Month: January 2005

Terror Moms and Soccer Dads.

Scuttling online today is new trailer for The Ring Two, and it looks like it has the potential to be as unsettling as its predecessor (particularly if it foregos the Nancy Drewisms that marred the middle hour of the first one.) Also, soccer coach Will Ferrell has no use for kids, creepy or otherwise, not following the game plan in the trailer for Kicking & Screaming.

No Right-Wing Flunky Left Behind.

By way of a friend of mine, the Dubya education department gets busted subsidizing conservative commentator Armstrong Williams for good press on NCLB. I mean, really, wasn’t Fox News enough?

Ballad of a Thin Man.

Also in the trailer bin, Daniel Day-Lewis stops cobbling long enough to appear in The Ballad of Jack and Rose (written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller, and, no, it doesn’t seem to involve Titanic.) This looks rather IFC-ish and not really my cup of tea, but anytime Day-Lewis returns to the big screen, it’s worth noting.

Ostrich Simplicity.

As a US general cautions of “spectacular” attacks prior to the Iraq election, the commander of our forces declares that 4 of 18 Iraqi provinces are not secure enough to hold the vote, and even Bush I consigliere Brent Scowcroft warns of an “incipient civil war” to follow them, what does Dubya do? Well, what do you expect? “‘Democracy is hard,’ Mr. Bush said in a brief question-and-answer session…’I know it’s hard, but it’s hard for a reason. And the reason it’s hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.’” Dang them evildoers, always making foreign affairs so needlessly complex.

The Elephant in the Room.

In a positive sign for more Congressional feistiness this next term, Dems force a two-hour debate over voting irregularities in Ohio. (Unlike in 2001 — as featured in the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11 — the House Dems found a Senate backer this time in Barbara Boxer. For his part, Kerry took a pass.) The GOP may chalk it up to simple sour grapes, but Congress desperately needs to talk about these issues: The American voting infrastructure was an international embarrassment in 2000 — that we had four years to solve the problem and didn’t speaks even worse of our self-appointed role as exemplars of democracy. If we can handle millions of ATM transactions every day, complete with paper trail, then surely we can do the same for millions of votes one Tuesday in November.

Dubya’s Man at Justice.

“Alberto Gonzales has paved the way of his own advancement with memos that are intellectually slovenly, that impute definitive powers to the executive, and whose attempts at shirking the basic moral precepts of international humanitarian law are not very skillful. If he is confirmed as attorney general, our nation will be shamed, shunned and endangered.” As the Gonzales hearings begin on Capitol Hill, Salon does an able job of exposing his egregious yes-man tendencies in both the torture memos and, previously, in managing Governor Dubya’s execution sprees. Update: Yet, the Dems roll over.

She’s De-Lovely.

The LotR team — PJ, Fran, and Phillipa — have announced their first post-Kong project and, as rumored, it’ll be The Lovely Bones. Judging a book by its cover blurb, the story — about a murdered 14-year old girl watching her killer from Heaven — sounds Oprah-esque and precious to me (and not in the Gollum sense.) But then again, I haven’t read it. If nothing else, the project does seem ripe for some Heavenly Creatures-like FX throughout.

All the Hammer’s Men.

Just when it seemed the House GOP might be doing the right thing on the ethics question, the truth comes out — Boss DeLay’s boys have decided to work the system rather than explicitly subvert it. Case in point, the imminent ousting of DeLay opponent Joel Hefley (R-CO) from the House Ethics chair. “‘I’m not naive enough to not know that there are some folks that are very upset with me because they think we were too harsh with DeLay,’ Hefley said.”