As I write this, the House of Representatives is enactingPresident Obama‘s watered-down, barely-worth-the-name health care legislation with no single-payer and no public option. It’s 11:07 pm, and the favoring vote tally just went over 216. Better than nothing and fine as far as it goes, but more than a bit of a letdown for some of us.
“This is about as interesting as it gets in politics,” MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz has just said. “The Democrats now own — lock, stock, and barrel — health care reform in America.”
“Congress gave final approval on Sunday to legislation that would provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans,” the N.Y. Times story says, “and remake the nation’s health care system along the lines proposed by President Obama.
“Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan said that anti-abortion Democrats were satisfied with a proposed executive order “to ensure that federal funds are not used for abortion services.”
“By a vote of 219 to 212, the House passed the bill after a day of tumultuous debate that echoed the epic struggle of the last year. The action sent the bill to President Obama, whose crusade for such legislation has been a hallmark of his presidency.
“Democrats hailed the vote as historic, comparable to the establishment of Medicare and Social Security and a long overdue step forward in social justice. ‘This is the civil rights act of the 21st century,’ said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat in the House.”
Sandra Bullock‘s Facebook declaration that she’s “single” isn’t too surprising, given the recently disclosed details. What got me was her statement that her political views are “conservative.” What?
HE reader David Speranza took this in Madison Square Park at 5:44 pm last Friday afternoon. And nobody blinked or gasped or anything. It was Speranza’s impression that the mordibly obese woman eating potato chips was “with” the flame-head.
Two days ago I wrote that seeing a film that was shot 18 months or two years ago can sometimes result (in your mind at least) in a slightly dated feeling — a hard-to-define sense of diminishment due to the film having passed its peak potency in terms of relating to the here-and-now. The case in point was an Australian thriller called The Square (Apparition, 4.9).
Lbs., a very decently written, affectingly performed little indie drama about fighting food addiction from director Matthew Bonifacio and co-writer/star Carmine Famiglietti that — get this — began principal photography in June 2001 and then played at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
The how and why of this absurd delay is explained in a section of the film’s website called “The Road To Release,” but Lbs. (a not-very-catchy title due to the abbreviation — it should been called Pounds or Fatass, even) may be the oldest indie film to ever open theatrically as a purportedly new release.
And yet, oddly, it doesn’t feel at all “dated.” Lbs. has its shaggy aspects, but there’s no denying that it has a well-honed, disarmingly honest, straight-from-the-shoulder quality. You watch and start to gradually sink into it, and you stop feeling like a smart-ass nitpicker and being bothered by time factors and whatnot.
Lbs. is about a dangerously overweight Brooklyn guy of only 27 years (Famiglietti) hitting rock bottom in terms of self-disgust and low self-esteem, and deciding to really and finally get rid of the tonnage. His method is to isolate himself from temptation by living in a crummy trailer in upstate New York and somehow discipline and bring himself along on a day-by-day, take-the-pain basis and drop 100 pounds or so.
There’s a married-girlfriend character of sorts (Miriam Shore) and a drug-addicted pally (Michael Aronov) and a villain — i.e., his food-pushing mom (Susan Varon). And there’s also a very strong performance from Lou Martini, Jr., as the groom of Famiglietti’s older sister.
A week or so ago a director-producer friend urged me to see Lbs.. He sent me a disc that arrived early last week, but I put off watching it for a few days. I finally popped it in last night, and this morning wrote the friend the following e-mail: “Not half bad. A well-acted, emotionally sincere, Italian blue-collar drama about addictions, honor, family values, and loving enablers.
“I would actually call it better than decent. It reminded me at times of Two Family House — remember that one? — and aspects of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty, even.”
I added that I didn’t believe that Shore’s character would be as forwardly matter-of-fact as she is in the film about wanting intimate relations with Famiglietti. I would have bought it if (a) she had been older (in her 40s, say) and indicated that she was deathly bored and in need of some random warmth, or (b) if she had confessed to having a fetish for big guys. We all know about male chubby chasers, but do women swing that way? I’ve never heard of this.
I think it may be somewhat meaningful for someone like myself, having written over and over (probably too many times) about deeply despising morbidly obese people, or more precisely the metaphor of obesity, responding to a film with this storyline. I think it speaks well to the film’s strengths.
Lbs. finally opens this Friday, and only in Manhattan yet. It should at least play Los Angeles before going off to video.
The figures are in and the top six weekend earners are Alice in Wonderland ($34,125,000 for a cume of $265,369,000), a distant-second Diary of a Wimpy Kid ($22,270,000), The Bounty Hunter ($20,785,000), Green Zone ($6,110,000), She’s Out Of My League ($6,015,000) and Repo Men ($5,900,000).
David Carr‘s review of Jules Feiffer’s “Backing Into Forward: A Memoir” gives me an excuse to re-post that Donald Sutherland sermon scene from Little Murders, the 1971 film that Feiffer adapted for the screen from his own play. My initial posting was two years ago.
I fell so hard for the vibrancy and sharpness in the recently released African Queen Blu-ray that I wound up pigging out — not exactly watching it over and over but playing it over and over as white-noise accompaniment while I worked. Now I need a break. I did the same thing with my grandmother’s oven-baked corn bread when I was nine or ten — i.e., ate so much that I got sick, and then couldn’t even look at corn bread for years after that.
In early ’06 I paid $135 or $140 retail for a 150 gig external hard drive (i.e., the small kind that runs off your pc’s power when you plug in the USB). Two days ago I paid just under $100 for the same type of external hard drive, made by Seagate, except it has 500 gigs. A totally routine development. Two or three years from now a thousand-gig hard drive will cost $75 or thereabouts.
I told Jett the other day there’s no way I’m springing for an iPad. For cost reasons alone I’m waiting for the 2.0 or even the 3.0 before I even start to think about it. I will, however, be investing thought and money in formatting Hollywood Elsewhere for the iPad, and of course I’ll need to create an app. You could actually say I’ve been slacking off in this regard.
I didn’t have an especially great time with Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland. I can see people taking the kids and maybe deciding they have no choice but to catch it because of the 3D factor. But I found Hubble 3D much more interesting and fulfilling even though it’s a somewhat routinely-made documentary. Why? Because it provides a feeling of awe that is 100% real.
All to say it really, really doesn’t add up that Alice in Wonderland is #1 at the box-office for the third week in a row, having yesterday brought in about $9.8 million from 3,739 locations. Okay, it’s a livelier-seeming attraction than The Bounty Hunter, which seems instantly dismissable to all age groups, creeds and cultures, as well as Repo Men, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Green Zone and so on.
But Alice in Wonderland is still a fairly tepid thing to sit through, and I just don’t get why it hasn’t fallen off. I’m coming from knowledge and experience here. I don’t just “think” Alice isn’t that great a movie — I know it isn’t. I sat in a theatre with mostly Hispanic Eloi, side by side, and I could sense their emotional engagement levels, and they were not enthralled — they were sitting there like bean-bag chairs.
According to a five-month-old survey on weightlossdietwatch.com, Mississippi is the Jabba capital of the U.S. For five years straight it’s had the highest rates of adult obesity (32.5 percent). It also has the highest rate of obese and overweight children (ages 10 to 17) at 44.4 percent.
This is what rankles me about our health-care situation. Obviously not the Obama-proposed legislation (which the country definitely needs ) but the fact that the health prospects of your average sea lion rep a tremendous financial burden for everyone. The total cost of obesity, including “indirect costs,” is estimated to be $139 billion per year, and that ain’t hay.
Obese people pay 77% more for health care than normal-weighters. And two-thirds of American audlts are now either obese or overweight, the survey says. And most of the tonnage is accumulating in the poorer states in the South.
Clearly, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken pose a much greater threat to the lives of Americans than Middle-East terrorism. If obesity was smallpox or some other scary disease there would be sirens blaring and National Guard troops outside your windows right now.
Why hasn’t Barack Obama been more ardent about pushing a physical fitness program? Not just by giving a speech or two about it, but really getting on the train and urging schools to enforce exercise regimens like President Kennedy did in the early ’60s? I’m not exactly sure, but it probably has something to do with Obama’s not wanting to overly agitate obese swing voters.
