Month: December 2007

Dubya’s Iran Plans, NIE-capped.

“Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” Uh, y’know that whole Iran is the new face of evil, imminent-WWIII thing we’ve been hearing about? Well, never mind. It’s time to update those lyrics, Senator McCain: A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report — which, it seems, Cheney may have held up for a year — finds that Iran actually stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. “Even if Iran were to restart its program now, the country probably could not produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single weapon before the middle of the next decade, the assessment stated. It also expressed doubt about whether Iran ‘currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.‘”

This happy piece of information obviously puts our Saber-Rattler in Chief in a bit of a bind — In a news conference this morning, he was reduced to spluttering, “‘What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?‘” What indeed…perhaps we should bomb them anyway, is that your point? Well, probably not. Says Slate‘s Fred Kaplan of the NIE: “If there was ever a possibility that President George W. Bush would drop bombs on Iran, the chances have now shrunk to nearly zero….Skeptics of war have rarely been so legitimized. Vice President Cheney has never been so isolated.” Still, just to keep the timeline in perspective, Dubya made that dubious WWIII comment months after being apprised of this information. So, in effect, he was lying to us yet again.

As for the 2008 contenders, the campaigns are all taking the news pretty much in stride, although Chris Dodd got off a pretty good zinger on Clinton: “It’s easy to say ‘fool me once, shame on George Bush,’ but when she’s been fooled twice, shame on her.“

Somebody Needs a Nap.

“When I decided to run for president, I accepted that my opponents would dig through my record looking for something to attack. I didn’t realize they’d go all the way back to kindergarten.” In keeping with their previously announced New Negativity, the Clinton campaign actually digs up dirt on Obama’s kindergarten ambitions. (Two days after the press release in question, now that it’s not playing so hot in the media, pollster Mark Penn claims it was a joke.) Desperate much? Well, before anybody throws a tantrum, two new polls put Clinton still in the lead in Iowa, by 5% and 7% respectively. Maybe that’ll help put an end to this type of sorry stunt by Team Hillary in the future. (By the way, I have no plans to ever run for anything, but just in case it comes up someday (and a la Edwards): When I was in kindergarten I wanted to be Han Solo.)

Hail Roadrunner.

“‘Nature is the final arbiter of truth,” said Seager, the Lawrence Livermore computer scientist, but ‘rather than doing experiments, a lot of times now we’re actually simulating those experiments and getting the data that way. We can now do as much scientific discovery with computational science as we could do before with observational science or theoretical science.‘” Developers tease the premiere of the first “petascale” computer, due out next year. It will be “capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second [and] akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined.” Well I, for one, welcome our new petascale overlords.

Savage Love.

Emerging from Julian Schnabel’s Diving Bell, I had all of two or three minutes — basically, as long as the creepy Freelancers’ Union ad shown before every film at the Angelika — to decompress before entering Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, a dramedy about two siblings confronting the onset of dementia in their estranged dad. And, in the early going, after a rather twee opening and some leaden scenes of Laura Linney writing a grant proposal and kvetching with her married boyfriend, I started to feel like I’d made a tactical error following Schnabel’s ambitious film so quickly with such a conventionally quirky, small-scale indy flick. But The Savages is a grower, and by the last reel, I was very glad I’d made the trip. Admittedly somewhat inconsistent — and I could have done with less Linney and more Hoffman — Savages is also at turns hilarious, bleak, and even rather moving (although I’m guessing I’m more of a sucker for the final moments than others might be.) And, in some ways, it was the perfect nightcap to Diving Bell (and, in its bickering siblings, to Margot at the Wedding the night before.) For Jenkins’ film is a grimly funny reminder that Bauby’s condition isn’t necessarily as exotic as it first seems. Eventually (if we’re even lucky enough to stick around that long), we all sink under the weight of the diving bell — it’s just a matter of time. A grisly insight, to be sure, but you could do worse than contemplating it here with The Savages.

Jenkins’ movie opens with a sun-drenched Broadway-style musical number (Peggy Lee’s “I Don’t Want to Play in your Yard“) in the Retirement Heaven of suburban Arizona, the type of warm, happy, golf-cart-heavy environment one generally expects — given all the conventional portrayals of the Golden Years — to spend one’s waning days. But Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco), who lives therein, is beginning to act erratic (namely by finger-painting with his own feces), and after his aged girlfriend dies, he is cast out of this Grandpa’s Paradise. Enter his children (who haven’t heard from him in years), Wendy and Jon Savage — no relation to Wendy and John Darling of Peter Pan, as people are definitely growing old around these parts. Wendy (Laura Linney) is a failed playwright in Manhattan, working as a temp and sleeping with her married, horndog neighbor (Peter Friedman). Her older brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an obviously miserable academic in wintry Buffalo, working on a tome about Bertolt Brecht and sleeping with his laptop and a small reference library. (This detail rang uncomfortably true, as did the organized chaos of book piles strewn around his apartment.) So, with Lenny increasingly showing unmistakable signs of dementia, it now falls to Wendy and Jon to find a place for him, be it a retirement community, assisted living, or most likely, an institutional-gray nursing home in deepest, darkest Buffalo, and — in the tried-and-true tradition of quirky independent films — maybe learn to get along as a family in the process.

The family-bonding, one-to-grow-on aspects of this project, admittedly, are where a good deal of the clunky stuff in The Savages emerges. The Savages bond over an unlikely neck injury suffered by Jon, all of which feels a little TV movie-ish. (Hoffman almost saves it with some good physical humor, though — watch him put his mail away.) And The Wire‘s Gbenga Akinnagbe shows up as a Nigerian nursing home worker who has a platonic relationship with Wendy, which all felt entirely too “Bagger Vance” for my taste. (i.e. He’s a convenient saintly African-American plot device used to move the white people’s stories forward.) But, other moments work better. There’s a running competition between the siblings over grant money which — having done the grant rigamarole — I thought was pretty funny. And, Hoffman in particular has a few memorable rants (outside the nursing home, for example), which are well worth the price of admission. Since I saw Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead a few weeks ago and Boogie Nights on TV since then, I feared Hoffman might come across as overexposed to me, a la Scarlett Johansson, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, or Janeane Garofolo. But he’s really great here, and comes across as a qualitatively different (if equally self-loathing) person than Before the Devil‘s older brother in question.

Perhaps most impressively, The Savages never really attempts to make Lenny all that huggable, or to softpedal his malady. In even his lucid moments, which are few, Lenny is a cantankerous old sort, and you can see why his kids have kept away from him for years. But Bosco brings a pathos to the role that is earned — you can also tell at various points that Lenny has brief inklings of what’s ahead of him — to wit, not much at all. In short, what Six Feet Under is to dying, The Savages is to the final stages of aging. It’s something we don’t really want to think about, but it’s there, somewhere over the last ridge. If we’re going to dwell on this subject, it’s probably best to confront that fact with the mordant humor of The Savages (while keeping in mind that, however inevitable that final end, it’s never too late to teach an old dog some new tricks.)

Madchester for McCain.

“We don’t agree with him on every issue. We disagree with him strongly on campaign finance reform. What is most compelling about McCain, however, is that his record, his character, and his courage show him to be the most trustworthy, competent, and conservative of all those seeking the nomination.” In a boon to his flailing presidential hopes, which now rest squarely on a superlative showing in New Hampshire, the right-leaning Manchester Union-Leader endorses John McCain. (IMHO, of course, for all the wrong reasons.) “McCain is pro-life. Always has been.” Uh, yeah.

The War on Drugs is Lost.

“All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs – with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes – a twelvefold increase since 1980 – with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana – and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.“

To their credit, those left-wing hippie radicals at National Review said as much way back in 1996, and HBO’s The Wire has dramatized the dismal consequences of the conflict for several years now. Now, coming to the same dour conclusion in 2007, Rolling Stone‘s Ben Wallace-Wells explains how America lost the War on Drugs, and argues that continuing to perpetuate it in its current fashion — with its “law and order” emphases of crushing supply, international interdiction, and mandatory minimum sentencing — is tantamount to flushing money and lives down the toilet. “Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point – all with little discernible impact on the drug trade…The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats — the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government.” (Found via Jack Shafer’s endorsement at Slate.)

It Takes a Carnival.

The promotional machine for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight continues to ramp up. As you may have noticed below, I’ve been posting several additional new photos of Heath Ledger’s Joker to the entry of a few days ago. Also, the online viral marketing has continued apace: First an edition of the Gotham Times was released, and, in keeping with the Dark Detective meme, that’s led to all kinds of spinoff sister sites and more municipal tangents than The Wire (Gotham Police Dept. (and Internal Affairs), Gotham National Bank, Gotham School District, Gotham’s DA hotline, Gotham City Rail, Gotham Cab, Acme Security Systems, Gotham Victim Advocate Organization, Remembering Gina, and a Jokerized version of the paper.) Whatsmore, at the original viral Joker site, you can now take a personality profile or try to open a vault for further clues. (Set your clock for 7:38am to do so.) Finally, both the trailer and the first seven minutes of the film will be released on December 14, before the IMAX version of Will Smith’s Omega Man-update I Am Legend. To the IMAXcave, Robin! Update: Another countdown, set for noon on Tuesday. The trailer, perhaps? Update 2: Nope. After some shenanigans involving local bakeries (the NYC ones were over in Yorktown), it’s a new one-sheet.

In the Blink of an Eye.


“Euh ess ahh err eee enn teh veh, ell, oh…” Suffice to say, I’m so glad I’m not writing this entry letter-by-letter (and in French to boot.) The first half of a powerful Saturday afternoon double-feature at the Angelika, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, from the painstakingly-crafted memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, is an impressive and heartfelt depiction of how one man’s personal Hell becomes, through love, will, memory, and imagination, at least a barely endurable purgatory. At first glance, a film about being almost completely immobilized in a hospital bed for months and years on end may not seem like your cup of tea — I wasn’t sure it would be mine. But, despite the inherent sadness to Bauby’s story, Diving Bell is in fact overflowing with humor and even joie de vivre in the face of horrific tragedy. Yes, it says, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But, even if you’ve lost everything, including basic motor function…well, all you have to do is dream.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins in a blur. Blue-gray blobs fade in and out of vision, ultimately rectifying into institutional decor and men in white coats. We’re in a hospital room, but we, and our narrator Jean-Do Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, of Munich) don’t know why or how we got there. Worse, while we hear our narrator perfectly fine, nobody else can. It seems Bauby can no longer speak. Nor can he do anything else for that matter, except look around the room in abject horror and blink. Eventually, one of the doctors explains that Bauby has had a stroke, is emerging from a coma after several weeks, and now suffers from a rare medical condition known as “locked-in syndrome,” for which there may not be any cure. If this sounds like a fate worse than death, well, it seems so to Bauby at first too. But, when trapped in yourself, body your holding cell, it definitely helps to have a bevy of French beauties around to look after you, including the estranged mother of Bauby’s children (Emanuelle Seigner) and two therapists at the hospital (One, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, is Schnabel’s real-life wife. The other, Marie Josee-Croze (also of Munich), is the spitting image of Naomi Watts and, needless to say, also very easy on the one working eye.)

With the latter’s help, Bauby eventually grows used to a lengthy but workable system of communication whereby he blinks when the letter he wants to employ is named from a list (from most-used to least-used), thus piecing together words, sentences, and paragraphs after long hours of toil. As he becomes accustomed to his condition and this new system, Bauby, formerly an editor at Elle magazine, dwells on his recent past — say, shaving his elderly father (Max Von Sydow) the week before the incident, or taking a trip to Lourdes with his most recent love (Marina Hands), who is now afraid to visit him. In addition, he starts taking imaginative flights of fancy from his bodily prison (Enter Emma de Caunes of The Science of Sleep), and ultimately decides he’s going to write a book about the entire experience, blink by painstaking blink (thus bringing another beautiful woman into the equation, his new assistant (Anne Consigny). I mean, I know being a completely paralyzed invalid in any hospital is a horrible, horrible experience…but really, aren’t there any unattractive orderlies or assistants in France?)

If you’ve taken an art or film theory class in the past thirty years, somewhere amid viewings of Metropolis, 8 1/2, and/or Blade Runner you more than likely came across the concept of the “male gaze.” Diving Bell‘s clever conceit is to make that concept literal: For much of the film, the camera is Bauby’s POV. We are trapped in Jean-Do’s body for at least the first thirty minutes of the movie and experience everything from his perspective, from the grisly horror of having one’s eye sewn shut to the tantalizing triangle of exposed neck revealed by his lovely therapists. (At one point, around twenty minutes in, I turned to look at the audience, and everybody in the theater (also) had their head cocked uncomfortably to the left.) It is testament to Schnabel’s skill here that this effect, while assuredly feeling claustrophobic, never becomes oppressive to the point of being unwatchable. (There are some great, humorous touches to leaven things, such as when Jean-Do’s new winter cap ends up obscuring some of his/our view.) And, when the camera later forsakes the diving bell world of flesh and frailty for the butterfly realm of memory and imagination, we feel the same exhilarating sense of liberation Bauby describes in voiceover. By finally soaring out of the confines of Bauby’s body and roaming the world with abandon, Diving Bell offers a visceral reminder of the power of film, and of imagination.

There are moments I might quibble with in Diving Bell — The recap of his accident comes rather late in the movie, and feels slightly unnecessary there (I assume this is where it might have fallen in the book — I haven’t read it, although I more than likely will now.) And the film is undeniably slow at times. (But that’s by design, of course. Given the sheer amount of effort Bauby must expend to compose a single word, a faster-moving film would have been untrue and unfair to the proceedings.) Nevertheless, particularly for a film about something as nightmarish as locked-in syndrome, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is truly transporting. It reminds us that there’s a certain miraculous magic to the power of sight, and that experiencing even the daily mundanities of the world is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted.

Rats on the Titanic.

“‘There’s a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic,’ said Craig L. Fuller, executive vice president of Apco Worldwide, a lobbying and public relations firm, who was a White House official in the Reagan administration. ‘Corporate executives, trade associations and lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies.‘” As a Democratic presidency in 2008 looks increasingly likely, business lobbyists scramble for deals under Dubya. “Few industries have more cause for concern than drug companies, which have been a favorite target of Democrats. Republicans run the Washington offices of most major drug companies, and a former Republican House member, Billy Tauzin, is president of their trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.” Well, for them to be really concerned, we Dems have to show more backbone in the face of lobbyists than we have thus far in this Congress. And, as Simon Lazarus recently pointed out anew in The Prospect, no matter who wins in 2008, corporate lobbyists will still have the Roberts Court to back their play for some time to come.