Nothing to see here, climate change deniers, move it along.
No, literally -- nothing to see here.
(via Sully, who also posted my JCS pun today. Huzzah!)
Me Me On the Radio
Well, internet radio, anyway. I'll be back on Blog Talk Radio in about 20 minutes to gab about the Nationals.
LOLERZ
DougJ, who increasingly proves he's the weak link among BJ's posters, gets schooled by Jake Tapper (jump down to comment 47 for Jake's response, or scroll down at your own pace if you want to read all the knee-jerk responses first).
I'm no fan of Tapper's, and I enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the Hindenburg that is corporate media burn as much as the next fella, but DougJ simply isn't a reliable witness. He's more Les Nessman than Herbert Morrison, and this kind of guilt by association bullshit is tiresome and unnecessary.
If Laura Ingraham had done a segment railing against Tapper for appearing on Rachel Maddow's show and saying non-commital things, DougJ would have been the first person to attack Ingraham for it.
I'm no fan of Tapper's, and I enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the Hindenburg that is corporate media burn as much as the next fella, but DougJ simply isn't a reliable witness. He's more Les Nessman than Herbert Morrison, and this kind of guilt by association bullshit is tiresome and unnecessary.
If Laura Ingraham had done a segment railing against Tapper for appearing on Rachel Maddow's show and saying non-commital things, DougJ would have been the first person to attack Ingraham for it.
Getting the Band Back Together
A while ago I suggested that a very shrewd plan on Obama's part, geared towards driving GOTv efforts for the 2010 midterms, would focus on three things:
1. passage of some form of health care reform
2. significant movement on the DADT / DOMA front
3. significant movement on immigration reform
We've now seen #1 happen. #2 continues grinding forward, and while you can debate whether there's been 'significant' movement so far, there's definite momentum.
#3 remains up in the air. Tens of thousands of people marched on Washington in support of immigration reform on Sunday (depending on which estimates you trust, they may have outnumbered the tea party HCR protesters about 7:1) but the Congressional calendar could be tight in '10, given that a jobs bill or two plus financial industry reform are pretty much givens.
boo suggests putting it off until 2012 and using it as a wedge issue against the Pubs (suggesting a climate change bill in its stead) but I personally think that's bad strategy for two reasons. One, even though we're two years out and it's impossible to predict what the landscape will be like, I find it really hard to believe the Pubs will be able to mount any kind of credible challenger to Obama unless the economy has bottomed out, in which case no wedge issue is likely to save him. Two, if the Dems don't minimize their losses in the midterms there's a good chance of complete gridlock in Congress, which means their best shot of getting anything done in the second half of Obama's first term is to maintain control over both chambers -- which means immigration reform will only be useful as a wedge issue, since it'll have no chance of passing.
Just to give some concrete numbers on why I think those three items are key to a successful GOTV effort in November:
1. Voters worried about being able to afford health care broke for Obama 60%/38%, and represented about 2/3rds of the population
2. LGBT voters broke for Obama 70%/27%
3. Hispanic voters broke for Obama 67%/31%
Those are solid Obama voters, and big parts of the coalition that got him into office, but they need a reason to head to the polls without Obama on the ballot to provide some coat-tails.
We already know the Pub GOTV effort will be big. The tea partiers are howling for liberal blood, and sadly that's not just a metaphor. Dem success in November (or, at least, minimizing the usual midterm damage) could depend a great deal on getting those voting blocs energized and organized.
1. passage of some form of health care reform
2. significant movement on the DADT / DOMA front
3. significant movement on immigration reform
We've now seen #1 happen. #2 continues grinding forward, and while you can debate whether there's been 'significant' movement so far, there's definite momentum.
#3 remains up in the air. Tens of thousands of people marched on Washington in support of immigration reform on Sunday (depending on which estimates you trust, they may have outnumbered the tea party HCR protesters about 7:1) but the Congressional calendar could be tight in '10, given that a jobs bill or two plus financial industry reform are pretty much givens.
boo suggests putting it off until 2012 and using it as a wedge issue against the Pubs (suggesting a climate change bill in its stead) but I personally think that's bad strategy for two reasons. One, even though we're two years out and it's impossible to predict what the landscape will be like, I find it really hard to believe the Pubs will be able to mount any kind of credible challenger to Obama unless the economy has bottomed out, in which case no wedge issue is likely to save him. Two, if the Dems don't minimize their losses in the midterms there's a good chance of complete gridlock in Congress, which means their best shot of getting anything done in the second half of Obama's first term is to maintain control over both chambers -- which means immigration reform will only be useful as a wedge issue, since it'll have no chance of passing.
Just to give some concrete numbers on why I think those three items are key to a successful GOTV effort in November:
1. Voters worried about being able to afford health care broke for Obama 60%/38%, and represented about 2/3rds of the population
2. LGBT voters broke for Obama 70%/27%
3. Hispanic voters broke for Obama 67%/31%
Those are solid Obama voters, and big parts of the coalition that got him into office, but they need a reason to head to the polls without Obama on the ballot to provide some coat-tails.
We already know the Pub GOTV effort will be big. The tea partiers are howling for liberal blood, and sadly that's not just a metaphor. Dem success in November (or, at least, minimizing the usual midterm damage) could depend a great deal on getting those voting blocs energized and organized.
10:43 pm, March 21st, 2010
That's when America took a first tottering step towards sanity in their health care system.
A Good Night for Vols Fans
So not only did Tennessee play a pretty decent game against SDSU, with the guys who needed to step up (Chism and Prince) stepping up, but Georgetown also got bounced by a 14 seed, which gives them a great shot at the Sweet 16.
Of course Ohio will be rabid to try and set up a Sweet 16 meeting with Ohio St., so that game is no gimme, and the hot 'n' cold Vols could just as easily have had only one good tourney game in them. But in what has probably been the worst year in school history when it comes to sports (a bad football year followed by Kiffin's departure, the basketball suspensions... at least the Lady Vols have bounced back from last season's swoon), a tourney win or two would be nice.
Of course Ohio will be rabid to try and set up a Sweet 16 meeting with Ohio St., so that game is no gimme, and the hot 'n' cold Vols could just as easily have had only one good tourney game in them. But in what has probably been the worst year in school history when it comes to sports (a bad football year followed by Kiffin's departure, the basketball suspensions... at least the Lady Vols have bounced back from last season's swoon), a tourney win or two would be nice.
Reading the Tea Leaves
Let's see... Kucinich has switched his vote. And Certified Village Idiot Dana Millbank has decided to pretend he was on the right side of history all along.
Yup, we're about to get health care reform. Huzzah!
Yup, we're about to get health care reform. Huzzah!
An Idle Thought
Secular Right pegs Romney's odds on winning the '12 Pub nom at 1 in 5 if health care reform flops, but 1 in 20 if it passes -- the thinking being that Romney's own, similar reform in Massachusetts would kill him during a primary campaign in which most Republican candidates would be pushing to kill HCR if they got into office.
As we saw last time out, with Moby Rush's retarded Operation Chaos idea and the GOS' pushback campaign to bolster Romney in Michigan, crossing over party lines to cause mischief is becoming less anathema. So if Romney is in trouble in the primaries, what would prevent him from throwing a Hail Mary, declaring himself to be the only Republican candidate willing to protect HCR, and hoping that enough Dems cross over to vote for him to ensure he gets the nomination?
I mean, it's not like anyone credible will be running against Obama, so Dem voters won't have much else to do but try something like this. Of course, they'd also have to be willing to take Romney at his word that he would keep HCR intact if he gets into office...
Hmm. On second thought, forget it. I've found the fatal flaw in the idea.
As we saw last time out, with Moby Rush's retarded Operation Chaos idea and the GOS' pushback campaign to bolster Romney in Michigan, crossing over party lines to cause mischief is becoming less anathema. So if Romney is in trouble in the primaries, what would prevent him from throwing a Hail Mary, declaring himself to be the only Republican candidate willing to protect HCR, and hoping that enough Dems cross over to vote for him to ensure he gets the nomination?
I mean, it's not like anyone credible will be running against Obama, so Dem voters won't have much else to do but try something like this. Of course, they'd also have to be willing to take Romney at his word that he would keep HCR intact if he gets into office...
Hmm. On second thought, forget it. I've found the fatal flaw in the idea.
Review: The Runaways
The Runaways (2010, directed by Floria Sigismondi)
Depending on who you talk to, the Runaways were either an interesting footnote in rock history, or one of the Most Important Band Ever. They certainly weren't the first chick rockers (Patti Smith and Suzi Quatro got there before they did) but they were the first all-girl band to actually make some legitimately awesome noise (despite being packaged as disposable sex kittens) and thus prove that girls could kick as much ass as boys. A biopic was pretty much inevitable; the only question was which generation of starlets would be the ones to portray them.
In the end, we got the Twilight generation. And that turns out not to be as tragic a bit of happenstance as it could have been.
As a movie, the Runaways is fairly bland, which is a weird thing to say about a film that begins with a drop of menstrual blood hitting the sidewalk. It makes no effort whatsoever to distance itself from all the usual rock biopic stereotypes. Drugs! Tyrannical managers! More drugs! Big success in Japan! Drugs again! Shattered home lives! Still more drugs! Partly that adherence to cliche is due to the source material. The movie, while produced by Joan Jett, is based on Cherie Currie's autobiography, and Currie apparently saw her life in terms of those cliches. Sigismondi's direction, in her feature debut, doesn't help either. She makes no effort to get to the other side of those cliches, just presenting them at face value rather than using them to reflect on Currie's choices, or contrasting how Currie was handling the ride to how any of the other band members were. Sigismondi frankly seems more interested in shooting a music video for Cherry Bomb (which she does, awkwardly shoehorning it into the Japanese tour sequence) than she is in making her characters three-dimensional.
Really, though, most of the blame needs to be pinned on Dakota Fanning. She's simply not up to the task at hand. It's fine that she doesn't come across as a terribly dynamic frontwomen for the band, since Currie wasn't a terribly dynamic frontwoman in real life, but what doesn't work is her doe-eyed distance from the proceedings. She's trying to play it guarded and damaged, but she just comes off as disinterested. Currie is supposed to be the fallen star, the one who burned out and couldn't handle the fame, who didn't trust that she deserved the success: the mirror image of Joan Jett's 'born to be a rock star' balls-to-the-wall determination and drive. Instead Fanning just alternates between being kinda nervous, and kinda sleepy, and never once seems to be giddy from the heights, or bracing for the (to her) inevitable lows.
And Fanning's weak effort is a crying shame, because Kristen Stewart is a revelation as Joan Jett. She absolutely fucking nails it. I'm sure it helped to have Jett herself on set for reference purposes, but that doesn't downgrade the bravado of the performance. From the moment she appears on screen she's a nuclear missile homing in on rock and roll stardom, who isn't going to let any motherfucker stand in her way. While Fanning has the showier role in Currie, Stewart's got the tougher assignment. Currie is living a cliche rock lifestyle because she doesn't know any better; Jett's living it to prove that she can, and because she knows she has to in order to get what she wants. The self-awareness, and self-assurance, in Stewart's performance is amazing, and completely unpredicted by anything I've seen her do before. It's a performance that to an extent even saves the film. With a lesser actress in the role, the Runaways would have been a total train wreck, as opposed to the merely OK movie that it is. I'll even go a step further. Kristen Stewart does a better job of channeling Joan Jett here than Joaquin Phoenix did of channeling Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. She's that damn good.
About the only thing I can think to compare Stewart's performance to is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's in Mysterious Skin. I had zero expectations for either of them heading into their respective movies, and came out the other end strongly suspecting that they might in fact be among the best actors of their generation. Gordon-Levitt's proved me right on that assumption since; I can only hope Stewart shakes Bella out of her hair and gets a chance to do likewise.
There isn't much to say about the rest of the movie, because there isn't much else to the rest of the movie. Michael Shannon isn't good at all as the band's svengali Kim Fowley. At no point do his profanity-laced tirades and mind games rise above the level of comic relief, and they really needed to have some actual menace behind them given how they were supposed to be contributing to the band's disintegration. The rest of the gals barely gets any screen time, which is weird considering that a) Lita Ford was the band's guitarist and it's not like she disappeared off the face of the earth after the Runaways broke up, and b) they went to the trouble (WARNING: OBLIGATORY SPINAL TAP REFERENCE APPROACHING) of inventing a bassist for the band, cast Maeby from Arrested Development (Alia Shawkat) as said fictional bassist, and then gave her all of about three lines. I understand the thought process behind inventing a bassist, since in reality the Runaways blew through more bassists than Spinal Tap blew through drummers, but it just seems a wasted effort to go to all that trouble and not do anything with the character. Keir O'Donnell does deliver a fine Rodney Bingenheimer impression though, so that's something.
Basically put, the Runaways is just all right. Stewart's performance aside, it's nothing special. It isn't daring enough to be more than a formulaic rock biopic, but despite all the teenage drug use and the brief lesbian scene between Stewart and Fanning (c'mon, you knew it would be in there... did you really need me to tell you about it?) it also isn't entertainingly trashy enough to be a legendary Gaggle of Starlets flick. It may, in fact, be the exact midpoint between I'm Not There and Satisfaction.
If it ends up doing for Kristen Stewart what the band itself did for Joan Jett though -- make her realize what she wants and what she's good at, and helps her get there -- then it'll all have been worth it.
Depending on who you talk to, the Runaways were either an interesting footnote in rock history, or one of the Most Important Band Ever. They certainly weren't the first chick rockers (Patti Smith and Suzi Quatro got there before they did) but they were the first all-girl band to actually make some legitimately awesome noise (despite being packaged as disposable sex kittens) and thus prove that girls could kick as much ass as boys. A biopic was pretty much inevitable; the only question was which generation of starlets would be the ones to portray them.
In the end, we got the Twilight generation. And that turns out not to be as tragic a bit of happenstance as it could have been.
As a movie, the Runaways is fairly bland, which is a weird thing to say about a film that begins with a drop of menstrual blood hitting the sidewalk. It makes no effort whatsoever to distance itself from all the usual rock biopic stereotypes. Drugs! Tyrannical managers! More drugs! Big success in Japan! Drugs again! Shattered home lives! Still more drugs! Partly that adherence to cliche is due to the source material. The movie, while produced by Joan Jett, is based on Cherie Currie's autobiography, and Currie apparently saw her life in terms of those cliches. Sigismondi's direction, in her feature debut, doesn't help either. She makes no effort to get to the other side of those cliches, just presenting them at face value rather than using them to reflect on Currie's choices, or contrasting how Currie was handling the ride to how any of the other band members were. Sigismondi frankly seems more interested in shooting a music video for Cherry Bomb (which she does, awkwardly shoehorning it into the Japanese tour sequence) than she is in making her characters three-dimensional.
Really, though, most of the blame needs to be pinned on Dakota Fanning. She's simply not up to the task at hand. It's fine that she doesn't come across as a terribly dynamic frontwomen for the band, since Currie wasn't a terribly dynamic frontwoman in real life, but what doesn't work is her doe-eyed distance from the proceedings. She's trying to play it guarded and damaged, but she just comes off as disinterested. Currie is supposed to be the fallen star, the one who burned out and couldn't handle the fame, who didn't trust that she deserved the success: the mirror image of Joan Jett's 'born to be a rock star' balls-to-the-wall determination and drive. Instead Fanning just alternates between being kinda nervous, and kinda sleepy, and never once seems to be giddy from the heights, or bracing for the (to her) inevitable lows.
And Fanning's weak effort is a crying shame, because Kristen Stewart is a revelation as Joan Jett. She absolutely fucking nails it. I'm sure it helped to have Jett herself on set for reference purposes, but that doesn't downgrade the bravado of the performance. From the moment she appears on screen she's a nuclear missile homing in on rock and roll stardom, who isn't going to let any motherfucker stand in her way. While Fanning has the showier role in Currie, Stewart's got the tougher assignment. Currie is living a cliche rock lifestyle because she doesn't know any better; Jett's living it to prove that she can, and because she knows she has to in order to get what she wants. The self-awareness, and self-assurance, in Stewart's performance is amazing, and completely unpredicted by anything I've seen her do before. It's a performance that to an extent even saves the film. With a lesser actress in the role, the Runaways would have been a total train wreck, as opposed to the merely OK movie that it is. I'll even go a step further. Kristen Stewart does a better job of channeling Joan Jett here than Joaquin Phoenix did of channeling Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. She's that damn good.
About the only thing I can think to compare Stewart's performance to is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's in Mysterious Skin. I had zero expectations for either of them heading into their respective movies, and came out the other end strongly suspecting that they might in fact be among the best actors of their generation. Gordon-Levitt's proved me right on that assumption since; I can only hope Stewart shakes Bella out of her hair and gets a chance to do likewise.
There isn't much to say about the rest of the movie, because there isn't much else to the rest of the movie. Michael Shannon isn't good at all as the band's svengali Kim Fowley. At no point do his profanity-laced tirades and mind games rise above the level of comic relief, and they really needed to have some actual menace behind them given how they were supposed to be contributing to the band's disintegration. The rest of the gals barely gets any screen time, which is weird considering that a) Lita Ford was the band's guitarist and it's not like she disappeared off the face of the earth after the Runaways broke up, and b) they went to the trouble (WARNING: OBLIGATORY SPINAL TAP REFERENCE APPROACHING) of inventing a bassist for the band, cast Maeby from Arrested Development (Alia Shawkat) as said fictional bassist, and then gave her all of about three lines. I understand the thought process behind inventing a bassist, since in reality the Runaways blew through more bassists than Spinal Tap blew through drummers, but it just seems a wasted effort to go to all that trouble and not do anything with the character. Keir O'Donnell does deliver a fine Rodney Bingenheimer impression though, so that's something.
Basically put, the Runaways is just all right. Stewart's performance aside, it's nothing special. It isn't daring enough to be more than a formulaic rock biopic, but despite all the teenage drug use and the brief lesbian scene between Stewart and Fanning (c'mon, you knew it would be in there... did you really need me to tell you about it?) it also isn't entertainingly trashy enough to be a legendary Gaggle of Starlets flick. It may, in fact, be the exact midpoint between I'm Not There and Satisfaction.
If it ends up doing for Kristen Stewart what the band itself did for Joan Jett though -- make her realize what she wants and what she's good at, and helps her get there -- then it'll all have been worth it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)