“‘What about Kofi Annan?’ Bush asked Blair. ‘I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and everything else happens.’” Dubya and Tony Blair get caught (apparently) off-guard and on tape discussing the escalating crisis in the Middle East. “Bush said that he feels ‘like telling Kofi to get on the phone with [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and make something happen. We’re not blaming Israel, and we’re not blaming the Lebanese government.’” (A lot of news sources seem to be fronting Dubya’s use of the S-word — “See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.” — but, really, who gives a shit about his language?) “Bush also told Blair that he would be sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region soon. ‘She’s going,’ Bush said. ‘I think Condi’s going to go pretty soon.’” Update: Watch it online, just to get a sense of how boorish and out-of-his-depth our president seems on the world stage. (Exhibit B: Dubya’s ill-fated and cringeworth back-rub attempt.)
Category: World at Large
They Shall Overcome.
“‘I gave blood,’ Mr. Lewis said, his voice rising, as he stood alongside photographs of the clash. ‘Some of my colleagues gave their very lives.'” Publicly embarrassed by their recent lapse into old-school “massive resistance,” (and no doubt chagrined by their dismal poll numbers), the House GOP get their act together enough to pass the Voting Rights Act extension 390-33, after giving fringe right-wingers the chance to vote up or down on a few poison-pill amendments. (All failed, thanks to the Dems.) Still, several southern conservatives are not appeased: “One of the 33 holdouts was Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). ‘Some politicians in Washington wouldn’t dare vote against this bill because they’d be lambasted by the media and liberal interest groups.’“
From Beirut to Jerusalem.
More grim news in the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket department: So, obviously, there now seems to be a full-fledged firing war going on between Israel and Hezbollah, one which has already set back Lebanon years and threatens to bring in Syria and Iran as official combatants (a.k.a. Hezbollah‘s main backers) if it keeps up. For his part, other than having Bolton spike a UN resolution condemning Israel for “disproportionate use of force,” Dubya has been basically AWOL in terms of world leadership — in fact, he’s been more effusive about a German pig of late than he has a conflagration that threatens nothing less than full-scale war across the Middle East. Where have you gone Bill Clinton, our nation turns it lowly eyes to you?
Spoils Spoiled.
As war profits begin to dry up, the Army announces it is finally ending Halliburton’s exclusive deal to provide logistical support to US troops, in favor of a multi-company approach that will hopefully spur some degree of price competition. Good news, sure, but this newly rational stance against Cheney’s pet corporation is coming more than a little bit late in the game: “The decision on Halliburton comes as the U.S. contribution to Iraq’s reconstruction begins to wane, reducing opportunities for U.S. companies after nearly four years of massive payouts to the private sector….No contractor has received more money as a result of the invasion of Iraq than Halliburton, whose former chief executive is Vice President Cheney.“
The Death of Dubya Diplomacy.
“‘It’s difficult to think of many other times and many other presidencies when so many dangerous events were happening at once,’ says Wendy Sherman, a State Department official under President Clinton. ‘But there’s so much going on in every global hot spot because the Bush Administration really opened up Pandora’s box with little-to-no plans to support their actions.’” TIME Magazine composes a cover story obit for the Bush doctrine. Good riddance: “As it turns out, Iraq may prove to be not only the first but also the last laboratory for preventive war. Instead of deterring the rulers in Tehran and Pyongyang, the travails of the U.S. occupation may have emboldened those regimes in their quest to obtain nuclear weapons while constraining the U.S. military’s ability to deter them.“
Viva Italia!
A belated congrats to Italy on winning the 2006 World Cup. I was rooting for France, and a PK shootout is a truly terrible way to choose the Cup champion, but — after headbuttgate and the Baggio mishap in 1994 — Italy seemed karmically due. At any rate, see y’all in 2010. And, now, alas, we’ve hit the sports dead zone until September…perhaps it’s time to give MLS another go, what with Red Bull United now on the pitch… Update: Zidane speaks.
Abandon Ship.
[Argh! Shiver me timbers! I had just finished this post, when an accidental double-click conspired to send it to the depths of Davy Jones’ locker. Ok, let’s try this again…]
Given that it just enjoyed the biggest opening weekend ever and that #3 (World’s End) is already pretty much in the can, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what I thought of the relentlessly overstuffed Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest, which I caught last Friday with the rest of America. Still, for what it’s worth, I found Pirates 2 both remarkably disappointing — sadly, this film is yet another whiff in a summer full of them so far– and literally stunning, in that the movie spends two and a half hours remorselessly beating the audience senseless with spectacle, to the detriment of plot, character development, pauses for breath, or anything else you might think to expect in a 150-minute flick. (AICN’s best reviewer, Alexandra du Pont, hit the nail on the head on this one: “The movie is stimulating without being dramatic. Nothing is properly contextualized..”) What we have here with Dead Man’s Chest is a reasonably well-directed film brimming over with talented actors (Say what you will about Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, but Johnny Depp, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, and Stellan Skarsgard? That’s a Murderer’s Row), expertly crafted special effects, striking cinematography, and — yes — rousing action sequences, and for some reason it all adds up to so much less than the sum of its parts. Pirates’ magic, this is.
So, what’s the gist of Dead Man’s Chest, besides all the furious running back and forth, and then back again? Well, that’s most of it. Somewhere in there, a malevolent magnate of the East India Company (Tom Hollander, doing a Peter Sarsgaard impression) has decided to break up the wedding of Will Turner (Bloom, bland and pretty) and Elizabeth Swann (Knightley, pretty and bland), in order to send them out to locate the formidable Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp, even stranger than last time) and — more importantly — his magic compass. Sparrow, meanwhile, has run afoul of the unfortunately not-so-mythical Davy Jones (Nighy, by way of Serkis), the squid-headed commandant of a ship of lost souls — among them Bootstrap Bill Turner (Skarsgard), Will’s dad — that he has retrieved from shipwrecks (and who are now turning into sea creatures as a side-effect of their Faustian bargain.)
With the board thus set, the pieces move…and boy, do they. Jack and Will spend a good forty-five minutes running to and from natives, Elizabeth stows away on a “haunted” ship, Will serves some time with dear old Dad, the Kraken — a ginormous creature of the deep — attacks not once, not twice, but three times (“ah ah ah!), everyone stops in for a few voodoo sessions and/or swordfighting, and all the characters from the first movie drop by every once in a while for a pop-in or three. This all may sound fun, but trust me — the frenetic result goes from intriguing to exhausting to mind-numbing in surprisingly short order. After a smile on my face for the first quarter-hour, I was starting to check out after forty-five minutes, trying to will my watch faster after seventy-five, and was ready to cut a deal with Davy Jones myself by minute one-hundred.
I liked the first Pirates, although I also said that it felt twenty minutes too long, Well, for almost its entire running time, Dead Man’s Chest basically feels like being trapped in that extra twenty minutes. Still, I have to admit, it also feels like something of a watershed. Perhaps the best way to look at Pirates 2 is as [a] an homage to the action-packed, plot-irrelevant, somewhat nonsensical pirate serials of yesteryear and [b] a sequel to a movie based on a Disney theme park ride — really, how good could it have been? And yet, in another way this really does feel like the type of flick film historians of the future might look back to as a signpost in the devolution of American film — as the moment when the summer blockbuster ethos, Krakenlike, effectively swallowed the moviemaking process whole. (There may be something about the increasing caffeinization and decreasing attention span of America in there somewhere too.) I mean, when reasonably talented people get together to spend a whopping $225 million and hundreds of man-hours to make a “movie” like this, which, as DuPont also suggested in her review, is effectively a two and a half hour version of Indy running from the big ball in Raiders — and then are so amply rewarded for it, to boot — one has to fear for the quality of future film offerings. Can we turn this ship around, or are we just going to have to watch it run aground?
Dark Lord of Flatbush.
“In buildings like 712 Nostrand Avenue, residents, many of whom are small children or seniors, go for months at a time without heat or hot water in a building that is little more than a sieve, with holes in the walls, dislodged window frames, and the wraith of a roof door off its hinges.” Friend, poker buddy, and journalist Olaf Bertram-Nothnagel evalutes the sordid career of Olufemi Falade as part of the Village Voice‘s Ten Worst Landlords series.
Failure to Launch.
“George Bush’s luck hasn’t run out just yet. North Korea’s Fourth of July missile fizzle is the biggest diplomatic break that the president has caught all term — and the biggest setback (‘catastrophe’ wouldn’t be too strong a word) that his most-loathed nemesis, Kim Jong-il, has suffered in years.” Slate‘s Fred Kaplan sees good news for the US in yesterday’s North Korean rocket launch, as, in effect, “Kim Jong-il shook the dice and rolled craps.” Still, “[w]hat happens next is worthy of nail-biting.”
Sylvia Path.
“Fonteyn could not jump the way ABT’s Gillian Murphy did on Monday night…” My sister Gill (recently interviewed here) gets a pair of nice reviews today for her recent turn in ABT’s Sylvia. ‘Gillian Murphy, who danced the title role on Monday, was born to play Sylvia…even early in her career she had a gift for ornamenting bold, bravura dancing with filigree musical phrasing, and that gift serves her well.”