Whatever else you may want to say about director Tony Scott, he has been consistent. In the 25 years since he hit the big time with Top Gun, he's stayed true to his roots in TV advertising and turned out a dozen feature films that all appear to be one long postscript to a title sequence. Whatever the movies are for him, they're not about telling a story.

When a filmmaker is that consistent over a long period, critics usually talk about him having a "personal style"--although what they usually mean by that is what the guy is doing when he's not trying too hard. What Tony Scott does when he's not trying too hard is to lean on the cinematic technology to make the screen as busy a place as possible, and dramatically to give us a sort of trash-novel voyeurism. In a Tony Scott film, we are allowed to garishly experience the low-life without actually getting dirty.

Scott cut his cinematic teeth on TV commercials, and his dominant early-period films are Top Gun, Days of Thunder, Beverly Hills Cop II, Revenge, Crimson Tide, The Fan, The Last Boy Scout and Enemy of the State. (20th anniversary notes about Revenge from an especially enraged correspondent, here.) Most of those were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer; and you occasionally get the feeling that when Jerry was feeling faintly intellectual towards his material he'd hire Scott, but would otherwise leave the noisy lifting to director Michael Bay. And while none of those movies suggest anything really approaching a personal style, there are some features they hold in common.

First, they're mechanisms, not movies. They are engineered, not written and produced. They're constructed as a combination Ferrari and McDonalds hamburger using the tools of speed, precision and predictability. Like the McDonalds commercial, they are designed to raise your skin temperature in measurable ways, but not much more than that.


Thus, everything in a Tony Scott movie is overdriven--editing, performances, soundtrack, lighting, everything. Nothing stays still for more than a nanosecond. Performers begin at over-the-top and work from there. The soundtrack makes your ears bleed and the sun seems to be rising behind every building. If you are a sensitive type, these things wear you down -- which is Scott's approximation of emotional engagement. If you are a hard-bitten type, they irritate -- at least for the first hour and a half, at which point Stockholm syndrome sets in, and nothing happens to you that can't be cured by a good stiff drink or three.

Everybody in a Tony Scott movie is unappealing, and that's because the idea seems to be that you have to understand who everybody is in just one look; you have to be able to figure every character out in no longer than 30 seconds -- about the length of a commercial. Which means you don't understand anything about anybody. You hate everybody in a Tony Scott movie -- but they photograph well.

Everything photographs well. Every image in a Tony Scott Movie -- every frame -- is beautiful, whether it's appropriate or not. Every shot screams at you: "I took ten hours to light." It's the screaming that's the problem -- it makes the difference between a movie and a procession of glossy magazine ads. And everything is sacrificed to the gloss. The Fan (to take an example at random) purports to be a serious look at obsession. What it is, is a serious look at the saturation potential of colour film.

Tony Scott films are an exploration by a cinematic weenie into what you can do with all the fun tools that Hollywood has at its disposal. Their emotional sophistication is somewhere around the level of 'male adolescent'. Intellectual content is nil. They are neither exciting nor really entertaining. But they are not without interest and if you're the type that lives for irony, they can be fun in an open-mouthed-disbelieving sort of way. In fact, in what has become an age of computer-made action movies, Tony Scott has lately become comfortably old-fashioned flashy; sort of a Robert Altman of action films. It's actually nice to see car-chases and combat filmed as if they were lingerie ads, instead of just commercials for the post-Matrix technology that produced them.

A classic example of that kind of late-period work is Domino, which the opening credits inform us is "sort of" based on the life of the late Domino Harvey, the indolent ex fashion-model daughter of actor Anthony Harvey, who went on to find her true niche in life as a low-rent bounty-hunter, working for a crooked California bail-bondsman. I'd recount what goes on for you, but there's not much to describe. Because Domino has been so completely fictionalized, there isn't a real character at its center to hold things together; and since there's virtually no narrative, you don't really know what's going on in front of you.

Actually, that's probably the defining motif, and the one interesting thing about Domino and the movies Scott has directed since: call it post-narrative film-making. Traditionally, viewers seek out narrative when they watch a movie -- it's been a storytelling medium for so long that cinematic narrative is hard-wired into us. But since the filmmakers here are so self-consciously flashy and voyeuristic, the unifying thread you catch on to when you're desperately grabbing for a story is that you're not watching a movie; you're watching people make a movie. (A large theoretical piece on that subject, here.)

Domino invites us to look over Tony Scott's shoulder while he does his thing, and mostly -- unless you're on drugs or harbor ambitions to make commercials yourself -- it's not much fun to watch. It's not really subject to analysis -- the only judgment you are encouraged to make is: is what's going on in front of you this moment worth sticking around for? For me, Domino was a procession of moments where the answer was mostly no.

As a cinematic artifact, Domino is one long trailer for itself. I'd say it's achieved some kind of perfection in that venture, although I'm sure in future features Tony Scott will push himself to transcend even those crippling standards he's set so far. Along with Man on Fire, Domino is a perfect example of a genre Tony Scott has made his own -- trailer trash.


According to The New Yorker's Anthony Lane, Scott stays the course in The Taking of Pelham 123:

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.2, as I like to think of it, is a game that declares itself to be a game. There is no pretense that any of the verities, whether of incident or of character, are in play, or that anything of moral weight is at stake; both Washington and Travolta, rather than inhabiting their parts, struck me as film stars toying with flashy personae.... I'm not sure that any genre of movie, least of all the thriller, can survive such a blast of self-consciousness. Keep deflecting like this, and there'll be no more stories to tell.

And coming this November: Another Denzel Washington vehicle -- another train. Get out the drugs.

• Odds that the broadcast will wrap up on schedule (150-1)
• Odds that ex-spouses and competing Best Director nominees James Cameron and Kathrine Bigelow will come to blows (30-1)
• Odds that co-host Steve Martin will make a joke about that possibility (3-2)
• Most likely butt of jokes made by a winner from the stage: Tea Party demonstrations (2-1); evangelical right-wing movie critic Michael Medved (8-1); Actor Rip Torn's recent arrest for breaking into a bank while armed and drunk (8-5); Robert Downey Jr. playing a cocaine addict in Sherlock Holmes (5-2); host Alec Baldwin's catastrophically fading good looks (12-1); the fact that when Norman Jewison stands next to Steven Spielberg you can't tell them apart (20-1); anything at all about James Cameron (8-5)
• The most long-winded speech from the podium will come from: Steven Spielberg (5-1); James Cameron (4-1); anybody who has to bring notes (8-5); Academy President Tom Sherak (3-2); Quentin Tarrantino if he's on any kind of drugs (3-1)
• Most likely sentimental winner: Gabourey Sidibe (8-1); Christopher Plummer (2-1); Jeff Bridges (3-1); Stanley Tucci (10-1); Morgan Freeman (8-5)
• Least likely sentimental winner: Randy Newman (10-1); Sandra Bullock (12-1); James Cameron (10-1); Quentin Tarrantino (20-1); Woody Harrelson (30-1)
• Actor least likely to be trusted to present an award: Robert Downey, Jr. (10-1); Woody Harrelson (12-1); Daniel Baldwin (5-2); Lindsay Lohan (3-1); Rip Torn (3-2)
• Dead movie person getting the biggest round of applause during the obituary reel: Ricardo Montalban (25-1); Bea Arthur (14-1); David Carradine (20-1); Farrah Fawcett (3-1); John Hughes (4-1); Patrick Swayze (4-1); Brittany Murphy (3-1); Michael Jackson (they'll work him in somehow) (2-1)
• Likely size of the 10 best picture nominee excerpts shown: 2 minutes (5-1); 1 minute (4-1); 45 seconds (7-1); still too short to justify the Academy's moving all the honorary awards to another ceremony to be able to fit all 10 best pic nominees in (8-5)
• Best Picture nominees most likely to be confused with each other by an unfamiliar viewer: Up and Up in the Air (3-1); Avitar and District 9 (20-1); An Education and A Serious Man (15-1); The Blind Side and The Hurt Locker (8-5);  Inglourious Basterds and  Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (85-1)
• Title that will sound worst being read several times during broadcast: Up (10-1); Inglourious Basterds; (3-1) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; (3-1) Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire (8-5)
• Movie that would respond best to having a title as convoluted as that last one: Avitar: based on the insufferable ego of James Cameron
• The movie that no Academy members will have actually seen that is most likely to win an award based on its title alone: Instead of Abracadabra (6-1); Logorama (14-1); The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (3-1); The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2-1); The Milk of Sorrow (10-1)
• Justice least likely to be done: The Fantastic Mr. Fox (3-1); A Serious Man (3-2); Carey Mulligan (5-1); District 9 (4-1)
  
• We don't know who else to vote for in this category: Nick Park's animated short A Matter of Loaf and Death (2-1); German foreign film nominee The White Ribbon (3-1); Star Trek for best makeup (5-1); live action short Instead of Abracadabra (3-2);
• If Avatar wins, James Cameron's first words from the podium will be: "I'm king of the world!" (15-1); "I'm king of the galaxy!" (12-1); "I'm king of Rancho Palos Verdes, California!" (20-1); "I really fucking hated Point Break as well!" (8-5)

Great idea; wrong cause A South Dakota rancher empties a bottle of Yellow Tail (looks like chardonnay from here) on the ground as a protest against Yellow Tail's donating $100,000 to the American Humane Society. "Front group man extraordinaire Rick Berman and his attack group, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), have launched a new Web site, HumaneWatch.org, to harass the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the country's largest animal welfare organization. In pursuing its mission of stopping animal cruelty, HSUS has apparently run afoul of some large, wealthy business interests, and now it is getting some major pushback."

(Thanks, Sourcewatch and PRWatch!)



Gotta keep those homeless people we forced into shelters sober for the hockey games British Columbia's Liquor Licensing Branch has been forcing private liquor stores in downtown Vancouver to close early during the Winter Olympics


I don't know much about art but I know what I like One of the Vancouver Olympics art installations is the Candahar, a working replica of an Irish bar.



But Bullwinkle, that trick never works Charlie Sheen is back in rehab. "Sheen did not show up for work on Monday and his bail -- which requires that he not consume drugs or alcohol -- could be revoked in Colorado, where he is awaiting trial on domestic-violence charges. The actor's spokesman, Stan Rosenfield, described his client's decision to enter rehab as a 'preventative measure' and added he would 'take some time off' from [his TV] series." In a semi-unrelated story, actor Rip Torn has entered rehab after breaking into a Salisbury, Connecticut bank while armed and drunk. "A court heard Men In Black star Torn, 78, was allegedly so intoxicated that he believed he was at home and had left his hat and boots by the door."

I use that term for these movies even though I don't really feel guilty at all - perhaps we should think of them as "counter-intuitive pleasures". It's a tough genre to define, but here are a few family resemblances you could tease out of the evidence below. A cinematic guilty pleasure is where  

• You take an ironic joy in something unexpected; something you formerly thought an anathema to yourself
• You recognize something admirable in the passion and commitment a filmmaker brings to a hopeless task; the transparency of the effort it really took to produce something so brazen
• You find an unexpected profundity; a power to shake the way you've looked at the world and force a reassessment of the categories by which you've understood things
• You resist thinking that you've simply been fooled, and that if something so horrible can raise feelings of sympathy in you, it needs to be explained; it needs to be made sense of
• You may even feel a certain sense of solidarity with the filmmaker; or even if you feel superior, you gain a real sense of what the true believer feels.

All the following movies tended to have been critically panned and then later reassessed (sometimes building up a serious critical following; sometimes something more cult-like.) As has been said under other circumstances, any of them will feel like a good bottle of bourbon smashed over your head. All are available on DVD at a better store near you.




The Fountainhead (1949)
Director King Vidor
Screenplay Ayn Rand

The most awful writer in the English language comes to the big screen - mostly intact. 1949 was the height of film noir, and most of the charm of The Fountainhead comes from the tension between how good the movie looks and how preposterous it sounds. One of the defining features of soap-opera dialog is that people just up and say what's on their minds, unadorned; and The Fountainhead is full to the gagging point of just the kind of faux-intellectual conversation you might imagine taking place at the University of Peyton Place. Wonderful, ham-handed agitprop - Leni Riefenstahl would have blushed.



Mandingo (1975)
Director Richard Fleischer
Screenplay Norman Wexler

Crazed, lurid and exploitative, Mandingo is Gone with the Wind as conceived by the Antichrist. Back in the bad ol' days down South, a falling-to-bits plantation owner (both he and plantation are falling to bits, that is) watches in dismay both as his son and heir falls for one of the plantation slaves, and his seriously unglued daughter turns down an advantageous marriage to find satisfaction in the arms of newly-acquired fightin' slave Ken Norton. Is it giving anything away to reveal that everybody comes to a bad end? In putting Mandingo in the context of the rest of director Fleischer's career, the NY Times' Dave Kerr calls it "more than a portrait of social decadence, Mandingo is Fleischer's last great crime film, in which the role of the faceless killer is played by an entire social system." And I guess it is that, too.



Prime Cut (1972)
Director Michael Ritchie
Screenplay Robert Dillon

Imagine the following scenario and you'll have a ghost of an idea of what Prime Cut's all about: The mob sends a hit man to shut down Robert Picton's pig farm in B.C. Switch the locale to Kansas City; give the farm operator the name "Mary Ann"; put him in charge of a white slave operation; cast Lee Marvin as the hit man and have him fall for a very young Sissy Spacek as well; and then put the entire farrago into the hands of what appears to be a crazy person to direct. Overheat and serve.



Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
Director Russ Meyer
Screenplay Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer

It's California, and the 60's are in decline. A crazed bosom-obsessed filmmaker with a great cinematic eye and an attitude somewhere between JD Salinger and Mad Magazine, who has spent a career making inexpensive quasi-satirical girlie movies, suddenly finds himself with a 2-picture deal at 20th Century Fox and access to all the tools that only a big studio can provide. He gets a phone call from an admiring up-and-coming movie critic who wants to collaborate on a script. Together they create a satire of California rock & roll celebrity culture - with lots of tits and bums. Over the top in every respect (nudge, nudge) and an often insanely funny nail in the coffin of the 1960's.

The Naked Kiss (1964)
Director Samuel Fuller
Screenplay Samuel Fuller

The film that killed writer-director Samuel Fuller's career (notes from an admirer, here). A hooker leaves the life and moves to a small town where she hopes to get involved with the community and leave her old life behind. She achieves the former; fails at the latter. Both an extremely high-temperature critique of the hypocrisy of small-town life, and a demonstration of the dramatic risks of a filmmaker hard-wiring a movie to his id, The Naked Kiss is the greatest cinematic car-crash ever made: you cannot believe what you see and you cannot turn away.

Year of the Dragon (1985)
Director Micheal Cimino
Screenplay Michael Cimino and Oliver Stone

What you get when you start with a passionately poor script, but everybody gives it all they've got anyway. The movie Michael Cimino made after his Heaven's Gate bankrupted United Artists and killed his reputation, Year is full of all the passion and artistic commitment that The Deer Hunter had - he's making this movie as if his life depended on it - but not a single brain in its head. The heavens aligned in three ways over this movie: Only a brute like Oliver Stone could have come up with the dialogue; Only Mickey Rourke at this point in his career could have believed in the script so passionately and turned his amplifier up to 11 for it's sake; and only a genuine cinematic savant with a commitment to his actors like Cimino had, could have entombed every line as memorably or as insanely. To that cinemagoer for whom irony is a way of life, Year of the Dragon is the greatest movie ever made.

Exactly two years ago today I suddenly developed a mystery ailment which is still with me: aside from making me short-tempered and stupid, it's left me with a lingering sense of fatigue and lassitude and a phantom noise in my head - tinnitus. Zoomer published a piece I wrote about my adventures with tinnitus in the Winter 2008 issue; it no longer appears to be on their server, but you can see a copy of it here.

One of the other things this mystery ailment seemed to do that I noticed only about a year ago was raise my blood pressure, which up until then had been pretty good - or in the words of my previous doctor in Toronto, "it doesn't get any better than that". So I lost some weight, got a little more disciplined cardiovascular exercise, and my blood pressure went down a bit and I felt a bit better - or at least I felt stronger and more capable of handling the assorted miseries that were part-and-parcel with my condition.

But I began to think: could the tinnitus be a product of the high blood pressure? High blood pressure isn't supposed to have symptoms ("the silent killer") so it was a bit of a long shot (for one thing, my tinnitus is worst at night, when one presumes your BP is lower). But my doctor went along with the idea of giving the theory a test, and he put me on Micardis, of which he had enough samples to last a course of eight weeks. That would be long enough to see if lowering BP had any effect on whatever it was that was actually giving me noticeable grief.

I don't like drugs. Put it another way - I don't like prescription drugs. I try and get by without them for the most part - I've had a couple of episodes where I felt like a physician's guinea pig, treating a chronic condition by trying out one thing after another. So if it's a really new and especially impressive drug; if it's not yet off patent and available as a generic, I don't wanna try it.

So I was a little suspicious of Micardis: it's been around about 13 years - which is not bad, really; if it were making people insane or killing them we would have noticed by now. But it's still very expensive (not off patent yet for a few more years), which makes for an interesting conundrum: if it does what I'm asking it to, I probably can't afford to continue using it. I wanted to test the theory by using a drug which, if it worked, I would have no hesitation (financial or otherwise) in taking every day for the rest of my life. Still, I went along: this was going to be limited to a couple of months and the drug company (Boehringer Ingelheim) would be paying the freight, so to speak. An experiment is an experiment.

The leaflet that came with the samples briefly summarized the action of the drug: "Aangiotensen II is a naturally occurring hormone in the human body that causes the blood vessels to constrict, thus making blood pressure higher. Micardis lowers blood pressure by specifically blocking the action of angiotensen II and thus relaxing the blood vessels." That last was a key thought: even if it had no effect on my blood pressure, I thought that relaxing my blood vessels was a good direction to be going: Tinnitus makes you feel that all the capillaries in your head are about to explode.

I'm intimidated by drugs I haven't taken before and I always check the literature for side-effects and adverse reactions - which I probably shouldn't do because I'm likely to imagine that I have them all. So I'm the last person who should try and do that kind of research online.

I did some research online. The first place I went (askapatient.com) had 102 entries from people who had something to say about the drug, and the very first user's list of experienced side-effects ran as follows:

Dizziness, Nausea, Cardiac arrhythmia, chest pain, imbalanced hot and cold spots around my body, shivers, palpitations, panic attacks, Hamroids, [sic] GI bleeding. Problems worsen in hot conditions causing throbbing, extremely fast heart rate, feeling boomy and sluring words, feeling less mentally able.

The author concluded with: "It's not a very good drug."

The very next entry began "No noticeable side-effects", but as I went on it became clear that this person was a major trooper who probably wouldn't notice a bullet-wound in his side:

I took Cozaar, Hyzaar, Diovan,and Avalide with too many side effects. 2x passed out. Now I try Micardis HTC 50 mg,and feel no side effects. I take it in the morning and tonight I take now 100mg Pycnogenol , what I believe is better than Aspirin, but not cheap. I also have to take Magnesium because leg cramp sometimes. Water at least 2 Liter is a must ,or you will pass out with this HTC Pills. My numb toe is also gone, what a surprise after a week.

Some comments, while complimentary about the drug, had a lot to say about the defects of the system that administered it:

BP was about 150/100 before this medication. I come from a family with serious hypertension issues. Reduced BP to 110/68. The insurance carrier fought me -- refused to give it to me. I did try several other medications (recommended by the insurance carrier) which then gave me severe vertigo -- I was so dizzy I could not see straight. I had to immediately stop and the cardiologist fought the insurance carrier on my behalf.

Sometimes, you have to wonder what's a side-effect and what's just a bunch of other health issues:

I have had sleep disturbances, which consist of intense dreams, some sexual and others disturbing. My legs are really restless all night long and I am thrashing around. I also have been on Clonidine (Catapress) for over 20 years. Being diabetic and recently in an auto accident, I take other drugs such as insulin and Celebrex. I also take one percocet pill a day. Still, I have a bad backache. Not sure if it is from the Micardis or from the accident which injured my upper and lower back, right shoulder and both knees.

There are times when your heart simply has to go out to some suffering soul:

I only took micardis for two days. Had I taken it for another day I am sure I would have died. I was still recovering two weeks later. My doctor was shocked. Anxiety, depression, NO appetite, sweating profusely, dry mouth, extremely bad nightmares, very poor sleep, fatigue. (According to my pharmacist such a reaction to micardis is rare.)

Although what you can learn that's actually relevant to your case from somebody who flips out after two pills is a tough call.

Anyway, it goes on and on -- grim reading, for the most part. The biggest problem to somebody seeking information is that there's no consistency to the litany of side effects -- some people retained water; on others the drug seemed to act as a diuretic. Some lost sleep; some were put to sleep; some lost sexual function, some gained. In short, I got no information whatsoever that would prove useful to my particular case. What I did get was a sense of  how much worse-off than I am most of these people are. I felt almost ashamed -- I hadn't earned the right to be among them.

It's entirely probable that the only people who comment on sites like this are people who have something to complain about -- if a drug does exactly what it's supposed to, you just get on with your life. While the online world holds out the promise of more consumer information, it's really more the realm of the powerless -- you go there for comfort and solidarity, not enlightenment.

It's been five days taking this stuff. It hasn't killed me. In my case, maybe ignorance, while not being blissful, is just the most sensible policy.

It was just the hormone replacement therapy talking Former Global and Rogers TV broadcaster Colleen Walsh was fined $2400 and forced to apologize publicly to a passenger she was found guilty of assaulting on a plane that had landed in St. Johns, Nfld. for an unrelated medical emergency. "Police and security officers testified that she was loud, insulting and appeared drunk when she was taken off the Air Canada Boeing 767 bound for Toronto from London. Provincial court Judge Greg Brown said Walsh's conduct that day was 'outrageous,' although she appeared 'to have been impacted greatly ... by lack of sleep, travel at 30,000 feet, the meal, two small bottles of wine and consuming a sleeping pill,' he said. Her actions could well have had something to do with mixing alcohol and medication, the judge added."



It's enough to drive Gordon Brown to drink The government of Britain is considering legislation to ban irresponsible promotional gimmicks in pubs, like all-you-can-drink and speed-drinking contests. "The crackdown will include a ban on drinking games such as the "dentist's chair", where drink is poured straight into the mouths of customers, and compulsory identity checks on all customers who look under 18. But a ban on the bulk discounting of alcohol by shops and supermarkets that led to police complaints that lager is being sold more cheaply than water has been dropped from the code."

In a related story, the Scottish government released research revealing that Scots were even worse boozers than the English. "The average Scot is knocking back the equivalent of 540 pints of beer, 46 bottles of vodka or 130 bottles of wine per year. We drank 50.5 million litres of pure alcohol last year - equivalent to 12.2 litres per person aged 18 and above. The figure is 2.5 litres more per person than in England and Wales."



Watch out for the red states Former failed American VP nominee and current Fox News meat-puppet Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker at the 67th annual Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA) convention in Las Vegas. " 'Governor Palin is a great supporter of America's free enterprise system and understands that industries like the beverage alcohol industry play a key role in driving our national economy,' said Craig Wolf, WSWA president and CEO.

That's a fairly typical reaction from anybody who runs into Ron Wood Kieth Richards has given up drinking. "A source tells Britain's The Sun, 'There's no guarantees (Richards will) stay off it - but he's doing really well so far. He has always quite enjoyed the fact that he seemed to be able to carry on drinking as much as he liked with no real negative impact on his health.' "


On the other hand, every day there is a big swinging dick day OverEasy, a Singapore bar, has announced Booze for Boobs days, where free drinks will be given out to women on the basis of their bra size. "Cheryl Ho, spokesman for The Lo & Behold Group, which runs OverEasy explained to The New Paper there would be two 'mystery' judges at the event - Dave, a musician, and Karen, a lawyer - who will suss out each woman visually. 'They are not boob experts, and neither are they from a bra company. They are our personal friends who will simply guess-timate as to the women's bra cup sizes,' said Ms Ho."


I wasn't expecting the Spanish inquisition "A bishop has condemned Buckfast, the fortified wine made by monks and regarded by some as the scourge of Scotland. The Right Rev Bob Gillies, Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney in the Scottish Episcopal Church, accused the Devon-based Benedictine monks of betraying Christian values. Speaking on BBC Scotland Investigates, to be broadcast tonight, Bishop Gillies said: "What sort of moral double-take is there that these monks can be so closely associated with that product and knowingly aware of the social damage as well as the medical damage it is doing to the kids who take it in such vast volumes?"

The story has been percolating away since Christmas: All-Star NBA guard Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards got into a locker-room argument with a teammate on Christmas Eve over a gambling debt, and pulled a gun on him. (Early versions of the story have both players drawing guns.) Making light of the situation, Arenas explained that he had a locker full of guns because he didn't want them in his home.

The league was not amused. It is an open secret that there is a significant gun culture in the NBA, and while the NBA does not prohibit players from owning firearms, it does ask players not to bring them to work.

This later led to charges being laid and a very quick guilty plea for felony possession of firearms, plus an indefinite suspension from the league. Sentencing is scheduled for March, and speculation runs in two directions: either he gets his wrist slapped (which is an option for the judge), sits out a substantial part of the season, but returns with his career (and income) largely unscathed; or it's the end of the road for him -- he does prison time; his contract is voided and the $90 million he was looking forward to stays in the pocket of whoever emerges in charge of the wizards after the November death of team owner Abe Pollin -- who it should be remembered changed the name of his team in 1997 from the Bullets to the Wizards as a statement against gun violence in DC.

What caught my eye, though, was that of the four handguns he'd been keeping in his locker, (he is reported to have owned hundreds) one was a .50 caliber magnum.

I'd never even heard of a .50 caliber magnum before.  But then, what do I know about guns? Everything I ever thought I needed to know I got from one line in Dirty Harry:

We are in Kansas, Toto.

It's January, so it must be just about time for season 8 of 24. What most fascinates me about the show is that it still exists at all, given that whatever genuine dramatic compulsion it possessed disappeared somewhere about the middle of season 2. It seems as if it's been sustained mostly by its political opportunism; in its apparent advocacy of torture during the Bush era. Can the show survive the fact that for several seasons now, it has descended, dramatically, into self-parody?

What follows is a modest bibliography of some of the more interesting 24 literature floating about on the web, suitable for pursuing while you wait for Season 8's first appearance of the immortal Jack Bauer signature line "I will kill you!"





We were all pretty innocent, then Kiefer Sutherland in 2002 (Flare Magazine)

"You got the sense that if he had been born 40 years earlier Sutherland might have had a good career as a western star. His most effective character type is reminiscent of a Joel McCrea or a diminutive Gary Cooper---the reluctant, laconic, self-effacing man of action. Taking on that kind of cinematic persona cannot be a calculated act in contemporary Hollywood---in a place where actors prefer to be seen as gods, nobody writes leading characters like that any more. No, he does it because it's genuine."




Kiefer's voice makes 'em think they're just in a Ford commercial Televising Torture: 24, Harsh Interrogation, and American Popular Culture (Academic paper)

"The number of acts of torture in prime-time television rose dramatically in the post-9/11 environment from about four scenes of torture in prime-time per year to over one hundred. Not only have the number of acts of torture increased but the content has changed in terms of who is doing the torturing, according to David Danzig of Human Rights First:

What's particularly disturbing for us about this is that when you look at who's doing the torturing, the people who are involved in it have changed. It used to be the bad guys were the ones who tortured, the Nazis or aliens or something like that, and torture never worked. But now it's people like Jack Bauer. It's the heroes of these shows--Sidney on Alias--and it always works for these people. So the message that 18-, 19-, 20-year-old soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan get is that good guys use this stuff and it works.

Art marinates life Whatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind "24." (The New Yorker)

"Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, "Most terrorism experts will tell you that the 'ticking time bomb' situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week." According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book "Torture and Democracy," the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel "Les Centurions," written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book's hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of "Les Centurions" provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy's scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies--that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats."



You left out "daughter menaced by cougars" New Era in Politics, New Focus for '24' (New York Times)

"As the writers and producers sat down in spring 2007 to draw the outlines of Season 7, they knew, Mr. Gordon said, that most of the low-hanging fruit in the action genre had already been picked: Bauer had foiled assassination attempts, interrupted bomb plots, saved his family, lost his family and been imprisoned and tortured."



Some questions are easier than others Can a liberal still enjoy 24? (The Guardian)

"Republicans have been quick to link themselves to the show. The highly-influential conservative thinktank The Heritage Foundation held an event a few years ago called "24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does it Matter?". The discussion panel included America's head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, and three of 24's Executive Producers, along with several cast members. Despite the high-octane approach of 24, Chertoff insisted it reflected real life."


Put that cigarette out or I will kill you How the War on Terror May Affect Domestic Interrogations: The 24 Effect (Chapman Law Review)

"My concern is not that the "24 effect" will necessarily cause torture to spill over from the war on terror into local police departments' interrogation rooms. I don't believe that the causal relationship is nearly that direct. Rather, my concern is that once the public has been inured to torture by its repeated factual and fictional representations - even its disturbing representations - it will increasingly discount the effect of non-physical coercive interrogation techniques on criminal defendants and will become more receptive to the use of those non-torturous techniques in run-of-the-mill criminal cases."



Lights going out and a kick in the balls / that's entertainment 24 and Torture (TORTURE: MORAL ABSOLUTES AND AMBIGUITIES, B.Clucas, G.Johnstone & T.Ward, eds., Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2009)

"Having considered the express intentions of the program makers, I apply a scheme of analysis on 'speech acts' devised by J.L.Austin, and developed by Langton, to argue that the real intention of the program makers is better understood as pro-torture propaganda: an instance of double immorality, as not only does the show push a pro-torture message, but also, it does so under the pretense of pure entertainment."



You don't have to eat the leg, Thompson; there's still plenty of good meat left -- look at that arm Worst TV show of the week: 24 on Fox (Parents Television Council)

"Moments later Jack is able to escape the bondage when he manages to lock his teeth onto the jugular vein of his captor.  Like a vampire he sinks his teeth in and then rips a chunk of the man's neck off.  The terrorist lays dead in a large pool of his own blood while Jack, resembling Hannibal Lecter, spits out the flesh and frees himself."



What a thankless job it is to be a producer The depraved heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood (The Guardian)

"The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters.  In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher describes how Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they performed. Most were well aware that they were doing things that brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, instead of saying "What horrible things I did to people!" they would say "What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, the temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate."



You can also just press Reset when the victim dies Virtual Torture: Videogames and the War on Terror (Game Studies)

"The chief reason 24: The Game does nothing to renew our disgust for torture-interrogation is because the interrogation is presented so clearly as a game. Unlike Splinter Cell, it is possible to get the interrogation wrong in 24: The Game. There are correct moves and incorrect moves.  Getting the interrogation just right -- pressing the right buttons at the right time -- is an end itself, a minigame whose gameplay is further constrained by a four minute time limit. Inexorably counting down the seconds, the iconic glowing 24 digital clock in the lower right hand corner of the HUD telegraphs tension, suspense, and the constant threat of failure. "



They were then asked if they missed Elisha Cuthbert after Season 2 Torture, Terror, and "24": Does Jack Bauer Raise Your Personal "Threat Level"? (Midwest Political Science Association 67th Annual National Conference paper)

"Participants were randomly assigned to watch either an episode of "24" or an episode of another military-tinged action drama, "NCIS." They then answered questions about their political attitudes, including questions designed to test three hypotheses: 1) viewers of "24" are more likely to claim terrorism as an important issue facing the country than are viewers of "NCIS," 2) viewers of "24" are more likely to judge President Bush's performance overall based on their assessments of his job on terrorism than are viewers of "NCIS," and 3) despite the speculation in the popular press, viewers of "24" are not more likely to endorse torture as a response to terrorism than are viewers of "NCIS." "



Wait, there's more What torture never told us (New York Times); Televising Torture: 24, Harsh Interrogation, and American Popular Culture (Academic paper); and too much to even list here: Everything Salon.com has ever published about 24

...Or, it's all downhill from here. It's taken a while, but Robert Parker has finally jumped the shark.

But, first off, a tip: It looks like 2007 was a very good year for wine all across southern France. (It was a memorably crummy and fantastically overpriced vintage in Bordeaux.) So if you come across reasonably-priced offerings from Southern Rhone appellations like Chateauneuf de Pape or Gigondas, or Vacqueyras or from the Midi, don't hesitate. Now, back to our story:

Thirty-five years ago, Robert Parker made his reputation by being a far stronger advocate for the 1982 vintage of Bordeaux than anyone else. History (to say nothing of the Bordelaise) has smiled on him for that -- to the point where he can make money merely writing about what he had for dinner the night before.

At some point, some scholarly type should really do a phenomenology of Parker's near-pornographic hyperbole, but at this moment it's sufficient to notice that it has served him very well as a price-setting mediator between the worlds high-end wine producers and the worlds millionaires. If he were to get run over by a tanker truck of vin du pays tomorrow, prices of the top 50 Bordeaux would almost certainly fall precipitously next vintage as a result.

As it turns out, though, if Parker were run over by a tanker truck of vin du pays tomorrow, the proprietors of Chateauneuf-de-Pape would personally nurse him back to health (or at the very least, animated zombiehood), because he's done them a great favor recently: Parker has just called the 2007 Chateauneuf de Papes the greatest wines he's ever tasted. (His exact words are the "most compelling vintage of any viticultural region I have ever tasted".) We should use the paragraph break following this sentence to ponder the enormity of that statement.


It's even bigger than that, actually -- Parker claims that a significant number of them are, in fact, perfect. Here's an example -- one of nine from this vintage of Chateauneuf de Pape:

Somebody did a count of the perfect scores Parker has given out in his career, and the number is somewhere around 210. That makes this particular trip to the Southern Rhone a major life-event for him -- about 5% of the greatest wines he's ever had, he tasted in a few days in Chateauneuf-de-Pape.

Unfortunately, this also makes it the second major pronouncement in 6 months where Parker has been significantly out of step with his peers in the critical trade. Nobody (except wine retailers like the L.C.B.O.) was as enthusiastic about the 2008 Bordeaux; and likewise, Parker's major peers all rate the 2007 Chateauneuf de Papes as significantly less exalted. (For example, here's what Hugh Johnson has to say about the 2007's from the Southern Rhone: "Very good, an early-drinking vintage. Abundant, sweet fruit is the vintage imprint. Grenache-only wines can lack tannin but drink sumptuously.... Cote du Rhones are fat and good. Openly-fruited, aromatic whites." In short, just the kind of wines that are Parker's favorite: Big, fruit-driven wines that are enjoyable even early on in their evolution.)

We are witnessing two worrisome trends that seem a bit like handwriting on the wall for Parker these days. The first is his iconoclastic overpraise of established wines, which has recently made him look even more obviously like a fartcatcher to the wine-trade aristocracy. Second -- and this is going to be the more long-lasting legacy -- is that his methodology is finally (and obviously) falling apart. When you claim to have found perfection both as categorically and as often as Parker has, you have punched your ticket to Babylon.

A scoring system claiming the range and precision of Parker's 100-point system breaks down when it approaches its top score in a way that, say, the Globe and Mail's 4-star system for rating movies does not. In a system that imprecise, four stars clearly doesn't imply perfection; but merely as good a movie as that lo-definition system can approximate. The fifty movies a year that earn four Globe stars (I just pulled that number out of the air) are clearly not meant to be thought of as fifty perfect movies; but merely the 50 best films the Globe has reviewed that year.

But 100 points out of 100 does make a claim of perfection, both of the product it claims to rate, and of the system it uses to make that rating. The gap between 89 and 90 Parker points is merely obnoxious when you contemplate what it means in the wine-trade as a whole and on wine-store shelf-talkers around the globe. But the gap between 99 and 100 Parker points is the gap between claims of expertise and pretensions of divinity.

It's blasphemous, actually -- we should allow ourselves a giggle over using that particular word, but it's technically appropriate. Who can claim to know perfection with the precision that Parker claims? And it's not a lack of humility that is worrisome.  It's the schizophrenic state of Parker's self-knowledge. In interviews Parker has admitted a margin for error of about 10% on any given day. If you at one moment claim a significant fallibility rate, you should not at the next moment claim to have known perfection -- to have found not just a perfect wine, but a whole nest of them on another day at the office.

Given the current state of the wine industry (to say nothing of the more-than-once-burned morale of the moneyed Western world) it's hard to see Robert Parker's increasingly overoptimistic and hyperbolic commentaries having the influence on future prices in the way that has marked his career so far.  Parker probably sees himself as too big to fail, but it's likely that his comments on the 2007 Chateauneuf de Papes will join those on the 1982 Bordeaux as the other bookend to his career.  The age of Parkerbole is coming to a close.

This booze isn't working any more The iceman cameth to the B.C. provincial election campaign as a lobby group representing independent liquor stores claimed that NDP promises to raise the minimum wage and hoist the wholesale price for private liquor stores would raise the price of a six-pack of beer by as much as three dollars. A panicked electorate re-elected the Campbell Liberals once again.


On the other hand, he did give her credit for their Chablis scoring 93 points with Robert Parker A French winemaker was charged with attempting to poison his wife, whom he accused of working too hard in the vineyard and of not doing enough for him. "Jacky Chatelain, a 51-year-old vineyard owner from Burgundy, was arrested after a four-year investigation into how his wife Josiane had fallen ill with arsenic poisoning."


But the age of consent stayed at 10 France raised its national drinking age to 18.


They're calling it Chateau get your ass the f--k back to your f--king stove Celebrity chef and Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares host Gordon Ramsay loaned his name to a Bordeaux line of wines


But then, a Ferrari doesn't insult a Tata Nano, and then toss its cookies in a back alley somewhere  In England, Tottenham Hotspur football team captain Ledley King was arrested for a drunken incident (with racist overtones) at a pub. Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp then declared that he will ban alcohol consumption for his team next season "Footballers should not drink. You shouldn't put diesel in a Ferrari." 


This wouldn't have anything to do with having to watch Fox News while serving in Iraq, would it? Nearly twice as many US army soldiers today compared to six years ago are either alcoholic or engage in damaging behavior such as binge drinking, according to army statistics. "Soldiers diagnosed by Army substance abuse counselors with alcoholism or alcohol abuse, such as binge drinking, increased from 6.1 per 1,000 soldiers in 2003 to an estimated 11.4 as of March 31, according to the data."