SUCH UNSPEAKABLE HORROR

Oh, you could spend your money on worthwhile DVDs today, like Lindsay Anderson's If... or Dusan Makavejev's WR--Mysteries Of The Orgasm. You could pick up a copy of Panic In Needle Park or a freshly-scrubbed reissue of Don Bluth's only really good movie The Secret Of NIMH.

Or you could watch Mame.

There are bad movies and there are bad movies. Then there are movies in which absolutely nothing works; the most basic elements needed to form a coherent and involving narrative experience are simply absent. 1974's Mame is one of those movies.

Many of the worst movies ever made are musicals. There's the excrutiating 1930 El Brendel vehicle Just Imagine, which will literally make your skin crawl, or 1973's notorious Lost Horizon, or Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees (plus the song stylings of Donald Pleasance!) in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...the list could go on.

But as horrible as they were, they still weren't this:



Where to begin?

With a score by Jerry Herman, based on Dennis Patrick's Auntie Mame, you would think this would be a camp classic without even trying. But as this clip shows, Gene Saks' direction seems to consist of simply turning on the camera and hoping for the best, leaving the editor to do his best with what seem to be random fragments of film.

Then again, Saks probably had his hands full dealing with the massive ego of his star. Lucille Ball was--how to put this kindly?--well past her prime when she made this, and even though Mame is supposed to be a blowsy old broad, Ball's closeups have enough Vaseline on the lens to hide Yoda's wrinkles, yet it fails to do her any good. And of course, there's her singing voice, Neville Brand channelling Marni Nixon.

Hollywood can be cruel to its aging stars, but in this case, Ball had no one to blame but herself. She fought for the lead, even invested in the damned thing to guarantee she'd get her way, and had veto power over the rest of the cast. Mame stands as a sort of ultimate cautionary tale on the perils of fame, a crumbling cinematic mansion inhabited by a real-life Norma Desmond.

AND THEN MY HEAD EXPLODES

Okay, I'm reading The New York Times this morning, and there's a story about John Edwards carving out his place as the candidate of the left, because while campaigning in Iowa, a strongly liberal state, that's the winning strategy.

Edwards as a leftist? Only by comparison, as in "Albert Speer was the most sympathetic Nazi."

Iowa is liberal? Iowa City, certain parts of Des Moines, but, you know, we helped reelect Bush here. By the reckoning of Big Media, that officially made us a Red State.

The Times also has a story today detailing the collapse of John McCain's campaign. There are various factors--swallowing his rhetoric whole, The Times claims most of them are related to his "maverick" tendencies--but what this story doesn't mention is, he's running third in Iowa, behind Giuliani and the front-runner, Mitt Romney.

That's right, Mitt Romney.

So Iowa is a supposedly liberal state, but the slightly-more-moderate Republican candidates McCain and Giuliani are lagging behind Romney, whose social views are so far to the right they actually make Our Beloved President appear enlightened.

And as for Edwards, I have yet to hear him say or do anything marking him as anything other than a canny politician, an operator who will say exactly what he thinks the people listening want to hear.

But, hey, who am I to argue with The New York Times? They're never wrong.

THIS HONKYTONK HEAVEN REALLY MAKES YOU FEEL LIKE HELL

No sneering, elitist assumptions from me: I headed down to Wal-Mart to pick up a copy of Joe Dante's feminist horror film The Screwfly Solution, certain I could find it at a decent price.

Most lefties eschew Wal-Mart, both because of their primitive labor practices (true, but hardly unique among retailers) and their perceived blandness; this is the store that proudly claims it won't sell music with a parental notice sticker on it, yet I've bought such off-kilter DVDs as Larry Cohen's Perfect Strangers and Bertolucci's The Conformist there, to say nothing of Dante's strongly anti-Bush satire Homecoming, so it's not as though the chain routinely engages in censorious behavior.

I suspect the reason many people avoid Wal-Mart is simply because it conjures up visions of lower-middle class hell, a playground for Welfare Moms and Nascar Dads, and though liberals claim to support the working stiffs, they sure as hell don't want to hang out with them.

Ordinarily, I hate this attitude; after all, I'm a working stiff. Besides, my experiences in Wal-Mart suggest a broad range of people shop there, from skater dudes to Stepford Wives. I tune them all out and get what I'm there for.

Today, that wasn't an option. Just walking through the parking lot was an overdose of right-wing bumpr sticker wisdom (I lost count of how many THESE COLORS DON'T RUN stickers I saw on foreign-model cars; apparently the pro-Bush crowd lacks any sense of irony), and inside was even worse, Larry The Cable Guy posters and a special display full of copies of Bill Engvall's autobiography. The DVD section had shrunk considerably since my last visit, and though they had a copy of the Dante picture, the whole electronics section was soundtracked by Toby Keith's latest.

On my way out, I passed a young couple clad in blue jeans and t-shirts. The woman, with tacky big hair, pushed a baby carriage and the man, paunchy and slightly balding, pushed a shopping cart. Their conversation seemed slightly agitated as I approached them, and as I walked by I heard her say, and I swear I'm not making this up, "I just don't want that no-good brother of yours stoppin' by and drinkin' all the beer."

From the almost ostentatiously dropped final g's to the reference to beer drinking, it seemed like a parody of redneck patois. The only way it could have sounded more like a line from Mama's Family is if she'd said "no account" instead of "no good". My God, I thought, these people would find Joe Don Baker movies too challenging.

For a second I questioned whether I was indulging in the smug stereotyping I find so disagreeable among many so-called progressives. Then I realized no, these people were stereotying themselves. If you're dumb enough to say something like that in public, you deserve all the scorn you can get.

BLUE ENTRANCE

Driving to work at 6 AM, slowing down to avoid the homeless people gathered in masses next to the Quik Trip, speeding up to pass street sweepers, just wanting to get there, to start this day and be done with it. Parking in the hospital's employee parking lot, entering the West Entrance, which in the hospital's color-coded system of entryways is dubbed the Blue Entrance.

The day proceeds in the usual way, endlessly walking corridors, pretending not to notice people wandering around in glassy-eyed states, families gathered in mourning, the wide, fearful eyes of paper-skinned old people wheeled on gurneys, their fears in no way aided by the endless, mindless chatter of orderlies. After one day here, all of this became so easy to ignore.

But down in the cage where these things are done, extracting blood from a recliner, reality intrudes. The usual precautions are taken, of course, gloves and a gown, but this chair hadn't been tagged, so presumably this blood is not tainted.

There's just...so much of it, in the seat, on the back, on the foot rest. This person, whoever he or she may have been, was not just brought in, fresh from an accident or a shooting. This person sat comfortably in a recliner, out of bed, feeling better, when all of this blood came from somewhere.

What became of this phantom bleeder? Is he okay? Did she die?

The extractor does its job well. Soon, the only trace of blood is a stubborn dark line along the edge of the seat, the only reminder this had ever happened.

SOMEWHERE THERE'S MUSIC

Alright, look, I overslept, and had to watch last night's Studio 60 before I got to the computer (yeah, it sucks, but I'm gonna ride it out to the bitter end, dammit), so no time for coherent gathering of thoughts today.

So let's just enjoy some music, shall we?

Here's The Jam with In The City:



Is there anybody who doesn't love Emmylou Harris' voice? It's one of the world's most perfect instruments, as demonstrated by this Texas Swing version of How High The Moon:



Now for something, well, completely different--Terry Jones introducing The Bonzo Dog Band--strangely enough, one of my mother's favorites:



And because it just wouldn't be me if I didn't include something depressing, here's Ute Lemper performing what might actually be Kurt Weill's saddest song ever, which is saying quite a bit:



Next time I'll write actual words. Or not, depending.

IT'S ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

Long after the rest of the world has moved on to new sensations, Paul's enthusiasm for Spider-man 3 remains undiminished. He's only seen it twice, yet he seems to have memorized every frame, and continues to ask me for clarification on certain plot points and character motivations.

Providing answers takes a bit of doing, since this movie is full of idiotic plot twists and illogical character motivations. (Both of which are on display in the very first scene, as we're confronted by the fact that our heroine has been given the lead in a Broadway musical even though she can't sing! Later, she's abruptly fired from the show, as if no one noticed during rehearsals that she couldn't sing, which leads her to...oh, never mind.) But Paul is able to rationalize everything, no matter how ridiculous. Isn't it kind of silly that Peter Parker's nemesis, Eddie Brock, just happens to show up at the very same church where Peter just happens to be pulling alien goo off himself? But he has to show up there, Paul says, because how else could he get the goo on himself and turn into Venom?

Okay, but what about all those scenes with Aunt May? They were pretty boring, weren't they? Yeah, he admits, they were. But you always have talking scenes in between the action scenes.

(He's right about that one. When I was a kid, I realized that you needed boring exposition scenes scattered throughout Where Eagles Dare, because if the whole movie had been nothing but Clint Eastwood machine gunning Nazis it would have been too much of a good thing. You need a little down time.)

Paul thinks Spider-man 3 is the best in the series, and from a seven-year-old's perspective, he's probably right. In fact, with it's irrational, herky-jerky plot and overdose of action, it almost seems to have been made by seven-year-olds. And though that may irritate those of us who care about silly things like plot and characterization, to a little kid, that makes it the coolest thing in the world.

PAPER SHIPS AND PAINTED FACES

IRAQIS FAIL TO MEET U.S. BENCHMARKS, says the headline in The Times. The Democrats fail to force a vote of no Confidence on Alberto Gonzales. And in Palestine...well, you don't even want to know.

Bad things happening in the world, yet all I can think about is the fact that I missed seeing Richard Thompson last night in Iowa City. Does that mean I'm going to cheat and pad this post out with clips? What do you think?



That was The Ghost Of You Walks, one of Thompson's very best. His amazing songwriting abilities are topped only by his astonishing guitar playing. If he's not the world's greatest guitarist--well, actually, he is:



Thompson's songs often seem born of despair, the laments of drunkards and delusionals, or epic chronicles of love gone wrong. But he writes pretty songs, too, sweet love songs like A Heart Needs A Home, performed here with his ex-wife Linda:



A beautiful song of devotion. Of course, the two of them went through a particularly nasty divorce, but that's another story...

GOOD SLEAZE

Again, lots of good new DVDs today. A box set of five Yasujiro Ozu films, Joe Dante's The Screwfly Solution, the third season of Deadwood--all worthwhile.

The release I'm most excited about is the long-delayed DVD debut of John Frankenheimer's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-Up. Produced by the notorious Golan-Globus organization in 1986 (a weird period in their history, when they funded bad ideas by esteemed auteurs--Altman's Fool For Love, Godard's King Lear--amidst the usual Bronson and Norris vehicles), this sank without a trace in its theatrical run. It should have reignited the careers of everyone involved.

Roy Scheider stars as a variation of the action-movie lead he'd done plenty, only this time his character is not quite so pure. He's a successful businessman caught up in a blackmail scheme which threatens the career of his well-connected wife, nicely played by Ann-Margret. The blackmailers are unforgettably portrayed by John Glover, Robert Trebor and Clarence Williams III, and they are possibly the scariest villains in movie history. Glover is the totally unpredictable ringleader, Trebor is a weak, pathetic (and therefore dangerous) loser, and Williams will kill someone just because he can. These guys are great.

In a perfect world, 52 Pick-Up would have been a springboard to bigger things for them. They all still work, of course--Glover is a Tony-winning stage actor, and was a ubiquitous on-screen presence in the early nineties, while Trebor and Williams find steady employment in small parts unworthy of their talent. For that matter, this was one of the last starring roles for Scheider, and the fact that he was working for Golan-Globus shows his career as a lead was coming to an end. In his case, that was probably not a bad thing; it freed him up to become the character actor he was always meant to be. (See his unforgettable Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch.)

John Frankenheimer's career was on the skids in '86, too, and even though 52 Pick-Up is easily one of his best films, it did his career no favors. He continued to languish in obscurity, cranking out the likes of the awful Don Johnson thriller Dead-Bang until a series of respectable cable TV movies brought him back to prominence. And as for Elmore Leonard, who gets a screenwriting credit here, even though he became a Hollywood darling in the late nineties (with fine adaptations of his work like Jackie Brown and Out Of Sight), 52 Pick-Up remains the very best filmed version of his work.

It's not perfect by any means--it has a cheesy synth score, and it looks like a product of the mid-eighties, with truly hideous wardrobe and hair. And even on its own terms, the third act is relatively weak, a flaw it shares with Leonard's book. But it's endearingly nasty, and cold-blooded to its very heart. The best thing about 52 Pick-Up is, I don't think it even has a heart.

SING WITH ME SOMEHOW

My new job sees me arriving at work shortly after 6 AM, and my interior clock adjusted itself accordingly. Most times I wake up at 3 in the morning, bleary-eyed but unable to sleep, looking for something to do.

This morning I filled the gap by watching an episode from a Columbo set I'd bought recently. These were TV movies from the late eighties, not part of the original series. I'd never seen any of these episodes before, though they used to run constantly on various cable channels, where my mother had seen them over and over, always asking me why I'd never watched them.

Maybe because it was so early, my brain still slept. After watching, I made a mental note to call Mom later to discuss this particular episode. Then I got dressed, brushed my teeth, blissfully unaware. Then reality dawned: Of course I can't call Mom.

Ever again.

It's been a long time, a long time, since this has happened, since some wires got crossed somewhere, causing me to forget this most salient fact: Mom is dead.

And for some reason, in a way it hasn't in this terrible year and a half without her, her absence finally struck me, and a profound sense of loneliness battered me.

It persisted all day. Weekends are pretty slow at the hospital where I work, at least in my department, and I was all by myself today, with nothing to do all morning.

Which was good, in a way, because it gave me time to escape to the storage area on the top floor, a dark, lonely, windowless place. Surrounded by obsolete equipment and broken beds, the tears finally arrived, my body wracked by uncontrollable sobs, the reaction I've managed to avoid until now.

It's easy, in a way, to come to terms with our own mortality; we can accept what happens to us. It's the others, the people we love who are suddenly gone, upending our lives forever, this is what hurts the most. It reminds us how little control we have over our lives, that we are, above all, helpless.

In honor of this mood, here's k d lang performing a beautiful version of a great Neil Young song:

A FEW OF YOUR BUDDIES, THEY SURE LOOK SHADY

When I first heard the news that the Bush administration officially decided against renominating Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, I thought, Jesus, had he said something truthful I didn't know about?

Pace, after all, is the guy who claimed homosexuality "immoral", who took Rumsfeld's advice at every turn, who recently fired off a letter begging clemency for poor Scooter Libby. What could this guy have done to piss off the White House? He's been a Loyal Bushie all the way.

And that, apparently, was the problem. For Pace to be reappointed, he'd have to meet with congressional approval. Which would mean a confirmation hearing. Which would mean questions.

Which is further proof the Bushinistas would rather sacrifice one of their own than allow their decision-making processes be examined in the cold light of day. This, combined with recent revelations that the administration tried to strong-arm an ailing John Ashcroft into signing off on their domestic spying program, would lead any sensible opposition party, or even Republicans with a smidgen of decency in their souls, to start talking impeachment.

Oh, but elections are coming up, and it wouldn't be wise to rock the boat. Who cares about the nation's greater good when there are votes to be had?

THEY HEARD THE CALL AND THEY WROTE IT ON THE WALL

I grew up in the seventies, so I tend to think of it as a Golden Age in the popular arts. In music, you had Steely Dan, Sparks, Warren Zevon, The Ramones, Parliament-Funkadelic. TV brought us The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Columbo and The Rockford Files. And as for movies, it was a time when Hollywood routinely produced small, personal films, and even things that were meant to be Big Dumb Entertainment became something more--like The Godfather and Jaws.

Then there was this:




This would be William Shatner on Dinah Shore's old talk show. He does this sort of thing now as a joke, but back then, he was painfully serious.

People didn't really get irony in the seventies. The old guard floundered, trying to be hip, missing by a mile:



The mannish, sexually ambiguous Bea Arthur and closeted gay Rock Hudson singing about drug use--the seventies in a nutshell.

Hudson, with his manly man appearance, may have convinced many, but what was the thinking here?



Paul Lynde with a wife and kids? In retrospect, one of the most painful aspects of the seventies was how the mainstream neutered the gay revolution. Paul Lynde could be allowed on TV if he pretended to be straight, and even The Village People were presented as asexual--they could sing about staying at the YMCA, but to get a gig on one of Dick Clark's shows, they couldn't suggest they'd engage in any, you know, inappropriate activities.

The early seventies saw the emergence of hardcore porn, but as the decade wore on, it got sublimated into the mainstream:



You've got to feel sorry for poor Karen Grassle there, sanwiched between the awesome mounds of Adrienne Barbeau and, in Howard Cosell's words, Lustrous Lynda Carter. Battle Of The Network Stars was a seriously weird show, full of down time in between shots of wet celebrity tits. Which, let's face it, was the only reason anybody watched.

I was in Junior High when this happened, one of the defining events of the decade:



People pledging unswerving fealty to a fanatical leader? That sort of thing could never happen now.

MADNESS TAKES ITS TOLL

I had the day off, and today was the final day William Friedkin's new film Bug would be playing in Des Moines theaters. I hadn't seen it because, frankly, going to the movie is a pain in the ass these days. Also, I hadn't had time. And, let's be honest, Friedkin's recent track record didn't inspire much confidence.

Commercial hackery like Jade, Rules Of Engagement and The Hunted seemed like a big comedown for the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, as the career he might have had dwindled away. Some critics dismissed Friedkin all along as a commercial hack, and his hopscotching through early projects--a Sonny And Cher vehicle (Good Times), several stage adaptations (including a fine version of The Boys In The Band) and a blatantly audience-friendly comedy (The Night They Raided Minsky's) prevented him from receiving full auteurist cred.

Yet purely as a technician, Friedkin was as good as any of the New Hollywood directors of the late sixties and seventies. His let-the-camera-follow-the-actor approach in The French Connection is still the preferred method for most cop shows, on the big screen or small, and The Exorcist is simply a masterpiece, possibly the finest horror film ever made. He made several underrated pictures while his name still had some cachet in Hollywood (Sorcerer, The Brinks Job, Cruising), and while he never allowed himself to get pigeonholed, his recent work (and by "recent" I mean from the early eighties on) has seemed desperate, forced, the work of an aging superstar nobody cares about anymore, like a Crosby, Stills And Nash reunion tour.

But now comes Bug, a commercial also-ran thrown away by its distributor--and also some kind of crazy work of genius. Much of the credit can go to writer Tracy Letts, adapting his own play. Still, it's Friedkin who takes a premise that might seem foolish when blown up on the big screen--two characters whose descent into madness is presented in literal, potentially over-the-top fashion--and makes it terrifyingly real, and astonishingly poignant.

Not that he does it alone. Ashley Judd is absolutely heartbreaking as an aimless, slightly past her prime woman in the middle of nowhere, haunted by a child gone missing and a husband just out of prison, and so desperate for some sort of human connection she falls helplessly in love with a withdrawn stranger she barely even knows. He's played by Michael Shannon, who starred in Letts' original play, but nothing in his performance feels stagy. He and Judd give abolutely fearless performances, that could almost go over the top, if not for the conviction they bring them, and for Friedkin's sympathy to them and the world they create. We understand how these people got this way, and we hope, helplessly, that they will pull back from their delusions--but we understand, too, that they will find fullfillment in the very thing that will destroy them.

MY COUNTRY IS ME AND MY FAMILY

So much good stuff on DVD today! Items that would be the highlights most weeks seem almost like also-rans.

For instance, there's a new Special Edition of the endearingly stupid, wildly entertaining sixties science fiction epic Fantastic Voyage, and some classic World War II dramas like Twelve O'Clock High and Air Force. Entertaining stuff--but save your money.

There's also a new boxed set featuring five Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedies. Even the least interesting effort here (that would be Pardners) has some laugh-out-loud moments, but the big news in this set is the first letterboxed issues of Frank Tashlin's Artists And Models and Hollywood Or Bust. Tashlin paradoxically used Lewis as more of a cartoon character than he'd ever been on screen before, while at the same time giving him more of a character to play. And he handled Martin beautifully--Tashlin really appreciated these guys' individual talents. If you're even a casual fan of these two performers, seperately or individually, this set is an essential purchase.

But if your budget only allows so many purchases, forget it, because you really shoud support Classic Media's ongoing reissue of Godzilla movies, which today issues great new editions of Ghidora The Three Headed Monster and Invasion Of Astro Monster, the movie previously known in the U.S. as Monster Zero. These issues are the first time the original Japanese versions of these pictures have been released in America, and they're two of the most endearing efforts from Toho's monster mill--Ghidora features one of the most awesomely designed of all movie monsters, and Astro Monster features Godzilla's Happy Dance, which I've been known to break into at the drop of a hat.

Yet these releases pale before today's most awesome event, as MGM finally--finally--releases the long awaited Sergio Leone Collection, four of the greatest movies ever made by one of cinema's true visionaries. The first three titles here--A Fistful Of Dollars; For A few Dollars More; The Good, The Bad And the Ugly--showcase Leone's growing mastery of the medium, and give a thrilling look at Clint Eastwood's invention of his own star image.

But it's the fourth title here, the long unavailable Duck, You Sucker, that's a real revelation. Leone, the virtual father of the spaghetti western, had long been criticized by some of his contemporaries for avoiding politics, as directors like Sergio Sollima and Giulio Questi injected stongly leftist themes into western epics. Leone responded with an epic tale of revolution, but however commited his politics, ultimately Leone cared more about people than slogans. This tale of the evolving relationship between a Mexican peasant and an Irsh revolutionary (James Coburn, superb) is both raucously funny and emotionally devastating. Leone's eye was always incredible, but this movie shows his heart was just as strong.

PROTECTION

According to a military assessment leaked to The New York Times, our commanders in Iraq are admitting that the troop surge isn't exactly paying off. In fact, they estimate only one third of Baghdad is under U.S. control. One third of one city. The Times quotes one unnamed senior officer as saying, "We were way too optimistic."

No shit.

The thing is, though, I, with no data available to me beyond what any schlub can pull up on the internet, could have predicted this. Most people could, in fact, which is why the vast majority of American citizens have turned against this thing. Things keep getting worse, and all the promises made by the Bushinistas ring more hollow every day. Even here in the heartland, people who once supported Our Beloved President are starting to turn. Nobody wants to think their sons and daughters are dying in vain, but it's getting harder to believe anything else.

And speaking of deaths, fifteen U.S. troops wee killed in the first three days of the month. That's fifteen people who should have been sent home a long time ago. Remember them the next time a politician of any stripe claims to support the troops.

WHAT? THIS IS MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL?

Okay, it's official: The Yankees are the most hapless, inept and infuriating team in baseball.

While they're not technically at the bottom of the AL standings (Thank you, Kansas City!), they're easily the worst team in either league with a bazillion dollar payroll. And what are the players doing for their money?

A-Rod, of course, is cheating on his wife, and arguably, cheating on the field. Derek Jeter fields like a seven-year-old. Kei Igawa, Bobby Abreu, Johnny Damon--sucks, sucks and sucks. With his best pitchers on the disabled list (which seems to happen to this team a lot), Joe Torre has been starting guys who simply aren't up to it.

Now Roger Clemens, who was supposed to start Monday night, has been sidelined with a groin injury (the first story I read about that described Clemens' groin as "squishy"--ewwww!), to be replaced by Igawa, who, as previously mentioned, sucks.

But what's the point of handing Clemens a twenty-four million dollar contract in the first place? Even if he pitched a shut-out--a big if--that's only half the game. This has long been the problem in the Steinbrenner era, throwing money at superstar individuals (like A-Rod) while failing to build a team that functions as a team. The decision to bring in Clemens, which felt like a disaster from the get-go, is the first major bone-headed decision since Steinbrenner ceded at least some of his power to his sons, which suggests things might only get worse.

As for the players themselves, I don't necessarily think it's true, as many members of Yankee Nation apparently do, that team members are happy to just collect their extravagant paychecks and half-ass the job. (And no, I haven't just spent an hour and a half plowing through angry comments at the Yankees blog at The New York Times. Why do you ask?) Jeter, for one, seems to be genuinely angry at himself, but the more he resolves to do better, the worse he gets. The whole team is in that mode--they feel the embarrassment, and are powerless to stop it.

IT'S ALWAYS WORSE WITH MUSIC

So I'm messing around on YouTube, just killing time, as i do with alarming frequency, when I discovered this:



Yes, kids, that was Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet and Joel Grey showing their utter contempt for rock music by camping up a Beatles classic. I must wash my eyes, to clense them of the memory of seeing this. Unclean! Unclean!

It reminds me how many of the worst things ever conceived by human beings are made so much worse by setting them to music. For instance, while it was merely a bad idea to let Lynda Carter do anything other than run around in star-spangled tights, it doesn't become a REALLY bad idea until you let her sing:



Seriously--what the hell were they thinking?

Similarly, anybody could've guessed that a Star Wars-based holiday TV special was a bad idea--and, Lord, was it ever--but it didn't slip the bonds of sanity until it became a song-filled extravaganza. Princess Leia, bring it home!



Ye Gods, that was awful.

But not the worst thing ever:



I saw this with my mom several months after its initial run. Why we even went, I'm not sure, but after about ten minutes, Mom started hurling insults--loudly--at the screen, until finally the movie's stupidity overwhelmed her and she bashed herself in the forehead.

After that, Mom met everything awful in the world with the Xanadu Standard: Is it bad enough to make me hit myself in the forehead? As she herself admitted, getting cancer was bad...but not as bad as Xanadu.

IT WRITHES--IT WRITHES!--WITH MORTAL PANGS

Since The Democrats so bravely caved in to Our Beloved President over Iraq, here are a few things that have happened:

1) In Northern Iraq, violence between Kurds and Sunnis has intensified. This has nothing to do with the insurgency; this is an age-old grudge match, the kind of thing that should have been predicted by any occupying force. Needless to say, the U.S. didn't see this coming, and lacks any plan for dealing with it. Would we expect anything else? Even with a troop increase, they can't even keep things quiet in the Green Zone.

2) Cindy Sheehan announced she no longer wants to be considered the face of the anti-war movement. She came to this decision after realizing too many anti-war liberals were only fair-weather friends. Once she started criticizing the Democrats, her former allies turned on her, and she realized her own personal war, the war against the war, was already lost.

3) Ten soldiers died on Memorial Day.

All this, while Clinton, Obama, Edwards and the rest continue to crisscross the country, assuring us things will magically be better once they're in charge. People are dying, and they treat it as a PR opportunity.

GOD WILLING, WE'LL ALL MEET AGAIN IN SPACEBALLS 2: THE SEARCH FOR MORE MONEY

Ordinarily, what with this being a Tuesday and all, I'd do a rundown on worthwhile new DVDs. But since there is virtually nothing of even the slightest interest being released today--the most notable is a Katherine Hepburn boxed set highlighted by Undercurrent, a Vincente Minnelli picture that not even the most hardcore cultist cares about--I'll find something else to talk about.

Specifically, Pirates Of the Caribbean: At World's End. Paul had been looking forward to this--a surprise, since he seemed mostly bored with the previous entry, Dead Man's Chest--so off we went, looking for the type of action and derring-do a seven-year-old craves.

Almost three hours later, we were still looking. For a movie boasting the Disney brand name, this is a long, grim haul. It opens with a mass hanging--we actually see a pile of bodies straight out of Abu Ghraib photos, and one of the hangees is a boy of ten or so--and plods on from there, with endless expository dialogue meant to explain character arcs and plot points no one could possibly care about. (At least it has the wit to acknowledge this; at one point, Geoffrey Rush's character greets a particularly mind-numbing development by growling, "Aye, strains credulity, I grant ye." On the other hand, if the screenwriters were this aware of their tortured plot, why didn't they just start over?)

As Paul pointed out afterwards, "They didn't even have a swordfight until the end." Exactly. The bare minimum you could expect from a pirate movie is swordplay and action (and okay, maybe a bit of romance), but this movie just grinds along, like it's trying to invent its own pop mythology in the Star Wars tradition, but forgetting to include any real elements of entertainment. The action scenes--what few we get--are so poorly staged by director Gore Verbinsky that you can't really tell what's going on; they're all noise and spectacle, but no coherence. (If nothing else, this made me appreciate Sam Raimi's overbusy but cleanly-structured Spider-man 3.)

Whatever entertainment value this actually has comes exclusively from the actors. Johnny Depp is funny, but oddly misused--he feels like a guest star in his own movie. Geoffrey Rush probably gets the most screen time, which is all to the good, as he's the only person who seems to be enjoying himself. Jonathan Pryce, Bill Nighy and Stellan Skarsgard attempt to find actual human moments amidst the bombast, and almost succeed.

Regardless, Paul claimed he enjoyed it. Of course, when you're seven and you've psyched yourself up to enjoy something, you'll tell yourself you liked it even if you're secretly disappointed. But he was squirming in his seat a lot, and mostly seemed bored.

After experiencing this noisy, joyless machine, I wanted to rent the great Burt Lancaster vehicle The Crimson Pirate, to show Paul what a real swashbuckler is like. But the video store we stopped by was showing Mel Brooks' Spaceballs on their in-house system, and he seemed very interested. So we came home and watched it, and though he thankfully didn't get all the gags ("Okay, Doctor, why don't you go back to the golf course and work on your putz?"), he laughed out loud at Brooks' endless assaults on movie marketing. After all, he'd just been a victim of it.

ALL THE LIVING, AND THE DEAD

For Memorial Day, a toast to those who are gone.

In memory of my dad, I thought about posting a clip of Harry Caray singing Take Me Out To The Ballgame, but common sense prevailed. Dad's tastes--how to put this?--often didn't match up with my own (or anybody else's in the family, for that matter), but he did like Johnny Cash:



In memory of my brother Keith, who first exposed me to the work of Peter Sellers, and in so doing introduced me to one of my cultural heroes:



In memory of Mom--well, this one is almost too easy, but I know wherever she is, this clip is making her cry:



Of course, to remember Mom, one clip just isn't enough. So here we have the drum solo--three whole minutes of it!--from Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Two years ago this very weekend, Mom and I went to see an oldies knockoff band just because one member of it had been in one incarnation of Iron Butterfly. When we got to the drum solo, Mom stood up, leaning on her walker, pumping her fist in the air. The fact that, in this clip, original drummer Ron Bushy resembles Ted Neeley from another Mom favorite, Jesus Christ Superstar, only confirms for me that it's her world, and the rest of us just live here. Anyway, take it away, Ron:



And in memory of so many others, here is Phil Ochs, so earnest, so passionate, so convinced music could change the world. When he realized it couldn't, he hanged himself. But surely no songwriter ever wrote truer words:



Requiescat in pace, folks.

MUSIC BREAK

More of this sort of thing later--I'm learning how to embed video, folks!--but for now, here's Tim Finn doing this site's theme song:



If any video existed of Lennon doing this himself, I'd have gone with that...but we're big Tim Finn fans around here. And of his brother, Neil, as well--expect plenty of Split Enz and Crowded House videos when I run out of things to say. Which, as it happens, is frequently. I'm babbling. Sorry...go listen to Tim again, won't you?

FEED THE KITTY

This is the greatest thing in the world:



However many times I see this, it always makes me laugh, and it always--always--makes me cry. I return to it as an old friend, to be reminded of how simple and profound great art can be. Chuck Jones was the first director's name I ever noticed, and his work taught me everything I would ever learn about comedy, and about the human condition.

The most important thing you can learn from this? Hugging kitties makes you happy.

HONEY, I'M MORE MAN THAN YOU'LL EVER BE

The local CW affiliate around here has a bizarre asortment of movies it plays at 2 AM. This morning they showed Foxy Brown, the 1974 Pam Grier vehicle, and despite Grier's awesome presence and a great bit by Sid Haig, the best thing about this movie is the effortlesly dynamic performance of Antonio Fargas.

Fargas was a stage-trained pro, which explained why his work in early seventies exploitation movies tended to stand out: he was a real actor. Unfortunately, due to his wiry physique and perpetually hangdog face, he tended to get cast in secondary parts, usually as pimps or drug dealers. His best-known part was as comic relef snitch Hugy Bear on Starsky And Hutch, not exactly the most dignified part a black actor could get.

Occasionally a good filmmaker would cast Fargas in a nonstereotyped part--Paul Mazursky gave him a great role in Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and Louis Malle put him in Pretty Baby. Maybe his best part came in the sloppy but entertaining Car Wash, in which he's hilarious and touching as the transvestite Lindy.

By the eighties, sadly, it was back to bit parts on TV, and occasional larger roles in projects that knowingly referenced Fargas' past roles, such as the pimp Flyguy in Keenen Ivory Wayans' I'm Gonna Get You Sucka. He still gets work--he's a regular on Everybody Hates Chris--but it's safe to say he's never going to get the great part he deserves.

It would be easy to blame Hollywood's institutional racism as an explanation for Fargas' stunted career, and that's no doubt part of it, but it may be simply that Fargas was a victim of his own talent: Never a leading man type, it was risky to cast him in a secondary role for fear that he'd steal the movie away from the hero.

WHY MUST YOU PUNISH US?

The network TV season has officially ended, which mean NBC figures it's time to burn off the remaining episodes of their expensive bomb Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Dear God, this thing is worse than I remembered.

Where to start? First of all, top-billed stars Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet and Bradley Whitford were all absent from this episode, for reasons never explained. This meant the bulk of the show was carried by the charisma vacuum that is Timothy Busfield--Was this the best way to bring the show back from hiatus?

Scripted by series creator Aaron Sorkin, this episode seemed to exist only to promote the Sorkin Universe, as the show-within-the-show was guest hosted by Allison Janney, star of Sorkin's West Wing, which was referenced repeatedly. Sorkin would probably call this "Brechtian"; anyone else would call it undue self-adulation.

(And for the sake of verisimiltitude, it couldn't hurt to point out that Studio 60's SNL-like fictional program is repeatedly referred to as edgy, hip and popular. And the biggest name they can get as a guest host is Allison Janney?)

The show's usual problems were as apparent as ever--Sorkin clearly doesn't know anything about live TV production, and his attempts at comedy writing are absolutely, utterly painful to behold--but this episode managed to slip from irritating to deeply offensive.

At the end of the show, which has been a series of disasters (there's a backstory there, but frankly I don't feel like explaining), guest host Janney is hopping mad at the whole production team. Until, that is, Busfield reminds her how lucky she is to be working in show business, because "it sure beats digging a hole for a living."

In other words, show-biz people are just plain better than those stupid schlubs who actually work for a living. This must be the most arrogant, self-righteous, classist thing I've ever heard on TV. At that moment, every criticism ever uttered by right-wing gasbags denouncing the "liberal media elite" suddenly seemed...valid. Thank you, Aaron Sorkin, for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

DOES ANYBODY CARE? ANYBODY AT ALL? NO? WELL, LET'S MOVE ON, THEN...

The AP finds it newsworthy enough to report the dropping of a disorderly charge againt David Faustino in Florida, but a drug charge against him will stand. This is presented as a "news story" which appears under a "headline"--and in the course of the story Faustino is referred to as an "actor."

Hey, Clu Gullagher is an actor. David Faustino is a freak show. As I noted back when the AP took the time to inform us all of Faustino's divorce, this guy is essentially a nobody. Yeah, he was on Married With Children for ten years, but really, if I hadn't mentioned that, would you know who he is? We're not even talking celebrity on the Danny Bonaduce level here. If this guy gets divorced or arrested or is found drowned in a pool of his own vomit, who really gives a rat's ass?

Okay, I realize this is the second post in a row to reference a wire story on some minor celebrity. At least I'm not writing about Monica Goodling and Alberto Gonzales, or constructing elaborate Star Wars analogies. So, you know, there's that.

Maybe I should go to bed now...

THE TEDIOUS INEVITABILITY OF AN UNLOVED SEASON

Hey, here's a surprise: Tom Arnold is filing for divorce. No, seriously, I'm shocked. Not that Arnold is filing, but that this is only his third marriage, and it actually lasted five years. Somehow, I figured Tom was into his seventh or eighth by now, most of them lasting a month or so.

This is almost as surprising as learning the Democrats have dropped any sort of deadlines from withdrawal in their war spending bill, or that, after a winning streak of two whole games, the Yankees lost 7-3 against the much-hated Red Sox.

It's comforting, in a way, when the things you expect to turn out badly turn out even worse than expected.

WELL, COME SEE A FAT OLD MAN SOMETIME

In honor of John Wayne's 100th birthday, it seems everything Wayne ever appeared in is hitting the shelves in upgraded editions--if you've ever felt the need to own a copy of Big Jim McCain, here's your chance--and to me, the best of the bunch is the new Special edition of 1969's True Grit.

This, of course, is the movie that won the Duke an Oscar, yet it's been consistently underrated by serious critics since its debut. Henry Hathaway's staid direction takes most of the blame, but to me, his straightforward approach to the sly, lightly self-mocking material (faithful to the fine Charles Portis novel) is what makes it work--a more stylized approach would have made the whole thing too precious. Plus, with a great cast (Kim Darby, Robert Duvall, Strother Martin), beautiful photography by Lucien Ballard (the only cinematographer to have worked with Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick and The Three Stooges!) and a rousing score by Elmer Bernstein, this is classic Hollywood filmmaking at its best.

Speaking of classic filmmaking, Clint Eastwood's magnificent Letters From Iwo Jima is out today, either on its own or as part of a multi-disc set with its companion piece, Flags Of Our Fathers. Either way, you'll get not only an emotionally devastating look at the human cost of war, but a great example of a master director showing how it's done.

Sidney Lumet can't quite be called a master; his career is full of indefensible crap, from the stupefying The Wiz to the hilariously misconceived A Stranger Among Us (or, as my mom used to call it, Undercover Jew), from the unbearably precious Garbo Talks to the amazingly unnecessary remake of John Cassavetes' Gloria.

On the other hand, there's Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. More to the point, there's 1981's Prince Of The City, probably his best work, which finally arrives on DVD today. Treat Williams is great as a cop who slowly becomes aware of how pervasive is the corruption surrounding him, and who discovers his efforts to do right slowly strip him of everything he knows and loves. Lumet's direction is naturalistic, the script is full of moral complexities and the acting is superb down to the bit parts. If not a truly great film, it's close enough.

Also out today: the gritty character study Straight Time with a fine Dustin Hoffman performance; the essential documentary The Murder Of Fred Hampton; and a whole bunch of Howard hawks pictures including the original Scarface, the hilarious Gary Cooper-Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Ball Of Fire and a new upgrade of Rio Bravo, which auteurist critics consider a masterpiece--but if I want a lighthearted comedy western vehicle for a dumpy John Wayne, I'll stick with True Grit.

BUT YOU CAN SEE EVERY PORE OF THEIR SKIN!

There's a McDonald's in the hospital where I work, and I must pass the thing a hundred times a day, so I see the posters cross-promoting the new Shrek movie a lot. And every time I do, I'm struck by how utterly ugly the character designs are.

Yeah, I realize shrek himself is an ogre, and supposed to be ugly, but all the characters look bad, especially the humans, with rubbery, disjointed limbs and creepy dead eyes. With the massive production team needed to produce this movie, wasn't there anybody on staff with a working knowledge of anatomy? Why were characters designed by people with no appreciation for aesthetics?

Of course, Shrek The Third is already claiming the largest opening ever for an animated film, as if a movie's worth is somehow determined by how much money it makes. (And that's why Happy Gilmore is a better movie than The Magnificent Ambersons.) All this proves is that people love fart jokes. Nobody's going to this because of its visuals.

Which is understandable--after all, your average Abbott and Costello movie looked cheap, but it would still make you laugh. But wouldn't it be nice if the people behind the Shrek series (or most other non-Pixar CGI efforts) actually tried anyway? If they gave as much thought to the visuals as they gave to the gags? Oh, I know every digital leaf in every digital tree is painstakingly rendered, but this is the work of techies, not artists. If the goal is merely to simulate reality, why not shoot reality?

Animation should open up a variety of possibilities, to stylize reality, to bend it to a filmmaker's will, to express what can't be otherwise shown. But Shrek, like Madagascar, like Open Season, like even many of Pixar's efforts (particularly the mostly dreadful Cars), is depressingly literal--grass looks like grass, wood looks like wood, skin looks like...well, they haven't quite perfected that one yet.

For crimes against art, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson should be shot for their announcement last week that they intend to make movie's based on Herge's comic strip character Tintin. Herge's work is justly celebrated for its clean, elegant line drawings, so naturally Spielberg and Jackson think the best way to interpret this is through the use of motion capture. Herge's work is deliberately stylized, deliberately flat, but the press release these two esteemed filmmakers issued stressed their determination to make the characters "real", to allow us to see every pore of their skin. That this is a blatant violation of everything Herge's work stands for seems simply to have not occurred to them.

It almost sounds like a joke, but they're serious. And like the fart gags in Shrek, it's not funny at all.

LIKE THE DESCENT OF THEIR LAST END

Still they tear through the cities and countryside of Iraq, 4000 members of the U.S. military, 2000 from the Iraqi forces, on a righteous crusade straight out of a seventies Charles Bronson picture: This time it's personal!

They will turn the country upside down, will do whatever it takes to find three comrades who came up missing. Are they alive or dead? Have they been captured? Have they gone AWOL? No one knows. But by Christ, we're going to find them.

I don't mean to suggest that the lives of these three soldiers are meaningless, but if you have a conscience and a soul, you can't help wondering why their lives are so much more important than the lives of those around them, why a military operation that can't be bothered counting the number of Iraqi dead places such a high priority on these three.

How many Iraqi citizens will have their lives disrupted or destroyed by this awesome display of overkill? How many more will turn against the U.S. occupation? The Bushinistas couldn't devise a more effective recruiting tool for the insurgency if they tried.

And still the losses will mount, and the dead will be mourned, and still it will go on.

'CEPT TO SIGN AN I.O.U.

As I've said before, it's tough to be a Yankees fan in the midwest even under the best of circumstances. You get branded as some sort of effete east coast snob, or an idiot, or a traitor (This is Iowa, son...You have to be a Cubs fan. Or the Cardinals. Okay, maybe the Reds. But not the Royals, because who the hell would be dumb enough to care about the Royals?), or, most devastatingly, a right-winger. (George Steinbrenner is, of course, a major contributor to the Republicans.)

This, I stress, under the best of circumstances, when the Yankees are cruising to an easy spot in the World Series, as if by Divine Right--or, at least, are playing with some level of competence. This season, I know the pain felt by Indians fans.

It started with the usual bright promise, with Andy Pettitte's awsome pitching and A-Rod finally earning that outrageous salary with an amazing run of homers. True, Derek Jeter seemed to make a lot of unforgivable errors, but he'd correct that, right? And the team would come together and everything would be as God mandated.

Then Pettitte hit a slump, then Rodriguez, at which point it became obvious: The team lacked anybody to take over their jobs. Pettitte aside, their pitching roster is frankly embarrassing, and they've been losing what should have been easy wins. Their losses to the much-reviled Red Sox infuriated loyal fans, and their recent string of losses on the road has been pathetic.

Now they're in New York, and one game down to the Mets. The Mets, for God's sake! The Yankees are on the verge of being the number two team in New York! How can such a thing happen?

My first instinct is to blame Giuliani. No real reason, but everything I hate about New York these days can mostly be traced to his tenure, and as mayor, he was a notorious Yankees suck-up. Last week's New York Times seemed to pin at least partial blame on turmoil in upper management, as Steinbrenner finally ceded power to his two previously disinterested sons. The Times found this scenario worthy of an overwrought comparison to The Godfather, but missed out on the most obvious point: If the Yankees are the Corleones, the guy in charge, improbably, seems to be Fredo.

KITTIES!

Quick update on my ever-expanding menagerie:

After initially introducing himself to the other two cats by incessant growling and hissing, Midnight has suddenly become very deferential to Monika. This happened literally overnight; evidently I missed something as I slept. Most likely Monika's patented James Coburn Zen Cool came into play.

(A clarifying note about the whole James Coburn thing: The Zen Cool specifically alludes to Coburn's deeply held personal beliefs, which he expressed in interviews, in a script he wrote with his good friend Bruce Lee, and most memorably, in a guest appearance on The Muppet Show. In Monika's case, we're referencing Coburn's role as the knife guy in The Magnificent Seven--leave him alone and you're okay, but if you push it, retribution will be swift and deserved. And this is as good a time as any to point out that even though The Magnificent Seven features Steve McQueen, James Coburn out-cools him without even trying.)

So whatever Monika did to Midnight, I'm sure it was fair--like Coburn, she'd never take it too far. And Midnight isn't off cowering in a corner, afraid to come out. He's just...respectful of his elder.

The other thing about Midnight is, he's taken to playing with some of Delmar's cat toys. Specifically these cloth, bean-baggy things, which he bats over to me, and I toss back to him, and he bats them back to me. He's not just playing, he's playing with me--clearly I've been accepted as a buddy.

This is the sort of thing the late, much-beloved Scotchie used to do, and there was a time when I would have turned into a weepy basket case, missing Scotchie and a life I used to know. Things have changed, though--now, I just play with Midnight and am happy he's here.

OR THE HEARTBREAK CALL FROM A MEADOWLARK'S NEST

My new job finds me working in a hospital. I'm a runner, which means I do a little bit of everything, shlepping furniture in and out of rooms, doing bed counts, hauling stuff hither and yon. I've only worked there two days, and I've already been all over the place, on every floor, in every room. Even that room.

Two years ago, Mom embarked on her grand tour of Des Moines hospitals. She spent time in all but one, including Mercy, where I now work. So I've done set-ups in the room in which she stayed, one of the rooms in which they were suposed to figure out what was wrong, to cure her and send her home.

She didn't die during her stay at Mercy--in fact she had many good months ahead of her, but it was the beginning of the end. The tiny, cramped room, the spacious, sun-flooded hallways, the elevators functioning with quiet, almost ruthless efficiency--these are all reminders of a time I'd prefer to forget. And I see them every day.

So I shake it off, and try to ignore it. Mostly it's easy; I have plenty to do and very little time for sentimental reflection. Still, it can bust out anytime, when passing a waiting room full of silent, glassy-eyed family members, or when catching a glimpse of a doctor looming over a patient's bed like a white-coated angel of death, speaking quietly, while the patient's face crumples into numbness.

These are the times I miss Mom, but my sadness comingles with theirs, a universal loss, a sense of humanity enriching us all.

HELLO, ALL YOU HAPPY TAXPAYERS

Oh, there are DVDs you should be buying today. Pan's Labyrinth is out, last year's finest film, one of the greatest dark fantasies ever, though I suspect its spell will be diminished, if not broken, on TV screens. Tim Buckley:My Fleeting House showcases rare clips of the great singer/songwriter in al his heartbreaking glory. Buckley's voice could make stone weep, and since the full story of his brief life is told here--well,have plenty of tissues handy.

The big news is, or should be, the release of Tex Avery's Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Cartoons, but this is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is, it's the first compilation DVD dedicated solely to the work of Tex Avery, one of the greatest directors in cartoon history, an authentic genius who almost single-handedly created the Looney Tunes house style, and influenced modern comedy in more ways than most people will ever know.

His gretest work was done at MGM. There he created the deadpan basset hound Droopy, the only successful running character he created during his time at the studio, but most of his best work came in his devastating one-shots.

Unfortunately, they're not included in this set. As the title of this collection suggests, this set is all Droopy, all the time. While Avery did some of his best work with this character--Dumb-Hounded, for instance, or Drag-a-long Droopy--as the years wore along, the shorts became increasingly formulaic, and while the gags in entries like The Chump Champ may be impeccably timed, they're not funny in the least.

Also, about a quarter of the cartoons here aren't even directed by Avery--they're Cinemascope efforts from Avery's ace animator Michael Lah, who took over once the great man left the studio. (There's also one from the somewhat underrated Dick Lundy, a fine animator whose work as a director deserves more attention.)

What is needed is a set devoted to ALL of Avery's work at MGM. Cartoon junkies like me will want the Droopy collection, of course, but will grumble about how great it should have been. Because, you know, that's what animation geeks do.

AND LEAVE YOU ON THE ROLLING RIVER SHORES OF CHANGES

New job starts today, and I have that vaguely shaky feeling I remember as a kid when school started again after summer vacation. Things aren't helped by the fact that I've been offered only the vaguest job description, and been given no idea of where to report, how to dress or even who to report to. But hey, if someone wants to pay me for wandering around aimlessly, I guess i'm good with that.

Here at this site, some changes might be in store. This job starts an hour earlier than my previous gigs, and since I usually tap this stuff out before heading to the daily annoyance that is work, and since I already get up insanely early and don't want to get up even earlier just to write stuff few people read anyway, I suspect postings here will become a bit less frequent. Not that it's going to dry up and blow away, but my semi-daily postings are likely a thing of the past.

For both of you reading this, I'm sure you're devastated.

ONE CLEAR MOMENT

That bastion of the left, that always-liberal beacon, that Commie rag The Washington Post gives editorial space to one of Our Beloved President's most loyal eunuchs, Paul Bremer, to justify his pathetic performance as The Decider's point man in Iraq.

I read the damn thing once, and to attempt to dismantle it would require me to study it closer, and frankly, until I get my blood pressure meds back in line, I'd better not. You can read it here if you dare.

Bremer's points seem to be 1) he was perfectly justified in patronizing the Baathists, 2) of course he had to dismantle the Iraqi army, and 3) if you haven't been to Iraq, you have no business criticizing him.

As the whiny tone of the piece makes clear, he takes the criticism personally. Why are they saying all these terrible things about him, Poor Widdle Paul? Don't they know they're hurting his delicate feelings?

There seems to be no realization on Bremer's part that he was a tool, a cog in an infernal machine, a bit player used to move the scenario forward. While he admits to be stymied by the difficulties the U.S. is facing in Iraq--"difficulties" apparently being the Bushinista's euphemism for "total, abject failure"--for the most part he spins the same old bullshit like it's 2002 all over again, and doesn't seem to realize nobody's buying it anymore. (He even compares Saddam to Hitler at one point. Say, Paul, that's original.)

And never for a second does it occur to Paul that the "democratically elected government" he boasts of is as hated and feared by many Iraqis as Saddam's gestapo, or that the American occupation was the very thing allowing al-Qaeda to gain a foothold, or that the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Hadditha have in any way eroded whatever credibility the U.S. had in the region.

No, none of that troubles Paul Bremer. He's too busy throwing a hissy fit over how that awful George Tenent called him names. And the rest of us are faced with the dreadful realization that the corridors of power are filled with kids playing in sandboxes.

SO YOU GRAB A PIECE OF SOMETHING THAT YOU THINK IS GONNA LAST

Things happen, certainly: Tony Blair calls it quits, Dick Cheney threatens Iran from the safety of an aircraft carrier, more and more Republicans realize how toxic Bush's Iraq policy really is, Alberto Gonzales continues twisting in the wind.

There's things of less immediate import, too. A current retrospective in New York City dedicated to the films of Lee Marvin reminds me how much I've been wanting to write something about Marvin and the great tough guy actors of the fifties and sixties, like James Coburn and Sterling Hayden, some of the coolest guys who ever stepped in front of a camera.

But I don't feel like writing about any of that right now. I don't feel like writing, period. Not sure what's going on here, I feel as though I'm in a period of transition, but that's not the case, really. True, I'm between jobs right now, but I have something lined up, there's no need to be anxious. Two or three years ago, I would have been crazy anxious, but not now. Instead, I just feel...unmoored.

Might have something to do with Mother's Day, a horrible day if you have no mother, or my birthday following a couple days later. Or maybe it's nothing, just an emotional bug, a feeling that will pass in a day or two.

In any event, I can't seem to define how I'm feeling at the moment, and it's hard to write coherently from any perspective when that perspective keeps shifting. Hopefully, things will straighten out.

WELCOME, MIDNIGHT

So I've acquired yet another cat.

Tabbatha had to fob her cat Midnight off on others when she moved into her current residence, but Midnight was a bad fit with his new foster family, and since no one else would take him, and no one wanted him going to the Animal Rescue League, he wound up here. In a tiny apartment. Where two cats already live.

Delmar, the pscychokitty his own bad self, immediately went apeshit, growling and hissing and spinning in circles in much the same way Lynda Carter used to on the old Wonder Woman show.

This display sent Midnight off into a growling frenzy of his own. Not that these two are mixing it up, mind you--they're pointlessly growling from seperate corners. Midnight will hop up on my lap, purring, affectionate, look over, see Del and suddenly start growling, then turn around and slap me in the face.

Fortunately, he's declawed, so his blow just lands with an ineffectual fwap, so it's more comical than anything else. Still, another cat whose emotions turn on a dime--Great!

Monika, meanwhile, really doesn't care--she spent years as Mom's cat, and is used to new creatures arriving in her life. As long as it's understood that she is the prettiest one and receives the attention due her status, Monika is happy.

Presumably they'll all eventually learn to tolerate, if not actually love, each other, as families and nations do. If families and nations were fur-coated and adorable, that is.

THIS IS WHAT YOU'D WATCH WHEN THERE WAS LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE TO DO

If you wait around long enough, apparently every last bit of cathode ray effluvia will eventually make its way to DVD, as evidenced by today's release of Jason Of Star Command: The Complete Series.

Yeah, I used to watch this thing. It originally aired in 1978 as a fifteen minute segment of the Tarzan And The Super Seven program, a grab bag of typically craptastic animated segments from the deservedly-reviled Filmation studio. (The highlight among the other segments was something called Manta And Moray, two superheros with the powers of--wait for it--a manta and a moray. Or some damn thing--I could never stand watching it for more than a minute or so.)

Anyway, Jason stood out among this crap because a) it was live action, and b) it was a total Star Wars rip. Our hero wore a Han Solo-styled white shirt and black vest, and ongoing villain Dragos wore a low-rent discofied Darth Vader ensemble. Plus, you know, there were spaceships and lasers and whatnot.

As these things go, it wasn't bad, and a better Star Wars knockoff than the same year's Batlestar Galactica (though I would never have admitted that at the time, because I was totally all about Galactica...Should I even admit any of this?), and it was much enlivened by the presence of Sid Haig as Dragos.

In fact, my mom made a point of watching simply because of Haig. He was a fairly busy character actor of the day, though he was (and is) best known for his work in the films of Jack Hill--women-in-prison epics like The Big Doll House, blaxploitation favorites like Coffy, and the unforgettable psychological spook show Spider Baby. Presumably Mom didn't know about any of that, but many years later, when Haig starred in Rob Zombie's House Of 1ooo Corpses, she thought it was the greatest thing in the world. So thank you, Jason Of Star Command, for letting me bond with Mom over a shared enthusiasm for Sid Haig.

Unfortunately, for its second season, the show expanded to a half hour and dropped the serialized format that had made it so involving in the first place, and it felt like a slightly more action-oriented version of Filmation's Space Academy series from a couple of years earlier, and even though Sid was still around, Mom and I both lost interest. (Although, in fairness, it should be noted the producers continued to show their appreciation for exploitation movie vets by introducing Tamara Dobson, of Cleopatra Jones fame, into the cast.)

By no rational standards could I tell anyone to run out and buy this collection, but for anyone with fond memories of seventies junk culture, it could be a lot of fun.

IN NUMBER, ONE BY ONE

At least twenty people killed by bomb blasts in Iraq today.

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday.

I don't really have much to say about that, but then again, neither does our president.

I DON'T WANT TO BE A SOLDIER, MAMA, I DON'T WANT TO DIE

A new Pentagon study funds that only forty percent of marines and fifty-five percent of soldiers stationed in Iraq would report instances of abuse to higher-ups.

Let's invert those numbers, shall we? Sixty percent of marines and forty-five percent of soldiers would shrug and look the other way if they saw their buddies beating the shit out of an unarmed Iraqi. Let's throw in another number from the study, which says that in the combined number of marines and soldiers who took part in the survey, fully ten percent of them had personally abused Iraqi civilians, either through physical violence or deliberate destruction of property.

Assuming we did not send a Dirty Dozen-style assemblage of sociopaths over to Iraq, the most likely reason for these troubling numbers comes elsewhere in the same report: Stress and anxiety levels among troops are spiking in crazy numbers as they're forced to deal with deployments lengthened bit by bit, or a second or third tour of duty they had been promised wouldn't come, at least not so soon.

The U.S. government and military have shown depraved indifference, both to the troops overcome with demons from the dark side and the Iraqi civilians who get in their way. (Reports have emerged showing a deliberate attempt to cover-up the brazen murders of women and children in Haditha, for instance.) If they can allow their subconscious to run wild over there, what can we expect when they finally return home?

Nobody wants to talk about that; nobody wants to acknowledge these men and women are living in a state of mind that permits everything, where recriminations are unlikely, where fear and paranoia are constant. They're being pushed harder and harder every day, dealing with pressures poor Cho Seung-Hui couldn't even imagine.

And then--someday, maybe--we'll expect them to come home and deal with spouses and childrens and co-workers and bosses and neighbors and all the pressure and tedium of routine existence, and expect them to somehow fit in. But they've seen things--and in many cases, done horrors--the rest of us can't even imagine. And maybe they'll deal with it.

But if they don't, then what? When a dog has been bred to kill, the dog may be put down when it attacks, but it's the owner who gets sued. If the Bushinistas have created a race of ticking time bombs as an accidental by-product of their own arrogance, who gets the blame when the shit hits the fan?

TRUE BELIEVERS

Saw Spider-man 3 last night, and much of what I predicted about it turned out to be true: It's basically an overstuffed thrill machine with a few lovely grace notes. Those fleeting bits are what break your heart about this enterprise, because they make you realize not only is this not the movie you want to watch, it's likely not the movie Sam Raimi would like to make.

Mostly it follows the standard blockbuster playbook, with some seriously lazy plotting and a typical reliance on CGI and hyperkinetic editing. In fairness, the CGI isn't convincing, exactly, but at least it's less cartoonish in appearance than the first two films. And despite the frantic cutting in the action scenes, Raimi at least knows how to stage the action--you can always tell what's going on.

Much time seems to be spent on character development, but the writing strands the poor actors with nothing to do, and Tobey Maguire gives the worst performance of his career. Thomas Haden Church brings some real poignance to his part as the main villain (Yes, main villain--this movie has way too many evildoers.), but he's not given enough screen time--it's as if they were afraid he'd hijack the movie and be more interesting than the hero. Other good actors, like Dylan Baker, James Cromwell and Teresa Russell, appear for a minute or two at most. It's good to see them, but why are they even there?

(Baker's part is particularly thankless--he's a science professor who appears only to explain the nature of the movie's dumbest plot device, an alien goo that brings out Spider-man/Peter Parker's "dark side". I was reminded of Glynn Turman's role in Gremlins, as a science teacher who appears to explain the nature of the title critters. Director Joe Dante hilariously sent up a ridiculous movie convention in Gremlins; Spider-man 3 plays this hoary trope straight.)

Those grace notes I mentioned earlier? Two brief, perfectly realized comedic scenes. One occurs in the offices of New York's slimiest newpaper, The Daily Bugle, and is sharply written and staged, and shows off brief, perfect turns by Elizabeth Banks, Ted Raimi and the peerless J.K. Simmons. The other is set in a high-toned French restaurant and showcases Raimi's old Evil Dead compadre Bruce campbell as a maitre'd with an outrageously phony accent. This scene, in which Peter Parker attempts (and fails) to propose to his long-suffering girlfriend, is initially played for laughs, and spirals into melodrama--and Raimi's touch is light as air, the farcical elements enhancing the poignant ones, making it richer, more fully realized than anything else in the film.

These scenes are reminders that Raimi is a sometime cohort of Joel and Ethan Coen, and one suspects he wishes he had a career somewhat like theirs. Somehow he became a creator of blockbusters, not the oddball comedies he would be ideally suited for. His next project will be telling--does he keep going for the easy green, or does he reclaim possession of his soul?

WITH GREAT MONEY COMES NO RESPONSIBILITY

Perhaps you've heard Spider-man 3 opens today.

Of course you know this; Sony's marketers have made sure that there's not a man, woman, child, dog, cat, buffalo or single-celled organism unaware of this. The marketing budget for this little item is somewhere in the range of 150 million dollars. Combine that with a production budget estimated by some sources to be as high as 350 million, and you have half a billion dollars being spent on one movie.

Half a billion.

I used to read the comic books. When I heard this latest installment would finally throw Gwen Stacy into the mix, I had a total geek moment. When I heard the villain would be the Sandman, I thought, cool.

I'm a huge fan of director Sam Raimi as well. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say i'm a huge fan of Raimi's Evil Dead movies, since much of what he's done since has been somewhat disappointing. (Not only did he direct a Costner crapfest, he made one of the worst--For The Love Of the Game.) While I enjoyed Raimi's handling of the first two movies in the Spider-man franchise, he's become more of a technician than an artist, instructing actors to move from Point A to Point B, because that's where the CGI will take over.

And I know Hollywood spends insane sums of money to keep us entertained. That's their job.

But half a billion dollars would go along way towards insuring every child in this nation. It could provide armour for troops in Iraq. It could be used to house the homeless or feed the starving. For that matter, Sam Raimi once could have made twenty or thirty Evil Dead movies with that kind of money.

Movie-making costs are escalating in insane ways. There is gossip claiming Tom Hanks might receive 50 million dollars to star in a sequel to The DaVinci Code. Does he need the money? Does anyone think that would be a good movie?

No, and that's the problem. If you spend a fortune and make a good movie, that's one thing. But nobody in Hollywood seems to understand how to do that anymore, pissing billions of dollars away on the likes of Poseidon or Superman Returns or The Holiday, movies that fail to fulfill even the most modest demands of entertainment...but nobody seems to learn.

I have no doubt Spider-man 3 will make a fortune, and on its own terms, it might be a good movie. But i doubt that anyone who sees it will actually love it. Movies used to be a shared experience, a dream we all experienced. Now we only share inertia.

IT FELT GOOD TO BE HERE

I'll always be grateful to the wonderful comic actor Tom Poston, who has died at the age of 85.

His occasional appearances as Cliff Murdock, "The Peeper", Bob's goofy old pal from his college days, were a highlight of the old Bob Newhart Show.

When I read of Poston's death, I remembered my family gathered around the TV on Saturday nights, laughing together. My father wasn't such a fan of Newhart or his show, but he loved Poston, and if he was on, Dad laughed loudest of all.

So even just now, when I read Poston's obit, I heard my dad's laugh, and it made me happy, and for that, I am grateful.

LONG AGO WE LAUGHED AT SHADOWS

It's Tuesday, so ordinarily I'd recommend some new DVDs, but instead I've got to talk about one of my hereos, Warren Zevon.

Today sees the release of the book I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life And Times of Warren Zevon, an oral history of the singer/songwriter compiled by his ex-wife, Crystal. Zevon charged her with this project shortly before he died of lung cancer in 2003. He instructed his friends to tell her everything, to censor nothing. Certainly the book is full of shocking tales of drunken rampages and gun-wielding assaults, paranoiac self-loathing and casual abuse of those he loved most.

But it's also the story of an artist, one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and how his demons and his art came from the same place. There is absolutely no moral excuse for many of the things Zevon did in his life--and yet for the man who wrote Desperados Under the Eaves ("Don't the sun look angry through the trees? Don't the trees look like crucified thieves?") or Accidentally Like A Martyr ("The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder") or The French Inhaler or Poor, Poor Pitiful Me or Mohammed's Radio or Finishing Touches ("You can screw everybody I've ever known/But I still won't talk to you on the phone") or Keep Me In Your Heart, the achingly beautiful song he wrote about his own impending death ("Hold me in your toughts, take me to your dreams/Touch me as I fall into view"), for this man, anything is excused.

When he learned he was dying, he refused any kind of treatment, and instead started work on one final album--and started drinking again, after seventeen years of sobriety. Zevon hated turning to this particular medicine, and his friends were angry but not surprised--they knew the monster and the artist were as one.

I was driving to work very early on September 7th, 2003 when I heard on the radio of Zevon's death. Part of me wanted to turn around, go somewhere, anywhere, to get away from such mundane matters as jobs and paychecks, to get drunk or write poetry or just live life on my own terms.

Instead, I pulled the car over, cried for several minutes, then went on to work. Unlike Warren, I just didn't know how to say, "Fuck it."

STATELESS

Today's Washington Post has an article on 82 inmates at Guantanamo Bay prison who have actually been cleared of all charges, but are still being held.

Nobody in charge has a good explanation for why the prisoners are still there. In some cases, it is because they themselves don't want to be deported back to their native lands, for fear of reprisals against them. Though eventually found innocent, the stigma of being branded not only a terrorist, but the "worst of the worst" by the Bushinistas, apparently lingers.

The U.S. government won't give them asylum, either, despite the fact that they created the situation in the first place, and most European nations won't let them in, either, apparently because The Decider told them not to.

The most interesting part of the article is this: According to U.S. government officials, of the roughly 385 people held at Guantanamo, only about 60 to 80 are due to be tried. The rest will be freed, eventually.

So they're innocent, right? Yet they're still held, still subjected to interrogation and torture and God knows what else, still victims of the capricious whims of an administration so utterly lacking in any kind of moral sense as to defy imagination, forced to act in a cruel farce even Joe Orton couldn't have penned.

Much of this nation and most of the rest of the world decries this madness, and yet it continues. A billion voices raised in protest cannot stop this. Can anything?

FOR YOU, THE LIVING

Bobby "Boris" Pickett has died at the age of 69.

I'm not going to make any extravagant claims for Pickett's one hit, The Monster Mash. It is what it is, a novelty song recorded solely to exploit his ability to do a decent but unremarkable impression of Boris Karloff. It gets trotted out every year at Halloween, not just by oldies stations, and I would guess more people today are familiar with Pickett's impression than they are with Karloff himself.

It's no great shakes as a song, but The Monster Mash easily evokes the heyday of Monster Kid culture, an era when children--boys, mostly--discovered the heady joys of classic Universal monster movies through TV syndication packages. The pleasure they derived from these felt forbidden but was mostly innocent, good clean fun with a mildly subversive edge.

I came along much later than that. The horror film had entered its punk phase by the time I came along, with crazy, wildmen filmmakers like George Romero and David Cronenberg taking a DIY approach to the genre, ignoring the familiar tropes of the past in search of something more meaningful, more personal, while still deploying spilled entrails and exploding heads.

Which was great, but part of me wishes my childhood memories included visions of Karloff's haunted eyes in The Mummy or Lon Chaney, Jr.'s helpless, uncomprehending transformations into The Wolfman or even Bela Lugosi's hambone turn as Dracula. I've seen these movies subsequently, of course, but I'll never know what they would have meant to me had I seen them at the right time, when they could have scarred me for life, or become old friends to which I could turn time and again.

I don't have those memories, but The Monster Mash gives me some sense of what that culture must have been like: It's a whole lot of fun.

HUH?

As you can tell by the symbol at the bottom of this post, I've been nominated --or have I won?--an award.

It would be nice if this was presented by some sort of society of eggheads and double-domes based in Oslo or some such, but it actually comes courtesy of my ex, Sue Ellen (who posts under the name Sudiegirl, which still sounds like an Earl Hamner character, but we'll let that go).

The Thinking Blogger award is supposed to celebrate blogs that do more than entertain, that make you think, and part of the deal with this is to name other blogs that make you think. I should, in fairness, mention Sue Ellen's--sorry, Sudiegirl's--site, which, despite a frequently snarky tone, details many of her personal struggles as somebody living with bipolar disorder and everything that entails. It's usually funny, not depressing, though I admit I think she writes better when she's depressed. Maybe that's just me.

A newly-started blog comes from Shawn Grandstaff. He writes with more enthusiasm than finesse, but he certainly has a unique perspective: He calls himself a "Christian anarchist", which means he believes the world can not only be changed, but saved. The rules of fair play compel me to mention that, as with Sudiegirl, I know Shawn, but that in no way influences my opinion. Ahem.

Okay, to recommend a site maintained by someone I don't know, let me suggest Dennis Perrin's site. Perrin wrote the splendid Michael O'Donoghue bio Mr. Mike, and is well-schooled in the art of comedy, but his site is mostly political, occasionally personal, frequently cynical but with just a hint of hope. An essential read every day.

There are many other blogs and sites I read on a more or less daily basis, but they fall a bit out of the purview of this particular award. So for now, I'd just like to thank the Academy, my agent, Marty Abramowitz, oh, and God, of course, and...hey, why is the orchestra cutting me off? Hey, wait...