“‘We tried to explain to the folks in Boston early on that it’s a little different here,’ says Terry Sullivan, a veteran political operative who is running former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in the Palmetto State. ‘It’s kind of a knife fight.'” Meanwhile, right down the road in my home state, the Republicans already seem to be fighting in the gutter, as Salon‘s Michael Scherer reports. “‘The person who wins the South Carolina primary generally becomes the nominee,’ explained South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham…’It’s a test of a red state. It will be a real test of strength among conservatives in general. So you have to have your best game on.’“
Month: April 2007
Back in the Mire.
“It’s all a stark reminder to voters about why they don’t want to turn power back to a Republican Congress that betrayed the public and used their majority for personal financial gain and to reward special interests.” The WP speculates on the ramifications of GOP congressional corruption returning to the headlines, as indicated by the recent committee resignations of Reps. Doolittle and Renzi. “‘Everybody’s kind of a little bit numb,’ said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.). ‘There’s this, “What else can happen now?” feeling going around here.'”
Birthday girl.
If you turn twenty in the middle of the woods of New Hampshire, does it make a sound? One hopes…A very happy b-day to my sister Tessa.
Dumbledore’s Army.
Alert the Ministry: The new trailer for David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now online, albeit not in the best format. Looks…ok, although I’d be surprised if it lives up to Newell’s Goblet of Fire (or even Cuaron’s Prisoner, since Order may have been my least favorite book in the series thus far.) Update: It’s now available in Quicktime — go here instead.
Mother Russia’s Uncle Boris.
In a World of Hurt.
“Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can’t have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It’s very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can’t have, and we can’t have what we love.”
Since I spent Friday evening watching In the Mood for Love — a tale of a romance-that-almost-was, told in furtive hallway glances — and 2046 — a broader and more diffuse disquisition on love and heartache — back-to-back, here’s an intriguing 2004 interview with director Wong Kar-Wai on how they fit together: “Mood is a chapter in 2046. It’s like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements.” Maybe so, but I’m glad I saw them as I did. At first Tony Leung’s Chow in 2046, a dissolute, world-weary rake, seemed eons apart from the quiet, somewhat nervous journalist of ITMFL. But the films are clearly meant to be taken as a piece. From its first images (hole, train) to its last (taxi, hole), 2046 dwells on the corrosive consequences for Chow of ITMFL: The memory of Su (Maggie Cheung), bottled up in the tree, is eating Chow alive…hence, the whole otherwise-non sequitur sci-fi subplot (ITMFL told again, by Chow to himself) involving the indecisive android. (Um, the last few sentences make more sense if you’ve seen the films, but only slightly.)
Now I really kinda wished I’d watched Days of Being Wild, the first part of Wong’s trilogy, before these two. But then again, however sumptuously filmed (these movies are absolutely gorgeous to look at), and however tempered by the presence of several stunningly beautiful actresses (Cheung, Zhang Zi Yi, Gong Li, Faye Wong), there’s only so much exquisite melancholy I can take in a given evening. By the end of this extended tale of romance and loss, I had half a mind to just curl up in a ball and drift amid a sea of despond for the rest of the night, lost in the phantom reverie that was both the allure and prison of “2046” in 2046. Even stronger was the urge to light a cigarette and watch the tendrils of smoke slowly writhe and curl through a shaft of light, preferably to the strands of some vintage Nat King Cole. If nothing else, these very worthwhile films suggest, if you’re going to ruminate on old heartaches, you might as well look really good doing it.
A Taxing Time Ahead.
“‘What strikes me now is the degree to which the fairly fiscally irresponsible policies of the last six years have put Democrats in a box,’ Mr. Greenstein said. ‘They’ve got these large tax cuts in place, they have even larger fiscal problems in the coming decades and they have large unmet needs right now, such as 45 million uninsured people. Addressing all three of those things will be very difficult.’” The NYT discusses briefly how the 2008 Dems are planning to approach Dubya’s tax cuts — As you might expect, everyone agrees that the giveaways to the tiny percentage of wealthiest Americans, those with incomes over $200,000, will have to stop. “‘Yes, we’ll have to raise taxes,’ Mr. Edwards declared in February in one of the first statements by a Democratic candidate on the issue.”
The Audacity of Tolerance.
“Skeptics derided JFK, as they now do Obama, as callow and ill-versed in substantive issues. And yet Obama, similar to JFK, manages to inspire people with sex appeal, cerebral cool, and a message of generational change.” Rutgers University professor David Greenberg examines the similarities between Senator Obama and President Kennedy, and argues that Obama’s team might just be taking a page from the JFK campaign’s Catholicism playbook with regard to race in 2008. “Having passed a threshold among most white voters, his race can implicitly encourage them to feel that a vote for Obama is a vote for tolerance, for a future free of the constricting prejudices of the past, and for a sense of hope that Jack Kennedy once evoked.“
If you’ll be my bodyguard, I’ll be your long lost pal.
“‘Everybody at the White House…all think he needs to go, but the president doesn’t,’ said a Republican who consulted the Bush team yesterday. Another White House ally said Bush and Gonzales are ignoring reality: ‘They’re the only two people on the planet Earth who don’t see it.’” True to form, Dubya responds to Alberto Gonzales’ flameout on Thursday by declaring he has “full confidence” in the Attorney General and calling his service “fantastic.” (Fantastic? Really? Do you mean that in the “fanciful” sense, perhaps?) In light of this bizarre news, Dahlia Lithwick reevaluates Gonzales’ testimony, arguing that what came across to us in the reality-based community as evasive, misleading, or just plain stammering seemed to Dubya a solid defense of the unitary executive theory. The really scary thing is, she’s probably right.
The Village Green Preservation Society.
Move over, Grindhouse, ’cause, lo, here comes the fuzz! (We will say goodbye to flesh and blood.) When Hot Fuzz began by packing no less than five funny cameos of very likable people in its first five minutes, I figured I was in for another good time with the Shaun of the Dead crew. And happily, they didn’t disappoint — this action flick homage-parody by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost is as smart, witty, rousing, and enjoyable as its zombie-laden predecessor. Moreover, unlike Tarantino and Rodriguez’s recent foray into film nostalgia (and, for that matter, Team America: World Police, also an action-parody), Hot Fuzz works at both levels — it’s both a clever send-up of action movie tropes and not a half-bad actioner itself (particularly in its last half-hour.) The proceedings here are all frightfully British, of course — in fact, that’s most of the joke. Hot Fuzz is Die Hard in a Wee Country Village, a bunch of quintessentially American Bruckheimerisms cross-bred with quintessentially droll English understatement. But if that wry sense of humor is your cup of tea (as it is mine), the result is probably the goofiest fun you’ll have had at a movie theater since Borat.
This time around, Simon Pegg is Sergeant Nicholas Angel, the most accomplished and dedicated peace officer on the London police force. (uh, police department, that is — the new protocols state you shouldn’t say force. Sorry about that.) He’s so accomplished, in fact, that he’s making everyone else look bad, and thus his superiors ship him off to the remote country idyll of Sandford, which proudly wears the title of the safest village in England. 9-1-1 is a joke in this town, and it soon seems Angel will spend the remainder of his days busting underage drinkers, chasing wayward swans, and fielding dumb questions from his new partner (Nick Frost), a second-generation lousy cop with an inordinate love for Point Break and Bad Boys II. Of course, if you’ve ever read an Agatha Christie novel, watched an episode of Doctor Who, rented The Prisoner or The Wicker Man, or basically taken in any contemporary tale ever set in a remote English village this side of All Creatures Great and Small, you can guess that things may not be all that they seem. And sure enough, it soon becomes clear that there’s a killer loose in this sleepy little haven, and that Sandford may need Angel’s finely honed police skills after all… (Particularly given that the town elders include Bond, Belloq, Boss Tweed, Jimmy Price, and the Equalizer, among others, so there are more than a few possible prime suspects to go around.)
A lot of the fun of Hot Fuzz comes not only from its smart writing and satiric edge (some of which I can’t discuss without giving away the game, sadly — but you’ll see what I mean) but also from its affectionate spoofing of American action tropes throughout. We have the two partnered cops, of course: the wide-eyed rookie learning the ropes and the grizzled veteran who can’t leave the job at home. But Hot Fuzz also features the ubiquitous Tony Scott quick-edits, the not-very-oblique homoerotic male-bonding subtext, the Michael Bay circular pans, the bad detective mustaches, and, of course, the big guns and bigger explosions. (I don’t remember a shot through the windshield of Pegg and Frost simultaneously screaming, as per the buddy-movie-standard, but I’m guessing it might have been in there too.) What separates Fuzz from the similarly knowing Planet Terror, a movie that was basically all inside-jokiness, is that this film never seems derisive toward its target, really. It lampoons the genre, sure, but it also delivers as a genre exercise. (As did Shaun, now that I think about it…hopefully Edgar Wright will bring a similar balance and panache to the superhero movie with his forthcoming take on Ant-Man.)
