Prop

The invaluable Crooks & Liars has up the new GOP censure/impeachment scare ad.

There a lot that's fascinating about it

SPOILERS :^)

like the massive exposure for Russell Feingold. In fact, Pres. Bush only appears in the ad for about :09 seconds. Sen. Feingold, Vice Pres. Al Gore, Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Harry Reid have almost :20 seconds of airtime.

Bush is revealed and again concealed with a fade-in and fade-out, all bookended with scary horizontal blue steel strips, some text floating inevitably towards you from the center of the screen, a kind of nuclear exposition of elliptical light pulsating out from the center behind the text, with electronic blast sfx, loud ominous techno score.

The whole ad opens with quick vignettes of some masked terrorist-looking types (staged? documentary?) running with guns through a burned-out building. Fade up/fade out, heartbeat pulsating tech score. They run outside, an old car blows up behind them.

Is it real, or is it Memorex?

So they start drumming up the terror with that sequence, have "On September 11th" come in big and readable along with some war rhetoric that spills over into the next slide, then Bush in some unidentified Big Brother-ish setting, wearing what looks like a formal jacket, U.S. flags pattern on the wall behind him.

Bush looks either as phony or sincere as you've come to harden your position on him, but he's only on long enough to say he gave his vow to not wait to be attacked again (like by Iraq again?).

Now two animated power text slides setting up the pitch. The first: "The President is Working to Defeat the Terrorists", as if there is anyone who still believes W. is all that hard-working. Then a slide with too much text, some big, some smaller, claiming he's aggressively pursuing Al Qaeda members, which to you might ring true but just made me depressed that he let Bin Laden slip away in Tora Bora.

Now come the parade of what I assume are intended as red meat targets for the hardcore Bush base; Democrats with names like buzzwords. I was surprised not to see Nancy Pelosi. Not so surprised that Hillary wasn't included as I believe they want her to get the 2008 Dem nomination, they want to run against her and will do everything they can to make Democrats think she's the best contender. Or maybe this ad was just about taking down The Men.

The thing is, aside from the ominous pulsating techno bummer music and the way some of the shots are treated or cropped, they don't seem to me like unreasonable guys. Feingold in particular, with the lion's share of screen time, comes off very serious, very normal, very good.

I'm thinking, they're hoping the emotional argument and Parallax View-style associations rev their choir, and there's enough of a groundswell of anti-Democrat Bushism that the Swing populace starts to sing along.

After the "gallery of Dem traitors" comes "Censure? Impeachment?" and sub-head "Is This the Democrats' Plan?" now with thunder SFX. (I kid you not about any of this.) Then - fade-out/fade-in - "The President is Taking the Necessary Steps to Keep America Safe."

In from the right slides a blood-red band and the words: "Who Do You Stand With?" No music now, just heartbeat and ominous technobreeze, then little white letters on black telling you it was paid for by the Republican National Committee. If you can squint to read it, kind of a punchline.

Here's my brilliant observation: it's all fear. That's the world they create in order to sell you that Bush is the only one who understands the direness of the situation (with no indication that he's really going to alleviate it).

My instinct is that while this may feed maybe a 28% Bush-committed electoral segment, it's only going to scare away potential new converts.

One big problem the Democrats have right now is the lack of a national party leader. Different pols handle different slices -- Dean outfitting 50-states for once, Schumer on Senate recruiting, Joe Biden on C-SPAN, Hillary doing the videogame values pander.

You also have Feingold trying to leapfrog his Party's stagnation. What's so strange to me about this ad is that the GOP give Feingold more prominence than Harry Reid would ever allow.

I guess that they're making sure their base has now clearly identified this new threat/target, maybe to set up a whole Fall Swiftboat campaign against Feinstein. Smears by October? September? End of April?

To me Feingold looks like such a good composed citizen in the midst of this whole berserk apocalyptic branding experience, I can't imagine it doesn't make him look good to anyone but the most wingy Dem-hater or Jew-hater or goddamned Jew Democrat hater. Or maybe I underestimate the size of that demo.

Will they ever offer hope, and not just horror film last-ditch-hope like the feeling engendered by the tiny Bush speech clip? Are we going to get an ad sometime where the goth-ish techno gives way to renewal strings and a bright, sunny palette, Bush in a sea of children, shaking hands and smiling, that childhood innocence, that Texas twinkle, the terrorists all banished from McHappyland by the Wise Emperor?

I think it all depends how well the GOP think they're doing in the polls. This could be one big loyalty test to make standing with the President win, or else walk away from the guy as much as possible.

To me the latching onto Feingold is a mistaken reading of now defunct polls, unless they're thinking they can just hammer and he'll fall fast victim to his chinks like every other Dem who has folded up their armor for the GOP before him. Feingold's stock only went up even after the Party Dems hid like scared turtles on his announcement. Aside from Republicans and Dem bigwigs, most folks seem to dig Feingold for his candor and cajones.

The theme of the next election has got to be hope, realistic hope because we're knowing the costs now. At least I think whichever party can establish that big claim, they win.

The alternative is a fear campaign. And will anyone be surprised if BushCo uses an attack on Iran to raise the fear meter enough?

The Dems shouldn't really run on fear, no matter how much every new day of Bush/Cheneyism strikes real terror in their hearts. They need to start building a credible message of how they're going to make things right, so they have some real positions that everyone can get behind.

So what's the verdict? Am I right on this ad? Or is it more effective than I imagine?

Stone

Crazy-as-hell Sharon Stone just showed up on The Daily Show tonight and won big. Basic Instinct 2, opening tomorrow, has been delayed for years. At one point she sued the producers, who claimed that it was actually her inability to accept any male lead who was interested in taking the co-starring role is actually the thing that kept them from working. At one point even David Cronenberg was attached to direct. Yowsah.

So now they've got it set in London with a British actor I've never heard of playing opposite her. The reviews have not been kind, but at least a couple hint at the guilty pleasure of camp. Some have even tried holding it up to the yardstick of Showgirls, if you can believe how far we've come.

Word is the studio felt like the critics and weren't planning to spend a gargantuan amount on marketing or promotion. They didn't count on Ms. Stone taking to the road on her own with her own little entourage, through Europe and, with now infamously daffy results, Israel.

God bless her, interest in the film went through the roof, and if it manages to dig out from its 10% Rotten Tomatoes rating and do over $10 million this weekend, she owns the miracle.

The way she won Stewart, who had mercilessly ridiculed the video footage of her in Israel mainly just by broadcasting it, was to show up dressed terrifically (as opposed to when she recently was scary fugly), giggle to the funny guy host just like every other starlet on every other talk show (and as usual on Stewart as well), but then she disarms him with some very funny rejoinders. It seems that she knows her image, she knows this movie, she's having a blast doing exactly what she wants.

I'll see about posting a link to the interview if they put it up on the show's website (usually a day or two after airing), but the best part is when she stops Stewart, who's stumbling ever so slightly when about to ask some who-cares question about the movie, dead in his tracks. "Spit it out, sweetie," is all it takes and he's speechless, and I was laughing harder than at anything on TV in weeks. Since the last episode of Beauty & the Geek.

Sharon is our post-modern Tallulah, a grown-up sexual woman, but this time without the drinking or nicotine. At 48 years old she's staking out final claim as the sex symbol of her generation. In an age where Hollywood offers fewer and fewer meaningful roles for women, especially as they age, I have to give her credit for essentially subverting the system with those particularly cruel cards set against her.

At least until the weekend grosses come in, she's got the world on a string. Maybe, just maybe, (if you'll ever forgive the pun) Ms. Sharon Stone is crazy like a fox.

Stan

One of my literary heroes, Stanislaw Lem, just passed away. At an impressionable age I read a fraction of his prolific oevre, half a dozen of his books over a period of several years, but I enjoyed them all and had my mind fairly blown by two.

Lem wrote under Poland's repressive Iron Curtain regime, forbidden to even write about certain topics, but his mind seems so fecund that you don't feel the limitations straining against the writer as with straight social tracts. (Credit for preserving Lem's engaging and nimble style in English goes to usual translator, Michael Kandel.) You feel his imagination, you feel this is a guy who really knows what's really going on, and although Lem and some of his admirers disdain the science fiction genre category slapped on his body of work (including Solaris), it's among the most mind-expanding science fiction.

It's been a long time since I've read them, but I'll try to do justice to the two.

The Futurological Congress (1971) is a tripfest, where Lem's favorite hero, Ijon Tichy, goes to a futurists convention in Costa Rica, winds up drugged in the middle of a coup, and awakens in the overmedicated utopia of 2039. In this vision of tomorrow, there is so much drug use that various capitalists and spies use any kind of delivery to create moods or warp everyone's reality. At points the air is so thick with competing, counteracting, mutating aerosol hallucinogens that our narrator can't trust anything he experiences, and much of it is pretty wild.

It's an acidy Philip K. Dick set-up but Lem, the more brilliant stylist, adds in helium. The story just never stops rising, with colliding characters mutating through unreliable layers of reality as one drug influence segues into another, Ijon searching endlessly for the real world, long before the end of the book clearly an absurd search.

The other one of his novel's that completely rocked my world was Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). Jerry Stratton describes it well here:

After an accidental holocaust in which all paper, and thus all civilization, is destroyed, the Pentagon still lives in a building deep beneath the mountains, safe from harm and still carrying out its war of words against “the enemy”, the “anti-Pentagon”. Even though “the enemy” probably doesn’t even exist. It doesn’t matter, because you can manufacture the enemy more easily if you start from scratch. Everything up to and including the stars is fair game...

...Lem constructs a place where paranoia is the ruling mindset, where everything is code, even code is in code, and the most precious item you can have is a straight razor.

A civilian wanders into the Building, but the bureaucracy has no idea what to do with him, so they turn him into an agent, giving him a “Special Mission”--but it quickly becomes clear that his real mission is penetrating the multiple layers of secrecy in order to find out what his Special Mission actually is. No one has clearance to give it to him. And those who do have clearance keep moving him off the track of his search. Slowly, his own vision of the world gets sucked into the paranoid world-vision of The Building.

We’re never quite sure what the protagonist and story-teller is in the building for...He has a pass, but the room number on his pass doesn’t exist--or at least, no one’s able or willing to tell him where it is.

The climax is simultaneously enigmatic and shattering; the vision sticks. Lem's allegory of a nightmarishly self-perpetuating bureaucracy could easily be life inside a Soviet-style fascist society, or just as easily some endlessly self-justifying war-loop government where secrecy and paranoia have already won.

Andre

The new Thief series on FX has kind of a mid-1950's urban noir feel, shades of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing but with darkly vivid color saturations of green, red, yellow. It's a man's man's world, even more by the end of the pilot than the beginning; blood is spilt.

The cast is generally terrific, and at the center of it all is Andre Braugher, my raison d'etre for tuning in. I cherish him as Detective Frank Pembleton as the brilliant hub of the brilliant Homicide: Life on the Streets, and here he doesn't disappoint, finding material and a production worthy of his talents.

He's playing another arrogant asshole, only this time on the wrong side of the law. Pembleton earned your empathy because at heart he was an avenging angel with a hard-ass conscience. Here he's the brainiac leader of a ring of thieves who do big jobs. He seems to sub-contract out for a wealthy backer (Linda Hamilton, in good form), although their arrangement is still a bit ambiguous. He's got a moral code, a very rigid one, but it's tested as things go south very quickly in the first episode, lots of jackpots coming together at once, starting with a sloppy end to the series opening heist.

That we feel any empathy for a character who does as much bad shit as Nick Atwater is a tribute to Braugher, and I think he's bravely trying to take it to a place where our bond is sorely tested, challenging himself in a way he hasn't been since H:LOTS.

The plotting is kind of male melodramatic but the treatment is distanced, a little too MTV for my taste, maybe just signature for director Paul McGuigan, who did Wicker Park and has Lucky Number Sleven coming out. David Manson and Norman Morrill are listed as writers/producers with Morrill as creator, so who knows how much of it is their own stamp or what a different director might reveal.

The best thing they do with the story, I think already by the 45-minute mark, is to have Braugher respond to his cash-poor crew that he's got an notion about another job. The idea forming. Already something to look forward to.

I'm wondering if we're feeling enough honor among these thieves that it'll really hit us if they start tearing at each other. I don't know how well-researched the show is or if it's just a fanciful conceit of middle-class thieves. Do rings like these really exist? Do they really ever hug?

In any case we don't know so much about the codes, the bonds, how they work. The guys don't seem to be in any way Mafia, they're not the Mod Squad.

What brought these thieves together, how long have they been making it click, how often?

And do the showrunners plan on filling us in?

WTF?

The unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has now officially entered The Twilight Zone.

Da-da-da-dah da-da-da-dahhh...

Can anyone say for sure whether U.S. forces mistakenly slaughtered 16 innocent Shiites or did some Shiite groups fake the whole news?

This report quotes U.S. commanders saying, "After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There's been huge misinformation." But is that the same as saying the whole thing was faked?

The NY Times article lede:

Frayed relations between Iraq's Shiite leadership and the American authorities came under increased strain on Monday as Shiite leaders angrily denounced a joint American-Iraqi raid on a Shiite compound and suspended negotiations over a new government.

The raid on Sunday evening, which killed at least 16 people, also prompted the governor of Baghdad to announce a halt in cooperation with the American authorities, and Shiite militiamen to brandish their weapons in the streets of eastern Baghdad and declare their readiness to retaliate against American troops.

So is this Lieutenant Calley My Lai massacre time, or just a manipulated triumph by radical Shiite cleric and oft-time occupation antagonist Moktada al-Sadr?

Even the consistently reliable and generally unflappable Juan Cole says:

All hell broke loose in Iraq on Sunday, but I'm darned if I can figure out most of what happened or why. It seems possible that the US committed two major military blunders that will worsen its relationship with Iraqi political forces.

He does offer a conjecture, the first plausible one I've read:

I have a sinking feeling that instead of raiding a Sunni Arab building in Adhamiyah, they got disoriented and attacked a Shiite religious center in nearby Shaab instead. Iraqi television angrily showed twenty unarmed corpses on the floor of the religious center, denouncing the US for killing innocent worshippers.

I'm just hoping there's not some nightmare retaliation around the corner. (Hate the war; support the troops.)

Just thinking, could this be the turning point where we finally start to GTF out?

Fascinating

A talented young writer-director to who's blog I have a link to on the side of this one is currently going though the script submission process at the same time that his feature directorial debut may be funded. The script sales process -- "going wide" -- is inherently fascinating, and over the past few days has made a robot that can write edge-of-seat reading.

Here's the set-up:

So we have two more agency passes on Ground Control. There are, I think, three left outstanding. But it definitely appears that we will be trying to sell the script ourselves. Without agency help.

I'm finding it a revealing look into a process often talked about but rarely diaried so clearly. If you want to catch all the suspense from the beginning (Friday 3/17/06) then start here.

As the first entry climaxes:

Anyway, that is the process. It all begins on Monday and if I understand everything it should only take a week or two to complete.

I suspect anyone who reads this entry be keeping their fingers crossed for this optimistic and intrepid screenwriting guy.

Babe

You may need to be a registered subscriber to the L.A. Times in order to read this welcome review of Jessica Abel's excellent graphic novel, La Perdida, so here's a small taste of why I loved reading it when first published in a series of 5 comics, about a young American woman on a mission to find a more authentic life in Mexico:

Carla arrives with a few hundred dollars and no resident visa and immediately recognizes the Mexico of her imagination, "where the hard truth about the crime rate, and the pollution, and the disappearance of traditional culture, just didn't apply." She quickly grows restless, however, with Harry and the other members of an expatriate community that lives isolated from native Mexicans (not a single Mexican friend in sight). Longing for something more vivid, she attaches herself to a group of radical anti-capitalists, who seem to Carla to represent pure Mexican culture — without the taint of U.S. consumerism or values. Yet even as she finds what she thought was authentic, Carla feels more lost than before.

A solid description, and what ensues becomes increasingly harrowing, the shattering climax foreshadowed from the very first pages.

I was never a fan of Abel's ArtBabe series, although mainly for lack of exposure. This material was just so instantly captivating to me, having had friends go down to Mexico for extended periods of artistic habitation, having read all about Frida Kahlo and William S. Burroughs shooting his wife, having had all those capitalism/anti-capitalism discussions in my early 20's.

The look of La Perdida is very much in the Marshall McLuhan comics-as-woodcut tradition, which ends up suiting the setting as well a providing an elegant simplicity for this somewhat complex story. I'll let reviewer Karrie Higgins tell you:

Her drawings are minimal, yet filled with detail and emotional nuance. She evokes the architecture and street life of Mexico, often crowding her frames with so much activity that you feel the hustle of the city, just as Carla does. At the same time, she conveys subtle facial expressions and gestures, even with simple lines and (often) nothing but ink dots for eyes.

Amen to all that.

Uncivil

The New York Times is full of good cheer about what's really happening in Iraq:

- Nice normal Iraq citizens killed with impunity by roving death squads.

- You'd be an idiot not to be packin' heat if you live in Baghdad.

- U.S. troops now fighting Shiite militias (again).

And when el Presidente Bush said he didn't want to go to war, "no President wants to go to war," he was perhaps, er, how you say in America...lying.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

Is this what Republicans mean when they call themselves the party of new ideas?

Native

Finally, a better use for tribal sovereignty than casino gambling. In defiance of South Dakota's new anti-abortion law:

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty." President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, says "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

I can't imagine the GOP leadership can be happy about this part of their quadrennial platform being put into actual law, just like with the anti-immigration legislation.

The last thing they could possibly want is to still up average Americans to action. Or Native American.

Vic

Just a quick thumbs up on the season finale of The Shield. I used to call it the Most Entertaining show on television. The HBO shows are still a notch better, but that may just be a function of budget. Shawn Ryan & Co. have created the best precinct series since Homicide: Life on the Streets. In fact, the original sin from The Shield's pilot episode is when the cop protagonist, Vic Mackey, kills another cop, an undercover threat to his four man Strike Team's corrupt operation. The murdered cop was played by Reed Diamond of Homicide, being directed by his partner from that show, Clark Johnson.

While the pure jaw-dropping entertainment value has dropped a step after four high octane seasons, it may be appropriate that S-5 is less of a blast, since they're finally dealing with the full ramifications of Vic's cold blooded homicide. Even at his worst, the show has always kept part of us rooting for Vic, our Faustian bargain. Supposedly the next season will be the last, so I'm just wondering if the plan has always been to make Vic really pay for his life of crime, or does he ultimately get one last wink in.

Aside from Michael Chiklis and CCH Pounder earning an award or a nom, and celebrated season-long guest stars Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, the cast hasn't really been celebrated. Everyone has had a chance to shine, but with this ep props must go to Kenny Johnson as Detective Curtis "Lemonhead" Lemansky, the big guy with a heart of gold, and Walton Goggins as Detective Shane Vendrell, Vic's hot-headed protege.

Early on these guys provided comic relief. How far they've come.

Peaceful

I can't say I'm as well informed as I should be about the immigration issues of our day. Although I've heard criticisms of Bush's guest worker plan as legalized serfdom, is actually seems like it could be the sole policy on which I could be persuaded to agree with him.

But the GOP can't seem to agree with each other. Some business interests need seasonal low salary workers enough that they favor a guest worker program. Then there's the House bill making all illegal immigrants instant felons. How many extra beds are there at Lompoc?

So there were protests today in Arizona and Los Angeles. And my favorite kind -- peaceful. No hotheads, no FBI provocateurs, and half a million in L.A. alone.

Not a bad vision of America.

Deductible?

Whoa!

Turns out Barbara and George Bush are investors in the very same Neil Bush company to which Bab's earmarked her hurricane "donation".

Does that mean she can or can't take that off her taxes?

Marie

Barbara Bush donates to a hurricane release fund but stipulates that the money has to go into an educational software company owned by her son, Neil.

Let them eat cake, baby!

Gentle

Ben Domenech didn't last his first week as the Right Wing blogger in a brand new Washington Post online feature, Red America.

Seems the Post needed balance for White House Briefing blogger Dan Froomkin. To my eyes Froomkin is a journalist who mainly pulls from published news and public quotes, and analyzes the situation in terms of political power, more scorekeeping that moralizing. But you know that Blame Game crowd, they like slapping on labels, the quicker the better. A Reality-Based journalist gets called (shudder) a Liberal.

How out of control is the Post? To balance an independent journalist they hire a 24 year-old Republican Bush crony. Yes, the youngest on record!

A former contributing editor to National Review Online, Domenech later became what he calls "the youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush."

The punk even had the gall to Red-smear Coretta Scott King on the day of her funeral. Y'know, for sentimental reasons.

Sadly, it turns out Gentle Ben is a serial plagiarist.

Looks like an attempt at a face-saving resignation offered by the Post. And what's the first thing Ben does when he leaves? Blames other people. By the end of the day I guess he had gotten his ass handed to him, he finally apologizes, but really only to his cohorts, and the editors and publishers he cheated. Not to his readership or the writers he ripped off. And to top it off he does the age dodge.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear. This is not a guy to be trusted. Ever. Not in print. Maybe in housing if he goes off and does a Jimmy Carter for a decade. Chickenhawk should just enlist if he wants his conservative blogger friends to even give him the time of day.

So a former Bush operative is caught in a lie.

Imagine that.

Money

The Sopranos this season has the longest credit roll of any series television program I have ever seen in my entire life. And, shocker, there have been quite a few of them.

I'm assuming that by now they have the best television crew money can buy in NYC. That's what you should do if you have some of the most expensive stars on television. The credits read like it's a feature now. James Gandolfini's Dialect Coach, no less.

What the hell, they're totally worth it. Gandolfini and Edie Falco must be the best acting team working today. Even when he's in a coma.

I'm guessing that HBO makes so much money on the DVD season sets that they're budgeting like a feature anyway. Does anyone know if they've hit $10 million per episode yet?

Have to say I'm excited to see where it goes. The first episode was insanely tight, laid out this very scary family right at the head of the season. It's for life, no way out.

The genius of the show is how it implicates the audience. It unerringly depicts contemporary suburban life, with all our prosaic self-deception, but then you realize those folks you're identifying with are very, very bad people. They kill people. Sometimes for a living. Sometimes for elective.

Oh beautiful.

Flashback

I've had a few folks ask me about the admittedly cryptic non-description of the blog-meets-life moment I had after getting sold out of V for Vendetta on Sunday night. At the time I wanted to protect the privacy of the other person involved, but since a little time has passed and the facts are not in any way scandalous, here's the story for those who still care.

Sometime over a week ago I wrote about my current favorite reality television program, better, funnier and more human by far than any sitcom, Beauty & the Geek. I praised the winners and urged my much more cultured friends to give it a chance, I guess maybe next season.

So I've left my car at the Arclight while heading to a nearby watering hole with the movie-missing friend, and when I head back to drive home, it turns out the person parked right next to me, also heading to their car with a buddy at that exact same moment, is the co-winner from the show, Josh! He's the geek half, of course, of "Josh & Cher".

I do one of those "are you who I think you are" looks, he's got that standing still waiting to see if I recognize him moment. I say, "Are you Josh?" and he fesses up. We have a terrific conversation.

Turns out Josh is a great guy like on the show, a deserving winner, who answers a number of my questions (yes, the way they edited it is a fair representation of what actually happened) and I tell him that I've written about the show on my new blog. He gets the URL and says he'll check it out. He also said he'd go in for the comments, likes to argue, give me "a run for (my) money."

I haven't heard anything from him this week and hope he's fine with this story, but it turns out he's a young screenwriter with one sale already under his belt, he stays in touch with the friends he made on the show, is a little more comfortable talking to women than before, and tends to dislike most movies while seeing a lot of them. He had just gotten out of V, maybe even the showing I had missed! And for those who watched this season you'll be interested to know that Wes is moving out here to try being together with Cher.

Good luck to all of them. But how strange that, in less than three short weeks, through a series of unpredictable events, blog and life are As One.

Spike

Regular readers know I've been on an Al Gore reverie for a couple of days and I guess I want to put it on hiatus until he either runs or doesn't, or maybe just until Paramount Classics releases the documentary about his global warming awareness campaign, An Inconvenient Truth, on May 26th. So here's a little coda.

Since this site is about entertainment & politics it's always nice when there's an obvious crossover character. Turns out Al has pretty respectable taste in movies, like Groundhog's Day and Being John Malkovich. So he invited Spike Jones, director of the latter, to come shoot him with his family for the day -- wife, kids, grandkids, mom.

How cool to choose Spike Jones.

Speaking of the movies, you get to see him with the family deciding what video to watch that night. They're thinking The Straight Story (David Lynch!) or Shall We Dance (original Japanese release) and all lukewarm/rejecting rejecting Mel Gibson's The Patriot. Seems he has good videowatching habits as well, always pausing for anyone leaving the room, going for the full experience. The olde fashioned way.

I think you see a genuine guy you'd have a nice time hanging out with, a breath of fresh air in that alt universe where we kicked ass in Afghanistan, didn't let Bin Laden escape in Tora Bora, and spread democracy through diplomacy, in general bolstering rather than denigrating our global reputation and influence.

Here's the pity: it was shot in 2000, shown at the Democratic Convention but not on network television, and then Gore's weak-kneed/overpaid D.C. consultants never released it into the public sphere. I'm not saying it would have won over Justice Antonin Scalia, but y'know maybe he would have seen that Al was a regular guy with a nice family and voted to let the recount proceed in Florida.

The glory of our sprawling post-post-modern culture gives us all 13:12 to check out and make up our own minds on Google video. So I'm putting the brakes on the reverie if you promise to:

see Spike's Al.

Rotoscope

I can't vouch how good the upcoming Richard Linklater adaptation of Philip K. Dick's classic tripfest science fiction novel A Scanner Darkly will be, but I sure am excited. Check out the website and trailer here.

The animation technique used for the film is called rotoscoping and invention is credited to Max Fleischer in 1914. His Superman shorts from the 1940's rule.

This technique was also used in a terrific computer adventure game I was privileged to produce, the well-regarded but undersold The Last Express.

There's also a Wikipedia history of the project here.

Would that there was a clamor after Linklater's film comes out for the game's re-release...

Truth

For over a year I've been saying that every time President George W. Bush opens his mouth he lies. Those lips flap and lies come out. He can't help it, he's a lying machine. That's how he's been programmed or programmed himself, because like many in his Administration he is nothing more than an extremely lucky and well-placed corporate criminal.

Check out this clip from his press conference today, an extremely rare event for him, and even more unusual taking questions from hero reporter Helen Thomas.

If you can stomach it, there's the usual litany of lies about him not wanting to go to war with Iraq, the reasons we went, the disproven conflation of Iraq with "the terrorists", the rhetorical 9/11 crutch, the works. It's like he took Helen's question as a chance to reprise the greatest hits of his lying path to ruinous war.

The way he handles it, my God, if Bill Clinton made being President of the U.S. look easy (and inadvertently made it possible for such a soft-expectation candidate as GWB to be voted in), Bush makes it look awfully hard. "It's hard work to be President", he once said. Yeah, if you combine the morals of Kenneth Lay with the one-trick intelligence of an olde time traveling medicine salesman. He makes light of how winded he is just answering non-scripted questions from non-Fox reporters. Better take a breather there, pal, schedule your next press conference for '07.

What's striking is the admission near the end of the clip, in response to a reporter's question, that how long we'll be in Iraq will be a decision for future Presidents. Note the plural! The truth he reveals, that hurts (everyone but Bush himself), is that We the People are going to be in Iraq for a long, long time.

So once again in his luckyboy fuck-up life, Incurious George has made a catastrophic mess, and plans to just run off to leave the adults to clean up after him.

Vibrant

Tom Spurgeon has the best web/blog/review site devoted to the art of the comic book, The Comics Reporter. The range of what he covers does the industry a rare justice. I wouldn't be surprised if its audience, already large, doubled in size over the next year or two.

I'm thinking I might get around to posting a 10 Fave Movies list for 2005, since Tom has only just posted his Top 50 Comics for 2005.

If you have even a remote interest in the form, I strongly recommend checking out his list, which has a cover shot or illustration for every title. Not only is Tom's taste impeccable, but you'll get the best overview available in any one place of the most vibrant art form currently being practiced worldwide.

I know that seems like a big claim, but just paging down through the representative images is blowaway impressive. So many different art styles, the recognizable and the totally fresh, all so masterful, elite levels of artistic and storytelling skill.

I'd say there's no more alive medium at the moment than comics, and with shows like the recent Los Angeles Hammer Museum and MOCA Masters of American Comics, it's finally being recognized by Culture.

It's where fine art and graphic art collide like 1950's Pontiacs smashing together in the desert, littering the dusty landscape with enameled steel shrapnel of cherry red and cobalt blue.