Solipsistic

Via Atrios:

We are there at the invitation of the Iraqi government. This is a sovereign nation. Twelve million people went to the polls to approve a constitution. It's their government's choice. If they were to say, leave, we would leave.

Atrios reminds us that, of course, Iraq was also a soveriegn nation prior to our invasion.

Yesterday in a commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy, the President revealed that bin Laden--whose capture the White House hasn't exactly made a priority--spoke with al Qaeda bigwig Zarqawi about using Iraq as a training ground for further attacks against the United States.

And...?

If this intended to a be a justification for the war, it's a bit of the old bait and switch and proves the anti-war talking point that invading Iraq would make it a more fertile ground for terrorist activity.

Pretty great finale. Who knew that Lost was going to have a similar ending to Return to Gillgan's Island?

SPOILERS AHEAD

Likely explanation of conclusion is that future Jack made a deal to get off the island and come back for the other castaways, but upon return home cannot find his way back and this crushes him.

Feel free to use comment section to discuss and trade Lost theories.

I was toying around with the idea that the island is like the infamous Stanford prison experiment. Thoughts?

Some spoilers ahead.

More than a few critics have blamed the new Mike White film about a pet owner who loses her way with pulling its punches. But how refreshing to have a comedy that's about love, care, and a search for meaning that doesn't reach the sad, cynical conclusion that it's all BS to begin with. Sometimes a bracing satire where everything falls apart and a character's life spirals into total destruction can be invigorating, but at this point it's de rigeur for indie films. How much more subversive it is to make a film where happy endings are possible and love is not a pipe dream.

All this to say, I enjoyed Year of the Dog. It's great to see Molly Shannon (SNL most notably as schoolgirl superstar Mary Catherine Gallagher) again and her performance is extraordinary. It's a difficult role that asks us to be at times sympathetic toward and simultaneously horrified with her character. She refuses to turn her animal loving heroine into a caricature. The film also features a great supporting cast including John C. Reilly, Regina King, Peter Saarsgard, and Laura Dern.

A very solid film worth checking out.

The networks unveiled their Fall schedules last week and TV Week posted the clips of the new shows. Be sure to watch Cavemen. Looks really bad.

Having just finished school, I've been on vacation and looking for work. So I haven't been on the internet much. Stay tuned for updates.

A tight, thrilling, horrifying scare machine. I haven't been this scared in a theater since The Exorcist.

Not for the faint of heart or gore-averse.

For everyone else, go see it now.

Once, the Audience Award Winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is a gem of a movie. I had the pleasure of seeing the film last night at the Tivoli Theater with the film's leads and director in attendance. Hoping for great word of mouth, they are touring around the country with their film answering audience questions and performing songs from the film.

Once is a musical but not as you might expect. There are no scenes of passerbys bursting into song and dance as the leads fall in love or swelling string sections as the lovers embrace. Rather, director John Carney fashioned a stripped down, more "realistic" musical where the songs emerge from the leads as they perform on street corners, for friends, and in recording studios. Carney informed the audience that the film was made in only seventeen days and for only $150,000. The leads are professional musicians, but have never acted before. No one will mistake this for a big budget feature, but in the rawness of its presentation and performances the film gains extraordinary power.

Carney's film--which he also wrote--is a love story about waiting and deferring gratification. It's about the struggle of making ethical decisions when caught up in the fever of new love. Musicals are frequently larger than life odes to seizing the day and falling in rapturous love, so much so that you can't help burst into song. Carney subverts our expectations of the musical and presents a film about quiet, reserved lovers-to-be who struggle with the consequences of what a rapturous affair would mean to those they love.

But don't think the movie is a bore. Rather, it is a spellbinding and fantastic romantic film. Glen Hansard, lead singer of The Frames, stars alongside Czech singer and Dublin resident Marketa Irglova. Their musical performances are raw and powerful. Their harmonies are otherworldly and fantastic. The music is reminiscent of Damien Rice. Hearing them perform live after the film, I realized how little the recordings we hear in the film have been altered. Fans of Rice and singer/songwriter performers will enjoy this film.

After the multiplexes have beaten you in to a pulp striving to entertain you this summer, you would do well to seek out the quiet, haunting Once. It sticks with you and has you humming on your way out of the lobby. It'll certainly make a bracing tonic to the sure-to-be-overstuffed Hairsprapy.

Baffling:

I think that withdrawal from Iraq — it obviously gives al Qaeda a huge victory. Huge victory. On the other hand, if we stay in Iraq, it gives them the opportunity to kill more Americans, which they really like.

One of the things, though, that I think the antiwar crowd has not considered is that, if we’re putting the Americans right within their arms’ reach, they don’t have to come to Wall Street to kill Americans. They don’t have to knock down the trade center. They can do it around the corner, and convenience is a big factor when you’re a terrorist.

So our soldiers are bait?

It was inevitable that Spiderman 3 would disappoint given the near perfection of the second installment in the franchise. What viewers will be surprised by, however, is the weirdness of the third feature. Dance numbers exist alongside extended comic riffs which exist alongside weepy soliloquies. At times it feels like Spiderman as envisioned by Baz Luhrmann. When the movie works, its kind of a rush to see director Sam Raimi swinging for the fences. I'm often a fan of the overstuffed and bizarre particularly in the loud, bludgeoning sameness of the summer movie season.

But much of the movie doesn't work. The dramatic scenes are just too long and neither the comic book characterizations--necessarily, I know--or goofy dialogue justify the extended close-ups and tearful monologues. Tobey Maguire is a master of understatement and reserve. Watching him--particularly in this film--you finally realize how easily he could play the quiet sociopath next door. His Parker always seems on the verge of a total pshychological break. This is oddly invigorating, but also gives him zero credibility during his scenes of tearful fighting with Mary Jane. We just don't believe this loopy Parker as a passionate romantic figure. He's too screwed up.

Also, the film's climactic battle feels the most cartoony of any moment in the series so far. One of the villains is so outrageous and so clearly a CGI creation as to become non-threatening. The film is, in fact, overstuffed with villains. Sandman, evil Spiderman, Venom, and the Green Goblin all vie for screentime. Venom is scary and effective in his short screen time. The Sandman has some great moments--particularly his birth and early fight with Spiderman--but the film's attempts to invest the character with pathos fall flat. Evil Spiderman/Peter Parker is often a hoot, particularly in an extended dance number. Some viewers will find these moments tonally inappropriate, but I thought they gave the film's sagging midsection much needed energy.

But I would recommend this movie and actually enjoyed it. It's got enough of the good stuff: a few great fight scenes, some scary villainy, and a go-for-broke spirit. The film gets enough right to keep fans of the previous two entries entertained. If Raimi had shaved off fifteen to twenty minutes, the movie may have been a smashing success.

Considering the dreck that we often get in the summer, Spiderman 3 is worth seeing.

Is nearly three hours long.

That's likely three hours of loud, boring incomprehensibility. The second was an abomination and given the speed with which the third is being released expect more of the same. You're going to be bombarded with Fun until you're beaten into submission.

The Pew Research Foundation recently conducted a survey on Americans' knowledge of current events. Answer nine questions to find out how you stack up compared to the rest of the country.

I got seven right which put me in the 77th percentile. Those who got their news primarily from Fox scored in the 50th percentile.

How do you stack up?

On the wiretapping "concessions."

Word is to set your expectations a little lower. This one doesn't sound like its going to top its predecessor.

And lies.

A very sad bit of theater.

I just finished reading the 2006 winner March--see below--and thought it was only good. I found it hard to believe it was the among the year's best. (Yes, awards are always highly subjective, but it seems inevitable that the panelists read several better novels in the judging process.) This year's winner The Road was certainly deserving and was a surprising Oprah's Book Club pick. (How will book clubbers repsond to the books overwhelming bleakness and brutality? I'm not questioning the intelligence of Oprah readers, merely the possibility of the book's limited appeal due to its tone and subject matter.)

I seek out Pulitzer winners because it seems a good way--"of making many books there is no end" (Ecclesiastes 12:12)--to separate the wheat from the chaff. This has led me to amazing books like Gilead, The Known World, Empire Falls, and Beloved. Occasionally, I run across one that elicits a shrug like Independence Day by Richard Ford. I listened to this one on tape and the narrator was very annoying so maybe that contributed to my frustration with the book's interminable navel-gazing. (Was the narrative more ironic than I realized, or was it as tiredly self-indulgent as it seemed? Maybe when I near a mid-life crisis, I'll appreciate it more.)

The Pulitzer has also been awarded to three of my favorite books of all time: Lonseome Dove, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the greatest novel ever written All the King's Men. So I'll continue to use it as a guide. It's just puzzling when a book like March gets to stand alongside Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison.

To my readers, have any past Pulitzer or other award winners left you cold? I know that although I found A Confederacy of Dunces inspired, it also seemed slight in comparison to other Pulitzer honorees. (I'm sorry that the dream team of director David Gordon Green, Will Ferell and Robert Duvall never materialized for the filmed adaptation. That had the potential to be an amazing film.)

Last year's Pulitzer winner for fiction comes up short in comparison to its brethren. Author Geraldine Brooks tells the story of Mr. March, patriarch of the famous March family of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Women follows the March family through a eventful year as their father goes off to the Civil War to minister to the troops, but tells little of the father's story. Brooks in March imagines what that year was like for the father including harrowing scenes of war violence and of his dangerous attempt to aid in the administration of a Southern cotton plantation manned by newly freed slaves.

Brooks sets her story in the early days of the Civil War when the North was experiencing brutal losses at the hands of Confederate troops. Northern victory looked unlikely and the President's ability to lead was in doubt. To this reader, setting the story in this time of of our country's uncertainty was novel. Many civil war stories seem to be set in a world in which the collapse of the Confederacy seems inevitable.

March's time on the plantation makes for exciting reading. March's education of the newly freed slaves and his efforts to awaken the plantation's callow boss to the humanity of his employees makes for riveting reading. The plantation is located on Confederate land recently claimed, but poorly defended, by Northern forces making the threat of Confederate attack on the plantation a constant worry. This is the book's strongest section and make it worth the read.

But the book also contains some regrettable staples of melodrama: a dangerous affair and the threat of discovery. The resolution of this story makes up the book's climax and, while unexpected in its execution, feels very tired. We've seen much of this before. The narrative is also a very straightforward first person narrative where the storytellers leave little to the reader's imagination. They do more telling than showing. Their motivations are rarely in doubt.

An interesting history lesson that lacks the impact and subtletly of past Pulitzer winners. Fans of Little Women should be aware of the book's brutal war scenes that would seem out of place in Alcott's mostly gentle world.