many bats are driven to fly into the rocky cliffs of the Greek isle in acts of self destruction by the ultrasonic shrieks the women use to express joy when meeting. Then we are treated to a soap-opera where everybody judges every event in terms of what they find the most flattering to their own egos, interspersed with absolutely ghastly covers of songs that were at best forgettable thirty years ago and at worst poor commercial jingles merchandised as popular music. The absolute low point is letting Peirce Brosnan’s weak voice fill the soundtrack with inane warbling. The musical equivalent of a million fingers scraping down a quarter of a million blackboards. Truly, he makes me long for Richard Harris to talk his way though the soundtrack of Camelot one more time. Meryl Streep fares a little better, but honestly the only people who can actually sing among all the primaries are Christine Baranski, here reprising her role as the template for cougars everywhere, and Julie Walters as the short, fat friend. When these two sing together the audience is given a brief taste of what the movie might have been if the casting and merchandising departments had not run the show. Otherwise, this remains a fantasy movie, not so much like the sublime Lord of the Rings trilogy brought to life by Peter Jackson as like the abysmal DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS movie. The songs are insipid, the dance numbers are ruined by having “Hollywood stars” rather than real dancers front them, and the plot is recklessly stupid. If you liked this movie, or more importantly, it you are a woman who dragged your male partner to see it, you should spend a weekend playing Magic the Gathering dressed like a slave girl as penance. And the next time you want to go all high and mighty on your significant other just remember, he’s no sillier than you are.

Maybe a whole lot less.

MOVIES- Vacant Strangers

(My drawing of Hitchcock may never have been more appropriate or inappropriate as the banner for the subject of movies.)

I’ve never really been a fan of horror movies. In fact it may be the only genre that I don’t like. Not that I can’t appreciate a good horror movie, it’s just that so many of them are so predictable and repetitive that I don’t find anything worthwhile in them. See if you’ve heard this one before- a small group of people take a holiday in a secluded spot and then when darkness falls they start to suspect that someone is trying to kill them. They attempt to deal with the situation by taking several incomprehensibly stupid actions which only cause them to start to disappear one at a time. Eventually only one of them are left and that one either escapes by single-handedly defeating the person or persons who have exterminated the entire group without breaking a sweat. During this process several things will dependably occur- someone will lose one or several articles of clothing, someone will be startled by one of their companions and kill or almost kill them thinking they are the villain, someone will have sex, many loud noises will happen at unexpected moments, and things will jump out at people.

Remember, snuff films are illegal only because of the murder involved, not because they have any different appeal than any other horror movie.

Now, to be clear, I’m probably not talking about actual horror films. I’m talking about that sub-genre commonly referred to as slasher films. Actual horror builds psychological suspense and a sense of dread through canny manipulation of ancient fears buried deep in the human psyche. These films have the same relationship to that kind of horror that jumping out from behind a corner and yelling BOO has to telling a well crafted ghost story. In fact, that’s probably the best description of them. Jumping out and yelling BOO cinematically.

The best thing on the whole disk of THE STRANGERS is the first thing director Brian Bertino says on the documentary about the making of the film. “This is something that’s never been done before.” I laughed out loud. Had he watched a movie called VACANCY, released the year before, perhaps he would have been more aware of the irony. The movies are virtually identical. Both involve a couple having relationship problems who wind up in a secluded area and are beset by a group of masked people who intend to kill them. Apparently not being married is the 21st century’s equivalent of what having teenage sex was in the eighties.

Both of the movies are reasonably acted and directed. Things go bang, people enter stray light beams slowly from dark backgrounds behind the main characters, people hide in closets, phones ring and there is no one on the other end. Both movies are completely devoid of an original idea but if I had to make a choice I’d probably give a slight edge to VACANCY simply because it spends a little more time setting up a plausible scenario and building tension. And because neither of the protagonists take off their shoes at any point. That’s important to me. If you are being attacked by a group of killers, put on your shoes so you can run. If you don’t have that much brain then I have a hard time believing you deserve to get away in the first place.

MOVIES- Confessions of a Superhero

Let’s say that you’re a young person who wants to be a star. You get out of high school, buy a bus or plane ticket, and head to Hollywood. But you don’t know anybody and you’re surrounded by literally thousands of other young people who have the same dreams and have done the same thing. Perhaps you are attractive, talented, and lucky enough that lightning strikes and you start getting roles. Perhaps you aren’t. Either way, you’ve got to find a way to make a living while things happen. What do you do?

You might find a job as a waiter, or in a McDonalds, or any one of the million other jobs young people do when they are starting out. But that isn’t going to help you. You need to be seen. You want to find some way to act. You want some way to get in front of the public.

Maybe you dress up like Superman, or Batman, or Wonder Woman, or the Hulk and go stand out on the Hollywood walk of fame and have your picture taken with tourists.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO is a relatively unknown (OK, I’d never heard of it) documentary about people who dress up like comic book character and hang out on Hollywood Blvd so tourists can take pictures with them for tips. Nobody hires them to do it. They aren’t licensed by the owners of the properties and legally they can’t even ask for money for what they do. They just make a costume and take off. CONFESSIONS shows you a snapshot of the lives of four of these people.

There’s Chris, a Superman who has been doing this for years and may have become a little too obsessed with the role. He does look sort of like Christopher Reeve, if somebody had left him in the oven too long. The film follows him to Metropolis, Illinois for the annual Superman Celebration that’s the little town’s only claim to fame. I don’t want to give too much away, but we get to know a lot about Chris during the movie and some things about him are strangely ambiguous.

Max is a self-professed “George Clooney lookalike” who dresses in a Batman Costume and has anger management issues. Max also has a colorful past, though, like Chris, there are questions about what that past might really be.

Max and Chris are pushing middle age, but Jennifer, who dresses up like Wonder Woman is in her mid-twenties. She came to California from a little town nobody has ever heard of in Tennessee and still has most of her dreams intact. But life is what happens while you make other plans and during the course of the movie she has some life happen.

And Joseph, the most un-Hulklike Hulk you could imagine. His transformation from a slightly built black man to a giant green monster is accomplished with the help of a full head mask and a head-to-toe green muscle suit. Joseph sold his Nintendo to buy the bus ticket that got him to California from the small Southern town he grew up in and landed in town the second day of the Rodney King riots. He’s probably had the hardest time of the four since he hit the coast, but things are looking up.

Sure, these people might be a little odder than most, but if you aren’t you don’t go to the coast and try to be an actor. But, then again, they might not be that different at all. During our 90 minute stay with these folks, director Matthew Ogens shows us one getting married, one divorced, one arrested and one landing a role. My immediate feelings about the strangeness of these people was replaced by understanding and sympathy. The movie is more affecting that I ever thought it would be. I found myself rooting for these strangers who spend their days standing in the California heat dressed up in silly costumes in the hope someone will give them a few dollars to have their picture made with them. And hope to become rich and famous actors someday. Like most superheroes, it’s the people behind the masks that make the story interesting.

The question of whether or not what they do is panhandling comes up a couple of times in the movie, but I don’t see how it could be. They render a service for the money they are given and it’s a far more honest way to make a living than attacking someone’s car at a redlight with a squeegee and a bottle of windex.

Ogen has made a half-dozen documentaries before this one, a couple of them for television, none of them which you’ve probably ever seen either. But perhaps that’s why he seems to have such compassion for these people. Like them, he obviously takes pride in his work and is looking for his big break. The movie is professionally shot and edited and doesn’t suffer from the bad lighting, poor sound, or shaky-cam problems that plague a lot of low budget documentaries. He never lets his direction and camera work get in the way of telling the story of these four people.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO is available from Netflix on DVD or through their instant download service and is well worth seeing if you are a fan of superheroes, struggling actors, documentaries, or just getting a glimpse into the lives of four people trying to make a way in the world. It has several surprises and is well worth the time.

MOVIES- The Man with the Initial for a Name

The postman brought me the movie W. from Netflix today. It has to be Oliver Stone’s best film in years. It’s much more a straight biography than I expected. It isn’t a polemic and it isn’t played for laughs. But it isn’t a whitewash either. I’m sure that Bush’s hardcore supporters will find plenty to dislike but as far as being a movie biography it’s an entertaining and engrossing look at one of the most important and divisive presidents in history.

Much of the credit goes to the cast. Josh Brolin is simply spot-on in the lead role. So much so that while looking away from the screen during one of the documentaries included in the supplemental materials I was surprised to look back and find it was actual film of President Bush rather than a scene from the movie that I was hearing. Richard Dreyfuss is the second immediate standout as Cheney. He underplays, as does most of the cast. It’s a good choice. The public personas of most of these people are so cartoonish that had they been played as broadly as they appear on Meet the Press the movie would have quickly devolved into caricature. Dreyfuss is arguably a more believable Cheney than Cheney is. I never got the idea that Dreyfuss was auditioning for the role of the Penguin in the next Batman movie, while I always got that feeling from the actual vice-president. Toby Jones, who is fast becoming one of the finest character actors working today, is somehow sympathetic as Karl Rove. Thandie Newton might brush more closely against that cartoon boundry, but again, the actual Condoleezza Rice is such a cartoon that to do anything less might have rendered the character unrecognizable. As it is, I defy you to recognize her from other things you might have seen her in- INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, CRASH, or MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II. If you saw JEFFERSON IN PARIS you might recognize her as Sally Hemmings but here she disappears into the role. Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld, Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, all are simply wonderful. Even the small roles stand out. Ioan Gruffudd, Colin Hanks (son of Tom Hanks), and even Daily Show alumni Rob Corddry never hit a wrong note in their brief time on screen. The only gripe I might have is with the portrayal of President George H. W. Bush by James Cromwell, who normally I find inimitably watchable. It’s not that Cromwell does a bad job as an actor, it’s just that every other person makes it a point to at least attempt to vanish into their well known roles and Cromwell doesn’t seem to even bother to try.

If the movie has an agenda, it only presents in subtle ways. I don’t for a minute think that Stone isn’t aware of these little digs but considering his reputation for bombast I’m still amazed at the restraint. The way Bush eats by stuffing his cheeks full and chewing with his mouth open, or cuts down a tree by sawing the chain saw back and forth (a good way to get your leg cut off), or considers confidence superior to ability. Especially revealing is the portrayal of Barbara Bush. Whitewashed and airbrushed the way the public personas of all the Bush family were, most people still think of mother Bush as being some sort of kindly grandmother. Only if you have done extensive reading do you start to realize what a vindictive, mean, aristocratic old bitch the portly matron actually was. Here you get just a hint but even that is such a rare glimpse into her real character that it is very telling.

All in all, the movie is one of the best of the last year. It keeps you watching, it tells you something you may not know, and it doesn’t stray too far from what seems to be objective (as far as such things go in the public forum) truth. Veracity is paramount if you’re going to make a biographical movie about a sitting president. Everybody knows how these people look and sound. Likewise, being careful not to take liberties with rumor or innuendo is very important. It could easily have been a hatchet job. The movie is anything but that. Instead it seems to give real insight into a man who changed the presidency and the country, who presided in a time of American crisis unknown in recent history.

“Faith frees me. From my past, myself, from the expectorations of others.”

MOVIES- In Defence of Oscar (reprint)

I’ve never reprinted a column before. But Sunday night is Oscar night and last year I said pretty much everything I had to say about why any movie fan should make it a point to see the show.

From February 24, 2008

Well, it’s Oscar night tonight. And with the annual Oscars comes the annual Oscar criticism. That the ceremony is boring and goes on far too long every year. That it’s a monument to vanity, where the uber-spoiled uber-rich strut and preen for the cameras and each other. That the voting is more about marketing and the Hollywood elite making statements rather than actually awarding excellence in cinema. That often the best in film never win. That it’s all politics anyway.

And all that is probably true. But that’s not why I watch the Oscars every year. I watch the Oscars for one reason and one reason only. The Oscars are the only time you may ever get to see these people be genuine.

Usually when you see an actor (or even a director or writer) they have been primped and polished to perfection. Every hair in place (even when it doesn’t look like it), makeup and clothing and lighting and background all orchestrated to make that person look and sound as good as they possibly can. Even during interviews, everything they say is scripted and rehearsed. Often these are people that you see more than some of the members of your own family, people you feel you know and often even feel that you like. You know about their marriages and divorces, their children, their hobbies, their problems. Our celebrity culture makes sure that even if you have no interest in movies or television, you probably know more about the intricacies or their lives than you do about your neighbors. But in reality you don’t know anything about them. What you know it what you’ve been told and what you’ve been shown.

And that’s why I love the Oscars. It’s the one night a year when you see these people in a real life situation. A situation that is not dissimilar to one you or I might find ourselves in- being at a party to honor excellence in our own profession. And it really means something to them. To be a lasting part of the history of what they love so much. Often the stress of wining an Oscar gives you real insight into the personality of the person on the podium. Whether it’s Sally Field’s insecurity in shouting “you like me, you really like me”; or David Niven’s genuine class and wit when, confronted with a streaker he simply made a joke about the man’s “shortcomings”, or even James Cameron’s hubris at saying he was “the king of the world”. (The last was unfortunately misunderstood as people forgot he was quoting the movie he won for.) Oscar night is a chance to see people who make their living pretending to be someone else be themselves for a change.

It’s also a chance to see just how many people stand behind the folks we all recognize. The ones who do the primping and polishing. The costumers, set designers, writers, artists, composers, and many others who work behind the scenes and make the stars look and sound so good. It’s a night for all the people who work to entertain us to put aside some of the artifice and be who they really are.

And who can resist seeing that?

MOVIES- Pineapple Express

I was surprised that I liked PINEAPPLE EXPRESS as much as I did. Yes, it’s another Judd Apatow production with Seth Rogen. Yes, it concerns a bunch of twenty-something stoners hanging out. Yes, it has the same sort of Kevin Smith dialog you’ve come to expect. We’ve seen all of that before, several times in the last couple of years actually. But what makes this movie different is that it is the rebirth of an almost lost form of comedy.

Slapstick.

I haven’t seen anybody do good slapstick since The Three Stooges. Television has had a couple of series that tried to do it in the 70s- LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY and that last Lucille Ball series where I spent every episode afraid that Lucy and Ethel were going to break a hip- but it wasn’t very funny. But the biggest laughs in PINEAPPLE EXPRESS are the parts where somebody gets stabbed with a fork, or hit in the head with a thrown ashtray, or run over with a car.

The Blu-ray is sharp with strong color. A lot of the scenes are lit with bright sunlight and the night scenes make no pretense at ambient lighting so there’s none of the grain that HD can sometimes have in dark scenes. OTOH, while the movie might not really require the picture quality of HD, the joy of having it is seeing the superb direction and photography of David Gordon Green and his DP, Tim Orr (who in the old tradition is also the cameraman). Like the picture quality of the Blu-ray, the compositions, staging and photography are far better than the movie requires but subtly add to the production.

The other place where the disk revives a lost art form is in the supplemental materials. Many recent disks haven’t had director’s commentaries and, in spite of the extra capacity of BD, supplemental materials have gotten rather scarce. PINEAPPLE EXPRESS has the quantity of supplemental materials that you would expect on a disk of CITIZEN KANE or GONE WITH THE WIND. There are deleted scenes, extended scenes, alternate line readings (with the most bizarre directors prompts you would ever imagine happening on set), a documentary about the stunts, a documentary on the making of the movie, an excerpt from their panel at ComicCon, and a commentary track that includes almost everyone who worked on the movie,

Now, there’s certainly a case to be made that the 734th Judd Apatow comedy made in the last 24 months really doesn’t deserve so much supplemental content, but it would be hard to make a case for anybody that loved the movie enough to buy a copy that less additional stuff on the disk is worse than more.

I put PINEAPPLE EXPRESS near the top of the Apatow heap with FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and WALK HARD. He and his cohorts have had an astounding string of movies that were both successful at the box office and critically praised. But the success is deserved. As I’ve said before, the state of the art in comedy for the last several years has been either Ben Stiller playing a grown Charlie Brown without the jokes or intelligence of the comic strip, Will Farrell playing a variety of cartoon characters using screaming as his biggest comedic ploy, or Adam Sandler in a recurrent role as a 45 year old mentally challenged child. The FREEKS AND GEEKS alumni don’t have a very high bar to clear, but they continue to do it consistently and by a wide margin.

Happy Presidents Day

To commemorate Presidents Day from our old friend Jonathan Coulton.

(This was written in 2005 so there's no verse about the current resident of the White House.)

SPORTS- SuperSunday

Well, today’s the big game and I don’t have a dog in the fight. Every team I might have wanted to see play lost out early. Hell, the Cowboys didn’t even make the playoffs. Which makes me think there is a curse associated with having your team on that HBO preseason football camp show. Kind of like The Madden Curse. (Which chalked up the last two in a row by having Vince Young on the ’08 box- you know, the guy who didn’t Quarterback the Titans to their best season this year and isn’t Fisher’s first pick for who he wants pitching next year either, and Brett Favre- nuff said).

So I’m going to watch the game. Though I may skip the five hour pre-game show. I imagine

SOLUTIONS- The Story of Stuff

This is the first of a new category.

I'm not a fanatical environmentalist or necessarily anti-corporate. And I realize that this little (at 20 minutes) video is simplistic. But I also realize that most people don’t give a second thought to where stuff comes from of what we’re doing to the planet. So I’m posting this as a sort of primer into further posts that will deal with some answers to the questions we are going to be faced with over the course of the 21st century. Plus, it’s entertaining and funny. Enjoy.

MOVIES- The Mummy (III)- Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

I thought that EAGLE EYE was bad, even for a summer movie. But that was before I watched THE MUMMY (III)- CURSE OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR. None of the silly fun, or self-deprecating wit of the first movie is evident. I’ve read that this was a movie born of corporate synergy between Universal Studios and NBC’s Olympics coverage since both companies are owned by the same Uber-conglomerate. I don’t know if that is true but this movie is so formulaic and uninspired that I can easily believe it was dreamed up by marketing.

I could talk about how this movie occurs in a parallel universe where the first two movies were actually stories written by Brendan Frasier’s wife. Rachael Weitz’s replacement in introduced by denying any similarity between herself and the character in the books. But I’m not going to do that because it’s the best part of the movie and it still isn’t very good.

They even screwed up the fight between Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li.

POLITICS- And Now for the Other Baldwin

Quickie Post:

Last July it was reported that Stephen Baldwin (you know, the brother of Alec, the handsome talented one) said that he would leave the country if Barack Obama was elected.

Does anybody know if he’s gone yet?

And if not, why not?

Hell, it's the only reason I voted.

MOVIES- The Golden Globes

Turning 180 degrees from the real life drama of the gridiron, Sunday was also the Golden Globes. I’ve never watched the Globes before (Even though I haven’t missed the Oscars in years. My reasons why are here.) and I have to say that they don’t seem to have the same kind of tension that the Oscars do. What they do have is a much better track record for picking the actual best movies, and performances than the Academy. Perhaps the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association have a little more objectivity.

So here are a few stream of consciousness thoughts:

Lots of well deserved love for the HBO miniseries John Adams, winning Best Miniseries. Best Actor was hard, any one of them could have won. But I have to admit that I was rooting for Paul Giamatti as I do anytime he is up for an award. I’ve loved him since before Crumb. This time he beat out Kevin Spacey! Laura Linney won for best actress and Tom Wilkerson for his natural and charming portrayal of Ben Franklin. (Beating another favorite, Neal Patrick Harris for his role as Barney on How I Met Your Mother.)

The other HBO standout was Laura Dern winning for her dead-frigging-on Susan Harris in Recount. I remember wondering if there had ever been a more spot on portrayal of a political figure when I watched it. Even Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin isn’t any closer.

Gabriel Byrne won for In Treatment, beating John Hamm in Mad Men and being the only winner from series. Mad Men was far from overlooked, though. It won for Best Dramatic Series. I reciently saw the first season on Blu-Ray and I highly recommend it. Full review to come later.

Sally Field looked a little different in person than she does in her Calcium supplement commercials, which airbrush her pretty severly. It didn’t wind up mattering that much since Anna Paquin beat her for Best Actress.

Ricky Gervais was charming as usual, beer in hand, giving a call out to Kate Winslet, “Told you to do a holocaust movie and the awards would come.”

Wall-E won for best animated picture, with the Jonas Brothers handing out the award and looking almost but not quite as real as the characters in the clip from the movie.

Emma Thompson (who somehow doesn’t look as much like Pete Postlethwaite as she used to) and Merryl Streep (the only person there with as much respect as Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg) both lost for best actress in a comedy or musical movie. Instead Sally Hawkins (who?) won and virtually broke down crying on the stage. I don’t know who she is but she was lovely and obviously had everyone in the crowd on her side. (for about the first five minutes) It’s moments of genuine emotion like that that make award shows worth watching.

It must suck to be Demi Moore’s daughter. Every boy you bring home falls in love with your mother.

Heath Ledger won for Dark Knight. Anything else would simply be a crime. Ledger’s performance as the Joker was simply one of the most riveting pieces of acting I’ve seen in many years. Riveting in the literal sense of the word. When he’s on the screen you can’t take your eyes off of him.

Alec Baldwin won best actor in a comedy for 30 Rock, which has the best theme music of any show on television. When 30 Rock won for best comedy the whole cast came on stage and Tracy Morgan informed the crowd that since Barack Obama won he would be speaking for the show in post racial America. Just a few minutes Tina Fey got a chance to talk anyway when she won for Best Actress in a Comedy.

Steven Spielberg received the Cecil B. DeMille award. A few years ago during an Oscar broadcast somebody joked that if the building caught fire Spielberg would go first and then everybody else. That’s about the size of it. It’s hard to debate that there has been a more successful or influential man in movies for the last 30 years.

Both The Dark Knight and Doubt were passed over. Slumdog Millionare was the big movie winner of the night, winning for Best Picture and with Danny Boyle winning best director.

Kate Winslet won both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress and also almost broke down on stage. She seemed genuinely surprised to have won.

So that’s it for the Golden Globes. See you on Oscar night.

SPORTS- Football Season Is Over With Two Weeks Left

I don’t post a lot of football posts because, while I love the game, I’m no expert. And even if I was an expert that’s no guarantee I’d have anything to say worth reading. Most of the experts don’t seem to. Oh sure, they get together an hour before the game and go over the injury report, talk about who’s playing well, which teams have the best defense, whether Payton Manning or Tom Brady is a better quarterback. But if you watch the games you know all that and the conversation really isn’t any different than what you’ve already had with your buddies that week. The big difference is that you didn’t have 60 hours that week to watch every game and you don’t get paid for the opinions you pull directly out of your ass. But they might be just as good as the pro’s opinions because they are getting them from the same place.

I find most of the talk in sports either boils down to either “did you see that catch” or some variation of “I believe that whoever is able to score the most points by the end of the game will emerge victorious” (the latter usually from some coach or player). Sure, I realize that the amount of planning that goes into a successful football team is as extensive as any endeavor possibly just short of a NASA launch. But I realize that anything I would think to say will eventually get said somewhere in the millions of words written and spoken each week.

But the last game of the second week of the playoffs just finished and I just wanted to say…

DAMN!

Every damn team I had any interest in seeing win is already out. My local Titans gave away their game by turning over the ball every time they got inside the 30. The NY Giants didn’t have quite as many turnovers but still enough to lose. The Cinderella Miami Dolphins, who nobody would have given you a rat’s ass for after their 1-15 season last year made it to the playoffs only to lose their first game. The staple playoff team Indianapolis, ditto. Their arch rivals the New England Patriots didn’t even make the playoffs after nearly going undefeated last year. Dallas bombed after being the smart money pick for Superbowl champs at the beginning of the season.

So I’m left with only two precious weeks of football left in the season and not a single team to root for. What a waste.

Well, there is always the football fan’s mantra- WAIT ‘TILL NEXT YEAR.

POLITICS- Should Bush Be Investigated?

This morning on ABC, President-Elect Barack Obama was asked if he would investigate the Bush administration.

Barrack Obama seems to be a smart, reasonable, gentle man. And that may make him too pragmatic to launch the country into the inevitable Civil War that trying to bring top members of the Bush administration to justice would cause. The Bush White House has proven on more than one occasion that the laws, the constitution, and even subpoenas from Congress mean nothing to them. Is there any doubt they will ignore a warrant from federal court? And if they do, is Barrack Obama ready to start a nation wide manhunt when they disappear? Is he ready to have high officers in the previous government, perhaps even the president, brought into federal court in cuffs?

I don’t know, because I don’t know what I’d do in his place. Even if he doesn’t pursue convictions for Bush, et al, he may be faced with foreign governments attempting to prosecute charges for torture and other war crimes. As much as I think this administration has been criminally guilty of breaking numerous laws, I just can’t wrap my head around the image of Bush in an orange jumpsuit.

But, as much as I hate the idea of that scene transpiring, even if it is well and truly deserved, I know that letting them walk away isn’t right. I don’t think I could do it. I hope Obama is a stronger man than I am because the heart of the matter was pierced by the words of Dawn Johnson, Obama’s choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel.

“We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation's honor be restored without full disclosure.”

POLITICS- Save the Porn Industry

I’m kinda amazed that the TV news has been reporting that Larry Flint and Joe Francis are petitioning the government for $5 billion on behalf of the porn industry with a straight face. I guess if they admit this is a satirical way to point out just how silly it is to give my tax money to failing businesses they are tacitly admitting that it’s a silly idea to give my tax money to failed businesses. It’s a no lose scenario for this pair of plucky entrepreneurs though (plucky, heh heh heh). And it’s obvious in this one question interview with Francis that he and Flint think it’s a pretty good joke. If they can’t get help from the gumment [then] they’ve exposed the hypocrisy of the whole thing. (Not that it’s hard to do so or anything. Finding hypocrisy in Washington isn’t so much like mining for gold as it is digging for dirt.) If they get the money, well, they get the money. If I had an interest group or a business I’d be trying it. But unfortunately, lame-ass-snarky-blogs-that-nobody-reads is a growth industry.

Maybe somebody should go to Washington and ask for help for the taxpayer industry. Oh wait, Obama is going to give us all back $500. The bank bailout (alone, that we know of) has cost every person in the country $2500 each and Obama’s plan will cost $3300 each and they are going to help by giving us back $500 per taxpayer. I’d ask how stupid they think we are but I’m afraid the answer is obvious.

So which is the stupidest? Giving tax money to businesses, the government borrowing money to give to us, or that we haven’t stormed the Bastille yet?

Maybe Larry and Joe could reduce their overhead by just filming the fucking we’re getting from Congress.

POLITICS- George W. Bush is the Most Successful President EVAR

Eight years of Bush are almost over.

I’d say that this was a wonderful thing if I hadn’t lived through enough elections to realize that the American political system is basically the Pepsi challenge. Choose between two nearly identical varieties of un-natural empty calories, neither of which is good for you and either of which will take your teeth if they get the chance.

It’s tempting to pull out a laundry list of everything that’s gone wrong in the last eight years and lay it at the door of the Bush White House. But if you’ve been paying any attention to what’s been going on then you’ve already heard it, and if you haven’t then you obviously don’t care. Needless to say, plenty of other people have compiled such lists and a brief Google search will get you several thousand to choose from.

But what really interests me about the last eight years is that I still don’t know if our 43rd president and his cadre are megalomaniacal morons, too stupid to live and too rich, entitled, and intertwined into the plate of worms that is Washington to ignore, or if they are avaricious geniuses who figured out a way to dispense with mere graft and sweetheart deals and decided the best place to steal all the money was from the top down. A sort of trickle-down larceny.

Sure, even cursory examination immediately indicated that George W. Bush was a mediocre frat boy douchbag that had never worked a day or had a serious thought in his life. He projected that image like IMAX. It was on display during his first campaign and has never relented. The verbal gaffs, the nonsensical ideas, the shit-eating grin accompanied by the head bob and swivel (Kermit the frog did it better) every time he came to the end of a paragraph in one of his speeches- if they were part of an act then it was the best and most consistent feat of thespis in my lifetime. And my belief has always been that no one was capable of acting that stupid that long without slipping. But there are things that make me wonder.

The main thing is that Bush, and the neocons that created him, had a well defined plan in mind long before he got elected. Bill Kristol even published it before the election. They wanted to usher in a Pax-Americana. They intended to cement American hegemony by accomplishing several things that would make it clear that America was in charge and every other country in the world might as well just get in line. They would use America’s military might to fight not one but two wars simultaneously, proving to the world that even if we were busy kicking the shit out of somebody we didn’t like that there was still plenty of whoop-ass to go around, so don’t get any ideas. They were going to deregulate business, returning the country to a golden age of robber barons and, perhaps if they were lucky, feudalism. They were going to return God to government, not for the sake of making the country more like Jesus might want it to be but to unite those two age-old organizations for bending people to the will of their leaders- church and state. They were going to re-institute the divine right of kings by giving the president total power and making it not only improper but immoral to disagree with what he did. And they were going to do it all by finally proving once and for all that what arch cynic H. L. Mencken said was totally right- nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

And they simply can’t be as stupid as they look, because they did all of it!

And their final act was to finally acknowledge what people had been warning and they had been denying for years- that the result of all this was going to cause our whole economic system to collapse- just in time to panic and convince congress that letting them steal a few trillion more dollars as they were packing to leave would be good for the economy even if everything they had done up until then wasn't.

I am almost convinced that the presidency of George W. Bush is the most successful in history. I haven’t always thought that. I was convinced that they were just the kind of businessmen I had met numerous times when I was in business- idiotic con men who thought they were smarter than everyone else because they could double-talk, cheat, and swindle enough people to get rich. Those businessmen invariably wind up going from business failure to business failure, bankruptcy to bankruptcy, because even though they may be master salesmen they don’t know how to run anything. They may be able to talk some rube into buying a $40,000 SUV on a $27,000 a year salary, but the actual nuts and bolts of managing a business is beyond them. Invariably they wind up taking the money and running when it becomes obvious that it isn’t going to be possible to keep the game going any longer.

Well, maybe my first impression was right after all.