On 8.26.12 I ran a piece about The Newsroom‘s Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) calling the Tea Party “the American Taliban” — an assertion that is 110% correct. But let’s remember also that British documentarian Adam Curtis pretty much owns this analogy, having presented a version of it in his 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares.

The Tea Party and the Taliban share the following traits and/or beliefs: (a) ideological purity; (b) a pathological hatred of the U.S. government; (c) a regarding of education as a problem and in some cases a dark force as it tends to undermine the teachings of the Lord/Allah; (d) a need to control women and their bodies; (e) a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism; (f) a denial of science, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress; (g) a regarding of compromise as weakness; (h) a tribal mentality; (i) severe xenophobia; and (j) intolerance of dissent.

“The most interesting thing about the popularity of superhero movies is that they are insanely expensive to make, yet they spring from a plebian, populist artform,” The Guardian‘s Joe Queenan wrote two days ago. “Comic books, at least until recently, were cheap. They were beautifully drawn and exciting, but they were still basically cheap. That was the point. Movies are not cheap, especially not in 3D. Comic-book heroes, like football players, have lost all contact with their proletarian roots.

“Some people will read all this and say: ‘You’re over-intellectualizing. You’re reading too much into it.’ This may be true. But these charges are always made by people who never over-intellectualize anything, who never read too much into things. They are made by people who want you to take the X-Men seriously, as legitimate fiction. And then when you do, they say that you are over-intellectualizing.

My heart skipped a beat when I first glanced at Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s Bluray.com review of the new 12 Angry Men Bluray from the UK branch of MGM/20th Century Fox. I thought for a second that this transfer might not look as grainy as the Criterion Bluray version. I find pronounced grain distracting; always have, always will. You want to see a version that looks really good without any noticable grain? Watch the free YouTube version. I’m serious.

A clear indication of the weakened state of the 1.85 fascist cabal is their odd silence about the 1.66 aspect ratio used for the just-released Bluray of Peter Bogdanovich‘s At Long Last Love (’75). As I believe in 1.66 as an eternal idea in the mind of God, I’m naturally delighted that this notorious clunker has been released in this format. The boxier the better, I say; especially for a film that sought to revive the spirit of 1930s musicals, when 1.37:1 was the rule. But I’m not aware of any historical justification for 1.66 being used for this 1975 film. Every stateside film was being shot in 1.85 in the ’70s except when otherwise specified (Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon, etc.) and/or in the case of European films, and by ’75 every theatre in the U.S. was working with 1.85 aperture plates.

To most people, Elysium (TriStar, 8.9) sounds like another Oblivion. Similar sound, four syllables, futuristic. Tom Cruise precedes Matt Damon, Joseph Kosinski precedes Neil Blomkamp. Chilly, survivalist, dystopian. Swells live in orbit above earth, mongrels barely surviving on spoiled/abandoned terra firma. My money’s on the Blomkamp because (a) it seems more visually complex and action-driven than Oblvion, (b) on some level it reminds me of THX-1138, and (c) District 9 was cooler and smarter than anything Kosinski has ever made or is likely to make.

As I first observed last March after catching an early trailer for Let Me Explain (Summit, 7.3), comedian Kevin Hart is into connecting with the masses. He loves making people laugh, being applauded, cheered, recognized. But he doesn’t seem all that funny. And I’ve been laughing for years with/at Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, etc. Is Hart the Gallagher of black comics? In the new redband trailer there are six or seven cutaways to urban types laughing at Hart’s material…we get it, we get it.

Oh, and the bit about being chased by a howling “deerbra” (half-deer, half-zebra) is unfunny because it appeals to the low-rent mentality of shopping-mall habitues. Nature! Nature’s comin’ after me, gonna take a bite out of my leg!

Last March: “Kevin Hart standing before a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden and being adored like God…they love me! Hart’s narration says Let Me Explain is about the joy of making people laugh. The footage, on the other hand, shows how deeply insecure he is, and how much he needs to fortify his ego. The cheers, the crowds, the adulation…Ceasar!

“A press release announces that Hart’s 2012 ‘Let Me Explain’ concert tour made $32 million. Leapin’ lizards…that’s a lot of money! I’ll bet Kevin can afford to buy a shitload of stuff now, right? Let Me Explain must therefore be really funny. After watching this trailer I wouldn’t see Let Me Explain if Hart personally paid me $100 to do so. Which he could afford.”

These guys fought because the weenie in the black T-shirt (i.e., the one who surrendered) didn’t have the driving skills to slip into the parking spot nose-first, like a ferret. Anyone who tries to back into a parking space on a crowded Manhattan cross street deserves whatever trouble comes his/her way. With power steering commonplace you should never do that. If you can’t nose your way in and wiggle around and eventually achieve parallel (which is how I park) then stop blocking the people behind you and man up and pay for a parking garage.

My prejudicial problem with Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Diana, a forthcoming drama about the last two years in the life of Diana Princess of Wales (Naomi Watts), stems from my belief that Diana, however unloved she was by Prince Charles and however beloved she was by millions, wasn’t all that bright or wise. She was just a nice, gracious, kind-hearted lady who didn’t have a tremendous amount of activity going on upstairs, and whose death was entirely caused by her mystifying decision to become the girlfriend of Dodi Al Fayed, by any measure a playboy and a wastrel.

Beware of samurai swords in action films. It means it’s beholden to extreme Japanese action-flick tropes and a general obsession with razor-clean slicings and gleaming silvery blades and blah blah. Eff that noise. I was in Tokyo for a day last November, and I vowed never to return. That includes seeing this film. During my time in Tokyo I didn’t see a single yakuza lose his hand or his head or get disemboweled by a samurai sword. I didn’t even see a samurai sword hanging on a wall. Do you think it’s all movie bullshit, the samurai fixation? What digits or appendages will Hugh Jackman slice off? Who’s his trainer?