The Money Pit.

“Hillary Clinton ended January with $7.6 million in debt – not including the $5 million personal loan she gave to her campaign in the run-up to the critical Super Tuesday elections, according to financial reports released Wednesday.” With the January FEC reports filed, Politico takes a look at the sinking fiscal ship that is the Clinton campaign. The key graphs: “According to the reports, Clinton raised about $20 million in January, including her loan. She spent nearly $29 million during the month. She reported a cash balance of $29 million. But more than $20 million of that is money dedicated to the general election. Her personal loan accounts for more than half of the remaining approximately $9 million, leaving just about $4 million in cash raised from donors. But even that money is illusionary when measured against the reported $7.6 million in debts.” So add that all up and you get: no money. (Hence, the fatcat 527.) But the silver lining for Sen. Clinton? At least she’s making interest on that loan.

Over at TNR, Christopher Orr emphasizes this finding from the piece: “More than $2 million of the red ink is owed to chief consultant and adviser, Mark Penn.” So that goes a long way toward explaining why he’s still employed over there these days, despite his obvious incompetence.

And a commenter in the same TNR thread teases out another key line buried in the article: “[T]he lengthy laundry list of IOUs also includes unpaid bills ranging from insurance coverage, phone banking, printing and catering at events in Iowa, New Hampshire and California.” Wait a tic: Sen. Clinton, she of the much-touted mandate, is now ducking the insurance bills? Hmm…maybe affordability is the real problem after all.

Update: Politico‘s Kenneth Vogel has more on where the money went, including $10 million to Mark Penn and $1300 to Dunkin Donuts.

Update 2: The NYT piles on the terrible financing issue: “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings…’We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,’ said a prominent New York donor. ‘So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.‘”

Darkness in Bucharest.

The Cannes winner of 2007 (over No Country for Old Men, which I still preferred), Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, a fearless look at a very dark day in the life of two Romanian women, is a tremendously harrowing exercise in Hitchcockian suspense, and a grim, unrelenting journey into the moral compromises and bureaucratic decay that characterized life in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. I have some issues with Mungiu’s film, which I’ll get to in a bit, but no one can deny that it’s a powerful and expertly-made movie, one that tortures with silences and devastates with quiet restraint. But it’s also, I have to admit, a film I admired more than truly enjoyed. That’s its intent, of course: I can’t think of any other movie I’ve seen lately that had me squirming with as much psychic discomfort. (Remember the visceral suspense of the hotel scene in No Country, when Chigurh passes by Llewelyn’s door and removes the hallway lightbulb? Now imagine having that feeling for over an hour.) Still, while I can’t deny 4 Month‘s emotional hold, I think I ultimately prefer The Lives of Others — a film that offsets its tragic tale with moments of grace, humor, and even redemption — when it comes to recent fables of the Eastern Bloc.

4 Months establishes its naturalistic, real-time feel from its opening moments, as we watch a young Romanian student named Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) fiddle with her belongings and seemingly make preparations for an important trip. As she frets, her roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, Oscar-worthy) wanders down the hall of their dormitory, navigating the nooks and crannies of a casual black market economy with a bored, practiced ease. (She picks up cigarettes for bribing officials, looks over the recent array of smuggled-in beauty products, and procures some Tic Tacs from a friendly dealer-neighbor.) But Otilia too gives the sense that something major is afoot, something we gradually glean the outlines of as the day goes along. Leaving Gabita behind, Otilia ventures out to lock down a nearby hotel room (something Gabita was previously meant to do, but apparently didn’t), borrows some money from her boyfriend (Alexandru Potoceanu), and eventually goes — on behalf of Gabita — to meet a Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov, memorably sinister), a man we eventually come to learn is a back-alley abortionist.

Then, things get worse. For not only is abortion a criminal offense under the Ceausescu regime, one that carries a penalty of prison or even death, but the helpless Gabita (the pregnant one) turns out to be flaky and careless to the extreme, and basically an abuser of Otilia’s competence and compassion. Worst of all, the seemingly innocuous Mr. Bebe — despite dripping with doctorly condescension toward the “young ladies” — turns out to be the type of monster that can readily flourish in the interstices of totalitarianism, reveling in the power he manages to hold over the desperate Gabita and Otilia. And, even beyond the ruthless Bebe — who, trust me, is more than loathsome enough — there awaits the very real risk of medical complications, and the danger of discovery by the authorities…

Sustained by long, masterful, and unbroken shots, 4 Months manages to ratchet up the tension well beyond comfortable levels, making even scenes of a casual dinner party at Otilia’s boyfriend’s house palpable with dread. Like the two women at the center of the story — and, like many people living through totalitarianism, I’d suspect — we’re constantly on pins and needles, waiting for the other shoe to drop. (But don’t get me wrong — some really horrifying shoes drop in this film.) As a remorseless and nerve-wracking Eastern bloc thriller, 4 Months has few parallels I can think of. So why do I harbor reservations about the film? Well, four years, 0 months, and 3 days ago, I wrote of the considerably overpraised 21 Grams that it “just ambles around in its terminally depressed jag for so long that it loses any sense of perspective, and instead becomes just a vehicle for indulging the arthouse fallacy that misery is a substitute for character.” Now, 4 Months is a much, much better film than 21 Grams, but — however tense and suffused with menace — the same problem persists.

Coming out of 4 Months, I was reminded of an interview I read with David Simon about the importance of humor in The Wire, which however bleak is also by all accounts a gut-bustingly funny show. (I know, I won’t shut up about The Wire, but bear with me here.) This article makes the same point: “Though people don’t talk much about the humor in ‘The Wire,’ it’s there. You drop somebody into an alien environment — a closed society like the homicide cops or the drug culture–and the key to working your way into that culture is to understand the jokes, which David does. It’s crucial, because, if it weren’t there, the work would be too depressing. It’s crushing subject matter, but not necessarily to the cops–they’re making jokes while they’re looking at dead bodies–and not to the people shooting dope, even. They’re not necessarily walking around saying, ‘Woe is me.’ There’s a grim humor that springs out of that life.” Picking up along the same lines, Jacob Weisberg wrote: “While The Wire feels startlingly lifelike, it is not in fact a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon’s, The Corner…The Corner seems to have been a crucial life study for The Wire, a program that attains the dimensions of tragedy without being depressing. The Wire does this by painting with brighter colors on a wider canvas and by leavening its pain with humor…What ultimately makes The Wire uplifting amid the heartbreak it conveys is its embodiment of a spirit that Barack Obama calls ‘the audacity of hope.’” (You see how I snuck in an Obama reference with a Wire reference? See, I’m always on message.)

Seriously, though, it’s that critique which gets to the heart of my hesitation about fully embracing 4 Months. I don’t fault its unflinching refusal to sugar-coat what amounts to a horrible tale in a sad time and place, and it probably speaks worse of me than of Mungiu’s film to even hold such a thing against it. Many stories — maybe even most of them — don’t have happy endings or a laugh track. And, after all, we watch Otilia and Gabita persevere through an extraordinary amount of suffering, so why should they have to crack a joke just to let us off the hook, and make us feel better about their obvious misery? Still, if you can look past the razor-sharp tension that drives 4 Months, it is a relentlessly downbeat — and even one-note — affair. 4 Months is an impressive and powerful movie in any event, but I think I’d hold the film in higher esteem if it — like The Lives of Others — occasionally broke the gloom and allowed its long-suffering characters an uncertain smile, even while staring into the abyss.

Tactics have consequences.

“‘It is a direct lie and distortion of the facts of his “choice” record and I believe it did a lot of damage,’ said Moore. ‘The women are all very prominent Democrats, many of them in leadership, and it is sickening.'”

When you engage in lowball tactics, there’s going to be some serious wreckage. The WP’s Alec MacGillis describes the emerging Democratic divide in New Hampshire between furious Obama voters and the cadre of pro-Clinton officials who signed off on the patently false abortion mailer. “Obama supporter Bill Siroty, a former Democratic chair for the town of Amherst, said the ill will is running so high that it could keep Democrats in the state who supported Obama from rallying behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, should she win the nomination. In 2000, bad feelings that lingered among some Bill Bradley supporters about tactics used by Al Gore in the primary – including misleading charges about Bradley’s health care plan – were seen as one reason why Gore lost the state to George W. Bush in November…’People are very upset about it,’ said Siroty. ‘I’ve heard one or two threaten they’re not going to vote for Clinton at all. Tensions are very high, and it could cause a rift.’“

The article is also worth reading for its delineation of a successful (and shady) attempt by the Clinton campaign to disrupt Obama’s Get out the Vote operation. “Clinton volunteers and local lawyers acting on behalf of the campaign demanded in Nashua, Concord and at least one other town that poll moderators ban the Obama volunteers from the polls, saying that their presence violated a state law stating that only the state party chairmen can delegate people to monitor the polls…The Obama campaign countered that that law applied only to monitors who are at the polls to challenge potentially invalid voters, a practice that is usually limited to general elections and which their volunteers were not engaged in. The attorney general and Nashua city clerk confirmed this when they were called about the dispute, saying that the Obama volunteers were allowed as members of the public to observe the polls, as long as they didn’t get in the way…The disputes, which dragged on for hours and grew quite heated, generally scrambled the Obama efforts to keep track of who was and wasn’t voting…The effect of it was that it basically disrupted our get out the vote operation,’ said Edwards. ‘My effectiveness that day [in checking off names] was less than 50 percent as a result of the people who kept coming in’ to protest the observers.“

The Clinton camp response to these incidents? Suck it up. “Bette Lasky, the assistant House majority leader and a top Clinton supporter who was involved in both the e-mail and poll interventions, said she was sorry to hear about the bad feelings but hoped Obama supporters would get over it. ‘It’s politics, and it happens,’ she said.” In other words, we can keep doing what we want because Dems will be forced to return to the fold. Didn’t these people learn anything from 2000?

Update: “[F]or Clinton to do this to the choice community is so appalling. I can’t tell you how it distresses me…how devastating this and how horrified I am that the Clinton campaign would do this. I fear it will happen elsewhere and it’s just appalling.” The abortion mailer controversy simmers in New Hampshire.

Clinton’s Abortive Abortion Ploy.

Yesterday, according to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama was too liberal. Today, he’s not liberal enough. Flailing about desperately for something that will stick on the Illinois Senator, the Clinton camp contrives a patently false abortion mailer questioning Obama’s pro-choice commitment. The mailer says “Clinton has a record of fighting ‘far-right Republicans’ to defend abortion rights, while Obama has been ‘unwilling to take a stand on choice.’” And the facts? “During his eight years in the legislature, Obama cast a number of votes on abortion and received a 100 percent rating from the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council for his support of abortion rights, family planning services and health insurance coverage for female contraceptives. He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive, a vote that especially riled abortion opponents.“

The peg Clinton is trying to hang her hat on is seven times in the State Legislature when Obama voted “present” rather than “yes” on a given abortion-related bill. As was reported over the summer (i.e, well before this mailer was composed), Obama “did so with the explicit support of the president and CEO of Illinois Planned Parenthood Council. ‘We at Planned Parenthood view those as leadership votes,’ Pam Sutherland, the president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, told ABC News. ‘We worked with him specifically on his strategy.’“

So, in other words, like yesterday’s mandatory minimums fiasco, this is another weaselly, obviously false desperation ploy by Clinton’s team. (And one, like the soft-on-drug-related-crimes gambit, seemingly aimed at preemptively marring Senator Obama’s general election viability.) Sorry, try again.

Little Miss Sonshine.

Update 1/7/08: If you’re visiting from Electrolicious, Ypulse, or elsewhere today, welcome. In case you’re interested, the main site is here, and the other collected movie reviews are here (including the best of 2007 list.)

“That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. That’s one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet.” If you find people talking in such overstylized hipster-speak for ninety minutes witty and/or adorable, you’ll probably enjoy Jason Reitman’s Juno quite a bit more than I did. While it’s not a bad film, and it has the advantage of clever repartee and appealing performances across the board, Juno — like everyone’s favorite indy comedy last year, Little Miss Sunshine — is, IMHO, being significantly overpraised. Suffering from dialogue that’s been stylized within an inch of its life, and with every scene festooned with kitschy pop culture bric-a-brac and scored to uber-sensitive indy rock, I came to find Juno cloying to the point of claustrophobia. (And hearing The Kinks (“A Well-Respected Man”) and those overlords of twee, Belle & Sebastien (“Piazza, New York Catcher”), at various points on the soundtrack only confirmed the sensation that I’d somehow wandered into a Wes Anderson after-school special.) Speaking of Wes, I feel about this film much as I did about The Darjeeling Limited — if this is your sort of thing, have at it. But I for one eventually grew exhausted and even somewhat annoyed with Juno, even as I found myself in sympathy with its denouement.

Juno begins with a chair. A recliner at a yard sale, in fact, which is being eyed by a Sunny D-chugging teenager named Juno MacGuff. (Ellen Page of Hard Candy and X3 — This role will no doubt cement her status as the new sassy, quick-witted, adorable-but-approachable brunette that middle-school fanboy types will crush over, a la Princess Leia, Winona Ryder, and Natalie Portman in their day.) As it turns out, this chair has a special meaning for Ms. MacGuff, since it was one quite like it where she and her nerdy best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera of Arrested Development and Superbad, in his wheelhouse and terrific) lost their virginity in a fit of (what’s being billed as) boredom. And now, two months later, Juno is, as the sayings go, knocked up, preggers, in the family way, with a bun in the oven. (She later memorably deems herself “the cautionary whale.”) What to do?

At first, Juno considers “procuring a hasty abortion,” but something about the waiting room at Women Now! gives her the heebie-jeebies. And so, after some discussion with her best friend (Olivia Thirlby of United 93, an appealing presence), Juno decides to go for it and have the baby. She informs her parents (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both excellent) and finds a baby-craving couple on the right side of the tracks (Jason Bateman and an impressive Jennifer Garner — she and Cera are the best parts of the film) to handle her spawn in its post-born phase. But, of course, it’s never that easy. For one, it turns out the Lorings may not be as ideal a couple as they first appear. (The wedding pics everywhere should be a tip-off, as they were in In Good Company.) For another, Juno slowly comes to discover that certain things — bearing a child, falling in love — are actually much harder than they’re made out to be on the TV and the Internets, and all the clever comebacks in the world aren’t going to protect you when life takes a painful turn.

Now, some caveats. First, Ellen Page’s Juno is basically a pop-culture variant of the hyperliterate teenagers you find in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan or Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and, as I’ve said before, I am really not a big fan of that genre. Page is as good as she can be in the role, but the character as written is drowning in self-conscious quirk. Now, as my brother pointed out, so was Ferris Bueller back in the day, so perhaps I’m just getting old. Still, every time Juno emotes wildly over seventies punk rock acts like Iggy and the Stooges or namedrops Dario Argento movies, all I heard was screenwriter Diablo Cody unrealistically foisting her own pop culture bona fides on a sixteen-year-old character. (I had the same problem with Scarlett Johansson karaokeing Roxy Music and The Pretenders in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.) To borrow from I’m Not There, “Live your own time, child.“

For another, and as Lauren Wissot pointed out at THND, every character in the film — with the exception of Jennifer Garner’s earnest yuppie mom-wannabe, who is defined mostly by its absence — speaks with the same arch, cynical, highly referential voice, spewing forth peppy bon mots and pop-culture zingers that tend to read a lot better on the page than they sound on screen. “Silencio, old man,” “I have to pee like Seabiscuit,” “The baby looks like a Sea Monkey right now,” “Thundercats are go!” Everyone from Juno’s parents to her girlfriend to her lab partners to Rainn Wilson at the Circle K indulge in this hyperstylized quipping to the point of exhaustion, including the director. (Check out the “jocks really love goth librarians” scene, for example.) Now, this is the exact same problem I have with most of Joss Whedon’s output and particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so undoubtedly fans of the latter may have more of a tolerance for Juno‘s endless string of impeccably-crafted, unrealistic-as-delivered witticisms. Still, Juno eventually reminded me of the exchange in Fight Club when Ed Norton makes the crack about people on planes being “single-serving friends.” Says Pitt: “Oh I get it, it’s very clever. How’s that working out for you? Being clever. Great, keep it up then…“

Now, this reaction posed a bit of a quandary for me, since, as y’all probably know, Juno is not the first unplanned-pregnancy-for-a-hipster-parent comedy to come down the pike this year. And when musing on Knocked Up over the summer, I put its many knowing pop-culture references — jokes involving Matthew Fox and Robin Williams’ knuckles, for example — in the plus column. So why can’t a 16-year-old girl make the same sort of wry cultural asides to her friends as a 23-year-old man-child? I guess the main difference is that I don’t remember Knocked Up being so wall-to-wall with the punchy quips, or the dialogue feeling so writerly or artificial throughout. (For example, there’s nothing that feels as true-to-life in Juno as the automobile argument in Apatow’s film.) Until I see Knocked Up again, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Also, while Juno is being billed in some corners as the female response to Knocked Up, it is and it isn’t. Obviously, the parent drenched in pop-culture irony this time is female, but in other ways the films are rather similar in their gender portrayals: The relationship dynamic between Garner and Bateman for example, plays quite a bit like the one between Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd in Knocked Up — She’s the Voice of Responsiblity, he wants to keep playing with his toys. At any rate, while I prefer the former, Knocked Up and Juno would probably make a quality double-feature in the future. If nothing else, they’ll help pop-culture aficionados of both sexes figure out what to expect when they’re expecting. Just make sure you have insulin or ipecac handy in case the overwritten, indy-pop sentimentalism of Juno proves too sugary-sweet, as it did for me.

Better Dead than Red.

“As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government’s failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests — corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on — that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone’s situation had become virtually impossible.” Slate and Rutger University’s David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet “socialized medicine.” “[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called ‘compulsory health insurance,’ it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association…But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, ‘buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.’“

Bizarro Dubya?

Some good news on the domestic policy front: Pushed forward by a veto-proof majority in Congress, Bush signs a Democratic Pell Grant increase into law. “The increase in financial aid is designed to come from cuts in subsidies that the government makes to banks, totaling roughly $20 billion…Bush at one point threatened to veto the bill on grounds that it included hidden costs and was an expensive expansion of federal programs.” In addition, an expansion of the State Child Health Insurance Program is now on Dubya’s desk after passing the Senate 69-30 and House 265-159, and also looks to become law despite the White House’s original opposition. “Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care, while creating an ‘entitlement’ whose costs ultimately would outstrip the money raised by the bill’s 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax. But Republican opposition is increasingly isolated.“

And if passage of affordable college education and child health care bills by Dubya — however reluctantly — isn’t through the looking glass enough for ya, check this out: “The world must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, told a meeting of governments on Thursday, in the most strongly worded statement on global warming yet made by the US administration….Her words reflected how far US rhetoric on climate change has moved in the past six months.”

Update: Ah, there’s the Dubya we know and…know. Despite its bipartisan backing, Bush vetoes the child health insurance bill, arguing that it was an attempt to “federalize” medicine. “‘I think that this is probably the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country. It is incomprehensible. It is intolerable. It’s unacceptable,’ said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who pleaded with Republicans to help overturn the veto.”

Death and Taxes.

“‘Instead of having all of us pay our fair share, we’ve got over $1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax code,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the invisible hand of the market at work. It’s the successful work of special interests.” In a speech at Washington’s Tax Policy Center, Barack Obama unveils his tax plan. “The plan means billions in breaks by: nixing income taxes for the 7 million senior citizens making less than $50,000 a year, establishing a universal credit for the 10 million homeowners who make less than $50,000 annually and do not itemize their deductions, and providing 150 million Americans with tax cuts of up to $1,000…Obama proposes funding the tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes, cracking down on international tax havens and increasing the dividend-and-capital-gains tax for the wealthy, he said.“

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton unveils her new health care plan. “A Clinton adviser compares the plan’s ‘individual mandate’ — which requires everyone to have health insurance — to current rules in most states that require all drivers to purchase auto insurance…Clinton is the third of the front-running Democratic White House hopefuls to formally unveil her plan, following Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and former Sen. John Edwards.” Said Edwards of the Clinton plan: “I’m glad that, today, the architect of the 1993 plan has another care proposal — and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I’m flattered…The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests — you can never join ’em, you just have to beat ’em.”

Snow Blind.

“Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration’s domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush’s vaunted ‘ownership society’…And yet Snow’s own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society — and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary.” Slate‘s Daniel Gross explains how the unfortunate plight of Tony Snow exemplifies the problems with Dubyanomics.

We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet?

“‘We’re sitting on the doorstep of a definitional moment,’ said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.” Faced with their own low poll numbers, the Democratic Congress readies a flurry of late-term legislation involving homeland security (implementing most of the 9/11 commission recommendations), ethics (gift bans and increased disclosure requirements), and child health care (expanding insurance coverage for children of the working poor.) “Republican leaders plan to stand in the way…But against such philosophical stands, there is a stark political problem: How many Republicans are really going to oppose legislation expanding insurance coverage for children, tightening ethics rules and bolstering homeland security?” More than one might think, I’d wager.