Happy Thanksgiving!

Five-Day Forecast: Little Chance of New Entries

I'm visiting with relatives over the upcoming holidays and will almost certainly not have time to post. I plan to resume posting by next Tuesday.

Oliver Stone's Redeeming Quality

I've hated Oliver Stone since walking out of the theater in the middle of Born on the Fourth of July years ago, but the emergence of Michael Moore has caused a dilemma: Which director of leftist agitprop pseudodocumentaries is "better"? Of course, by any rational criterion, the question becomes: Who is the less-able propagandist?

If we take John Podhoretz's word for it, the movie Alexander might crack that chestnut! According to this short review, the movie "... isn't just bad. It's Springtime for Hitler bad." So at least one of them can make a funny movie, if not on purpose. Stone might just edge out Moore in terms of watchability, and unintentional humor fails as a propaganda tool. Think Reefer Madness. As a bonus, Podhoretz mentions Angelina Jolie's standout role as Alexander's mother: "... Jolie plays Alexander's mother like she was Natasha from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons." I realized her comedic potential after seeing her play romantic rivals in Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow and in Shark Tale. This will provide a nice added dimension to the movie!

But then, maybe I'm wrong. If you believe that Moore helped throw the election to Bush, then he gets credit for helping a just cause, if only by accident. Moore would thus get the nod for having made the greater positive impact -- if you give him that much credit. My impression, though, is that Fahrenheit 9/11 was just one more drop in the bucket of anti-Bush propaganda to hit the media markets before the election. So I regard his impact there as minimal. (I suspect that this verdict would irritate him more than the idea that he helped re-elect Bush. In the latter case, he could at least claim major relevance.)

I'll still go with Stone, but I'll wait for Alexander to come out on DVD.

Using the Free Market Solution

The wife and I scored some FluMist for $25.00 a pop today at a grocery store. For all the publicity about this year's government-induced vaccine shortage, we encountered no lines, and at that, only one other couple showed up the whole twenty minutes we were there for a dose! Granted, there wasn't exactly a media blitz about this, but the store advertised this yesterday. Presumably, plenty of pre-Thanksgiving shoppers got the message....

Check back here in a week. If I post, the attenuated flu viruses didn't kill me or make me sick!

-- CAV