The headline of a 3.31 New York article by Jonathan Chait flat-out says that Republican intransigence about climate change (a significant percentage of Republican legislators and voters are still in denial mode and/or downplaying the data as much as possible) will trigger a “worldwide catastrophe” if these monkeys continue to be put in positions of responsibility by voters. And God forbid that a Republican denialist or proscrastinator (i.e., another Dubya) gets into the White House.
“In reality, the Manhattan-as-underwater-theme-park scenario remains very much in play. The latest modeling projects a sea rise of five to six feet by the end of the century, with a sea-level rise of a foot per decade after that.”
Somehow this new data hadn’t quite gotten through to me. It basically means that the East River and the Hudson will have begun to seep onto Manhattan streets by the time Jett’s grandchildren (he’s getting married next year) have reached their 30s, and certainly by the time his great-grandchildren are running around.
A September 2013 article by National Geographic‘s Tim Folder (“Rising Seas”) stated that in 2006 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a maximum of 23 inches of sea-level rise by the end of this century.
If Nice Guy Eddie was to see this trailer for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, he might say the following: “You know what? I think it’s all that CG superhero comic-book mythology semen has been pumped up your ass so far and now its backed into your fuckin’ brain and its comin’ out your mouth.” In response to which Zack Snyder might say, “Eddie, you keep talkin’ like a bitch, I’m gonna slap you like a bitch.” I’ll say this much — Jesse Eisenberg‘s Lex Luthor is going to be fun to hang with. Note: I could have posted this last night but I didn’t care enough. I refuse to stand at attention and go “whoo-whoo!” like a little ComicCon bitch when a new superhero trailer comes out. I’ll take my sweet time posting it, and tough darts if that’s not good enough.
“We can’t put aside this annoying oversaturation of superheroes. Doesn’t it seem almost insulting? One superhero per film isn’t enough for these people, the executives are thinking. The moviegoer these days needs more stimulation, more explosions, more heroes, more villains! It’s like we’re subjects in a science experiment that have become immune to treatment so the researchers have upped our superhero dosage.” — from a post by Esquire‘s Matt Miller.
I briefly spoke with Fox’s Gerald Rivera on his Geraldo At Large show last night around 10:10 pm. The subject was all the recent negative stories about The Hurt Locker (articles about the film’s lack of authenticity, Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver‘s lawsuit based on his claim that he was the basis for Jeremy Renner‘s character, the Nicolas Chartier snafu), and whether this might impact the Best Picture race.
I was asked to contribute, I gather, because Geraldo or one of his researchers saw Eric Ditzian‘s 3.4 MTV.com article (“Will ‘Hurt Locker’ Controversy Affect Its Oscar Chances?”) in which I was quoted saying that the Hurt Locker attacks were “obviously coordinated…these things don’t happen at the last minute on their own.” What I meant was that they were coordinated — initiated, researched, reported on — by like-minded editors and reporters looking to portray a last-minute tightening drama in the Best Picture race.
Geraldo said during our on-air chat that he’d been told by a source that “a producer of Inglourious Basterds” had allegedly fired a press torpedo or two directly at the hull of The Hurt Locker. He obviously wanted me to say “yeah, I’ve heard that also…probably true!” Except I don’t know or even suspect that so I naturally declined to point the finger at anyone connected to Basterds (i.e., Harvey Weinstein). No one’s even whispered there’s anything to this — zip
So I said what I basically think, which is that certain journalists and editors sensed a great dramatic potential a few weeks ago in the prospect of a Hurt Locker reversal-of-fortune, especially after the BAFTA and Eddie Award wins created a front-runner status, and so some decided to research and write articles that might introduce a cliffhanger element into an already thrilling David-vs.-Goliath scenario.
That scenario was waay too complex for Geraldo At Large, of course, so the conversation ended soon after, the show went to a break, Geraldo said “thanks, man” and I said “sure, likewise” and scooted off.
I had an argument last night with Jett over my assertion that conservative righties are essentially defined by selfishness. Because they’re basically the party of “me first, taking care of my own family, the less fortunate need to get their act together and work harder, darker-skinned people are entitled to the good life but a lot of them don’t seem to really get it like we do, I-don’t-know-about-that-global-warming-stuff, I like to play golf and drive my SUV to the hardware store or the country club and do whatever the hell I want within the bounds of reason because that’s what rugged American individualists get to do,” etc.
There are wrinkles and variations and exceptions among them but righties are basically bastards and social Darwinians who live by their belief that the world is for the few, I said. And Jett felt I was talking like a demagogue.
I then said that while I don’t like to use absolute moralist terms like “good” and “evil,” one has to at least define them and use them as reference terms if you want to communicate with people. One can therefore say that the essential core quality that has to exist as a behavioral platform for evil to flourish is selfishness. Selfishness — “not them but me, not the greater good but mine” — is where all bad and ugly things begin.
It can therefore be said that in this day and age, righties are, by their relentless me-first attitudes and by certain lights and after a certain fashion, evil.
Because they only care about their own rice bowl. Because they’re still stone cold in love with the idea of being John Wayne on horseback with a rifle at the ready, and because their party is the house that welcomes and pays lip service to all the ignorant crazies out there — the beer-gut yahoos and birthers and anti-stem-cell researchers, Minutemen and hee-haw Christians (which is to say fantasists who need to believe in absurd mythology in order to embrace morality). They are the party of “hey, what about the way things used to be when rock-solid white people basically controlled everything?”
Because in an era that cries out for measures that address social inequities and benefit the greater good, for deeds and legislation that will address the financial plundering of the last 30 years and keep the buccaneers who’ve brought this country to the brink of financial Armageddon from ever again revelling in insanely lavish profiteering to the detriment of Average Joes, and which will institute policies that will stop or least slow the advance of global pollution and ruination, the righties are still in love with the idea of “get government off our backs so we can hold onto more and live lavishly and hold high the torch of Ronald Reagan and have sleazy affairs with assistants if we so choose.”
In a perfect liberal world the selfishness of the truly obstinate righties (recognizing that some righties live by a certain Barry Goldwater-ish integrity that warrants a certain respect) would simply not be tolerated any more. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh or rash but any home-owner who’s dealt with crabgrass will understand. We don’t, of course, live in a perfect world. But we can dream.
Jett was appalled. You can’t rashly define conservatives as being evil, he said. I’m not precisely doing that, I said. I’m saying that their core instincts and beliefs allow for a behavioral climate and philosophy that feeds and winks at the essence of evil.
And that this way of seeing and living life has no place in a world that’s been all but ruined by selfish plundering that has done little but fortify the lifestyles of the tennis-playing, rifle-toting, red-tie-wearing and cowboy-hatted Cheney elite. I’m saying that while everyone is basically selfish and grappling on a constant daily basis with out-for-ourselves urges, at least liberals don’t embrace a theology that celebrates selfishness — i.e., “greed is good.”
Exterminate, forbid or significantly reduce selfishness in our society and we’re obviously looking at a better world. Therefore the extermination of the right would theoretically be a reasonably good thing. Not that this is possible. I understand that. But if I ran things they would all be rounded up and sent to green internment camps for reeducation. All right, I’m kidding.
This is what people say over beers. But the only way you learn what people really think is over beers. Or when they let go with a Freudian slip or words in passing (obiter dicta) that give the game away. Or when they’re angry and arguing with their families. People are basically one-eyed jacks. The world only sees the the palatable/reasonable side of their faces and natures.
Last week a serious dolphin lady and longtime friend named Gini Kopecky-Wallace, whom I’ve known since ’79, went to see The Cove (Roadside, 7.31). An off-and-on participant with a research project studying wild dolphins for more than 20 years, Kopecky-Wallace writes about dolphins, whales, diving, islands and oceans any chance she gets. Here’s her review:
It wasn’t an especially dolphin-loving crowd that showed up for last Wednesday’s screening of The Cove — the Jim Clark/Louie Psihoyosdocumentary about a group of filmmakers, free divers, surfers, techies and activists who team up to document the annual dolphin slaughter that takes place in a sealed-off cove in Taiji, Japan. The talkers in the room were more into bragging about themselves. The film got mentioned exactly once by a latecomer trying to score points by putting it down. “Now we’re all going to learn,” he said, “that killing dolphins is bad.”
But nobody was smirking at the end. For a while after the lights came up nobody moved or said a word. Then one person spoke — maybe this same guy, maybe someone else. “Good movie,” he said soberly. And that was it. No one else said a thing. Everyone just stood and slowly filed out. Which was gratifying, I have to say, and a more accurate gauge of the film’s impact. Of course it got to me. But if it got to these people…
I think the fact that it is such a surprisingly good movie impressed everyone. You’d have to be made of stone not to be horrified by the subject matter and humbled by, good lord, what it took to get the film made. But you hear “killing dolphins” and you gird yourself. You don’t expect a documentary that also works as a feature film, with heroes, bad guys, action, suspense, horror, heartbreak, beauty. You don’t expect to be swept up.
The material for it was there. Dangerous mission, colorful characters, great cast — including beautiful and brave human mermaid Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, and former Flipper dolphin trainer-turned-dolphin liberationist Ric O’Barry with his wonderfully weathered face. But the filmmakers worked the material well too — building suspense, sustaining the action, never straying too far from the main story, jazzing up visual effects with thermal-camera footage, and going easy but not too easy on the carnage.
Watching a lone dolphin struggle and flail as it bleeds to death is excruciating. Watching dozens being brutally speared makes you numb.
I can see where some researchers, advocates and activists might have a few arguments with this film — what’s said and what isn’t, what’s shown and what’s not, how certain issues are framed, who takes and gets credit for what. The film also isn’t completely clear on whether the American captive display industry — the people who bring us dolphin-swim programs and orcas in tanks — can or can’t be linked to these captures and killings. Important as the film is for what it exposes and is trying to stop, it also makes me yearn for another film — maybe a sequel? — that focuses American audience attention on dolphin issues closer to home.
Still. On my way into the ladies’ room after the screening, I passed a woman coming out who took one look at my expression and knew we’d just seen the same film. Impassioned discussion ensued. What a film! She’d had no idea! It made her ashamed to be human! “It sure makes you think differently about going to places like marine parks.” She writes about film, wanted to do something to help. “People need to know.” Maybe she could interview Ric O’Barry. “Or I could do a column on what’s wrong with SeaWorld.” Her higher-ups wouldn’t like it, she said, fire dancing in her eyes. “But it’s my column.”
Score 1 for The Cove. Watch crazy-brave people doing crazy-brave things and there’s no telling what other people will decide they can do.
(Kopecky has written about diving in Bonaire, interacting with wild dolphins, and islands she has loved for Shape Magazine. She wrote about the plight of Keiko, the orca star of Free Willy, and about the handling of the dolphins used in the remake of Flipper for The New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section.)
Three days ago Variety‘s Dave McNaryquoted a Milken Institute report claiming that the WGA strike “[has] cost the California economy a projected 37,700 jobs and $2.1 billion in lost output through the end of 2008.”
Which means, in effect, that the studio suits and producers who needlessly prolonged the WGA strike are the responsible parties. Am I wrong? Is there any other interpretation?
The Milken report “also asserts that the 100-day work stoppage helped tip the state into recession earlier this year,” McNary wrote. “The researchers said the strike’s impact will be less noticeable next year unless the Screen Actors Guild strikes — in which case the impact will intensify and the recovery will be delayed by another year.
“SAG’s current contract expires June 30. Guild is in the 24th day of talks with the majors but has not yet set a strike authorization vote.”
According to this 4.10 Yahoo article by Jeanna Bryner, the Judd Apatow fantasy of schlubby galumphs hooking up with hot mommas isn’t that much of a fantasy.
“Women seeking a lifelong mate might do well to choose the guy a notch below them in the looks category,” she writes. “New research reveals couples in which the wife is better looking than her husband are more positive and supportive than other match-ups. The reason, researchers suspect, is that men place great value on beauty, whereas women are more interested in having a supportive husband.”
I still think this is horseshit. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. Nine tend to hook up with nines, eights hook up with eights, sevens with sevens, etc. And smart guys never, ever marry women who are nines or tens because they’re more trouble than they’re worth.
A recently-published study in the Journal of Epidemial Community Health, compiled by researchers at the Center for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, has determined that rock stars are more likely than other people to die before reaching old age — brilliant! “More than 1,000 British and North American artists, spanning the era from Elvis Presley to rapper Eminem, found they were two to three times more likely to suffer a premature death than the general population.” Nope, not a put-on.
I was genuinely unnerved last night — okay, somewhat scared — as the heavy-creepy stuff began to happen in Mikael Hafstrom‘s 1408 (MGM, 6.22). Roughly 30 minutes in, and people to the right and left of me were feeling it also. This is good, I said to myself. I’m feeling queasy and anxious and insecure, and I’m generally immune to the crap that scary movies tend to push.
The difference is that 1408 isn’t peddling the usual usual — not your typical torture-porn, anything-goes, too-bad-if-it’s-not-credible shocker stuff, but seriously chilly vibes that are rooted in a believable psychological state that’s eating away at the main character. This, for me, is what makes it all workable and palatable, and that means it’s going to do pretty well. I mean, I’d be really surprised if it doesn’t.
An adaptation of a Stephen King short story, 1408 is primarily a one-set spook show with John Cusack as a paranormal book writer facing all kinds of demons (including his own) inside a haunted Manhattan hotel room. He gives something close to a one-man performance. But one of the things that scared me the most has to do with a roll of toilet paper. I just wanted to say that — a roll of damn toilet paper. Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman has written that 1408 “doesn’t pretend to be a seismic Stephen King movie like Carrie or The Shining.” Except 1408 is a whole lot scarier than The Shining. They’re both haunted-hotel flicks but they exist in fairly different realms, and I prefer 1408‘s. Save for a few special effects moments, its main order of business is serving up old-fashioned fright. Something being in a room, and nobody knowing when, why or how the thing is going to happen and scare everyone shitless. Eli Roth would probably be a little bit bored by this film, and I think that’s wonderful. By the way: King apparently got the idea for 1408 from a real-life experience of parapsy- chologist Christopher Chacon when he visited room # 3502 at the Hotel del Coronado in Coronado, Calif.. He may have encountered the ghost of Kate Morgan, who died in the hotel in 1892 under dark circumstances. Chacon has described his visit to room # 3502 as a “classic haunting.” Using infrared cameras to track magnetic fields, humidity, temperature fluctuations and electronic emissions, he found 37 abnormalities in one day.
The impetus for the wonderful bile in John Cook‘s Sundance-dissing piece in Radar — and a very well-written thing it is — is that Cook (a) didn’t know enough well-connected publicists, and (b) he wound up going to the wrong parties. It’s also apparent (to me anyway) that he didn’t fall in love or at least get laid. I fell in love up there (with Once, I mean), and it made all the difference in the world.
“The Sundance Film Festival is about independent cinema in much the same way the quadrennial Republican and Democratic national conventions are about democracy,” Cook observes. “Which is to say, the Sundance Film Festival is not about independent cinema. It is about status, and money, and self-regard; it’s an annual industry junket and trade show.
“The 400 or so major screenings, mind you, are not for the benefit of audiences but of fat-pocketed distributors — many of them divisions of the Hollywood studios that Sundance disingenuously poses in opposition to — eagerly searching out the next Sex, Lies and Videotape or Little Miss Sunshine.
“The relative quality of available celebrity notwithstanding, the organizers of Sundance were on a relentless campaign this year to promote the notion that the festival is about art and cinema, and that the attendant clusterfuck of swag lounges and Hummer limos and party girls dressed up like Eskimo hookers are contrary to its principles.
“Much of what happens in Park City is beyond the control of Sundance. But the festival’s arch posturing against commercialization, with Robert Redford inveighing against the swag lounges on Main Street designed to get luxury brands onto the pages of Us Weekly, is too much to take in the face of the omnipresent logos of festival sponsors Volkswagen, Hewlett-Packard, and AOL.
“And the dismissive sniffing about ‘celebrity coverage,’ which Sundance’s chief press handler, Levi Elder, accused me of contemplating when I applied for credentials, becomes petty and egregiously hypocritical when one considers the fact that the fest is programmed deliberately with films featuring stars — Winona Ryder, Heather Graham, Mandy Moore, John Cusack — who are trotted out at screenings to stand on fake, tented-off “red carpets” to be photographed in front of backdrops festooned with those aforementioned corporate logos.
“Better passes translate, roughly, into less waiting. And for the press, the arbitrary, merciless decisions of publicists — 150 credentialed publicists were in attendance — tended to induce a state of what psychological researchers call learned helplessness.
“Waiting outside for admittance to a press conference one afternoon, among a throng of perhaps 30 other journalists, I was rescued, Schindler’s List-style, by a publicist who burst from inside the building, surveyed the crowd (or, to be precise, our badges), and selected three of us who were allowed to come inside.
“I never learned why, but decided from then on that good things would happen to me if I meekly made sure I was always in eyeshot of a publicist. And when they shined upon you, all the bitterness you previously felt about the better-credentialed prima donnas would melt away, and any sense of solidarity with your freezing, milling brothers and sisters in the cold would dissolve into condescension. See you, suckers!
Microsoft has had a huge team of highly-paid techies going over Windows Vista for months and months with a fine tooth comb and no apparent issues, but serious flaws have turned up only days after exposing the new operating system to the general software community. The too-familiar lesson is that corporate management somehow always manages to discourage employees from airing and/or candidly examining in-house problems — issues never seem to surface until outsiders have had a looksee.
A 12.25 N.Y. Times story says that Microsoft is facing an early crisis of confidence in the quality of its Windows Vista operating system as computer security researchers and hackers have begun to find potentially serious flaws in the system that was released to corporate customers late last month.
“On 12.15, a Russian programmer posted a description of a flaw that makes it possible to increase a user√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s privileges on all of the company√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s recent operating systems, including Vista. And over the weekend a Silicon Valley computer security firm said it had notified Microsoft that it had also found that flaw, as well as five other vulnerabilities, including one serious error in the software code underlying the company√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s new Internet Explorer 7 browser.
“The browser flaw is particularly troubling because it potentially means that web users could become infected with malicious software simply by visiting a booby-trapped site. That would make it possible for an attacker to inject rogue software into the Vista-based computer, according to executives at Determina, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that sells software intended to protect against operating system and other vulnerabilities.
“Determina is part of a small industry of companies that routinely pore over the technical details of software applications and operating systems looking for flaws. When flaws in Microsoft products are found they are reported to the software maker, which then produces fixes called patches. Microsoft has built technology into its recent operating systems that makes it possible for the company to fix its software automatically via the internet.”
I’ve tried and it’s impossible — there’s no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford — an expanded, unexpectedly touching documentary about the legendary helmer that will show twice on Turner Classic Movies Tuesday evening (and also at a special AFI Film Festival screening at the Linwood Dunn) — the muddle is still there.
But Bogdanovich’s film gives you a feeling — one that seems clear and genuine — that you’ve gotten to know the old coot better than ever before, that you’ve really and truly seen past the bluster and the scowl and the cigar, beyond the scrappy Irish machismo and into some intimate realm. After many years of saying “Ford sure made some great films but what a snappy old prick he was,” I’ve finally come to like the guy. And I feel I owe Bogdanovich a debt for that.
I tried to say this during my Monday afternoon phone chat with Bogdanovich. We spoke for 25 or 30 minutes. And I never quite said what I felt the film had taught me about Ford, which is that he was a shameless softie who used a snarly exterior manner to keep people from getting inside and discovering who he really was. But of course, his films made that pretty clear on their own.
Directed by John Ford is really and truly one of Bogdanovich’s best films. It’s right up there with The Last Picture Show, They All Laughed, Targets, Saint Jack and Paper Moon.
It reminds us once again that the director of The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Man Who Shot Libery Valance was a superb visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none. His films were always layered and understated with sub-currents that never flowed in one simple direction. His films always seemed fairly obvious and sometimes sentimental …at first. Then you’d watch them again and reconsider, and they always seemed to be about a lot more.
Bogdanovich actually made Ford in 1971, but he was never very happy with that earlier version. The current version still has the Orson Welles narration and a trio of warm, hilarious, fascinating interviews with John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart. These three alone make the doc worth seeing. The interviews were shot in 35 mm and very carefully lit and framed. The fact that Wayne, Fonda and Stewart have all moved on to the next realm makes it all the more affecting.
The additions include new interviews with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill and Steven Spielberg.
The other big extra is an audio tape of a 1973 heart-to-heart between Ford, then lying on his deathbed, and his lifelong love interest Katharine Hepburn (they fell for each other during the making of Mary, Queen of Scots). At one point you can hear Ford tell her that he loves her. It’s the kind of thing a guy like Ford would only say knowing that the clock is ticking and he’d better spit it out while he can still breathe.
I love Spielberg’s recollection about meeting Ford and being brusquely told how he’ll never be a decent director until he learns to frame landscapes without the horizon being dead center. I take pictures every day and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that lesson. I know I won’t.
I’m still bothered by the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of Ford’s films. The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film), and so on.
But I now feel that I’ve finally come to know and very much like Ford the man. Maybe some day the stuff that still irritates me about his films will cease; maybe not. But I know my attitude about the guy has definitely been altered by Bogdanovich’s film. I presume I’m not the only one, or at least that I won’t be after it airs tomorrow night.