The Screengrab : george w. bush

Screengrab Review: “We Pedal Uphill”

Nick Schager — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A collection of thirteen vignettes set around the country during George W. Bush’s presidency, We Pedal Uphill gauges the state of the union with less flash and blunt-force blather than your average Hollywood message picture, but nonetheless contains quite a bit of preachiness. Addressing various socio-political issues from the past eight years, writer/director Roland Tec certainly attempts a subtle touch, his script largely sidestepping declarative speeches and leaden exposition to make its points. His functional digital-video cinematography won’t win any awards, and his theater-trained cast’s unshowy turns are saddled with a stagey quality, but strictly in terms of aesthetics and performance, Tec’s film eschews – save for a few notable exceptions – ostentation and pomposity in favor of tonal and narrative modesty. Unfortunately, while he channels his anger, frustration and sadness about the nation’s health into short stories free of hysterics, his collage still all too frequently succumbs to moralistic clichés, and never coheres into a rousing, affecting whole.

We Pedal Uphill’s episodes often involve establishing a scenario that subsequently develops in an unexpected manner. Sensationalistic bombshells are mercifully nowhere to be found, yet Tec’s polite direction can’t overshadow the limpness of his arguments. In “The Mouse,” two men retire to a hotel room after meeting at a club, discover that they’re both Disney employees (one an exec, the other a parrot trainer), and then one offers the other monetary incentives to stay the night and get high, a supposed commentary on class tensions and economic disparity that comes off as half-baked. The same holds true for many of the film’s rough-sketch segments: prison management company employees discuss using every last inch of a cow for prisoners’ food before voraciously chowing down on a catered lunch; a Caucasian secretary brings to her African-American attorney boss’ attention a discrepancy regarding local voting machines, and is roundly criticized; a man goes to work, adorns his car with conservative bumper stickers (pro-life, pro-NRA, pro-Gitmo), enters his office and is revealed to be a liberal radio shock-jock. Mistaking insubstantiality for obliqueness, Tec’s stories only manage to brush up against their hot-button talking points before American-landscape transitional imagery shuffles us off to the next scene.

If some of these tales would benefit from ten additional minutes, others convey their meaning so bluntly that they seem unsalvageable. In “Wrong Turn,” an African-American man visits a suburban Louisiana community full of staring-from-their-lawns residents in order to thank the Caucasian man who saved him and his family during Katrina, a sequence about the squandered opportunity for post-flood racial harmony that – despite two solid performances – trades in painfully obvious juxtapositions. We Pedal Uphill’s clunkiness, however, is most strongly felt in “Treason,” a drearily one-note comedy bit concerning a New Mexico tour guide’s severely lopsided history lesson about the Rosenbergs to bored listeners. And the film’s fondness for indulging in already-hoary stereotypes is epitomized by the penultimate lecture “What Happened to Rita?”, in which a librarian returns to work after three years as a dazed semi-amnesiac, her condition the consequence (as nicely integrated flashbacks reveal) of a testy late-night encounter with Homeland Security agents who want the take-out records of an Arab man, and whose villainous menacing makes them come across like crude Big Brother cartoons.

The Crawford, Texas Mofo Party Plan

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

David Modigliani's documentary Crawford (which played at last spring's South by South West Festival to much acclaim) is about the little Texas town where George W. Bush bought himself a ranch when he needed a stage set where he could strut and clear brush and generally establish his down-home bonafides. Reviewing the movie here, Scott Von Doviak wrote that its subject is both "media complicity in Bush’s myth-making" and the regular folks who are trying to continue living their lives in the same old place they were in before the circus came to town. (The President has delicately suggested that, because he "owes it" to his wife, now that his political career is coming to an end, Crawford may have seen the last of him.) Now comes word that B-Side Entertainment is announcing "a nationwide grassroots exhibition program for this exceptional film - 'Host Your Own Farewell to W. - CRAWFORD’s 50-State Screening Party'. From January 1-19, leading up to inauguration day on Jan. 20, we will be coordinating grassroots screening events in all 50 states - red, blue, and everything in between." Sounding just a little like Amway salesmen on the ganja, the company is peddling %50 "Screening Party kits" that include 5 double-sided DVDs that can shown on your home entertainment system, screened at theaters you might want to rent for the occasion, projected on the walls of abandoned buildings, you, know, get creative! As the company says, it's your party. (They also note that you can sell the discs themselves after you're done. You can check out the full details here. Me, I'd be all over this myself, except I'm not sure that I'll be out of jail before January 21st for what I'll get up to tomorrow night.

The Screengrab Election Day Online Viewing Guide

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:30:00 GMT

So you’ve cast your vote and now all you can do is wait until tonight to watch the returns roll in. Sure, you could spend your day obsessively clicking on the political sites and following the exit polls, but you know those are notoriously unreliable. Fortunately, you have a number of free viewing options only a mouse click or two away. We’ve already told you about Crawford, the documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted hometown, which is available on Hulu. (And if you really want to relive the entire election season, Hulu has all four debates, all of the relevant SNL skits and Daily Shows, and even a selection of campaign speeches, if you’re a real masochist.)

We also told you about the Iraq War documentary No End in Sight, still available on YouTube, and Michael Moore’s Slacker Uprising, which you can download from his website as long as you aren’t Canadian. (His rules, not ours.) And of course there’s Nerve’s contribution, courtesy of the Screengrab’s own Phil Nugent: The 20 Greatest Campaign Ads of All Time.

The mother lode of free online documentaries can be found at (duh) freedocumentaries.org. Here you can watch HBO’s terrific and terrifying expose of voter fraud Hacking Democracy, and then spend the rest of the day wondering if your vote ended up being erased by a giant magnet. Take a nostalgic look back at the fun-filled 2000 presidential election with Unprecedented, or examine the not-at-all-relevant-this-year issue of African-American voter suppression in American Blackout. By the time you’re done with all that, why, you may never vote again!

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Thursday Poll for October 30, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

And It’s George W. Bush by a landslide! Inspired by the recent release of W., we asked our readers to compare the onscreen presidency of Josh Brolin with his father’s performance as Ronald Reagan on the controversial miniseries The Reagans. In the end, it wasn’t even close, with every single vote going the younger Brolin’s way. Of course, there were only a handful of votes registered by our state-of-the-art polling instruments, which either means that only a few of you have seen either or both of the films, or there was some massive voter disenfranchisement going on. Of course, neither would possibly stand a chance against Terry Crews' spot-on portrayal of President Camacho, but that's a poll for another time.

This week’s poll comes just in time for Halloween. This afternoon, we ranked our all-time favorite horror movies, and now it’s your turn. I’ve listed the five most popular films among our writing staff, and now it’s your turn. Which of the Screengrab’s all-time favorite horror movies is your favorite?

Which of Screengrab's top 5 horror classics is your favorite? | BuzzDash polls

Ooooooooh, scary! Leave your comments below, and when you’re out trick-or-treating, remember to check your candy before you eat it. See you in November!

“W.”: The Footnotes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone still hasn’t gotten over all the criticism he faced from Kennedy assassination scholars after the release of JFK. Once it was made clear that the film was based more on wild conspiracy theories than factual evidence, Stone was quoted as saying, “"I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a counter-myth.” This always sounded just a tad defensive (and, of course, convenient), especially when the release of Nixon was accompanied by a published screenplay annotated with hundreds of footnotes citing sources. There’s your “facts,” buddy! He’s done the same with W., his new George W. Bush bio, but there’s no need to purchase the screenplay to get the footnotes. They’re available online!

Here’s an index to the 83 footnotes, each corresponding to a scene from the movie. For example, footnote #20 is titled Bush-Pretzel Incident. “On January 14, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush emerged in front of a press conference with a very prominent broken blood vessel welt on his cheek, and said that he had choked on a pretzel while watching television the day before. Bush had reportedly been sitting on his couch, 90 minutes into watching an NFL football Miami vs. Baltimore play-off game on television, when he choked on the pretzel, falling to the ground, injuring himself, and briefly losing consciousness before awakening to see his dogs Barney and Spot showing alarm at his state. Laura Bush was reportedly in the adjoining room at the time, and Bush was alone watching the football game.” The source cited for this information is…well, it’s Wikipedia. But I’m sure the Wikipedia page cites someone reliable. (Really, how alarmed was Spot? Was he interviewed?)

The film also depicts W. as being behind the infamous “Willie Horton” ads during his father’s 1988 campaign – and Karl Rove being behind W. Footnote 33 provides some documentation supporting the involvement of “Junior,” but Rove is not mentioned – probably because Rove was actually running Supreme Court campaigns in Texas at the time. Let’s just call that one creative license; it doesn’t quite rise to the level of “counter-myth.” And as for the scenes in which Bush swills O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer? Total fiction. According to Footnote #60, Bush’s brand is Buckler.

Related:
Screengrab Review: "W."
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Dead-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed: Dubya in the Movies

Phil Nugent — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

DC 9/11 was first broadcast four days short of the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In other words, at a point (four months after the "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln) when many Americans felt that the Iraq War was won and concluded, and just as the actual Bush was warming up his re-election campaign. It's a very pure propaganda movie, with Bottoms playing a resolute, on-top-of-things commander in chief who explicitly connects the case against Saddam Hussein to the need to protect the nation from terrorism and to avenge the lives lost on 9/11. It's a measure of the national mood at that time that the film didn't arouse much in the way of head-shaking or tongue-clucking in the mainstream media. But as it became clear that the war wasn't going to be one of those little problems that can be wrapped up in the course of one man's eight years in offices--not this man, anyway--and support for it began to plummet, it became less common to see Bush depicted onscreen as a one-man Mount Rushmore. But the funny thing is that, even as Bush began to be portrayed as stupid and inept and gutless, he continued to be portrayed as, well, kind of sympathetic. The original media cartoon of Bush, as captured in the campaign-diary documentary Journeys with George (co-directed by Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra), was that he was a dopey but lovable regular guy, who might as well be given the country to run, since everyone knew it wasn't that hard. Then, after a brief interlude in which Bush was portrayed in the media as a down-home cross between George Washington and Nick Fury, the earlier stereotype was reinstated, with the new fillip that being lovably dumb didn't qualify run to be leader of the free world--but how can you blame such a nice guy for that?

When the nice but dumb Bush made his comeback, it was in such movies as the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which the sweetly dense president (Perry King), looking lost and frightened, politely asks his Cheneyesque vice president if there's anything he should do in response to the end of the world. The scene is a stand-in for the Bush administration's original answer to the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, a scene that Oliver Stone declined to stage: what the hell happened between the time Bush set down that copy of The Pet Goat and the time he next showed his face on TV. (The Day After Tomorrow actually kills the Bush stand-in off quick, the better to shift the blame for everything that's gone wrong to the Cheney figure, played by Kenneth Welsh--to you Twin Peaks, the actor who played Windom Earle, the serial psychopath who tied Major Briggs to an archery target and failed to closely examine the fine print on his contract regarding his capacity to ask visitors to the Black Lodge for their souls.) For even softer treatment of Bush, you can turn to such "satires" as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which portray Dubya as a friendly middle-aged frat boy who is either ignorant of the effects of his own policies or too cowed by his own advisers to take a stand--at least until some righteous weed and male bonding has had its effect.

In W., Stone, too, treats him as basically a nice, well-meaning guy hobbled by his inability to overcome his daddy issues. (And for good measure, he has James Cromwell playing the dithering, unfeeling Bush, Senior as a noble, aristocratic Rudy Vallee type whose greatest crime is to tear up when Bill Clinton hands him his ass at the polls.) It will irritate many Bush haters to see him continue to evade responsibility like this. On the other hand, it may be a sign that however lingering the effects of his presidency will be, Bush's personal mark on history may be slight and transient. After all, the modern president who still looms largest in the national imagination may be Richard Nixon, who is also the one who has turned up in the most movies behaving like a cross between Dracula and a James Bond villain. For that matter, movies of the last eight years have done less to hold Bush responsible for the effects of his presidency than '90s movies like Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, and Absolute Power did to hold Bill Clinton to task just for his inability to keep it in his pants. As Elbert Ventura points out, the meanest version of Bush to turn up onscreen is probably the American president played by Billy Bob Thornton in Love, Actually, who bullies the British prime minister--Hugh Grant playing a fantasy of Tony Blair as a likable lonely guy--until the P.M. catches him hitting on his own object of romantic desire, at which point he hitches up his britches and marches to the nearest bank of microphones to stand up to the little toad. In other words, to get an unsympathetic version of George W. Bush into a movie, you have to jump to another continent and give him Bill Clinton's zipper problem.

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: "W."

Screengrab Review: "W."

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It's not for me to offer unsolicited advice to a famous and successful filmmaker like Oliver Stone, especially when it's too late for said advice to be taken anyway – but what the hell, while I'm here I might as well tell you my idea for the movie Stone should have made instead of W. As you may have read here in the Screengrab or elsewhere in the liberal elite media, W. is a biopic of our current president, George W. Bush, who is not up for re-election and is leaving office in January no matter who wins. (Unless he barricades himself inside the Oval Office with a shotgun and a bottle of whiskey, which might have made for a good scene in W…but I'm getting ahead of myself.) As such, W. is unlikely to have a substantial effect on the upcoming election.

What if, instead, Stone had made a movie about the administration of President John McCain? Stone and his screenwriter Stanley Weiser could have cooked up a juicy, paranoid fantasia of a potential McCain Era in American history, supplemented by flashbacks from McCain's actual colorful past. It would be a similar movie in many ways; as Tom Dickinson writes in the fascinating Rolling Stone cover story "Make-Believe Maverick," McCain and Bush were both youthful fuck-ups with daddy issues, the major difference being that "George W. Bush was a much better pilot."

Our 43rd president's career as a pilot isn't covered in W. but Stone's film samples most of the greatest hits from Bush's misspent youth. We see his hazing as a Yale fraternity pledge, his inability to hold down a job for long (whether it be on a Texas oil rig or on Wall Street), his fondness for the demon alcohol, his courtship of librarian and future wife Laura (Elizabeth Banks), his baseball dreams, his sobriety and salvation, and finally his entry into "the family business." And although we don't see much of brother Jeb in the movie, it's clear that (in Stone's view, anyway) patriarch George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell) sees the boy he calls "junior" as the Fredo of the family.

These blasts from the past are scattered throughout W., which primarily concerns itself with the Bush administration’s ramp-up to the war in Iraq. The film opens months after the 9/11 terror attacks, as the president and his cabinet brainstorm a catchphrase that will resonate with the American people. “Axis of hatred” falls short, but…ahhh, “Axis of Evil! I like that!” This scene plays exactly like the moment in Stone’s The Doors when Ray Manzarek dreams up the keyboard intro to “Light My Fire.” Sometimes it seems there is only one biopic in the world.

Stone’s unique brew of absurdity, paranoia and psychobabble is at its most potent in these Strangelovian war room scenes. The cast alone makes for compelling viewing, if only for the wide variety of acting approaches. As Condoleezza Rice, Thandie Newton is such a near-perfect replicant, she doesn’t come close to resembling an actual human being – she’s like something Disney shipped in from the Hall of Presidents. Jeffrey Wright is doing a voice as Colin Powell, but to the best of my recollection, it’s nothing like Powell’s actual voice. Others barely attempt any imitation at all; as the man Bush calls “Vice,” Richard Dreyfuss only once hints at Cheney’s Penguin grin, but he’s got the prince of darkness vibe down pat. When Cheney explains what the real plan is for Iraq – that is, the establishment of a new American Empire in the Middle East and Asia, with delicious black oil flowing from every pipe – W. is at its most giddily satirical and subversive.

It’s a shame the rest of it is so pedestrian. It all flows together and moves along at a brisk pace – it doesn’t feel like a movie that was shot, edited and released within the span of a baseball season – but the script is far too reductive and simple-minded. (Yes, you could argue that’s appropriate to the central character, but then you still have to sit through it.) Stone likes to be able to claim he’s depicting both sides of the story, so he appears to treat key points like W’s religious conversion and romance with Laura seriously. Then he turns around and gives us one of those classic Bushisms (“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”) and jars us right out of the movie.

As Phil Nugent posted earlier this week, Stone had originally planned to include more black comedy and surreal elements, and I do think that might have been the more fruitful approach. To the extent that W. does work, give credit to Josh Brolin – he’s the one member of the cast who gives both a pitch-perfect impression and a genuine performance. It’s hard to play dumb and spoiled and, y’know, carelessly destructive of an entire country, and still maintain a modicum of likeability – but Bush did pull it off for a while and Brolin pulls it off here. Poor Elizabeth Banks is saddled with a conception of Laura Bush that doesn’t extend much beyond “enabling airhead,” and James Cromwell projects too much gruff gravitas to pass for the patrician elder Bush.

It all comes down to “Poppy didn’t love me best, so I’ll show him,” and even if that’s true in reality, it’s a boring cliché on the screen. And since we’re dealing with Oliver Stone, a point worth making once is worth making a hundred times, in 100-point boldface type, until not even the dimmest bulb in the audience can possibly miss it. I’m reminded of a scene in Barcelona, where a character explains that he understands subtext to mean a “hidden message or import of some kind,” but wonders what you call “the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious?” That is, of course, the text – and Stone’s movies are all text all the time, right there on the surface, completely open and obvious.

Trailer Review: W. Trailer #2

Paul Clark — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Ah, there’s the Oliver Stone we all know. When it was announced that Stone was making a movie about George W. Bush to be released on the eve of the Presidential election, many people scratched their heads. How would he take on our most prickly and controversial Commander in Chief since Nixon? But the more I see of W., the more interested I get. Sure, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser could very well make mincemeat of the historical record, but hell- that’s par for the course with Stone. Yet I like the chutzpah he shows here, using a strange cocktail of fact, conjecture and outright fabrication to attempt to figure out what makes Bush tick. Moreover, he’s actually done it in a context that looks like a rollicking entertainment instead of a muckraking screed. More and more, it’s looking like I’ll be there opening weekend.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Don’t worry, Batfans, this isn’t another post picking on The Best Movie Ever – we’ve got that covered elsewhere. No, this is a post picking on dipshits who view anything that goes thermonuclear in the pop culture as validation of their political leanings. You’ve probably seen them by now – the “Batman is Bush” editorials, the most notable (and laughable) of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week under the byline of right-wing thriller author Andrew Klaven.

“There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war,” Klaven gasses. “Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”

Klaven has plenty of evidence to support this seemingly dubious proposition. For instance, if you squint a little, the bat-signal looks a bit like a “W.” And…well, that’s about it, but then we have Andrew Bolt in the Australian Herald Sun, claiming that Christopher Nolan made a film proving Bush right, though he had to “disguise it a little, so journalists wouldn't freak and the film's more fashionable stars wouldn't walk.” Boy, I betcha Christian Bale feels silly now! Bolt has also noticed the bat-signal’s similarity to a W, and goes on to equate Batman beating the crap out of the Joker with waterboarding, claiming “Batman has resorted to the last hope to make this terrorist squeal, because only the Joker has the information the police need to save two goodies who have just minutes left to live.” This sort of ignores the fact that the Joker intended to reveal this information all along and that the police didn’t save those two “goodies” at all, but let’s bear with him. Bolt goes on to cite Batman’s surveillance of Gotham City’s cell phones as another telling similarity to Bush. Except, well, nobody ever elected Batman to any office, nor did he ever swear to defend the Constitution or uphold civil liberties. That’s sort of what makes him a vigilante, no? The movie knows what he’s doing is wrong because Morgan Freeman says so, and everybody knows Morgan Freeman is the voice of God (or the Magical Negro, if you must go there).

These theories really fall apart when the editorial writers equate the Joker to Osama bin Laden. Think about it – if The Dark Knight was really an allegory for the Bush administration, Batman would half-heartedly pursue the Joker for the first few minutes of the movie and then let him escape and spend the rest of his time dicking around in Metropolis looking for Mr. Mxyzptlk and his weapons of mass destruction. Yet I do think these numbnuts are onto something with the Batman/Bush parallel – just not in the way they think. See, Batman doesn’t particularly remind me of George W. Bush, but Bruce Wayne sure does. That is, the public Bruce Wayne – the drunk party boy, the son of privilege, the out-to-lunch executive falling asleep during important meetings. (And this is not even the first time Bale has reminded me of Bush – his accent in I’m Not There sounded like Dubya’s worst Dylan impression.) You could conceivably make the case that the movie is actually a mockery of ol’ 43…or you could just accept that all the “war on terror” overtones are intended to lend the movie some contemporary resonance – to make it a Batman for the 21st century – and not much more than that.

Related:
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Screengrab Review: "The Dark Knight"

Trailer Review: W.

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Once again, Oliver Stone finds himself faced with the same questions that accompanied his previous film, World Trade Center- is it too soon to make a movie that dramatizes an American tragedy? Okay, settle down folks, I'm just kidding. And so, it seems, is Stone, making a movie about a boozing, tomcatting son of privilege who somehow rose to the highest office in the land. More than ever, the film feels like something of a put-on, what with George H.W. Bush threatening his son with an ass-whuppin’. But at the same time, I’m intrigued as to what the hell Stone is going to do with this. At the very least, it should prove to be a million miles removed from the stately apologia that was Nixon, to say nothing of his pious WTC.

America The Critical: 15 Movies That Show What's Wrong With U.S. (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“This used to be a hell of a good country,” Jack Nicholson’s pot-smoking lawyer George Hanson laments in 1969's Easy Rider. “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it...”

He didn’t know the half of it.

And yet, even after seven-plus years of the Bush administration, the United States is still, for the most part, a hell of a good country, and next week, as the nation barbecues and cherry bombs itself into a frenzy of patriotism over the 4th of July weekend, we here at the Screengrab will join the celebration with a list of movies that show just exactly how and why America kicks ass.

But this week, partly in tribute to the passing of beloved comedian (and scathing social critic) George Carlin, we thought we’d take a cinematic tour of the nastier side of the American Empire. From slavery and the near-extermination of the nation’s indigenous population to rampant corporate greed, bigoted religious fanaticism and horrific military fiascos, the U.S. (and its citizens, including me and possibly you) have a lot of skeletons in our collective national closet.

Fortunately, we’ve also managed to (more or less) hang onto that whole freedom of speech thing, resulting in the following films (some by outsiders, but mostly homegrown) that, to paraphrase Toby Keith, put a boot in the American way.

THE WIRE (2002-2008)

Again, as with last week’s inclusion of Angels in America among the Gay Pride Top Twenty, I’m cheating a bit, since HBO’s epic, five-season dramatization of the death of the American working class, the devastation wrought by the “War on Drugs,” the failure of inner city public schools, the inherent corruption of organizations and the helplessness of the individuals trapped within them is, technically, “just” a TV show. But, taken as a single, sixty-hour cinematic exposé, David Simon’s epic, multi-layered, deeply human depiction of the drug dealers, junkies, cops, dockworkers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, reporters and regular civilians of modern day Baltimore (and, by extension, Anytown, U.S.A.) trumps just about any movie ever made in its unflinching depiction of the ways that Americans become trapped in their own delusions and systems of organization, allowing hacks and sociopaths (like Jamie Hector’s drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, Michael Kostroff’s sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy and corrupt cops Herc (Dominic Lombardozzi) and Burrell (Frankie Faison)) to flourish while system-bucking firebrands like Detective McNulty (Dominic West) and Michael K. Williams’ iconic stick-up artist Omar Little are marginalized or destroyed. But, unlike grim civics lessons like the recent slate of doomed Iraq films (typified by Robert Redford’s deadly earnest Lions for Lambs), The Wire (even at its most harrowing) was never a slog, thanks to the work's relentless humor, suspense, virtuoso writing, astonishing performances and, for all its pessimism, a crucial, inspiring sense of gratitude for the men and women (like Sonja Sohn and Wendell Pierce as “good police” Kima Greggs and “Bunk” Moreland, Deirdre Lovejoy’s tough, incorruptible state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman and Jim True-Frost’s ex-cop turned schoolteacher “Prez” Pryzbylewski) who somehow manage to keep their heads down, plug away and, ultimately, hold the world together for the rest of us. (Now if only the not-racist-at-all Emmy voters would notice and finally honor The Wire with at least one friggin’ award.)

DOGVILLE (2003)

Lars Von Trier's Dogville (the first of his proposed – and still uncompleted – "U.S.A. – Land of Opportunities" trilogy) certainly got the job done in terms of provocation. Von Trier, already one of the most controversial and divisive directors working today, sure wasn't going to win a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic when he announced, not long after September 11, 2001, his intention of making three films whose intent was to turn a gimlet eye on some of the ugliest aspects of American culture. And when Dogville was released, it had a polarizing effect almost immediately: for everyone who praised its uniformly excellent cast, its stark, eerie direction, and its brilliantly minimalist set design (which served as an unsettling visual reference to that most all-American of plays, Thornton Wilder's Our Town), there was someone who condemned its inflammatory rhetoric, its brutal tone, and its determination to poke at the festering sores of everything bad about America, from racism to sexism to crime to class inequity. Some critics – no names, no pack drill – apparently became so unhinged over the movie that they spoke of it in terms better suited to hate crimes, or even war crimes, than to movie reviews. But the deeply dividing effect that Dogville had on audiences and critics may have proven nothing more than the fact that the reaction Von Trier gets out of his movies is exactly the reaction that he wants.

ROGER AND ME (1989)

No list of films critical of America could be complete without a Michael Moore documentary (strangely enough, no one at Screengrab headquarters was lobbying for Canadian Bacon), so it was only a matter of choosing which one. In the end, there was no real choice. Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the most incendiary grenade Moore has lobbed, but it's marred with some cable access-level conspiracy mongering. In both The Big One and Bowling for Columbine, the messenger overwhelms the message. And I'll confess I haven't seen Sicko yet – I'm simply Michael Moore-d out. But that wasn't the case back in 1989, when Roger and Me arrived in theaters as a most unlikely breath of fresh air. How unlikely? Here was a film released by a major American corporation (Warner Bros.) openly criticizing another major American corporation (General Motors) for its outrageous treatment of its employees. Here was a movie about the economic devastation wrought on an American city by the closing of its auto plants – and it was funny. Moore hadn't worn out his welcome, because we didn't know who the hell he was; he was just this shambling schlub in a ballcap trying to get an audience with GM CEO Roger Smith to find out why his hometown of Flint was being put through the wringer. If his shtick has long since grown stale, it was fresh then, enlivened by such real-life characters as Deputy Fred (who tries to evict the newly unemployed in the friendliest possible way) and the woman who offers rabbits in two varieties: "Pets or Meat." We know now about the manipulations of chronology (Horrors! In a movie?) and many of us have soured on Moore's self-aggrandizing style, but the impact and influence of Roger and Me on documentary film – for better and for worse – cannot be overstated. And if you lost your job on the assembly line and nobody gave a shit, you'd probably be grateful to have a high-profile advocate – even a self-righteous schlub in a ballcap.

BLOW OUT (1981)

The critic J. Hoberman called Brian De Palma's conspiracy movie the last great film of the 1960s, even though it was released during the first summer of the Reagan administration -- a moment that it also memorializes quite well in its own sick way. Set in Philadelphia, De Palma's picture stars John Travolta as a motion picture sound man who inadvertently records the gunshot that sends a car containing a potential presidential candidate and a hooker (Nancy Allen) into a river, killing the politician. Another figure, a photographer played by Dennis Franz, claims to have recorded the crash in a series of photos that are published in a national magazine. Meanwhile, the man who shot out the tire -- Burke, played by John Lithgow -- is committing a series of murders so that he can take out the Nancy Allen character and make it look like the work of a serial killer the papers have dubbed "the Liberty Bell Strangler." Not satisfied with this amalgam of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and G. Gordon Liddy gone off the reservation, De Palma invented his own bogus patriotic holiday, "Liberty Day", so that he could show his hero failing to save the heroine against a backdrop of oblivious citizens garishly celebrating the country whose promise we in the audience can see openly turning to criminal rot.

THE CANDIDATE (1972)

Robert Redford uses his Kennedyesque qualities -- "Kennedyesque" having once been code for anyone really good-looking who might plausibly read his subscription copy of Newsweek -- as a double-edged sword in this collaboration between a director, Michael Ritchie, with a special knack for throwaway slapstick and bits of offbeat Americana and a screenwriter, Jeremy Larner, who was regarded as a walking mother lode of inside political knowledge from his having worked as a screenwriter for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign. The film has plenty to say about the importance of money and image, at the expense of substance, in American politics, though what really sets it apart is the absolute hopelessness that comes attached to its cheerful, Zippy-like grin. Redford's Bill McKay is the son of an former governor and old-style pol (Melvyn Douglas) who, thanks to watching his father at work, knows that nothing can be achieved through conventional politics and so works as a liberal lawyer for good causes. He's talked into running against the despicable old conservative incumbent Crocker Jarmon (Don Porter) so that he can shake up the campaign and bring attention to the real issues he favors; he signs on with the understanding that he can't possibly win. But when he does so badly that he risks becoming a joke, he agrees to let the handlers polish the rough edges on his campaign style, and damned if he doesn't end up winning -- after which he turns to his chief handler (Peter Boyle) and asks, in a state of mild panic, "What do we do now?" Other movies in this period, such as The Parallax View and Executive Action, jumped on the JFK-assassination-theory bandwagon and took it on faith that if anybody decent ever ran for office in this country, the big boys would have him whacked. The Candidate's Nader-esque attitude -- that politics is such a total shuck that nobody decent would ever get involved with and if, by some accident, they did, the compromises they'd have to agree to would reduce them to a dithering nothing -- seems less doom-laden on the surface but is actually much worse, if only because so many intelligent people find it irresistable as a reason for bowing out of political engagement altogether.

Click here for Part Two and Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Oliver Stone Finds His Dick

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

When last we checked in with Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic, W., most of the major players were in place. Josh Brolin was busy practicing his chimplike smirk and hunched shrug of defeat for the title role, with Elizabeth Banks as the missus, and the cabinet filled out by Thandie Newton (Condi Rice), Rob Corddry (Ari Fleischer) and Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell).

One major hole remained: the man behind the throne, Dick Cheney. Speculation pointed to Robert Duvall (who reportedly turned down the role) and Paul Giamatti (who may have had his fill of White House machinations with John Adams). Now it appears the role has been filled.

The Hollywood Reporter sez: “Richard Dreyfuss could soon make the trip to Oliver Stone's White House, entering final negotiations to play Dick Cheney in the provocateur director's upcoming W.” The Reporter also passes on the following helpful tidbit: “The 60-year-old Dreyfuss has never played a U.S. leader, but has had a few related roles. He starred as an opposition senator to Michael Douglas' commander in chief in 1995's The American President, as Alexander Haig in a television movie about Ronald Reagan and played the president of a banana republic in the 1980s comedy Moon Over Parador.”

How appropriate that it took the addition of a Jaws star for the casting of W. to jump the shark.

Spike Lee Blasts Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Talking up his World War II epic Miracle at St. Anna, due in October from Walt Disney (!), Spike Lee took the opportunity to get in some shots at a couple of perennial Cannes darlings.

It wasn’t quite Kanye West declaring that George Bush doesn’t like black people, but Lee did have some thoughts to share about Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed pair of WWII pics, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. "Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee told reporters. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

At least that observation has some relevance to Lee’s current project, but he seemed to go out of his way to swipe at the Coen brothers as well. "I always treat life and death with respect, but most people don't. Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life like a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that."

All of this comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which also notes that Lee is about to start work on a documentary about basketball legend Michael Jordan. Lee knows Jordan from the commercials they did together for sneakers made by Asian sweatshop labor, a little factoid Eastwood or the Coens may want to bring up next time the Do the Right Thing man starts gassing on about his respect for human life.

First Look at Oliver Stone’s Capra-esque Bush Bio

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new issue of Entertainment Weekly provides our first peek at Josh Brolin as George W. Bush and Elizabeth Banks as First Lady Laura Bush. It does not give us a gander at Dick Cheney, as that part has yet to be cast even though Oliver Stone’s W (or possibly dub-ya) is set to go before the cameras in less than two weeks. “Stone denies rumors that Robert Duvall turned down Cheney. And he won't comment on reports that he's talking to Paul Giamatti about the part.” From John Adams to Dick Cheney? That’s a depressing commentary in itself.

It’s quite a startling transformation for Josh Brolin, from the Marlboro Man of No Country for Old Men to the “Cowboy President.” (It may be an equally startling transformation for Elizabeth Banks, but I don’t think I could have picked her out of a lineup before this.) “When Oliver approached me about George Bush my initial reaction was 'Why would I want to do that?” says an entirely sensible Brolin. “But Oliver pointed out certain similarities I had with the character. We both have well-known fathers. We both grew up in the country. We both have strong mothers.”

As for why Stone is making this movie at all, the auteur gasses thusly: “I think history is going to be very tough on him. But that doesn't mean he isn't a great story. It's almost Capra-esque, the story of a guy who had very limited talents in life, except for the ability to sell himself. The fact that he had to overcome the shadow of his father and the weight of his family name — you have to admire his tenacity. There's almost an Andy Griffith quality to him, from A Face in the Crowd. If Fitzgerald were alive today, he might be writing about him. He's sort of a reverse Gatsby.”

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Stone movie without controversy, particularly in matters of historical accuracy, but the director is having none of it. “I'm tired of defending the accuracy of my movies. I'm past that now. JFK was a case to be proven, Nixon was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I'm not bound by those strictures anymore. Bush is not a complex and dark man, so it's different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He's awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He's not your average president. So let's have some fun with it. What are they going to do? 'Discredit' me again?”

We’ll all get the chance, maybe sooner than expected. Stone is hoping to have the movie in theaters before Election Day.

Independent Film Festival of Boston: Three Things I've Learned About Crawford, Texas

Andrew Osborne — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Crawford, a documentary about (and named for) George W. Bush’s favorite cynically selected folksy backdrop...I mean, uh, vacation spot...was first reviewed here by Scott Von Doviak (at SXSW) and will screen this weekend at the Independent Film Festival of Boston.

The film profiles the titular town and its residents from just before the future commander-in-chief’s arrival (he bought his ranch there around the time of the 2000 presidential campaign, back when he was governor of the state) through the Decider's recent reversals of fortune. The film was a little preachy-to-the-choir but interesting and taught me the following things about Crawford...

1. The town is small, but not really as dusty and rural as the president would have you believe. In fact, in one of the doc’s best moments, the filmmakers reveal how dozens of different TV news crews use the same farm equipment as a backdrop for their reports from the "Western White House," while carefully framing out the modern high school adjacent to the folksy rustic hardware.

2. There’s a pretty wide, purple-state range of opinions in the heart of "Bush country"...and, in fact, a “peace house” was sitting smack dab in the middle of Crawford even before Cindy Sheehan and the Camp Casey crowd showed up.

3. Once the novelty wears off, having your small town crammed with reporters, protesters and secret service agents gets old pretty quick.

Light It Up: Perfecting the "Stoner Protest Comedy" with Harold and Kumar

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

It has been suggested that, after the box-office (and, largely, critical and artistic) failure of the big, dramatic "Iraq war" films of yesteryear, the next step at dealing with the great issue of our times in movies will be through satire. But still, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay? It's good to know going in that they escape, but still, is everybody sure that Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg--who created the characters played by John Cho and Kal Penn in their screenplay for the 2004 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and who co-wrote and co-directed the new movie-- can be trusted to address the subject of "post-9/11 paranoia" with the right tone? Speaking to Dennis Lim, Schlossberg was quick to insist, “It’s not that Guantánamo Bay itself is funny.” Okay, that's a good start. Apparently the Gitmo thread was written into the sequel partly as a response to Penn's own difficulties when he was trying to get around to promote the first film. “Once we were with a friend of mine — he’s the same age, same height as me, except he’s white,” Penn says. “I was stopped at security, but he went through even though he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. They were so focused on pulling out the brown guy, they didn’t even notice.” He adds, "“That’s probably one of the only parallels between Kumar and me. We both get pulled out of line at airports.” Did you get that, studio bosses, LAPD, and Fox Network? It's one of the only parallels between them. Kal Penn does not toke up!

As Dennis Lim points out, "Race is at once central and beside the point in the Harold and Kumar movies. Casually integrating nonwhite heroes into a genre that has always been a white male preserve, the films seize on smutty, gross-out humor as the great equalizer. The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience." (Or, as Schlossberg puts it, “If you don’t know that [racism is bad], you’re a moron.") Beyond that, the filmmakers resist being politically pigeonholed--which is in itself a political statement, since it implies that they reject the notion, still prevalent in some quarters, that rejecting racism is a partisan position. James Adomian turns up in the new movie as George W. Bush, an appearance that Lim describes as "while not exactly respectful, it is arguably the most sympathetic movie portrayal of him to date." “In our minds he isn’t that much different than Kumar in terms of motivation and certain life issues," says Hurwitz. "Both characters have a family trade they’re pushed toward and have a certain attitude of resistance.”

“Don't Get Cute, Turdblossom”: Inside Oliver Stone’s Bush Biopic

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Oliver Stone’s latest presidential biopic W. isn’t due in theaters until the end of the year, but the early reviews are already in. A draft of the screenplay by Stanley Weiser has been leaked, and even though reports indicate the script has been revised at least twice in the interim, that hasn’t stopped the Hollywood Reporter from soliciting feedback from Bush experts.

“It leaves you with the impression that the White House is run as a fraternity house with no reverence for hierarchy, the office itself or for the implications of policy,” said Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush. “Everybody calling everybody else nicknames and chatting about whether to go to war as if they were chatting about how to bet on a football game really misses the mark of how many White Houses, including this one, are run… Bush's adversaries have been ill-served by this belief that Bush is an observer to his own presidency. This notion that his schedule is driven by what's on ESPN is ludicrous.”

In his defense, Weiser notes that he has read 17 books on Bush. Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is more than a little skeptical of Stone’s motives. “His saying he is going to be fair to Bush is like Donald Trump saying he is going to be modest.” Apparently Weisberg passed on his advance copy of the script to Slate contributor Juliet Lapidos, who provides some juicy excerpts and dialogue exchanges in this piece. Exhibit A:

“Pages 48-51: A ‘slightly snockered’ W. nearly kills his friend Don Evans during a joy ride in a Cessna jet. Evans gets worried when the jet begins to wobble and shake; he asks W., ‘Tell the truth—this is the first time you've ever flown a Cessna, isn't it?’ W.'s response: ‘This is how you learn. By doing. No need to ask a million questions.’ Could this scene, which ends with the plane spinning out of control and landing in a desert, be a metaphor for W.'s learn-by-doing approach to war?”

Scenes like this would certainly seem to be in line with Stone’s usual light touch, but it remains to be seen how many of them survive into the final version. We certainly hope this exchange makes it intact:

Chief Speech Writer: "Axis of hatred?" I don't know. Something about it … just misses.

Rove: Well, then what about "Axis of the unbearably odious?"

Bush: Don't get cute, Turdblossom. This is serious.

Chief Speechwriter: What about … "Axis of Evil?"

Bush: "Axis of Evil." I like the ring of that. That's it.

Oliver Stone Pitches a “W”

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:30:00 GMT

President George W. Bush threw out the traditional first pitch in the Washington Nationals’ home opener last night, the first game in their new ballpark. (The Nationals won on a walkoff homerun by Ryan Zimmerman, who is on my fantasy team, thank you very much.) The Prez was greeted by either a chorus or a smattering of boos, depending on your affiliation. We wonder what sort of reception was Oliver Stone hoping to hear; in other words, what sort of audience will there be for his rapidly developing biopic W?

Last week we noted the casting of Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Banks as Dubya and his First Lady, Laura Bush. Now Entertainment Weekly reports that “James Cromwell is in negotiations to play George Bush Sr., and Jeffrey Wright (Casino Royale) is in talks for the role of Colin Powell. But at press time, it was still unclear who will take the role of Vice President Dick Cheney. A source close to the production tells EW that Stone will reach out to Oscar winner Robert Duvall, though the actor's agency says that an offer has not yet been presented.” And then there are the rumors. Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere says he has been “told about three casting ‘likes’ for Oliver Stone's W -- i.e., actors who are wanted for the George Bush biopic but not (as far as my source knows) signed. Toby Jones (who plays legendary super-agent Swifty Lazar in Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon) is being sought to play Karl Rove. They want Jeffrey Wright to play Colin Powell, and they'd like Tommy Lee Jones to have a go at Donald Rumsfeld. Again -- nothing firm, no contracts.” Paul Giamatti is also rumored as a possible Rove, per New York magazine.

Whether there’s any truth to these rumors should become clear quickly, as shooting is scheduled to begin April 21st in Shreveport, Louisiana. Stone is looking to have the movie in theaters before Bush leaves office in January – a sort of goodbye present, no doubt. It’s still not clear what the director finds so compelling about Dubya’s story, but the official line is that the film will be “the improbable story of a man who went to the White House despite getting fewer votes than his opponent; who became commander-in-chief despite having avoided military combat himself; and who became the least popular president ever elected to a second term. W will shock and surprise you and leave you questioning everything you believe to be true.” Here’s something we believe to be true: this will be another Oliver Stone film that leaves us questioning everything.

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.”

SXSW Review: Crawford

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Why would the president of the United States want to spend the hottest month of the summer in a tiny town in the middle of Texas? When asked, many residents of Crawford, TX are baffled; surely Hawaii would make for a nicer vacation spot. High school teacher Misti Turbeville isn’t mystified, however; when George W. Bush purchased his Crawford ranch while gearing up for his presidential run, it was clear to her that some image-making was on the agenda. The candidate needed a home besides the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas, just a few short blocks from the Paramount Theater where David Modigliani’s immersive documentary Crawford premiered on Saturday.

No one ever heard of Crawford before the year 2000, and that’s just the way most of the 700 or so residents liked it. In the years since, they have seen media hordes descend on their town in the wake of the Florida election fiasco, souvenir shops crop up along main street, and protesters and counter-protesters swarm and multiply along every roadside. Crawford is about the townspeople, and the effect the “Western White House” has had on their lives.

Some, like conservative shop owner Norma Nelson-Crow, are thrilled to share their hometown with the president. Others, like Turbeville and her student Tom Warlick, grow increasingly disgruntled, particularly in the wake of 9-11 and the ensuing war in Iraq. Once Cindy Sheehan arrives in town and establishes Camp Casey, a haven for war protesters on the outskirts of Bush’s property, many longtime Crawford residents have had enough of tourists and outsiders.

Crawford is about people as much as it is about politics – it wouldn’t be half as interesting without character like folksy rancher Pug Meyers and alienated teen Warlick, who hardly seem like they inhabit the same planet, let alone the same one-light town. It’s also about media complicity in Bush’s myth-making; the townspeople are bemused to see all of the network news correspondents setting up in front of the same ramshackle shed and bale of hay, all the better to enhance the president’s cowboy image. In the end, there’s one thing Bush’s supporters and detractors all seem to agree on: they’ll be happy when it’s over and life gets back to normal.

World Film Beat: "The District!"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

At a time when a black and white animated movie about growing up as an aspiring punk in the shadow of the Iranian revolution can be nominated for an Academy Award, it might seem that animation has lost its identity as a disreputable, marginalized form, especially if it comes with subtitles. The Hungarian film The District!, which had a blip of a U.S. theatrical release a month ago and has just been released on DVD, serves as one hell of a corrective towards the trend in cartoon respectability. Set in a teeming Budapest neighborhood that's mythic in its grungy amorality — a newscaster in the film blithely describes it as a "hotbed or organized crime and the European porn industry" — it's a misanthropic vision out of Ralph Bakshi's seamiest nightmares. The movie traffics in ethnic stereotypes, some pretty standard (Jewish, Arab) and some more exotic — when's the last time you saw a movie that went out of its way to slander the Gypsy community? It's also energetic and funny, with a mock-hip hop soundtrack, and it has its own look. The filmmakers cast "actors" as the characters, then took multiple head shots of their faces and tacked those onto hand-drawn bodies. Presumably to match up with the herky-jerky way the faces lurch instantaneously from one expression the the next, the bodies move like jointed cardboard marionettes. Visually, the total effect is grotesque, but in a not-displeasing way. Actually, that wouldn't be such a bad tagline for the movie itself.

The District! was directed by Aron Gauder and written by Erik Novak (who also produced and wrote the music), Máriusz Bari, Viktor Nagy, and László Jakab Orsós, and they're so plainly eager to give offense that it's a pleasure to accommodate them. The plot centers on the little rascals of the district, a bunch of local kids who want to get in on the neighborhood action but who, unlike their pimping, gambling, boozing fathers, think big: they build a time machine, go back to prehistoric times, wipe out a herd of mammoths and bury their bleached corpses, so that they can return to the present day, harvest the fossil fuel and become oil tycoons. It's typical of the movie's cheeky topical humor that, to accomplish this goal, they make use of a suitcase bomb that the Arab kid acquires from Osama bin Laden, who's hiding out in a plush lair beneath the family store. (Some of the other faces in the movie — presumably they belong to local politicians — have been concealed, but Bin Laden's hasn't. I guess the filmmakers fear litigation more than fatwa.) The action eventually draws in George W. Bush — first seen while "hunting", picking off wild boars with a high-powered rifle, from the safety of a high tower — who is prepared to go nuclear to prove that "Europe has no control over our righteous, God-given economy." Even when its jokes fall flat, The District!'s sheer audaciousness makes it something to stare at. A midnight movie of the old school, it's a real blast of foul air.

Morning Deal Report: Oliver Stone Directing Bush Biopic

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Oliver Stone is planning Bush, a biopic of the world's cleverest president, which he says will be "give a sense of what it's like to be in his skin." He's already cast Josh Brolin, apparently. Too bad this title is already taken. Still, they could do better than just plain ol' Bush, no? What about The Decider? Goin' Nucular? Where Wings Take Dream?

Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst will star together in All Good Things, the feature debut of Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki.

If you like the National Lampoon movies, but sometimes feel alienated by their excessive classiness, we've got just the production for you: Maxim's Mardi Gras, shooting this spring. Take your chick, bro!

Adrien Brody will play legendary R&B mogul Leonard Chess, against Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, in Cadillac Records.

"Chuck Norris Doesn't Endorse, He Tells America How It's Gonna Be!"

Peter Smith — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Iowa voters (and anyone with an Internet connection) have just begun seeing this campaign ad, in which Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reels off a few of the more family-friendly and less pretzel-twistingly surreal "Chuck Norris facts" while Norris sits beside him assuring potential voters that the Huckster will protect our Second Amendment rights and "put the IRS out of business." Taken strictly on an aesthetic level, and reminding everyone that any time we use that term in reference to political commercials we're grading on a curve, it's a smart piece of work. Discussing the ad in Slate, the site's "Trailhead" campaign blogger writes, "It's unclear to me why he would base his first Hawkeye State TV campaign on an outdated Internet meme that might not have trickled up to most caucus-goers," thus paradoxically implying that the "Norris facts" angle is all played-out, yet at the same time suggesting that it's too hip for the room. What may really matter is that in a contest where all the other Republican candidates have been concentrating on establishing their grim-manliness bona fides, Huckabee has unexpectedly demonstrated a sense of humor. What's more, he's dared to suggest there's something comical about macho icons, and maybe, by extension, something comical about a bunch of middle-aged rich white guys competing in a "Who Is Most Macho?" contest. Huckabee's delivery in the ad is pretty good, too; he doesn't ham it up, but unlike, say Richard Nixon, whose last words might well have been, "Explain to me again what I was doing on Laugh-In", he does make it clear that he gets the joke. If Huckabee gets anywhere in the primaries, it'll be because he manages to establish himself as the preferred candidate of religious conservatives, but if he builds on that base, it'll be because he manages, as George W. Bush did in 2000, to strike voters who might be inclined to see conservative holy-roller types as kind of scary as reassuringly normal. (How Bush ever pulled this off we still don't understand. Were we all drunk that year?) If nothing else, Huckabee has already pulled off a major comedy coup by inspiring the complaint, "Mike Huckabee has confused celebrity endorsement with serious policy," to pass the lips of his rival Fred Thompson, currently running for president on the basis of his record as New York City's pretend District Attorney. — Phil Nugent