SO WHERE'S THE RIGHT'S CLAIM ON SUPPORTING THE CONSTITUTION...

,,,when it comes to the postal service. Rightwing Republicans are always going on about the Constitution and The Founding Fathers, but it was the Republicans who semi-privatized the U.S. Postal Service which led, in part, to the situation now, where post offices are closing and hours of delivery being cut back, and other changes for the worse for those who still rely on the mail for many things (i.e. the poor who don't have access to computers and smart phones, and those not-so-poor who haven't succumbed to the Internet's lure).

The U. S. Postal Service was established in the Constitution, one of those very specific articles there, and further honed by The Founding Fathers in the years after that article was ratified. So, in order to provide for the general welfare of all its citizens, the U. S. government should be able to run the Post Office with revenues from taxes as well as postage and other fees. But like the country's railroad system(s), rightwing Republicans have managed to decimate the Postal Service, as well as the rail lines (which can be justified by the Constitution in several ways, but one of them might be the section about "postal roads" being built and maintained, since a lot of mail has always traveled by mail).

And they've done this while subsidizing, with our tax dollars, big banks, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, billionaires, etc. etc. etc. (which is nowhere supported in The Constitution).

But as post offices disappear, and those of us who still use the mail get forced to turn to "for profit" carriers like UPS and FedEx (the U.S. Postal Service was not meant to be "for profit" until the Republicans changed it to a semi-private corporation back in the '70s), rightwing politicians will continue to tout their proprietary claim on The Constitution and The Founding Fathers as if the rest of us can't read or don't bother to, so will never realize what hypocritical liars they can be and often are.

J. EDGAR

Clint Eastwood has made some great movies, like THE UNFORGIVEN, and some flawed but still good ones, like GRAN TORINO. But for me, J. EDGAR is neither. Don't get me wrong, there's things about this movie that are great, or flawed but still good. There are also things that are pretty weak, even bad, for my taste.

It's way more ambitious than most of his films (except for the two about the battle for Iwo Jima, mini-masterpieces to me), with many more scenes and settings than he usually has in his films. Clint's the master of the minimal, minimal dialogue in the scripts he chooses or cuts that way, minimal gestures as an actor, minimal scenes and camera set ups, even minimal casts. And the music he often composes for his films is minimally intrusive, usually no grand orchestra movie soundtrack overcompensating.

But for J. EDGAR, Eastwood is only minimal in offering any dramatic explanations for why this guy was as creepy as he was and did so much damage to our country during his half century of power.  In everything else about the film, Eastwood's maximal. It's a big cast with I would guess more minor roles than almost any of his other movies.

He tries to cover over sixty years in Hoover's life and profession, as well as the contemporaneous history that Hoover's trying to control and does too often. And that presents a problem. I was hired to write a screenplay for Otis Redding's life story back in my Hollywood days, and thought I'd given them a pretty good one, but the studio heads changed by the time I finished it and the new guy wanted it entirely different to put his stamp on it. And then it never got made.

So I know how difficult it is to do a biopic. It starts with the writing, and in this case, Dustin Lance Black, who wrote MILK was the writer, and I wasn't crazy about that sprawling portrait of a man's life either. Both films have some of the same problems: moments of emotional connection, separated by scenes that seem either arbitrary or expository with little or no connection to the rest of the film and its characters (the movie about the great Irish hero, Michael Collins, had the same problem, as do many biopics).

So I wasn't crazy about the story. It depended on many stock bio tricks that I would have liked to have seen Clint resist. Judi Dench does her usual great acting, but in the service of the cliched monster mother, whose scenes with her son seem to be positing that it's all her fault he turned out to be such a cretin.

But at least her character has a clear connection with Leonardo DiCaprio's "J. Edgar" that makes at least cliched sense, unlike Naomi Watts' "Helen Gandy"—Hoover's career long loyal secretary who kept his secrets to the grave. Why she was so attached to him is never evident dramatically, she just is okay?

The standout performance may be Armie Hammer's (he almost stole SOCIAL NETWORK playing two privileged twins) as "Clyde Tolson"—Hoover's loyal second-in-command who shared Hoover's life so completely it has always been assumed they were lovers. The movie is not definitive on that score, though it offers up some contrived, to me, scenes that no one could possibly know about to demonstrate the connection they had. But again with no evident reason for it.

DiCaprio makes his usual strenuous effort to portray the character he's been hired to portray, but as so often happens in his films, at least from my perspective, he's miscast. His face, even when covered with make-up tricks to make him look a little more like Hoover, still betrays that boyish cuteness that makes it pretty impossible for me to buy him as the kind of men who seem to have been born old, like Howard Hughes or J. Edgar Hoover.

And the latter, of course, looked like a miniature bulldog, a very old miniature bulldog. There are other actors who do nice work, my old friend Michael O'Neill as Senator McKellar in a scene where he drills Hoover at a hearing, and Christopher Skyer gets Nixon so right, he should be cast immediately in a movie about maybe our most diabolical president.

As always, the music is one of the best things about the film, and like I said, there's other things to dig about it. But in the end it fudges or skips over some of the worst aspects of Hoover's seemingly endless grip on unelected power, while making the insidiousness of the man seem at times justified or almost sympathetic. But Hoover was a pathetic, hypocritical, lying, chicken-hearted blight on what our democracy aspires to and our Constitution stands for, and though the movie alludes to all that, it seems to be trying to soft sell it, the way I see it.

So, it wasn't the movie I'd like to have seen on this subject. Maybe you'll feel differently.

ANOTHER MUST READ KRUGMAN COLUMN

He says it better than most of us have: here.

GOTTA SEE THIS

If you haven't already. I feel like I've seen it before and maybe even posted it. But it's worth seeing again.

PS TO LAST POST (MORE COMIC RELIEF)

Another hysterical short short film.

Only this one you have to link to and make sure the kids aren't around when you watch it.

And pay attention right from the beginning, that's not a real ad.

[PS: And thanx to my great friend Sue for hipping me to it.]

SOME COMIC RELIEF

This has got to be one of the silliest Youtube videos yet, and totally fun.

I found it on the Dangerous Minds blog, which my older son, Miles, turned me on to (and I added to the list of recommended blogs and sites on the lower right).

There's more from the group that created it, Punchy Players, including the "Cream of Wheat" Judy and Liza clip that this is a PS to.

THE HELP

Finally saw this film and can see why it was highly praised and equally strongly criticized.

What's good about it is the story-as-story sucks you in and pays off with some strong emotional satisfaction. It brought tears to my eyes several times, as well as gave me a few laughs. Much of that can be attributed to the acting.

Emma Stone in the starring role has turned into everything Lindsay Lohan's younger years seemed to promise for her career as an adult actor before she got derailed by her problems. Stone has a few repetitive quirks that may become mannered if she keeps them much longer, but they work for her character in THE HELP pretty consistently.

Viola Davis is once again a wonder to behold on screen, as she anchors every character she plays in a reality so tangible you feel like you know her from the moment she first appears on screen, and have known her forever by her last scene.

Octavia Spencer is the revelation of the film, as many critics and audience members have testified to, but so is the always unique embodiment of character that Leslie Jordan brings to a small role that almost steals the movie as the newspaper editor.

Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson do their usual screen magic. Mary Steenburgen does a good job too, though in a role that wastes her talent and screen presence.

But the criticism is correct too, because almost every character is a stereotype, most of them overdone, some of them way overdone, though to perfection, like Jessica Chastain as the newly rich "white trash" wife of the wealthiest male character, or Bryce Dallas Howard as "Hilly" the racist female villain of the book and film.

The author of the book was criticized by many for hiding a not so subtle racism behind the guise of attacking historic racism. Set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, the story is meant to expose the complexities of relations between well-to-do "white" Southern young wives and their definitely-not-well-to-do and no longer young "black" maid/nannies.

Supporters of the book and movie point to how much of an expose the story is, even if retrospectively, of how hypocritical Southern racism was in family life, particularly in terms of women. It's "a women's movie" in the sense that all the males are secondary or nonexistent characters. The story is as much about "white" racism as about "black" oppression, and the reaction to both by those brave enough to fight it (thus the Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer characters).

Interestingly, most of the criticism has come from African-Americans, including "The Association of Black women Historians." (Here's a blog that delineates some of that criticism, mostly of the book.) The criticism is easily understood, e.g. that the "black" maids speak a distinct dialect from the "white" characters, that "black" husbands are either brutal or long gone, or that this is the perspective of a white author and a white director and misses the more complex realities of that time and place for African-American domestics, as well as letting the white male characters almost completely off the hook for their common sexist as well as racist treatment of their "black" domestics.

But what that criticism misses is that in the movie there are several "good" African-American male characters, either on screen or referred to, and that the "white trash" character is as stereotypical as any of the "black" characters, as are in fact all the female characters who dominate the story.

Having experienced the segregated South at very close range when I was stationed there at the time the movie is set, where I had a relationship with an African-American woman my age (we were both twenty at the time) who had worked as a domestic in a "white" household, I know that the characters in THE HELP are stereotypes, and that the movie obviously whitewashes (literally) the common "white" male boss's inappropriate and sometimes much more than inappropriate racism coupled with sexism toward any "black" female help.

But the movie does get the main emotional and psychological high points correct enough to still make it a good story. And the actors, despite the cliches in their characters as written, make each role so real they transcend the limitations of the writer's easy categorizing.

In other words, it's one of those movies about the South and race that oversimplifies too much and yet manages to also probe some aspects of those subjects that gets at some deeper truths that seem relevant to not just our recent history but our present time. All we have to do is look at the response to our president to see how many still cling to old ideas about race in this country, and have a hard time seeing past it. And I'm not just talking about "white" folks.

[In fact, a movie could be done today about "Mexican" and other "Latin" "help" in restaurants and households etc. not being treated so well either, and stereotypically, etc.]