Miles David Moore

There are only a couple of weeks left to view "The Cinema Effect: Dreams," the compelling current exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., but if you're in DC or plan to be there shortly, be sure to go see it. This bracing exhibit of 20 avant-garde films from 21 filmmakers demonstrates the power of the medium to enter and, in some ways, create the subconscious of the viewer.

The curators of the exhibit designed it astutely, with an eye for effect. Douglas Gordon's "Off Screen." the first exhibit, lures viewers into a properly dreaming state, as a beam of light projects their shadows at double size onto a wavering orange curtain. From there we proceed to the granddaddy of all dream movies, Andy Warhol's "Sleep"--mercifully a mere two hours of the 5 1/2-hour original, as the naked poet John Giorno lies still in his own world of dreams. The third exhibit is masterfully insinuating--Stan Douglas' "Overture," a grainy black-and-white film of a train trip through the tunnels and trestles of the Canadian Rockies, seen from the engineer's view, as a flat-voiced narrator intones the great passages from "Swann's Way" about the twilight state between waking and sleep. And so on, until Harun Farocki's TV-monitor exhibit, "Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades"--presenting documentary images as well as scenes from the work of such filmmakers as Chaplin, Antonioni and Von Trier--releases us back into the workaday world.

To describe each exhibit in detail would take much more time and space than I have (and would also spoil the fun of seeing the exhibit), so I'll only touch on a few of my favorites. The most written about of all of them is probably Christoph Girardet's "Release," which stretches Fay Wray's famous scream at her first sight of King Kong into a half-agonizing, half-ludicrous 9 1/2 minutes. Darren Almond's "Geisterbahn" is the nightmare analogue to Stan Douglas' dream state--a darkly lit trip into a carnival funhouse, accompanied by an unnerving electronic music score. Chibo Aoshima's vibrantly colored five-panel animation "City Glow" forges a link between anime and nightmare science fiction, as mutating skyscrapers sway and chatter at each other. Kelly Richardson's "Exiles of the Shattered Star" channels Magritte as it depicts flaming meteorites falling in endless succession into a peaceful mountain lake. Perhaps the most amazing of all is Anthony McCall's "You and I," in which a projector beams ever-changing parabolas onto a pitch-black wall as machines shoot water vapor into the air. If you walk into the projector's beam and look into it, you will find yourself enveloped in an amazing tunnel of light and smoke.

I meant to write about this exhibit much sooner--it opened in February--but I found that one viewing wasn't enough for me to take it all in, and various obligations delayed my second visit. Oh well--it's still there at the Hirshhorn until May 11, if you're in DC and can possibly take the time. If you miss it, all is not lost: "The Cinema Effect: Realities," the second part of the exhibit, opens at the Hirshhorn in June, and if it's half as good as "Dreams," it will be well worth seeing.

A few months ago, I wrote about Kathi Wolfe's pending chapbook, "Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems." The chapbook is now available for $10 from Pudding House Press in Columbus, Ohio, and I assure you your $10 will be well spent indeed if you buy it. These poems achieve the very highest goals of historical/biographical poetry--to project themselves into the inner life and world of the subject with total believability, and to do so using language that is both precise and beautiful. Wolfe's Keller is not the plaster saint of sentimental legend, but flawed, at times irascible, and always scintillating. Wolfe begins her collection with "Q&A: Palace Theater," a marvelous found poem that features Keller's own words from her appearances in vaudeville:

What is the greatest obstacle to world peace?
The human race.

What is the slowest thing in the world?
Congress.

Do you think women are men's intellectual equals?
God made woman foolish
so that she might be a suitable companion to man.

Do you desire your sight more than anything else in the world?
No! I would rather walk with a friend in the dark
than walk alone in the light.

From this statement of original principles, Wolfe creates a flesh-and-blood Keller who disarms us with her brilliance, wit, insight, and romantic intensity. "They call me wonder woman, then say/they'd rather be dead than live like me./I'd like to blow smoke rings around/their pity," Keller says in "Fingertips and Cigarettes: Helen at the Cafe." In "Dreaming of Heaven," Keller defends her perceptions of the world: "What right/do I have to even talk/of color, you demand.//No more right/than you/to tell of Paris,/unless, like me,/you've inhaled/the mingled scent/of cigarettes and hyacinths/along the Seine." Yet Keller by no means is always on the defensive; there are poems of great tenderness, such as "Brush Strokes: Helen Greets a Friend": "Your mustache/dances with my fingers,/tickles their tips. Your skin, rough,/misshapen as a skewed moon crater,/smells like sun-drenched lavender." In "A Letter to my Hands," Keller says of them, "You exhale the dots of Braille," and concludes, "You'd go on strike/if I were the factory boss/and you the union./Who knows/why you stick with me?/I only know,/apart from you,/I couldn't even breathe."

As a journalist, Wolfe writes often about differently abled persons and disability issues; in "Helen Takes the Stage," she has raised advocacy for the differently abled to art--much as Helen Keller herself did. This is a deeply humane, moving and funny book, and you can buy a copy from www.puddinghouse.com.

Roger Ebert may have been the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, but Pauline Kael was the first to become a household name (and the first to win the National Book Award). Critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, Kael was a one-woman Cahiers du Cinema, combining an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic history, theory and technique with a tart, vivid literary style and very strong opinions as to what made a good movie. She excelled at the long-form reviews she published in The New Yorker every week, in which she could expound on the cinematic trends she considered important and the actors, directors and screenwriters she most admired (or, more memorably, despised). However, readers can still get an idea of her style and her influence by reading 5001 Nights at the Movies, a compendium of her encapsulated reviews still in print 26 years after the first edition appeared.

Rereading Kael after a number of years, I can attest that her reviews always make a bracing read, even when (fairly often in my case) I disagree with her. I still don't comprehend Kael's enthusiasm for John Boorman's indigestible Excalibur("It's as if Boorman were guiding us down a magic corridor and kept parting the curtains in front of us," she wrote); still less do I endorse her dismissal of John Ford's masterful The Quiet Man as "fearfully Irish and green and hearty" or of the exquisite David Lean-Noel Coward Brief Encounter as "implicitly condescending." And don't get me started on her downgrading of Hitchcock (a petit maitre if ever there was one") while she praised Brian De Palma for doing Hitchcock knockoffs. Nevertheless, at her best she could encapsulate a director's entire oeuvre perfectly in one line; of Jean Cocteau, she wrote, "Cocteau's special gift was to raise chic to art." She was every bit as good at pinpointing the appeal of popular films she didn't necessarily admire: she wrote of An Officer and a Gentleman, "It's crap, but crap on a motorcycle." And of Easy Rider, she wrote, "The film became a ritual experience. It was the downer that young audiences wanted; they puffed away at it."

Of course, no one ever got skewered in print until they got skewered by Kael. She positively body-slammed Samson and Delilah: "De Mille, with God as his co-maker...The sets are wondrous chintzy." And she was no respecter of high reputations, as evinced by her review of Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour: "(I)t makes you so conscious of its artistry tht you may feel as if you're in church and need to giggle." And I am overjoyed when Kael agrees with me about a movie; I cannot tell you how happy I am that there's one other reviewer besides me who doesn't think Terms of Endearment is the heartbreaking, staggering, magnificent, eternal, makes-Jean-Renoir-look-like-Andy-Milligan masterpiece that every other critic said it is, at least in 1983.

Reading Kael's capsule reviews is like eating a jar of macadamia nuts: a gourmet but compulsive experience. Although you may not always agree with her, you will respect her as a cinematic scholar who despised the generic, who championed what she saw as the idiosyncratic and innovative, and who had the guts, brains, and literary talent to make her influence felt.

P.S. To update my pre-Oscar entry, left hanging so shamefully for two months: Congratulations to Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who made headlines in Dublin, Prague, and everywhere else after all.

For such an overcrowded field of worthy movies, the 2008 Oscar race certainly narrowed itself quickly. Most of the winners in major categories are foregone conclusions: "No Country for Old Men" for Best Picture, the Coen Brothers for Best Director AND Best Adapted Screenplay, Daniel Day-Lewis ("There Will Be Blood") for Best Actor, Julie Christie ("Away from Her") for Best Actress, Javier Bardem ("No Country for Old Men") for Best Supporting Actor. Best Original Screenplay is a little harder to read, but the Academy has a history of honoring quirky left-field hits ("Breaking Away," "Little Miss Sunshine") in that category, so logic dictates that the Oscar will go to Diablo Cody for "Juno." The only really contested category is Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, Ruby Dee and Amy Ryan, who split the pre-Oscar awards between them, all have a good shot. In such a close race, the Academy usually resorts to its sentimental side as a tie-breaker, so my guess is that Dee--an octogenarian and first-time nominee whose credits include extraordinary performances in "A Raisin in the Sun," "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever"--should start clearing her mantelpiece to make room for that little gold statue. I would guess the same thing for Hal Holbrook, another octogenarian first-time nominee with a long and glorious career, except that the pre-Oscar acclaim for Javier Bardem has been so overwhelming.

The good thing about this year is that there was such a preponderance of Oscar-worthy films. The bad thing is that, in an awards program that allows only five nominees per category, a lot of very worthy films, actors, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, etc. got stiffed good and hard. The five films nominated for Best Picture--"Atonement," "Juno," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men," and "There Will Be Blood"--all indisputably deserve their nominations. Yet I would remove any one of them--yes, even "No Country for Old Men"--to make way for my own favorite this year, Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd."

I haven't yet seen the film whose exclusion from the Best Foreign Film category scandalized everybody--the Romanian drama "4 Months, 2 Weeks and 3 Days," which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and has been described everywhere it's played as a cinematic revelation. I have seen, however, a lot of films that deserved Oscar consideration but received not a single nomination. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"--the probable valedictory film of the great Sidney Lumet, as fresh and thrilling as "Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon" were 30 years ago--leads this sad list, followed by the late Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" and Scott Frank's "The Lookout." There also are worthy films that were shunted aside with one or two minor nominations, such as James Mangold's remake of "3:10 to Yuma" (Best Original Score and Best Sound Mixing).

There were so many great performances by leading actors this year that--even granting the dominance of Daniel Day-Lewis, giving in "There Will Be Blood" the sort of performance that's seen maybe once a decade--you could make a credible alternate list of Best Actor nominees off the top of your head:

Christian Bale, "3:10 to Yuma"
Josh Brolin, "No Country for Old Men"
Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"
James McAvoy, "Atonement"
Denzel Washington, "American Gangster"

And that isn't even mentioning one of my favorite performances of the past year, that of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "The Lookout." I said at the time of its release that I doubted I would see a better performance in 2007; except again for the remarkable Mr. Day-Lewis, I didn't. Yet I heard not the slightest whisper of Best Actor talk for Gordon-Levitt, and also none for Best Supporting Actor for his co-star, the versatile and brilliant Jeff Daniels, who is about two decades overdue for his first Oscar nomination.

The sad omissions go on and on: sure, Ellen Page was delightful in "Juno," but so was Keri Russell in "Waitress," playing a VERY similar character. And, going down the list, the most magnficent photography I saw in any film in 2007 was Eric Gautier's for "Into the Wild." I am second to none in my admiration for the genius cinematographer Roger Deakins, but couldn't the Academy have lopped off one of Deakins' two nominations to give one to Gautier?

Here's a name I never thought I would include in the Legion of the Robbed: Eddie Vedder. I had thought I would be complaining here about the unfair omission of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, the lovable and very gifted songwriting duo from "Once." Hansard and Irglova were excluded from the Golden Globe nominations for Best Song, and that award went to Vedder for his song "Guaranteed" from "Into the Wild." The Academy, however, stiffed Vedder, gave a single nomination to Hansard and Irglova, and gave three "Enchanted" nominations to Disney house composers Stephen Schwartz and Alan Menken, who rent a hangar at LAX to store their previous Oscars. I had thought going in that the race would be between Vedder and Hansard-Irglova, with Vedder the winner, and consoled myself with the thought that Vedder's songs were very good and added greatly to the film in which they appeared. I had forgotten that, in the Academy's eyes, great songwriting begins and ends with The Mouse. I'll still keep hoping that the Best Song award this Feb. 24 will make headlines the next morning in Dublin and Prague, but I won't hold my breath.

The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

--A.E. Housman, 1896

By now I hope everyone has read Kathi Wolfe's column this month, paying just tribute to Karren Alenier and her book, "The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas." I've known Karren for more than fifteen years now, and it's been a wonderful and invigorating process to see how her fascination with the life and work of Gertrude Stein led first to a series of poems about Stein, then to her opera, "Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On," and finally to her immersion in the world of new American opera that has made her a leading authority on the subject. Besides "The Steiny Road to Operadom," I recommend checking out Karren's books of poetry, especially "Looking for Divine Transportation." To read Karren's work is to introduce yourself to a witty, quirky and sagacious observer of life and art.

Kathi Wolfe is too modest to boast about herself, but she too is an excellent poet. Her own fascination with the life and work of another great American woman writer--Helen Keller--led her to write a chapbook of Keller poems, "Helen Takes the Stage." The chapbook was one of six finalists in this year's Pudding House contest--out of a field of 750--and will be published by that press sometime in 2008. Wolfe rips the cloak of sanctity we've draped over Keller, revealing her as a woman of fierce loves and hates, a scholar and thinker, a connoisseur of hot dogs and good scotch. These poignant, profound and often laugh-out-loud funny poems give us Keller as a flesh-and-blood woman, and stand as a work of bold advocacy not only for Keller, but for the differently abled everywhere.

As usual, I don't have a thought in my head, so here instead are some random scribblings:

1. My deep and blushing thanks to Brenda Balfour for her kind words about my reviews on the Reader's Blog. (To be compared with Roger Ebert is high praise indeed, especially when you've read his books and his Sun-Times columns as I have.) I haven't seen "American Gangster" yet, Ms. Balfour, but I plan to, and my thoughts on it will appear in due course.

2. If you live anywhere near the Washington, D.C. area, you still have time to see the very fine production of "As You Like It" at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre. The sparse yet lovely staging, with its imaginative use of illuminated panels, airily recreates the Forest of Arden in the Folger Library's intimate Elizabethan theater. The cast is excellent: Amanda Quaid (Randy's daughter) is a charming and graceful Rosalind, Noel Velez a suitably manly Orlando, and there also are two first-rate if diametrically opposed Shakespearian clowns in the buoyant Sarah Marshall (Touchstone) and the saturnine Joseph Marcell (Jaques). The production runs until Nov. 25.

Although a cruel illness sidelined Deborah Kerr for the last twenty years of her life, she was never forgotten by those who appreciate either great actresses or beautiful women. From the 1940s on, she quietly gave some of the most distinguished perfomances the British and American cinemas have ever seen. Although her image was always that of an elegant and proper lady, within that image she had an astonishingly broad range, from the beleaguered nun of "Black Narcissus" to the adulterous officer's wife of "From Here to Eternity," the King of Siam's friend, adviser and dancing partner in "The King and I," the nightclub singer of "An Affair to Remember," the hysterical, mother-ridden spinster of "Separate Tables," and the possibly mad governess of "The Innocents." The last-named movie may contain her greatest performance; during her interview with Michael Redgrave, when she affirms her love of children, there is just the slightest touch of desperation in her voice, just the slightest glint of derangement in her eyes, making us wonder just how far we can trust this woman. Kerr deplored the trend toward nudity and blatant sex that began on-screen in the late 1960s; as the actress who appeared in possibly the single sexiest scene in the history of the movies, making love in the Hawaiian surf with Burt Lancaster in "From Here to Eternity," she knew the difference between what was sexy and what was merely salacious. Whatever your religious persuasion, I think you'll join me in thanking whatever Powers That Be for letting us have Deborah Kerr.

The world cinema was dealt a double tragedy on July 30, 2007 when two of its most renowned directors, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, passed away. Arthur Meiselman has already paid eloquent tribute to Bergman, a director who expected maturity and deep thought from both his actors and his audience. I remember my first encounter with Bergman in college, coming out of the Athens Cinema in Athens, Ohio, after having seen Bergman's "Shame," and feeling as if all the skin had been peeled off my body. I did not quite replicate that experience with the other Bergman films I have seen, but still marveled at the power of "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," "Autumn Sonata," "Fanny and Alexander," "The Virgin Spring," and other merciless dissections of the human mind and heart. But Bergman could still surprise me, as he did with that most exquisite and worldly-wise of romantic comedies, "Smiles of a Summer Night." (It's now impossible for me to think back on that film and not hear the sweetly acidulous, funny-sad melodies that Stephen Sondheim created for his musical adaptation of it, "A Little Night Music.") I am far less familiar with Antonioni's work, and what I have seen of it tends to make me agree with Orson Welles' assessment of Antonioni as "that fabricator of empty boxes." But the image of Monica Vitti in "Il Deserto Rosso," looking lost and waiflike in the industrial wasteland her haute bourgeois world created, is one I still carry with me.

As sad as the loss of Bergman and Antonioni was, they were old men who lived fully, created an impressive body of work, and knew well the world's adulation. Far sadder was the death of German actor Ulrich Muhe, who died of stomach cancer July 22, just months after the worldwide distribution of "The Lives of Others," the first film to bring him international attention. Playing a rigid, authoritarian Stasi agent whose views are transformed by the dissident intellectual couple he is keeping under surveillance, Muhe created an unforgettable portrait of a man who, slowly and at first unwillingly, undergoes a metamorphosis from monster to hero. Few cinematic portraits of redemption have been more moving. At 54, Muhe was a little over half the age of Bergman and Antonioni. It is tragic that there will be no more new work from him; but his performance in "The Lives of Others" still constitutes more than most actors accomplish in a lifetime.

Given today's geopolitical situation, it's no surprise that Michael Winterbottom's film "A Mighty Heart," about the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, premieres just as the Muslim world rises in protest at the British government's grant of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. The most memorable news photograph of the past week was that of the sandaled foot of a little boy stamping on a picture of Rushdie; the caption said the photo was taken in Lahore, Pakistan, but it could just as well have been Iraq or Morocco or Indonesia. The Pakistani government responded to the news of Rushdie's knighthood by granting its highest civilian honors to Osama bin Laden. The idea that Rushdie could be honored for distinguished contributions to English literature is, to the protestors, an insult; the only conceivable purpose for honoring Rushdie, they claim, is to show enmity toward everyone and everything Muslim, and to declare war against Islam. This, of course, is what the protestors teach their children, who trust their parents and teachers like all children everywhere. Which is why the little boy in Lahore stamped on the picture of Rushdie.

I have no idea if children in Pakistan and the Middle East are taught anything about Daniel Pearl. But his story and Rushdie's alike leave me afraid, angry, and grieving. What hope does the world have if children in Muslim countries are brought up to believe that everyone in the West actively seeks to destroy everything they hold sacred?

The same question, alas, can be asked of at least some of the children in our own country. Last year's documentary, "Jesus Camp," depicted a group of children from fundamentalist and evangelical Christian families, being tenderly brought up to believe that people who are pro-choice or believe that global warming is real are minions of Satan.

"When I'm with non-Christians, I feel kinda creepy...kinda yucky," says of the children at one point in the movie. Yes, the boy meant Muslims by that, and also Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and atheists. And he also meant Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians--all the mainstream Christian sects whom the evangelicals do not regard as true Christians, because they do not accept the Rapture and other doctrines put forth in the Schofield Reference Bible. As someone who has always been just fine with Lutheran interpretations of the King James Bible, I can't help but feel the noose tighten a little around my neck when a little boy says he finds people like me kinda creepy...kinda yucky.

George W. Bush once famously asked, "Is the children learning." Yes, Mr. President, they're learning. But some of the things they're learning scare me to death.

In the White Pages for the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. (where I live), there is a Benjamin R. Stone and a Bennie W. Stone, as well as three other Stones with the first initial B, who are potentially if not actually Benjamins. I note this only because the lead male character in Judd Apatow's new movie, "Knocked Up," is named Ben Stone. He is only the latest in a series of cinematic and TV Ben Stones in Hollywood's apparent effort to have us believe that "Ben Stone" is as common a name as "John Smith." (There are 58 John Smiths in my phone book, including one I actually know.) Besides the Ben Stone played by Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up," there is the Ben Stone played by Michael Moriarty in "Law and Order;" the Ben Stone played by Michael J. Fox in "Doc Hollywood;" and the Benjy Stone (a/k/a Benjamin Steinberg) played by Mark Linn-Baker in "My Favorite Year." I also remember that Donna Reed's TV family was named Stone (no Bens that I remember, though).

There's no point to this rumination, except that "Ben Stone" seems to have become an all-purpose, shelf-friendly name for irritable screenwriters to reach for. I guess we should all be thankful that the names "Reginald Van Gleason," "Clem Kadiddlehopper" and "Gervase Brooke-Hamster" did not reach this level of ubiquitousness. Meanwhile, if anyone knows of any other Ben Stone characters from movies or TV, please provide them in the Comments section.

I am a journalist by trade, and like most journalists I tend naively to believe what I read in print, particularly from news sources that are commonly referred to as "accredited" and "respected." So if the two gentlemen I am just about to mention protest that I am treating them unfairly, I can only quote my sources.

Both of them, to different degrees, can be described as media moguls. Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul by any standard--owner of newspapers and cable news networks around the world, so jealous of the phrase "fair and balanced" to describe his properties' news reportage that he sued for its exclusive use. By all reports, he is about to add a particularly glittering jewel to his media crown: the Wall Street Journal.

On the eve of this important acquisition, therefore, it is interesting to note that Matt Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter assigned to China, wrote recently in the Washington Post that Phoenix TV, the Chinese cable news network in which Murdoch owned a substantial stake, routinely kowtowed to Chinese government policies during Murdoch's ownership, even when those policies were violently condemnatory of the U.S. and the West. (Murdoch might want to confront Pottinger about this "unfair and unbalanced" story, but he'd have to go to Iraq to do so. Pottinger is with the Marines there--not embedded, mind you, but as a combat soldier on the front lines.)

Danny Glover can't claim to be a mogul on Murdoch's level, though as the star of the "Lethal Weapon" movies, "Lonesome Dove," "Places in the Heart" and many other famous films, he can claim a substantial measure of world fame. But he does qualify as a media magnate, based on his board membership in Telesur, the Latin American TV network founded by his old friend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Glover has a longtime reputation as an advocate for the poor and oppressed. His dream project is a film about the life of Toussaint Louverture, the 18th-century Haitian who led the successful revolt against French imperialism that made Haiti an independent nation. Recently, Glover solicited and received $18 million in financing for the project from his old buddy Chavez. That announcement was simultaneous with the news that Chavez had yanked the license for Radio Caracas Television, arguably the most important opposition media in Venezuela. Meanwhile, Venezuelan directors said they could produce 36 films for the $18 million Chavez is giving Glover. (One of my sources for this is Time Magazine, which Glover and Chavez could denounce as a propaganda organ for the Bush administration. The other is Agence France-Presse; I guess Chavez and Glover will say that France wants Haiti back.)

I imagine I'll catch hell from both sides of the ideological spectrum for pointing out these things; but, like I said, all I know is what I read. Meanwhile, if Messrs. Murdoch and Glover would care to explain their fondness for dictators, all they have to do is press the "Comments" icon.

Dear Hollywood,

You wouldn't put a guy in a trenchcoat at every box office and video store counter, accusing every customer automatically of trying to shortchange the cashier.

So why do you put ads at the beginning of every DVD--ads we can't skip by pressing "Menu," as we can with previews--reminding us that video piracy is a crime?

I know that illegal video downloads are a crime. So you have told me 849,000 times. I would never think of doing an illegal video download--and not just because my computer literacy is on a level with Samuel Johnson's. I want the actors and directors and writers and cinematographers and gaffers and best boys to receive just recompense for their labors. (The fact that Julia Roberts makes more in a week's shooting than I will in a lifetime is irrelevant. No one's going to plunk down $9.50 to see ME in "Pretty Woman.") I realize that every time someone sees a movie without paying, it eats into the profits that allow future movies to get made. Furthermore, because I am a technological dinosaur, I actually like going to Borders or Barnes & Noble or Best Buy, looking at all the DVDs in their shiny boxes, browsing through them, making the hard decision whether I will go home that day with "It Happened One Night" or "Escape from New York" or "Au Hasard Balthasar." (Julia Roberts, of course, could go home with all three, but I told you I don't make as much money as she does.)

So why do you constantly have to chide and rebuke me about pirating your intellectual property? If you think I look like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow or Errol Flynn as Captain Blood, I'm flattered, but it's a case of mistaken identity. The guy you want to reach with your ads is fingering his pocket protector with one hand as he presses the "Enter" button on a download of "Spider-Man 3" with the other. Only you're not reaching him. Because he's not watching your DVDs.

I've been a Washington journalist for more than 25 years, but I'm not necessarily one of those who gets to hang out with the big guns. I go to the hearings, I listen to the senators and congressmen pontificate, but I'm not one of the Bob Schieffers or Wolf Blitzers who debates Iraq war policy in cigar-smoke-filled backrooms, glasses of 12-year-old Glenfiddich in hand, with Ted Kennedy and Trent Lott. So when I saw the cover of the current "Weekly Standard"--featuring a caricature of the GOP flavor-of-the-month presidential hopeful, Fred Thompson--I remembered with a shock that I had met him once, many years ago.

It wasn't in Washington, but in Lancaster, Ohio, that I had my encounter with future greatness. As a reporter for "The Reaction," the student newspaper for Ohio University-Lancaster Campus, I was assigned to cover the speech at the campus of the minority counsel for the Watergate hearings--an up-and-coming Tennessee lawyer named Fred D. Thompson.

This was years before "Law and Order," before "Wiseguy" and "The Hunt for Red October," before his battles as senator with Jane Alexander over whether the government should continue to fund the National Endowment for the Arts. (Alexander, who was Bill Clinton's NEA chairman, said Thompson believed that if an arts project couldn't attract Hollywood money, it couldn't be any good.) I don't remember Thompson's speech very well, except that he used the phrase "bite the bullet" several times. In this time of national trouble, he said, it was good that the government could bite the bullet and face the endemic problems that Watergate signified.

Thompson certainly wouldn't remember me; I was one of about eight people after the speech, sitting around a booth at Old Bill Bailey's Bar, swilling pitchers of Rolling Rock and listening to Tom Ryan, "The Reaction's" photographer, reel off several choice excerpts from his inexhaustible fund of dirty stories. I remember Thompson, beer in hand, looking vaguely embarrassed and very, very tired.

Tom Ryan died a year later, in a car crash. Fred Thompson is on the cover of the "Weekly Standard," and I'm here, typing.

I forgot to mention I also knew Sen. Chuck Hagel way back when; he was government affairs director for Firestone when I first came to Washington. In the Reagan administration, he headed some White House commission or another; he called me to his office to give me a big interview about what he and the commission were doing. When he was elected senator, neither he nor his staff returned my calls. In the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes."

The common wisdom is that Eddie Murphy got robbed, and perhaps he did--I haven't seen "Dreamgirls" yet. I myself, however, couldn't suppress a little yelp of triumph when, last Sunday, the name of Alan Arkin was read as the winner of this year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar. I'm not sure that many moviegoers under the age of 50 had a very clear idea before this year of the depth and range of Arkin's talents (though my friend Jon Gardner, a mere broth of a boy at 38, cherishes Arkin's performances in "Catch-22" and "So I Married An Axe Murderer"). Filmgoers of my age, however, can remember the incredible star run Arkin had in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in a bewildering range of roles in which he was never less than perfect. Arkin had us rolling in the aisles as the befuddled Russian U-boat commander in "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming;" gripping our seats in terror as the psychotic murderer who doused Audrey Hepburn with gasoline in "Wait Until Dark;" and using up box after box of Kleenex as the tragic deaf-mute in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" (still one of my all-time favorite screen performances). And that isn't even mentioning "Popi," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "Freebie and the Bean," "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," "The In-Laws," "Grosse Pointe Blank," and of course the aforementioned "Catch-22." Arkin has continued to work steadily throughout the decades, but mostly in low-budget independent films that few people saw. "Little Miss Sunshine," which at first glance seemed like just another one of those indies, unexpectedly turned out to be one of the most beloved films of 2006, earning Arkin a Screen Actors Guild award, a BAFTA award, and the Oscar. Not only do I applaud these awards, but I sincerely hope they will send audiences back to Blockbuster and Netflix to check out Arkin's earlier films. How many living actors could make us believe in and love a dirty old man who snorts heroin, advises his grandson to "fuck a lot of women," and teaches his seven-year-old granddaughter a strip-tease routine? There's only one, and his name is Arkin.

I found out early this morning: tuning to 104.1 FM and expecting to hear the Cleveland Orchestra, I heard instead...the Electric Light Orchestra. The long-threatened demise of WGMS is now a fait accompli. Bonneville International Corp. didn't sell out to Dan Snyder in the end, but to the perception--in my opinion erroneous--that classical music is a dying art form, in radio and elsewhere. WGMS, which purveyed Mozart and Mendelssohn to the Washington, DC listening public for six decades, is now something called "George 104," dedicated to playing "The Music of the Seventies...The Eighties...And Anything We Want!!!" (Just as long as what they want doesn't involve anyone named Beethoven, apparently.)

On a hunch I fiddled around with the dial, and sure enough came upon WETA-FM just as announcer Scott Blankenship introduced the Theme and Variations for flute and string quartet, by Amy Beach. About an hour later I was reading the scoop from Paul Farhi, the Washington Post's excellent media reporter: Bonneville and WETA have been in negotiations for the past month, planning an orderly turnover of classical programming to WETA, a public station that switched from classical to an all-news format a few years ago.

In a sense this is good news: WETA has the strongest signal of any station in the Washington area, no commercials, and a library of 43,000 classical recordings (including the 18,000 it inherited from WGMS). I will now resume sending the membership checks to WETA that I stopped sending when it switched to all-news (just as long as they don't expect me to listen during Pledge Week). It would be nice if WETA and WGMS were both still classical outlets, as they were for so many years. The Washington public supported them both, and--despite the pessimism of Dan DeVany and Joel Oxley--still would. And it would also be nice to listen in to old friends like James Bartels, Chip Rienza and Diana Hollander when the mood struck me. Wherever they land on the radio dial, I hope their parachutes are golden.

In my last blog entry, "Hold Up Your Head, Paul Dooley," I noted the injustice of Mr. Dooley being passed over for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his brilliant work in "Breaking Away," in favor of "Kramer vs. Kramer's" juvenile star, Justin Henry. How could I have forgotten the delicious irony that transpired a few years later, when Paul Dooley and Justin Henry played father and son (and Molly Ringwald's father and brother) in John Hughes' "Sixteen Candles"? A pox on me for a clumsy lout! (And what a great idea for Christopher Guest's next movie, what a natural sequel to "For Your Consideration"...)

Somewhere toward the middle of Christopher Guest's new movie, "For Your Consideration," there's a brief movie-within-a-movie scene featuring an argument between an older and a younger cop. The scene lasts perhaps a minute, maybe a little less, and neither actor appears at any other time in the film. The older cop, jowly and stern, moves with the slow deliberate authority of one who has spent his life in front of a camera. Although most viewers probably won't be able to call up his name, they will find his face familiar. As indeed they should: the older actor is Paul Dooley, longtime member of both the Christopher Guest and Robert Altman stock companies, veteran of hundreds of commercials and TV guest shots. He was Wimpy in Altman's "Popeye" and a crazy judge on several programs including "The Practice."

In 1979, Dooley had what was perhaps his largest part in any movie, playing the bemused dad of Italophile bike racer Dennis Christopher in "Breaking Away." Dooley's performance is, for my money, one of the greatest comic performances in the history of the cinema--a masterful portrayal of a man of limited patience but infinite kindness, a household tyrant whose bark was infinitely worse than his bite, a low-grade con man (genus: used car salesman) who basically was just too nice a guy to be successful at his cons. To remember that movie at all is to remember Dooley's high-pitched, nasal voice intoning such lines as, "There goes that Eyetie music again!" or, "Your'e not a cutter--I'm a cutter," or, "REFUND?!?!?"

In that year's Academy Award nominations, "Breaking Away"--a low-budget sleeper, released with absolutely no fanfare, that caught on by word of mouth plus the enthusiasm of critics such as Roger Ebert--received five, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay (which it won) and a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress nod for Barbara Barrie, who played Dooley's wife. In its infinite wisdom, the Academy handed a nomination to Justin Henry, the little boy in "Kramer vs. Kramer." Paul Dooley, giving arguably the best performance in any film that year, got zilch.

Dooley's brief appearance in "For Your Consideration" makes his one missed shot at an Oscar all the more poignant, and the film itself all the more truthful. "For Your Consideration," for those who have not seen it, is about a group of journeyman actors--all of whom have done fine work for years with little public or critical notice--thrown into a tizzy by Oscar buzz for their low-budget indie film, "Home for Purim." It is filled with Guest's superb regular performers, all of them comic masters who have never gotten near an Oscar--Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey. (O'Hara did receive this year's National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress, so perhaps it's her time after all.) And, in the middle of it, on screen for one minute or less, is Paul Dooley.

It's hard to say whether an Oscar nomination for "Breaking Away" would have made any difference in Dooley's career (it didn't for Barrie). But, on the release of "For Your Consideration," it is appropriate to give a tip of the hat to Paul Dooley, one of those consummate professionals without whom the acting profession could not survive. And, who knows? This year, Jackie Earle Haley--one of Dooley's co-stars in "Breaking Away," whose career seemingly faded soon after the film's release--is getting Oscar buzz for his performance in the low-budget indie film, "Little Children." As long as Mr. Dooley continues to act, there is hope.

Better news on the classical radio front: In today's Washington Post, there is a story that says WETA-FM may resume classical programming if the sale of WGMS to the Egregious Mr. Snyder goes through. If that indeed comes to pass, then I will offer Sharon Percy Rockefeller my apologies, my thanks, and--most importantly--my pledge checks, which ended when WETA became an all-talk station.

I'm off on Christmas vacation till Jan. 2. I'll be back then, to bloviate at you some more.

Until Dec. 8, 2006, I was at least a nominal Washington Redskins fan. I don't really follow sports, I have only a basic knowledge of the rules and strategy of football, and I can name precisely one member of the Skins' current starting roster--Jason Campbell, the new quarterback. But in those years, long ago, when the Redskins were doing well, I was happy as anyone would be for the hometown team. And when--long, long ago, in the glory days of Doug Williams, Dexter Manley and John Riggins--the Redskins won the Super Bowl, I was as overcome with Hog Fever as the next guy.

From now on, however, if anyone dares to say to me, "How 'bout them Hogs?" I will be likely to answer, "Roasted on a spit with apples in their mouths, they'd be delicious."

That's because Dan Snyder, owner of the Redskins, is buying WGMS-FM, the last remaining classical music station in Washington, from its current owners, Bonneville International Corp. Sometime shortly after Christmas, the station is scheduled to become the Redskins' flagship station, broadcasting regular- and off-season games with general sports-talk shows filling in the gaps.

In his Dec. 8 article on the WGMS sale, Paul Farhi, media reporter for the "Washington Post," writes, "Classical music has been a dying radio format, nationally and in the Washington area." Of course it has--because the people who own and manage radio stations have been hellbent on killing it. A few years ago, WETA-FM, Washington's flagship National Public Radio affiliate, phased out all classical programming in favor of an all-news format. I wrote a letter of protest, and was answered by a form letter signed by Sharon Percy Rockefeller, chair of WETA's Board of Directors. The letter was a politely phrased variation on, "We know what's best for you, peasant." Meanwhile, WETA actually lost listeners, at least initially, after ditching classical music, but you'd never guess that from the rapturous self-praise in which the WETA management regularly indulges.

And now, Dan Snyder, whom the city fathers would fawningly allow to bulldoze the White House and turn it into a Redskins practice field if he wanted, has commandeered WGMS. As a rank-and-file fan of WGMS, I have no recourse. It's the old Golden Rule--them that has the gold makes the rules. And it's not as if any enterpreneur could come in off the street and set up a new classical station; there are only so many frequencies in any given radio market, and the FCC guards them zealously.

The horrifying irony is that WGMS was among the most popular and profitable classical stations in the U.S. According to Farhi, WGMS boasts 3.8 percent of D.C. radio listeners--not huge, but respectable considering the number of stations in the area--and makes nearly $10 million annually in advertising revenue. It is hard to imagine that Snyder's planned format would improve significantly on that--fans with access to TVs will watch Redskins games there, and the D.C. airwaves are already glutted with sports talk programs. But what Snyder wants, Snyder gets.

I, and other classical listeners, have been drop-kicked into the gutter by Dan Snyder, and sneered at by Sharon Percy Rockefeller as she passes in her solid gold Cadillac. WGMS, perhaps, wasn't my ideal classical station--there were an awful lot of commercials, and the programmers were a little Franz von Suppe-happy for my tastes, particularly in the morning. But for my nourishing daily dose of Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, Faure and Vaughan Williams, it got the job done. Like other area classical fans, I felt cushioned from the dumbing-down of radio programming as long as I could hear the voices of James Bartels and Chip Rienza announcing the latest recordings by Joshua Bell, Alfred Brendel and Anne-Sophie Mutter. I'd already been affected by the WETA cutoff, and by the switch of WHFS-FM from alternative rock to Top 40, but I never in a million years imagined that anything could happen to good old WGMS. But the handwriting's now on the wall. If you're not Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Tim McGraw--or Jason Campbell--you're through in radio.

In other words, when they came for Elvis Costello and R.E.M., I said nothing. When they came for Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins, I said nothing. When they came for Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. I said nothing. When they came for Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, I said nothing. When they came for Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson, I said nothing. When they came for Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight, I said nothing. And now that they've come for Bach and Beethoven, who is left to hear their cries?