All the Way

Shame is the best art movie I've seen since Exit Through the Gift Shop, but a lot more minimalist. It's a film by director Steve McQueen, originally an installation artist in England, who's got a tremendous eye and a way with getting actors to commit. His first movie, which I did not see, similarly starred Irish/German actor Michael Fassbender (Magneto!) and had a one-word title, Hunger, with Fassbender as real life figure Bobby Sands, Irish nationalist who died on hunger strike in a British prison. That one looked too grueling to me. This one has a lot of nudity without the emaciation.

Brandon lives in NYC and has a super power: his gaze. Without seeming to do anything but focus his attention, his unwavering gaze, on a pretty young woman on the subway train, he can charge her erotically, to the point where her arousal turns into shame, and a chase, a predator and object of desire.

We see him, intercut with the subway as it all starts, getting out of bed and walking through his stark, stylish NYC apartment after having had sex, his shoulder's broad, penis flopping, long shot where we can see his bare feet to patterning hairline, shadowy figure emphasizing the feral. Sex is, after all, what we have in common with the beasts. Brandon the beast, as are all the other bodies he couples with, seen in beautiful silhouettes and appreciation for human form, in extended take foreplay-to-coitis, in fast-cut electroshock reaction to tortured moments of real human feeling.

Brandon is, as they're treating the movie in PR, a sex addict, and while the movie takes that seriously as a heart attack, this is no after school special. In fact, the question of whether Brandon has learned anything is open to the last frame, and I think it's meant for us to go deep in ourselves, what we believe is possible about our own capability to break out of those mechanisms we use to block feeling because, as the movie makes clear in both elliptical and visceral ways, feeling so often is about pain.

So this (incredibly well built and well-hung) sex addict (in a successful job) in Sexhattan is seducing or buying or onlining it every free moment, even in the stall at work. He seems to assume he's covering his tracks well enough, or maybe not being seen unless he so wills it, but when his sister, Sissy, comes to town, everything starts falling apart, and Brandon's addiction is exposed at work and to her.

McQueen's eye is brilliant, with surfaces reminiscent of Michael Mann's great L.A. version in Heat, but much more in mastershots, often one long Steadicam or static take with actors improvising dialogue, or sex, almost like a cinematic play, unfolding unbroken, in real time before us.

There's man times when it's reminiscent of Antonioni, where the architecture of the modern city traps the characters in defined spaces, or dwarfs them, trapped and alienated, from their own souls. There's a bravura tracking shot, something like ten blocks of jogging at night in the city, ending up at 32rd & Madison Square Garden and a broken sign that shows the lengths our addict is going to escape his shame. But as we all know, New York City is at all times the city of where fornication never sleeps.

James Badge Dale is very different than he's been in that I've seen before, playing Brandon's married hound dog boss, Nicole Beharie makes a huge impression as an office fling, as does Lucy Walters on the subway in a what's essentially a silent film performance. All the actors seem completely natural to the world, noir, distanced, darkly glamorous, almost sci-fi noir. And, yes, they're great to look at.

Fassbender carries every scene, so completely committed to every revealing inch of the role, running a slow burn gamut that leads him all the way down to hell. Several times in the movie he hangs his head (in shame, of course) so low that, shot from behind, he appears to be the headless man. Man lowered below the beast, because he knows of his sin.

But it's Carrie Mulligan who breaks out completely in this. As Sissy, the ne'er-do-well sister just looking for love and shelter but getting ditched and burned at every turn, nowhere in sight is that prim core that's even in her character in Drive, let alone An Education. She there's naked, flawed, the most human thing in the movie. She sings an almost unbearably slowed down version of "New York, New York," revealing a hell of a voice and holding an infinite close-up, her eyes breaking our hearts, and her brother's.

What is it they share? What has caused him to run away from even her, and her to run to everyone? It's only obliquely referenced, just enough of a hint, but you can use your imagination. There's an element of horror Shame, that thing that at times makes it closer to Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom than Last Tango in Paris, that the past hints at and the present dreads.

Because Shame equals loneliness, and loneliness is it's own shame. A cycle of love and pain. Shame, as my mother liked to say, one of the great twin gifts that a parent gives a child.

The other being guilt.

All-American Girl

Yep, Sarah Palin appears to have snorted cocaine with her addict husband, cheated on him with his best friend business partner, and she had a spate of jungle fever -- which she consummated, prior to marriage.

If she ran on all that, even I might vote for her.

But, then again, she's a quitter.

Distraction

At some level, who really cares? So Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), one of the brightest, funniest, most committed progressive members of Congress did some sexting over Twitter. In his come-clean statement today, teary and regretful, he made it clear that there was never any physical contact. Even though he was fairly recently married to an attractive woman, he went outside the marriage for some fantasy interactions with your women, he says all on his own electronic equipment, on his own time, the shame being mainly for stupidity and embarrassing his wife. And trying to lie about it in the lamest media strategy ever.

I'm guessing the big shame is that his masturbatory practices have been exposed. Morally, this can't be nearly as big a sin as Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) having sex with his close colleague's wife and trying to pay them off, or Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and former Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) paying for prostitutes in direct violation of the law, or former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) knocking up a Los Angeles climber while his wife was sick with cancer. Or even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cheating on his wife and dumping her while she was sick with cancer. Or the closet homosexual liaisons of several Republicans in Federal government.

Whacking off to someone 3,000 miles away just does not rise to the same level of offense. Embarrassment, sure. Criminality, doubt it. And extra points to Rep. Weiner for not insisting that his wife stand next to him in shame and smouldering anger while he told the world of his humiliatingly flawed behavior.

And never, to my knowledge, has Rep. Weiner ever run on marital or sexual morality. Not abstinence, not homophobia, nothing like when GOoPers who have voted against gay marriage etc. have been caught in the act.

I'd like to see him bounce back, win re-election next year and eventually become Mayor of NYC. Maybe a little humility will be good for the Weiner. I hope he and his wife work it out, and if they don't I hope he finds someone who alleviates his need for Internet liaisons.

Most of all, and here's where I think he may have been particularly targeted by the rightwing Internet trollers who outed him, I hope he can continue to work on the potentially monstrous conflict of interest that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has with his wife accepting money from anti-healthcare reform organizations, if and when the Affordable Care Act comes up for judicial review.

That, or may someone of equal or greater effectiveness pick up the cause, ideally of disbarment.

Back to Jersey

Now that the midterm election is finally over, and as we wait for the inevitable GOP overreach, it's time to return to the arts, specifically the television arts, and a new show that, eight episodes in, has become an addiction for the past several weeks.

I speak, of course, of HBO's Boardwalk Empire, which takes place in Prohibition Era Atlantic City and follows the web of crime surrounding and often led by Enouch "Nucky" Thompson, County Treasurer and king of the town.

There's the noted pedigree, of course, of Creator and Executive Producer Terence Winter of The Sopranos fame, and no less than Martin Scorsese, Executive Producer and Director of the tone/look-setting first episode. Like many HBO shows (including The Wire and Six Feet Under) it took sticking to it through a number of episodes before the hooks caught. I trace my first perking up to episode four, when Michael Kenneth Williams (all hail Omar from The Wire) finally received a great monologue to deliver in his role of Chalky White:



The final hook was the end of the following episode, when Kelly MacDonald as Margaret Schroeder brings the FBI to raid lead character Nucky Thompson's (Steve Buscemi) big private event and he responds by showing up at her door and initiating their romance. Since then the intrigue has heightened, the violence and sex ramped up, and whether it's entirely accurate or not, they makers are doing a notable job of creating a 1920's atmosphere, if in a way we've never quite experienced before. I expect they looked at films like Scarface and The Roaring Twenties for inspiration, 1930's pictures that basically depicted the crime scene of that era. It's particularly strong in the grotesques, most notably a disfigured World War I veteran sharpshooter wearing the type of mask that had to do in that pre-plastic surgery era, just introduced (with a bang) this past week:



It doesn't hurt that the character, Richard Harrow, is played by Jack Huston, grandson of legendary Director-Writer-Actor John Huston, known for him crime films himself. The show may also be a turning point in respect for Gretchen Mol, who goes the distance and then some as a showgirl with loose morals. In movie-actor-studded cast, Michael Shannon is another standout, playing sexually repressed (or perhaps heavily sublimated into his work) FBI agent Nelson Van Alden. Michael Stuhlbarg, coming off his genius lead in the Coen Bros A Serious Man, plays legendary Jewish mobster and World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein. And English actor Stephen Graham (Public Enemies, Snatch, This is England, Band of Brothers) plays a convincingly insecure, unpredictable and violent young Al Capone.

But the guy you really can't take your eyes off is Michael Pitt as James "Jimmy" Darmody, Nucky's protege and maybe (it seems hinted at) his son by way of Gretchen Mol's Gillian. Pitt first received notice in sexually provocative material, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. He's also worked with Gus Van Sant playing a Kurt Cobain-modeled character and has his own band, the Brooklyn-based Pagoda, where he leads as vocalist and guitarist. Not a typical career for a major leading man in the making, but that's what he feels like on this show.

Pitt's Jimmy is a war vet himself, carrying hidden wounds, having thrown away half a Princeton education and an out-of-wedlock child. His trajectory thus far has taken him from a backwoods booze hijacking gone wrong to Chicago where he's gotten in with Capone and his mob bosses, but it looks like he's headed back to A.C. soon (per this trailer for Episode 8):



Pitt is so period in his looks, the tempo of his movements, his voice and demeanor that you can easily imagine yourself watching this character, this actor in a silent movie from that era. His profile, in particular, seems straight out of the type of drawings found on magazine covers of that era. The perfect R-rated movie star -- every moment, you're wondering what he's going to do next.

If there's more to say about the show's themes or that of individual episodes, that'll have to be for another post. I'll just leave it that we're watching a world pretending to be on the up-and-up on the outside but drenched in corruption just through the door, where Prohibition is a public fig leaf but merely enables the powerful to dilute their liquor ten-fold and makes exponentially more money than they would have under full disclosure.

Come to think of it, sounds a little like post-Citizens United America. A little like the election that just kicked it off.

Hard Sci-Fi

This one is definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK viewing, but shockingly funny, especially if -- like me -- you were a big fan of legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury back in high school. It's just too good not to share with you, valued reader:



S if for Space, L is for Love. Of course!

Think young comedienne Rachel Bloom might have made her own breakthrough to stardom?

More/Same

It's March. Time for yet another in the collectible series of Republican politicians getting busted for engaging in something they demagogue against - which most of the time means homosexuality:

So we decided to look back: just how anti-gay is Ashburn's record?

Said Equality California director Geoff Kors in an interview with TPMmuckraker: "He has voted against every LGBT rights bill that's been introduced in California since he's been in the office."

At that 2005 anti-gay marriage rally, Ashburn said that "Our friends and neighbors in our community are restating the obvious -- that the institute of marriage is fundamental to our society. Marriage between one man and one woman is fundamental to civilization."

And the truth about California State Senator Roy Ashburn (R):

A California Republican family values legislator who was arrested early Wednesday morning for drunk driving had recently left a gay club,sources tell a local news channel.

State senator Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol on Wednesday at 2am in Sacramento, after police saw the car he was driving swerving erratically. An unidentified male passenger was in the car with Ashburn.

The sources told CBS13 that Ashburn, a father of four, had that night been at Faces, which touts itself as "Sacramento's premier GLBTI Nightclub since 1985."

Not the first trip to the bar for Roy:

The openly gay mayor of West Sacramento says that he's spotted state Sen. Roy Ashburn (R), who has racked up a consistently anti-gay voting record over the years, at gay clubs a number of times...

...The owner of Faces, the club where Ashburn reportedly was hanging out before his arrest, told CBS 13 that he can't confirm whether Ashburn was there Tuesday night because the club was packed with 400 patrons for a Latin drag queen beauty pageant.

Ooh. Spicy, Roy!

Moisture Action

The funniest and most original ad on TV right now is for Hally's Refresh with New Advanced Moisture Action:



MILFs are in, right on. Coincidence that it's Sarah Week?

Love the ending on this one, makes the piece -- it's what we're thinking, rarely are American ads that un-full-of-shit.

Brilliant Complex

If you, like Nettertainment, you get excited at the nexus of movies, politics, sex, violence and history, then get to a theater by next Thursday or maybe the Thursday after, before this leaves town:



It may seem sacrilegious on 9/11 to be writing about the birth of modern Western urban terrorism, but it's actually a great time to be thinking about it, especially if we're ever going to defeat it. I can't write a better review of The Baader-Meinhof Complex than Dana Stevens here in Slate, and Christopher Hitchens writes authoritatively about the era in praising the movie:

Researching this in the late 1970s in Germany, I became convinced that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis. One of the main recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save social revolution...

The Baader Meinhof Complex, like the excellent book by Stefan Aust on which it is based, is highly acute in its portrayal of the way in which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical. More arrests mean that more hostages must be taken, often in concert with international hijackers, so that ever more exorbitant “demands” can be made. This requires money, which in turn demands more robbery and extortion. If there are doubts or disagreements within the organization, these can always be attributed to betrayal or cowardice, resulting in mini-purges and micro-lynchings within the gang itself.

All performed by brilliant and magnetic German actors, most notably Martina Gedick (The Lives of Others) as the leftwing bourgeous journalist and mother who interviews the gang before joining and writing their propaganda; Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run) as the juvenile delinquent turned notorious terrorist gang leader, Andreas Baader; and the amazing Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, the real co-leader and sexual mate of Baader, extreme and smart, the core ideologist, who along with Baader seems to be using Meinhof more than anything else.

The movie is extremely accurate to the events as well as the look and feel of the times (some scenes shot in the same places), and comes from a book of the same name written by Stefen Aust, who was a journalist colleague of Meinhof's from before she joined up. He advised on the picture, which was written and produced by Bernard Ettinger (Downfall) and directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn). It's the most expensive movie ever made in Germany, covering ten years (1967-1977) in two and a half hours, and once it gets rolling (after the forebodingly paradisaical opening with Meinhof's family in a nudist resort), it's like a gangster movie on 1970's speed, covering a staggering train ride of events, sharply shot, with a forgotten late '60's to late 70's style that takes you back, one of those time machine movies where you actually think you're there.

Definitely for fans of The Wire, looks like repeat viewing will be in order. The "Complex" of the title refers to a number of things including the name confustion -- the press called it the Baader-Meinhof Gang but they called themselves the Red Army Faction (and Baader paid a designer to create their militant logo). The movie is also complex in not overtly judging the characters, rather letting the totality of the presentation, even to the last shot before it bang-cuts to the director's name, and your own conscience be your guide to how desperate they are, how bloodthirsty, even if the injustices they claim to be responding to need addressing. It's the mental complex Hitchens refers to.

The movie made me run to Wikipedia and other sources. People don't know or don't remember how scary the world was back then, with the Vietnam War, the first ever to be televised, such a neverending grievance that it seemed to infect every level and institution in American society. It became a prime rallying flag for unrest in Europe as well, where revolutionary Communist ideology (especially Mao) existed in the open, college youth and beyond, and at the fringe activism morphed into passionate and deadly "action", an idea that spread around the world through cells like this one and training camps run by the PLO. Strange bedfellows, like bands collaborating for an album or tour, or just supplying weaponry.

What's so fascinating is that this group of middle class intellectuals convinced themselves that blowing up buildings, kidnapping and killing would somehow spark a spontaneous or coalescing revolution, assumedly with them in charge, that they taught themselves how to do all this, and that they spawned generations who carried on under their banner, to the point where they don't even know the one trying to break them out of jail.

There's echoes of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (with Johanna Wokalek as the Anne Wiazemsky?) but of the two Godard-influenced pictures I saw this week...this was the keeper.

Another Day...

...another hypocritical "family values" Republican elected official in a tawdry sex scandal:

Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He's a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is "a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school." (Check out the religious imagery on the site -- the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God's presence -- which of course shows Stanley's deeply pious nature.)

Stanley recently sponsored a bill designed to prevent gay couples from adopting children. And when a Planned Parenthood official recently sought his support for family planning services for Memphis teens, Stanley told her, according to the official, that he "didn't believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence."

...

In a sworn affidavit, a Tennessee state investigator has said that Stanley admitted to having a "sexual relationship" with a 22-year-old female intern working in his office, and to taking nude pictures of her in "provocative poses" in his apartment.

...

Late Update: It gets worse. In 1994, Stanley's first wife, Judy Martin, filed for a restraining order against him, charging that he had physically assaulted her three times. She wrote: "He was going out the door to leave our house and he hit me with a tremendous blow and then he proceeded to turn and run away from me outside the garage to the street." Stanley and Martin divorced the following year.

According to the Nashville Post, Stanley met his current wife, Kristi Stanley, soon afterwards, while both were working for Bill Frist's U.S. Senate office in Memphis. She was working as -- an intern.

Yep, The Party of No can say no to healthcare reform for struggling Americans...but they sure say yes between the sheets!

Compart Mental

My brother-in-law has a theory that men don't think they're being watched, i.e. when they're doing things they don't want people to know about. Checking the fly, picking the booger, cheating on the wife with Maria in Argentina. They think they're getting away with it.

Mark Sanford may preserve his political career, but I think there are already too many state officials of his own party in South Carolina who think that his disappearing without any contact for five days is dereliction of duty. If not batshit crazy. Which his press conference most definitely was -- like what's the craziness at the beginning about his love of the Appalachian Trail...and adventure trips:



Did accepting the federal stimulus money drive him to Argentina? He apologizes long before revealing what everyone is expecting with sickening banality, like a well-known segueway between songs on an overplayed CD. He even brings up the Appalachian Trail canard like he planted it with his staff as a red herring, Sherlock still holding out on the final reveal. He goes off on "God's Laws" whatever that is as to protect us from ourselves, "The biggest self of self is indeed self."

At 7:42 he admits his infidelity with "a dear, dear friend in Argentina." At 14:12 he goes into how this friendship developed not in spite of but because of what Obama calls the bubble of big-office political life. Mind-melding over their separate problems, counsel for each other. Then a year ago there began three trysts. Just three. And now he's been crying in Argentina breaking it off, and as on the next stage of his journey "to get his heart right."

Heart/head: this is a man who got himself way too compartmentalized and is finding the walls dissolved. If he isn't lying about this Argentinean woman, then he's brought this all on himself in a way he never had to, unless she was a threat of blackmail. He's doing his public philosophizing about his own shortcomings, and the shortcircuits are showing.

Look, it's an easy mark (which is not to say cheap) that those most sanctimonious about such matters, those who derive a significant percentage of their voter support from such sanctimony as opposition to marriage equality, should prove themselves more worthy of being whacked with the first stone rather than casting it.

But I also think all guys live a double life at some level, or have at some point in their lives, the life they don't think others see. Sanford's press conference is like watching a newbie relate his own jejune personal experience, his own wonder, even, at the world he has both created and found himself in.

He should have learned from the best.

WTF Sanford

One wonders what shoe is going to drop -- if Gov. Mark Sanford's wife had no idea where he was on Father's Day and his staff is claiming he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, was he hiking...in the raw?:

We’re not suggesting that the formerly missing Governor of South Carolina specifically ditched his family and security detail to go hiking on Naked Hiking Day. It’s just that one of the days he hit the trail also happened to be the aforementioned holiday...

...Then it took a Farrelly brothers screenplay type of twist. Sanford had not disappeared. According to his spokesman, he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. Coincidentally, on Naked Hiking Day.

It’s a big tradition. Many hikers celebrate the summer solstice by hiking au naturel. It just so happened the solstice occurred on Fathers Day — one of the days Sanford was hiking.

If he was hiking. Or is there something else at play? A reported sighting gives the lie to the "official" story:

Local news channel WYFF4 reports:

On Tuesday, sources told News 4's Nigel Robertson that a state vehicle is missing and was tracked down, not to the Appalachian Trail, but to the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta.

Sources told Robertson that a federal agent spotted Sanford in the airport boarding a plane. Robertson was told that the governor was not accompanied by security detail.

...

News 4 called the governor's office, and was told again by staffers that they stand by their original statement that the governor is hiking the Appalachian Trail. They did not want to comment on this story.

It had previously been reported that the governor's cell phone had been tracked to the Atlanta area.

Sanford's staff put out the word late last night that he's hiking the Appalachian. Of course, it would be possible for Sanford to have driven from Columbia to Atlanta, boarded a flight to somewhere else on the trail, got off the plane, and embarked on his hike. But it doesn't seem like the most logical way to do it.

So is/was Sanford hiking? Writing? Exorcising? Tripping 'shrooms? Freaking out?

Or is it possible that there's some tie, even by inspiration, with the recently revealed Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) scandal?:

It's almost a given that a guy who wastes time on the Senate floor blustering about the sanctity of marriage would have an affair with a married woman. So when news broke earlier this week that Sen. John Ensign would be coming clean about his infidelity, we weren't all that surprised.

We did figure he'd step down though, if only because he loves the word "resign." He called on Sen. Larry Craig to resign after his wide-stance problem was revealed. He also called on Bill Clinton to resign when the president's cigar issue became known. Ensign even said that if he was in the same -- ahem -- "position" as Craig, that he would resign. Ensign has also said that he thinks that "we need people who are in office who will hold themselves to a little higher standard."

Well, apparently he wasn't talking about his own higher standards. Ensign merely gave up his leadership position in the Senate, which makes some sense. After all, how can you have seniority when you're such a big baby? Anyway, it would be kind of bizarre if Ensign got all upset and called on himself to resign.

Ensign is also a member of the Christian group the Promise Keepers, begging the question of what promises he's kept.

Another Republican so-called Presidential contender down the tubes. So who knows what's up with Sanford -- and if his wife is out of the loop, what reasons spring to mind?

Maybe John Ensign can join Mark Stanford on that Appalachian Trail.

Outfitted the way God created them.

Froth of the Damned

It's possible my feelings will change as the year tails out, but I'm thinking that Woody's Allen's unlikely new film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, is my favorite moviegoing experience so far this year. Sure, The Dark Knight is excellent spectacle, especially in IMAX. And I may have laughed harder throughout Tropic Thunder or Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But Allen has made his best film since, well, I'll call back to 1989's Crimes & Misdemeanors. And this one is shot better.

What touched me about this new Allen opus is how well it captures that particular bohemian freedom and experimentation of youth, that time of openness and frothy decisions which you don't think will have the critical impact on your life that maybe they do. Rebecca Hall (excellent in The Prestige but the protagonist here) and Scarlett Johansson (best performance to date?) play Vicky and Christina, two friends with very different views of love, who are on that one last trip together to Barcelona, where they meet a reknown painter paid by the incredibly appealing Javier Bardem and, eventually, his psychotic ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). The rondelay of seduction leads to rather unexpected places, and ultimately a comic rondelay of the damned, although the sureness of touch makes it seem almost soft-pedaled, even as the final image takes our beautiful co-leads down.

During the first third of the movie, the most effervescent section, we're watching a movie about youth that could almost be created by a young filmmaker. It's the the twists in the second and third act that reveal the long view of a novelist, not condemning as an angry young director might, but certainly putting the knife in on the expressed theme that "only unfulfilled love can be romantic."

Along the way, with 60 year-old Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, Allen seems to rediscover the camera, even more profoundly than he did with another highly successful recent picture of his, Match Point. Since the tragedy this time is more Chekhov than Dreiser, the feeling is a hell of a lot lighter, but the shots are sumptuous and feel like discovery, whether the tourist trip to the Catalan world or the beauty of the young starlets in close-up.

Whatever the pleasures of the other movies listed above and the shared competence with Allen's latest, this is the one that feels the most like real people undergoing real character change, inasmuch as attitude changes while character remains constant. This is the movie breathing fully of life and offering the most flesh-and-blood experience in the most entertaining way, with lots of laughter but something tho take home and think about.

And, as a little bit of a reality check for those (like me) who sometimes deride auteur Allen for his flops, let it be noted that this is Woody Allen's 43rd directing effort. That kind of directorial productivity only happened back in the days of the studio factories, and now he's doing each one basically as an annual independent film. When all is said and done, considering his 100% creative control, it is a career unparalleled in the history of moviemaking.

And #44 is on the way.

Vile

So if there's one thing John McCain can no longer run on, it's character.

The Obama-Britney-Paris celebrity ad gets the BAGnews semiotics treatment, and it's brutal. First, the sexual race-baiting:

I agree with Josh that McCain's video hit man (reprising his Harold Ford handiwork) is playing heavily on racist allusions to sexual promiscuity and even rape.

If you study the individual frames, in fact, you'll see how the fades juxtaposing Obama and Britney, and Obama and Paris Hilton are virtually identical.

In each, Obama -- framed as a protean black celebrity (like O.J.) -- comes up on the woman, each an oversized icon, and creates the digital effect of a physical merger...On the other hand, the difference between the two -- Britney more "receptive" and Paris seemingly "unwilling" -- also resonates with the two dimensions of this ugly stereotype, one objectifying the white woman's supposed secretly lust for the black man's sexual prowess, and the other representing the more predatory "take it by force" scenario.)

And McCain dares to say Obama's playing the race card. He even says he's proud of this divisive, issues-avoiding, swiftboating commercial. Has he no shame -- or is he just playing the "Playing the Race Card" card?

Sounds like McCain campaign "outside advisor" Karl Rove to me. Is there a more perfect harbinger of George W. Bush's Third Term?

But there's worse. BAGnewsNotes uncovers the deeper evil of the ad, the bone-chilling call to violence:

But then, watching the video without the sound, and looking at it slowly, bit-by-bit (lessening the "distraction" of the celebrity meme, and considering the subliminal allusions hitting the brain as fast as the scenery from a speeding train), the imagery starts to suggest other inferences.

Beginning with a sequence of flashes paired with isolated hands, followed immediately by a sequence (above) from what looks like the last Democratic Convention (where Obama made his first major jolt, but where the scene itself bears next-to-no direct connection to Obama having his picture taken), now all the "pop-pop-pop" and the violently-sensory "flash-flash-flash" seem indistinguishable from explosions.

With those fireworks serving as a (possible Denver) table setting, and just on-the-other-side of the seductive Britney/Paris segment, we arrive at this chronological sequence in which Obama is mingling with the Berlin crowd, a single nervous-looking Secret Service agent fixed off the candidate's left shoulder...

...I don't even want to think what this looks like to me...

Thank goodness Obama can take care of himself:

John McCain is shrinking by the day.

The Fun Begins

McCain says that Hamas endorses Obama and somehow that's how he's going to beat him. Obama says McCain is losing his bearings (nice, aeronautical). McCain's guy protests that Obama is being ageist. Obama said he never said that, and anyone can lose their bearings (I mean, look at Bush and he's not yet a total geezer).

So Obama gets to slip the knife in early like he should, rise above, take a victory lap in the House of Representatives where he's treated like a rock star. Later in the day he speaks stalwartly at a celebration of the 60th Anniversary of Israeli Independence.

Hillary is out of money so she's turning up the racial tap, claiming only she can win whites, looking at some visionless Mark Penn micro-poll, no doubt. Stay classy, Rodham. She is probably just running now as an enterprise, try and earn back the $12,000,000 or so she's loaned her campaign, before the election happens and some laws kick in. She's raised $1,000,000 since Tuesday, which used to seem like a lot. Al Sharpton tells his New York Senator via NY1 interview, “The worst thing in the world is when an entertainer doesn’t know when the show is over.”

Obama matches Hillary in actual elective office-holding superdelegate endorsements. He's hitting up Edwards delegates. It turns out the margin of victory for Clinton in Indiana ended up at around a mere 1%. Obama lays down his plan to declare victory on May 20th, right after Oregon goes for him.

Obama is, I believe, pulling the trigger ju-jitsu style and making a move he's planned for a long time: running the table. He needs to go for the jugular now, albeit in the same non-personal way he's conducted his campaign. Superdelegates will no longer be afraid of her, starting now.

And what could possibly add to this burgeoning period of fun?

Nothing other than yet another Republican sex scandal, this time straight but with adultery and, best of all, the hidden out-of-wedlock child.

Adding to the juice: the twist's a former Air Force lieutenant colonel.

Zeeeeeet.....

Brun Sugar

Once again showing the world politics done right, or at least most entertainingly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who's wife suddenly divorced him last October (sure, guess why) has gone legit by marrying ex-uber model Carla Bruni.

He's 53 and she's a trophiesque 40, but best of all, the most notorious romance in Bruni's past was with Mick Jagger, which was the homewrecking last straw in his marriage to ex-uber model Jerry Hall. In Bruni's own self-defense:

Bruni has already spoken: "It was a fling. I was in my 20s so I wasn't thinking about a relationship.

"There are so many other women with Mick. I don't think I was responsible for his divorce from Jerry Hall. There were maybe ten other women."

Hey, Mick, satisfaction all down the line, heartbreaker.

So Sarkozy rolls like a Stone, Carla gets respectable, and Steven Taylor fires the best line:

Bill Clinton must be so jealous.¹

Rocks off.

If It's Friday...

...it must be another Republican sex or corruption scandal.

Or...two Republican sex or corruption scandals!

Just yesterday I was wondering, what to write on Nettertainment? What about that old staple topic, the godsend, the Republican sex scandal? Where were you in my hour of need?

Mark Foley: Spent.
Larry Craig: Played.
David Vitter: Climaxed too soon.

But tonight, all is well. Thanks to Joey DiFatta, St. Bernard Parish Councilman and until-today GOP candidate for Louisiana state senate:

Jefferson Parish deputies working an undercover detail in a men's bathroom at Dillard's at Lakeside Shopping Center in March 2000 stopped DiFatta after he indicated a desire to engage in sex with an undercover deputy in an adjoining bathroom stall, according to an interoffice memorandum written by Sgt. Keith Conley, one of the deputies involved in the investigation.

The report said DiFatta slid his foot into the deputy's stall and tapped the deputy's foot. In the report, Conley noted that such activity is common among men to indicate a willingness to participate in sex.

The deputy inside the stall, Detective Wayne Couvillion, responded by tapping his foot, and DiFatta reached under the partition and began to rub the deputy's leg, the report states.

The detective asked DiFatta, "What do you want?" according to the report, and he replied, "I want to play with you."

As anyone who knows me, I'm all for play. And I don't actually think our police need to waste their time looking for all-male hook-ups. I don't think even Councilman DiFatta should have to lead a double life, or be ashamed about his perfectly normal homosexual orientation.

But once again, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, i.e. one running on the platform plank, "Defend our conservative values from attacks by extreme liberal groups."

Moving On, poor Joey DiFatta's sad little scandal is nothing compared to the wild times at Oral Roberts University:

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males."

One can only speculate that the other shoe waiting to drop is embezzlement to support the psycho over-indulged lifestyle, otherwise that's not really a scandal, it's the cost of doing religious business in those evangelical circles. It would still leave the "Affirmational" Action backdoor scholarships and, although underage males are involved, not homosexuality, but instead (and this is what makes this scandal so unique and potentially the most entertaining of all):

Underage Cougar Action.

Leave it to the GOP to innovate UCA.

Just like clockwork, providing salvation for bloggers everywhere; as if on schedule, run like a corporation, the one product of theirs we crave and the one that they will always eventually deliver.

It's like a contract with America.

Compulsion

Republicans can't help themselves. Just as Freud wrote about the return of the repressed, the fake "family values" and "moral majority" party is filled with out-and-out perverts:

Former Republican Rep. Ted Klaudt could spend the rest of his life in prison
after turning himself in to authorities Friday on felony charges that include
eight counts of rape involving foster children and former legislative pages.

Five girls told authorities they were assaulted by Klaudt, court documents
state, although charges filed Friday involve only two of the girls.

Four of the girls said they were accosted in Klaudt's hotel room in Pierre,
where he stayed while serving in the South Dakota Legislature. Two of the girls
were legislative pages when they were attacked, they told investigators.

Kinda reminds you of this. And this. And this. And...

Family Values

Is there any fruit as sweet at that of the GOP sex scandal?

Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.

Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President's Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.

A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for "personal reasons."

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the "Pamela Martin and Associates" escort service "to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage." Tobias, who is married, said there had been "no sex," and that recently he had been using another service "with Central Americans" to provide massages.

Because we all know, Central Americans give the best massages.

Funniest of all:

As the Bush administration's so-called "AIDS czar," Tobias was criticized for emphasizing faithfulness and abstinence over condom use to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Look, it's common knowledge that horny does make you stupid, but this looks like maybe the other way around.

Again, one has to ask, is there any limit to the Republican party's capacity for shameless hypocrisy?