King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) enlists backup from Faramir and Jimmy McNulty as David Wenham and Dominic West join the cast of 300 — based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae — along with Rodrigo Santoro of Love, Actually and Lena Headey of The Brothers Grimm. 300 Spartans against a million Persians? McNulty had best call up Omar for this one.
Category: History
Marcy to Miers.
“Although it’s obviously too soon to situate the Bush administration in history, it’s possible…that it may be leading us into a period where politics is defined according to the old spoils system rather than the technocratic assumptions ushered in by the Progressive Era.” With the Miers pick in mind, Slate‘s David Greenberg reviews the sordid history of Supreme Court cronyism from Jackson to LBJ.
House of Shame.
“Thus began [in 1994] what historians will regard as the single most corrupt decade in the long and colorful history of the House of Representatives…[N]ever before has the leadership of the House been hijacked by a small band of extremists bent on building a ruthless shakedown machine, lining the pockets of their richest constituents and rolling back popular protections for ordinary people” By way of Cliopatria, Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter surveys the corruption of Boss DeLay’s ring, with an eye to history. Update: And, wouldn’t you know it, Boss DeLay has been indicted again, this time for money laundering.
New Deal, Raw Deal.
“It was during the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman that such great progressive policies as Social Security, protective labor laws and the GI Bill were adopted. But with them came something else that was quite destructive for the nation: what I have called ‘affirmative action for whites.’ During Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s, when southern members of Congress controlled the gateways to legislation, policy decisions dealing with welfare, work and war either excluded the vast majority of African Americans or treated them differently from others.” With Katrina as a newspeg, Columbia’s own Ira Katznelson previews his new book on New Deal racial exclusion in the Washington Post.
I’ll see you on the beach.
Also (finally) emerging this evening: The very long-awaited Day of Defeat Source. I haven’t played much in the past year or so, but if DoD-S has managed to merge 1.0‘s already-excellent WWII FPS gameplay with HL2‘s immersive physics and graphics engine as rumored, this could get real ugly. So, DSSG‘ers, other long-time DoD’ers, and Robin Williams, best keep an eye out for the return of Liberty Lad, a freeborn man of the USA.
Politics of Ancient History?
“Our generation has envied our elders’ experiences more often than we’ve questioned them. Growing up in the shadow of the ’60s, we couldn’t help viewing the political involvement of the age as nobler, the culture and the music as more vital, the shattering of social norms more exciting, than the zeitgeist of our own formative years.” Slate‘s David Greenberg invokes popular culture’s (and the academy’s) rampant Sixties-ism to suggest why post-John Wesley Harding Dylan gets so little love.
Burden of the Bayou
Hidden over at the official FX Nip/Tuck site (click on the Sony lounge button at the bottom of the screen) are a number of new trailers for upcoming big-ticket films, including Freedomland (with Samuel Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, and The Wire‘s Clarke Peters) and Memoirs of a Geisha (with Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.) Both, particularly the latter, look impressive.
Less impressive, unfortunately, is the trailer for one of my most eagerly awaited films of the year, All the King’s Men. To be fair, I have very high hopes for this flick. All the King’s Men is far and away my favorite “Great American Novel” for many reasons. (To name just one, anyone thinking of going anywhere near a history graduate degree should peruse Jack Burden’s trying experience at State University first.) Whatsmore, it’s being brought to the screen (again) through the efforts of my old boss, who’s got, you might say, a good handle on the source material.
But this trailer misses the punch of the book and, frankly, plays like not much more than warmed-over Oscar bait. Ok, no biggie, it’s just a trailer. But more worrying, Jude Law and Sean Penn, both excellent actors, seem miscast. As the passage cited above attests, Burden is by no means a fresh-faced kid when he enters Willie’s circle — he’s been around the block a few times, fallen in and out of love and lust, gotten kicked around when he’s down, and taken refuge more than once in the smothering arms of the Great Sleep. There’s a sadness and a resignation about him that’s just not gonna shake…Think Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing. But, here, Jude Law looks entirely too wide-eyed, beaming, and innocent — in a word, too pretty — to do justice to the part. As for Penn…well, he just seems off to me, particularly considering how perfect Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) and Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) look. But, well, perhaps I’ll get used to him. (The Stantons — Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo — are neither here nor there, but I’m getting a bad feeling about Anthony Hopkins, who’s been known to phone it in, as Judge Irwin.)
Evading Rita.
Oh no. Here we go again. Rita’s officially a monster — the third strongest hurricane in recorded history. And, this time, it looks like Galveston — a town that knows a thing or two about deadly hurricanes — is on the brunt end. Let’s get it together this time, y’all.
First Batty, now Booth.
Beware the finger of death, Confederate conspirators. Former fugitive, scoundrel, and president Harrison Ford is slated to track down Lincoln’s assassin in the forthcoming film Manhunt. Ford will play Everett Conger, the retired cavalry officer who helped catch John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett farm, near Port Royal, Virginia, twelve days after Lincoln’s shooting.
Killen Time.
On the other side of the Padilla coin, a terrorist who has been tried and convicted has been walking free…until now. 80-year-old Klansman Edgar Ray Killen is rejailed after it was discovered he had been lying about being wheelchair-bound. “‘It’s interesting,’ said Susan Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. ‘Forty-one years ago the police department was involved in a conspiracy to murder these three young men. The fact that members of that same police department are now involved in putting Mr. Killen back in jail is indicative of how far this community has come.'”