What Would We Do Without John Woo?

We'd have to invent him, that's for sure. I've commented on the great man before, specifically his work on Stranglehold, the game that doubled as a sequel to his masterpiece Hard Boiled, though when I did that I had surprisingly little interest in his latest movie Red Cliff, even though the awesome Tony Leung Chui Wai is in it, and surely the return of Woo to Chinese cinema (and the reteaming with the co-star of Hard Boiled) should be a cause for celebration after his American films failed so badly.


I was paying so little attention to the production of Red Cliff that until a week ago I didn't even know it had been finished, let alone that it had been split into two movies, that the first had opened in Asia to enormous audiences, and that the West would have to wait until next year to see a single film that would lose about two hours of footage. Well, that's not going to happen on my watch. I got hold of a copy of Red Cliff: Part One this week, and I'm thrilled to say that it did not disappoint at all. In fact, I found myself, at times, applauding it. Saying it's his best film since Face/Off might sound like faint praise, as his post-Face/Off films were pretty rough, but trust me, this is an immediate classic. Accessible to all audiences, fast moving, thrilling, imaginative, beautifully shot and scored, and a feast for the eyes, it has vaulted high up my still-in-construction Best Of 2008 list.

(Yes, it's cheeky to add a film that isn't even getting a proper UK release into my list, but then release dates have made a mockery of our list-making, and caused much upset within our household (and we will probably not shut up about it for a while). Still, I'm not going to wait until next year to praise this film, especially as the second installment will be hitting cinemas in January, meaning I have something to look forward to. Here's the trailer for the first movie, just to give a taste of why I am so excited about this.)



Of course, I rave about it without having any knowledge whatsoever of the historical background, and so I pretty much just shouted, "OMG awesome!" every time one of the characters did something cool like catch a spear in mid-air. Even just a couple of minutes spent Wiki-ing leaves me utterly befuddled by the amount of controversy about rival interpretations of this period, i.e. the end of the Han Dynasty. Based as much on Chen Shou's original Records of Three Kingdoms as much as on the later novel Romance of Three Kingdoms by Luo Guangzhong, Red Cliff is a re-telling of a story very familiar to Chinese audiences but barely known in the West. These texts have been translated into English, but they're hard to come by. Just now I considered shelling out for a copy of the unabridged Records of the Three Kingdoms, but it's over 2500 pages long. As I'm still not done with the infernal Atlas Shrugged, another big book does not appeal right now.

So, I have to just accept the movie for what it is, and not get into a debate about whether it should be censured for its interpretations of Prime Minister Cao Cao and Zhou Yu, who are treated with more accuracy than usual, even while Woo keeps the practically superheroic qualities of Guan Yu. It's fair to say Woo was looking for the best opportunities to show off the themes he is always drawn to, while getting maximum hardcore action possibilities from his cast of characters.


It's also informed by the success of Lord of the Rings and 300, with the Red Cliff itself reminiscent of Thermopylae as a location where a decisive battle is held. Woo, as far as I can tell, has been informed by the success of LOTR, as much of the film concerns the actions of Zhuge Liang as he endeavours to unite Liu Bei and Sun Quan against Cao Cao, just as much of the final two LOTR books and films show Aragorn and Gandalf trying to break down the division between the rulers of Gondor and Rohan (which makes me wonder if Tolkein ever read anything about the Three Kingdoms). The supporting generals also resemble the colourful characters of the Fellowship, with Guan Yu almlost Legolas-like in his ability to take down huge amounts of enemy soldiers, Sun Shangxiang resembles Eowyn in her efforts to join in with the fighting despite the misogynist fretting of the menfolk, and volatile Zhang Fei, with his booming battle cry, reminded me of Gimli (though Gimli never body-checked a horse).


Of course, the popularity of those movies means we've had our fill of battle scenes that are just overhead shots of phalanxes of cavalry racing towards each other. Luckily, though Red Cliff does feature that, the battle within the Eight Trigrams Formation is unlike anything I've seen before, with thousands of shield-bearing soldiers forming a maze within which an army is utterly devastated in a series of ambushes. Unlike most action scenes (especially the hyper-kinetic gun battles Woo is famous for), this twenty minute sequence is paced surprisingly slowly, but is filled with imaginative twists and turns and lots and lots of blood. Action scene of the year? Very probably.

It also features men respecting each other and giving pointedly adoring looks; in some scenes the admiration Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has for Zhou Yu (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) would qualify as homoerotic if it wasn't for the fact that this is what Woo does. Instead, they're a classic Woo double act, two men forced together by circumstance and filled with admiration for each other, all the while knowing their friendship is almost certainly going to be tested to the brink of destruction by events outside their control. And yes, there are doves. One bravura shot shows a dove fly from Red Cliff, over Cao Cao's navy, and into the heart of his military camp, which is greatly pleasing, especially as it is a showcase for the excellent effects team, who provide work more convincing and better integrated than any other Chinese film I can think of.


One of the reasons I responded to this with such joy (other than that seeing Kurosawa Woo-ised is as gratifying as seeing Peckinpah get the same treatment) is that I also saw Peter Chan's The Warlords recently, and even with Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro heading the cast, it was disappointing. One terrific scene with Li charging a row of cannons thrilled me, and a mid-film sequence showing the terrible choices made following the siege of Suzhou was very interesting, but it fell apart in the final thirty minutes, and was so slackly paced prior to this that I struggled to maintain interest. Red Cliff, on the other hand, is a pure joy, and ignore the haters who complain that it is too slow. As the first half of a four-hour movie, it makes perfect sense to structure the movie the way it has been, and I cannot wait to see how all of the narrative threads introduced here are tied up in the final half. Forget the truncated Western version. Chase down a DVD copy of the first half, or find some other way to get hold of it. It's worth the effort.

Bad News Follows Good, As Always

The post-election joy party continues, with even more politiblog haunting, even more excited chatter, and even more news watching. Enduring the dour coverage on Fox News was entertaining for a minute or two (a first), but you have to wonder what nasty trickery they're going to employ to belittle President-Elect Obama's achievement over the next few years. I had enough of CNN FutureNews HoloUpdate 3000 on election night, so I won't be watching that network for a while. BBC was fun last night. Jeremy Paxman was interviewing a constant stream of pundits, writers (including West Wing and House writer/producer Eli Attie), elected officials, and spokespersons, asking each of them pretty much if racism was over. Yes, he did it with more subtlety than that, but his interviewees treated it with the short shrift it deserved. And, of course, because it was the BBC, there were the obligatory gaffes. An interview with Alice Walker went haywire as Paxman cut to her sitting in some sort of meditative, head-waving trance, unaware the satellite link was active. That was pretty embarrassing, though the subsequent interview was spiky and interesting enough to make up for it.


However, it's not all good news. In the midst of all this, we all found out that Michael Crichton died yesterday after a battle with cancer that he had kept from public attention. AICN has a nice piece on it here, with clips from many of his films, including some he directed. In the later years of his career I stopped reading his novels, as I belatedly realised some of our politics had never really matched up. I think it was when I understood that Crichton's perfect villain would be a sexually aggressive, female, environmentally aware geneticist from Japan who farts nanobots. Of course, it's not lost on me that I stopped reading his books but am currently voluntarily subjecting myself to the seemingly endless flagellation of reading Atlas Shrugged, so I'm one to talk. Believe me, as unpleasant as I find a lot of Michael Crichton's politics, I'd much rather be reading any of his books instead of Rand's whiny shriek. It never seems to end.

Beyond any other caveat or consideration, I maintain that Crichton was the best thriller writer I have ever read, a master of suspense and pace who kept me hooked even when the subject matter was as dry as corporate malfeasance in the aerospace industry (Airframe, which I blasted through in a few hectic hours). For a long time, especially at the crest of his popularity, the release of a Crichton novel was, at least for this jerkoff blogger, an event on a par with the release of a new Spielberg movie, so you can imagine how excited I was when Jurassic Park came out. Having tried to read other bestselling thrillers by dreary, inexplicably successful hacks like John Grisham, James Patterson and Tom Clancy (who I still read even though he's an awful, ponderous writer with even more unpleasant views), I am even more grateful for Crichton's work, which showed those other writers up even when he was not operating at full capacity.

That said, why his books and films featured characters with the most vanilla names ever has always mystified me. Just a random selection of names from his books includes Karen Ross and Peter Elliott (Congo), Norman Johnson and Harry Adams (Sphere), Peter Smith, Tom Graham and John Connor (Rising Sun, with the former renamed Webster/Web in the Philip Kaufman movie), and of course Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park. Why the dull names for the main characters? Was it some kind of device to increase audience association? Why did I become obsessed with this? Do I have a problem with boring names? Haven't I got more important things to be worried about? Apparently not. Thanks for temporarily curing me of my woes, President-Elect Obama!

His books and films have been so popular that I often forget he was also the creator of ER, which was, for a long time, my favourite show on TV (until I discovered Buffy). Though he had some right-leaning tendencies in later years (and his response to criticism was less than classy), ER's compassionate air led one to believe he had the same notions. A show so fascinated by the poverty of County General Hospital and the desperation of the board trying to keep it running in the face of corporate indifference has to be run by those of a more liberal mindset, right? Perhaps it was producer and writer John Wells, but I'd like to think that Crichton, a former doctor, agreed.

It's also easy to forget that he directed movies too, some of them genuinely great. Westworld and Coma are terrific thrillers, with the former regularly cited as an influence on The Terminator and, with much less frequency, Stephen Malkmus.



I even liked Runaway, which features Tom Selleck vs. Gene Simmons and his acid-injecting spider-bots! How could that be anything less than awesome, even though it never inspired a song by Stephen Malkmus?



And (really embarrassing admission coming up), I also liked Looker, which featured an uncomfortable-looking Albert Finney going up against James Coburn and his fugue-state-inducing light gun.



Seeing that film at an early age might have been the reason why I have a healthy distrust of advertising, even though most of it is pure nonsense. For that alone, I owe a great debt to Michael Crichton. He shall be missed.

All Hail the Fingers Of Fury!

If a writer has writers' block, then a blogger will suffer from Blogger Clog, and that's certainly the case here. There are numerous reasons for my infrequent posting, perhaps most importantly this goddamn illness, which, while little more than a cold, has been hanging around for weeks. Hard to be prolific when one side of my head feels heavier than the other. On top of that is a much busier than usual week at work which has drained me of much energy, and oh God this election this fucking election it's driving my brain crazy with the excessive checking of the politiblogs, so much so that, even though I've been enjoying his updates, if Andrew Sullivan writes "know hope" one more time I'll either turn violent or cry or cry violently. It's the classic split between his faith and my atheism; he can know hope all he likes, but I'll not relax until Obama's inauguration. People who know me will be very familiar with my fatalistic tendencies. ::takes break from hard minute's blogging to check fivethirtyeight.com::

Another reason, which is probably the main one if I was willing to sit and poke at my ossified brain in order to find out, is my attempt to finish reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Though I'm wary of saying anything about it for fear of angering her many many fans/followers/cultists, I have to say it is about to defeat me. No, Randian visitors, her worldview has not dominated mine, as if it had been dismantled and bested by a philosophy of vast strength and power, like the machines that conquer and crush the rocks and mountains of the earth. I'm just, well, really really really fucking bored by now. Her insanely florid prose might have amused me before, but by now, after being shouted at in a self-pitying and mean-spirited tone for 700 pages, I might not be able to make it. But I must! For am I not a human being? Is not my mind the Alpha and Omega, the force that can harness nature and bend it to my will, able to withstand this mighty onslaught, bearing the winds and rains of her ideas and rising, triumphant, like a Titan, like the owner of himself and his destiny, masterful and immortal? Fuck you, book! You shall never defeat me!

However, I do just want to get it over and done with by now, if only because I need a break from it. I'm glad I'm reading it, especially at a time like this, when one presidential candidate is bellowing "Socialist!" and running from person to person like Kevin McCarthy in the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the world's most powerful Objectivist, Alan Greenspan, is talking about how there is a flaw in the world that makes his free market ideals untenable (I'm totally paraphrasing; please don't correct me, people). Before reading Atlas Shrugged I would have thought his comment rather cheeky, blaming people for the market disaster and not The Market itself, but now I see his point (though I don't necessarily agree with it). If I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right (again, don't comment, I don't need clarification just yet), the Objectivist creed would work just fine as long as everyone was "moral" by Rand's code, but after many many years Greenspan has apparently discovered that people (i.e. traders and bankers and economists and anyone who deals with money anywhere in the world ever) won't abide by that code of behaviour, and will in fact take as many short cuts as possible to fill their pockets with as much Fat Bank as they can. I see where he's coming from. I think he's a bit tapped to be suddenly saying, "Oh, it's humanity's fault for this and not mine for coming up with a system of economics that doesn't take into account actual human behaviour as it really actually exists for reals, but instead bases its assumptions about what people are like on the idealised ramblings of a writer from the 50s who had a weird thing for dominatory industrialists and smokestacks and trains going into tunnels and which therefore cannot possibly work," but I do see where he's coming from. Thanks for the recession, jerkwad.

So yeah, it's been interesting to listen to Republican and conservative thought with a new, deeper understanding of where it's coming from, and to finally comprehend why followers of that creed hate taxation as much as they do even though I think they're wrong, and so I do owe a debt of thanks to Ayn Rand for giving me such a long-winded peek into that mindset. Sadly, my brain is dying from the melodrama and the hate and the victimhood, and I just want to get it over with so I can move onto something fun (I got John Hodgman's new book two days ago and it's begging to be read). Until then, time I would devote to blogging is being taken up with enduring the endless Rand-ting, so it's like another blog slowdown, and one I really don't want to endure but will because I'm stubborn like that and hate leaving books unfinished (especially when I'm 700 pages in). I will get back to the planned post about Mad Men, and some Face/Offs I've been looking forward to as soon as I can, but for now, I must complete this mammoth task.

In the meantime, here is the other thing that has totally possessed my mind over the last week, but luckily it's a thing that is making the brain very very happy. Marnie Stern, super-genius guitarist, has just appeared on my Radar of Unbelievable Awesomeness with her new album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (which is a phrase attributed to Zen philosopher Alan Watts, according to AV Club). It is absolutely incredible, easily on my 2008 best list along with Re-Arrange Us by Mates of State and The Family Afloat by Bound Stems and several other lovely works. Stern's guitar playing is unlike anything I've heard before, and strumming along to it would be the most insane Rock Band challenge ever (especially as Zach Hill's drumming is almost as complex and frenetic). This is her new single, Transformer, and it should be number one across the planet.



Even better is her song Ruler, which you can find on her MySpace page. Thank you for keeping the book cooties from smothering my brain, Marnie Stern.

Masculinity + Sweat + Intensity = Chuck Heston (RIP)

When he heard the news, even Moses needed a hug. Charlton Heston died today, and though I wanted to talk about him and his work, I didn't want to say too much about his politics, other than to say that the views he held later in life were antithetical to mine, and that though he came out of Bowling for Columbine looking bad, Michael Moore came off looking bad too for haranguing a sick old man (that said, the end of the interview, with Heston walking away, followed by Moore, is oddly enough more dramatic and "exciting" than most car chases made today, though much slower). But how easy is it to talk about Charlton Heston without talking about his political influence?

I've found that having a blog makes me want to write about everything that happens around me in some form or another (one good reason not to get Twitter, because I would be chained to it), but when sitting down to do it, I realise I've not reached a point of comprehension complete enough to ensure what I write won't look ridiculous or ill-informed or outright embarrassing. Commenting on contemporary politics of any kind is too daunting to get into, which is why I've concentrated more on pop culture chatter (though again I pledge my support for Firefly/Pilager '08).


I'm sure I've failed over and over for many reasons (though I'm right about Torchwood), and that's bad enough, but when it comes to talking about politics, I find it even harder. It's not like I know nothing about it, but I'm not able to comment from a position of superiority, and that's a failing that makes me shrink from talking about it (even though a blog is meant to be about personal experience either as monologue or starting point for a dialogue, and not a source of encyclopaedic knowledge). A blog post about my experience reading and watching both versions of The Fountainhead lies unwritten because I know it will open me up to all sorts of criticism, either justified or cranky or knee-jerk and hostile. The technical term for this is, "cowardice".

It's the same with Charlton Heston's gun love. I strongly believe he was wrong, but today it struck me that even though I didn't hold to his beliefs, his work had a big effect on me. I've been working on a project looking at sci fi in popular culture, and the late 60's/early 70s featured some outright classics, three of which starred Heston. It meant that during for a short period he was the populist face of bold sci fi, appearing in films using the genre to comment on the world in the aftermath of the counterculture clashes of the Vietnam period (Tom Cruise and Will Smith do a similar thing now), starring in a trilogy of good to great movies that remain relevant or intriguing to this day.

That's all I want to talk about, and yet with someone as divisive as Heston was, it's hard to get into it without paying lip-service to my mixed feelings about him. People focus on his right-wing views later in life, but let's not forget his support for the civil rights movement and his march with Martin Luther King. This article has some good pithy background on that. So, now I've reluctantly touched on his political life, here are five (personal, pop-culture-related) reasons why Charlton Heston's death has affected me above and beyond any comment about what he eventually stood for.

5. It's not that great a movie, and it's the kind of film that would be loathed today for following a trend and being nothing more than a big event movie, and the moment that shocked me most is a rip of the end of The Poseiden Adventure, but when Charlton Heston dies at the end of Earthquake, my young self (watching it on TV) was horrified, mortified... terrified.


He did many better movies (only a few of which I've seen), but to see him try to save Ava Gardner and then meet his maker was just too much for me, and haunted me for ages. Apparently it was his idea as well (unveil the spoiler at the bottom). So yeah, not a brilliant movie, but compare it to Dante's Peak, or Volcano, or The Day After Tomorrow, or any of the recent disaster movies that pop up every so often like the bling-encrusted but spoiled brats of the genre, thumbing their mechanical noses at the classy parents borne in the 70s, and you see real craft there. Plus, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Richard Roundtree, Walter Matthau, and Geneviève Bujold, who I thought was all French and classy and hott when I was young. It may not be The Towering Inferno, but it's not The Swarm, so it wins some kind of award. Okay, so everything that isn't The Swarm deserves an award, but still.

4. A lot of comment flies around about Charlton playing a Mexican in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, but never mind that, feel the quality of that Hestonian intensity! This is my favourite Welles movie, and this original trailer is incredibly salacious, all sweat and low camera angles and shadows. I love it.



3. "WHAT IS THE SECRET OF SOYLENT GREEN?!?!?! WHAT IS THE SECRET??!?! SERIOUSLY, I'VE BEEN HIDING IN A CAVE WITH NO BROADBAND ACCESS??!?? IS THE SECRET THAT IT IS TASTY DELICIOUS TO THE MAX?!?!! IS IT LOW-FAT?!?! HELP A GUY OUT!!!" I love old trailers.



I'm actually including this because I'm so impressed he was willing to play an almost irredeemable asshole in Soylent Green. In a future where food is nothing more than slabs of protein made in a factory, where natural foodstuffs are rare and the difference between the haves and have-nots is even more pronounced than it is now, where fighting to survive means you have to be ready to kick a lot of ass for things we take for granted now, Heston had to sell that at the risk of alienating the audience. His macho bravado, chauvinism, brutality and uncompromising attitude are a sight to see. Many actors would resist playing someone this unlikeable, but Heston knew what he was doing.

2. Obviously, Planet of the Apes has to go in here somewhere. It's one of the great final scenes of all time, one that made my poor child brain turn into a cinder when I first saw it, but just like THE SECRET OF SOYLENT GREEN, it's been spoiled to the point where it's impossible to recapture that amazement. I came close a few years back, while living with a flatmate who had not only never seen it but had no idea about the twist. How he managed this I don't know, though it might have had something to do with his dismissive attitude towards any non-musical cultural artifact that was American. I badgered him into watching it one night even though he was initially sceptical and kept whining that he didn't want to see a dumb ape movie, but that Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack and hyper-intense Heston performance held his attention right up to this incredible scene.



He looked like he had been punched in the gut. "Fuck! It was Earth all along!" Priceless.

1. Shades of Caruso is heavily pro-I Am Legend, thinking the most recent re-telling of the story is a much-misunderstood classic that will be reappraised over time (our copy of it is in-bound from the US and is highly anticipated even though There Will Be Tears). That said, though Canyon thinks I have brain-problems for even considering it, I'm also a big fan of The Omega Man, Boris Segal's version of Richard Matheson's novel, partially because Ron Grainer's score is excellent, but mainly because Heston was at his most Hestony for the majority of it. With no one else onscreen, he perspired and grimaced and filled the screen with machismo tainted by loneliness and madness, a violent tough guy and killing machine reduced to rewatching Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock over and over again just to see crowds again. The sight of this iconic he-man, who had represented the word of God and hung out with Jesus and fought film wars with Sam Peckinpah, sitting in an empty theatre watching hippies dance about like the last living embodiment of the fossilised losers of the culture wars, was a memorable image.



The best scene, though, comes early on, when trying to find a new car to replace the one he just crashed. Coming across a car dealership with the right model parked inside, Heston engages in a bit of banter with an imaginary salesman, and his response to the outrageously high price (again imaginary), is possibly my favourite line reading of any dialogue ever in all of cinema ever ever no comebacks. It probably won't affect other people the way it affected me (i.e. gales of laughter). It's just so out of the blue, but then I guess he too is insane from the first frame of the movie, just like Will Smith is in I Am Legend. Plus, you know, he's right.



RIP, Mr. Heston.

Things I Learnt Today (Dec 4th)

1. Michel Gondry has a brother almost as talented as him.

If I were to name the artist I derive the most inspiration from, it would have to be Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Human Nature, and some of the greatest music videos ever created. The DVD, The Work of Michel Gondry is the one I would save from a burning building, as it features so many little works and touches and thoughts and clever little moments that I'm inspired to just devote my life to creating art every time I watch it (and then I forget to, but that's my fault, not Gondry's). I love that his philosophy of lo-fi DIY filmmaking not only informs how he makes his movies (The Science of Sleep's on-set physical effects), but also the projects he chooses (the wondrous Dave Chappelle's Block Party, in which Chappelle throws a huge party seemingly on the spur of the moment and basically wings it), and the plots of new projects. Case in point; his next movie Be Kind Rewind, which looks to be about taking art back from the corporations and making stories for yourself and your friends and relatives. It's a charming idea, and even better it stars Jack Black and Mos Def, two actor/musicians who seem to annoy a lot of people but fill me with joy.


Anyway, it turns out his brother, Oliver "Twist" Gondry, is also a filmmaker/animator, and has worked on many ads, some of which are quite beautiful. This is my favourite; a Hewlett Packard ad that features Michel talking about his philosophy, as well as his family.



On the Works DVD, he idolises his son and has an endearing rapport with him. Hearing him talk about him here in the advert made me realise how unpretentious he is, how happy he is to mesh his life and his art, and how his need to keep creating things keeps him so centred. He truly is an inspiration.

2. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing another stadium gig in London next May.

I am, of course, thrilled to hear this, but of course if I can't get a ticket, I will be very very sad and might have a horrible strop not unlike earlier tonight when I spilled a carton of double cream on the floor.

3. Do not spray Mr. Muscle Multi-Cleaner on spilled double cream.

They say don't cry over spilled milk, but having a screaming fit over spilled cream is just fine. It's hard enough to get off the floor as it is, but upon trying to wash up the last bits, I applied a Mr. Muscle variant which instantly curdled the cream, turning it into a viscous substance not unlike the glue we used to use in primary school. It had to be almost pulled off the floor, it was so tenacious. Without my wake-up coffee, and in desperate need of a shower, the last thing I needed was to wrestle with some dairy-based epoxy. That the kitchen didn't get demolished by my subsequent Hulk-like tantrum is a testament to some vestige of restraint within myself.

4. Cutthroat Bitch Amber might make a return to House.

This was posted on Michael Ausiello's blog last week, but I only just noticed it tonight. Seems Anne Dudek made a big impression on the House showrunners, as producer Katie Jacobs explains.

Michael Ausiello: Why'd you cut the Cutthroat Bitch! I loved her!
Katie Jacobs: I can tell you that it was a phenomenally difficult decision. When we decided to go in this [Survivor-like] direction this season, [fellow exec producer] David Shore and I never anticipated that we'd fall in love with as many of the characters as we did — and [Cutthroat Bitch] was certainly one of those. But I would say that, if you want to see more of her, so do we. And I think that that might happen. She's terrific, and she adds a really great color to the group. I'm looking forward to finding a way that she could come back into the fold.

While I maintain she would not be a good fit as a member of the Cottages, Dudek was enormous fun this season, and it would be great to get her back in some capacity.

5. Many years ago, it was illegal to smile in Russia, except for propaganda purposes.

While searching for information on Ayn Rand (I'm currently reading The Fountainhead in order to back up or dispel certain comments I made in a Ratatouille post some weeks ago), I found a transcript of her perfectly charming testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, during the McCarthy period. She talks of a movie made during WWII called Song of Russia, made to bolster the relationship between American and Russian troops united against the Nazis, in much the same way that Poweel and Pressburger made A Matter of Life and Death to engender fond feelings between Yanks and Limeys. With the war over, Rand explained why she thought the film showed a false image of Russia, based on her time there.

Also realize that when all this sweetness and light was going on in the first part of the picture, with all these happy, free people, there was not a GPU agent among them, with no food lines, no persecution -- complete freedom and happiness, with everybody smiling. Incidentally, I have never seen so much smiling in my life, except on the murals of the world's fair pavilion of the Soviets. If any one of you have seen it, you can appreciate it. It is one of the stock propaganda tricks of the Communists, to show these people smiling. That is all they can show.

Mr. [John] McDowell: You paint a very dismal picture of Russia. You made a great point about the number of children who were unhappy. Doesn't anybody smile in Russia any more?
Miss Rand: Well, if you ask me literally, pretty much no.
Mr. McDowell: They don't smile?
Miss Rand: Not quite that way; no. If they do, it is privately and accidentally. Certainly, it is not social. They don't smile in approval of their system.
Mr. McDowell: Well, all they do is talk about food.
Miss Rand: That is right.

Also no one could look at each other, and if you had food, watch out because everyone will rip you to shreds to get at it, even though it was probably horrible beetroot soup!

In my time we were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror -- afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us -- and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love -- nothing but food and fear...

Now, here is the life in the Soviet village as presented in Song Of Russia. You see the happy peasants. You see they are meeting the hero at the station with bands, with beautiful blouses and shoes, such as they never wore anywhere. You see children with operetta costumes on them and with a brass band which they could never afford. You see the manicured starlets driving tractors and the happy women who come from work singing. You see a peasant at home with a close-up of food for which anyone there would have been murdered. If anybody had such food in Russia in that time he couldn't remain alive, because he would have been torn apart by neighbors trying to get food.

::sigh:: Oh Ayn, you kooky old bird! You need to buy yourself a rootbeer float to cheer yourself up. Have a dollar on me. Or should I say, as my copy of The Fountainhead tells me, have a colophon of the philosophy of Objectivism on me, whatever the hell that means.

As for Brad Bird, I also found out he denies being an Objectivist in a NY Post interview with Lou Lumenick.

Bird: The idea that "The Incredibles," a mainstream animated feature, was thought of as provocative was wonderful to me. I was very gratified, though I thought some of the analysis was really kind of goofy.
Lumenick: Such as?
Bird: Some pieces compared the viewpoint to the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. I thought that was silly and the writers were humorless. I was into Rand for about six months when I was 20, but you outgrow that narrow point of view. Some compromise is necessary in life.

Knowing that, I might just give up on this damn book now, except that it's so overwrought and funny. Hell, even though I find her philosophy unpleasant, and her alliance with HUAC detestable, I owe it to her and myself to at least give it a try. I guess. [Thanks to decca for inspiring me to find that crazy transcript.]

6. I'm so envious of Americans because John C. Reilly is touring as Dewey Cox.

Canyon has already written a post about Walk The Line and how excited we are at the imminent release of the spoof Walk Hard, but now I see John C. Reilly is touring the US. He'll be in character as Dewey Cox, and will be backed by his band the Hard Walkers. It's sold out already, which bodes well for the movie box office (unless the gigs suck and annoy the audience, of course). There's no plan to tour the UK, obviously, as we're just Airstrip One, after all. The movie isn't coming out on time here either, thus increasing my ire. Still, at least this perfect poster eases the pain somewhat.


Plus, we're getting Springsteen in London! Beat that, America! ::pokes out tongue::

ETA: 7: It seems my Ticketmaster account was out of date:

While buying Springsteen tickets, I found, to my great amusement, that I haven't used my Ticketmaster account since living elsewhere. As a result, my bank card was out of date and my old address was listed. I'm not good in stressful situations, and the purchasing of popular tickets within a very small window is one of the most pulse-stretching things I can do, so it was not much fun to have to change everything while a little message tells me I only have one minute to confirm the purchase. But I did it! And I have tickets! Directly opposite the stage, and therefore several miles away from Bruce, Clarence, Little Steven, Max Weinberg and the rest, but it's better than nothing. Much better. Because it is a Bruce Springsteen gig, and as Jon Stewart said recently, they are pure joy.