Golden Globe reax

Very happy about Mickey Rourke winning for The Wrestler: I saw it the other night with Kate and thought it better than Raging Bull (my opinion of that movie is not as stratospheric as some). Just seeing Rourke being interviewed is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And didn't Spielberg's ouevre look spectacular in compilation like that? Not so happy about Kate Winslett winning both Actress (my heart belongs to Hathaway) and Supporting Actress. I'd understand if they gave her supporting as consolation, but to take the supporting award away from an actress who genuinely played a supporting role, like Marisa Tomei, was wasteful — more to do with Weinstein than Winslett. The biggest disappointment, though, were the awards showered on Slumdog Millionaire, the slickest little fake to come our way since Chocolat. How Fox dressed up the new Danny Boyle extravaganza as this scrappy little underdog from the Indian subcontinent is marketing savvy worthy of serious study. It's a foreign movie for those who can't be bothered with subtitles. And the love story doesn't work for a single, luscious frame.

Men buggering men

In the middle of the recent controversy over Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the address at his Inaugeration, Warren said some peculiar things. He was defending himself from the accusation that he is homophobic, comparing homosexuality to his own battle with internet porn, saying that much as he'd all like to watch porn all day long, he must resists the impulse. He handed over the Internet addresses for the pornographic sites he liked so that his wife Sherry could put locks on them.

She created specific blocks for them, so I can no longer access them. Once again, this eliminated a lot of my temptation. I now feel comfortable using my own computer, but nervous when I use an unprotected computer. I’m glad my wife established these blocks.

The peculiar thing about this — the thing I find peculiar about all anti-gay Evangelicals — is their assumption that the only thing separating heterosexual men from homosexual men is resistance to temptation — that we'd all like to bugger other men, given half the chance. You know — if nobody was looking. It's kind of funny and even a little bit radical when you think about it. They basically believe that we're all gay — 'gays' are just the ones who've given up the fight not to be. I'd have that if you wanted to put some distance between yourself and an activity you found unholy, the last thing you'd want to do is paint it as different in degree, not kind, with just a slippery slope to separate you. I guess if they admit difference in kind, then they're basically agreeing with gay people that they're born that way, and then they'll end up looking intolerant. So they end up painting themselves into this strange little corner, instead:
the only thing separating an evangelical pastor from a raving sodomite, apparently, is whether your wife is watching.

A righteous wind at his back

Kate tells me I have a man crush on Daniel Craig but whatever: he's superb as a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis in Edward Zwick's Defiance. So is Liev Shrieber, as his brother, also a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis. I don't think I've enjoyed seeing more Nazis mown down more since Where Eagles Dare. Don't believe the middling reviews: some of the speeches could have used a little trimming, there's a long winter in there with lots of coughing and no nazis but boy, is it exhilarating seeing Craig wander into an informant's house and put a bullet through his head. I think I may have liked this movie as much as I liked WALL-E.

All in all, a good day

Today, Obama announced his choice of Leon Panetta to be the next CIA director. A year ago, Panetta wrote a piece called 'No Torture. No Exceptions' for The Washington Monthly, in which he argued:—

How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation.... We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

Dawn Johnson, the woman appointed to head up the OLC is even more promising: she isn't just against torture, but advocates prosecution of torturers. Of her predecessor John Yoo's Infamous Torture Memo, she wrote:

The shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it--all demand our outrage.... At the time of the Torture Opinion's issuance, violations of Common Article 3 were punishable war crimes under federal law.

Yummy. This is by far my favorite of Obama's appointments so far.

Blair defends Iraq

New York magazine asks Blair if he regrets the decision to invade Iraq.

“I don’t think the region would be more stable if Saddam and his two sons were still running around.”

Even if you grant that the Iraq war hasn't destabilised the region, strengthened Iran etc, there is also the question of the half a million who might still be alive, and the justifiable grievance their families now nurse towards the US and its allies.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to ask who killed them. There’s also a lot of people who died and who would have died under Saddam."

This is about as eloquent as any defence of the Iraq war gets: yes half a million people died but they might have died anyway. And that's Blair, too. Imagine what Bush's answers would be like.

A good year to be an American

A great piece in the NYT about the fact that Oscars don't go to the best films: they go to the most Oscar-worthy films, which is to say, the films that allow Hollywood the most pleasing reflection of itself:—

Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford’s magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” while Orson Welles’s game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.... By selecting “Cavalcade” — a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noël Coward play, about a wealthy couple (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) stiff-upper-lipping their way through 40 years of English history — the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office... For most of the ’30s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (“It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences. During World War II priorities shifted from moral development to patriotic fervor. The “outstanding motion picture” of 1942 was determined to be William Wyler’s portrait of a middle-class British couple enduring the Blitz, “Mrs. Miniver”... By the mid -’70s, the basic elements of an Oscarizable film were fixed in place: literary value, social criticism, grand spectacle and mature content, to be mixed and matched at will.

My gut tells me that the winner this year will be something with big box office and little violence — a reaction against the last two indie-winners The Departed and No Country for Old Men. Also that it's a bad year to be a Brit and a good year to be an American: the biggest feelgood spectacle of the year was the election. On Oscar night, the confetti from the Inaugeration will be just days old. Hollywood will want to throw the after-party party. One more reason to favour Penn and Hathaway.

Make Me a Glamour Model

I just got back from the UK, where I spent half the time explaining who the celebrities were to Kate and the other half asking other people who they were. The pages of Heat magazine were particularly baffling. But the TV show that most caught our eye was Make Me A Glamour Model — a very British title, I couldn't help but feel. In America, the show would almost have been called I Want To Be A Porn Star, because aspiration and initiative is to be praised and rewarded. But in Britain, where success is unmerited, and fame is a fake, aspiration is recast as a low surly demand, implying that the only difference between me and the girls with their bits in the papers is the fact that they are in the papers, and not me. Therefore: do it. Wave you wand. Put my bits in the paper. Make me a glamour model.