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Weather Underground co-director Sam Green has posted a short statement about William Ayers, his friend, on A.J. Schnack‘s All These Wonderful Things site. Reading it reminded me how infuriating the sentiments of the Sarah Palin flock about Ayers’ radical past have been. Would they condemn the sometimes violent acts that came out of the anti-abortion movement of the ’90s with the same outrage, the same certainty? It appears likely, in any event, that McCain will bring up Ayers at Wednesday night’s debate, so it’s worth reviewing.
No society can or should tolerate terrorism, but political hot-heads determined to strike back at the perceived evils of industrialism, capitalism and corporatism have been popping through since the late 1800s, and the culture of rebellion and turnover and transformation in the ’60s and early ’70s produced a torrent of this. And then life happened. People got older, eased their attitudes, moved on, calmed down, felt the fatigue, had kids and said “that was then and this is now.”
The people who went the way of the Weathermen in the late ’60s and ’70s — who veered away from anti-Vietnam War organizing and SDS membership and into domestic terrorism — jumped off a very high cliff without a chute. An unwise and reckless decision in hindsight, yes, but one that first of all demanded the kind of passion, commitment and courage that most people don’t even read or hear about, much less develop a slight or glancing acquaintance with. “To live outside the law you must be honest” (i.e., the Bob Dylan line) isn’t the half of it. Read Ayers’ Wikipedia page — it’s all there.
Here‘s Green’s statement:
“Like most Obama supporters, I have watched with a mixture of apprehension and revulsion as McCain and his VP-pick have ratcheted up their efforts to smear Obama with his tenuous link to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground. Me and my pal Bill Siegel made a documentary about the Weather Underground a couple of years ago, and we filmed a number of interviews with Bill Ayers. Since that time, he’s become a good friend of ours. We took him and Bernardine Dohrn, his wife, with us to the Academy Awards in 2004 when our film was nominated for an Oscar.
“So it’s hard to see this brouhaha and not feel terrible for the person at the center of it. After his long-ago association with the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers has gone to become a widely known and respected education expert. He’s a Distinguished Professor (really, that’s his title!) at the University of Illinois and has written more than 10 books. To have all of his work, and what he’s about, so publicly misrepresented must be extremely painful. Not to mention the fact that he’s received such a torrent of death threats that the University has had to provide him with a bodyguard.
“All of this is compounded by the fact that Bill Ayers has had to remain silent. He’s made the intelligent decision that there’s no way to engage with the media in a case like this and win. Anything he might say publicly will only add fuel to the fire, and give the ‘issue’ more of a life. There really is nothing, or at least nothing significant, at the heart of the Ayers-Obama connection, so it’s gotta run out of steam at some point. There’s nothing more to be said about it.
“Bill Siegel and I have taken the same approach. Starting when this’issue’ first surfaced in the MSM during one of the Democratic debates, we have been bombarded by media requests (no pun intended), but have felt that for strategic and political reasons, it’s been best to stay silent. (It’s not been an easy decision — any filmmaker wants their work out there, and this in some ways would be a great opportunity to promote the movie).
“As depressing as this whole Bill Ayers thing has been, I am hopeful about one thing, and that is that I don’t think that it will work. It was pathetic enough when Hillary trotted this shit out, but today, with the financial meltdown and all the other real issues that we’re facing, I just can’t see how this desperate, bankrupt ploy by McCain and his VP-pick will turn things around.
“The Weather Underground is available for download at iTunes and DVDs can be ordered directly from Green’s website. If you order a DVD from the website before the election, Green will include a free 8×10 Bill Ayers mugshot.”

“Oliver Stone gets points for speed and efficiency — he shot the picture over 46 days this spring and summer on a tiny $30 million budget and gave it a rich, polished look — but not for the scope of his vision,” writes Time‘s Richard Corliss. “W. isn’t tragedy or farce; it’s illustrated journalism, based mostly on extant Bush biographies and memoirs of early Bush appointees. All the incidents are there but not the insight. What’s missing is the one thing Stone films have never lacked: a point of view.”
W. says Bush is a mediocre Oedipal figure (i.e., driven by father issues) and therefore, as repugnant as he may be in straight-up political terms, to be finally pitied. This isn’t a point of view? Sure seems like one. It never really sank in before I saw W. that George W. Bush is a fundamentally sad and trapped fellow. However accurate this view may be, it’s now with me and that’s the doing of Oliver Stone. The certainty of mind I’ve had all these years in simply despising Bush is, for better or worse, no more.

“We (and you) were none too pleased when Ben Lyons joined Ben Mankiewicz as the host for At the Movies earlier this year, particularly when we considered Lyons’ track record as something of a half-wit Richard Roeper to Mankiewicz’s low-rent Roger Ebert. And while Mankiewicz has settled in relatively well in the last six weeks, we continue to cringe at the sight and sound of Lyons fluffing away at Hollywood loins in his blurb-fertile reviews.

“Still, we knew he was a hack; what we didn’t know (at least to the extent we do today) was the garish, staggering extent of his starfucking.” — from Stu Van Airsdale‘s completely justified slice-and-dice of a posturing showbiz toady.

Early Monday afternoon Defamer‘s Kyle Buchanan rapped the knuckles of Owen Gleiberman, Anthony Lane and yours truly for bringing up — mentioning! — the racially-diverse-couple aspect of Rachel Getting Married. The piece is/was called “How Older, White Critics Have Missed the Boat on Rachel Getting Married.”
Buchanan’s view is that the only acceptably enlightened way to approach the above-described aspect of Jonathan Demme‘s latest is to ignore the undercurrents, as the film pretty much does. Right!
But how come Buchanan waited nine days to get into this? I ran my original Rachel piece on 10.4. Shouldn’t counterpunch pieces run within 72 hours of the original post? That’s my rule, at least. And why does it take up to a day for a reader comment to pop up on a Defamer post? That doesn’t happen on this site. You can be Count Vronsky writing from an internet cafe in Albania and your reply to one of my posts will show up like that.

Footage of this sort would never be included in a major film today. Sexist, objectifying, poolside porn-drivel. Certainly not with a major star. The internet (that’s right, no capital “I”) has cornered the titillation market. A scene of this sort, which feels even more ridiculous due to that idiotic reaction from Phil Silvers, feels as removed from ’08 as a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical number.

I don’t consider Quentin Tarantino‘s decision to add Julie Dreyfus, Michael Bacall and Omar Doom to the cast of Inglorious Bastards to be hot news. But the poster that accompanied the original Playlist story is cool. Obviously meant to look like a Nazi souvenir that’s been sitting in some World War II vet’s attic for the last 60 years.

With Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking these days about how his career went plop into the toilet in the ’90s, I found this Entertainment Weekly piece I filed from the ’92 Cannes Film Festival interesting. It was just a few days after the L.A. riots when I came across a Rourke quote about those he felt were responsible. A few hours later I ran into Spike Lee at a party, showed him the clipping, and he grabbed my tape recorder and said what he said.

Late May 1992 EW clipping

You are not a true film person unless you know what CRM-114 means — what film it’s from, what its function was, who first mentions it, etc.

Everyone regards MSNBC’s Chuck Todd as a brilliant political pulse-taker, but he and his First Read team are consistently the most cautious and conservative estimators around.

Today, three weeks from Election Day, Todd & Co. are only giving Obama a modest 101 electoral vote lead over McCain, 264-163, with 111 votes (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida) in the toss-up column. This at a time when almost everyone else regards Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as leaning-Obama states, at the very least. (Okay, one or two polls indicate Ohio is only slightly leaning to Obama.)
Fivethirtyeight has only Missouri and Indiana in the toss-up column, and is projecting Obama over McCain 351 to 187. The toss-ups at Pollster.com are Nevada (actually slightly leaning to Obama), Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina (again, slight Obama). They’re giving to Obama over McCain 320 to 158 with 60 electoral toss-up votes. And the Yahoo Dashboard is projecting Obama over McCain 344 to 167 with only one toss-up state — North Carolina.
So what’s up with Todd? What is he seeing that others are missing? Are the others all doing the wildly speculative spitball thing — slapdash, guesstimating — while only Todd is taking stock of the actual numerical realities? I don’t think so. I think there’s an element inside MSNBC that’s become cautious to a fault. I’ve pretty much come to think of Todd and his team as the “hold-back guys” — i.e., the last ones to admit that something’s happening here, Mr. Jones. It’s as if Tom Brokaw is tugging at their jacket sleeves and going, “Hold on, hold on…not so fast, don’t jump to conclusions.”

Jamie Stuart again grapples with existential conundrums, an unfaithful (or at the very least weak and malleable) woman, phantom creeps on the street and other stuff that feels a little too poised and over-considered. Sooner or later all artists accept the fact that an orange is an orange is an orange.
And oh yeah, Wrestler star Mickey Rourke talking about his movie-career detour is cut into all this.
Here’s a flattering assessment of Stuart and his work by the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday, posted yesterday.
I love the brief Mac screen shot of an entry or password code: “CRM-114.” You are not a true film person unless you know what CRM-114 means — what film it’s from, what its function was, who first mentions it, etc.
“You think people are stupid and don’t pay attention today? You should see it fifty years from now.”