A reviewer named Seitz explains why I enjoyed Downton Abbey (the motion picture) in spite of it all.

In dramatic fashion at the last minute on New Year's Eve (well, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.) I doubled my total of "new release" motion pictures viewed in 2019 -- from one to two.

Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old is a visceral, deeply moving reminder of things that mustn't be forgotten.

We viewed Downton Abbey, the movie. No fresh ground was broken and there weren't any startling insights. I expected neither. I missed at least the last two seasons of the series and maybe more; of course the characters still were familiar to me, sparing the film version from introducing and developing them. I'm no fan of the aristocracies of old, and it's a bit off-putting when the denizens of the "downstairs" defend them. Why ostensibly "democratic" Americans find any of it compelling remains a question for the ages.

And yet, I was entertained, and the explanation comes in this positive review by Matt Zoller Seitz, with whom I'm unfamiliar. He hammers every nail, and the biggest one for me is the second paragraph in the excerpt below, because I'm the kind of viewer who "will travel some distance to see a film in which well-dressed, reasonably thoughtful adults do and say grownup things."

The reason I watch very few movies is because the vast majority featuring "dinosaurs, robots, superheroes, or Jedi knights" (or whole comic book narratives) are of zero interest to me. When I want to escape reality, and like anyone else I do, it's time to put on headphones for music or read a book.

To each their own. I really appreciate this movie review.

Downton Abbey, by Matt Zoller Seitz (Roger Ebert Dot Com)

The star rating at the top of this review is not for people who don't like "Downton Abbey," have never seen it, or grew tired of watching it long before it finished its six-season run. Those viewers will consider this a two-star or one-star or no star movie. The rating is for die-hards who will comprise the majority of viewers for this big-screen wrap-up of the Julian Fellowes drama about nobles and servants in an early-20th century English manor. The rating is also for fans of a certain sub-genre of film and TV: lavishly produced costume dramas about repressed people who might cut loose with a bitchy remark now and again, but only if they're pushed to decorum's edge—or if, like Violet the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), they're too old, tough, and set in their ways to care what anybody else thinks of them.

Finally, the rating is for the kinds of viewers who will, I suspect, turn this movie into an unexpected smash: those who might not feel obligated to leave their homes to watch blockbusters featuring dinosaurs, robots, superheroes, or Jedi knights, but will travel some distance to see a film in which well-dressed, reasonably thoughtful adults do and say grownup things. Said adults inhabit a tale set in something resembling reality, with banquets, dances, familial intrigue, gown fittings, chaste flirtations, declarations of love, and expertly timed reaction shots of characters silently disapproving of other characters. But the movie omits the Method masochism and "eat this bowl of chaff, it's good for you" bombast that has increasingly become synonymous with Hollywood's Oscar bait ...

Of Scrooge and The Dead.

We watched two seasonal films on Christmas Eve, first The Dead (1987), then Scrooge, the musical with the late Albert Finney (1970). They're considerably different in terms of intent, but there is much to be said for both. It’s hard to imagine either being produced today.

The Dead is a faithful and thought-provoking rendering of James Joyce's enduring short story, and it was director John Huston's final work.

Finney is a colossus in Scrooge, appearing in almost every scene; the songs won't be familiar to contemporary listeners, but they're effective. Scrooge has been Diana's go-to for a long time, and she has converted me. The Dead probably won't be a film I watch every year, but I'll return to it, and reading the original novella is a must for me in the coming weeks.

All in all, it was a quiet Christmas Eve at home with my soulmate and our cats; in a world filled with idiotic clamor, the evening was a respite and I'm thankful for it.

Addendum:

The song "I Hate People" from Scrooge speaks to me impressively, perhaps because it reminds me of our local political chat, as directed to the vicinity of NA's ruling elites.

Scavengers and sycophants and flatterers and fools
Pharisees and parasites and hypocrites and ghouls
Calculating swindlers, prevaricating frauds
Perpetrating evil as they roam the earth in hordes
Feeding on their fellow men
Reaping rich rewards
Contaminating everything they see
Corrupting honest me like me
Humbug! Poppycock! Balderdash! Bah!
I hate people! I hate people!

Martin Scorsese is absolutely right. Down with "market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified" life.

Photo credit: the article.

Let's begin with a vital disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a movie "buff." This said, as a reasonably well-educated human being, I'm by no means blind to the artistic merits of cinema. It's just that film entertainment is seldom entertaining to me, and as it pertains to the famous query -- well, 99 times out of 100, I'd just as soon read the book.

Unless it's sci-fi, fantasy or a comic book. Hard passes, those.

It remains that nothing cultural exists in a vacuum, even those aspects I disdain, and so I'm alert to the times when items of little interest to me as yet retain their ability to teach.

This essay by John Semley at The Baffler is one such occasion. It's about Martin Scorsese's much-discussed "The Irishman," for which I've read pans as well as praise. Semley goes deeper.

Those film franchises?

Fuck 'em.

The ad hoc, often brutally violent manner in which the Teamsters, the mafia, etc., assert their authority seems, by today’s standards, almost quaint. Old fashioned racketeering is downright homey compared to corporatized forms of exploitation practiced by the modern capitalist-as-gangster. Think of scene in The Sopranos when Patsy Parisi attempts to shake down a chain coffee franchise, only to be spurned by a manager who explains that the diffuse corporate structure makes extortion essentially impossible. “It’s over for the little guy,” Patsy moans. It’s played as a joke. But is he wrong?

Granted, the rush towards an increasingly corporatized, homogenized experience of American life may well negatively impact entrepreneurial mafiosi attempting to secure protections rackets. But it also affects the whole culture. In a world where everything is Starbucks and Walmart and Disney movies and generic Howard Johnson’s hotels, where the experience of life is determined in board rooms by parties purely interested in bolstering their bottom line, where pretty much every aspect of existence increasing feels, in Martin Scorsese’s terms, “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified,” the individual feels superfluous, a Frank Sheeran-styled leftover. The same is true of popular filmmakers attempting to ply their trade in a climate that, more and more, seems not only inhospitable to anything like art, but contemptuous of it. Even more than his searing Times op-ed, The Irishman, warts and all, mounts a persuasive case for the preservation and cultivation of such individual artists.

As to the specious claim that Martin Scorsese—with his uncredited voice-overs and sly cameos, his recurring cast of confederates, and his re-articulations of themes of faith under duress—constitutes his own “franchise,” well: that certain viewers fail to comprehend the difference between the expression of personal peccadilloes and the mandates of a mega-corporation, between art and commerce, speaks to the very breadth of the abyss Martin Scorsese stands against, onscreen and off.

An amazing Albanian propaganda film, circa 1984: "Where a free and happy people are living by the sweat of their brow."

If you've never viewed an old-school "New Communist Man and Woman" heavy-industry-porn propaganda film, then prepare an adult libation, get comfy and watch this. It's the very definition of "period piece." The music alone is worth the 20 minute viewing time.

For balanced background, this excellent overview from the New York Times was published in 1984, about the same time as the 40th anniversary celebration mentioned in the film.

Enver Hoxha, ruler of Albania for four decades, died in 1985.

Two years ago, Mr. Hoxha wrote: "There are some, the imperialists and their lackeys, who say that we have isolated ourselves from the 'civilized world.' These gentlemen are mistaken. Both the bitter history of our country in the past and the reality of the 'world' which they advertise have convinced us that it is by no means a 'civilized world,' but a world in which the bigger and stronger oppresses and flays the smaller and the weaker, in which money and corruption make the law, and injustice, perfidy and backstabbing triumph."

Communism in Albanian collapsed in 1991, and I visited the country in 1994. The photos of this trip are in slide format and await digitization. Until then, here's the text of the journey 25 years ago.

From the 2016 revision:

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 1 of 3).

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 2 of 3).

Old Albania, 1994: Beer in the Land of the Eagle (Part 3 of 3).

"Turning horror into comedy" in the brilliant film The Death of Stalin.

Undoubtedly The Death of Stalin is the best film I've watched this year.

It's also the only film I've watched this year.

These two positions are compatible because I know how to pick 'em, having grown to hate wasting time on waves of comic book crap when I could be reading instead.

It's a satire overload, and I'm reminded just a bit of the original cinematic version of M*A*S*H, insofar as the viewer can be gut-laughing amid scenes depicting death and deathly seriousness, with humor and revulsion occurring all at once.

Dargis' review (linked below) aptly summarizes the experience. As a longtime student of Russian and Soviet history, I'll add only that the characterizations are surprisingly accurate, if exaggerated for comic effect.

Khrushchev really did perform the part of the buffoon to mask his own ambitions, and Molotov really was willing to sacrifice his own family for the greater good of the party. Beria was an epochal, world-class sociopath whose messy end may actually have paralleled the film's jarring conclusion.

The Soviet leadership struggle following Stalin's death was the last one to feature murderous mayhem as default strategy. When Khrushchev was overthrown by Brezhnev in 1964, he was retired, not killed. Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko died of illness and old age. The plotters against Gorbachev in 1991 placed the last Soviet leader under flabby house arrest, and folded like a house of cards when Yeltsin rallied support against the coup.

Then there's Molotov, played superbly by Michael Palin in the film. He survived all the preceding luminaries save only Gorbachev, and died peacefully in hospital in 1986 at the age of 96.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough. In the context of my admittedly narrow tastes, it's a masterpiece.

Review: The Slapstick Horror of ‘The Death of Stalin’, by Manohla Dargis (New York Times)

The comedy of cruelty is rarely funnier or more brutal than when it comes from Armando Iannucci, a virtuoso of political evisceration. A comic talent who should be household famous, he is best known for “Veep,” the HBO series about Washington politics that was a satire when it first hit in 2012 but now seems like a reality show. He also directed the movie “In the Loop,” an aptly obscene burlesque about the run-up to the Iraq War. He only seems to have abandoned contemporary politics in his latest, “The Death of Stalin,” an eccentric comic shocker about a strong man and his world of ashes and blood.

The laughs come in jolts and waves in “The Death of Stalin,” delivered in a brilliantly arranged mix of savage one-liners, lacerating dialogue and perfectly timed slapstick that wouldn’t be out of place in a Three Stooges bit. Turning horror into comedy is nothing new, but Mr. Iannucci’s unwavering embrace of these seemingly discordant genres as twin principles is bracing. In “The Death of Stalin,” fear is so overwhelming, so deeply embedded in everyday life that it distorts ordinary expression, utterances, gestures and bodies. It has turned faces into masks (alternately tragic and comic), people into caricatures, death into a punch line.

The movie opens in early March 1953. The iron-fisted Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), 74, has ruled the Soviet Union for decades and racked up countless crimes against humanity and millions of victims. A near-monosyllabic thug with a helmet of steel-gray hair and a retinue of flatterers — Khrushchev and Molotov are among the names crowding this familiar roll call — Stalin likes classical music and old westerns, a casual reminder that barbarism and civilization are often partners in crime. Squirreled away in a dacha, a relatively modest woodland retreat at a remove from the Kremlin, Stalin kicks back with his toadies only to fall grievously ill later that same evening.

He briefly hangs on, gasping but mute, throwing his nominal comrades in arms into a fast-spiraling panic. The most appealing, or rather the least obviously terrible, of these is Khrushchev (a superb Steve Buscemi), the minister of agriculture and a cunning, outwardly drab schemer. Like a seasoned standup, Khrushchev tells his wife which of his jokes made Stalin laugh, an accounting that she dutifully preserves for future reference. When he learns that Stalin has taken ill, Khrushchev hastily pulls a jacket and pants over his pajamas and rushes to his side, where Beria (Simon Russell Beale, brilliant), the head of the secret police, the N.K.V.D., has already taken up position and begun plotting ...

John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Warren Beatty's Reds both are recognized as American classics.

Leading off, dialogue from Warren Beatty's classic film Reds, with Beatty as journalist/socialist John Reed, who is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Reed: Officer, these men have the legal right to assemble.

Policeman: What the hell're you doing?

Reed: Me? I write.

Policeman: You right? Uh uh. You wrong ... (skulls are cracked and the oligarchy is buttressed).

The scene is so vivid and lifelike that a Floyd County Democratic Party elder or One Southern Indiana operative might as well be playing the gap-toothed restorer of order, albeit brandishing an electronic muzzle rather than a billy club.

My name's not Reed, but I read, and it's been only a week since I wrote about my limited yearly intake of cinema, but this shouldn't be construed to mean that I don't have favorite movies. Having failed to assemble the requisite "Top Whatever" list, a few preferred films spring to mind:

Animal House
The Lives of Others
Bull Durham
M*A*S*H
The Dark Knight
Anything by the Marx Brothers and Errol Flynn
Foreign films that aren't stupid and violent

And so on, although perhaps my number one movie remains Beatty's 1981 epic.

Based on Jack Reed’s 1919 novel Ten Days that Shook the World, which also provided the title for Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece of Soviet montage “October: Ten Days That Shook the World,” Reds is a first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution. It follows Reed’s life as a Communist journalist and writer, both in the U.S. and abroad in the streets of Petrograd.

Jason Fraley tells the whole story of Reds, which would appeal to me for no other single reason beyond it being released at precisely the point of highest Reaganism, and moreover, for Beatty's use of what were referred to as witnesses.

Most memorable is his decision to intersperse his narrative with actual interviews of prominent real-life figures of the movement — doing for politics what When Harry Met Sally (1989) did for romance. These voices — credited as “Witnesses” — appear in several forms: between sequences as interviews, as voiceover narration and even voiceover music as witnesses sing songs like “Over There,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the film’s recurring favorite “You Can’t Come in Play in My Yard.” This fusion of reality and melodrama is a credit to Beatty’s filmmaking ability — and a testament to how personal the project was to him. In fact, Beatty began filming the interviews back in the early ’70s before Reds was even an official project, but no doubt already weighing on his mind.

Many of the witnesses had died by the time of the film's release. Writer Henry Miller, another of my faves, was one of them. Now, about those ten days ...

Everybody Knew That Something Was Going to Happen, but Nobody Knew Just What, by Andrew Hartman (Society for U.S. Intellectual History)

This essay, by me, is the first post in our roundtable dedicated to John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World.

John Reed arrived in Petrograd at the dawn of history. The globetrotting journalist had traveled to Russia with his feminist wife Louise Bryant as soon as news of impending revolution broke. It was 1917, and “Jack,” as his friends knew him, had a front-row seat to the October Revolution.

Famous for his vivid first-hand accounts of labor conflict and war, Reed was the perfect writer to tell the electrifying story of Lenin and the Bolsheviks seizing power. Ten Days that Shook the World, Reed’s celebratory account of the Russian Revolution, is now hailed as an American classic. George Kennan of all people praised it as “a reflection of blazing honesty and a purity of idealism.” In a recent New York Times retrospective, Condoleezza Rice, no Bolshevik, writes that Ten Days “provided a riveting and vivid—if not impartial—account of the most pivotal phase of the revolution, as viewed from the ground.”

But Reed’s “slice of intensified history,” as he called it, had trouble finding an audience at first. “Here by wide acknowledgement,” a sympathetic Reed biographer wrote, “was a great American journalist, an eyewitness to the greatest story of the time, but not an editor outside the tiny radical press would give him an inch of space” ...

THE BEER BEAT: Airline pricing for movie theater drinks, although we've little idea which ones.

If I were an editor at Business First -- well, that's unlikely, given that business-oriented publications contain far too many numbers for a humanities major like me, and anyway, it's my habit to refrain from fetishizing grubby capitalists -- I'd ask the contributing writer why some of the following beers are tagged by brand name, but the wines are identified by style.

What's on tap at Baxter Avenue Theatres' new bar, by Marty Finley (Louisville Business First)

... The bar has been in the works for months and carries several domestic and imported beer selections on tap — priced between $7 and $9 — alongside red and white wine selections for $10, according to Apex.

The theater's beer selection includes Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Lite, Rolling Rock, Cumberland Brew, Dos Equis, BBC Pale Ale and Rhinegeist. Wine selections include merlot, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, white zinfandel, chardonnay and moscato.

Maybe the printing on the mass-market wine box was too small, or the press release incomplete.

Furthermore: Miller Lite is a specific beer brand, but Rhinegeist and Cumberland Brew (forgot an "s" there) are not. Which beers from these two breweries are they?

Then there's the reference to BBC Pale Ale. To my knowledge, BBC (currently down a brewery since the St. Matthews location closed earlier this year) isn't packaging at present. Is this draft, and if so, might it be BBC American Pale Ale (APA), which has been the name since the mid-1990s?

To summarize, seeing as I attend movies in theaters like this about as often as I read business-oriented publications ...

Cinema: "The Lives of Others" earns a curmudgeon's ultimate accolades.

The blog record shows that in the autumn of 2007, I watched a film called The Lives of Others.

Released 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall marking the end of the East German socialist state, it was the first noticeable drama film about the subject after a series of comedies such as Goodbye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee. This approach was widely applauded in Germany even as some criticized the humanization of Wiesler's character. Many former East Germans were stunned by the factual accuracy of the film's set and atmosphere, accurately portraying a state which merged with West Germany and ceased to exist 16 years prior to the release. The film's authenticity was considered notable, given that the director grew up outside of East Germany and was only sixteen when the Berlin Wall fell.

At the time, I made only a casual mention of the film, but noted that inexplicably, my cheeks were wet when it ended.

Until the return flight from Estonia two days ago, I hadn't watched The Lives of Others a second time. This isn't because I disliked the film. To the contrary: It's because it is so very moving for me. On the plane home, it was all I could do to avoid crying. I cried just now when viewing the trailer, and again after reading the synopsis at Wikipedia.  

I love reading and music, but I seldom watch movies. That's because life is too short for bad beer and cinematic schlock, and most films released in a calendar year are dire, derivative crap.

And yet, there are exceptions, and I believe that this film is one of the best ever. Period.

I never lived in East Germany, but stayed in East Berlin for a month in 1989, and those ghosts simply won't let me be. Perhaps it's because knowing what kind of person I am, it's clear that had I been born into the GDR, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The pegs were expected to be round. I'd have spent the 1980s in prison, or worse.

Truly, words fail me. If you have any interest in the period, and have not watched The Lives of Others, please consider doing so. Your two hours will be well spent. You may wish to have tissues available, but maybe I'm just weak that way.

The Lives of Others, review, by David Gritten (The Telegraph; 2007)

... The Lives of Others is that rare thing: a best foreign language Oscar-winner that fully deserves its prize. Beautifully acted, and making equal demands on our intelligence and on our hearts, it is a significant act of historical reckoning.

I was a Marxist long before I was a Marxist.

A Marxist of the Groucho variety, that is.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we watched Marx Brothers films on five consecutive evenings, thanks to a Christmas gift to ourselves of a DVD box set.

(1925 -- my father was born)
1929 ... The Cocoanuts
1930 ... Animal Crackers
1931 ... Monkey Business
(1932 -- my mother was born)
1932 ... Horse Feathers
1933 ... Duck Soup
(1960 -- I was born)

Some years back we purchased a set of DVDs documenting the back side of the act's career, from A Night at the Opera through The Big Store, to their quasi-finale in A Night in Casablanca. The quality of this compilation is very good, but this latter period is a time of diminishing comedic and artistic returns, and I grew tired of waiting for the "first five" films to be re-released in modern and tidied formats.

But they're watchable, if not gussied up. Consequently, with the exception of Duck Soup, it was the first time I'd seen the first four  Marx Brothers in their entirety since ... when? The 1970s, or early 1980s at the most recent? Probably. Clips and excerpts, yes, though not entire films.

Follow the link to read about these movies, and an arc of achievement that surely peaks with Duck Soup. The Marx Brothers were considered vintage and archaic by the time I first started viewing these films during late night local television marathons, but importantly, the content was no less anarchic, and was a huge influence on me.

Groucho was, and remains, my main man. As one who seemingly found it impossible to overcome crippling shyness and speak aloud, I found Groucho's glib and articulate abrasiveness a godsend, and something to try to emulate (with varying degrees of success).

Time -- what a concept.

The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection, reviewed by Mark Bourne (DVD Journal)

Throughout the Great Depression, the comedians known as Groucho, Harpo, and Chico (ably supported by youngest brother Zeppo) were welcome explosions of insanity in a brutally sane world. Now after 75 years they can still lift us out of our own depressions, great or otherwise.

Words such as zany, madcap, and gonzo seem made exclusively for Marx Brothers movies. When it comes to their first five, and best, films — collected within this six-disc DVD set — we can also add irreverent, subversive, anti-authoritarian, and damn near surreal. (Salvador Dali was a Marx Brothers fan, with a special affection for mute Harpo, who existed on a plane all his own like a crazed angel.) Their fast and lunatic humor ran the gamut from lowbrow slapstick and punning to sophisticated verbal and visual horseplay. The restrictions and protocols of what the rest of us call consensus reality were at best guidelines that the Marxes shredded to confetti whenever it suited them. They gave bullies and tyrants the what-for, always coming out on top. They deflated pretensions and popped the buttons off stuffed shirts. They could say and do things that we silently wished we could get away with. Groucho's withering one-liners reduced any pompous son of a bitch to ashes. The pinkies-out wits of the Algonquin Round Table embraced them as their own. So did the average joes in Hoboken and Kansas City, who identified with the "immigrant" humor or the relentless mockery of authority figures and social propriety.

An excellent movie about the life of the artist J. M. W. Turner.

"Fountain of Indolence by J. M. W. Turner" 

What, two references to movies in one day?

Amid the breathless ubiquity of film "culture" in America, I may be the only living citizen desperately attempting to suppress a yawn. Insofar as I took time to watch movies at all in 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel stands out as particularly enjoyable. There may have been a half-dozen or so others, the names of which I cannot remember. Maybe I fell asleep.

Granted, I enjoy certain genres, primarily foreign films and documentaries, but that’s about it. To me, entertainment is a very selective concept, and usually, I'd rather listen to music.

Consequently, I'm shocked to have recently viewed two movies in three days, both of which were thoroughly enjoyable. One of them was The Way, described here.

The other was Mr. Turner, a Mike Leigh film about a 19th-century English painter with whom I'm otherwise entirely unfamiliar. You can view some of his works here.

It's a quality production in every way imaginable, and I highly recommend it.

The Painter Was a Piece of Work, Too: ‘Mr. Turner,’ About the Life of the Artist J. M. W. Turner, by A. O. Scott (New York Times)

“Cynicism has no place in the reviewing of art.”

Words to live by, for sure, and all the more so for being uttered by John Ruskin, one of the giants of 19th-century British art criticism. But nothing is quite so simple. In “Mr. Turner,” Mike Leigh’s revelatory new film, Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) appears as a pretentious carrot-topped nitwit with a voice like a posh Elmer Fudd. In one scene, he offers up “controversial” theories about landscapes and seascapes to a roomful of harrumphing artists. It’s all very well, one of them says, to opine and interpret, but unless you have braved the elements with brush in hand, you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

ON THE AVENUES: It's just like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

ON THE AVENUES: It's just like when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

A recent, pointless exercise on social media asks us to name a movie we’ve seen one hundred times.

For me, it’s a baffling question, seeing as amid the breathless ubiquity of movies and film culture in America, I may be the only living citizen desperately attempting to suppress a yawn.

Insofar as I took time to watch movies at all in 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel stands out as particularly enjoyable. There may have been a half-dozen or so others. Granted, I enjoy certain genres, primarily foreign films and documentaries, but that’s about it.

While I’ve listened many hundreds of times to my favorite albums, it’s almost unimaginable for me to have watched a movie more than one or twice. However, there are exceptions, and the one springing immediately to mind – perhaps even surpassing the century mark -- is National Lampoon’s Animal House.

Before I’m upbraided for lowbrow tendencies, permit me to note that no less an authority as Dr. Murray Sperber, an internationally respected academician best known as Coach Bob Knight’s one-time arch-nemesis on the campus of Indiana University, has looked to Animal House for deeper social meaning.

In Beer and Circus, Sperber’s seminal masterwork, he held that the drunk, rambunctious and oversexed crew of Delta Tau Chi offered a dissolute fictional vision of higher education -- bottomless keggers, willing coeds, togas, Hawaiian shirts, optional sleep, grudging perusals of course materials only moments before the final – that actually never existed in reality. Art influenced life, providing America’s colleges and universities with a perfect strategic coping mechanism

Specifically, Sperber charged that for decades following the 1978 release of Animal House, Big Time Universities knowingly enticed students not with learning, but with the twin recreational lures of party culture and NCAA athletics, hence his “Beer and Circus” aphorism.

Consciously echoing ancient Rome, it was a ploy by which students were distracted from realizing that their chosen institutions had failed to provide them with a quality undergraduate education.

Major universities, coveting lucrative governmental and corporate funding that rewarded success in higher-level academic research, employed the best, highest-paid researchers, whose research load precluded them from teaching undergraduates, who in turn were increasingly in need of intensive, remedial resources not applicable to top-flight research programs.

The cash flow of undergraduate tuition funds remained essential to the whole enterprise, and so undergraduates were shunted into mass lecture halls holding hundreds of students, taking classes commonly taught by graduate assistants or part-time professors. In return for this depersonalized inadequacy, undergraduates were given enjoyable diversions, i.e., cheap swill and spectator sports.

The totemic, drunken, decidedly non-academic John “Bluto” Belushi famously wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the generic term “College” -- and what could be more collegiate than clocking out Thursday, drinking through the weekend, attending the big game against Tech, partying into Sunday (possibly even Monday) and barely considering one’s ostensible reason for being on campus in the first place until some point on Tuesday - at which time the cycle was ready to begin anew.

It’s incredible.

Animal House single-handedly created a cultural facet so destructively injurious that even now, three decades later, whole sub-cultures of reformers and do-gooders spend lucrative careers seeking to eradicate the menace of fraternity drinking, even as the money in big-time college sports spirals completely out of control (see Arena, Yum!).

C’mon -- can your favorite movie do that? It shows that I sure know how to pick ‘em.

---

D-Day: War's over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.

Bluto: Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

Otter: [whispering] Germans?

Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.

Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough... [thinks hard] the tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go! [runs out, alone; then returns] What the fuck happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer -

Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards.

(snipped)

Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.

D-Day: Let's do it.

Bluto: LET'S DO IT!!

---

This most inspirational of cinematic passages, at least in my lifetime, occurred to me earlier in the week when it was reported that Jeff Gahan, New Albany’s hermetic mayoral incumbent, has amassed a $95,000 war chest going into municipal elections this year.

That’s big money for a small city. Is the race already over?

It might be interesting eventually to study the itemized list, although the total shouldn’t surprise anyone. New Albany’s budget has increased by strangely untold millions since Gahan took office, and the public trough has been tapped early and often for various construction and patronage projects. This City Hall clearly performs triage at every decision-making juncture: If it can’t be monetized to ensure the requisitely metaphorical post-coital-cash-stuffed handshakes, it tends not to happen.

Probably this is the primary reason for the ongoing lack of traction for walkability and street reform. People merely walking and biking provide far less lubrication for future political campaigns than automotive interests – or fear mongers. The usual suspects are baffled at unpredictable paybacks, hence feet are dragged as they await the proper formula for the ritual wetting of beaks.

For an independent mayoral candidate like me, Gahan’s surfeit of cash has the potential to be daunting. As yet, I have no campaign funds, as in absolutely none, and it remains my intent to ask for no more than $20 per donor once the fundraising effort begins in earnest. That’s 4,750 contributors just to reach Gahan’s current total, a number so astronomical that I could not have determined it without a calculator.

But I’m not discouraged. In fact, I’m oddly serene. That’s because I believe that words have meaning, and while City Hall might be flush with the fuel of DemoDisneyDixiecratic machine politics, it is at a decided disadvantage when it comes to the marketplace of ideas – where its collective GPA is lower than Bluto’s.

Not only that, but nothing gets the competitive juices flowing quite as much as being the underdog. It may require an unconventional effort … and we’re just the guys to do it.

When’s the Harvest Homecoming parade this year?

---

Recent ON THE AVENUES columns:

ON THE AVENUES: As Admiral Gahan steers his Speck study into the Bermuda Triangle, crewmen Padgett, Stumler and Caesar grimly toss all the rum overboard.

ON THE AVENUES: Upscale residency at down-low prices.

ON THE AVENUES: Street “sweeping” epitomizes the degradation of governance in New Albany.

ON THE AVENUES: Got spa? Time for CM Zurschmiede to reel in the years.

Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story," Monday night at NABC's Pizzeria & Public House.

There'll be a free movie night tomorrow (Monday, February 6) in the Prost Room at the NABC Pizzeria & Public House at 3312 Plaza Drive, New Albany (812-949-2804). The time is 6:00 p.m., and the movie is Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story." This and other free movie nights are being sponsored by interested and generally left-leaning local citizens, so if you're not attending the city council meeting, consider coming by for a beer and entertainment.

In 1967, it was a "hot summer" in the GDR.

For more on cinema in the GDR: DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst - Cinema of East Germany

Film: “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.”

Can it happen here?

In Communist Romania during the first two decades following World War II, contraceptives generally could not be obtained. However, abortion was legal, readily available and absurdly cheap, and some estimates suggest that there were four abortions for every live birth in 1966.

In 1967, Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal overnight as part of a megalomaniacal drive to increase the country’s population. The short term effect was an abrupt doubling of the birth rate, followed by a fast and steady decline, to the point that twenty years afterward, Romania’s population had ceased to grow at all.

One population statistic did increase in Romania during this time. The maternal mortality rate tripled. The likely explanation is that women dying from botched illegal abortions were included statistically with those dying during childbirth.

From 1967 through Ceausescu’s overdue toppling and execution in 1989, the Romanian governmental bureaucracy actively intervened in the sex lives of the country’s citizens as part of the dictator’s psychotic desire that greater numbers of New Communist men and women be created to man the ramparts of a decaying, doomed society.

Two nights ago we watched “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” a harrowing and compelling Romanian film that tells the story of a university student’s illegal abortion in the year 1987. It is by far the best of the four Romanian cinematic productions that Diana and I have seen this year. All of them have been good and thought provoking, especially for someone with a workmanlike grounding in the history of the area, but “Four Months …” indisputably exists on a higher plane of achievement.

I shan’t reveal the plot, which is eloquent in its simplicity, but it should suffice to note that the film’s action takes place against a stifling backdrop of big governmental intrusion in the lives of ordinary people. All parties involved in transacting the illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, a Romanian woman of the time who was seeking to terminate a pregnancy (in the absence of contraceptives) could be imprisoned and her career – her life – ruined.

There may be little to justify the public life of a Nicolae Ceausescu outside of cynical Cold War politics and a certain level of regional backwardness, and yet there are others among us right here in America, some in gated communities, others with no worldly possessions, but all possessed of a fervent belief that control must be exercised over reproductive freedom, and who if asked, would volunteer the imposition of the semi-literate tin pot Communist strongman’s solution of a ban on abortion and the expansion of a police state to enforce it.

That’s very, very frightening.

REWIND: Inspired by George Clooney and Warren Beatty.

The original title of the following essay was: George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” will lure NA Confidential to the multiplex.

On 10/13/05, I vowed to obtain a DVD of the movie "Reds." It never happened, but this weekend we're watching it courtesy of Netflix. This inspired me to search the NAC archives, hence today's reprint. Eventually we saw Clooney's paean to Edward R. Murrow, and my recap can be read here: Drop everything you're doing and go see Good Night, and Good Luck.

Meanwhile, the experience of watching "Reds" again after so long has been inspiring, and I recommend it to readers. Speaking of Reds, in this case the Cincinnati variety, we're off today to watch the home team play the Red Sox. I'll have a tankard for you at the Hofbrauhaus in Newport ... and contemplate the New Albanian revolution.

---

On average, NA Confidential views one film every two weeks.

Recent choices have included the documentary “When We Were Kings,” foreign films “The Dreamers,” “Goodbye, Lenin,” and “Colonel Redl,” and “Beyond the Sea,” Kevin Spacey’s bizarre paean to the singer Bobby Darin.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fell into the play list somehow, and although it was amusing, one cannot do justice to the concept without explaining exactly why travelers must carry a towel.

To be truthful, if it were not for the convenient “order history” feature at http://www.netflix.com/, it would have been difficult to compile the preceding list.

When it is suggested that I accompany Mrs. Confidential to an actual movie theater, my astonished reaction invariably apes that of fictional detective Nero Wolfe’s annoyance at being asked to walk from his brownstone out onto the street.

“Out there? To the theater?

Merry disclaimers aside, when the opportunity to see George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” comes around, I’ll not only go to the theater to see it, but I’ll offer to drive.

That’ll confuse her.

The movie is reviewed in the current issue of Rolling Stone, and here are excerpts.

Does George Clooney have a box-office death wish? You have to wonder why the star of Ocean's Eleven would risk his standing as a pinup for ka-ching to direct, co-write and co-star in a movie set in the 1950s, shot in black-and-white and focused on a fifty-year-old battle between TV newsman Edward R. Murrow, indelibly played by David Strathairn, and the Commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Wonder no more. Clooney knows exactly what he's doing: blowing the dust off ancient TV history to expose today's fat, complacent news media as even more ready to bow to networks, sponsors and the White House. As Murrow said in a 1958 speech, which frames Clooney's dynamite film, the powers that be much prefer TV as an instrument to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate." Challenge is a loser's game …

… For a paltry $8 million, Clooney has crafted a period piece that speaks potently to a here-and-now when constitutional rights are being threatened in the name of the Patriot Act, and the American media trade in truth for access.

Obviously, the subject matter of Clooney’s film is a fastball in NA Confidential’s socio-political wheelhouse.

Journalist Edward R. Murrow was referring to the McCarthyism of the 1950’s when he said, “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason," but I’m certain that he’d have no objection to my applying this sentiment to the vacuous populism of New Albany’s Siamese Councilman, Dan Coffey & Steve Price -- but where's the Tribune's Murrow when we need him?

Besides that, it’s always enjoyable to view the reaction when handsome Hollywood idols turn inexplicably subversive and craft important films about genuinely significant historical topics.

In 1981, at the height of the Reagan Revolution, Warren Beatty completed and released “Reds,” a three and a half hour dramatization of leftist American journalist John Reed’s life and times during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent red baiting of the post-Great War era.

A quarter century later, “Reds” remains a great favorite, but my elderly videotape is shot, and a replacement DVD purchase looms.

Murrow said, “Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.”

He might have added, “especially when it comes to ideas.”

Ideas are the currency and the lifeblood of progress, and proliferate when the human mind is challenged and stimulated – by conversation, reading, playing … and sometimes even watching movies.

Next up for Clooney: Ocean's 13, in which he leads the gang to New Albany to help UCM Price uncover those missing nickels and dimes, because as you know, nickels and dimes add up ... to inanity.