Month: April 2007

[Reihan] Instead of seeing Rush Hour 3 I’d really much rather see a movie about the intense racialized psychodrama that has been the making of Rush Hour 3.  Way back in 2000, I read a Lynn Hirschberg piece, "How Black Comedy Got The Last Laugh,"  which discussed Chris Tucker at considerable length.  Brett Ratner had some strange things to say about Tucker.

During ”Money Talks,” which was directed by Brett Ratner, the rumors about Tucker began percolating. ”They said he was illiterate,” Ratner recalled recently. ”That he was crazy, and he couldn’t read, and that no one could understand him, but that, in spite of all that, he was going to be the next Eddie Murphy, a huge star.” Ratner laughed. ”Chris can read, but sometimes the references have to be explained to him. Often these scripts are written by white writers, and they’re just too white. In ‘Money Talks,’ Chris had to say, ‘I’m waiting for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.’ He didn’t know that line came from ‘Sunset Boulevard.’ He had never heard of ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ and he didn’t know DeMille was a great director. So he changed the line. He made it his own. And frankly, if Chris doesn’t get that reference, neither will the audience.”

And Brett Ratner is Tucker’s friend?  This isn’t exactly flattering.  People get pistol-whipped for saying less.  While reading Entertainment Weekly‘s Summer Movie Preview of RH3, I came upon the following.

The last time the director brought Tucker and Chan together as bumbling, backflipping buddy cops Lee and Carter was six years ago. Rush Hour 2, like the first, was a rollicking success, hauling in nearly $350 million worldwide. Box office bonanza aside, it started to look like Rush Hour 3 would not happen. Someone was dragging his feet. ”Chris isn’t in a rush,” chuckles Ratner. ”So, Jackie goes off and does his movies. I go off and do X-Men 3. [Chris] hasn’t worked in five years.” Whispers circulated that Tucker, who earned a staggering $20 million for Rush Hour 2, was holding out for more money this time around — which he denies.

Tucker has a quite different interpretation.

”It wasn’t me,” insists the comedian. ”It was finding the script. [New Line was] saying, ‘We’ll get you a script. Just sign on.’ I usually don’t do that. That was the big holdup. I need to see a script.” Nevertheless, Tucker eventually relented, and a script was written that involved Lee and Carter trailing a list of Chinese gangsters through Paris.

It seems they finally agreed upon a script with all the gravity and seriousness we’ve come to expect from the Rush Hour series.  The most interesting leg of the triad, in my view, is of course Jackie Chan.

Speaking of landmarks, Chan, who earned less up front than Tucker for his chopsocky contributions to Rush Hour 2, will be getting a healthy portion of Rush Hour 3’s distribution rights in China. ”I like to bet,” says Chan. ”Maybe, at the end, I’ll [make more] than Chris.”

Maybe indeed.   

[Ross] Via The Plank, the latest Rasmussen poll has Obama tied with Hillary nationwide. And this related survey, I think, is telling:

Thirty-three percent (33%) of Likely Voters say they’d definitely vote for Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D). That’s the highest total received by any of ten leading Presidential hopefuls included in the poll. Thirty-three percent (33%) also say they’d definitely vote against Obama giving him a net differential of zero (33% definitely for minus 33% definitely against equals net differential of 0). All other candidates have a net differential in negative territory meaning more people are set to definitely vote against them rather than for them. Other polling during the past month found Obama’s favorability ratings have increased to the highest level of any 2008 candidate.

In a way, it’s the opposite of Dean-versus-Kerry in 2004 – this time around, it’s the outsider candidate, Obama, who looks like a better bet for the general election, and the insider, Hillary, who looks like more of a gamble. That landscape may shift as Obama becomes better known and his rivals start going after into him, but if it lasts till primary season, it’s a dynamic that could play a powerful role in tipping undecided, victory-hungry Dems into the Illinois Senator’s column.

[Ross] By coincidence, I finally got around to seeing The Lives of Others – which was as good as advertised – the day before Boris Yeltsin died, and it’s hard not to let the movie’s vision of pre-1989 East Germany edge into your thoughts while reading his obituaries. The story of Russia since Communism fell has been a deeply unhappy one, and Yeltsin has to shoulder a great deal of the blame; still, he was one of the men who ushered the Soviet bloc peacefully off history’s stage, and for that "peacefully," in particular, we all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude. Communism would have fallen eventually without Boris Yeltsin, but the grinding everyday evils that The Lives of Others summons up could have ended with a Ragnarok rather than a whimper. Yeltsin bequeathed us Putin, but he helped spare us something infinitely worse.

Rod Dreher flags a moving anecdote from the Times obit:

During a visit to the United States in 1989, he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by the centralized, state-run economic system where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

Leon Aron quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.”

I was nine years old when the Berlin Wall came down, and eleven when Yeltsin rode the tank, and in both cases I was simply too young to appreciate the magnitude of what was happening. I wish I had been older.

[Ross] How do you solve a problem like demographic decline? If you’re Europe, one obvious solution would be to stop letting the healthiest generation of seniors in human history take early retirement. (hat tip: Stanley Kurtz)

[Ross] Looking for a way to cram the whole internet into a single magical browser page? Of course you are – and that’s why they invented Netvibes. Reihan explains it all here.

[Megan] Also at The Economist this week, we’ve got John McWhorter guestblogging on Democracy in America, our American politics blog.  His first two posts are great.  On Al Sharpton:

Just where anyone gets the idea that any significant segment of black America takes its cue from Mr Sharpton as to how to vote is unclear. Mr Sharpton always implies that he has some kind of power in this vein a la old-time city bosses, but given that he has no raft of patronage of the kind that those guys did, and given that neither black leaders nor ordinary folk are given to mentioning Mr Sharpton as their bellwether for who to pull the lever for, it would appear that everybody including Mr Sharpton is playing a kind of game for the cameras.

I suppose Mr Sharpton does have a kind of power in the negative sense, in that if Mrs Clinton, in particular, did not go through the motions of kissing Mr Sharpton’s feet, in certain quarters the question would be raised as to whether she were a racist or not. I’m not ecstatic over the idea of measuring one’s feelings about black people according to whether one is a fan of the particular black person known as Reverend Al, but I understand that Senator Clinton doesn’t have time to split hairs.

Mr McWhorter also has a great bit on the "Stop snitching" movement:

Ecce the “stop snitching” Zeitgeist, in which it has become a shibboleth of being “down with” your people in poor black neighborhoods to refuse to give the police information about a black-on-black homicide, even if you witnessed it. This version of black identity has become so entrenched over the past few years that it is making it ever harder for investigators to crack murder cases.

No—tracing this to “racism” doesn’t work. Police brutality was much worse in the past, and the War on Drugs is old news. The current "stop snitching" notion is the latest fashion amidst a larger phenomenon: a sense among black and brown teens and twenty-somethings that to be in aggressive opposition is the soul of being authentic. There has been an element of this in the black community since the sixties. But these days, it is so deeply felt that it is tacitly approved to place anti-authoritarian sentiment over black lives.

What planted the seeds for this new black identity to develop and set in is, ironically, the eclipse of open racism and segregation. When all black people had to make the best of the worst, there was no room for callisthenic acting up. Recordings like Cam’ron’s "Come Home With Me", celebrating gunplay and drug peddling and depicting women as unclean tramps worthy of physical abuse, would have been unthinkable.

But the reason people like Cam’ron have elevated this attitude into an entire sense of place in the world is because the Civil Rights movement freed blacks into an America that had just made the upturned middle finger into an icon of higher awareness.

He’ll be blogging for us all week, so please stop by.

[Ross] Did McCain’s little ditty actually help his campaign? Slate thinks so, and so does Daniel Larison, so it must be true.

[Ross] Speaking of domestic policy wonkery, Jonathan Cohn and David Gratzer went back and forth on health care last week in TNR Online, and Yuval Levin chimes in here. (Yuval’s earlier lay-of-the-land essay on the issue, co-written with Eric Cohen, is also worth your while.)

[Ross] If I were to pick the New Yorker writer least likely to convince me that "there is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun," Adam Gopnik would be pretty high on the list. And sure enough, I’m not convinced.

Fortunately, the issue also includes Anthony Lane on Barbara Stanwyck, which is a slightly better match of writer and subject.

[Ross] Matt Yglesias wonders why more right-wingers aren’t singing the praises of a carbon tax:

Every once in a while I wonder why you don’t see a constant, dogmatic drumbeat of enthusiasm for carbon taxes from conservative pundits. You’d say, "we should have a carbon tax and offset it with reductions in income taxes" and split yuppie liberal types who worry about global warming from more traditional populist types. What’s more, since to be effective a carbon tax would need to succeed in reducing carbon emissions you’d also set the federal government on a glide path to reduced revenues. It’s great. But you almost never see people beating this drum.

I can imagine a few explanations. One is that most conservative pundits have allowed that portion of the brain that one uses to analyze a substantive question of national policy to atrophy to the extent that they don’t understand why this is something that conservatives should like. Another is corruption; this proposal would be bad interest group politics and the energy companies are major financiers of the right. A third is hackishness; this proposal would put you in disagreement with George W. Bush and other Republican Party politicians. Last is the politics of resentment; conservative pundits just hate environmentalists too much to see the forest for the trees. Some combination of factors may be at work. And it’s worth saying that several of your better conservative pundits — Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks come to mind — are on the bandwagon.

Well, Matt’s least-favorite conservative pundit is on the bandwagon too. So is David Frum, and so are various right-of-center economists: Greg Mankiw is all for it; Bruce Bartlett has suggested that he’d be amenable; Tyler Cowen is on board; and so on. It’s true that the broader "movement" hasn’t embraced the concept the way they’ve embraced, say, the war against "Islamofascism," and I’m obviously sympathetic to the idea that the Right has let the domestic-policy side of its brain atrophy a bit in the last decade or so, and that conservative intellectuals haven’t pushed back nearly enough against the GOP’s interest groups of late. But I’m not sure that the case of the missing carbon tax is a problem with conservative pundits, in particular, so much as it is a manifestation of a problem with punditry in general. If you were to pick a really good policy idea that liberals ought to be supporting but aren’t, I suspect you wouldn’t find all that many prominent left-of-center pundits championing it, because most prominent pundits just don’t champion innovative domestic policy ideas very often.

Why? Well, because American punditry is geared around horse-race analysis of the kind that dominates most political talk shows (see this Yglesias post, for instance, which highlights a particularly sorry example), and at the higher end it’s filled with writers who have been given columns because their editors like their writing style, not their substance. (Thus Maureen Dowd, thus Frank Rich, thus Anna Quindlen, and so on the down the list of liberals who sound sweet and have almost nothing substantial say.) In addition, foreign policy is much, much sexier than domestic policy, so the smarter pundits tend to gravitate toward writing about war and peace, not VATs and EITCs and all that boring stuff.

All of which is easy to bemoan, but it’s also the case that TV shows and newspapers serve an audience of consumers (a dwindling audience, in the latter case), and to a certain extent they’re just responding to what this audience demands: I’m willing to bet that horse-race talk, foreign-policy arguments, and Dowd-style stylings sell way more newspapers (to the extent that any punditry sells newspapers) than serious proposals for, well, a carbon tax. Which, to bring this post full circle, is also part of the reason the Right has grown so much less interesting, so much staler and so predictable, in recent years – because conservative writers are playing to a mass market in a way that the old NR gang and the ’70s neocons weren’t, and that market doesn’t want new and troubling ideas like a carbon tax with an income tax offset (I’d prefer a payroll tax offset myself, but that of course just makes the idea even more confusing) – it wants, well, this.