EMBRACING MY INNER GLENN REYNOLDS: Or why I think I'm becoming a fake libertarian. Two reasons:

1. Most of the posts on Hit & Run about the financial crisis just annoyed the crap out of me, especially anything having to do with the auto bailout. Seriously--in the midst of a global meltdown and after giving bajillions to the people who actually caused the meltdown you're against keeping our manufacturing sector alive? Is "Austrian" Randite for "Hooverite"?

Comments about how much people enjoyed their Toyotas were particularly hard to take. As if the quality of their product was anywhere near the biggest reason the Detroit 2.5 are in trouble. (Or 1.5 as it turned out, Ford obviously put a priority on managing their company over managing the Lions.)

Sometimes I think I am still libertarian, but I think the unit of competition should be the nation-state, not individual companies. I mean do you think Japan or Germany would let their automakers fail? Of course not--they'd get in there and muck around because they know their national prosperity is at stake. And yet it's a big debate in this country. Maybe our nation-state needs more government intervention in business and such to stay competitive with the other nation-states, you know? It certainly works for the rest of the world.

Other time I think the big gaping hole in libertarian economics is there is no conception of finance--that is, there is no conception of how money actually works, I guess because it's a practical, pragmatic field that you can't just yell "GOLD STANDARD!!!" at and explain anything. The only libertarianish thinker (she was in Reason once) I've enjoyed during this whole megadebacle is Yves Smith, who was in the big money business and is absolutely nondogmatic about this stuff. More libertarians need to get into the sausage-making business, I feel like, even if they become less pure by their exposure to the messy way things actually get done.

2. I am completely on board with government intervention to bring down the BCS, like the Utah AG is trying to do right now. The BCS is as clear an example as I can think of of the free market reaching the worst outcome possible. And yet you hear people say "if the government gets involved think of how bad it could get!!!!!!" How could it be worse than what we have right now? We have the worst of all possible worlds right now. It's not really a poll-based system anymore, since the final poll isn't allowed to vote anyone other than whoever wins the BCS Championship as number one. You can still split a championship but only if you're somebody who's on the AP's radar from the beginning, those dudes are not going to say to themselves "you know what, Utah? We were wrong all along" (even though they were wrong all along, of course) and give them half the title. And it definitely isn't a playoff. I remember reading somewhere that the BCS sort-of made sense coming out of the late 90s when it was always clear who #1 and #2 were (not sure if this was true or not, but it's a nice idea.) But now? No sense whatsoever. There is no legitimacy in a 1-2 matchup today, but especially this year.

And yet ESPN has bid to broadcast this system through 2014? Are you serious? Five more years of anticlimax? Of national media peoples pretending anything was settled on the field? Ugh, and ugh again. The people in charge of college football have shown no inclination to change their ways, and they're not going to, even if everybody's (on ESPN) favorite coach, Pete Carroll himself, thinks they're full of it. The conference commissioners are in charge and will be in charge until somebody takes power away from them. The networks and advertisers don't seem like they want the power, even though they have the money. (I've never understood why no one has tried to set up a competing system yet. Fox gets outbid for the BCS? Okay--flash some cash at the non-BCS schools, try to peel off a few BCS programs for added legitimacy--USC can't be happy about Rose Bowl after mindnumbing Rose Bowl--instant Counter-BCS! Or playoffs even.) The government is the only entity capable of rectifying this situation. And antitrust seems a perfect way to do it, as we really do have teams excluded from championships based purely on what conference they play in. But no matter how they do it, they're the only ones who can.

And so my libertarianism gets faker. Next I'll be writing sympathetic portrayals of how THE LEFT!!!! destroyed poor Alberto Gonzales. But I'm not a Republican!

(Sorry no links in the above, you need a blog that updates more than twice a year for that kind of attention to detail.)

EPITAPH FOR THE BUSH YEARS, OR THE FINAL REPUBLICAN POOR DECISION: Yglesias:

The House conservatives who sank the bailout didn’t do so because they were listening to loud and angry voices. They sank the plan by accident. They were trying to double-cross the Democrats. First, they wrung lots of concessions out of Democrats at the negotiating table as the price for delivering 80 votes. Then, by not delivering 80 votes and forcing Pelosi to pass the bill as a partisan Democratic bill, they were going to wage a demagogic anti-bailout campaign. But Pelosi refused to be played for a sucker and so the conservative inadvertently sank a bill that, all evidence suggests, they actually wanted to pass. They just wanted to vote “no” on it for short-term political gain.

Getting rolled by Nancy freaking Pelosi is the final indignity for the GOP. If Matt's right with this, I mean.

And of course playing political chicken with financial armageddon in the balance is probably in poor taste. That said, I'm glad the bill died on Monday, since by all accounts it really is a big giveaway that won't solve the fundamental problem--see Yves. Of course Paulson's going back to try and get this particular bill done again, without explaining what the problem is (of course not, then he'd have to come up with a plan that wasn't a giveaway.)

By the way--I've always been curious if hedge funds contribute anything of real value to the economy, or if we'd even notice if they and their gallons of wealth disappeared. I guess we find out tomorrow!

AND PONTIUS PELOSI SAID TO THE CROWD, "WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE PASS UPON YOU: A BAILOUT, OR A DEPRESSION THAT SHALL BE CALLED GREAT?" AND THE CROWD SAID, "FREE MARKETS!!!11!: Pelosi to give everyone a day to decide if they like the final bailout bill or not. If a bill gets done, that is.

Yes, I am moving into the "something must be done fairly quickly" camp. Too many people (Roubini, Krugman, Buffett) saying we're in it deep this time.

OH LIKE LAUTENBERG EVEN KNOWS HOW TO WORK A FAX MACHINE: But if he did he'd be seeing this totally state-of-the-art Krugmanny bit of US American democracy:

I’m one of your constituents, and I want to urge you to not vote for any version of the bailout plan that does not involve an exchange of equity for taking troubled assets off a bank’s books. This is close to what Sweden did when they were going through a similar crisis to our own, and I think it would work much better than the massive cash dump Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson are proposing. The Chairman and the Secretary seem to think the crisis is one of confidence, and if we just pump more money into the banks things will turn around. I do not think they are right. We are in the midst of a massive deflation of the housing market and no amount of emergency lifelines from the Federal Reserve will change that. I think Congress will be serving the nation much more effectively if they offer banks the chance to exchange equity for their bad assets. This will ensure that the banks that are in trouble receive help—at a price—without simply giving money away. I believe this was how Sweden dealt with their crisis; it was painful, but it dealt with the crisis quickly. The alternative model is Japan’s, which propped up their failing banks for far too long and lost a decade of economic growth because of it, that they even now have not fully recovered from. I do not think that needs to happen here.

Thank you.

Hurray! My vote counts! Or something. Anyway--as far as I can tell the housing bubble is deflating no matter what. Tossing money at banks who may not even need it is not going to help.

ADMIRAL ACKBAR, A LONELY NATION TURNS ITS EYES TO YOU: Please, Democrats. Don't fall for it.

(Harry Reid said somewhere that they had no idea what to do. They should stick with that.)

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION REALLY HAS ONLY ONE RESPONSE TO A CRISIS: When in doubt, take more power!

AH, THE ECONOMY: At this point it's hard to do anything besides sitting back and watching the carnage.

MY FINAL WORD ON THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AS OF TODAY: I just don't think this is the year where stupid shit like moose hunting is going to work.

And at this point I should probably just secede from the blog reading community as I do have stuff (ugh) to worry about. But I probably won't.

WHY SO SERIOUS: Is making me pine for the days of I drink your milkshake.

YOUR POLITICAL CARTOON WITH JAY WARD REFERENCE OF THE DAY: Rocky & Obamawinkle. I laffed and laffed....

....otherwise I might get depressed! I don't get these Democrats. You have this one who's picked up this gas tax holiday thing from a Republican and is running with it for all it's worth. You have this other one who's pointed out that a gas tax holiday is not going to change a blessed thing. And yet the one who's pushing the Republican idea, and who went on the Republican house organ tonight, is the one who is coming on strong. Is--how you say?--curious.

(This is my preferred explanation for the Wright-Obama breakup: they're in cahoots! Wright says something off the wall, Obama says "now you've gone too far" and DENOUNCES!!!! and REJECTS!!!!!! him, the cretinous media finally lets it go. Obama doesn't look like he's turned on his friend, especially after defending him for what feels like months. Wright keeps his ability to say whatever comes into his head. Everybody wins!)

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT: John Cole is right, nothing to worry about, Barry is in fine shape. Yep. Said the Kerry/Dean before Kerry/Nader in '00/Perot in '96 supporter. I'm so scared....[/blair witch whisper]

Yeah. I personally am on the Obama "no stupid bullshit, love it or leave it" train. But I fear a steady disembarking, just enough for the hideous Clinton strategy to pay off. Oh numbers, help me!

Close in Indiana.
Still way ahead in NC.
This little data in Kentucky?
Not much in Oregon either but it looks like Obama country.
Same for West Virginia except it's Clinton country.
South Dakota is for Obama. Don't see any Montana numbers but I'm sure they're similar.

So John's right--she just can't win straight up. Her only hope is the same hope she's always had, that the supers get all nervous as the economy becomes a bigger issue than the war (profiting Clinton in conventional wisdom terms) and they vote her in over the primary results. But if anybody can win in this backhanded way, it's a Clinton. And then Justin Slotman, mild-mannered office drone with an endless graduate school campaign, becomes the purple-shorts-wearing INCREDIBLE MCAINIAC! SLOTMAN SMASH PUNY CLINTONS! And so on.

WELL. THIS WAS ALL THE TEST MARKETING FOR ULTIMATE LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL MARVEL NEEDED: I can just see how this got started, somebody down in the basement at Marvel Legal, got some request from some indy publisher, thinking "how many jungle girls we got anyway?" and then "shoot, just give 'em Lorna, mebbe it'll catch on in the Internets or sumphin" (since the guys in the basement at Marvel Legal all talk like Ben Grimm.) But no.

(This isn't right to say, but no blogfight wants to make me break out the popcorn quite like an intra-feminist blogfight. It's a very....earnest style of blogfighting.)

DURRR THE OLYMPICS DON'T MATTER AFTER THE COLD WAR: And that is one of the more annoying tropes I've heard in my time in the bloggy intertrons, particularly at Reason (otherwise my favrit mag--well TAP is good too, and I will never be left enough to hate The Economist) here in particular (I swear there was more, in comment threads at least, but I can't find any evidence. Matt Welch is scrubbing the archives TO THWART ME!!!!) Of course this latest torch run proves my header to be the "end of history" of sports punditizing.

Anyway--I've been reading a lot lately about these whole "China vs the world" protests, like and this and this and this and this and this (no cites, the blogs I've been reading, mainly the ones on the Peking Duck blogroll, were all talking about similar stuff), and the one thing I'm really convinced of is China has atrocious image management. I mean, why did it take the Internet for me to see this sequence of photos? This is a propaganda coup! Wheelchair-bound paralympian fends off torch snatcher! Especially the sequence those photos are in--she starts off just happy to be there, protesters show up, she cradles the torch with both hands (fantastic form--she should play para-American football next since apparently she's too old for the fencing team (mentioned in the EastSouthWestNorth translation)), does not let it get stolen from her, and the relief on her face when the ordeal passes is palpable. (Where were the dudes in the blue track suits, anyway?) And yet the only people who seem to be seeing and getting exorcised by these photos are the worldwide Han community, who are obviously predisposed to getting exorcised by them. Possibly a little too exorcised. And yes--the "Western" (god I hate that term) media has its own set of biases that's going to preclude it from wanting to do anything China-sympathetic on the Tibet question. I think for educated Americans and Europeans, that question has been answered: China's wrong! Therefore Tibet should be free. And that's that. What? Northern Ireland is entirely different....

God, too many explosive tangents there--I have no idea how I didn't work abortion in. The point is, Jin Jing is an enormously sympathetic figure that you probably don't know too much about unless you're plugged into the Chinese mediasphere. Never mind that the Chinese intertrons have already turned on her since she spoke out against the Carrefour boycott (though I have no idea if those comments are representative or not. Imagine gauging the AMERICAN STREET!!! using LGF commenters.) Non-Chinese institutional biases and good ol' yellow perilism aside, China--and by "China" I mean the goofy government of China--has been given a gift-wrapped propaganda moment and they seem to have no clue how to push it. Other than pushing it at their own citizens, which strikes me as a poor long-term governing strategy, this whole idea of ramping up nationalist sentiment and then trying to cut it off before it explodes (I hate to say anything bad about Jin Jing, but her anti-boycott comments fit this strategy perfectly.) As Raj at The Peking Duck put it:

The Chinese government should be shitting their pants over this - they have created a self-conscious monster (a very nasty strain of Chinese nationalism) that will demand people conform to what it wants, but not necessarily what Beijing wants. If things carry on as they are, with manipulation of the media to stoke xenophobic attitudes and repress open discussion and more generally the support of angry nationalism to divert attention away from the CCP, one day this beast may well turn against the political establishment. Then there will be blood, one way or another.

I can't wait for the torch's journey through Japan!

IT'S PROBABLY A TRIBUTE TO OBAMA'S INTELLIGENCE: That it takes so little from him to get so much stupid written. And then he responded like this. I mean look at this:

“Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch? No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania. I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They’re angry and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.”

Do you really think what he said was a gaffe? I think it was more of a bait and POW! (Note that he's openly running against two people now, if it wasn't obvious before.)

EDIT: I liked this general summary of Obama news cycles from The Commentator Formerly Known as NCSteve. Particularly "And then, as always, Obama will calmly do that Akido thing he does with all these nontroversies" both for use of the word nontroversies and for somebody else thinking there's something very martial arts about Obama's political style. (Via Carpetbagger comments.)

"WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE? HISTORY WILL NOT JUDGE THIS KINDLY.": John Ashcroft, ladies and gentlemen! Ah, for the days when we thought he was the worst part of the Bush administration. If you read the story he comes off not so much as anti-torture as thinking it looks bad for cabinet officials to be discussing the torture of individuals, but still.

Via unfogged.

IF I HAD ONE OF THEM FANCY NEWFANGLED BLOGS WITH CATEGORIES AND SUCH THIS WOULD GO UNDER "THINGS OBVIOUS IN RETROSPECT", "BSG": In the role of John McCain: Colonel Tigh. And Cindy McCain is so clearly Ellen Tigh! This is amazing. Plus with the "Adama gets shot" storyline we have a pretty close approximation of a McCain presidency.

AND SOMETIMES MLS FRANCHISE NAMES DON'T TOTALLY SUCK: Seattle's franchise to be Seattle Sounders FC. (Via The Swamp.) I had no idea that Drew Carey was involved, or that a condition for his involvement was that the franchise had to have a marching band. Doubly awesome that Seattle gets the American-style name and the American-style spectacle. (Doesn't quite make up for the Sonics, though.)

NCAAPOCALYPSE: To a certain kind of basketball fan--and I am of this kind--having a Final Four composed of all number one seeds, and not even interesting number one seeds (like the year St Joe's was one), is pretty much the worst possible outcome. I know it's interesting because it's never happened before, but this tournament isn't popular because it's predictable. (Predictable in the sense of higher seeds beating lower seeds--I know it's predictable in a bracketology sense.) It's popular because crazy stuff happens and very occasionally crazy stuff wins it all. It's not supposed to be an annual blue-chip program coronation process (though it turns out that way more often than not.)

At least freaking Duke is done. And hey, Memphis isn't that blue-chippy, certainly not compared to the other three. And Conference USA is barely a league! So go Tigers, I guess. Deny the entitled fanbases, please. Let me have some joy in this post-Stephen Curry tournament. (He's only a sophomore! They'll be back.)

ANNUAL LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE FINALLY OVER: You-know-who loses. Time to get me down to Goodwill for a couch, and then to the hardware store for some kerosene.

HOW OFTEN DOES THOMAS NOT VOTE WITH SCALIA, ANYWAY?: He didn't today in this Washington primary case. And he wrote the majority opinion. Just found it curious since I thought they were joined at the hip.

MAN, THAT SPEECH: Even Charles Murray went ga-ga for it! (Does that make The Bell Curve less racist?) You just have to admire Obama's willingness to do things completely differently and go after the race issue in a way that's intelligent, nuanced, and (possibly) easily digestible (in the "media eats x and poops out y" sense--the poop they make out of this somehow won't stink. Or I don't see where they'll get the soundbites that make him look like a doofus out of this.) My current wishful thinking is that rightwing radio is going to regret trying to make a big deal out of this, that he just jujitsued them all over the mat by not disowning the crazy (in a good way--I mean, Condoskeeza Rice? HAHAHAHAHAHA!) reverend (so they couldn't accuse them of DUMPING HIS FRIENDS! NO CHARACTER) and turning it into a general conversation about race (which rightwing radio and friends definitely do not want to go.) They thought they had him kobayashi marued (look it up, non nerds) in a situation where they could get him to dump his old pastor OR make him at least appear to agree with his old pastor's words but he just mushed them together and went into the legit and non-legit points of the Wright speeches and spun that into the conversation about race we've been avoiding since the 90s. Excellent stuff.

"KRISTEN" UPDATE: Waitaminnit--she's filthy rich now! Or much wealthier anyway. That's kind of awesome. Remind me to write a book or something and sell it wherever people sell e-books so I can at least profit from any future notoriety.

(Via naked capitalism, I've been on a big finance blog kick lately because of the coming Great Depression II: Electric Bugaloo and all. I can't tell--because I've just started reading them--if finance writers/pundits/bloggers always think we're DOOMED! DOOMED! DOOMED! or if we really are doomed this time. Wasn't billmon a former finance reporter? He always thought we were doomed.)

YEEEARGGH OBAMA PASTORGATE: Well--at least all this means he's isn't a Muslim anymore. As far as I know.....

LEAVE "KRISTEN" ALONE!!!!: Seriously--she is not the person at the center of the Spitzer mess or the person who brought down a governor, etc. This is not that kind of story, the lazy-ass media is doing this as a Bill Clinton or Kwame Kilpatrick kind of deal and it's not. It's a guy who saw hookers! Cripes, if he had a regular affair he could have kept his job, since everybody who has affairs gets to keep their jobs and even run half-baked campaigns for the presidency (hi, Rudy!) But he wasn't even having a pseudo-affair with her, like she was his main pay-for-sex squeeze or something. She was the latest in a series and any previous woman in that series could have been the one WHO COST THE GOVERNOR HIS CAREER (and I'm sure they're thanking their lucky stars that they weren't the ones on the wiretap.) So please, lay off poor Ashley Alexandra Dupré, nee DiPietro, nee Youmans. Focusing on her is like focusing on the vice cop in the stall next to Larry Craig WHO BROUGHT HIS PROMISING SENATORIAL CAREER TO AN END. Or not.

Plus she seems fairly goofy based on her MySpace (not actually seen by me, "Category: Personals & Dating" is banned at work) and not really deserving of major ridicule. Then again, I don't know who wouldn't appear goofy based on their MySpace. Don't you know SERIOUS PEOPLE HAVE BLOGS???

MERRY SPITZMAS (IF THAT IS A HOLIDAY YOU CHOOSE TO CELEBRATE): Eeeyikes.

Yes, yes, victimless crime, two consenting adults, in a sane world it would be legal, etc. And I never really hated the dude that much. Still, the fact that he was involved in busting up prostitution rings at the same time (or close to the same time) he was using prostitution rings and thus allowing them to exist makes this a solid double in hypocrisy baseball terms (Larry Craig, for the sake of comparison, hit a bases-loaded grand slam. He had an amazing hitting stance--okay I'll stop.)

WE MUST REPEL THE MAPLE LEAF MENACE: Foreign interlopers in our elections! GASP! (Via a commentator at The Field, I think.) They haven't tried something like this since 1812. Yet we refused to learn the lessons of the past.....

GREAT THOUGHTS FOUND IN THE COMMENTS SECTIONS OF OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS, THE CONTINUING SERIES: "Exhibiting any discretion whatsoever in what you watch is the film buff’s version of original sin. Everybody does it, but if you any soul you’ll beat yourself up about it." --Alex Jackson, one of my favorite internerd film critics.

Watching everything you can get your hands on is something I associate with the Tarantino school of watching movies; the guy doesn't possess in any traditional notion of taste, which is pretty evident from his movies. And I routinely keep my Netlifxes out for months and then just give up and send them back and hope for better motivation with the next batch. Forgive me, cinema gods, I have sinned.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO HATE SIMMONS: He's clearly on the side of the angels with this whole Sonics debacle.

Here's something I've been having a hard time finding information about--I hope somebody in Seattle is working on whatever Cleveland did to keep the Browns' history in town.

EDIT: Googling for reasons Howard Schultz sold the Sonics in the first place got me to this, which I liked insofar as it implied that the skillset for running a large, successful corporation are much different from running a somewhat successful pro sports franchise. And I hate Starbucks sometimes and Schultz comes off like an ass in this whole debacle. Venti my ass. It's a large coffee. LARGE!

MAYBE--DON'T FEAR THE MILLENNIALS?: Kept meaning to write about this, it's your pop sociology article of the moment that the Inky published a week or so ago about the generational dynamics behind the Obama phenomenon. It fed into my Boomer hatred (or whatever flattened emotional response a card-carrying GenXer is supposed to have) as it portrayed them as an idealistic generation unwilling to compromise and thus unable to get shit done, and contrasted them with a civic generation--and they're putting the Millennials in that category--who're more low-key and--gasp!--actually capable of compromise. Previous civic generations gave us Lincoln and FDR so Obama is going to be a super-memorable president, is I guess what the take-away conclusion is. And it wouldn't be a pop sociology article without one moment of stupid overreach:

Since they started watching Barney as toddlers, the millennials have learned to be concerned for the welfare of everyone in the group and to try to find consensus, "win-win" solutions to any problem.

Yeah. And Mr Hooper taught Generation X apathy!

Note: following Kevin Drum's guide to blogging, I googled the authors and neither one is an actual sociologist and they have a book to push. Yay for pop sociology written by laymen!

RIGHTWING NOISE MACHINE NEEDS REWRITES: Not this stupid Deval Patrick thing, which is from the leftwing noise machine (when even Cap'n Ed says something is bogus.....). It's even stupider! Both Hannity and Medved had these clips of an Obama audience member fainting on multiple occasions--not the same audience member, but a front-row audience member fainting at multiple rallies. Obama responds the same way at each fainting--interrupts his speech, asks people to give the fallen space, etc. And this was evidence of PERFIDY! The Obama campaign is planting fainting people! To make Obama look....umm....more like the kind of guy who cares about fainting people! Yeah! To me, this is evidence that Obama is kind of a rockstar, something your average rightwinger wouldn't know anything about since they weren't allowed to watch the Beatles in the 60s. (WHY DON'T THEY CUT THEIR HAIR???)

A QUESTION OF POLITENESS: Is it better to let the poor lady in Hyderabad go through her whole "let's get your account activated today" routine and then say no (because you always say no--honestly, if you fall behind on your payments aren't you going to end up spending the same amount? These protection plans just take the money from you gradually, versus socking you with the fees all at once) or to interrupt her mid-spiel so neither of you waste your time? I go with the former, just because it seems nicer not to try and fluster someone--not everybody can swiftly recover from spielus interruptus, after all. And we're both working for the company store, y'know? Might as well not get mad at the wrong people.

DEFUSING THE "OBAMA LOVES CHE" CONTROVERSY (HA!) IN TWO LINES: A comment in a Cap'n Ed thread:

1...WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THAT WAS A REPUBLICAN OFFICE?

2...WHAT IF THEY HAD A CONFEDERATE FLAG ON THE WALL?

There are as yet no replies to this comment. (Whole stupid story via John Cole.)

CLINTON RACEMONGERING NOT A RANDOM SLIP OF BILL'S TONGUE?: Not that it ever was, in reality, a random slip of Bill's tongue, but at least they could claim that and it looked like they realized it backfired since they locked in him in Dick Cheney's bunker after he said what he did. But now Hillary's doing it? Jeez. Doesn't that generate far more bad press than it does votes for Hillary?

I am an Obamabot, of course, so feel free to point out where he dismissed California due to all the Latinos or something.

ONE WAY THE SHAQ TRADE MIGHT MAKE SENSE: Riffing off this Yglesias post--if you believe the NBA to be sort of mildly fixed (mildly fixed: assigning certain refs to games when a certain outcome is desired, like when you want a playoff series to go seven games, as in the sixth game of that Lakers-Kings series a few years back; allowing refs to be influenced by star power, though this might be a problem with basketball at all levels; arbitrary enforcement of the rules, like the Horry incident from last year (Horry is one of the great on-court bastards, by the way, and he never gets enough credit for it); the general appearance of wanting certain personalities to be successful, as in the atrocious championship won by the Shaq and D-Wade Heat) as I maybe* do, and you believe the Suns sort of realize the league or the officials were never going to really reward their style of play (THE NBA IS PHYSICAL!!!! DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!!!) you might as well roll the dice and get a guy who has been handed titles in the recent past and still might have some pull with the refs. And you weren't going to win in your present configuration.


*I know it's the Internet, and it's okay to be a total crank, but still, thinking the NBA is fixed is still just outside reasonable opinion. Because of and/or in spite of Simmons.

RECOMMENDED: Chris Bowers handicaps Hillary's chances for the rest of the race. (Via tennbengal in The Swamp.) The comments break down Texas district by district. It's good to know that not even Texans understand how the caucus part of the Texas primary-caucus thing works.

2004 WAS SO LONG AGO: And so was my Howard Dean fandom. And I thought, "Let's say we click on this Joe Trippi interview and take a little trip down memory lane, hmm?" So I did! And it's from right before Super Tuesday and I was struck by this bit:

On Hispanics, I didn't know how he was going to undo what had been baked in cake in Nevada about his appeal to Latinos. There's no better name in the party [to help him with that] than Ted Kennedy. The Kennedy name, particularly Ted. Look at Massachusetts. He was 38 points down. Now he's got Kennedy, Kerry, Patrick. He's got a real chance. He can win. No way he can win California without a big shift in the Latino vote. If he could somehow pull out California and Massachusetts, he could be right back in it. If she wins California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arkansas, what states is he going to win? Illinois and Georgia? Then where? Alabama? Then where? She's way ahead in Tennessee, Oklahoma. You know what I'm saying?

And everything he was talking about came true--Obama lost CA and NY and NJ and even the hoped-for MA. And TN, and OK, and AR. But he still won the day, more or less, or at least tied it (tied in the popular vote it looks like, slight victory in the delegate count.) And I'm like--how did he do it, despite Trippi's points above?

My answers would be: 1. C'mon--it's Joe Trippi. 2. His "Then where? Alabama?" query was answered with CO, MO, ND, AK (sounds like Cthulhu's brother-in-law.....COMONDAK!), DE, CT, ID, UT, MN, and KS. Now--did Trippi forget about them? Not consider them a big deal since five are pretty tiny? Not think about CT or MO at all? Or think Clinton's Hispanic edge would give her CO, and so on. I don't know. CT and MO are ones he could have lost (or "lost"--proportional, proportional!) but won (or "won" in the sense that CNN will color them his color), and those were the only close races at all. That's part of the perception of Victory: Obama. 3. I'm taking Trippi out of context, he wasn't saying Obama was doomed, just sort of handicapping the race. Probably true. I was just struck by the (basically accurate) paragraph above in combination of what seems to be an Obama win. 4. Obama really is a media creation! Or an elite blog creation! (Like that would translate into actual votes.) Like the people at Talkleft keep saying. So of course the elite bloggers/talking head media think he won. I dunno, wouldn't the televised media prefer to keep the Clintons around? If they really are obsessed with them, which strongly suggests that Clintons mean RATINGS!!! 5. Trippi didn't realize the Obama caucus advantage. Which he wouldn't realize before yesterday

Eh, I'm rambling at this point. Trippi's larger point was that he thought Hillary had repositioned herself as the Change Candidate but I don't think she's going to convince the Obama fanbase of that anytime soon. And it's the same size of her fanbase at this point. Tie game! I am not looking forward to "smoke-filled rooms" being the catchphrase of the summer of '08.

SO WHAT WAS OBAMA'S MOST IMPORTANT VICTORY?: Missouri? Really? It is what they call a bellwether.

New Jersey was personally disappointing. New York was a loss but at least Obama got to 40%. California was a huge bummer. And stupid TAXACHUSETTS! But you gotta remember, it's proportional, no matter how many times Wolf mentions California going to Hillary or whatever. It's the delegates, stupid. And Missouri.

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, THE 2007-08 NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS WERE TO BE REMEMBERED AS A HISTORICAL CURIOSITY: Holy crap.

By the way--what was up with that mindbendingly offensive animated pandas speaking broken Engrish ad? Somebody's going to get several strongly worded blog posts in the morning, if they haven't already.

SUPERBOWL XLII MENU: What a depressing season. The only rational response is GLUTTONY:

Barbecue turkey legs. My boss told me her slow-cook method (simmer a few hours, then bake for an hour under foil, then add your sauce) and it's wonderful.
I am going to attempt the Tom in Texas chili recipe. Couldn't find a chili beer in Jersey, though, and I don't think I have exactly the right dry peppers either.
This is the wing recipe I've settled on. Shamefully, I do like the wings at Applebee's or Chili's or whatever.
Bacon-wrapped jalapenos. The simplest, tastiest appetizer of all time.
Spam musubi! Must invoke spam at the Superbowl! (All references to the Superbowl are property of the NFL Corporation.)
White Castle enchiladas. Yeah. And then I make actual sliders with Asian pork patties.
Recipezaar has this recipe plastered over its front page. It looks good, so it's bound to turn out right when I make it!
Oh, there's some other stuff too. Maybe even some vegetables.

TONIGHT'S DEBATE IN FIVE WORDS: Get a room, you two!

(Sorry. Still an Obama guy, but I suddenly don't hate Hillary anymore. That may change.)

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE" REDUX: After watching that debate--I'm convinced! The differences were: "I'll be long-reaching change" versus "I'll be safe change." But change is apparently on the table! Nobody was taking Wolf's bait to fight either. I think the Hillary campaign has decided that anything that looks anything like dirty trickses is not going to fly this year, and especially not against Obama, and the new strategy is: kill with kindness. It might be enough to stop the bleeding.

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE": I keep hearing this (and if I wasn't a lazy, bad blogger I'd go find some links) and I'm not sure how true it is. I mean, isn't Hillary (based on Bill's record, and I guess her war votes too, and just the general Clintonian preference for taking the politically more expedient path) more likely to blow some shit up then Obama?

(Hey, if your main issue is the drug war--and it's pretty close to mine--who do you vote for? I imagine Obama would be better on it, just because--again--you know the Clintons aren't going to anything different in general, so at least with him you got a chance at something different. But Stop The Drug War says don't get my hopes up. And the Hillary people tell me Barack's an ordinary politician that the media's in love with, so I might as well just vote for Hillary. How very inspiring....)

ETA: Obama has made some noise about marijuana decriminalization, so that's something.

YEAH, JUST TO PILE ON HERE: With Giuliani out now the number one worst possible presidential scenario has been avoided, and we can all be thankful for that. Now the question becomes, who's more awful out of Hillary and McCain? (Which is why I'm pro-Obama, it's an easy decision with him versus anybody.)

IF I MAY GET EASTERBROOKIAN HERE FOR A MOMENT: The Patriots are the defining team of the Bush years. Being introduced as a team in the first post-9/11 Superbowl, just a bunch of blue collar guys not given much of a chance against the Greatest Show on Turf--it was such a feel-good moment when we needed a feel-good moment. And here they are now, the most hated NFL franchise since the 70s, having been convicted of cheating and not having to pay a competitive price for it. It's a Bushian arc! (If only in terms of approval ratings. Look--it's an Easterbrookian analysis. It doesn't have to make sense.)

The above probably makes Eli into Barack Obama, so it's utility as a metaphoric explication of the Patriots is questionable. Still--Patriots, Patriot Act, amirite?

"TESTOSTERONE TO ME IS SO IMPORTANT FOR A SENSE OF WELL-BEING AS YOU GET OLDER": Your quote of the day that made me laugh for some reason.

THAT'S JUST POLITICS LOL: I swear, there is no more annoying defense of the Clintons than that. At least Talk Left tried to make an actual argument defending their latest shenanigans--though I myself am unconvinced by one link to somebody's diary from three months ago.

A week ago I could have gone with any Dem candidate, but things start looking a little bit bad for the Clintons (Iowa, the ambiguous Nevada result) and they react like they have been....I don't want people who govern like that in power again. End of line. So let's go you-know-who (now available in Hebrew.)

MAN, THIS COULD BE TOTALLY UNFAIR: But it seems like a lot of your bigger lefternet blogs have steadfastly refused to pick a candidate, I guess so they don't say something they regret later, and it's annoying. You're telling me, lefternet, that you really don't have an opinion on Bill making skin color campaign issue number one of the moment? Or Hillary's Reagan bullshit? I feel like only the wonkier blogs have stated their preferences at this point, like Kevin Drum's Hillary love or the gang at ObWi trending Obama.

It's the ObWi gang who's got me in an Anyone But Hillary mood at the moment. Publius, then hilzoy then hilzoy again. And they'll probably end up supporting Hillary if she gets the nod, but I'm not a durn demmycrat and if anybody can get me to vote Republican in '08 it's the Clintons.

Not that I won't change my mind in the next 10 months, McCain can be a legit scary dude and "President McCain" sound like the name of a fictional President in your average 80s low-budget science fiction dystopia (the ones where the United States is strangely depopulated and most of the movie takes place in abandoned factories.) But as for right now there's an Obama beanie with my name on it just as soon as I get paid.

CAN YOU NAME A GREAT TEAM GRIMMER THAN THE 2007-08 NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS?: What are "Questions Bill Simmons would be asking if he wasn't from Massachusetts," Alex?

(Note: If he has mentioned this, I apologize. But he's become unreadable for obvious reasons so I can't really check for myself.)

MEMO TO THE PS3-OWNING INTERNET: If you're trying to format your external hard drive to FAT32 so the PS3 can recognize it, just use GParted. It's graphical, easy to use, and doesn't give you the opportunity to screw things up like with the terminal-based partition editors. Take it from one who knows.

Then again, I'm like, "Why am I bothering? You know how many copies of Q*bert you'd need to fill up 50 gigs?" But maybe I'll stick a bunch of movies in there and never have to take a DVD out of the case again. I dunno.

(Q*bert actually available at Playstation Network, the sick man of next-gen console download services.)

OH YEAH--SINO-MEXICAN WINGS: These are amazing. Via wing enthusiast Henley.

YEAH, SO REMEMBER WHEN I WAS WATCHING ALL THOSE 80S MOVIES?: Of course I crapped out on it, but I managed to finish seeing nearly everything from 1980 I wanted to at least. Ah, half-completed ambition, the Internet is littered with it.

Anyhoo, Hollinger is finally getting the DVDVR 80s Project moving again, so I might start recycling movie review content again. Note: I will not be watching every movie I want from 1981 through 1989. I will not even attempt this. I have learned my lesson. Hollinger says the deadline is November 30th, so I pretty much cannot watch--say--every Dabney Coleman or Stacey Keach movie ever. But I'll do what I can.

GRINDHOUSE REVIEW: AKA recycled message board content, but if you're coming here from Henleyland or something, I want you to know I'm still alive.

Good Grindhouse linkage:

The Outlaw Vern review.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich debate Tarantino.

The Dennis Cozzalio appreciation.

As for me--I thought the whole thing was fantastic. Planet Terror is closest I think Rodriguez has ever come to making a movie involving, and evoking, actual human emotions (so of course it makes sense that he legit fell for Rose McGowan while making this thing.) Something about that final scene, with Cherry and the baby on her back, and her in the role as leader of her people, sealed the deal for me. Plus he succeeded admirably at calling up the feeling of watching a very good Carpenter film, down to the Carpenter-esque scoring which was really perfect. Something about the restraints of the Grindhouse project really helped Rodriguez here, I think; he couldn't just sit down at the computer and play around because he had to think about recreating that cheap 70s aesthetic. So most of his CGI choices were in melting people, something that looks just as good using 70s technology as it does with computers, and Rose McGowan's leg, which--on the one hand--is way too impressive an effect for an actual exploitation movie, in the sense that it just looks too perfect. If they did this in the 70s, there'd be angles where you'd see Rose's leg tied up behind her to acheive the stump effect or whatever. Or they'd hire an actual legless actress. On the other hand, it's such a perfect image for the kind of movies they're trying to celebrate--hook for hand's been done--let's do leg for gun!--I can see why they cheated on the specifics. I think I read somewhere that "girl with gun for a leg" was one of the first ideas they had in mind when they were creating this thing, so there you go. Anyway--I dug Rose, I dug Rose and Freddy, I dug the scene with the one brother finally giving up his barbecue recipe to the other brother. Don't get me wrong, Planet Terror is in large part drenched in that persistent (and annoying) Rodriguezian sense of unreality (which is some combination of Bob Clampett minus the exuberance and Carpenter minus Carpenter's empathy for his characters) but there's enough of the former kinds of moments to make me think Robert is finally learning how to make movies that might mean something.

Trailers: Zombie > Roth > Wright. None of them were perfect, but Zombie had Nic Cage as Fu Manchu and seemed the most respectful of the (actually nonexistent) source material. Roth's had a lot of the details right (washed-out look, bad camera angles, ridiculous premise) but the narration was so, so wrong--it sounded like Roth himself was doing it in a really deep voice and thought that would be funny. Ugh. Wright's started strong but got too self-knowingly goofy towards the end. Perhaps it didn't help that I already knew what the gag was.

Ah, Death Proof. What a beautiful conundrum you are. If Kill Bill was his Leone I think Death Proof is his De Palma, or at least the Dressed To Kill/Blow-Out De Palma: killing off lead characters half-way through a la Psycho, exposing the guts of how a movie gets made as part of the movie (the tour inside Stuntman Mike's car, and, less plausibly in terms of the point I'm making, casting an actual stuntwoman as one of the leads; and don't forget Monica Staggs, the driver of the doomed car, is also a Kill Bill stuntwoman), just the general hey-let's-tear-a-genre-film-open-and-see-how-it-works sense I got from it. It's got the De Palman ambition of confusing the audience while entertaining the audience. But De Palma was riffing off Hitchcock (not only Hitch, of course)--Tarantino is riffing off a whole different set of genres and directors, many of which I'm sure De Palma never took seriously. Nick Schager says Death Proof is a synthesis of the serial killer movie, the "dragster flick", which I guess is where he's accounting for the Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry namechecks, and the cheerleader film, and the latter two are nowhere in the De Palma filmography. But here's Tarantino, grinding (HA!) them all together into a pretty hearty meal. The serial killer and car movie markers are obvious; the cheerleader thing is stated twice: literally in the second half (Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing an actress dressed as a cheerleader) and functionally in the first half (all the short-shorts and ass shots of women who are not cheerleaders, but it functions as T&A.) Plus the opening credits that introduce "The Girls" are like the credits of a sexploitation picture. I would argue that there is a fourth genre at work here (and I know the female revenge picture is in there too, but I haven't seen any of those so no comment,) kind of a Shaw Bros-style morality play with martial arts replaced by stuntwork, where bullies are always exposed as cowards and where the need to humiliate and defeat a villain is unquestionable. This narrative takes over right about the time where Zoe Bell says "Let's go get 'im," and I think that final freeze frame--victors raising their hands in celebration just as the villain lies defeated--is straight out of Shaw Brothers. Of course, Tarantino has to put his own little twist in by having Rosario Dawson crush Kurt Russell's face right after the freeze frame, but that's Tarantino--there's always that little nudge in there to make you think to yourself, "Say, why am I enjoying this?" Like, when Kurt Russell gives that grin to the camera and we're like, "Yay, Kurt Russell!" at the same time we know he's going to go kill Vanessa Ferlito, not too mention Rose McGowan's Pam who was the only person in that bar to give him the time of day. So, is it OMG KURT RUSSELL!!!! or is it "Stuntman Mike is an evil bastard who would rather kill girls than get lap dances from them" (the Ferlito lap dance actually exists, allegedly, but Mike is supposed to not enjoy it), or (later) is it "poor Mike, he's crying like a baby and those girls won't leave him alone"? Knowing Tarantion, it's both, or all three. His is the cinema of contradicting ideas and conflicting genre traditions presented at the exact same time, and that is why I am a Tarantino fan.

Two things "took me out of the movie," as they say: First, Tarantino's cameo in Planet Terror. All I could think of was, "any reasonable character actor/formerly famous person/70s icon would be a better choice than this." Because he was a bad, bad choice for that role, but I'm thinking now it was just part of the general mirroring between Planet Terror and Death Proof--double Tarantinos, double McGowans, double Earl McGraws, Sheltons, whatever more there were. Plus I'm sure Rodriguez enjoyed CGI-ing the hell out of him, and Tarantino returned the insult with the absolutely non-computerized car chase in Death Proof. Second, in the Tracie Thoms versus Kurt Russell duel she completely masculinizes herself--the dialogue is all "tapping that ass" and "busting a nut in that ass" and so on and we get it, she's a woman saying the lines of a male porno actor and she is strong and Russell is the real wuss, it was just too explicitly calling attention to the general role reversal of Kurt Russell from hunter to hunted. A lot of things Thoms said were a little off, but this was the most jarring to me.

(As an aside--Sydney Poitier seems to be getting all the press, but Vanessa Ferlito's Butterfly seemed to be the most fully-rendered of the doomed women, and was the only one who had that little closeup as the accident happened--the quick shot of her closing her eyes when Stuntman Mike turns on the lights at the last second. Poitier got all of the foot fetishizing--which is part of the huge self-parody undercurrent in Death Proof, along with the extra-long diner scene--but Ferlito got the massive closeups and the whole "iconic" treatment. At least where her face was concerned, and of course she was the only one of the girls who had her face destroyed, just like Poitier was the only one to be dismembered. David Edelstein mentioned something about Tarantino getting off on the contradiction between loving onscreen mayhem and being revulsed by his own reaction to it--wait, here's the exact quote: "It's also a small masterpiece, dredged up from the psyche of a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence." And that idea is pretty vividly illustrated by the buildup to the crash and the crash itself.)

So. Best time I've had at the movies in I don't know how long. Hopefully the Weinsteins release it on DVD as it was in theaters, in addition to the split versions; I really think it functions well as a total cinematic experience. Which obviously you can't replicate at home, but it would be nice to have the option to try.

JUST IN CASE MY PARENTS STILL READ THIS BLOG SOMETIMES: See--I haven't totally left the flock!

You know the Bible 88%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

And that's without having consulted the Good Book in what feels like five years. I thought I was going to get a 50%.

(Via cleek.)

WINTER ASIAN GAMES FEVER!: Catch it!

THE IRONICAL THING ABOUT FLORIDA'S BASKETBALL AND FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS: Is that both were overshadowed by historic wins by semi-unheralded teams--George Mason and Boise State, respectively. Well, I thought it was worth mentioning.

[1981] MAN ON THE BRINK: Hey--New Wave undercover cop drama! Infernal Affairs twenty years ago! Or one half of Infernal Affairs--poor Ah Chui, an undermotivated cop mysteriously picked for undercover duty. (Mysteriously because I found it mysterious that they picked a guy who was shown thinking about quitting the force in a previous scene, and let an old lady get away in the opening scene because he felt bad for her. Wouldn't you want somebody completely committed to police work for your undercover guy?) He doesn't turn out to be a particularly good thug, either--he's not quite brutal enough--but just being with the thugs begins to turn him rotten. He drives his girlfriend away as he gets more casually violent, and then he's fired from the force when he organizes a hit on his ex's new lover's jewelry store and is left a thug in name and in deed. That's just the one-sentence summary, there's a bunch of twists and turns, plus some unfortunate moments of bad comedy and errant sentiment. But overall this is an unusually character-driven film, not an exercise in plot one-upmanship or style like a lot of Hong Kong crime movies. Ah Chui isn't a bastard, but he isn't noble either; he's kind of a cop everyman who gets his girl and eventually his life stolen from him because he's forced to walk between two worlds (there's your title) and in the process of falling between the two and staggering back to his feet he gets run down to nothing. In the end he gets beaten to death by a bunch of vindictive apartment-dwellers after a botched raid, his final words something like "Is this a heroic death?" And the final freeze-frame is a friend of his screaming in rage at his friend's death--a raw ending for a generally raw film, aforementioned tonal lapses aside. A lot of the New Wave was powered by raw anger, wasn't it?

[1981] TRAGEDY OF A RIDICUlOUS MAN: Mild Bertolucci movie about the owner of a failing cheese factory (Ugo Tognazzi) whose son gets kidnapped. Or does he? Doubt begins to creep in about whether the son staged the whole thing to finance his leftist buddies, and when there's a rumor that the son has been killed that's doubtful too. All the owner knows is--if his son is dead, he can reinvest the ransom money back in his factory. His wife (Anouk Aimee--and Bertolucci loves the Anouk Aimee closeup) is of course constantly erring on the side of hope and constantly has to prod her husband into following the ransomer's wisher. And there's two of his son's friends who may be part of the kidnappers, or may be acting in his son's best interests--who can say? Bertolucci makes sure everyone's motivations are muddled or opaque (with the possible exception of Anouk Aimee, who--if she wanted anything other than her son's safe return--I didn't see it) and so when the son turns up alive in the end we have no clarification about the particulars of his kidnapping. All we know is that Ugo Tognazzi's character is one confused, passive-agressive dude. And that's what we're left with, Tognazzi running from the camera like he evaded thinking hard about anything throughout the movie (he's the ridiculous man of the title.) Like I said--it's a mild film about a mild little man that you'll enjoy but not especially rave about. It's, like, the safe artistic foreign movie retired people see at the local arthouse matinee.

[1981] ENTER THE NINJA: What?? Directed by Golan and produced by Globus? Of course that's a must-see! And it's plodding and artless and terrible, one of those things that doesn't function as trash or as art or as trash-art. Well--there are comically exaggerated death scenes, but that's the only thing this movie does well. I don't know how this thing launched the ninja craze and Sho Kosugi's career, but it did and I'm mystified. Reviews I have read have seen something menacing in his performance that I did not see at all. What kind of ninja cackles maniacally while doing a job? Maybe just the very idea of a ninja was enough in 1981? Ninjas and blood and cockfighting and Franco Nero saying "I'll be back." I will say that the variety of death dealt by Nero in the final fight was entertaining, if badly executed due to his lack of martial arts talent. And the Golanian love of nutshots was in full display in this film. But some decent death is not enough to make this even close to good trash.

[1980] FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES: Decent enough and entertaining Bergman film about nice, unhappy Peter Egermann (Robert Atzorn) who has a sudden moment of violence and kills a prostitute to the shock of everyone who knew him. Marionettes starts with the murder and spends the rest of the movie jumping around between the police investigation and sessions with Peter's psychiatrist (back when Freud was still taken seriously) and scenes from Peter and Katarina's marriage (Katarina played by Christine Buchegger--and the Egermanns themselves are supposed to be characters from Scenes From a Marriage.) Everything scene is presented--I don't know--formally with title cards indicating where they took place in relation to the murder, like Bergman was stringing together pieces of evidence and leaving it up to you at home to determine why Peter kills. And there's blame for everybody--Peter, Katarina, his mother, the psychiatrist, Katarina's business partner who introduced him to the prostitute. Their marriage was a big culprit too, one of those hate each other/can't get enough of each other kind of deals. There's almost too much evidence; in the end, all that matters is that Peter has been trapped by life, wiling away his days in a locked room in a sanitarium playing chess against a computer. I liked this more than I thought I would, given Bergman reputation for being depressing--not that this wasn't depressing, but it was pretty vital too. It's a very watchable little character study--not must-see by any means, but if you run across it give it a try.

[1981] MARTIAL CLUB: Another great little movie from Lau Kar Leung--not like My Young Auntie was great, this is simpler and probably more successful for it (though also less ambitious.) The whole of the conflicts of the movie are provided via different kung fu schools defending their honor--nearly every fight stems from Gordon Liu's school (he's playing Wong Fei-hung in this) or Kara Lui's school or the somewhat villainous school where Johnny Wang is employed. Except for once he isn't the villain--he's a visiting Northern master out to broaden his horizons by travelling among the Cantonese. He actually ends up tempering the more dishonest ambitions of the master of the school he's visiting, since he really believes in obeying the rules of kung fu. So the fights are exhibitions for the most part, nobody's out to kill each other and there's no blood coming from people's mouth and I'm pretty sure nobody got killed in this, but this made the martial action sort of more purely enjoyable for me. The final bit of sparring between Liu and Wang was incredible, and it ended in a stalemate, because kung fu isn't about winning anyway (I think that was the lesson.) And the opening had lion dancing on top of a platform carried by four or five guys, who were on top of a platform carried by eight or ten guys, who were on top of a platform carried by twenty guys--just an exciting, well-composed bit of cinema. Oh, and Kara Hui gets multiple chances to kick ass, including a couple of fights with Gordon. And it's all pure kung fu done for the sake of kung fu, so it doesn't always have the emotional impact of other kung fu movies, but Liu and Hui and Johnny Wang just on their own are a pleasure to watch.

[1980] LOULOU: This was strong stuff and not exactly enjoyable stuff, and as a tale of sexual obsession it's no Bad Timing. Pialat's Loulou is a lazy, womanizing ne'er-do-well (Gerard Depardieu, apparently the only actor in France capable of the young leading man role in the year 1980) who unaccountable becomes the object of the very middle class Nelly's (Isabelle Huppert right before she shipped off for Heaven's Gate) affections. Nelly, in turn, is loved by Andre (Guy Marchand), but the picture leaves him behind fairly quickly--it's Huppert and Depardieu's film. And they each are throwing each other into the emotional minefields, and you can't always tell who's being manipulative, or hateful--Pialat is careful to not give either one of them anything like a moral upper hand. It's practically a documentary in terms of the way Pialat never takes either Nelly or Loulou's sides for very long. It's also documentary-like in the sense that it's an observation of how a process unfolds (in this case, the process of two people inexplicably bonding together) than a dramatic narrative. We stick with these two characters until the point that they can't do anything else to each other, and then the film ends. I can't say it was the most pleasant thing in the world to watch, but it really did do a good job in making Nelly and Loulou (not so much Andre) into real, living people. It's a small, deeply realized character study of two not possibly mismatched people and you may appreciate it without loving it, as I did.

[1981] ADIEU, GALAXY EXPRESS: I'm guessing this is not the movie to watch in isolation, but I was never going to delve into the works of Leiji Matsumoto anyways, so I'm just going to be stuck with my lack of nuanced appreciation of this film. And watching this has not gotten me interested in seeking out other adventures of Captain Harlock or Emeraldas or even the original Galaxy Express. At it's best this was something like an anime Baum--well, a militarized, apocalyptic Baum where the characters pass through a variety of fantastic settings where the threat of death is always present. But the insistence of mixing constant death with whimsical fantasy does not sit well with me. When our heroes get to their destination (the heart of the empire of the machine people--and I didn't enjoy this enough to want to get into any plot specifics, it's just a kid on a space train touring the universe for mysterious purposes) it turns out the machines survive by stealing the life forces of people, and people are ran through a factory and turned into corpses so that the machine people can survive. Then, like five minutes later, a passing "machine life stealing comet" (no, it makes no sense) passes by and eats all the screaming, flailing machine people. So you have two genocides for the price of one! There's some attempt at a moral about eternal life has to come at the cost of someone else's life, and an additional one about the hero-child turning into a man because his machine princess-companion-girlfriend keeps ditching him, but it was really slight and borderline stupid. This is the kind of well-animated (really well-done in some places) but incoherent and close to spiritually empty anime that is not going to sell you on anime if you're already biased against it.

[1981] ZOOT SUIT: This was very much on the mediocre side of things, not awful but too flat to be good. Somehow Luis Valdez ended up directing the movie version of his play Zoot Suit about the Sleepy Lagoon trial (which was botched and biased and resulted in the imprisonment of several Mexican-American youths, who were freed within a year and a half.) And it's like he couldn't figure out how to make it a movie, so he threw his hands up and said "fuck it--I'm just going to film the play." And he pretty much literally did that, right down to including an audience which he goes to for reaction shots on occasion, and at one points lets the action of the play spill into it. It seemed like purposeless fourth wall-breaking to me. Maybe it happened in the actual play as well and Valdez felt like he had to leave it in? But up on the screen it just served as another reminder that what we're watching is a filmed play. The play itself isn't too bad--it focuses on Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez), who's one of the defendants and has Edward James Olmos' idealized pachuco character living in his head and egging him on to bad decisions and an embrace of cynicism. Olmos' character is all the things Reyna thinks he wants to be, and the substance of the play is Reyna wrestling with how much he wants to become like the glowering, mean, zoot-suit-cool Olmos. So it's basically a smallish character study set during a period of actual social injustice (the trial in 1940s Los Angeles) and the social justice stuff frequently smothers the character stuff, muting the impact of both. Yeah--the play is passable enough, but as a movie it's got no reason to exist.

[1980] PHOENIX 2772: It's an adaptation of the future portion of Tezuka's Phoenix series, produced by Tezuka himself, and it's really quite good. Obviously in 1980 it predates the whole "overpowering visuals" style of anime (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there is one, unknown by me) and gets by more on character design (and everything looks like Tezuka sketched it out before hand, it's a very true representation of his style, down to the always-jarring "graphic death visited upon cute little cartoon characters") and lush orchestration (nearly the entire film has the orchestra booming away in the background.) Storywise it's in the mystic science fiction tradition: The Earth is dying, there's this mysterious "space firebird" that can provide the energy to bring the planet back to life, or something, so space pilot Godoh takes it upon himself to get out there and bring back the bird. He's accompanied by robot-girl Olga (who raised him and is in unrequited love with him) and assorted comic relief characters both alien and human. It's a very busy movie, and that would be my biggest complaint--it tosses you from the Godoh-Olga story, to the sidekicks being goofy, to the power of the phoenix (or the corrupt dystopian government back on Earth) and back to Godoh and Olga again, without giving you a chance to take anything in. But though it moves around a lot the constant orchestration helps to give everything a consistent tone (and maybe a consistent tone was what director Taku Sugiyama was going for, as opposed to a fully coherent narrative.) The opening sequence was wonderful, though, a lengthy dialogue free sequence showing Godoh being raised by machines, including Olga. And the ending was a bit of a riff on 2001 and Pinocchio as Olga is transformed into a real woman and Godoh is reduced to infancy (a bargain he made with the phoenix to save the Earth) and they are left to reprise their roles from the start of the film. This movie isn't going to blow you away, but you're going to enjoy it because it's so solid and well-done. A movie doesn't have to blow you away in order to be really worthwhile.

[1981] WOLFEN: The other movie by Michael Wadleigh! It's not exactly a werewolf picture--the wolves here are these ancient godlike creatures that only the Native Americans remember and respect. Like Edward James Olmos' character, who's the only person who can clue cop-with-a-past Albert Finney onto what's been killing people in a very bombed out and desolate version of New York City. There's this amazing scene where we first meet EJO's Eddie Holt and Finney has to climb up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge to meet him and they're both really up there on the top of the bridge. And Finney looks terrified and Olmos is calmly walking about without a harness and I really hope it didn't take them too many takes to get that shot because it looked like it was excruciating to film. Wadleigh sort of overuses the steadicam point-of-view shots--we almost always know where the monsters are, so there's not much reason to be afraid unless you scare easy (like me.) But I think that was intentional--Wadleigh wants us on the monster's side, to understand why they're killing both old Dutch New York aristocrats and homeless people, and he does do that pretty well. Some of the other murders--the wolves' rationale was less convincing, like when they killed a zoologist who seemed like one of the few people in the film who was on their side. Other negatives: way too many fake scares, too much of the "Native Americans equal nature undespoiled" hokum. But overall it's a quite fine account of the conflict between civilization and the eroding natural world that still wants to survive. It just takes up the natural world's side as much as it does civilization's, and is a more interesting picture for giving us the point of view of the "monsters." So: not hugely terrifying, and way too intelligent to be exploitation (despite the occasional gore.) A very different horror picture.

[1980] UP THE ACADEMY: Yeah, so Midnight Madness was worthwhile trash and this pretty much is useless trash. This was supposed to be Mad Magazine's foray into movies (to keep up with National Lampoon) and Gaines and the rest of The Usual Gang of Idiots ended up disowning the final product. I can sort of see why they did--this isn't the most awful thing ever committed to celluloid, it's just pretty blah, and pretty much unacceptable for a magazine that was still trying to be on the cutting edge of a certain type of humor. (Adolescent male humor.) And I guess Ron Leibman must've been a real Mad fan to have wanted himself removed from the credits of a film that he starred in and where he gave the most entertaining performance by leaps and bounds. And the only competent performance, as the deviant, lonely, sociopathic academy instructor Major Liceman. He was one of the few good things in this movie, along with a somewhat dignified Barbara Bach cameo (doing a terrible Southern accent, though) and Rick Baker's Alfred E. Newman mask. Oh, and the soundtrack is this amazing grab bag of 80sness. Blondie! The Stooges! Nick Cave! Lou Reed! Pat Benatar! Cheap Trick! But the movie isn't worth watching for the soundtrack (it's the only thing that keeps it interesting sometimes) or for Ron Leibman's efforts or anything else. It's just a pretty indistinct piece of cinema.

[1980] MIDNIGHT MADNESS: This was mindbendingly, transcendentally stupid--a whole new dimension of stupid--but it works so hard at being stupid that it really grew on me as it went along. I mean, the plot isn't much of anything--a Los Angeles-wide scavenger hunt between five college-age teams--and the performances aren't on their own much of anything but somehow collectively they're charming. I think, for me, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the idiocy of this thing because director/writers Nankin and Wechter are ultimately very kind to their characters. There's nerds and fat girls and the movie isn't especially mean to them like it could be; even Eddie Deezen has some kind of dignity within the Midnight Madness game. The closest any of the characters get to being irredeemable villains is the spoiled rich kid Harold (Stephen Furst) who's more irrational than anything else and is saddled with a nagging father and a nagging girlfried, and the mean old landlady Mrs Grimhaus (Irene Tedrow) who calls the cops on the game. Which doesn't work since the game is so much fun the cops want to watch too! Yeah--it makes no sense. But scenes like the nerd team extending their moped antennas in unison or a fratboy hearing a choir of angels outside the Pabst brewery (and is this the origin of Pabst hipsterism?) and the much-ballyhooed "FAGABEEFE" (don't ask) lend it all a breezy charm. I don't want to overpraise it--it's no Caddyshack, though it shares that film's flaw of dull protagonists (in Midnight Madness, it's David Naughton's forced conflict with his brother, Michael J. Fox before he figured out how to act.) As a Disney production it obviously could not be Caddyshack. But I think the Disney restraint forced it to be goofy when it should have been vulgar, and made a it a lot more memorable than it should have been. Put this with Watcher In The Woods as the interesting 80s Disney experiments--Watcher the bloodless thriller, and Midnight Madness the sexless teen comedy.

[1981] LION VS LION: Kung Fu Cinema praised the heck out of this thing but I found it to be very much a mixed bag. I think it may be a good title for the kung fu purists, in that the fights are really excellent but the plot is quite hard to follow--it's something to do with a secret list of rebels against the Manchus that winds up in the hands of conman Ah Cun (Wong Yu) and his dumb-but-noble partner Ah Yue (Lo Meng.) Johnny Wang gets to play a hero for about three-quarters of the picture, but turns into his usual Shaw villain near the end. Directors Chin Yuet-sang and Hsu Hsia really knew how to do an action scene--and Kung Fu Cinema says they were both longtime action directors before this movie, so that explains that--but building a movie out of the action they're less good at. I mean, the lion vs lion fight of the title (a lion dancing fight, to be specific) was incredible but they also stuck it in more-or-less randomly, like they had an idea for a lion fighting scene and just pasted it in there where they could. But it's a great fight, you could see this movie for that sequence alone and it'd be completely worthwhile. There just wasn't enough holding the fights together, and I'm not enough of a kung fu fan to love a movie on the basis of the fighting alone.

[1980] THE NINTH CONFIGURATION: This was quite good, like a more intelligent One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without those pieties about the crazy really being the sane or whatever. No, sane or insane, we're all in the same boat in The Ninth Configuration's universe, utterly alone in a cruel, capricious universe. Directed by novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty, it's definitely the work of somebody who's got literary sensibilities first and cinematic sensibilities second; for a large part of the opening of the film the dialogue dominates everything, in the form of witty monologues and back-and-forth between the guards and staff of a military hospital for the insane. I had the feeling of one of those very heavy, idea-drenched and fast-paced science fiction novels, like Bester or Harness, where people say things normal humans wouldn't necessarily say but you don't care because it's intelligent and clever and tossed off quickly, one after the other, so you don't have time to think about it either. But there's also moments of incongruity where you get the sense Blatty was trying too hard, like when astronaut Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) dreams about seeing Christ on the moon, or when a couple of the inmates decide to put on a version of Hamlet with an all-dog cast, or weird blackface solo with an actual black guy nodding approvingly. Yeah--it's definitely in that late 70s tradition of works of overweening ambition, and stands with The Stunt Man as the great lost auteurist classic of 1980. (Like Rush, Blatty went on to direct one more movie--The Exorcist III. Kids, a compare-and-contrast essay between The Color of Night and Exorcist III would make a great topic for your Films of the 90s seminar, let me tell you.) It's hard to talk much about Ninth Configuration without giving away the more important twists; suffice it to say that Stacy Keach's Vincent Kane, army psychiatrist, has a big bad secret. And the big secret isn't that great, and there's some explanatory psychobabble thrown in and the circumstances are pretty implausible, but I can forgive it, it gave Blatty the right framework to put Kane through the metaphysical ringer. Keach was fantastic as Kane, too; it's a really great portrayal of a guy torturing himself with past sins to the brink of insanity. I dunno--I think this approaches must-watch status for the year 1980. It's not entirely successful, but it's a failure of too much ambition and I can't fault Blatty for trying to stick in as many of his Deep Thoughts as he could.

[1981] SHAOLIN AND WU TANG: Yeah--easing my way back into the 80s project with a little kung fu. This was on my list because it's Gordon Liu's directorial debut (though Kung Fu Cinema says this is Lau Kar-leung joint. And IMDB has him directing another movie eight years before this. Who knows? The kung fu filmography is jacked beyond measure.) Gordon is Shaolin and Adam Cheng is Wu Tang and Johnny Wang is the DIRTY CHING! who forces them to fight. Johnny needs the Wu Tang and Shaolin secrets to ensure the continued rule of the Manchus, lest the two schools combine and become dangerous. Of course, Adam and Gordon remain friends despite the interschool conflict, and end up teaching each other the opposite school's secrets during their final fight (which is actually pretty good.) Once they've swapped styles they're both good enough to teach Johnny a lesson and win the day and give the audience a nice little take home message about kung fu being for everyone, whatever school or style they happen to enjoy. But before their last fight it's a fairly cretinous movie, though it's consistent tonally (i.e., no Shaw-style sudden bits of comedy.) And there's this bizarre scene where Adam is locked away in prison with a bunch of crazy women until he reveals the Wu Tang sword style (or something,) and the women are shrieking in bad dubbing and Johnny's planted his sister there to collect Adam's secrets, and Gordon ends up infilitrating the prison and teaching her the Wu Tang fist--it's hard to describe but it was a nutty scene, in an annoying way. The DVD didn't help--it looks liked somebody took it off a VHS tape and when it's a night scene you can't see anything. English dub only, too, so it at least has the curiosity value of being the source of quite a few of the Wu Tang Clan's samples. Aside from that--it's not anything you need to seek out if you're not a kung fu head, even with the unconventional final fight (in terms of there not being a winner or loser--kung fu itself wins!)

CINEMA INTERRUPTUS: Yeah--I've hit a period where I can't keep up my at least once a day movie pace. It's the end of the semester, for one, and for another I discovered the Asian Games, which have to be the greatest non-Olympics international competition, smoking the Commonwealth and Pan-American Games as far as I am concerned. I mean--with 10000+ athletes they're about the same size as the Olympics, and with 39 sports to the Summer Olympics' 28 they're actually a more--varied event, shall we say? And that's 39 sports without any track and field! It's regional stuff like sepaktakraw and kabaddi and non-athletic stuff like chess and billiards and the usual Olympic cult stuff like table tennis and badminton. As an Olympic-style sports fan I'm in heaven right now.

[1980] STIR CRAZY: Much like I dismissed Caddyshack as the stupid gopher movie, I always dismissed this as the stupid Wilder and Pryor in chicken suit movie--and of course they're only in those costumes for about twenty seconds, proving that I should never ever believe a studio's advertising campaign, or something. Anyway--Pryor is good in this, but it's Wilder's movie more or less. It's not that he gets all the good lines, but he gets to be the hero (sort of) and get the girl in the end. It also seemed like he was on camera more, and his charming and neurotic character is what impressed me most about this movie--it's a very aggressive New York sort of charm and sensitivity though. Sidney Poitier (who directed) for the most part just lets them do their thing, and keeps the machinations of the plot to a minimum, cutting away just when he's communicated the bare medium of whatever was needed to keep things moving. So his timing was great. Even during a mostly humor-negative stretch near the end he kept things moving well (an actually reasonably clever prison break--the boys are in prison for this one, you see; hence the title.) It's a genuinely funny movie with and because of a great performance from Wilder and I think I will leave it at that.

[1980] AMERICAN GIGOLO: I LOLed quite a bit during this and I don't think I was supposed to--some of the dialogue between Richard Gere's cynical yet vulnerable hooker and Lauren Hutton's depressed society wife was stuff human beings would not say--even human beings in a revisionist noir, and Hutton frequently looks just confused as to what she's supposed to be doing, or feeling. Once their romance gets going both of them become more grounded and likable, though; theirs is the only fairly normal, healthy relationship in the movie. And they even get a semi-happy ending. But there's so many ridiculous scenes in this thing, like Gere suddenly becoming a tough guy and writing his number on some poor schlub's forehead (in front of a poster of The Warriors with a big X through it--I didn't get that at all,) or him holding Bill Duke by his feet out a window and there being an audible pop when he slips out of his boots and falls to his death, or when Gere inexplicably recreates Gene Hackman's apartment-destroying scene from The Conversation in search of some stolen swag. It's an odd, unsuccessful thing, this movie; I get the idea that Schrader wanted to do an experiment where he'd have the noir hero also be the hooker and the femme fatale character have all the stoic, heroic virtues, plus the sexual obsessions, and I'm glad he did the experiment but the results are a mess.

[1980] FRIDAY THE 13TH: Okay--this is the Argento with training wheels (Watcher In The Woods is the Argento big wheel.) It's effective at what it does--nice scares (in particular Kevin Bacon's death and the final dream/flashback) in between long stretches of nothingness--nothing conversations, nothing lives, nothing situations, with a dash of a sense that something's out there, like when the town crazy shows up, or they kill the snake and the kid with the knife looks like a psycho, or the constant shots of the moon Cunningham keeps feeding us. Mike Bracken called it "almost a minimalist film," and there definitely isn't any evidence that it's minimalist on purpose--meaning the low-keyness has more to do with Cunningham's pretty much bland directing style and not with anybody's aspirations at doing an intentionally streamlined slasher picture. Maybe "bland" is too harsh, but he never really succeeds at creating an atmosphere of menace; he plays at it with the Mrs. Voorhees point-of-view shots but the rest of the time I felt pretty safe that a body was not going to fall into the frame. And then the final Alice-Voorhees feels longer than it should because we already know who the villain is and we're just waiting for everything to conclude already, so all the shots of Alice being scared are somewhat exasperating. Oh--and in a film filled with one-note performances (and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, like with the minimalism question above; were they bad actors? Or just badly directed?) Betsy Palmer was the only one who did something memorable with her part. Cunningham knew what he was doing with her, at least, with those closeups on her bared teeth as she switched from Jason to Mama Voorhees. A really good bit in a fair-to-good movie.

[1980] HONEYSUCKLE ROSE: So I picked this up because Pauline Kael gave it five pages in her book for 1980 through 1982, and it's definitely on the very okay side of things. It's weird to see Willie Nelson before he became permanently stoned actually try to act, and do reasonably well with it. But he has a really good supporting cast (Slim Pickens, Dyan Cannon, Amy Irving) and his character is a version of himself--he's Buck Bonham, travelling country singer. And he's always on the road which is wearing on his wife (Cannon;) meanwhile his best friend (Pickens) is retiring and is going to be replaced on the tour by his (Pickens' character's) daughter (Irving.) And Willie starts falling for Amy Irving, who has idolized him since she was a child, and there you have the PLOT! I would say for the first 45 minutes or so this film is really good--there's lots of performances, including a Cannon-Nelson duet, an elaborate family reunion concert, and an Emmylou Harris run-in. But once the PLOT! gets going and Willie's character has to do stuff the movie kind of flounders; there isn't enough of a reason (that I saw) for him to fall for Irving, or try and get back with Cannon, or for Cannon to take him back, except for that's what would give the movie a conventional happy ending. Yeah, there's too much half-assed drama in here for me, spoiling Willie being Willie and a bucketload of Southern vignettes and "on the road" vignettes. I mean, the climatic fight is Willie versus a drunk Slim Pickens--did anyone really want to see that? I don't think even the filmmakers did, which is why they blew it off and had Slim and Willie go get drunk right afterwards. A bit more performance and a bit less conflict-for-the-sake-of-conflict would have done it a world of good.

[1980] COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER: I don't generally care about stuff like who won what Oscar, or for biopics, but Sissy Spacek really owned the you know what out of this movie. Her performance as Loretta Lynn is up there with Theresa Russell in Bad Timing for films of the year 1980 for me; where Russell was unabashed and open, Spacek is a bit of everything. She's more on the Oscarbait capital-A acting wavelength, doing Lynn's transformation from backwoods 14 year old child bride to pill-popping superstar. And Oscar loves that kind of thing--see De Niro's Oscar this same year--but Spacek is really good at being a petulant child, or a young woman giddy with being on the threshold of success, or the mature Lynn who keeps on performing and performing and being popular without ever completely excising her self-doubt. I loved the scene near the end where she breaks down on stage, the burdens of her husband (a mostly just-along-for-the-ride Tommy Lee Jones) and her fans and everything else finally wearing her down. Now dramatically, the movie is sort of iffy, as it portrays Loretta Lynn as almost entirely a creation of her husband, which may be true, but it doesn't make for a super-compelling story. But it's okay--Spacek's performance is enough of a story all on its own.