I’ve assembled sequential excerpts from my original reviews of the 17 Pure Pleasure films of 2009, starting with my 5.24.08 review of Il Divo and ending with my Toronto Film Festival 9.17.09 review of Collapse. I haven’t seen Avatar yet (it’s supposed to screen on 12.10), but the bottom line is that there are no October, November or December ’09 releases on the list.

(1) From “Gospel of Il Divo,” 5.24.08:

“Never overdramatize things. Everything can be fixed. Keep a certain detachment from everything. The important things in life are very few.” — former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, whose political career, particularly the events that led to revelations about his ties to the Italian mafia and reported complicity in the murder of a journalist, is dramatized in Paolo Sorrentino‘s Il Divo.

“Wisdom, or a semblance of same, sometimes comes from very odd places. There’s nothing very admirable about the Andreotti portrayed in Il Divo — an uptight, coldly calculating Machievellian politician of the highest (or lowest, as the case may be) order. But since hearing the above lines, I haven’t been able to shake them. They’ve almost become a kind of mantra to me. Hearing them spoken by actor Toni Servillo (whose performance as Andreotti is somewhere between a marvel and a hoot) led to some kind of ‘aha!’ moment.”

(2) From “Good As It Gets,” 9.9.08:

“The Hurt Locker is absolutely a classic war film in the tradition of Platoon, The Thin Red Line, Pork Chop Hill, Paths of Glory and the last 25% of Full Metal Jacket. Set in Baghdad and the full maelstrom of that godforsaken conflict, this is a full-power throttle, nail-biting, bomb-defusal suspense film that gradually becomes a kind of existential nerve ride about the risk and uncertainty of everything and anything, plus an explanation of the addiction that war is for some guys who go through it and can’t quite leave it alone.

“There is no ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ judgement about any film, but now that I’ve seen The Hurt Locker I’m stunned that Variety‘s Derek Elley could have panned it the way he did at the Venice Film Festival, calling it a hellish thing to sit through, and one that says nothing new about the Iraq War U.S. troop experience, and that it takes too long to get to the point (such as it is). What did Elley see over there? Was he on painkillers?”

“Something is very wrong with life, the world, human nature and the film business when a movie this knock-down good is still hunting for distribution. I’m obviously aware of all the Iraq War films that died last year but this movie is something else. You don’t shun movies like this. If you’re a distributor and that’s your judgment — walk away, we can’t sell it, we’ll lose our shirts — then you need to get out of the movie business and start selling refrigerators or cars.”

(3) From HE In The Loop review, 1.13.09:

“In The Loop is easily one of the funniest comedies about governmental inanity and media mis-speak I’ve ever seen. It also felt to me like one of the fastest laughers of this type since Billy Wilder‘s One, Two,Three. And it has some absolutely wonderful insult humor. I’m talking one beautiful saber thrust and club-bludgeon after another.

“It’s basically about how the media can sometimes focus on a gaffe by an official or spokesperson and make it sound (via sheer repetition and obsession) to represent firm government policy concerning this or that major issue.

“In The Loop‘s major issue is a potential military conflict involving U.S. and British troops — think Iraq in ’02 and early ’03. The humor is about how various second- and third-tier government types in London and Washington try to dodge, maneuver and counter-spin their way around an essentially meaningless statement by a British cabinet minister that war is ‘unforeseeable.’ Meaningless and yet strangely meaningful once the media gets hold of it. And the source of endless misery for many people.”

(4) From “A Knock-Out Education,” 1.18.09:

“Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, a coming-of-age period drama set in 1961 London, is the absolute shit — the best film of the Sundance Film Festival, a finely tuned and deeply engaging film by regular popcorn-watching standards, an award-calibre drama that will definitely be in contention at the end of the year, and a movie that has launched a genuine movie star in an old-fashioned and yet very new-fashioned sense — 23 year-old Carey Mulligan.

“I know that special old-soul-mixed-with-youthful-effervescence quality that you see in very few actors and actresses over the years, and trust me, Mulligan has it. A wondrously true and satisfying film has broken out of the Sundance ’09 pack, and a brand-new actress with just the right face and just the right approach and precisely the right touch of sadness in the corners of her mouth has hit one out of the park.”

(5) From Girlfriend Experience review, 1.20.09:

“I was pretty okay with The Girlfriend Experience. It smacks of right-now verite, is smartly written and very well made. (And recently shot also with all kinds of references to the Obama-McCain race and the economic meltdown.) No one would call it the stuff of high Shakespearean drama, but I wasn’t bored for a second. It’s smallish and low-key like Soderbergh’s Bubble, but set in Manhattan and focusing on a very pretty upscale prostitute and the various men in her life — boyfriend, journalist, high-rollers looking to buy her favors, Glenn Kenny‘s slimeball website journalist, etc.

“I presume that everyone reading this knows that Soderbergh is far too dry, ironic and circumspect to be a provider of hot sex scenes or even mildly suggestive ones (as in, say, Alan Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour). He maintains a cool distance in this regard at all times, which is welcome considering the appearance of Grey’s clients. Some of them, I mean. Two or three inspired a prayer from yours truly: ‘Please, God, I don’t want to see any middle-aged butt cheeks or bloated stomachs or funny-looking feet.'”

(6) From Sin Nombre review, 3.19.09:

“Sin Nombre is a tough, fully-believable story about survival, love, family and fate. (Or luck, as it were.) Every frame is solid, lean, gristly and true. There’s no question about it — Cary Fukunaga is a major new director.”

(7) From “Toback at Harvard Club, 4.11.09:

“My interview earlier today with Tyson director James Toback was easily the most spirited, relaxed and and enjoyable discussion I’ve had with anyone in a long while, taped or not. Toback is one of the most sage observers I’ve ever known, and hands down the greatest gabber — not in a blah-blah, listen-to-me-talk sense but in the vein of a guy who just knows and doesn’t believe in trimming his sails. Intimidation (even the intimidation that beautiful women impose on the best of us) never seems to affect him. He doesn’t seem to know from hesitancy. Which is why his discussions with Mike Tyson went so well, which is the main reason, I feel, why Tyson connects.”

(8) From “Anvil Guys,” 4.19.09:

“How can Sacha Gervasi‘s Anvil! The Story of Anvil not wind up being nominated for Best Feature Documentary Oscar? It’s got heart, it’s about over-the-hill, down-on-their-luck artists getting their groove back, it’s well made, it’s connecting with audiences, it’s funny, it’s lowbrow-highbrow. How can Academy’s doc committee ignore it?”

(9) From Bright Star review, 5.15.09:

“It’s been done quite perfectly — I was especially taken with Greig Fraser‘s Vermeer-lit photography — with immaculate fealty for the textures and tones of early 19th Century London, and a devotion to capturing the kind of love that is achingly conveyed in hand-written notes that are hand delivered by caring young fellows in waistcoats. You know what I mean.

“But it struck me nonetheless as too slow and restricted and…well, damnably refined. I looked at my watch three times and decided around the two-thirds mark that it should have run 100 rather than 120 minutes. I know — a typical guy reaction, right? The pacing is just right for the time period — it would have felt appalling on some level if it had been shot and cut with haste for haste’s sake — but there’s no getting around the feeling that it’s a too-long sit. It’s basically a Masterpiece Theatre thing that my mother will love. I’m not putting it down on its own terms. I felt nothing but admiration for the various elements.”

(10) From HE Broken Dreams Cannes review, 5.19.09:

“Broken Dreams is easily the most fully realized, thematically satisfying, self-assured and purely entertaining film of the festival so far. Not as fully emotional as Almodovar’s best films, but on a very high station in the second tier. Way in front of anything I’ve seen so far.”

“Partly a romantic noir, partly a tragedy about playing around, largely about creative creation and holding to a vision and putting things right in the end, the story spans some 16 years (set in ’08, flashing back to ’92 and ’94). It focuses on a film director (Luis Homar) who’s lost the love of his life (Penelope Cruz) as well as his eyesight to a jealous lover, and how after much revelation he achieves a kind of satisfaction in the end. I’ll say no more except that it’s a profound and enriching finish all around.

“Pedro World is a perfect haven, a warm cave filled with invention, brilliance, constant emotional intrigue, suspense, and exactitude. It’s a place to hang, a place of assurance that always mesmerizes and delights and makes you feel well taken care of, like you’re staying in some $2000-a-night hotel in some tranquil valley.”

(11) From “Enemies Forever,” 6.24.09:

“Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies is glorious and levitational — the most captivating, beautifully composed and freshly conceived gangster movie since Bonnie and Clyde. It’s an art film first, a Mann head-and-heart trip second, a classic machine-gun action pulverizer third, and a conventional popcorn movie fourth. The schmucks will go ‘meh’ and the people who are hip enough to understand what this movie is doing/has done will retire to tens of thousands of nearby cafes and talk it over for at least a couple of hours.”

(12) From “Total Cove Guy,” 7.16.09:

“You don’t come out of The Cove simply saying ‘really good movie!’ (although you do). You come out The Cove wanting to fly the next day to Taiji, Japan, in order to kick some Japanese dolphin-slaughtering ass. You come out furious and moved and converted and dug in.

“No one should get the idea that The Cove is primarily a classroom-lecture piece and an eco-activist movie, although it is obviously those things in a political undertow sense. Because it’s first and foremost a very well-made, thoroughly watchable murder-mystery — a gripping and entertaining sit by any standard. (Unless you happen to be, you know, an idiot.)

“That’s right — murder. As in seawater turning pink and then blood red. Anyone who’s ever watched the various Flipper entertainments (the two early ’60s movies, the ‘ mid ’60s TV series, the 1996 feature with Elijah Wood) or has visited any kind of Sea World amusement park needs to see it especially. And no wimping out (or allowing the girlfriend/wife to steer you away from it). Stand up, man up and buy a ticket when it opens on 7.31.”

(13) From “Prawns, Dust and Garbage,” 8.14.09:

“There’s so much garbage, dirt, dust and detritus in [District 9] that I started to feel physically dirty after a while. I almost began to smell the stench. I began to feel like taking a shower or at least using some sanitary wipes.

“If someone had come up to me and said ‘if you give me $20 bucks I can fix it so that the movie will stop with the dust and the desaturated color and all the scuzzy gooey stuff and cut to a full-color scene in a fashion mall with a couple of pretty women talking about nothing over margaritas,’ I would have given him the money. Dust! Fucking smelly dust and skanky garbage and black goo leaking out of wounds! I needed to get away from this for a minute or two.

“And I wasn’t all that rocked by the way the story rocks and lurches, taunting you into thinking ‘ahah, okay, things are going to work out’ only to pull the plug and leave you in the lurch, only to push the plug it back into the wall again. Up, down, in and out, oh my God…here we go!, hair-trigger, cliffhanger. Writing a story along these lines is a wanker’s game. Come to think of it, it’s an old Peter Jackson tactic.

“And I’m not a big fan of ‘the cackling villain who can’t be killed & shan’t be killed until the very end’ cliche. Nor do I admire endings that leave everything & everyone hanging in the lurch in preparation for the sequel. District 9 is definitely playing this game.”

“But I agree with those who’ve been saying that Michael Bay could learn a thing or two from director Neil Blomkamp. District 9 is watchable and inventive and alive on the screen, which is more than you can say for Transformers 2.”

(14) From “Calmly Touches Home,” 9.11.09:

“Up In The Air really has it all — recognizable human-scale truth, clarity, smart comfort, the right degree of restraint (i.e., knowing how not to push it), and — this got me more than anything else — a penetrating, almost unnerving sense of quiet. It doesn’t tell you what to feel — it lets you feel what it is. All the best movies do that. They don’t sell or pitch — they just lay it down on the Oriental carpet and say to the viewer, ‘We’ve got a good thing here, and if you agree, fine. And if you don’t, go with God.’

“You know what? The hell with that attitude. If you really watch and let this movie in and then say, as a friend of a good friend said after watching it in Telluride a few days ago, ‘I don’t know…it’s nice but it’s more like an okay ground-rule double than a homer,’ then due respect but you’re the kind of person who likes candied popcorn and Strawberry Twizzlers and feel-good pills. No offense.

“The thing that puts Up In The Air over is that it’s about right effin’ now, which is to say the Great Recession current of 2009. Reitman has been working on the script for six years, and if the film had come out last September — just as the bad news about what those greedy selfish banking bastards had done was being announced and everyone started to mutter ‘uh-oh’ to themselves — it wouldn’t be reflecting the cultural what-have-you as much as it is now. And yet it never alludes to anything that specific. It doesn’t have to.”

(15) From “Slow Death by Jewish Kiki,” 9.11.09:

“Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is a brilliant LQTM black comedy that out-misanthropes Woody Allen by a country mile and positively seethes with contempt for complacent religious culture (in this case ’60s era Minnesota Judaism). The Coens are fearless at this kind of artful diamond-cutting. …and it absolutely must rank as one of the year’s ten Best Picture nominees when all is said and done.

“The worldview of this maliciously wicked film (which isn’t ‘no-laugh funny’ as much as bitter-toxic funny, which I personally prize above all other kinds) is black as night, black as a damp and sealed-off cellar. Scene after scene tells us that life is drip-drip torture, betrayal and muted hostility are constants, all manner of bad things (including tornadoes) are just around the corner, your family and neighbors will cluck-cluck as you sink into quicksand, etc.

“This is the stuff that true laughter is made of, and this is a genuinely wonderful film to sit through because of it. It’s so refined and compressed , so precisely calibrated and cold as nitrogen, and yet hilarious as Hades. Literally. I can’t wait to catch it a second time.”

(16) From “Lonely Number,” a Single Man review that ran on 9.16.09

“The thoroughly readable feelings in the features of star Colin Firth — longing, grief, numbness, curiosity, contentment — keep A Single Man aloft. Along with the immaculate visual values, of course. The film reminded me visually at times of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert and tonally of La Notte. The conservative gayish vibe will mean box-office issues with hinterland heteros, I suppose, but it’s so exquisitely composed and refined and well-written, etc. It’ll be a huge hit with urban gay audiences, but film lovers of all persuasions owe it to themselves.”

(17) From “Collapse Wallops,” 9.17.09:

“The reason I’m only 5% concerned with Michael Ruppert‘s credibility is because he fits the paradigm of other crazy prophets who’ve been right. He’s the aged soothsayer who went up to Julius Caesar and said ‘beware the Ides of March.’ He’s Elijah, the man in rags who warned Ishmael in John Huston‘s Moby Dick that ‘there will come a day when ye shall smell land but there will be no land, and on that day Ahab will go to his grave…but within the hour he will rise and beckon.’ He’s I.F. Stone, whose newsletter called it right on so many issues in the ’60s and ’70s.

“Isn’t it in the nature of most alarmists to be alone and uninvested in establishment currencies and memberships with a tendency to shout from streetcorners, publish nickel-and-dime newsletters or expound in low-budget documentaries such as Collapse?”

One of my many derelictions right now is not having seen John Lee Hancock‘s The Blind Side, which I’m planning to catch tomorrow. It’s a much bigger hit than box-office pundits were expecting, of course. “A 47% uptick from its opening day B.O. with $16.2 million on 3,140 runs…pic’s domestic cume stands at $76.3 million,” Variety reports.

The basic appeal, I’m guessing, is that it’s a good Middle American movie that’s not informed by the neurotic mentalities of the coasts. I heard this morning that a rival distributor (i.e., not a Warner Bros. guy) recently projected to a friend that it will ultimately make north of $200 million. It’s the only film besides Up to have a CinemaScore A-plus so far. Old news, chasing the tail, etc.

“Bright vivid technicolor…like Spielberg directed it…a serial-killer movie meets The Color Purple…Silence of the Lambs meets What Dreams May Come.” — a friend who caught a screening last night in Los Angeles.

A couple of hours hence I’ll be heading over to BAM’s Harvey Theatre and a matinee performance of the Sydney Theatre Company’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which began yesterday and runs only through 12.20. The lure, of course, is a reputedly devastating Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois. The classic Tennessee Williams play was directed by Liv Ullman, and costars Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski and Robin McLeavy as Stanley’s wife and Blanche’s sister, Stella.

Cate Blanchett in BAM’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

“If Blanchett’s nerve-shattering turn doesn’t knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away,” wrote Washington Post critic Peter Marks on 11.2. “What Blanchett achieves…amounts to a truly great portrayal — certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I’ve ever experienced.”

I know the Streetcar dialogue so well I’ll be able to mouth a good part of it along with the actors. Like Winston Churchill mouthing Hamlet from the front row as he watched Richard Burton perform it on the London stage in the ’50s.

The run is totally sold out, of course. Impossible to get tickets except through fiendish scalpers. 190 minutes with intermission, or something like 170 or 175 minutes without. Elia Kazan‘s 1951 film ran 122 minutes, or roughly 50 minutes shorter.

Edgerton, Blanchet and McLeavy

I had a half-hour chat last Tuesday evening with Me and Orson Welles star Christian McKay, and despite enjoying our time and really liking the guy — he’s spirited and razor-sharp and full of buoyancy — I waited five days to post. I don’t know why and I’m sorry. It doesn’t indicate anything. I just fell into a lazy pocket.

Me and Orson Wells star Christian McKay outside the Regency hotel just before we said out farewells — Tuesday, 11.24, 5:20 pm.

Actually, that’s not true. I was reluctant to get into a McKay thing because as gifted as he seems to be — he’s actually brilliant in MAOW — he’s in his mid 30s now and only just starting to happen, and I knew I’d have to answer what he’s been doing all this time and why he wasn’t on the stick in his early 20s. The answer, he says, is that he was into music when he was younger. The other answer, I suspect, is that, like myself, he was simply a late bloomer.

Whatever — the guy is a British dynamo with one of those “God, I love acting!…I mean, I love being paid attention to!” personalities. He looks like Orson Welles, of course, but he’s obviously himself as well, and after sitting with him for 20 or so minutes and then talking a bit more under a hotel awning out on Park Avenue it seemed obvious that he’s really and truly got it. Which means some combination of heat, hunger, talent, ambition, chutzpah and whatever else. Oh, and McKay smokes cigarettes. And he’s had a battle or two with the bathroom scale.

As I wrote a few days ago, Me and Orson Welles “is absolutely worth seeing for Christian McKay’s thunderbolt performance as the 22 year-old Welles — a headstrong genius in his hormonal-visionary cups. Vincent Donofrio was a fine Welles in Ed Wood (although someone else voiced the dialogue) and Liev Schreiber delivered a reasonably full-bodied Welles in RKO 281, but McKay — 34 or 35 when the film was shot, and looking like he could be 28 or 29 — is the Fo. He’s the standard-bearer and the king of the hill, the guy to beat the next time somebody plays Welles.”

And N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote that the film contains “the ego and the brilliance [of Orson Welles]..in full blossom. They are captured, with a brio and wit that puts most biopic mummery to shame, by Christian McKay, a British actor with a slender resume and superhuman confidence. His evident relish in the dimensions of this role is a crucial part of the performance. It’s so much fun to play Orson Welles because it must have been at least as much fun to be Orson Welles.”

Since MAOW McKay has performed a small part in Woody Allen‘s next film (i.e., the one shot last summer in London) and a character named Hamilton McMillan in Bernard Rose‘s Mr. Nice.

He was on his way to do a Charlie Rose taping (along with director Richard Linklater and costars Zac Efron and Claire Danes) following our chat, but I’ve searched and searched and can’t find the segment on the Rose site or anywhere else. It doesn’t exist! I also asked the publicist when it’ll air…zip.

And the reaction to Yoostar, the cinema karaoke software with studios licensing clips for Average Joes & Janes to put themselves into movie scenes…? Actually, I’d rather be William Munny in the climax of Unforgiven.

“All the airports kind of feel and look the same now,” Jason Reitman told the N.Y. Times‘ David Carr in an 11.25 interview piece. “Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you’re going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You’re going to get your coffee and the USA Today or New York Times in every airport. All the things that you want are there, so you can land anywhere, and you feel at home. You’re given the sense that you’re everywhere, but you’re nowhere; that you are constantly with your community, yet you have no community. There’s kind of a terrific irony to that.”

But you do have community in an airport. You’re surrounded by hundreds of people who are just like yourself. You just don’t usually talk to them as a rule. And some airports are more soothing than others, especially those in Germany and Swtizerland.

As I put it without irony on 9.27…

“No man-made atmosphere makes me feel quite as serene as an airport. When I’m waiting for a plane, I mean. (And after I’m through the security scan.) A blissful feeling of being neither here nor there. All my cares and anxieties suspended. It’s actually kind of beautiful.

“I know and accept, of course, that airport environments are no substitute for anything, least of all the real rock ‘n’ roll of life. I only know what I feel when I’m inside them. I’m in a kind of womb — a place in which the normal heave and pitch of things doesn’t happen or disturb. The appointments, challenges, pressures, deadlines — all that will surround me and more after I’ve landed. Expected, understood. But what a charmed feeling it is to be within an airport with all of that stuff outside, and with nothing to do inside but chill. I especially love three- and four-hour layovers. I adore browsing around, having a cafe au lait, leafing through magazines, looking at the hundreds of travellers. (Especially the women.)”

“I’m really disappointed” in Barack Obama, writes playwright Christopher Durang. “I mean, I know he’s way better than Bush. I guess I miss the oomph that LBJ had both in civil rights and in getting Medicare/Medicaid passed into law. Then he let his mistakes in fighting in Vietnam sink him.

“Obama is cool and charming. But oomph? Seemingly not. Hip and appealing. Yes, but can he do aggressive arm twisting to get something passed? Can he bring some power and aggressiveness to explaining things the country needs, to get people on board?” Not so much. So far.

“And if Obama isn’t the one to change things in a major way for the better — health care, environment, people’s rights — who is? I am a disappointed idealist.”

The Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell has bravely compared Gone With The Wind, a metaphor about the miseries and deprivations of the Great Depression of the 1930s (and a comment about how the nicest people aren’t necessarily the ones who do well in tough times, and vice versa) with New Moon, a stunningly dull and tension-less Mormon metaphor about just saying no to pre-marital sex.

Howell is one of the nicest and smartest guys I know and one of the best film critics bar none, but this article is…uhm, unpersuasive. To me, anyway.

Howell actually calls New Moon a “well made, competently acted” thing that “properly complements the Twilight book series.” It’s “not one of the year’s best movies,” he allows, “but it’s a far cry from the worst.” And the critical slamming of it, he suggests, was due to “the same sexism that prompted many critics to dismiss Sex and the City completely out of hand, simply because it was perceived to be a movie for women, and thus not a movie to be taken at all seriously.”

Nope, wrong. It’s not that New Moon is aimed at women — it’s the obvious fact that Catherine Hardwicke‘s Twilight, released a year ago, did a much better job of tapping into the panting Bella Swan + Edward Cullen current than Chris Weitz did in New Moon. Much. As in don’t even compare them. It’s not that New Moon is too girly and swoony — it’s not girly and swoony enough.

On top of which Howell totally ignores the ghastly season-changing sequence in New Moon that became an instant laughing stock — one of the stupidest such sequences in motion picture history.

The fact that title cards indicating the passing end-of-the-year months were deemed necessary to insert (presumably due to test-screening reactions from Eloi audiences that indicated confusion about why the front lawn had changed color and was thereafter covered with leaves and then snow) is one of the most persuasive and depressing indications that there are some amazingly stupid people out there.

Howell not even mentioning this sequence, which film professors will be showing to their students for decades to come as an indication of societal rot and collapse, completely destroys his other arguments. It’s too glaring and too comical to be brushed under the rug, and failing to at least acknowledge it when a writer is laboring to defend New Moon means that attention isn’t being paid.

And I for one didn’t rip the Sex and the City movie because, as Howell suggests, “it was aimed at women and therefore not to be taken seriously.” I was morally offended by that film. I called it “a grotesque and putrid valentine to the insipid ‘me, my lifestyle and my accessories’ chick culture of the early 21st Century.” I didn’t call it a movie that Satan himself would have been proud to have directed, but I should have.

“The soul of this movie is infected with gross materialism, the flaunting of me-me egos and the endless nurturing of the characters’ greed and/or sense of entitlement,” I said. “It’s all about money to piss away and flashy things to wear and lush places where the the girls lunch and exchange dreary confessional chit-chat. And this, mind you, is where millions of middle-class women in every semi-developed country around the globe live in their dreams. They’re going to this movie right now in multitudes. Sad. Really sad. Because SATC is crap through and through.

“A few items back I called Sex and the City a Taliban recruitment film. All I know is that I felt ashamed, sitting in a Paris movie theatre, that this film, right now, is portraying middle-class female American values, and that this somehow reflects upon the country that I love and care deeply about. It’s a kind of advertisement for the cultural shallowness that’s been spreading like the plague for years, and for what young American womanhood seems to be currently about — what it wants, cherishes, pines for. Not so much the realizing of intriguing ambitions or creative dreams as much as wallowing in consumption as the girls cackle and toss back Margaritas.

“All I know is that the faux-splendor of the movie — the insipid Marie Antoinette-ishness of the damn thing with the look-at-me clothes and sets and nouveau-riche ickiness of the apartments and restaurants — felt to me like a kind of hell.”

The way I hear it Clint Eastwood arrived in South Africa to shoot Invictus on a Friday, never having visited the country before as an explorer looking to absorb and learn. He began shooting two days later (i.e., the following Monday) and, typically for Clint, shot it fairly quickly — two days under schedule, I’m told. He would always finish at five and then, my source says, work out for a couple of hours each day.

My heart and admiration goes out to anyone with that level of vigor and discipline at an age when most people have downshifted if not ceased operations altogether. The guy is amazing — an inspiration. Daily workouts are obviously a way of keeping flush and toned and attuned and overpowering the natural aging process, which tends to begin shutting things down once you’ve hit your late ’70s or thereabouts, if not sooner.

Clint “obviously knows what’s coming” — who doesn’t? — “and that’s why he’s moving so fast and doing one film after another, and making them so cheaply that no one’s going to say ‘no’ and knowing all the while that his brand has an intrinsic value and so on.” I just have to shake my head and go “wow.” Talk about being the captain of your soul.

Pamela Ezell‘s 11.27 Huffington Post Invictus piece notes several parallels between former South African president Nelson Mandela and U.S. president Barack Obama. First black president, humble backgrounds, preachers of tolerance and forgiveness despite haters, etc. But the Mandela-Obama parallel falls apart in Clint Eastwood‘s film when Morgan Freeman‘s Mandela is told he’s risking his political capital, and he replies “the day I am afraid to do that is the day I am no longer fit to lead.”

Is there anything less Obama-like than a core belief that a leader must sometimes risk much if not all in order to get the right thing done? Has there ever been a president with less backbone — with more of a mushy cottonball approach to leading and using power than Obama? Has there ever been a president who’s been less inclined to take any risks whatsoever? Who’s been more willing to bend over and defer to his enemies and say to the worst scummiest Republicans, “Hmmm…okay, maybe you guys have a point”?

Here’s another line that Mandela says in the film:

It’ll be an ice-cold day in hell when Barack Obama says to a White House adviser, “In this instance the people are wrong, and it is my job as president to make them see that.” The mantra of Barack Obama is, “We know what to do and we know what’s right, but it’s better to cave in and get along because that way our poll numbers will be steadier. Because…you know, I can’t afford to be seen as an angry black guy. I don’t have that authority that Franklin D. Roosevelt had when he became ‘a traitor to his class.’ The right is too powerful and there too many crazies out there. It’s all I can do to chill them out.”