Wailing Into The Void

I caught a bit of Chris Rock’s latest HBO special late last night while I was briefly up out of bed having a snack.  Maybe I dreamt the whole thing but it seemed like the concert video was spliced from at least three a separate performances.  This in itself isn’t remarkable except for the fact that the editors weaved this footage together in such a way as to make it look like Chris Rock is magically changing outfits right in the middle of his bits.  I might not have even noticed if his outfits weren’t so dramatically different.  But there are scenes where he’s doing the setup in a shiny leather jacket and nailing the punchline in a dark suit.  Weird.

This is the George W. Bush I will always remember.

I saw it earlier this evening. First impressions:

1) Everyone comes across as much more likable than I imagine them to be in real life.
2) Josh Brolin is now a bona fide movie star.
3) The movie was less over-the-top than most of Oliver Stone’s best known works and I felt a bit cheated by the lack of in-your-face heavy-handed conspiracy mongering that made Nixon and JFK extra entertaining.

You can find more straight talk from Billy here.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night.  I just read Infinite Jest for the first time earlier this year, and while it’s long and much of it went straight over my head (although I’m sure the copious footnotes would fill me in on much of what I missed if I had the inclination and ambition to read them all) I liked it a good deal.

It looks like it’s Cyclone, RIP.

I just finished reading David Halberstam’s 1972 book about how the United States became embroiled in the Vietnam War.  I highly recommend it to anyone with any interest in this period of American history.  Halberstam gives a very thorough account of the Kennedy and then Johnson administrations’ gradual but inexorable slide into what ultimately turned out to be a colossal waste of blood and treasure.

While Halberstam does an excellent job pointing to many of the major factors that pushed the U.S. into greater and greater involvement in Vietnam, perhaps the best lesson that can be taken from the book is that no matter how smart you are - or how smart the people are around you - you are never completely immune to the illusion that you are in control of events rather than the other way around.  This idea is neatly summed up by Halberstam’s use of a quote from Under Secretary of State George Ball, who paraphrased a line by Emerson when he said ”Events are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

Write something like this in your movie review:

Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance is nearly on par with what Heath Ledger did as the Joker.

Everyone fancies himself a movie critic, even brain-dead television sports commentators do.