Why watch a movie about a disgraced President Richard M. Nixon being interviewed some thirty years ago by a British television personality? What possible relevance does it have for 2009? It has more than you would think, given that we are in the last two weeks of the disgraced Bush Administration. A series of four interviews were broadcast in 1977 between the reclusive Nixon and British TV host David Frost. This was three years after Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace over his obvious complicity in the illegal Watergate cover up.
At the time, our current vice president, Dick Cheney, was the Chief of Staff to Nixon’s successor, President Gerald R. Ford. Many assert that it was Dick Cheney who is the current mastermind behind expanding the authority of the president beyond what most believe are its constitutional limitations. Where did Cheney pick up this idea? Toward the end of the movie, you will see reenacted the famous scene where President Nixon gives the opinion that if the President of the United States says something is legal, then it is. At least Nixon then went on to say that this was probably an opinion not shared by most Americans. His view is clearly shared by Dick Cheney. Arguably, Dick Cheney has spent the last eight years living out Nixon’s vision of the presidency to our own national shame.
Therefore, the timing of Frost/Nixon now playing in theaters is probably not coincidental. You had to have been born in the 1960s or earlier to have any remembrance of Nixon as president at all. Consequently, for many Americans, Richard M. Nixon is someone wholly unexplored. In Frost/Nixon, Director Ron Howard can acquaint younger Americans with arguably our slimiest president.
As an ex-president, Nixon was widely reviled and loathed. He needed his Secret Service protection because it was unlikely he would have survived otherwise. Yet, in many ways Nixon’s likely crimes, which were preemptively pardoned by President Ford, seem like a minor kafuffle compared with the actions of President George W. Bush. Had he not been pardoned, Nixon would have been impeached and convicted for the serious crime of obstruction of justice. George W. Bush though gets a pass for deliberately and flagrantly violating our laws on torture and wiretapping.
Back in 1977, when Americans heard the name David Frost, it was invariably “David Who?” Frost was a British TV personality known more for hosting lightweight shows than as a serious interviewer. Michael Sheen portrays Frost as a bit of an airhead and playboy, but also as someone unafraid to take major chances to enhance his career. He was indefatigable when it came to securing the coveted Nixon interviews. It took hundreds of thousands of dollars to land the interviews in the first place, which was during an era when “checkbook journalism” was considered unprofessional and was widely decried.
Frank Langella deftly portrays the disgraced former president. He demonstrates his ability in the first three interviews by dominating them. Frost can hardly get a word in edgewise. At the time, Nixon was obsessed with rehabilitating his image. His interviews with Frost became the means toward that end. He used every deft political skill he had acquired to succeed. Meanwhile, Nixon’s critics were obsessed with trying to get Nixon to admit he conspired to obstruct justice. Perhaps, they hoped, Frost could at least get Nixon to apologize to the nation for his actions.
The pressure is on both Frost and Nixon in the last interview. Nixon has to talk about the topic of Watergate, his least favorite topic, and Frost has to nail Nixon to the wall, which is much like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. At this point, Frost is seriously financially overextended and he is feeling desperate. He has put up much of his personal fortune buying the interviews. He has also undersold the interviews in the broadcast market. He needs a winning final interview to dig himself out. What happened is a matter of historical record, but in case you do not know, I will not spoil it for you here. Suffice to say though that even if you know what is coming, in some ways you will pretend you do not know.
Director Ron Howard does a great job pulling you into the post Watergate world. Nixon was a very private man, so it is hard to know exactly what those years were like. Thanks to Langella’s excellent acting, we have excellent speculation. The scene where a drunk Nixon calls up Frost is likely the invention of screenwriter Peter Morgan but it certainly helps spice up what would be for many a rather dry battle of wits.
Whether you enjoy Frost/Nixon will depend in large part on whether you were around when Nixon was president, as well as any curiosity you may have about our disgraced 37th president. It is a tightly focused film, equally as focused on the multifaceted Frost as our wily 37th president. Of the two, Nixon proves far more interesting.
Like most Americans who remember President Nixon, I grew up to feel ashamed of what he did to our country. After seeing Frost/Nixon I can better appreciate the tragedy of Richard M. Nixon, a Shakespearean character of the 20th century if there ever was one. Like our current president, he largely successfully hid from confronting the magnitude of his own mistakes, to his own diminution. He was not entirely successful in doing so though, thanks in part to David Frost.
Can one see the musical Les Miserables too many times? Perhaps. Les Miserables remains my favorite musical weaving some of the best tunes, lyrics, stories and characters into a three-hour musical that is almost impossible to dislike. If you do not find yourself crying at least once during the show, you are either Dick Cheney or have ice water in your veins.
I plunged into my fourth Les Miserables experience today for an important reason. While I had seen it three times before, I was so far up in the rafters that I felt like I was missing something. Since it was being restaged at Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia, this meant that I could finally see an intimate staging of the musical. In fact, I was able to garner front row seats for today’s matinee. My wife and I were on Left Stage, seats 1 and 3.
This was our first time to Signature Theater. It is not exactly the Kennedy Center Opera House, which is an advantage. We were one of what could be no more than two hundred fifty people in the small black box theater. Pretty much any seat you choose is going to feel intimate, but with front row seats and my feet comfortable resting under the stage, intimate theater took on a whole new experience. We were within spitting distance but really any seat on the lower level is technically within spitting distance. I frequently had actors within touching distance and even singing in my face. Wow!
In fact, on a smaller stage, there is no way to render the full Broadway theatrical version. It is just as well because while the staging was innovative twenty years ago, it had gotten somewhat dated. Rest assured though that the poor look as threadbare and as miserable in this production as they did in the original production.
I also had to wonder if the quality would suffer on a smaller stage. It is expensive to stage even on a small stage, as it requires a large ensemble and orchestra. Even with $75 tickets, I had to wonder if they could cover expenses, since the theater is new and doubtless, all the actors were earning union wages. Thankfully, the quality did not suffer at all. In fact, smaller stagings like Signature’s may be the best way to get the Les Miserables experience. For Les Mis is a powerful human story. No matter how well it is done, it loses something unless you are close enough to see the acting as well as hear the music. At Signature, you cannot help but get both.
The orchestra was excellent but at times was so loud it overpowered the actors. As with any production, some actors did better in their roles than others. Overall, any fan of Les Miserables will appreciate the quality of the performances. While some of the actors (like Tom Zemon, who had played his role on Broadway) are nationally known, most of the actors were more regionally known. Thankfully, the Washington area is blessed with hundreds of excellent actors. I doubt that anyone who saw the production on Broadway will feel cheated by this staging.
One thing was clear from this show: it was uniformly well acted as well as sung. (In my mind, this is the key difference between musicals and operas.) Many of those performing in their roles were the best I have seen in the part. Here is a rundown of some of the major actors and how I felt they did:
Christopher Bloch (Thenardier) – A. Absolutely the best Thenardier I have seen in the role. His performance is not to be missed.
Rachel Boyd (Young Cosette) – A. Her role was short (she only gets to sing one song) but she was a heartbreaking cutie with big doe-like eyes and a real stage presence. You wanted to leap on the stage and hug her.
Andrew Call (Marius) – B. Competent in the role but his performance is not particularly noteworthy.
Felicia Curry (Eponine) – A. An African American Eponine took some getting used to but Ms. Curry shines in the part. Her voice is not quite as lovely as others who have sung the part (Lea Salonga would be hard to beat) but her acting is to be savored. Mmm.
Sherri Edelen (Madame Thenardier). A. A worthy contender with anyone on Broadway who played the part.
Tracy Lynn Olivera (Fantine). B. I personally was delighted to see a plus size woman in the role of Fantine. Usually she is played as someone who is disheveled but impossibly model-like. For the first time, I found the stage image of Fantine matched my mental image.
Jordi Parry (Gavroche). C. Meaning no disrespect, but he is a boy after all.
Chris Sizemore (Enjoras). B. Typically Enjoras is cast a bit taller and more handsome, so in a way it was nice to see Enjoras looking a bit more down to earth.
Greg Stone (Valjean). B. The whole story of course evolves around Jean Valjean, so his role is crucial. Nothing wrong with Stone’s performance but nothing exceptional either. He reminded me a bit of a young Liam Neeson.
Stephanie Walters (Cosette). A. Usually Cosette comes across as a mere star-struck wallflower. Not this time. Walters provides real depth to her role. For a change she was not overshined by Eponine. Watch the way she lunges for the gate while she waits for Marius. Lovely.
Tom Zemon (Javert). B. My wife had a higher opinion of Zemon’s acting than I did. He was suitably grave and chisel-faced, which seems to be a prerequisite for the part. I was hoping in his death scene to see more anguish from his decision kill himself than I did.
The rest of the cast in general. A. They were bubbling over with enthusiasm. It helps to have a largely fresh cast for whom this is all new material. It makes a difference.
Expect a few songs to be tightened up and a few scenes changed a bit, but this is all for the better. The show has been extended through February 22nd, so if you are a fan of the musical and live in the Washington area, I recommend getting tickets. You will not be disappointed. I think you will find that the Signature Theater crew breathed new life into this amazing but somewhat overplayed musical.
Four years ago, I wrote about the folly of teaching substandard or abstinence-only sex education. Now we have proof, or at least a darn convincing clinical study.
Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
For most teenagers taking a pledge to remain a virgin until marriage is an exercise in satisfying their parents’ anxieties rather than a sincere conviction. It is hard to know just how sincere teenagers were when they took the pledge. In many cases, they make pledges like this long before they have the maturity to do so. Whether sincere or not, the lure of Mother Nature seems to trump Mom and Dad’s counsel. All that abstinence sex education, sermons in church and lectures from Mom and Dad seem to have no effect on whether and when you decide to have premarital sex. The study started tracking teenagers who took the pledge in 1995. Curiously:
By 2001, Rosenbaum found, 82 percent of those who had taken a pledge had retracted their promises …
Apparently, if you take the virginity pledge and become sexually active, you are also more reticent to take precautions. Did taking the pledge at least delay the onset of sexual activity? Apparently not:
… and there was no significant difference in the proportion of students in both groups who had engaged in any type of sexual activity, including giving or receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, the age at which they first had sex, or their number of sexual partners. More than half of both groups had engaged in various types of sexual activity, had an average of about three sexual partners and had had sex for the first time by age 21 even if they were unmarried.
So there was no benefit for taking an abstinence pledge except falsely assuaging Mom and Dad’s anxieties. However, by taking the abstinence pledge when your child does decide to have sex they are more likely to get pregnant or pick up a disease. They could even pick up AIDS, which is currently incurable and will eventually kill them. This could be the price you and your child pay for trying to assuage your anxieties about premarital sex.
How about trying something different? How about insisting that your children get a comprehensive sexual education rather than one that leaves them woefully ignorant on vital information they need to know? If you are pro-abstinence, it is perfectly correct to point out that, unless your child is raped, it is the only way to guarantee they will not become a parent or pick up a social disease. Of course, abstaining until marriage is no guarantee that they will never pick up a social disease. They may marry a philanderer for a spouse. I know you think your wonderful son or daughter would never do this, but just in case they do, wouldn’t you want your son or daughter to at least be aware of what might await them?
Ignorance is always stupid. To some extent, when it comes to sex education the inclination toward ignorance is understandable, since it is typically an uncomfortable topic for both parent and child. Yet, this inclination must be resisted. If you love your son or daughter you have to make sure they have a comprehensive sex education and that they are prepared to handle the emotional and physical consequences of their choice. For it will be their choice. Even if they do “just say no”, this does not really help them resolve the difficult transition from sexually inactive child to sexually active adult. You can preach as much virtue as you want, but statistically by the time your son or daughter is 21 they will have had on average three sexual partners. Since people are marrying at later ages, they are almost certain to have premarital sex. It is better to get them prepared for that reality.
You can do it by insisting that your school system provide complete and unbiased sex education and by making sure your child takes the course. Abstinence can certainly be mentioned, but it needs to point out that for most teenagers it will be ineffective. Mother Nature fills them with hormones and sexual curiosity. The need to be sexually active is not unlike a hatchling needing to learn how to fly. It is innate and entirely natural. Since most of our precious children are going to be sexually active before marriage, if you really love your children, you must arm them with the information needed to succeed in this transition.
If your school district, like most of them, gives sex education short shrift, there are alternatives. You likely are not a Unitarian Universalist, but you can inquire with a local church to find out when their program, Our Whole Lives, will next be taught. It is one of the few programs out there that is unbiased and covers not only the physical aspects of sexuality but the emotional aspects too. Most UU churches do not require you or your child become a member of the church to take the course.
There is also a lot of online information, with the most reputable information on the Planned Parenthood or the SIECUS web sites. In my humble opinion, these are a poor substitute for classroom teaching but it is better than nothing. If your children are not too squeamish, they probably would be helped hearing your experiences, how you dealt with them and how you felt about each sexual relationship.
Your child must absolutely know how to protect themselves from premature parenthood and social diseases. You must step up to the plate. You could bring home a sample of over the counter birth control products. You can show your son or daughter what a condom looks like and feels like and how it is used, using your fingers as an example.
If you have an excellent relationship with your child, they may even feel free enough to come to you when they feel close to being sexually active. If you have a daughter, you can take her to a gynecologist. Planned Parenthood clinics are in most communities of a certain size. You could show them where the local clinic is and make sure they know that they can get birth control products and STD information confidentially, cheaply and safely.
You may be aghast at some of my suggestions. Let me assure you though that after the initial shock wears off, your child will have a higher opinion of you. Many parents, including mine, skipped most of these steps. I like many ignorant young adults made many preventable mistakes in my journey toward being a sexually active adult. Providing comprehensive tools and information for your children to make the choices they will have to make is a sign of deep love. Your children deserve nothing less.
I can understand why most Americans do not want to look at their financial statements. If you take the time as I did yesterday, it is scary. I do not have all the numbers for my household yet but a year ago, our net worth was around $938,000. Today our net worth is about $771,000. That means in just one year about eighteen percent of our wealth has vanished.
Our real net worth is probably lower. How much is our house really worth? I will not know unless I actually sell it, so I go with our county’s assessed value, which was done before the sub-prime mess fully exploded. There are no bright spots in my portfolio. Our T. Rowe Price New Era fund is worth just 52% of what we paid for it. If this is what our “new era” will look like, it does not sound hopeful. This fund was supposed to be used for our daughter’s college education. We are drawing on other funds for now but unless stocks turn around dramatically over the next few years, we will have lost money set aside for her education, despite investing consistently for fifteen years. It suggests that we would have been much better off putting the money in a mattress.
Our other funds show a similar but less dramatic story. I can only hope that since most of our investments are for the long term that they will actually turn out to be investments rather than places to throw away our good money. Perhaps Michael Moore had it right all along: keep your money in government insured accounts only. Granted, the money may not grow that much, but at least it is unlikely to disappear when you need it.
A year ago, my personal financial adviser forecast that there would be a significant economic upturn toward the end of 2008. This was based on reading and listening to other people he respects. He was proven wrong of course. I cannot hold it against him. Even Warren Buffet lost money in 2008. This was a year when no matter what financial strategy you chose, unless you invested solely in bonds, you were going to lose money. The Washington Post today crunched the numbers and put the total loss on Wall Street during 2008 at $6.9 trillion. How much money is that? Consider that the federal government spent about $2.9 trillion in fiscal year 2008. In one year our investments, and consequently our national net worth, dropped by more than the federal government spends every two years. Gone. Poof.
Despite his prediction a year ago, my personal financial adviser is optimistic for 2009. “We are now convinced that the stock market has either hit its low, or is very close to it,” he tells me in his latest newsletter. He may have something this time. One measure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, shows signs of bottoming out. It slipped briefly below 8000 and has floated between 8000 and 9000 for a while now. If we have hit a bottom in the stock market then now is the time wise investors should be purchasing stocks. Of course, there is no way to know. With all due respect to my financial adviser, anyone who tells you they do know for sure is bluffing. We will only know in hindsight when the bottom occurred.
Unless you need money from your investments right away, the current value of your investments should not matter too much. What is more important is whether you retain your job and lifestyle. One thing we have noticed in our family is that many information technology jobs have become commoditized. This is not good news for someone like my wife, who lost her full time job on an IT Help Desk in 2004. She was making close to $50K a year. Her job was outsourced to someone who did the same work for a lot less money and who conveniently was not on “staff”. She now has a part time job doing similar work but took a substantial pay cut to get the job. As for benefits, the doctor’s office she works for has little in the way of a 401-K other than a general profit sharing plan. Unfortunately, the money they contribute toward it would not let you live on dog food in retirement. I am more fortunate but even in the software and systems development area where earn my living, many people are hurting. The bottom line is that our standard of living was hurt too and our income (adjusted for inflation) is down substantially from the start of the Bush Administration.
Perhaps this explains why three out of four Americans are glad to see President Bush leave office in nineteen more days. Bush has been saying in interviews that he will be judged by history as a far wiser president than we give him credit for now. I would suspect him of sniffing glue but I think hitting the bottle is more likely. I am confident that historians will not be kind, for reasons I outlined here, but which you already understand.
Our falling net worth is a meaningful measure of the price of incompetence and of the failure of government to, well, govern. It is not as if we were doing stupid or risky things. Rather, our government was doing stupid and risky things by placing inordinate faith in a free market and by actively reducing its oversight role. Frankly though in this economy I feel lucky. $166K of my family’s worth may have vanished in the last year, but we are both gainfully employed and we have maintained our standard of living.
Like most Americans, I feel that January 20th cannot come soon enough. I admire Barack Obama for having the audacity to believe that he can move us out of the national wreckage of these last eight years. When the dung is piled this high, it is hard to see daylight. While I hope my financial adviser is right, my intuition tells me that the dung is much higher than we think. I suspect it will be quite a while before we see the sun. Good luck, President Obama. You will need not just exceptional competence but extraordinary luck if our country is to successfully emerge from the wreckage of the Bush Administration.
Happy New Year to all of you! Before I begin another year of blogging, I like to post my annual blog statistics for the previous year, if I have them. In the past, I have had to rely on SiteMeter, which is niggardly about providing annual statistics of much note unless you pay them money. I have been running Google Analytics on this site for a bit more than a year now. I consider its statistics more meaningful than those provided by SiteMeter. It also provides a wealth of detailed data.
The statistics presented here do not come close to the number of hits and page views in my web logs. This is because the web logs record all sorts of traffic including traffic generated by robots and search engines, which account for the bulk of the traffic. The statistics I present represent actual people using the site because their browser interaction is tracked.
Here are some of the statistics of note for this blog for 2008.
Overall Statistics
Total Visits: 77,126 (average 211 per day)
Total Page Views: 98,394 (average 268 per day)
Percent New Visits: 90.34% (This means only about 1 in 10 of you visit repeatedly)
Most Viewed Posts
You Porn: A Traveler’s New Best Friend? (32,543 page views)
Sharon Mitchell: Porn Saint (8,073 page views)
Site Home Page: (7,654 page views)
The Id Unleashed at Craigslist Casual Encounters (2,682 page views)
Eulogy for my mother (2,197 page views)
Top Browsers
Internet Explorer: 64.2%
Firefox: 27.54%
Safari: 5.06%
Busiest Month: February (10,275 page views)
Slowest Month: June (6,350 page views)
This site is also accessible as a newsfeed, both RSS and Atom. Most of those reading the blog via a newsfeed do so via FeedBurner. Here are a few FeedBurner statistics for 2008:
Average number of subscribers per day: 31.38
Average hits per day: 159
Average click-throughs per day: 7
Doubt director and writer John Patrick Shanley can be forgiven for framing his movie inside the insular world of a Catholic parish in the Bronx in 1964. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a better setting for this movie. Catholicism of course has little room for doubt or uncertainty. Its priests and sisters are expected to have a finely honed sense for the presence of sin. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is the principle of a parochial school in the parish. From her long experience among the unwashed and sinful masses, she can sense a fire long before there is any combustion. For a Sister of Charity she has few things charitable to say about the students she oversees. It seems that without her constant vigilance all her pupils are doomed to lapse further into a life of sin. She rules the school through fear and intimidation to such an extent that even her fellow sisters are cowed and silent in her presence. She makes no apologies for her methods and cannot conceive of any other way of governing.
Meanwhile over in the rectory Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is hard at work trying to become a more liberal and expansive priest. He is full of enthusiasm for Vatican II and wants to be known as a warm and accessible priest. This naturally raises Sister Aloysius’s suspicions. What does it mean when the school’s only African American student is called into a private conference with Father Flynn and he returns smelling of communion wine? For Sister Aloysius, this means something sinful and unnatural must have been going on. She plunges headfirst into these dubious moral waters, determined to make Father Flynn accountable for his behavior. After all, she has spent a career witnessing it among her pupils. Confirmation of her suspicions is rather beside the point. She must bring a stop to whatever immorality is occurring, no matter what the cost.
Streep and Hoffman provide fine performances as you might expect. What you do not expect is that Amy Adams (who plays Sister James) will rise to their level and by many measures give the finest performance in the movie. Sister James is deeply troubled because the boy is in her class. She becomes anguished and feels pulled both ways by Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. Her inability to resolve her feelings, which are amplified by both the stakes and the clarity of Catholic theology, nearly destroys her. Adams gets far less camera time than either Streep or Hoffman but in many ways her performance is the most memorable. Is Father Flynn a child molester? Are Sister Aloysius’s suspicions unjustified? The film magnificently explores the issue of reasonable doubt in a climate where none is permitted, and the havoc the dichotomy can cause within such an insular community.
If you enjoy fine character driven and human stories then without a “doubt” you should see Doubt. If you are a Catholic or ex-Catholic, you also might enjoy inhabiting again the world of the American Catholic Church in 1964, which is flawlessly rendered. As a result a number of those Catholic hymns that I had thought I had purged from my brain are now running around in my mind again, along with long forgotten memories of my own time as an altar boy.
I spent nine years in parochial schools. We had our own Sister Aloysius, so I can attest that Meryl Streep’s portrayal as school principle is dead on for the period. We had our Irish priest too, whom we secretly suspected of drinking too much communion wine. Consequently, I found the plot entirely plausible. The Catholic Church, like many moral institutions can run but not hide from the moral squishiness and ambiguity of life. Doubt captures it brilliantly.
3.4 on my 4.0 scale.
P.S. The metaphor of the windows in Sister Aloysius’s offices so often being unexpectedly open is, I am sure, quite intentional.
Watching movies and shows online can be both fun and convenient. On Christmas Eve, I watched the British film Cashback streamed live to my desktop computer. Last night I watched classic Star Trek, specifically the episode City on the Edge of Forever from the show’s first season. Many Trekkers insist this was the best episode in the three-year run of the original series and I am inclined to agree. It was ostensibly written by science fiction author Harlan Ellison, but had to be substantially rewritten by staff scriptwriter D. C. Fontana to keep it within the show’s budget and fifty-minute length.
In case you have not seen the episode, at the start of the show NCC-1701 (a.k.a. the U.S.S. Enterprise) finds itself in the midst of a space-time disturbance. It jolts the ship; the usual sparks fly out of the navigator’s console and knocks out poor Lieutenant Sulu. Dr. McCoy (“Bones”) rushes to the bridge to give Sulu a small dose of “cordrazine”. When the ship is rocked again by another space-time disturbance McCoy accidentally injects the rest into himself, which turns him into a paranoid schizophrenic. He manages to elude security and beam himself down to the planet they are orbiting, which is at the center of the space-time disturbance. There on the planet a mysterious structure called The Guardian acts as a portal to human history. Dr. McCoy, still in a cordrazine paranoia high, jumps through the portal and back in time to New York City during the Great Depression.
It is not a good idea to disturb time because McCoy apparently does something to cause their present reality to disappear. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock end up going back to the same time to try to prevent McCoy from doing whatever he did to change history. This is a tall order because there is no guarantee they can find him.
I will not give out too much more of the plot on the off chance you have not seen the episode. While I watched it online on Netflix, there are other places online you can watch it, some for free. One place is cbs.com, which is more than a bit ironic since it first ran forty years ago on NBC.
I was ten when the show first ran in 1967. For some bizarre reason my parents considered Star Trek too adult for us godly devout Catholics (perhaps it was the miniskirts the women wore), so it was off our list of approved shows. I did not actually see it until the early 1970s when it was broadcast in abbreviated form on an independent TV channel in Orlando. As I was living in Daytona Beach, this meant poor image quality and many Ronco ads. Watching it online though was a pleasure, because I could see it in full color and in higher definition than the 435 lines available to TV viewers back in the 1960s. It was like watching it projected in a movie theater. It made quite a difference.
Star Trek is of course a fantasy about the future, but to me it was a blast into my distantly remote past when I was only ten years old, we were up to our hips in Vietnam and prominent people like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were being gunned down. As much as Gene Roddenberry tried to hide it in its 23rd century frame, the show espoused the values of those times. Back then, the network censors were pretty ruthless. Kirk’s line at the end of the episode, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” considered shocking at the time, was lucky to make it past the network censors.
Women may have worn miniskirts in the U.S.S. Enterprise but there are oddities in the shows that today’s National Organization for Women would find sexist. When time stops, for example, Lt. Uhura says (rather unconvincingly), “Captain, I’m afraid.” It was perfectly reasonable back in the 1960s for a woman, even a Star Fleet officer like Uhura to revert to wallflower when the situation got too heavy. The same was not true for Kirk or Spock. It was time to raise the shields of masculinity and exude some testosterone.
For the 1960s, Star Trek was high primetime cinema. However, the pressures of putting out twenty-six episodes a year as well as keeping to a strict budget frequently strained the quality of the show. City on the Edge of Forever is an excellent episode for classic Star Trek, yet if compared to most shows of its successor, Star Trek: The Next Generation, it would rank maybe in the middle. In the 1960s, TV was not considered to be art, but entertainment. Occasional series like The Twilight Zone showed what the medium was capable of. With the constraints on time and budget the show was under, putting out good episodes every week was impossible. Unlike the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation was syndicated. This allowed for bigger budgets, higher production values and better actors. Watching the original Star Trek series forty years later, the lack of quality, even for the better shows, is glaring.
Still, if you can rewind your mental clock back four decades you can appreciate that City on the Edge of Forever as a really good episode. New York City in the Great Depression was portrayed on a back lot of Desilu Studios, but the scenes were quite convincingly rendered. William Shatner’s ego is kept in check by director Joseph Pevney, who probably not coincidentally directed many of the show’s better episodes. Joan Collins plays the kind-hearted social worker Edith Keeler and renders a surprisingly fine performance. Some of the dialog comes across as rather strange and the music is at times too suggestive of how you are supposed to feel, but the episode is a great blend of fun, drama and science fiction. Actually, the best performance in the episode is given by the late DeForest Kelley (McCoy). It is consistently well acted, well directed and well written. The essence of Ellison’s fascinating and tragic plot is retained and convincingly rendered.
What a pity that network executives were so niggardly with prime time shows back in the 1960s. Star Trek was obviously an innovative idea for a TV series, given its long and successful franchise. Given the relative paucity of its production values (which were considered high for the time) the original series, when it was good in episodes like this one, demonstrated what the original series could have been had it been given the time and the money necessary. Star Trek’s true glory was destined to show up in future incarnations of the show.
Netflix is now offering a service where you can watch movies instantly on your home computer. I am not sure how but they offer this service at no charge above their monthly rate. Their selections are somewhat limited compared to all the movies you can rent, but it sure is convenient. Moreover, you can watch as many movies online as you want. Since I tend to like independent and foreign films I thought I would try my first online Netflix by watching the British film Cashback.
Sean Biggerstaff plays Ben Willis, an art major. Ben is an introverted and sensitive artist who is devastated when he is dumped by his steady girlfriend of more than two years, Suzy (Michelle Ryan). One consequence is that he becomes an insomniac. Eventually he decides that as long as he is awake and is a poor college student, he might as well earn some money. So he takes a night shift job at the local twenty four hour supermarket.
Ben is definitely not your typical early twenties young adult. Although he appears somewhat scrawny, he is a deeply sensitive and caring soul. Except for his lack of rippling muscles and his career prospects, he should be every woman’s idea of a great boyfriend. His artistic inclinations help him peer beyond the façade that most people exhibit and see their underlying humanity. He is particularly enamored with beautiful women and feels driven to capture their inner beauty in his drawings.
Unfortunately, Ben spends most of his life surrounded by crude and boorish men. This problem only worsens when he begins working at the supermarket. The store is full of characters, from the night manager to the shelf stockers all of whom have yet to emerge into adult emotional maturity. They may be crude and boorish, but each is memorable in their own way so they provide good entertainment. Working the night shift though is tough. Hours pass interminably. Ben’s own strategy to deal with the boredom is to freeze time. Whether it happens in fact or is a figment of his imagination is unclear. While people are in this frozen state, Sean is free to go around and examine them closely, and to draw sketches of them. He is so captured by beauty that while women are in a frozen state he will undress them to sketch them better. If you appreciate beautiful young women, there are plenty here to admire in both a partially and fully undressed state. There are also numerous flashbacks to Ben’s childhood, which help explain his obsession with beauty and the female form, as well as his somewhat different outlook on human sexuality.
For weeks, Ben seems unable to emerge from his funk over being dumped by Suzy, and appears to be one of the walking dead. Perhaps this accounts for his ability to freeze time. Only one woman appears to work at his supermarket at night, Sharon (Emilia Fox). She is the cashier and most of the time, she too seems to be one of the walking dead. Over time, Sean becomes interested in Sharon, although it takes a long time for the two to connect in any meaningful romantic fashion. As they do, Ben begins to sleep again.
The premise of this movie seems weak, but it is surprisingly engaging. I have tried to put my own years working retail into the form of a novel, but never got too far. If you are looking for a movie that captures the feelings of working retail (an experience common to many of us) this one should fill the bill. Of course, life working at the supermarket is merely a frame for a larger story about love, its nature and how it is experienced. The metaphor of freezing time works really well in conveying Ben’s feelings, which would be hard to capture any other way. At its core, this is a movie about the emotional pain and devastation that accompanies romantic breakups. It is also about how the human heart is healed from this experience. As this is a relatively unexplored aspect of love on film, this movie will give you some things to chaw over.
All the characters in this movie are memorable and each faithfully portray their characters. Director and Writer Sean Ellis does a nice job of portraying Ben’s sad and poignant reality, and adds some interesting visual tricks that merge past and present. Cashback surprised me because it turned out to be a much better movie than its premise suggested. It was doubtless shot on a modest budget yet the movie paints a broader and more interesting canvas than its modest plot would suggest. In short, be prepared to inhabit Sean’s world. You will both enjoy and grow from the journey.
I am one of many people who have been puzzling over Barack Obama’s peculiar inaugural invitation to Pastor Rick Warren. Just in case you have been living in a cave these last few weeks, Warren is a jet-setting pastor of the evangelical Saddleback (California) Community Church (a mega-church) and the best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life. He befriended Barack Obama a couple years back. Obama even spoke to his congregation. Warren also happens to be against homosexual marriage. Obama has at times sounded both pro gay-marriage and anti-gay marriage. However, he clearly is for civil unions, which he sees as the legal equivalent of marriage, and is opposed to all discrimination against gays and lesbians.
The gay and lesbian community is outraged over Obama’s invitation to Warren to say a prayer at his inauguration. They were among his staunchest supporters during his campaign and feel his invitation was a slap in their faces. After all, Rick Warren had equated gay marriage with incest and pedophilia. I am not gay and I sure found those words offensive when I read them. Yet, realistically his words were no more offensive than a lot of other tripe coming out of the conservative Christian community. As I pointed out in this recent post, polygamy is also Biblically sanctioned but I do not hear Pastor Warren sanctioning that.
As I expected, Rick Warren has quickly toned down the rhetoric. Today he asserted that he is not anti-gay, just anti-gay marriage. He has also said he regretted his choice of words when he associated gay marriage with incest and pedophilia. His church also removed wording from its website that said gays were welcomed as members only if they first repented for their homosexual lifestyles. It is unclear though whether homosexuals can now become members of the church.
Warren also recently shared the stage with songwriter Melissa Etheridge, a rather public lesbian and who is legally married in the State of California to her lesbian spouse. How much longer her marriage will be legal is an open question, given that people like Warren worked tirelessly to ensure the proposition’s passage. Sharing a stage though gave Etheridge and Warren a reason to talk about their differences on these sensitive issues. Etheridge for one is willing to cut Warren some slack on his past remarks.
I can understand why most in the homosexual and lesbian community would be irate with this invitation. If I had been discriminated and scorned much of my life for my natural sexual preferences and my perfectly understandable desire to have my marital state sanctioned by society, I would be hollering too. Why would our president elect do such a thing?
In the interest of balance, Pastor Warren is not be the only minister Obama asked to speak at the inauguration. Joseph Lowery, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, accepted an invitation to give the benediction. Lowery’s views are far more inclusive than Warren’s. Obama himself said, “It is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.” To gays and lesbians in particular, their rights are more than mere “social issues”.
Obama must have known that by inviting Warren he would raise a ruckus. What is Obama really up to with his invitation? Is he trying to win the respect of those who did not vote for him, and thereby increase his chances of rallying the country on painful changes that will be hard to swallow? Is he telegraphing that his support for gays and lesbians was half-hearted and his appeals to this community duplicitous? Is he making a statement that in the grand scheme of all the severe problems facing this country that gay and lesbian rights are not that important?
While I cannot read his mind, I think I understand Obama’s strategy. Those who are most virulently against extending full civil rights (including marital rights) to gays and lesbians are, in my observation, those who spend the least amount of time interacting with them. Sure, they are among us but unlike skin color, which you cannot hide in ordinary life, it is easy to hide your sexual preferences.
If we are to end the polarization on this issue, those who are opposed to gay and lesbian rights must spend time in civil dialog with openly gay and lesbian people. It is especially important for prominent people on both sides to have civil dialog. By talking to Melissa Etheridge before their appearance at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, as well as sharing a stage with her, Warren had the opportunity to have his beliefs challenged in person and in a way that did not make him defensive. It turns out that Warren is also a big Melissa Etheridge fan, which doubtless helped Etheridge get her views across. While I am sure she is not the first overtly gay or lesbian person he has met, repeated encounters help people like Warren understand that gays and lesbians are not freaks or a special class of sinner but completely ordinary people.
The full enfranchisement that gays and lesbians seek will not occur through noisy in your face confrontations. Such confrontations may feel good, but their effects are likely to be counterproductive and inflame passions on both sides. Such actions are also likely to retard the progress that gays and lesbians seek. Barack Obama is forcing a dance between these two social forces in a way that promotes genuine dialog rather than hate and vindictiveness.
An enemy ceases to be your enemy once you can relate to them. It is through dialog that conservative Christians and others opposed to homosexual rights will eventually be won over. There are far more vitriolic ministers on this issue than Pastor Warren. Warren though exhibits a certain amount of common sense and reasonableness. It is through changing influential minds like his that much larger groups are persuaded. Obama’s timing may be inflammatory, but I think his judgment with this invitation will be proven sound.
Social change is always painful, so this invitation is bound to be painful to many who fight valiantly for full civil rights for gay and lesbian Americans. However, it may turn out to be a significant step toward achieving the full enfranchisement that gay and lesbian Americans seek. If America can break the color divide by electing an African American president, can healing the divide between gay and homophobes really be that far away?
There are plenty of memorable Christmas movies and shows to enjoy this time of year. Each attempts to capture the spirit of the season that is largely absent. One of my favorites is not from a movie or a made for Christmas cartoon, but from the first season of the TV show The West Wing. The episode, “In Excelsis Deo”, was written by the series creator Alan Sorkin and Rick Cleveland.
I hate it when a show is so good that it makes you cry. Damn it, this episode made me cry, but in a good way.
If you are not familiar with The West Wing, the withdrawn and acerbic Toby Zeigler (played by Richard Schiff) is White House Communications Director. Toby also happens to be a Jew. As Christmas closes in, he gets a call from the D.C. police. A homeless man died on a park bench on The Mall. Toby’s business card was found in the coat. Toby had donated the coat the man wore to Goodwill.
The man who died turns out to be a Korean War veteran who was wounded in action. For reasons that seem to puzzle Toby, he feels compelled to make sure this homeless man he never knew receives a proper burial at Arlington Cemetery.
This episode was voted the best of the long running series by the viewers of IMDB.com, and it won probably for this last scene. This YouTube excerpt contains the key scenes from this episode. Grab a tissue or a handkerchief and prepare to feel the true spirit of Christmas. Moreover, perhaps you can do what I did today, and drop off a bag full of clothes for donation. Due to the poor economy, the number of homeless is rapidly increasing. We hit a high of 27 degrees here in the Washington D.C. area today.
Happy holidays to everyone, regardless of your faith or lack thereof.
Anyone else want to join us in seeing the musical Ragtime in May at the Kennedy Center?
07:02:45 PM January 05, 2009 from web
Ack! Twisted my angle today trying on running shoes. My own damned fault. It's a good thing Motrin does not make you high.
07:19:38 PM January 03, 2009 from web
Happy New Year to all the readers of Occam's Razor! May it be better than 2008, which should not be too difficult.
09:03:53 PM December 31, 2008 from web
IMHO, the war in Afghanistan is a lost cause too, as was Iraq and Vietnam. Destroying al Qaeda, on the other hand, is possible.
10:27:09 AM December 23, 2008 from web
Prediction: Rev. Warren will eventually apologize for equating gay marriage with incest and pedophilia. It's crazy what people believe.
05:05:22 PM December 21, 2008 from web
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Your political posts really do help me understand things better as it's hard for me to read through all the rhetoric out there and see what's what.
I like your style. You're not afraid to dish it out to both major political parties -- I wish everyone could be as willing to accept the faults of both.
You've always got something interesting to say.
A wonderful source of reading for me.
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