The Screengrab : barack obamal john mccain

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.

Barack Obama and Brad Pitt: Separated at Birth?

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Genealogists have uncovered some startling connections between our current crop of presidential candidates and everyone’s favorite celebrity couple – and for all we know, they’ve given Oliver Stone some casting ideas for a future project.

According to the Associated Press, the good people at the New England Historic Genealogical Society have determined that Barack Obama is a distant cousin of Brad Pitt, while Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angelina Jolie are “ninth cousins.” But that’s not all! “Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother's side, is also a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, can call six U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, his cousins. McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.”

This should give Stone plenty to work with should he ever get around to making a movie about the 2008 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the JFK and Nixon helmer is at work on his latest meticulously researched and thoroughly accurate biopic, this one called simply W. Yes, it’s the inspiring story of George W. Bush, starring No Country for Old Men cowboy Josh Brolin as the current president. Entertainment Weekly reports that Elizabeth Banks (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) has been cast as first lady Laura Bush in what the director describes, presumably with a straight face, as “a fair and accurate portrait, focused on things like his relationship with his father, President George H.W. Bush, his wild younger days, and his conversion to Christianity.”

Not That Anyone Cares Now, but Rudy Giuliani Was the Tazmanian Devil

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Jeff Greenfield at Slate offers a timely new unified theory of American presidential politics based on the work of Chuck Jones. In a nutshell: American politicians are divided between those who remind voters of Bugs Bunny and those who remind them of Daffy Duck. "As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones — he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities — Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor." JFK was a Bugs, Nixon a Daffy; Ronald Reagan, a Bugs, Jimmy Carter a Daffy (who, as if in some Biblical prophecy, prepared for the 1980 contest by being attacked by a rabbit.) Some partisans may detect cracks in the argument. Greenfield identifies the current incumbent as a "Bugs Bunny", but do either Al Gore or John Kerry match up with Daffy Duck, as described by Greenfield: "He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury," responding to every setback with "a sibilant sneer"? (Personally, I always associated Kerry with Bullwinkle. But maybe dragging in characters from Jay Ward Productions would demand a whole other set of rules.) And while there may be something to the idea that George W. Bush seems more "at ease, laid back, secure, confident" than his adversaries, it will come as some news to the United Nations that "he never flails at his opponents or at the world" — and perhaps a bit of a belated shocker to everyone else that "he knows the way things work." (Me, I'd say that Bush was more like that manic little dog who used to follow Spike the bullddog around, looking like he was about to piss himself, babbling non-stop about how they were gonna find some cats and put the smackdown on them. Spike, of course, was Dick Cheney.)

In Greenfield's analysis — and he must be right, he does this for a living — Hillary Clinton is a Daffy, Barack Obama a Bugs. "When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply 'denounce' Louis Farrakhan but 'reject him,' Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don't really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination." So that should give Obama an edge in the general election when he faces John McCain, who is as Daffy as they come. But if Clinton should prevail, then come November, we will have the awesome, perhaps scary spectacle of two Daffys locked in a winner-take-all battle for supremacy. Worlds will collide in a way that Chuck Jones never dared to imagine.