SNOGGLES

Da Answers. No one nuked Vanuatu!

2009-03-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ben Jonson, Smokey Robinson, Mother Theresa, Lord Bragg, Larry David, Tatiana M. Ali.

Ben Johnson, Arthur Freed, Andre the Giant, Harold MacMillan, Roald Dahl, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ford, Henry Purcell, Anne Archer, Monica Lewinsky.

Ban Johnson, Ben Johnson, Nehru, Jon Voight, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, Nikola Tesla.

John D. Rockefeller, Marius Petipa, Calvin Coolidge, Benny Goodman, J.R.R Tolkein, Vincent Van Gogh.

Mary Cassatt, Louis Pasteur, Eddie Cochran, Lana Turner, F.W. Murnau, Delia Smith.

Axel Rose, Ari Shapiro, Steven Sondheim, Danny Kaye, Zoe Deschanel, Keri Russell.

Bob Mortimer, Buzz Aldrin, Jason Alexander, Joy Bryant, Donny Osmond.

Gary Sinise, Frederic Forsythe, Bob Dylan, Felicity Kendall, Julia Roberts, Hattie McDaniel, Klaus Kinski.

Name 'em all and nuke Vanuatu!

2009-03-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

Da Ansas...no one won a monkey.

2009-03-10T20:35:00.001-07:00

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (gastronome), Fats Waller (musician), Hirohito (Japanese emporer), Isambard Kingdom Brunel (engineer), Mark Radcliffe (radio DJ), Mullah Omar (Taliban leader), Alfred Tennyson (poet)

Jonjo O'Neill (racehorse trainder), Armando Guebuza (Mozambique President), John Locke (philosopher), Fess Parker (actor/winemaker), Donovan Bailey (sprinter), Hal Roach (film producer)

W.C. Fields (comic), Heath Ledger (actor), Dunga (football coach), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik), "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan (pro-wrestler), Titian (painter)

Matilda of Flanders (William the Conqueror's missus), George II (King of England), Lloyd Bentsen (politician), Ry Cooder (musician), John Sununu (politician), Pancho Villa (Mexican General), St. Bernadette (saint)

Nancy Cartwright (voice actor), John Cabot (explorer), Walter Matthau (actor), Veronica Lake (actor), Emily Dickinson (poet), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistani politician)

M. Emmet Walsh (actor), Tony Daly (footballer (soccerer)), Franz Kafka (writer), D.H. Lawrence (writer), Mark Williams (snooker player), Jackie Robinson (baseball player)

Papa Doc (Haitian leader), Brenda Lee (singer), Artie Shaw (musician), Denholm Elliot (actor), Charles Dickens (writer), Washington Irving (writer), Gandhi (politician)

Toby Keith (musician (alleged)), William Shakespeare (writer), Marco Polo (explorer), Henry Clay (politician), Son House (bluesman), Dirk Bogarde (actor), Billy Fane (Geoff from Byker Grove)

Name 'em all and win a Monkey!

2009-03-09T21:22:00.001-07:00

Saturday's Worthless Rehash

2009-03-07T14:23:00.000-08:00

I'm a player, a playa
which in spanish means 'beach'
beach which hyphenated is pronounced bee-atch
biyotch, which I'll be playing tonite with a little rum and soda and some salad and some mayonnaise
and in a daze I'll be murdering bruthas with a click of my wrist,
show my fist to a nigga on my block and watch him brick,
show 'im da nine guage and watch that nigga turn himself in,
and watch the cops thank Brown Box for being top of the tin.
- Brown Box, "We Done Tolerated Chu" from the album 'Square', Capitol Records c. 2000

Dig that constant drone of the traffic and the wind and spend a whole day trying to discern which is which beyond the click clack and splish splash of the neighbor doin' dishes, the baby crying and the constant tap tap tippy tap tap of the keys of my computer and everyone elses. And a deep, angry twelve cylindrical roar of a Maserati or a Bugatti rips the afternoon sound open as it courses across the Beverly Hills concrete. So no voices. No Spanish people shouting to each other or kids playing or screaming or sirens - a crow just now. But no other birds. Maybe a pigeon's hum in the eaves of the building but no voices. A car horn now and again and the sound of a drill or construction equipment or a mower or something from a nearby garage but no voices echoing across the parking lot or in the street or in the distance. Just the various simple...hang on. It's a vacuum. From an upstairs apartment in the next building. And the crow still crowing but no voices from the rooftops. A dog barking, sure, but no voices yet from the hallway or the gardens or the town or the garages or the apartments. None but the occasional cry of the year-old baby from across the way, whose determination to wail is beginning to disturb us.

And sure, the low flying airplane.

And sure, the young kid killing the transmission on his Camry as he floors it down Roxbury.

Oh finally. A voice. Hispanic. A woman. Stern and displeased with someone she's talking to on a phone. But no real, live conversations here, from the window of a small apartment in Beverly Hills.

10 days down, 27 to go

"A man without booze, is a man without booze"
- Ethel Merman (probably apocryphal)

Wednesday Recorder Recital

2009-03-04T22:36:00.001-08:00

Jo-Jo stubbed his toe
on the way to Mexico.
Coming back he broke his back,
climbing on the railroad track.
Then at last he broke a bone,
talking on the telephone.
- Unknown Recorder Teacher

It's nice to get off the telephone after so long at sea. Look in the newspaper and read about the dead people and the car crashes - like I never left. I turned on the wireless just now and fell about laughing at the idea - the very idea! - of a Bagel being made Governor of Tennessee. Forgot to drink my Lemonade, yep. There you go. It's been quite strange trying to remember that stuff needs doing and gots to get done. The touch of books; something eerily reminscent of a life I lived once, but not quite. Like trying to imagine your infant life.

I have been off the booze for just one week now. And yet there is a 12 pack of Miller High Life on my floor, along with four cushions and an empty bottle of water. Is it a bottle of water when it's empty? Or just a bottle?

It's nice to get off the telephone...after so long...

Oscar Picks

2009-02-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to be bothered blogging on the weekend. The sunshine has returned to SoCal and I'm going to go out and bask.

Here's what this is (unnecessarily complificated as it is): in each category I've got the movie I expect to be picked on Sunday (Will), followed by the movie that I would pick from the nominations (Should), followed by the movie I would have picked regardless of nominations (Snoggles). Click on any of the movie titles to reach their extended review.

I probably won't watch the ceremony because I don't have a television.

Best Supporting Actress:
Will: Amy Adams, Doubt
Should: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Snoggles:Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona/Elegy

Best Supporting Actor:
Will: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Should: Heath Ledger
Snoggles: Heath Ledger

Best Original Screenplay:
Will: Milk
Should: Frozen River
Snoggles: Synecdoche, New York

Best Actor:
Will: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Should: Mickey Rourke
Snoggles: Mickey Rourke

Best Actress:
Will: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Should: Angelina Jolie, Changeling
Could: Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky

Best Director:
Will: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Should: Gus Van Sant, Milk
Could: Courtney Hunt, Frozen River

Best Picture:
Will: Slumdog Millionaire
Should: Milk
Could: Synecdoche, New York

A few notes:
- If you're going to have these kind of awards ceremonies with such distinct categories, you can't blame an individual component for the other component's failings. Angelina Jolie shouldn't be blamed for Changeling's shortcomings. In my opinion, her performance is superb. I have literally no idea why anyone thinks otherwise (and lots of people seem to).
- Mickey Rourke and Heath Ledger are fully primed to disappoint me. I just think they're two performances that I've watched this year thinking, 'Christ! I thought he was dead!'
- Slumdog Millionaire has carried this strange momentum into the Oscar season that would lead the most wishy-washy of Academy members to tick its box in major categories.
- I will be raging if Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep, Benjamin Button or Downey Jr. get anywhere near a gold statue. However, there are plenty of outcomes, other than the above predictions, which I would tacitly salute.

Let the games...commence.

Oscar rundown: Doubt

2009-02-19T17:15:00.001-08:00

I really don't have very much to say about Doubt. It only has about 5 actors in it and I think all of them are nominated for Oscars, including Viola Davis who appears onscreen for about twelve seconds (I'm not kidding), during which time she cries and snot drips down her face (isn't she brave!). It's about a battle between a priest and a nun who suspects him of sexually abusing the only black child in the school. It's set in the 1960s, adapted from the play written by John Patrick Shanley, who was previously satisfied with such iffy fare as Joe Versus the Volcano (3.4) and Alive (3.9).

I didn't like any of the performances in this movie. I thought they were universally crap. Amy Adams does her usual 'whoops-a-daisy' stuff with wide, tearful eyes and pursed lips, but she's by far and away the best actor involved because she seems to restrain herself once in a while - this is a movie about Catholics, after all. No such restraint from either Streep or Hoffman who bluster about making shows of themselves and Viola Davis doesn't help us to make sense of her character's very odd and frankly despicable values.

I felt exactly the same way about The Queen (6.9) a couple years back. I really don't believe for a teeny, tiny second that in reality Her Maj acted anything like Helen Mirren's pouting, emotionally overwrought caricature and yet it seemed like the perfect role for an Oscar win (everyone knew it long before the nominations were announced). Just so, the Academy have once again gone all out for big, overblown, intense performances that contain the same quantities of honesty and conviction as a Sarah Palin interview.

I intend to say no more, except that I will be sneering at this one on Sunday.

Snoggles Score; 4.9

Oscar rundown: Tropic Thunder

2009-02-17T21:47:00.001-08:00

d. Ben Stiller w. Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux, Etan Cohen

Plot:
A British film director (Steve Coogan) struggles to control his stars (Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr.) on the set of a hugely expensive Vietnam-war epic, which is based on the true experiences of an armless vet (Nick Nolte). With a maniacal, extremely profane studio exec (Tom Cruise) breathing down his neck, the director opts to take the two actors, together with the film's three co-stars (Jack Black, Brandon T. Jackson and Jay Baruchel) out of their luxurious element and into the real 'shit', as they say, in order to achieve more genuine performances. However, when the director promptly steps on a French landmine, the quintet find the 'shit' more real than the very story upon which the movie is based. Got that?

If not, here's a trailer that almost makes it look half-decent:

This film's failings are perfectly exemplified by the reaction of the disability advocacy community (right), who complained about the use and abuse of the word 'retard', which they consider to be as powerful and offensive as the n-word to black people, or the q-word to homosexuals. Why does this protest exemplify the movie's failings? Because it shows how completely unfunny it is.

Writers/producers Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen probably didn't intend to offend the mentally challenged as they took aim at naive, exploitative Hollywood filmmakers. Downey Jr. plays a white Australian actor (vaguely modelled on Russell Crowe) who dyes his skin in order to play an African-American sergeant. The fictional black rapper Alpa Chino (vaguely modelled on Ludacris) plays a smaller role in the fictional film, and comes into conflict with Downey Jr. over his characterization of black people. Meanwhile, Stiller's character (a Stallone/Van Damme/Schwarzenneger type) endured a critical tongue-lashing after he played a mentally challenged man in 'Simple Jack'.

In the offending dialogue, during which the r-word is bandied about like a preposition, Downey Jr. mutters in his affected southern grumble that an actor should never go "full retard" in pursuit of an Oscar (ie. the character should always be some kind of savant). It is the severe repetition and thus debasement of the r-word that clearly offended the Special Olympics folks (I'm not mocking them now, they really are represented by Special Olympics spokespeople) and I think that repetition is also what's meant to be funny - say 'retard' over and over again and see if you start laughing. It's not an amusing word. Waggle. That's an amusing word.

I didn't find the film's principle ideas to be outright offensive to either African-Americans or people with disabilities and I have no objections to their skewering of industry bigwigs and actors. What I found offensive was the absolute baseness of the comedy that the film employed in order to make its points. It's the sort of comedy that should be confined to stoned, late-night conversations and drunken frat parties. At best, it's the sort of comedy that should only appear in movies that are about nothing, rather than movies that are actually trying to make very vague, very tired, reaching statements about the entertainment biz. And in terms of those statements, there's something oddly bitter about the entire thing, including Tom Cruise's lauded (abysmal, in my opinion) performance in a role that's flogged to death every week on Entourage. A great man once said; "If a comedy isn't funny, it's serious". That great man was me. I said it just now. Just as Ricky Gervais' ironic declarations occasionally lose their ironic sheen due to his poor humor, or Larry David's faux-naif characterization of himself seems too close to a genuinely naive or ignorant real-life Larry; Tropic Thunder falls victim to all the ill-advised pronouncements it makes about Hollywood and its characters, by not being funny. Hoist by its own retard.

The movie is blatantly targeted at a young male audience and is part of a new breed of self-conscious, quote-baiting parodies which mix the low-end of Steve Martin's erratic oeuvre with the quick pace of Abrahams-Zucker-Proft movies. But the key to those Abrahams-Zucker-Proft movies was their contemporaneity; a tradition that is perpetuated to varying success by the Wayans brothers. This movie seems to want to parody a twenty year-old genre and fifty year old ideas. There's not very much to parody in movies like Platoon or Apocalypse Now, and it shows.

I should take this opportunity to poke my stick at Benjamin Edward Stiller, who is little more than a crap Adam Sandler to me (could there be a lower blow?), with absolutely no obvious comic appeal. What's with this new breed of handsome comedians? We can't laugh at handsome people - they're handsome! They can't be funny! Is it just me, or don’t we want our comedians to be ugly or disheveled or fat or something? I think I laughed twice at this movie, and both of those times was at Jack Black, who is fat.

Flaps.

Snoggles Score; 4.4

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 16.0

2009-02-16T22:43:00.001-08:00

Yeardley Smith, voice of Lisa Simpson, driving her blue Prius out of the Parking Garage at the corner of the Santa Monica and Rodeo, on Valentines Day. She nearly ran us over, but backed up to give us room upon realizing her error. I thanked her with a smile and a wave. That's our best intercelebrity relations since Bill Maher.

Bo!

Oscar rundown: The Visitor

2009-02-10T20:35:00.000-08:00

d. Thomas McCarthy w. Thomas McCarthy

You've seen this movie before - they made 20 of them every year in Hollywood's Golden Age. It's the standard 'Man meets Guy, Guy plays bongos, Guy has Girl, Man walks in on Girl in the bath, Guy teaches Man bongos, Guy gets thrown in immigrant jail, Man keeps playing bongos, Man dates Guy's Syrian mother'. You know the drill. You know what to expect. A couple of young stars opposite an old hand. There's nothing new here.

Allow me to start with a personal tidbit: I watched this movie during the Christmas break, when my own immigration interview loomed on January's horizon and the movie's reminder of the current state of America's immigration services shook me up, exacerbating my dread of this draconian process. Having breezed through that interview without incident I feel immensely relieved, but no less angry at the way it occasionally made me feel.

You don't need to have gone through the immigration mangle to understand this feeling - anyone who has been falsely accused of a misdemeanor, or who has been forced against their will to deal with any of the branches of their government will surely understand the sense of helplessness when one's destiny is out of one's hands and is instead on the desk of some heartless bureaucrat with a ballpoint pen and a daily quota. It's horrific. The only consolation when you suffer these situations is that you are not alone.

This movie managed to encapsulate my own frustration with the 'system' and did so by a very clever and considered comparison of different forms of intelligence. Richard Jenkins plays a university professor, representing conventional forms/systems of intelligence and understanding, while Haaz Slieman plays a Syrian musician, who works in a kind of intuitive, more fluent form of intelligence and understanding. When Jenkins starts learning the bongos, he taps into this alternative world and revels in its rewards as the thin threads of his career begin to unravel and a more honest truth reveals itself - his life means very little to anyone, including himself. It's a remarkable metaphor for the conflicts going on in America in the past year and right now as the nation struggles to decide whether it wants to be considered a 'people' or an institution.

It isn't an easy film to watch. In fact, if you manage to sit through the entire thing without reconfiguring your buttocks a few times, you're either asleep or dead. It's often gut-wrenching and intensely frustrating viewing. In one particular instance, in which Richard Jenkins screams “we’re not children”, the frustrations of 75% of the American people seem to be voiced briefly and very powerfully. In the weeks since I've seen it, I've grown fonder and fonder of my memory of it, to the extent that I now consider it a great film and one I believe I will look back on as a great summation of the times.

Richard Jenkins is nominated for Best Actor, but won't win and doesn't really deserve to for this performance (it's just not that kind of role). But Slieman would have been a more deserving nom for Best Supporting Actor than Robert Downey Jr. or Josh Brolin. His effortless charm is the absolute fulcrum of this excellent picture.

Snoggles Score; 9.0

Oscar rundown: BAFTAs SchmAFtas

2009-02-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

Who gives a hairy gibbon's shithole about what the British Academy of Futile Televisual Arsebandits thinks?

Lately, Britain's been giving itself the old reach around to pat itself on the back for 'achievement' in film. If a movie involves British personnel, it's a British movie as far as the Chateau Margaux-quaffing toffs in Mayfair are concerned, and even though they haven't produced a great movie since Withnail and I (9.1), they swan around acting as if they rule the world of cinema.

Thusly, each year the BAFTAs nominate a bunch of American movies and yet declare it a great year for British film. This year, they've presented us with the curious paradox of calling Slumdog Millionaire the Best Film and yet declaring Man on Wire the Best British Film. Ummmm....so Man on Wire beat Slumdog Millionaire to Best British Film...doesn't that make it the Best Film?

Elsewhere, In Bruges is surprising the fuck out of me - I saw the trailer for this film and nearly took my own life, yet it's bossing the screenplay categories in all awards listings. I'm considering just reading the screenplay and fucking the movie off.

I'm running out of things to comment on - everything about the BAFTA nominations and winners fucks me off - far more, actually, than the Oscars, which make a kind of sense. It just seems that the BAFTAs take every opportunity to nominate British 'talent'. Dev Patel nominated for Best Actor? Are you fucking kidding me?

We should pity this small-minded people on their tiny, pathetically meaningless island. They have nothing better to do with their time than pretend that they are significant.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 15.1

2009-02-07T00:34:00.000-08:00

We were eating dinner on Friday with our friend at Casa Vega on Venture Boulevard and there we were lucky enough to see both failed-suicide-actor Luke Wilson and his beau; Kate Hudson.

They were celebrating the birthday of someone at their table but we know not whom. We have no interest in elaborating on the experience.

UPDATE: I'm reliably informed that the nobend above is Owen, not Luke, Wilson. Well, fuck it. Who gives a rat's arse? I wasn't even the one what saw them.

Oscar rundown: Ignored for good reason

2009-02-02T20:48:00.000-08:00

I'm always ragging on the Academy for one reason or other, but actually, I'm quietly impressed by this year's nominee list (apart from the Best Picture category). Perhaps it's time that I commend them for something...

Academy members' mailboxes are flooded with screeners every year; some even get multiple copies of several movies, creating a great mess in their palatial living rooms. And every year there's a whole flock of movies that don't deserve to get anywhere near the nomination list, nor do they. This year, I've seen a few of those bad boys, so here's a quick roundup of the films that the Academy rightly ignored:

Westerns keep going through these little revivals that last for about two movies and then collapse. This year, Ed Harris' Appaloosa (5.6) waded into the genre with stunning mediocrity, showing very little ambition, drama or intrigue in his adaptation of a Robert B. Parker novel. If all post-1968 westerns are coffins for the genre, this one is an unremarkable plywood box, with Renee Zelwegger's ugly name spraypainted unceremoniously onto the side and a grating, incongruous Tom Petty track to accompany its passage into the netherworld (said track plays, much to the viewer's surprise, over the credits). Viggo Mortensen's steady weight tilts the coffin off-kilter, occasionally threatening to topple it and open it up - he's just too good and you can't stop looking at him, even when you should be looking at Ed Harris. But on the whole the movie, and the coffin, is a bit of a duckfart. Nobody attended its burial - it's in the grave five rows behind Arch Stanton.

What Just Happened (4.7) adapted Hollywood producer Art Linson's tell-some novel into a comedy with no laughs, seeming to carry itself as if it was the first movie ever to hold Hollywood up to the light, or at least relying on people's fascination with show business for its success. Robert De Niro proved incapable of making producers interesting or sympathetic. We've seen this movie before a dozen times.

This year another great actor, Sir Ben Kingsley, proved similarly incapable of making seedy super-novelists appear sympathetic, although I don't think that was really one of the aims of Elegy (3.9). I haven't read the Philip Roth novel upon which it is based, but I feel like it fails to convey the kind of subtle emotions for which novels tend to be better suited. Spanish Director Isabel Coixet fills the movie with ideas, where an ascetic approach would work better. Penelope Cruz's performance is the standout of the movie, which is also true of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (3.8), another of Woody Allen's modern masturbatory fantasies, whose faults are probably best listed:

- Dull, lifeless 3rd person narration
- Unseeming, soulless characters
- Unconvincing, Brechtian performances
- Naive approach to foreign cultures (as was true of Scoop (4.2) and Match Point (0.9))
- Soap opera-ready passion
- Not funny...is it a comedy? Not dramatic...is it a drama? Not anything...is it?

Elsewhere, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (3.5) was a dull, gaudy English romp completely ruined by Frances McDormand's appalling English accent and Bottle Shock (3.5) took a vaguely interesting event in Californian wine history - when two Californian vintages trumped the best french wines at a Paris blind tasting - and turned it into a bizarrely lifeless daytime-TV love triangle melodrama. Seven Pounds (4.9), while redeemed by Will Smith's bottomless pit of charm, drowned a bad idea in a cold bath of Nick Drake and Muse music videos (halfway through the movie - literally whole songs with no dialogue, just images; what?!), with two box jellyfish Public Service Announcements: donate your organs, don't text while driving. I'm not going to bore you with what all that means. Don't see the movie. Watch this trailer for clues:

The worst movie of the year by far, which had the gall to market itself for Oscar consideration, was Sex and the City (0.6), an extended edition of the successful HBO TV show. In a year when films like Wendy and Lucy and Frozen River suggested a new-wave of bold American social-realism - focusing admirably on the harsh lives of working-class Americans during these bleak times - Sex and the City depicted the careless lives of a band of wealthy yuppies, offering a heartless example of all that's wrong with the American capitalist system; the new Fred and Ginger, jetting around the world during the Great Depression.

Of course, we can't blame the movie for not predicting the global downturn: when it opened in London, March '08, the DOW was at 12,262 points - everything was peachy. When the DVD came out, things were still OK - 10,854 points. By the end of the year, when I got round to watching it, the DOW had dropped as low as 7,552! So no, we can't blame the movie for not predicting the downturn - we have to wonder if it caused the bloody downturn!

The problem is not so much the movie's lack of foresight, than its glorification of these women, as though they are splendid examples of female empowerment. The narrator tells her audience in the opening monologue that they have come to New York, along with so many others, to find love. Well, the title should be a clue that love isn’t precisely what they’re after and they proceed to satisfy themselves with all manner of gaudy, bourgeoisie accessories - sexy neighbours, handbags and children. As far as I can see, the women presented in this movie are narcissistic, hedonistic layabouts who contribute little or nothing to society. They are the problem with America and the film is nothing but a hideous, immoral distraction for the luckless masses.

Oscar rundown: WALL-E and Benjamin Button

2009-02-02T16:29:00.001-08:00

WALL-E d. Andrew Stanton w. Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon

Alright - Pixar movies that I've seen, in order of preference, complete with Snoggles Scores to the nearest tenth of a Snogglemetre. Go!:
Toy Story (9.1)
Finding Nemo (7.9)
Toy Story 2 (7.8)
Ratatouille (7.0)
The Incredibles (6.7)
Monsters Inc. (5.5)

Yeah, I wasn't so impressed by Monsters Inc. or The Incredibles (in fact, I think the above score is being a little kind to the latter film) and in general, I am much more impressed by Andrew Stanton's output than I am by any of the other Pixar honchos. Thus, I had high hopes when I heard Stanton was bringing us WALL-E.

Trailer Trailer Trailer Trailer Trailer Trailer Trailer...

There's two things I need to comment on: what this film is, and what they said it was. Let's start with what they said it was. Here's a blurbographical survey:

"funny, touching masterpiece...in a word, a marvel...a cinematic miracle" - Christopher Orr, The New Republic
"about as charming as movies get" James Berardinelli, Reelviews
"one of the greatest animated movies ever created...The genuises at Pixar continually change our world with each new film" Sean O'Connel, Reel.com
"masterpiece" Joe Morgenstern, NPR and Wall Street Journal

Now, I'll allow that plenty of reviewers picked up on some of the movie's flaws and not all of them lit up all of their little stars or Oscars or whatever little systems they use to rate movies (t'ain't the Snogglemeter, fo sho), but the above is a pretty accurate example of the mainstream consensus.

One of the most problematic and infuriating features of American film criticism is its shameless and unfailing tendency toward strenuous hyperbole. Thus, following the release of Wall-E, I was lured by the film press' ecstatic, romantic praise for the movie. But my attempt to see it in the theatre was scuppered when we arrived at the Century City AMC to find a packed house, so I caught it months later, once the hype had died down, on home video. Perhaps some of its punch was lost on the wee screen, because while this is an enjoyable, considered, lasting movie from the Pixar company, it’s hardly the megalithic, masterful portrait of the swift demise of consumer culture that some have deemed it, nor is it even a patch on Toy Story.

Fact is, during the summer, critics are typically starved of anything substantial to chomp on, so they bite into whatever they find that’s got more depth than your average slice of turkey jerky.

It’s too cutesy to be a 'classic' movie: too romantic, too twee; which is often my problem with Stanton’s side of Pixar (it was never my problem with Toy Story). If he could combine his astounding visual artistry with Brad Bird’s immense ability to pen highly developed scripts, Pixar might just pull out something timeless. I hope they do. But the way most critics are talking about them they pull a classic out every time they reach down to scratch their balls. WALL-E's plot is all over the place, it is amusing but not particularly wowing once the humans are involved, the imagery is terrific but, like all Pixar movies, isn't dwelt on long enough for us to enjoy it. But here I am again, making it sound like something soft and brown that I just trod on while strolling down Rodeo Drive. It's not so bad - just check out its score:

Snoggles Score; 8.5

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button d. David Fincher w. Eric Roth

"Who? They're doing what? They're adapting what? By...by who? But...but, but, but why?"

If I was a Hollywood producer, sitting in my corner office over at Paramount, churning over lists of names and faces and appointments and dinner reservations, alfalfa, spec-scripts, soy beans, paranoia, non-fat lattes, goatee beards and budget reports; the above would have been exactly what you would have heard me say when a coy young runner called Billy, with whom I would be engaged in a discreet homosexual affair, would have poked his head in through my doorway with a wink and told me that Chaffin, Kennedy, Marshall and a bunch of other jokers were making an F. Scott Fitzgerald short-story into an epic movie directed by David Fincher. I don't think I would have been able to cope.

In reality, having seen the tangible results of their very-real venture, I'm equally bewildered and I think the only reaction to the Oscar noms that my fictional Hollywood-producer alter-ego could have mustered would be a sudden, devastating heart attack and a prompt burial, almost a month before the Awards ceremony, in Forest Hills Memorial Cemetery.

Following so far? If not, the summary is thus: S'SUCKS.

Let’s see... ‘The Mildly Interesting Case of Benjamin Button?’, no, ‘The Tepid Telling of the Dire Story of...’, no, ‘The Interminable Trudge of...’. There's all kinds of alternate titles that I could've given this movie, which is just not very good at all. It looks beautiful, I guess, but so did The Notebook and that was approximately as bad, maybe better in fact, and had the same old-person narration device which was almost equally spectacular in its absurd conceit.

People are drawing comparisons with Forrest Gump - same writer, same period study through the same prism (an odd, genetically enfeebled man’s life) - but Gump was funny, deeply moving, brilliantly performed and almost absurdly universal in its appeal. Here, the various period settings, the disease (which makes Benjamin so curious) and the stodgy emotional palate of the characters are all strangely incidental to the dreary, plodding life story. It’s such an obvious point that I’m almost afraid to say it, but it really feels like what it is - a short story painfully fleshed out into a long movie. I don’t know what the point is, I don’t know what it ever was and I don’t really care to find out. It’s just another handsome bore - rather like its lead actor - and Hollywood is already full of those.

Snoggles Score; 4.8

Oscar rundown: Adaptations

2009-01-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

Twilight (0.8/10) was the top box-office adaptation of the year, pulling in $184 million so far (about 5 times its budget). But original movies - mostly of the action and animated kind - topped the box-office list for 2008; The Dark Knight (6.9), Hancock, Iron Man, and WALL-E (review in the pipeline) among them. However, the Academy Awards nominations, as per usual, are filled with stories adapted from novels, novellas and plays: incredibly, Milk (7.5) is the only original movie in the Best Picture category.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the purpose of adaptations, especially when they're from novels that so many people have read, or even those that were/are considered 'literature'. Doesn't a film attain less value if it has existed in another form? Can we really talk of a film's value in this way or is film, by its very nature (and its expense), a sort of secondary medium, destined to replicate as much as it creates?

It seems to me that adapting a story is a lot like adopting a child. If that child is young, maybe newborn, maybe under a year old; you're going to be able to be a parent to it almost as much as a real parent (save the DNA connection). If, however, the child is older, maybe really old like Revolutionary Road (4.3) or Benjamin Button (review in the pipeline), or maybe famous already in the manner of Hannah Montana (Twilight, Harry Potter); you're going to have less to do, aren't you? I mean, you're dealing with an established person once they're older, or famous. No less love is required, but you can't expect to have the same impact on a 40 year old or an international popstar as you do on a newborn bairn.

And although I have trouble with this argument when it's used to disqualify or degrade people who adopt, for whatever reason - you're surely going to have more impact on the child, it's going to be more yours, more a part of you, if you actually created it, than if you adopted it. It seems obvious. You might not do a great job of parenting, mind you, but it's yours - it's your baby.

But there's no doubting that adaptations can be worthwhile and rewarding. And you're never going to be able to stop producers from reading books in their ample freetime, then thinking: 'Hey, this would make a great movie'. It's what producers do - they don't like to have to think for themselves, or even rely on others to think for themselves. They're bottom feeders. They eat what drifts down to them, they don't like to raise their heads or dig deeper.

But there's no doubt that film adaptations can be brilliant when they want to be. The Wizard of Oz (10/10, duh!) is an adaption of a 1900 novel, but they made it into a Technicolor musical-extravaganza, taking incredible liberties with the book by redrawing Dorothy's character and colorizing everything that needed colorizing. They aren't just filming the novel - they're changing it's form entirely. And I'd have to say that Francis Ford Coppola did the same for The Godfather (9.8) as Steven Spielberg did for Jaws (10!) and Jurassic Park (8.1) - giving these novels a new cinematic language that maked them less of an adaptating than an envisioning process. They manage to romanticize the stories and give them fresh life.

Likewise for Gone with the Wind (9.8), which falls into that aforementioned Hannah Montana category - it had a fully fledged, famous life before the screen as a Pullitzer Prize winning, best-selling novel. But Gone With The Wind is so huge in its production values, its sweep, its length and its majesty that it commands a unique place in the history of Hollywood - along with D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (9.3), it works as an ode to cinematic bombast. I don't value it so much for its story or its technical quality than I value it for its ambition and its sheer size and its monumental success. It really is the biggest movie of all time and probably ever will be so and vitally, the movie is of that studio era when business was positively booming. Titanic (1.3) is equally huge, but doesn't hold the same intruige for me. I don't think there's any better document than Gone With The Wind of Hollywood's mythic venture capitalism.

But aside from making the biggest movie of all time, there are other options open to potential adapteurs: You could do what Stanley Kubrick (screen left) liked to do - The Shining (10!), 2001: A Space Odyssey (10!), Full Metal Jacket (9.7), Barry Lyndon (8.7) - and P.T. Anderson did last year with There Will Be Blood (9.3): simply use the novel as a launching pad for a movie that, aside from a very vague outline, is basically original. You can do what Coppola did with Apocalypse Now (9.9) and use a novel as a kind of apotheosized template, like a new monomyth.

I have been railing against adaptations of late, wondering at their point, their value and what their preponderance might mean for Hollywood's current state of health. But the fact is, the adapted movies this year are just not very good and, as I've shown above, it's more than possible to make a fine movie out of a book, but it requires forming an entirely new language on the screen. Too many directors and adapting screenwriters are too cautious and too respectful to their source material and it is on these occasions that movies just adopt the fully-grown book, rather than attempting to bring up their own child to be like that orphaned adult.

Christ, I really shouldn't bother with extended metaphors.

Oscar rundown: The Big 5

2009-01-27T15:57:00.000-08:00

I know the Big 5 are rather swallowed by Conglomerates - Warner Bros is a subsidiary of Time Warner, Paramount is a subsidiary of Viacom, Universal is General Electric's, 20th Century Fox is News Corporation's and Columbia is Sony's - but those five are still essentially the biguns in town, along with Disney, and they all churned out 7-11 movies each this year. And, sure sure, each of those studios have independent studios working under them - Fox 2000, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Vantage, New Line, Sony Pictures Classics, Focus, Miramax, Castle Rock...

But I thought it'd be interesting to take a glance at what the big boys produced this year. Adaptations are in bold. Straight to video or foreign releases are not included.

Warner Bros:
10,000BC
The Dark Knight
Fool's Gold
Get Smart (TV Show)
Lost Boys: The Tribe
Nights in Rodanthe (novel)
Speed Racer (comic)
Trick'r'Treat
Yes Man (book, true story)

Original/Adaptation ratio:5/4

20th Century Fox:
Australia
Babylon AD (novel)
The Day The Earth Stood Still (remake)
The Happening
Horton Hears A Who! (kid's book)
Jumper (novel)
Meet Dave
What Happens In Vegas
The X-Files: I Want To Believe

Original/Adaptation ratio:5/4

Universal:
Death Race (remake)
Definitely, Maybe
Flash of Genius
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Mamma Mia! (play)
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer
The Tale of Despereaux (kid's book)
Wanted
Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
Wild Child

Original/Adaptation ratio:8/2

Paramount:
Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (novel)
Cloverfield
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (short-story)
Drillbit Taylor
Ghost Town
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Iron Man
The Love Guru
Stop-Loss

Original/Adaptation ratio:7/2

Columbia:
21
Hancock
Made of Honor
Pineapple Express
Quantum of Solace
Seven Pounds
Vantage Point

Original/Adaptation ratio: 7/0

Walt Disney Pictures:
Bedtime Stories
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Bolt
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (novel)
College Road Trip
Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both World's Tour (ummm...)
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
Morning Light (documentary)
WALL-E

Original/Adaptation ratio: 8/1

So now then...
I'm most impressed by Columbia with their 100% original showing (Quantum of Solance wasn't really adapted, although that's debatable) and Paramount have done well this year. Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox seem to be the most adaptation-hungry. Fox, in particular, should be ashamed of their output this year; look at those original movies. I just took a dump and that was a far better output.

In general, the kind of original movies that are produced by Hollywood with a capital H, are fluff - either star-driven/animated filler for mass markets and number crunchers or big-money action-packed bazooka blasters. Surprised?

What I'm most surprised about is how few of the Oscar-nominated movies of 2008 were produced by the big studios. Nowadays, the 'quality' pictures, that used to be produced by the Big 5 or 6 or 7, are made by the so-called independent studios - Working Title, Paramount Vantage, Miramax and so on. Aside from Benjamin Button, you don't really see Oscar-nominated movies here. And sure - those kind of thoughtful, handsome movies aren't quite so bankable, but good movies often are bankable and relatively inexpensive. No Country For Old Men grossed 3 times its budget, There Will Be Blood doubled its budget - the last Harry Potter movie didn't even do that!

I'll be looking into the adaptation question in a later post - whether adaptations are worthy of our attention, or when they are worthy of our attention - but for now I'll let you to dwell on the movies listed above, which speak for themselves. Is that what people want to see in their local cinemas? To put it in Obama terms: Is Hollywood working for us?

Also, bare this in mind: in 1939, most studios churned out more than a hundred movies each, but Fox gave us Young Mr. Lincoln, Columbia delivered Only Angels Have Wings and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, RKO made Gunga Din, Warner Bros churned out The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, MGM produced Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and Tarzan Finds A Son!; while an independent studio called Selznick International Pictures produced Gone With The Wind, one of the boldest films in history, which made a stack of money and swept the Academy Awards. Funny how things change, but they don't.

Los Angeles non-landmark 4: Gregory Peck!

2009-01-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

We started this blog with the idea that we'd have regular features on a limited number of topics. We had the Hall of Cool: Tom Waits, Clemens Scheitz, Bill Hicks, Richard Dawkins, and Jason Robards Jr. were our inductees (more to follow pending a review of their credentials). But we haven't touched the Hall of Cool feature since October.

Then there were the Snoggles Presidential Profiles, which were supposed to be a wry look at the Presidents of old with mind to the race of '08: we got as far as Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant, then we got bored.

Then there was Bottoms Up!, our wine feature. We reviewed a ton of cheap plonk, we completed a full survey on Barefoot wines and then we lost our rhythm. Snoggles was taken over by our award-winning coverage of the Presidential race and more recently by our Oscars rundown (which will continue thru Feb 22nd). We haven't reviewed any wine in ages.

But the Los Angeles non-landmark feature always seemed the most likely to prevail, and here it is - ressurected after a 7 month hiatus. Non-landmarks 1 thru 3 were: 350 Beverly Drive, The Valencia Target Boulder, and The Burbank Globe. Non-landmark 4 is...

Gregory/Peck!

I'm pretty sure that Beverly Hills' street-namers weren't thinking of the pictured Mr. Eldred Gregory Peck (HIS NAME WAS ELDRED!) when they named Gregory Way and Peck Drive and had them cross each other in the 90212 zipcode. If they had, it wouldn't even be a landmark. As it is, it's a non-landmark!

Now, our resident Beverly Hills historian tells us that Peck Drive was named after C.L. Peck, an architect who built the Peck Building, a lovely Tudor-style office building on the corner of Beverly Drive and S. Santa Monica (since demolished to make way for the ugly brown cuboid of the Bank of America building). We're not sure who that Gregory chap is, after whom Gregory Way is named, but we doubt it's old Eldred, who didn't make it out to Hollywood until 1944 at which point the road was already there. Of course, that would have given him an opportunity to live at a cross-section that was inadvertantly named after him, and there's a lovely house right there on the corner. However, old Eldred chose to make his home just up the road from Elvis Presley, on Carolwood Drive in the hills above UCLA.

Missed opportunity...........Eldred.

We always enjoy visiting the intersection, as you can't see on Sausage's face in the above picture and would recommend it to all of our friends and all of your friends too. Below, is a map in case you want to plan a day-trip there.

View Larger Map

Who's A President? Grange Hill shit

2009-01-24T12:02:00.000-08:00

President Obama employs the schoolyard trick of prestidigitatious flatulence, using Vice President Biden's hand as a prop (ie. 'hold my hand and check out what I can do').

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Oscar rundown: Frozen River

2009-01-23T13:40:00.000-08:00

d. Courtney Hunt w. Courtney Hunt

I noticed on the Huffington Post the other day, the announcement of the Oscar noms came with a subheadline: "Frozen River?!"

I guess a lot of people haven't seen it - it didn't get a wide release although it probably will now (or at least, a wider release) and those who did see it may not have seen much in it to reward, certainly not at the Oscars. I'm in another category - I'm sure I'm by no means alone - in that I saw it, really liked it and thought it did have a lot to reward, but I didn't expect anything from the Academy, nomination-wise.

It got nods for Original Screenplay and Best Actress for Melissa Leo, both of which are much deserved although not the exact categories I had it shortlisted for.

Here's a trailer, then some explanation:

The trailer makes it look a bit melodramatic, and comes with that great ass Tarantino's wimpish seal of approval, but it could be worse. Actually, if you want a movie this year that's a brilliant analogy for 'America', the idea, the institution, the people and all of their contemporary woes - this is it. Not Dark Knight - see my inspired review for the why.

This film is about a fundamentally honest, hard-working mother played by Melissa Leo, who lives in New York State near the Canadian border, whose husband absconds with all of her money leaving them in dire straits (the husband is Wall Street - dig it), trying to live the simple American dream of owning a home that she can't afford (subprime housing bubble - dig it), who is forced to team up with a suspicious young Mohawk woman, played by Misty Upham (America's negligent history catching up with it - dig it), to embark on a border smuggling operation, across a frozen river in the Mohawk territory (institutional structures breaking down - dig it).

The most unforgettable moment of the movie, for me, is when Leo and Upham take a Pakistani couple across the border and Leo worries that she might be smuggling terrorists into the country. It's so masterfully composed and performed that it deserves an Oscar for best scene and it is effortlessly, naturally applicable to the GWOT situation.

Now, I could go on all day about the border - that frozen river - what it means, what it represents, how figurative and metaphorical this movie is, but I won't because 1) I'm too glad that these kind of smart, challenging movies are being made in America; and 2) I listened to an old fart on NPR going on and on about it and he sounded a bit poncey, so I won't go there, and 3) more important than all the fartsy symbolism, is the simple story of hardship and struggle that defines contemporary America succinctly, tactfully with zero bullshit.

At times, this film is so relevant, it's painful.

Snoggles Score; 8.3

Oscar rundown: The Noms

2009-01-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

So now then. The nominations are out. If I picked them for my noms they're in red.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Benjamin Button
Doubt
Frost/Nixon
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

I have to admit that I've seen few adapted movies this year, so my 5 were kind of cobbled together. I think it's a stupid category - the screenplays should be lumped together, with double points for original screenplays.

Best Original Screenplay
Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk
WALL-E

In Bruges? In fucking Bruges? I think someone's pulling my plonker. I've got to dig up that pile of Oirish horsewank. Now, there's two excellent movies here that I don't think belong in this category - Frozen River and Happy-Go-Lucky. They're missing from other categories where they belong - what the fuck? Now, I thought the Wrestler was very well written, The Visitor was the indie one to slip in there, but Synecdoche was the most mighty tome of the year.

Best Director
Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

I have no comment. Same old same old.

Best Actor
Richard Jenkins - The Visitor
Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn - Milk
Brad Pitt - Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

They've stuck Heath Ledger in the supporting section. Who precisely was he supporting? Unbelievable. They've figured out a way to make every fucker happy. I need to see that Button movie.

Best Actress
Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie - Changeling
Melissa Leo - Frozen River
Meryl Streep - Doubt
Kate Winslet - The Reader

I haven't seen either Doubt or Rachel Getting Married, so the actress categories are otherwise a mystery to me. I'm pretty fucking glad (and pretty fucking surprised) that they gave a nod to Melissa Leo. Superb!

Best Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin - Milk
Robert Downey Jr. - Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt
Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road

Downey Jr? Come off it! At least in this category I don't strongly object to any of the picks.

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams - Doubt
Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis - Doubt
Taraji P. Henson - Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler

As I say, haven't seen Doubt or Button yet, but I'm confused as to how the Golden Globes had Winslet as a supporting actress for the Reader, yet she's conveniently a leading role for the Oscars. What's going on?

Best Picture
Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Not a sausage, but then I expected that. I judge the picture on how much I liked it, so those five were never going to be in it. I can't believe the Reader slipped in. I'm delighted that Revolutionary Road did so poorly, but Synecdoche, Defiance, where art thou?

Ho hum.

Oscar rundown: Snoggles nominominations

2009-01-22T00:00:00.000-08:00

OK. It's midnight - I'm releasing my nominations for the main categories. These aren't what I expect to turn up in a few hours time. They're what I have chosen. If I was the Academy - these would be my nominations. Bear in mind that I haven't seen all of the movies that the Academy are considering, but I will have before the Awards are doled out next month.

Best Picture
Defiance
Happy-Go-Lucky
Synecdoche, New York
Wanted
The Wrestler

Best Director
Darren Aronofsky - The Wrestler
Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire
Courtney Hunt - Frozen River
Charlie Kaufman - Synecdoche, New York
Edward Zwick - Defiance

Best Actor
Daniel Craig - Defiance
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Synecdoche, New York
Frank Langhella - Frost/Nixon
Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Best Actress
Sally Hawkins - Happy-Go-Lucky
Angelina Jolie - Changeling
Melissa Leo - Frozen River
Michelle Williams - Wendy and Lucy
Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road

Best Supporting Actor
James Franco - Milk
Eddie Marsan - Happy-Go-Lucky
Liev Schreiber - Defiance
Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road
Haaz Slieman - The Visitor

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona/Elegy
Danai Jekesai Gurira - The Visitor
Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler
Misty Upham - Frozen River
Kate Winslet - The Reader

Best Original Screenplay
Clayton Frohman, Edward Zwick - Defiance
Thomas McCarthy - The Visitor
Charlie Kaufman - Synecdoche, New York
Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon - WALL-E
Robert D. Siegel - The Wrestler

Best Adapted Screenplay
Noah Stollman - Adam Resurrected
Peter Morgan - Frost/Nixon
David Hare - The Reader
Simon Beaufoy - Slumdog Millionaire
Kelly Reichardt, Jonathan Raymdon - Wendy and Lucy

Oscar rundown: Revolutionary Road, Frost/Nixon and Defiance

2009-01-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

Apparantly, the Academy will announce the Oscar nominations at 5:30am tomorrow! Christ! Why so early guys? Which means I have to rush out three reviews of movies I fully expect to turn up in the listings tomorrow. Check it:

Revolutionary Road d. Sam Mendes w. Justin Haythe

Plot telegram in lieu of trailer: young married couple in Connecticut suburb STOP decide to move to paris for him to pursue his dreams STOP can't move when she gets pregnant and he gets promoted STOP adapted from the richard yates novel STOP

This movie didn't depress, arrest or possess me like it did most critics. I've been cycling through imdb's list of reviews looking for a bad one. I can't find one, so I'm writing one. Not just to be contrary, y'understand. But because this movie sucks with a capital 'sucks'.

So, what have we got here...an adapted 'period' novel, Di Caprio in his flattop period gear, Winslet playing an emotional broad, a by-the-numbers, even-you-can-play-it Thomas Newman score, Roger Deakins' handsome photography - we’ve seen this film before around Oscar season have we not? I think Sam Mendes might even have directed something similar once. For me, it’s precisely the kind of contemporary Hollywood movie that I despise - lazy, pretty, performance-driven adaptations of thoughtful novels. Bah!

WHAT is the point in adapting novels like this one - what does one hope to gain by making a movie of the story? I also have to wonder - why now? What is it about 2008 (or 2009 for that matter) that makes it time to make an adaptation of a 1962 novel about the 1950s? Not that there has to be some huge reason, but I’m just not sure there’s any justification for exhuming Richard Yates at this point. We've already had Pleasantville (7.5) - that was a decent, cinematic movie about the '50s. This one has missed the boat by about 10 years, if there ever was a boat. I’m quite sure I’d enjoy the novel (I have not read it and won't) because characters like these ones come across much better without the annoying filter of the Hollywood star system. They feel more real, more focused when they are revealed through interiority on the page, rather than grand exposition on the screen. I know little about Richard Yates except the fact that Larry David once dated his daughter. That's the kind of pleb that I am. I gained more from watching the extras on Seinfeld DVDs than I did in four years 'studying' literature (I think I read a total of three books cover to cover).

Winslet and Di Caprio will surely be gunning for Academy nominations at the very least, but I don't like either of their performances and I don't think they deserve any awards. I found them both immensely dull, unmagnetic and trite. The only character that comes over well on the screen is Michael Shannon's neighborhood lunatic - that’s the sort of character that movies were made for. I hope he gets nominated. He looks funny.

Meanwhile, something has to be done about Thomas Newman (pic left - what a prick) - I despise his scores. They only ever succeed in detaching the viewer from the story, in this case making a cold, bitter story seem a little more cold and bitter. He's making an industry out of waving his wand - all his scores sound the same. I reckon he just lashed a few out on ProTools a couple years ago and now he's flogging them like a...like a...like a 1950s salesman. I think a different composer would have added a lot more to the mise-en-scene without stopping to the eerie, new-age orchestral wash that Newman seems obsessed with. Get over it man and write a fucking symphony!

Snoggles Score; 4.3

Frost/Nixon d. Ron Howard w. Peter Morgan

Hear ye! Hear ye! Ron Howard’s a dirty, low-down cheat!
Just look at him!

Yeah I said it, boy! A cheat! Lately, he’s been taking stories that are so easy to direct he could only fuck-up by getting his huge, bald head in the way of every single shot (one or two bald mishaps to be permitted). However, I think seasoned directors like Ron should be a little more discerning when they pick up these easy gigs and throw them into the Oscar-season rumble and should probably hope for a lot more than dreary, recent-historical behind-the-scenes drama.

The screenplay is appauling - flitting all over the place and mucking around with the narrative structure just for the sake of it (a typical ‘look at me I’m a writer’ technique for Oscar try-hards) and the movie only succeeds in adding melo- to the natural drama; piling on the conflict and psychological intruige. The strength of the movie is the conversation between Frost and Nixon, which already happened and was captured quite fantastically on televisual filmographical equipment. Fact. This film adds nothing. Why did they bother? Easy Oscars, that's why. Fuck them and the palaces they live in.

Snoggles Score; 5.0

PS. Frank Langhella and Michael Sheen are both very good. Leave them out of any ritual slaying.

Defiance d. Edward Zwick w. Clayton Frohman, Edward Zwick

Daniel Craig, Liev Schriber, Jamie Bell, a mildly pretentious title, actors putting on Russian accents, and a made-to-order Oscar-contending holocaust yarn.

That's all I would have written here if I disliked this movie just as I dislike Frost/Nixon and Revolutionary Road. But I don't. I thought it was excellent and I was a little surprised by that fact.

Now, I'm often talking about whether or not I think movies will last. I'm not sure why I bother thinking along these lines because one never knows what one will remember really nor why one remembers what one does. Too often, I judge movies on the basis of whether or not I think they will last. When I watch Oscar movies, I frequently find myself thinking that, as pleasant as many of these movies are, they will most of them be forgotten in years to come.

Your average Academy member's attic or garage is probably clogged up by screeners for recent mediocre pap the likes of All The King's Men (5.4), The Bucket List (1.8), Down in the Valley (6.8), Beyond the Sea (5.4), Monster's Ball (7.0) or Frailty (6.6). Not all of those movies were made with Oscars in mind, but many are, few of them were nominated, and few of them are likely to be looked back on as anything other than light-night TV filler.

I guess we can but hope that a film lasts. There's no ingredients for that. But if there's a film this year that has the necessary backbone and the integrity to last, it's definitely Defiance.

PREVIEW, MONSIEUR? VOILA!:

I expected (and saw, in previews like that one above) grandiose speeches, cliched, sentimental imagery, passionate wartime relationships and some drifting helicopter shots with lofty orchestral music. Instead, I got a gritty, ballsy even, no-nonsense, honest depiction of the cold, cruel realities of World War II in the Eastern bloc, filled with brilliant performances delivered with tremendous restraint, a subtlety in the storytelling that could easily have been destroyed with bombast or pity, and a completely absorbing narrative, free from moral judgements, religious suggestions or sentimentality.

While Craig is excellent and masters his character's complete emotional withdrawal, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell do more than simply support - they are both superb, never turning their speeches into opportunities to show off (where others may have been tempted). It is not without its flaws - the women in these kind of war tales tend to appear two dimensional, even a bit fawning, and that’s too often the case here, but they are there to satisfy love interests, which never become too heavy or unrealistic. Realism is the key here and I’m surprised to see an Oscar-pining movie maintain a consistent dedication to realism and restraint. I enjoyed it immensely and have higher hopes for it than I do for the Academy.

Snoggles Score; 8.8

Oscar rundown: Happy-Go-Lucky and The Wrestler

2009-01-20T14:47:00.000-08:00

The Oscar nominations are on Thursday, so I'll rifle off a few snappy reviews in the next few days to get the jump on them. I'll review movies that I fully expect to be nominated on Thursday, then I'll gripe after Thursday if movies I expect/want to be nominated are not.

Happy-Go-Lucky d. Mike Leigh w. Mike Leigh

There's been a paucity of strong female performances this year, so Sally Hawkins should have little trouble getting nominated for her role in Mike Leigh's newest show. More than his previous films, this one is really driven by her singular, utterly unique performance and the plaudits belongs as much to her as they do to the bearded auteur.

Trailer in lieu of plot, as per:

A lot of critics have called this film a departure for Leigh, considering it an ode to joy, in sharp contrast to the bleak dirges of the likes of All or Nothing (8.1), Career Girls (9.2) and Secrets and Lies (7.7). I don't agree. In fact, I think those critics only watched the above trailer, which is a flagrant misrepresentation of the content and character of the film. Not only is it far from an ode to joy, but his previous films aren't actually as bleak as everyone makes out. OK, maybe All Or Nothing is, but the rest aren't. Leigh's movies are pretty distinct - they are crafted by lengthy rehearsals with individual actors, followed by months of rehearsals with the actors together. The plot, then, is merely a process of unfurling the layers of the characters' personalities; drifting and rarely resolving in any kind of cathartic denouement. Coming from a middle-class British home, in a very middle-class Southern town, I can always recognize the distinct, closely observed, unflinching analysis of this demographic in Leigh's movies. It's often quite uncomfortable to watch - it hits so close to home. But it's never depressing or even outright melancholy. Perhaps brooding is a bad word, because it would make them seem pedantic but I do think his movies brood a little more than your average Brit-flick, or even your average indie sleeper-hit. But that's what men with beards do, innit? Brood?

Hawkins' character Poppy is similar to all Leigh’s characters, in that she is both likeable and infuriating, often at the same time. Like the titular character in Vera Drake (9.1), she breezes through life, kicking against the pricks with a bouncy, positive outlook. The movie then, isn’t an ode to joy, it’s just got an unusually effervescent character at its fore.

It's not a classic, either in terms of Leigh's work or in larger terms. It doesn’t flow particularly well - often seeming to lurch from one scene to the next, with too many of Poppy’s encounters feeling like extended improvisations with no discernable conclusion. This is always a danger with Leigh - the plot can be too episodic, vignetted, like Luis Bunuel or summing. However, I remain enchanted by the feeling I get when I finish watching a Mike Leigh movie - that feeling of having witnessed something true, vaguely brutal and vitally uplifting.

Snoggles Score; 8.8

The Wrestler d. Darren Aronofsky w. Robert D. Siegel

I had not expected to like another Darren Aronofsky film after Requiem for a Dream (3.0). And yet with The Wrestler, he has delivered an ingeniously oxymoronic film - frenetically gentle, gut-wrenchingly warm - with all of his usual motifs and themes but none of his distracting, obscure style.

Mickey Rourke plays an ageing professional wrestler who is forced to fight in murky clubs to make a living. When he is told he can never fight again, he pursues the stripper with whom he is in love and attempts to make amends with his estranged daughter. There. No need for a trailer to ruin shit for you.

There can be few more convincing performances than Mickey Rourke’s in this movie. While many have lauded Heath Ledger’s Joker or Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk, I think that above those, this is the film performances for the ages, if that’s hyperbole enough to keep up with the Hollywood press. His immensely affable, commanding, gentle, spirited, melancholy performance reminded me on more than one occasion of Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (8.6) and carries the film to a place that all of Aronofsky’s strengths could never have taken it. I guess the thrill, for those viewers familiar with Rourke's E-True-Hollywood-Insider story, is that a lot of his character's emotions would seem to ring true for him in reality. Like the weary aftermath of the prodigal son's return, or the rock star's dying apologies, there's few actors better equipped to understand the tone of a faded wrestling star's extended litany.

It may be the most human movie this year and it’s pleasing to see Aronofsky’s preoccupation with embodiment and desperation meet with a more empathetic set of characters than his previous movies. It’s a joyous movie from start to finish, even being as visceral and repulsive as it occasionally is, and one I am keen to revisit.

Snoggles Score; 8.6

Who's A President? Whodya fink?

2009-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

It's wonderful to see how quickly things become commonplace. I really don't see it as much of a huge deal at all that Barack Obama is now the 44th President of the United States of America - a few months ago, I would have - I did. Obama is now as Presidential as all the preceeding 43 put together and the fact that he's black, the son of a Kenyan man and a struggling single-mother is no big deal.

Listening to Obama on the stage today, I started to wonder if his essense isn't defined by his commanding presence, his power, or his brilliance, but by his normality. I started to feel like I agreed with Christopher Hitchens - that Obama is overrated. But there's something inspiring in that - in that realization that he's just a regular guy, whose probably now rather nervous about, overawed by and unprepared for the task ahead of him. As a candidate, he continually asked his supporters and his fellow citizens to share the burden with him and that's because he's just one man, just one regular guy. Kinda commonplace.

It's refreshing, I feel, if not particularly inspiring.

Oscar Rundown: Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-14T14:11:00.000-08:00

Talking about this film yesterday, Sausage and I agreed that its deciding factor is whether you are captivated by its love story. We weren't and thus this review is not as laudatory as it might have been, nor are we as enthusiastic as many other reviewers have been. Frankly, love story aside, there's a lot that's wrong with this movie and I don't believe it is the kind of film the Academy should recognize this year.

Here's the movie's trailer in case you wanna know what's it's all abouts:

In the movie, the fourth option for how Jamal won the prize is: 'It Is Written'. I have no idea why the trailer changed it to 'It Is Destiny'. I also have no idea why Sigur Ros' Hoppipola was used instead of something more appropriate but I understand that this kind of pop culture referencing is the done thing these days - Happy Go Lucky's trailer was spoiled by a fucking Kate Nash song. I shall come back this thought later (not Kate Nash, the trailer).

Let's start on a positive note, because this is above all else a very positive film. It's a familiar narrative - the child or young man raising himself from the urban mire to untold riches and endless happiness. It's a fairytale, at heart; not particularly realistic nor even likely, not particularly original. And in the manner of a fairytale it is brilliantly colorful - Danny Boyle succeeds in turning the slums of Mumbai into a patchwork of bright, exotic shades. The way the film looks is often its strongest asset.

And let's make no mistake - this is a thoroughly decent film. I don't want you to mistake the cow for beef jerky before I take it into the abbatoir for slaughter. It's a cow. And a good cow. It produces milk. The milk is good. Not Grade-A milk, but it's good milk. You can put it on your Corn-Flakes. It does the job.

Also, I think special mention should be given to Anil Kapoor's pronunciation of 'millionaire', as evidenced in the above trailer. It's fun and it's funny every time he says it.

But it's the very premise of Slumdog that bothers me. I understand that this is an adaptation from an Indian story by an Indian writer, but to me it reeks of Anglocentricity. The British writer-director-star team make this a movie that appears to be cashing in on the growing thirst for accessible films set in foreign lands addressing global issues and could even be accused of cashing in on the astounding audience figures for Indian movies.

The British writer-director-star team are: Simon Beaufoy (right), Danny Boyle and Dev Patel (left). Mr. Patel delivers a performance duller than all three Harry Potter stars put together (and that's quite dull), single-handedly killing the movie's romance with his sheer unlikeability. Beaufoy, who appears to be receiving most of the praise, is the great culprit for me. He turns an unlikely, but potentially cathartic story into TV-drama-worthy flatness and together with Boyle really fails to deliver opportunities for empathy and for the character's vital emotions to come through. Boyle's style, for all its merits (especially evidenced in the film's trailers), gets in the way of the story as often as it works with it. I still don't rate him very highly and I think he looks far too much like Morrissey.

See?

OK, but the premise. Here's what's wrong with it: this is a British-grown Indian drama, which literally touts a European solution (the TV show) to the Indian class problem. Doesn't it evoke just a little bit of colonial patronization? If that seems a bit of a stretch, perhaps consider the film's lack of interest in either representing or providing solutions to the national issues it highlights. I believe, with a dash of hope, that an Indian filmmaker would have tackled it differently and I believe that lack of reality, depth and maybe even of passion is its greatest flaw.

This brings me back to the trailer. The music for the movie is one of its greatest assets and even includes a popular track by M.I.A. She's badass, no mistaking it. Paper Planes would be perfect for a trailer. Instead, Warner Bros or whoever dig up the orchestral pomp of Sigur Ros' most bland record. Tone it down, europeanize it. Likewise, the replacement of 'It Is Written' with 'It Is Destiny' has the effect of making the film's message western friendly. Perhaps 'It Is Written' has too much of an Islamic connotation.

Slumdog Millionaire simply ends up telling a folksy fairytale. And while it tells it well at times, it’s still a meagre fairytale without any of the inspiring wonderment of Disney, the terrific realism of City of God (9.4), or the emotional tug of Britain's working-class dramas like Billy Elliot (8.2).

It’s simple lovely that globalized dramas are becoming a sort of genre, but as they become more frequent, the quality is likely to dip as it does here.

Snoggles Score; 7.6

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 14.1

2009-01-13T16:13:00.000-08:00

If you ever come to LA and you want to see a whole bunch of celebrities, I'd recommend that you walk up and down Beverly Drive, between Olympic and Santa Monica Blvds, for a few hours.

Today, within about 10 minutes of each other, we spotted both Milo Ventimiglia and Mackenzie Crook. I was waiting for Sausage outside the Beverly Drive branch of Victoria's Secret when Milo walked by, surprisingly short and regular-looking, he walked down the road and into a fancy shirt emporium (whose name escapes me).

After recovering from the shock of seeing Milo (although Sausage didn't quite see him),
we wandered south on Beverly, only to see Mr. Crook amble past and slink into a Starbucks. I squeezed Sausage's hand and attempted to direct her attention to the slender chap to our right, and this time her eyes caught him full bosh in the gob - so I didn't have to feel like a celeb-spotting loner.

Props to Beverly Drive, coming up trumps once more.

Who's A President? Federal Interrogations

2009-01-12T22:07:00.001-08:00

I'm going to be interviewed tomorrow by a federal employee, on the same day that Hillary Clinton's doing the same thing. I have done nothing wrong, like Hillary, although I feel I will be pressured for things I haven't done quite right, just like Mrs. Clinton, and things that I've been doing perfectly right, but which might appear suspicious to suspicious eyes.

I hope HRC and myself do well out of this process. I'm reminded that, despite the hopeful aura surrounding Obama's inauguration, these remain dark times for this country and we're both caught up in the flak (like she was in Bosnia that time, while I was in hospital with meningitis).

Pray for us, babies. Pray for America.

Oscar Rundown: Les Globes D'Or

2009-01-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

Fucking Golden Globes.

Who votes for them? Bunch of journos based in Hollywood from all round the world? Why do we care? I mean, why not start an awards ceremony based on the votes of Starbucks employees based in Hollywood? Why not start an awards ceremony based on Brazil-nut farmers in Upper Volta?

Load of bollocks.

I'm sitting just down the road from where they're happening. I'm in Hollywood. I'm from England. Let me tell them what I think of their bullshit awards ceremony.

Oscar Rundown: Burn After Reading

2009-01-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

There was once something mystical, mythical and meticulous about Coen Brothers movies. I re-watched pieces of Millers Crossing (9.4) to write this review, and my what a fine film it is - better than I remembered it, and I remembered it fondly. Aside from making good movies, they made movies that seemed to link together in some sort of oddly omnipotent oevre. They were filled with common traits: exact place and time settings, fat men bawling, fat women screaming, strange haircuts, purposefully mispoken lines, Shakespearean protagonists, face-punching scenes (scenes wholly devoted to the punching of the face), protege relationships, holocaust references, homosexual undercurrents, slapstick comedy, bloody twists...yada yada yada.

After The Man Who Wasn't There (9.2), things went a bit awry. The duo who turned down the first Batman movie (amongst other big-time Hollywood offers) because they 'just wanted to do their own thing', a vague paraphrase, joined with capital-H-for-Hollywood surfer-dude Brian Grazer to make Intolerable Cruelty (6.5) and The Ladykillers (6.8), which were both unintentionally intolerable (or, at the very least, not great). Since then, they've raised themselves from their unfortunate mire with No Country for Old Men (8.8) which, while hardly a return to supreme form, was certainly a big step up.

I was glad to see that this year brought us the first entirely original Coen Brothers movie since the aforementioned 'Man' (their next movie is about another 'man', although this one is 'there' and is apparantly serious about it). And here's the usual trailer in lieu of plot, to ruin all the funny bits:

Yes! Clooney, Pitt, McDormand, Malkovich, Richard Jenkins, Tilda Swinton, J.K. Simmons - sounds promising.

Here's 3 things what's wrong with it: 1) Frances McDormand is acting in another movie. I think it's Raising Arizona (7.6) or Fargo (9.8) or something. It's not this one. And everyone else is either struggling or unwilling to keep up with her high-strung, hyperactive mannerisms. I think part of the problem is that the part doesn't really suit her. Her career has been plagued by poor casting decisions, which is unusual for someone as versatile as she is. This year, she also manage to spoil the otherwise edible Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day (3.5), with a severely patchy accent and a glum performance.

2) The storyline is too often too confusing to follow (and not in a good way). Now, this is a criticism I've heard levelled at Coen Brothers movies I love. Screwball, zany plots are part of their oeuvre, but this is just a bit of a jumble sale for throwaway gags and stringy narratives. Normally, the Coen's brilliant main characters plaster over the plotholes, but here there's no main character. Again, they're not strangers to ensemble pieces, but there's always a protagonist of some kind. Here, I don't know whether I'm supposed to be watching Clooney, Pitt, McDormand or Richard Jenkins and I feel like there's too many stars, shining in their roles, to make it a true ensemble piece.

3) Emmanuel Lubezski and other things. They need Roger Deakins back (and I believe they have him back for their next movie). Occasionally it harkens back to classic Coen iconography - tracking shots of walking feet (Hudsucker Proxy), or soulless domesticity (Fargo), flubber-gubbing (O Brother Where Art Thou) - but it lacks the gorgeous locations and the subtle drama of those movies. Lubezski doesn't seem to have Deakins' knack for making things look colorful and strange.

But somehow it's still a good film. A very funny, very enjoyable film. Brad Pitt is occasionally the lynchpin of the operation - delivering the kind of comic scenes that make you wish he'd devoted his career to the task at hand. He takes a hand from Clooney as an established actor, entirely unconcerned about his putative legacy, quite willing to look like a moron.

Meanwhile, the movie actually appears to be about something: there's a terrific sadness beneath the comedy - everyone's so horribly desperate, to be listened to and to be loved. It's like it started out as a movie about unintelligent intelligence operations and became a movie about how sad everyone is.

In that way, it's unique. From spy movie to chamber drama. And if nothing else, we should expect to rely on the Coen Brothers to churn out unique shit every once in a while. I don't expect it to be nominated for any Oscars whatsoever, never mind win them.

Snoggles Score; 8.5

Oscar Rundown: Synecdoche, New York

2009-01-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

The studios have got all their contemporary bases covered for 2008: Milk takes care of the political action of the year; Dark Knight seems vaguely analagous to the war on terror; WALL-E takes care of the dystopian futurism that I'm hearing all over NPR; Burn After Reading makes a mockery of intelligence services who are lately making a mockery of themselves; while Frozen River, The Visitor and Slumdog Millionaire go hard at the less savory elements of globalization in various fashions.

It's probably not a good year for Charlie Kaufman to direct for the first time, with his most introverted, solipsistic movie yet - a movie about a theatre director who uses a grant to fund a futile play based on his own life, which inevitably, eventually includes an actor playing a man using a grant to fund an epic play based on his own life. Like most Kaufman characters, the director is not particularly interesting to begin with, so the movie consists of plenty of bodily fluid analysis, replaying of uncomfortable conversations and difficult sexual encounters, including one with his own daughter. The director's project runs for years (a whole lifetime, in fact), during which time he becomes completely out of touch with the world and with his family.

Here's the trailer if only to fill some space:

It's actually funnier than the trailer makes it look, which is quite often the case for intelligent comedies - trailer editors just don't seem to be able to figure out how not to make all movies look like Adam Sandler vehicles. And I think the fact that it's funny is probably what makes this movie the roaring success that it is - because without humor, this would be like Bergman without the pretty images.

So far, I've got this down as my Best Picture pic, and my movie of the year and here's the main reason why: the feeling when you walk out of the movie theatre, or turn off the DVD player having watched this movie is unlike any other movie that will be considered for the Oscars this year. The effect is rather like waking up the morning after a night of nibbling on gently hallucinagenic drugs - disorienting, sure, but not unpleasantly so for the memory of all that probably passed before your eyes during that hallucinatory experience.

The organized jumble of time frames, realities and characters really fuck up one's mind. I don't know a better way to put that. The effect of seeing scenes play out twice in the space of 2 hours, with almost every character, including the real ones (if that makes sense), being played by more than one person, and so many scenes played out more than once, with several leaps of around 20 years, is absurdly disquieting. It's very rare to feel the way you feel after you watch Synecdoche - it's not something Kaufman's done for me before, and even David Lynch hasn't quite made me feel so...odd.

I suppose it's important to say that Kaufman's stories often depend on the stregnth of the actor playing the protagonist. It's why I wasn't really bowled over by Adaptation (8.4). Philip Seymour Hoffman is a dream casting for this role - I don't think there's anyone else in Hollywood who would've worked as well. But I really wonder where his career is going to go. I dunno if you can carry on playing the characters he's playing and it not become tedious. Anyhow, that's an aside.

Give me a movie this year that said as much about humanity, art, America, family, embodiment and death, with such a solid, honest philosophical conviction. I don't think you'll find one. There's enough in this movie for an undergraduate dissertation. I just can't be bothered to write one. Seems a bit, I dunno, futile.

Snoggle Score: 9.2

Oscar Rundown (and down and down): The Dark Knight

2008-12-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

d. Christopher Nolan (smug bastard pictured right) w. Christopher and Jonathan Nolan

This could be upsetting. My opinion of The Dark Knight has already upset at least one person and it's likely to upset others before it's finished. A quick revue of the prevailing blurbographical consensus finds the film largely praised for its production values, lauded for its clever plot and touted for wholesale Oscar haulage (does any of that make any sense at all?). The film is currently number 4 on IMDB's Top 250 (based on user rankings) - just behind Godfather Part II (Snoggles Score: 9.4) and ahead of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (10). And it's not the case that a smaller sample of votes has skewed the ratings - the film has received as many votes as any of the top 10 and is likely to receive more votes than any film on imdb. I added my own rating to the mix, but it seemed to affect the ranking very little.

I find myself in the camp of The New Yorker's David Denby and David Edelstein of NPR, whose lack of enthusiasm for the film didn't prevent them from brashly proferring their recalcitrant attitudes (es tut mir leid, I woke up with a Thesaurus in my gob). Here's my cogent summary before the grand exposition (or should that be deposition): Great film, this is not. Stop reading now if you're uninterested in knowing why.

Heath Ledger, the Joker no one's laughing at
Like the final Lord of the Rings installment (8.2), Dark Knight has landed into a relatively dank year for movies and has thus been replete with hyperbolic Oscar ballyhoo, especially aimed toward the late Heath Ledger ('a kind of Brando', seeming to be the most pervasive lament). Most critics have focused on this performance as the anchor or standard-bearer (or masthead for those still squeamish about mixed metaphors) for the film, so let's not stray from that conventional wisdom. There's no doubt that it's a great performance and in my opinion it's the picture's saving grace (for want of a more unholy phrase). But Heath's acting in another movie from everyone else; and although it might well be a much better movie, it's so obviously out of goose with what the rest of the cast is doing that it occasionally baffles as much as it pleases.

So what are the rest of the cast doing? Christian Bale is simply continuing to make a fine career of playing stylized dullards. Gary Oldman meanwhile, is making a patchy career of stylized, lacklustre mumblers and Aaron Eckhart only seems as convincing as he is convinced of his own lines - not very. Even Maggie Gyllenhaal, for whom I have an abundance of respect, falls a little short in my estimation here. What it all boils down to is that when Ledger’s off-screen, the movie slows and becomes frankly turgid. And while we're on the subject of turgidity, it’s worth remarking that this movie is too heavy with plot.

The Plot (thickens, thickens again, becomes paste, becomes goop, is thrown into the gutter for the stray swine)
**SPOILR ALRT**

Too many characters (that being, folks with names and backstories), too many moronic side-plots with elaborate, labored set-ups and too much bland, inane dialogue. It might seem like a push but I think the film should’ve either been longer - closer to four hours - to give proper time to address all these stories and characters, or they should have been cut. It packs too much in - it’s like watching a marathon episode of Gilmore Girls, only much more stressful. Because it is apparantly rushed, many of the plot devices seem dumb and reaching, where given time they could have been more acceptable. Oldman’s 'death', for instance, seems just pointless and we aren’t given time to accept and empathise with its emotional dimension (party because Oldman is so passive). When Harvey Dent is kidnapped, it’s mentioned out of the blue when we think we’re supposed to be watching something else - it’s an absurd way to treat such a plot element and I wonder (although I’m probably wrong) if the scene where it actually happened was cut for time. I hope so. Because otherwise the writers made either a serious error of judgement or a supreme folly. One might be inclined to call it the latter, thus blaming those brothers Nolan, since the same problem carries into their action scenes.

lights?, camera?, ACTION (who needs lights when you've got an imax camera?)

Completely, needlessly confusing (much like this review), the action sequences are another of the movie's pitfalls. Now, a fan of the movie might say that they are meant to be and that the sense of disorientation is wholly intentional and effective. But there’s a fine line between being disorienting through style and being confusing through excessive style. For me, the fight scenes are just confusing, with all sorts of extraneous shots, apparantly filmed by a child with ADD - constantly bored of its perspective, flitting from POV to POV, from subject to subject. Too much. It doesn’t add up to anything. When you look at a comic strip, you spend time examining the images. You don’t fan through it in 30 seconds (at least, you shouldn’t). I think if one creates comic strip for the screen, one must surely allow the viewer to relish the artistry and majesty of one’s shot choices. Here, a gorgeous crane shot is only given enough time to high-five the retina, when a handshake would have been appreciated.

Making a commment (big fucking whoop)

We now come to the filet mignon of my beefs with this movie, both in terms of how it is presented and how it was received: the sociopolitical commentary it is alleged to convey. In the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Klavan called the movie "a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush" in the war on terror. Liberal hacks from the likes of The New Republic shot back with expressions of bafflement. There seems to have been a rush from both ends of the American political spectrum to brand the movie as a statement.

For many people (not me), there are two movies here: the comic-strip action movie and a dark, political nightmare. The fight between Batman and the Joker is said to represent the troubling relationship between America and its terrorist antagonists and in a key scene - the key scene in the movie to this end - Joker tells Batman, his interregator and torturer, that his way of life means nothing and that they are essentially two sides of the same coin for want of a more suitably Hackneyed expression.

The world presented in Dark Knight is certainly one where people are poor vessels for humanity. The police force are corrupt, untrustworthy, cowardly and moronic (as they generally are in comic strips) and the general public are contempible narcissists - which made me think instantly of Ghostbusters II (4.8), a narrowly worse movie which voiced similar contempt for city folk and their selfish ways, albeit with an attempted comic bent. Both films climax with a message that people, together, can prevail against evil despite their foibles.

Now, I’m all for action movies stepping into the alleged void of American movies dealing with all of our post-9/11 issues (Frozen River did just that this year, quite memorably and subtlely, to little acclaim - a review of that movie will appear here shortly), but that doesn’t mean its approach should be so unquestioningly accepted. Naturally with these things, my own political outlook strongly affects my opinion on the subject. I am more likely to read TNR than the WSJ, and yet I find myself agreeing with Klavan more than I do Christopher Orr.

OK, I have tremendous problems in the first place with a comic strip movie being used as a vehicle for this kind of commentary, especially with regard to the ongoing war on terror. In reality, this conflict is already painted as good vs. pure evil, brazen ideology vs. freedom - black and white. Just like a comic strip. It's no wonder that self-proclaimed liberal and conservative journos are fighting over its political undercurrents like turkey-vultures - the movie is set-up to feed their polemic.

There’s an extent to which the movie seeks to deconstruct those binary values, but for all its moral intellectualising, it never effectively reaches a conclusion, even a deliberately ambiguous conclusion, as to how the Batman-Joker relationship will play out. The Joker is a psychotic anarchist, hell-bent on full-blown, senseless mass-murder and thus only serves to fit the narrow perception of modern terrorism and jihad, as promulgated by the American government, if indeed he is meant to represent said jihad. I should say that I’m not entirely convinced the film does make those connections as completely and directly as they have been read, but its ambiguous thesis is only unsettling, rather than prudent or academic. When it does connect with reality, it does so with labored, rather desperate dialogue that can’t be passed off as comic-strip speak, such as in the aforementioned interrogation scene between Ledger and Bale. I found it frankly embaressing, almost absurdly clunky, albeit admirably played by one half of the ‘dynamic’ duo. But it’s not the only absurdly clunky, overblown scene in the movie.

Absurd, Clunky, Overblown (or yada, yada, yada)

I had to laugh when the mobile phone mapping was introduced as the AT&T-sponsored Big-Brother ethical dilemma. It’s too much. The Nolans are trying to fit all of our apocalyptic nightmares into one epic apocalyptic feast. Meanwhile, there’s something unintentionally funny when the Laurence Fishburne/Tony Todd/Michael Clarke Duncan sound’n’lookalike steps up to represent the convicts on the boat. But the running absurdity is Christian Bale’s strange Batman voice. I just don’t get it. I wonder if anyone does. And they really put the cherry on top with the closing reference to Shane (5.0) for all the movie buffs tugging themselves into a cold stupor on the back row.

The more I write about this movie, the less I like it. So I should probably stop writing about it before I declare it the worst movie of all time, which it quite clearly is not. It’s quite enjoyable, in the same way as I’m sure Iron Man was earlier in the year and Transformers might have been also (I’m yet to see either). But it’s a film that misses all its chances and flubs all its punches and goes down in my book as a coulda been exceptional film, perhaps even a coulda been outstanding film. I think it’s tiptoeing the line between comic strip exaggeration and subtle political commentary are unsatisfying and my resounding message is certainly: “Don’t Believe The Hype”.

Snoggles Score: 6.9

Oscar Rundown: Milk

2008-12-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

d. Gus Van Sant w. Dustin Lance Black

In November 2008, in case you missed it, America elected its first African-American President, a man who saw America's red-blue divisions as a mere construction, running on a platform of change and hope, he was one of the most liberal candidates since Adlai Stevenson. Meanwhile, California - one of the most liberal states in the country - voted overwhelmingly for a proposition that banned gay marriage. Not a bad time for a biopic of Harvey Milk, one of the great civil rights campaigners for one of the last great civil rights issues, on the 30th anniversary of his assasination.

Here's the trailer in lieu of a plotline:

I should probably always start by explaining my preconceived opinions, because they frequently matter much more than what I end up seeing. My introduction to Gus Van Sant wasn't My Own Private Idaho or Drugstore Cowboy, it was Good Will Bloody Hunting. Thus, I have very little respect for the man. Sean Penn has variously repulsed and enthralled me but I prefer his more recent work. I found that Milk was most compelling and affecting when it was brutally honest and its success in this way owes more to Penn than Van Sant.

The opening hour is the meat of a great film, but after that it sort of fizzles out, failing to adequately portray Milk's relationship with his colleague and eventual assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin) and failing to give Brolin the room to give as complex a performance as the role clearly required. Thusly, the film hangs his romantic entanglements like party-popper remnants around the scenes and central character is lost in flashbacks, narrative techniques and showmanship.

Now, that's a harsh review, but it's only the harsh review that a Best Picture category movie like this deserves. It's narrative structure is its biggest failure and Gus Van Sant does a poor job of making us care for all the peripheral characters, relying on a bunch of strong performances to do his job for him (Franco and Hirsch especially). It's an entertaining movie, especially in its first half, but it doesn't last and I don't think it will last as it should have done. Shame.

Snoggles Score: 7.5

Oscar rundown: Gran Torino

2008-12-15T22:42:00.000-08:00

With upwards of 40 movies considered every year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I doubt that very many of the Academy members have the time to watch them all and neither do we. But we're gonna make an effort to opine on as many as we can before the nominations are announced on January 20th.

Presuming at that point, some of our favourite movies aren't mentioned and some of our least favourite movies are (let me tell you now that that's looking very likely), then we'll fill the time until the February 22nd ceremony by offering our unwanted views on the movies that were nominated, but we hadn't reviewed and our bitter diatribes on poor Academy choices.

Alrightee, let's go!

Gran Torino d. Clint Eastwood w. Nick Schenk

I suppose you could say, if you wanted to, that it's Clint being his most Clint since Unforgiven. You could say it's Clint's best movie since Unforgiven. You could say it's Dirty Harry 5! You might even say that it's Million Dollar Baby meets Boyz n The Hood. Well, aren't you glad that you're reading a review written by Snoggles and not the sort of scumbag who say shit like that?

Here's the trailer in lieu of a plot outline.

The Oscar season brings an unusual abundance of movies like this one, that bring old-fashioned storytelling standards to contemporary subjects. While in Naked Gun 33 1/3 every Oscar nominated movie was One Person's Personal Struggle Set Against the Backdrop of a Historical Event, now the formula is: One Man's Internal Struggle Set As A Metaphor For Everything What's Going On Right About Now In America. Last year, In The Valley of Elah was a good example of that template, but this is a much better movie than that'n.

Of the two former actors in Hollywood who regularly craft big, handsome, old-fashioned movies that value story way over style, I know I prefer Eastwood to Ron Howard and I know why. Two words: Bigger Balls. I can't watch too many movies that don't have balls. I start to feel dirty inside - I shower and it won't wash off. But these movies force me to go out and buy a six pack of American beer and drink it before midday. I have no choice.

Clint is in parody mode for the first time in ages (that I've seen), snarling witticisms and stoicisms with a little more knowing irony than is usual - he's on the verge of looking into the camera with a wink and a nod. Shit, I can't wait until he starts doing that. The rest of the cast might not always be up to the task (his own son gives an unfortunate performance as a jaunty wigger), yet somehow the key relationships involved in Walt's transition are entirely convincing and quite moving. I guess that even though the actors aren't good enough for Lear, they maintain enough honesty in their parts to make their performances satsifying.

It's good to see a movie involving itself in the language and issues of the working classes at a time when America's elite has fiscally soiled itself (and everyone beneath it) after on too many oyster and kaviar cocktail parties. It's good to see another vague stab at provoking honest multicultural debate in America after Paul Haggis seemed to deaden the subject. And it's just good to see a movie that isn't afraid to have its character travel on a journey to enlightenment without need for moral ambiguity as a sort of indemnity clause.

I'll avoid spoilers by saying I didn't find the film's climactic conclusion convincing, nor was I particularly enthused by the Jamie Cullum song over the closing credits, but then, it did feel like a 1970s-movie moment. Like Play Misty For Me or The Eiger Sanction. So perhaps it's inspired bearing in mind that Clint is vaguely revisiting his '70s roots with his movie.

Snoggles Score: 8.2

I've no eyes vs. Illinois

2008-12-09T20:08:00.000-08:00

While the whole of America's up in arms about Illinois politics after Ron Blogyerwotsit was caught by the FBI talking like a proper politician, I was rather more taken with a story I spotted on Wired today: Filmmaker Plans to Install Camera In His Eye Socket. Oh boy - it's started. Why aren't we going crazy about that? I thought we were supposed to be obsessed with the future!

I mean, after all - there's a simple solution to the Blagwojerschmitz scandal - Barack Obama returns to take his Senate seat. Joe Biden is crowned President with John McCain in the VP slot, people regain their faith in Illinois politics and the racist nutcases go back into their respective holes. I think Obama'd be up for it. Judging by his pallor on Meet the Press last weekend, with bags under his eyes and a scratchy voice, he's already worked out that the Presidency isn't worth the fighting for. The country might not even be worth the fighting for.

But little cameras in empty eye sockets? Now there's something!

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 13.0

2008-11-25T09:19:00.000-08:00

Walking up Beverly Blvd t'other day we saw Ben Stein; actor, producer, political activist and conservative maniac. Frankly, I knew him best as the slow-lorris dullard from The Wonder Years, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and tons of other movies and TV shows.

I wasn't aware that he was a pro-life, anti-evolution idealogue. Honestly, how can people criticise science as an ideology? This is fundamentalist religion's answer - to decry science as mere theory? Bah.

Bottoms Up! Raiding the Cellar

2008-11-19T21:05:00.000-08:00

We've been raiding the cellar quite frequently, actually, but haven't, as yet, dusted off a wine that's wowed us enough to provoke a little review. My, I, do, use, lots, of commas, innit?

Well, that period of non-provocation est finis. Tonight, we dusted off and are currently drinking Four Wines' Anarchy. My. My, my.

Before our honeymoon road trip through California wine country, we watched Oz Clarke and James May's Wine Adventure show. Oz and James visited a Four Wines site in Paso Robles (although it clearly wasn't the little shack we visited on Vineyard Drive, next to a splendid bakery selling excellent snickerdoodles). We can only sing the praises of Four Wines, from whose free stemless glasses we have been drinking since our honeymoon. All of their wines and tasty, full, fairly complex, but mostly just delicious. Really delicious, vaguely hedonistic (although perfectly refined), entirely American wines.

"Smooth, somewhat chocolatey and oaky. James was right, this is a fucking good wine. You think it'd be harsh on the palate but it's actually quite nice and there's a very unique kind of warmth to it and I can't quite describe but it may be one of the nicest glasses of wine I've ever had. A bit of nuttiness to it in a way. It's hard for me to figure it out. I feel like everytime I take a sip it's a different taste. Always nice though and I think that's a testament to how good it is."
Sausage; 9.2

"Here's a wine I wanna take a mouthful of. I could drink a bottle of it and drive to San Luis Obispo to piss on the Pacific. It's got legs. I however, am legless and this review is done."
Ghet; 9.0

Bottoms Up! 5.0

2008-11-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

It's Barefoot...Part 3!

Whaddya mean you'd forgotten we reviewed wines? Listen, we try to stay regular (in every conceivable way), but we're no alcoholics. In fact, we recently gave up alcohol for a week after a shameful double-display at a prominent LA nightclub. So give us a break, willja?

Shiraz, 13.5%
"I really like it actually. I like how it's soft with almost a plummy taste with a hint of grapefruit. I think it's a nice balance between being pleasantly fruity and still kinda more on the dry side. I like it. I don't think I've had a lot of Shiraz have I? I would like to say that once again, Barefoot have succeeded in making a really nice wine. How do they do it? And where do they grow their grapes?"
Sausage; 8.7

"It's not as impressive as the Merlot or the Cab, but it's another thoroughly decent bottle. It's flaws are that it's slightly less drinkable because it's so dry - a few more glasses than two and my mouth is parched, my stomach is a little turned too. The taste is pure, smokey and tanniny. It'd be a nice one with a meal, but not so great for a night alone in front of the TV."
Ghet; 6.9

Zinfandel, 13.5%
"We chilled it slightly in the fridge, just because. This is a delicious, drinky-drinky wine, for when you just wanna drink wine and do nothing else. Good with Ramen noodles, oh yes. Cool, fresh, every-so-slightly peppery, but above all light. Funnily enough, it's all the things a Zinfandel never is, but it's officially one of my favourite Barefeet."
Ghet; 7.7

"I thought it was very good. Light and fluffy - tastes much nicer than I expected it to. That is all." (Sausage is clearly getting bored of this reviewing nonsense)
Sausage; 7.7

Extra Dry Champagne, 11.5%
"Barefoot actually do a whole range of sparkling wines, but we're not sparkling wine drinkers, so we figured one would suffice to cap off our Barefoot experience. We opened this one in celebration of Barack Obama's election as President of the United States of America and thus it was suitably dry, predictable and satisfying without being world-beating. Basically the way I expect the Obama presidency to play out (Sausage probably doesn't agree)."
Ghet; 6.7

"Made me feel exactly the way champagne is supposed to make one feel - I was happy, emotional and I felt like I could drink it for days. It wasn't too, um, carbonated. It had a nice dry flavor about it, kind of like bubbly birch tree. For the price especially ($5.99) I feel that this was a very good bottle of Champagne."
Sausage; 6.7

That concludes our extensive, exhaustive (and exhausting) round-up of the Barefoot brand. We're still wholly enamored of Barefoot, even if their Sauvignon Blanc sucks. We think they form a perfect introduction to each grape varietal, far far better than your usual supermarket plonk, and we'd recommend them to both non-wine drinkers and amateur wine enthusiasts (like us).

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 12.0

2008-11-08T17:28:00.000-08:00

Wandering home today through Beverly Hills, Sausage and I spotted Darius Danesh leaving the Rite-Aid on Bedford Drive. He had a thing of milk in his hand and, as I rubbernecked in his direction I saw him drinking straight from the bottle. I couldn't really believe that it was him until I found out that, not only is a bit of a thesp these days (Hollywood loves handsome British thesps), but he's going out with that girl from Species, who's bound to be based in Hollywood.

Having performed on stage in the West End and sold millions of records, Darius might feel like he's come a long way from the day he made an arse of himself on ITV's Popstars show back in 2000, but to me and Sausage he'll always be the ponytailed, beardy narcissist who butchered Hit Me Baby One More Time for no reason other than the fact he's in love with his big stupid face.

The Top 10 Republican Counties of 2008

2008-11-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about Presidential elections is the data that spews forth from news outlets and local councils. Thus, although not all of the votes are fully in (and Alaska has not produced county-by-county returns) I was able to find the Top 10 Republican Counties of 2008.

Barack Obama didn't receive more than 12% of the vote in any of these counties, which, perhaps predictably, are mostly situated in the Texas Panhandle. In fact, only 2 of the 10 lie outside Texas and of those 2, Beaver County has a border with Texas and was part of The Republic of Texas. From the easternmost point of longitude on this list, to the westernmost point of longitude is only around 175 miles - incredible, considering that the distance between America's longitudinal extremeties, is approximately 5,228 miles.

However, if this were a top 20 list, that would by no means be the case. In fact, before I read the statistics on Texas, Georgia counties were dominating in a big way, along with those from Nebraska and Kansas.

All in all, 1,098 people from these counties voted for Obama out of the 17,330 who voted, an average of 110 per county. Of course, the populations of these counties vary wildly.

Here they are, with all the info I could find on each one. Excuse the demographics only including the white population, but as I'm sure you'll see, other races represent mere trace amounts and the data for their make-up is negligable. On the rare occasion where the black populous was more than 2%, I included that data.

10. Hansford County, Texas 11.46%
Population in 2007: 5235
Demographics: 97.8% white (of which 42.7% Hispanic)
Median Household Income: $36,216
Unemployment 2007: 3.1%
County Seat: Spearman
239 people voted for Barack Obama in Hansford County. It is one of 46 dry counties in Texas - that means not a single alcoholic beverage can be sold, which means that the electorate are unlikely to vote in favor of the candidate they'd most like to have a beer with. Hansford is the first of five dry counties on our list. It is named after congressman John M. Hansford and was the childhood home of Rex Linn (right), star of CSI: Miami.

9. Motley County, Texas 11.38%
Population 2007: 1,287
Demographics: 93.8% white (of which 15.1% Hispanic)
Median Houehold Income: $29,752
Unemployment: 4.0%
County Seat: Matador
67 people voted for Obama from Motley, another dry county. As a demonstration of its historic dryness, hear ye the sorry tale of Tee Pee City, once bustling western town, now ghost town having been shut-down by ranchers in 1904 for having a bad influence on their cowboys. The county is named after J. William Mottley, one of the sigantures of the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, who died soon after, aged 26 at the Battle of San Jacinto. The County began their existence with the ignominy of misspelling Mottley's name, but I'm sure he doesn't mind. I'm wondering which I'd prefer - to be 26, dead, with a mispelled county named after me; or 26, alive, with no mispelled county named after me. I can't make up my mind.

8. Grant County, Nebraska 11.33%
Population 2000: 747
Demographics: 98.8%
Median Houehold Income: $34,821
County Seat: Hyannis
Only 41 people voted for Obama from Grant County, NE, named for President Ulysses S. Grant. It's very difficult to find out anything about Grant County, since the population is so small and it only seems to contain one incorporated township (Hyannis). However, I can testify that from space, Grant County (and much of the surrounding area) looks like a furrowed brow, or a several damaged carpet.

7. Borden County, Texas 11.2%
Population 2007: 585
Demographics: 97.3% white (of which 17.6% Hispanic)
Median Household Income: $36,817
Unemployment: 4.5%
County Seat: Gail
Obama garnered just 40 votes from the good people of Borden County, TX. Another dry county, it contains another good ghost town - Mesquite (pictured right) and is primarily a ranch county.

6. Oldham County, Texas 11.15%
Population 2007: 2,075
Demographics: 94.3% white (of which 12.9% Hispanic), 2.9% black
Median Household Income: $36,521
Unemployment: 4.0%
County Seat: Vega
102 Oldham County voters picked Obama for President. Perhaps the most poverty stricken county on the list, Oldham is mostly farm country - wheat crops and cattle. The former county seat was a wild western town called Tascosa (pictured above right), which became a ghost town in the late 30s, having been bypassed by the railroad. I promise I'm not trying to make any subtle points by all this ghost town business. I promise. The area around the old ghost town now houses Texas Boys Ranch, whose website claims not to discriminate on the basis of sex. Seems like it should.

5. Beaver County, Oklahoma 10.76%
Population 2000: 5,857
Demographics: 92.71% white
Median Household Income: $36,715
County Seat: Beaver
Part of the Oklahoma Panhandle and the second most populous state on the list, only 265 of Beaver County's electorate turned out for Obama although turnout looks like it was pretty poor. It's another patchwork of farms - the kind of farmers that don't like change, clearly.

4. Glasscock County, Texas 9.39%
Population 2007: 1,174
Demographics: 98.6% white (of which 31.4% Hispanic)
Median Household Income: $42,566
Unemployment: 3.7%
County Seat: Garden City
Surely the best name of the bunch - named after George Washington Glasscock, an early Texan - only 52 Glasscock folks were convinced by Barack Obama. The Southernmost county on the list by the looks of things, Glasscock has a history of being passionately Republican. In 2000, they topped the list of Republican counties for George W. Bush. That Statesman chart is worth a look to compare. Glasscock is one of three counties to make the list again, which wasn't nearly so Texas-heavy 8 years ago.

3. Roberts County, Texas 7.92%
Population 2007: 831
Demographics: 98% White (of which 6.7% Hispanic)
Median Household Income: $54,091
Unemployment: 2.3%
County Seat: Miami
Another dry county, just 41 Roberts County residents voted for Barack Obama. The video below comes from avid YouTuber Rixterkat, who posts videos mostly of heavy machinery in the middle of nowhere or kittens on sofas. I don't know if Rixterkat is from Roberts County, but if I'm right, it was filmed in Roberts County. Kinda gives you an idea of what's not going on down there. Rixterkat's videos are fascinating, by the way.

2. Ochiltree County, Texas 7.85%
Population 2007: 9,587
Demographics: 97% white (of which 42.6% Hispanic)
Median Household Income: $41,835
Unemployment: 2.7%
County Seat: Perryton
The most populous state on the list, Obama gained 243 votes from Ochiltree County. It's dry, as you probably figured and is one of the 3 counties to feature on that aforementioned 2000 list, but it was joint 1st in 2004. However, Obama actually got 2 more votes in Ochiltree than did John Kerry in 2004, which may say more about McCain vs. Bush than Obama vs. Kerry.

1. King County, Texas 5.03%
Population 2007: 291
Demographics: 94.5% white (of which 12.7% Hispanic), 3.8% black
Median Household Income: $41,738
Unemployment: 4.5%
County Seat: Guthrie
My, my. Only 8 people voted for Barack Obama out of the 159 who turned out. If we're to figure that those 8 are the black folks in town, then we can declare the white electorate pretty non-plussed about old Barack. King has one of the lowest populations of any county in America, but plays home to the Pitchfork Ranch, a good old working cattle ranch that's been around over 100 years. Thus, I imagine the bulk of the voters were cowboys. If I were Obama, I'd head down there first before the 2012 campaign. There's going to be a saying in 4 years time (I can just feel it): "Once you've got the cowboys, you've got America".

Here's a little map showing the counties' distribution this year:

Who's A President? Barack Obama, that's who!

2008-11-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

Let's put the two maps side by side, my predictions first, then the results:

North Carolina's not in yet, nor will it be for maybe a month, it's that close. But the Obama folks sound pretty confident about it staying in their pockets, as I predicted.

Actually, I did pretty poorly. I got Montana, Missouri, North Dakota and Indiana entirely wrong. North Dakota wasn't even close. But I think I overestimated the power of the swing. It seemed like those big sky states were swinging Obama's way. Momentum, as John McCain found out, was not a big enough factor in a campaign where solid domestic issues were paramount.

In terms of my coverage predictions, I also entirely overestimated the network's competitive and sensationalist instincts. In fact, watching the hour or 45 mins before California released its results on MSNBC was remarkable. They weren't allowed to call it, even though it was patently clear that Obama had won. Very odd situation.

So, that's the 2008 Presidential election...

America has again proven its ability to produce and elect great, exciting, energizing leaders.
Measure H didn't pass by...68 votes! I bet those Hilton scumbags will try to pretend they didn't hear the result and build their superhotel anyhow. Bastards!
Sadly, Proposition 8 did pass and California is going to have some serious work to do to restore equal rights.
I wish I lived in Kenya - they got a national holiday today.

I'm going to have to find some new entertainment...my life feels so empty...

Ah well, at least the NBA's back. 45th President, perhaps, this guy?:

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.6

2008-11-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

7pm. Iowa goes blue! Woo-hoo! Just as predicted, no surprise. Man, it's looking dark in Phoenix. Chicago looks like a fun place to be.

Too close - Montana.
Too early in Nevada, but Obama leading. Arizona too early.

Oh hey! I forgot! I changed Ohio to blue later on in the night in my predictions! Bingo!

Indiana's gonna go all the way - they're waiting until all the votes come in.

Anyhoo, we're in for a fairly futile waiting game for the next hour. Until California and X (any number of many combinations) can be called, the election can't be called. However, Olbermann and Todd are enjoying playing with the numbers, letting viewers know that it's really only a matter of time. This is like watching the fucking BBC it's so impassive.

It's approaching 8pm, here's the map:

I expected Nevada to be blue already. Idaho's not colored in yet.

But there it is, at exactly 8pm - Barack Obama is the President elect. At last.

Now, at, 8:40pm, here's the MSNBC map:

I'm looking forward to comparing with my final prediction. So far, I only got North Dakota wrong.

9:21pm. Still to hear from AK, MO, MT, IN and NC. I'm disappointed by Barack Obama's speech - postmodern in the extreme. Snippets from Sam Cooke, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and JFK (maybe even LBJ, I'll have to do some reading). Dour delivery, unemotional, unexciting. Confirms all that I fear about the man. Not that I'm not pleased he won.

I demand to know the final 5 states. We could have a landslide. They're all in-CREDIBLY close. Obama leads in Montana.

9:31pm. Doris Kearns Goodwin makes a comment about Millard Fillmore - nobody wants to be that kinda President. Chris Matthews guffaws and declares: "Millard Fillmore didn't want to be Millard Fillmore". I hate people dumping on Fillmore. He was a hard-working, lower-class vagabond. It's sheer, petty elitism to decry his achievements. I'm sad to see it on MSNBC.

Final post will cover all the remaining details...

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.5

2008-11-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

6.30pm New Mexico goes blue. They're restraining themselves from saying so, but that's it. Ohio brought it. As I predicted, they called it before 6:30pm.

Florida's coming in SOOOO slow.

HA! Olbermann makes the explicit point that it's clear Obama has won. He points out that it's obvious! But it's clear he's not supposed to be doing so. David Gregory moves swiftly on.

6:37pm. West Virginia for McCain. I had that going red ages ago. Slow release of results, I guess.

Max possible electoral votes for Obama at this stage...388. Let's go for that!

6:45pm. Right about now, I predicted Flordia coming through for Obama. Chuck Todd's talking about it, but the results remain slow. So I was premature.

6.50pm. Geraldine Ferraro just effectively called it for Obama on Fox11. She's trying hard not to giggle.

Colorado's not in yet? It should be in already!

Texas goes red. ABout bloody time!

Nate Silver calls it for Obama!

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.4

2008-11-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

6pm. I predicted instant calling of RI, NY, MN and WI for Obama and I was fully correct there, plus Michigan has finally been called for Obama. LA, WY, KS, SD, AZ and NE I predicted going for McCain, only 2 came in - KS and WY PLUS North Dakota.

Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana too close to call!
Texas, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nebraska, South Dakota, Ohio still initially too early.

So, North Dakota goes. I predicted it going for Obama (eventually). That's my first major error.

6:07pm. Arkansas called for McCain, finally. Now, I said CBS would FINALLY call Arkansas at 6:23pm, so that's not a bad prediction. It's surprising it took so long.

Indiana and North Carolina are both close and looking good for Obama. Any of those break blue, it's game over, because he would only need CA, OR, WA and IA to win. He's almost 100% sure to grab those.

6:17pm. This is the stage at which I expected NBC to be calling it for Obama. Well, bollocks to that. Mostly because Virginia hasn't said peep.

However, if North Carolina, Colorado, Ohio or Florida are called in the next half hour, it's lights out McCain and I SHALL BE VINDICATED!

6:22pm. Ohio goes Obama! That's it! He only needs CA, OR, WA and HI! Done and dusted! Of course, that's IF Ohio actually goes blue. In terms of my prediction, I called Ohio red, so bugger it!

Louisiana goes red. Big deal.

Here's the uncautious MSNBC map:

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.3

2008-11-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

5:30pm Someone said "shades of 2000" concerning Florida - they're counting absentee ballots. Why do these voting systems have to be so fucking complicated? It's piss simple!

Online assessors still aren't calling Pennsylvania or New Hampshire for Obama. They're the new breed of political analyst - very skeptical, cautious, pragmatism not sensationalist.

Christ! David Gregory just said that Arkansas is TOO CLOSE TO CALL! Can you believe it? I predicted that happening, but on another network. Meanwhile, Alabama goes red - no surprise, apart from how late it is.

Virginia's still much too close to call. I'm a little surprised, but I think they're waiting for some key counties' results. Chris Matthews mentions the fact Virginia was the capital of the confederacy.

Here's an incredible fact that no one will want to mention: if Obama takes Ohio or Florida, he's definitely won. There's no realistic way to 270 for McCain.

5:36pm. Georgia goes McCain now. So I was right in terms of the closeness, but wrong concerning when they'd call it.

They're coming thick and fast now. I can hardly keep up. But on the whole, the process has being slower than expected. Networks don't appear to be rushing to draw conclusions on each state, which is entirely contrary to my predictions. Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana (!) and Missouri remain largely uncommented on. They're waiting for solid numbers, clearly. Very solid numbers. Don't want to fuck this one up, boys?

Flicking over briefly, a very sombre mood on Fox11. Can't help but love that.

5:47pm. Chuck Todd reminds viewers that McCain CAN'T lose ANY of the toss-ups if they want to win.

I'm surprised we're still waiting on Indiana - it's clearly close, which isn't good for McCain. Why Texas isn't in, I don't know. Perhaps it will be shortly.

Here's the current, very cautious Politico map:

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.2

2008-11-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

5pm. IL, MA, NJ, CN, DL, ME, MD, NH! and PA!!! all projected for Obama! Biggun! That's huge! Yikes. I did not expect them to call Pennsylvania so early. HUGE! Why's DC not in the column yet? It's guaranteed Obama. It was guaranteed 4 years ago.

TN, MS and OK for McCain. Alabama will too when it comes in. Why's Texas not gone yet?

Too close in Florida, Missouri. Unsuprising. But it sounds like Virginia's becoming the state I thought Florida would be - the hold-out.

I love the MSNBC coverage. Keith Olbermann isn't used to talking to people who aren't on his wavelength and I think he thinks Joe Scarborough is an idiot. I agree.

5:11pm. Shitting crickey! Fox just called the NC Senatorial race against Elizabeth Dole! Big loser!

I'm vaguely on the mark, apart from the early call of PA and NH and the complete lack of a call on Indiana.

Who's A President? Be I Rev. Wright or Be I Rev. Wrong? Pt.1

2008-11-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

I watched the MSNBC coverage of the election online, making notes in comparison with my hour-by-hour predictions of yesterday.

ALL TIMES PST

4pm. They called Kentucky for McCain, Vermont for Obama. Told you.

4:15pm. So the map at this stage doesn't look quite as I expected. Here's what it looks like (map from Politico.com):

South Carolina and Georgia not colored in, so I was wrong on those fronts. But I have no doubt they will be thus colored, shortly...maybe...

4:30pm. I swear MSNBC just called Illinois for Obama on the graphic. Weird! But I haven't seen it pop up since. Perhaps a hallucination.
They're being very conservative in general. Waiting for actual numbers. That's a new trait of this election. Even the networks are unconfident in exit poll numbers. Thus, my wild predictions regarding Ohio and Virginia seem unlikely.
4:45pm. SC goes to McCain. Later than expected. But that says more about MSNBC's coverage than anything else. Still no word on Georgia. WTF?
Unfortunately, Politico aren't yet giving SC to McCain, so the map is unchanged as we approach the biggun.

Pt. 2 coming up.

Who's A President? The Obama Administration: Dangerous Liasons

2008-11-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

Barack Hussein Obama pals around with sycophants. No. What is it? Terrorists. He pals around with terrorists. And Nazis. And Extremists. He's also widely considered to be the first US President with a firm grip on ironic humor.

With that in mind, here's our predictions for the chief members of the Obama administration:

Secretary of State
Louis Farrakhan.
Shits and Giggles.

Secretary of Defense
Pee Wee Herman.
Craps and titters.

Secretary of the Treasury
Johnny Depp.
Treasury. Treasure. Pirates. Pirates of the Caribbean. Jack Sparrow. Johnny Depp. The logic's all there.

Attorney General
Ted Stevens.
What? You think he's unqualified? He knows the law inside and out!

Secretary of the Interior
Bill Ayers.
HAVE THAT AMERICA! HAVE THAT! I DIDN'T PAL AROUND WITH HIM IN CHICAGO! MAYBE I WILL NOW IN WASHINGTON DC! YEAH!

Secretary of Agriculture
Hugh Fernley Whittingstall.
I don't know anyone who knows more about agriculture.

Secretary of Commerce
Tina Baca Del Rio.
Currently, she's the Mayor of Commerce, California. I think she can handle being a fucking secretary. It's effectively a demotion. Plus, look how teeny and cute she is (photo is actual size).

Secretary of Labor
Angelina Jolie.
It is Labor as in, shitting out babies, yeah? Cos she's expert.

Secretary of Education
Sarah Palin.
I don't know anyone who knows more about starting from knowing nothing and learning everything as rapidly as possible.

Secretary of Energy
Mel Gibson.
He's got an oversized mono-kidney. That's when you've got not 2 normal kidneys, but 1 super kidney. That kidney presses on Mel's adrenal gland, giving him an awesome overabundance of hyperactive energy. Apparantly he sleeps for only, like, 3 hours a night or summat. N-R-G!

Secretary for Homeland Security
Chuck Norris.
Ka-pow! Consider that Homeland...BAM...Secure!

Chief of Staff
Gandalf (the White).
Do I need to explain that?

Secretary for the Funniosity of Names
Saxby Chambliss.
I love it! His surname was already Chambliss, and yet his mummy and Daddy elected to name him Saxby! Brilliant! That's what America's all about!

Measure H: The issue of our time

2008-11-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

While the Presidential election may be consuming the masses, and Proposition 8 has California enraptured; the controversial issue of 2008 in Beverly Hills, where Sausage and I reside, is Measure H.

Measure H is a proposition to expand the existing site of the Beverly Hilton and also to build a huge Waldorf Astoria condo complex in the vicinity. Twice in 3 days, our humble door has been knocked upon by those soliciting a 'Yes' vote.

The houses on Beverly Hills' Lower Westside team with 'No on H' and few 'Yes on H' posters. There's a store on Beverly Drive that's been taken over by the 'Yes' campaign to showcase the 'improvements' that the Hilton has in mind. Their argument most pertains to the benefits to Beverly Hills' economy - schools, fire department and hospitals. We weren't aware there was any problem with those schools, fire departments or hospitals. That said, there is another measure designed to provide earthquake-safe improvements to Beverly Hills schools. So maybe the whole place is falling apart.

For the record, I instructed Sausage to vote 'No'. Whether she did or did not, that depends on her mood at the time of filing the ballot. If, somehow, someone in Beverly Hills is reading this, I urge you to vote no. Any vote otherwise is a vote for Paris Hilton.

Who's A President? Sleep through the morrow

2008-11-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

Everyone's asking the question - will the networks have the discipline to wait until the polls close in a state before calling it for either candidate? Plus, will they be able to restrain themselves if say, Obama takes both PA and VA, making McCain's route to 270 electoral votes pretty impossible?

I do believe the networks will be immensely conservative and cautious tomorrow, if not because they don't want to bugger this one up like they did 2000 (and some of them, in 2004), then because they want people to actually give a shit even after they've had their dinner. If Obama clinches too early, folks'll be turning off the TV and going to the pub. No one at NBC wants that.

However, you don't even need to turn on the TV tomorrow. You can go straight to the pub! Snoggles has consulted its fairy godmother, who has looked into her crystal ball and read the tarot cards. Thusly, below is the hour-by-hour rundown of tomorrow's election-night TV coverage - when the polls close in each state and how they will be called by the networks, those unfettered arbiters of democracy.

ALL TIMES PACIFIC

3pm. IN (most), KY (east).
Because the polls aren't closed statewide, the networks won't call either. But they're all basically handing Kentucky to McCain, but saying Indiana looks too close to call.

3:45pm. Fox is first to color Kentucky Red.

4pm. VA, FL, GA, SC, VT, NH (half), IN (rest), KY (west).
Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia go Red on all networks.
Vermont goes blue.
Early polling in New Hampshire makes it look blue, but no certainty. Florida is too close to call, all networks agree. Polling shows mixed results. Tom Brokaw fears another 2000 and reaches for the Pro-Plus.
Virginia looks blue, but no one's calling it. Everyone calls it a key state. Nobody wants to give it to anybody.

4:15pm. With more Indiana results in, Fox calls it Blue, curiously. NBC and CBS hold back on calling Indiana, waiting for results.
NBC remarks on how close their Georgia polls are, considering it's a red state.
Here's how the map looks on most networks:

4:30pm. OH, WV, NC (half).
Desperate to be ballsy, NBC calls Indiana Red. Notes how close both it and Georgia were in their polling data. Then, out of nowhere, Chuck Todd screams 'VIRGINIA GOES TO OBAMA! VIRGINIA GOES TO OBAMA!'
Bob Schieffer shits himself live on air. CBS gives Virginia to Obama. Fox follows suit. Everyone agrees it's a biggy.
All networks are quick to call Ohio and West Virginia for McCain. NBC note that the polling for Ohio was a close, but just outside the margin of error.
Still waiting on New Hampshire (looks blue) and Florida (complete chaos). Fox adamant that Indiana went to Obama.
The map looks like this, all things considered:

And here comes the biggun:

5pm. NH (rest) ME, MA, CT, NJ, DE, MD, DC, PA, TN, AL, MS, MI, IL, MO, KS (most), OK, TX (vast majority), SD (half), ND (some).
CBS, looking to get a jump on, colors New Hampshire Blue. Networks gradually follow suit. Everyone talks it up as a biggy for Obama. A sign that it's gonna be a good night for him.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, DC and Illinois all instantly colored blue.
Michigan goes blue big style - everyone discusses how that one went from being a toss-up to a solid Obama state in no time at all.
Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama are colored red, natch.
Still holding out on Florida, which looks like it's gonna be another complete bastard. No one wants to call Pennsylvania, but they're all agreed that if they do, it's lights out for McCain. They're enjoying the fact that, at present, the electoral votes are about even - 143/134 in Obama's favor.
Everyone trains their beadies on Pennsylvania, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida (with correspondents tearing out their hair and bleary eyed politicos shaking their sorry heads).

5:30pm. AR, NC (rest).
Fox, NBC gives Arkansas to McCain. CBS says it's too close to call (and they can hardly believe they're saying that out loud).
NBC gives Missouri and North Carolina to Obama, declaring that unless McCain delivers Pennsylvania, his night is over.
CBS calls Pennsylvania for Obama. So does Fox.
NBC calls Pennsylvania for Obama as the other networks catch up and agree with their coloring Missouri and North Carolina blue. No one gives McCain a hoot in hell's chance. He has to win Iowa, they say. Sounds unlikely.

5:45pm. Fox is curiously late in calling Indiana for McCain. They're unusually shy about their earlier error.

Here's how that map's a-lookin':

6pm. NY, WI, MN, LA, NM, AZ, CO, WY, NE, SD (rest), ND (rest), RI.
Well, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesotta and Wisconsin are colored blue instantly, obviously. Just as instantly, they give McCain Louisiana, Wyoming, Kansas, South Dakota, Arizona and Nebraska. No word from North Dakota.
NBC calls Colorado for Obama. If Obama just wins California - he's the next President. Everyone agrees that, with Florida too close to call, Colorado is the clincher. It's impossible for McCain.

6:14pm. NBC says Obama looks like the 44th President. Colors New Mexico blue.

6:23pm. CBS calls Arkansas for McCain. Calls Colorado for Obama. Obama looks like the 44th President. Here's the map:

6:40pm. NBC and CBS call Florida for Obama. With 270 votes exactly, they both pronounce him the 44th President of the USA. They predict a large victory.
Fox calls Florida for McCain, but reluctantly calls Colorado for Obama. Says it looks like he's won. Charlie Crist is interviewed, says Fox are crazy - Flordia's gone Obaman.

7pm. NV, UT, ID (most), MT (most), IA.
Iowa, Nevada called Blue. Utah, Idaho called Red. No one wants to call either Montana or North Dakota.
Polling data from Ohio is giving the state to Obama. NBC takes it out of the Red column.
CBS calls Ohio for Obama. Fox does too. NBC is last to do so, just as Fox calls Florida for Obama. He's the 44th President. Hip-hooray.
Here's that mappo:

8pm. CA, OR, WA, HI.
All states that come in are called, by all networks, for Obama.
North Dakota (shock! horror!) goes blue on all networks. My, but it is cold up there. Montana looks to be going the same way.

8:15pm. Montana called for Obama. It's not a landslide, but it'll do.

9pm. AK.
McCain gets the consolation prize. He attacks Sarah Palin with a butter knife.

I'll be posting on the 5th to detail where I was wrong and why. I expect it to be a very brief post.

Who's A President? Losing My Religion

2008-11-02T22:43:00.000-08:00

An unsettling phenomenom has gripped the Snoggles Review office in these last days before the election. Boredom!

And no, not boredom with the election itself, but boredom with the heir presumptive - Barack Obama. He's getting seriously dull and, on occasion, even a little annoying. And after McCain's little SNL skit t'other night, I'm almost willing to hand our endorsement over to Team Maverick.

Let me explain the process by which it came to this:

1) During the debates, Sausage and I were frankly annoyed with how often Obama would repeat: 'let's be clear'. It almost trumped McCain's overuse of; 'my friends'.

2) Obama's tone of voice has been nagging. That colloquial, indignant, shoulder-dropped, crescendo ranting has been like your 2 year old son learning to say 'fuck off': endearing at first, but gets old rather quickly.

3) At the Al Smith dinner, he wasn't funny enough. This is a guy who's supposed to be known for his dry sense of humor (a humor some say he is keeping under wraps in order to get elected). I think Gerald Ford could've done better.

4) His stump speeches haven't improved since January. I'm desperate to get ahold of that Jon Favreau and find out what in hell the kid does. If Barack Obama doesn't give the hardest, most awe-inspiring inaugration speech of all time, the entire world's going to lose their semi. And disappointing folks is often worse than improving upon their very low expectations.

5) Then the recent interview with Jon Stewart showed him as a smug, grinning, unfunny sycophant. It was his most unsuccesful interview to date, if you ask me. Then again, not a good one for Jon, neither.

6) Criticism of Fox News. Now, make no mistake - I can't stand Fox News and am routinely outraged by their coverage of this election and their choice of personnel. However, I can neither see what's to gain from battling them, nor how that reflects positively on Obama's supposedly unifying Presidency. Like it or loath it, Fox is the outlet of the right and if an Obama Presidency seriously wants to reconcile political differences, it could start by not making an enemy of that organization or its passionate supporters.

6) More than anything else though, Obama's a fucking prude. He's the Gordon Brown of American politics - all shrewd Y-front and no silk boxers. He's winning by a considerable margin and yet he's unwilling to take the risk to solidify that lead by being bolshy, commanding and declarative. He's still the lucky candidate, the historical underdog - yet the polls show him as the bloodthirsty Alpha Dog. Why don't he act like one?

Could it be that America's become a nation of pussies?
John McCain's a pussy for sure. Sarah Palin can't be considered a pussy, because she doesn't have the requisite intellect.
Biden...nah. He's no pussy.
Joe the Plumber? Big time Pussy.
Leslie Graham? Pussy.
John Kerry? Pussy.
Bush? Pussy. Cheney? Severe pussy. DEFCON 3 pussy, in fact.

Nation of pussies. There you have it.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 11.0

2008-10-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

We're getting rather good at this.

We popped over to the Landmark Theatre on Pico and Westwood to see Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (8.8 - recommended) and as I waited for Sausage to come out of the bathroom, who did I see head into there but Ray Liotta, star of Goodfellas, mostly a voice actor these days.

I gotta say that Ray looked a bit puffy. I feel like he's looked a bit puffy for a few years now and I'm not sure what you have to do to yourself to make yourself look so puffy. I think he's had some kind of cosmetic surgery that's gone a little bit wrong or something. I dunno. Maybe he's just getting old.

Who's A President? Back to the Future

2008-10-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

When there's very little to say about the election race as it stands, journalists go after the future. And since the 'Can McCain possibly win it?' track is getting old, they've taken to analyzing the prospect of an Obama presidency, predicting Sarah Palin's post-defeat strategy and making retirement plans for John McCain.

One matter that hasn't been talked about often (although I'm by no means the first to mention it), is the future of the Republican Party at large. You might call it, the Elephant in the room (see what I did there? Eh? Eh?). They've split ranks (is that a saying? can you split ranks?), they're headed for big losses in Congress and they're headed for an uncertain future similar to post-Carter Democrats. They've been headed this way for a while, mind you. The last two Presidential elections were insanely close - George W. Bush is the most narrowly elected President in history and 2008 is looking like a landslide for the Democrats. You can't say it wasn't on the cards.

Well, never fear, GOPers. Snoggles is here to light your path to victory in 2016! Simply follow the following instructions and add water:

1. Dump the neo-cons!
It's not that neoconservatism is dead, it's just that it can't be seen to be the forefront of Republican politics anymore - it's not all that popular. All those wars, that economic policy, that media-baiting - no one's buying it. Karl Rove, John Bolton, the Bushes - gone.

2. Cease your obsession with Ronald Reagan
Emphasizing that you're the party of Lincoln, Grant and Theodore Roosevelt might work better. Those are some enduring, iconic political figures without the oddly disasterous economic legacy of Reagan. Young voters will know the older 3 from history classes, but are less likely to have even heard of Reagan, except through their embattled, old, racist grandfather.

3. Stop calling yourselves the Grand Ol' Party
In fact, perhaps make a point of doing a little switcheroo on the public, and calling yourselves the Wee Young Party-Poopers. Pooping on the Democrats party. Somethin' like that, I dunno. Get Frum to come up with something snappy.

4. Don't let Mitt Romney anywhere near the frontline
He's a walking disaster. You've already won Utah. You'll win Utah for another 100 years. You don't need no Mormons with their crazy space-God nonsense. Put him in a room in Boston with a sign on the door reading - 'The Most Important Republican Around'. Give him some magazines to cut up. He'll be happy with that.

5. Get a youthful crop of frontliners
I've got some suggestions (below). It's not so much that all of the party has to change, but just look at the Tory party in Britain. They're touting the same old Buckinghamshire policies, but they've got some shaven, coiffured oiks on their frontbench to tout them for the curmudgeons at the Commonwealth Club. So, here's who you do:

A. Bobby Jindal
No one's racist against Indians - it's an established fact. And there's nothing funnier than an Indian with a Louisiana accent. So he gets the comedy vote. Nobody can believe how young he is, and no one will believe it in 8 years time either.

B. Arnold Schwarzenegger
He can't be President (work on that), but he could well be the most important mouthpiece of the Republican party and a vital component in regaining California as a red state. It might be full of liberals, but it's also got a growing, conservative Latino faction and is traditionally a fiscally conservative state.

C. Mike Huckabee
This guy is actually the only likeable conservative politician around. And he's vital for re-capturing the old conservatives: the fiscal conservatives, libertarians, evangelicals, isolationists, pro-life moderates. He's a voice of reason and his campaign for the nomination for President brought him fans from both ends of the politican spectrum. His Fox show is brilliant.

D. Rob Lowe
Everyone knows he's gagging to become a Republican politician. Let him!

E. Charlie Crist
Frankly, he should've been VP. He might have been everything the party needed. He might have taken Florida, maybe even North Carolina. He's an oddly compelling politician and although he's hardly young, he seems ridiculously ambitious, with strong political abilities. Plus, his surname reminds the base of someone who's rather important to them. And as you've worked so hard to establish in this election - names matter. But first things first, get him a wife. Need to quash those Gay rumors.

6. Notice who's not on the list
Sarah Palin teaches the GOP two things: the so-called Republican base (who are mostly old-style, rural conservatives) are energized by Washington outsiders; and that national politics is not for gormless amateurs.

Palin may improve. She's probably learned a lot from this contest and might continue to learn a lot, until she's learned so much that her mind explodes. But she's never going to be equipped for a run at the Presidency. Not in a hundred years. Put her in an office with a sign on the door reading - 'You Betcha' - and lock her in there. Forever.

OK, Gingrich, I'm charging $700 per suggestion. Paypal or Credit Card?

Who's A President? Joseph Campbell, anyone?

2008-10-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

It is oft noted that Barack Obama's life story, as framed by his own autobiographical books and by fact, fit quite neatly into the stages of the monomyth. Thus, if he wins next week, he joins the ranks of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Dionysus, Babe Ruth, Luke Skywalker, Neo from The Matrix and Harry Potter. Quite a bunch of ranks.

So what can we expect from Obama once he's elected, if indeed he's following the path of the monomyth? Well, I suppose that depends on how you figure his election fits into the monomyth structure.

Let's presume for a moment that Obama's election (I still don't give McCain a hoot in hell), is the apotheosis of his journey. After all, the US Presidency is most powerful elected office one can reasonably expect to hold in the world at the moment - it's something of an apotheosis of power, monomyth or no.

It could, of course, be considered the passing of the first threshold, since this is only really the beginning of Obama's quest (or is it?). However, I would prefer to call his victory over Hillary Clinton the passing of that threshold. Here's a video to remind you how that all went for him:

As I say, I'm not the only one who's aware of this monomyth thang.

So, we're now at the apotheosis. I'm not quite sure how we can define the rebirth section, which should already have happened. Perhaps the renunciation of Rev. Wright? Or maybe just his holiday in Hawaii? Yes, I like that. His holiday in Hawaii. Here's a quick AP summary of that adventure:

Not quite Jonah in the belly of the whale, or being baptised by John the Baptist, but it'll do. He got wet. That's all that matters.

So the election since then has been the classic road of various trials, Sarah Palin is the vile woman he must reject or defeat, or in fact - that woman could be Ann Coulter (pic right) who always refers to him as B.Hussein Obama; then Barack's public expression of pride in his given name becomes the atonement he must make with the man from whom he got his name, his late father.

You following?

So where are we? Rejection of a woman, atonement with father, apotheosis. We're now at the stage where we can analyze the Obama presidency. Here's what's going to happen:

He's going to become a little overwhelmed by the power and perhaps he won't want to use his superpowers to help the little guy - the common man, if you will. He's going to become instantly surrounded by all kinds of evil entities who will try to limit the representative, grassroots government he's attempting to institute and he's going to have to fight these people, but he might initially fail. In fact, he may need to be saved from these evil entities by the American people; the common man - I suspect they'll have to literally march on Washington, storm the White House and save Barack Obama from the lobbyists and Special interests.

The people will thus carry him from the White House and where Barack can establish a new venue for the presidency, more real, more earthly, less detached - perhaps in Anacostia - where he can administer true freedom to his fellow man.

After that, peace will reign and Americans won't need Jesus anymore.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 10.0

2008-10-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

So we were at the Magic Castle last night. No big deal. We both got wasted, Sausage puked on her jacket, I drove home. Very unwise.

But at the start of the night - the sober end of the night - we were very, very excited to see Chris Williams, aka Krazee-Eyez Killa! Oh yeah! The steal-showing star of one of the best Curb episodes ever!

Chris was with friends and, as I've said, we were sober, so we didn't approach him, slap him on the back and tell him how wonderful we thought he was. But I did search the entire Castle looking for him at the end of the night. I didn't find him.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 9.0

2008-10-24T16:19:00.001-07:00

On the corner of Wilshire and Bedford at about 8pm yesterday, cellphone pressed to her ear, short hair, wearing a suit - Karyn Parsons we did see. Like everyone else on earth, we know Karyn as Hillary from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the elder daughter of the Banks, who's two sandwiches short of a picnic, rather than two cups short of a brassiere (see image above).

We don't know what Karyn was doing, walking alone down the dark, desolate boulevard, so late. Perhaps she is a lady of the night these days. I've certainly not seen her in anything since Gulliver's Travels.

Who's A President? Gunpowder, Treason and Plot!

2008-10-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

I dare Barack Obama to declare on Nov 4th - "Tonight John McCain is the candidate afraid to use the word 'victory', and that's because he's a big loser".

I dare you Barack!

If the Junior Senator from Illinois does not take me up on my dare, then I'm afraid we'll have very little to talk about a week from Tuesday. If any network has the balls to call Virginia and Pennsylvania for Obama before 9pm ET, then they'll be starting the party in New York before the polls close in California; the 44th President will be Barack Obama.

So what the hell does a network fill its time with? Counting electoral votes? That's not going to win you any viewers. Interviews with Chuck Todd or Jack Cafferty? Who cares!

I've got a list of solutions for the networks, which I will sell to them for $100 a piece, since I am so hard up right now.

1. Pretend you don't know anything about anything
Literally, just sit there and make comments like - 'America looks pretty tonight', or 'It so nice to be able to talk at a camera', or 'Who's A President? What's a Matzo?' Stop all the scrolling newswire gizmos and turn off all the lights in the studio. Read poetry and hum songs - try and get the audience to guess what they are. Just don't mention the election. Pretend you don't know it's happening.

2. Switch entire focus to Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman
It's the Senate race that everyone's talking about, but no one cares about. So generate some buzz - talk it up as the Celebrity vs. the Politician. Get a panel of three celebs - I suggest Paris Hilton, Jenny McCarthy and Adam Grenier - and a panel of political swabs - how about Karl Rove, Al Gore and Scott McClellan - and get them to shout and scream about which is better, celebrities or politics. Sounds good - I'm jazzed!

3. Bring on New Kids on the Block

There's nothing like a 90s revival to remind the viewer that, even if things seem like they're changing, they're really just becoming the same more than ever before. Follow this up with a short stand-up routine by Eddie Murphy, some American eulogizing from John Wooden, magic from David Copperfield and...dun-dun-dun-daaaaaa...

4. Re-runs of Love American Style

This is precisely what all you fat, ignorant Americans will need, to wash away the bad taste of having elected a black man. That catchy theme tune, that snazzy logo - Aaron Spelling where art thou?

5. Switch coverage to Palau

A famous member of the coalition of the willing, Palau elects its President and all of its congressmen and women on November 4th. Of course, it is 14 hours ahead of the US Eastern Seaboard, so by the time Obama is crowned, the Palauan President will have been decided. However, there's four candidates - Chin, Whipps, Toribiong and Koshiba - and with a population of just 20000 people, fewer than 12000 of whom are eligible voters, there is always the potential for a split decision and a violent revolt against any decision. Fingers crossed for that.

6. Switch coverage to Guy Fawkes Night

Although November 5th is officially Guy Fawkes night, I can guarantee that several bonfires and fireworks displays will be going on across southern England on the day before, especially by villages who want to get the jump on their showboat neighbours (eg. Cuckfield and Lindfield, West Sussex). So I'd like to see David Gregory given the night off from the MSNBC newsroom and sent to some dank, rural outpost in olde England. If Obama has won by 5pm, switch coverage to David with the Guy burning in Winchelsea. There be drama.

Alright, that's six. So, cough up $100 each - Murdoch, Moonves, Zucker, Iger, Kent and...I'll give Jim Lehrer one for free.

Who's a President? Wassa Point?

2008-10-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

Seems like the election over. Seems like John McCain's lost it, or Barack Obama's won it, or whatever.

So, people are talking about scenarios for a McCain victory - the various unlikely ways that he might still bag the presidency. Justin Webb at the BBC seems to think that the only remainging game-changer is terrorism. I'm starting to think that Justin Webb is the least informed person in the media, although he's not alone in that belief.

To quote Sausage's favourite Obama phrase, "let's be clear": there's no reason to think that McCain still dominates the foreign policy sphere, nor crisis management. The debates and the financial crisis proved that.

I'm done talking along these lines - I just don't see a realistic scenario for a McCain victory, even if the world is plunged into nuclear winter by the sleeping inattention of a Pakistani nuclear technician. Besides, that's not realistic. Pakistanis don't sleep and they have never ever been inattentive, any of them, ever.

Thus, I think it's time we roll out our favourite 5 firsts of the Barack Obama Presidency!

1. First Black President
Oh yeah, you knew that. Well fuck me if that doesn't basically make him the most important President in history. Certainly, there have been few Presidents who have fought against such dire social odds to fight their way to the Presidency. Lincoln, Nixon, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson perhaps, but they all had their skin on their side. The African-American community suffered diabolical oppression for about 350 years, they continue to suffer from institutional and constitutional racism and this is a giant leap for blacks worldwide and the American people.

2. First President with a non-European name
Since the Republican's have made his name something of an issue, I see no reason not to make it a positive issue now that he's our President. Look down the line of Presidents: the closest you're gonna get is Martin Van Buren (there on the right - nice beard). Now - he was the first and last President for whom English was a second language. But that's for the future to repeat. With this First, Barack has opened the doors to David Wu, Bobby Jindal, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Doris Matsui, Raul Grijalva (although I'd be surprised if we see him running for President), John Sununu and, oh, I dunno, Louise Slaughter (unfortunate name, fo shizzle).

3. First Northern Democrat President since Civil Rights Act
They thought it couldn't be done. We were told in our American History classes that Democrats have failed to elect a Northern Democrat since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because that's when they lost the South. Johnson was Texan - that helped (so did George Wallace). Carter was Georgian and Clinton was Arkansan. Arkansinian. Arkansassish. I like that. Arkansassish.

4. First President to admit to having taken illegal drugs
And not just weed! "Maybe a little blow", Barack says, and I like the way he says it. It doesn't matter. Everyone takes drugs because drugs are brilliant. Well, that's actually not quite what he said. He didn't say drugs are brilliant, that's just my opinion. And it's important to remind people that drugs have really only been illegal since the 1940s-50s. Jefferson grew opium. He fucking grew it! So there's no precedent for Presidents who grow shit. It's just that they never admitted to having sucked it up since it's been declared against the laww.

5. First President to have been born in Hawaii
And the first to have been born outside the continental United States. Hawaii wasn't even a state until 1959 - when McCain, 22, was serving in the Navy. Of course, McCain would fulfill the non-continental 'First' too, having been born in Panama. But he's not going to win, so that's irrelevant.

More firsts to come, as and when we think of em.

Hall of Cool 5.0

2008-10-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

Entry 5: Jason Robards Jr.

While watching All the President's Men the other night with Sausage, it became abundantly clear to me that something had to be done. Something had to be done to raise the profile of one of America's coolest actors who, while thoroughly respected as a performer and a guy, never really got the kind of parts that would separate him from the ranks of John Candy, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou, John Hurt, Thomas Mitchell and Martin Balsam, the latter of whom he co-stars with in the aforementioned picture. None of these actors are being inducted into the Hall of Cool, but they occupy the same status locum as Robards Jr.: unstarrable background giant. Sure, sure, they all get their moment onscreen in some movie or other, but they remain, somehow inattractable to mainstream audiences and thus continue to languish in the dulldrums.

Jason Robards Jr. brings cool to every picture he's in. In All the President's Men he plays a character who drives Woodstein with his wit and bite. In Once Upon a Time in the West he carries the weight of Western history on his shoulders like he's a Nepalese Sherpa; lending the picture a charm and grace that no actor of his generation could have mustered. In The Ballad of Cable Hogue he literally embodies cool - a man whose ambling lifestyle is an earthy constant despite the vaulting ambitions of mechanical venture.

As the clip below testifies, he's also an incredibly highly respected actor - it's not as if people don't know who he is. It's not even that we particularly wish he were better known - it's more that he's searingly brilliant, without the recognition of your Tom Cruise or your Dustin Hoffman or your Seth Rogan, a malingering arsehole whose fat face will likely grace my wall as a trophy when I take up human hunting in the spring.

He's the second actor to be inducted into the hall, but the first to have had any training. He should have plenty to chat to Bill Hicks about - doubtless Bill will treat him with the gentlemanly grace deserving of one who has served cinema so selflessly in his long career. And judging by the clip, he should also be able to have a game of How Low Can Your Voice Go with Tom Waits.

Welcome Jason Robards! Cool, you be!

Who's a President? Palindromes

2008-10-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

I've wasted my entire evening on this brilliant website where one can build one's own Sarah Palin speech.

Here's my Sarah Palin sextape.
Here's Sarah's Shopping List.

Who's a President? Ain't No Sunshine

2008-10-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

The GOP are making a big whoof out of a duckfart.

Apparantly, during his early days as a Chicago upstart (before graduating to becoming a Washington upstart), Barack Hussein Obama (it's his name people, deal with it! And it means Blessed, Handsome Superhero, so deal with that!) attended a fundraiser, or raised funds with or from or was somewhere in the vicinity of singer-songwriter Bill Withers.

So, here comes Sarah Louise Heath Palin (meaning Wife of Abraham, Warrior, Low-lying woodland, Cuntface - that doesn't even make sense, deal with that!). She is going nuts about it! She wants to know why this isn't being made an issue. She refers to Bill as a domestic terrorist and a 60s radical - apparantly a member of some sort of group of violently repressed Weathermen (Halifax's John Kettley being the founder, of course). I don't know what Bill was doing in the 60s, but if his 70s music tells any kind of story, it wasn't anything very radical. No more radical than, say, Who Is He And What Is He To You?

Sarah wants Barack to talk this up a bit more and be "forthright" about what his relationship with Bill was. I think she's desperate for some erotic story where Bill sang Just the Two of Us into Barack's ear while they fondled each other in front of an ornate marble fireplace.

Enough is Enough! Barack Obama was 9 years old when Bill's first single hit the charts! And no matter what people say, I always enjoyed Bill's voice and I think we could do with more of his easy-going, bouncy, sing-song soul in our lives nowadays instead of all this Alicia Keys and John Legend non-sense.

And really Sarah, just because Bill sang Ain't No Sunshine and Lovely Day, doesn't mean he's an anti-American Weatherman. He's just a fickle forecaster!

Let's leave the elderly African-American musical heroes alone. Let's take it back to the issues. Here's Bill miming his way through with a cringeworthy remix (or what passed for a remix in the 80s) of the aforementioned Lovely Day:

Bottoms Up! 4.0

2008-10-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

So continues are merry jaunt through Barefoot's cellars. Part 2!!

Pinot Grigio
"Easily my favourite Barefoot wine. I'm surprised we haven't written about it yet as I've drank more bottles of this Barefoot wine than any other. It's light, not too dry, somewhat crisp orchid flowers. I don't know what it tastes of, but it tastes good."
Sausage; 8.7

"For a cheap wine, there's a stunning complexity to the flavors here. Cream of grapefruit soup, gentle flowers aromas, yadda yadda yadda. What makes this wine so, so brilliant, isn't its blurb, it is how perfectly drinkable it is and how subtley stimulating. A clear-headed, early December morning, superb, well-priced wine."
Ghet; 8.8

Chardonnay
"A perfectly respectable Chardonnay. It's not the most thrilling, or flavorful of the Barefoot tribe, but it's mellow, easy-going and a good one when you want to drink wine with non-wine-drinking friends. It's funny - if you don't like Chardonnay, especially the cheap Chardonnays, you still might like this one. It's got that gentle, inexact, introductory quality that Barefoot achieves so consistently."
Ghet; 6.8

"Meadow grass...and fresh laundry! It's light and airy, something of a sweet tinge when it first hits your tongue and there's a strange I-don't-know middle taste to it that I can't quite place, but it's very pleasant to drink. Rather like honey-butter. Very nice."
Sausage; 6.5

Cabernet Sauvignon
"You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking that, whatever the relative quality of the wine, Barefoot wines are a superb introduction for wine novices to the various grape varietals. This is an direct, easy, thoroughly drinkable Cabarnet Sauvignon. It's an excellent introduction, especially compared to the excellent Merlot, to the nature of Cabarnet Sauvignon; it's saucey, slightly spicy, thick and thoughtful. A wine for a cool autumnal night. You'd have to spend at least $8 more than the $5 we spent, to get a wine as good as this. Fact."
Ghet; 7.6

"I really liked it. It was rich and warm. Wrapped flavors of barley and chocolate around my tongue - I just adored it. Certainly worthy of its gold medal mark. It will be one I would be happy to drink over and over and over again. Look - even our Pelican enjoyed it!"
Sausage; 7.8

Who's a President? Put your keys in the bowl...

2008-10-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

Swingers! Or, swing states. Or whatever.

There's 10 of them that could go either way (shown east to west, with number of registered voters):

New Hampshire---700,000-------------4 votes
North Carolina-----5.5 million--------15 votes
Virginia--------------4.9 million--------13 votes
Florida---------------11.7 million--------27 votes
Ohio-------------------8.1 million--------20 votes
Michigan-------------7 million-----------17 votes
Indiana---------------4.3 million--------11 votes
Missouri--------------4.1 million---------11 votes
Colorado--------------2.9 million--------9 votes
Nevada----------------1.1 million----------5 votes

The rest can be put into one column or the other, barring any October surprise (and it would have to be as surprising as a photograph of John McCain with his cock in another man, perhaps Sarah Palin (who would be revealed to be a man)).

That means, that the electoral college is currently split 243/163 in Obama's favor, with 270 needed to win

That means, that the election will be decided, not by 130-odd million voters, but by about...49 million

No, no - that's erroneous. Because it doesn't take into account registered Democrats and Republics. We should only be counting independent voters.

That means that the election will be decided, not by 130-odd million voters, but by more like...18 million

That means you can discount national polls. All that matters is those 18 million, how they are affected, swayed, whatever you want to call it, in those battleground states.

Now, McCain is giving up on Michigan, but not Pennsylvania (which we, along with most people now, are calling for Obama). So Obama just needs New Hampshire and EITHER Nevada or Colorado to win (both states are looking pretty hot for him). This is one possible scenario. But Virginia looks to be in Barack's grasp right now, so that's another game winner if Michigan's in the bag.

Right now, frankly, unless McCain takes Pennsylvania (which would take a huge effort on the part of his campaign), things look bleak in terms of the electoral college. He would need to win every other major battleground state - CO, NV, MO, IN, OH, FL, NC and VA (not counting Michigan, which he is backing out of) in order to win. Pennsylvania is this year's Florida/Ohio. Fuck the rest.

Our advanced electoral college prediction:
Obama 291
McCain 247

Bottoms Up! Raiding the Cellar

2008-10-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

We're raiding our cellar to celebrate the uneventful end of the Palin-Biden debate!

The wine we chose is a wine we have never tasted:

Line Shack Pinot Noir 2006, Monterey County, CA 14.2%

A quick whiff reveals a rich texture of dark berries, blackcurrant, pecans, cinnamon and cooked rhubarb. The Sanguine color gives away the fact that this is going to be a thick, fruity feast. Speaking of 'sanguine', Ghet detects a little blood on the palate - that metallic, secretive quality when you lick your own wounds. But don't be put off - that sense is dominated by dark chocolatey cloves and maybe even a light overtone of coffee. It's maybe a touch alcoholic, but that's hardly a complaint. We need alcohol to stay alive, after all.

Sausage declares: "It should only be consumed in a Mahogany colored room with thick, heavy drapes".

Case closed. Nice wine.

Who's a President? Put the riot in patriot.

2008-10-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

I don't want to be one to harp on about a candidate's mental health issues. I won't harp.

I'd like to make a brief point today about one of Sarah Palin's tendencies, revealed tonight in the interview with Katie Couric, that might have wider implications for the millions of patriotic Americans who are aghast at her political inabilities. First, here's the already famous video:

Now, that brief silence at the start of her answer has already been commented on by everyone from MSNBC to the National Review. I'm interested in what she actually says first: "Well, of course, in the great history of America, there have been..."

Stop right there! That's her fallback when she has no clue! Empty-headed, unthinking jingoism. I hate to indict popular American philosophy, make no mistake I'm not an agitator, but I'm wondering if the American people, through the blundering idiocy of this hapless candidate, will start to see through the colorblind lies of the American mythic (because, honestly, no matter what country it is, there's nothing "great" about it's entire history), as presented to them by demagogues like Palin.

I wonder...

Bottoms Up! 3.0

2008-10-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

WANTED!!

The Riven Rock Ranch brand...
For crimes against Oenology
Specifically by it's 2005 Cabarnet Sauvignon terrorist cell

We have never, ever tipped a wine away before. This wine smells like pork, grease and rubbing alcohol. I don't like to be reminded of my time as an altar server, but this plonk sure did it. It's sacramental wine! Low-grade, watered-down sherry. We wouldn't cook with it.
Ghet; 0.4
Sausage; 1.4

Who's a President? Uh'Murikan Eye-Dye-Ots.

2008-09-30T16:14:00.000-07:00

The Tenets of American Idiocy:

1. Freedom of Speech is Full Freedom to Speak Everything

Here's Sarah Palin's speechwriter, explaining why America is so full of idiots:

2. Eloquence is not indicative of intelligence

Maybe not. But Idiocy is indicative of idiots. Why don't we confront idiots when we see them and hear them? 'I'm sorry, Mr. President, but that was just a load of old guff?' OR 'Excuse me, Governor Palin, but you just fed me a melange of overcooked soundbites'.

3. There's no right way to say a word. The English Language is interpretive.

Samuel Johnson is rolling in his grave.

Transcripts of Sarah Palin's comments read like someone who's sure that there's no right way to say what she's saying. I've itallicised phrases and words that I find troubling, confusing, imprecise or like the unenlightened ramblings of a third grade remedial, ie. most of it:

On her comments about Joe Biden's age: Oh no, it's nothing negative at all. He's got a lot of experience and just stating the fact there, that we've been hearing his speeches for all these years. So he's got a tremendous amount of experience and, you know, I'm the new energy, the new face, the new ideas and he's got the experience based on many many years in the Senate and voters are gonna have a choice there of what it is that they want in these next four years.

She seems particularly confused about the difference between 'I' and 'we'; understandable given the obvious fact that she requires a huge team of campaign aides to get her ready for interviews.

On the publications she reads: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where, it's kind of suggested and it seems like, 'Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C. may be thinking and doing when you live up there in Alaska?' Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

That final statement confuses me. Even if Alaska (pictured above left) is "like" a microcosm of America (with its rampant drug crime, vast unoccupied, picturesque, middle-bit and addiction to its fragile economy), how does that pertain to her consumption of news and current affairs? This is another 'I look out my window for the facts' response. Here was the first example of said response:

On Alaskan foreign policy: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

Exactitude is not your average American's forte. Hence, the overuse of 'you know', 'like' and 'kinda'. But it's a diconcerting phenomonem when it applies to leaders - both Palin and Bush's hardline, no-blinking, uncompromising worldviews seem to be influenced by the fact that they are so unsure of themselves and how to communicate what they think.

4. People should be allowed to think and say what they want, free from criticism

Now, you may be thinking - they don't think that! Ah, but they do. The teaching of American History and Culture has been so vague in this country for 60 years that American youngsters are now convinced that freedom of speech is speech free from comebacks. Just look at how debateless cable news is, how debateless American politics is, how...wait a minute. Debateless isn't a word! I've got the disease! I'm an American Idiot! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

For a country that so adores its government of 'checks and balances', it makes no effort to check or balance the machinations of its idiotic elites. Language, good grammar and speaking in general is rather loftily regarded back in Britain, but over here it's unimportant. That, my friends, is the source of American Idiocy and the reason that idiots so often rise to power in this country.

That said, even Schwarzenegger was astounded by this British idiot:

Who's a President? Ungaffing Joe Biden

2008-09-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

You may be thinking: Ungaffing Joe Biden? Is that the new Judd Apatow movie? Or perhaps the name of a swarthy, side-saddle rider in a cowboys-and-indians paperback? No, no, you're both wrong - it's merely the title of our post today, which will attempt to unravel 5 of the most famous so-called 'gaffes' committed to record by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DL), who sits rather sullenly at the bottom of the Democratic ticket this fall. Incredibly, Joe has been referred to as "gaffe-prone" by political commentators, but we're going to defend him to the death, because we think Joe Biden is one of the cleanest, brightest, most articulate crackers to come out of D.C. since Henry Clay.

Joe recently admitted that Hillary Clinton "might have been a better [veep] pick".

The real reason this comment is considered a gaffe is because of its implications, not its incorrectness: it is off-message, seems to throw Obama's decision-making into question and doesn't conform to the traditional model of a Presidential candidate talking themselves up as if they built the Pyramids. Well, firstly, I don't see anything wrong with complimenting HRC to the degree that she should, by rights, be VP; it keeps her happy, keeps her fans happy and simultaneously rubs in the fact that she'll never, ever be a member of the Executive branch.

In terms of the tone, after Cheney's antics, we admire a little bit of humility in a candidate and look forward to Biden's restoration of honor in the office of Vice President.

On Obama, Joe said: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

The reason this is considered a gaffe is also because of its implications: Bush also referred to Obama as "attractive" and "articulate" and there's a sense there that both Joe and George are surprised he's both A-words because he's black (I mean - they eat with their toes, for Chrissakes!!). But Bush didn't use the words "first mainstream African-American". So let's break that down...

Joe's wrong on that front. The first mainstream African-Americans were Duke Ellington and Bill Cosby. So, were they articulate? Well, yes, both were highly articulate. Were they bright? Yes, I'd say both were pretty bright. Clean? Yes, they were both noted for their respective respect of personal hygiene. Nice-looking? Well, in his heydey Ellington was quite the ladies man, and Cosby's got a certain adorability about him that a lot of women go for. So here, essentially, is where it all falls apart for Joe. He forgot about Duke Ellington and Bill Cosby. That's not a gaffe! That's just a minor ommission!

Joe asked the wheelchair-bound Missouri politician Chuck Graham to "stand up" at a rally.

So, let me get this straight - you can do it when you're a crazy Southern pastor, but when you're a politician, you just have to let handicaps be handicaps? WTF? Good on Joe, for trying his hand at miracles. It's about time our politicians exercised their talents beyond mere demagoguery.

Joe said that in Delaware, “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

While everyone's been up in arms about Joe's dodgy racial comments, no one has been to Delaware to refute this one. In fact, no one has been to Delaware, ever. I've certainly never met anyone who's been there who doesn't already live there. Well, here at Snoggles, we weren't content with just 'not knowing' like the New York Times and everyone else, so I contacted a friend in Delaware and asked him to take a photo of the employees behind the counter at his local 7/11. Here's what he sent me:

Case closed.

Joe told Katie Couric that "when the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt went on television".

Now, people say strange things to Katie Couric. Just ask Sarah Palin. You only need to look into her eyes to understand why. She's a hypnotist. Let's just get that out of the way - she's a flagrant hypnotist and she's a serious threat to national security.

Nevertheless, people say Joe was dead wrong. They say there wasn't television in 1929 when the stock market crashed. Some say that FDR wasn't even President in 1929. But Joe didn't say he was President! And we've got news for you, whingers: Whatever Roosevelt was doing at the time (I think he was a camel herder in Italian Tripolitania) - he did record an address to the nation and it was broadcast on the only television in the world - in John Logie Baird's basement. It's true as true can be! Here's the video of his 1929 address to prove it:

So look past the word 'gaffe' when you flick through your cable news shows or click through your online outlets - there's more truth to Biden's words than they'd ever have you know.

Perhaps instead of focusing on terms like 'gaffe' and 'off message' we can start looking at words like 'idiot' and 'harbinger of the apocalypse'. But that's another post, another Vice Presidential candidate, and another time.

Until then, then...

Who's a President? Old Bastards 1776-2008

2008-09-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

The above is a graph of the ages of every President of the United States of America since George Washington. Sorry it's a bit small, but I think you can still notice certain spikes. Below are the pictures are of each of those spikes - the eldest Presidents, plus John McCain who, if elected, would be the eldest first-term President. They are William Henry Harrison, James Buchanan, Zachary Taylor, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and, again, John Sidney McCain III.

We like our arbitrary theorums here at Snoggles, so we feel it's worthy to analyze the fact of age in this election. Barack Obama, if elected would be ONE of the youngest - preceded only by Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Ulysses S. Grant. Is that an issue? Is it a coincidence that the above four Presidents are among the most revered Presidents in history? Reagan is revered, of course, but are the other oldies? I think not!

Here's a few age facts to consider:
Median Presidential Age: 54
Mean Presidential Age: 55
Mode Presidential Age: 51/57

Admittedly, these are fairly crude observations: this is only the age of the President at time of first inauguration and does not take into account more elaborate spreads of Presidential ages. However, crude observations, as FoxNews confirms everyday, are as valuable to the public as considered observations. Therefore, we are forced to observe (the above data proves it!) that John McCain is just too old to be the President.

Here's the list, in imperfect age order (due to my long-held belief that there is no way anyone can be anything other than an exact age - you're never 10 and 8 months - you're 10!). Feel free to draw your own conclusions:

Ronald Reagan 69
William Henry Harrison 68
James Buchanan 65
George H.W. Bush 64
Zachary Taylor 64
Dwight D. Eisenhower 63
Andrew Jackson 61
John Adams 61
Gerald R. Ford 61
Harry S Truman 60
James Monroe 58
Thomas Jefferson 57
James Madison 57
George Washington 57
John Quincy Adams 57
Woodrow Wilson 57
Andrew Johnson 56
Richard M. Nixon 56
Benjamin Harrison 55
Warren G. Harding 55
Lyndon B. Johnson 55
George W. Bush 54
Rutherford B. Hayes 54
Martin Van Buren 54
William McKinley 54
Herbert Hoover 54
Abraham Lincoln 52
Jimmy Carter 52
John Tyler 51
Chester A. Arthur 51
William Howard Taft 51
Calvin Coolidge 51
Franklin D. Roosevelt 51
Millard Fillmore 50
James K. Polk 49
James A. Garfield 49
Franklin Pierce 48
Grover Cleveland 47
Ulysses S. Grant 46
Bill Clinton 46
John F. Kennnedy 43
Theodore Roosevelt 42

Who's a President? Mass Debate!

2008-09-26T10:50:00.001-07:00

Some kind of duel is occurring in Mississippi tonight between this old white guy and this youngish black dude. Local authorities were quick to violently suppress all murmurs about socio-historical connotations.

The white guy will use the following weapons: the Semiautomatic .44 Maverick, the Vietnam POW-MASTER 5000, the 'Ronald Reagan' American-Hero Shield and an immaculate, if overused vintage 26 year-old Senator sword. He will be supported by the US Navy, the State of Mississippi and his mascot; an Alaskan moose.

The black dude will be armed with the following as he returns fire: the Change Glock, the Bushwhacker 2001, the Maasai Shield and the Kansas pitchfork. He will be supported tonight by 300000 Germans, Keith Olbermann (6'3") and his mascot; old Delaware Joe (a famous eastern cartoon character).

The duel is said to concern issues of a foreign nature, but rumours abound that the real issue is money and that at some point, that fiscal factor will come to the fore.

A local man, when interviewed by reporters, was said to mutter: "Same old, same old."

Judge Judy volunteered to offer her experience and skills to resolve the financial dispute, but PBS NewsHour's Jim Lehrer stepped in, telling Mississippi press that he "had nothing exactly better to do".

Kick-Off! Who's a President 2008?

2008-09-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

Bugger me sideways and call me Reginald! Snoggles is jus' about ready to launch the tip-off in its electoral coverage for the big ol' Presidential election of the year two-thousand and eight in the twenty-first century after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Starting from tomorrow, along with our continued Hall of Cool, Bottoms Up!, Celebrity Spot, Presidential Profile and Los Angeles non-landmark features (admittedly, some more frequent than others) will be a daily dash of our own perspective of the race (not that race, by the way, is an issue). We didn't step in earlier because, frankly - WE DON'T BELIEVE IN 2 YEARLONG FUCKING ELECTIONS.

You might wonder why we're going political when the internet is so thoroughly bogged-down by individuals proferring their unwanted partisan opinions on weary blogospherical ears. Well, from experience, we've learned that if you're not adding to pollution, you're creating it! So we're intent on adding to all that hot air that's heating up our planet, complexifying our political debate and stultifying our national consensus.

Expect outrage, comment and general anti-Daily Kos banter as we sweep through the coverage and offer our own alcoholic take on the events of the day. Currently one of the campaigns is officially suspended, a debate is scheduled for tomorrow evening and an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions looms on the dark, dustbowl horizon. It doesn't feel like a beginning, but the Mad Hatter said: 'Start at the beginning and when you get to the end, stop', so we will. And this is the beginning, folks! The beginning and the beguine (Palin) of all you've been waiting for!

Start the race! McCain vs. Obama vs. Barr vs. Nader vs. wassername from the Green Party vs. Palin vs. Biden vs. Gonzalez vs. Bush and Pelosi, the tag-team!

Go!

Bottoms Up! 2.0

2008-09-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

We stumbled across the Barefoot brand a little while ago and have fallen rather in love with its cheapness and its consistency. Bottles seem to retail in our hood for between $4.99-6.99. Below is part 1 of our complete review of the Barefoot cellars:

Merlot, 13.5%
"A perfectly respectable, enjoyable Merlot. Inobstrusive, tobacco-ee, toffee flavors with a smooth, unspicy finish. If I only made $5 a day, I could buy this every night and skip dinner - it's that decent."
Ghet; 7.0

"Warm and inviting with light fruity traces offset by something I'm not totally sure what it is. Drinkable and pairable with most dishes. I really like it!"
Sausage; 7.5

Riesling, 11.5%
"Apricot! Apricot! They've got it all apricot! We don't normally drink Riesling, but we acknowledge that it's an underappreciated wine with a bad image (at least, I acknowledge it's underappreciation). However, we do not intend to balance that underappreciation. Barefoot have done well to produce a Riesling that, for me, is drinkable for one glass. And one glass only. And yet, I drank three."
Ghet; 5.5

"Cuttingly sweet. Extreeeeemly strong taste of apricot, with a bit of granite. Giggley and clearly intended for girls. Girls who don't like wine. It's so sweet it makes my teeth hurt."
Sausage; 4.8

Sauvignon Blanc, 13%
"I think this has to be the worst of the Barefoot brand. I've never known a wine to smell of onions and lysol before. Its taste isn't as nasty as its smell, but it's still not pleasant. It's too tangy, alcoholic - almost bitter. Don't ever buy this one. It belongs on your back, not in your belly."
Ghet; 3.6

"This wine is one step up from the average household vinegar. In that respect it helps to clear my sinuses. However, it's seriously lacking in any kind of pleasant taste. It's sharp, tangy and all round dull. But a few points for being alcoholic. Of all the Barefoot wines, this is BY FAR the worst one I've tried."
Sausage; 4.6

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 8.0

2008-09-24T23:20:00.000-07:00

I was driving down Sunset earlier today. The traffic was relatively heavy for the early afternoon. I stopped at a street with no light or crosswalk, I don't remember which, and let a large silver car make a left turn in front of me.

The driver was none other than Bill Maher!

He thanked me, not just with a wave of the hand, nor a nod, but with a fucking thumbs up! A thumbs up! I thought he was about to fucking wink at me! Brilliant!

I think Bill was not only pleased with my prudent driving style but also with the fact that the woman in the 4x4 behind me was waving her hands demonstratively in the direction of my rearviewmirror. Really, woman! Do you so despise Real Time? I think it's alright, even if Bill only contributes to the aboniable sleet of noise deposited on the American people everytime they turn on their news channels.

Thanks for the thumbs up, Bill!

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 7.0

2008-09-21T22:50:00.001-07:00

I'm afraid we're back to the old one-at-a-timing with regards celebrities, snogglers. We saw the venerable Madeleine Stowe in the Pottery Barn on Santa Monica's 3rd Street on Saturday with her presumably daughter and presumably hubsland or partner.

We have seen, and enjoyed Madeleine's performances in The Last of the Mohicans, The Proposition (great, great movie), Twelve Monkeys, Short Cuts (where she's a nudey giggler), and Blink (where's she's a blind).

It's always nice to see nice-looking celebrities in nice places. A lovely addition to our canon.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 6.9!

2008-09-16T22:30:00.000-07:00

We just popped over to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a couple blocks away from our pad, hoping to catch even a fleeting glimpse of Barack Obama, the Presidential candidate whom we officially endorsed a couple months ago. The bad news is...we didn't see Barack. The good news is, we saw all of these people:

1. David Axelrod (pic right) - Obama's Media guy. I've seen him dotted around the microphones surrounding the campaign, mostly in the early days of the primaries. Actually, I thought he was one and the same as the 'lounge' musician David Axelrod. I also thought Obama's chief speechwriter was actually Jon Favreau (they share the name). I was all like - shit, that Favreau really can write! And I was like, shit - that Axelrod's multitalented. But no. No.

2. Robert Gibbs - Obama's Communications dude. In fact, there was a whole Blabber of Campaign executives (Blabber being the collective noun) hanging around where myself and Sausage were stood. We still don't know who most of them were, but Robert Gibbs, like Axelrod, is pretty prominent, so we got him.

3. Sendhil Ramamurthy (pic left) - we presume he was there for the Obama event. He was out front of the hotel, having a drink with a couple of stiff shirts. We thought Sendhil was appaulingly bad in Heroes - an appaulingly bad show - and we felt like telling him so but unfortunately for him, we had celebrities to spot.

4. Barbara Boxer - yeah, I know. Yawn. But Barbara's a cute little politician. A political chihuahua; small and lethal. She was swallowed by the crowd pretty quickly - one of several celebrities to be ushered directly into the venue.

5. Gray Davis - he posed in front of the cameras, waving at them as if that would do him any good. I know very little about him, except that he was succeeded by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is something that should make everyone feel bad, whether they're the Governor or the guy who cleans the shit of the floor at the end of the night in a Memphis 7/11.

6. Ron Howard (pic right) - the little bald savior of Hollywood. I know that nobody's meant to dislike Ron - he makes decent movies, he finances good TV shows, but shit if he doesn't get on my nerves with his all-American oeuvre. I think he sucks the balls of racist Marines.

7. Sarah Silverman - Sausage likes her, which meant that the hour of standing waiting for Barack was almost worth it. I find her one of the most cringeworthy comedians around at the moment. The female equivalent of Dane Cook.

8. Rosario Dawson (pic right) - whoo, I wish I coulda got closer. Rosario was wearing some natty pink heels which clashed with her dress - reeeeespect to that! She was ushered directly into the venue by the head usher of the hotel. Hottest celebrity spot so far, methinks. Sausage might disagree. Actually, the Fonz is pretty hot.

9ish. Gary Sinise - we think. Coulda been anyone with mongol eyes I suppose.

10ishish. Warren Buffet - he's Obama's economics man, so there's good reason for him to have made the trip from Omaha. But quite honestly, 90% of old men who aren't bald look like Warren Buffet. If he hadda got close to me, I would've asked him for $10.

A successful night, all in all.

Bottoms Up!

2008-09-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

Just a little tongue-tickling tantalizer to warm your cockles as we enter the 'fall'...

We just got back from a wine tasting adventure of a lifetime - all the way up through California's various wine producing regions. We're excited to have returned with a whole host of suggestions and opinions which we will present to you all gradually over the course of the next few weeks.

We're also preparing a little feature on one of our favourite cheapo wine producers: Barefoot.

Stay tuned...

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 5.3!

2008-09-11T21:33:00.001-07:00

Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!

We've been away for a month Snogglers, but boy are we back with a vengeance! While we were entertaining out-of-town relatives, we managed to bag a total of 4 celebrities! And 3 of them are the best celebrities you can ever imagine!

1. Henry Franklin Winkler

That's right boyo! I saw The Fonz at the Westwood Ralphs on August 23rd heading back to his car, smiling a big smile right in my face. I managed to direct my family's gaze in his direction before he had a chance to pull off. We are huge fans of Henry, not just because he IS The Fonz, but also for his remarkable, scene-stealing performances as the family lawyer in our favorite recent sitcom Arrested Development.

2. Whit Hertford

At least we think it was Whit. He was getting off California Screamin' in California Adventure, Disneyland's 2nd best park on August 27th. He was very large, with bleached blond hair and with large man-boobs. He didn't look 30 years old, but he did look very unwell. We're pretty confident it was he. I remembered Whit from his scene at the start of Jurassic Park. I was forced to wonder, with my cohorts, why it was that Whit was hanging around in that movie with a bunch of archaeologists and paleontologists. But later in Disneyland we saw...

3. Gordon Ramsay

The man who, after watching his shows, no matter how much I resist, never fails to invigorate me into becoming a sweary, megalomaniac bastard hell-bent on taking over the world. Seriously! He's like the best motivational speaker of all time. He was charging through Disneyland with his wife and kids on a VIP, whistlestop tour. We saw him once going from the train to the Haunted Mansion and a second time as he raced past the line for Indiana Jones (he was close enough to lick!). My sister took a snap of Gordon, but we don't publish it here out of respect for the big dong's privacy.

4. Larry 'fucking' David
Holy mother of Christ! We hit the fucking big time, Snogglers! A couple months ago, shortly after spotting Jonah Hill on Melrose, I told LA to cough up some real celebrities. Well LA just coughed up my Number 1. Larr' was walking down 3rd Street in his home town of Santa Monica on August 29th at about 5pm, slightly unkempt, mouth agape as he passed a crowd of tourists surrounding a break-dancing street show, cap on, clothes comfortable - he might as well have been filming a Curb episode. It's all downhill from here my friends. Jesus Christ himself could show up at my front door right now. I'd be unimpressed. Larry 'fucking' David. Descendent of the King of Kings (King David). Here's a clip to keep you warm. Pretty good, I think you'll agree. Prettay, Prettay, Prettay...well, you get the idea.

Bottoms Up! 1.0

2008-08-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the sparse blogging of late, Snogglers; we've been rather occupied by our nonline lives and have had no time to spot celebrities or identify non-landmarks or profile former Presidents or induct any cool dudes.

What we have had time for, however, is drinking! And lots of it!

We've decided to start rating the wines that we drink each week (or every so often, as it will probably turn out) if only to give ourselves a reminder of what they tasted like. Cos, we tend to forget. Funny that.

We are not wine connoisseurs, as shall be demonstrated, and we live in abject poverty, so the food we eat will never, ever compliment the wine we drink, or vice versa. However, we do enjoy wine verily, are interested in wine culture and shall shortly embark on a trip to wine country from which we expect to return completely, profoundly and indelibly changed.

Black Ridge, Cabernet Sauvignon, Lodi, 13%
"I would say while a rather husky wine, I thought the smoothness at which the Cab collected around my palate was intruiging, considering the heaviness of the flavor. It has a strange balance of potency with the classic mundane red wine taste that I like. I thought it was quite good with Ramen Noodles. But then again, most wines are! The pretty label on the bottle is an added plus."
Sausage; 7.5

"I bought it at Whole Foods, where it was recommended as decent, affordable plonk. It might smell of varnish, but it's a drinkable Cab, albeit with a slight aftertaste of leather. Hints of redcurrant and licorice. Actually, no. No, it's not nice at all. It tastes like crap Livingston. I ate this with Ramen Noodles too, with Beef Flavoured MSG, which wasn't a good idea. I think the MSG has killed my taste buds. Therefore I shall never know whether this would have tasted nicer, or worser with a different dinner. I'm guessing nicer."
Ghet; 5.4

Oak Grove, Petite Sirah, 2005 Reserve, San Martin, 13%
"A lovely, smooth wine. Our first ever Petite Sirah and it was a fine introduction. Very easy to drink and not at all complicated. A nice, genteel wine for a warm, summer evening."
Ghet; 7.2

Robert Mondavi Private Selection, Cabernet Sauvignon, 2006, Woodbridge, 13.5%
"We bought this because it was marked down to almost half price. It was certainly worth the price we paid - a fragrant, spicy Cab - and it had that Mondavi flavor. It's a peoples' wine - approachable like a friendly dachshund, with the vague stateliness of a Bloodhound."
Ghet; 6.9

Meridian Vineyards, Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005, Napa, 13.5%
"Cheap and cheerful, but a slightly acrid aftertaste. We won't be buying it again. It doesn't even have a freaking fancy label!"
Sausage; 6.7

Paso Creek, Merlot, 2005, Paso Robles, 13.5%
"Very nice indeed. All the smoothness and ease you expect from Merlot with a little spice, and Pear-kinda citrus scents. Delicious - we drank it in a couple hours. And although you can't tell in the photot, the label is embossed, which is lots of fun to run your fingers over."
Sausage; 8.0

Smooking Loon, Syrah, 2006, Napa, 13.5%
"It's not quite as good as Ghet makes it out to be below. Quite a heavy, rich wine. We don't often drink Syrah. Ghet says it tasted kind of like Smoke, but the name may have put that idea in his head. We were mildly impressed. Our local Ralphs seem desperate to flog this company's wines lately."
Sausage; 7.0

NB. The scores we give wines are not joint decisions and reflect our own, personal scale for quality.

Snoggles Presidential Endorsement!

2008-08-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

OK, so...

It's what the entire world has been waiting for, especially the sovereign nation of Tuvalu: The Snoggles Presidential Endorsement.

We've remained pretty tight-lipped about the entire thing, but we've finally come to a conclusion - our chosen candidate, and the candidate we recommend to our readership, is Illinois Senator Barry O'Bammer.

Our reason? He's Irish! Both Sausage and I have a rich Irish heritage that dates back before the famine, before Oliver Cromwell and King Billy, before even there were any people were living on the Island, or before there were rocks in a field in Donegal, before Ireland became detached from what is now Great Britain, before the Earth became separated from other matter so many billion years ago. We really are very Irish.

And what's there not to like about Irish Presidents? Let's just look at a few Presidents who had distant ties to the Irish:

1) John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The most heroic President of all time. He faced off with the Soviet Union, averted nuclear armaggedon and instigated the Civil Rights Act, finally providing the equality the constitution demanded.

2) ummm...no. Actually, that's it! Kennedy and then no one. Sure, sure - Ronald Reagan had a touch of Irish in him - but I'm sure we've all been touched by the Irish at some time or other. And all those Presidents with Scots-Irish ancestry don't count. Because they are Protestants.

So how can a country justify having only one President from the country whose people were the first white folks to land there? Huh? Yeah - even before the Vikings and Christopher Columbus, but not before those pesky Chinese (are they white?), evidence shows that Irish monks rowed themselves (because the Irish never did things the hard way) to the East Coast, where they were probably gobbled up by Natives.

Here at Snoggles, we say - Barry's our boy! Change was always an Irish platform! Sure, don't Irish people change their socks every other day? Don't Irish people change which side of the road they're driving on according to the quality of the road?

Some people say - 'he's black! he can't be Irish' - or - 'He's Muslim, isn't he?' To which I say sure! But he's Black Irish, as Black as burnt peat, and rumour has it - he's a Catholic Muslim, not a Protestant one.

So rally with Snoggles this November for Barry O'Bammer! The most Irish President in HISTORY!

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 4.0

2008-07-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

The L.A. gods smiled upon me just now. My car was parked in someone else's spot (because some bastard parked his motorcycle in mine) so I had to move it. As I pulled up into the 1 hour parking zone (that bike had better be gone in an hour), I noticed a slightly paranoid looking chap parking on t'other side of McCarty Drive. Twas Tony Shalhoub! Hooraaayyyy!

At last! A celebrity that I WANT to see. No more B-list losers who I struggle to place for about 2 days. We admire Tony for is thankless work in the rubbish TV show Monk, for his unique performances in the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There, and for walking (when I saw him) exactly like you imagine he would walk. All hunched up and full of uncertainty. He had a script in his hands. I hope he gets the part.

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 3.0

2008-07-08T16:48:00.000-07:00

We saw Jonah Hill, the star of Superbad, on Melrose this weekend just past, strolling along merrily with a Dodgers cap on and a girl in his hand. We have not seen any of his movies, so he's as meaningless to us as the Johnny Rockets hot dog we were munching on at the moment we saw him. Actually, only I was eating a hot dog. I think Sausage was eating a burger. I had relish and onion on my hot dog. It was very nice and I would recommend Johnny Rockets in general. I think Jonah may have looked over at my hot dog longingly. I hear he's on a big fat bastard's diet. I would also recommend Bob's Big Boy in Burbank, which we visited over the weekend too. I always appreciate any venue with plenty of B's in its name.

Here's a list of the types of celebrities we would like to see:

Hulk Hogan
Will Smith
Clint Eastwood
Jim Carrey
Alice Cooper
Steve Carrel
Angelina Jolie
Dennis Hopper
Pamela Anderson
Tom Cruise
David Beckham

You know - people with a, how you say, resume? Come on Los Angeles! Show us the fucking money!

Snoggles Celebrity Spot 2.0

2008-06-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

Clearly, Beverly Drive is where Sausage and I should be spending our time if we want to spot celebrities. T'other night, we saw Peter Berg crossing Wilshire, with his dinner jacket slung over his shoulder, top button unbuttoned, talking on a cellphone like the big-time Hollywood actor/director/producer that he is these days.

It took me some time to remember where I had seen him before, resulting in a desperate imdb search lasting 2 full days with nothing to base the search on except a large forehead and a skinny face. It was Collateral what did it.

I was unexcited to have spotted Peter at the time and I remain unexcited. Bring on the A-list!

Hall of Cool 4.0

2008-06-21T15:10:00.000-07:00

Entry 4: Richard Dawkins

I have not read The God Delusion nor do I intend to. I don't think it's meant for the likes of me, who were quick to fathom at some point in their teens that the likelihood of the world having been created by a supreme being was extraordinarily slim, and that organized religion was too often a tool for training the mind to ignore established fact. At 14 or 15, along with a couple of friends, we established the Church of Jimmyism, where Jimmy White was god and nothing in the world existed other than certain items and persons of our delineation - Des Lynam, Dev Malcolm and Jeff Minton being some of our favourites. It is and was my opinion that Jimmyism had as much merit, exhibited as much profundity and warped reality as much as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Islam. It was a nonsense. It was a religion. Or vice versa. Or whatever.

It is fairly easy to elucidate the patent insanity, unreasoning and bigotry of organized religion, but due to the opposition one naturally faces to said argument, it is necessary to do it very well. One man has been recently occupying himself with that unenviable task more than anybody else. He is Professor Richard Dawkins (right).

Again, I have not read his book(s), nor do I intend to. I have come into contact with Dawkins mostly through YouTube videos and newspaper articles. I would be foolish to attempt to either rephrase or summarise Dawkins' arguments (about as foolish as I would be to attempt to give historical accounts of US Presidents), but I was struck by something about his manner and style of delivery that gave me an angle to provide comment through Snoggles:

The boy's coooool. He has a coolness about him. And it's very often his secret weapon in debate or lecture.

No matter which dunderheaded imbecile he has to confront, he remains resolutely calm, measured and polite. When he faces ignorance, he approaches it with the application of reason and seeks always to persuade, not to force. He is presenting a simple truth, the scientific fact of our existence, yet is continually confronted by the illogical, sectarian ramblings of what is, unbelievably, the majority opinion of the Western world. So rarely do I see him approached with a considered counter-argument that I wonder if he wonders if he is the only intelligent man alive, an island unto a sea of loonies. I doubt that he does. He's far too intelligent.

Below I provide a short-clip that really shows why Professor Dawkins belongs in the Hall of Cool. Neil deGrasse Tyson waffles on for about 2 and a half minutes about nothing in particular, and Dawkins responds succinctly and with more than a measure of cool.

I am proud to induct Professor Richard Dawkins into the Hall of Cool. Welcome Professor! Keep your fingers away from Herr Scheitz's mouth! Sit and chat with Bill about the concept of truth in America! The Hall of Cool is officially Godless! Have that Ann Coulter!