Peter Krupa

Reuters headline of the week: Pope tells Irish bishops pedophilia a heinous crime.

Now that James Cameron says he’ll be directing a sequel to The Most Derivative Movie Ever Made, I thought I’d throw out some ideas for the new film.

• Jawal is a Na’vi cop. He’s a rebel who uses unorthodox methods to get results. But when he crashes another winged batty thing in a madcap aerial pursuit, his superiors have had enough. They assign him a new partner: A human fresh from the academy, who does things strictly by the book.
• An evil inter-galactic emperor rules Pandora with a heavy hand. With only her pluck and indigenous  ingenuity, as well as the help of a mysterious human who can make things float with his mind, a Na’vi princess is able to mount an insurgency that frustrates the Evil Emperor and brings him to their planet. She leads her people to victory in a climactic battle against a bunch of walking machines. The emperor and the floaty human have a showdown in which it is revealed that the emperor is his father.
• A giant meteorite is threatening to destroy Pandora. The humans have to work together with the Na’vi to stop it – BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
• Uhllanta, a beautiful Na’vi female, invites her fiancé over to spend a weekend with her manipulative mother and authoritarian father. Hilarity and awkwardness ensue when it turns out her fiancé is a human.
• Jenny really wishes her boyfriend Nummbata – a Na’vi worrier – would propose to her. After all, they’ve been dating long enough. But all he’s interested in is hanging out with his friends, smoking pot, and killing things with spears. She wishes he would get serious and take that job her dad has offered him as a mid-level manager at Staples corporate headquarters. Then, God appears in the form of Anthony Hopkins. He whisks her off on a journey through time and shows her the true meaning of Pandora, or whatever.

There’s more where this came from. Cameron: Call me.

From Oliver’s birth2

Oliver Simon Krupa Flores, born February 9, 2010.

I’ve decided I like Gail Collins a lot. She’s sarcastic, but she never quite looses her shit, which I’m afraid I would do if I had to write about the mind-blowing stupidity in Washington on a regular basis. (This is a big reason I am not – not – a columnist for the New York Times.) From her column this morning:

Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on (all Obama administration nominations). His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.

“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.

Those two paragraphs nicely encapsulate the two prongs of Republicans’ incredibly confusing philosophy of governance, which are:

1. All government spending is bad, but some government spending is good.
2. ZOMG LOOK OVAH THERE A TERRORIST!!1!

What is going on.

I have two things to say about The Bonfire of the Vanities. First, it’s profoundly racist. Not that Tom Wolfe is racist, necessarily. I don’t know the guy. But there’s not a single sympathetic black character in a 700-page book full of black characters. If there’s a non-racist explanation for this, I’d like to hear it.

Second, who ever thought that this book’s description of the excesses of Wall Street would someday sound, well, quaint? I mean, Great Jove! Sherman makes one million dollars per year? That makes him… like… a millionaire! And try to imagine an I-banker worried about losing his job over one $6 million mistake. Are you kidding? That’s petty cash! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!

I guess I don’t regret reading The Bonfire of the Vanities as a part of my cultural education. It’s just that as a piece of culture, it hasn’t aged well.

From The Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

From the New York Times:

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

Scalia tweets.

I’ve been wondering for ever so long why movie studios always manage to release odd films with roughly the same premise at basically the same time. Two volcano movies, two asteroid-destroys-the-Earth movies, two Victorian illusionist movies, and now – now! – two guy-wandering-through-desolate-post-apocalyptic-wasteland movies. First, The Road:

And now The Book of Eli:

I ask you, dear reader: What the dickens?

What really attracted me to Obama during the campaign was common sense. He said he wasn’t an ideologue. He said there was stuff to do, and by golly, he was going to do that stuff, and get it done, and he would do so bipartisanly. It didn’t work out so well.

For the first year, I thought he was crazy. Principled, but crazy. It looked like he’d brought the proverbial knife to a gun fight, like he was playing chess on a rugby pitch, like he was quoting Shakespeare when all anyone really wanted was fart jokes.

If I were him, I would have dropped the gloves a long time ago and started nut-punching. The Republicans have been so incredibly destructive over the last few years that it almost seemed like a moral imperative to destroy them back. But now there’s this hour-long video of Obama wading into a meeting of Republican lawmakers, taking their questions, and absolutely devastating them the way only a former law professor can:

After watching this video, I’m starting to think that I underestimated Obama, severely. He wasn’t just mouthing talking points when he boosted bipartisanship in the campaign. The man was stone-cold serious. Bipartisanship really is his philosophy of governance, and (like it or not) he’s demonstrated that repeatedly by including Republican proposals in legislation passed by Democrats.

By fielding their questions clearly and firmly, Obama managed to reveal the Republicans for the nincompoop, hypocrite obstructionists that they really are, while at the same time inviting them to join him in moving the country forward. This was a display of not only incredible political savvy, but profound intellect. After watching this, I really think there’s a chance that Obama will turn out to be one of the great, historically-important presidents of the United States of America.

I also think Republicans will never, ever again let themselves be filmed asking Obama questions.