About foreign policy. And also Jay-Z. To wit:

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

Is Marc Lynch the Kai Ryssdal of FPM?

So I’ve got three articles sitting in my Firefox window, and I need to get rid of them if I’m going to scratch this itch at the back of my brain. Over the weekend last week three separate articles on three very different news sources identify just how crazy the Republican Party is.

To wit:
1) From Wonkette: Glenn Beck and guest call on Osama to nuke America to save it.
2) From Slate.com: Richard Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.
3) From The Washington Post: Dick Cheney influenced the Executive’s response to his leaking Plame’s identity.

Bat. Shit. Cray. Zee.

I’ve got a job thing today, and will be able to write more on these nutballs later this evening.

And yet — and here’s the part where I really think ROTF approaches “art movie” status — the movie’s id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

I might have to go it alone; I had a partner-in-shame for “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” but will likely go stag for this one.

Here are my most recent book reviews (in most to least recent):
1) “Horse Soldiers” by Doug Stanton sucked.
2) “Hey! Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone!” by Craig Schuftan was amazing.
3) “The Chris Farley Show” by Tanner Colby and Tom Farley, Jr. surprisingly stuck with me (and still does).

More stuff right here.

A bad book about the military will do one or several of the following things: 1) reduce the troops to tropes; 2) wave a flag; 3) become an excuse for an author to enter into a partisan argument between himself and the reader’s sensibilities; and 4) read like a Michael Bay (or, if in the 90s, Jerry Bruckheimer) movie.

I just finished reading an earnest attempt at macho beachside literature, “Horse Soldiers,” pitched to me by the PR company slinging the book as something for Dad on Father’s Day (which was Sunday?). My dad’s a retired Commander in the US Navy, so I couldn’t really think of the book without wondering how he would feel about it, and the military has kind of seeped into the back of my mind and informed, I’m finding increasingly as I get older, how I look at most things.

As such I feel compelled to discuss further the risks of writing a sensationalized take on military strategy, to elaborate on my negative review of the book, which should appear on Blast sometime this week.

The thing is this, at bottom: Nobody’s going to go to a book about military strategy, especially the War On Terror, without a political position of their own. I, myself, think the entire affair was ruined the moment the Commander in Chief decided not to pursue Bin Laden, so, within those confines, the Horse Soldiers’ mission (to fight Al Qaeda) wasn’t really the issue. The issue I had with the book was more that it didn’t do what it could to treat the soldiers as people, and instead gave us a Tony Scott movie with a pair of protagonists, a faceless enemy and a host of extras.

It’s about, I suppose, “supporting the troops.” The author, Doug Stanton, did a monumental amount of research to put “Horse Soldiers” together, and it shows. But Stanton’s encyclopedic amount of interviews and legwork produced not a book full of humanity, but a book full of pop and action. I didn’t care about the people whose lives were at stake in the war, and I didn’t get a sense of how their campaign fit in with the rest of the war, and these two things made the book into an excercise in sugar-spinning.

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I get, in fact. The book’s got staying power; I’ll give Stanton that.

Stanton’s book reads like a summer action movie, or maybe a Spike TV miniseries, about gutsy soldiers with waiting wives back home, fighting for Uncle Sam in the War On Terror, against Al Qaeda terrorists in the deserts of Afghanistan… you know, fighting The Bad Guys for America. Politics doesn’t enter into the equation at all, since, as the book jacket screams, the story is about “a band of U.S. Soldiers who rode to victory in Afghanistan.”

It’s even structured like a movie. Ready? Act 1: get the team together. Act 2: deal comically with saddlesores and miscommunications between cultures as the teams prepare for Act 3: Assault on the Terrorist stronghold.

Is it wish-fulfillment that America beat Al Qaeda on horseback? The meta-narrative of the book isn’t even glossed over: It’s cowboys vs. Indians writ large, with Freedom at stake; the perfect thing to read on the beach next to your wife, who’s probably reading something like “The Ya Ya Sisterhood” if you’re in the target demographic for this simplistic blockbuster.

In the interest of fairness, here’s what I liked about the book, before I go further with what I didn’t like: the description of Afghani tribal warfare realpolitik; the quiet times in the lives of soldiers, where they emerge behind Stanton’s ham-handed macho prose, briefly and sweetly, to appear as people; and the strange craving I’ve been having for goat curry as a result of reading the book.

I suppose I must also give Stanton props for not turning his book into some jingoistic tract, though he flirts with this notion several times in several ways. The early parts of the narrative told from the Afghan perspective read differently, as though Stanton wrote them with a different “voice” in mind. The voice frequently marvels at the strange American super-high-tech and speaks with many, many fewer contractions than the American sections.

Sections written about John Walker Lindh (whose chosen Muslim name is only alluded to) begin and end with pompous declarations like, “So said the voice of God,” another awkward attempt at “othering” the Muslims. In the hands of a better author, these might have worked. Here, they don’t.

It’s a fun — if completely brainless — book, one you will likely only find worth it if you don’t think too hard. It’s written by a guy who spent, I kid you not, dozens of pages salivating over GPS units and EMS catalogue items at the beginning of the story, with detail that eclipsed virtually every other part of the book. I got a better feel for the palleting system used to gather together the commercial-grade gear CIA agents used in Iraq than I did for the agents themselves. I may be exaggerating a little. I liked a couple of the soldiers… but for the life of me, I can’t remember their names.

Which, I suppose, is the biggest problem Stanton has created for himself. The soldiers aren’t really people except when they’re remembering their wives, who are all, if the Men’s Journal staffer is to be trusted, cleaning floors on their knees and weeping into buckets of sudsy water, waiting for their strong men to get home, or, if they are dead, waiting for their buddies to get vengeance.

The disappointment I felt nearing the end of the book had multiple layers. First, the middle hundred pages or so (leading up to the climactic battle scene, which is spoiled in the prologue anyway so whatever) put me to sleep. Second, I never got enough of the personalities of the several soldiers Stanton interviewed to care about any of them. Third, the complete disconnect I felt from the narrative made the book’s attempt to Tell the Soldiers’ Story (which, if handled by a better writer, would have been incredible) a little more than insulting, since they are all reduced to cardboard Action Movie cutouts.

Want a similar narrative? Since this book is a movie waiting to happen, skip the wait and go rent “Lawrence of Arabia,” and watch it on your huge television. Sure, it’s about the British soldier T.E. Lawrence, and not a bunch of American Cowboys, but the basic structure is the same: Westerner(s) network with Middle Eastern Tribal warfare, blow stuff up, and go home. The saddle sores, cultural differences, and goat curry love are handled with more dignity, care and skill than this forgettable beach read.

“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”

I dedicate this to all of you going through hard times.

shb

I fell in love with music and with poetry all over again. I craved some mash-ups that I’d never, ever see. To wit: taking the best of Keats and Billy Corgan, how about “Ode to Mellon Collie?” From Shelley and Gerard Way, “The Masque of Anarchy leads the Black Parade?”

Schuftan’s book, still for some stupid reason not available in the States, is an amazing success.

I recently talked the book up to a punk friend of mine from college, whose name, on her request, I have left out. I include it here because, frankly, I love the book too much not to.

Me: So this book I am reviewing, you would love it. When you come and visit me you should borrow it. It’s not out in the states yet so you are SOL.

ANON: Whee! Oh snap.

Mme: It’s about the roots of punk, pop, emo and goth in I SHIT YOU NOT LORD BYRON AND SHELLEY. it. is. the. greatest.

A: Byron and Shelley were the ORIGINAL GOTH KIDS.

Me: Actually Milton was but whatever. Then again maybe Milton was more of a punk.

A: Nah, Milton was a nerd.

Me: using his art to be a revolutionary and whatnot.

A: Okay, maybe he was a punk.

The author’s passion for tunes, pop, emo, punk and goth is matched with his love for Romantic poetry (and this author would have a tough time pitting the two against each other in the Thunderdome, and is content to see them share the stage) and 19th century history.

Look, honestly? This book needs to be released in the States yesterday. I had a blast reading it.

The book starts out with a confession: Schuftan likes My Chemical Romance. And I have to confess, similarly, that so do I, after reading “Hey! Nietzsche!” If only because reading the book gave me a much bigger appreciation for where the band’s music is coming from, historically and artistically. It’s easy to point at Gerard Way’s Black Parade makeup and derisively laugh, “emo kid,” but when Way calls emo “a pile of shit,” he starts to sound a bit more like Byron when he went to go fight in Greece.

Mechanically, Schuftan illustrates his point by juxtaposition and historical inference. It’s quite brilliant, really, in the sense that when you take a good long look at Bryon’s pallor, his disinterest in people, and his massive poetic talent, he really does look like Rivers Cuomo. Similarly, when you think about Gerard Way voicing a desire to save the world with rock and roll, it sounds a lot like Milton’s Satan.

And really? If it sounds like this praise is too high, or to elevate Weezer and MCR up to the heights of a pair of the greatest poets to ever commit pen to paper, the point is lost on you, dear reader. Byron, Schuftan’s Adam from which all this pale, black-wearing music descended, was a rock star. People read his poetry and loved him Beatles-style. Calling cards arrived in buckets, and Bryon, like a rock star, took in the sex, booze and drugs en masse, with the perfect nonchalance.

The biggest success in the book is making the connections seem so obvious. Schuftan doesn’t strain to make a point once in the book’s 300 pages. The book concludes with an affirmation, and so must I. Love your Byron, listen to your Weezer, and for the love of God, read this book.

Yes, really.

The story of Farley, as he’s affectionately called by his friends in narratives compiled almost a decade after the “Saturday Night Live” star’s death by cocaine overdose, is on the one hand a group of friends remembering a person frequently described as a force of nature, and something of a book of regrets: looking back on their friend’s all-consuming drug problems, alcoholism and inexorable self-destruction, the closest friends and colleagues of Chris Farley are sorry they didn’t do anything to save their friend.

You’ve heard it before, the story of The Great Artist brought down by drugs; Edie Sedgwick comes to mind; Jimi Hendrix; and of course, John Belushi.

And so the book takes two directions, and is pulled between them constantly. Was Chris Farley a comic genius, a force of charisma unlike anything his friends — teammates at Second City and “Saturday Night Live” — had ever seen? Or was he, as his brother describes him, a deeply religious kid, ashamed of his weight and scared of the devil, hungry for love?

I suppose the question is: why can’t we think of him as both? The book, a series of interlocking, transcribed oral narratives, constantly toes the same line between self-important exoneration and apology with which most celebrity postmortems wrestle, to no clear answer.

Is that the core of the narrative? It has to be. The book might be an oral history, but given that it was co-authored by the man who, essentially, taught Chris Farley how to live, it has to have been delicately constructed to toe the line.

When the book’s authors made the decision to get away from straight-forward narrative biography and let the voices of Farley’s friends simply take over, the reader is thrust into a complicated narrative less about the actor himself and more about the difficult feelings everybody had for Farley.

Should they save him, or should they laugh? Nobody outside of Farley’s family admits to guilt by complicity; only Farley’s own siblings recognized in the book that Farley, and their entire family, had serious issues.

And in a way, co-author Tanner Colby is to blame. Early in “The Chris Farley Show,” Farley’s brothers discuss how Chris read Colby’s book about John Belushi’s drug problems, “Wired,” and describe how he took all the wrong lessons away from the narrative. According to “The Chris Farley Show,” what Farley learned form Colby’s book about his on-screen idol was, essentially, that if Farley drank to excess and was a wild and crazy man, people would love him.

The worst part of the whole sordid thing is that everybody did love Chris Farley despite, or in spite of, his incredible self-immolation. I got the feeling from the book that the people around Farley thought of him as a beautiful train wreck: a huge, powerful force, completely destroyed. They wanted to slow down and watch, but couldn’t bear to pull bodies from the wreckage.

The troubling thing is, reading the book and watching clips of Farley’s performances, I couldn’t help but read into them deeply. When Farley’s most famous character, motivational speaker Matt Foley (named after a childhood friend) scolds David Spade and warns him that he will end up thrice divorced and in a van by the river, I couldn’t help but wonder if Farley was yelling at himself: an alter-ego character that came out and talked to everybody but the actor responsible for bringing him to life.

The book, like Farley as he’s described, will draw you in, and you won’t want to look away. I found myself captivated as much by the better days Farley had, the honest-to-god funny stunts he pulled growing up, as I was by his absolutely stupid binge-drinking once he found fame at Second City and “SNL.” I couldn’t decide which was more powerful, the good or the bad, and I get the impression that this is what the authors wanted.

After all: if they’re wrestling with their own guilt, shouldn’t the reader? If everybody who ever knew Chris Farley beyond his shitty, fratboy movie was so conflicted about him, shouldn’t people who are drawn to his story also wrestle with it?

So that’s what you get when you pick up “The Chris Farley Story”: conflict, indecision and guilt. Thinking back on it, I can’t help but think about Macbeth’s soliloquy: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.”

What have we got to remember Chris Farley? YouTube, Hulu, DVDs, and “Tommy Boy.”

If only because, jesus, it’s like you hear “Birdhouse in your soul” every day for a year, right, then you go see Barenaked LadiesThey Might Be Giants? And they play it live and the whole crowd is erupting but you’re just sort of whelmed, neither over-nor-under.

But I’ll tell you: the Film Companion and Art of the Film coffee table books? They are so cool.

If only because, well, they’re clearly written by people who are very passionate about the comic, its philosophy, its meanings, and how its visual representation, as a comic (or a film) makes the philosophy and themes of the story reality. They’re both written, in short, by more or less complete nerds.

It’s weird. I was captivated by both books when I sat to read them a couple of weeks ago, before the movie came out. I couldn’t look away. The amount of work and detail that made it into the movie’s production was borderline fetishistic. It was the creation of a world.

Maybe I’m a process person, finding the work that went into the movie more enthralling than the movie itself. Anyway, check the books out. You will not be disappointed.

It was the punk kid in the back of the classroom who knew everything already, and was angry with and bored at the kid in the front of the classroom who didn’t know the answer but was the quickest to throw his hand in the air.

It told everyone to grow up, and they did. By and large, the Watchmen made Batman who we know today. It made Superman a demigod. It made the X-Men take their allegory seriously. It made the Punisher a big old anti-war parable. Comics were never the same after the final issue of that series, they say.

Zach Snyder’s “Watchmen” simply can’t live up to that. And I suppose I shouldn’t tell a guy to give something an honest try, because everyone should try. But Snyder’s a kid wearing his dad’s suit and tie.

Snyder isn’t as brilliant, as angry, as well-versed in the medium he works in, or, simply, as crazy as Alan Moore, but he loves Moore’s book, and his earnestness really shows. I feel like if Hollywood kept training on lesser Moore books, like, maybe if they had a different director keep taking stabs at “V for Vendetta” until they got it right every two years, maybe in 20 years or so we might have had a “Watchmen” movie as insane and as genius as the book.

See, the next comic book movie we get? It’ll still be a comic book movie. The absolute genre subversion of the source material didn’t come through with the adaptation, and that’s the movie’s central problem.

Beat for beat, Snyder did pretty well. The movie is weird, but not as weird as the book. It’s philosophical, but nobody’s got the brain Moore does. It questions the genre not of comic books, but of comic book movies, a genre only a bit more than a decade old in its current form, which started, (I hate to say I know this), with the stupefying success of the 1997 “Blade” movie.

I get the changes to the source material he had to make, which I really don’t want to discuss here. In a way, they do sort of work: the movie is less a sprawling epic than it is a taut novel, where everything in the story revolves around the central characters. I suppose given three hours (but it didn’t feel like it) and not a series which can take even the most assiduous reader a week to read cover to cover if they do it right, the movie did admirably enough, but if you go to the book’s deepest bit of strange, the chapter of Dr. Manhattan on Mars, you’ll get to the book’s philosophical core.

The movie? Not so much.

I suppose that’s the problem. A lot of the philosophy of the book had to be trimmed down to make room for the fight scenes which didn’t appear in the original in the first place.

But here’s what worked, as I’ve sure you’ve heard. Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian and Rorschach are practically trying to wrestle the show from one another. Billy Crudup is transcendent in the role, and where other people saw detachment in his character, I picked up on a great deal of sadness. The special effects team that created him, too, deserves no end of praise. The Comedian also was played with a layer of depth that one might not notice at first. And Rorschach? Jackie Earl Haley just walks away with it. It was amazing.

If the rest of the movie lived up to the promise of its central characters, I would have no problem calling it one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. As it stands, though, the three best-played characters feel like they’ve walked into a lesser movie.

Go if you love the book already. You’ll spend the hours after the movie talking about where it went wrong.

Otherwise? Take the three hours and watch “The Dark Knight” again.

What are you telling yourself? How are you all sleeping at night? Are you hedging your bets with canned goods and shotguns, or plans for urban communal farming? Are you starting a business? Restructuring through bankruptcy? Moving back in with your parents?

My favorite Spider Robinson aphorism is “Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.” Jump into the comments and tell us about your plans, dreams, denial and successes.

The second, from the Post? Not so good: Swift, Steep Downturn Crosses Globe.

The echo-chamber answering its own question? It’s weird to wake up to realize the apocalypse might have happened, and I slept through it. The market is amazing that way.

Commenters/trolls: how you doing with the economy? Everything alright on your end? Do you still have a job? Afraid you’ll lose it?

It might prove something of a boon to those who reach for the remote control when yet another costume drama comes on television: Elton John’s Rocket Pictures is developing a new spin on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this time featuring a nefarious seven-foot extraterrestrial with hideous mandibles and a penchant for human blood. Yes, it’s Pride and Predator.

It’s about time Austen is getting a refreshing new spin. And you know, you just know Mr. Darcy would kick some ass.

Developing…

The hardest kind of review to write is a review for a mediocre film. I didn’t hate “Friday the 13th” as much as I hated “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and I certainly didn’t love the movie as much as I loved “Milk.”

It was exactly what you would expect from a horror movie. Disposable, yes. Fun, most of the time. With the jumping-scares? Yes. But the movie simply is not the grindhouse masterpiece that the earliest “Jason” movies were.

I’m not familiar with the endless parade of late-in-the-series Jason films. Jason in Hell? Didn’t see it. Jason goes to Space? Didn’t see it. The gimmicks used in the movies started to seem to me like Earnest movies. I wonder how long it was going to be before “Jason Saves (ruins?) Christmas” was going to be the next fast-tracked entry into the series.

So I’m glad they rebooted it, and I’m glad they gave us pretty much exactly what we wanted out of a Jason movie: Abandoned summer camp, sex, boobs, gore, inventive kills (some of them) and dickish fratboys who die painfully.

And yet, well, since the filmmakers just gave us exactly what we wanted, I felt like there was something lacking. Nothing surprised me.

That’s not true – one thing did surprise me: the black guy didn’t die first. He died rather late in the movie, which never happens in these kinds of things.

What was good about the movie? God, the kills. Some of them were just perfectly over the top. The two best: One with a sleeping bag, and one on a dock. The dock kill more or less perfectly represented the horror trifecta, too: tense waiting (you could count the one-two-three beats before Jason dispatches his target), blood, and, of course, breasts. The crowd ate that scene with a spoon, too.

I read a review of this movie in which the critic lamented that the best kills came earliest in the movie, and the rest of the thing is spent with the “plot.” This is true: You can go into the movie, leave before the title card shows up (easily a good 10 or 15 minutes into the film) and have seen one of the most intense, scary, taunt slasher movies made in a long while.

This is because it’s only a few minutes long, and it goes through the same slasher genre tropes the rest of the movie goes through (a second time). The prologue, however, does the slasher genre so much better than the rest of the film. It’s like seeing a movie and its sequel back to back, and having the denigrated quality of the sequel thrown that much more into relief by the absolute badassness of the first film in the series. Everything my companion at the show and I were talking about came from the first ten minutes of the movie.

The movie, for me, was saved by the audience. They, like me and like you, knew exactly what they were getting into. They jumped, they screamed, they laughed — at all the right moments — and although what we were all experiencing together was basically junk food, that was the movie we were all jonesing for.

Don’t go expecting quality, and only go if you know there will be an audience that loves this type of movie. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

Mr. Updike had been battling lung cancer. He was 76.

The author of the “Rabbit” series and countless contributions to the New Yorker magazine was hailed throughout his career as an author whose work elevated the ordinary aspects of American life.

In the spring of 2008, the National Endowment for the Humanities chose Mr. Updike to present the Jefferson Lecture, one of, if not the highest honor in the humanities.

The seeds of his 54-year career were planted when he saw his mother writing at a table, the story goes. He reached huge critical acclaim with his “Rabbit” books, and in 1984, “The Witches of Eastwick” was made into a movie starring Cher, Michelle Pheiffer, Susan Sarandon and Jack Nicholson, and was filmed at the Crane Estate in Essex, Mass.

The prolific author wrote about a novel a year throughout his career. His work ranged from tales of suburban infidelity to magic realism and science fiction. He wrote for television and the stage in addition to his novels and streams of short pieces published in the New Yorker.

Los Angeles Times critic David L. Ulin’s obituary of Mr. Updike, published Jan. 27, casts a quietly tragic light on one of America’s most prolific writers.

Ulin wrote that his image of Mr. Updike will forever remain “as a self-described ‘freelancer,’ who produced a nearly endless stream of book reviews, novels, stories, poems and occasional pieces — more than 60 volumes’ worth in all — because he felt he’d be forgotten if he didn’t keep his name in print.”

Mr. Updike was born in 1932 in Reading, Pa., to author Linda Grace Hoyer Updike and math teacher Wesley Russell Updike. He leaves behind his wife Martha, four children from his first marriage, Elizabeth Pennington, David Hoyer, Michael John and Miranda, and three stepchildren.

Mr. Updike’s work has been hailed as some of the greatest American fiction. There is no doubt in this critic’s mind that he will never be forgotten.

Updike is survived by his wife Martha, four children from his first marriage, Elizabeth Pennington, David Hoyer, Michael John and Miranda, and three stepchildren.

We’ll bring you more later in the week on the life of Mr. Updike.

By the way: Because of a reporting error, we falsely stated that Mr. Updike wrote “The World According to Garp,” which was written by John Irving.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — I can’t, for the life of me, think of a good reason you should see the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

It takes itself much, much too seriously, and it should not.

Everybody knows the story of the original movie pretty well, whether they think they do or not. Alien comes to earth, says, “Whoa, everyone, chill, or I’m coming back. Okay, Klaatu Berata Nikto,” gone. Right?

It would seem that the directors of the movie are basically as familiar with the story as anyone else. The rest, all summer action movie explosions – marketed for the Oscar-grabbing winter season. What the hell? You’ve got a good cast in this thing. Jennifer Connelly. John Cleese, even Don Draper is in it! And yet … Keanu Reeves is also in it, sort of.

I’m not going to defend his acting, really, because he doesn’t do too much of it. (Has he emoted since he put down his Wyld Stallions air guitar after all?) But critics, I’ve noticed, have bent over backwards trying to explain his wooden delivery. One critic said he’s an alien not used to his human body.

I’d chalk it up to Keanu being made out of wood, or maybe low-budget Computer Graphics. All the effects budget was spent, probably, trying to convince John Hamm he needed the movie for his career. These are the things that are destroyed in the movie: a truck and truck driver, a stadium, and most of the hipster part of New York.

Jennifer Connelly’s adorable step-kid, Jacob Benson played by Jaden Smith, (who was so, so annoying) acts his role to a tee. So much so, his shrieks stuck with me on the commute to work this morning. I saw this film three days ago. Is this a movie that will stay in the box office strictly because it will annoy you with its earnestness?

Picture this. A bunch of left-leaning Prius-driving celebrities get together and say to themselves, “we’ve got to make a movie about climate change, only Leo DiCaprio’s not available, and also the movie can’t be a comedy.” This is what you would get: a scientist, played by Don Draper, is one of the key players doing something about global climate change, and he drives an SUV. He was the actor I bought the ticket for this movie for, and I ended up joking he appeared late in scenes because he was off banging someone else’s woman and drinking expensive scotch.

“We can change,” is Jennifer Connelly’s repeated line. That’s fine, Jen, you have an Oscar already. But hey, Klaatu, he doesn’t care. You screwed up the planet. Exept in this movie the 11^th-hour change is so abrupt, you’d honestly believe Klaatu was just trying to get the hell away from the whiny little Smith and Connelly, which is sad.

Not to wave my dork flag or anything, but in the original movie, Klaatu carries an anti-nuclear proliferation message, and addresses it to the People of the Earth.

In this case? Save the whales. And he addresses it to a mother and child. A wasted opportunity, more or less all the way. From script, to internal logic, to the total mistreatment of the cast. The movie is number one at the BO right now. Maybe there is something wrong with Earth.  
  

The greatest accomplishment of “Milk,” Gus Van Sant’s film chronicling the rise and fall of the first openly gay elected official, is the director’s ability to place the viewer in the thick of it.

The openly gay Van Sant makes a movie about an openly gay politician. Is it a gay movie? Not explicitly. It’s a movie about hope, and a movie about changing the world.  Harvey Milk was not a veteran politician: he was a businessman when he moved to San Francisco, and became a politician because he wanted to help people.

Van Sant’s camera rarely shoots Milk from above, and more often than not, is placed in the middle of a throng. You are there, with the crowd. It’s as though Van Sant is in as much awe of what the politician can do as is his cabinet of young, gay outcasts. You fall in love with Harvey Milk, and his murder is all the more tragic for it.

But that’s the point: Milk was trying to do some honest good for people, and he was killed for it. The tragedy of the film doesn’t hit home until the viewer is confronted by documentary footage of rivers of candle-bearing mourners, thousands strong, marching from the Castro to San Francisco City Hall – another incredibly potent reminder that the entire thing was real.

Sean Penn, an actor with whom this writer confesses little familiarity, loses himself in the role. With the use of documentary footage, old camera stock and modern filmic techniques, 1978 and 2008 get confused, and Penn disappears. It’s a masterful performance, deserving of any number of accolades. With a gesture as simple as a smile or a raise of the eyebrows, Penn, through Milk, woos the viewer just as easily as he woos the crowd.

As a film, not just a love-letter, “Milk” is supremely executed. It’s book-ended with Milk’s murder at the hands of Dan White, and follows the narrative Milk himself recorded on cassette tapes days before his death. The film is organized to doom Milk’s mission from the start.

“Spook Country” is an accidental sequel to William Gibson’s post-911 requiem “Pattern Recognition,” according to a video on his website. It reads like the cultural exploration of a man so immersed in the future (remember: when 1984 came out, the idea that we’d have avatars running around inside computers was science fiction. Now, we have Second Life) that he forgot to notice, until one probably sunny morning, that we are living in a science fiction world.

At its core, the novel states the following: the future didn’t turn out to be one of flying cars and magic pill hamburgers, but of works of art that you can only see if you’re wearing virtual reality goggles, standing on a particular street corner. The idea is almost the response to the call-out of “Neuromancer”: Information is all around us, rather than a thing into which we insert ourselves.

Like all of Gibson’s work, it’s a science-fiction escapist piece for readers who meditate on what their world is up to, what it’s becoming.

“Spook Country” introduces us to the weird world of information immersion through the eyes of Hollis Henry, the former frontwoman of progressive-rock band The Curfew, trying to make a break into journalism with a mysterious assignment from emerging magazine Node. Henry’s assignment is to interview locative art specialist Bobby Chombo, who took his last name from a computer program which, according to the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, “provides a set of tools for implementing finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations on block-structured adaptively refined rectangular grids.” Don’t expect that to make sense—the point is, Bobby is a computer geek with a fascination for the intersection of virtual space and real space.

He specializes in geospatial technologies. He got into locative art after a career working navigational systems for the US military, and uses his expertise to place works of art on a VR grid mapped over real cities and towns. Think Google Streetview, only, with giant squids or F. Scott Fitzgerald Tableaus in the middle of record stores. The point is, Chombo is Gibson’s metaphor for the ubiquity of information, and Hollis is the late-20th or early-21st century n00b who has to figure out what it all means.

Gibson’s story is not only about locative art and how weird our world is becoming: he also has the good graces to give us a spy story, which deals with the ubiquity of information in a different way. Agent Brown and his captive junkie Russian translator, Milgrim, are on the tail of a Cuban-Chinese Spetsnaz-trained ninja believed (rightly) by the US government to be smuggling information to an unknown entity for an unknown purpose. Brown relies on satellite information to track him, another nod to the ubiquity of information, and keeps Milgrim in the dark about his actual affiliation and intent. Milgrim, an Ativan addict, constantly battles Stockholm’s syndrome. He is a prisoner of that world of information.

In “Spook Country,” Gibson takes his time weaving these three storylines together, letting the story of Tito the ninja, Brown and Milgrim, and Hollis build to a conclusion which amounts to a great big middle finger to the war in Iraq. Gibson has crafted a book full of characters looking, literally, for their place in the world, and has shown readers that the world didn’t turn out to be the futurist paradise we might have wanted, validating our inevitable escape into the digital.

The book  is horrifying in a nutshell — exploitative and obscene. But if you put it down for longer than the time it takes to use the bathroom—for any other reason than unbeatable disgust—you are a testament to humanity’s true weakness in the face of suffering.

Everyone remembers, vaguely, where they were when The Juice was found not guilty in criminal court of the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown. He was later sentenced in civil court, found liable for willfully and wrongfully causing the deaths of Goldman and Brown, and for committing battery with malice and oppression. He was charged some millions of dollars, and left to fade into obscurity until he broke into a casino to steal some sports memorabilia he claimed was his.

So that was the period between the ‘90s and last week.

It’s Goldman’s relatives who are responsible for having the book published at all. After an initial fight to keep the book off the shelves when it was supposed to be published earlier this year, the Goldmans reversed their position with the intention that everyone who reads the book will be convinced of Simpson’s guilt.

The Goldman family’s quest to keep the book off the shelves is discussed in a lengthy introduction (titled He Did It), saying that the royalty money from the publication was to be funneled to a sham corporation “operated” by Simpson’s children. The Goldman family bought the rights to the book after the sham nature of the corporation was discovered, and decided to publish Simpson’s original manuscript with their preface, a preface written by the ghostwriter (Pablo F. Fenjves) and an afterward written by a judge.

This turns O.J.’s original manuscript — which was purported by Simpson himself to have started out as a fictional account — into a weird sort of dialogue, or debate, between two distinct visions of the truth.

The three bookends to The Juice’s manuscript each ring out the same tune: He did it, we know he did it, we’re all disgusted and aren’t you? And going into the book, you either agree or you don’t.

That’s not the point: the point is to hear from our generation’s most famous killer since Aileen Wuornos. This is the Juice’s side of the story, billed by Fenjves as his final confession. Consider If I Did It O.J.’s “Monster.” We get to see how the killing started: girl trouble.

Yes, girlfriend troubles. The first hundred pages of the book are O.J.’s account of his torrid romance with Nicole Brown, from its dreamy beginnings to its bloodsoaked end. With no one to contradict him, and a ghostwriter who seems to have written the book verbatim from his subject’s own rambling narrative, Simpson makes her out to be a schizophrenic, dangerously unstable, needy, hairpin-turn kind of nutjob girlfriend, with whom O.J. spent nearly two decades before finally snapping and butchering her and an innocent bystander.

It’s this tale which is almost as morally repugnant as the act itself, but actually the real reason I simply could not put it down. O.J. Simpson’s catastrophically mundane troubles and almost touching confusion in the face of this woman he cheated on his wife to be with one week into her 18th year, is the perfect celebrity-tragedy story for our time.

I mean, come on, you’re not getting Romeo and Juliet here. This book is trashy celebrity romance, a tabloid tell-all written by a failed National Enquirer writer.
It’s beach reading for those of you with no shame at all. It’s kind of fun to wallow in The Juice’s whining.

Until you remember that it’s all just excuses and half-ass justification for why he killed his ex-wife and an innocent bystander.

Is it a narrative of quality? Not at all. Even with the Goldman family’s moralistic cautionary tale taped to the front of the original manuscript, the book still serves no purpose other than to shock. The Goldman family turns O.J. into a monster outright, and O.J. turns himself into a monster accidentally.

By the end of the narrative the whole sordid thing is just exhausting. Whether you agree with the Goldman family or Simpson, you’re going to finish reading and need a hot shower.

Conservapedia is one of a growing number of websites that takes Wikipedia’s model of truth-by-aggregate and applies a sociopolitical ideology. It, in turn, has spawned another biased wiki, RationalWiki, a website responding to the Christian Right of Conservapedia with a bent on scientific rationalism and anti-conservative rhetoric.

The question raised by the rising number of ideologically-driven websites is, what can we call ‘truth’ when it’s driven by a partisan point of view or agenda?

Conservapedia is filled to the brim with encyclopedic entries expressing the far Right’s point of view. The founder of the site, New Jersey-based history teacher and lawyer Andrew Schlafly, began the enterprise as an exercise for one of his classes in 2006. It has since ballooned and garnered attention from pundits and journalists alike, ranging from bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum to commentators on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and National Public Radio.

In a March interview with Robert Siegel on NPR entitled “Data for Birds of a Political Feather?”, Schlafly said that Wikipedia has a liberal bias “six times greater than the level of liberal bias in the American public, according to studies that we’ve done.”

Conservapedia’s intent, Schlafly said, is “to present topics and treatment of subjects that are embraced by many Conservatives and many members of the public.”

It’s impossible for encyclopedias to be neutral, he concluded.

And yet, a quick turn to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1971 edition), found that encyclopedias are defined as comprehensive reference works “containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically.”

Wikipedia has taken that idea and released it to the digital mob, allowing a collective, and arguably nonbiased, truth to be presented. Conservapedia’s founder has rejected the notion of an unbiased encyclopedia, and has created a website which presents all things from the Christian Right perspective.

For instance, the day Alberto Gonzales resigned, Conservapedia’s front page ran a blurb framing the event as a left-wing attack: “Alberto Gonzales resigns, after months of political witch-hunts on the part of deceitful Liberals. President Bush said he reluctantly accepted the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose ‘good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.’” The blurb is followed by a link to CNN’s report of Gonzales’ resignation.

Conservapedia’s articles feature a good deal of bias, consistent with Schlafly’s stated intent for the site. The articles are structured the same way as a typical Wikipedia entry, featuring extensive footnoting for most, but not all, of the entry’s assertions.

In the entry for “breast cancer” for instance, Conservapedia’s stated risk factors include diet, race, family history and abortion. Of those risk factors, the assertion that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer is not footnoted, and this omission prompted the creation of another wiki with a bias.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “Dr Peter A. Lipson, an internist in

Lipson created RationalWiki, which like Conservapedia wears its bias on its sleeve, with three main ideas: “Analyzing and refuting the anti-science movement, ideas, and people; Analyzing and refuting the full range of crank ideas,” and “explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism.”

Unlike both Wikipedia and Conservapedia, RationalWiki admits to being a place to publish original research. It also, like Conservapedia, has a clear bias, as outlined in its “about” page: “As a site we have a point of view, and that point of view is that the scientific method and the information gained from its application is better than almost anything else humanity has come up with.”

Its Community Standards page states outright that the site is a “mobocracy,” adding, “We are ultimately an expression of the active editors on this project.”

As is Conservapedia, and, ultimately, Wikipedia as well. The only difference between these three sights is what the active editors chose to express and how they chose to express it.