Those of you that do not watch The Colbert Report regularly probably aren't up on the latest "scandal" making headlines in the ever-so-ridiculous American news media. (Or, as a young lady of my acquaintance prefers, "ricockulous.") For the first time in goodness-knows-how-long, this blog would like to call attention to the insightful--- yes, I said that--- words of a politician: "I think it's an important thing for members of Congress to be able to participate in a good-natured joke." Somewhere, the spirit of Jonathan Swift is rubbing its ectoplasmic temples in unfathomable agony (why? c.f. the revolting misrepresentation of same here and the last sentence here). It occurs to me that if held to the same nonsensical standard of libel and besmirchment, the Not-So-Good Doctor would surely be publicly excoriated for buggering raccoons in front of schoolchildren (while eating veal in Gestapo garb, of course).
For the record, equally insightful words from the politician at the center of this ricockuolous storm: "If you combine the two together, it's probably even more fun." Ahhh, selah....
Let us consider, for example, poor 
It happens, coincidentally enough that I write this in the same week that I watched The Bridge On The River Kwai again. One of its stars, the stalwart 
Oh, 
March of the Penguins (or "pengweenies," as an ex used to say, as if they were Italian pastas), I have to say, caught me entirely off-guard, despite the terrific word-of-mouth it received (and, as usual, the Not-So-Good Doctor was probably the last person in North America to see it). Like Blood Simple, the movie depends heavily on stark imagery, though to a very different end, namely a strikingly sad affirmation of special persistence. The film presents itself not as a documentary but as a love story (its own words), and despite whatever churlish charges of anthropomorphism that might hurled at the film for doing so, it succeeds. It succeeds, in fact, astonishingly. Some of its sequences are as touching as any in more typical love stories: the coupling penguins nestling each other with their beaks, their heads cast downward in a kind of sombriety, is as tender an image as you'll ever see, a quiet celebration of that basic instinct that opposes death so nobly and sometimes so vainly. That the penguins themselves waddle as they do in their march provides a poignant counter-image: their black backs seeming to lope so sadly through the antarctic wilderness, they look like mourners in a ceremonial death march, even if the whole point of their march is not death but life. If this seems a sensitive reading, that's because it probably is. The film reads its subjects with such lyrical sensitivity that it's all but impossible not to follow its lead. There's a sublime austerity to its sadness, as plaintiveness responds against severity with a greater determination than defiance could provide. That's where the movie's poetry lies, and I think only the most viciously cynical could fail to be moved by it, at least partially. 
Until then, though, the characters can indulge in grotesquely cynical platitudes and whinges, the latter from Keaton, the former from the wonderful Frances McDormand, who is utterly wasted, save to deliver a pompous prognostication about sexist double standards and then vanish all-but-completely. The supporting cast really gets short-shrift here, especially Keanu Reeves, and you know things are bad when I start feeling sorry for Keanu Reeves. Here's he stuck in what they used to call the Ralph Bellamy role, as the decent chap who's finally gonna get screwed over simply because he's not the romantic lead. (It's now called the Bill Pullman role, and it remains as thankless as ever.) What's most putrefying about the movie, however, is that it's finally just a public exercise in art as therapy, writer-director Nancy Meyers clearly overidentifying with her heroine to the point that self-flattery becomes personal sanctification, especially as we're supposed to realize how wonderful her heroine is for deigning to receive at last her rakish and repentant suitor, of course against the cliched backdrop of Paris in winter. You see, we're supposed to think she's perfect because she accepts her age and life with someone her own age, a gesture of such supposed romantic munificence as to suggest its inevitability as an ending. After all, every woman in her late 50s would choose Jack Nicholson over Keanu Reeves, even if Keanu's a strapping young doctor in the Hamptons who loves her work and thinks the sun shines out of her surprisingly still-shapely ass. Any self-respecting feminist that doesn't recognize by this point that Meyers is just composing a cinematic paean to herself should probably just apron herself and beginning looking through Barbara Billingsley's boudoir for her bedtime wear. Even Keaton's estimable radiance can't compensate for this vomitously invidious vanity-project: her vivaciousness isn't quite enough to counteract the movie's fundamental vacuousness and its offensively-vituperative inclinations. 
It's a lazy day 'round these parts, the Doc's ambition roughly that of a sloth's. At least, however, I managed to convert a few more CDs to MP3 files so I'm not always fumbling with clutter & clobber. In doing so, though, I wound up listening to Van Morrison's Days Like This for the first time in a very long while. An imperfect but generally underrated album at the time of its release (1995), it's one of those easy Sunday-afternoon albums that grows with repeated listenings. Largely a piece of mellow grooves, it's also a work of restlessness searching for rest, as many Morrison recordings are. Differently, though, this one finds rest (after a fashion, anyway) not in contemplation or nostalgia, but in an expression of carnality with the stepping romanticism of its closing track, "In The Afternoon." It's after that song's bridge that flight is assumed, or rather a kind of dizzied ascent, Morrison's voice alternately soaring and growling as he declares how his lover has got him "rollin' and tumblin' / and talkin' all out of [his] mind." Okay, so the lyrics aren't John Donne, but the inflections and cadences are superb, simultaneously liberated and muted; there's something almost perfectly checked about the delivery, as if the album has somehow shifted from being shaken to being stirred right at its finale. There's also something playfully steeling about it all--- and perfectly appropriate for a Sunday (er) afternoon. Carpe meridianus?
Alas, one supposes it was just a matter of time, but the CBC has decided