OSCARS FOR REALS

So I finally saw Good Night, Good Luck to confirm that Capote is the indeed best picture of the year. Consider it confirmed. Here are my quick takes on this year's nominees:

1. Capote
Why is it the best? The filmmakers weave the moral complexity of Truman Capote's actions around In Cold Blood with a light touch, but it's there and even-handed enough to make you think.

2. Brokeback Mountain
Why is it second best? Because it has supplied heterosexual men a generation's worth of jokes to deflect their unease regarding homo anal invasion.

3. Good Night, Good Luck
Why is it third best? Because it's not homoerotic enough. Strathairn and Clooney make a good newsroom buddy combo, but it's no Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it's no Jack and Ennis, hell, it's not even Riggs and Murtaugh. The film is politically and historically involving but completely devoid of people to care about.

4. Crash
Why is it second worst? Because this film should have been titled See Crash to Assuage White Guilt. Every white person in this film is a business-suited Klansperson. Every 10 minutes, we're treated to a freshman-level sociology lecture on racism. Naturally, the Academy loves it.

5. Munich
Why is it the worst? Spielberg says Arabs suck and Jews rock but sometimes even the Jews are forced to get medieval on Arabs because the Arabs started it by going jihad on the Jews. Well, I could have read The New York Times to learn that instead of watch 130 minutes of Spielberg bathing his star of David in CGI-enhanced white light.

REVIEWS FIVE WORDS OR LESS

The Von Bondies: The White Stripes without Vitaligo

Spoon: A spoonful is not enough

The New Pornographers: Ziggy Stardust Is Not New

James Blunt, Keith Urban, etc. For White Chicks Only

Septuagenarian Hunting Trips

When I heard that our Veep had accidentally shot his 78 year-old hunting buddy over the weekend, I had to ask:

When does one become too old to hunt?

I'm all for grandfathers and fathers and sons hunting together but is it time to hang up the flannels when you're talking about great-great-grandfathers hunting with great-grandfathers hunting with grandfathers and so on. Don't you want to intervene and say Grandpa Dick, you can't see, you've had ten heart attacks, maybe you want to put down the quavering muzzle of your sawed-off, take out the earplugs, take off the prescription googles and let the fowl go this President's Day?

I'm surprised septuagenarian hunting accidents don't happen more often. In fact, President Bush didn't immediately know that Veep Cheney was the shooter. If I were Dubbs, that would have been my first question and I would have asked with great fear.

BURNING AND LEARNING (cont'd)

This is the best article I've read on this cartoon controversy thus far:

Something is Rotten Outside the State of Denmark
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/02/08/cstillwell.DTL

I never thought I'd say this but: The West is cowering in fear of some (not all - but certainly enough to organize and riot) simple-minded Muslims, too frothy to realize that they are being manipulated by their own imams and mullahs.

And for those pining for the Clinton years, don't.

Instead of supporting Jyllands-Posten's brave defense of free speech, Former President Bill Clinton railed against what he called "these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam."

Mr. President, I'm ready to enlist to fight for our freedom to read comics.

REVIEW: MUNICH

As if I'm not already Israel-and-Palestined out, my girlfriend and I saw Munich last night in our near-completed tour of this year's Academy Award Best Picture nods.

Each of this year's Fab Five seems to have its own category. Capote and Brokeback Mountain are legit best pictures nominations in any contest, filmmaking and filmmakers at the crest of their creativity and complexity. Good Night, Good Luck seems to be a nod toward The Newcomer (in this case, Clooney), though I've yet to see it. Crash is in The Philadelphia category: ridiculously overrated films about minorities. And Munich, despite its lustrous celluloid face, falls in the category of Token Oscar Nod Given To Formerly Gifted Filmmaker Past Creative Summit.

Spielberg's Munich joins past nominees awarded for long past greatness, like Scorcese's Gangs of New York. From the start, Munich is admirably tense and uncomfortable watch. The narrative's relentless pursuit of the moral and political implications of terrorism's resulting terrorism and its resolute avoidance of personal stakes bears some resemblance to The Passion of the Christ. In fact, Munich may be a more softly lit, less violent and Aramaic version of The Passion. Every individual's will is subjugated to the greater good of Israel in and none of the characters question it. Seems like an audience-limiting world view, doesn't it? Never you fear, Hollywood formula appears...

1) Characters are killed off in reverse order of Hollywood cache.

2) Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, 007 Daniel Craig from Liverpool, England utters, "The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood."

3) By far the nadir of the film comes when Spielberg heaps on the Straight-to-Video effects for Eric Bana's allegedly climatic reunion love scene with his wife, which is spliced with dramatizations of the Munich murders. Between Eric Bana's Shannon Tweedesque hair-tossing and the globs of sweat flying from his greasy locks, I wondered who was supposed to be more traumatized: Eric Bana, the woman who plays his wife, or the audience.

The film suffers from a weak center. While Eric Bana throws himself into the materials that's there (he's much better than the film - check out the Aussie film Chopper), his Avnar Kaufman never questions his role in avenging the murders at Munich and frankly, Spielberg isn't doing much questioning himself. It's cringe-inducing to watch an especially contrived scene in the second half of the film when Jewish and Arab terrorist groups are thrown in the same "safehouse" and forced to co-exist long enough to eliminate their targets. Naturally a political discourse ensues about home and what the Israelis are also doing to the Palestinians and vice-versa and it all sounds like dialogue a 10-year-old Chinese boy could have written, and by then, it's 120 minutes too late. We already know it's not bloodthirst that Spielberg is questioning, it's the aftertaste.

Like War of the Worlds, Spielberg's latest is another entirely external exercise, a movie with muddle to say politically or morally and nothing to say personally, which takes special effort given the weight of the historical events. Munich shines the soft white light on what Spielberg has been for years. A stellar stylist and nothing else.

BURNING AND LEARNING

Can a movie titled Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World be more relevant and timely this week? If Al Brooks had added a question mark to the title, the answer would be no, can't do, and not likely.

Perhaps the most insightful statement about the recent Danish cartoon controversy came from Tariq Ramadan, Europe's best-known Muslim intellectual (a label that means a whole lot less today as Europe seems intolerant as a continent and the term "Muslim intellectual" seems oxymoronic and blasphemous even by Muslim standards:

"In the Muslim world, we are not used to laughing at religion, our own or anybody else's. This is far from our understanding. For that reason, these cartoons are seen, by average Muslims and not just radicals, as a transgression against something sacred." Ramadan notes, however, that Muslims who live in European countries "must understand that laughing at religion is a part of the broader culture in which they live in Europe, going back to Voltaire." For Westerners, he explains, "[c]ynicism, irony and indeed blasphemy are part of the culture," so for Muslims in the West, "it is really important to be able to take a critical distance and not react so emotionally."

Advice that would have been good for Muslims in the East, South, North, West and Middle. But today it's too late for calmer heads to prevail in Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

Yes, embassies and missions are burning over a series of cartoons. And yes, I know it's wrong and unacceptable and blasphemous and all to caricature the big Moh, but these cartoons were published in Europe. When did the Muslim mobs get to tell the rest of the world what to do and why? That's the West's job (laugh...this is irony.).

Frankly, it appears that our stone-throwing, effigy-dangling brethren need a little of what the West has to give them, just as the West could learn a little more respect for matters of the Holy Spirit from the East. And if that little something happens to be a bit more respect for irony and cynicism, both products of the natural societal friction of a broader and open worldview, so be it.

After 9/11, many in the media opined that irony was dead. Four and a half years later, the world has become so much more dangerous, the gap in values between the West and the Middle East has been so widened by the Bush administration's handling of post-9/11 geopolitics, we now know the pundits were only partly correct.

Irony is deadly in 2006.

LEARNING AND BURNING

Here are a few songs worth learning this week:

1. Game of Pricks, Guided by Voices
Best Line: I've waited too long to have you hide in the back of me / I've cheated so long I wonder how you keep track of me

2. Cocaine Blues, Johnny Cash
Best Line: Shot her down 'cause she made me sore / I thought I was her daddy but she had five more

3. Get em High, Kanye West
This track may be more inspired than anything on The College Dropout. Naturally Talib Kweli is involved.

Songs that need to be burned:
1. Unpredictable, Jamie Foxx
Note to Jamie: just because you know musicians and play one on the big screen...well, never mind...loved you in In Living Color, can't wait to see you in Miami Vice.

2. Grillz, Nelly
The whole top diamond and the bottom row gold!