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Once again, American conservatives ignore stated principles in favor of advancing their agenda.

“I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand,” said outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien recently–can you imagine the Bushinator telling the world he’ll be enjoying his retirement through a haze?

This Summer’s big road trip? I predict Vega, only 25 light years away, which seems to have an Earth-like planet in orbit. Shotgun!

According to Mercury News TV columnist Charlie McCollum, Angels in America is possibly the best show ever made for television. Premieres this Sunday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m. with the conclusion the following Sunday. Just so you know, he said this show all by itself is a reason to subscribe to HBO. Directed by Mike Nichols, stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson. What’s the play about?

Released in 1976, The Front was one of the first serious–and non-allegorical–attempts by Hollywood to explicitly examine the effects of McCarthyism on its own people. Most of the major creatives involved, including the writer, director and several actors, were themselves victims of the blacklist and are identified as such in the credits. The star, Woody Allen, was not on the list but had an upfront and personal view as a staff writer for Sid Caeser’s TV show at the time.

The story has Allen, a cashier at a Manhattan diner and failed bookie named Howard Prince, approached by childhood pal who’s been put on the list and not able to get work. The pal wants to put Prince’s name on his scripts and have Prince pretend to be a new writer; when the scheme works three more writers join in and produce scripts for Prince. Since these are good writers, the scripts are big hits and Prince attracts the attention of the men who crave the pleasure of crushing others.

Meanwhile, comedian Hecky Brown (portrayed by blacklist victim Zero Mostel) is victimed by the House Unamerican Committee and despite all attempts to cooperate, all protestations that the closest he came to flirting with Communism, were attempts to get in the pants of a comely female activist, cannot clear his name. So Brown is dropped from his role as host of Prince’s show and cannot find work anywhere. No one who could hire him is willing to cross these powerful bullies. Finally, Brown solves his despair by leaving a hotel room via the window.

Only days after Brown’s death Prince is called to appear before the committee himself. Completely apolitical, the faux-writer cannot conceive of how he could come to harm; thinking the Congressmen and their lawyers idiots, he convinces himself that fooling them without really cooperating will be a breeze. Fooling his own inner mensch, though, is not as simple.

As a movie, The Front is a decent drama, a small movie but one with a clear message. The important characters are given depth, the plot and dialog avoids cliches by focusing on the toll of the events, and the acting is strong. Which is not surprising given the time Walter Bernstein had to develop the script and the quality of the actors, especially Mostel as the sad.

The McCarthy era and the Blacklist were a part of American history of which we should be ashamed, but perhaps the source of the problem is something too deeply ingrained in human nature to be changed so quickly. Only a few years after the American public seemed to learn their lesson, Vietnam came along and many Americans were pointing fingers across the divide and calling opponents unamerican.

The ideological divide is still present in America today as an examination of popular blogs will show. Too many times since 9/11 I’ve heard or read people state that one must either support President Bush and his administation’s policies or one is unpatriotic. No one can oppose the war in Iraq, for instance, because our armed forces are on the ground there and opposition would give succor to our enemies. Such statements are sad, very sad, and to my mind completely miss the point of what American freedom means. This is a very timely movie.

Recommended

Supreme Court Considers Foreign Arrests. Another case where international law comes into play: Does our government, having failed to get cooperation of another nation’s government, have the right to arrest someone for violation of American laws and bring them here to stand trial? Lower courts have said no and thrown out the arrest in question but the Feds are appealing.

Could be important if we ever do capture someone like bin Laden and want to bring him here for trial… yet I’m still thinking that violating national sovereignty could be a slippery slope, especially if we expect other countries to respect ours. Hypothetical case in point: China would like very much to arrest the founder of Falun Gong (Falun Dafa), Li Hongzhi, but last I read he lives in the US. There’s no way we would extradite him, we don’t even recognize what the Chinese government’s accused him of as a crime. But if arrests of the type in question are legitimized by SCOTUS, could we complain if they sent a team in and took Li Hongzhi by force?

Speed up your old Tivo with the CacheCard.

Luke Perry will play Harry in a British stage production of When Harry Met Sally…

I hate getting weird programming errors and while setting up the Etc… page I had a reason for the first time in a while to look at the page for my aborted story, The Fear. Instead of working as expected I got a page saying

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare xmlrpc_decode() in /home/blazar/www/utils/bxmlrpc.php on line 1004

I’ve checked through to the extent of my expertise, looked through the PHP newsgroup, refreshed my copy of the relevant files, searched through the PHP docs, even checked with a friend at Google in case the error was on their side since my page is using their API to pull the entries out of the blog database, but nothing makes any difference. I even grepped all my source just in case I was somehow using the same function name in two places but that was no help either. What a bummer!

Following up on Friday’s review of Bad Santa, the Times has an interview with director Terry Zwigoff though after reading it, I’m more confused than before.

It’s 20 years down the road but Eddie Wilson’s music is heating up the charts in a way it never did in the old days. The a-holes at the record company have even found some unreleased music Eddie made without the Cruisers–but was it made before or after he drove off that bridge? Meanwhile Eddie is alive, living in Montreal under a new name, working construction, making music only for himself.

Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! starts with a decent premise, Michael Pare returns as Eddie and has John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band back again to make the music. But fans of the original movie will quickly realize that this one was made simply to cash in and is devoid of any originality. The plotting is split between an A story showing a band coming together and a B line mystery of lost and now found Eddie Wilson tapes. Eddie is driven by his music and neither he nor the band is good enough for what is in his head. Even the Eddie Lives! songs are consciously chosen to mirror the energy and pace of the first.

Made by a Canadian cast and crew, other than Eddie only Matthew Laurance plays the same role except in a few brief flashbacks (taken from the first, not newly filmed), even the writers (Rick Doehring and Charles Zev Cohen in essentially their only IMDB-credited production) and director (Jean-Claude Lord???) were clearly chosen for low cost. Though I’ve never met these people and have nothing against them, the entire production is low budget and, if I recall correctly, went straight to video without benefit of theaters.

In a sense I was disappointed by Eddie Lives! because Eddie and the Cruisers was such a wonder to me. The obvious connection was to Bruce Springsteen, with a similar mythos and music, was really exciting at a time when Born in the USA was all over the charts. But the second film came out in the shadow of Bruce’s split with the E Street Band and, besides, what happened to Pare’s career in the six years between them?

Modestly recommended

A bunch of sites, such as Whump, Kottke, Dave and Garret have done some freshening up, so I thought perhaps the time had come for minor tuning here too. Dave did more than just change the visual aspects of his site, he re-architected as well and, not to be a Dave-basher, while I like the new design I don’t care for the architecture. As for here, there’s much more whiteness and the site navigation bar on the left side of all pages has been pruned, with the removed pages transferred to an Etc… page. This was an example of how the use of CSS makes visual changes easy; all I had to do was change the color specified in three styles and boom!

Nice combination: Gigabyte’s USB Wireless LAN and Memory Card

Willliam Gibson created an entirely new genre in science fiction with 1984’s Neuromancer and for his efforts he won all the major awards that year. Browsing through a used book store a few months back I thought enough time had passed since my last reading and so I took it home. Perhaps, though, too much time has passed, too many novels came after mining the same vein and too many related real world developments have come to be and so I couldn’t enjoy the book nearly as much in 2003.

Neuromancer tells the story of a cowboy named Case who roams the wide open spaces of the Matrix, a computer mediated virtual reality space, as he takes a job to remove a physical, legally-imposed constraint preventing the further development and growth of an artifical intelligence created by a secretive, wealthy, space-dwelling family. Case works with an enhanced female warrior; her eyes are covered by implanted mirror shades, each of her fingers has a short steel blade which extend out at will, and her nervous system and musculature are beyond what steroids can do. Armitage is the team’s visible boss though in truth he’s a burnt out shell with a temporary personality embossed by the AI. Peter Riviera has the ability, not sure how he got it, to project illusions, very complex and believable.

Gibson, though he’s often worked in science fiction, has never really considered himself an SF author but more in the literary tradition of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell using speculation as a dramatic tool. This novel is built on rich and vivid language, deep and subtle characterizations, dialogue well fit to a speaker’s place and persona. And for the most part the plot is deft and well-paced, though as with so many other stories the ending doesn’t quite match up to the rest of the book. Still, that’s a small complaint for what is an amazing accomplishment for a first novel.

Recommended–absolutely if you’ve never read it before.

I hope I never really get caught up in simplistic politcal correctness yet, on the other hand, I’m sure that humor derived from negative portrayals and comments is usually coming from a wrong place. That conflict surfaced as I was watching and enjoying Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa yesterday.

Skipping right over the questionable tactic of producing an adult movie that many kids will see advertised and want to watch themselves, and this is not a movie I’d recommend at all for the under-15 crowd, screenwriters John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (previous claim to fame: Cats & Dogs) use so many human attributes and characteristics as targets of mockery that it’s hard to know where to start: alcoholism, sexual abuse, race, height, a mentally-challenged child whose father is in prison and mother is dead, age-induced loss of contact with reality, wussiness, suicide and murder.

However, the movie is genuinely funny and only afterwards, when I began thinking about what I’d write, did the vast negativity of the picture came to me. The basic story came from the Coen Brothers and they’ve shown a definite lack of sensitivity in past movies such as Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Fargo yet have an ability to make the films work. The director here is Terry Zwigoff, who’s garnered some notice for a couple of offbeat movies based on comic books, especially Ghost World; this is Zwigoff’s first shot at a decent budget and a mainstream production.

Beyond the politcal correctness, though, this film is genuinely nasty and filthy. Santa rarely utters a sentence fragment that doesn’t include a curse word, even when talking to small children and drinks everywhere; he targets ‘hefty’ women for his favored backdoor sex except when he gets together (in a car, in a hot tub, whereever they can) with Santa sex-obsessed Lauren Graham. There’s a gratuitous subplot where the Kid keeps getting picked on and beat up by a slightly older neighborhood bully. And so on.

The actors are mainly TV types: Bernie Mac (who seems to be the ‘cool black dude’ these days), Graham (who isn’t really hot enough for her role but gives an okay performance), John Ritter (last movie role but not quite meebly enough here), Lauren Tom (convincing as a shrew but is that what her character is supposed to be?) and even minor roles such as Billy Gardell (the Roundtable Pizza guy) and Ethan Phillips (Neellix on Star Trek: Voyager).

Props to Thornton, though I wonder if–and I’m basing this solely on press reports of his behavior–he isn’t just more or less playing himself in a Santa suit. Tony Cox is pretty good as his accomplice, the real brains of the outfit or at least the partner able to stay sober for more than an hour at a time. Last props to Brett Kelly, playing the Kid, taking all the abuse that the bad Santa can give and then some.

(Barely) Recommended

Would be interesting to see what kind of sounds Stanley Jordan, say, could get out of this guitar!

Less than three hours spent at Baghdad International Airport today will pay serious political dividends over the coming months for The Bushinator. The secrecy with which this event was pulled off will be used for gain as well. Though Thanksgiving always is a publicity event for major politicians anyway.

Those DirecTV commercials with Danny Devito, Lawrence Fishburne and Andy Garcia (and whoever else) are stupid, stoopid. Plus annoying for good measure.

Reject me? I reject your rejection!