Displaced

Get on your dancing pants, kids, there is finally a movie worth the $12 of a pre-order ticket. Stranger Than Fiction is an understated movie with an original premise supported by an excellent script and performances of just the right size.

“Understated” isn’t a word anyone’s ever used to describe Will Ferrell. In a recent interview on Fresh Air, he characterized his usual roles as “men with unearned confidence.” As a 180-degree departure from that history, this movie is going to do for him what Lost in Translation did for Bill Murray, what 40-Year-Old Virgin did for Steve Carrell and what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind almost did for Jim Carrey. This is a career-shifting movie and a joy to watch.

Harold Crick (Ferrell), an IRS agent with a highly routinized and largely empty life, begins hearing narration of his activities in his head. Emma Thompson plays the novelist with writer’s block who is unknowingly writing his life, Queen Latifah is the assistant hired by Thompson’s publisher to make sure she finishes the book, Dustin Hoffman – in a welcome departure from his recent scenery-chewing roles – plays the professor of literature Harold enlists to help him sort out what’s going to happen, and she of the rosebud mouth, Maggie Gyllenhaal, plays a baker and tax anarchist targeted by the IRS.

The most striking feature of the film is its simplicity. There are no unnecessary diversions into side plots. There are none of the winks and nods that have ruined other comedies with disbelief-suspending premises. The characters are all fully realized when we meet them. There are no explanations offered: everything you need to know is on the screen. I’d almost forgotten how lovely good editing and a script that gives the audience some credit can be.

Director Marc Forster guides the film quietly, following in the footsteps of Finding Neverland‘s gentle appeal, never overplaying the jokes or idiosyncrasies. There’s a touching moment when Will Farrell sings. The audience laughed, prepped by years of Marty Culp and Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute, but settled down as it became clear that Farrell was actually going to sing and it wasn’t meant to be funny.

The best way to cast stars is to leverage their history without relying on it. Unfortunately, to enjoy Tom Cruise in MI3, you have to have the springboard of Jerry McGuire to make him likeable and Mission Impossible to make him believable because MI3‘s not going to cover either of those bases. On the other hand, when we see Bill Murray shilling for Santorti whiskey, we remember him selling Swill – but Lost in Translation doesn’t need that knowledge to succeed. Shopgirl is a pleasant surprise for Steve Martin fans because it’s such a far cry from wild and crazy guys and from the schlock of Cheaper by the Dozen. We’re so pleased he had it in him. Likewise, Stranger Than Fiction is the realization of Ferrel’s potential as glimpsed in the slightly out of the groove Anchorman. He’s not parodying his past, he’s extending into the future and, like Harold’s epiphany that he should live a better life in the face of death at the hands of his narrator, we are warmed to see someone doing better, improving his seemingly inevitable fate.

David Edelstein called Murray’s Lost in Translation, “Saturday Night Live meets Chekhov.” Stranger Than Fiction is Lost in Translation meets Old School.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but a landscaping company in Texas recently refused to take on gay clients with the email message, “I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work for homosexuals.”

Mrs. Farber, half of the Garden Guy, Inc. team, defended their actions by saying that, “My husband made a personal choice, according to something he felt in his heart.”

I’m sure racists and skinheads also feel that hating minorities and Jews is a personal choice, and I’m absolutely certain they feel it in their hearts.

Americans are free to make personal choices about what they think, what they do in their homes, and who they socialize with, but the public realm is governed by laws prohibiting discrimination, whether it’s based on personal choice, close mindedness or low IQ. Those laws do not yet extend to gays in most places. I hope incidents like this one will force that to change.

In the meantime, if you need a landscaper, I know a fantastic one in New York. He’s more than happy to work with anyone who will pay his rate and he has no problem with homosexuals, probably because he’s gay.

A journalist in Los Angeles was researching a profile of Cary Grant and telegraphed Grant’s secretary in New York, “How old Cary Grant?”

Cary Grant himself received the telegram and wrote back. “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

To cut back on holiday stress, I am giving everyone on my list exactly the same thing, and this is what it is: a Twinkie home bake set. It’s a brilliant idea: fun for the kids, irony and memories for the adults. And my foreign friends who have never eaten a food made entirely out of preservatives will reconsider their prejudice when they taste the homebaked goodness and be tricked into supporting that sink hole of American culinary culture, Hostess. Once, anyway.

I have dubbed the bizarre whipped cream injection syringe The Impaler. As a British friend remarked about this equally peculiar instrument, “It is a bit urgent, isn’t it?”

A new girl came to my writing workshop last week. She works in an office.

New Girl: I’ve been thinking about starting a children’s book…But I’m not I’m not sure what I want to write about.
Instructor: Well, why not start by writing what you know?
New Girl: You mean goals, objectives and measurable outcomes? For kids.

So. Election Day. Finally. I won’t get into the whole voting machine fray and disenfranchisement of voters mess. Others have done a much more exhaustive job on that topic and I think the summary of both topics is the same: as the world’s self-proclaimed poster-child for democracy, we are an embarrassment. We can’t get it together to run an election that meets our own international standards for clean and tamper-proof voting and, as a result, we are, intentionally and unintentionally, screwing a lot of people out of their vote. As a white, middle-class San Franciscan living in an affluent neighborhood, I’m not worried about my personal situation, but I will say that that my local 125-year-old pollworkers did a lot better with the Rube Goldberg curtains, slots, punch cards and pull levers we used to have than they do with the new electronic voting machines. When was the last time you called your grandmother to help you fix your iPod? That’s all I’m saying.

There’s an avalanche of press on how the Democrats might miraculously and accidentally carry the election and how voters haven’t been this upset since Watergate. What I’m reading a lot less about is whether it’s a good idea for them to carry the election. There are two arguments the Democrats make for why they should win. First, the country is a mess. Iraq, the environment, healthcare and education are all a mess. Even the economy, which is being flogged for good news, doesn’t reflect how poorly the working poor are doing. Second, Bush needs a beating the likes of which we’ve never seen because he’s the no-good, ignorant, stubborn son-of-a-bitch that brought all this bad news to town. His Republican Congress hasn’t called him or his posse onto the carpet for any of his reality-rejecting shenanigans. The thought is that a Democratic Congress will correct that mistake by impeaching his ass and running him out of town on a rail.

Don’t get me wrong: I would be in the front row (or, more likely, I’d watch the highlights on CNN.com and cackle) if there were Congressional hearings to impeach Bush, but I’m not loitering on C-SPAN hoping it’s going to happen ’cause it ain’t. Impeachment takes forever. Look how long it took Kenneth Starr to finally get something on Clinton (and that ‘something’ was pretty debatable). We just don’t have that kind of time. Bush only has two more years in office. Do you really think Democrats, with their demonstrated level of incompetence at identifying the big issues, calling them by their right name and organizing around them, are going to be able to get the job done? Not likely. They’ll still be adjusting their cuffs and setting up their huffy press conferences by the time 2008 rolls around.

Besides, let’s face it: by the time you’ve lied, cheated and stolen your way into the White House, you’ve pretty well learned how to cover your tracks. This administration has mastered the improbable art of coming right out and admitting what they did all along, using the defense that they’re entitled to do it in the first place, so no crime was committed and no mistake made. That brazenness has worked well for them. It certainly had the element of surprise, at least early on in their tenure. And it creates a much more complicated road to judgment because now we’re talking about Constitutional separation of powers instead of just half-assed decisions, rigged contracts, misallocation of funds, hiring of unqualified cronies, misguided warmaking, criminally negligent emergency management and ludicrously selective information management. These guys may be arrogant, but they’re nothing if not cagey. You can bet they’ve covered themselves legally every step of the way. I imagine Cheney carrying around a burn bag like the rest of us carry a cell phone.

Since a Democratic Congress won’t be able to get the retribution job done quickly enough, why win and put ourselves in the line of fire? Democrats don’t frame things well, they have no rapid response machine and they don’t have the right people for the job. So why not take one for the team, hunker down and think long-term? It worked for the Republicans. They spent decades putting together the “successes” of the last twenty-five years. The Democrats need to start thinking along those lines. Gather resources, groom candidates, build and oil your machinery and watch the Republicans implode. Does it really make sense for the long-term Democratic agenda – which, right now, consists of only making sure Republicans don’t completely destroy this country, other countries and the planet – to win the mid-term elections? If you really want the most bang for your buck, save your team for the big game.

Of course, this presumes that we’ll get a team together in the next couple of years, but it’s a better bet than spending the next two years failing (or making only moderate progress, which is the same as failing in political time) to correct the cataclysmic mistakes it took the Bush administration six years to cobble together. It’s a lot easier to get rock to roll downhill than it is to roll it back up again and that rock is almost at the bottom of the gulch. A Democratic win would only slow it down and maybe, if we’re lucky, get Rumsfeld fired. That’s best case. Worst case is the Democrats get pinned under the rock when it finally stops and, if the last six years have showed us anything, it’s that the Democrats can figure out a way to tie their own shoelaces together even when they’re wearing loafers.

I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try. I’m saying maybe they should try at something else. Let the Republicans keep screwing themselves for a couple more years. Leave ’em to it. The Democrats will be over here putting together an actual plan and focusing on a sweep in 2008.

Stanley Fish has been writing a series of blog posts for the New York Times that are a.) exactly what I think, and b.) coincidentally, excellent. Check out the latest here. His recurring theme is that higher education is separate from politics and, as such, carries no moral obligations to come down on one side of the argument or the other. This is remarkably similar to what I see as the central tenant of therapy: examine the issue at hand without the pressing requirement to form a judgment and take action. How else would we be able to construct a balanced and considered opinion? What a relief it would be to live in a world where we all took a moment to educate ourselves impartially before leaping into action.

Vespas are my thing. I have wanted one since I was in second grade. My teacher drove one to school through the Boston suburbs and even though she was not young or pretty, she wore pegged pants and looked vaguely European with her curly bob and narrow hips. Plus, a.) she moved faster than me on my bike, and b.) she got to drive alone. That was all I needed. I was hooked.

So here’s my question: why are there no Vespa cops? First, there were cops on horseback. Then they got motorcycles. Then bikes. And now apparently they’re issuing dirt bikes. I saw two of them the other day in the Mission looking like they were headed to a BMX rally. God knows why they branched out in that direction before tapping the Vespa market. If you think about it, it’s a fantastic idea: non-threatening, community-friendly and stylish. I guess it’s a question of priorities: before they can go Italian stylin’, they’ve got to get rid of the polyester pants and the random beatings. The motorcycle boots are a good first step though.

(For those of you who are already hooked, check out the Vespa porn.)

This demoralizing job search thought brought to you by Indexed.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think Stephen King isn’t a lot better than one of his ghastly creations. And I mean that in the most good-natured sort of, “You frighten me enough that you might be the devil,” sort of way. On the principle of keeping my enemies closer, we grabbed our season tickets for City Arts & Lectures and headed out to Herbst Auditorium on Monday. It was the eve of All Hallow’s Eve and they’d brought him out to hawk his latest book, Lisey’s Story. The king of horror. Speaking on Halloween. Get it? I didn’t. Same way I didn’t notice that I was wearing a bright orange sweatshirt. I’m just not very Halloween-aware which might explain why I can’t stand horror.

Here’s my beef with Mr. King. (I like calling him that because, taken out of context, I might be referring to Don King or Larry King and, in my imagination, they are the new Three Stooges except that all of them are assholes and two of them are boring. But it’s still funny when they fall down.) I think everyone is responsible for what they put out into the world and what Mr. King puts out is terrifying and gruesome.

I can feel the ACLU creeping onto my back porch like a scary clown. I’m not saying you can legislate it – pipe down – but I still think, like chewing with your mouth closed and wearing deodorant and not shouting obscenities on the R train, that it should be part of the How to Be a Decent Human Being in a Crowded World That Has Enough Problems As It Is training course. If you put horror and fear and all the bile of your imagination out into the world, you’re no better than a corporation that dumps its sewage into the river. Yeah, sure, there are going to be kids downriver who think that radioactive turtles and fish that can speak Russian and have one and a half legs are cool, but that doesn’t make it OK. Because there’s an audience for it doesn’t make it all right. Letting the market drive every damn thing is what’s getting intelligent design into the schools. Those kids should be protected from themselves: cut back on licking lead and watch more PBS and no encouragement to think that there are things out to get them in the night.

I don’t buy that personal choice and responsibility fall only on the consumer and not on the producer. Producers of horror (both for entertainment and for access to oil) are implicitly endorsing a society in which horror is accepted, and I can’t get behind that, no matter what a skilled writer or good guy the producer might be. In this country, he has an undeniable right to write whatever violent stories he sees fit. Sure. But with every right comes a responsibility, whether you can legislate it or not, and Stephen King is responsible for contributing to the level of violence and unpleasantness in the world and for that I find it hard to forgive him. Everyone has a right to their own bowl and they can pick whatever f’d up cherries they want to put in it. I just wish people like Stephen King produced fewer f’d up cherries for people to sort through.

I was thinking about making this point during the Q&A – in spite of my revulsion, I am curious to hear his side of it if he has one – but it turns out that Mr. King is exceedingly dull. He’s like that boring uncle who tells long stories full of irrelevant details and steps on his own jokes but still thinks he’s a riot because someone once told him at an office party that he was a real entertainer. This is somewhat comforting, since it proves he’s not the devil. We left half an hour into it. I would have stayed for the devil. I hear he’s entertaining.