Another Useless Fact

Six Songs

2005-10-18T00:29:00.000-04:00

Not as dramatic as Margo Stilley and Kieran O'Brien, admittedly, but some thoughts about some recent videos I've been seeing

Weezer's "Beverly Hills": The video is shot at the Playboy Mansion. Which is actually in Holmby Hills. In other words, in plebian Los Angeles. Oops.

Gwen Stefani's "Cool": The best song of 1982 meets the best picture of 1957. One expects Tab Hunter or Troy Donahue to ride up on a scooter to sweep Gwen away.

The Black Eyed Peas's "Don't Phunk With My Heart": Wonderful re-creation of a 1970's gameshow. But where's Charles Nelson Reilly? Hee haw!

Kanye West's"Gold Digger": Wonderful Varga-style pinups come with Jaime Foxx doing backup. Hopefully the video world will not make a trend of featuring Best Actor Oscar winners. I don't want to see Ernest Borgnine and F. Murray Abraham bopping with Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent. Well, I would like to see Abraham in a cover of Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus".

Natasha Bedingfield's "These Words": How could anyone resist a song which rhyms "Keats" with "hip hop beat"?

Hail to the Supremes!

2005-05-26T13:30:00.000-04:00

Henry Regnery used to be the thinking conservative's publisher, issuing serious books about conservative philosopy, e.g. Russell Kirk. But in recent years the company decamped from the Windy City to the Sodom-on-the-Potomac and has issued a series of best-selling books that make even dyed-in-the-wool troglodyte conservatives blanch, books such as Barbara Olson's posthumous best-seller The Final Days or Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access. The latest of these screeds intended to preach to the choir rather than convince an audience is Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America by Mark R. Levin, who has a radio show on WABC-AM in New York City and is president of the Landmark Legal Foundation in Northern Virginia.

There are a number of little mistakes that grated. He misspells the name of Justice Brandeis, for example. And in the Pledge of Allegiance case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, he writes of the Supremes that "the Court bent its own rules and gave Newdow permission to argue the case himself." Well, Newdow did go to law school but even if he didn't that's irrelevant. The United States Code, specfically section 1654 of title 28 (the text is here) gives everyone the right to argue his own case in all Federal courts. That Levin is a lawyer and be oblivious to this is suprising. It has only been law since 1911. He also wrongly states Ex parte Merryman was a Supreme Court case. I also saw a case citation that was clearly wrong.

The chief problem is how deeply schizophrenic this book is. Levin denounces Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case in which the Court declared the right to declare laws unconstitutional. Similar scorn is directed at Roe v. Wade, the abortion case, and Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Court upheld the interstate commerce clause as giving Congress unlimited power to regulate anything and everything. But yet he's delighted when the "activist" Court does things he agrees with, e.g. the 1935 decisions declaring unconstitutional various parts of the New Deal. He approves of the rulings in the "sick chicken" case, Schechter Poultry v. United States; Carter v. Carter Coal; and the Railroad Retirement case. "In these rulings," Levin writes, "the Supreme Court was merely upholding the Constitution and preserving the Constitutional balance between the federal government and the states." Isn't it unprincipled to object to judicial activism but support it when the Court supports your own side.

But essentially, Levin is a defender of the Bush regime, not principle. How else to account for his chapter eight, "Al Qaeda Gets a Lawyer", where he objects to the Supreme Court's rulings in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush, two cases concerning the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, comparing Bush favorably to Abraham Lincoln's mass arrests and suppression of opposition newspapers. "Indeed, he hasn't taken any actions to silence his critics." There are a lot of people who would disagree with Levin's characterization, to start with the North Carolina college student who the Secret Service called upon for having an anti-Bush poster. (See the story here.) What the Bush administration tried to do was declare that Guantanamo was outside the reach of law, a twilight zone where the government could do anything it liked. Wasn't the whole point of fighting the Revolution to end such tyranny? When President Truman tried to take over the steel industry under his power as "commander-in-chief", the Supreme Court said in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer that he was commander only of the military, not the whole country. Assuming Youngstown is still good law in the eyes of the present government, then the Bush administration position is the government could take away the life and liberty of anyone it liked, but not their property.

Levin also tried to make a distinction between "persons" and "citizens", trying to say that foreigners don't have rights under the Constitution. Just look at the plain text of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights, notably the Fifth Amendment with its guarantees for the accused, talks of "persons" and not "citizens". The Fourteenth Amendment, which he also cites, speaks of both "citizens" and "persons" in such a way that it is clear "persons" have rights too. One rule of interpreting laws is that the authors knew how to draft statutory language and it is clear that his claims about foreigners are bunk.

Certainly there is material that both conservatives and liberals can agree with, notably his chapter ten, "Silencing Political Speech", about the First Amendment Repeal Act of 2002, which the Supremes upheld in McConnell v. Federal Elections Commission. But you know that Levin would have loudly cheered had the Court not deferred to Congress and struck down the campaign finance law. Levin's book is about getting what his side wants from the courts (as evidenced my the long section, including copies of Democratic strategy documents, on appointing right-minded judges to the Federal bench.

It is most decidedly not, as its title implies, a call for judicial restraint. But it is doubtful any but the converted will be reading this volume in the first place. No harm, no foul.

When Will They Ever Learn?

2005-05-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

"This too shall pass" applies to so many things. Infatuation. Grief. Incarceration. But one exception is that the old folks never tire of talking about how awful the young generation is. How they're dumb, lazy, sex-crazed, and what not. Rich Karlgaard, editor of Forbes Magazine, had a piece in the April 11 issue, titled "Real-World Advice for the Young", which is more of the same nonsense:

Apart from the blue-collar kids who are fighting in Iraq, most American kids today are soft. That's a harsh statement, isn't it? But cultural anecdotes back it up. Kids weigh too much. Fitness is dropping. Three American high schoolers ran the mile in under four minutes in the 1960s. It's been done by one person since. Parents sue coaches when Johnny is cut from the team. Students sue for time extensions on tests. New college dorms resemble luxury hotels. College grads, unable to face the world, move back in with their parents and stay for years. Does this sound like a work force you'd send into combat against the Chinese? I don't know the answer here. But the trend is bad, and we can do better. For our kids we must do better.

The Times of London reports that Japanese youth are terribly rude here.

Talk to someone older than yourself and you'll find his parents and grandparents said the same thing about his generation, that they just weren't worth a damn. And undoubtedly his parents and grandparents heard the same thing from their forebears. You doubt me? Jeff Greenfield on NewsNight on May 12 had this to say:

How far back does our discontent with the young go? Well, here's how Socrates described the young Athenians of his day. Quote, "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders. They no longer rise when their elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize their teachers."

I'd bet Socrates heard the same thing from his parents. It just shows you that, even after two and a half millennia, human nature never changes. To continue quoting Greenfield:

In the 1920s, parents wondered what was going on when young people's courting moved from the front parlor to the backseat of an automobile.

In the 1950s, now seen as the golden age of innocence, violent comic books, drag racing and sexually provocative rock n' roll were the culprits.

In the '60s, sex, drugs and rock n' roll became the axis of evil, and enough of the baby boomers were out in the streets to make the generation gap page one news.

Today, the same fears are fed by different sources. What are they getting from MTV, from rap, from video games, from the Internet? Well, a good deal of it is the basic impulse of young people to begin staking out emotional territory of their own.

Here are a couple of things you might want to ask yourself. First, how would your parents have reacted if they learned all about your teenage conversations, fantasies, desires, inner feelings about your life or your family back then? Today, while the language, the music, the dress may all seem to be coming from another planet, is it really all that different?

The times, they are a changin', but the kids are alright.

Cover Girls

2005-05-18T13:29:00.000-04:00

You can judge a book by its cover. One with a black and white photo of its author, especially one with has the ruffled edges of a 1950's snapshot, is going to be a heartwarming yet bittersweet tale of how great the author's youth was in Lower Armhole, South Dakota, or some such place. A cover that is a bold or metallic color and has the author's name in Second Coming type is an author who has written a baker's dozen previous novels practically indistinguishable from this one, all of which had sales in the six figures and not one of which was reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

And the Gossip Girl novels--there are now seven of them, all by Cecily von Ziegesar--are exactly what you'd expect from their cover art: catty novels about the sort of people who will be the first to go before the firing squad when the dictatorship of the proletariat comes to power, people who deserve a Digby Baltzell or Thorstein Veblen to chronicle their extravagance. Von Ziegesar chronicles the type who never leave their Upper East Side pads, with monthly rents of six figures, unless clad tip to toe in the sort of garments pictured in the hundred pages of advertisements before Graydon Carter's editor's letter.

These characters are young, they're in love, but so far they have not followed Bonnie and Clyde's lead by killing anyone--but it's only a matter of time. Prep school types, like those seen in the film Cruel Intentions, they have those oh so tough decisions to make. Princeton or Yale? Aspen or Sun Valley? Prada or Gucci? Sephora or Bloomingdale's? Jimmy Choos or Manolos? You know, the questions that are the bane of human existance, the sort of issues the existentialists are eaten up by.

Our heroine is Blair Waldorf, the first fictional Blair I've encounted since the days of the similarly situated character played by Lisa Whelchel. Her on-again-off-again boyfriend is the stoner Nate Archibald, who she's been trying to bed but because of various complications her best laid plans . . . well, only the plans are getting laid. Nate, however, has hooked up with Serena van der Woodsen, Blair's ex-best friend whose name puts me in mind of the late Mauritian Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. Serena, a glamazon who naturally struts into a big modeling career and winds up on the runways in Bryant Park during Fashion Week, even gets a perfume named for her: Serena's Tears. (As Dave Barry likes to put it, sounds like a good name for a rock band.)

Blair and Serena go to school with Jenny Humphrey, a ninth grader with an endowment bigger than Harvard's, who is horribly insecure about her figure, a fact we are reminded of every time she appears, the type of girl who writes those anxious letters to Seventeen about "My Most Embarrassing Moment". Her brother Dan is a poet whose work is the kind Robert Frost had in mind when he said "writing blank verse is like playing tennis with the net down." But the tiny mummies of The New Yorker publish one of his poems, one with the soigne title "Sluts". How did this happen? Well, in this alternative universe his girlfriend Vanessa (I love that name) picks a name off the masthead and sends it in and it is plucked from the slush pile. Or maybe slush piles don't exist in this Manhattan. After all, there The New Yorker has a masthead. (Or is that an "oops!" by the author.)

Vanessa is the most interesting character here and not merely for the Swiftian name. With her shaved head and filmmaking dreams, she's different and realizes the vacuity of the other characters. (Unlike fellow fictional teenage filmmaker Dawson Leery, she's interested in artsy films that'll only play at the Angelika and be reviewed by Stanley Kauffman rather than Speilbergian popular entertainments.

I could go on with the characters, but they're all pretty much the same facing the same poor little rich kid problems. That Mad TV sendup of The WB's lineup, "Pretty White Kids With Problems," sums it up. Is any of this believable? Not for a moment. But I read five of these novels in a weekend. So what if they're chewing gum for the mind--I'm waiting for the next one coming this October. "You know you love me," writes Gossip Girl and she's right, even if some of us are more inclined to break into a Yip Harburg lyric, you know

Down with love,
Let's liquidate all its friends,
The moons, the Junes,
The roses and rainbows' ends,
Songs that talk about night and day,
Down with love
Yes take it away,
Away.

Note to self: remember to abide by own rules about book covers in making selections.

Is That All There Is?

2005-05-14T15:45:00.000-04:00

Random House told readers to "Open the door to first fiction" in its three page ad in the Library Journal for March 15th. It's no wonder most of us can't get an agent let alone a book deal because all these books seem the same. They profiled thirty books and fully half of them are chick lit:
*Whores on the Hill by Colleen Curran. "A sensual evocation of sexual awakening played out against a backdrop of adolscent angst . . . as three adolescent girls run wild through the last all girl parochial school in Milwaukee." So except for Milwaukee, it's a new Gossip Girl novel?
*Emily Ever After by Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt in which a girl gets a job at a New York publisher. Hasn't this already been written half a dozen times?
*Exclusive by Barbara Fischkin. About two sparring reporters. Anyone heard of Hildy Johnson?
*Soapsuds by Finola Highes and Digby Diehl. A book about an actress on a soap opera by an actress on a soap opera. Better I suppose than the character herself supposedly being an author as AMC's Erica Kane supposedly was. And I doubt it could be as good as The Confessions of Phoebe Tyler. Say, wasn't there a movie like this with Teri Hatcher and Sally Field?
*The Perfect Manhattan by Leann Shear and Tracey Toomey. Cassie, a name I love, is the lead in "a novel about the bartending life and uppercrust society in New York City." Hopefully, it comes with a coupon for booze to distract oneself from the novel.
*The J.A.P. Chronicles by Isabel Rose. "Sex and the City meets Jane Austen." A description which speaks for itself.
*Pounding the Pavement by Jennifer van der Kwast. "Twenty-something living in New York City". Noticing a pattern?
*They're Not Your Friends by Irene Zutell. Three reporters (again?) in, guess where? That title is the quintessential chick-lit caption.
*FAB by Kieran Batts Morrow and three others. "A chick lit-side splitter" about four girls in Gotham and Lalaland. Nothing wrong with southern California that a rise in the Pacific couldn't fix, right?
*Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur. Two women from the Big Apple don't like the guys they date so they send them to re-education camp. Can you imagine the fury from the NOW-crowd if a man wrote a book about doing this to women?
*The Butcher of Beverly Hills by Jennifer Colt. Two crime-fighting redheads "out to rid L.A. of various criminals." Including the people who decided to put this sort of thing between two covers?
*Alternate Beauty by Andrea Rains Waggener. In an alternative universe, the Reubenesque is in. So Roseanne would be more attractive than Paris Hilton? Talk about a Hobson's choice.
*Making It Up As I Go Along by Maria Lennon. "Wanting to save the world in Africa, Saffron Roch finds herself pregnant and in love with a cheating doctor." Quick, do Finola Hughes's writers at GH or AMC or whichever program she's on now know about this plot?
*Fashion Victim by Sam Baker. Yet another reporter, this writer doing the Jessica Fletcher bit by tracking down the killer of a fashion designer and a gang of trademark infringers. Oh. My. God.
*Passing Roscoe by Debra Borden (not listed in Amazon so I can't link to it). Kitchen-sink drama about the travails of a mother dealing with her kids and her mother. Random comes up with exactly one book about a real person with a real life and even that doesn't sound appealling.

Gentle Reader, this post is far too long already, so I'll save the remaining first fiction for another time. I'm also working on another review for you: the Gossip Girl series. So stay tuned.

We Don't Need No Stinking Congress!

2005-05-13T14:00:00.000-04:00

Mark Twain, to whom all good quotes of uncertain provenance are attributed, is supposed to have said that "no man's life, liberty, or property is secure while the legislature is in session." On March 3, 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 814 (see information on it here), which would direct the states to swiftly hold special elections in the event one-hundred or more members are dead or missing.

This bill, similar to one passed in the 108th Congress, is a product of fears following the September 11th attacks, Congress worried it would be put out of business as was hypothesized some years ago in one of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels. Norman Ornstein, the public-policy guru who is a fixture on the television news, organized at the American Enterprise Institute the Continuity of Government Commission, which put out an informative report on the subject. Certainly, I feel that special elections take too long--look at the long delay in South Dakota last year following Bill Janklow's conviction. Yes, something needs to be done, but I'm of mixed feelings about Congress taking action like this rather than the states.

Oh, Really?

2005-05-12T13:03:00.000-04:00

Sarah Glazer's piece "How to Be Your Own Publisher" in The New York Times Sunday Book Review on April 24th claims that The Times will not review books issued by vanity publishers. Well, how does she explain the review in the Book Review for Decembert 20, 1998, of Andrew Heiskell's book Outsider, Insider, issued by something called the Marian-Darien Press? Perhaps Glazer's claim is only applicable to those not married to members of the Sulzberger clan? Marian of Darien is the former Marian Sulzberger, sister of former publisher Punch and aunt of current publisher Pinch Sulzberger.

Less Than Nine-tenths of the Law

2005-05-10T12:18:00.000-04:00

After seeing Neil LaBute's excellent cinematic adaptation of A.S. Byatt's Booker-prize winning novel Possession, I was eager to read the underlying book as its themes were similar to the stories that captivated me in Richard Altick's The Scholar Adventurers (how's that for a title!) and Nicholas Basbanes's volumes on bibliomania. Having slogged through Byatt's five-hundred page tome, I regret my eagerness.

The plot's summation (unlike its execution) is simply put. Roland Michell, a literary scholar employed by the British Library, finds a letter by a great Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash, to a mystery woman and he decides to chase down the elusive romance. Alas, Byatt is so caught up in concocting Nineteenth Century letters, diaries, and poems--which undoubtedly was great fun--that the novel sinks under the weight of all this spurious material. It is not unlike how Boswell's Life of Johnson is simply unreadable because the author insists on giving us endless verbatim letters to, from, and about people we don't know or don't care to, often in untranslated Greek and Latin.

One diary, that of Mrs. Ash, seemed all too precious and deliberate, not resembling diaries I've read, such as Quincy Adams's or Pepys's. It reads very much like she had an eye to the press, not unlike Evelyn who rewrote his "diaries" for publication. Real diaries reflect the extemporaneous nature of their composition.

This artificial tone infects the characters' dialogue as well. While they all sprang, Athena-like, from Byatt's head, she herself lacks any affection for her brainchildren. Michell is penurious, messy, and cold, saddled with a Xanthippic girlfriend who is always in a sulk. Maud Bailey is an undersexed feminist academician. Mortimer Cropper, apparently modeled on the University of Texas's Harry Ransom, is a crude American acquisitor always waving his checkbook about. Leonora Stern is a vulgar, oversexed American academician who tries to seduce Maud. Beatrice Nest, a self-loathing woman, is lost in her own erudition, having spent two decades editing Mrs. Ash's journal for publication and is nowhere near completing her task. James Blackadder, Michell's boss, is a typical cold, stoic Scotsman. And Ash's modern-day heir is a money-grubbing twit.

Byatt describes Cropper as engaging in a "reverse hagiography", determined to bring his subjects down to earth. Byatt as a biographer would have the same affliction. Undoubtedly, she would do it quite colorfully. Byatt is learned, having no qualms of showing her knowledge of literature, geology, mythology, art history, and countless other fields, so much so one wishes Dr. Nest could supply us with explanatory footnotes. Lorraine Adams, reviewing A Whistling Woman, one of Byatt's more recent books, correctly tags the author as "a melodramatic pedant" whose allusions are in "a kind of endless mitosis."

Which is a shame, as from Michell's discovery in the London Library we are taken on a wild Gothic adventure. Hikes in Yorkshire, lectures on biography, seances, lost children, adultery, family secrets, family feuds, suicide, penurious heirs to a home they cannot afford to maintain, musty archives, and even grave robbing! All elements the creator of the detective story, a contemporary of Ash, would have loved. Think what a novel Edgar Allan Poe could have made of this.

As for the film, hardly anyone saw it, despite it starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Northam, and Aaron Eckhart. It's quite good and terribly unlike the pieces LaBute usually does. Get the movie, not the book.

We The People

2005-03-16T11:22:00.000-05:00

C-Span did its Washington Journal live from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (the video is here) on March 4th. The first segment of open phones was to ask what viewers thought the Framers would think of their Constitution today. And I was pleased that not one called thought they'd be pleased. Most felt they'd be outraged, a few thought they'd be disappointed. "Appalled" and "rolling over in the graves" was the general consensus.

I was bothered by Richard Stengel, the CEO of the Center, when he was asked by a caller how the Federal government could have an education department under the Constitution when it is silent on the subject of education. His response is that the Constitution is silent on a lot of things and there can be a Department of Education because the Constitution doesn't bar it. Huh? I guess he's not familiar with the Bill of Rights, particularly the Tenth Amendment which limits the Federal government's power by assigning every power not assigned to the Federal government to the states and the people.

This is a man whose job is educating the people on the Constitution and he doesn't know it himself.

Running the Red-carpet Gantlet

2005-03-09T12:49:00.000-05:00

With the Oscars now a distant memory and the jostling for next year's awards already in earnest (the smart money is on Vin Diesel for best actor for The Pacifier), I wanted to pass along a scene from my novel, where my intrepid hero attends the Academy Awards:

"This is the moment I've been dreading," Joseph said to his wife as they headed down the red-carpet.

"Be brave. I'm right here with you," reassured Angel.

"And now on the red carpet we have George Huddleston, who's up for best original screenplay. He's only twenty-two! I've got panties older than that!" shrieked the interviewer, a real live harpy who have survived thousands of years only to find herself a television personality. America, what a country!

"My name is Joseph and it's adapted screenplay I'm up for."

"The card says 'George', George."

"I know my own name, Joan."

"I'm sure you think you do, George. So about your original screenplay--"

"Adapted," he said, but she paid him no mind.

"That's the Little Richard story, right?"

"Uh, no."

"Tutti Frutti, right?"

"The book was called Cosi Fan Tutte, If You Can."

"That's what I said, Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti. It's a Mafia picture, set in Ohio."

"Please?" said Joseph.

"The Cosi Nostra. For a writer you don't know your own material."

"No, Joan. I guess not," he said, furtively looking for an escape.

"This must be your lovely wife, Angie. Wonderful to meet you."

"It's a pleasure to meet the woman responsible for Rabbit Test."

"That animal is dead to me--dead! Let us never speak of it again!"

"I'm sorry."

"S'alright. Who are you wearing?" she asked Joseph.

"I have no idea."

"Men!" she exclaimed, throwing up her arms. "What about you, Angie? Valentino?"

"Rachel McGarrett, custom made," she said, dropping the name of her mother, Angel having sensibly recycled a prom dress.

"It's fabulous! I love it! You must give me her number."

"She'd never speak to me again if I did."

"Hah! I know the feeling. I'm as popular in dress shops as dry rot and mildew! So George--"

"Joseph."

"--what was it like working with Little Richard?"

"Indescribable," as it never happened.

"Oh! Oh! Oh! There's your sister Sally. Come over here!" she ordered. Salix, Joseph's cousin, ascended the platform. "Give us a kiss!" They air kissed each others cheeks. "Now that is a marvelous, simply fabulous dress," she said. "Of course, it helps if you have the right equipment," she said as she cupped her breasts. "Don't change them."

"Our creator's handiwork."

"They're real and they're spectacular. But don't get me started on Him."

"Not on speaking terms?" asked Angel.

"You make just one little pact--one!--with the competition and you are dead--dead!--to him. Sally, you don't much look like your brother."

"I guess not."

"Thank goodness," he said.

"I loved the song you two did, even if I don't speak Yiddish anymore." (The song was in Latin.)

"Oy gevalt!" said Salix.

"So what award are you presenting tonight, George?"

"I'm not."

"Then just what is it you are going here at my ceremony?"

"I'm up for original screenplay."

"Adapted," she corrected. "Any last words before I shove you off my red carpet so I can speak to the legend herself, Miss Pia Zadora?"

"Are you drunk?"

"As shikker as a Kennedy behind the wheel. But I have some smooth X to even it all out," she said, popping some pills right there. "Scoot! I've got real celebs to harrangue. Pia, darling, you were incredible. I wept during your death scene. Or I would have it I still had tear ducts. Anyhow," she continued as Joseph and company headed to the Shrine Auditorium.

"Well, Joey, for once the worst is not yet to come," said Salix.

"Who else needs a drink?" he asked.

All the Orthography That's Fit to Print

2005-03-08T10:30:00.000-05:00

The New York Times did its duty in building our word power yesterday with its front page story "U.S. Checkpoints a Deadly Gantlet" by John Burns. That's how it appeared in the national edition, but it appears under a different title in the linked story.

"Gantlet"? Huh? I immediately wondered who the copy editor was who let that misspelling slip through--and on the front page, no less. But then I had my doubts and pulled my trusty dictionary. There it was, gantlet being a variant spelling of gauntlet. (In addition, gantlet is also the name of a Y-shaped piece of railroad track allowing two tracks to converge and run together.) A gantlet is where one passes through a dangerous narrow place subject to assault while a gauntlet is the glove in suits of armor that one throws down to make a challenge. (The American Heritage College Dictionary, however, puts both words under the spelling gauntlet.)

A piece in the Columbia Journalism Review here says that gantlet and gauntlet are two different words entirely and they should not be confused. And a class for copy editors at the University of Richmond specifically lists the two words in its syllabus.

I'd never noticed it before but a Google-aided search of the Times's site reveals the spelling "gantlet" is not a rarity in its pages. For example in "Lapses Feared in 2000 Vetting of Kerik" by Kevin Flynn and William K. Rashbaum on December 17, 2004, appeared the sentence "White House officials have said they relied in part on the assumption that Mr. Kerik had already run a gantlet of city background checks before becoming police commissioner." And in "Paying a Price for Doughnuts, Burgers and Pizza" by David Gonzalez on January 25, 2005, was another appearance in an alliterative couplet: "It is no accident that one of the best views of this gastronomic gantlet is from the steps of the very place where it has led more than a few unfortunates: the Ortiz Funeral Home."

Just when you thought you knew your native tongue it leaps out and bites you with its intricacies.

Actually, Not

2005-03-07T12:15:00.000-05:00

And the Erich von Stroheim Award goes to . . . Richard Curtis!

Yes, for his bloated, meandering, plotless, pointless, humorless, romanceless romantic comedy Love Actually, whose running time as released of one-hundred thirty-five minutes (cut from two-hundred ten) put me in mind of the notorious Greed.

The film presents a web of Londoners, all apparently entrants in the Kevin Bacon Sweepstakes for all are a degree of two from one another, a cinematic equivalent of Winesburg, Ohio. With at least nineteen principals (the number credited in the main titles), I had trouble following how everyone was connected and certainly did not begin to care about any of them. But how could I? There are so many of them their introductions are cursory and none can be accused of having even the shadows of a third dimension.

Certainly there are amusing ideas here. Hugh Grant inhabits Number 10, "no nappies, no teenagers, no scary wife" he notes, in contrast to the present occupants. King of the British Geeks Colin Frissell (presumably Rhys Ifans, who played the same part, more or less, in Curtis's Notting Hillwas unavailable), who couldn't get arrested in London, becomes a chick-magnet when he flies to America's Dairyland, Wisconsin. Rowan Atkinson's solicitous jewelry salesman reminded me of John McGiver's turn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

A series of loosely connected stories can work, as in The Simpsons' clever "Thirty-two Short Films About Springfield" episode, but only if one knows (or can know) the characters. Curtis has enough material to keep the cast of EastEnders busy for months. (An alumna of that show, Martine McCutcheon, is in Grant's employ, and who he finds himself smitten with.) As a film, however, it is all too much.

What's more troubling is that a film so gung-ho about love should be so utterly devoid of it. Not one of these relationships seemed in the least loving or even natural. Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as an old married couple, perhaps is exempt from that criticism, but there's no chemistry at all between anyone else, the cloying and contrivedly musical selections' efforts notwithstanding. (Speaking of which, this is a film featuring everyone from Joni Mitchell to Kelly Clarkson to the Bay City Rollers to Wyclef Jean to the Beach Boys, a soundtrack as schizo as the film it accompanies.)

All this musical nonsense puts me in mind of Randy Newman's "Political Science". As a serial recidivist with this sort of film (he's also given us Four Weddings and A Funeral and Bridget Jones's Diary), might I suggest we put Newman's musical suggestion into practice: "Let's drop the big one and see what happens." Maybe with Curtis's flat as ground zero, our long transatlantic nightmare can be over.

Anchors Aweigh

2005-03-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

I'm generally against change because it usually makes things worse, but I was pleased to see a special order speech in the U.S. House this week by Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican of North Carolina, who has introduced H.R. 34 (available here as a PDF file), which would rename the Department of the Navy the "Department of the Navy and Marine Corps". Jones spoke about this on March 1, 2005, in the House. See the PDF file of his remarks (in the center column) here.

I applaud this legislation as it would accurately reflect what the agency does. And on that note, the Department of Defense itself would be better served by assuming the Department of the Army's old name: the Department of War. As we've seen in the past five decades, DOD does little defending and a lot of war-making abroad. That name would accurately describe its activities. Plus "the War Department" simply sounds better. But they have no sense of euphony in Washington for the original name of the DOD was the "National Military Establishment", an unfortunately chosen acronym. (Go ahead, pronounce it.) Jones's bill previously passed the House but died in the Senate. Let's hope he gets it on the statute books this Congress.

Today in History Dept.

2005-03-04T11:30:00.000-05:00

Seventy-three years ago this week was the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. That incident is revealed in Philip Roth's over-praised novel The Plot Against America (2004) to have been behind the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh Roth concocts.

I read the book, which is up for various awards and is likely to be a Pulitzer finalist, because of its alternative history about the 1930's, a period that interests me greatly. I was under the impression from the press that the politics were the central element, but rather it focuses on the family of a character called Philip Roth, who live in Jersey City, New Jersey. In Roth's fictional world, Charles Lindbergh decides to enter politics, an isolationist opponent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to manoeuver us into the war in Europe. Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination and chooses Burton K. Wheeler, a Democratic senator from Montana, as his running mate, then wins the 1940 election.

Roth posits that Lindbergh as president not only would engage in friendly (i.e. peaceful) relations with Germany, but he would actually import their treatment of Jews to America. Absurd, but what bothered me most of all was his depiction of one of America's great United States Senators.

Burton Kendall Wheeler (1882-1975) was born in Massachusetts and, after law school at the University of Michigan, set up his practice in Butte, Montana. (Thus the clever title of his memoir, Yankee From the West.) When Wheeler arrived in Big Sky Country, Montana was practically a wholly-owned subsidiary of Anaconda Copper. It was the biggest landowner and employer in the state. It owned most of the banks and newspapers. And it owned the legislature.

Wheeler, a dedicated Progressive, fought the company on the side of the small miners and the workers. He won a seat in the legislature and was appointed United States Attorney by President Wilson. After an unsuccessful bid for the governorship, he was sent to the Senate in 1922 where he continued to fight for the little guy, work that earned him the enmity of the Justice Department when he uncovered scandals and the Bureau of Investigation (then as now a den of iniquity and repression) attempted to frame him to cover-up the government's lapses. He served as LaFollette's running mate in his 1924 presidential bid against Coolidge and Dawes and Davis and Bryan.

When FDR was elected, Wheeler was 110% behind the New Deal. There was scarcely a member of Congress more behind the President's program. But in 1937, the Democrats having made substantial gains in the 1936 elections, Roosevelt decided to take on the one branch of government that had not surrendered to him. His proposal to pack the Supreme Court with like-minded cronies raised Wheeler's hackles and he was one of the Senators instrumental in killing the plan. At one Judiciary Committee hearing, Wheeler dramatically produced a letter from Charles Evans Hughes, the chief justice himself, stating that the court was fully up to date on its docket, showing that Roosevelt's claim the measure was simply to speed up justice and ease the workload on the justices was nonsense and was exactly what his critics said: a power grab.

That was Wheeler's first break with the President, though he still supported his domestic measures. The second break was on the international front where Wheeler adamantly opposed Roosevelt's efforts to get us into the war in Europe, Wheeler being an isolationist. (Wheeler's famous line was the President had a "triple-A foreign policy, one which will plow under every third American boy," a reference to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a New Deal program that paid farmers to plow under their crops.) Wheeler voted against the President and a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor was thought to have leaked the administration's Pacific war plans to the press (though this was never proven). The war turned public opinion and when Wheeler sought re-election in 1946, he was defeated in the primary. He remained in Washington practicing law until his death.

In Roth's book, President Lindbergh vanishes, whereupon Wheeler assumes the role of acting president. He locks up Mrs. Lindbergh, turning into a dictator who goes after the Jews. Impossible. Wheeler all his life fought for the downtrodden. He was a committed progressive who simply believed, as most Americans did at the time, that we had no business involving ourselves in these foreign conflicts. For Roth to depict Wheeler in this manner is a libel on a great American. It is disappointing that Roth hasn't been called on the carpet for this lapse. Either he is ignorant of history or cynically hoping everyone else is.

For Wheeler's official biography and a photo, click here. For The Wall Street Journal review, see here. And The American Conservative's review "Heil to the Chief" here is exactly right on the outrageous depiction of Wheeler.

Unidentified Flying Field

2005-03-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

Peter Foy, the master of stage flight who developed the rigging which let Mary Martin soar as Peter Pan and Sister Bertrile take to Puerto Rico's skies as The Flying Nun, is dead reports The New York Times.

Sure it was a silly premise but The Flying Nun was a good show in a decade of silly premises (e.g. Bewitched, My Mother the Car, Green Acres) because Sally Field was--and still is--a good actress. Not having seen her turn on ER, the last thing I saw her in was Absence of Malice, borrowed from the library, where she plays a reporter who runs a story fed to her by the cops saying Paul Newman was involved in a murder, their effort to flush out the real killers. The movie doesn't work for me--especially the leads' romance--but as always she's interesting to watch.

I was disappointed that ABC so quickly axed her Supreme Court drama The Court (2002), killed after only three weeks. (CBS's competing court drama, First Monday, lasted only a little longer that same season.) How do you dramatize the Supreme Court? They sit all day in their marble temple reading. Not a lot of action there, especially since the melodramatic William O. Douglas is long gone. You can make a drama out of anything but it is hard with material such as this. ABC didn't even give it a chance.

Maybe ABC could repent with a Flying Nun reunion film. Sister Bertrile ought to be Mother Superior material by now.

As Tommy Lee Said So Eloquently Sang

2005-03-03T05:37:00.000-05:00

The weekly edition of Variety (February 14th issue) carried a disturbing review by Robert Koehler of a film that debuted at the Santa Barbara Film Festival on February 6th. The Moguls is about a group of small town folks who decide why can't they make a porn film of their own. Okay. That's got possibilities. I can hear the pitch: "Jenna Jameson gets naked with Garrison Keillor." But look at this cast: Jeff Bridges, Ten Danson, William Fichtner, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Lauren Graham, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Steven Weber, and Eileen Brennan. Aside from the incomprable Lorelai Gilmore, is this a company we want to see deshabille? I think most audiences would pay for them to stay fully clothed.

Carmella DeCesare, the brunette Buckeye who is the reigning Playboy Playmate of the Year, told her hometown Cleveland Magazine (January 2005 issue) that nudity is "not a disrespectful thing. It's how secure you are with it." I'm with Julia Sweeney, America's favorite former androgyne, who wrote in her God Said "Ha!" (1997) "I'm not ashamed of my body, I just don't see any reason to not cover it up as much as possible. I'm one of those people who think those garments the Amish women wear are a great idea for everyone regardless of their religious affiliation."

Mike D'Angelo dissected Natalie Portman's peek-a-boo in Closer in the February 2005 issue of Esquire, a piece captioned "Everybody Get Naked: The thinking man's argument for more on-screen nudity. Tastefully done, of course." D'Angelo found Portman hypocritical. She shot nude scenes (she plays a stripper) but then successfully argued with director Mike Leigh to cut them. "Her spasm of retroactive modesty is downright unconscionable," he writes. "If Portman had the slightest doubt about her willingness to let the world see her gyrating about in her birthday suit, she should have turned the role down . . . ." Agreed. Cinematic nudity is almost never necessary but it's cheating to do what she did.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a portrait photographer who is a contributor to Vanity Fair magazine, found that the porn stars he photographed for his book XXX were more comfortable and natural naked.

The best response to nudity surely was from Charles Kimbrough as the strait-laced Jim Dial on Murphy Brown. Paula Cale, before becoming the sister on Providence, for a time was Mondale (think MTV's Kennedy), a young anchor on FYI brought aboard to lure young people to the show. Mondale for a press photo shoot posed naked in one of the anchor chairs a la Christine Keeler's famous photograph. The rest of the gang were outraged. What's the big deal she asked? "We're all naked beneath our clothes," said Mondale. Jim Dial recoils in horror. "I'm not!" he insisted.

United States' Rights

2005-03-02T06:45:00.000-05:00

"Power without responsibility, the power of the harlot throughout the ages," was the first thing that came to mind upon hearing of the Supreme Court of the United States' ruling in Roper v. Simmons, the Missouri case involving a seventeen-year old murderer. This absurd ruling says that the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" now prohibits the states from executing sixteen and seventeen year old killers. The Eighth Amendment has been in force for two-hundred thirteen years now and the Supremes only in 2005 discovered this fact.

The demographic affected by this ruling can drive, give blood, have consensual sexual relations and marry. In California, they can be emancipated and considered adults in the eyes of the law--see this article for one example. In Ohio, seventeen year olds have the vote in primary elections. They can marry, and join the service. Under canon law, the age of reason, the time at which children are responsible for their actions, is seven. Seven.

The ruling yesterday is an extension of the infantilization of our young people. The ages of consent and marriage have been delayed, today's young people somehow being less competent than their forebears. Likewise look at the changes with driving licenses and the drinking age. At eighteen, a man can hold public office or go fight in Iraq, but he isn't responsible enough to buy a bottle of Bud? Who is kidding who here?

The decision came from the Gang of Four (Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer), joined by Anthony M. Kennedy, the opinion's author. They were opposed by The Usual Suspects (William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas), joined by the Great Compromiser herself, Sandra Day O'Connor.

Mr. Dooley famously noted that the Court paid close attention to the election returns, but Justice Kennedy's opinion continues down the road of rewriting the Constitution by substituting "evolving standards of decency" and "the weight of international opinion" for the word and intent of the Framers. This phenomenon, which we well saw in Lawrence v. Texas, the consensual sodomy case, is just as dangerous as what Mr. Dooley saw.

It is the role of the Congress and the state legislatures to take the pulse of the nation, not the courts. (I got straight A's in Constitutional Law so you can trust me on this.) Justice O'Connor, for once taking a principled stand, noted that were she still in the legislature, she being the only member of the Court who has ever faced the voters, she would vote against these executions. But in her judicial capacity, she correctly said she could find no justification in the Constitution for making the ruling the majority issued. It also occurs that if a consensus is to be the driving force for the court's rulings, then Brown v. Board was wrongly decided and Roe v. Wade ought to be swiftly overturned. And the Supremes ought to do something about O.J. Simpson and a few others about whom a consensus on their guilt or innocence has developed.

And just what is this "international consensus"? Most of the countries of the world are repressive regimes which have no respect for the rule of law or human rights, some of them the best friends of the American government, e.g. Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The creeping internationalization of our domestic law, founded on so-called norms drafted by an European elite, oft unelected and out of step with their own peoples, is a very threat to the entire international order which, since the Peace of Westphalia three and a half centuries ago, has been predicated on the assumption that the nation-state is sovereign and ought to control its own internal affairs.

A term of art such as "cruel and unusual punishment" must have had a specific meaning to those who wrote and approved the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment, like the other nine amendments, was sent by the First Congress to the States for ratification on September 25, 1789. Ratification was completed on December 15, 1791. The proper study for the Court would be the records of the First Congress, which drafted the Amendment; of the ratifying legislatures, which pondered it; of what the members of those bodies said and wrote; and of what the British courts, whose rulings are at the fundament of our legal system, had decided. What the European Court of Human Rights or the government of France thinks today is utterly irrelevant to the present situation. We might as well as Britney Spears or Sean Penn to weigh in while we're at it.

As Justice Scalia wrote, the Court has been setting itself up as today's moral arbiters, our answer to the Roman censors. If this continues, not only are the United Sates no longer of the masters of their own destinies, but we the people and the election returns we generate are meaningless.

Case materials are here (scroll down to October 13) and here.

Coverage in The New York Times is here and here. Coverage in The Washington Post is here. Coverage in The San Francisco Chronicle is here.

Some other views are here from a blogger and the American Bar Association.

Styling by the DWP

2005-03-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Monday night had the best comment on Adam Duritz of The Counting Crows, who performed their best song nominee on Sunday's Oscars, that they Academy had denied Sideshow Bob (ne Terwilliger) the recognition he deserved. The obviously have the same stylistic: the electric company. See a photo here.

Lost in Translation

2005-03-01T13:17:00.001-05:00

One way to spot a foreign film from its trailer is how none of the characters will be allowed to speak in it, distributors well aware that, except for a small circle of people who read Stanley Kauffman's reviews in The New Republic, Americans don't like foreign films.

That bit of conventional wisdom came to mind when I saw the trailer for Sahara, the adaptation of the Clive Cussler novel, on E!'s Coming Attractions show Sunday morning. Penelope Cruz, who is untelligible in English, is in the picture. She's clearly shown and identified. But she is not heard at all. The lead is Matthew McConnaghey, who I can't see him as Dirk Pitt, Cussler's oceanographer adventurer, a sort of aquatic James Bond. Someone such as George Clooney or Pierce Brosnan is who I pictured in the role.

I used to read Cussler's novels but his prose has become increasingly bloated and unreadable. In the New York Times's "Making Books" column, Cussler was once quoted saying he didn't believe in a lot of editing to his books. It clearly shows. Apparently all the publisher must do anymore is run spell check and send it to the typesetters. One of Cussler's problems is his unbelievable dialogue. His scientists are supposed to be brilliant, experienced men. But he shoehorns awkward exposition into their mouths, e.g. "Al, you will recall how we foiled the Japanese plot to explode nuclear bombs in rental cars across America and my many relationships with beautiful Members of Congress, which has prepared us for this latest adventure in the AGD-2343 submersible vehicle, which you invented in 1995 to search for mahi-mahi and . . . . "

One of Cussler's books was previously made into a film, Raise the Titanic (1980), which was such a colossal bomb wags noted it would have been cheaper for the studio to lower the ocean. Richard Jordan starred as Dirk Pitt, Jason Robards was his boss, Admiral Sandecker; and M. Emmet Walsh was Dirk's partner, Al Giordano.

An Oscar Trivia Question

2005-03-01T07:19:00.000-05:00

Only three films have ever collected all of the top four Oscars (best picture, actor, actress, and director), namely It Happened One Night (1934), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). But usually a film which gets one of these will get at least one more. For example, at Sunday's Oscars, Million Dollar Baby collected three of the top four awards (picture, actress, and director) and in 1998 Shakespeare in Love collected two (best picture and actress). It has been a long time when each of the top four went to different films. When was that?

Never Went Broke Dept.

2005-03-01T07:08:00.000-05:00

Yet another salvo in the War of the Wrights was launched today. An article in the Winston Salem Journal reports that the Aviation Heritage Foundation, a Dayton, Ohio-based group dedicated to the memory of the Wright Brothers, conducted a survey last month stating that forty percent of Americans thought that the Wrights, Dayton's most famous sons, invented the airplane in North Carolina, the state they made their first flight in because of its steady winds. Only fourteen percent knew they were from Ohio.

This is the latest in a long-running rivalry as aviation is a bit of a sore spot for the Buckeye State. Ohio was so disturbed by the North Carolina license plate (which boasts that state was "First in Flight"), it changed its own plates to "Birthplace of Aviation." Then when the U.S. Mint came calling it put the Wrights and Neil Armstrong (a native of Wapokoneta, Ohio) on its state quarter. It is only a matter of time before Ohio takes advantage of the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction to sue the Tarheel State for false advertising. Just because you don't have a leg to stand on doesn't mean you can't get a lawsuit going. That's the American way and we can at least take comfort that when America's factions fight they generally do it with polls, pleas, press releases, and plates.

Kodachrome Memories

2005-02-28T10:54:00.000-05:00

The 77th Annual Academy Awards, conducted at the Kodak Theatre in the Hollywood and Highland complex in Hollywood last night, were a big disappointment. The chief highlight was the early (relative to most years) finish, the show wrapping after three hours ten minutes.

I've not seen enough of Chris Rock to have an opinion. I recall he was on Saturday Night Live but he didn't make much of an impression. I saw him as Rufus the forgotten apostle in Kevin Smith's Dogma, but that's about all. The Academy and the press had been building him up like it was the Second Coming and as most things hyped are, he was a let-down. Samuel L. Jackson as host of the Independent Spirit Awards, held the previous evening, did a fine job. Funny jokes and gags and helped by Megan Mullally et alia singing about the best picture nominees. Very light and casual. And good television even if ninety percent of Americans couldn't have seen most nominees even if they wanted to.

He simply wasn't funny. The declaration that some people weren't stars sounded harsh to my ears. The joke against himself, that if you have him, don't make the picture and wait for Morgan Freeman, of course works. The stuff against Bush needed polishing. As delivered, it felt too raw and unfocused. Humor at the Oscars should singe, not burn, and Rock burned a lot of people. (Witness the uneasy laughter to his monologue and Sean Penn coming out to explain who Jude Law was.) And after his monologue, he disappeared except for the schtick with Adam Sandler about Catherine Zeta-Jones. I did get a chuckle when he introduced "comedy superstar Jeremy Irons" to present the best live action short award. That was good because Irons can be very funny, a dry humor well shown in Die Hard With A Vengeance and Reversal of Fortune. (In the latter, Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) tells Irons's Claus von Bulow "You've got one thing going for you. Everyone hates you." Irons waits about two beats and deadpans "Well. It's a start.")

The hosts in the past decade (David Letterman, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, and now Chris Rock) show the need to sign Robin Williams (who stole the show with his mimicry last night) or Billy Crystal to long term contracts. Crystal was the last host who knew how to do it. He's got the jokes, he's got himself inserted in the nominated films, he's got the wonderful songs (e.g. Secrets and Lies to the theme to The Brady Bunch and The English Patient to "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady).

I felt sorry for many of the technicans who were denied their moment in the sun by the producers' decision to put a number of them in a line-up and then call the winner. We didn't even get to see most of their faces. And I'd sure feel gypped if I'd won an Oscar and didn't get to make that walk up on stage as was done to the short subject winners.

Was it a little joke by the producers to have the two sound awards presented by Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz, two unintelligible actresses? Hayek I do like but Cruz is absolutely incomprehesible. See Eyes Wide Shut or Woman On Top. Or, rather, don't actually.

As usual, I found myself watching the late reel, introduced by a wooden Annette Bening, and wondering who'd get the most applause. An unseemly bit of business as always. I didn't detect a winner, but Tony Randall and Jerry Orbach did very well, as did Rodney Dangerfield. (I wonder if the Academy ever gave him any respect. A decade or more ago he applied and was turned down for membership and told to "improve his craft". Philistines.)

I haven't seen Million Dollar Baby but I'm glad it beat Sideways. I saw the first two films of Sideways's director, Alexander Payne, and they were both nasty, vicious little films. Clint Eastwood was his gracious self. I'm pleased to see him win. I'm not bothered in the slightest that Martin Scorsese has been shut out. I don't approve of the auteur theory and find that when a film touts who directed it, it usually isn't very good.

Cate Blanchett winning supporting actress for her portrayal of four-time Oscar winner Katherine Hepburn (The Aviator) makes a nice bookend to Maggie Smith, the only actor to receive an Oscar for playing an Oscar-loser. (That was California Suite.) Jaime Foxx I've liked for some time. He's got a good, albeit small, role in The Truth About Cats and Dogs. The announcer said he was one of ten actors to receive both lead and supporting nominations the same year. Julianne Moore is one. Barry Fitzgerald is another--he got nominated for lead and supporting for the same role in Going My Way!

My candidate for best song, "Accidentally in Love", sadly lost to a tune from The Motorcycle Diaries. Salma Hayek's praise for that biopic's hero, Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a "young, passionate idealitst" was disgusting. He was a thug who relished torturing his victims. She sounded not unlike the parents of Charles Graner, the U.S. Army soldier convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq, defending their son. Why is it Che is a cult figure to those on the left?

I'll give the producers' credit for eliminating the time wasting montages and interpretive dance numbers (which for years were the Academy's sop to the choreographers for the lack of an Oscar for that field). But in all a big disappointment. What should have been a night of excitement was a snooze.

For photos and the list of winners, check out the official site.

Read Tom Shales's opinion from The Washington Post here, he being similarly unimpressed with Chris Rock.

Best Pictures

2005-02-28T01:55:00.000-05:00

I've seen about half of the seventy-some Best Pictures. Some really don't age well, e.g. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) I'm sure was a moving film in its day but now seems very ordinary. I've not seen Mrs. Miniver (1942) but I've heard the same of it. Around the World in 80 Days (1956) is fun for spotting the cameos (Noel Coward! Hermione Gingold!) but rather dull and rather studio-bound. The Apartment, oft cited as a classic and the last best-picture winner to be entirely in black-and-white, I didn't care for at all. It is interesting to see Fred McMurray playing a cad. Marty (1955) started as a t.v. drama (Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand were in it) and on the big-screen seems small.

The French Connection (1971) looks simply ugly. Maybe it was a bad transfer, but it was very drab when I watched it. And I did not care about the characters in the slightest. The chase under the elevated is a must-see however. Annie Hall (1977) I simply don't get. Diane Keaton's appeal has always been lost on me. Funny moment though when they're in line at the cinema and the blowhard in front of them is quoting Marshall McLuhan and Woody Allen pulls out McLuhan to rebut the man. The Sting (1973) has its moments but didn't do much for me.

Terms of Endearment (1983) I hated. Jack Nicholson gets an Oscar for playing the same loony-toon character he's been doing for thirty-years. Shirley McLaine is smothering and we wish Debra Winger would just die so we can all go home. And who thought up John Lithgow as a randy bank manager in the Hawkeye State? The Last Emperor (1987) is long and tedious. I once looked up the obituary of Pu-yi in the New York Times and found only a few grafs. The obit conceded what a dull, boring man he was. In that respect, Bertolucci nailed it.

Titanic (1997) is a spectacular achievement in special effects and production design. But with a script that could have flowed from the pen of Marx, and I don't mean Groucho, one is grateful for the plunge into the cold water. If only it could have happened about two and a half hours earlier. Neat to see Gloria Stuart, however. How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Rebecca (1940) didn't work for me, but Dame Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in the latter must be seen so one can allude to her. A Beautiful Mind (2001) is one of those mistakes I'd wager the Academy will regret in a few decades and rank up there with The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), unseen by me but oft regarded as the worst best picture.

Now for best pictures I liked. My favorite used to be My Fair Lady but its star has been fading in my eyes. There are good moments, e.g. Higgins's "Why Can't the English?", the "Ascot Gavotte" number, when Higgins sings of his triumph at the ball, and Alfred Doolittle's "Get Me to the Church on Time" but there's no spark, no chemistry at all between Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. Alfred Hyde-White is wonderful as Pickering, though. Amadeus (1984) also seems less impressive with time. My current favorite must be Shakespeare in Love (1998). A wonderfully funny, dramatic, romantic allusive film. Simply marvelous.

Oscar Mania

2005-02-27T15:07:00.000-05:00

February has been a month of busy Sundays. The first Sunday was the Super Bowl. The second was the Grammies. The third was the Daytona 500. And today brings us the Oscars.

I like the Academy Awards as much as the next cineaste, but who on earth is watching the E! channel's coverage live from the red carpet which began eight hours before the show begins? That's as bad as Fox's marathon of pre-game coverage for the Super Bowl. Is E! planning hot scoops from the janitors and security guards? Find out whether the assistant greensman likes Scorsese's chances this year? Query the fans from Possum Grape, Arkansas, in the bleachers whether Paul Giamatti was robbed by being denied a nomination? At least Joan Rivers isn't part of this slog, but we'll get to endure her later when we want to check the schedule on the TV Guide Channel. My favorite reply to Rivers came a couple years ago when Hugh Grant flat out asked her "Joan, are you drunk?" Why don't more of her victims respond like that?

Last night the local PBS station had a show on The Aviator, the sort of puff piece with junket interviews that one only usually finds on E!. That's why they deserve millions of our tax dollars every year?

I've not seen The Aviator. In fact, I've seen precisely one candidate for any of the awards, Shrek 2, which is up for best animated feature and a best song nominee ("Accidentally in Love" by the Counting Crows). The original I thought was a lot of fun. But the sequel I didn't like at all. There's nothing new or creative at all about it. A typical idiot plot: son-in-law is hated by father-in-law and lovers struggle to overcome phony obstacles. So what. Seen it a million times. The song, however, I really liked and I hope it wins. But the Academy has weird taste in music. A song in Latin from The Omen, a hymn to the Devil, once was nominated but darker forces prevailed that year, the Oscar going to Barbara Streisand for "Evergreen." "Sweet Lelani", made popular by Bing Crosby beat the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away From Me." But hey, if Eminem and the former Robert Zimmerman can be Academy Award winning songwriters, why not Mr. Duritz?

Where's Alanis When You Really Need Her?

2005-02-27T12:32:00.000-05:00

I'm like Winona Ryder in Reality Bites (1994) when Anne Meara challenges her to define irony and she's reduced to the Potter Stewart defense: I can't tell you what it is but I know it when I see it. Irony is such an overworked and abused word I try never to use it because of its slipperiness.

But today I break my rule. Judge Gary Lancaster of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania issued a ruling in a criminal pornography case that not merely threw out the indictment, he declared the Federal pornography statute unconsitutional, based on his reading of Lawrence v. Texas.

The dismissal (available here ) came in the case of United States v. Extreme Associates where a California couple was selling videotapes and providing clips of them on a password protected web-site. In an abuse of venue, the Feds went after them not in the Western District of California, where they resided, but in Pennsylvania. (It's not unlike when the U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Tennessee indicted the performers in Deep Throat in Memphis, a place they had no connection to.) I guess the prosecutors' strategy backfired.

Now the opinion is largely tacit on just what the defendants had done, the judge referring to the indictment. But that indictment, which describes just what sort of videos they were peddling, is blocked by filtering software. Documents on a First Amendment case censored. It's ironic, don't you think?<