St. Patrick's Day

I hate St. Patrick's Day.

I'm half-Irish, and I hate this time of the year, when spring begins to bud and the weather gets warmer. Every March, I know it's coming. I know this is supposedly the day of "my people" (as a teacher in Middle School once described it to me) and that today everyone is Irish. Beer is consumed, people wear green, parades are had, people drunkenly wail through "Oh Danny Boy" and then barf in the streets. Grew up in Chicago, seen it happen. Credit to my heritage, to see frat boys emptying their guts onto the sidewalk, let me tell you.

I don't mind cultural pride, and I don't mind the inclusiveness of St. Patrick's Day. I'm mildly bothered by people saying their Irish for one day, co-opting a culture under the guise of a good time. And yet if we couldn't have that, I couldn't have celebrated Cinco de Mayo or sat in a Buddhist temple in Houston. Plus, it's a celebration, and there's nothing wrong with that.

What does bother me is the following.

1) Co-opting a culture so you can get shitfaced. Look, just be a drunken asshole and stop with the rationalization that you can get hammered because of an Irish bishop who lived 1,500 years ago. St. Patrick and that Guinness you drink have nothing to do with each other. Just admit you're a lush and go on with your live. If you want to toast and boast, stand up on the table an hoist a pint to the good saint. Bellow that the man wasn't from Ireland, but likely from Wales or northern France. He escaped from the British slave trade and become a man of God, spreading the Good Word to everyone, no matter their class. A mean feat for the 5th century. He also didn't drive out the snakes from Ireland. That's a myth. More likely, his spreading the faith pushed out the Druidic sects from Ireland, and the snake has been linked to Druidism, so St. Patrick's most lasting legacy is a metaphor at best. Finally, Patrick (who wasn't born Patrick, by the way) lived a life dedicated to the abolition of slavery in all forms, something which made him a marked man. After his death, he was named the patron saint of Ireland. Not bad for a runaway slave.

2) We are not history's drunks. Sorry. The Irish are a profoundly stoic and artistic people. The Irish are one of the most resilient people on earth. Religious oppression, famine, discrimination. You name it, the Irish have survived it and come out more hardcore. And yet, there's a profound soul to the Irish. Until the conversion to the Euro, Irish money carried the visage of poets. On the euro coins, it's the harp. It's not a coincidence, either. The Irish have a tremendous history in the arts and letters. In fact, you probably have heard the Irish saved Western Civilization, with learned scholars preserving books and other written works from destruction, copying tomes and securing them so the world didn't fall into a permanent dark age after the fall of Rome. Again, when you hoist a Guinness, thank the monks.

3) St. Patrick's Day parades. Now, as I said, I love a good ethnic celebration as much as the next guy, but any celebration that promotes one idealized version of a group of people makes me shiver in a sort of existential dread. Case in point is the annual St. Patrick's Day celebration and parade in New York, reportedly the largest Irish pride parade in the world. Year after year, the organizers force to keep gay and lesbian Irish-Americans from taking part. And while it's a gross sight to see every year, this year it's coated with an extra topping of vile, trying to deny the New York City Council Speaker, herself Irish and a lesbian, from identifying herself as the latter in the parade. Great. The Irish migrate over from Ireland more than 150 years ago as bottom-rung immigrants, and now, once they have some power, they exclude their own for being gay. Makes me want to pull the organizers aside and scream "The Irish were the shitbucket of the British Empire, we came over to America to excuse discrimination, famine and oppression, and suddenly you want to act like a British asshole king with regard to gays? Short attention span much?" Embrace every Irish person, because at one point in Irish history, the British were content with wiping all of us out through the famines.

In the end, I know it's just a party, and I nod and smile, knowing it'll be over Saturday morning, save for the puke on the sidewalk. People will put away their green shirts and go back to the non-Irish heritage. Still, it'd be nice for once that on just one St. Paddy's Day, we stop the crap with the leprechauns and shamrocks and old-school U2 and the "Kiss Me, I'm Irish." If you're going to celebrate a people, then do it right. Understand where they came from, and once you know that, you'll be amazed at all the strife and heartache the Irish had to endure. And yet, they come out this odd but buoyant blend of stoic and singing. I've seen it in the Irish side of my family, and I know that through all the family trauma and chaos, they'll be there for each other. Get a big Irish family in a room, and you'll see what I mean. It's hard to keep the Irish down, tempered by faith and family and history and a slow-burning optimism.

And, yes, they brew some good beer, too.

A Verdict on Visionary Vindicating Violence

Or "V for Vendetta," the longer review.

First, if you are in love with the source material, you are going to get your heart broken. This isn't Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's flawed gem of a graphic novel about a modern-day Guy Fawkes running around a hyper-Thatcheresque London. No, this is more akin to Peter Jackson's version of the "Lord of the Rings" novels. Distilled to its essence, the story remains but the order is switched around, re-written, updated, polished. For someone who has read (meaning devoured and picked apart) the Moore/Lloyd work which was first published nearly two decades ago, it came as a shock to see characters acting differently, back plots and resolutions dropped, and subplots introduced. Bits and pieces of the original script from the novel float in and out, and observant viewers will get the nods given to the graphic novel laced throughout the film. If there's a way you can do it, put aside the original work before you see the film. It'll work out better in the long run.

Okay, that overture out of the way, it's time to get to the symphony (an in-joke left for you to discover). "V for Vendetta" is likely the bravest thing you'll see come out of Hollywood in a while. It's a film (if you haven't figured it out from the trailers) about a terrorist in a future fascist London who is bent on destroying the system. First by going after the people responsible for his past suffering, and then the whole she-bang itself. It's more of a study of fascism and power than an action film. V (the terrorist, placed by Hugo Weaving, who goes faceless throughout the film) isn't Batman or Wolverine. He relies far more on guile than guns, although he does pack a mighty nasty set of knives. With his Guy Fawkes mask in a perpetual smirk, he becomes a murderous ghost of Christmas Past, killing anyone part of the ruling class.

Which all leads to Natalie Portman as Evey, the young girl V rescues from plainclothes policemen who were about to rape her for violating curfew. V for Vigilante? Nothing so simple. Evey becomes the conduit for us to enter V's world. We learn about his plan, which is far larger than it first appears, and how the killing of a few party officials isn't the end, but merely the beginning of a much larger destruction. Evey's also the audience's voice, questioning how murder and mayhem can be good, if ever. Is there a point where violence works, and when, and can we live with the consequences? Can a society pacified by government-sponsored fear can aroused to take a stand? Is V justified in taking his revenge, once we learn the back stories of both his creation and the government that twisted him into being? And what if V is right, that there is a time when violence is the only solution left for a society rules by cruel masters? Speaking of which, V doesn't stop to console a fearful Britain. In one of the film's best moments, V hijacks the TV signal and speaks directly to the British people, giving them the hard truth that to find the true culprits of today's woes, they only need to look in the mirror. To paraphrase the man, it hurts because it's true.

There's nods and pokes at where we are now as a society. Hate-based pundits, fear-based newscasts to keep the populace cowering, government surveillance, heated political rhetoric labeling anyone against the system as a terrorist. It's achingly familiar, done to make the absurd (a man in a mask running around causing havoc, avoiding capture) a little more real. And compared to a mess of other graphic novel/comic book films out there, V for Vendetta has the bravery to not be about just the action, but to explore the ideas behind them.

"V for Vendetta" is a fable about living in fear, living in a society where anything is done for absolute control, and the power of standing up and saying "no." And V understands what other superhero/graphic novel-made movies don't: Heroes exist as part of the time they live in. And the smart ones play their cards to bow out at the right time. V lasts as long in any given room and with any given character he's supposed to, and his finale is masterfully played.

"V for Vendetta" is about finding a point past fear, and being liberated from a life of terror. It's a violent film, violent in ideas and actions, and it is as fearless as its lead character. It's slow and awkward in places, and there's at least one "wait a minute" moment involving the British Mail system, but on the whole it's worth your time in the audience and afterward, thinking about how (as Stephen Rea's police investigator character deciphers) the chain reaction of events in the film was arranged years in advance by V. It'll get you thinking about how the words "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" are easily interchanged. And yes, it'll get you thinking about war, terrorism and freedom. It's not an simple film, but a necessary one, an allegory for mad times. It is a film about an idea, which V tells us can't be killed.

And you should go see it.

V for Vendetta, first impressions

The bravest damn thing Hollywood's made in years. Not perfect, but then neither was the source material. It's a fable, an allegory, a hand at the back of your head making you see a slightly warped version of the world we live in now and dare call civilized.

And if you think the conservative screechers got their knickers in a twist over gay cowboys, just you wait until they get a load of that violent jester V.

Go see it when it invades the cinema near you.

More tomorrow.

Good Night, Good Luck, Good Gods (BSG spoilers below)

After a couple weeks of staring at a laptop screen until I nearly weep in frustration, I'm going to try to bypass my writer's block by writing another scene. Rayelle's going to have to be stuck for a while longer until she gets clever enough to come to me and tell me how she gets out her current jam, which resembles something out of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" in terms of orchestration and believability. I mean, I am writing fiction, but fiction has its own rules and gravity that the audience accepts to a certain degree to start with. There's a contract there, and you best not make someone superhuman unless s/he has an S on the chest from the start. Rayelle's been through a lot to get to this point, and I'm not sure this scene she's mired in isn't real enough. I want it to be hellish and foreshadowing, but she just got out of a tight scrape a few pages back. I'm wondering if it's too much.

When I wasn't squinting in horror at my laptop, I was parked in front of a larger screen in another room. George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck" comes out tomorrow and I got an advance screener of his lauded, but Oscar-ignored feature about press freedom, government bullying, and the advent of television a medium for justice or tyrant, depending on who is holding the reins.

It's a low-scale affair, this film, shot in a crisp black and white, with a feel that it was shot for television, fitting since it's a piece of TV history. The music, which is done by Dianne Reeves, who serves as a velvet-voiced Greek chorus, is worthy of a listen on its own. "GNAGL" is one of those document films, a slice of Americana when we held an institution in better regard, and this time it's journalism standing up to one senator's vision of loyalty and "patriotism." It's a vital film not just because it document how far the American press has fallen, but that it shows that the truth is the only thing that can cut through paranoia, and how one man (and his team) risked their bond with the public to expose domestic tyranny in the face of a foreign threat (in the film, Communism is the boogeyman).

The best way to approach "GNAGL" is to not think of it as a movie in the terms of sweeping emotion or massive explosions, but as a piece of jazz inside a beehive. The queen bee among the CBS news team of the early 1950s, when TVs were beginning their steady march into American homes, was Edward Murrow, a veteran newscaster who cut his chops in radio before graduating to the talking head furniture set where he began helming "See It Now," a weekly precursor of the news affairs show "Nightline," in 1951. Murrow also started the weekly celebrity softball interview show, "Person to Person," and both shows are illustrated in the film, a desk being replaced with a comfortable chair, and Murrow looking uneasy asking Liberace when he's going to settle down with that right girl.

It's jazz in that Murrow (played with a hypnotizing reserve by David Strathairn, who lost Best Actor honors to Phillip Seymour Hoffman) barely says anything when on screen. You can tell he's thinking by the way his eyes dart among his colleagues who brainstorm around him and in the taut way he smokes one of an endless chain of cigarettes. He's waiting for something, holding back and thinking of what he'll say on camera, and when Murrow goes on air, it's with a clipped precision of a surgeon, a man who makes every word count. He is a soloist when the camera captures him, and he betrays no fear when taking on the biggest bully of the day (Sen. Joe McCarthy, playing himself from archive footage) and the network itself in the form his boss, William Paley (played with a stony dominance by Frank Langella). And when the mike and camera both go cold, Murrow recoils into silence, smoking again, being the quiet one in the bar as he and his CBS co-workers await the morning papers. It's strange. In other films, a passive, quiet, enigmatic performance would throw me off, anger me for not knowing more about the character, but Strathairn plays it quietly, showing in crisp pieces what Murrow values through his words and a seemingly force of will. It is in the final scene, when he lectures his co-workers about where television stands as it is about to enter the 1960s. It's a warning, but it's also a plea to understand the greatness televison can aspire to. To me, it sounded like the "Vast Wasteland" speech Newton Minnow would give three years later. Watching Strathairn as Murrow is a revelation, and not because the story of one man taking on McCarthy, but the amazement how people on TV talked back then. Watching "GNAGL," there's a pang that goes through the soul to see how far we've gone, from Murrow's eloquence to cable news screamfests. It makes sense in the pathology. Murrow came from radio, where words, not looks, mattered. Now, you have niche programming that has to scare you to bring you back, or outrage you so you channel the screaming newscaster as your champion. Murrow did neither. He told the truth. That, as the man says, is a radical act these days.

And finally a brief word about last Friday's "Battlestar Galactica," which can be paraphrased from Murrow: "Good luck" to Ron Moore, the show's majordomo, who took two years worth of stellar drama and action and dared to hit the reset button on the whole damn pot o' stew. The last 20 minutes of the 90-minute season finale hit me like a fever dream where I was unable to make out the edges as I stumbled along in new surroundings. The fleet is gone, New Caprica is overrun with Cylons, a fourth of the fleet nuked in one hell of a camera-rattling (nice touch) explosion, Baltar has served up humanity's demise to the Cylons twice in almost two years (must be a record). Like my wife says, I'm not sure about the changes. Too much all at once, and Ron Moore and Co. have their work cut out for them to come up with a damn good resolution by October. If they pull it off, BSG is going to be one of the best shows ever made. If they don't, the show is going to collapse harder than the Mulder-free "X-Files."

So for now, BSG takes a bow and the Sci-Fi channel is running the new "Dr. Who," which, like BSG, reset itself and won critical and audience acclaim. Glad to see the new "Who" is getting to American eyes at long last.

Tomorrow night, "V for Vendetta."