The Chicago Humanities Festival is in its 17^th year, having grown from a small, one-day event for Chicago residents to a multi-week festival that draws students from all over the Midwest. My professor had mentioned it last year, and what fun she had at it, and so when she told me that she wished to nominate me for an ACI Fellowship—basically, a way to cover the costs of tickets and lodging—I said yes. For a while, it seemed as though I wouldn’t be selected: I imagined that as a computer science major, I would be a lower priority than other English, History, or Poli. Sci. majors who wished to go.

Despite all that, however, I received a letter in the mail saying I had been chosen, and a few days later, I received a package of tickets, a program brochure, a dorky name tag necklace, and information about special events. I was going after all.

When the time drew near, I was somewhat leary: the previous weekend had been my 4^th anniversary, and I had done enough driving to last me a long time. I was tired. I wanted to spend my weekend sitting in my underwear, drinking coffee and blogging. I knew it was a good opportunity, though, and besides, I had already sent in the forms agreeing to go. I knew that I merely had to overcome my inertia—the sort of mental inertia that prevents me from doing a lot of things and going a lot of places—and I would be fine.

Friday, November 3^rd

I drove up to Chicago with my professor, Dr. Marzec, who I have had for a number of classes in the past, including History of the Language this semester. I met her in the parking lot at 3pm, threw my suitcase in the trunk of her Buick Roadmaster, and we headed up 53N. On the way, she popped in a Tom Waits tape (it was my first exposure to Waits: what a curiously fascinating artist…) and we chatted about books we had recently read. I talked about Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and the problems of translation, which led to a discussion of Walter Kaufman’s excellent translations of Nietzsche. She talked about J.M. Coetzee, though the way she pronounced his name (i.e. correctly) was so different from the way I perceived it when I read Foe that I didn’t realize we were talking about the same author; later, when she talked about Life of Pi, I brought up Foe as another shipwreck-centered tale and the truth was finally revealed. In preparation for Sunday’s presentation by Joyce Carol Oates, she talked about some of the Oates novels she’s read, including Zombie, which is a first-person narrative by a serial killer. In response, I brought up Ellis’ American Psycho, and its disturbing questions about narrator reliability

Once in Chicago, she dropped me off at the hostel, which was to be my accommodations for the weekend. If you know me personally, you understand that the thought of rooming in a hostel, with strangers, made me pucker up a bit, but it turned out not to be so bad. It’s a nice enough place—it was completely redone in 2000—but seemed significantly more quiet and less lively than its website made it out to be (surprise!). There was a cafe attached to it that wasn’t open at any time during my stay; there was little need for it, I suppose, as the hostel was in the middle of downtown, meaning meals were a short walk away.

I got settled in my room, which housed six, and read my book while I waited. Dr. Marzec had invited me to dinner with her daughter and friend, who lived in Chicago, so I was merely waiting for those plans to coalesce. She picked me up at 6:45pm, and we drove north up Lake Shore Drive, getting off on Foster St. Shortly thereafter, an asshole in an RV sheared our car’s sideview mirror on the driver’s side, squeezing past us on the left. Dr. Marzec swore and honked to no avail. I took down the license number and we vowed to file a police report.

Upon getting to her daughter’s apartment, which she shared with her twin brother and as many as two others (the living arrangement weren’t entirely clear), we naturally took several minutes to coo over the pets there, which included a very excited pug, and two cats. It soothed me to know that Dr. Marzec anthropomorphizes pets as much as my family does: the rest of the night was filled with stories about their family, pets, and growing up. For dinner, we were joined by Dr. Marzec’s other daughter, who had recently returned from out of state, where she was working on a big assignment.

We ended up at a tiny Thai restaurant. I’ve never had Thai food before, but it’s similar enough to Chinese food that I was unfazed by it—I order Pad Thai and was just fine, even though I couldn’t finish it at all. Once again, those of you who know me will understand that I felt somewhat awkward, being both the youngest present and the most unfamiliar with the family. Nevertheless, both Dr. Marzec and her daughters are affable and charming, so I had a wonderful time.

We were a little late leaving, and I was supposed to attend a special presentation called “Curiodyssey” at the Field Museum at 10pm. I wasn’t sure what to expect: the schtick for this event (which was preceded by an expensive gala where rich donors could get drunk) was that it was secret and mysterious, although once I arrived, late, I immediately regretted even bothering. In actuality, it was a sort of variety made up of truncated performances that would be occurring on Saturday and Sunday. And that was it. When I arrived and quietly entered, they were in the middle of an excerpt of Bill Morrison’s Decasia a movie made from old, decayed film. Then, a professor of marine biology lectured about octopi, and finally a performance artist named Pamela Z did three pieces.

The most aggravating part of the night was trying to get home: Museum Drive is too far from the hostel to walk, especially since it was a bitterly cold night, and there was a very sudden outpouring of people, all of them wanting taxis. So, after waiting probably 45 minutes in the cold, I finally found a taxi and made my way back to the hostel. After a long phone conversation with Allison in the empty meeting room, trying to warm up my frozen hands and running nose, I washed up and hit the hay. One thing I will credit the hostel with: they provide a Navy-style blanket that rough but warm as all getout.

Saturday, November 4^th

I was awakened the next morning shortly after 6am by a knocking on the door. I raised my head, noticing my roommates stirring as well. I hopped groggily out of bed and opened the door. I was practically blind, but I could tell that it was the girlfriend(?) of one of my roommates, and I shook him awake to let him know, and then staggered back to bed. He left the room, but came back about ten minutes later and climbed back under his covers. I still don’t know what the hell that was all about.

I slept until 8:30, and then showered and headed downstairs to the dining area, where ACI was handing out donuts and orange in exchange for us staying long enough to listen to their spiel about how great the festival is, and how great we are, and how gosh, they’re just so happy that we’re there. I left immediately after, needed coffee like a smack addict needs his little baggie of powder. Thumbing through my program booklet, I noticed that there was a presentation about war comedies being given at the Gene Siskel Film Center, which was about a block west and six blocks north on State Street. It was a nice day, and so I decided that I would be perfectly happy to walk, which would also give me an opportunity to score some java.

I’ve been to Chicago plenty of times by now, and I’ve certainly walked around enough, but it’s a strange feeling to walk around in Chicago by myself: previously, I’d had either Adam or Allison there with me.

I immediately came across a Dunkin Donuts, where I got a medium hazelnut coffee, expecting that I would not be able to bring it into the theatre with me. Otherwise, I would have gotten a large. Six blocks was a relatively short walk, and I had the strangest feeling that staying downtown, and having that home base of sorts, did a great deal to demystify the bizarre and contemptuously sprawling area that is downtown Chicago. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t do a fair bit of wide-eyed gawking.

The Gene Siskel Film center is next door to a Borders, which itself is basically next door to the Oriental Theatre, where Allison and I were exactly a week before. The presentation I was seeing was entitled “War is Hell(arious),” and while it wasn’t exactly brimming with original theory, it was an entertaining diversion insofar as it included some pretty funny clips. So funny, in fact, that it inspired me to hunt down episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth, as well as the old movies Duck Soup and The Great Dictator.

Afterward, I stopped into the Borders, got a large Seattle’s Best coffee (I have a strange attraction to this brand, which used to be sold in the Cinnabon here before it folded), and browsed all the bargain books for a while. I also checked out the general fiction before I left, noting with some pleasure that this location carried trade paperbacks of all three of Tristan Egolf’s books, which made me smile.

Having nothing else to do, I headed back to the hostel, but on the way, I stopped at a Panera Bread and got some lunch; I managed to beat the lunch rush by a couple of minutes, which was rather impressive. I hadn’t had Panera since before summer, when Allison still worked there. Once she began working a different and much better job at JULIE (the local utility line discovery service), we never went there anymore. The potato soup wasn’t as good as I remember it.

I had two presentations I wanted to see that afternoon at the Harold Washington library, which was really just a block west of the Hostel. After lunch, I headed over there and immediately downstairs to their auditorium. The speaker was Stanley Lombardo, presenting “An Iliad for Today“. This particular presentation was well-attended, but mostly by older people, which was to my extreme dismay: once Lombardo started reading a long excerpt of his Modern English translation of the Iliad, it became clear that his mic wasn’t working properly, and several of the older people got crotchety and either left, ostentatiously, or moved. The organizer of the event had to interrupt Lombardo at one point to set up a better mic, and he looked annoyed and/or embarrassed. I felt bad for him, but I was impressed by his reading: the excerpt he chose was the slaying of Hector by Achilles, which is delightful in a gruesome sort of way. Abou would have loved it.

I then had an hour to walk around the massive library, which I did like a typical tourist, gawking at the shelves and shelves of books. I was able to find all three of Egolf’s books (again), but this didn’t surprise me: the CPL’s got just about everything. I hadn’t been there since I was in the 8^th grade, and visited on a field trip, but I’d seen the massive gothic structure that tops the edifice just about every time I’ve been in Chicago.

At 3:30, I went back downstairs, where Derek Collins gave a presentation called “The Iliad as Performance,” which primarily concerned the competitive nature of oral recitations of Homeric texts by ‘bards’ called rhapsodos, something Collins equated to slam poetry. Collins was an extremely vivid speaker, and while one got the sense that he was presenting a formal paper, he was extemporaneous enough that he remained interesting and engaging throughout, fielding a great many questions afterward, too. Dr. Marzec attended this presentation as well, having gone earlier in the morning to a presentation about the Music of the Spheres.

Afterward, I went back to the hostel and read some more. At 6:45, Dr. Marzec picked me up again and we headed to her eldest daughter’s condo, which is near the Aragon Ballroom (which, unfortunately, had a concert going that night, meaning that traffic and parking was nasty). The daughter, the daughter’s boyfriend, Dr. Marzec, and myself all went to (surprise!) another Thai restaurant. My social disabilities had apparently not put me in the daughter’s bad favor, as she was just as pleasant to me. We discussed a lot of books that night (I’m reading Stones of Summer, and after some explaining, they realized that they had seen Mark Muscowitz’s Stone Reader), as well as travel (the daughter likes to travel, apparently, especially to second- and third-world countries), but I think it was clear that all four of us were pretty tired. I tried the ‘fried dried beef’ with sticky rice and hot pepper sauce, and ordered a pork dish I’d never heard of, and it was quite good, actually. Once again, the restaurant was a tiny little whole in the wall, but Dr. Marzec’s daughter assured us that it was the best Thai place in the city.

Upon explaining to her the incident with the RV from the night before, she suggested that we file a “Hit and Run” with the police. Calling on her cell phone, we were told that we would need to come into the station. With her help, we found the station and filed the report with a sleepy officer at the front desk, who told us truthfully that it was mostly for insurance purposes: when there was no injury involved, these sorts of things are almost never followed up.

Vowing to sleep, we parted ways. When Dr. Marzec dropped me back off at the hostel, there was only one other person in the room, who was getting ready for bed. At this point, I was very tired and had a rather nasty headache (and no aspiring aspirin in sight…), so I washed up, slid under the covers, and slept so soundly that I failed to ever notice the other four roommates who must have come in at some point.

Sunday, November 5^th

I awoke earlier on Sunday, needing time to shower, pack up all my crap, check out, and walk to the Symphony Center by 8:30. Actually, I needn’t have really worried, since I was attending an open breakfast that lasted 90 minutes, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t last in line for the shower, which might have extended my prep time considerably. I had to store my luggage at the security desk, which cost me a measly $2, but which was still a bit irritating.

The Symphony Center is a gorgeous place, smack dab on Michigan Avenue. The breakfast was being held upstairs in one of the small banquet rooms, which I think are used to wine and dine donors during intermission. I grabbed some fresh cantaloupe and pineapple, some banana nut bread, some orange juice, and a cup of coffee, and found an empty table. I was all alone for a while—again, my social skills are not the most sharply honed. There was a group of kids from Illinios Wesleyan University who I vaguely knew from a conference I attended there, but their table looked full, so I sat by myself. At least one of them, a very pleasant girl whose name escapes me, apparently thinks very highly of me. Goodness only knows they probably thought I was a grumpy, sullen-looking git by the end of the weekend. In retrospect, sitting and talking with them would have been a perfect opportunity to make some friends, but dammit, I’m a weak, weak person.

After a while, however, I was joined by an older couple from New Jersey (Daniel and Carolyn), whose daughter Amanda worked for CHF (and who joined us a little later). We talked for a long time about presentations we’d been to, about music, and about very random things in that getting-to-know-you sort of way. It was very pleasant. After 9am sometime, Dr. Marzec joined us, and there were introductions all around. By the end of the breakfast, our tiny table had grown to include a panelist who would present later that afternoon, the panelist’s brother, and a sweet girl from Concordia, named Julia, who appropriately enough reminded me of Julia Stiles. She had a very soft voice, though, and I had a difficult time hearing her over the hushed roar of the hall, which by that point was very full indeed.

The presentation itself was scheduled for 10-11am. There was a lot of hot air by various executives and editors and everything before Joyce Carol Oates came on. As I said, I’ve neither read her nor read about her, so I had no idea what to expect. She’s a tiny little woman, still dark-haired and ravenlike despite her age, who has the gaunt and gothic demeanor of Morticia Adams, but who is absolutely hilarious when she wants to be. I very much enjoyed myself.

I decided to spend my downtime searching out the nearby Powell’s Bookstore. I had seen other kids with Powells bags, and had mistakenly assumed that there was a branch of Powells.com; it turns out that Powell’s Bookstore Chicago is a different thing entirely, though it refers to the Portland-based Powells.com as its “sister site.” I had to kill thirty minutes waiting for the store to open (i.e. reading the paper and drinking tea in a Caribou Coffee, next to the American Pyscho girls), but once it did, I launched myself in. I could have bought so many books, but Powell’s isn’t the cheapest of used bookstores, and so I was watching my wallet. I did, however, buy a hardcover of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion for $5, and was very pleased with myself.

There was a second presentation at the Symphony Center at 1am 1pm—Louise Erdrich and Taylor Branch was receiving the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland prize. Taylor Branch is a chronicler of the civil rights movement in general and Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular. He was an excellent speaker, as well, and tugged a bit at everyone’s heartstrings. Louise Erdrich, of whose work I’ve only read a single story, was not as good a speaker, though by her own admission she professes to be shy and uncomfortable with such things.

Afterward, Dr. Marzec and I headed to a place called Miller’s Pub, where we ate lunch and drank beer and yakked even more about various things, most notably about food and diet. We were joined, eventually, by Dr. Marzec’s two ladyfriends, who were the sort of bubbly, middle-aged women who act fifteen years younger than they are; one can’t help but smile.

We had to leave them, though, and get to the library again by 3:30, where there was going to be a performance of some sort of Beowolf. I was worried, especially at the beginning, because I thought it was going to be entirely modern dance. Let’s face it: Beowulf has a story like a Jean Claude van Damme movie; it’s real treasure is its language and historical significance. But the adaptation, done by the Metro Theater Company of St. Louis was actually pretty neat, a blend of dialog, narration, and semi-dance.

Neither Dr. Marzec nor I had the inclination or energy to stay into the night. After the Beowulf performance, we picked up my suitcase, walked to her hotel, and high-tailed it back home. We both, apparently, slept very soundly that night.

Conclusion

I wish I had something grand and original to say. I’m not going to flutter my eyelids and proclaim that CHF was a lifechanging event. I have to wonder, for instance, how my experience would have been different had I not spent much of my evenings with Dr. Marzec’s delightful family (and friends). But certainly, the presentations were very interesting, and I was able to attend only a fraction of them, representing a small slice of the festival’s subject matter; of course, it was nice to be paid for, and put up for free. Part of me wishes I wasn’t a senior, so I’d have the opportunity again next year (that wish is quickly squashed by the realization that I’ll be done with school by May).

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. [...]

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

…. Does this seem just a bit creepy to anyone else, or am I on my own here?

A few problems:

Allowing an industry to develop a curriculum is a recipe for disaster (or should I say “flop”?). I would no more allow the MPAA or RIAA to tell me about copyright than I would allow Exxon to tell me about alternative energy or Microsoft to tell me about “embrace and extend.” Remember, the MPAA’s the same organization that said you aren’t allowed to make backups of the DVDs you buy—if it gets damaged, you simply have to go out and buy another copy. Apparently, this sort of stricture is perfectly OK, but it strikes me as odd, given the Boy Scouts’ fear of homosexuals: apparently, getting fucked in the ass is only all right if it’s a litigious media conglomerate doing the mounting.

Glickman, ever stubbornly flogging the same dead horse, is right when he concludes that the attitude toward intellectual property theft needs to be changed—yes, by consumers, but just as much by the studios and the soulless abysses which represent them. I think people know the value of movies, and that is precisely the problem: certainly, they don’t seem to be worth buying anymore. At least, not when they suck, hard, and are available on digital media that was designed to give consumers the shaft.

The article goes on to that say that prospective badge-earners must also choose from a list of activities which include visiting a movie studio “to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy.” I love this, because I’m quite certain these children will be told that for every movie they download, some humble janitor or assistant to the assistant director will lose their job and return home, Bob Cratchit-like, to tell his starving family that there’ll be no Christmas presents this year—piracy has ruined the movie industry and it tireless, selfless constituents. No one will tell the Boy Scouts, of course, that the people who really care about piracy are executives whose salaries won’t be affected. The truth is that this tack by conglomerates to stem piracy with appeals to pathos is little more than people like Dan Glickman holding a pistol to some lowly worker’s temple and screaming that Dammit, if the piracy doesn’t stop, then Mr. Cratchit here gets it!

Dan Glickman is an asshole. And his merit badge isn’t worthy to wipe my ass with. Fín.

On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio’s “Twin Towers,” according to a copy of the document.

YouTube promptly handed over the data to Paramount, which on June 16 sued the creator of the 12-minute clip, New York City-based filmmaker Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court in Washington.

That YouTube chose to turn over the data, rather than simply remove the offending video from its site — as it did Friday when it agreed to take down 30,000 videos at the request of a group of Japanese media companies — came as a surprise to copyright experts.

And now YouTube is safely(?) within the investment portfolio of Google, whose own video service failed to make even a dent in YouTube’s market share, as it were.

Here’s the rub: I’ve no doubt that Google will take considerably better care to hide user privacy than YouTube was in the above case. But, as Google’s concessions to China prove, they aren’t afraid to put their stock price above the quality or completeness of their service. I would not be surprised if Google did make every effort to remove videos which offend copyrights. It would also, then, not surprise me if YouTube’s traffic dried up like a puddle in the desert sun.

I don’t mean to make it sound as though YouTube is little more than a horde of lawless bandits, wickedly profiting from the theft of intellectual property, but that that whole point of the service—sharing videos—had little respect for the vagaries of copyright law. If User A thought last night’s Daily Show clip was hilarious and wants to show User B, he’s not going to care very much about whether or not he has “express written consent” to distribute it. We’re in an era where remixable and quickly distributable content is the norm, not an outlier—as much as it irks labels and studios, the old rules don’t apply. The **AA (MPAA and RIAA) likes to make YouTube users and movie downloaders out to be vicious, conniving, motherless bastards robbing the poverty-stricken organizations of their last pennies. Like just about everything that comes out of the **AA, this is crap.

But I digress. The MPAA is like the crotchety old man in everyone’s neighborhood who hobbles out onto his stoop to wave his newspaper threateningly at kids whose football rolled into his lawn. My point is that, like Napster, an organization under the watchful and stringent (not to mention myopic) eye of this incontinent, senile fool will never take off with users. Control tends to scare off originality. YouTube as we know it—the place for online video, the trendy go-to destination for all things audiovisual—will cease to exist, and will morph into one of two things.

1. It will become a place for media creators and media creators only—a little like DeviantArt, but for video. I see two problems with this: one, video quality is complete crap once it’s been processed into an FLV file. Like Google Video, though, future versions of YouTube may store a high-quality AVI for download as well. Even if YouTube does turn into a thriving community for video auteurs and filmmakers in training, it won’t have anything in common with the near-complete compendium of broadcasted material that YouTube is today, and thus will enjoy only a limited traffic stream, and consequently a limited revenue stream, as well.
2. It will become little more than Google’s search engine for copylefted and public domain video—with maybe a smattering of ‘illegal’ works up there as well. In that case, it would require a significant effort to properly name and tag these videos (as good as Google’s search is, it can’t search full motion videos, AFAIK), which wouldn’t be done by a community, because it wouldn’t exist anymore.

In either case, the users find somewhere else to engage in their “piracy” and Google’s left with the problem of monetizing a service with little desirable content and nobody to look at it. Hell, YouTube has a hard enough time monetizing their current setup, and they’re one of the most popular sites on the internet!

Personally, I don’t think the YouTube saga can ever end well. It’s one more casualty in the swath of **AA’s scythe, doomed by its own publicity, and the zeal of stupid, stupid media companies.

Hat tip: Scott @ ExtraLife

Katie Holmes was raised a Catholic, but, says fiance Tom Cruise, their soon-to-arrive baby will not have a Catholic baptism.

“No,” Cruise tells Diane Sawyer in an interview on ABC’s “Primetime,” airing Friday night in the U.S. “No, I mean you can be Catholic and be a Scientologist. You can be Jewish and be a Scientologist. But we’re just Scientologists.”

The 27-year-old Holmes’ switch to Scientology has sparked reports of a rift between her devout parents, Ohio natives Martin and Kathleen, and the 43-year-old actor, who introduced her to Scientology.

However, Cruise shrugs off the stories of family friction, telling Sawyer he’s close with “the whole family” and — “absolutely, yes” — they approve of Scientology.

Lies, lies, lies. If you’ll remember, Scientology says that humans learned about current religions by being indoctrinated—while in disembodied thetan form—in giant movie theatres. There’s no way Holmes’ supposedly conservative Catholic parent’s “absolutely, yes” approve of Scientology. More bad lies from the king of Hollywood bullshit, Mr. Tom Cruise.

I reiterate my hope for Katie to suffer from postpartum depression.

I did not see every second of it, but my wife did, and she joins me in noting that there was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans. There were pitifully dishonest calls for peace — as if the people we are fighting were interested in any peace for us but the peace of the grave. But not one word for the hundreds of thousands who have served and are serving, not one prayer or moment of silence for the dead and maimed.

If he didn’t see one second of it, and his wife did, then she doesn’t “join” him in noting anything. She does the noting, and he accepts her report as genuine. But that’s just semantics. As to the lack of wellwishing to our troops overseas, well, it’s the Oscars. Any of that sentiment would have been as forced as the film montages. It’s a masturbatory award ceremony: what do you want? A large American flag backdrop and heartfelt renditions of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism

Does Ben Stein think that George Clooney’s movie “stands up against” Joe McCarthy because they fear that he’ll rise, zombie-like, from the grave and attract his faithful legions? Or maybe—just possibly—because the issue of the media vs. the government is somehow a relevant topic? Oh, but wait, there’s more:

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

Except…. we don’t treat gays and blacks as equal. Oh, and oil companies somehow manage to reap obscene profits even in a stale economic period. Oh, and America has one of the greatest wealth gaps in the world. A guy who says these things isn’t brave; he’s shamefully dishonest.

No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working class heroes to attack America — which has made it all possible for them. They are not. They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin. But someone might yell at them or even attack them with a knife if they said that, so they never will.

No doubt. Certainly, rich actors who think that they are working class heroes would be sadly mistaken, although those that portray working class heroes may be celebrated for their bringing the issue to the fore. Of course, there’s a big difference, not just semantically, between “attack[ing] America” and pointing out America’s flaws. If I pretended that America was just dandy, well, I’d not only be an idiot, but I’d be failing my civic duty as well. A movie that points out crooked politicians or bigotry is not attacking America in a malicious sense; it’s only pointing out flaws that need to be fixed, just as we have been fixing flaws since our inception as a nation. It’s no more honest for Stein to call Goodnight, and Good Luck a cowardly attack than it would be to call Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a cowardly attack. Or maybe it is: damn the 1920s and their liberal media!

And no doubt many people—Hollywood included—understand the grave, looming threat of Islamic terrorism and its primacy. No doubt there are celebrities making asses of themselves by proclaiming otherwise, though I have yet to hear of any. The fact that liberals try so desperately to fix America domestically is because they want to make it worth saving.

Hollywood is above all about self: self-congratulation, self-promotion, and above all, self-protection. This is human and basic, but let’s not kid ourselves. There is no greatness there in the Kodak theater. The greatness is on patrol in Kirkuk. The greatness lies unable to sleep worrying about her man in Mosul. The greatness sleeps at Arlington National Cemetery and lies waiting for death in VA Hospitals. God help us that we have sunk so low as to confuse foolish and petty boasting with the real courage that keeps this nation and the many fools in it alive and flourishing on national TV.

All very valid points, though I would nitpick insofar as there was greatness in the Kodak theatre, because there is an incredible power in cinema, even if the Oscars turns it into a carnival. But I don’t ever recall calling a celebrity “brave,” only talented. Perhaps Ben Stein is chasing a ghost.

Now imagine that you’re not imagining.

What. The. Hell.

Hat tip: Abou.

“The celebrity status in Hollywood has gotten really out of control,” Theron told The Associated Press at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where her new film “North Country” premiered.

“Like one of those snow-globe things, it’s this fragile little ball of perfection, and I think people have forgotten what actors do. After a while, I was like, ‘Well, what did you want me to do? Did you want me to play this woman and not look like her?’ ”

That focus on her appearance gradually subsided in a wave of newfound respect for her as a serious performer, culminating in her best-actress win at the Academy Awards for Monster.

Did Charlize Theron wake up one morning and say to herself, “For as long as I’ve been an actress, I’ve starred in mostly crappy movies like Reindeer Games and The Astronaut’s Wife where I bare my chest for no good reason. I think now I’m going to stop those, do a couple of half-decent films like Devil’s Advocate and Sweet November and then turn around and start being a really excellent character actress”?

How the hell does this work?

I knew just from the trailer’s of this new Tim Burton iteration that I wasn’t going to like it. When it saw it for the first time, I felt a sense of abject betrayal that anyone, even Johnny Depp, for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect, would even attempt the Sisyphean task of measuring up to Wilder’s performance. It doesn’t help at all that Burton’s style is not at all suited to such a script. I understand that the 1971 version took a lot of liberties with the original story, and that Dahl’s predilection for oddly twisted storylines seems like the ideal project for someone as morbidly quirky as Burton, but the latter takes the dark, screwball ambience to such an extreme that it patently ruins the magic of the story.

In Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (as opposed to 1971′s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), Wonka is a strange, heavily made-up man who harbors a lot of neuroses from a bad childhood relationship with his father (a facet, I believe, which was not in the original book). Depp plays the character well (we knew he could: just look at his portrayal of Raoul Duke), but the character itself is a disappointment, falling far short of the exceedingly eccentric but always composed and charismatic Wonka that Wilder gave us so many years ago. In fact, the acting in general is far superior in the earlier version, no doubt helped by the artificial surrealism that Burton tries to impose on all his films. Peter Ostrum as Charlie is a cute blonde kid (with bad pitch, I grant you) and not the Harry Potter clone of the new one. Veruca Salt is an honest-to-god Traci Lords clone, pouty and bitchy and utterly convincing. Mike TV is a simple spoiled boy, as opposed to the computer genius that Burton gives us (although I really appreciated the line about particles being different from waves).

SPOILER ALERT

But perhaps the most irksome of all the differences is the ending. In the ’71 version, the contest is contigent upon a question of morality: a Wonka employee poses as the rival candymaker Slugworth, who offers each child fabulous wealth if they get him an Everlasting Gobstopper. When Wonka tells Charlie he has lost the contest (because he stole Fizzy Lifting Drinks), Charlie leaves the Gobstopper on Wonka’s desk, thus displaying integrity (if not logic). In Burton’s version, Charlie merely wins by default (a great lesson for kids). When Wonka offers him the factory, Charlie says that he’ll only go if his family comes, so Wonka (who, remember, is neurotic in the new version) revokes his offer and goes home. This is followed by an incredibly contrived subplot tacked onto the end of the film, involving Wonka and his father the dentist (played by the woefully undercast Christopher Lee). Only after we’ve suffered through it can Burton’s diversion rejoin the proper storyline and Charlie gets the factory and his family (which includes, I might add, a father who was absent from the book). It’s anticlimactic, and it ruins the story as far as I’m concerned. Not only is the morality play gone from the equation, but turning Wonka the Enigma into a bundle of primal fears and unresolved issues effectively mitigates him into something unimpressive and unimportant.

One other aspect I should mention, even though I don’t find it particularly important, is the Oompa Loompas. Burton cast one midget (named Deep Roy) and digitally cloned him into an army of Oompa Loompas. The songs they sing use Dahl’s original lyrics, but run the gamut from disco to heavy metal. They’re fun, I suppose, but also unintelligible; all in all, however, they aren’t a contentious point with me, as they are merely incidental to the story, anyway.

Like Sideways, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory‘s original movie adaptation, while not completely true to the book, turned it into something much better and longer-lasting. Unless you really like Tim Burton, and you don’t have a deep affection for the ’71 version, don’t even bother seeing the new one. It’s just not worth it.