WEIRDLAND: Politics and Stock trading

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Politics and Stock trading

"When Stone went meditative in Nixon, moviegoers stayed away as if they'd just heard popcorn was carcinogenic. And last spring, critics would have had to try bribery to get people to see Alexander Payne's dandy comedy Election, which gently suggests that our political mores aren't unrelated to our national character. Election, which has just come out on video and DVD, is indeed a small gem. If anything, it's too carefully made; some more recklessness wouldn't hurt. But that's a minor failing in a satire that inveigles its viewers into siding with Matthew Broderick's sad-sack but decent teacher against Reese Witherspoon's go-getting high school pol before turning into caustic, rueful proof of the old Pogo line, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Broderick's bitter final gesture vents the audience's own frustration with politics. But even he knows it's pathetic, and his disgust is also self-disgust--leaving no way out.

[...] Reducing all issues to a duel between Innocence (James Stewart's idealistic newcomer) and Corruption (government itself), Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is as expressive of our craving to transcend the whole sordid business as The Wizard of Oz is of our desire to escape to home instead of from it. Still, you can rely on Capra to churn up darker stuff about America than Oliver Stone dreams of, only to find it innocuous and celebrate it. Despite provoking patriotism the way green corn causes diarrhea, Mr. Smith is a peculiar civics lesson, since the hero isn't elected, casts no votes, and saves himself by an undemocratic filibuster. In fact, in what we can only hope is a blissfully unwitting way, this ostensible ode to democracy is a hairbreadth away from turning into a favorable account of the rise of a dictator.Sixty years after Mr. Smith, we're back at the crossroads of innocence and corruption; however, with (our) naivete personified by two clueless, giggly teenage girls and corruption incarnated by Dan Hedaya's comic-horrible Tricky Dick himself, the confrontation is not only apt but simply, unexpectedly moving. The final scene, with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams holding up their gleefully obscene sign while a maddened Nixon gives them the finger, can choke you up even while you're grinning, because Hedaya's grimace hints at genuine pain, and the girls' exhilaration is also the dawn of cynicism. And while the coda, with Dunst and Williams roller-skating to "Dancing Queen" around an empty Oval Office, practically hollers "soundtrack video," it's also beautiful--a surreal distillation of the moment when, with Nixon gone, the seventies became "the seventies." Source: www.esquire.com
Michelle Williams was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role as Alma in the 2005 movie "Brokeback Mountain" (starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal). When Williams was a teenager she began getting small TV roles, and when she was 15 she appeared in the feature film Species (1995). She legally separated from her parents before she was 18 to pursue a career in acting, and it paid off. In 1998 she began the first of six seasons on the hit TV show Dawson's Creek as Jen Lindley. The show made her a star, alongside fellow Creeksters James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes. While working on the series she began a film career that has included the horror film Halloween H20 (1998)and the political comedy Dick (1999, opposite Kirsten Dunst). Williams and Ledger became a couple during the filming of the movie, and their daughter Matilda Rose was born in October of 2005. They separated in 2007, and Ledger died in 2008.
Extra credit: Willams is unrelated to Michelle Williams, the pop singer from the group Destiny's Child... Williams's father, Larry Williams, is a successful stock trader; in 1997 Williams herself won a stock-trading competition"
Source: www.who2.com

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