Wimpy city council to vote today on wimpy waste management plan

Want to get rid of some trash? First, dump the Dallas’ proposed waste management plan which hopes and prays but does nothing to guarantee the city will achieve zero waste by the year 2040, at least 10 years later than what any reasonable plan should call for.

Chief Wimp
Forrest Turner

But, according to the city’s chief wimp, Assistant City Manager Forrest Turner, this is the will of the people of Dallas. Ha! The constantly misguided and misinformed Turner is basing this on the fact that 50 people — 50 out of a city with a population of 1,223,229 — attended a meeting at City Hall back on Jan. 26 and, according to the city’s own presentation Monday to the Transportation and Environment Committee, could not agree on one single thing.

Here’s the plan in a nutshell: We’re hoping the good citizens of Dallas will voluntarily help us achieve zero waste by the year 2040 and if we see they are not volunteering to do this we’re going to get very, very mad.

Don’t believe me? Read it yourself. I wish I could link you right to the presentation but this link will get you close. It takes you to a list of Monday’s city council committee meetings. Just scroll down to the Transportation and Environment Committee and click on Local Solid Waste Management Plan Update. Your computer needs to be equipped with Adobe Reader to see this travesty in all its glory.

Here’s another kicker. The plan completely removed any mention of bans on plastic bags and foam cups because, chief wimp Turner argues, these are an "environmental and litter related issue."

WHAT? What is that man thinking? What is he drinking? A solid waste management plan, by definition, is an "environmental and litter related issue." When push comes to shove, what we’re talking about here is trash and garbage and please — please! — tell me how can anyone in their right mind can try to argue that garbage is not an environmental issue and litter is not a trash issue. And if the solid waste plan is not an environmental issue, what the hell is he doing briefing it to a body called the Transportation and Environment Committee?

Of course, this city administration has proved time and time again it doesn’t give a damn about the environment anyway. If it did, it wouldn’t be signing leases to drill for shale oil within the city limits or pushing for plans to construct a high speed tollroad through a city park and wilderness area. So this is just another way by chief wimp Turner to shunt aside product bans.

What the City Council will do, ultimately, is embrace this plan today that doesn’t ruffle any feathers. Heaven forbid, that body should demonstrate actual leadership, which often involves major feather ruffling. District 12's Sandy Greyson will argue the plan is "not very proactive" (her words at Monday’s committee hearing), but I’ll bet she, too, will cave and ultimately vote for it.

So what’s the big deal? Because it appears the city is also caving in on the Flow Control issue, in about 50 years the city will be looking for a spot for a new landfill and because that landfill will have to be hundreds of miles away, sanitation rates will climb at least 1,000 times of what they are today. But these wimps don’t care. They won’t be around then. That will be somebody else’s problem. How’s that for leadership.

The shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar

It’s only a minute and 45 seconds long and here it is in its entirety. Check it out. It’s amazing.

Quick Oscar reaction

Relatively dull show, with Seth McFarlane definitely out of his element. And that entire William Shatner episode was an unmitigated disaster. I still maintain the Oscar show would be better without a "host."

Couldn't disagree more with the Dallas Morning News' pronouncement that Ang Lee's win over Steven Spielberg was "a huge upset." The Lincoln bandwagon ground to a halt a couple of weeks ago (right around the time Spielberg arranged to have former President Bill Clinton introduce the film at the Golden Globes) and by the time the awards were ready to be handed out, both Lee and David O. Russell had better chances to win than Spielberg.

I only had two award surprises: Christoph Waltz winning supporting actor (I thought it was close between Tommy Lee Jones and Robert DeNiro) and, of course, the tie in the sound editing category.

I thought Catherine Zeta Jones nailed the All That Jazz number from Chicago, the best musical moment of the night. The sound mixing on Adele's Skyfall was abysmal. Any engineer who allows an orchestra and a chorus to overwhelm that woman's voice should be dismissed on the spot, no appeals allowed.

My Top Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis
COLLEGE MEN
1.  Indiana 24-3 (1)
2.  Duke 24-3 (3)
3.  Florida 22-4 (2)
4.  Gonzaga 27-2 (5)
5.  Michigan 23-4 (6)
6.  Kansas 23-4 (9)
7.  Louisville 22-5 (7)
8.  Miami, Fla, 22-4 (4)
9.  Michigan State 22-6 (8)
10. Syracuse 22-5 (10)
11. Georgetown 21-4 (12)
12. Arizona 23-4 (11)
13. Ohio State 20-7 (18)
14. New Mexico 23-4 (16)
15. Wisconsin 19-8 (14)
16. Pittsburgh 21-7 (13)
17. Oklahoma State 20-6 (15)
18. Kansas State 22-5 (22)
19. Marquette 19-7 (19)
20. Memphis 24-3 (21)
21. Colorado State 21-6 (17)
22. St. Louis 21-5 (NR)
23. Minnesota 18-9 (20)
24. Virginia Commonwealth 22-6 (23)
25. UNLV 21-7 (NR)
Dropped out: Butler, (25), Cincinnati (24).
COLLEGE WOMEN
1.  Baylor 26-1 (1)
2.  Connecticut 25-2 (2)
3.  Duke 26-1 (3)
4.  Notre Dame 25-1 (4)
5.  Stanford 26-2 (5)
6.  California 25-2 (6)
7.  Maryland 22-5 (7)
8.  Penn State 23-3 (10)
9.  Kentucky 23-4 (9)
10. Tennessee 22-5 (12)
11. Texas A&M 21-7 (8)
12. North Carolina 25-4 (13)
13.  Louisville 22-6 (11)
14. South Carolina 22-5 (14)
15. Iowa State 19-6 (17)
16. Georgia 23-4 (18)
17. Colorado 22-5 (16)
18. Delaware 24-3 (15)
19. UCLA 21-6 (20)
20. Nebraska 21-6 (24)
21. Dayton 24-1 (21)
22. Syracuse 22-4 (19)
23. Texas Tech 20-7 (25)
24. Wisconsin-Green Bay 22-2 (NR)
25. Michigan State 20-6 (NR)
Dropped out: Florida State (22), Oklahoma State (23).
NBA
1.  San Antonio 45-13 (1)
2.  Miami 40-14 (3)
3.  Oklahoma City 41-15 (2)
4.  Los Angeles Clippers 40-18 (4)
5.  Memphis 37-18 (5)
6.  Denver 35-22 (6)
7. Indiana 35-21 (NR)
8.  Golden State 33-23 (8)
9.  Chicago 32-24 (10)
10. Brooklyn 33-24 (9)
Dropped out: New York (7)

Available on DVD: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”

There are some good movies about breakups (Woody Allen's Annie Hall, Albert Brooks' Modern Romance) but not many where the breakup is amicable. The essence of storytelling is conflict, so someone needs to be unhappy before the happily ever after.

In the case of Celeste and Jesse (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg), the unhappiness belongs to their friends, who can't understand how the couple can laugh, love and live together several months after agreeing to a divorce.

Celeste is a successful marketing executive. Jesse is an unsuccessful artist who sleeps in the studio of the Los Angeles home they share. He's more than a little lazy, but in the secret, silly language they share, Celeste can vent her frustrations about clients such as pop tart Riley Banks (Emma Roberts). So when Jesse meets Belgian beauty Veronica (Rebecca Dayan), Celeste finds herself jealous.

While Celeste fends off a suitor of her own (Chris Messina as a nice guy from her yoga class with whom she has little in common), she tries to prepare for the wedding of her best friend (Ari Graynor) but goes into a tailspin co-piloted by her pot dealer (Will McCormack, whose brief real-life relationship with Jones became the basis for their script).

Jones has been an engagingly patient co-star in comedies such as I Love You, Man and The Big Year and in the TV series Parks and Recreation. In her first starring role, Jones is self-effacingly funny in a Kristen Wiig way without down-playing the intelligence she showed in The Social Network. By comparison, rubber-faced Samberg is irritatingly broad, although the character does grow when he's presented with a sobering challenge. Likewise, Roberts evolves from a cartoonish teen queen to something like a real person.

To its credit, Celeste and Jesse Forever wants to be more than a formulaic farce. It succeeds to the extent that the neighbors keep up with Jones.

Available on DVD: “Killer Joe”

One of the rarest qualities of a Hollywood film is provocation — the capacity to shock us. Even horror movies have become predictable.

In 1973, director William Friedkin followed the pioneering gay drama The Boys in the Band and the Oscar-winning thriller The French Connection with arguably the most shocking film in Hollywood history: The Exorcist. Friedkin has never came close to that level of success again, but almost 40 years later, he's made a movie that's equally ripe for dissection, if not consumption.

Killer Joe based on the play by Tracy Letts, is a tasteless tour of the rural underclasss, yet the gun-toting guide is hard to ignore. He's Matthew McConaughey, continuing his midcareer diversion into dangerous territory (Magic Mike, Bernie). He's downright scary as the title character, a swaggering, leather-jacketed Texas cop who moonlights as a hired killer.
Joe is hired by dimwitted trailer trash Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his debt-ridden son, Chris (Emile Hirsch), to exterminate Ansel's ex-wife and collect her life insurance. The supposed beneficiary is spacey pubescent daughter Dottie (Juno Temple); but the secret schemer in the background is Ansel's stripper squeeze, Sharla (Gina Gershon).

When Chris gambles away the down payment on the murder contract, Joe asks for collateral: Dottie, whom he woos like a rapist Romeo while the rest of the clan cowers outside the double-wide.

Killer Joe is one of the most repugnant parodies of small-town stupidity that you will ever see, and Friedkin amplifies the shrill obscenities with blaring cartoon and kung-fu footage from his art director's fever dreams.

Yet the smeared colors, vivid dialogue and fearlessly unsympathetic cast compel our attention until a ferocious finale of sexualized violence that merits the NC-17 rating (and will permanently curb your appetite for fried chicken).

Watching Killer Joe to the bitter end is like playing the Pick 6 lottery and getting three of the numbers right. You don't win anything, but you still think you're smarter than all those other idiots.

City's Congressional program acknowledges climate change

I was about to criticize the City of Dallas’ Legislation Program for the 113^th Congress, which was briefed to City Council today, for only paying lip service to deficit reduction — and I’m still going to do that — but first I must applaud the city for accepting the reality of global science change.

This is a big step forward for a council that, regardless of how blue the county is trending, is still a rather conservative body. There are Tea Party nuts out there who, regardless of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, absolutely refuse to accept the reality of climate change and many of those right-wingnuts are Congressmen representing the North Central Texas area.

Yet here is the city of Dallas, saying in its Legislation Program: "Although the challenges created by global climate change (emphasis mine), air pollution and energy security are international in scope, local governments are well placed to implement policies and pursue innovations to meet these challenges, especially if they are given the resources to do so."

What the City is saying in this section is basically this: Don’t order us to do anything that reduces greenhouse gases unless you give us the money to carry out those orders.

But the overall message of the program is "Don’t cut any more of our funding." And that’s where I have a problem.

If there is one thing upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree it is that the national deficit must be reduced. Where they disagree, of course, is how to reduce it. The Democrats argue that the deficit should be reduced with a combination of budget cuts and tax increases, primarily by eliminating deductions that benefit only the wealthiest of our citizens and the largest of our profit-making corporations. Republicans, for the most part, want the deficit reduced solely by cutting spending.

It appears to me the City is siding more with the Democrats on this issue. Here is what it had to say on deficit reduction:

"The City of Dallas supports efforts to reduce the federal deficit through a balanced approach (emphasis mine). Elimination of the federal deficit solely through discretionary spending cuts is impossible. Deficit reduction efforts should neither disproportionately focus on core local government programs nor reduce or delay much-needed investments in our nation’s core infrastructure. The reduction of the federal deficit should share the burden evenly and should not disproportionately harm national defense and our troops, safety net programs, or our nation’s cities."

My problem here is a lack of specificity on what the city means by "a balanced approach." That phrase is the one Democrats use to argue for both revenue increases and spending cuts. It appears the City doesn’t want to offend those millionaires here in Dallas, many of whom give money to the City, or the Congressional leaders from the area like Pete Sessions, Joe Barton, Sam Johnson, Jeb Hensarling et al to whom "a balanced approach" is anathema.

So my reaction to the city’s congressional legislative plan, if I was a member of Congress, would be "All well and good, but don’t tell me what not to cut until you give me a viable alternative for reducing the deficit."

Still the greatest inaugural address

I was 19 years old — a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. The summer before, my father, a vice president at Brown & Root, had been a delegate from Texas to the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Although he was a major supporter of Adlai Stevenson, he was pledged to Sen. Lyndon Johnson of Texas because, back then, Texas had something called the Unit Rule. The Unit Rule stated that the candidate supported by the majority of the delegation would be the candidate supported by the entire delegation.

There were five serious candidates vying for the Democration nomination for president — Stevenson, Johnson, Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington and a brash young Irish-Catholic senator from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

My dad did me an immense favor by taking me with him to the convention in Los Angeles. On Monday of that week, former President Harry S Truman, an avid Symington supporter, blew into town and held a news conference at the train station saying that, at 41. Kennedy was simply too young to be president. Kennedy’s camp announced the Massachusetts senator would not only answer the charge, but answer it a meeting of the Missouri delegation’s caucus the following day. My dad took me to that caucus and I heard Kennedy deliver a speech in which he outlined all the things that could not have happened in our history had individuals 41 or under be denied positions of responsibility. He ended his list with these words "…and Columbus could not have discovered America." My dad turned to me at that moment and said "There’s your next president."

I was not in Washington when Kennedy delivered his inaugural address — still the greatest in history (Proof: I doubt if anyone can quote a line from any other inaugural address, but millions who weren’t even born when Kennedy was elected knows "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.") But I’ll never forget how it electrified and energized me when I saw it on a black and white TV in Austin, Texas.

When I saw this superb re-interpretation of this great speech, prepared by the Harvard Kennedy School, it saddens me more than it electrifies or energizes. Perhaps that’s because the Kennedy presidency lasted only around 1,000 days and ended so tragically. If watching this doesn’t bring a lump to your throat or a tear to your eye, then you’re just too young. But you can still appreciate its majesty and purity of thought.

My Top Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis.
COLLEGE MEN
1.  Indiana 23-3 (1)
2.  Florida 21-3 (3)
3.  Duke 22-3 (2)
4.  Miami, Fla. 21-3 (5)
5.  Gonzaga 25-2 (6)
6.  Michigan 22-4 (4)
7.  Louisville 21-5 (8)
8.  Michigan State 22-4 (11)
9.  Kansas 21-4 (10)
10. Syracuse 21-4 (7)
11. Arizona 21-4 (9)
12. Georgetown 19-4 (17)
13. Pittsburgh 20-6 (12)
14. Wisconsin 18-8 (20)
15. Oklahoma State 19-5 (19)
16. New Mexico 22-4 (15)
17. Colorado State 21-4 (18)
18. Ohio State 18-7 (13)
19. Marquette 18-6 (23)
20. Minnesota 18-8 (14)
21. Memphis 22-3 (NR)
22. Kansas State 20-5 (16)
23. Virginia Commonwealth 21-5 (NR)
24. Cincinnati 19-7 (21)
25. Butler 21-5 (24)
Dropped out: Creighton (22), San Diego State (25).
COLLEGE WOMEN
1.  Baylor 24-1 (1)
2.  Connecticut 24-1 (2)
3.  Notre Dame 24-1 (3)
4.  Duke 24-1 (4)
5.  Stanford 24-2 (5)
6.  California 23-2 (6)
7.  Maryland 21-4 (7)
8.  Texas A&M 20-5 (8)
9.  Kentucky 22-3 (9)
10. Penn State 21-3 (10)
11. Louisville 21-5 (12)
12. Tennessee 20-5 (13)
13. North Carolina 23-4 (11)
14. South Carolina 21-5 (14)
15. Delaware 22-3 (17)
16. Colorado 20-5 (19)
17. Iowa State 18-6 (16)
18. Georgia 21-4 (21)
19. Syracuse 21-3 (22)
20. UCLA 19-6 (15)
21. Dayton 21-1 (20)
22. Florida State 20-5 (18)
23. Oklahoma State 18-6 (NR)
24. Nebraska 19-6 (NR)
25. Texas Tech 19-7 (NR)
Dropped out: Michigan State (25), Oklahoma (24), Purdue (23).
NBA
1.  San Antonio 42-12 (1)
2.  Oklahoma City 39-15 (2)
3.  Miami 36-14 (3)
4.  Los Angeles Clippers 39-17 (4)
5.  Memphis 33-18 (7)
6.  Denver 33-21 (5)
7.  New York 32-18 (8)
8.  Golden State 30-22 (6)
9.  Brooklyn 31-22 (NR)
10. Chicago 30-22 (10)
Dropped out: Indiana (9)

Available on DVD “10 Years”

It takes a while to sort out who’s who in the gabby high school reunion comedy 10 Years. But once you do, the movie that comes together is an unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn’t aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like The Big Chill, American Graffiti or Diner. But it has enough markers — a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar — to suggest an approximate date.

This first feature directed by Jamie Linden, a writer of We Are Marshall and Dear John, who also wrote the screenplay for 10 Years, doesn’t define a generational mood beyond observing that a decade after graduation, several former classmates at Lake Howell High School (named after Linden’s alma mater in Florida) are struggling to grow up.

About 20 revelers converge at a hotel — the reunion was filmed at the Hotel Andaluz in Albuquerque — for a well-lubricated evening of reminiscing and catching up. The movie focuses on about a dozen of them, with Jake (Channing Tatum), the class jock, receiving the most attention.

Tatum, one of the movie’s producers, gives a disarmingly natural and appealing performance as this 28-year-old former high school hero who brings his longtime girlfriend, Jess (Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Tatum’s wife), to the fete. He is contemplating giving her an engagement ring he has stowed in his car’s glove compartment.

When a former sweetheart, Mary (Rosario Dawson), unexpectedly shows up with a husband, Paul (Ron Livingston), there is some awkwardness as the old flame sputters to life. The glum, wordless Paul leaves the party early, as does the beautiful and understanding Jess. But the movie wisely refrains from turning these pangs of desire and regret into shrill melodrama.

One alumnus, Reeves (Oscar Isaac), is a pop star who serenades the assemblage with his biggest hit, a sweet folk-pop love song inspired by the demure, hesitant Elise (Kate Mara), his secret high school crush. She is not into pop music and is only vaguely aware of his renown. The rootless, itinerant life he describes to her is a lonely existence, and although they have chemistry, she resists jumping into his arms.

Other characters regress alarmingly. The competitive buddies Marty (Justin Long) and A J (Max Minghella) vie for the attention of the radiant Anna (Lynn Collins), a sultry beauty who arrives in a fur stole, and end up making fools of themselves when they play a childish prank. Once their defenses are down, these three are not as they first presented themselves to be.

The most badly behaved of the group, Cully (Chris Pratt), was the class bully, who ostentatiously apologizes to those he teased, especially Peter (Aaron Yoo), a nerd he used to torment with homophobic remarks and who cringes at the sight of him. Then Cully repeats his ugly pattern while drinking himself into oblivion as his embarrassed wife (Ari Graynor) stands by. Stumbling onto the stage, he sings the worst version you’ve ever heard of The Lady in Red.

10 Years settles into a sweet and sad ending, with enough hints of bitterness to keep it from being cloying.

Available on DVD: “Sleepwalk With Me”

It takes a kind of crazy tenacity for an aspiring stand-up comedian to endure the grubby humiliations of life on the bottom rung of the professional ladder. Watching Matt Pandamiglio, the jocular, slightly schlubby alter ego of the comic performer and writer Mike Birbiglia, take his act on the road in Sleepwalk With Me is like observing an out-of-shape military recruit stumbling through the first week of boot camp. Survival depends less on talent than on having a thick enough skin to recover after every setback and still maintain a facade of genial equanimity.

Matt’s ordeal is not as excruciating as you might expect because he is unflappable and reasonably good-humored even in the worst of times. Before his road trip he works as a bartender in a New York comedy club, where he is seldom allowed to test his skills.

Despite scant evidence of significant talent in his early performances, which rely on flat jokes that elicit more groans than giggles, he refuses to give up. The first time he earns genuine laughs is when he muses out loud about his troubled relationship with Abby (Lauren Ambrose), his loyal, supportive live-in girlfriend of eight years.

Suddenly he connects with an audience on a human level. But that involves betraying his relationship by dismissing it. His remark — "I decided I’m not going to get married until I’m sure that nothing else good can happen in my life" — is not an encouraging sign for the couple’s future happiness.

This small, likable movie, which Birbiglia adapted from his 2008 one-man show with the producer Ira Glass (This American Life), Joe Birbiglia (his brother) and Seth Barrish, is several things loosely wound together by Matt’s breezy narration directly to the camera.

It is an unvarnished portrait of the kill-or-be-killed stand-up comedy world’s lower echelon, in which paying dues means driving from gig to gig for meager wages in places that are nearly empty or are home to crowds that subject the performer to brutal heckling.

It is also the story of a relationship that deteriorates as Matt’s ambition outweighs his uncertain commitment to Abby, who demonstrates extraordinary tolerance for his childishness and reluctance to marry. Beautiful, smart, funny and empathetic, Abby is about as good as it gets. And Ambrose infuses her with a warmer, more mature version of the sensitivity that she brought to Claire Fisher, her character in the much missed HBO series Six Feet Under.

The strangest thread of the movie has to do with Matt’s worsening sleep disorder, brought on by relationship anxiety, which he refuses to deal with until it endangers his safety. He has weird dreams during which he walks in his sleep. In the most perilous somnambulistic misadventure he hurts himself jumping from a second-story hotel window.

These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

The blood-drenched National Rifle Association exposed -- a must-see video.

Cruz wastes no time embarassing Texas

Newly elected Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas is already being compared to Joe McCarthy. And we're going to have to put up with his antics for at least six years. What a shame! What a travesty!

Rubio kills presidential chances

With one ill-advised move Senator Marco Rubio destroyed any dreams he might have harbored to be elected President of the United States.

And here’s another tip for the Republican from Florida (free of charge, because that’s the kind of guy I am): Before he goes on national television rebutting the President Obama’s State of the Union Speech by saying "Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in," he should not be doing this.

My Top Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis
COLLEGE MEN
1. Indiana 21-3 (4)
2.  Duke 21-2 (2)
3.  Florida 19-3 (1)
4.  Michigan 21-3 (3)
5.  Miami, Fla. 19-3 (8)
6.  Gonzaga 23-2 (6)
7.  Syracuse 20-3 (10)
8.  Louisville 19-5 (9)
9.  Arizona 20-3 (7)
10. Kansas 19-4 (5)
11. Michigan State 20-4 (14)
12. Pittsburgh 20-5 (15)
13. Ohio State 17-6 (11)
14. Minnesota 17-7 (12)
15. New Mexico 20-4 (18)
16. Kansas State 19-4 (19)
17. Georgetown 17-4 (20)
18. Colorado State 19-4 (17)
19. Oklahoma State 17-5 (23)
20. Wisconsin 17-7 (25)
21. Cincinnati 18-6 (16)
22. Creighton 20-5 (13)
23. Marquette17-5 (NR)
24. Butler 20-4 (22)
25. San Diego State 18-5 (NR)
Dropped out: North Carolina State (21), UNLV (24).
COLLEGE WOMEN
1.  Baylor 22-1 (1)
2.  Connecticut 22-1 (2)
3.  Notre Dame 22-1 (3)
4.  Duke 21-1 (4)
5.  Stanford 22-2 (5)
6.  California 21-2 (6)
7.  Maryland 19-3 (7)
8.  Texas A&M 19-5 (8)
9.  Kentucky 21-3 (9)
10. Penn State 20-3 (10)
11. North Carolina 22-3 (13)
12. Louisville 20-4 (12)
13. Tennessee 19-5 (11)
14. South Carolina 20-4 (14)
15. UCLA 19-4 (17)
16. Iowa State 17-5 (18)
17. Delaware 20-3 (19)
18. Florida State 19-4 (24)
19. Colorado 18-5 (20)
20. Dayton 21-1 (21)
21. Georgia 20-4 (16)
22. Syracuse 19-3 (22)
23. Purdue 18-5 (15)
24. Oklahoma 18-5 (NR)
25. Michigan State 18-5 (NR)
Dropped out: Oklahoma State (25), Wisconsin Green Bay (23)
NBA
1.  San Antonio 40-12 (1)
2.  Oklahoma City 39-12 (2)
3.  Miami 34-14 (3)
4.  Los Angeles Clippers 36-17 (4)
5.  Denver 33-19 (6)
6.  Memphis 32-18 (5)
7.  New York 32-17 (8)
8.  Chicago 30-20 (9)
9.  Golden State 30-21 (7)
10. Indiana 31-20 (NR)
Dropped out: Brooklyn (10)

Second run at Oscar Predictions

Picture: Argo
Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln
Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Supporting Actor (the toughest race to call): Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook just barely over Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables 
Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Adapted Screenplay: Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Original Screenplay: Michael Haneke, Amour
Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph
Cinematography: Life Of Pi
Costume Design (no contest): Anna Karenina
Documentary Feature: Searching for Sugar Man
Documentary Short (who knows?): Open Heart narrowly over Inocente
Film Editing: Argo
Foreign Language (Duh): Amour
Makeup: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Score: Life of Pi
Song: "Skyfall," Skyfall
Production Design: Anna Karenina
Animated Short: Paperboy
Live Action Short (I never get this one right): Curfew
Sound Editing: Skyfall
Sound Mixing: Les Miserables
Visual Effects: Life of Pi

My Top Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis

COLLEGE MEN
1.  Florida 18-2 (3)
2.  Duke 19-2 (4)
3.  Michigan 20-2 (1)
4.  Indiana 20-2 (5)
5.  Kansas 19-2 (2)
6.  Gonzaga 21-2 (8)
7.  Arizona 19-2 (6)
8.  Miami, Fla. 17-3 (9)
9.  Louisville 18-4 (10)
10. Syracuse 18-3 (7)
11, Ohio State 17-4 (11)
12. Minnesota 17-5 (12)
13. Creighton 20-3 (13)
14. Michigan State 18-4 (14)
15. Pittsburgh 18-5 (20)
16. Cincinnati 18-4 (17)
17. Colorado State 18-4 (NR)
18. New Mexico 19-3 (22)
19. Kansas State 17-4 (NR)
20. Georgetown 16-4 (NR)
21. North Carolina State 16-6 (21)
22. Butler 18-4 (18)
23. Oklahoma State 15-5 (NR)
24. UNLV 17-5 (23)
25. Wisconsin 15-7 (NR)
Dropped out: Marquette (25), Mississippi (19), Oregon (15), San Diego State (24), Wichita State (16).

COLLEGE WOMEN
1.  Baylor 20-1 (2)
2.  Connecticut 20-1 (1)
3.  Notre Dame 20-1 (3)
4.  Duke 20-1 (5)
5.  Stanford 20-2 (4)
6.  California 19-2 (6)
7.  Maryland 18-3 (7)
8.  Texas A&M 17-5 (11)
9.  Kentucky 19-3 (10)
10. Penn State 17-3 (8)
11. Tennessee 17-5 (9)
12. Louisville 19-4 (15)
13. North Carolina 20-3 (12)
14. South Carolina 19-3 (13)
15. Purdue 18-3 (14)
16. Georgia 19-3 (21)
17. UCLA 17-4 (24)
18. Iowa State 15-5 (16)
19. Delaware 18-3 (22)
20. Colorado 16-5 (17)
21. Dayton 19-1 (19)
22. Syracuse 18-3 (25)
23. Wisconsin Green Bay 17-2 (23)
24. Florida State 18-4 (20)
25. Oklahoma State 25-5 (18)

NBA
1.  San Antonion 38-11 (1)
2.  Oklahoma City 35-12 (2)
3.  Miamia 30-14 (4)
4.  Los Angeles Clippers 24-15 (3)
5.  Memphis 30-16 (5)
6.  Denver 30-18 (6)
7.  Golden State 30-17 (7)
8.  New York 30-15 (8)
9.  Chicago 29-18 (10)
10. Brooklyn 28-19 (9)

All it takes is a little ripple to get the week started

Available on DVD: “Unforgivable”

Literate, intelligent and a model of accomplished European filmmaking, Unforgivable showcases the kind of emotional complexity that is all but gone from the screen these days. The interplay between its characters is so intricate that the very nature of the film seems to change, more than once, as we watch it.

Directed by France’s veteran André Téchiné and co-written by him from a novel by Philippe Dijan, Unforgivable starts as an adult romance but quickly becomes a thriller. It then takes an unexpected turn toward bleakness before transitioning into something altogether different.

To do something this psychologically involved requires not just an accomplished director (Wild Reeds and The Girl on the Train are among Téchiné’s best-known works) but also actors up to the task, and Unforgivable has what it needs in French stars André Dussollier and Carole Bouquet. Plus there’s Italy’s Adriana Asti, a luminary as far back as 1964's Before the Revolution, a sequence from which is inserted in this film.

What’s at stake in Unforgivable is an exploration of the unknowability of the human heart, a look at the inexplicable, often painful things people do to each other, especially — like children to parents, lovers to each other — to those they care most about.

It’s not surprising that Unforgivable has a thriller element, because its protagonist, Francis (Dussolier), is a French writer who’s done so well with them that he’s become known as "the king of neo-Gothic thrillers."

Francis is introduced in Venice, where he wants to temporarily relocate to write his next book. Judith (Bouquet) is a French-born real estate agent he consults who makes an immediate impression. So immediate that before the afternoon is over, he impulsively asks her to move in with him, and she eventually agrees.

Following Judith’s advice, Francis rents a house not in the touristic heart of Venice but on the remote island of Sant ‘Erasmo, accessible only by boat. (Taking a similar tack, cinematographer Julien Hirsch has concentrated on deftly providing unexpected looks at a very familiar city.)

Unforgivable cuts almost immediately to 18 months later, when the happy couple welcomes a visit from Alice (Melanie Thierry), Francis’ adult daughter from an earlier marriage, and her daughter.

Though Alice seems friendly enough, there is an edge to everything she says, almost as if making trouble is second nature to her. She soon proceeds to do exactly that: Leaving her daughter behind, Alice promptly disappears.

Francis assumes Alice is with Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi), the wastrel son of an aristocratic family, but the young man denies it. What is undeniable is that his daughter’s disappearance is a serpent that worms its way into Francis’ and Judith’s previously happy lives.

Frustrated, worried, unable to sleep, Francis hires Anna Maria (Asti), a local private detective who happens to be an earlier lover of Judith’s, to try to find out where his daughter is.

Unable to leave well enough alone, the obsessive, suddenly jealous Francis also ends up hiring Anna Maria’s reprobate ex-con son Jeremie (Mauro Conte) to follow Judith, to see where she is going and, more to the point, to find out whether she is seeing anyone on the side. It’s no wonder that Judith says at one point, "The better I know you, the less I know who you are."

If any of this sounds familiar, rest assured it is not. Téchiné is a restless director, a fastidious storyteller who is not interested in what less adventurous movies have to say about human relationships. He wants to dig deeper, even if the results aren’t always clear.

Helping the director enormously is co-star Bouquet, who is exceptionally good as a woman of mystery almost despite herself. With an air of coolness projected through profound blue eyes, Bouquet as Judith projects a combination of independence and unknowability that both attracts and frustrates Dussollier’s Francis. This is the way people are, Unforgivable says, and we’d better get used to it.

Available on DVD: “Pina”

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, director Werner Herzog explored the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caverns of southern France, using a 3-D camera. The movie was quiet but magnificent. Now another director, Wim Wenders, has turned a 3-D camera on a similarly exotic and unlikely subject: the dancers of northwestern Germany’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, colleagues of the late German dance-theater choreographer Pina Bausch.

The results are no less magnificent. This suggests a simple thing: That 3-D’s effectiveness relates directly to its subject’s lack of noise, verbal or visual. The subject merely has to be alive in some way.

Bausch’s work — dense, severe, witty, hypnotic, thick with implication and substance — responds beautifully to 3-D because these are performers whose bodies and faces live in the world. They are not glamorous in the conventional sense.

But in both theatrical environments and open-air ones, with Wenders paying close attention to the geometrics as well as the psychology of the movement, Pina is the best possible tribute to Bausch, and to adventurous image-making.

Bausch died in 2009, two days before filming was to begin. Wenders folded up his plans, but the members of Bausch’s troupe, among others, persuaded him to rethink the project and forge ahead. The outdoor settings of some of the dance pieces take the viewer to strange places, strange, at least, for dance: an ordinary city sidewalk, or a trolley car, or an open field. Outside in the sun or on a traditional stage, Wenders’ camera brings us into arrestingly intimate proximity with each unison hand gesture or robotic adjustment of a torso, or an arm. Bausch’s work was all about mechanized conformity up against idiosyncratic humanity. Wenders responds intuitively to this theme, and we come to appreciate Bausch’s sense of the world.

Some of Bausch’s better-known works are included in Pina, including "Cafe Muller," pulling on strands of Heiner Muller’s dramatic literature. On camera, but offstage, the members of Bausch’s company speak (often dreamily and vaguely, if lovingly) of the late choreographer’s influence on their lives. The dancers run the gamut in terms of body "types" and age and ethnicity. Their words come to us in the languages of German, English, Russian, Italian, French, Slovenian, Korean, Spanish and Portuguese (with English subtitles).

But the movement matters most, and Wenders’ calm, enraptured camera honors that movement without chopping up Bausch’s rhythms unduly. I’m eager to see Pina again, in 3-D (the Criterion DVD is in 2-D), just as I’m eager to revisit Herzog’s cave in 3-D.

My Top Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis

COLLEGE MEN
1.  Michigan 19-1 (2)
2.  Kansas 18-1 (4)
3.  Florida 16-2 (3)
4.  Duke 17-2 (1)
5.  Indiana 18-2 (8)
6.  Arizona 17-2 (7)
7.  Syracuse 18-2 (6)
8.  Gonzaga 19-2 (10)
9.  Miami, Fla. 15-3 (14)
10. Louisville 16-4 (5)
11. Ohio State 15-4 (13)
12. Minnesota 15-5 (9)
13. Creighton 18-3 (11)
14. Michigan State 17-4 (17)
15. Oregon 18-2 (18)
16. Wichita State 19-2 (19)
17. Cincinnati 16-4 (15)
18. Butler 17-3 (20)
19. Mississippi 17-2 (22)
20. Pittsburgh 17-4 (23)
21. North Carolina State 16-4 (16)
22. New Mexico 17-3 (21)
23. UNLV 16-4 (NR)
24. San Diego State 16-4 (NR)
25. Marquette 14-4 (NR)
Dropped out: Colorado State (24), Missouri (25), Virginia Commonwealth (12)

COLLEGE WOMEN
1.  Connecticut 18-1 (1)
2.  Baylor 18-1 (2)
3.  Notre Dame 18-1 (3)
4.  Stanford 18-2 (5)
5.  Duke 18-1 (4)
6.  California 17-2 (7)
7.  Maryland 17-3 (8)
8.  Penn State 17-2 (10)
9.  Tennessee 16-3 (9)
10. Kentucky 19-2 (6)
11. Texas A&M 16-5 (11)
12. North Carolina 19-2 (13)
13. South Carolina 18-3 (18)
14. Purdue 17-3 (19)
15. Louisville 17-4 (14)
16. Iowa State 14-4 (17)
17. Colorado 15-4 (15)
18. Oklahoma State 15-3 (12)
19. Dayton 17-1 (20)
20. Florida State 17-3 (21)
21. Georgia 17-3 (23)
22. Delaware 15-3 (NR)
23. Wisconsin-Green Bay 15-2 (25)
24. UCLA 15-4 (24)
25. Syracuse 16-3 (22)
Dropped out: Michigan State (16)

NBA
1.  San Antonio 36-11 (3)
2.  Oklahoma City 34-11 (2)
3.  Los  Angeles Clippers 33-13 (1)
4.  Miami 28-13 (5)
5.  Memphis 28-15 (4)
6.  Denver 27-18 (8)
7.  Golden State 26-17 (6)
8.  New York 27-15 (7)
9.  Brooklyn 26-18 (9)
10. Chicago 26-17 (NR)
Dropped out: Indiana (10)

Hollywood’s memo to the Academy’s Directors Branch: “Argo F— Yourselves”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how badly Ben Affleck got screwed when the Directors Branch of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences failed to nominate him for an Oscar.

What we are witnessing now is a movement sweeping across Hollywood to rally around Affleck’s snub and to let the world know it wasn’t fair.

First came the Golden Globes that awarded Affleck’s superb directorial efforts for Argo and then, in a move that definitely surprised me, gave Argo its top prize for a movie drama. But I chalked that up to the idiosyncracies of the Golden Globes which just wanted to see glamor boys Affleck and George Clooney share a stage.

But then last night the Producers Guild, in a major shocker, named Argo best picture of the year, and tonight, in another upset, the Screen Actors Guild effectively named Argo best picture by awarding it the ensemble cast award.

Now Argo has suddenly replaced Lincoln as the favorite to win the best picture Oscar. Although I do think Oscar voters wanted to coalesce around a film other than Lincoln, a movie everyone respected but no one really loved, but (and I have no way to prove this) I would argue that alternative wouldn’t have been Argo if the Academy’s Director Branch had given Affleck the recognition he so justly earned and deserved.

Every once in a while, justice is served.

Available on DVD: “Dark Horse”

Abe (Jordan Gelber) is a tubby underachiever in his 30s who lives with his parents, sleeping in a bedroom full of action figures, movie posters and other emblems of interminable childhood. In other words he is, in the context of recent American cinema, not unusual. But Dark Horse is a Todd Solondz movie, which means, among other things, that Abe is neither a sweet Apatovian schlub nor a stoner saint like the title character in Mark and Jay Duplass’s Jeff, Who Lives at Home. He is, instead, an emblem of loneliness and failure, whose cocoon of self-delusion and misplaced vanity is carefully dismantled by the sharp, remorseless tweezers of Solondz’s sensibility.

Abe is not pleasant company. At home with his parents — a stiff, humorless dad played by Christopher Walken and a simpering, smothering mom played by Mia Farrow — he whines and rages his way through daily storms of entitled petulance. Abe works for his father, a real estate developer, or at least spends time at the office, seething and daydreaming behind his computer screen while Marie, the office manager (Donna Murphy), covers for him and his eager cousin curries favor with the boss. The bright yellow Hummer Abe drives is an obvious symbol of his wounded, bloated ego. His courtship of Miranda (Selma Blair), a mopey young woman who also lives at home in a state of arrested, medicated quasi-adolescence, is frequently excruciating to watch because it exposes just how misplaced and bizarre his self-confidence is. What a jerk, you can’t help but conclude. What a loser. Why doesn’t he know it?

But Solondz brilliantly — triumphantly — turns this impression on its head, transforming what might have been an exercise in easy satirical cruelty into a tremendously moving argument for the necessity of compassion. Again and again — in the ’90s indie touchstones Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, and more recently in Life During Wartime — this director has blurred the boundary between misanthropy and humanism. He surveys the human geography of his native suburbia with what looks like unbridled disgust but is actually an unquenchable and steadfast love. Dark Horse may be his warmest, most generous movie, but it also casts a beam of empathy backward, illuminating the baffled, benighted, icky souls who have populated Solondz’s universe from the start.

Can anyone love Abe? Is he worthy — or capable — of love? These are serious, life-and-death questions, and Solondz refuses to make them easy. He favors lurid, borderline-ugly colors and finds a tone that somehow erases the distinction between deadpan comedy and overwrought melodrama. His eye for social detail is merciless and exact. Miranda and Abe’s families are, by any objective demographic measure, nearly identical, but the tiny differences that separate them, evident in the architecture and décor of their respective houses, imply an unbridgeable chasm of taste. Those differences are further explored in an encounter between Abe and Mahmoud (Aasif Mandvi), Miranda’s supercilious, ostentatiously cosmopolitan ex-boyfriend. This guy thinks he’s so much better than Abe, and the joke is that the feeling is entirely mutual. It has to be, since in this world you are nobody unless you are better than somebody else. And if you aren’t, then you better be able to find someone to blame.

That may be one thing Abe is genuinely good at. His father’s toughness, his mother’s softness, the apparently effortless success of his younger brother, Richard (Justin Bartha), a doctor — all of these are elements in what Abe sees as a global conspiracy to keep him down. The title, Dark Horse, refers to his idea of himself as one of life’s secret winners, preparing a glorious come-from-behind victory that will be his revenge on all the people who have dared to underestimate him.

Solondz puts Abe’s fantasies of glory on screen, increasing their frequency until the end of the movie becomes a Buñuelian cascade of dreams within dreams. (The film culminates in one of the most eloquent, heartbreaking shots I have seen in a very long time.) But the film’s purpose is not to revel in Abe’s disillusionment or ridicule his longings. It aims, instead, to cast a skeptical eye on the brutality and complacency of a society that ruthlessly sorts its members into winners and losers.

I’m going to go out on a limb a bit here. Looking at Abe, I saw the shadow of Willy Loman. Dark Horse and Death of a Salesman are both stories of a family (implicitly Jewish) with a mother, father and two boys in the thrall of — and threatened by — the American dream. The theme of both stories is the ideology of success and its casualties; the ways the expectation of material comfort becomes a spiritual quest and a psychological hazard. Solondz’s film is, on the surface, a comedy, preferring quick, barbed exchanges to thundering speeches. But like Salesman, its departures from realism have the effect of enlarging the narrow, unremarkable lives that are its focus, and by extension the audience’s sense of what those lives might mean. Attention — tentative, half-repulsed, hopelessly ambivalent — must be paid.

Available on DVD: “2 Days in New York”

If Woody Allen were an attractive French woman — I’m sure he’s had fantasies about this — he might come up with something like 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s engagingly loopy comedy about the ways our families drive us nuts. The movie’s a follow-up to the actress-writer-director’s 2 Days in Paris (2007), but you don’t have to have seen the earlier film. Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, New York spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.

But it would be a lesser planet entirely if Chris Rock weren’t involved. He plays Mingus, a writer and NPR radio host who is the latest live-in love of Marion (Delpy), an artist now residing in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Mingus is the film’s straight man and Delpy gives him much to be straight about, since Marion’s father and sister have just arrived from Paris for an extended stay. The father’s an old goat played by the star’s own dad, Albert Delpy, and the sister, Rose, is played by Alexia Landeau, who co-wrote the script. The whole movie has the feel of a shaggy-dog story cooked up over a pot of pasta and several bottles of Bordeaux.

Rose brings along her current flame (and a long-ago ex of Marion’s), Manu (Alex Nahon), who is one of the great idiot Frenchmen of recent movies. Calling in a pot delivery during a family dinner with Mingus’s young daughter (Talen Riley), clipping his toenails at the table, indulging in unspeakable sexual practices with his host’s electric toothbrush, Manu is a glorious boor, and proof positive of the old adage about houseguests and fish. With Manu, it’s three minutes rather than three days.

Rose, meanwhile, likes to walk about the apartment in the nude and flirt with Mingus (or "Min-GOOSE," as the interlopers call him). The sisters’ decades-long rivalry reaches a peak in a restaurant scene in which Manu mistakes an acquaintance of Mingus’s who works in the Obama administration for "that guy from the Harold and Kumar movies."

Marion also has an art opening coming up, and there’s a labored subplot about a conceptual piece in which she has offered her soul to the highest bidder. It pays off (sort of) with the appearance of a downtown indie-movie icon playing himself, but by that point, Marion and the movie have both collapsed in a frazzled heap. 2 Days in New York posits its heroine as a hipster Lucy Ricardo, and some of the tangents have a decidedly sitcom twist. When Marion lets a stuffy neighbor couple believe she has an inoperable brain tumor, only the deft underplaying of Dylan Baker and Kate Burton keep the bit from descending into shtick.

What works best is the gleeful, loaded culture clash between French entitlement and American uptightness — that and the knowledge that we rarely get the families we think we deserve (and vice versa). And whenever Delpy’s nervous chatter threatens to overwhelm 2 Days in New York, all Rock has to do is lift one of those cartoon eyebrows to bring her dithering and the movie to a place of blissful comic serenity.

My Top 25 College Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis
1.  Duke 16-1 (1)
2.  Michigan 17-1 (5)
3.  Florida 14-2 (6)
4.  Kansas 16-1 (4)
5.  Louisville 16-2 (2)
6.  Syracuse 17-1 (10)
7.  Arizona 16-1 (8)
8.  Indiana 16-2 (3)
9.  Minnesota 15-3 (7)
10. Gonzaga 17-2 (8)
11. Creighton 17-2 (11)
12. Virginia Commonwealth 16-3 (15)
13. Ohio State 13-4 (12)
14. Miami, Fla. 13-3 (14)
15. Cincinnati 16-3 (16)
16. North Carolina State 15-3 (13)
17. Michigan State 16-3 (17)
18. Oregon 16-2 (20)
19. Wichita State 17-2 (25)
20. Butler 16-2 (24)
21. New Mexico 16-2 (22)
22. Mississippi 15-2 (23)
23. Pittsburgh 15-4 (NR)
24. Colorado State 15-3 (NR)
25. Missouri 13-4 (21)
Dropped out: Notre Dame (18), San Diego State (19).

First run at Oscar predictions

Picture: Lincoln
Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln
Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Original Screenplay: Amour
Adapted Screenplay: Lincoln
Animated Feature: Wreck-It Ralph
Documentary Feature: The Gatekeepers
Foreign Language Film: Amour
Cinematography: Life of Pi
Costume Design: Anna Karenina
Editing: Zero Dark Thirty
Makeup: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Score: Lincoln
Song: "Skyfall," Skyfall
Production Design: Anna Karenina
Sound Editing: Skyfall
Sound Mixing: Skyfall
Visual Effects: Life of Pi

Available on DVD: “Last Call at the Oasis”

Jay Famiglietti, one of a handful of expert witnesses in Jessica Yu’s Last Call at the Oasis, is a thoughtful scientist with an engaging manner who specializes in water. In particular, he studies — and tries to raise public awareness about — the rapid depletion of water supplies caused by agricultural overuse, rampant development and global climate change. His analyses are thorough and clear, and he presents them, at public meetings and straight to Yu’s camera, with good-natured patience. For the most part, that is. At one point, contemplating a future of unchecked consumption and political paralysis, he sums it all up in blunt layman’s terms: "We’re screwed."

That might serve as an alternative name for Yu’s film, or even for the genre to which it belongs. The global-catastrophe documentary is a thriving form these days, as the apparent unsustainability of human life has emerged as fertile ground for cinematic journalism. Last Call at the Oasis follows Payback, Surviving Progress and The Island President — to name only some of the most recent releases — in a drumbeat of elemental doom. The food we eat, the stuff we buy, the air we breathe, the fuel we burn, the water we drink: it’s all killing us!

Yu, who has directed scripted television episodes as well as documentaries, wraps a lot of bad news into a slick, informative, fast-moving package. Dwelling mostly on the United States, with forays to Australia and Israel and brief glances at Asia, Africa and South America, she weaves local stories of drought and pollution together with larger-scale explanations of the worldwide water crisis.

Dr. Famiglietti and others (notably Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute) take us to the drying-out regions of the West, where competition for water has a long history (as fans of Chinatown may recall). Fast-growing Las Vegas, as it drains nearby Lake Mead, contemplates a pipeline to pull water from ranch land in northern Nevada. Conservationists in the San Francisco Bay Area who want to restore rivers and protect fish incur the wrath of farmers in the Central Valley of California, and the specter of less snow in the mountains haunts everyone.

In addition to scarcity, there is contamination. Tyrone Hayes, a biologist, shows us mutant frogs, their endocrine systems scrambled by pesticide-borne chemicals. Erin Brockovich visits towns with terrifying rates of cancer, continuing the work that inspired the Oscar-winning film starring Julia Roberts (a few clips of which are shown). Lynn Henning, a Michigan farmer, monitors the toxic runoff from lagoons full of cow manure from huge industrial feedlots.

Meanwhile, we clog the waste stream with empty plastic water bottles and persist in believing that there is a never-ending supply of this essential substance. The calm, knowledgeable voices of the experts — also including the journalist Alex Prud’homme, whose book The Ripple Effect is cited as an inspiration in the opening credits — make Last Call at the Oasis especially scary. Nothing is more unnerving than predictions of an apocalypse delivered by a reasonable person in friendly, conversational tones.

The question is whether anyone is listening, and it is a question that always nips at the heels of documentaries like this one. One way the question is answered — or perhaps finessed — is by the optimistic, encouraging tone that tends to sneak in at the end. Most examples of the "We’re screwed" documentary, in other words (at least in the American version of the genre), end on a note of "Yes, we can."

Some of the optimism in Last Call at the Oasis comes from a gratifyingly unlikely place — the Middle East, where shared water problems have led to cooperation amid otherwise intractable political conflict. There is also a measure of hope to be gleaned from Yu’s interview subjects, though less from what they have to say — which is pretty grim — than from their seriousness and dedication.

However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won’t have or need movies like this to tell us so.

My Top 25 College Basketball Teams

Last week's rank in parenthesis.
1.  Duke 15-1 (1)
2.  Louisville 15-1 (4)
3.  Indiana 15-1 (6)
4.  Kansas 14-1 (3)
5.  Michigan 16-1 (2)
6.  Florida 12-2 (10)
7.  Minnesota 15-2 (9)
8.  Arizona 15-1 (5)
9.  Gonzaga 16-1 (8)
10. Syracuse 16-1 (7)
11. Creighton 16-1 (11)
12. Ohio State 13-3 (19)
13. North Carolina State 14-2 (18)
14. Miami, Fla. 12-3 (20)
15. Virginia Commonwealth 14-3 (16)
16. Cincinnati 14-3 (17)
17. Michigan State 14-3 (21)
18. Notre Dame 14-2 (14)
19. San Diego State 14-2 (24)
20. Oregon 14-2 (NR)
21. Missouri 12-3 (13)
22. New Mexico 15-2 (NR)
23. Mississippi 13-2 (NR)
24. Butler 14-2 (NR)
25. Wichita State 15-2 (12)
Dropped out: Illinois (15), Oklahoma State (25), UNLV (23), Wyoming (22)

A conspiracy among directors

I smell a rat.

It was a travesty that Ben Affleck wasn’t included among the best director contenders when the Oscar nominations were announced yesterday morning. But I am convinced now why he wasn’t.

Ben Affleck, the victim of a
conspiracy among directors

Affleck wasn’t nominated because enough members of the director’s branch of the Motion Picture Academy formed a conspiracy to block his nomination. They found enough members of the branch to agree not to include him on their ballots.

Why would they do this? Because they knew if Affleck was nominated he would win the Oscar and these directors are simply tired of actors stealing away awards they think rightfully belong to one of their own.

As everyone probably knows, the Oscar nomination process is somewhat restrictive. Only members of the directing branch can vote for directing nominees. Only members of the writing branch can vote for the contenders in the two writing categories. The only category in which every branch can vote is for best picture.

(As a point of information, the voting branches of the academy are in alphabetical order: Actors, Art Directors, Cinematographers, Directors, Documentary, Executives, Film Editors, Makeup Artists & Hairstylists, Music, Producers, Public Relations. Short Films and Feature Animation, Sound, Visual Effects and Writers. The Academy also has 246 at-large voters.)

However, once the nominations are set, all members of the academy are eligible to vote in most of the categories. The largest branch of the Academy, by far, is the Actors Branch which has 1,172 voting members. The second largest, the Producers Branch, has 450.

When an actor is nominated in the directing category, the Actors Branch rally around that nominee and thus some actors have unjustly won the Oscar in the directing category: Robert Redford in 1980, Kevin Costner in 1990, and Clint Eastwood in 2004 quickly come to mind. Eastwood, however, did deserve his Oscar in 1992 and, although I am loathe to admit it, so did Mel Gibson in 1995.

As further proof that a conspiracy among enough directors in the Oscar’s Directors Branch denied Affleck a nomination is the fact that the Directors Guild did nominate him. But only members of the guild get to vote for the winner of that award, so the winner will be decided by other directors, not by actors rallying around one of their own. It should also be noted that Affleck won the prestigious Critics Choice Award this year for best director.

I was also surprised that the Directors Guild nominated Kathryn Bigelow but the sexist Directors Branch of the Academy passed over her. But this is just a bunch of testosterone injected males who are jealous of the fact that a woman is directing better war movies than they are.

That omission was simply petty, not a conspiracy, but there you have it.

What, me worry?

Let me see if I got this straight. The worst general manager in all of professional football has fired the best coach on the Dallas Cowboys staff. There's a move that will come back to haunt the team.

Shame on the baseball writers

If an avowed racist like Ty Cobb is in baseball's Hall of Fame, how can baseball writers exlude Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens?

At least this time the Dallas Morning News sportswriters got it right. All three who are eligible to cast ballots for major league baseball’s Hall of Fame — Evan Grant, Tim Cowlishaw and Gerry Fraley — cast votes for Barry Bonds, the all-time home run leader, and Roger Clemens, who won more Cy Youngs than any other pitcher in history, to be inducted. However, too many sanctimonious, self-serving jerks who also cast ballots left them off so they will not be inducted, at least this time around.

Why? Because these idiot writers think they know more than they do. Plus they are two-faced hypocrites.

They previously voted in Ty Cobb, whose avowed racism led him to be charged with attempted murder. Plus he and Tris Speaker (many researchers have written both were members of the Ku Klux Klan) were implicated in a game-fixing scheme. Chicago Cubs first baseman Cap Anson, voted into the hall in 1939, refused to play if the opposing team’s roster included black players. Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, also voted into the hall in 1939, had black Baltimore Orioles infielder Charlie Grant thrown out of the major leagues when Comiskey revealed Grant was black and not a Cherokee Indian as he had claimed.

The hall is full of acknowledged drunks. Manager Casey Stengel said right fielder Paul Waner (1952 inductee) was so graceful "he could slide into second base without breaking the bottle in his hip pocket." Team owner Bill Veeck claimed legendary pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander (1938 inductee) pitched much better drunk than sober. Chicago sportswriter Mike Royko wrote Hack Wilson (inducted 1979) should be moved from the outfield to first base "because he wouldn’t have as far to stagger to the dugout."

Gaylord Perry (inducted 1991) repeatedly broke baseball rules by doctoring baseballs with spit, Vaseline and other stuff.

Orlando Cepeda (inducted 1999) served 10 months in prison in 1975 for smuggling marijuana into Puerto Rico.

Paul Molitor (inducted 2004) admitted using illegal recreational drugs and Wade Boggs (inducted 2005) confessed to Barbara Walters he was a sex addict. Duke Snider (1980) repeatedly failed to pay his income taxes.

Robert W. Cohen said it best in his book Baseball Hall of Fame — or Hall of Shame: "In theory, when it comes to these kind of votes, it’s true character should matter, but once you’ve included Ty Cobb, how can you exclude anyone else?"

My Final Top 25 College Football Rankings for the 2012 Season

Last month's rank in parenthesis
1.  Alabama 13-1 (2)
2.  Oregon 12-1 (3)
3.  Texas A&M 11-2 (7)
4.  Georgia 12-2 (8)
5.  Notre Dame 12-1 (1)
6.  South Carolina 11-2 (12)
7.  Florida 11-2 (4)
8.  Stanford 12-2 (6)
9.  Kansas State 11-2 (5)
10. LSU 10-3 (9)
11. Ohio State 12-0 (11)
12. Oklahoma 10-3 (10)
13. Clemson 11-2 (15)
14. Florida State 12-2 (14)
15. Utah State 11-2 (20)
16. Oregon State 9-4 (13)
17. Vanderbilt 9-4 (NR)
18. Texas 9-4 (19)
19. Nebraska 10-4 (16)
20. Oklahoma State 8-5 (22)
21. Northwestern 10-3 (25)
22. Baylor 8-5 (NR)
23. San Jose State 11-2 (24)
24. Michigan 8-5 (17)
25. Mississippi 7-6 (NR)
Dropped out: Northern Illinois (21), Southern California (23), UCLA (18)

My Top 25 College Basketball Teams

Last Week's rank in parenthesis
1.  Duke 14-0 (1)
2.  Michigan 15-0 (4)
3.  Kansas 12-1 (2)
4.  Louisville 13-1 (3)
5.  Arizona 14-0 (6)
6.  Indiana 14-1 (5)
7.  Syracuse 14-1 (8)
8.  Gonzaga 15-1 (10)
9.  Minnesota 14-1 (9)
10. Florida 10-2 (7)
11. Creighton 14-1 (11)
12. Wichita State 14-1 (17)
13. Missouri 11-2 (19)
14. Notre Dame 14-1 (NR)
15. Illinois 14-2 (20)
16. Virginia Commonwealth 12-3 (16)
17. Cincinnati 13-3 (13)
18. North Carolina State 12-2 (18)
19. Ohio State 11-3 (12)
20. Miami, Fla. 10-3 (NR)
21. Michigan State 12-3 (NR)
22. Wyoming 13-0 (22)
23. UNLV 13-2 (21)
24. San Diego State 12-2 (NR)
25. Oklahoma State 10-3 (14)
Dropped out: Butler (25), Colorado (23), New Mexico (24), Pittsburgh (15)

Available on DVD: “Your Sister’s Sister”

An improvisational three-act comedy featuring three appealing actors, Your Sister’s Sister is a study in triangulation set in a light-filled cabin in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle.

A slight but satisfying film ingeniously structured by writer/director Lynn Shelton (Humpday) and deftly improvised by Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt, and Rosemary Dewitt, it’s a triangle whose the hypotenuse ever shifts. As Shelton graphs with geometric precision, a triangle is made up of three legs, and each pair of legs has a special relationship.

At a memorial for his brother, Jack (Duplass) offers a roast instead of a toast, much to the discomfort of others present. Iris (Blunt), his brother’s ex-, promptly stages an intervention, commanding Jack to her family cabin so he can clear his head.

After a long bike and ferry ride, he arrives to encounter Iris’ sister, Hannah (Dewitt), who has just decamped from a seven-year relationship. The first night it’s Jack, Hannah, and a bottle of tequila. The following morning, Iris makes a surprise visit.

Awkward Jack implores Hannah to keep their close encounter a secret from Iris. Even more awkwardly, Iris confides a secret to Hannah. For her part, Hannah does not immediately share her secret. But from the expression on her sphinxlike face, we know she has one.

What ensues is surface civility with so many emotional undercurrents and crosscurrents coursing beneath that it’s a wonder the principals remain buoyed, if not always buoyant.

Their secrets, naturally, obstruct the intimacy each of the unmoored Seattleites craves. It is ruefully funny to watch, among the many avoidance conversations, discussions of whether gluten-free pancakes are superior to old-school flapjacks. And even funnier to watch first Jack, than Iris, pull Hannah out for sidebar conversations.

Shelton and her cast are so skillful that before long it seems we are not watching a movie on a TV screen but flies on a wall witnessing real encounters and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest.

The infinitely watchable Duplass is a manchild of many gifts. He is a prodigiously talented actor. He is also the microbudget Judd Apatow who, with brother Jay, directed the edgy Cyrus and the quietly transcendent Jeff, Who Lives at Home. How does he do it? He suggests more without appearing to emote than any actor working.

Before its blackout finale the geometry of Your Sister’s Sister recedes and the film assumes the shape of a high-stakes poker game. The bemused players wonder, does the love between sisters trump that between romantic partners? Does love trump friendship?

Available on DVD: “Ruby Sparks”

Imagine a 21st century romantic comedy that flirts with the classic Pygmalion myth — a Greek sculptor’s beautiful statue comes to life — and throws in some Dr. Frankenstein "what have I created?" issues. Then you’ll have a sense of Ruby Sparks, an engagingly off-kilter love story of a writer, the girl of his dreams and the power of his pen.

The film is about as meta as meta gets. Real-life couple Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan star as lovebirds Calvin (the writer) and Ruby (his dreamy dream girl). They are directed by another real-life couple, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, from a screenplay by Kazan, who had Dano in mind when she was writing. Love is definitely in the air, as well as under the microscope

As stories involving novelists so often do, Ruby Sparks begins with a major case of writer’s block. Calvin’s first book at age 19 was a sensation, and he’s been living on the fumes of that success for years. Prodding by his A-type brother Harry (Chris Messina) isn’t helping much, nor is therapy with Dr. Rosenthal (a nice, if slight, turn by Elliott Gould, later followed by equally nice but slight turns by Annette Bening as Calvin’s free-spirited mom and Antonio Banderas as her live-in love). Harder to bear is the praise showered on him by mentor and writing nemesis Langdon Tharp (Steve Coogan, who’s super as a cloying literary vamp).

All that changes when Dr. Rosenthal gives Calvin an assignment: write a page about the imaginary girl who has recently invaded his dreams. A creative surge and 40 pages later, the writer’s block is broken and the girl in his dreams has become the protagonist of his lively new novel. And, she’s cooking breakfast in his kitchen. Really.

What? How? Huh? Like love itself, the film requires a serious leap of faith from the audience as well as from Calvin — to simply accept that a figment of his imagination has come to life. Herein lies the fun, and the folly, of Ruby Sparks.

The film is concerned with what Calvin will do with the power he has to write, and rewrite, Ruby’s life. Will he erase from her his pet peeves, or give her new talents, like the French she breaks into as soon as he puts it on page? Will he make her hopelessly devoted? The underlying question is, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, if you get what you want, does that mean you got what you need? It is answered in fits of brilliance, and a few serious fumbles, capped by a final chapter that is sincerely awesome.

This is the first feature for Dayton and Faris since they made such a splash in 2006 with another quirky comedy, Little Miss Sunshine, which included Dano in its ensemble cast. The indie hit won two Oscars before its broken-down VW bus and beauty-pageant dreams were done.

Except for the quirk factor, the two films couldn’t be more different in design. The mess of an extended middle-class family so perfectly played in Sunshine has been traded for the solitary writer’s life in Ruby. A rambunctious and fractious cross-country journey is replaced by an interior, introspective one. What binds the films — and was better realized in Little Miss Sunshine — is the filmmakers’ light touch with dark themes and their understanding of how to have a little fun with identity crises.

Kazan, a playwright making her screenwriting debut, shows a penchant for risk-taking that is refreshing, if not always spot on. And she’s a whiz at dialogue that is fluent in hipster artiste-speak. In Calvin she’s created a good stretch for Dano, allowing him to expose lighter shades of the vulnerability and angst that have come to characterize his darker roles — the mute, rebellious teen in Sunshine, the fire-and-brimstone preacher in There Will Be Blood.

And as an actress, Kazan’s delicate face and expressively large eyes give her a kind of ethereal sensibility that fits Ruby’s flighty eccentricities. But she has a tougher time with the sudden shifts in moods and emotions required as Calvin tinkers with his heroine.

Much of the action takes place inside Calvin’s house, a study in white modern minimalism — its own blank page beautifully rendered by cinematographer Matthew Libatique and production designer Judy Becker. Ruby arrives on the scene like a sudden splash of color. There is a great deal of playfulness between the couple that will touch the romantic in most. Everything about their relationship is fine, near perfection, until they venture out into the real world where issues like love, hate, envy, regret and ex-girlfriends tend to complicate matters.

But mostly the movie is about how to make reality and romance with Ruby a dream, which happens to be far harder than turning a dream girl into reality in the first place.

The 25 Best Films Reviewed Here in 2012

1. A Separation. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the way A Separation’s exquisitely human situations unfold is that the narration allows for as many points of view as there are characters. Everyone is fallible yet everyone feels justified in their own particular grievances, and the film is at pains not to pick sides.

2. Elena. Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s somber, gripping film is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn’t want to live there.

3. The Interrupters. No concept in the critical lexicon has been more devalued and debased than "inspirational." The term has been so misused, it’s just about lost all meaning. A film that makes that word real and vital has to be special. The Interrupters is such a film.

4. Take Shelter. This film, which, it should be said, boasts haunting but seamless visual effects, is a movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.

5. Monsieur Lazhar. This film is good. Really good. Philippe Falardeau's gentle, perceptive drama takes viewers by the hand, not the throat, leading them through volatile emotional territory with assurance, compassion and lucid, steady-eyed calm. Deceptively simple and straightforward, Monsieur Lazhar resembles a clear, clean glass of water: transparent, utterly devoid of gratuitous flavorings or frou-frou, and all the more bracing and essential for it.

6. Project Nim. There is no doubt that Nim, the chimpanzee at the center of this documentary, was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Director James Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.

7. Certified Copy. The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s delicious brain tickler is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth.

8. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Eerily tragic and chillingly hard to come to terms with.

9.  Footnote. Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It’s a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky’s bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

10. Le Havre. Alternately lighthearted and deeply spiritually grounded, director Aki Kaurismaki's distinctive sensibility spins what could have been a grittily realist polemic into a fanciful fable, all the more affecting for being so tethered to the urgencies of the real world.

11. Marley. Though made with the cooperation of the Marley family, the film is far from a hagiography; and while stocked with musical sequences, it is not a concert film. Few if any of his songs are heard all the way through. Marley is a detailed, finely edited character study whose theme — Marley’s bid to reconcile his divided racial legacy — defined his music and his life.

12. Mysteries of Lisbon. A formal marvel carved from, and around, a narrative whopper, Raul Ruiz’s adaptation of the mid-19th century Portuguese novel Mysteries of Lisbon arrives on DVD as a two-disc, four-hour version edited down from a six-hour version produced for European television. It’s a lot. But if you’re at all inclined, it’s just right.

13. The Deep Blue Sea. Rachel Weisz — in what has to be the performance of her career, and there have been lots of good ones — plays an intelligent woman in the grip of a lust that's too big to handle or suppress. She can either ride the tiger or be devoured.

14. Ai Wiewei: Never Sorry. You come away from this documentary with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai’s art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It’s an invigorating experience.

15. Thunder Soul. You may never have heard of the Kashmere Stage Band, but by the end of Thunder Soul you will wonder why. A big-hearted, back-in-the-day tribute — and a stand-alone argument for public-school music programs — Mark Landsman’s bittersweet documentary has designs on your feet, heart and mind.

16. The Queen of Versailles. What might have been mere reality-TV fodder about hissable symbols of overconsumption turns out to be a three-dimensional study of a marriage. It’s also a timely look at the middle-class American Dream on hyperdrive: aspire, acquire, arrive and then try to keep the "good life" going.

17. I Wish. Tends toward the vaporous and not just because of its volcano; but whenever its children are on screen, lighted up with joy or dimmed by hard adult truths, the film burns bright.

18. Melancholia. Leave it to writer-director Lars von Trier to conceive an intergalactic sci-fi metaphor for a psychological disorder — and then make it work so astonishingly well.

19. Goodbye First Love. This movie endows each word of its title with equal weight. It examines, with compassion and clarity, a young woman’s discovery of passion and also of the pain, disappointment and partial wisdom that follow.

20. Pariah. Benefits from solid performances among its young castand warm, lucid camerawork, but benefits most of all from a careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of heroine’s poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."

21. Senna. A documentary with the pace of a thriller, a story of motors and machines that is beyond compelling because of the intensely human story it tells.

22. Coriolanus. Features the sheer pleasure of hearing Shakespeare’s words spoken by an actor like Ralph Fiennes, whose phrasing is so brilliant, you might be tempted to close your eyes if his physical performance weren't equally mesmerizing.

23. The Guard. For the f-word in heavy, conventional rotation, rent the DVD of The Change-Up. Which is another way of saying there's not much reason to watch The Change-Up, unless you're an unusually big fan of Ryan Reynolds or Jason Bateman. But for the same word in heavy, unconventional and often very funny usage, in a disarming black comedy set in County Galway, Ireland, feast your ears on the sweetly profane dialogue of writer-director John Michael McDonagh as heard in The Guard.

24. Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This film is is a foodie’s delight, obviously, and best viewed either on a full stomach or with restaurant reservations immediately following.

25. Martha Marcy May Marlene. This film moves from its protagonist’s dream state to her memories to her waking present in imperceptible shifts — the effect is disorienting, at first, but ingenious. We’re as rattled and wary as Martha is — we’re seeing the world as she does, pulled under in the wake of her trauma.