I’m a sucker for the behind-the-scenes machinations of almost all things political, so the trailer for Jason Pollock’s The Youngest Candidate, a documentary focusing on a quartet of teens/early twentysomethings running for public office, is, topically, right in my wheelhouse. (Not to nag, but shouldn’t the title then be candidates, plural?) Good that it works as a piece of legitimate, intrigue-stimulating short-form non-fiction, then, no matter how the feature-length version might play out.
There are flashes of pure entertainment value in the trailer, and the life stories of the subjects seem diverse and interesting, too. Still, even as someone who recognizes that ageism exists, and is distasteful, I’m perhaps most heartened that Pollock doesn’t seem to give these kids a free pass; the movie appears to capture and embrace the headstrong obstinateness of youth, and craft an implicit narrative track that underscores the counterbalancing value and significance of experience and discretion — the latter one of the most difficult learned traits of adolescence. I missed The Youngest Candidate‘s special “Donkaphant” festival screening about a month back, pegged to coincide with the Los Angeles Film Festival, but look forward to seeing it hopefully gain some traction elsewhere, either on the festival circuit or with an eventual boutique release.
As part of his advocacy work for clean water and sanitation around the world, actor Matt Damon recently visited new water projects in India, and also took part in some cultural activities (thus the Bindhi mark on his forehead). While there, he took a few minutes to thank the more than 100,000 ONE members who signed a petition to United States senators asking them to cosponsor the Durbin-Corker Water for the World Act, and show an example of the kind of projects the bill will support.
His new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, doesn’t drop until early October, but Hollywood Elsewhere nicely links and recapsa recent, illuminating Bill Moyers interview with Wendell Potter, the former vice president of corporate communications for CIGNA, and a current health care advocate with the Center for Media and Democracy, about how Michael Moore‘s 2007 documentary Sicko got the shaft, in the form of meticulously strategized undercutting by the health care industry. It’s from the same old slippery-slope, fear-the-government playbook that moneyed powers-that-be have used to forestall social progressivism for years if not decades, but I can tell you that this sort of shit sounds like white noise to a lot of the under-35 set.
In hard-nosed fashion, actor Alec Baldwin takes a swipe at CNN’s Jack Cafferty, who apparently previously questioned his credentials to ever run for public office. I generally love slap-fests like this, because it’s just baiting the societal trap for more political engagement, albeit in incremental fashion.
War may indeed be hell, but on screen the polarity of its heightened stakes can make occasional fodder for some wicked comedy, which is certainly the case with the very funny In the Loop, a feverishly pitched political satire in which low- to mid-level British diplomats and their American counterparts all try to advance their own contrasting agendas during the lead-up to a preemptive war in the Middle East. It’s rare, the movie that consistently delivers this much towel-snapping pleasure in its dialogue, and it’s rarer still that it comes attached to something that wants to make you think. For that reason, In the Loop is the perfect indie antidote to so much droning, effects-laden summer fare.
Iraq is never explicitly mentioned, and so In the Loop vaguely unfolds in a nebulous, alt-universe present day, though clearly its narrative is a farcical stand-in for the prelude to that invasion. Against this backdrop, the movie throws together nearly a dozen clashing personalities, almost all arguably jockeying for some degree of personal glory and/or taking delight in the stumbles of a rival while also happening to execute their official duties.
While their respective heads of state (never glimpsed) seem set on a path to war, dovish American Lt. General George Miller (James Gandolfini) doesn’t think invasion is the answer, and neither does the British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander). After Foster accidentally seems to rule out military action in an innocuous TV interview, he suddenly has some new friends in Washington, D.C., including Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and her aide, Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky).
Meanwhile, as Foster and his harried new political advisor, Toby Wright (Chris Addison, above right), try to repair his image, a pros-and-cons-of-war memo penned by Liza, an old college friend of Toby’s, leaks out and is misconstrued by various parties. All of this frustrates to no end the Prime Minister’s chief communications spin-doctor and pit bull, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, above left), who’s helping push a war resolution vote at the United Nations.
Co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci, In the Loop is delightfully acerbic, and well acted across the board. There’s an effervescence and manic, wheels-spinning charm to all the turmoil and dressings-down that is reminiscent of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, and the entire thing is cut together with the energy and verve of a top-shelf action movie. Over an hour into the film, there’s a jarring moment of silence for an establishing shot, and it’s here that one most fully realizes just how crammed with whip smart, overlapping banter almost every other nook and cranny is.
Overall, the narrative focus skews toward the British side; its humor (or perhaps that should be spelled humour) leans a bit more heavily on across-the-pond notions of bureaucratic gear-grinding, as evidenced by Foster’s continuing inability to speak in bland, safe aphorisms (never really a problem for American politicians), and an arguably extraneous story strand involving Steve Coogan as an English constituent angry about a collapsing wall near his mother’s property. Hubris, workplace rage, and CYA-protectionism is universal, though, and accordingly In the Loop translates smashingly well. (IFC Films, R, 106 minutes)
Lapsed Republican Andrew Sullivan takes a swing at the Coulter-O’Reilly-Limbaugh-Hannity flu-strain of conservatism, and ticks off why the GOP is poison to him. Namely, it’s “their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders.” Sullivan also wonders when someone will “Sister Souljah them,” but then (correctly) arrives at the truth: whom Republicans hate is their core motivation right now.
I recently put a bullet in a long-lingering copy of Sidney Lumet’s Power, from 1986. It’s a not-at-all-bad political-power-broker drama, starring a mustachioed Richard Gere as Pete St. John, a hired-gun, high-billing, ultra-successful political image consultant who’s wrapping up a populist national campaign in South America while also overseeing simultaneous gubernatorial races in New Mexico and Washington, plus a special Ohio senate election to fill the seat of one of his first clients, and perhaps closest friend.
The film’s plot turns mostly on the latter strand, and a potential blackmail/political reorganization scheme that may be afoot in an effort to squash — get this — a comprehensive renewable energies program. Yes, in 1986. Some other forward-reaching, ahead-of-the-curve and/or timeless bits — including eerily appropriate invocations of “straight talk” and not being “able to afford on-the-job-training” — help make the movie look hip, politically knowing and with it, if the fashions certainly don’t. It’s desperately out of step, however, with regards to the mercenary ethic with which it imbues St. John. Money may have ruled in the mid-1980s, but partisans on both sides have since hardened; while party switcheroos are not unusual, either early or late in political life (see James A. Baker, and most recently Arlen Specter), top-shelf campaign gunners could now certainly not move so freely along the ideological spectrum as Gere’s character. They wouldn’t be trusted — kind of like a guy who neither drinks nor knows a single thing about any sport. Information would be withheld, jaws clenched, etcetera; destruction would commence from the inside out, on one brittle campaign or another.
Mostly, though, I was struck by an amusing depiction of technology in Power. There’s a 103-second computer search sequence (think about that) where a number-crunching ally of St. John tries to unearth the business connections, off-shore and otherwise, of a shadowy lobbyist (played by Denzel Washington) who’s hired St. John to oversee the campaign of a well-financed Ohio Democrat. It’s a looong scene, sure, so it’s funny in that regard. But it’s also notable because the character even leaves the room, assuming, I guess, that it will take his supercomputer all night to complete the task. Watching this, you can’t convince me that Google and other search engines, for all their advantages, aren’t going to (even further) massively effect the gratification impulses of today’s kids. This partially relates, I believe, to the Bush administration’s (political) success in playing so fast and loose with facts about the Iraq War, torture, et al. Why? Because information seemingly means less when, over and over, it’s gained without consistent, focused mental effort.
In a blog posting over on the Huffington Post, Sean Penn — no blind, knee-jerk supporter of Barack Obama — takes the piss out of those that would criticize Obama’s recent handshake with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, saying, “This is a pattern of bad acting advice from bad actors. All wimps think playing a tough guy is done in one-note coldness. With a friend or an enemy, our president will gain greater strategic position with a smile.”
From The 213, Telly Davidson’s take on Right America: Feeling Wronged, Alexandra Pelosi’s new HBO documentary about “those for whom the economy hasn’t worked since Ford and Carter,” and thus fear that guy, now president, with the funny name, and love the give-’em-hell-facts-be-damned moxie of that personable Sarah Palin. The hour-long doc debuts tonight, and then enjoys rebroadcasts on February 19, 22 and 25, as well as March 7 and 10.
On Friday, January 2, the Aero gets political with a Frank Capra double feature, hosting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at 7:30 p.m. and Meet John Doe at 10 p.m. The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for these movies, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
From the intersection of religion, politics and douchiness comes this guy, a South Carolina priest who says his congregants who voted for Barack Obamashouldn’t take communion until they’ve done penance for supporting the man he called “the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or run for president.”
On the eve of the election, sign up to be notified when advance tickets go on sale for Will Ferrell’s January 20, 2009 Broadway bow, in the form of You’re Welcome America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. After previews, the show officially opens on February 5, and runs through March 15, at the Cort Theatre, on West 48th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues.
Sure, the presidential election looms, but 28-year-old actor Jason Ritter is a one-man October surprise. In the low-budget indie Good Dick, he stars opposite longtime real-life girlfriend Marianna Palka, also the film’s writer-director, as a Los Angeles videostore clerk who slowly draws a sullen, emotionally deadened young woman out of her claustrophobic cocoon of hostility and sexual antipathy. In Oliver Stone’s W., Ritter — who as the son of the late John Ritter knows a thing about family legacies — portrays Jeb Bush to Josh Brolin’s title character. I spoke with Ritter recently about Stone, traditional notions of male chivalry and Jeb Bush’s pot-smoking Socialist period. For the full Q&A interview, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. More from the interview to follow later in the week.
Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner has an interesting interview with Oliver Stone in advance of W.‘s release this Friday, and Stone specifically addresses some of the heat he’s feeling from the far left, namely that the movie is too empathetic a portrait of George Bush: “We didn’t go against the truth. We show clearly what kind of man he is:
a simple-minded man with limited intellectual curiosity. That’s the
essence of the man. It doesn’t matter that we don’t show him doing
cocaine or drinking too much — you don’t have to dwell on his defects.
What are his crimes? He’s embraced the war on terror in the notion that
it’s a war for freedom and democracy, for good vs. bad, which is a very
Manichaean view of the world, and a very simplistic view.”
David Brooks nails the gear-grinding turmoil of the Republican party. To wit: “This year could have changed things. The GOP had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking ‘eastern elites.’ (Mitt Romney!) And John McCain picked Sarah Palin. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch. And so, politically, the GOP is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”
With its endless stream of partisan cookie cutter talking points, GOP tutors help tell Sarah Palin what to say… but now you can too, courtesy of the hilarious new interactive Palindrome site, which lets users muck around with audio snippets from her speeches and debate appearance to form entirely new sentences, not unlike those packets of tiny refrigerator magnets sold at specialty gift stores. Very user-friendly, the site, if a bit slow at times. My contribution. And another good one.
Wow. This is most assuredly not the video to attach to international tourism entreaties. It does chillingly explain the political persistence of xenophobic character assaults, though — because there are still (always?) easily impressionable bumpkin loons like this. We get it, m’am… you don’t at all like Barack Obama‘s middle name. (As a side note, I like the background plea of “Don’t spill that beer!”) On the plus side, though, she also says, “Black ain’t got nothing to do with how these Arabs are trying to sneak this guy into our country.” So… one small step, I guess?
The new tactic of political persuasion? Sarcasm, per this celeb-laden voter registration video, which seeks to insidiously undermine apathy through phony slacker identification. The list of familiar faces runs into the dozens, but it’s Sarah Silverman and Jonah Hill who get off some of the best one-liners. “Darfur? I don’t even know what that is — that sounds like a T-shirt company to me,” says Hill. Later, Silverman adds: “You can literally register to vote while pooping… if you have a laptop.”
When was the last time you saw a white guy, in a major forum, go off against racism so heartily, as the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka does here? Andrew Sullivan is right — it is moving, and the seeds for something profound could start to germinate in this election if we really want it to. Trumka’s speech is all the more affecting because of the blue-collar nature of it, that it’s not totally polished or driven by intellectual reasoning. In Hollywood studio speech-writing, this might not quite fly. But it’s real, and of the world. And by the time Trumka reaches his voice-raised (near-screaming) climax, you feel the passion and force of his words. For those pooh-poohing the notion of hope, or mockingly wondering what “the fierce urgency of now” means, this is it, concentrated.
I commented a few days back on the brilliant, evocative new trailer for Oliver Stone’s W., and it’s now up and running in chopped-and-diced form in 30-second television spots, including on MSNBC and CNN. There’s a new line not glimpsed in the theatrical/online long-form cut (“I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up at lunch,” says President Bush says to Vice President Cheney when the latter starts talking about the potential for an anthrax attack), but perhaps most fascinating is the inclusion of voiceover and text narration that sells the film as “based on the unbelievable true story of George W. Bush, and the trillion dollar mistake.”
Wait… which trillion dollars, again? I know it’s not the Iraq War (which currently sits at around $585 billion, but runs as high as $3 trillion when factoring in long-term costs). And it’s not the total federal deficit, which has ballooned to $10 trillion-plus under Bush. Oh, right… it’s that other $1 trillion or so ripped from taxpayers’ futures, in the form of the Congressional economic bail-out package. Put a saddle on this guy. I can’t recall any other agitated-entertainment promotional campaign — and this includes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — so openly, contemptuously bagging on a public figure, and incorporating up-to-minute material. Of course, I can’t really recall anyone else who has so brought it upon themselves and deserved it, either. Regardless, it’s the right campaign to run for W., really, stripping the bark off its own subject of focus. This push has me rethinking my previous assessment that Stone’s movie is financially doomed; talking to a few friends and colleagues recently opened my mind to at least the possibility that the filmgoing public could be receptive to a cathartic dismissive experience, something I hadn’t previously considered.
