--Philip Caputo on Mexico's drug wars
--Tim Garton Ash and Anne Applebaum on 1989
--Gina Kolata on cancer drugs (really, it's fascinating!)
--Hanna Rosin on Christianity and the housing bust
--Elizabeth Kolbert on Freakonomics
--(TNR's own) Brad Plumer on Michael Specter's new book
--And The Onion on Sasha Obama's White House activities
A.O. Scott's piece on a decade's worth of movies is, as usual, worth reading. However, I do think this passage deserves further comment:
Perhaps the easiest and most satisfying way to make sense of the unruly cinematic abundance of the past 10 years is to sift through it for masters and masterpieces, kicking the tires to see what has been built to last. Whatever else was going on, a handful of great filmmakers made a handful of great films, just as in other decades. Steven Spielberg, freed in the ’90s by the successes of “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” from the burden of importance, made a series of bracingly imaginative entertainments — “Minority Report,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “War of the Worlds,” “Munich” and “The Terminal” in addition to “A.I.” — that were both nimble and deeply resonant. Clint Eastwood, in his 70s, entered the most prolific and diverse phase of his career as a director, breathing new life into long-established Hollywood genres, including the boxing picture (“Million Dollar Baby”), the crime thriller (“Mystic River”) and the combat epic (“Letters From Iwo Jima”). Martin Scorsese collected his overdue Academy Award for “The Departed”; Joel and Ethan Coen won their first Best Picture Oscar, for “No Country for Old Men,” in the midst of popping out a film a year. Gus Van Sant, Robert Altman, P. T. Anderson, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Haynes. The canon of American cinema, since the early ’60s a catalog of acknowledged auteurs, expanded significantly in the new century.
Scott highlights a bunch of excellent filmmakers, but I think most of their good work occurred in the 1990s, which was a truly great decade of film. By comparison--or even on its own terms--the last ten years look pretty pathetic. "Catch Me if You Can" is wonderful, but the rest of Spielberg's output this decade has been disappointing (and did Scott really use the word "nimble" in connection with "A.I."?) Compare that to the 90s, when the director made "Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan", and "Jurassic Park" (the last of which is much more enjoyable than the other Spielberg movies Scott mentions).
Scott is right about Eastwood' marvelous work, but compare Scorsese's output this decade to his output in the 90s ("Casino", "Goodfellas", "Cape Fear", "Age of Innocence"). This is all subjective, but I think Gus Van Sant, P.T. Anderson, and Spike Lee ("Clockers", "Malcolm X", "Jungle Fever") all did much better work in the 90s than they did this decade. I would even argue that this is true of the Coen brothers ("Fargo", "Big Lebowski", "Miller's Crossing").
The other depressing thing about this decade is how much worse it has gotten year-by-year. Take Steven Soderbergh, who kicked off the decade with "Erin Brockovich", "Traffic", and "Ocean's 11", before going on to make a bunch of terrible movies. Spike Lee's best film of this decade, "25th Hour", was in 2002. "Catch Me if You Can" and "Minority Report" were in 2002. Spike Jonze's really excellent movie of the decade, "Adaptation", was in 2002. Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" was in 2002. Let's hope the next five years bring better movies than the last five years did.
Wednesday, CNN.com posted a Sen.-John-Thune-on-the-rise piece by Dana Bash.
Today, we are presented with David Brooks's even more glowing "Meet John Thune" column in the NYT.
Hmmm. Smells like somebody has a new PR push underway.
In the Palinpalooza revival we're seeing in the run-up to next week's release of "Going Rogue," one line from today's WaPo piece caught my eye:
"Her volume already sits near the top of online bestseller lists, based on pre-sales alone, and HarperColins's religious imprint Zondervan will publish another edition of the book."
How fitting, considering the creepy fervor that Palin worship has assumed among the conservative base.
Maybe the ex-gov's pic on the cover of that edition should be rendered in a nice stained-glass effect.
If you'll recall one of the big foreign policy nightmares circa 2005-2006 was the possibility that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a destabilizing proxy war between Sunni-led Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran. We stuck around and that didn't happen. But we may now be getting it anyway... in Yemen.
ABC's Tapper on the White House counsel's departure:
"There is a firm belief from the President on down that Greg is taking more blame than he deserves for Gitmo," a senior administration official told ABC News. "This was a decision made by the President and supported by many officials."
This seems eminently fair to me. The common explanation for Craig's exit is that the Gitmo closure process has been a hash--we can't find new homes for all the detainees, the politics of moving them to the U.S. blew up, and it looks like Obama won't make his self-imposed one-year deadline to close the detention camp. (Things got "outside of regular order," as the NSC's Denis McDonough put it to me this summer, though without mentioning Craig.) But little or none of this is Craig's fault. Obama had to know how tough it would be to relocate more than 200 suspected terrorists within a year. And while someone presumably could have better prepped Capitol Hill for the possibility of detainees coming to America, congressional outreach wouldn't seem to be Craig's job. The fact is that if closing Guantanamo were easy, it would have been done a couple of years ago. Even George W. Bush came to see what a liability it was.
From whence came the leak of two cables from the US Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, warning against an escalation in Afghanistan? It's not clear, though most of the speculation assumes that Eikenberry himself publicized it to shift the public debate away from how many more troops to send to whether to send more troops at all. Some reporting indicates White House anger [Update: I'm told the item linked at left has been retracted] over the leak, directed at Eikenberry himself. But Marc Ambinder has an intriguing notion: What if the White House leaked the memo?
You could see it a few ways. One is that opponents of a buildup, fearing that Obama is leaning toward a bigger influx of troops per the advice of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, leaked this as an effort to strengthen their hands. My Washington-trained gut says it's the opposite, a trial balloon because Obama will go with a smaller buildup, and putting Eikenberry's concerns out there serves as a counterweight to McChrystal. It, in effect say, "Look I have smart generals who don't want a buildup.
Laura Rozen had more on this yesterday. That said, this wouldn't be the first nettlesome Eikenberry cable to hit the pages of the Washington Post. In August, the paper reported on a missive that Eikenberry sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Note that the August story carried was written by two reporters who also co-bylined yesterday's story.)
In a cable sent to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry said an additional $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending will be needed for 2010, about 60 percent more than the amount President Obama has requested from Congress. The increase is needed "if we are to show progress in the next 14 months," Eikenberry wrote in the cable, according to sources who have seen it.
That first cable also gives you an clear idea of where the man is coming from. He believes what we need is a civilian surge, not a military one. To which some counterinsurgency proponents will argue that civilian good works generally require security that only the military can provide.
Update: And I see that while I was closing a print piece yesterday, Jason blogged something similar and I missed it. Damn you, Zengerle!
At this point, I’m not sure which has become more tiresome: Roland Emmerich’s penchant for emotionally overwrought end-of-the-world pictures or his penchant for giving said pictures time-specific titles. With the exception of Godzilla, which advertised its subject with forthright specificity, his titles have exhibited a peculiar insistence on emphasizing the when at the expense of the what: Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and now 2012. (Even his relatively Armageddon-free caveman film--humankind evidently hadn’t yet built enough to bother annihilating--was called 10,000 B.C.) I shudder at the thought of such potential future projects as A Week from Thursday, Maybe Sometime in the New Year?, and Whenever.
One advantage to Emmerich’s narrow frame of vision, of course, is that it’s easy to have a sense of whether one will enjoy his latest film based on whether one enjoyed the ones that came before. All the pesky x factors that make ordinary movies such a crapshoot--standout performances, narrative ingenuity, emotional authenticity--have been banished from the proceedings, leaving only Emmerich’s spectacular CGI catastrophes and his maudlin, fraudulent melodrama.
Alas, like his last comparable effort, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 features a good deal of the former in the early going and far too much of the latter as the movie progresses. How can it be that so prominent a purveyor of the larger-than-life is unfamiliar with the concept of saving the best for last?
The conceit this time out--not that it matters in the slightest--is that a series of escalating solar flares has produced a “mutated” form of neutrinos, which are penetrating the Earth’s crust and heating up its core. The ancient Mayans somehow foretold that this solar calamity would take place in 2012, but the movie makes no effort to explain how they knew: Emmerich’s in this for the earthquakes and super-volcanoes; leave the geo- and metaphysics to someone who cares.
The protagonists are all strictly off the shelf: a likable Everyman (John Cusack), his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), their two kids, and her new boyfriend (one guess how this awkward family situation will be resolved!); an idealistic scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor); a scheming bureaucrat (Oliver Platt); a noble president (Danny Glover) and his still nobler daughter (Thandie Newton); and various other do-gooders and blood relatives whose cataclysmic deaths we can mourn lightly.
For a while it’s watchable enough, at least for those with a taste for the ridiculous. Emmerich rends the Earth’s crust like damp tissue, slides California into the sea, and turns Yellowstone into nature’s most glorious roman candle--with Cusack & Co. forever one step (literally) ahead of the tectonic carnage, watching the ground disappear behind them as they flee on foot, by limo, by RV, by prop plane, and by cargo jet. (Emmerich evidently couldn’t fit any camels into the budget.)
But just as the cyclones and tsunamis of The Day After Tomorrow ultimately succumbed to a terminal case of narrative frostbite, 2012’s ludicrous thrills begin burning themselves out by the movie’s midpoint. There are tidal waves yet to come, and some wan echoes of Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure, but even the bath largely gives way to bathos. There are tearful farewells, acts of selflessness, the steady exploitation of children in danger, and more moral handwringing than you’d find at an alternative daycare discussing which snack foods are and are not appropriate for kids. As the movie approaches its two-and-a-half hour mark, you, too, may feel that The End can’t come soon enough.
By my count, it's been six months since your last Obama-Spock comparison, so here's some material to inspire you, from a Boston Phoenix interview with Leonard Nimoy:
I’ve met Obama a couple of times. The first time, my wife and I went to a very modest luncheon, very early, when he was just starting to put himself out there as a candidate. We were waiting for him outside on the back patio of this lovely home, and he came through and saw me and gave me the Vulcan hand gesture and said, “They told me you were here.”
By the way, tomorrow is officially "Leonard Nimoy Day" in Boston, so celebrate accordingly.
As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.
In the process of trying to figure out who leaked the Eikenberry memos and why (her sources' best guess: the White House political operation which is trying to push back against a pushy Pentagon), Laura Rozen makes a point that hadn't occurred to me:
Obama may have additional leverage to assert his continued Afghanistan deliberations against a pushy Pentagon right now, another Democratic foreign policy hand suggested yesterday. That's because of Fort Hood, and the emergence of numerous accounts that suggest the military sat on serious concerns raised about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan by several military colleagues.
"The Army [screwed] up here," he said. "The Army [screwed] up in such a monumental way. The Army generals are running for cover now."
There are a lot of ironies in those two paragraphs.
Last night, Charlie Rose featured a powerful one-two punch of glib thinking (the powerful one-two punch of glib thinking): The 'Freakonomics' guys and Malcolm Gladwell (in separate segments). Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner were about what you would expect...
CHARLIE ROSE: And [global warming's] s man created?
STEVEN LEVITT: It's harder to know whether it is man created. It's always harder to know why something happened the way it did.
...but Gladwell's interview was more interesting. Rose asked whether Gladwell saw himself as similar to Levitt and Dubner, to which Gladwell responded, "Well, anytime I can associate myself with Steve Levitt I will." (Don't tell that to Elizabeth Kolbert, your New Yorker colleague!). Then Rose asked this:
CHARLIE ROSE: Because people want to duplicate your success, they always ask this question, how does the find the story which you finally have told us?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: [I]t's about teaching yourself that everything is interesting, because our natural inclination as humans is when we're confronted with things, to try to edit. And we have to dismiss things and say I'm not interested in that and I'm not interested in that. And as a writer I think you have to... you have to reverse that very common human desire to edit and just to surrender.
This is one of those unintentionally perfect answers that an interviewer dreams about. Later in the interview, Gladwell was talking about the "10,000 Hour Rule," which I did my best to mock in a review of his recent book, Outliers. The idea is that you need 10,000 hours of practice to be really, really great at something (why exactly 10,000 hours?? don't ask...).
MALCOLM GLADWELL: "Outliers" is a book of many themes.
CHARLIE ROSE: Practice, practice, practice, practice and it's studied practice.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: It's this idea that outsiders always underestimate the amount of work that goes into expertise. What is interesting about the 10,000 hour rule which I talk about in Outliers is not that you need to practice to be good. We knew that. It's that you need to practice that much. Who would have said it was ten years of practice to get good? We would have said maybe five or four or three. It's that ten that's so...it's just the sheer vastness of the preparation and that's what's amazing to the outsider.
The first sentence here is a classically Gladwellian assertion about what the rest of us think. The rest of the paragraph consists of, more or less, made up numbers and figures which Gladwell claims constitute a "rule". Seriously, read these sentences again. Where does he get these figures? Anyway, the exchange ended on this note:
CHARLIE ROSE: Everyone always has this question when I tell them your story and hand your book out to people, and they say what does that say about gift and superb talent?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I remain -- I'm uninterested in that topic.
CHARLIE ROSE: Which one? The relation between gift and practice?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, I'm not interested in natural gifts. I know they exist and I know there is such a thing as natural talent, but I just feel so what, right?
Apparently there are some things that are uninteresting! The cumulative effect of watching both of these interviews was to make one feel enhanced respect for experts and for the peddlers of conventional wisdom. Here are three guys who style themselves as being unconventional and bold and generally at an angle from received opinion. And yet after watching them talk for an hour, I felt like I was being sold a bill of goods by people who did not know what they were talking about.
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