| For smarter audiences... THE HAPPENING |
Um... never mind. |
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Posted on October 08, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) |
| BOOK SMART: Vincent Bugliosi prosecutes George W. Bush for Murder! |
What do Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson and George W. Bush have in common? Vincent Bugliosi believes they are all cold-blooded killers. Wow. Guess no one’s ever had to tell Vincent to pick on someone his own size.
It was Mr. Bugliosi — then working as an Assistant District Attorney in Los Angeles — who put the swastika-scarred Manson behind bars for life. In turn, Mr. Bugliosi recounted the proceedings in Helter Skelter , the best-selling true crime book of all-time, having amassed over 7 million copies sold. (Helter Skelter also earned the author the first of three Edgar Awards.) In Outrage, Mr. Bugliosi reviewed California’s case against famed footballer and infamous memorabilia-swiper Simpson, finding that Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden presented the evidence incompetently and concluding that O.J. is indeed guilty of double homicide, whether or not the glove fit. Now, Mr. Bugliosi launches his opening statement with his latest book’s title: The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder
When I spoke with Mr. Bugliosi, it was evident that many close to him questioned the wisdom of publishing this brilliant and brutal legal assault on the President of The United States. Some speculated that Mr. Bugliosi might befall a fate worse than Valerie Plame’s public outing. (Or, members of Dick Cheney’s hunting party.) Yet, the 75-year-old, former prosecutor claims he “had no choice.” It’s not that he’s brave; he swears: “I am not courageous. I never have been. I’m not even very bright. I just see things differently. I see what other people don’t see even though it’s right in front of them. And what I see, makes me sick.” What turns his stomach are the “needless deaths of 4,000+ American troops and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians” killed during “Bush’s war.” And, the fact that no one in the mainstream media or mainstream politics seems willing to say a discouraging word about the Commander-In-Chief. (In particular, he scorns Nancy Pelosi for taking impeachment off the table despite the fact her Republican colleagues were willing to oust President Clinton for his consensual, sexual peccadillos.)
“This isn’t my war. This isn’t your war. This isn’t America’s war. This is George Bush’s war. This is Condoleeza Rice’s war. This is Dick Cheney’s war. Now I don’t know why they did it. I don’t need to prove motive. You don’t have to in a murder trial. However, I can prove intent. I do know and I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George W. Bush intentionally misled this nation into this war based on a series of lies. The evidence is incontrovertible.”
Indeed, reading The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder, it is hard to conjure a defense for everyone’s favorite vacationer in Crawford, Texas. Mr. Bugliosi systematically details the contradictions and miscalculations of the Bush Administration in editing the National Intelligence reports into the positively war-mongering white papers, the President’s own attempts to link Saddam Hussein and 9/11 through almost-subliminal pairing in speeches and the damning Downing Street memo that clarifies Bush as an imminent threat to Iraq and not the opposite as so broadly bellowed at news conferences and Sunday talk shows back in 2003. In fact, when I asked Mr. Bugliosi how he might handle the case were he the defense attorney, he could not muster a single credible angle… other than to blame a conniving Condoleeza Rice from purposing withholding information from her boss. (Of course, if this were true, the title of the book would change to incriminate the Secretary of State. And, most likely, the tome would not already be rocketing up The New York Times best-seller list.)
Of course, some may wonder how America’s 43rd President could be tried for murder considering he’s never killed anyone; on the face of it, the worst George Bush has done is torture the English language. (Or should that read: subject English to advanced interrogation techniques?) Fascinatingly, Mr. Bugliosi uses the same tactic to accuse Bush that he did Charles Manson. Others acting on behalf of both men, either under direct instruction or not, committed crimes that each irrefutably knew would lead to the deaths of others. In short, George Bush had to know that people would die in warfare and if he sent troops into combat under false pretenses, his guilt is irrefutable. “George Bush’s actions were, have been and are conspiratorial… culminating in death.”
Now, given jurisdictional constraints, George W. Bush could only be tried in the United States for the deaths of American soldiers. Perfectly, the case would be brought in federal court in Washington D.C., though any State’s attorney could press charges for the murders of that particular state’s war dead. (In conjunction with the book’s publication, copies were distributed to prosecutors nationwide with Mr. Bugliosi offering his assistance in any way.) “This case may never go to court. If it did, it might, eventually, be struck down by a stacked Supreme Court. But at least I know I’ve tried to do something. I can’t stand by while this smug man, smiles his way through every day, laughing while good American men, true patriots are dying. If nothing else, I want to plant a seed in George Bush’s head. I want him to know he will never truly be a free man. There is no statute of limitations for murder. He could be indicted any day [after he is out of office]. I want him to have second thoughts for the rest of his life.”
To those “second thoughts,” I add a third: Vincent Bugliosi won 105 out of 106 felony cases and was a perfect 21-for-21 in felony murder trials. To simplify matters for the former owner of the Texas Rangers, that means Mr. Bugliosi is batting a thousand. Batter up?
Check out The Warren Report podcast for highlights of Warren's Words & Wine interview with Vincent Bugliosi. This edition of The Warren Report is sponsored in part by Superbeans which urges you to visit http://prosecutegeorgebush.com/
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Posted on October 01, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) |
| For smarter audiences... AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL |
On a scale of 1 to 10, Americans rate a… Oh, hold on. That’s the whole problem. As a nation, we are obsessed with ranking our attractiveness, comparing ourselves with friends, loved ones and supermodels. It’s a simple, overwhelming problem but never has it been addressed with such clarity, breadth, depth and earnestness as it has by Darryl Roberts in his documentary, AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. The filmmaker covers more social blemishes than Clearasil on a high school chess team. Wisely, he frames the cornucopia of related (and some very tangential) aesthetic concerns with the story of Gerren Taylor, a 12-year-old girl who broke into the modeling industry, quite literally, accidentally. The young beauty’s trajectory is acute, spiraling downward rapidly after a moonshot launch. Her rags to runway to rags saga, parallels our own insatiable craving for beauty and our inevitable failure to achieve this unattainable ideal, resulting in a snowballing self-loathing. (You can never be too rich, too thin… or too well-therapized.) Mister Roberts could be faulted for intermittent navel-gazing, but that is an inherent and forgivable pitfall of the filmmaker-fronted documentary form. Luckily, one grows fond’a his demeanor, thanks in large part to his narrative naivety and the sage, compartmentalized editing of Kurt Engfehr (who partially-tamed Michael Moore in FAHRENHEIT 9/11). AMERICA’s highlights include the shocking candor of magazine editors admitting to their rampant exploitation (their honesty may explain why many no longer hold their jobs) and the appalling bruit force of Dr. Steven Marquardt, a certified (and certifiable) Maxillofacial surgeon, who spouts more clichéd racist claptrap than Archie Bunker, Jesse Helms and Don Imus on a moonshine-fueled Klan retreat. (I needed an operation just to wire my dropped jaw back in place.) AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL ought be seen from sea to shining sea, but an R-rating may limit the audience that is most in need of viewing it. (Apparently, the MPAA deems a couple of curse words and some suggestive banter morally unacceptable, while THE LOVE GURU with its barrage of inane innuendo earned a PG-13. Write your local censor if you are outraged.) AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL will prove redundant to the self-actualized and thoroughly enlightening to the young, the insecure and the media-saturated.
Check out The Warren Report podcast for Warren's interview with filmmaker Darryl Roberts recorded over three separate nights in Seattle during preview screenings of AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL.
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Posted on September 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) |
| BOOK SMART: Roman Polanski undressed by Christopher Sandford |
POLANSKI: A Biography
by Christopher Sandford
Palgrave Macmillan
Mark Twain calculated: “The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.” Of course, the wag hadn’t factored in those individuals who are crazy enough to assume the role of lightning rods, willingly. Roman Polanski and his biographer Christopher Sandford are two such folks who dare earth-bound strikes of, potentially fatal, static charge. Polanski survived World War II then went on a cinematic rampage. His early films — most notably REPULSION, KNIFE IN THE WATER and A TASTE FOR WOMEN — reflect a carnal kink, a vague sexist agenda — that provoked critics and would later seal his fate in the court of public opinion. Despite his talent and his tragedy — wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson gang in ’69 — Polanski’s conviction for the statutory rape of a 13-year old branded him (rightfully?) as an out-of-control hedonist with as little respect for others as for the Law. Mr. Sandford creates a compelling portrait of a thrill-seeker who may be accountable for his actions, but may have also been a product of his times and his equally lascivious movie-making mates. The author relies on previously unreleased courtroom documents and the testimony of colleagues to frame Polanski. However, Sandford’s previous bios do raise concerns about the accuracy of his research. Can the man who infamously smeared Kurt Cobain and partially defamed others such as Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Steve McQueen be trusted to offer an honest appraisal of CHINATOWN’s auteur? Really, does it matter? POLANSKI plays in print like ROSEMARY’S BABY on screen, an edge-of-your bed page-turner with a devilish outcome. Beware, readers, when in Rome, do not do as Roman did. After all, lightning can strike twice.
Listen to Warren's interview with Mr. Sandford on The Warren Report's podcast. Subscribe now, it's FREE!
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Posted on September 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) |
| FILM RAP... Alan Ball (TOWELHEAD) |
Invest just a little time and effort and you can come up with far better reasons to dislike people other than the color of their skin, their country of origin. Hate others for the content of their character.
Maybe this isn’t what Martin Luther King had in mind, but Alan Ball may still agree, though his spin would be far less curmudgeonly. The Emmy®-winning creator of Six Feet Under and Oscar®-winning screenwriter of AMERICAN BEAUTY, is a compassionate progressive, acutely capable of parsing the differences between individuals and then poetically adept at celebrating those distinctions on screen, recognizing every one’s capacity for blending black and white; yet still realizing them in glorious Technicolor, not a murky grey.
TOWELHEAD, based on the novel by Alicia Erian, proves Mr. Ball’s greatest challenge. The movie is told, primarily, from the point of view of Jasira, a thirteen-year-old girl who is shuttled from her indifferent American mother to live with her intolerant Lebanese father in Houston. Once ensconced in this religiously air-conditioned, precariously-integrated cul-de-sac community, Jasira is subjected to her father’s double-standards regarding assimilation, her neighbor’s indelicate prejudices and inappropriate sexual proclivities and one schoolmate’s own natural, if premature, romantic desires.
TOWELHEAD is dramatically diverse, universally moving. Mr. Ball expertly guides his superb cast — Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello and Toni Colette along with rising stars Summer Bishil and Peter Macdissi — through his enthralling and emotionally-draining feature directorial debut. TOWELHEAD may be a derisive epithet for some, but for Mr. Ball it is the name of an instant film classic.
WARREN: You’ve created your own stories for so long, what was it that made you passionate enough to adapt and direct TOWELHEAD ?
ALAN: You know when I read it. I actually had another screenplay that I was ready to go out with — a screwball comedy set in the 30’s — and my agent called, said he just got a manuscript and thought I should take a look. And when I read it, I just got so pulled into the viewpoint of Jasira and what she was going through. The book had a tone that I responded to… it was harrowing, sweet and there was a lot of humor. Obviously there are themes in there that I’ve explored before, that obviously I respond to, but also I loved the whole casual, multi-culturalism of it. I loved the fact that the book didn’t judge its characters. The book refused to judge them, it refused to cast Jasira as a victim, it refused to punish or condemn her for being sexually curious and allowed her to keep that curiosity after everything she’d gone through. A lot of people are uncomfortable with female sexuality, and there is a little bit of a fetishization of victimhood in pop culture. We like our women to be victims. So I loved the fact that here is this young girl that just out of the sheer strength of her own character transcends this pretty horrific event and not only does it not ruin her, but it enables her to extricate herself from another abusive situation and to really take control over her own life and her own destiny and her own body for the first time in ways that she wouldn’t have been able to.
WARREN: Is it your life experience that allows you to have that compassion for all the characters in your stories?
ALAN: I’m just not interested in stories that judge their characters very harshly, and even in real life I feel like as a society we tend to really want just to seal everything into this viewpoint, all or nothing, good or evil. And life is much more complicated and much, much richer than that. Things are not simple, no matter how much we want them to be. And you can look at that as a blessing as well as looking at it as a curse.
WARREN: But some things people do can actually be wrong, no?
ALAN: Of course, absolutely. And you know, if I were the father of a 13-year-old girl and, and some guy molested her I would want to kill him, but… as a writer, as a storyteller, what is interesting to me is why does he do this, how does this happen. I don’t think the movie in any way lets him off the hook for what he did. He certainly is punished for it. And you know what? He should, but that doesn’t mean that he is not a human being, that he doesn’t have his own reasons for what having done what he did. It doesn’t excuse him, doesn’t let him off the hook, but I’m interested in how this happened, as opposed to just condemning him.
WARREN: So is it safe to say that for any character there are explanations for behavior but not necessarily excuses?
ALAN: Yeah, I believe there are explanations… I think we are all capable of doing great things and we are all capable of doing monstrous things and that’s part of what our life is about, learning to make those choices… I do believe that we grew up with a mythology that taught us the right choices get rewarded and the wrong choices get punished and I think that’s a lie. I think a lot of people are making really evil choices and getting away with it. So in reality, if you make the right choice it’s probably going to make things harder for you, but it’s still important to do that.
WARREN: But is everyone redeemable?
ALAN: I can’t answer that. I don’t know, you’re talking about millions of people.
WARREN: I think of you as a God amongst writers.
ALAN: Well that’s a misconception that maybe you shouldn’t be operating under. I don’t know. I like to think that everyone is redeemable, but I can’t possibly say that with utter conviction that’s the case. Maybe there are some people who are irredeemable. Dick Cheney jumps to mind.
WARREN: If Rodney King were to ask you “Can’t we all just get along?,” would you’d say ‘nope?’
ALAN: You know actually I wouldn’t. I would say “yes we can” but we have to realize that we are not separate from each other, and that we aren’t separate entities, that that’s all an illusion. That it’s easy to hate each other. It’s also incredibly un-evolved. So yes we can, but we don’t seem to want to.
TOWELHEAD opens in Seattle on September 19th, 2008.
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Posted on September 03, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) |
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