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Follows the old cinematic dictum: If you show a wolf trap early in a movie, someone had better get caught in it by the end. A truly terrible film. Wretchedly bad. Dustin Hoffman's performance is goofy and amateurish.



Even worse than Straw Dogs. Abysmal. Couldn't make it through to the end.

Monty Python's send-up of Sam Peckinpah:

37 Years Ago Today

all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery

I've not read the entirety of Cormac McCarthy's catalog, but each of his half-dozen novels I've read is post-apocalyptic. Calling The Road post-apocalyptic is therefore redundant, but understandable given that there is a genre of novels entitled thusly and this one is well-situated therein.

What does post-apocalyptic mean? In McCarthy's worldview life itself is a grand apocalypse continuous in its unfurling. Men move about his works, buffeted more often than not counter to their aims by the calamatous unwinding of time. Some manage through will, luck, or pluck to forge a hardscrabble existence; others fail and are swept aside, detritus gathered in the mossy eddies of life's bitter stream. Any beauty found is accidental and fleeting, any order artificial, and morals are the artifice of weak men used to control the strong and free.

The Road stands with the best of McCarthy's novels, the ones I love best: Child of God, Outer Dark, and Blood Meridian. Morality, law, and beauty might be foolish and temporary attempts to restrain the random and chaotic, but McCarthy laments their loss nonetheless in this gorgeous bleak book, humane and terrible. Love blooms brightly in its awful pages, and the tender finale could jerk a tear from the driest eye. Put down whatever you're reading and hit The Road.

Phelps Phamily Values

Ah, the Phelps family. You know you're scraping the bottom of a barrel most foul when you come across a group of fundies that Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck find extreme and distasteful.

Steven Hart over at The Opinion Mill linked a documentary about the universally loathed members of the Westboro Baptist Church. The Most Hated Family in America is at once profoundly disturbing and very sad. The filmmaker, an Englishman named Louis Theroux, manages to excavate a kernel of humanity from some of these hateful, wretched people. What is wrong with them? one asks in vain. How did Gramps Phelps pervert them all with his moronic dogma?

The film works like one of those train-wreck family reality TV shows, along the lines of The Osbournes or that Flava Flave abomination. Humor and compassion are sometimes the best weapons against hatred, and Theroux displays both, wielding his weapons with remarkable patience. The unbelieving filmmaker displays a deeper comprehension of Christ's message than his subjects.

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The DVD wouldn't play on my old Panasonic, so we had to borrow an LCD projector from Cha's office and watch it using a laptop. That was fun, like a drive-in movie in the house.

Forest Whitaker kicks ass. Loved him in Bird, Smoke, Platoon, and most particularly in Ghost Dog. His performance in that craptastic schlock The Crying Game was heart-breaking, and remains the only memorable thing about that movie.

This is not your cuddly intellectual Forest, however. In playing Idi Amin he's tapped himself into some deep-seated vein of pure malevolence, made himself into an entirely different creature. Whitaker's Amin is charming and witty one second, and coolly oversees torture and massacres the next. Childish vulnerability, obsequiousness, monstrous apathy, paranoia--this bundle of sociopathologies is a smorgasbord for any actor, and Whitaker is up to the task. A great performance.

The movie, however, is only so-so. I didn't much like the story, wherein some Ewan McGregor clone recently awarded his medical degree in Scotland runs off to Uganda to "make a difference." Apparently "make a difference" means shag the locals and drink. I suppose this is meant as a commentary on post-colonial British/English/European meddling in African affairs, but it's clumsily handled. I disliked entirely the character Dr. Garrigan, whose naivite is beyond profound. Garrigan is rightly sickened by the English and their scheming: they help Amin to power because perhaps they can use him to continue exploiting Africa, and then they want to get rid of Amin because he's uncontrollable. But if anyone deserved to be got rid of, it was this butcher. By the end of the movie Garrigan--who has aided and abetted Uganda's dictator--is awakening to Amin's true nature, and one is supposed to sympathize with his plight. Um, no. He should be hung for crimes against humanity. [Spoiler alert: We get some satisfaction along those lines.]

The Last King of Scotland is basically a thriller with a political/espionage backdrop, wherein a young idealist is perverted by power and wealth into enabling a genocidal maniac. Perhaps the novel is better? Maybe I'll find out some day.

The director Kevin Macdonald made the documentary Touching the Void, which I enjoyed a great deal.

May Day rally 2007

May Day rally 2007, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Seth took some shots of a May Day rally in Chicago. Don't know that anything similar was going on 'round here.

Watched some French TV online--after a story about Le Pen calling for a boycott of the Presidential election (the choice between Sarkozy and Segolene does not please the extreme right)--much of the remaining half hour was filled with stories about labor issues and socialist politics. I didn't watch any US news yesterday, but doubt somehow that was the case here.

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Ugh.

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In June of 1994 Cha and I were on a bus from Heathrow Airport into London on our honeymoon. On a long flat highway amongst green pastures we cruised along, the driver occasionally pointing things out and discussing them. Then an absurd fairy tail automobile appeared coming toward us in the right lane, a confection of glass, wood, and polished metal. Seated inside in an elevated rear compartment was a hat the size of an extra-large New York pie, drooped at a saucy angle. The Princess of Wales without escort, without fanfare. She passed within two meters of me, her seat somehow as high as mine in that carriage of hers. The bus driver murmured something about the Princess of Wales not bothering to wave at us after he waved at her. "At the least her driver could acknowledge one of his own," he said.

I never much bought into the fascination with the monarchy, but had friends who went NUTS over the Diana/Charles wedding and subsequent scandals. All of that seems rather quaint now, given the tragedies to follow. It's also hard to think of Diana's death without the maudlin grotesquerie of Elton John's "Goodbye England's Rose," which thousands of ghouls lined up to purchase at the bookshop.

Helen Mirren rules, and I'm glad she finally got recognition. She is a one of my very favorite actors, and nails Elizabeth in this charming soap opera. Almost as good is Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. Sheen perfectly captures the unctuous Labour PM with uncanny political instincts. Again, it's hard to remember how energetic and fresh Blair seemed when he took over English governance from the wintry John Major. Now he's just another hack, a Bush toady, and he's gone in a few weeks.

The Queen is slight, and could easily have wandered off into made-for-TV-movie territory. The actors give it substance, however. I recommend it.