LA Weekly

I thought they were going to swap spit at the end of their debate. Where the hell was Bill? I mean, something's going on there. It's at least an emotional affair if it hasn't crossed over into a full blown political one yet. Barack and Hillary seemed like they were positively in love. Is this a fast moving courtship, one fueled by the heat of battle, passions running wild over the prospect of a huge new address on lots of prime real estate in a pricey neighborhood? Or is it just a strategy to bring civility back to their contest so they can keep Dems across the land excited about the historic moment they find themselves in?

The prospect that these two might make a ticket is tantalizing, though still a bit hard to fathom, even if they almost played tonsil hockey at the close of their very genteel debate. And a ticket may be possible, if Hillary wins the nomination. Being Vice President wouldn't be a bad step at all for Barack. It's a logical progression for him, though I'm more convinced now that he should be the nominee. Hillary's just too exposed on Iraq, as Obama pretty deftly showed tonight and McCain is very vulnerable there, obviously, since he wants us to stay in Iraq forever. But he's also vulnerable on the economy, since he just can't seem to relate there to anyone. Obama can win on both those issues. Clinton can win on one of them.

But I can't see Clinton accepting a VP nod from Obama should he get the nomination. It doesn't make any sense for her. She's been that close before and she wants the whole enchilada. Anything else for her will be failure. But it's a kind of failure that she can take back to the Senate with her, where her status would be greater than as it would be as VP, where she's been too close to been-there-done-that.

We'll see how it goes. But it's kind of fun to think about. I mean, she looked kind of hot tonight, and he was as handsome as ever. They make the prettiest pair since Mondale-Ferraro.

Oops.

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Man, did I get a lot of heat from my recent postings about the current cinema. Well, not all of it was heat, a good deal of it was agreement, but it certainly generated enough commentary to remind me of how connected we are to films and filmmaking. It's encouraging to know people care so passionately about film because I do believe it's a wonderful, and often visceral medium for art, expression and entertainment. At its best, good cinema can take us away and take us inward -- it offers us a rich journey in a language that is in many ways more nuanced, more layered, more open and more instinctive than words.

One of the films I criticized in Feelings About Juno, Judd and Other Movies In General (January 18), was, well, Juno. It's funny how the mood, the setting and the company one is with can affect how one perceives a film. I saw Juno again, by mistake (the movie we thought we were going to see wasn't playing) and feel, much as did Rolling Stone magazine when it once panned Lou Reeds masterpiece solo record, Berlin, only to admit years later that it made a mistake and that the album stands as one as a true classic of adult rock and roll, that I have to make amends.

I took Juno to task for being glib and self-satisfied. On second viewing, I feel like I missed a lot the first time around. The glibness is actually a perfectly understandable defense mechanism for a fairly self-possessed teenager who is going through an overwhelming process. There were many, many nuances in the film, where the facade cracked and Ellen Page's character let her guard down enough to put the film on perfect footing -- in other words, it was true to character and event and had a heart at its center that I didn't give it enough credit for the first time around. I still don't get Michael Cera, though, other than to get he looks mildly amusing in goofy track gear.

On another note, though, I was somewhat disappointed with There Will Be Blood. I thought it lacked character development and the denouement at the end was borderline silly ("drainage, drainage!"). Daniel-Day Lewis's character, Daniel Plainview, comes into the film angry and menacing for reasons we're never really let in on and leaves the film angry and menacing. Sure his anger and menace reach the logical conclusion of the film's momentum, but I never felt like the audience was let in on why it was so or became so -- unless the conclusion is that success isn't all it's cracked up to be, if you're successful and alone. But Plainview's aloneness is a willful, stubborn and not inevitable one and his pathological character is never really explained or developed -- it just is. Sure he's rejected God, especially the god of the bankrupt evangelical who is sort of his nemesis (though never really seems up to the job enough to take seriously). But his rejection of God in favor of his own pride, which is a profound idea even if you don't believe in the God he was being sold, is insufficiently played out. And so the film went by as a series of events and juxtapositions (and some great shots) rather than as a truly compelling narrative.

There Will Be Blood strives for a Citizen Kane-like rumination on the spiritual corruption of American capitalism and religion (one in the same in many cases, here where success is religion), but P.T. Anderson doesn't seem to know exactly what he wants to say about it the topic. A historical fiction such as this can say a lot about such things if it's allowed to breathe, (like Citizen Cane, The Godfather's One and Two) but this one seems to be smothered by its desire to be important (and by its lead actor).

As for Daniel-Day Lewis, he remains as scene-chomping an actor as has ever been illuminated on the big screen. In this film, it feels like he took all his cues, physical, verbal and otherwise from watching old films. Not for character or history, but to mimic -- and the thing that he most mimicked was the stilted nature of old reels, as if that were actually the way people carried themselves back then. The performance, much like the one he gave in The Gangs of New York, had the feel of caricature, not character, to me, anyway.

I will say, however, that it's an ambitious and admirable attempt to do more than titillate, and it doesn't think it's audience is stupid, like so many films these days, and that Anderson is going to make a classic film one day. This one just isn't quite it.

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Okay, back to politics. Obama's raising of Ronald Reagan as role model is cowardly and pandering. He's obviously courting independents who have a misguided-rose-tinted memory of the late, disastrous President Reagan. Aside from bullshit, feel-good rhetoric, and too much credit for the demise of the Soviet Union and the ending the cold war --- which was really ended by a complex confluence of factors, but mostly by brave Russians, East Germans, Czechs, Poles and a disastrous war in Afghanistan (much like ours in Iraq -- not to mention the world may have been better off had the godless commies prevailed in Afghanistan, rather than the Muslim fundamentalists whom we supported) a vodka-emboldened Boris Yeltsin, and MTV -- we are still reeling from the Reagan legacy.

What's the Reagan legacy? Huge deficits and federal debts, disastrous deregulation of banking, finance, and transportation industries, pillaging the environment and a culture of greed that encouraged corporate pigs to feed freely at the trough while the working and middle classes suffered, a cynical and disastrous War on Drugs, forsaking public education and welfare. Oh, yeah, and all that empty, facile patriotism.

Reminds me again of why I liked Edwards in the first place. At least he has the guts to call bullshit on bullshit.

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I'm gonna take a little break from the political commentary to finally get around to something that's been on my mind, which is how bad the current cinema is. My first bit of evidence is Juno. This film has been almost universally praised and I'm not sure why. Yes, it's clever and Ellen Page delivers the witty, snappy dialogue with aplomb. But, seriously, isn't it a bit glib, considering. Juno makes teenage pregnancy seem like the greatest thing ever -- like a trip to Disney World. Teenage pregnancy, through this film's eyes is the happiest place on earth. Actually, that's not quite right, because in Juno teenage pregnancy is way cooler than Disney World -- it's the new skinny jeans. All good if this were a farce, but it's not.

The annoying, cloying, too-cute soundtrack doesn't help any, either. This is take on the situation that could only happen in the very privileged suburbs, and not even there. And am I the only one who finds Michael Cera, the go-to-geek for feel-good-geek cinema annoying? I don't know if this guy has any talent whatsoever except for looking awkward (or cute if that's how you see it) in overly-contrived geek trappings, like his short running shorts and track jersey in Juno and his supernerd gear in Superbad.

Speaking of Superbad...what exactly was funny about that? The scene where the fat guy gets menstrual blood on his jeans? Yeah, that was a riot. The writing was dull, the jokes came from a mile away and were delivered so lackadaisically that they almost weren't there, except for the cops played by Seth Rogen and Bill Hader who went so far over the top with their mediocre material that they only highlighted its mediocrity. Maybe Judd Apatow isn't that funny -- have you tried watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin a second time?

Read on...

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Who is Hillary Clinton? Do you feel like you know? Is she the woman who has feelings, too, from the New Hampshire primary, or the obfuscating, parsing politico we saw on Meet The Press on Sunday? Or is she the condescending smirker from the Las Vegas debate? I can't tell, either.

She has done things that baffle -- like voting to authorize the war in Iraq and virtually voting to hand Bush war powers should he feel like doing the same in Iran over a nuclear weapons program even our own Nation Intelligence Estimate says ceased years ago.

She lacks her husband's ability to convey empathy, except for what now seems like that blip in New Hampshire, if not empathy itself.

Her attempt to reform health care in this country to the standards of the developed world some 15 years ago was admirable, if her approach was somewhat imperial. And she does convey an imperiousness that is sometimes hard to swallow. And yet, her Senate tenure is fairly widely respected on both sides of the aisle. Nobody has every accused her of being lazy or dimwitted.

She somehow maintained her dignity while her husband lost his. She knows disappointments personal and professional and she knows how to withstand attacks that have been and would be withering to others. She seems somewhat fearless of whatever dirty tricks the Republicans are going to pull in the general election, having faced most of them before, and that's going to be a quality that is needed and one that has been missing from recent Dem candidates.

She may actually be the best man for the job, and, added bonus, she's a woman. Yet, she somehow seems more like Margaret Thatcher than, I don't know, Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, a grand Dem dame for whom it was hard not to root. She claims to have found her voice in New Hampshire, yet she lost it almost immediately after she regained her footing. The vulnerability became her, yet it seems like she's been all-too-eager to dismiss it, as if it were a closeted secret she was afraid to expose because, well, she's a woman and vulnerability can be spun as weakness in the gender game. Another inequity in her marriage, since it was precisely a sense of big Bill's underlying vulnerability that made him so relatable to everyday people.

That she's so steely and steady for the most part; so unable, except in moments of near-exhaustion, to pierce the veil, are qualities we tend to admire in a man and call stoicism or resolve. Yet, they often work against Hillary, making her seem unapproachable and imperious.

So, is this her problem, or ours?

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There were a couple pieces in the Sunday LA Times Opinion section poking a little fun at the way all the candidates in both parties are claiming to be the agents for change. Basically the one piece took them all to task for using the notion of change as an alluring but ultimately empty catch phrase, but not really articulating what kind of change they would manifest or how. The other, more clever piece, got a little philosophical, noting that change is constant, or as Heractlitus said, you can't ever step into the same river twice, so what does change really mean, if change is the only constant?

Interesting, but ultimately useless intellectual exercises. When things are so fucked up, there's no choice but to change. The question is away from what and towards what? Here are a few ideas.

Let's change away from a reductive, literalist, sometimes barbaric and ideologically driven Supreme court to one that recognizes the Constitution and laws of the land have their roots in humanism and the Enlightenment and were established to protect more noble ideas, even existential ones such as the pursuit of happiness and equality before the law, than just property and profit.

Let's change away from fear as the organizing principles of our lives and towards a governing principle based on compassion and fairness.

Let's change away from the idea that public education is a horse not worth backing and towards the idea that it could be our greatest resource. Quality public education was one of this country's greatest achievements, and, possibly, the greatest contributor to our prosperity and security. It only started failing when we started getting selfish and failing it.

Let's change away from the idea that social welfare is a evil and towards the idea that throughout the world how well a society treats its least privileged and most vulnerable segments generally has a direct correlation to how high that society's quality of life is -- based on indicators such as health, mortality rate, crime, etc.

Let's change away from the idea that decent healthcare is a privilege and towards the idea that it's a right and a hallmark of civilization.

Let's change away from the idea that saying we're the greatest country on earth (are you sick of it yet?) makes it so and towards the idea that that's something we have to earn.

And let's change away from the idea that good music is being made by skinny guys with spotty facial hear, vintage button-up, long-sleeve shirts and acoustic guitars (or electric guitars played like they're acoustic guitars) or women who sing and write like they're pixie-dusted girlie girl and towards the idea that it's usually being made by dudes who look like Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend or Iggy Pop and by women who look like The Runaways, or Chrissie Hynde.

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I'm going to miss Bill, Richardson, that is. He brought humor, self-deprecation and common sense to the debate that is going on in the primary campaign and in the national dialogue. He always struck me as a self-assured, soulful and witty guy. I hope he continues to play a role in shaping the direction we go in. Remember, he was out there first saying get out of Iraq, let's scrap the bogus No Child Left Behind and really reform education, let's have a sensible foreign policy, real health-care reform and the like. He always seemed to comport himself with a certain, low-key dignity. So, here's to Bill and let's hope his example is followed in the days to come.

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Whether the Democratic nominee turns out to be Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, this country is about to take an important step. Having a woman or a black man in the race for president is necessary for our mental health. However ugly it may get, and I'm willing to bet it'll get pretty ugly for either of these two in the presidential election -- sexism and racism, latent or overt, will play a role -- we need to do this. A valid question, perhaps, is are Clinton and Obama the right woman and black man to inspire us to seize this moment and opportunity, one in which we can collectively grow up and embrace who we really are -- a nation of many colors and two genders who's supposed gap in closing every year. No matter what you want to think, it's still tougher to be a woman or a minority in this country than a white male, and yet, here we have a woman and a black man leading the most energized and exciting primary season I can remember. It's not just about them staking a claim for what they represent by their gender or race, it's about us recognizing that their gender and race is besides the point and that we are a people based on ideals and not sex and race and ethnicity-- that's the possibility to embrace here.

Read on...

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Are you like me, feeling as anxious as a cat in a pool? Everywhere you look, it seems, the news isn't good. On a personal level, 2007 would have to go down as one of the worst years ever. Friends, family and I, too, dealt with challenges -- health, career, relationships, the gamut -- in 2007 that were daunting, to say the least. Last year, pretty much sucked. So, one tends to look at a new year with optimism. It doesn't seem like it could get much worse, knock on wood.

Yet, here we are at the dawn of 2008, and the news everywhere isn't good, it seems. Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, take your pick, but uncertainty and chaos rule. And on the home front, just about everyone thinks we're poised upon, if not already in, a recession. These are days, as they say. Which probably goes a long way towards explaining the appeal of Barack Obama.

It's easy to talk about hope and change, but talking about hope and change can come across as empty and even cynical if the vessel through which the message is coming feels contrived. And this is where Obama is starting to harness some magic, I believe. For some reason, when he talks about hope and change, it feels inspiring, and not a calculated political ploy. Of course we want change. Of course we want to have hope, but put Obama's words in any of the other candidate's mouths and they'd seem empty, which is why they haven't been able to capitalize on the nation's fear and disappointment in the way that he seems to be doing.

Why it's different with Obama, I'm not sure. Unless, gasp, it's as simple as he really believes what he's saying. And I think he does. But even that isn't quite as simple as that. See, we've become accustomed to our fears and disappointments being met with fear mongering. Even John Edwards, God Bless him because I believe in his zealot's reforming zeal, doesn't seem to be able to get his message across without it sounding like a fire and brimstone preacher admonishing us that we're going to burn in hell if we don't change our ways.

But Obama is different. Yes, he's saying, we need to change our ways, but something about the way he says it is more inspiring than daunting. He seems to be challenging us, in a way that is inclusive, that resonates on a communal level, to be better, to do better, to expect better, to demand better, to work for better. His magic, so far, and I think it's only going to become stronger, is to remind us, that it is up to us to grasp the future, and not to some big daddy (even if that happens to be a woman) who maintains that he or she is the most qualified to keep the wolves at bay.

It's the right message at the right time, after eight years of the most fear-mongering folks in memory running the country by fear, for fear in the service of fear and, well, power and profit. Running it into the ground, because we let them, because we lost our courage. Obama reminds me, and here comes the geek factor, of the speech Viggo Mortensen gives in the final battle in the Lord of the Rings finale (Return of the King, I think it's called). To paraphrase, he says that there will come a time when the courage of men will fail them, and tyranny will rule the day, but that day isn't today.

I believe Obama is trying to tap into our innate courage -- telling us that today isn't the day when it will fail us, despite those who would benefit from it being so. He's putting it on us, and, as a result, just might lead us into battle. And a battle is what's needed here.

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