Should W see W?

The White House spokeswoman Dana Perrino said George W Bush had better things to do than see a ridiculous film like "W" but it might have been a great piece of insight lost that no one in the administration saw the film.

Oliver Stone, who felt a special connection to W. being that they were at Yale at the same time, among other commonalities, surprised many people who had him pegged as someone making a propaganda film by restraining himself from taking a couple cheap shots at the president and offering a very sympathetic portrayal of Bush. Stone essentially basic premise is Bush wasn't a man who wasn't particularly sinister or idiotic but a man who simply made a crucial error in judgement in 2003 that undermined his presidency. Stone's mission is to probe the man and his past, daddy issues and all, to understand why he would make such a mistake.

There are concerns that we've seen so much of these characters in the news, why would we want to watch them for two more hours, but I saw it differently. Because these characters are already so familiar to us, it is enjoyable to watch fine actors test their mettle in the difficult challenge of playing their interpretations against very public images. These include Richard Dreyffus playing Cheney in a very unanimated manner, which sort of makes sense because Cheney never has much stage presence, even if the the supposed depths of his misuses of power could allow for someone to play him as a classic villain. Tobey Jones is also particularly appealing as Karl Rove, who seems little conniving underneath the surface. Jeffery Wright feels a little stiff but seems more or less spot-on. Scott Glenn is very interesting as Rumsfled but he's not in the film much.

The film is also a great narrative: The issues of a man trying to make hard decisions, a man trying to turn his life around, and most prominently, a son trying to please his father. Even though you've seen this guy on the news for several hours of your life at this point, Stone recreates the character in a different light: He is not an authority figure who you want to look up to in need of leadership only to be disappointed. Instead, he shows him as a man you look down on with empathy as you see him trying to make good on his strengths and cope with flaws.

With all this in mind, it is a shame that the administration reacts so negatively upon this, and that is indicative of a bigger problem. It seems to me that the Conservative party does not like to come upon information that they might not like. This is what got them in this bad of a war in the first place, after all. Although there are exceptions to every rule, it strikes me that members of the conservative party have their own news channel that tells them what they want to hear and serves to invalidate all other sources of information. As what often happens with movies that are being protested by the right, they won't even bother to watch the movie before denouncing it.

One item that comes to mind is how annoying it is when commentators of Fox news and the conservative radio are dedicated to suppressing the discourse of ideas that aren't conducive to their agenda. Once respected sources instantly become invalid once they stop saying things that conservatives like hearing. Recently, and this is one of many examples, Campbell Brown at CNN came under fire for being soft on Obama and hard on McCain. Campbell was right on the money, however, responding that she calls things as she sees them and its ridiculous to think that she's obligated to produce exactly the same number of hard-hitting criticisms of the democrats that she's unleashed upon the Republicans. The McCain campaign said "We once liked Campbell Brown but lately she's gone insane" or something along those lines. Don't launch some kind of smear campaign on her because she's stopped playing for your team, all of a sudden. It shows a lack of integrity.

"You want the truth, you can't handle the truth!"

I was watching the Dixie Chicks documentary "Shut Up and Sing" and first of all, very good documentary that stirred some passions in me. I think it stirred some passions in me about the way that people can interfere with each other's right to free speech and I strongly feel that we need to allow our creative minds to be able to voice their opinions without fear of repercussions. While I admire the Dixie Chicks' resolve to not let things get to them, they still got to me. There's arguments on both sides of the story. One side of the argument is that just as people have a right to voice their opinions, other people have a right to chose whether or not to buy their records. What I don't think is right, however, is to interfere with other people's choice as to whether or not to buy the records or to actively mobilize opinions and to try to influence contingents of people to boycott a record. Especially through questionable means: The right wing plays on rudimentary mislogic to try to influence large droves of God-fearing people. They present the logic: Bush=A representative of a party that traditionally associates itself with God=The wishes of God, therefore The Dixie Chicks who oppose Bush=The Devil, therefore buying=The Dixie Chicks album. They spewed this stuff out to congregations and just influenced a lot of people, it's a disgusting hijacking of religion and yes, people can chose whether to listen to the Right Wingers, but there's a lot of grey area here, and the first ammendment is capable of underestimating the power of people to be manipulated by groups who proclaim they're doing things in the name of God. I would just like to live in a country where the right wingers who supposedly have a higher moral sense than anyone else, would stop pretending their politics are in the name of God and stop preying on innocent church going people. So good for the Dixie Chicks for winning the album of the year at the Grammys.



But anyway, one scene got me thinking. Where the head of a record company straight-up lied to the camera and to congress that he wasn't ordering people to stop playing stations. He just admitted it and he got caught up in his own logic. And you know what? People can't afford to admit that they're wrong when there are millions of dollars at stake.

That was one of the themes of a recent film I saw, Michael Clayton, which features two characters on parallel descents to madness. One character, played by Tom Wilkinson slowly descends into a breach of legal ethics as he realizes that a class action law suit he has been working on for 6 years, is ethically wrong and that he is helping a corporation do something that is morally reprehensible. At the same time, Tilda Swenson's character is slowly descending into a breach of ethics (as in killing people, lying to people, swindling innocent people out of their money) as she tries to preserve the legal ethics of her job.

My dad saw the film with me and commented that Tom Wilkinson wasn't aloud to do that. And I said "how"? He said, it's a violation of legal ethics to aid the other side and disclose information. Well, in my option, our existing legal system is one that was never ethical to begin with. The idea of two opposing people spinning the same situation into two different versions of the truth that they're supposed to belive in and defend to the best of their ability, is fundamentally wrong to me.

I know this is a sweeping statement but a lot of wrongs result from the fact that in our society, it's in people's job descriptions not to tell the truth. Companies cannot admit truths like "we messed up" when billions of dollars are at stake, politicians can't admit the truth and admit mistakes because too many constituents are at stake, and lawyers can't admit the truth because it's unethical.





by the way, I have no respect for Toby Keith anymore

The bias behind a bias

I'm sick and tired of people accusing various media outlets of having a "liberal bias" or a "conservative bias."

I'm tired of conservatives using the argument that news stations or newspapers operate under a bias. In this way they seek to invalidate the opinions of those who oppose them rather than engage in a constructive argument. It's true that Washington Post has more liberal opinions ono their editorial section but most of the staff writers and journalists are professional reporters who operate under a set of standards. I don't think people appreciate how good of a job the vast majority of reporters in this world do at abiding by those standards. The way conservatives portray the news media who disagrees with them, they'd have us believe that people take on careers in journalism out of a desire to massively influence public policy through distortions of the truth. In fact, the people doing those are mostly conservative radio pundits. There are probably a few biased liberal pundits too.

The true bias comes from belonging to a party. Liberal and conservative are entirely abstract words that only make sense in the context of American politics within this certain period of American history. They don't really mean anything in absolute terms, but they mean a lot to a lot of people. It ties them to a certain set of principles to fight for, so that's their bias and distortion.

The set of principles I like to abide by is what's good for America and me as a voter. I belong to the "good government" party if that exists. I also am all for the "truth" party. I'd like honest information, and the people who get closest to that are reporters. They're trained in truth-seeking and it's true, us journalists have biases but those have to do with meeting deadlines, making their leads abnormally flashy, making boring people interesting. Maybe in some cases, that produces a distortion, I'll admit but that's so much smaller than the pundits will have you believe.

The truth is that if the vast majority of news agencies are saying things like "War on Iraq is bad" and the pundits are arguing that their all distorted, then pundits and everyone else who cries foul, needs to accept the possibility that the only thing that's distorted is the truth in relation to their own views. I'm not even arguing for or against the war on Iraq. I'm arguing against the innocent smearing of a journalist's name by a pundit for political gain.

Keep your politics out of my movies

In response to critics who dismiss Blood Diamonds merits as a film because it's "too left-wing":

First of all, basic question. If you dismiss this as left-wing, does that mean that the right-wing view is that all these people in Africa should be killed for diamonds and that their story shouldn't be told? That's disgusting.

I hate the way our partisan political culture takes its toll on the way we see films. Movies are art serve an important function in analyzing and putting up a mirror to our culture. They should feel free to do so completely uninhibited from the potential response of self-proclaimed left or right-wing people. Unless, it's a movie like Farenheight 911 which is made with the explicit purpose of removing a president from office, movies are just movies. They might have political overtones but they deserve to be treated as works of art as such. I think we've gotten to a point in society where people just take their truly arbitrary political labels and use those biases to dissect everything around them in life.

On the note of movies just being movies, Ed Zwick clearly states in his production notes that he desires to make entertainment first and foremost. Second, he wishes to state a message. You can agree or not agree with his message but don't dimiss the art. Don't dismiss the merits of his film and don't dismiss his right to say it. Also, i hardly see how you can disagree with his message unless you're in the habit of being so attached to a set of beliefs that it's just your policy to dismiss the merits of anyone on the opposite side of those political beliefs as you. You can't honestly believe it's a bad thing to shed light on the struggles taking place on the African continent?