“I was in my mother’s belly as she sat in the waiting room of the abortionist’s office. Dr. Sunshine was his code name. I was fifty feet from the drainpipe, and she saw a painting on the wall that reminded her of her mother, who had recently died. She took that as a sign to have the baby. That’s what I call luck.” — from an Esquire “What I’ve Learned” piece by George Carlin, edited/reported by Larry Getlen and posted (or re-posted) on 6.23.08.

In an interview with Christianity Today‘s Mark Moring, WALL*E director Andrew Stanton talks about how his Christian faith has informed his creative process at Pixar and the making of his latest film. You’d barely know from Moring’s side-stepping intro and Stanton’s many quotes that there’s a strong anti-corporate, beware-of-unbridled-consumerism, save-the-earth-before- it’s-too-late theology that runs all through WALL*E.
Pixar’s John Lasseter and his nervous-nelly lieutenants have clearly put the word out to downplay this aspect of the film out of fear that American Jabbas and other impulse consumers will avoid WALL*E if they get the idea that it’s some kind of lefty message flick that Al Gore would be proud to call his own.
I’m starting to feel vaguely offended, I must say, by a p.r. policy that’s totally fine with sucking up to Christian moviegoers (a conservative bunch that harbors a faction of global-warming deniers) but shilly-shallies away from acknowledging that a significant side of WALL*E is dealing with the most pressing and life-threatening issue of our time. Sorry, but there’s something a wee bit sickening about this.
Kids are going to get what they want to get out of this (cute robots, etc.) but the glory of the Pixar product is that it’s concurrently written for and angled to adults.

Bouncing off yesterday’s October Surprise piece, a two-day-old clip from “Fox News Sunday” with Weekly Standard editor, NY. Times columnist and rabid neocon Bill Kristol implying that Bush “is more likely to attack Iran before leaving office if he believes Obama is going to win the election because he is confident that McCain will continue his Iran policy for a third term,” etc.

By far the best “Make McCain Exciting” video of them all, submitted yesterday to the Colbert Report by the brilliant “Wayne S.”

“You could certainly say that George Carlin downright invented modern American stand-up comedy in many ways,” writes Jerry Seinfeld has written in today’s 6.24 N.Y. Times. “Every comedian does a little George. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve been standing around with some comedians and someone talks about some idea for a joke and another comedian would say, ‘Carlin does it.’ I’ve heard it my whole career: ‘Carlin does it,’ ‘Carlin already did it,’ ‘Carlin did it eight years ago.’
“And he didn’t just ‘do’ it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.
“I became obsessed with him in the ’60s. As a kid it seemed like the whole world was funny because of George Carlin. His performing voice, even laced with profanity, always sounded as if he were trying to amuse a child. It was like the naughtiest, most fun grown-up you ever met was reading you a bedtime story. Everything he did just had this gleaming wonderful precision and originality.
“I know George didn’t believe in heaven or hell. Like death, they were just more comedy premises. And it just makes me even sadder to think that when I reach my own end, whatever tumbling cataclysmic vortex of existence I’m spinning through, in that moment I will still have to think, ‘Carlin already did it.'”

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has launched a daily blog to complement his once-weekly “Big Picture” column. Welcome to the club. The more the merrier. To put it kindly or generously, it only took Patrick’s bosses five or six years to decipher the writing on the wall and respond accordingly.

Patrick Goldstein

Goldstein assures he’ll be writing “with much the same style and sensibility that you’ve grown accustomed to in the column” although the blog “will be broader in scope…where the worlds of entertainment, media and pop culture collide.” Why not drop the “pop” and just say culture, Patrick? Then you do like me and write about anything and everything when you’re in the mood or feeling dried up on movie stuff.
Goldstein also says the blog will be a group effort with other Times journos jumping in from time to time. Translation: he’s a little bit freaked by the idea of round-the-clock postings and doesn’t want to kill himself.
Taking Goldstein at his word that this new enterprise is a “work in progress,” I have a modest suggestion for the Times‘ notoriously sluggish online designers. They need to give the blog (a) a name of its own and (b) a vibe and a logo of its own. Right now the Big Picture blog simply says, in large upper and lower-case black letters, “The Big Picture — Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture.” The regular weekly column of old says, in small caps, THE BIG PICTURE/PATRICK GOLDSTEIN. The pulse quickens! A person unaware of the new blog might easily mistake it for the regular weekly column and vice versa.

The design guys, in short, need to go outside and get high**, and then come back in and make the design of the Big Picture blog an attitude and an atmosphere unto itself. Make the reader feel as if they’re diving into some cool inner-sanctum environment that’s only tangentially related to the dull, holding-down-the-fort but at the same time going-down-the-tubes L.A. Times mainstream journo culture. Make it feel like a place where the thinkers, dreamers and schemers go to kick back after the sluggish senior editors have put on their madras sports jackets and left the newsroom. As Sam Fuller would say, make it emotional.
** As someone who hasn’t toked up in over 30 years, I’m of course being figurative.

Disney/Pixar’s WALL*E is a robot love story, yes, but also — as I reported a while back — a message movie about the lunacy of destroying our planet with fossil-fuel pollutants and whatnot, as well one that points the finger at the evil agents of this destruction. In an article up today, CHUD’s Devin Faraci, who’s seen the film, has described these bad apples as “corporations, out-of control branding, insidious advertising and rampant consumerism.”

And yet writer/director Andrew Stanton, oddly, recently downplayed the ecological theme during the film’s recent press junket. Faraci has also confessed to being “fascinated by the disconnect between the film’s ecological and anti-consumerism messages and the huge merchandising push to sell plastic toys and other crapola.”
Here’s what Faraci has written today:
“The most I do is recycle, and sometimes I’m even pretty bad at that,” Stanton said at the WALL*E press junket when asked about the ecological and political themes of the film. And he wanted to make sure that the assembled journalists didn’t think he was smuggling a subversive message into his kid’s movie. “I don’t have a political bent….I don’t have an ecological message to push.”
And yet, Faraci says, “the environmental and political themes of this movie are well beyond subtext and are so blatant that you’d expect to see the WALL*E character being used in conservation ads and for the life-size animatronic WALL*E built to promote the film to show up at environmentally-themed events. Instead Stanton and Pixar are all but disavowing these obvious, in-your-face messages and pushing WALL*E as a simple robot love story.
“Pixar’s always been good about staying on message. Go back to all the publicity for Cars and you will see every single person involved with that movie spinning the same tale about John Lasseter‘s family and their cars and blah blah. The White House can’t get their p.r. spin together as well as Pixar does.

“That ‘on message’ aspect is part of what makes Pixar a successful company. They understand that they’re building their own myth right now. They understand that having a narrative behind the scenes helps make everything more sellable. And it helps draw attention away from elements they’d rather not focus on and highlight the elements they do want to have spotlighted; in this case to not talk so much about the environment and to bring it back to young robots in love (a message all the participants at the press day were on point for except John Ratzenberger, who seemed to claim global warming didn’t exist).
Stanton, says Faraci, was not completely dismissing any positive environmental themes. “I don’t mind that it supports that kind of view….it’s certainly a good citizen way to be,” he said in the most half-hearted support for environmentalism possible.
“Stanton’s measured, middle-of-the-road language clarifies to me just what the heck is going on here: someone in Pixar decided that leaning on the environmental angle would possibly scare off certain segments of the ticket buying public.”

An incendiary comment by McCain adviser Charlie Black in a just-published Fortune interview states that (a) the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an “unfortunate event” but McCain’s “knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief, and it helped us”; and (b) “so would another terrorist attack on U.S. soil…certainly it would be a big advantage to him.”
I suspect that righties like Black are talking about another shocking event in the wings because they’re picking up whiffs of an upcoming military confrontation between Israel and Iran sometime before the November election, and they’re looking to set the stage before it happens. Hardcore Cheney neocons would not only be okay with a military blowup in the Middle East sometime in the early to mid fall because they believe, as Black stated, it would help their side and their agenda. I’ll bet they’re also rooting for it. An Obama victory will obviously mean the end of a “window of opportunity” as far as a decisive strike against Iran is concerned, so it’s soon or never. The Israelis will make the first move, and that’ll be the flash point.
Consider the implications of the following three items:
(1) Last Saturday’s report in the Independent that Israel “has mounted a major long-range military air exercise — involving more than 100 F15 and F16 fighters — as a rehearsal for a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, American officials have indicated.”
(2) A recent article by New American Foundation’s Steve Clemons that included the following statement: “I’m not saying that war or conflict with Iran is imminent. In fact, I don’t think America, even under Bush, will strike Iran first — but I do think that there is an increasing chance of a trigger event driving a fast escalation of higher and higher consequence military options. This trigger could be a mistaken signal, a ship collision, an event engineered by the Israelis, or by the IRGC Al Quds force, or by some other splinter terrorist operation wanting to exploit regional tensions and the current fragility of affairs.”
(3) An op-ed written by former German foreign minister and Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer on Friday, 5.30.08, in The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, with this headline: “As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon.”
Here’s the nub of it:
“Anyone following the press in Israel during the [recent 60th anniversary of Israel] celebrations and listening closely to what was said in Jerusalem did not have to be a prophet to understand that matters are coming to a head. Consider the following:
“First, ‘stop the appeasement!’ is a demand raised across the political spectrum in Israel – and what is meant is the nuclear threat emanating from Iran.
“Second, while Israel celebrated, Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted as saying that a life-and-death military confrontation was a distinct possibility.
“Third, the outgoing commander of the Israeli Air Force declared that the air force was capable of any mission, no matter how difficult, to protect the country’s security. The destruction of a Syrian nuclear facility last year, and the lack of any international reaction to it, were viewed as an example for the coming action against Iran.
“Fourth, the Israeli wish list for US arms deliveries, discussed with the American president, focused mainly on the improvement of the attack capabilities and precision of the Israeli Air Force.
“Fifth, diplomatic initiatives and UN sanctions when it comes to Iran are seen as hopelessly ineffective.
“And sixth, with the approaching end of the Bush presidency and uncertainty about his successor’s policy, the window of opportunity for Israeli action is seen as potentially closing.
“The last two factors carry special weight. While Israeli military intelligence is on record as saying that Iran is expected to cross the red line on the path to nuclear power between 2010 and 2015 at the earliest, the feeling in Israel is that the political window of opportunity to attack is now, during the last months of Bush’s presidency.”

The forthcoming “extended cut” DVD of Terrence Malick‘s The New World will run 172 minutes, or just shy of three hours. The press release says this will amount to “more than 30 minutes of never-before-seen footage.” That’s only if you’re comparing it to the 135-minute version that New Line gave a semi-wide release to after the initial 150 minute version, which was seen (or so I recall) in a limited big-city release. So the extended cut will actually include 22 minutes of never-before-seen footage…right? (The IMDB lists another 125-minute version that played at the Mar del Plata film festival.) The 172-minute DVD will be released on 10.14.

John Anderson has written a 6.22 N.Y. Times piece about Cecilia Miniucchi‘s Expired, an “anti-romantic comedy” starring Samantha Morton and Jason Patric “as erotically charged, thoroughly incompatible parking enforcers working the mean streets of Santa Monica.” It’s also a film that, prior to Anderson’s article, has been having difficulty getting attention.

Samantha Morton, Jason Patric in Cecilia Miniuccchi’s

I never got around to seeing it at Sundance, Cannes or the local AFI Fest. (Sue me.) And for screening-conflict reasons I decided not to catch the one press screening I had a shot at, which happened yesterday evening. (The other one happened on May 13th, when I was in France.) Expired opened last Friday (6.20) in New York and will have its LA debut four days from now — on Friday, 6.27.
Anderson says the film “has already defied expectations” because “it’s being given a theatrical release in an atmosphere in which serious, personal filmmaking is being produced independently and exiled to the furthest margins of the marketplace. Not coincidentally, the root causes of all this are central to the film.”
√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’We are living in a very transitional moment right now,’ Miniucchi says, ‘in terms of what to do with quality films. The common denominator among distributors is fear, the reason being the internet. You don’t need to have a face anymore. Kids interact without ever meeting. They have sex without ever meeting.'”

I don’t know which of these Malibu surfer-brawl videos, taken yesterday, happened first — clip #1 or clip #2. But any beating up of paparazzi by anyone is a good thing as long as no one gets killed or crippled. Black eyes are good, bruises are good, broken cameras are good, missing teeth are good…all of it.

Paparazzi are pigs in the gutter — the scumbucket jackals of worldwide celebrity culture. The lowest of the low, covered in their own slime. They deserve every bad thing that happens to them except death or disfigurement or being turned into paraplegics.
The fighting was about a dog-pack of twelve photographers trailing Matthew McConaughey to a cliff-shrouded Malibu beach he’d visited in order to surf and sunbathe. Matthew McConaughey! A group of surfers attacked the paparazzi in quick little skirmishes — giving one guy a broken nose, breaking another’s camera, pushing the same onto some rocks, etc.