A Grand Illusion

In reviewing Michael Kazin’s new biography of William Jennings Bryant, Andrew O’Hehir also provides a terrific summation of the mercurial Democratic demagogue most famous today for allying his name to creationism during the Scopes trial, the “Cross of Gold” speech of 1896, and for running (and losing) for president three times (still a record):

He convinced his followers that he was for the little guy and for Christian virtue, and that they came to the same thing in the end. But beyond a general constellation of issues that varied only slightly during his 30 years in public life, neither Bryan nor his believers worried much about ideological consistency. At various times and for various reasons, Bryan made common cause with the Socialist Party, the American Federation of Labor, biblical fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan.

How do you categorize a politican who ran as a committed populist, resigned as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state to protest American involvement in World War I (and was probably correct), then exploited the most abject kind of rural ignorance to protest the teaching of evolution in the mid 1920’s. As most of his admiring colleagues were prepared to admit, Bryan didn’t know much. After he got the Democratic nomination in 1896, Thomas Gore, the first senator of Oklahoma (and grandfather of Gore Vidal), famously said, “He never learend anything else ever again in his life.”

Me on Kool & The Gang’s unexpected masterpiece, “Misled.”

Not particularly profound column by Andrew Sullivan on the surprising success of Brokeback Mountain, but it’s worth reading for two reasons: rereading comments by nabobs back in December (like Charles Krauthammer’s charming “Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people — but the right 18 — and will win the Academy Award” remark in a Washington Post column); and his quiet wish that America acknowledge its peculiar homosocial history:

In America this is particularly odd, since the greatest gay writer in its history, Walt Whitman, was a man of the heartland. And you only have to read about the early years of Abraham Lincoln’s life to see that same-sex love and friendship was integral to the making of America, especially in its wildernesses and frontiers. You see that today even in the American gay vote, a third of which routinely backs Republicans.

Oscar season forces us to ignore the better angels of our nature. It took two nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to compel me to watch a movie I already knew was foul. North Country takes Norma Rae, Karen Silkwood, Erin Brokovich, and Anita Hill, locks them in a Port-A-Potty, then topples it so that they’re covered in piss and shit (fun fact: this happens to one of the film’s hapless woman coal miners!). This is the kind of film in which the men all flash missing teeth, glower around a facefful of coal dust, and shout vituperations like “This bitch wants to take every single swingin’ dick!” so that the audience understands that Sexism Still Exists. North Country makes Crash seem like Grand Illusion.

Lots of good actors are wasted. Sissy Spacek has one quietly pungent moment in which she lets her husband know that she ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. Channelling Fargo’s Marge Gunderson and her Wise Mom in Almost Famous, Frances McDormand is halfway successful at creating an original character. Unfortunately it reminds you of other movie characters, not a life; then she gets Lou Gehrig’s Disease and talks through one of those larynx voiceboxs. That’s the end of her performance. As Theron’s father, Richard Jenkins of “Six Feet Under” fame comes closest to truth, notably in the scene in which he admits he doesn’t like his daughter very much.

I don’t get Charlize Theron. Yeah, she’s purty and all, and she’s got some talent, but her career is a textbook example of a fallacy every beautful actor or actress must commit, a fallacy which we will henceforth refer to as the Lange-Pitt Syndrome: plagued by misgivings about their looks, they accept any/every role which suppresses their greatest asset (that’s what happens when the studio system collapses: a movie star’s narcissism overwhelms his/her common sense). Theron was charming in an unforced way in Woody Allen’s Celebrity (she was the only human being in the film) and movie-star-glamorous in The Italian Job. In Monster, her Oscar-endoresed turn, the director didn’t give Theron anything interesting to do except make cretin faces at the camera. Moreover, she was too conscious of the pancake makeup that turned her into a murderous banshee; at times she seemed to be impersonating a beautiful woman’s rage when she’s suddenly made ugly (Tom Cruise endured similar raptures in Vanilla Sky). Critics are ever susceptible to rewarding actorly exertions.

In response to a student’s insistence that we must salute the flag to evince our patriotism:

Has anyone ever figured out calmly what effect the flag drills, patriotic pageants, and other such maudlin buffooneries, now raging everywhere in the federal union, will proabably have upon the rising generation? Go look at one of these exhibitions if you are in doubt…If this is a good way to inculcate love of country, then a good way to inculcate a love of aquatic sports would be to play upon the kids with a fire hose. It is, in fact, precisely the best way imaginable to make patriotism loathsome. The young emerge from their banal gestures and recitations with a firm conviction, probably never to be broken in after life, that venerating the flag is an operation not distinguishable from learning the multiplacation table, taking castor oil, or getting washed behind the ears.

– H.L. Mencken, “The Psychic Follies,” November 7, 1926.

I can’t think of a more infuriating director than Robert Altman. Responsible for some of the most wondrous, idiosyncratic films of all time (M.A.S.H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, 3 Women, Vincent & Theo, The Player – films whose poetry is vulgar, offbeat, and distinctly American), he’s also capable of enterprises of stupefying badness (Buffalo Bill & The Indians, Health, Ready to Wear, Kansas City, The Company) as well as near-misses (California Split, 3 Women, Short Cuts, Gingerbread Man, Gosford Park). The guy is almost 80, has fought with studios for almost half those years, and shows no signs of quitting. On the evidence of McCabe & Mrs. Miller alone I could make a case for him as the greatest American filmmaker of the last half-century (and I’ve yet to see Thieves Like Us).

So, it is with a mixture of delight and scorn that I applaud the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for awarding Altman an honorary Oscar – his first, after five nominations as Best Director. Yup, the same honorary Oscar that Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Martin Scorsese have won when the Academy, in shame and embarassment, ignores the fact that it rewarded George Roy Hill, John G. Avildsen, and Kevin Costner instead. Terrence Rafferty’s generous essay is a nice overview of Altman’s career; it’s also got a few pungent insights, like this one about McCabe & Mrs. Miller: “It’s the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes” (it’s also the only movie to find images correlative to the soundtrack, i.e. composed of Leonard Cohen songs. Convinced yet? Go rent the fucking film already).

According to Blogger.com’s bylaws, every responsible blogger is permitted one posting of ridiculous fanboy gibberish (or what Andy would more accurately term, “RF”; for clarification, send an email to andy.diaz@gmail.com)

So here’s mine.

To the surprise of British film industry wags, Brokeback Mountain swept the British Academy of Film Art awards last night, winning Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. The most-nominated film, The Constant Gardener, won just one award.

The biggest upset? Jake Gyllenhaal wins Best Supporting Actor; this was a category in which “the George twins” (in Jake’s words), nominated for Syriana and Good Night, Good Luck were supposed to prevail.

The boy gave such a guileless acceptance speech that even Clooney looked happy he’d lost. And on his way to the podium he almost kissed costar Heath Ledger.

Awright, I’ll shut up.

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, mercdiful,
Blindfoled me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation, as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing
Into a world of wild
Flowers, feasting, tears — or was I falling, legs
Buckling, heights, depths,
Into a pool of each night’s rain?
But you were everywhere beside me, masked,
As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

– James Merrill, from “Days of 1964″

My interview with Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens is up. Chief among the surprise revelations is Forster’s Jimmy Buffett love.

My interview with Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens is up. Chief among the surprise revelations is Forster’s Jimmy Buffett love.

I have a couple of questions for David Gregory and the other reporters outraged that they weren’t notified in advance that the Vice-President was going to accidentally shoot one of his quail-hunting buddies: where were you on the eve of the Iraq war? Where were you ater 9-11 when the Bush administration was scaring the bejeesus out of citizens? Save your righteous indignation for a more pressing charge. Mark R Levin’s got it right:

Yes, Cheney is a public man so his actions are public — but in this case, they are public and unimportant. David Gregory and his band of pampered colleagues may be offended but many of us are not. Sorry, I don’t see any great offense or principle on display here. And I dare say most Americans are tuning out. The vice president is safe, his lawyer friend is okay, and nothing tawdry occurred. Now, back to the war

.

Apa and I always tousle over the merits of Wedding Crashers, a film I wanted to love and ended up disliking intensely. It’s a cowardly film, lacking the courage to follow its smut inclinations through to the denouement (Wedding Crashers is also an interminable 120 minutes-plus):

After dismissing Broken Flowers as an “an exercise in inertia,” made by a filmmaker whose idea of awakening a dozing audience is to treat us to some unasked-for Lolita skin, James Wolcott lets’er rip:

A make-work project, Broken Flowers at least isn’t as slapdash, bulldozingly obvious, and lumpily arrogant as Wedding Crashers, one of the worst comedies ever to win good reviews (the , disjointed 40 Year Old Virgin at least had the Bollywood finale), its dinner-party scene so badly staged and acted that someone should have nailed a “condemned” sign across Vince Vaughn’s mugging mug and arranged for whoever wrote the “Eleanor Roosevelt” dyke jokes to be shipped to destinations unknown.

I wish I’d come up with “The Frat Pack,” his derisive name for the Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughan-Will Ferrell trifecta

Phoebe’s latest Oscar predix column is hilarious and spot-on, correctly predicting that the race for Supporting Actor is between George Clooney playing a fat important person in Syriana and Paul Giamatti in Cinderella Man, doing penance for not attracting voters to notice his performances in American Splendor and Sideways.

But her Jake Gyllenhaal swooning has just the right fangirl gush mitigated by tough criticism (for which I take full credit. At our last meeting, over many drinks, I extolled Gyllenhaal’s greatness in Brokeback, and I finally felt as if I found someone who understood how terrific you can act in spite of an awful fake mustache).

Scorching Richard Cohen column which ran on Wednesday, in which he inveighs against Alberto Gonzalez (an “apparatchik” who “lacks the courage of his mendacity”) and the administration for presenting a set of hastily cobbled fictions as facts:

The argument in favor of the National Security Agency intercepts is consistent with those that took us to war in Iraq. They are all a collection, an assemblage, a concatenation of fibs, exaggerations, misinterpretations, selected evidence, hype, false leads, vile suggestions, felonious deletions and the like, which marched us to Baghdad where we remain to this day.

Scorching Richard Cohen column which ran on Wednesday, in which he inveighs against Alberto Gonzalez (an “apparatchik” who “lacks the courage of his mendacity”) and the administration for presenting a set of hastily cobbled fictions as facts:

The argument in favor of the National Security Agency intercepts is consistent with those that took us to war in Iraq. They are all a collection, an assemblage, a concatenation of fibs, exaggerations, misinterpretations, selected evidence, hype, false leads, vile suggestions, felonious deletions and the like, which marched us to Baghdad where we remain to this day.