Tribeca Film Festival: The Eclipse

A much duller tale than its Irish literary festival setting would suggest, The Eclipse is the third feature film directed by award-winning playwright Conor McPherson, who has further damaged the proceedings by clumsily inserting jump-in-your-seat ghost-story thrills into a wan character study. In a picturesque seaport town, woodworking teacher Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds, imposing and largely wasted) operates on several levels of denial, burdened by his unresolved grief for his recently deceased wife, demonstrations of authoritarian bluster to his two tween kids, longings to resurrect collegiate writing ambitions, and horror-movie visions of his institutionalized father-in-law. Michael pauses in furtively adapting his spectral encounters at his icy attic's desk long enough to work as driver and gofer at the annual lit shindig for both a supernatural-fiction hottie (Iben Hjejle) and a loutish American drunk who pens bestsellers (Aidan Quinn, hamming like a sitcom Hemingway). Hinds and Hjejle do a coy mating dance, he predictably ends up in a knockdown ball-squeezing brawl with jealous Quinn, and has his zombie nightmares interrupted by a slip on a real pool of blood—though a suicide in this context is just a plot point to facilitate the tearful, healing embrace of a spouse's apparition. The dialogue and situations all tend to the generic and mechanical, shaken up far too infrequently by Hjejle's tipsy smile or Hinds's slapstick tumble into a lakeside hilltop's man-sized pothole. The types played by the three leads never bridge their insurmountable distance from reality, and Hjejle's familiarity with the spirit world implies a survivor's trauma equal to Hinds's, but one is never revealed. Attempting to darken its touristy middlebrow sensibility with shocks and farce, this Eclipse characteristically doesn't illuminate anything.

The Eclipse @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The House of the Devil

Yet another of this year's homage-facsimiles, The House of the Devil forgoes campy self-awareness in favor of reverential faithfulness—and in doing so, implicitly critiques contemporary horror cinema. With its cinematography combining unadorned realism and angular expressionism, and its title sequence emblazoned with yellow title cards and marked by synth music, freeze frames, and sudden zooms, Ti West's latest mimics '80s horror flicks with a straight face. Its rhythms, dialogue, and period detail are so finely attuned to the style of its chosen era that, were it not for a technical dexterity generally absent from its predecessors, the film might pass as an exhumed relic.

West clearly knows his stuff, but isn't out to flaunt it with a smirk, and thus there's great pleasure to be had from his introductory passages, in which college sophomore Samantha (Margot Kidder lookalike Jocelin Donahue) rents a house (from Dee Wallace's landlady) and, strapped for cash, responds to a campus flyer for a babysitter. West, however, doesn't rush his heroine into a situation that—as confirmed by the title, and the fact that when she calls about the gig, it's Tom Noonan's sinister voice that answers—is destined for horror, laying out Samantha's friendship with Megan (Greta Gerwig) and her dire financial motivations with methodical patience. "I promise to make this as painless for you as possible," says Mr. Ulman (Noonan) in convincing Samantha to accept the job, a comment rife with black humor. Yet West plays his material not for giggles, but for slow-burn chills, employing languorous long takes and pitched, frequently low-positioned camera setups to build a sense of unreal terror. Upon arriving at the rural Ulman estate, located right past a cemetery, Samantha learns that the job involves watching an elderly woman while Mr. Ulman and his wife (Mary Woronov) enjoy the evening's historic full-moon eclipse.

As the tale unfolds, a debt to not only '80s horror films, but also Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror, and Hammer's gothic '70s classics also emerges: food (specifically, pizza) is a source of fetid disgust; murderous mysteries are discovered in the remote mansion's nooks and crannies; and Satanism is revealed as a malevolent force with which Samantha must ultimately reckon. Before that confrontation can occur, however, House of the Devil proves content to simply spend time in Samantha's company. And though she's a rather one-dimensional audience proxy, West's leisurely depiction of her exploring the Ulman residence—highlighted by a sequence in which she dances about, cumbersome walkman affixed to hip, listening to the Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another"—allows his story's dread to slowly creep under one's skin.

If West's unhurried pace can occasionally be trying, his refusal to indulge in cheap jolt scares or force his protagonist to behave in ludicrously nonsensical ways—aside, of course, from the never-quite-plausible decision to accept any offer from Noonan's cane-wielding weirdo—seems not only a welcome antidote to today's current spate of disposable hack-and-slashers, but something of a direct rebuke. The House of the Devil elicits fear not from knife-wielding maniacs, but, rather, from a sense of macabre unease that spews forth from, among other moments, Mrs. Ulman's unseemly, sex-fixated initial conversation with Samantha, or the preceding shot of the girls being greeted at the front door by Noonan, their unsettled looks directed upward at an imposing face cut off by West's frame. Throughout, the director employs conventions with an assuredness that's never tainted by look-at-me egotism, his fidelity to the genre marked by an admiration that carries through to the very, bloody end, which—true to its forbearers—is mildly anticlimactic, resorting as it does to images of monstrous satanic evil that can't quite match what one's own imagination had already cooked up. No matter. As evidenced by the care taken with its establishing chapters, House of the Devil knows that, even with regard to hell, the destination isn't half as terrifying as the journey.

House of the Devil @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Soul Power

Sparingly touched upon in 1996's Academy Award-winning When We Were Kings, the three-day, all-star Zaire '74 music festival that ran alongside Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's epic Rumble in the Jungle fight receives the spotlight treatment in Soul Power. Directed by Kings editor Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, this amiable if slight doc is culled from the hours of footage left out of its predecessor, and the results are unsurprisingly underwhelming, less because of the performances captured than because there's no substantive story to tell. Concocted by Hugh Masekela and Stewart Levine (the latter heard, with stoned-red eyes, not-so-cryptically referring to an extra 32 pounds of luggage), and promoted by Don King, Zaire '74 brought together African-American and African artists on stage in Kinshasa, Africa, the underlying intent being to present and promote racial/cultural solidarity. Bill Withers, B.B. King, and headliner James Brown all espouse a desire to reconnect with their ancestral home, a sentiment frequently heard but rarely explored, given that Levy-Hinte relegates himself to using only footage shot at the event.

Soul Power spends its first half documenting the humdrum buildup to the show, which is dominated by canned press conferences, photo opportunities, and dull-as-dirt snippets of an investment firm representative mildly fretting over logistical non-issues. Once the legends hit the stage, the film finds a more comfortable groove, with Withers's mesmerizing rendition of "Hope She'll be Happier" and Brown's rollicking "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" proving two of the standouts. Still, there's little rhythm or depth to Levy-Hinte's affectionate portrait. The optimism felt, and returning-to-our-roots declarations made, by many of those involved are undercut by Brown's surprisingly candid admission that he will "not get liberated broke," as well as the unmentioned tyranny of concert benefactor, Zairian president Mobuto, whose giant portraits are seen looming above the city. Furthermore, while Brown is a magnetic figure, the sporadic appearances by Ali hopelessly unbalance the proceedings, his fiercely outspoken interviews providing the only morsels of substance and, consequently, throwing into sharp relief Zaire '74's status, in relation to Ali-Forman, as the occasion's second-stage.

Soul Power @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Cropsey

Unable to unearth concrete new facts about the case of murderous Staten Island "pied piper" Andre Rand, documentarians Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio instead exploitatively reprint the legend ad nauseam in Cropsey. A homeless man who camped in and around the grounds of the derelict Willowbrook State School for the mentally challenged, Rand was sent to Sing Sing for the 1987 abduction of a 13-year-old girl with Down's Syndrome, Jennifer Schweiger. An ostensible psycho—an impression conveyed by a perp-walk photo of him drooling like a lunatic—and also a possible devil-worshipper who prowled the abandoned hospital's corridors and underground network of tunnels, Rand became Staten Island's very own Cropsey, a term that, according to a regional historian, is a Hudson Valley catch-all for a madman who preys on innocent children.

The directors grew up in Staten Island spooked by such folklore, which seemed to come true in the form of Rand, even though he wound up behind bars solely thanks to circumstantial evidence. When Rand goes back on trial in 2004, this time for the 1981 snatching of another little girl, the filmmakers begin their own inquiry into the issue of his culpability while also attempting to nab an interview with the alleged kidnapper. What they discover are mounds of scary photos and news clippings, numerous locales happy to talk about the anxious era and advance outlandish rumors, and hospital ruins fit for menacing musical cues and nighttime visits from Zeman and Brancaccio that devolve into apparent outtakes from The Blair Witch Project.

Cropsey casts Rand as a dangerous nutjob while also promoting the notion that he may have been a scapegoat for a community with a history of denial, and in the film's most tantalizing (yet under-examined) thread, a reporter characterizes the borough as a "dumping ground" where the city deposits its trash and—as evidenced by young Geraldo Rivera's 1974 expose about horrifically run Willowbrook—its handicapped kids. Yet Zeman's portentous, trailer-ready narration and the film's correspondingly manipulative horror-film aesthetics and fondness for creepy suggestions over vigorous journalism, typified by a wannabe-Zodiac "You decide!" ending, turns what might have been a portrait of the boogeyman myth's lingering societal role into merely a crude episode of 48 Hours.

Cropsey @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Moon

Forty years after its groundbreaking debut, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to cast a long shadow, its influence so pervasive that it's nigh impossible to craft a contemplative sci-fi saga without at least subtly paying homage to Kubrick's classic. Rather than fleeing that monolith in the genre, director Duncan Jones (a.k.a. Zowie Bowie, son of David) warmly embraces it with Moon, an assured, mesmerizing tale of intergalactic loneliness, self-inquiry, and man's innate, enduring hunger for life which repeatedly and openly tips its hat to 2001 and its progeny (Solaris, Silent Running).

As a pitch-perfect introductory commercial elucidates, in the near future, Earth's energy and environmental dilemmas have been solved by Helium 3 solar energy harvested from rocks on the far side of the moon. The station established to accomplish this vital task is manned by one man, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who at film's start is two weeks shy of finishing up his three-year tour of duty alone in the echoing base, which boasts the all-white décor of a space station from a '70s-era movie, is shot by Jones in deliberate, ominous widescreen compositions, and is also populated by Gerty 3000, a robot with the soothing HAL-ish voice of Kevin Spacey and a rotating series of smiley-face emoticons for expressions. When a routine maintenance checkup on a roving harvester goes awry (thanks, in part, to a distracting and gorgeously wrought hallucination of a girl standing amidst a shower of dug-up rubble), Sam awakens in the sick bay, where he discovers—spoilers herein—that the station has a new resident: himself. Except that it's not exactly himself, as the new Sam is a far healthier, more temperamental mirror image who initially keeps his distance and silence but eventually forms a tentative relationship with the injured Sam, who is desperate to return home to the wife and young daughter he communicates with via taped messages. How two Sams have come to suddenly coexist in this lunar domicile is the prime mystery of Moon's first third, one that's unsettling in a manner less horror cinema-scary than existential.

Jones's measured aesthetic, complemented by Clint Mansell's typically melancholy fusion of orchestral and electronic melodies, creates a mood of philosophical pensiveness that casts genre mechanisms—such as Sam's early vision of a girl sitting in his room, or the threat implied by Gerty's overly soothing speech and the robot's clandestine conversation with Earthbound HQ—as pieces of a haunting puzzle about inner reflection and identity definition in which man proves instinctively compelled to ensure his own survival. While his story could have naturally veered into Big Brother/corporate malfeasance territory, Jones refuses to play the easy card, instead patiently detailing the Sams' increasingly traumatic struggles to comprehend, and then come to grips with, their unique situation, and how it speaks to their conception of reality. Moon's explanation of its conceit isn't a stunner, but Jones's intimate consideration of his protagonists' attempts to reconcile dueling psychological and empirical truths nonetheless has a quiet, empathetic grace.

Such is Moon's lyrical understatement that even the central special effect that allows for two Sams (who, in one striking scene, play ping-pong against each other) quickly becomes an afterthought. However, that trick ultimately has less to do with computerized deftness than with Rockwell, whose dual performances as suffering original Sam and surly, detached new Sam are treated not with caricature superficiality but tormented physical and spiritual somberness. Alternately bearded, goateed, and clean-shaven, his eyes morose and yet always alight with a flicker of self-determination, Rockwell is as snark-free human and compassionate as he's ever been. And in a shot of him tenderly embracing himself in a bare hallway, the actor dexterously conveys the means by which life—though here depicted (à la 2001) as evolving toward the artificial, and thus in the opposite direction as that of technology—remains, despite all obstacles, fundamentally autonomous, irrepressible, dynamic.

Moon @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: American Casino

A revelatory howl against the still-gestating, $8 trillion-and-counting financial-services industry bailout, Leslie Cockburn's American Casino follows the money that changed hands, or account columns, at every step of the subprime home-loan scam. Beginning with an incisive nuts-and-bolts dissection by financial reporter Mark Pittman (as well as some astonished industry witnesses) of our amok age of deregulation, this outraged survey starts on Wall Street with careful but thriller-like exposition of the house of cards built upon the backs of targeted new homeowners, in many instances minorities being hoodwinked with hidden escrow costs and mortgage documents impenetrable to most professionals.

For the predatory lenders, "the value is extracted upfrontthey have no skin in the game," explains one analyst, leaving those who inherit the derivative "financial products" to deal with skyrocketing monthly payments and the buyers with possible homelessness and bankruptcy. The value of one category of X-generation derivatives "can't be tied back to anything real," says another Street-watcher. Well, who would buy those products? "Idiots." Titles cards (the film is narration-free) excerpt internal memos reeking with cynicism or gallows humor, as with a Standard & Poor's email that confesses of freely dispensed AAA loan ratings: "If it was structured by cows, we'd rate it." Newly devised standard procedures such as credit swaps fobbed off on insurance companies by banks that knew, with a Cheshire-cat grin, that home prices were about to crash, exact no penalty in the casino system, but their perpetrators are rewarded with bailout funds.

Changing keys after an often intimidating, but usually comprehensible, cascade of lending jargon, Cockburn turns to African-American neighborhoods of inner-city Baltimore to individualize the humiliating pain and real danger behind the collapse of the derivative-fueled housing boon. A clinical psychologist, treating clients paying the human cost of the foreclosures' fallout, is herself in danger of losing her home, wiping away tears when her mortgage agent flatly refuses to accept a check. A high school teacher wanders his packed-up house that's just been auctioned away from him on courthouse steps; a minister who's been evicted from her childhood home speaks of loss of identity and sleeping in a friend's car every night. Scored by Baltimore-area hip-hoppers, these segments are a tragic rebuttal to vilification of these buyers by right-wing pundits and President Bush's 2002 Trojan-horse rollout of an agenda to increase minority home purchases. The faces behind the default statistics are scared, shamed, and struggling to rebalance their lives.

The film's final segment follows a mosquito-control team on a circuit of vacated California properties as they attempt to exterminate larvaeup to 800,000 per swimming poolbefore they can raise the risk of West Nile virus (and after the crew has checked there are no squatters, some of whom use the abandoned homes for meth labs or pot farms). American Casino ends with no faith that the treatment of the subprime fallout will come at any cost other than trillions more for the floor managers of this enormous scheme, and with an estimated eight million more home losses in the next three years.

American Casino @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Racing Dreams

Annabeth Barnes, one of the three tweener go-kart racers Marshall Curry follows throughout Racing Dreams, believes God gave her the talent to race. Weaving in and out of every turn and around the track at lightning speed, she faces danger at every turn, which presents a problem for her supportive mother. But the sport is in the family's blood, so as a brood they keep racing, looking past the sport's imposing dangers with that one goal in mind: competing in a genuine Nascar race one day. Annabeth is not alone in this mindset, as both Brandon Warren and Joshua Hobson, the other two racers profiled, aspire for greatness on the roadway as well. Curry distinctly illuminates the clear social and economic differences between the kids, revealing a sport only bred for the fortunate. The eldest of the three, Brandon, has a story so devastating and lurid an entire film could be made about him; one scene in particular captures his evasive, deadbeat dad walking through the living room of his grandfathers house (where Brandon lives), essentially making some sort of shady deal, possibly involving drugs, and Brandon & Co. watch from the kitchen as a clutching silence takes a hold. These looming, roaming moments are sprinkled throughout Dreams, complementing the lively, fist-pumping racing action with a taste of the very real circumstances surrounding these kids' lives. Digesting over 500 hours of footage, Curry has expertly stitched together a 90-minute triumph in crowd-pleasing, wholesome entertainment, finely showcasing the intricacies of the sport (for all the Nascar die-hards) as well as intimately dissecting the tumultuous, blossoming lives of these three highly impressionable yet precocious racers. Falling in line with past rousing kid-themed docs like Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom, Dreams qualifies as the next-in-line, potential-sleeper hit of the summer.

Racing Dreams @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Girlfriend Experience

All the world's a financial transaction just waiting to be negotiated in The Girlfriend Experience, a handsome, frosty, rather one-note time capsule from October 2008. Steven Soderbergh's latest is his second work for 2929 Entertainment (after 2005's Bubble) to be shot on the HD fast and cheap, and to receive simultaneous premieres across theatrical, DVD, and TV platforms. And like its predecessor, as well as last year's four-hour, two-part Che, it's defined by emotional detachment, its story about the daily trials and tribulations of a high-class escort in Manhattan told at an impassive remove.

In a certain sense, that tenor is apt, given that Soderbergh's portrait of Chelsea (porn star Sasha Grey)—shot primarily with rigid, static camera setups and in beautifully sleek, cool hues—casts human interaction as merely a series of rational, calculating business deals, a situation given resonance by the material's setting during the pre-election campaign and economic meltdown. Thematically and aesthetically, the project ably holds together. Yet unlike a spiritual predecessor such as Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, Soderbergh's aloof approach never elicits engagement with its heroine, the film so thoroughly building barriers between the external and the internal that it can be admired only as one might a department store's striking window display.

Soderbergh's title refers to the full-suite services of ritzy call girls like Chelsea, which include dates and mouth-kissing as well as whatever fetishistic sex a client desires. Given that no Soderbergh film has generated even a modicum of heat since George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez undressed in Out of Sight, it's no surprise that there's little steaminess in Girlfriend Experience, and that what minor physical contact is depicted comes off as cold, clammy, and mechanical. For the most part, Chelsea's story involves talking shop to clients, to a reporter, and to her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), a personal trainer who we see attempting to acquire a new job and jumpstart his athletic clothing line. The topics of conversation invariably revolve around money, or power, or the ways in which Chelsea balances her professional life and personal desires, though Soderbergh investigates these subjects with hastiness, his narrative routinely linking every character's behavior and emotion to cash concerns, but going no further. Chelsea is the embodiment of the dehumanization of capitalism, as well as—when she's written about nastily by a sleazy online forum webmaster (film critic Glenn Kenny, stealing the show with drawling come-ons and smack downs)—a stand-in for Soderbergh himself, another provider of gorgeous, remote entertainments.

Amplified by Limey-esque chronological fracturing and sumptuous recurring shots of Chelsea in a limo's backseat, Girlfriend Experience offers an icy view of modern urban depersonalization, yet that chill is so pervasive that it eventually becomes a hindrance. Although there's hardly a plot to speak of, the tale eventually hinges on Chelsea's decision to break her own rules and go away with a new client for the weekend, damn Chris's wishes or the risks posed by such a naked stab at finding true love. Chelsea thus finally lets her guard down and—spoilers herein—is punished accordingly, learning a lesson both she and we, at this point in the proceedings, already know: that there's no such thing as real passion, only mutual satisfaction arranged through fiscal bargaining.

Yet during this signature moment, when his protagonist actually dares to feel something, Soderbergh finds no way to make us invested in her gambit, too thoroughly has he kept everything at arm's length. As with the performance of Grey, whose eyes exhibit the hardness of someone well-trained in the art of living behind self-constructed walls, Girlfriend Experience bars us from entering its sphere of action, locking us out of its highly specific Obama-vs.-McCain, market-plummeting moment in time.

The Girlfriend Experience @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB

"Fuck this place," bellows a beer-spraying singer at the last Sunday matinee of hardcore bands at CBGB, a rare burst of rock 'n roll anomie in Burning Down the House, a largely sentimental documentary of the final months of the Valhalla of New York punk clubs and the failed attempts to save it. Often dissed in its last decade for running on nostalgia for its glory days ("Playing Tonight: Nobody Good," per a skeptical cartoon), the venue found itself in a struggle for a new lease in 2005 with its landlord, a homeless advocacy organization headquartered next to it on the Bowery, whose nonprofit status made for a dicey PR dilemma. Director Mandy Stein recaps the club's '70s spawning of the Talking Heads, Ramones, Blondie, and Television with brief vintage clips, along with tour de force footage of transsexual provocateur Jayne County performing "Toilet Love." (Most of the archival performances, presumably cursed with poor or absent sound, are accompanied by studio recordings.) CB's sphinx-like founder Hilly Kristal, a former Radio City Music Hall choral singer and bluegrass picker who opened his dive in 1973 and serendipitously served as godfather to a musical uprising, found himself in an increasingly hopeless endgame despite the return of alumni playing benefit concerts and a strange flirtation with moving the bar to "the shittiest street in Las Vegas." There's no suspense about the outcome (scenes of the bar, fixtures, and infamously appalling bathroom being dismantled are intercut throughout), but Stein, whose parents either managed or signed some of the club's touchstone acts, does best when capturing the melancholy of the former patrons and musicians, aged between forty- and sixtysomething, who saw CBGB's demise as the Viking funeral for their youth. Framed with scavenger hunting in the stripped bar by Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante, who uncover guitar picks and 1979 graffiti, and climaxing with Patti Smith's finale on the last night, Burning Down the House honors the passing of the Blitzkrieg Bop's home base and says of Madoff-era Manhattan, "Fuck this place."

Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Fish Child

With a plot recalling the fevered fictions of Jim Thompson, late Polanski, and Isabel Allende, The Fish Child banks on the sizzle of its pair of young female stars and their enactment of class and erotic tensions to flavor its Sapphic noir melodrama. Blond and saucer-eyed teen Lala (Ines Efron), a daughter of Buenos Aires privilege, trysts and dreams with her raven-haired Paraguayan maid Ailin (Mariela Vitale), who is conveniently just 20, and inconveniently having a backstairs affair with Lala's dad (Pep Munne), a creepy, sybaritic judge. Flashing backward from Lala's bus journey to her lover's village after Dad turns up dead, the film's opening third is writer-director Lucia Puenzo's most accomplished and surprising stretch, stitching an impressionistic weave of past passions and present dread, along with establishing the party-filled, pop-fueled demimonde of upper-class Argentines. Puenzo, adapting her own novel, augments the melodrama with focused, tightly-framed observations of her anti-heroines, who steal paintings and jewelry from Lala's family to fund their goal of settling down in a lake house near the rural home of "la Guavi" (as the aristocrats call their domestic). Sensuous Vitale lounges on a bed, face to the camera, and the mattress shakes for awhile before we see her employer mounting her from behind; Efron, hitting strong, introverted counter-notes, chops her hair off in a dazed bathtub scene, a tableau of abandonment and possible madness. Puenzo's cool, grainy gaze and Efron's desperate gamine keep Fish Child from floating into risibility until one of the girls lands in prison for the other's crime, and the ensuing gunplay and lurid paternal horrorscape make for a wheezing finish. Puenzo earns cred for the bold stroke of having the mythological aquatic boy of the title swim into Lala's consciousness midway, but the kid's ultimate significance is the stuff of telenovela formula.

The Fish Child @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Outrage

Outrage launches its purported exposé of closeted politicians who push anti-gay agendas with the familiar audio excerpts of Senator Larry Craig, caught with his pants down and foot tapping in an airport-toilet entrapment in 2007, unconvincingly protesting his hetero credentials (the punchline about his "wide stance" curiously missing). Kirby Dick's muckraking rundown consists mostly of Republican lawmakers, many exposed by crusading blogger Mike Rogers, whose same-sex proclivities are described by hookups both anonymous in silhouette and reported secondhand by gay lobbyists, activists, and journalists. Former New York mayor Ed Koch, a decidedly illiberal Democrat who was contemptibly laissez faire during the emergence of AIDS in his city, and current Florida governor Charlie Crist, whose recent marriage is portrayed a sham to shore up his 2012 presidential prospects, are among those whose gay affairs are plausibly traced. But filmmaker Dick falls short of his previous, nuanced work in Sick and Derrida, merely cataloguing a "community" political scorecard and losing focus by including a solitary pickup anecdote concerning a Fox News anchor. Isn't this case just good old-fashioned dishing and nothing else? Yet more egregiously, former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey gets to coast through recounting his "journey" to becoming an out "gay American" without any mention of how fabulous a diversion it was from his more routine peccadilloes and scandals, and the hiring of his lover to a sinecure in his administration. (Further demonstrating liberal inattention to Democratic malfeasance, George W. Bush is appropriately vilified for endorsing a marriage "protection" amendment to the Constitution, but Bill Clinton's signing of the Defense of Marriage Act isn't cited.) One can at least partly embrace the concept that outing pols who torpedo gay rights is defensible and still find Dick's film too frequently a would-be sensationalistic bit of tut-tutting for queer Dems and their politically-connected friends, who here proudly credit gay staffers with making contemporary Washington run. There's a damnable accusation.

Outrage @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: In the Loop

Television-to-film crossovers usually land on the silver screen as more bloated, drawn-out versions of their boob-tube counterparts. But Armando Iannucci's debut feature In The Loop carries on the staggering comedic traditions of its source material, his critically embraced BBC series The Thick of It, hardly ever missing a step—a nonstop riot of fumbling, ego-fueled, lunatic politicians making wrongheaded decisions left and right, cutting off each other heads in the process.

An English government official (Tom Hollander) unwittingly stands behind a potential U.S.-led war with the Middle East on live British radio, and is then confronted by a verbally aggressive, expletive-spewing communications chief (Peter Capaldi) who demands the clumsy politician and his new advisor (Chris Addison) fly to Washington to make amends with the U.S. State Department for his well-broadcast slip-up. But the State Department has made other plans for the Brit, as the Assistant Secretary of Diplomacy (Mimi Kennedy) and her expedient intern (Anna Chlumsky) hope to use the visiting diplomat as a pawn in their anti-war movement. Soon, a peace-loving Pentagon General (James Gandolfini) becomes involved, momentarily negating the intolerable, steely, war-happy State Department head (David Rasche) from pushing forward his Future Planning Committee agenda (also known as the "secret" War Committee).

Employing similar humorous methods as seen in The Office (stilted awkwardness) and Arrested Development (harebrained absurdity), Loop establishes mad-capped Parliament types and U.S. politicians in a world where war is just a game and the players would rather not focus on the fine, minor details like the death of millions of human lives. Possessing immeasurable deadpan gifts, Kennedy endures a profusely throbbing toothache that leads to a riotous, playfully campy bathroom scene with her never-endingly bleeding from the mouth. Balancing a crazed jigsaw of dozens of characters, director Iannucci creates a startling indictment of war-mongering officials whose invaluable lines of communication are suspiciously disengaged, with quick-paced, acerbic dialogue cementing the raucously droll backdrop. Let's just hope the kids in Washington learn a lesson or two from this portentous, weighty satire.

In the Loop @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Lost Son of Havana

"Years is easy to say, but those are days and nights," offers an anguished Luis Tiant, famed major-league pitcher of the 1960s and '70s, returning to his boyhood streets and playing fields after a 46-year absence in The Lost Son of Havana, an autumnal portrait of a hero haunted by loss and regret. Leaving home for a three-month ball-playing stint in America at age 20 in 1961, right after the Bay of Pigs, Tiant found himself trapped by the severance of diplomatic relations, and was urged in a letter from his father—himself a former star hurler of the Cuban, Mexican, and American Negro Leagues—not to return, but to seek his professional destiny in the States. After breaking in as an All-Star flamethrower with the Cleveland Indians, Luisito came back from a freakish shoulder fracture by reinventing himself as a crafty artisan—featuring a funky windup where his head turned to centerfield, then bobbed skyward—for the Red Sox, prompting hordes of Bostonians to ritually chant his name. In a storybook climax to his family's baseball journey, Tiant's elderly parents were permitted by Castro to join their son in 1975, where they witnessed his stirring performance in the World Series.

From his sobbing embrace by elderly aunts he hadn't seen in a half-century to somber musings that "it all could have been different," El Tiante's narrative is a ready-made tearjerker, and director Jonathan Hock not only wrings them out of the poignant reunion tale, but the nearly simultaneous deaths of both of Tiant's parents the year after their unlikely furlough from Cuba ("They killed me," mourns the son). Still, the man's cigar-chomping bonhomie that so well served his mainland media profile remains magnetic, and he's authentically bemused by his "lost" status in 21st-century Havana, as when baseball aficionados in mid-debate, prompted to name the greatest native pitcher, toss out the names El Duque and Jose Contreras. As for the politics of exile, the documentary doesn't delve into ideology or advocacy beyond capturing the undertow of the poverty in his Cuban Tiant family that gnaws at their celebrated prince. "We are barely scraping by," a cousin declares frankly to Luis just before he departs the island once again, and when he peels off some U.S. bills to meet her discreet but unadorned plea, it's both the only thing he can do and, in his own mind, not nearly enough.

The Lost Son of Havana @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Rudo y Cursi

Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the Mexican Matt & Ben—never more toxic than when paired on screen—reunite in Rudo y Cursi to denigrate rubes from Jalisco as slow-witted provincial brothers and banana plantation workers whose unlikely rise to soccer stardom supplies the purported comedy. García Bernal's "Cursi" (corny) is a gullible romantic who wants to run off to Texas on a quest for a singing career; Luna's "Rudo" (tough) is a husband, father, farm foreman, and fuck-up with twin passions for gambling and bullying Cursi. After a fútbol scout (Guillermo Francella) watches them play a local game on a dirt pitch, Cursi serendipitously makes a decisive kick to best his more talented goalkeeping sibling (in a groaningly obvious setup for the third act), and is whisked off to Mexico City and the pros. When Rudo follows, first-time feature director Carlos Cuarón (co-writer of brother Alfonso's obnoxious Y Tu Mamá También, the leads' launching pad) turns the farce into a gag-starved Dumb and Dumber, with Luna, sprouting facial foliage worse than his Milk mustache, falling into debt with gangsters from his gaming losses and coke habit, and García Bernal donning Tejano cowboy duds for a music video cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" (like nearly everything on view, not as funny as it sounds). The overaged brats flail about slapstickily, undergoing shower-room pubic shavings and cock-whippings, returning home as celebrities for their sister's wedding to a drug lord, and trading "asshole" and "faggot" jibes in the absence of a También–style make-out scene that would bring some agreeably incestuous adventurousness into the picture. As Rudo and Cursi are correctly labeled old for soccer prospects, these bucolic 30-year-old ninnies are even more tiresome than the randy little shits the stars played in their breakthrough vehicle. As Cursi boinks his TV hostess girlfriend on a kitchen countertop, a mock-portentous narration by the scout announces, "Loving a woman is like loving a ball—she requires guidance and control." The younger Cuarón should've applied either virtue to this bungled rehash of sports comedy clichés and sophomoric star power.

Rudo y Cursi @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Garapa

An exposé of severe poverty with every trace of glamour carefully removed, José Padilha's documentary Garapa finds the Elite Squad auteur training his camera on the poorest of the poor: the struggling families of Brazil's rural villages and urban favelas. Opening and closing with an explanatory text that situates the action in the context of a world hunger epidemic, the film otherwise avoids unnecessary exposition as well as the flash of the director's Golden Bear winner, instead simply watching its three subject families performing their daily tasks—much of which has to do with the acquisition and consumption of food—as they unfold through sometimes excruciatingly extended takes.

Only occasionally interrupting this observational mode to directly interrogate the subjects (and in one case provide them with pain medication), Padilha lets their quotidian lives dictate the content of the film. Endless shots of naked children cavorting (one of the subject families has 11), close-ups of flies buzzing around scabies-infested skin, the constant mixing of the titular concoction (a sugar water capable of warding off hunger, but providing nothing in the way of nutrition) all captured in excessively grainy black and white, this is the damning evidence of the cycle of poverty that forms the putrid core of Padilha's film. The circumstances of the three families follow more or less the same pattern: the inability of the father to find work, often compounded by an alcohol problem, an ignorance about birth control methods, severe malnutrition in the kids and a reliance on the aid of others—the church, government programs, a generous individual benefactor—to avoid complete starvation.

Emerging through Padilha's interviews with his subjects as well as through a particularly revealing sequence where one of the subjects takes her children to a health clinic (among the horrendous details that emerge here, the family is forced to defecate in plastic bags because they don't own a toilet), this background information provides a bare minimum of context that helps situate the film's observational core. For the rest, Padilha simply watches, and after the endless repetition of the same fruitless actions what emerges is not simply the horror or the futility of poverty, but the terrible banality of the daily existence it gives rise to. The contradictory evidence of flashy entertainments like City of God or Slumdog Millionaire notwithstanding, this last observation seems about right.

Garapa @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Still Walking

Still Walking is a family drama that gets the family dynamic exactly right, a film that understands the ways in which unspoken resentments tend to accumulate and unresolved conflicts later harden into regrets. Unfolding over the course of a single day, the picture brings together three generations of a middle-class Japanese family under the grandparents' roof to pay tribute to their long deceased eldest son on the anniversary of his death. As in any domestic drama, everyone's got his issues and in the hothouse environment of the patriarchal household in which nearly the entire movie takes place, most of them come to light. The grandfather, a doctor forced to give up his practice when his eyesight started to fail, locks himself in his study, refusing to speak with his surviving son and emerging only at mealtimes. That son, an out-of-work art restorer, shows up with his new wife, a widow, and her young child, a domestic arrangement that, along with his perceived inability to live up to the example of his dead brother, puts him at some odds with his parents, even as he points out that his family situation is hardly anomalous in contemporary Japan. Meanwhile, his sister is planning on moving her own family into the house, an arrangement with which her mother is having some difficulty coming to terms.

But while these familial resentments and anxieties may come to the surface, they're never brought to a point of crisis. Directing his own brilliantly measured screenplay, Hirokazu Kore-eda frames his characters in long, fixed takes, turning a coolly observational eye on the assembled party as they deflect rather than confront potential sources of conflict or submerge their accumulated regrets in the performance of domestic ritual: cooking, eating, bathing. But if the film's restrained aesthetic and refusal of expected closure leads to a certain dryness in the presentation, then Kore-eda smartly portions out a few generous flourishes—like a perfectly lovely sequence in which an orange butterfly, taken by the grandmother to be the embodiment of her dead son, flutters around before landing on the picture of the deceased, and the film's epilogue, signaled by an ellipsis of shattering abruptness, which is unusually wise about the ways in which, for all our deepest regrets, life continues heedlessly on.

Still Walking @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Fear Me Not

The latest from the Dogma cine-factory is notable for director Kristian Levring's visual suggestion of madness. Ulrich Thomsen is fortysomething Mikael, clinically depressed for reasons left largely unknown, though from the cautiously loving treatment he receives from his wife and daughter we glean they're used to being kept on edge. At one point he jokes to his little girl about being the Incredible Hulk, and when he agrees to participate in a clinical trial for an anti-depressant, Mikael spends the rest of the film popping pills in order to quell feelings of intense antisocial behavior. Levring frames his main character just off-center, toying with space and movement to suggest entrapment and mounting despair; during a scenic rowing trip in the lake adjacent to his house, Mikael and his brother-in-law essentially move from medium shot to close-up with every thrust of their oars. This type of fussy but nonetheless jolting formalism comes to reflect the festering boil that is Mikael's psyche, but is there anything to Fear Me Not beyond Levring trying to sustain a perpetual sense of dread—that Mikael, at any moment, can go ape-shit and obliterate everyone in his path? Minimally plotted, at least by screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen's typically dense standards, the story hands Mikael and audiences a bit of surprise. The reveal happens almost matter-of-factly, and though it doesn't clarify the root of Mikael's mental state until now, it still deepens the film, delivering an intriguing message about mental illness as we understand it to manifest itself within us, and how we use the pretense of insanity to justify immoral behavior.

Fear Me Not @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Black Dynamite

Dolemite and its blaxploitation siblings were appealing in large part because, despite their amateurishness and outrageousness, they often took themselves and their sexy-cool poses seriously. Black Dynamite, on the other hand, is just a replica blaxploitation adventure in which actors pretend to be clueless about their own awfulness, a situation that turns out to be generally humorless and pointless, devoid as the film is of any commentary on the genre to which it's paying loving tribute. Though Quentin Tarantino's cinema history-referencing work does more than merely duplicate its forefathers, the director's Kill Bill and Grindhouse endeavors are nonetheless primarily to blame for photocopy exercises like this, which afford directors and actors the chance to play dress up in the costumes and amidst the settings of the movies that inspired them.

Helmed by Scott Sanders and starring Michael Jai White as the titular vigilante super-mofo, Black Dynamite reproduces the extreme-contrast visual palette, lame musical cues, gratuitous violence, cheesy kung-fu combat, and macho ladies' man one-liners of its predecessors, but its superfluous story about Black Dynamite's efforts to avenge his brother's death, clean up the smack-infested streets, and take down The Man never generates much comedic momentum. Part of this is due to the ho-humness of such one-note imitation, which quickly wears thin. Mostly, however, it's because the filmmakers rarely take even the slightest of risks.

Randomly loony moments such as the sight of a brothel headmistress smoking a blatantly unlit cigarette are the finest, but they're so few and far between that they register as anomalies among a plethora of predictable chop-socky gags and Black Dynamite threats and come-ons. His character's ego as big as his muscles, Jai White's embodiment of idealized African-American physical and sexual might is goofily pitch-perfect. Yet the nagging sense that he's in on the joke renders his performance, and the rest of the proceedings, lifeless, to the point that even a finale involving penis-shrinking malt liquor conspiracies and a nunchuck-wielding Tricky Dick proves more bad than badass.

Black Dynamite @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: Easy Virtue

"Ohhh, you're American," laments the haughty aristocrat Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) on meeting her son's plucky auto-racing bride (Jessica Biel) at the start of Easy Virtue, an adaptation of Noel Coward's social comedy-melodrama last filmed as a silent in 1928 by the nascent Alfred Hitchcock. The audience's cause for disappointment is that director Stephan Elliott is determined to contemporize a playwright whose rhythms, concerns, and craft are all permanently bonded to the '20s art of British sophisticated escapism, art being short for "artifice." The open warfare between Scott Thomas's crocodile smile and the insouciant posture of Biel's interloping Larita, a mysteriously widowed Detroit girl given to sabotaging fox hunts and accidentally offing the family Chihuahua, isn't so much over Larita's hunky naïf of a husband (Ben Barnes) as Anglo-American tension over just what isn't done. This now-moot material begs for a musty proscenium and rapid patter at close quarters, but the camera tracks the players through a series of imposing mansion locations, and they try to snap out Coward's trademark bon mots on scandal ("We try not to speak of it…except in public") and reputation while only the unshaven, Great War-traumatized patriarch stands with his misbehaving daughter-in-law against the brood of snobs. Will he be the one to rescue her? Is the casting of Colin Firth in the role a big enough clue? Elliott made a fiftysomething Terence Stamp stylishly fierce in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but here he reflects Scott Thomas's monster-in-law visage in a billiard table's eight ball to reduce her to the Wicked Queen of Snow White. Busily scored with Jazz Age songs from Coward and Cole Porter, Easy Virtue flattens its creator's light gifts so gracelessly that it adds period arrangements of "Car Wash" and "Sex Bomb" for cheap shtick, the equivalent of drowning a modest sorbet in Kahlúa.

Easy Virtue @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival: The Boys in the Band

"No camping!" snaps party host Michael (Kenneth Nelson) before admitting an old and presumably heterosexual college pal to the queeny festivities in The Boys in the Band, adapted from Mart Crowley's 1968 stage landmark by the playwright and directed by future blockbuster-maker William Friedkin. The characterizations on display, steeped in assorted measures of vaudeville bitchery, self-hatred and guilt, acquired similarly verboten status. A political football in the subsequent four decades of queer cultural history, the film was essentially unprecedented in presenting a whole gaggle of gay archetypes—loudmouth nelly, divorcing dad, dumb and pretty hustler—in contrast to previous Hollywood movies (before and after the Production Code's adoption) daring only to use token single homos for comic relief or as tragic victims, preferably of suicide. Viewed in the new century, with American voters having just freshly refuted the possibility that homophobia was creeping into extinction, Boys stirs the same ambivalent feelings expressed by queer critic Vito Russo in his book The Celluloid Closet (both "a freak show" and "the best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form"); the dishy wit and behavioral truths of its late-'60s demimonde of sophisticated New York homos doesn't dilute the unnerving shame and emotional warfare that explode in its scabrous second act.

After a title sequence that represents the major attempt to "open up" Crowley's play (Manhattan location shots of the characters shopping, cruising and working, now superfluous but for a glimpse of the still-surviving Julius tavern), Michael, a furtively practicing Catholic and debt-ridden globetrotter who has newly sworn off booze, prepares his East Side duplex apartment and patio for a birthday party, aided by a coolly critical friend-with-benefits (Frederick Combs). The other thirtysomething guests soon follow: the indefatigable queen Emory (Cliff Gorman), "a butterfly in heat"; a coupled teacher and fashion photog (Laurence Luckinbill and Keith Prentice) quarreling over monogamy; a genial black bookstore clerk (Reuben Greene) who absorbs Michael and Emory's racial jokes with an inner grimace; and two outsiders, a young whore in cowboy drag (Robert La Tourneaux) hired for the honoree, and that WASPy college friend/lawyer in crisis (Peter White) who recoils from and then strikes out at the circle of alien "pansies." Finally, stoned, pockmarked "Jew fairy" Harold (Leonard Frey, introduced with a grotesque trio of heels-to-'fro, creature-feature close-ups) arrives at his fete just in time to provide a scathing play-by-play on internecine bloodletting that culminates in a brutal telephone truth game.

Friedkin shoots the theatrical action—largely verbal parrying and combat, with one physical assault—fluidly, fresh off adapting another stagey Birthday Party (Harold Pinter's). The sizzle of the bon mot–tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film's momentum, along with Crowley's lacerating dialogue, some of which has passed into knowing pop lexicons similar to those the party boys draw on in reflexively invoking Suddenly, Last Summer and Bette Davis (the lasagna-toting Emory's "Hot stuff, comin' through!" made it into The Simpsons's gay steel-mill episode). But comedy recedes in the long climactic sequence, where an off-the-wagon, vicious Michael forces his friends to "phone the one person you've truly loved," buried grief is exhumed, and lingering jealousies and resentments stoke accusations and betrayals. Swellegant!

The film stood accused by Russo in 1981 of presenting "perfunctory, easily acceptable stereotypes" and "lots of zippy fag humor that posed as philosophy." All of that, and the option of focusing on Michael's sadism and hatefulness as emblematic of the Life, is still arguably evident. The non-swishy lovers played by Luckinbill and Prentice, who come to a tender, hopeful understanding amid the cruelty, are generally denied the attention critics grant the acid-tongued flamboyance of Michael, Harold and Emory; they're the movie's strongest channel to a socially accepting day yet to come. (If one imagines the characters' bond enduring, they could be the subjects of contemporary media stories on decades-long same-sex partners marrying, however temporarily.)

Crowley's is not a great play, owing a significant debt to the bitter gaming of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for its melodramatic act-two truth-telling. Shot in the year of Stonewall, Boys is indeed a time capsule of its era's mores, but if Crowley's limited palette of self-loathing and camp-drenched cattiness made it an instant "period piece" per Russo, the notion that it blames these men for their fears and lies (which sat well with moralists viewing it as a cautionary tale) seems a clear misreading. The partygoers are caught in the tragedy of the pre-liberation closet, a more crippling and unforgiving one than the closets that remain. Michael's final wish—"If we could just learn not to hate ourselves quite so very much"—has been largely fulfilled. Not quite so very much.

The Boys in the Band @ the Tribeca Film Festival

Obama the Obstructionist?

The Republican Party takes its role as the opposition with the same seriousness a white, gun-toting suburbanite protects his or her colonial home. Two weeks ago, a certain talk radio host criticized President Obama for not responding boisterously enough about the Somali pirate hostage crisis. Before launching into an incomprehensible—and incomprehensibly long and sarcastic—monologue about how the pirates couldn't be Muslim because Obama claims we're not at war with Islam ("I suppose they could be a rogue band—a very, very, very tiny, small infinitesimal minority of Islam. But we're not at war with Islam. The president said so. So the Somali pirates—I mean, the story is that they're Muslims, but that can't be, because we're not at war with them. My guess is it's the Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews committing piracy in the open seas off Somalia over there, there's no question in my mind"), Rush Limbaugh claimed that the reason there has been a resurgence of piracy of late is "because idiots like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama think pirates and terrorists—and this is terrorism—are criminals, not enemies."

Never mind that the recent piracy scourge began during the last administration, but if Limbaugh believes that piracy is terrorism and that we're indeed at war with Islam, then why, after Obama approved an operation in which U.S. snipers shot down three of the hijackers and thusly rescued the U.S. hostage, did he say this: "You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a U.S. merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths…Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas"? Yes, the bloated face of the Fringe Party is also, fittingly, the bloated face of hypocrisy.

Subtler, though no less duplicitous, is the daily assessments of Bill O'Reilly, a man who bases the quality of his network's coverage on the number of viewers who saw it. On The O'Reilly Factor last night, Fox News White House Correspondent Jim Angle chided Obama for deeming waterboarding "too harsh," but ordering air strikes on terrorists "in their homes, presumably with their wives and children." When asked by O'Reilly about "some" people—read: "us"—who think Obama is "making a big deal out of [waterboarding]," Angle said: "One could argue that waterboarding isn't nearly as bad as being blown up." He actually said that. Out loud. I suppose he deserves some credit for his transparent attempt to dress it up so that he could later claim that he wasn't the "one" who was arguing that insidious point.

Partisan spin is expected from these political hacks. But if there was ever any question about who was running the country for the last eight years, the recent flood of criticism about the fledgling Obama administration from senior members of the Bush team, and the relative silence of Bush himself, should leave no doubt. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice president of the United States," Karl Rove said without a hint of irony in regard to an anecdote recalled by Vice President Joe Biden. (Rove's hypocrisy deserves a piece in and of itself—and it's already been written.)

And speaking of vice presidential liars, Dick Cheney has at least exhibited the virtue of consistency by claiming that Obama is putting the country at risk by, among other things, halting the previous administration's torture program. For that, Obama has been praised by both the left and the right. But his disinterest in prosecuting the CIA operatives who committed the crime of torture and those in the Bush administration who sanctioned those acts, though consistent, has angered many of his supporters. Unlike Republicans, who acquiesced to George W. Bush's every war-mongering, Constitution-dismantling, executive power-grabbing whim, it seems that Democrats are unwilling to sit idly by and blindly support a president who seeks to obstruct justice in the name of politics.

Starting a witch hunt at the CIA could result in the kind of mass exodus of seasoned intelligence officers that weakened the agency during the Clinton administration. Obama understandably doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of his Democratic predecessor, and the announcement last week that his administration has no intention of seeking prosecutions of CIA employees who carried out policies ordered by Bush and Cheney is further evidence of that. But Obama's disinterest in pursuing justice extends to even operatives who went beyond what was authorized in the recently released memos regarding those "aggressive interrogation techniques," the top Bush officials who composed those memos, and presumably Bush and Cheney themselves.

Over the weekend, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told ABC that the president believes that those who devised the torture policies should not be prosecuted. This kind of stance is not simply disappointing or embarrassing, it's downright lawless. The message continues to be that the United States can do whatever it wants, that we can ignore international laws and treaties. More specifically, it signals that the country's politicos and their minions will not be upheld to the same standards of justice as ordinary citizens. As lefty Glenn Greenwald so nonpartisan-ly put it: "Perhaps it's time to begin a FREE BERNIE MADOFF campaign based on Obama's oh-so-moving decree that this is a time for reflection, not retribution, and that we must look forward, not backwards."

This "look forward, not backward" mantra has become as disturbingly pervasive as any of Bush's asinine slogans, with Emanuel, increasingly inept White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, and a chorus of others in Washington employing it ad nauseam. But before I join the ranks of those on the left crying foul, I'd like to examine, briefly, the possibility that Obama is attempting the ultimate have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too political move. In the current issue of Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas cite sources inside the Department of Justice who suggest that Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, is still considering investigating the issue of torture, while Democrats in Congress, specifically head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy, still want a commission to examine the abuses. As president, Obama has an obligation to focus on the country's most pressing issues—the economy, health care, those pesky wars—and to keep the intelligence community on his side, and that's exactly what he's doing. Presidents aren't prosecutors, and, unless you're George W. Bush, the executive office doesn't run the DOJ. That means it's your move, Mr. Holder.

Single Review: Miranda Lambert's "Dead Flowers"

What works best about Miranda Lambert's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the rare album that actually seems to improve over time, is its attention to broad structure: the way Lambert takes a particular word, turn of phrase, or theme from one song and uses it in a different, often inverting context elsewhere, giving the album a real depth that's often overshadowed by her outsized tales of shotgun-wielding and barroom intimidation. If she holds true to that already pretty spectacular form and continues to demonstrate this same kind of conceptual sophistication on "Dead Flowers," the first single from her third album (due in September), the track gives her plenty of material to work with and just as many reasons to be optimistic about the quality of that upcoming record. Offering a surfeit of dense, loaded phrases and sharply drawn images, the song hits with devastating accuracy because of how well Lambert sustains its central conceit. At turns blunt (there's a finality to the way she sings the line, "They're sitting in the vase/But now they're dead," in the opening verse) and poetic (the parallel she draws between the titular flowers and a string of burnt-out Christmas lights makes for a simile that's as effective as it is clever), the verses outright grieve for a failed relationship, only to explode into the refrain's barbed accusations.

If that refrain lacks a conventional lyrical or melodic hook, which makes the single more of a grower than "Kerosene" or "Gunpowder and Lead," Lambert's powerful vocal more than carries the dramatic narrative forward. Having already proven herself to be the most nuanced interpretive singer among her contemporaries, her voice has gained more substantial heft during her two years on tour, and here she provides a perfect example of well-controlled restraint. Her measured performance is matched by the song's arrangement, which, as was the case on "Gunpowder," swells in tandem with the lyrics, giving the single the kind of structural awareness seldom heard on country radio. That arrangement doesn't fit neatly into any contemporary country trends: Few pop-country acts would foreground this track's excellent steel guitar run in the mix, but the heavy drums and pulsing guitars would also scare off most traditionalists or staid Americana acts. The crescendo of ringing electric guitars and percussion in the song's final throes recalls, of all things, Coldplay's "Yellow." Whether or not that makes for a good choice for a country single remains to be seen, but "Dead Flowers" makes it clear that Lambert is more interested in forging her own artistic path than in bending to ill-fitting trends set by far lesser talents.

Tongue Control: Guns and the Right

The recent spate of gun violence—the massacre at a Binghamton immigrant aid center on Friday, the slaying of three Pittsburgh police officers on Saturday, and a fatal shooting at a Christian retreat center in California last night—has inspired a lot of finger pointing, with liberal bloggers blaming some on the right for inciting paranoia about gun rights. Specifically, the targets have been Fox News loon Glenn Beck and the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who, like Pittsburgh cop killer Richard Poplawski, believe that the Obama administration is planning to take away gun ownership rights, among other things. Salon's Alex Coppelman helped put things in perspective, claiming that every time there's a crime committed by a person with a known political grievance, one party "goes on the attack, claiming their opponents are responsible for the deaths, while the other counterattacks, saying their opponents are just exploiting the tragedy."

While this may be an accurate observation, it doesn't mean that nobody bears responsibility for fanning the flames of a few crazies' fires. It may be unfair to blame the entire Republican Party for the ostensibly mentally unstable Poplawski's brutal ambush of three civil servants over the weekend, and the Binghamton shooter was reportedly motivated by the loss of his job and his inability to speak English (shame and humiliation are both known triggers for this kind of violence, and are more frequent during economic downturns), but the right's loudest voices, if not the most lucid or most popular, have been spewing outrageous rhetoric and calling for extreme action since before Barack Obama even took office. To be sure, the smears began before he even won the election.

I asked the question last year, and it bears repeating: What is the right so pissed off about? Republicans ran the country for years—and not just any Republicans, but the most extreme faction of the party. The Bush administration's neocon-designed policies were some of the most radical the country had seen in decades, if ever, and the left was rightfully enraged. But if the left's rage felt immediate, in the form of eggs splattering against the side of the then-newly christened president's limousine, it was because of the nature of his election, not his policies—at least at first. There was early opposition to George W. Bush's policies (and make no mistake, they were radical from the outset), but no one called for a revolution. And it wasn't until Iraq spiraled into uncontainable violence and the administration's corruption and war crimes hit the front pages that the most visible on the left finally started pounding the pavement.

And there's one more important caveat: The right isn't upset about what Obama has done, but what they're afraid he's going to do. So where is this fear coming from? I once jokingly likened Keith Olbermann to Howard Beale, and now Olbermann has taken to likening Beck, who routinely bursts into crying jags, to Harold Hill, the conman from The Music Man. But Beale is probably more like it. Even the abhorrent Michael Savage thinks Beck is a few bricks short of a solid foundation: "I'm afraid the guy's going to have a nervous breakdown on the air," he spat. "This guy's on the edge everyday." Beck defended himself against the assertion that his rhetoric is influencing people like the Pittsburgh gunman by saying that blaming anyone other than Poplawski himself "is like blaming the flight attendant after a terrorist takes down a plane," comparing what he does on the air every night to giving the passengers of a plane "a nice little safety talk to prepare them." Creepy.

For her part, Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann has been disseminating a litany of paranoid nonsense, from the elimination of the U.S. dollar to Senator Edward Kennedy's desire to use "re-education camps" to brainwash the country's youth. She has repeatedly called for a revolution, most recently on Sean Hannity's radio show: "It's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing." She followed that cherry bomb by reframing it as an "orderly revolution," but her language—calling for citizens to be "armed and dangerous"—and the urgency with which she and others have been sounding the alarm is disturbing. "We can't let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer!" she warned Hannity, who literally started singing hallelujahs. Evidently Republicans have a much lower threshold of tolerance than Democrats when it comes to not being in power. A whopping two and a half months of policies they don't agree with is apparently just too much to handle.

The DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas put it best when, in 140 characters or less, he offered this: "When [Democrats] were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk 'revolution' and kill cops." For years Olbermann called for Congress, the courts, and the voters to take action against the Bush administration, but even at his most smug, at his most righteously indignant, he simply appealed for legal avenues of action. There was no coded language that could be misinterpreted as a plea for extra-legal action. We have elections in this country, a concept Bachmann, who nearly lost hers last fall after proposing a congressional socialist witch hunt on Hardball with Chris Matthews, clearly doesn't grasp.

You can't ignore these hysterical Chicken Littles because they've been given a national public platform with which they are instilling this paranoia in their audiences and/or solidifying the fears of those who would do exactly what they're advocating: take extreme action. The most dangerous thing about charlatans is the people who follow them. But it's not just the fringe that's propagating fear: Dick Cheney has publicly derided Obama's national security policies, claiming they are weakening the country. How long will it be before one of these guns is pointed at the president or his family in the name of protecting America?

To hear it from the lips of Obama himself, personal responsibility is no longer just a virtue espoused by the right. Coppelman is right to say that it's foolish to point fingers when it comes to gun violence. But when a pattern develops, all of the contributing factors need to be examined. And when the violence runs rampant, policies are worth examining too. No one in the Democratic Party advocates taking people's guns away. Banning weapons altogether is unlikely to stop criminals from getting their hands on them—prohibition and the drug war have taught us that. But reinstating the Federal Assault Weapons Ban along with stricter overall regulation, like closing the gun show loophole and requiring permits for carrying a concealed firearm, might—might—keep guns out of the hands of just a few loose screws. Of course, then there might not be anyone left to lead Bachmann's revolution.

What Sesame Street Taught Me About Wall Street

To quote President Obama, I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak. I took courses in finance, accounting, statistics, and even a class on professional ethics in college, and I have a basic understanding of how Wall Street functions. But the truth is, I learned everything I know about regulation of the financial system from Sesame Street. When I was little I saw a segment on the PBS program about the importance of traffic lights, and the image of cars careening haphazardly through the streets, narrowly escaping collisions and sending pedestrians running for their lives, was indelible—one that repeatedly pops into my head whenever I hear debates about Wall Street regulation:



The particulars of TARP or debt-for-equity swaps are, to quote Obama again, above my pay-grade. I'm more interested in the larger issue of regulation and its role in a capitalist system. As Warren G and Nate Dogg once said, sometimes you have to regulate. Sure, they were talking about shooting pimps and getting high, and not the financial derivatives market, but the suits on Wall Street aren't any less gluttonous than your average hip-hop artist. After all, it's their job to be greedy—just ask Michael Douglas. And in a capitalist system, it's the job of government to ensure that the system doesn't run amok.

Whether it's the financial sector, health care, or taxes, the right cries "Socialism!" anytime someone suggests that putting the interests of the people of America ahead of the interests of corporate America might be a good idea, or that supply-side, trickle-down nonsense is just that: nonsense. But when it comes to lining the pockets of legislators on Capitol Hill, greed doesn't discriminate. In the late 1990s, Phil Gramm, then-Texas senator and future economic advisor to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, wrote the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall, but Democrats were complicit in—if not outright enthusiastic about—rescinding the Depression-era law that prevented banks from getting their fingers into the insurance and securities industries.

And now the same business interests that helped create the problem are flexing their muscles and using their political influence on the Hill to prevent the very reform that's necessary to fix it. The Washington Post reported today that Larry Summers, one of the president's top economic advisors, was bribed—I mean, paid—handsomely for speaking engagements last year by Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. To wit, Bill Black, professor and former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, told Bill Moyers last night just how little change he believes Obama has brought to Washington when it comes to the incestuous, deregulated relationship between Wall Street and the U.S. government.

The French Revolution was sparked by conditions not unlike the ones the U.S. is experiencing today: costly wars, increasing economic disparity, the refusal of the upper class to pay higher taxes, leaders who seem tragically out of touch or downright corrupt. Middle-class wages are stagnant in the U.S., while the top 1% of the country controls exponentially more wealth than it did 25 years ago. Let them eat pie! More precisely, let them eat a third of it!

By default, capitalism allows for the prosperity of big business—and yes, Joe, even for small ones to get big enough to graduate to a new tax bracket. A capitalist system encourages ingenuity, exploitation, and free enterprise. The problem is that instead of creating anything of value, industrious Wall Street traders, with the compliance of Congress, simply used their new capitalist freedoms to invent new ways of creating wealth that were so convoluted that it was impossible to see the forest for the bundles of bad investments that it was. As a result, the giant casino we call the stock market has become even more of a fantasy ride. It's the job of the people we elect to represent us to make sure we don't get run over.