'The Road to Guantanamo'

The controversial film, along with Cars, A Prairie Home Companion, and Ghostface Killah's Fishscale, is reviewed in my latest Consumables column.

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Attention, all bloggers: If you're sad that no one's responding to your heartfelt, eloquent postings, Pearls Before Swine feels your pain. Kinda.

the fast and the furious: tokyo drift

The new installment in the Fast and the Furious series isn't necessarily terrific, but its up-and-coming star, Lucas Black, may be someone worth keeping an eye on.

the lake house

The new romantic drama starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, which opens Friday, will be a hit among the female set. Men are another matter entirely.

bruce springsteen: protest folkie

While I respect Springsteen's post-9/11 work, it's been hard for me to love it as much as Tunnel of Love or Born in the U.S.A. His fans, of course, won't have the same difficulty.

the need for iraqi civil war

While the Bush administration strains with all its might to insist that Iraq is not tumbling into civil war, Edward N. Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that, frankly, maybe that's just what Iraq needs:

Civil wars can be especially atrocious as neighbors kill each other at close range, but they also have a purpose. They can bring lasting peace by destroying the will to fight and by removing the motives and opportunities for further violence.

The logic is very sound. Of course, the White House will have a hard time accepting this rationale -- it will be a bitter pill for the Republicans to swallow if they acknowledge that they have to step aside and let the country implode so that the Iraqi people can eventually move forward.

camera obscura

This sextet from Glasgow write pretty songs about being sad. Let's Get Out of This Country is their latest. I quite like it.

Playwright Edward Albee argues that what separates us from animals isn't our ability to use tools or possess a soul -- it's our desire to create art:

I hold that we are the only animal that makes art, and I'm convinced that this is part of the evolutionary process. We all used to have a tail, you know. Not a collective one, you understand, but we still have a jut of bone at the base of our spine called the coccyx, and that is the vestigial remnant of our tails. You still have this jut of bone; don't look now, but take it as we must so much on faith. To simplify just a little bit, what happened is this: Somewhere along the line in the evolutionary process, our tails fell off and we grew art.

For most writers, this would be a strong enough point, but Albee goes further, chiding us to understand the repercussions in a society where art is no longer valued:

[B]roadly speaking, the [artists] we rightly put up on pedestals have less influence on the mind and morality of this country than their intellectual and creative inferiors. We know it is commerce that determines this, which equates popularity with excellence. But I warn you, if the finest minds and talents cease to matter in the larger cultural picture, we are in serious trouble, and our culture is in serious decline.

the best weapon against terrorism? scorn

Professor J. Michael Waller has an interesting suggestion on how to win the War on Terrorism. When engaging an enemy whose main weapon is fear, he writes, you must remove Al Qaeda's ability to inspire terror. In other words, you need to mock them, which the U.S. military did to great effect by releasing those humiliating outtakes from Abu Musab Zarqawi's latest video.

To most Americans, ridiculing terrorists might seem trivial, even sophomoric, as a weapon of war. But dictators and terrorists, being unable to function in the free market of ideas, need propagandists to control (not merely spin) their public images. They require obedience or acquiescence -- a fear factor that cannot long coexist with put-downs and snickering.

Intellectually, the argument makes a certain amount of sense. Of course, it also calls to mind this exchange from Woody Allen's Manhattan:

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.

Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

getting people to see united 93

Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman is only scratching the surface of a worthy debate, but he raises a good point about the so-called "small-scale success" of the terrific, harrowing docudrama, United 93. Was it, in fact, a bad idea to make the movie seem like such a tough night at the theater?

All [the media's] talk of ''lowered expectations'' may have been an accurate barometer of United 93's ultimate fortunes, but it had the effect of marginalizing the movie before it was even released -- making it sound like something that no ''normal'' American would ever want to see. In a sense, many of us in the media became enablers, telling our viewers and readers, in essence, ''It's okay. Movies aren't supposed to be this painful.''

I also can't help but wonder if lack of stars didn't help lessen the film's visibility.

avoid rv ...

... you'll thank me later.

on my wedding day

In the three years I've been dating my wonderful girlfriend/fiancee/bride-to-be, I've consulted an essay entitled "The Road Taken" by Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau on many occasions for guidance, inspiration and its candid look at how one couple's married life works. It has nothing to do with music, per se, but it has everything to do with the passion and love generated by a well-developed romantic life that inform your appreciation for the art around you.

If I ever get to meet the man, I'd buy him a drink and thank him for this piece. I can only hope my baby and I get to have as healthy, happy and long a life as he and his wife Carola have had.

god bless doonesbury

Who needs to spend time criticizing the Bush administration when Gary Trudeau can do it for us in eight perfect panels?

calexico

On their latest album, Garden Ruin, the Tucson band get as political as you can while still writing lilting, acoustic ballads. Or so says I.

kurt cobain has now been dead for 12 years

On the anniversary of the Nirvana frontman's suicide, I decided to go back and re-read this piece from The Black Table. Several writers, including James Frey, Tom Perrotta and myself, were asked to reflect on Cobain's life and death. I have to say, I agree with what I wrote even more now than I did then.

yes, billy joel

It'll break my dad's heart, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't find much nice to say about Billy Joel in this recent piece.

she wants revenge

I love them, I hate them, I don't know what to do with them.

a movie world before dvd and multiplexes

Peter Bogdanovich risks sounding like the grumpy old man who always complains how great things used to be back in his day, but his defense of the communal movie experience is hard to resist -- especially this paragraph...

Movies, when you used to see them on the big screen, had a mystery that they no longer have. For one thing, they were irretrievable: Once the first and second runs were past, most films were not easy to see again. They were much, much larger than life and therefore instantly mythic (screens and theaters were a lot bigger before the multiplex arrived). And they were inexorable; once a film had started, there was no pausing it or in any way stopping its relentless forward motion.

loving the imperfect: the cultish devotion to malick's the new world

"Not everyone adores The New World," J. Hoberman writes in The Village Voice, "but those cineastes who like it, really, really like it. The movie has not only admirers but partisans -- it can only be truly loved by attacking those too blind to see the truth."

And while Hoberman didn't love Terrence Malick's most recent film, he appreciates the passion the movie inspires in its fans. I feel the same way as Hoberman -- The New World is the first of Malick's film I was indifferent to, but movies that draw strong reactions (especially when they polarize people) are what make filmgoing worthwhile.

Hoberman's piece reminds that I wish I had seen The New World one more time before it left theaters -- I'm sorry I missed my chance.

the real reason crash won, part 894

James Bates does a commendable job going beyond the angry accusations to lay out a very calm, logical explanation for Crash's win at this year's Oscars: Lionsgate did a remarkable job marketing it to Oscar voters.

I'm not dismissing those who really loved it and the reasons why they really loved it, although I'm on record as hating the film. But what I appreciate is that Bates solely examines Crash's strategy for getting out the vote -- he avoids the rhetoric about the Academy being homophobic and simply focuses on crunching the numbers.

Much of the morning-after punditry and blog logic has centered on whether members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had trouble giving "Brokeback Mountain" a best picture nod because of its gay love theme.

Another theory: Like a cinematic John Edwards, "Brokeback" peaked too early and its Oscar buzz dissipated.

In fact, the key to the success of "Crash" was that the film itself — and the carefully orchestrated promotional campaign undertaken by its distributor, Lionsgate — appealed to the academy's largest voting bloc: actors. With 22% of the voting members, the acting contingent is nearly three times as big as the next-largest group, producers.

It was actors — specifically, those in Los Angeles — who were targeted to deliver votes. And judging by the upset, deliver they did.

It was very shrewd and, considering that Lionsgate also does terrific work advertising its Saw franchise, you have to give the whole company the respect it deserves.