Month: May 2004 (Page 2 of 5)

Mrs. du Toit is advocating the return of the monarchy. I wonder what her close personal friends the Founding Fathers would say about that. Especially with George I on deck. (Of course, GWB agrees with her.)

The woman has become such a psychotic reactionary, her rhetoric has folded in on itself like a wad of stuck-together duct tape.

All I have to say is, if this is what the Germans call a comedy, I’d hate to sit though two hours of German tragedy.

I found myself in this leaden pseudo-comedy after a minor brain disorder caused me to say to my friend Paul, “I’ll go to whatever movie you want to see.” He’a always criticizing me for my narrow movie choices, although my narrowness mainly centers around not wanting to sit through endless foreign films where people hug and learn lessons. So I wanted to show that I was broad-minded, even though I knew there were several “hugging and learning” movies flitting about. (The plot synopses usually start with something like “A moody Istanbul photographer…”)

So we went, and although it wasn’t exactly horrible, by the time the fourth or fifth story arc was wending its way toward self-conscious laugh-cry resolution, I was longing to see something blow up.

Watched the President give the first of six (!) planned speeches on the future of Iraq last night. It wasn’t carried by any of the networks, which I think doesn’t bode well with Bush getting his message (such as it is) out to the American public before the election.

As usual, he alternated between frightened and smirking. He always appears to me to have only the vaguest understanding of what he’s reading off the TelePrompter. But that’s just me, and we should judge a Presidential speech by its content, shouldn’t we? (Although I couldn’t help but think that Bush’s inability to pronounce “Abu Ghraib,” after all that’s happened, is sort of like Dick Cheney not being able to pronounce “Halliburton.”)

Based on content, the speech was an abject failure. “Stay the course,” when we don’t know what the course is, isn’t a plan. What does sovereignty mean when 130,000 – maybe more – American troops are roaming your country? What kind of legitimacy will an American and U.N.-picked government have? How come the handover is only a month away, and we still don’t know who we’re handing over to? When will American troops be coming home? So many questions with no answers.

I don’t know who I feel sorrier for: the Iraqis, or us.

“There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too.”

-U.S. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, casting around for a way to spin the latest PR problem in Iraq

In other news: GWB’s approval rating is at 41 percent. Wow. And 65 percent of those polled said the country is going in the wrong direction. That’s the same percentage as just before the 1994 elections, when voters gave control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Ouch.

An entertaining and thought-provoking documentary from Morgan Spurlock, who put his health at risk by eating McDonald’s food three meals a day for a month.

But as usual with documentaries, and movies in general, some of the most interesting stuff comes in the margins. The central stunt has an understandably dire effect on Spurlock’s health – he gained 25 pounds and put serious stress on his liver and heart. What’s more compelling are sequences like the one showing an alternative high school in Appleton that contracted with a natural foods company to provide healthy, unprocessed foods for the at-risk students there – and the wonderful effects that has on both the students’ behavior and learning.

This movie isn’t up to the Michael Moore standard of entertaining documentaries (a lot of people would consider that a good thing). But it has some important things to say about how corporate greed and American laziness and pleasure-seeking feed on each other. And it does it in good spirits.

Recommended.

The discussion over at Peppermint Tea for some reason reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from “Cheers.” Harvey played Rebecca Howe’s high school boyfriend, who came back to the bar and came out to a shocked Rebecca (Kirstie Alley). Which led to this exchange:

Rebecca: I always assume people are straight until I find out they’re not.

Harvey: That’s funny. I always assume people are gay until I find out they’re not.

I know The Lifetime Movie Title Generator has been around for ages, but it’s damn funny.

Another bit of much-needed humor comes to me courtesy of the estimable Miss Anthropy, who sent along a link to these banners, which would be perfect if they were narrow enough to fit into my page design.

There’s a lot of stuff I could be writing about these days. I could be writing about our forces killing 40 people at an Iraqi wedding. I could be writing about a pattern of abuse that was set in motion from Rumsfeld on down. I could be writing about how a guest on Bill O’Reilly’s show last night called for the U.S. to formally declare war on “The Nation of Terrorism,” which I think would be slightly difficult to find on a map. I could be writing about right-wing nostalgia for the days of Japanese internment camps. I could be writing about the latest anti-gay rhetoric on right-wing sites, spurred by the Massachusetts marriages, that goes something like “If we could only figure out what made them gay in the first place, we could switch them back and everything would be peachy-keen. Plus, no new ones!”

But I find I have a lot of anger these days. And when I try to write about this stuff, I can’t even form my usual sentences. Kim “the rags are fucked” du Toit talks about the “red curtain of blood,” and I must say in this case I think I understand what he’s talking about. Where I used to feel depressed, now mainly I just feel angry.

I know this is not healthy. Maybe I need a stuffed GWB and a wiffle bat. Or at least some better movies to review.

Does anyone out there have an invitation to a Google Gmail account they could spare? If you do, you’d instantly become my new best friend. I’d really like to check Gmail out. Many thanks.

“It’s not you, it’s me. I just think I could do better.”

-Reese’s now-ex-girlfriend, on “Malcolm in the Middle”