Grave of Fireflies

Apparently I never posted about the Japanese animated film, Grave of Fireflies, by the great Miyazaki.

I'll make it short. It's a tragic film about the aftermath of American bombing of Japan in WWII, but it's also about the great love of a brother for his sister.

Heartbreaking but beautiful.

Mongol

Mongol is a wonderful movie. Part of a projected trilogy directed by a Russian, it describes the early life and rise to power of Temujin, later to be known as Genghis Khan.

It has many things Mongol, from gers (yürts) fermented mare's milk to throat-singing, to stews with lots of bones in them. It also has a love story, lots of scenes of people crossing the wilderness on horseback and on foot, and lots of bloody battles.

Apparently (I'm no expert) it's fairly true to history.

If you like the exotic, or fantasy stories about strange and imaginary places, or just dramatic and unfamiliar scenery, this film is worth seeing.

Hollywood's Red Decade

One of my hobbyhorses has been the deification of the Hollywood Ten, Hollywood writers who were prosecuted for refusing to testify before a Congressional committee investigating communist influence in filmland.

The business of interrogating people about their political views is, to be sure, unsavory. But these guys really were supporters of Stalin, a mass murderer. Why they should be given a bye when any hint of Nazi sympathies makes one a pariah has never been clear to me.

In this post, J.K.Dunn regales us with snippets about some of the pro-Russian propaganda films of the WWII era, encouraged by FDR, who feared that suspicion of the alliance with Stalin would harm his 1944 campaign. Dunn writes:

There are good reasons why the left doesn't claim these films. Instead, they try to take credit for other, unrelated films: film noir, which is supposed to represent a "Marxist critique of American society". (This is nonsense - almost none of the noir film-makers were leftists of any sort. Like all film buffs, I have my own theory concerning noir, which we don't have the space for here.), and the "social problem" films of the late 40s through the 50s, such as Gentleman's Agreement, No Way Out, and On the Waterfront. But the Hollywood Reds were either blacklisted or doing time during the heyday of these pictures. With few exceptions (Laurents wrote one, Home of the Brave), social problem films were liberal propositions.

No better example of the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of the left exists than these films. They should have been allowed to make as many as they wanted. No blacklist, no Congressional hearings, no interference whatsoever. A couple dozen more like these and Hollywood communism would have been relegated to comic relief. Left alone, they'd have knocked themselves out.

Reserved for the Dons

Rod Dreher's tender sensibilities are shocked by the fact that the Sundance Film Festival is all a-twitter (or all a-neigh) over a film, Zoo, about an underground of folks who are into sex with barnyard animals, one of whom was killed while being buggered by a horse.

I once spent several months in a Brazilian fishing village where the young men routinely called one another barrão, which in context meant "sow bugger." The difference is that no one sought to enshrine this adolescent hi jinks as great transgressive art. Some carnal people have always managed to bugger pretty much anything that moves, and some things that don't. Only occasionally do they think they are contributors to human enlightenment when they make art about it.

As I said in Rod's combox, you can't make this stuff up, just as during Watergate I realized that political novelist Alan Drury, as good as he was, could never have thought up those events, either. Who could have thought this movie up? Maybe Jules Feiffer, who wrote Little Murders in which Elliot Gould plays a photographer who does art pictures of dog turds. Maybe Fellini when in Satyricon mode. Anyone from Oxford University:

A student up at St. John's
Attempted to bugger the swans.
'No no', said the porter,
'Ye buggers me daughter.
The swans is reserved for the dons'.

We could use Savonarola, perhaps, but he's long dead.

Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You

Barack Obama announced last week that he was forming an exploratory committee to explore whether he can really be as fabulous as the media say he is. And happily the answer is: Yes! He's young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim. He rejects the way "politics has become so bitter and partisan,'' he represents "a different kind of politics." He smokes, which is different. He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say. And he looks totally cool when he smokes! I haven't smoked since I was 14 but I'm thinking of taking it up again just because the sophisticated refreshing nicotine taste helps take the partisan bitterness out of the atmosphere. Barack Obama is Lauren Bacall to America's Humphrey Bogart. Lauren Barack coolly blows smoke, leans against the wall and purrs:

"You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow."

Some commentators say he's a blank slate. And how long is it since we've seen one of those? They used to have 'em in the schoolhouses back when the kids still learnt stuff instead of just discussing their sexuality with the guidance counselor all week long. I'll bet in those radical madrassahs they're still using blank slates.

--Mark Steyn

They say that the song originally went

So here's to you, Mrs. Roosevelt,
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo!

They changed it to fit the movie title.

Oh please Mister Obama
We soon must say goodbye
We've lost our dear old mama
And must have health care -- you know why!

Polish Jokes and Bush Babies

The "Polish Joke" is a type of humor in which the teller and the hearer build their own solidarity in a sense of superiority over an ethnic group supposedly composed of rubes and dopes.

How many Polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Three. One to hold the bulb in place and two to turn the ladder.

Ba-dump-bump.

In different places, different ethnic groups are the butt. In Brazil, it's continental Portuguese:

Someone said to a Portuguese man, "Manoel, your house in Niteroi is on fire, and your children will burn!" He ran to the ferry and jumped across the water just as it was leaving. Then he slapped his head and said, "My name's not Manoel, I don't live in Niteroi, and I don't have any children!"

Ba-dump-bump.

In Canada, a "Newfie left" is a right turn. The Polacks of Canada are the Newfoundlanders. Etc., etc. and so forth:

There were two teams of telephone pole installers. A team of Americans and a team of Newfies. Their supervisor went up to them and said, “I’m sorry to say this, but we’ve had budget cuts and one team has to go. For the next three days we’re going to have a contest. The team that installs the most poles stays and the other one goes.” At the end of the first day both teams went to their supervisor and reported their numbers. The American team put in 20 and the Newfies, 15. At the end of the second day the Americans had put in 45 and the Newfies had only put in 30. On the third and final day the Americans put in 50 poles and the Newfies got 35 in. Their supervisor went up to them and said, “Well I’m sorry to be the one to do this but the American team got more poles in so you Newfies have to go.” The Newfies looked very upset and cheated and one of them said, “No fair, they were only putting their poles in half way!”

Borat, according to Steve Sailer, is an extended Polish joke, and he may just be right:

To my mind, Baron Cohen and the critics have it exactly backwards. I try to be polite in private and candid in public, but that's not terribly fashionable. The critics are claiming to be outraged that the Americans in the film who were exposed to Borat's anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism in private didn't denounce him to his face. Instead, they tended to be polite and tried to change the subject. In contrast, almost none of critics have mentioned Baron Cohen's extremely public anti-Slavism. Complete apathy reigns over Baron Cohen's revival of traditional goyishe kop attitudes toward Slavs. As Lenin said, the ultimate question remains "Who? Whom?." And everybody wants to be on the side of the Who, not the Whom.

I've seen "Da Ali G Show," which includes Borat as a character. I like it when he sends up people like Noam Chomsky. Originally I wanted to see the flick, but exposing the supposed stupidity of people who are just trying to be polite strikes me as cruelty, even if I can't help being amused by it.

Which brings me to the early episodes of "American Idol," a national craze and one in our house. The producers revel in mocking self-important, lower-class fools who think they can sing and make spectacles of themselves. One strange-looking hopeful was compared to a "bush baby," a kind of primitive primate. It's a kind of musical "Jerry Springer Show," without the sex and nudity. I must confess I find the early episodes funny.

Rod Dreher, whom I like but whose middle name is either Namby or Pamby, finds AI appalling, notably the apparent cruelty with which Simon Cowell delivers his usually negative verdicts:

I'd heard that this Simon person is especially cruel, but it shocked me how harsh he was with that young woman. She begged for another opportunity to sing, but after the second one, they sent her away with a fusillade of insulting remarks. Offstage, she sobbed, which you knew was coming. She graspingly tried to salvage her dignity by saying that she was "sick," and that that had affected her voice. But she was, of course, completely untalented. She didn't realize that. She does now, most likely.

I did something I never would have done 10 years ago: I turned off the TV. The schlubby young woman was a fool, but it was unbearable watching her torn down like that.

Dreher goes on to repent of some of the things he wrote in his past as a critic.

Dreher's combox is filled with a debate on this discussion. Some commend Simon for telling the truth to the hopelessly untalented, and some lament his cruelty. An audition is an event in which most participants lose, and only a few win. That's life in show business, and if you can't stand that heat, buy your food ready-made at McDonald's. If someone is hopelessly untalented and would do better to study refrigerator repair than waste more money on singing lessons, it's only fair to tell them so. To be sure, they aren't going to like it, and by now should have known what to expect. On the other hand, an honest message can be delivered without exposing the recipient to the superior tittering of the entire nation. Such attitudes degrade the viewer as much as the butt of the joke.

And yet, sinner that I am, I find it all amusing.

If I had to do it over, I'd eschew the TV entirely, something my family wouldn't tolerate. Without a TV, I could really feel superior. And if I lived in Poland, I could attend movies for the blind.