Author: KcM

Fall on Me. (It’s Gonna Fall.)

Since it’s a lazy Sunday morning, which I’m about to spend watching football with one eye while catching up on work, and since it occurred to me earlier this weekend that the trifecta of Fame, Pandorum, and Surrogates just has to be the lamest movie weekend we’ve seen in many moons, here’s the rest of the fall film schedule. If a movie is listed below without parentheses, it’s on my must-see list — Movies in paras are definitely-maybes. Also, some of these, particularly the ones in and around xmastime, may be limited release on the date given.

Out now: (The Baader-Meinhof Complex)

Oct. 2: A Serious Man. (Capitalism: A Love Story, The Invention of Lying, Whip It)

Oct. 9: (An Education, Zombieland)

Oct. 16: Where the Wild Things Are. (New York, I Love You)

Oct. 23: Amelia. (Astro Boy, Anti-Christ, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant)

Oct. 30: (Gentlemen Broncos)

Nov. 6: The Men Who Stare at Goats. (The Box)

Nov. 13: (2012, Pirate Radio)

Nov. 20: (Red Cliff)

Nov. 25: The Road. (Nine, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Me and Orson Welles)

Dec. 4: Up in the Air.

Dec. 11: The Lovely Bones. (Invictus)

Dec. 18: Avatar.

Dec. 25: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. (Sherlock Holmes)

Guinness for Strength.

“The company is celebrating the decision by Arthur Guinness, the son of a land steward, to sign a 9,000-year lease on a run-down brewery in Dublin’s St James’s Gate in 1759.” Granted, this whole “Arthur’s Day” business today has the strong whiff of a brazen marketing ploy. Still, I don’t need much of an excuse to raise a glass to my favorite drink (this side of Red Bull and the occasional Jamesons.)

So happy 250th, and Slainte to you and yours. May you all have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a road downhill all the way to home.

Prevent Defense.

“‘We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded,’ he said at the time. ‘They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.’” The Obama administration backs away from the new preventive detention law they’ve been floating in recent months. This is a clear victory for civil liberties advocates, but, as The Prospect‘s Adam Serwer makes plain, only a partial one: “‘It may be one of the better results we could hope for, but in reality indefinite detention continues,’ said Michael W. Macleod-Ball, Chief Legislative and Policy Council for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. ‘That’s antithetical to the American justice system.‘”

Indeed, the administration’s fallback position is one long held by Dubya — that the authority for preventive detention already exists in the post-Sept. 11 blank check written by Congress. That’s not change we can believe in. See also Glenn Greenwald today on this and recent developments on the state secrets front: “[T]he Obama administration has proven rather conclusively that tiny and cosmetic adjustments are the most it is willing to do. They love announcing new policies that cast the appearance of change but which have no effect whatsoever on presidential powers.“

In the NY Review of Books, meanwhile, Garry Wills takes the long view of all this: “[T]he momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch…Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941-2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.“

Wills concludes his essay on a worthy, if fatalistic, grace note that holds for a lot of ideals in this troubled age: “Nonetheless, some of us entertain a fondness for the quaint old Constitution. It may be too late to return to its ideals, but the effort should be made. As Cyrano said, ‘One doesn’t fight in the hope of winning’ (Mais on ne se bat pas dans l’espoir du succes).”

Lord of the Flies.

“The project would represent a chance for Cronenberg to return to a film that helped establish his career, but to do so in the effects age, using techniques that weren’t possible nearly a quarter-century ago.” Um, ok. Apparently caught in a feedback loop of some kind (I blame those pesky transporters), David Cronenberg looks to remake his remake of The Fly. No word on whether Jeff Goldblum or Geena Davis will be involved…Frankly, I’m not seeing the point.

Chandraayan’s Tears.

”This will create a considerable stir. It was wholly unexpected,’ said one scientist also involved in Chandrayaan-1. ‘People thought that Chandrayaan was just lagging behind the rest but the science that’s coming out, it’s going to be agenda-setting.’” Well, this definitely changes things if it holds up: India’s first mission to the moon discovers “evidence of large quantities of water on its surface(!)”

“Another lunar scientist familiar with the findings said: ‘This is the most exciting breakthrough in at least a decade. And it will probably change the face of lunar exploration for the next decade.’” NASA comments tomorrow, so be ready to hum a few bars…

Norsemen and Networks.

Casting for Kenneth Branagh’s take on Thor fills out, with Jaimie Alexander and Colm Feore joining the cast. Alexander plays Sif, while “Feore’s character is shrouded in mystery, though it is known to be a villain.” (That spells trouble to me — Be it stage or screen, Feore can be super-hammy.)

Whoever Feore is playing (Mephisto?), it’s not Loki — That would be Tom Hiddleston, appearing alongside “Papa Kirk” Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Natalie Portman as Jane Foster.

Meanwhile, the strange Aaron Sorkin-penned, David Fincher-directed Facebook movie, The Social Network, gets a cast in Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, and Doctor Who alum Andrew Garfield (also soon to appear in Gilliam’s Imaginarium.) “Eisenberg will play Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Timberlake will play Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who became Facebook’s founding president; and Andrew Garfield will play Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who fell out with Zuckerberg over money.“

Paean to Djarum.

“Anything that doesn’t taste like tobacco, other than menthol, is out. If you thought you could get around the ban by rolling your own cigs with flavored paper, sorry, that’s banned too.” The FDA ban on clove cigarettes goes into effect today. [Official statement.] Somewhere amid the stoops, corridors, and crannies of Adams House, the Djarum-stained ghost of my college self is now that much more disaffected.

The Trouble With Bazookas.

“The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to ‘any organization’ that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things. In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.“

D’oh! As it turns out, the GOP’s ridiculous act of political gamesmanship last week may well cause some severe blowback for government-as-usual in Washington. “Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) picked up on the legislative overreach and asked the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to sift through its database to find which contractors might be caught in the ACORN net. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both popped up quickly, with 20 fraud cases between them, and the longer list is a Who’s Who of weapons manufacturers and defense contractors.“

What this probably means is that the ACORN ban will be found unconstitutional sooner rather than later. After all, the spice must flow.

The Last Dog Diatribes.

“During the discussion, Clinton told his vice president that he was disappointed that Gore had not used him in the last ten days of the 2000 campaign in strategically significant states — Arkansas, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Missouri…Clinton insisted to Gore that he hadn’t cared about how Gore had referred to Clinton — and his personal scandal — during the campaign. Paraphasing this portion of the conversation, Branch writes that Clinton told Gore, ‘To gain votes, he would let Gore cut off his ear and mail it to reporter Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, the Monica Lewinsky expert.’”

In Mother Jones, David Corn previews some of the interesting tales disclosed in historian Taylor Branch’s forthcoming The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. “In 1997, after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an acerbic column about Clinton and golfer Tiger Woods — maintaining that the the two green-eyed hucksters deserved each other — Clinton told Branch, ‘She must live in mortal fear that there’s somebody in the world living a healthy and productive life.’“