Crazy Heart

Capsule review: Eh.

Slightly expanded review: Everybody seems to be over the moon about Crazy Heart because at least it isn't awful. Considering that our theater screens are mostly filled with animated rubbish, special-effects action rubbish, teenage Angst rubbish, and other varieties of rubbish, a country music drama with characters who are (the movie industry's idea of) real people has an obvious appeal to thinking audiences.

Has there ever been a musical drama where the musician isn't strung out on a drug and/or booze and messes up his or her life while we watch? I'm afraid Crazy Heart follows the well-worn path. It even follows the Saved by the Love of a Good Woman path. Are you getting the signal that there's not a carload of originality here?

But what about Jeff Bridges? Look, Bridges is maybe the best American actor around, but contrary to other reviews, this is not one of his better roles. It comes painfully close to caricature. But the script almost forces him to play the lovable loser in neon colors. He might as well wear a sandwich board that says, "Sensitive, pathetic drunk."

I found Maggie Gyllenhaal more interesting, possibly because I'd never seen her in a movie before. She is a left-wing nutter and 9/11 conspiracy theorist, but on the evidence here she's a fine actress, combining charm and vulnerability in this performance, and gives the picture what depth it has. I also love her name — Dutch?

There are no other roles of consequence. Robert Duvall gives a minimalist reading of a supporting role, and Colin Ferrell proves he is just as lame playing a country singer as he is playing you-name-it.

The movie has its intermittent pleasures: a good line here and there, authentic atmosphere (except Duvall's accent, which makes him sound like a Texan who's spent the past 40 years in New York, or vice versa). Location shots in my former home town of Santa Fe and the southwestern desert gave me nostalgic enjoyment.

Two or three scenes work up a respectable dramatic heat, but the story line is basically episodic and predictable. My wife said Crazy Heart is "a Lifetime TV movie for guys," and I concur.

America's alien turnstile

Our national government's population replacement program comes with a price. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of Mexifornia, has a plan to lower the bill.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday that the state could save $1 billion by building and operating prisons in Mexico to house undocumented felons who are currently imprisoned in California. …

"We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. ... And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons," Schwarzenegger said, predicting it would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

About 19,000 of the state's 171,000 prisoners are illegal immigrants, according to the most recent statistics available online.

In other words, the United States has an, er, understanding with Mexico that the latter can siphon off its poorest to El Norte as a safety valve. A certain percentage of the "immigrants" reaching the land of dreams are caught in criminal activities and banged up, but that's expensive and Mexifornia is broke. So Mexifornia pays Mexico to take charge of the criminals the U.S. made no serious attempt to stop admitting in the first place.

Prisons built and run by Mexican companies, to hold Mexican citizens, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Brilliant. How many of these criminals will serve out their sentences? But don't worry, the system is a perpetual motion machine. El Norte will continue to allow "undocumented" Mexicans in with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink; some will commit crimes serious enough to get them sentenced to hard time; back they'll go to Mexico, along with taxpayer money to keep them in televisions and hip-hop mariachi music while they serve out the remaining week or two of their incarceration.

Or maybe, au contraire, Mexifornia pays for the prisons to be built and Mexico decides it doesn't want their errant citizens back. Presumably the United States will have to accept them as refugees. The situation of some Somalis in Uganda offers a precedent.

THE American government is to resettle 5,800 refugees from Nakivale refugee camp in Isingiro district to the United States, Prosy Katura, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) protection officer, has revealed.

Katura said a team has already been sent to Nakivale to scrutinise the refugees to ensure they have no links with al-Qaeda, an extremist group. The American taskforce at the camp will also study files of individual refugees since they arrived in Uganda. During a meeting with the Germany ambassador to Uganda, Reinhard Buchholz, who visited the camp on Friday, Katura said the exercise under the “expedited Somali resettlement programme” should be completed by September. “We have so far scrutinised about 2,000 Somalis out of 5,800 who are living in Nakivale.”

Why is the United States taking in this particular group when, according to the article, the refugee camp holds some "470,000 refugees from Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Burundi, Kenya and Eritrea"?

Explaining the reason of resettling Somalis to the US, Katura said Somali refugees have failed to integrate with other refugee groups living in Nakivale and with the local communities because of their unique language and culture.

Oh, I see. They can't get along with other Africans because of their "unique language and culture," so we'll settle them in Minnesota, where they'll blend right in.

But maybe they'd feel even more at home in a country where the climate and social conditions are more like what they're used to. Mexico?

Forever young

[This entry is cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

— Bob Dylan

The pace is picking up. “My” generation is dying off.

I put quotes around “my” because it doesn’t necessarily mean exact chronological cohorts. Rather, people whose work affected me when I was young, or at least a lot younger than I am now, and left a lasting impression.

It’s hard to imagine them aging, impossible to comprehend them dying. They and I will always be in the 1960s or 1970s when I think of them. (That’s not so long ago in my mind, although for young adults it’s the Pleistocene Age.)

Just this week, two people I never met personally but with whom I connected with emotionally passed out of this life.

The first was Kate McGarrigle, one-half of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Their first album floored me when I heard it in the early ’70s; some 35 years later, it still does. Practically every track on the album sparkles. They were bilingual “English” girls from French Canada, blessed with splendid voices, individually and in harmony. I’m not sure which songs were written by which sister (the sublime “Heart Like a Wheel” is credited to Anna), but they were synergy in action.

Kate and Anna released other albums over the decades. While they were of uneven quality, and none in my estimation surpassed that original effort, the craftsmanship was always there. They continued to offer consolation to those of us who were immiserated as popular music sank to ever-more artificial, and often cretinous, levels.

The other loss this week that affected me was the detective novel writer Robert B. Parker. I believe I discovered him by way of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, about the same time as the sisters McGarrigle swum into my ken. He created the tough, wisecracking detective Spenser who was to Boston what Hammett’s Sam Spade was to San Francisco and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Los Angeles.

Parker has his detractors, and I agree with some of their reasons. After the first few novels, the Spenser series started to roll off an assembly line -- still entertaining enough to be good company on an airplane ride or for light reading, but successive titles did not grow in depth over the years like Ross Macdonald’s, for instance.

But it was thrilling enough to my young self to learn that the Raymond Chandler tradition was alive and well, and the snappy dialogue probably influenced my own style, as it undoubtedly influenced many others. (I’m not, of course, saying I imitate Parker or comparing myself to him as a writer.)

In the 1960s, even before the McGarrigles and Parker came on the scene, the San Francisco Chronicle’s wonderful columnist Herb Caen wrote a piece I remember: about how he dreaded opening the paper to the obituaries and seeing names of people he’d known for years.

The English poet Philip Larkin said that once he had reached a certain age, there was always Something standing behind him, which he could almost see if he glanced over his shoulder. (Henry James called death “that distinguished thing.”)

We are not forever young, nor are the people who are part of our lives, at least not in the way we imagine when we ourselves are young.

But maybe in a different sense we are. According to many mediumistic communications from the Other Side, souls who have passed over usually take the astral form of the most physically vibrant years of their earth lives. So, even a person who dies very old might have the appearance in spirit of a 20-year-old. Time and aging have no place in the afterlife. Forever young.

What did I tell you?

Rewind to January 14.

Today:

Federal immigration officials are expecting up to 200,000 undocumented Haitian immigrants, including nearly 68,000 in South Florida, to apply for a new federal immigration program that would allow the migrants to legally remain and work in the United States for 18 months.

The estimated number of potential applicants for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is far larger than earlier predictions of about 30,000 Haitians nationwide, according to local immigrant organizations and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials.

This is no more than an opening move. First, give "temporary" amnesty to as many as 200,000 Haitians illegally in the United States. Temporary will mean until the sun burns out from Manmade Universal Cooling. Meanwhile, those temporarily protected aliens won't be slow to issue anchor babies.

Then, of course, all the children/parents/grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins/nephews/nieces of les criminels haitiens will get their invitations to come hither — can't separate families! If that doesn't give the Democrats a permanent lock on Florida, we will adopt Haiti in its entirety as a "special U.S. state."

The Alinskyite Marxists sure do know how to dismiss a citizenry and hire a new one.

Turning America's disaster into Obama's

Thank you, Massachusetts, for giving us hope and change.

The Obama machine for scalping America into high-tax European-style nanny state with government-controlled health care has stalled. Best of all, the victory is down to individuals, not a lobbyist-financed party machine.

Plenty of bloggers will analyze the Brown victory and its implications, and most of them will know more than me, so I'll limit myself to one observation.

Do not underestimate the fanaticism of the radicals, their acidic hatred of individual liberty, their worship of transnational progressivism, and their willingness to make common cause even with aggressive Islam. They will do anything to tear up the Constitution and substitute a British-style soft totalitarianism in which the State makes the rules for every department of life, from the words you are permitted to speak and write to the methodology for loading your trash in the wheelie-bin.

We got a glimpse of the Obama gang's anything-goes strategy in a desperate trick by the Coakley campaign.

ALERT! COAKLEY VOTERS REPORT RECEIVING BALLOTS PRE-MARKED FOR BROWN!

… said the headline in a Coakley organization news release yesterday, January 19.

We've received several independent and disturbing reports of voters across the state being handed ballots that are already marked in favor of Scott Brown. This is obviously a serious violation, and our legal team is taking immediate steps to protect the integrity of this election.

There are many ways to commit fraud in an election, but giving out pre-marked ballots is about as stupid and easily detected a means as possible. Ethical issues aside, why would a candidate with a lead in the polls risk everything on a clumsy scam?

Oh, one other thing. The Coakley news release was dated January 18, the day before the election.

Turning Haiti's disaster into America's

The earthquake was a horror for Haitians, but for the Left in the United States it's almost all silver lining.

What an opportunity for moral exhibitionism!

Former president Bill Clinton will travel Monday to Haiti to deliver emergency relief supplies and meet with the country's leaders, his foundation's office said Sunday.

Clinton will meet with President Rene Preval and other members of the Haitian government, as well as visit with those assisting in the earthquake relief effort, the foundation said.

Clinton must believe that he has the power to heal, not by touch (as kings of old were said to have), but merely by his presence.

But at least he is so far performing his magic act in situ. The next stage will be an answered prayer for the Left in its desire to remake the United States as an oligarchy of transnational progressives ruling a society of poor, dysfunctional, easily manipulated peasants. We will bring Haiti here.

In preparation for a possible mass migration of Haitians, local Red Cross officials are dusting off old disaster plans used when the U.S. allowed mass migration of refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

"It's something that we as a country have done before, so it's not new," said Becky Sebren, director of emergency services for the Mid- Florida regional chapter of the Red Cross. ...

At the Hope CommUnity Center in Apopka, whose founders have long worked with the immigrant community, Sister Ann Kendrick said, "We'll do whatever we need to do. If they send children, we'll find families."

She witnessed the community open its doors and hearts to desperate people before — notably, in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba, when 125,000 people came to Florida.

"My experience was that it was the poor, immigrant families who made room," Kendrick said. "They have nothing — but they have a generosity of spirit. … And if we need to, we'll put up cots here at the community center. We have a kitchen here. I mean, we'll do anything."

Since when is immigration policy decided by the Red Cross and the Catholic Church? It is supposed to be determined by Congress -- not that I expect any of that bunch would have the courage to stand up to a humanitarian invasion.

The pretext is "the federal government's plan to repatriate the 45,000 American citizens who were living in Haiti at the time of the earthquake." It is hard to believe that 45,000 Americans have chosen to live in dirt-poor, crime-ridden Haiti, but depend on it that no one in the leftist mainstream media will question the number. In any case, those 45,000 supposed citizens will be the thin end of the wedge.

Since Haiti has for generations been a failed state, our latest venture in nation building will inevitably bog down in corruption and incompetence. Voices will be raised to insist that the only way to "save" Haiti is to hand its inhabitants a get-out-of-Hell-free card.

Chris Roach, at Mansizedtarget, observes:

... Our desire to help must be tempered by our responsibility to our countrymen to maintain an orderly, safe, and prosperous country. It also must be tempered by some recognition that Haiti’s bad circumstances are not caused by the earthquake, but rather are exacerbated by the earthquake; the conditions that made the earthquake so bad stem from the characteristics of the Haitian people and the unique characteristics of Haitian society.

It is not simply people we will be offering a place to, but their cultural characteristics: lack of skills and self-reliance, superstitions (think voodoo), and what will undoubtedly be for many a permanent need for welfare assistance. The Social Work Establishment must be salivating at the thought of a whole new "underserved" clientele. The Liberal Establishment is surely licking its chops at the thought of another servile population for their plantation.

Roach adds:

We no more have to take these forlorn Haitians into our homeland to show our compassion than we have to take real life, often self-destructive, homeless people into our real life homes. But that’s what Obama and company want Florida to do for Haiti: a gesture stemming from a perfect storm of liberal compassion, the opportunity to show a “lack of racism,” indifference to America’s working class, and the cultivation of a political constituency through specialized immigration policy. This is going to be bad and especially bad for Florida.

But Obama and his fellow graduates of the Alinsky School of Marxist Infiltration think we deserve it because we are such a bad nation. Like Jesus with the Gadarene swine, he wants to drive the national evil into middle- and working-class Americans and send them over the cliff. As his handler said, never let a crisis go to waste.