William Jennings Bryant 1860-1925

In reviewing Michael Kazin's new biography of William Jennings Bryant, Andrew O'Hehir also provides a terrific summation of the mercurial Democratic demagogue most famous today for allying his name to creationism during the Scopes trial, the "Cross of Gold" speech of 1896, and for running (and losing) for president three times (still a record):

He convinced his followers that he was for the little guy and for Christian virtue, and that they came to the same thing in the end. But beyond a general constellation of issues that varied only slightly during his 30 years in public life, neither Bryan nor his believers worried much about ideological consistency. At various times and for various reasons, Bryan made common cause with the Socialist Party, the American Federation of Labor, biblical fundamentalists and the Ku Klux Klan.

How do you categorize a politican who ran as a committed populist, resigned as Woodrow Wilson's secretary of state to protest American involvement in World War I (and was probably correct), then exploited the most abject kind of rural ignorance to protest the teaching of evolution in the mid 1920's. As most of his admiring colleagues were prepared to admit, Bryan didn't know much. After he got the Democratic nomination in 1896, Thomas Gore, the first senator of Oklahoma (and grandfather of Gore Vidal), famously said, "He never learend anything else ever again in his life."

As heavy as a Chevy

Me on Kool & The Gang's unexpected masterpiece, "Misled."

O' Reilly, Kaus, Krauthammer: There still ain't no reins on this one

Not particularly profound column by Andrew Sullivan on the surprising success of Brokeback Mountain, but it's worth reading for two reasons: rereading comments by nabobs back in December (like Charles Krauthammer's charming "Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people — but the right 18 — and will win the Academy Award" remark in a Washington Post column); and his quiet wish that America acknowledge its peculiar homosocial history:

In America this is particularly odd, since the greatest gay writer in its history, Walt Whitman, was a man of the heartland. And you only have to read about the early years of Abraham Lincoln’s life to see that same-sex love and friendship was integral to the making of America, especially in its wildernesses and frontiers. You see that today even in the American gay vote, a third of which routinely backs Republicans.

Workin' in a coal mine

Oscar season forces us to ignore the better angels of our nature. It took two nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to compel me to watch a movie I already knew was foul. North Country takes Norma Rae, Karen Silkwood, Erin Brokovich, and Anita Hill, locks them in a Port-A-Potty, then topples it so that they're covered in piss and shit (fun fact: this happens to one of the film's hapless woman coal miners!). This is the kind of film in which the men all flash missing teeth, glower around a facefful of coal dust, and shout vituperations like "This bitch wants to take every single swingin' dick!" so that the audience understands that Sexism Still Exists. North Country makes Crash seem like Grand Illusion.

Lots of good actors are wasted. Sissy Spacek has one quietly pungent moment in which she lets her husband know that she ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. Channelling Fargo's Marge Gunderson and her Wise Mom in Almost Famous, Frances McDormand is halfway successful at creating an original character. Unfortunately it reminds you of other movie characters, not a life; then she gets Lou Gehrig's Disease and talks through one of those larynx voiceboxs. That's the end of her performance. As Theron's father, Richard Jenkins of "Six Feet Under" fame comes closest to truth, notably in the scene in which he admits he doesn't like his daughter very much.

I don't get Charlize Theron. Yeah, she's purty and all, and she's got some talent, but her career is a textbook example of a fallacy every beautful actor or actress must commit, a fallacy which we will henceforth refer to as the Lange-Pitt Syndrome: plagued by misgivings about their looks, they accept any/every role which suppresses their greatest asset (that's what happens when the studio system collapses: a movie star's narcissism overwhelms his/her common sense). Theron was charming in an unforced way in Woody Allen's Celebrity (she was the only human being in the film) and movie-star-glamorous in The Italian Job. In Monster, her Oscar-endoresed turn, the director didn't give Theron anything interesting to do except make cretin faces at the camera. Moreover, she was too conscious of the pancake makeup that turned her into a murderous banshee; at times she seemed to be impersonating a beautiful woman's rage when she's suddenly made ugly (Tom Cruise endured similar raptures in Vanilla Sky). Critics are ever susceptible to rewarding actorly exertions.

Flag schmag.

In response to a student's insistence that we must salute the flag to evince our patriotism:

Has anyone ever figured out calmly what effect the flag drills, patriotic pageants, and other such maudlin buffooneries, now raging everywhere in the federal union, will proabably have upon the rising generation? Go look at one of these exhibitions if you are in doubt...If this is a good way to inculcate love of country, then a good way to inculcate a love of aquatic sports would be to play upon the kids with a fire hose. It is, in fact, precisely the best way imaginable to make patriotism loathsome. The young emerge from their banal gestures and recitations with a firm conviction, probably never to be broken in after life, that venerating the flag is an operation not distinguishable from learning the multiplacation table, taking castor oil, or getting washed behind the ears.

-- H.L. Mencken, "The Psychic Follies," November 7, 1926.

¡Viva Altman!

I can't think of a more infuriating director than Robert Altman. Responsible for some of the most wondrous, idiosyncratic films of all time (M.A.S.H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, 3 Women, Vincent & Theo, The Player – films whose poetry is vulgar, offbeat, and distinctly American), he's also capable of enterprises of stupefying badness (Buffalo Bill & The Indians, Health, Ready to Wear, Kansas City, The Company) as well as near-misses (California Split, 3 Women, Short Cuts, Gingerbread Man, Gosford Park). The guy is almost 80, has fought with studios for almost half those years, and shows no signs of quitting. On the evidence of McCabe & Mrs. Miller alone I could make a case for him as the greatest American filmmaker of the last half-century (and I've yet to see Thieves Like Us).

So, it is with a mixture of delight and scorn that I applaud the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for awarding Altman an honorary Oscar – his first, after five nominations as Best Director. Yup, the same honorary Oscar that Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Martin Scorsese have won when the Academy, in shame and embarassment, ignores the fact that it rewarded George Roy Hill, John G. Avildsen, and Kevin Costner instead. Terrence Rafferty's generous essay is a nice overview of Altman's career; it's also got a few pungent insights, like this one about McCabe & Mrs. Miller: "It's the only movie I know of in which you can watch a community come into existence, changing and growing before your eyes" (it's also the only movie to find images correlative to the soundtrack, i.e. composed of Leonard Cohen songs. Convinced yet? Go rent the fucking film already).

In which I slobber over Jack Twist some more

According to Blogger.com's bylaws, every responsible blogger is permitted one posting of ridiculous fanboy gibberish (or what Andy would more accurately term, "RF"; for clarification, send an email to andy.diaz@gmail.com)

So here's mine.

To the surprise of British film industry wags, Brokeback Mountain swept the British Academy of Film Art awards last night, winning Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay. The most-nominated film, The Constant Gardener, won just one award.

The biggest upset? Jake Gyllenhaal wins Best Supporting Actor; this was a category in which "the George twins" (in Jake's words), nominated for Syriana and Good Night, Good Luck were supposed to prevail.



The boy gave such a guileless acceptance speech that even Clooney looked happy he'd lost. And on his way to the podium he almost kissed costar Heath Ledger.

Awright, I'll shut up.

Poetic interlude

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, mercdiful,
Blindfoled me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion, I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation, as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing
Into a world of wild
Flowers, feasting, tears -- or was I falling, legs
Buckling, heights, depths,
Into a pool of each night's rain?
But you were everywhere beside me, masked,
As who was not, in laughter, pain, and love.

- James Merrill, from "Days of 1964"

My interview with Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens is up. Chief among the surprise revelations is Forster's Jimmy Buffett love.

The quails have come home to roost

I have a couple of questions for David Gregory and the other reporters outraged that they weren't notified in advance that the Vice-President was going to accidentally shoot one of his quail-hunting buddies: where were you on the eve of the Iraq war? Where were you ater 9-11 when the Bush administration was scaring the bejeesus out of citizens? Save your righteous indignation for a more pressing charge. Mark R Levin's got it right:

Yes, Cheney is a public man so his actions are public -- but in this case, they are public and unimportant. David Gregory and his band of pampered colleagues may be offended but many of us are not. Sorry, I don't see any great offense or principle on display here. And I dare say most Americans are tuning out. The vice president is safe, his lawyer friend is okay, and nothing tawdry occurred. Now, back to the war

.

The wages of skin

Apa and I always tousle over the merits of Wedding Crashers, a film I wanted to love and ended up disliking intensely. It's a cowardly film, lacking the courage to follow its smut inclinations through to the denouement (Wedding Crashers is also an interminable 120 minutes-plus):

After dismissing Broken Flowers as an "an exercise in inertia," made by a filmmaker whose idea of awakening a dozing audience is to treat us to some unasked-for Lolita skin, James Wolcott lets'er rip:

A make-work project, Broken Flowers at least isn't as slapdash, bulldozingly obvious, and lumpily arrogant as Wedding Crashers, one of the worst comedies ever to win good reviews (the , disjointed 40 Year Old Virgin at least had the Bollywood finale), its dinner-party scene so badly staged and acted that someone should have nailed a "condemned" sign across Vince Vaughn's mugging mug and arranged for whoever wrote the "Eleanor Roosevelt" dyke jokes to be shipped to destinations unknown.

I wish I'd come up with "The Frat Pack," his derisive name for the Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughan-Will Ferrell trifecta

It's Giamatti and Clooney battling for Best Supporting Porcine Schlub

Phoebe's latest Oscar predix column is hilarious and spot-on, correctly predicting that the race for Supporting Actor is between George Clooney playing a fat important person in Syriana and Paul Giamatti in Cinderella Man, doing penance for not attracting voters to notice his performances in American Splendor and Sideways.

But her Jake Gyllenhaal swooning has just the right fangirl gush mitigated by tough criticism (for which I take full credit. At our last meeting, over many drinks, I extolled Gyllenhaal's greatness in Brokeback, and I finally felt as if I found someone who understood how terrific you can act in spite of an awful fake mustache).

"A collection, an assemblage, a concatenation of fibs..."

Scorching Richard Cohen column which ran on Wednesday, in which he inveighs against Alberto Gonzalez (an "apparatchik" who "lacks the courage of his mendacity") and the administration for presenting a set of hastily cobbled fictions as facts:

The argument in favor of the National Security Agency intercepts is consistent with those that took us to war in Iraq. They are all a collection, an assemblage, a concatenation of fibs, exaggerations, misinterpretations, selected evidence, hype, false leads, vile suggestions, felonious deletions and the like, which marched us to Baghdad where we remain to this day.

"I don't know why you don't want me..."

How is an artist with 11 country #1's overlooked? I dunno. It isn't because her music sucked. My appreciation for Rosanne Cash deepens with each listen; these handsome reissues by Columbia (which I review here) are the place to start.

Oh...

A reminder to check out Back & Forth. Latest entries: Matos on the Harmonettes, me on Change feat. Luther Vandross, Thomas on Sounds of Blackness (whom I've never heard of).

Jefferson: godless heathen

I love quotes by the Framers which affirm their unobtrusive atheism. Here's Thomas Jefferson, writing to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787:

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear...Those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change of the laws of nature in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, etc, but it said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired....Do not be frigthened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you....Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but uprightness of the decision.

Take that, James Dobson!

Responding to accusations that he was an unbeliever, Jefferson loudly proclaimed that he'd always been a Christian -- neglecting to inform his critics that he'd edited the Gospels so that only Jesus Christ's actual words were all that remained, unencumbered by those pesky evangelists.

Is it queer enough for you?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the promoters of Brokeback Mountain have misrepresented the film, no doubt with the best of intentions as well as practical, i.e. financial ones. Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Elusive Embrace (if you haven't read it, seek it, one of the few coming-out narratives I'll recommend), getting impatient with the critics and publicity machine which seek to turn Brokeback Mountain into a "universal love story." He especially takes issue with Roger Ebert's defense: "It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any 'forbidden' love." No way:

The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But homosexual love, so often thwarted in Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar's time, is different in that it provokes a self-loathing that's corrosive and often tragic -- a "psychological tragedy," Mendelsohn avers, although he's too quick to blame that bugaboo "society."

Plainly, the strategy has worked. I keep commenting on this film despite my caviling (it wasn't even my favorite movie of the year although it came close) because now its impact has seeped into the culture. When my students want to discuss it in class (I may ask them to read the story), when my parents complain about "Hollywood" trying "to shovel gay stuff down our throats," when my student colleagues are downloading bits of the film to watch in the newsroom -- this is clearly a mass cultural phenomenon; and like all totems, you need to take a swing at it with a sharp ax.

Oscar chatter

The redoubtable Manohla Dargis responds to questions from readers about the Oscar nominations, and their attendant vagaries. She's one of the few critics to prefer Heath Ledger's work in Brokeback Mountain ("I don’t just admire the performance on the level of craft, I am also deeply moved by it, just as I am by the film") over Philip Seymour Hoffman's in Capote ("both the performance and the film leave me cold. I don’t care about either") and to give Bill Murray what-for:

Listen, I usually love Bill Murray (I even suffered through “Garfield” because of him) and I think he should have received an Oscar and every other possible prize in creation for his performances in “Groundhog Day” and “Rushmore.” In preparation for reviewing Harold Ramis’s latest film, “The Ice Harvest” (sigh), I recently watched “Caddyshack,” “Stripes” and “Groundhog Day” back-to-back for the umpteenth time. Ivan Reitman’s “Stripes” is slapdash if a lot of fun – the other two, meanwhile, both directed by Mr. Ramis, are genius – but what struck me this time around was how much more present and engaged Mr. Murray seemed in these earlier films than he did in either “Broken Flowers” or “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” He was wonderful in Mr. Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes,” but since "Lost in Translation" he sometimes seems content to coast on his cool, which, while very considerable indeed does not a fine performance make.

Heed my advice: save the $10 and rent Crimes & Misdemeanors instead of spending the cash on Match Point. It's not the worst Woody Allen film (Interiors and September -- those echo-chamber dramas with no jokes, directed by someone with a rudimentary grasp of the English language -- will always keep those honors) but it's the most misguided attempt at a comeback since Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line. I mean, Match Point is so bad that it's perversely fascinating: Woody tries to get back into critics' good graces by reminding us of the mistakes we thought he had matured enough to learn from. We get tin-eared literary allusions ("We had the most fascinating chat about Dostoyevsky," one character actually says), wasting great actors in roles that amount to generous cameos (Brian Cox, for one, who utters that Dostoyevsky line in a manner that suggests he was instructed to criticize his mom's breasts), hoary attempts at reviving shopworn theatrical conventions like foreshadowing, and having characters explain metaphors to his audience (here it's tennis) -- metaphors he thinks can support the rickety structure in which they're embedded.

The two leads are terrible. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' junkie-Garbo poses deserve tableaux as lurid as our suppressed fantasies about him (like, I dunno, mincing through Brian Eno's "Baby's On Fire" in the glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine); here he's just a mouth and a pair of cheekbones, the latter of which are exquisite but get dull after staring at'em for two hours. He doesn't project class envy: he's merely petulant, in the manner of Hayden Christensen in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of George Lucas. As for Scarlet Johansson, what does it mean that she gets the Angelica Huston harridan part in Crimes & Misdemeanors, and that Huston, shot in the most unflattering light and given nothing to do but act shrill, is infinintely better?

PS: If you're reading this, Woody, please remember that next time you film a drama, be sure to hire Alan Alda. And write him some jokes. Please.

Noblesse O-blige

Solipsism can be compelling if an artist reminds you in a non-smug fashion of the degree to which we all preen before mirrors. In this Mary J. Blige has always seemed reasonably grounded artistically, a singer whose imprimatur depends upon a reliable fusion of old R&B totems (up-from-the-bootstraps empowerment; vocal class, sealed with a hip producer's kiss) and self-help maxims (psychobabble lyrics increasingly delivered with enough melisma to send Mariah back to therapy). The Breakthrough's scariest moment occurs when Blige wails, "I love you, but I love myself too." Er, excuse me: "too"? Didn't you finish reading The Power of Now, Mary? Fuck this "too" business: you gotta love yourself, period, as you always have, unreservedly (then again, maybe I'm being too harsh; this album is way too long, suggesting that Mary's love affair with herself continues unabated).

On this album the less she tries, the more she succeeds, as in the generic-but-pretty "Be Without You," whose sensual robo-coolness evokes One In a Million-era Aaliyah; and "MJB the MVP," hijacking The Game and 50 Cent's "Hate It Or Love It" without a regret in the world, damn straight. When she joins forces with that titan of self-regard, His Holiness Bono Vox, for a not-bad cover of "One," the two mirrors face each other, and crack.

Anyway, Jason King's review covers a lot of the same ground.