“We’ve now got this huge fight over a sideshow,” Graham said during a meeting with Washington Post reporters and editors. “It’s always been a sideshow, but we sold it as the main event.” To the White House’s consternation, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) argues for sidelining Dubya’s private accounts in favor of a Social Security compromise. Well, let’s make sure they’re well off the table before we talk.
Good, Bad, and Sinbad.
With Neo, Constantine, and A Scanner Darkly all under his fanboy belt (we’ll put aside Johnny Mnemonic for now), Keanu embarks on The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad. Keanu in a period piece? Uh oh. At this point, though, I’m more worried about the director — Rob Cohen of XXX and The Fast and the Furious. Hardly a Harryhausen.
Running Ape, Running Water.
Coming Soon offers some choice updates on two long-awaited fanboy projects this afternoon. First, Naomi Watts finds it’s not easy seeing green as she films her New York scenes “with” Kong, and secondly, we have confirmation that Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is finally off the ground with these first two shots from the movie, starring Hugh Jackman (not Brad Pitt) and Rachel Weisz.
Blood Makes Noise.
The various covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due out July 16th, are released. (You’ve probably already figured it out, but that’s Dumbledore on the left.) Kinda staid, but ok…it’s what’s inside that counts.
The Most Dangerous Game.
John McCain, to many the face of campaign finance reform in Washington, struggles to avoid the appearance of impropriety regarding recent donations by Cablevision to the Reform Institute, an independent group with ambiguous ties to the Senator. After his awful performance prostrating himself before Dubya in 2004, I’ve run sour on the mythical maverick — to paraphrase Progressive era Senator George Norris (R-NB) speaking of his colleague William Borah (R-ID), McCain “shoots until he sees the whites of their eyes.” But, still, he’s campaign finance reform’s biggest blue chip, and he should know better than to endanger the cause with this type of shadiness…particularly with anti-reform forces gunning for him. What would be plausible deniability for anyone else seems rather implausible coming from McCain, given his place at the head of the movement.
Open War.
With the Social Security fight looming on the horizon, Dems and the GOP clash over ethics in the House and both abortion and the minimum wage in the Senate. (Salon‘s Tim Grieve exposed the fraudulence of the Santorum “alternative” minimum wage plan yesterday.) Speaking of Social Security, several prominent Dems — including James Carville, Stan Greenberg, and Harold Ickes — advise our side to produce an alternative reform plan to Dubya’s private accounts, and soon.
No Jacket Required.
Attentive observers of the sidebar might have noticed that I caught The Jacket over the weekend. If I don’t write about it now, I just might forget it completely. Amiable enough as a genre exercise, The Jacket is ultimately a fluffy, ephemeral B-flick. While containing elements of Jacob’s Ladder, 12 Monkeys, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it ends up falling somewhere between an average episode of Quantum Leap and any episode of Touched by an Angel.
The story doesn’t make much sense, even by the liberal standards one must accord time travel tales. But here goes: After befriending a small child and her mother (Kelly Lynch, looking haggard) along the side of the road, recent Gulf War vet Jack Starks (Adrien Brody, better than the material deserves) manages through a series of unfortunate events to get himself locked up in a mental institution somewhere in what looks to be Stephen King’s Maine. At this asylum, despite the concerns of the resident Good Doctor (Jennifer Jason Leigh, not HST), the staff Bad Doctor (Kris Kristofferson, grizzled-as-ever) insists on pumping patients like Brody and Daniel Craig (crazier here than Rhys Ifans was in Enduring Love) full of drugs and locking them in a morgue cabinet for hours at a time. During one of these sessions, Brody’s Starks finds he can visit “the future” (2007), where he encounters the girl he met by the side of the road…all grown up, Knightley-esque, and troubled to the core (you can tell she’s troubled, I presume, because her mouth is open all the time — Knightley pulls off a decent American accent, but that’s about it.)
Got all that? Well, if it doesn’t make sense on the page, it doesn’t do much better on screen, and there are several more narrative jags to go. I don’t want to give the ending away, because that’s all there really is here, but it has very little to do with the first half of the film, in either tone or content. What begins as a dark psychological thriller — the audience spends a lot of time as a mote in Brody’s eye while he writhes and whimpers in the dark — becomes a rather saccharine (and creepy, given Brody and Knightley’s first meeting) romance along the lines of Always. All in all, The Jacket looks menacing but turns out to be harmless — I guess it might make for a decent enough afternoon rental if you’re bored enough. (And here’s one last tip, Brody, next time you find you can travel back and forth through time, think Biff in Back to the Future II.)
Bolton’s got a screw loose.
“There’s no such thing as the United Nations…if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” So Dubya has picked John Bolton as our new UN ambassador and, guess what? Yep, he’s a right-wing freakshow. Said avowed UN enemy and former Sen. Jesse Helms (no, not yet) of Bolton: He’s “the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon.” Brilliant. (CLW link via BookNotes & Digby) Update: Slate‘s Fred Kaplan has more.
Sea of Sin.
The full trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City is now online. The jury’s still out on this one for me. On one hand, it looks as close to the Frank Miller source material as you can get. On the other, I’m not sure if it looks like a film, really…I could see this coming off like a bad community theater production after the first few minutes. Quite a cast, though.
Time to Face the Music.
“‘The large deficits and apparent inability of Republicans to constrain spending has made it impossible for sensible folks to advocate’ big tax cuts, said Kevin A. Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ‘Sooner or later. government has to pay for everything.'” In the face of rampant Dubya deficits, the GOP strains toward a moment of clarity and takes further tax cuts off the table for the time being. (Indeed, to the dismay of Grover Norquist, some Republican Senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-SC), are even considering raising taxes.) Reality bites, doesn’t it?