So, Gangster Squad showed up in my mailbox today, so I gave it a watch.  You may remember the trailer.  Awful, kaka poo poo movie. I mostly wanted to watch it because a former student of mine, Mireille Enos, is in it. She was in fact, great, in the small but crucial role of Josh Brolin’s pregnant wife.  She was also the only character that brought something that looked sort of like humanity to the film; not actual humanity, because it was too bad a movie for that, but the kind of faux humanity that is the highest action movies ever aim for.

But Gangster Squad did include several examples of a new action movie meme I’ve seen a lot lately.  Obviously, because it’s an action movie, the good guys are very good shots, and the bad guys can’t hit the broad side of a barn.  So in scene after scene, the good guys and the bad guys would be shooting at each other, and bad guys would drop like flies, moaning and holding injured parts of themselves, while the good guys go unscathed.  Oh, sure, occasionally a good guy sidekick character would die, so all the other good guys can weep and mourn and vow with clenched teeth how they’re going to devote themselves to getting the miserable scum who killed Joey.

The idea that good guys are marksmen and bad guys can’t shoot isn’t anything new.  (The best example of it ever was in the original Star Wars, when Obi-Wan sees the damage done to Uncle Owen’s farm and says that it has have been done by Imperial Storm Troopers, because of the accuracy of the firepower.  This about a group of clowns that can’t shoot at all).  No, the new meme isn’t that bad guys can’t shoot, it’s that good guys can literally dodge bullets.

Have you seen this one?  In Gangster Squad‘s final scene, for example, the good cops are coming after Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who is holed up in a luxury hotel, protected by an army of tommy gun wielding thugs.  The good guys consist of, like, five cops.  They’re outnumbered 100-5.  And their oh-so-clever plan is to walk up to the front door and start shooting people.  That’s not a violation of civil liberties, not at all, ’cause you see, they have a search warrant.  Signed by a judge.  So everything’s completely copacetic.

So Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin are advancing into the hotel.  And this one baddie jumps out with a tommy gun, and opens fire.  Right there, point-blank range, blasting away at Josh Brolin. Who responds by sort of ducking his head a little.  And then plugs the bad guy mid-chest.

It’s the ducking thing that got to me.  Apparently, it’s possible, when someone is shooting at you (with an automatic weapon, no less), if you duck at just the right time, you can literally dodge the bullets.  I mean, I don’t know how else to interpret that cinematic moment.  The guy is maybe fifteen feet away, point blank range, and he has a machine gun, and he blasts away.  Josh Brolin ducks. And the bullets all miss.  How else are we supposed to interpret that?

I’ve seen it in other movies.  Chris Pine does it in the new Star Trek.  Tom Cruise did it in Jack Reacher.  Good guys have always been bullet-proof, but now, it seems, they’re bullet-proof not as a sign of their moral superiority, but also due to their superior, super-human reflexes.

Okay, this is all silly and we all know it’s unrealistic.  But I do think some version of it drives some folks’ views on public policy.  For example, one persistent thread I’ve seen in relation to Benghazi goes like this: “Obama could have and should have sent troops in.  We could have saved the lives of those brave Americans if we could have responded, immediately, with Special Forces.”  And this, of course, is Obama’s fault, not sending in reinforcements.

Well, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates (a Republican, let it be noted), addressed that very issue.  We’re so used to movies, we’re so used to good guys beating bad guys against impossible odds, we have a, well, cartoonish understanding of real-life military capabilities.  Cartoonish is the word Secretary Gates used, and it’s an apt one.  Movies like Gangster Squad are cartoons.  And cartoons can be amusing.  But they don’t even approximate real life.

In the actual factual military, ops are planned, based on solid intel.  And in movies, the good guys plan too. But their plans are always silly.  Basically, the plan, in Gangster Squad, is ‘we’re going to walk up to the front door and start shooting.  And eventually, we’ll work our way through all the henchman and kill Sean Penn.’  It works splendidly.  But mostly because Josh Brolin has the ability to duck incoming bullets.

Even a movie like Zero Dark Thirty, which went to great lengths to get the combat sequences right, does romanticize battle some.  But it does show how carefully real Navy SEALS train, and plan, and how meticulously they execute.  It’s refreshing to see a movie at least try to get all that right.  But Hollywood mostly doesn’t bother.  It’s more fun to see Josh Brolin duck bullets. My guess is, he actually can’t.

So, President Obama’s second term in office is off to a booming start, I’d say.  An encouraging jobs report. An economy that continues to recover.  One foreign military commitment essentially over and another winding down.  It’s true that two second-term legislative priorities, gun control and an immigration bill are stalled in Congress, but certainly progress has been made on both fronts.  Everything’s looking tea and crumpets for this President.  Tickety boo.  Copasetic.

I am, of course, kidding. We’re in the middle of the worst week of the Obama presidency, and it’s only Wednesday.  On Sunday, more shocking revelations on Benghazi.  The fabled ‘talking points,’ turns out, were not simply produced by the ‘intelligence community.’  Someone in the White House tinkered with them, softened words like ‘terrorist’ into words like ‘extremist.’  This was absolute red meat for conservatives, who have been insisting all along that the Benghazi ‘cover-up’ was initiated in the White House.  Then, turns out, the IRS (everyone’s favorite government agency) had been targeting conservative groups, giving special scrutiny to their 501 (c) (4) applications.  Also, Monday, we learn that the Justice Department had secretly obtained two months worth of phone records for Associated Press reporters and editors.  Finally, the President is hosting British Prime Minister David Cameron, a man who is currently less popular in Britain then President Obama is in Provo.

Second terms are tough. Nixon’s second term was destroyed by Watergate, Clinton’s by impeachment.  Reagan’s second term was defined by the Iran Contra affair, while George W. Bush’s saw the complete meltdown on the world economy.  Grover Cleveland’s second term saw the Panic of ’93, while even George Washington’s second term was marred by the massively unpopular Jay treaty.  So here we go, right on schedule, the sounds of Beyonce’s lip-synced national anthem barely fading. Scandal and disgrace. (In fact, isn’t that where it all went wrong?  Isn’t this really Beyonce’s fault?)

So let’s take a look, in descending order of importance, the big three scandals of this week, in reverse order of how we learned about them.  For starters, the AP phone number thing.

This link takes you to AP’s story on the scandal.  How’s that for irony?  But folks, this is serious stuff. The Justice Department has stone-walled the press on this, which is both entirely predictable and completely the wrong thing to do.  That’s the first law of scandals–get your story out there first.  Be the one to break it.  Take control of the narrative.  And that’s exactly and precisely what Justice has failed to do.

Bottom line: the federal government may not conduct special surveillance on news reporters doing their job.  It was wrong when Nixon went after the Washington Post during Watergate, and it’s wrong now.  It violates the spirit and letter of the first and fourth amendments.  Whoever in Justice authorized this needs to be fired, immediately and without hesitation.  I also think Attorney General Eric Holder needs to resign or be fired, whether or not he approved it or even knew about it.  Even if he learned of this the way the rest of us did, by watching the news, he’s clearly guilty of having mismanaged the Justice Department, if subordinates could possibly consider this a good idea. And if President Obama knew about it or approved it, this is an impeachable offense.  I like this President, I voted for him and I supported his re-election financially.  But you don’t spy on reporters.

We don’t know what this was about, but anything this colossally stupid and wrong-headed and fundamentally unconstitutional has to have originated with the War on Terror.  The AP story I linked to above speculated that “the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot,” and speculates that this probe may be related to that investigation.  That makes sense to me. I don’t doubt that Justice would very much like to know AP’s sources for that leak and that story.  But they don’t get to bug reporters’ phones.

So that’s the big one; the major story of this week. And I’m glad that it came out. Way too much of the War on Terror operates in what can only be called legal and constitutional gray areas. President Obama knows this; hence his obvious discomfort with the detention of terror suspects at Guantanamo.  The President knows perfectly well that the United States can’t legally or constitutionally hold detainees there forever.  He wants to close the base–has said so many times.  But he hasn’t actually closed it, mostly because, I suspect, he doesn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the detainees.  Just letting them go seems, uh, irresponsible.  So charge them with something and try them criminally?  That’s probably the right answer, but what evidence, by now, hasn’t been corrupted?

So it’s an awful mess.  And of course, Presidents must feel tremendous pressure to do something, to keep Americans safe.  But the way to defeat terrorism isn’t to kill or capture all possible terrorists.  That’s a Sisyphean impossibility.  The way to defeat terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized.  The way to defeat terrorism is with a little David Ortiz. Props, Papi.  F yeah.

Above all, we cannot abandon our deepest and truest values, and especially those enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  I’m a liberal and a Democrat, and I voted for President Obama, and I desperately hope this scandal doesn’t go that high, to the White House.  If it does, he needs to go.  So this scandal really is genuinely a big deal, far and away the most troubling of the big three that broke this week.

Okay, second scandal, the IRS targeting conservative groups applying for 501 (c) (4) status.  I read about this scandal with a comfortingly familiar sense of deja vu.  It was comfortingly familiar.  Used to be Greenpeace and the ACLU that got this kind of attention. Now it’s groups with ‘Tea Party’ in their name.

Look, I don’t think political advocacy groups should be eligible for 501 (c) (4) status at all.  ‘Social welfare’ organizations are eligible, but ‘political advocacy groups’ are not.  It reminds me of when I was a student at BYU, and the Honor code prohibited girls from wearing ‘jeans’ but allowed them to wear ‘denim slacks.’  The line is so nebulous, IRS decisions are always going to be seem arbitrary.  Apparently, the problem at the IRS is that inadequately supervised employees decided to give special scrutiny to groups with ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their title, but not groups with ‘progressive’ or ‘progress.’  This story points out that the IRS wasn’t particularly consistent even there, but yeah, they approved groups like Progress Florida, but applications from groups like T.E.A. (Taxed Enough Already) languished.

I would say that the IRS commissioner should be fired over this, but there isn’t one–the Republicans in the Senate have filibustered a vote on the President’s nominee for the job.  Love that irony.  Meanwhile, yeah, this is inappropriate. There should be an investigation, and probably someone at the IRS should lose his/her job.  I would suggest that Congress revisit 501 (c) (4) guidelines.  But this Congress?  Anyone have any confidence that they’d not just make things worse?

Finally, Benghazi.  Yes, it looks like someone in the White House altered the talking points Susan Rice used when she appeared on Sunday talk shows after the Benghazi attacks.  As a result. . . . viewers of those shows were slightly (emphasis on slightly) less informed for a few days than they might have been otherwise. Stripped of all the usual conservative argle-bargle, this remains a non-scandal.  It is, predictably, the one Fox News has focused on the most.

Like Fred Krueger, Jason or Rasputin, Benghazi keeps crawling back to terrorize us.  Yesterday’s hearings marked the ninth time Congress has held hearings on Benghazi.  The public reaction was, again, a yawn.  Jon Stewart, as usual, got to the heart of why this nation-wide apathy.

It doesn’t matter.  That’s what Secretary Clinton said about it when asked, and she’s right.  It doesn’t matter. What?  Outrageous!  Four brave patriotic Americans died!  How can that not matter?  So let’s be clear about what matters and what doesn’t.

Four men died. A US ambassador, a lifelong diplomat, Chris Stevens, died.  That’s a terrible tragedy, and it deserves to be thoroughly investigated.  And I think pretty well everyone agrees what the focus of that investigation should be.  We want to know exactly what happened.  We want to know who-dun-it, and how to catch them.  We want to know what specific, concrete steps can be undertaken to increase embassy security.  We want, maybe, to look at possible military responses to a US mission under siege.  Relevant questions might be ‘is the US Diplomatic Security Service properly funded and trained?’ Or, ‘why doesn’t the Africa sub-command have a on-call Marine detachment that can be quickly flown to trouble spots?’  Or my favorite, ‘why didn’t the safe room in the Benghazi compound come equipped with gas masks?’

Serious errors were made.  Those errors may be correctable.  Security experts should investigate.

And in fact, that’s happened.  Benghazi has been thoroughly investigated.  The Accountability Review Board Report is available on-line.  It’s hardly a whitewash.

Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department (the “Department”) resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.

The full report is available on-line, and it’s scathing.  Serious mistakes were made.  Security was inadequate.

So yesterday, Gregory Hicks testified before Darrel Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  He essentially corroborated the ARBR report, adding extra, painful details.  He argued, for example, that additional Special Forces could have supplemented the forces that did show up, from Tripoli. I watched Hicks’ testimony.  Powerful stuff. It added a little to our understanding of the event.  I was struck, yet again, at what a miserable screw-up the whole thing was.

But not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up.  Not (get real) impeachable.

The focus of House Republicans has consistently been misplaced.  On the Sunday talk shows, a few days after the Benghazi attacks, Susan Rice said that a terrorist attack rose spontaneously from a protest over the anti-Islamic video on Youtube.  She was simply reflecting the talking points prepared for her, but those talking points were incorrect.  The video had nothing to do with Benghazi.  It was a carefully planned terrorist attack.  Everyone agrees on that point.

But my gosh, the outrage!  The talking points have become the entire narrative for conservatives.  It’s a cover-up!  Worse than Watergate! It’s really remarkable.

Let’s be clear: the incorrect talking points had no real-world impact on events.  Ambassador Rice said a few things wrong to George Stephanopolous.  It meant that people who watch This Week were slightly less informed for a day or two.  No terrorists went free.  No other embassies were attacked.  It meant nothing.  It’s completely unimportant.

Today, the news is all about a ‘smoking gun’ email, apparently, that shows that the White House National Security office was involved in editing the talking points.  They replaced ‘terrorist’ with ‘extremist,’ for example.  So this feeds into the whole ‘cover-up’ narrative.

See, what’s supposed to have happened is that the White House was afraid that a highly public terrorist attack would hurt President Obama’s election chances.  It would make him look weak on terror.  It would undercut a Democratic argument: ‘President Obama had Osama bin Laden killed, and therefore made American safer.’ It would show that Al Qaeda was still an active threat.  So the talking points were softened, for political reasons.

And I suppose all that is possible, though there’s no evidence that either President Obama or Secretary Clinton was involved.  (‘Plausible deniability!’)  So here’s why I think that argument is  honestly kind of silly.

First of all, the politics of it don’t make sense.  If President Obama was afraid to talk about resurgent terrorism, then why did he use the ‘T’ word in his own remarks the day after the attacks?  Generally, when Americans are attacked by terrorists, the President’s approval numbers go up.  It’s pretty much always a plus for sitting presidents.  A guy standing up resolutely against terrorists is the kind of image voters love.  In his Rose Garden remarks, the President looked, well, Presidential.

More to the point, we need to see the entire event in context.  Conservatives love to mock the ‘video protest’ argument, but the reality is, there was a video, it was preposterously offensive, and there were riots in Egypt over it.  Those riots spread to Tunisia, to Tripoli, and throughout the region. That’s why the talking points talked about video protests.  The State Department had been on alert for days precisely over video protests elsewhere.

It’s basic human nature to focus on one emergency at a time. We all do it.  So, for example, in the coverage of the Boston bombings, we kept hearing about how another bomb had also gone off in the Kennedy Library.  It turned out that a fire alarm had gone off there, but it wasn’t connected to the bombings in any way, and wasn’t actually any big deal.  But with everyone focused on bombings during the Boston Marathon, it makes sense that a report of an incident elsewhere would be conflated with the thing we were all worried about.

At State, whether or not Benghazi had anything to do with video protests, the emergency caused by the protest was still on-going at the time that the talking points were being prepared. State was trying to calm things down.  ‘Extremist’ is a softer word than ‘terrorist.’ Softening the talking points for diplomatic reasons makes much more sense than altering them for political reasons.

In any event, it still doesn’t matter.  Secretary Clinton’s testimony remains the best and final word on the talking points aspect of the controversy.  Getting the story straight for a TV show was almost certainly everyone’s lowest priority.  And anyway, what does it matter?  What matters is catching bad guys, and improving embassy security going forward.  These recent House Benghazi hearings will do nothing to accomplish either objective.

When I started this blog, I wanted it to be really eclectic; movie reviews and cultural commentary, political thoughts and book reviews, theology and history, with an occasional smattering of baseball.  That’s kind of who I am, a guy with many interests.  I’m a playwright–we dramatists have, by nature, pack rat minds. So after a few days on a single subject, it’s time for a review.

And Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina film is really something special.  Such an interesting director: Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna give some idea of his versatility.  Now he turns Tolstoy’s novel into a highly theatrical exploration of the separate lives we live in public and in private.  Given a taut, literate, compact screenplay by Tom Stoppard, Wright turns the material inside-out and upside down, opening up the material and transforming it.

We start in a theater. An older proscenium space, with a huge forestage and capacious fly space.  And in a sense, the entire film takes place there, in that theatrical setting.  We see a stage door open, and an actor step into a Russian winter; we see actors step through a door, and find himself in a train station, we see a horse race, all rapt faces and thundering hooves, but no actual horses, and when finally horses appear, they’re racing past a proscenium opening. We see flats and backdrops.  Actors enter, and have to negotiate their way past footlights.

The dance where Anna meets Count Vronsky, where he woos and wins her, is a sinuous waltz, the dancers using their hands as well as their feet, precisely choreographed serpentine writhing hand movements simulating making love.  As Keira Knightley as Anna, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who made a brilliant John Lennon in Nowhere Boy) as Vronsky dance, the other dancers freeze, until Anna and Vronsky swing past and free them.

The mystery of Anna Karenina is what on earth Anna sees in Vronsky.  She’s married, and we have no reason not to see her marriage as a happy one.  Although Jude Law captures Karenin’s stolid dullness, he also shows us, unmistakably, his essential goodness.  He’s a considerate, pious and decent man, and he desperately loves her.  Why would she throw away her marriage and her family and her child, why would she toss all that aside for a vain little popinjay like Vronsky?  Taylor-Johnson is unquestionably good looking, a precise little man with gorgeous hair and perfect mustache, but he’s comparably insubstantial.  Karenin has what Vronsky does not: integrity, character, a position, and kindness to spare.  You know Vronsky’s going to cheat on Anna as soon as he’s bored with her, and when he does, the only thing that’s surprising is that he lies to her for so long about it.  Vronsky’s Mom (Emily Watson), offers the secret to his character: “so you’ve had an affair with a married woman.  That’s a valuable experience.  But it’s time to move on.”

But what Wright does show us, through the dance scene, is the beginning of a hopeless, desperate, self-destructive sexual infatuation.  The dance encompasses it–it’s exciting, intoxicating, dangerous.  When we finally see Anna and Vronsky in bed, their flexuous writhing echoes the dance; they make love like snakes.  And then we see them entangled in bedclothes, and we can barely tell where Anna ends and Vronsky begins.

They’re in love, says Anna repeatedly.  She’s in love with him.  But they hardly seem ever to talk, and when they do talk, she seems insane; insanely jealous, insanely besotted.  And this is where Knightley’s performance strikes me as so extraordinary.  She plays every moment full out, every emotion as an extreme, without seeming to care if those moments are stitched together into a complete characterization.  Having seen the film, my initial response was to wonder why Knightley wasn’t nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, instead of, say, Naomi Watts, whose character in The Impossible (though exceptionally well acted) spends most of the movie in a coma.  I think, though, that Knightley’s commitment to each moment of the performance may have struck some critics as ill-conceived, like she had no sense of the character, and so just overplayed individual emotional states.

But I thought her performance was perfect for this movie, for this approach to the material.  Wright’s over-all strategy isn’t realistic, not ever for a moment.  It’s entirely stylized, almost Brechtian.  Knightley isn’t so much a character as an enigma, a huge question-mark at the heart of the film. The rapid-fire mood changes fit the shifting scenery and ever-present mirrors–it’s not human life we’re seeing, but a fragmented approximation.

And by playing her that way, Wright is able to emphasize what seems really to interest him; the sexual double-standard.  Anna is a ‘fallen woman.’  She is disgraced.  And she is therefore ostracized.  So we see her at the opera, and no one will speak to her, except Shirley “Moaning Myrtle” Henderson, in a tiny role as ‘Rude Opera Woman,’ who disses her so completely that Anna dissolves in tears and leaves.  Vronsky sees all this, and seems bothered by it.  But it takes two to tango, and one can’t help but notice that Anna’s partner in adultery gets off scott-free, because he’s a guy.

Meanwhile, we see another side of love, another version of conventional propriety.  Domhnall Gleeson plays Levin, another aristocrat, hopelessly in love with the lovely Princess Kitty (Alicia Vikander).  She’s young, though, and her head has been turned by Vronsky; she rejects Levin’s proposal.  Levin, meanwhile, tries to care for his revolutionary brother, who is living with a woman to whom he is not married.  Eventually, Kitty matures, accepts Levin’s proposal (in a lovely scene involving wooden letter blocks.)  And Levin feels like he needs to shield her from any ‘scandal’ involving her acknowledging the ‘fallen woman’ in his household.  Kitty impatiently rejects any such nonsense, and patiently and kindly helps her nurse the invalid brother back to health.  Compassion is possible–convention can be successfully navigated.

Of course, Anna dies; we knew going in that she would, that she would fall between the wheels of a train.  The final image of the film is the field where her children play, patiently and lovingly looked after by Karenin.  And then the camera pulls back, and we see the field, the flowers and grasses, and they’re part of a stage set, on the stage floor.  And we end where we began, in a theater.

It’s a strangely beautiful film, a superb adaptation of a great novel by an immensely inventive director and writer.  It’s a film that’s in part about the tragic mystery of intense sexual infatuation.  It’s a film about more lasting varieties of love.  And it’s a film about a society that refuses to allow women equality, not in love, and not in sin.  It’s spectacular.  See it.

It’s Oscar time tomorrow, and I’ve already laid in supplies for my Oscar party.  Nate Silver has weighed in with his Oscar predictions, and since he’s scary good at prognosticating, I’m going to bow to the inevitable and concede that Argo is probably going to win.  It’s a fine film, very exciting, and a deserving contender. Lincoln is a better film, I think, but if Argo does win, I won’t be as outraged as I have been in the past.  Like, say, last year, when The Artist, a charming French remake of Singin’ in the Rain (sans music), a substance-less gimmicky fluff piece, somehow beat out The Tree of Life.  Remember ’94 (Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction), remember ’06 (Crash, over Brokeback Mountain?  Anyway, my predictions.  Lincoln will somehow win Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and Best Screenplay, and still won’t win Best Picture.  Oscar is relevant how?

No, my son asked me instead to list my personal top ten–my ten favorite films from last year.  So here goes:

1) Lincoln.  I know, I know.  But it’s such a remarkable film.  So beautifully written, with that eloquent, smart, complex screenplay by Tony Kushner.  America’s finest playwright, writing about our greatest President, and our most stupefying and astounding national tragedy: slavery, and the war we had to fight to end it.  Daniel Day-Lewis embodies Lincoln, doesn’t just play him, and Sally Field was just as superb as Mary Todd Lincoln.

2) Seven Psychopaths.  The great Irish playwright wrote and directed his second film, and it’s amazing; strange, smart, human and humanist, post-modern without losing its soul in self-conscious cleverness.  It’s a such a layered film.  And Sam Rockwell gives the finest performance I saw last year in any film not starring Daniel Day-Lewis.  And a performance by Christopher Walken that felt like the coda on a brilliant career.

3) The Cabin in the Woods.  Joss Whedon’s writing partner, Drew Goddard, also directed–I’m still calling it a Joss Whedon film, and putting it in here instead of The Avengers, fun superhero movie.  Cabin is this amazing deconstruction of horror films, a meta-cinematic full-on assault on the preposterous moralism of horror as a genre.

4) Brave.  It’s not just the animation.  Of course Pixar can make a red-haired girl riding a horse look amazing.  It’s the story, the relationships.  When have we seen this before?  A marvelous new Disney princess–a young woman of independence and intelligence, willful and determined, and utterly uninterested in any of the princes who offer themselves as suitors.  Instead, we get a film about a mother and a daughter, exploring that fraught, difficult, but deeply loving relationship. And in a film that also manages to be really genuinely funny. Why was Kelly MacDonald not considered for Best Actress?

5) Life of Pi.  Love the book, love what Ang Lee did with the movie.  So gorgeous.  “Which is the better story.”  A great movie that honors a great book.

6) Hope Springs. Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones, as a married couple re-connecting.  Lovely writing, lovely acting.  Beautiful film.

7) Django Unchained.  Quentin Tarantino, historically revisionating away.  Love the performances, loved the writing, love way it depicts the sheer horror of slavery as the ultimate moral evil.

8) Les Miserables.  How to make a movie out of a musical.  How to turn it into a powerful personal political statement.  Anne Hathaway is magnificent.

9) Zero Dark Thirty.  I really do think it’s ultimately just another good thriller.  But it’s an awfully good one.  Superbly made, if historically questionable.

10) Argo. I really did like it a lot, and wouldn’t at all mind if it won Best Picture.

I would also say that all ten of these films, and all the other films nominated for Best Picture, would have swept last year’s Oscars. This was a great movie year.

‘.

Last night, I went to a staged reading of a new play by my friend Elaine Jarvik, sponsored by The Best Professional Theatre Company in Utah, also known as Plan B.  And as it happens, I started a new play yesterday.  And a friend and I spent some time texting back and forth about producing another play of mine that just got read.  And so I thought I’d tie those things together.  I know: a playwright talking about ‘process,’ shoot me now.  But maybe it’s a little interesting to someone, maybe.

The reading last night was awesome.  Elaine’s play isn’t finished, but it’s a terrific premise, and the conversation was invigorating.  Jerry Rapier, the artistic director of Plan B, arranges these readings on a monthly basis.  I come, along with Julie Jensen and Matt Bennett and Jenifer Nii and Elaine and Debora Threedy.  What’s great about this group is that it’s basically ego-less.

I don’t mean that playwrights aren’t egomaniacal and self-obsessed and narcissistic; of course we are.  At least I am.  I mean that in that setting, we don’t any of us have anything to prove.  We’ve all seen each others’ work, we’ve all been dazzled and amazed at plays we desperately wish we were good enough to have written. We’ve also all participated in Plan B’s annual SLAM event, 24-hour theatre, where we get to write a play overnight, and see it in production twenty-four hours after having been given a title to base it on.  It’s a completely terrifying experience, and also humility-inducing; we all sit there in the theater watching the scripts’ performances, saying the same quiet prayer: “Please let mine not suck the most.”

So at last night’s staged reading, there was nothing show-offy about the conversation afterwards.  We all focused on the same task: helping Elaine’s play improve.  I didn’t sense for a second that any of us had any other agenda. I sat there, and Julie would say something terrifically helpful, and then Matt would, and that would spark a thought for me, and all of it was play-focused.  We like Elaine, we admire her talent (I envy her gift for comedy), and we all want her play to be as good as it can be.  I don’t feel like I have Elaine’s permission to tell you what the play is about or what the premise is, but let me tell you, it’s going to be a corker.

Knowing I was going to this reading, I sat home yesterday, and opened a new file, and started another play.  Sometimes I wish I were a novelist.  I’ve written one novel, and most of a second, and I have to say, it just doesn’t flow for me.  It’s agonizing.  Writing is always a solitary thing–just you and the computer, naked and alone– but I’m not naturally a solitary person.  I feel like I’m a pretty social person, honestly.  That is, I think, why I’m a theatre guy.  You may write alone, but the creative process has another crucial step–stage production, where you interact with directors and actors and designers and stage-managers and all.  It’s especially great when you have a long-term relationship with all those people–working with Plan B feels to me very much like ‘hanging out with friends.’  It’s task-centric, but it’s also interactive.

My last play was about macro-economics.  The one I started yesterday is about something quite possibly even more boring: the Investiture Controversy of 1078.  I don’t know why I do this.  I used to write these deeply personal plays about people and their problems–now I seem drawn to 11th century papal politics.  I don’t think it’s because I’ve lost my humanity.  Probably I have, but it happened really slowly and gradually, and I didn’t catch on ’til I was too late.

No, what attracts me to the Investiture Controversy is the same thing that attracted me to Keynes and Hayek–the primary cause aspect to it.  The disagreement between Emperor Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), and Pope Gregory VII was about, essentially, sex.  Henry claimed the power to name and promote clergy, and some of the people he picked weren’t very good people.  The Pope wanted celibates.  This was really the start of mandated celibacy in Catholicism, and I think it lies at the root of the sexual abuse scandal today.  Henry, meanwhile, was sort of edging towards the idea of government providing a social safety net–rudimentary as that would have been in 1078.  The other nice thing is, it’s a nice, limited cast–Henry, Gregory, the Marchioness Matilda of Canossa (the great meeting took place just outside her castle–she was Michelangelo’s great great great great grandma), and also Hugh of Cluny, a monk who everyone respected, who agreed to mediate the whole thing.  So, four characters, all of them interesting.  I ended up with 9 pages on it yesterday. Hugh’s fun to write–have to be careful he doesn’t take over the play.  Anyway, it was a real thing, and super interesting.  Wanna see a picture? See what I mean; Matilda’s kinda cute; freakishly big hand, but I like her bangs; gives her a hippie-chick vibe. Is that a headband? Kirsten Dunst in the movie, am I right?

Some playwrights do all kinds of pre-planning before they start a draft.  One friend writes a detailed treatment, for example.  I just absolutely can’t work that way.  I don’t know the people yet: how can I predict what they’re going to want to do?  I have to get them talking to me, and the only way that happens is if I write dialogue.  Of course, I end up throwing a lot of it out, but that’s okay, it’s sort of fun.  First drafts are horrible, of course, because we’re just getting acquainted.  It’s the awkward cocktail party stage of writing, where everyone’s being polite and you don’t know a soul.  Takes a few weeks before they start letting their hair down–then it all goes much better.

And then a friend of mine contacted me, and wants to produce my play Mess of Pottage, which got read last week. And February, for some reason, seems to be ‘terrific plays I’m desperate to see’ month.  Mel Larson’s Little Happy Secrets at the Echo.  Matt Bennett’s Eric(a) at Plan B.  Great stuff. So that’ll be fun.  Anyway, that’s playwriting–a lot of down time, which you spend reading and writing and hoping, and then every once in awhile, good things happen.

Being wiped out with pneumonia the last week, I found myself without the energy to do much work, or even read much.  So, you know, did what you do, watched too much crappy TV.  Sports: that Montana v. Idaho State game was a barnburner!  Bunch of Dog Eat Dog re-runs.  And while I was at it, I watched some Fox News. My son tells me that he watches a ton of it, because it’s on 24-7 where he works, so thought I’d check it out.  Like I said: felt crappy, watched crappy TV.

What struck me, aside for Fox’s nearly endless supply of attractive young blonde conservative women, was this: they’re seriously afraid.  Wow, are they afraid.  Of course they’re all about the ‘debt crisis.’ I love the ominous tone they strike: “Economies collapse slowly . . . then all at once.”  And they love various little anecdotal parable-like stories.

Greece!  We’re turning into Greece!  If Greece didn’t exist, Fox News would have to invent it, but fortunately for them, we do have Greece, everyone’s favorite morality tale of profligacy and waste and corruption.  See Greece is a country!  With an economy!  And we’re also a country!  Also with an economy!  We’re exactly the same!

Yeah, and Justin Verlander and my neighbor’s twelve-year-old in Little League are both pitchers. And there’s no qualitative difference between Lionel Messi and these kids.  Exactly the same. Kicking a ball with their feet.

So on Fox, they’ve got all these ads for gold.  Gold! The one investment that never loses value!  The one thing that will survive the complete collapse of the US economy!  Buy gold!

I really don’t get it.  Gold is a commodity, like any other commodity, traded internationally, as subject to the vagaries of supply and demand as anything else.  Those constant ads on Fox–juxtaposed against very serious looking talking heads blathering on about the coming apocalypse–are just guys who seem to have a business model that apparently includes artificially increasing demand for their commodity.  Make some money off old scared white people. But the world hasn’t been on a gold standard since the Great Depression finally convinced everyone that maybe a little more flexible monetary policy than gold allowed for might give the Fed some tools to prevent another catastrophe.

Plus, the commercials.  Okay, my daughter and wife and I have been known, on occasion, to watch The Price is Right.  What can I say: Drew Carey is even better than Bob Barker.  But when you watch a show like that, you also get to watch the commercials, and you can tell what demographic they’re pitched at.  Ads for lift chairs.  Ads for those stair elevator things.  Ads for Dentu-creme and baldness remedies.  For fecal incontinence products.  Okay, I admit, I use a lift chair.  But I’m not old!  I’m not!  Get off my lawn, kids!

Well, Fox News ads skew even older than that.

So I’m a geezer.  I guess.  Don’t really feel like one, apart from the memory loss and constant joint pain.  But what I am is an optimist.  I feel hopeful. Maybe absurdly so, but I do.

I really have become convinced, that this last election was between hope and fear, and hope won.  Everything about the anti-Obama rhetoric was so extreme. He’s a socialist.  He’s a Moslem (which means in league with terrorists).  He’s anti-American.  Vote for Obama and you vote for the End.  Of America.  Of everything.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets Facebook posts like this one:

The democrat party has been taken over by extreme left radical socialist “progressives” who want to dramatically change our country to a top-down, authoritarian regime, where all aspects of our lives will be decided by bureaucrats in Washington. The ideas held by Obama and the other communist-leaning politicians have been tried before, and they fail every time. Have you not read history to see that this is true? Where do you find your faith to believe in a system that demands more and more from the hard working, to give to people who are fully capable of working, but choose not to? You don’t see any flaws in a system like that? You don’t see that this mentality has bankrupted cities and states who have followed this model for years, being run exclusively by democrats?

And I don’t know how to respond to any of that, except just to say, ‘come on.  Stop.  You’re making a fool of yourself.  You have to know that none of that’s true.’

But then I think of a time when things were really bad, where it really did seem as though capitalism itself had failed, when it really looked like our economy had collapsed entirely, when we wondered if it would ever right itself.  When we looked internationally, and saw, instead of pathetic Greece, actual terror, Germany in the hands of a madman, Italy under the control of vicious fascist buffoons.  And what happened?  Great men stepped to the fore.  Churchill.  Roosevelt.  Keynes.  And the right things were said and the right things were done.  And our current prosperity is built on their genius.

So I’m working my way through Robert Sidelsky’s magisterial three volume, eighteen hundred page biography of John Maynard Keynes.  I’ve written a play about Keynes, Clearing Bombs, which my dear friends at Plan B Theatre are strongly considering for production, and thought I should do some massive re-reading, just to make sure I got it all right. Before I take one final pass at it. Plus, Keynes is fun to read about.  Then, a couple of hours in, I took a break, so I could watch this, Paul Krugman on Morning Joe.

Joe Scarborough used to be a Republican Congressman, but he’s reasonably moderate, and a great interviewer.  I like his show, don’t catch it every morning, but I do check out his guest list.  When Krugman appears on something like This Week with Snuffleupagus, he tends to be shouted down by the likes of Mary Matalin.  But Scarborough is more respectful to his guests, and lets the conversation go on for enough time for Krugman to make his points.  Even Rachel Maddow, who I adore and who also had Krugman on recently, gave him maybe four minutes.  Scarborough gave him twenty one.

Krugman is actually a bit like Keynes in this sense–he’s the economist as rock star.  Krugman’s new book, End This Depression Now (which I really recommend), is out on paperbook now, so he’s doing the media tours, but he’s always a favorite talking head.  Like Keynes, he’s a terrific economist, a Nobel laureate.  He’s also unafraid to take on conventional wisdom.  He can be pretty feisty.  Like Keynes, he makes a lot of his money in journalism.  Like Keynes, he writes some books intended for a general readership, and other books intended for economists. Like Keynes, he keeps up an active teaching load.  And, of course, Paul Krugman calls himself a Keynesian, or a neo-Keynesian.

Keynes’ great moment, the time when he really shined, was during the Great Depression.  He advised Roosevelt in the creation of the New Deal, just as Krugman advises President Obama in fighting the economic devastation caused by the Great Recession, the world-wide financial crisis.  But for both men, their best advice was in part ignored.  Krugman called for a job growth economic stimulus, and Obama did go to Congress and get one, but half the size Krugman called for.  Same with Roosevelt–the New Deal job stimulus measures were never big enough, and Keynes continually said so.

But watching TV this morning, while also reading Skidelsky on Keynes, I suddenly had this insight: they represented an economics of hope, and those who opposed them represented an economics of fear.

Krugman continues to insist that the current Washington obsession with debt reduction is completely misguided.  Most of our European allies chose austerity, because it sounds good.  It appeals to our Calvinist sides–we have sinned–racked up massive debts–and we must repent, or catastrophe beckons.  The Austrian school economists (best represented by David Ricardo and Ludwig von Mises and, above all, Friedrich Hayek), were convinced that Roosevelt’s New Deal would prove catastrophic.  That the debt he was accruing would lead to hyper-inflation.  Which never happened.

Here’s Krugman this morning:

People like me have been saying for five years, don’t worry about these deficit projections for the time being, they’re not an issue, and people have been saying ‘imminent crisis, immanent crisis; how many times do they have to be right and do people like me have to be right before you believe in us.

And one of the other guys on the show, pretty red-faced and angry by this point, responded:

You’re right until you’re wrong, and that’s a bad day!

You’re right until you’re wrong.  And what you see, over and over again in this debate is crisis talk.  The national debt is a crisis.  The collapse of our economy is upon us.  Interest rates are going to soar, inflation is going to rise, borrowing will become impossible, hyper-inflation (Germany in the 30′s) beckons.  We’re like Greece.  Always always poor screwed-up Greece.

It’s all about fear.  It’s nothing but fear.  If we don’t immediately cut spending, end this (non-existent) spending spree we’re on, we’re going to see really really bad things happen to our economy.

Krugman has repeatedly pointed out this: Greece is a country that does not control its own currency.  As we’re now seeing, that is a very very bad idea.  Iceland’s economy was in a much bigger hole than Greece’s was four years ago, but Iceland never joined the Euro, and Iceland is much further along the road to recovery than Greece is even close to being.  Greece is in such bad shape, it’s putting itself up for sale.  In Greece, nobody–seriously, basically nobody–pays their taxes.  To compare the US economy to the economy of Greece is like comparing LeBron James to the last kid off the bench of his high school’s junior varsity.

When you say the name ‘Paul Krugman’ to conservatives, they tend to recoil, because let’s face it, he can be pretty dismissive.  Rude, honestly.  I read his blog every day of my life, and I admit it, he’s pretty partisan.  (In all fairness, he’s been much tougher on President Obama than he is on conservatives.)  His favorite targets are what he calls ‘Very Serious People’, which is to say, Beltway conventional wisdom.  He thinks they don’t understand economics and that they’re wrong about our country’s current economic problems. But I think the larger point is this:

Predicting catastrophe makes for better sound bites.  Predicting gloom and doom sells.  Predicting disaster works.  In my play, I paraphrase Keynes as follows:

Classical economics is unsentimental, tough-minded, austere, and that lends it a kind of virtue.  Plus, it’s complicated and difficult, constructed with such a vast logical superstructure—it must therefore be profound.  And it can explain social injustice and cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, and argues that any attempt to change such things as likely to do more harm than good; what government wouldn’t find that attractive?

That’s close to what Keynes actually wrote, in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.  But he said, it’s not true. Government can work to create jobs.  We can stimulate a sagging economy.  And governments can do what private individuals cannot; borrow large sums of money at generous terms.  And use it to ameliorate human suffering.

When economies boom, then austerity makes sense, then deficit reduction can become a priority.  Right now, it shouldn’t be.  We can choose hope.  We don’t need to succumb to fear.

I always feel a little stupid reviewing movies months after their initial release. Hope Springs came out last summer, when there were all these other movies out we wanted to see more; finally caught it via Netflix last night.  It’s one of those quiet, character-driven movies that don’t make a big splash, but are terrific and real and funny and smart.  And let me say this: if you’re like me, married for awhile, happy in your marriage but aware that it’s become a bit. . .  habitual, this is the movie for you.  Seriously, see this movie.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Arnold, a long-time middle management type, probably in some kind of insurance related business.  Married to Kay, played by Meryl Streep.  Their children are grown and out of the house, and their lives are comfortable enough.  They sleep in separate bedrooms–she always has breakfast for him before he goes to work, then a nice supper when he comes home, then he falls asleep watching the Golf Channel.  Kay is quiet, sort of shy, not terribly assertive, and, as we learn, terribly terribly unhappy.  Lonely, sad.  Their marriage rituals have become habitual, completely lacking in intimacy or passion.  These are decent, honorable people-when Arnold declares that he’s never cheated on Kay, we believe him.  When he says that he’s done his job, provided for her and their kids, well, he has.

But as the movie begins, Kay’s unhappiness–which she’s never really expressed–finally has led her to enroll them both in a marriage counseling retreat.  A therapist, Dr. Feld, (Steve Carell), has a practice in Hope Springs Maine, and Kay tells Arnold, she has cashed in a CD and bought plane tickets and arranged motel accommodations and paid four thousand dollars for a week intensive couples counseling.  And Arnold can’t believe it, and tells her he won’t go–she’s welcome to go by herself, but he will have no part of it.  But Arnold is all bluster–we know well enough that he’ll be on that plane, and indeed he is.

Arnold is a bit of a grump, a tightwad, a complainer.  They stop in a cafe for breakfast, and he orders an egg and bacon as sides.  The waitress points out that he’s just ordered the breakfast special.  He says, “I don’t want the special.  As sides, they’re a dollar less.”  He constantly complains about the therapist, about how much he’s charging them.  He initially won’t cooperate, won’t do any of the exercises Dr. Feld prescribes.  But as we see Kay quietly admitting how lonely she feels, how starved for affection and intimacy, you can also see that Arnold hears every word.  And how completely lost he would be without her.

I was reminded of my grandparents.  Ragnar and Ellek Samuelsen were married for, gosh, well over fifty years, and in all that time, they never once said they loved each other. Because I spoke Norwegian, I was pretty close to them, especially when Bestemor (my grandmother) had heart surgery and was in the hospital. Bestefar would see her every day, and I go with him, then we’d have supper together in the hospital cafeteria.  He would say to me in Norwegian ‘I love her so much. What would I do without her?’  And I’d say, ‘why don’t you tell her that?’  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ he’d respond, embarrassed.  So, troublemaker that I am, I’d go in to her her and I’d tell her what he said.  ‘Well, it’d be nice if he told me that,’ she’d say tartly.  But he never could, never did.

This movie does that, makes you think of your own marriage.  Makes you think of how easily the daily routines of life can become unimaginative, uninspired.  How marriage can become pure habit.  You feel for Arnold, having to do all this uncomfortable sharing and confessing and, eventually, snuggling.  And more.  But above all, you feel for Kay, you sense how unhappy she’s become.  How much she needs for him to, once again, really see her.

Carell was terrific, as the counselor.  No snarkiness, no irony–just a good therapist, genuinely committed to helping these two unhappy people.  But of course Jones and Streep are incredibly good together.  All those movies we’ve seen then both in, but you never sense it, you never think ‘I’m seeing two movie stars giving great performances.’  You think ‘I’m seeing Arnold, I’m seeing Kay, I’m seeing this married couple.’

A lot of their intimacy issues have to do with sexuality–they admit that they haven’t made love in over four years, and you sense that it was never all that wonderful.  The film is rated PG-13, but it has moments where it’s quite sexually explicit, often comically so.  I don’t mean that it was pornographic, anything but.  But it’s a movie about sex therapy, or perhaps more accurately, intimacy healing.  I would suggest that the ideal audience for this movie is a married couple, together for 20-plus years.

It’s terrific.  Beautifully written, superbly acted.  I’m glad I saw it.  Glad my wife and I saw it together.  And I think I have some things to work on.