NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

I finally caught this on DVD. (I don't get out that much. A trip to the video store is a big event around my house.)

I had heard that the movie is great up until the ending, which I heard described as confusing and pointless. I can understand the confusion, because the movie fakes you out. It's pretending to be a certain kind of film that you've seen a million times. The kind that only flirts with existential dread. When Tommy Lee Jones showed up early on, I actually said to my wife, "Oh, it's Tommy Lee Jones, everything's going to be all right now". Which is exactly what I was supposed to think.

Like the motorist pulled over by the police cruiser in an early scene, you respond automatically to certain signals that reassure you that a safety net is in place. But the safety net hasn't held, and the tent around you is on fire. The film leaves you standing, slack-jawed and dull-eyed like cattle, watching the bolt aimed at your brain but failing to understand its purpose until it's too late.

Galveston

Faith and Edie playing in the rain at my in-laws' beach house, Galveston Island, TX, April 2007.

Madame President

DAY ONE: What the hell were they thinking nominating this woman? She's clearly insane. I guess it's over for McCain.

DAY TWO: Oh, I get it, she's the kind of insane that's great on television. Well, hopefully the Democrats won't play into the Republicans' hands on this one.

DAY THREE: We're dead.

Little known fact

Little known fact about me: my kisses can now heal pinched fingers, skinned knees, and insect bites of all kinds.

Olbermann

MSNBC removes Olbermann and Matthews from election coverage.

Why does this annoy me. It's just this nagging feeling that the other side would never do this. Try telling Fox to muzzle their top people because they're coming off a little too partisan.

Apparently it was a necessary thing to do, because some people organized an anti-NBC chant at the RNC. I mean, a chant. Something that you should stop being intimidated of after about the fourth grade.

What is it about Democrats that they feel they have to just go and stuff themselves in the locker voluntarily?

The Dark Knight

"A vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy... a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit... the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world."


"The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day... The dam's broken and you can't put the water back; and though it's not obviously an allegory for them, suddenly the film functions as stark reflection of our anxieties that we might be too late to save the planet, too uncertain of the terms to win the war."


"Midway through, I realized that the picture was genuinely upsetting me, that I was actually terrified by the places it was allowing its Joker to go. This Joker isn't carnival sideshow, he's not Jack Nicholson crazy--this Joker is cross-the-street crazy. The glittering beauty of it is that the character is scary because his madness is born of sadness and possibility."

-All quotes from Walter Chaw, filmfreakcentral.net

Cindy McCain

I never would have thought that anyone could make that robotic, wicked-witch quality work for her, but $300,000 later it sort of does.

Grandpa Ivan

My in-laws were in last week. One afternoon, maybe because so many people have come and gone recently, Edie went completely off the rails in a mind-bending two-hour tantrum. She talked her way out of time-out four times, and like a jerk I kept falling for it. 

After she'd exhausted both of us, I was giving her a lecture about being nicer to her Grandpa Paul. Possibly keen to change the subject, she started asking where her Grandpa John was. Seattle, I said. "And... where's my... Grandpa Ivan?"

This was actually my Grandpa Ivan, who she only knows from photos. What do you say? I guess you say he's not with us anymore. Not knowing what else to talk about, I start telling her how she would have liked him, and he was very kind to me when I was a little boy.

Explaining my grandfather to my own child, maybe I just suddenly got kicked in the ass by the circle of life, you know? Or mabye it was because her tantrum had me at the end of my rope already. But I instantly lost it. Which made her freak out all over again and I had to get it under control. 

"CLONE WARS" REVIEW

Ha ha, just fucking around. I'm not going to go see that garbage. 

In honor of George Lucas' latest disappointing piece of film, I've been poking around a site called "The Secret History of Star Wars", which devotes several articles and an e-book to asking the question, where and why did Lucas go so wrong.

The surprising short answer is, he didn't. The new stuff is actually representative who he is when left to his own devices. He's never been much of a writer. The first Star Wars was created through a tremendous effort (by himself and others) to overcome his own limitations. He labored for years like a mad genius, absorbing any sci-fi or adventure he could get his hands on in the service of his vision, constantly rewriting and hating himself for not being better at it. It didn't hurt that he had a support system of film-school pals with names like Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, Milius, and Kaufman. But nobody but him could have come up with the concept. 

Strangely enough, digging in to this history actually has the effect of re-awakening my admiration for the man.

PICTURED: O.G.-WAN KENOBI

Edie & Grandparents

Edie with Grand-Paul and Mama-Sue at our house, 9-1-08