LOVE AND MOVIES: Several of you wrote to ask about the happy personal news I alluded to in my last post. None of you, on the other hand, wanted to know my Oscar predictions or the story about the famous economist.

So: the happy tidings. I wasn't sure if a blog was the best place to announce this, given that I have good friends who still don't know, but the news is already seeping through cyberspace, so what the hell: R. and I are now engaged. I asked her the weekend before last, she said yes, and we're looking tentatively at a wedding in October. I'm happy, she's happy, and everyone else is blowing each other up.

I'll save the story about the economist for another time. As for the Oscars -- the ceremony has come and gone, but here's the prizes I would've given out if I were in charge:

Best Movie Released in 2002: Mai's America
Best Older Movie Not Released in the U.S. Until 2002: Y Tu Mamá También
Most Overrated (By Critics): Sunshine State
Most Overrated (By Audiences): My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Most Overrated (Made-for-Cable): The Laramie Project
Most Overrated (Online): anything by Mark Fiore
Silliest Controversy: the furor over Barbershop
Best "Bad" Movie: fear dot com
Best Movie I Watched on an Airplane: the seat-belt instructions
Worst Movie I Watched on an Airplane: Serving Sara
Worst Movie I Watched Anywhere: Robin Williams: Live on Broadway
Worst Movie by a Good Director: Hollywood Ending
Best Movie by a Bad Director: I'm saving this spot for Unfaithful, which I still haven't seen
Best Movie That Gave Me a Cameo: Sean Connery Golf Project
Least Convincing Scene in Which a Character Rebuffs an Accusation of Child Molestation: About a Boy
Good Story/Silly Message Award: Signs
Good Story/Lousy Effects Award: Spider-Man
Unexpectedly Good Performances: Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love; Brendan Fraser, The Quiet American
Best Cinematography: Sex and Lucia
Best Editing: Femme Fatale
Best Choreography: Russian Ark
Best Stunt: Russian Ark
Best Installation: The Girl on the Train in the Moon

posted by Jesse 4:42 PM

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ABSENCE: There's a bunch of stuff I keep meaning to write here. Oscar predictions. A funny anecdote about a famous economist. Some happy personal news. That sort of thing.

But we're at war. I mean, we already were at war -- those troops are still in Afghanistan -- but now another one's starting. And it kinda casts a shadow over everything else.

Now, I suppose I could write about Iraq here, except I'm already up to my neck in a war-related writing project that's somewhat larger than a mere blog entry. And when I do have blog-sized comments to make about the war, they're more likely to show up in Hit & Run.

So instead I'll just note that my interview with Howard Rheingold, noted here two weeks ago, is now available online. With over 4,000 words entirely unrelated to Saddam, it's a balm for the prematurely war-weary.

posted by Jesse 6:02 PM

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SELF-PROMOTION: I wrote a short rant today for the Reason website, on the difference between hating Bush and hating Clinton.

posted by Jesse 10:42 PM

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PR VICTORIES: So I'm reading a piece in The New York Times about the growing influence of The Weekly Standard, a well-known neocon rag. And there I see that Bill Kristol has written a book called The War Over Iraq "with Lawrence F. Kaplan, a senior editor at The New Republic. The collaboration with a writer from a magazine identified with the Democratic Party is one more symptom of The Weekly Standard's transformation from outré journal of the right to the Boswell of the new global agenda."

Coming after the Observer's article about The New Republic's alleged new "daringness" -- represented by stances that break with neither conventional wisdom nor the mag's long-stated positions of the last decade -- this is too much to bear. I've been reading Kaplan's articles for several years now, and on foreign policy at least -- that is, on the one topic he ever seems to write about -- his views are completely indistinguishable from Kristol's and those of Kristol ally Robert Kagan. Indeed, I've sometimes slipped and said Kagan's name when I meant Kaplan's, and vice versa. The fact that he would write a book on Iraq with Bill Kristol represents no political realignment whatsoever. The New Republic and The Weekly Standard may disagree on taxes, but on foreign policy they are as one, and were so even when the Standard was allegedly an "outré journal of the right."

Why do I get the impression that some reporters assigned to cover magazines never read the publications they're writing about? The real story here isn't the increasing influence of the Standard or The New Republic's willingness to say purportedly daring things. It's the ability of magazines' PR people to sell other journals' writers on stories that are obviously untrue.

posted by Jesse 10:31 PM

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Anxious to tell of my pathetic search for delights, I shyly poured out my woes to [septuagenarian blues-gospel musician Gary] Davis as a naive kid to his experienced older brother. After an account of a failed romance with a curvaceous singer who knew she could do better and canoeing with two sisters onto a lake to sip appalling wine, I sighed, 'So, Reverend, these are my big adventures at fifteen. What did you do when you were my age to have fun?' After a little laugh he paused, as he always did:

"'One time there was a widower living nearby and us boys saw that every night he would get on his knees before the fireplace and pray to God for a wife who could be a mother to his children. So we went off and killed a sheep, you understand, and cut off its head and put it on a rope. Then when he was praying we climbed up on his roof and lowered that head down the chimney, so when he was there prayin' his heart out he saw that head in the fireplace, and he ran for a gun and started shooting up the house!'"

--Allan Evans, liner notes to Rev. Gary Davis, The Sun of Our Life: Solos, Songs, a Sermon, 1955-1957

posted by Jesse 1:15 PM

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AND NOW THE TALKIES: Some other movies I've seen recently:

UFOria (John Binder, 1980): A lovely little comedy, marred only by a few rough transitions. It's filled with small touches that deepen the characters, turning what initially seem like stereotypes into complex, three-dimensional beings. And it's surely the only flying saucer movie in which the lead character takes pride in his physical resemblance to Waylon Jennings.

the wife (Tom Noonan, 1996): A darker comedy, or perhaps a bleakly comic drama, about an unplanned encounter between a manipulative New Age therapist, one of his patients, and their wives. As in UFOria, the film's characters display unexpected depths and its plot takes unexpected turns. Unlike UFOria, it's constantly unsettling, as though the characters' mind games are spilling off the screen.

Gods and Generals (Ronald F. Maxwell, 2003): A Civil War epic that's been widely condemned as soft on the Old South. It's not a fair complaint. The movie actually aims to present both sides of the conflict as sympathetically as possible -- not to promote (or attack) the Lost Cause, but to better represent the tragedy of the war.

Now, almost everyone reading this knows that North and South alike were basically military dictatorships throughout the conflict, that the South was chiefly fighting to preserve slavery, that the North entered the war for reasons that had nothing to do with abolition -- in short, that there was plenty of venality and brutality to go around. There was nobility on both sides as well, of course, but Maxwell's decision to treat both Union and Confederacy as essentially noble was made for reasons of art, not scrupulous accuracy. A battle between gallant, fraternal foes makes the bloodshed all the more tragic, and thus gets to the heart of why the Civil War is still so important to Americans. It may not be perfect history, but it's a legitimate approach to the story.

So I admire the intentions of this movie, and at times I admire the movie itself. Maxwell has a real talent for war scenes, and his battle of Fredericksburg is filmed so well it's almost worth sitting through all the interminable speeches the soldiers make when they're not shooting at each other. Unfortunately, he has no ear for dialogue and little sense of narrative pacing. The script cries out for a red pen, the finished film for another trip to the editing room. (Also: He's assembled a fine cast here, but couldn't they grow their own facial hair? All those fake beards look kind of silly.)

My friend Bill Kauffman has written that this "is not only the finest movie ever made about the Civil War, it is also the best American historical film. Period." I usually concur with Bill's judgments about American film, but my favorite Civil War picture is still Buster Keaton's The General.

posted by Jesse 9:13 PM

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SILENT CINEMA REPORT: Last weekend I finally got a chance to watch the restored Metropolis (1926), Fritz Lang's mad masterpiece of early science fiction. It's a great film whose maker made one serious mistake: He repeatedly spells out his moral ("The mediator between brain and hands must be the heart"), thus preventing us from interpreting his odd mishmosh of social speculation, futurist architecture, radical social commentary, and Christian symbolism as something complex and profound. A nicer way to put it would be that Lang's own feelings were complicated, and that the film frequently reflects this, but that he felt the need to mask these internal conflicts with a tidy little moral. It's a wonderful movie, anyway, whether or not it has anything deep or original to say. It's simply staggering to look at, and has a wonderfully cracked story to tell.

Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) is another silent masterpiece that was only available, until relatively recently, in butchered form. I watched it over the course of a couple evenings this week, and digested a message even simpler than Lang's: that Bonaparte was a great and noble man. Geez. At least Lang's little piety about head, hands, and heart is broadly acceptable to the viewer of humane sensibilities. Gance's is propaganda for an imperialist butcher.

Then again, the great silent movies of the early Soviet Union were usually propaganda for men even worse than Napoleon, and that doesn't stop us from admiring their visual and narrative brilliance. Gance's epic is arguably the most inventive film of the '20s, with four or more hours -- depending on which cut you watch -- of superimpositions, rapid montages, and an insanely mobile camera, with a climax that is literally panoramic, projected onto three adjacent screens. Yes, the director puts those intoxicating images in the service of a dubious message. That merely means you should watch the film rather than read the screenplay.

Napoleon also contains the single best snowball-fighting scene in the history of cinema. If that sounds like a minor achievement, it's because you haven't seen it.

posted by Jesse 8:11 PM

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LONGHORN SLAP SHOT VERITE: My brother, cited in this space yesterday for having spotted an Elvis impersonator at an Arkansas hockey game, today sends me this suggestion for filmmakers: "There is a possibility for a great documentary about hockey in Texas....Nobody in Texas knows the rules to hockey, but there are more professional hockey teams in the state than any other. Make a documentary following these bush league Canadians, Russians, and Yankees through long road trips from El Paso to Austin to Corpus Christi to Waco to Laredo to Fort Worth to Shreveport to Albuquerque. Meet the 'hockey chick' groupies. Watch the beer flow in small arenas. Meet the rednecks who come to see the fights. Interview the church groups and the Cub Scout packs. Cover the hundreds of loyal Laredo Bucks fans who cross over from Mexico for the games. (They even have a Spanish edition of their webpage. Do a keyword search on 'Hockey esta Noche'!) Show promotions far better than any minor league baseball team or stock car race has ever known, Elvis impersonators included. Make it surreal. Create the Texan response to Bull Durham."

posted by Jesse 6:28 PM

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TRAVEL TIPS: While my girlfriend's dodging bombs in Israel, my parents are in Italy and my brother is Somewhere In America. He gave me a call the other day to say he was at a hockey game in Arkansas -- I think he said Arkansas -- and that an Elvis impersonator was out on the rink singing "Suspicious Minds."

I always loved that song.

Now a friend writes to tell me that he's thinking of taking a three-week cross-country trip, and do I have any suggestions for places to see? (Sure: ask the Walker who isn't traveling.) I told him to let Roadside America be his Bible. And then I told him this:

If you go through Utah -- and really, there's no point to doing a trip like this and not seeing Utah -- then you should check out Bryce Canyon. It kicks the Grand Canyon's ass.

One of the casinos in Vegas has a big statue of Elmer Fudd in it.

Meridian, Mississippi, is filled with lovable run-down old buildings, and it's got the Jimmie Rodgers Museum too.

If you go to California, you should take Route 1 up the coast. If you go to Seattle, check out Gasworks Park. And for God's sake, don't skimp on the Rust Belt. Everyone knows about the crazy west and the gothic south, but there's a lot of hidden weirdness in Ohio and Michigan, too. And Pittsburgh is one strangely beautiful city.

Interstates are good for making relatively rapid jumps. They are not good for actually seeing the country. Use them, but use them wisely.

Keep your radio on. If a station sounds cool, drop by for a visit.

Utah and Nevada contain the country's weirdest people and the country's weirdest landscapes. Explore both.

Phoenix is ugly. Tucson is not.

There's some great burritos in Blythe, California. And there's some great felafels in Dearborn.

Most of my best cross-country driving experiences have had less to do with places than with the people I find there. Crashing on a stack of dirty mattresses by a pirate radio transmitter in San Marcos. Hanging out with militia and Panther types in Chattanooga, while it rains outside and they tell me wild stories and I feel like I'm underground. Hiking with an Australian hippie girl I met at a hostel in Boulder, then finding out she's related to Allen Ginsburg. (When she was little, the old guy taught her how to meditate.) There's lots of great sights to see out there, but the most important thing is to interact with all the interesting people you can.

And bring lots of country music, for those stretches where the radio's playing nothing but static or Clear Channel. You can't see America without listening to Haggard and Jones.

posted by Jesse 2:24 PM

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LONG DISTANCE: A bad way to wake up in the morning: an early phone call from your girlfriend to let you know she wasn't blown up in the latest Israeli bus bombing. She's out there visiting her expatriate sister, who's just had a baby at a pretty scary time. She figured she should call me before I could get up, read the news, and panic. It was a good call, in more than one sense. But it's a bad way to wake up in the morning. Makes me spend the day thinking about death.

posted by Jesse 2:00 PM

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SELF-PROMOTION: I write yet more about reality TV today, this time in a column for Reason Online. I also have four articles in the new print edition of Reason: two short pieces in the Citings section, a lengthy interview with Howard Rheingold, and a shorter interview with Mickey Mouse. (An earlier version of the Mickey piece has already been published on the Web.)

Meanwhile, of course, I continue to post comments to Reason's weblog, Hit & Run. Indeed, I daresay most of my blogging energy goes into Hit & Run these days, with very little left over for this space. If any of you actually miss the era when I posted here virtually every day, you can go over to the other blog and live those memories all over again. Yesterday you would have seen me get into a tangle with Big Glenn Reynolds, which may or may not be an entertaining spectacle to behold.

Oh, and I was on KPCC-FM's Airtalk earlier today, along with a television producer and FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. A recording of the program will eventually be available on the station's website.

posted by Jesse 2:01 PM

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CHEAP SHOT ALERT: Three years ago, Jules Feiffer stopped writing and drawing his eponymous comic. "The big surprise has been how easy it was to give up the weekly strip," he says in The New York Times today, "and how I haven't missed it at all." Hey -- that makes two of us.

posted by Jesse 1:26 PM

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