An era of better movies

I took my daughter to see the movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix today, and among the trailers we saw was one for a movie from the first of Phillip Pullmans' His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass (December 2007, Cecil). Coming on the heels of very good films from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Bridge to Terebithia, this should have been unsurprising; but I still found my first reaction to be, "Wow. Someone in Hollywood thought that would make money?" Immediately I shushed myself (hell, I was in a movie theater after all); but yeah, they did! We've reached a point in film history where good stories that are accessible for children can get worldwide marketing. I suppose we went through one or two such phases before (E.T. kicked one off in the '70s), but it has been a while, and I don't think we've ever had such a sustained run of both quality and quantity.

So there's hope for the "other" movie-from-book that I've wanted to see since I was a boy (The Lord of the Rings being the first): John Christopher's "Tripods" trilogy.

J'accuse

Keith Olbermann will be written off by the far right, once again, as an irrelevant partisan nutcase. (The psych types define this as projection.) That doesn't mean the rest of us, the Great Silent Majority in this country, shouldn't listen to him and finally stand up and say, yes, this is truth.

We enveloped our President in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected—indeed those who did not believe he had been elected—willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.