Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

Transcendent or trite? The new Terrence Malick film, The Tree Of Life.

Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

Woody Allen's latest: Midnight in Paris.

Jury Duty

Here's an interesting story that provides contrast to the case of DSK.
Two New York City police officers have been acquitted of raping a drunk woman in her apartment. They brought her home, put her to bed, and then came back several times, apparently to rape her. A surveillance camera captured the two officers going back to her apartment several times after their official posted call. However, because she was so drunk, there were lapses in her memory and the jury could not find enough reasons to convict them. There was no DNA evidence. Apparently, one of the officers used a condom. They have been fired.
Ladies, when you go out and drink in NYC, do yourselves a favor and learn to hold your liquor. You have to have your wits about you.
I wonder if DSK, who has the best lawyers money can buy, and who are already saying sex was consensual (!), will be also acquitted. His case is much harder. The woman wasn't drunk, she was doing her job. Plus, he has a reputation for being a satyr. He is also powerful and white, while his accuser is an African widow with a child. DSK arrived at the Sofitel and there was no female in the staff he didn't accost. I don't know how he could possibly get out of this pickle.
The issue is whether men can still get away with this kind of thing because a woman's word has less value than theirs. Or because in rape cases, men think that women find them so irresistible that they will do anything to get into their pants. One would have thought that the police officers' case was pretty obvious, but if they say that she instigated it, and she is drunk, then that is that.  In the case of DSK, the idea that this poor woman was so hot for him she desperately wanted to have his dick in her mouth as she was doing her job (or at any time) is risible, but that may be what the defense will present. I think DSK is indefensible, and he should have pleaded guilty. But he is probably so entitled and has been coddled for so long in France that it didn't even occur to him that someone would seek punishment for what he's been doing to women for so long. The only thing that occurs to me is the insanity defense (since the French notion of a political conspiracy is rather hard to prove). If I were him, I would claim sexual compulsion, satyriasis, sex addiction, that is, an illness over which I have no control, to try to get a reduced sentence. But that would mean admitting weakness, and this bastard would rather humiliate himself, his family, the French, and worst of all, his victim, in order to avoid that. What hubris.

All this is to say that I got a summons for Jury Duty a couple of months ago and I postponed it because of work reasons (dang!). I actually want to serve on a jury.  I've been told that I do not know what I'm talking about, but I love this stuff.

Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

An excellent Romanian movie: Tuesday, After Christmas.

Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

The Lars Von Trier Show.

Le Perp Walk

How about the reaction of the French media to the arrest of IMF president and former French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn! They are appalled, they are horrified... at how harshly the NYPD treated him, fishing him out of first class on a departing plane and oo la la, the violence and the humiliation of le perp walk.
Quel horreur!
They have not shown that much sympathy for the chambermaid who accused him or the many women he has apparently groped and humiliated throughout the years. He comes with a reputation for randiness. Mesdames et monsieurs, if the guy is innocent, he will be exonerated. If he isn't, he deserves to be behind bars. Knowing the French, they may even vote for him in solidarity with his irrepressible joie de vivre. Stephen Clarke, the guy who wrote the very funny A Year in the Merde, explains how French society really works. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, mon cul.
What the French don't understand is that we are a country of puritans and the perp walk is our morality play. We collapse as a nation if someone shows an accidental nipple in the Superbowl, so actual sex scandals really do scandalize us. In contrast to the laissez faire attitude of Pepe le Pew, we don't believe that you should be the leader of a country, a party, a state, or a world bank if you can't keep your dick safely inside your pants. And usually we're talking mostly pecadilloes, like cheating on your spouse, having secret children out of wedlock and getting bjs under the table, not rape.
The French also don't understand that in this country the wealthy can try to get acquittal with the help of very good, expensive lawyers. But if you are arrested, and particularly if you are notorious, you'll get the perp walk (remember Bernie Madoff, O.J Simpson, etc). The perp walk is unfair and perhaps it should be abolished, but it's not a guilty sentence either. Some people are championing the perp walk as an equalizer, although I suspect that the perp walks of the rich and famous get much more attention than those of anonymous criminals. Supposedly, in America everybody gets treated equally (thanks to some ideas we actually borrowed from the French). However, this sentence made my eyebrows rise to the ceiling:

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was being held in protective custody in the West Facility at Rikers because there was room there to give him a wing to himself, an official said.

Do all presumed rapists get a wing to themselves in Rikers? Je ne croi pas.
In this world there is no such thing as 100% equal justice and there will never be. It's simply not in human nature.

Today On I've Had It With Hollywood

It's a total hoot: Bridesmaids.

Crazy Tuesday News Digest

Whoa there, Tuesday!

• Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5 billion.
Will we have to open our C drives to skype?

• The Chinese government has declared war on... jasmine. You heard right. Because revolutionaries in Tunisia used the fragrant flower as a symbol, the reliably heavy handed, paternalistic, capriciously and none too brightly authoritarian Chinese authorities are now bent on discrediting a flower, which is as far as I can tell, a huge part of their culture (all that fragrant tea!).  It's like that souvenir royal wedding commemmorative dish set made in China that had the wrong prince on it (millions of them): embarrassingly clueless.

 • The Governator and Maria Shriver are calling it quits. NOOOOOO!
Actually, who cares?
He is also going back to the movies, which is too meta for me to understand. 

• Newt Gingrich is running for president. This guarantees an awful circus I don't really want to know about.

• Today is Mexican Mother's Day, which is mostly characterized by hellish lunchtime gridlock in Mexico City.  Felíz Día de las Madres, madres, Mexican and otherwise.

Don't Do Israel No Favors

There are some self-righteous Jews out there, who, thinking that Israel can't survive without their help, end up causing more harm than good. These are the people who scream when a movie like Miral* is screened at the UN, hereby causing it to gain far more attention not only than it deserves, but that it would have ever gotten if they had not raised a stink in the first place. Or like this guy on the board of CUNY, who decides that playwright Tony Kushner does not deserve a honorary degree because he doesn't happen to agree with Kushner's views on Israel. I'm sure Kushner is no Netanyahu, but he is not Ahmadinejad either. And unless he is cheerleading for the wholesale destruction of Israel, which I'm sure he isn't, what does that have anything to do with his making the list for an honorary degree?  This is, contrary to its intended effect, bad for the Jews. Because it gives ammunition to those idiots who think we indeed control everything.
So use your seichel (brain) before you open your mouth. Also, there is such a thing as freedom of thought and expression. They happen to have it in Israel. You may want to look it up.

*The Jews who are so ashamed of Israel that they make it look worse than it is, also deserve a zets in kop.

Due To Popular Demand

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(I know someone who's going to be very happy).