Conservatives and Hollywood: An update

Looks like Ben and I will be writing our weekly Scripps column about the new Big Hollywood site that I talked about yesterday. Forgive me, but I think that Big Hollywood — like, say, Andy McCarthy — is going to be a gift that keeps on giving for me.

Why? Well, apparently a “well-known screenwriter” needed the cloak of anonymity to write this:

Explain to me why we can’t say ‘actress’ anymore? “She’s such a brave actor”

Doesn’t ‘actress’ MEAN an actor of the female gender? And isn’t ‘actress’ infinitely more elegant than ‘female actor’? Who starts this nonsense?

I suppose it’s the essence of the blogosphere that no thought goes unpublished. And personally, I don’t care whether you say “actress” or “actor.” But if this is the kind of stuff that conservatives have been dying to stick to the liberal Hollywood establishment, I think the liberal Hollywood establishment is safe.

Battlestar Galactica: The George W. Bush years

Newsweek asks critics to pick art “they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” TV critic Joshua Alston’s answer mirrors my own:

An orchestrated terrorist attack. An inexorable march to war. An enemy capable of disappearing among its targets, armed with an indifference to its own mortality. It sounds like a PBS special on Al Qaeda. In fact, it’s a synopsis of the Sci Fi Channel series “Battlestar Galactica,” which—for anyone who manages to get past the goofy name—captures better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world. Yes, even better than “24,” with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, “Battlestar” has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society’s battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn’t flinch from one question that “24″ wouldn’t dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

I wrote about this earlier this year, on the eve of BSG’s fourth season premiere. If I can be allowed to plagiarize myself:

“Battlestar Galactica” is perhaps the smartest and most comprehensive artistic meditation on life in post-9/11 America that exists in all of popular culture. Also, it has sexy robots, which is pretty awesome.

OK, OK, I know I sound like some kind of sci-fi fanboy who secretly wishes his wife were a Vulcan. And that’s not entirely unfair. It’s easy to dismiss me. And it’s also easy to dismiss a show that has its roots in the 1970s, Dirk Benedict and feathered hair. But today’s “Battlestar Galactica” is not yesterday’s “Battlestar Galactica.” Yes, they share a name and a premise — the last remnants of humanity flee a genocidal race of robots in search of Earth. But where the former opted to use that premise as a launching pad for Trek-lite “adventure of the week” excursions to the Casino Planet and sexy fun, the newer show is gritty, dark and maybe a little bit fatalistic. In a good way. The result has been praise from lots of non-genre quarters — a Peabody Award, a perch atop Time Magazine’s “best shows” list, and obsessive examination from the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Spencer Ackerman.

It’s a crime this show hasn’t been nominated for a major Emmy. It’ll have to settle, instead, for being one of the greatest shows of all time.

But let’s go back to the beginning. You can get a recap of the whole series in the eight-minute video above, or maybe check out this overview from Salon. The series opens with, essentially, the end of the human race — the robot race of Cylons mounts a nuclear attack on the 12 human homeworlds. There are fewer than 50,000 survivors, spread out among a “ragtag” fleet, led by President Laura Roslyn (Mary McDonnell) and Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos, in all his quietly gravelly voiced glory).

The robots don’t look like robots, though. They look like humans — really attractive humans. And the humans have no problems with torturing and murdering what Cylons they find in their midst — because the enemy, after all, is just a soulless killing machine undeserving of the same moral respect that humans might give each other. Sound familiar?

But these Cylons, it becomes clear, have feelings and ambitions. They believe in God. They bicker among themselves And over time, some of them choose to help the humans. And the humans — some of them, anyway — choose to give those few Cylons a bit of grudging trust.

The humans, by the way, don’t look anything like the perfect (and boring) people we saw in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Some of them are drunks. Some of them make morally suspect choices; all of them make horrible personal choices. And when they’re cornered by theCylons and put under occupation, some of them choose to strap on a bomb vest and go blow themselves up in a public square crowded with the robot enemy. Again: Sound familiar? Who, exactly should we be rooting for here?

Along the way, the crew of the Galactica wrestle with whether abortion should be allowed — the species needs to grow again, after all. They have to decide if democracy is compatible with war fighting. They have to decide whether to forgive each other for the sins they have committed. There are moments when you detect a conservative sensibility at work; others when it seems that liberals are running the show. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, though, something comes along to upset your perspective.

At the end of Season Three, in fact, Lee Adama — the admiral’s son — gives a rousing courtroom speech. Everybody, he says, has committed awful mistakes in the course of trying to survive the end of the human race. But those sins should be forgiven, he suggests, because everybody is trying their best in the face of unspeakable evil. Left and right, we all need to give each other a little grace.

This is profoundly human stuff that disregards the typical black hat/white hat template that dominates so much of our movies and television drama. It’s difficult to graft onto the real world and our considerations, say, of John Yoo’s memo saying the president has the authority to authorize “harsh interrogations.” And the truth is: “Battlestar Galactica,” despite that season-ending speech, doesn’t offer many easy answers. But better than any other show in prime time — with the possible exception of “Lost” — it is asking all the right questions.

will.i.am’s victory video

Please. Stop.

“The Godfather” kicks butt. (No, this post is not about politics.)

So last night, we watched The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration. And man, was it fantastic.

Like many American men, I’m addicted to The Godfather. For me, the devotion started about a decade ago; I’d avoided seeing the movie because it was so recommended, so praised, that watching it had taken on the whiff of doing homework — when you have to see a movie, that makes it a little less enticing, at least for me. But one weekend I was home sick, there was a VHS copy of the movie (very grainily) recorded from Cinemax, and, well I was hooked. (This, of course, was back when Al Pacino was still acting instead of SHOUTING! EVERY! LINE!)

It was the first release of The Godfather on DVD back in 2001 or so that prompted me to buy a DVD player. And it’s this new release of The Coppola Restoration — an effort to restore the film footage so that the movie looks like what audiences saw in theaters in 1972 — that has me contemplating an upgrade to high-definition.

I didn’t do that last night; instead, we downloaded the restoration from iTunes and watched it on my wife’s big-ass computer monitor. That’s not quite HD, but the results were still amazing. The picture was crisper, the colors popped; the final scene in the garden between Michael and Vito Corleone (”There wasn’t enough time”) looks like, well, art.

The story of The Godfather was always compelling. Now — after a few decades — the visuals match the story.