The Screengrab : barack obama obama

"I Am Atrios!": Kirk Douglas, MySpace Celebrity

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

MySpace has honored its "oldest celebrity blogger" who, it turns out, is Kirk Douglas. Guy Adams reports Douglas "began blogging last year, as part of a temporary initiative to promote his memoir Let's Face It, but decided to continue after seeing the level of interest his comments sparked. In one entry, he writes that he now receives too many messages to answer them personally, his goal at the start. 'But I want you to know that I appreciate each comment that I receive – positive or negative. And I enjoy the opportunity to talk to so many people much younger than I am.' " (Kirk, man, we love you, but you're 92 years old. Odds are pretty solid that you have the opportunity to talk to someone younger than you are whenever someone calls to ask if you're satisfied with your long distance carrier.)

According to his MySpace page, Kirk is white/caucasian, Jewish, married, straight, and a Sagittarian. (Hey, high five, my fellow archer.) At the time of this writing he has 695 friends, though that number is likely to go up as word spreads that this "Kirk Douglas" on MySpace is, whoa, Kirk Douglas. (There are other "Kirk Douglases" and even a Spartacus or three on MySpace, but they are other people.) His favorite movies are Champion starring Lola Albright, Spartacus starring Tony Curtis, Paths of Glory starring Timothy Carey, and Lonely Are the Brave starring Walter Matthau. Dude! No love for The Fury!? It's nice to see that, five years after he formally retired from acting, the man who broke the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to work on the script for Spartacus and telling him he didn't have to use the kitchen entrance is still in touch and keeping up with politics: he's so pleased with the election of Barack Obama that he could plotz. "I express my opinion, and I tell them that they don't have to agree with me because it's a free country," he has said, by way of explaining his blogging philosophy. "And their answers are very, very interesting. I take it seriously. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I don't have to do it, I don't make money. It's something that gives me personal satisfaction."

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

LOCAL HERO (1983)

Whither Bill Forsyth? Withering, apparently: after a charming run of movies in the 1980s (including Gregory’s Girl, Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping), the Scottish director flamed out with 1993’s Being Human (a terrible film which, unsurprisingly, stars Robin Williams), disappearing for good after 1999’s Gregory’s Two Girls (which may or may not be terrible, since I only just learned of its existence through the Internet Movie Database). But Forsyth can make sequels and terrible Robin Williams movies from now until doomsday and he’ll still be one of my favorite directors of all time, if only for bringing Local Hero into existence. A simple but compelling vision of utopia, the film takes place in a gorgeous Scottish fishing village where everyone is welcome and accepted at the local ceilidh, from punk rockers and homeless beachcombers to American businessmen, Russian sailors, African preachers and pretty big city scientists who just might turn out to be mermaids. Movies (especially the Hollywood variety) are usually too impatient, loud and cynical to capture the best parts of actually being human – the beauty of a fantastic night sky, the electric giddiness of a new flirtation, the relaxed camaraderie of smart, decent people – but Forsyth seduces us with the salty sweetness of his celluloid world the way the fictional village of Ferness eventually seduces the film’s shaggy dog protagonist, Mac (played with deadpan cable-knit sweater warmth by the ever-reliable Peter Riegert), an oil company executive tasked with paving paradise to put up a shiny new oil refinery...and, like most real-life utopias, the sense of bittersweet impermanence only heightens the appeal of the place.

SOLARIS (1972)

The beginning of Tarkovsky's Solaris takes place in a retro-future world so sterile and strange that it was filmed in Tokyo. There's a lovely long tracking shot as our hero, Kelvin, drives through the city. I long to sync it with the retro-future sounds of the krautrock band Neu!, which similarly used repetition, driving drums and avant-noise to achieve transcendence. Kelvin visits his parents' house, too, and it is a little Eden of a cottage with a nearby pond. Kelvin soon leaves the cold, clean Earth for the broken-down spaceship circling the planet Solaris, which is potentially sentient. It's not long before his ex-wife, a suicide, shows up in the flesh, so to speak. The end of the film finds Kelvin in his little Eden again, although everything is different now. It's a mirror of Kelvin's perfect little Eden, but the reflection cannot live up to the reality. And the reality is lost to memory, anyway. The above clip is from the end of the movie, so be forewarned. (Soderbergh's remake is interesting, but lacks the punch of Tarkovsky's film.)

BRAZIL (1985)

Terry Gilliam, according to legend, had always wanted to do a movie of George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Michael Radford beat him to it, so he had to invent his own version. It’s probably a good thing he did – Gilliam, whatever his strengths as a director (and they are many, as many as his weaknesses), is probably too weird to make an adaptation of the rise and fall of Winston Smith that made any kind of sense. But as great as Radford’s movie was, Brazil is greater, not in spite of, but because of the fact that it’s so relentlessly strange. The ever-watching eyes of the state peer endlessly at its own civil servants, with results that are as hilarious as they are tragic. Technology is meant to be miraculous but is instead disastrous, and the most subversive thing someone can do is to fix things. Government torturers dress in absurd masks and order the deaths of the wrong people through bureaucratic cock-ups. The heads of state and upper-level party functionaries, instead of being grim and faceless tyrants, are self-deluding clowns who make themselves unrecognizable with plastic surgery or spout endless, hollow sports metaphors. Orwell had seen life’s horrors in his time, and reflected them in his novel; but Terry Gilliam chose to focus on life’s absurdities, and his nightmare vision of the future was one of a man who couldn’t believe that human beings, asinine and incompetent as they were, could even get a dystopia working properly.

PUNISHMENT PARK (1971)

When it was released (to complete indifference from the public and general hostility from the handful of critics who saw it), Peter Watkins’ unnerving pseudo-documentary seemed, to some, unnervingly real. Its nightmarish dystopia seemed, to those who opposed Nixon and his crackdown on anti-war activists, right around the corner: dissidents would be rounded up and used as little more than cannon fodder in military training exercises. Watkins is still the master of the alternate-historical documentary, and for its target audience, the scenes (mostly improvised by an amateur cast) of sneering young soldiers putting increasingly hysterical political prisoners through their paces must have come across as chillingly plausible. In later years, the film became hard to find, which might have seemed for the best: with the eschatological frenzy of the Vietnam era beginning to fade, it probably came across as increasingly strident and paranoid, with every thoughtful dissenter who claims that in a time of government oppression, the honorable path is that of a criminal, there’s an overblown windbag spitting at the pigs and screaming about the Man. It finally came to DVD at just the right time, though: in the post-9/11 era of the USA-PATRIOT Act and governmental scorn for Constitutional protections, it was newly relevant. Latter-day conservatives feverishly dreaming of being locked in confiscation camps by Comrade Obama might even find something to like in it, if its protagonists weren’t a bunch of dirty hippies.

Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs, Leonard Pierce

Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan, Craig, Obama...

Phil Nugent — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

We're used to seeing actors endorse political candidates, but not like this: in an interview with that distinguished cultural journal Parade, Daniel Craig sizes up the American candidates for president and decides which of them is best-suited to take his job. After asking Craig about which Hollywood "tough guy" he would most like to emulate (“The obvious choice for me would be Bogart. Not only because of that ease he had with his unique take on masculinity, but also—and this is much more important—because he got to sleep with Lauren Bacall.”), interviewer Kevin Sessums hits him with the big one: “Who do you think would be the better James Bond—Barack Obama or John McCain?” As Sessums reports, "Craig doesn’t hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because—if he’s true to his word—he’d be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond’s boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'”

In other election season movie news, Reuters is reporting that a majority of people who responded to a Moviephone.com poll voted Harrison Ford's character in Air Force One as their favorite movie president, coming in ahead of Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. Trying to explain this, Moviefone's Scott Robson says, "It seems everybody is looking for a commander-in-chief who can come in and take command. Our readers voted with their hearts at a time when you have the economy going down the tubes, but in an ideal world it would be great to have a president who can kick some ass." It will be remembered that presidents Ford and Freeman stood up to Gary Oldman in a Satanic goatee and a big fucking rock from space, respectively. Others who made it onto the top ten include Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!, and Jeff Bridges in The Contender, who, respectively and with varying results, stood up to alien attackers, more alien attackers, and Gary Oldman in an Antonin Scalia haircut. E. G. Marshall in Superman II finished out of the money entirely, proving that if you balance the budget but also kneel before invading Kryptonian supermen, one guess which act is the one that everyone remembers.

Jon Voight Warns America's Youth About Obama and the Coming Socialist Era

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Fresh from his battle with the East Coast media elitists, in the form of the cover of The New Yorker, Barack Obama finds himself targeted by liberal Hollywood and a onetime representative of the baby boom generation, in the form of beloved sixties relic Jon Voight. The fearless and batshit actor went after the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate in an editorial he wrote for the Moonie-funded newspaper The Washington Times. "We, as parents," writes the man now best known as Angelina Jolie's dad, "are well aware of the importance of our teachers who teach and program our children. We also know how important it is for our children to play with good-thinking children growing up. Sen. Barack Obama has grown up with the teaching of very angry, militant white and black people: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers and Rev. Michael Pfleger. We cannot say we are not affected by teachers who are militant and angry. We know too well that we become like them, and Mr. Obama will run this country in their mindset." This kind of naive faith in the power of "teachers" to permanently shape the young minds to which they have gained access may be par for the course coming from the star of Conrack, but I'm not sure I really buy it. When I was a kid, there were of course adults around who did their best to "teach and program" me, and I probably show how little lasting impact they had on me every time I wake up in a city with paved roads and venture out into it while wearing shoes. But I digress. Voight, whose failure to be cast in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate is starting to look like one hell of a grievous oversight, opines that "The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America."

"The Democrats," according to Voight, "have targeted young people, knowing how easy it is to bring forth whatever is needed to program their minds. I know this process well. I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement." At this point, the reader may begin to suspect that this whole op-ed is Voight's way of apologizing to his new, politically like-minded friends for having starred in, and won an Oscar for, Coming Home, a movie that reduced the Vietnam War to the message that a groovy windblown blond stud of a war protester--Voight's role--fucks better than an Army captain who believes in the war, even if the war protester is paraplegic. (And especially if the Army captain is played by Bruce Dern.) Voight, who was last seen sitting in the audience at the MTV Movie Awards applauding lustily at the news that his daughter had lost the trophy for Best Villain to Johnny Depp, also has some strong words for "Gen. Wesley Clark, who himself has shame upon him, having been relieved of his command, [and who] has done their bidding and become a lying fool in his need to demean a fellow soldier and a true hero." Voight, who himself has shame upon him, having starred in and co-written Lookin' to Get Out, believes that "If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way." Obama will no doubt be counselled to ignore this double-barrelled assault on himself and those who taught and programmed him, but he may do so at his peril. Surely a man who, in this decade alone, has played both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Howard Cosell is no ordinary celebrity crackpot.