The Dish

[Reihan]

Yesterday afternoon I saw Mike White‘s Year of the Dog, a movie I’ve been looking forward to for some time now.  I think Mike White is a genius, and both The AV Club, which I generally trust, and Lisa Schwarzbaum were glowing in their praise.  Manohla Dargis loved it too.  But what struck me most as I saw it with one of my best friends, a fellow Mike White fan, is that Year of the Dog could just as easily have been titled, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace Jihad.  During the course of the movie, Peggy, as brilliantly portrayed by the criminally underrated Molly Shannon, slowly becomes … how can I put this? … she slowly becomes a total lunatic who sublimates her basic human desire for companionship into increasingly militant political causes.  It’s by no means clear to me that Peggy’s journey will end where the movie ends, in a bus ride to a peaceful demonstration.  I fear it will end somewhere far more tragic.

Thanks to a fateful encounter with a gentle man, the similarly-excellent Peter Sarsgaard‘s Newt, Peggy directs her grief over the loss of her beloved dog outward, into a rage against animal cruelty, a rage that actually become murderous. I have to wonder: is this all an elaborate prank by Mike White?  I was expecting an intelligent comedy about loneliness, and about how the love of animals can both enrich and warp our lives.  Instead Year of the Dog is a moving, intense, mostly funny but occasionally chilling look at humanity at its worst.  Peggy’s best friend is a deeply clueless woman, unattuned to the awfulness of her philandering lover.  Her brother and sister-in-law are a loathsome, narrow-minded upper-middle-class caricature.  Though very kind during an important (murderous moment), they’re also incapable of reckoning with the intensity of Peggy’s increasingly violent extremism.  That’s why it’s so baffling that reviewers are treating Year of the Dog like the cute character study I imagined it would be.  Nathan Rabin writes,

Like a distaff Marty, Dog indelibly chronicles the emotional thaw of a woman seemingly resigned to living life quietly on the sidelines until fate spurs her into action.

And yet where does Rabin detect an "emotional thaw"?  I could see it in her vulnerability, and her willingness to acknowledge her affection for Newt.  But the surprising twist at the end suggests that she’s forsaken the real love of her family and friends for love of jihad, in the name of animals she’s never met.  I’m a believer in the humane treatment of animals.  This is part of why I increasingly choose to eat Quorn and other meat-substitutes in lieu of the real thing.  I look forward to a time when synthetic meat-substitutes render industrial agriculture a thing of the past.  (Also, as New York recently pointed out, it tastes almost exactly like a Chicken McNugget.  Someone page heaven and tell them I’m already there.)  I buy the idea that our sphere of moral concern has steadily expanded over time, and that it ought to include thinking, feeling non-human animals.  I certainly don’t believe in stabbing people because they may or may not have inadvertently poisoned Pencil with snail-bait. Dargis has a similarly generous take.

In its broad outline, “Year of the Dog” is the story of a woman who goes slightly bonkers and becomes an animal-rights advocate, not because she’s bonkers, but because the love of animals is where she finally finds her peace of mind, sense of self, grace. It’s also about the creation of conscience, about what makes us human and why, a surprisingly little-told story in contemporary American cinema. You can learn a lot from our movies, like how to hold a gun and blow someone’s head off. It’s more unusual to watch a film in which the central struggle is how to be happy and sane. There’s a touch of the saint in Peggy, true, but what makes me love her is that she’s ridiculously, beautifully human.

Holy moly!  Where to begin!  Part of having a conscience is surely recognizing the limits of what we can and should say to small children.  Peggy does indeed go bonkers, and this is a sad and poignant part of the story.  And her animal-rights advocacy becomes a way of avoiding the incredibly hard choices she’d need to make to build a happy and fulfilling (not necessarily "normal") life.  I’ve seen this happen to people I care about, and it’s hard to watch.  It’s surprisingly hard to watch it happen on screen, particularly to characters who are so beautifully drawn.

Peggy is less ridiculously, beautifully human at the end of this movie than ridiculously, tragically alone and ridiculously, tragically crazy.  The truly horrible thing is that there are plenty of people who will prey on her loneliness and use her as a pawn in their larger design.  There’s nothing cute about this movie.  It might be the most important you’ll see this year, and I can assure you that it will be one of the more difficult to watch.

[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.