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Highlights This Month

4/4/68: The day — the year — that innocence was lost.

The narrative of this country changed forever in 1968. We lost our innocence as children and as a nation, and once lost, a fragile thing like innocence can never be restored.

By Syl Jones, StarTribune/MN

April 9, 1968: Mourners during funeral services for Dr. Martin Luther King, in Atlanta. Don Hogan Charles, Associated Press

My junior year in high school, I skipped prom. See, prom smacked of The Establishment and reeked of aristocratic nonsense. At least, that's what some of us thought in 1968.
 
We debated such ideas ad infinitum. The John Birch Society, bra-burnings, the Vietcong and bell-bottoms. The Beatles, Yippies, Afros and the Pill. These were a few of our favorite and least-favorite things. As children on the threshold of choices that would forever seal our fate -- or so we were told -- we were confronted with a multitude of contradictions. For example, while we prepared diligently for college, the specter of the draft hung over many of us like an iron cloud.

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No War for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is a striking metaphor for the challenges faced by our democracy.

James Rocchi, Huffington Post

Recently, the winner of the 2007 Oscar for Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, came to DVD, and I've had the chances to re-watch it several times since I first saw it at Cannes in May. We've also recently marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of major combat operations in Iraq. And the one had me thinking about the other. Looking at any film for the presence of symbolism and metaphor for its times is one of those exercises so simple it can possibly slide over the line to simplistic, but even back in December (when I first wrote some of these notes below down) it was easy to see No Country for Old Men as a striking and cautionary tale about the challenges democracy is facing right now. And as we pass the fifth anniversary of the War in Iraq, I think we've all been thinking a lot, lately, about what exactly five years of this war -- a war ostensibly started to make us safer -- has actually done to eliminate the threat of terror. Over the months, my repeated viewings of No Country for Old Men led me to a very different reading of the film than the one I had at first, and increased my already substantial admiration for the film.

Of course, it's got to be said that the elements in play that led me to this perspective may not be intentional on the part of the Coens or Cormac McCarthy; at the same time, I think that how No Country for Old Men offers as many -- and as rewarding -- readings as it does is a great indicator of why it's going to endure. Tommy Lee Jones's Ed Tom Bell is a Sheriff, the classic Western hero (which is to say the classic American hero), but his time-honored ways and methods can't cope with the seemingly irrational Chigurh (Javier Badem). Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss isn't motivated by tradition or law; just capital and expediency. But he's not prepared for Chigurh, a man who can't be bribed or threatened or worn down or outrun.

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Mike Lester

Surprise Hit or New Kind of Chick Flick?

The failure of high-budget chick flicks doesn’t prove that women don’t go to the movies anymore, but that we’ll only go if we see real women facing issues we recognize onscreen.

Sarah Seltzer, RH Reality Check

Sometimes I think Rupert Everett had a point when he compared Hollywood's attitude towards gender and sexuality with that of a certain terrorist group spawned by Enemy Number One.

Last week, the New York Times ran an article about the problem with chick flicks, or about their imminent demise-slash-reincarnation as chick-and-dude flicks. Young women, it seems, aren't going to movies in droves anymore, and so high-profile filmmakers who once wooed "chicks" can no longer do so and make a profit. The article focused on Nora Ephron, one of the pioneers of the chick flick genre, and hearkened back to "Sleepless in Seattle" as one of said genre's biggest icons. "Sleepless" is a lovely movie. And Ephron, in her heyday, was tops at writing romantic comedies. But a more interesting film, a film that might have helped given the Times a clearer thesis, is another film Ephron wrote: "When Harry Met Sally," mentioned only as an aside.

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Draft Iron Man to the West Wing

Lorelei Kelly, Huffington Post

This is one piece of summer entertainment that is definitely not mindless. When I say Iron Man belongs in the West Wing, I don't mean as President, but more along the lines of Special Advisor on National Security. I saw this movie on opening night last week at the Avalon, in the heart of think-tanky Northwest Washington and I left with a greater sense of the threats and challenges facing the world than most of what I might garner from watching mainstream news. My congratulations to everyone involved in this movie--you pulled off a more subtle treatment of hugely complex issues than what often passes for a Congressional hearing. Briefly, the setting for this film looks like Afghanistan and the violent conflict surrounding the hero reflects the sort of well-armed anarchy that exists in many places in the world today. It is the type of circumstances that our military and other international public servants like diplomats and humanitarians face: an environment where anything might explode where you're standing.

The film is a benchmark for the end of the Cold War and the start of something we can't even name yet. What we do know is that we've gone from warfighting that is linear, top-down and technological to violent disasters that are chaotic, random and very human. Many people call this surround sound threat the "dark side of globalization" Iron Man, with his ability to jet around the world knows this. Tony Stark--in his evolution from pretty boy to policy wonk--discovers this. Here's where the movie meets national security:

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Hollywood's Eco Trip

Hollywood...will pull out all the stops to make you laugh, cry, and kiss a few bucks goodbye. And even if it stays true to its source material, a lot of the substance and sweep of the original will wind up on the cutting-room floor. In Hollywood, the truth may be inconvenient, but the solutions are anything but.

Dave Gilson, Mother Jones

As tourists ogled Johnny Depp's fossilized footprints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre on a mild day last December, a couple hundred entertainment industry insiders gathered on the other side of Hollywood Boulevard to celebrate their shrinking environmental footprints. Inside the first Hollywood Goes Green conference, attendees heard about how Evan Almighty had neutralized its carbon emissions and how the 2007 Academy Awards had been "greened" right down to the recycled toilet paper. Producers delivered elevator pitches for ecofriendly reality shows; an nbc exec praised her bosses at General Electric for being "great green activists." Willie Nelson's biodiesel supplier drummed up business, and former Dallas oilman-turned-avocado-farmer Larry Hagman boasted about the size of his solar array. After hours, the fate of the earth was considered over organic vodka cocktails mixed in bicycle-powered blenders.

A day earlier, Al Gore had accepted his half of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, affirming his role as the patron saint of the burgeoning environmental-media complex. An Inconvenient Truth was a wake-up call for the film industry, whose previous climate-change disaster flick was the apocalyptically absurd The Day After Tomorrow. Though fewer than 5 million people saw AIT (as it's known in the biz), those are extraordinary numbers for a documentary film. AIT proved not only that audiences would sit through a glorified PowerPoint presentation billed as "the most terrifying film you will ever see," but also that a low-budget, feel-bad movie could become the 21st-century version of Silent Spring.

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Why "The Vagina Monologues" Matters

The monologues mainstream important feminist concepts.

Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon

Rebecca Traister has a great article about the 10th anniversary of "The Vagina Monologues" in New Orleans, and ends up having the same reaction that a lot of what you might call advanced patriarchy-blamers have when seeing this play: a reluctant appreciation for how fun it is to see it, after a period of intense irritation at the hoopla around it. I'm definitely in the rationalist category of feminism, as it were, and have little to no patience with the Earth Mother feminism that tries to make a big deal out of the feminine essence. It's true that we are awash in a culture where anxious men have a submissive relationship to The Phallus, but seriously, the way to correct that is not to make a great emblem out of vulvic energy or whatever you want to call it. There are some men who have a healthy relationship with the penis---they like it, but see it as a tool that belongs to them. I think that route out of shame over having ladyparts is to take that pathway. But, as Traister notes, Ensler surrounds the play itself with this Earth Mother goddess stuff that makes me squirmy.

In Ensler's megalomaniacal V-universe, everything from voter registration to the Iraq war is seen through the speculum, er, spectrum, of the vagina, and moist metaphor and love for Eve (and beav) rule the day. It often seems, in fact, that Ensler has taken her laudable grass-roots success and turned it into a celebrity-centric, glitzy franchise -- one that has, in its unrelenting and patronizing focus on women-as-cootches, often felt as reductive and objectifying as the language Ensler originally set out to fight.

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Miley Cyrus: Accidentally, on purpose

Miley Cyrus is just one victim of her Vanity Fair photo controversy. Society itself is another, having shed its seriousness of purpose.

Syl Jones, StarTribune/MN

Miley Cyrus, shown on “American Idol,” is outgrowing her 5- to 14-year-old audience. What Vanity Fair offered her was a career opportunity. Mark J. Terrill, Associated Press

Let's dispose of the pretense: There is no way a multimillion-dollar starlet like Miley Cyrus of "Hannah Montana" fame can pose for Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair magazine without someone at Disney green-lighting it. The outrage expressed by Disney executives after the fact is further proof that Disney is a first-class corporate manipulator, looking to lead its young demographic to the next level of consumerist excess.

But why are the media so obsessed with manufactured conflicts involving movie stars and singers and celebrities on the A-thru-D list? What's really happening behind a trend that sandwiches the Cyrus episode between reports of deaths in Iraq and the rising price of gasoline on most major news networks in the United States?

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Mike Luckovich