With the death of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens now being reported, the voters of Alaska are being reminded of the constant cycle of things. This actually has nothing to do with Stevens, a corrupt old buzzard, being killed in a plane crash, but the fact is that fresh energy is needed. Alaska needs to shed skins, reinvent itself, support new fellows.

I’ve noted before that a good portion of popular movies and popular actors have always been mediocre and/or mushy. You can’t quite say that the more popular a film is now, the less cultural cred it will have in years and decades to come…but a lot of popular stuff sure seems old or stodgy in retrospect. And an awful lot of popular actors from the big-studio era sure seem like nothing. Which correlates, of course, to our current crop.

(l. t. ro.) Bing Crosby, Robert Taylor, Mervyn LeRoy.

Everyone today gets what Cooper, Cagney, Bogart, Gable, Astaire, Raft, Davis, Widmark, the Marx Brothers, Monroe and Dean were about. But other studio-era figures seem stodgy, Pleistocene. You watch their films and can’t understand what the big deal was.

Who rents the movies of Bing Crosby today? Nobody, but he was a major Box-Office God in the ’40s and ’50s. Ditto the bland and dismissable Robert Taylor, who was quite popular in the ’30s and ’40s. Who talks about the films of Mervyn LeRoy these days? Except for ardent fans of Little Ceasar, I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, no one. That’s partly because LeRoy became a total status-quo mush head in the late in the ’40s and ’50s, churning out stuff like Little Women, Quo Vadis?, Million Dollar Mermaid, Mister Roberts, The FBI Story, A Majority of One, Gypsy, etc. All but unwatchable today.

Among the box-office chat-toppers between 1995 and 2000, only one — Titanic — has any dramatic or cultural cred today. (And that’s only because of the last 25 minutes or so.) The rest are borderline embarassments now. ’95’s top grosser was Die Hard with a Vengeance — awful. The ’96 champ was Independence Day — Chinese water torture today. Armageddon topped the ’98 list — all but excruciating because of the machine-gun cutting. The biggest film of ’99 was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace — enough said. The biggest grosser was Mission: Impossible II, which I’ve seen exactly once and will probably never see again.

So who are the Bing Crosby’s and Mervy LeRoy’s of today? Which actors and directors will mean absolutely nothing to film lovers in 2040 or 2050? Presuming there will be serious film lovers around 30 or 40 years hence is a big presumption, isn’t it? The fans of Michael Cera and Snooki and movies like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World will be in their 50s and 60s and running the show.

Cinema Blend‘s Josh Tyler has written the best defense of The Expendables so far. Wait…who has defended it? Anyone? The point is that Tyler’s writing is honest and the thinking is right out there — no posturing, no subterfuge, no clever-dick wordsmithing. I vaguely sympathize with what he’s saying — this is the age of Michael Cera, the little-girly man with the scrawny bod and the little fairy voice and deer-in the headlights expression, and woe to any culture that embraces such a pale expression of maleness — but The Expendables is still a stinky, third-rate embarassment.

“The Expendables is not a great movie,” Tyler admits, “[and] maybe it’s not even a good movie, but it’s a MAN MOVIE in all-capital letters. For fathers, The Expendables is a rare opportunity to share a little bit of the manly movie magic they shared with their dads, with their own sons.

“It’s violent and gory and utterly reprehensible — there’s no denying that. And it’s true that the story’s a mess and the characters are two-dimensional. Everything Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich wrote in her negative review of the film is absolutely true. She’s dead on. Yet I’m not sure I’d want it made any other way. The Expendables should be like this. It must be this way. Cavemen are two-dimensional, black and white, on or off. From that dogged, admittedly dumb, often careless simplicity comes their power. So it is with The Expendables.”

I for one completely support the position on Afghanistan taken by Senator Barack Obama. His is a very intelligent and perceptive view of an obviously untenable situation. If only…

We all know exactly — exactly — what to expect from Nora Ephron‘s forthcoming Reese Witherspoon-as-Peggy Lee biopic. Lee’s rep is that of a soulful singer-artist who peaked in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, was kind of led around by her loins and hot blood (marriage to Dave Barbour, “Fever,” “Lover”), did some animal voicings in 1955’s Lady and the Tramp, and ended up feeling a little dispirited and disappointed (“Is That All There Is?”). Accurate or dead-on, unfair or unkind, that’s the sum-up.

If I know Ephron, she’ll tone down the eroticism (or she’ll try to get into it but blow it all the same). She’ll focus instead upon Lee’s singing, spirit, artistry, awards and longevity. She’ll try for a female Walk The Line, but will deliver a squarish tribute to a woman singer who blazed her own path and did it her own way, etc. Singing over sex. Ephron is not Bernardo Bertolucci and never will be. But Witherspoon won’t let Ephron suffocate the eroticism entirely and will kick ass with the Lee character, and will absolutely, definitely be nominated for Best Actress in 2012 or whenever. You can take this to the bank.

Am I right or am I right, Scott Feinstein and Sasha Stone?

In an April 2006 MacLeans piece, Mark Steyn wrote the following: “The other female vocalists who emerged from the big bands of the forties — Doris Day, Dinah Shore, Rosemary Clooney — were ‘girl singers.’ Peggy Lee was a woman singer, and not just because she was shoehorned into gowns that exaggerated that hourglass figure: in the fifties, the poise, the cool, the raised eyebrow and the beauty spot made her as defining an emblem of mid-century pop culture style for the distaff side as Sinatra was for men.”

Eat Pray Love is a fertile satirical topic this week (Eat vs. Expendables, chick-flick aesthetics, boning Bardem vs. Bali spirituality, is Roberts resurging or over?) and Jimmy Kimmel‘s writers decided to focus on Latino fat guys?

According to a poll released today by TheFrisky.com, a decisive majority of empty, spiritually diseased young women who read this site would rather trade places with Jersey Shore‘s Snooki than Bristol Palin, Heidi Montag, Britney Spears, Vienna Girardi or Lindsay Lohan. I’ve half-jested before about putting geekboy fans of CG superhero movies into green reeducation camps. It’s a benevolent idea at heart — to try and detoxify people who’ve become so polluted with various media poisons that they’re unable to recognize healthy aesthetic convictions, and have to come to prefer sequential junk-food highs as a way of life. Let’s just say the readers of TheFrisky.com would be in for some helpful lifestyle changes If I was dictator.

In an 8.9 New Yorker posting, Richard Brody is urging the daring and the willing to catch Elaine May‘s Ishtar tomorrow morning on Turner Classic Movies at 4 am (i.e., about 11 hours from now). Brody calls this misunderstood 1987 calamity “one of the most original, audacious, and inventive movies — and funniest comedies — of modern times. It isn’t just a movie worth rescuing for a few choice bits; it’s a thoroughgoing, beginning-to-end masterwork.”

Warren Beatty as “Lyle” in Elaine May’s Ishtar.

All right, now that’s just horseshit. Over-cranked, over-exuberant, not trustworthy. And yet Ishtar, on the whole, is worth seeing. Here’s how I explained it last January:

(1) “The general…well, at least marginal view that Ishtar is better than its rep and is actually hilarious in portions”; (2) “Ishtar was one of the first ‘no-laugh funny’ films ever released. That was a completely new concept back then, and people didn’t know what to make of it”; (3) “Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman played a pair of profoundly untalented New York-based songwriters — I remember that much clearly. I also recall that the first half hour or so played pretty well, and that the film’s troubles didn’t start until they travelled to Morocco…Ishtar, I mean. I remember that the best no-laugh humor happened when Beatty and Hoffman were compulsively composing awful songs”; (4) “Ishtar is a decent (some would say inspired) piece of entertainment, a legendary Hollywood debacle that, like Heaven’s Gate, gradually found a measure of respect. Okay, among people with a slightly corroded and perverse sense of humor but still, no one today thinks of Ishtar as a film to be shunned. I haven’t conducted a poll, but I’ll bet very few critics would put it down, and that most would probably say ‘not half bad.'”

I’m also amused by a Pauline Kael line from her original review (which Brody quotes): “The movie certainly isn’t dislikable; you observe the fine touches. But you feel as if your mind is wilting.”

Bleeding Cool‘s Rich Johnston reported last Friday that 20th Century Fox has bought screen rights to Nemesis, a Mark Millar/Steven McNiven graphic novel that Tony Scott may…okay, probably will wind up directing with Scott Free producing. Because the world simply can’t wait for another property about another costumed vigilante a la Tony Stark (i.e., eccentric billionaire), and another plot about this guy’s parents having been killed and the vigilante bent on revenge, etc.

Am I hallucinating? Is this a dream? I don’t how how to say this differently so I’m just going to repeat that I really can’t stand this any longer. I thought I made it clear during ComicCon but I guess some people were busy or offline and didn’t get the word: no more big-studio comic-book movies of any kind…ever!

Kill all comic-book movies and hunt down the whiskered, T-shirted geeks in flip-flops who are dying to see them. Kill all comic-book movies and hunt down the whiskered, T-shirted geeks in flip-flops who are dying to see them. Kill all comic-book movies and hunt down the whiskered, T-shirted geeks in flip-flops who are dying to see them. Kill all comic-book movies and hunt down the whiskered, T-shirted geeks in flip-flops who are dying to see them.

And no, I don’t care about the twist, which Millar (Kick Ass, Wanted) has explained as follows: “What if Batman was a total cunt?” That’s interesting for about four or five seconds. After that it’s a non-starter because a ne’er-do-well vigilante in faux-superhero guise is the same formula crap flipped over on its back. Stories and movies like this are oppressive, poisonous, polluting our souls. Stop making them, stop making them, stop making them, stop making them.

Sylvester Stallone‘s The Expendables “isn’t a good movie — it’s merely a serviceable one,” writes Marshall Fine. “Stallone wants it to be a valedictory, perhaps: a meditation on the way men of violence live their lives and live with themselves. But Unforgiven it ain’t. Neither is it The Wild Bunch nor The Dirty Dozen. It wants to be, but, again, there’s not that much depth.

“Stallone would like to fancy himself an auteur on the order of Clint Eastwood: a director/writer who happens to act and who, eventually, could step behind the camera full-time. But as The Expendables shows, he is, at best, a journeyman filmmaker. He’s capable of assembling a movie that is mildly coherent, but not one that engages the audience emotionally or intellectually. Instead, it’s all about the big-bang theory: the bigger the bangs (explosions, gunshots, mammoth fireballs), the bigger the box-office. In theory, anyway.

“It’s all fairly economical: a little action, a few stale wisecracks – and then one huge blowout at the end. But two things keep the film from rising past the level of middling (which is a generous description).

“The script is the main problem. Written by Dave Callaham and rewritten by Stallone, it wants to have humor, action, thrills and drama all jostling for your attention. But aside from the action itself, the rest of it — from Barney’s conscience-stricken decision to go back to the island to the attempts at banter involving Jet Li — seems sketched out, rather than written

“The other problem is the editing, [which] succumbs to the chopped-salad school of film cutting. None of the mano e mano duke-outs are ever given a clean, clear look. Rather, the action is sliced into fragments so that you never have a sense of how the action builds; instead, it’s all pay-offs – punches that connect, kicks that deliver, body-slams that raise a cloud of dust. Or diced-up action [that] is intercut further with scenes of what the other characters are doing at the same time. There’s no continuity to the action, and so no sense of fulfillment.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about how it’s possible to buy into an implausible movie like Salt. The Expendables, however, is both implausible and ridiculous, a formula on to which other formulas have been carelessly grafted. I’d say that I already can smell the sequel, but I believe that odor is coming from this film.”

My father, a grumpy rationalist, never bought into religion. But my mother did, to my great distress, and so she raised me as a Episcopalian. I was unenthused, reluctant. I know I should have just relaxed and rolled with it. The Episcopal church, after all, was thought to be a kind of mild-mannered, middle-class path to God. Not as stringent or demanding as Catholicism. Its parishioners were less passionate than the Methodists. It was thought that even Presbyterians were a little more Catholic-y than Episcopalians.

Episcopalian ministers weren’t that dogmatic; they were liberal guys who drank wine and smoked pipes and led discreet hetero lifestyles. They weren’t into guilt-tripping or rapping anyone’s knuckles. I think of them now as middle-aged, easy-going guys who tended to look like Hugh Hefner or Richard Attenborough.

But none of these distinctions mattered to me back then. All religions were prison, I felt. In my view the Episcopalian faith wasn’t about spirit or salvation as much as socializing and singing in church and wearing suits. I despised the whole charade — going to catechism classes, taking part in religious pageants, Holy Communion, etc. But some kind of receptivity to the idea or observance of religion sunk in over the years. Getting drilled for years with Episcopalian teachings and rituals has a way of softening you up, I suppose.

What happened is that out of the blue I suddenly got into Hinduism when I turned 20. Hinduism, that is, by way of LSD and readings of the Bhagavad Gita. I found serious satori. I walked around all the time with a blissed-out expression. I became the kind of guy you would never, ever invite to parties because all I would do was sit on the floor in the lotus position and talk about enlightenment. I never became a practicing Hindu, and in fact gradually blew the whole thing off as I got a bit older. I nonetheless feel much more aligned today with Hinduism — the white middle-class LSD kind — than I’ve ever felt for any of the approved suburban white-people faiths.

All to say that I vaguely relate to Julia Roberts‘ recent declaration that she’s become a practicing Hindu (i.e., “going to temple to chant and pray and celebrate” with her three children and husband-cameraman Daniel Moder, etc.) She got into Hinduism, she says, during the making of movie Eat Pray Love in India.