SALON

Tuesday, Jul 29, 2008 11:38 AM UTC

Nostalgia for the Bush era

Oliver Stone's "W." has people excited -- no, really! Plus: Aronofsky vs. "Robocop," gals conquer Comic-Con, and Arab cinema's greatest voice falls silent.

By

Topics: George W. Bush, Beyond the Multiplex, Twilight, Movies,

Nostalgia for the Bush era

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in “Twilight”

Summer’s gone past its peak and no amount of chilled and sugared caffeine seems sufficient. Here’s all I know so far this week:

I’ve been devouring coverage of Comic-Con, the annual summertime San Diego geekapalooza, most notably from the spunky crew at SpoutBlog and from Variety’s Anne Thompson, the wry insider’s wry insider. I alternate between wishing I were there, watching trailers from “Watchmen” or listening to people feud over the upcoming “Terminator” prequel, and being profoundly grateful I don’t have to experience 6,500 “Lost” fans in a single auditorium or hear someone try to explain why the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series needs remaking.

Here’s this year’s Comic-Con story in a nutshell: Girls! Girls! Girls! And I don’t mean the ones with boob jobs, lacquered hair and leopard-skin bikinis who’ve been engaged to hand out product samples. By all accounts, female fans are in the house in unprecedented numbers, howling for the display of sci-fi hunkage and powering up the anticipation around “Twilight,” director Catherine Hardwicke’s upcoming screen adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire-romance saga, beyond any manageable level.

And while I don’t think there’s any direct connection between Comic-Con and the recent announcement that Darren Aronofsky has been selected as the director to reanimate the “Robocop” franchise, I’m sure word has spread. Also, it’s one of the few examples of auto-cannibalization in our crap-warmed-over cultural era that actually sounds promising. The whole question of how Aronofsky went from the guy who made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream” to the guy remaking an ’80s sci-fi spectacle (no matter how “ironic” it may be) — well, let’s leave that for another time.

I’m about the 253rd blogger to weigh in on this — but doesn’t the so-called leaked trailer for Oliver Stone’s “W.” look weird and irresistible, and kind of fantastic? I thought all the predictable things when I heard about this movie: A) who the hell wants to see a movie about George W. Bush at this point; B) the star-loaded cast has a classy, TV-miniseries feeling about it; C) Oliver Stone was always a loon and the years have not improved that problem; and D) who the HOLY ROLLING JESUS HELL wants to see a movie about George W. Bush? But actually seeing James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Thandie Newton as Condi Rice, Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Richard Dreyfuss doing an amazing Dick Cheney have suddenly made me (and a lot of other people) inexplicably excited. Admittedly it’s like finding out that someone has turned your bad dreams into a Hollywood movie — but you’d go see that, right?

I know, we don’t need any more “Dark Knight” screed around here — it’s now earned the fastest $300 million in movie history, breaking the “record” set by “Pirates of the Caribbean 38: Davy Jones’ Rockin’ Locker” or whatever it was called — but I can’t resist. Ever-irascible critic Michael Atkinson (we’re former colleagues, and I like him) has let loose his own delayed salvo. “Superheroes are, essentially by definition, idiotic confections intended for children,” Atkinson observes, “and the fact that I can’t escape them as an adult so far this millennium makes my blood boil.” As you can tell, a fair-minded, judicious consideration. I think there’s nobody left to write you hate mail, Mike. They’ve all exploded.

In news arguably more germane to the subject of this column, Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, the leading figure in Arab cinema, died in Cairo on Sunday, at age 82. Chahine’s story is both one of tragedy and triumph, and given his cultural and historical surroundings, it could scarcely be otherwise. When Chahine began his filmmaking career in 1950, Egypt was still a British colony; he had the distinction of making movies that appeared to criticize virtually every current in his nation’s recent history: Western imperialism, pan-Arab nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and religious intolerance (Chahine himself was a Christian), and the autocratic post-Sadat regime of Hosni Mubarak.

He also made movies in almost every genre you can imagine; I’ve seen only a few myself, and most remain hard to find or totally unavailable on North American DVD. His most famous work is unquestionably “Cairo Station” (1958), a neorealist classic in which Chahine himself starred as a disabled newspaper boy obsessed with a pretty lemonade seller. His better-known work also includes “Saladin” (1963), a left-leaning biopic about the 12th-century sultan who defended Jerusalem against the Crusaders; the Aswan dam documentary “Once Upon a Time on the Nile” (1978); and two films sharply critical of the Sadat era, the murder mystery “The Choice” (1970) and the oft-banned political drama “The Sparrow” (1973).

A Roman Catholic and an eclectic sexual adventurer in a puritanical Muslim country, Chahine grew up as an upper-class kid who spoke French and English better than Arabic. All over the Western world, people who have seen few or none of his movies will write respectful obituaries today; one can only hope the response in Egypt is not the official silence that greeted so much of his work. Chahine is but one more example of the universal rule that real artists are exiles from their own culture, by choice or by force. The man or woman who offers to show society its true face, rather than flattering its vanity, is never welcome.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 33 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations