Great news, everyone! The 12th book of the incredible Left Behind series is almost out, and this time, Jesus returns! Rock on! Unbelievers may well be discomfited by these books, but that’s only because they don’t recognize the glory and truth of Our Risen Lord and Savior in passages like the following:

“Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder,” the authors write. “Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of God.”

Ahem. As a good gay backslid Catholic boy, I just have to take a moment in the wake of this book and The Passion and Jack Kelley and that whole Spanish Inquisition thing to point out that not all Christians are obsessed with lacerated flesh, gushing innards, and/or severed heads and raining limbs. Please don’t judge us.

Here’s a superlative for you: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the cleverest movie I’ve seen that didn’t sacrifice any of its beauty or truth to be so. The movie just clicks together, equally satisfying as an intellectual exercise and an emotional trip. I will not mess with Charlie Kaufman, for he is clearly my master.

Michel Gondry does an excellent job with the material — and what else would you expect? The man’s brilliant! — but there are a few things I’ll fault him for. The headline of my critique reads “Gondry Shows Too Much Restraint.” It’s subtitled, “Jim Carrey Is Perfectly Serviceable, But Why Not Get An Actor?” Oh, and handheld camerawork needs to be seriously fined by the FCC, ’cause if I leave another frickin’ movie with a dull headache, there will be problems.

Most of the restraint works exceptionally well. Where the movie could be flashy, it never is. The gimmicks of the script and camera never feel like gimmicks, or at least you never resent them for being gimmicks, because they serve real emotional purposes. And yet, those purposes are never explicit. Gondry never really pushes to make you laugh or cry or grit your teeth or whatever, and that seems rare. He just paints a picture, and lets Kaufman’s story take you where it will. But that approach brings one drawback — there’s no catharsis. When I was finally ready to let go and really approach the movie’s core in one big, perfect, emotional moment, Gondry let me down. Maybe this is a personal quibble, and it’s pretty minor, but Gondry has the opportunity for one perfect searing moment that would have been so satisfying and affecting, but he doesn’t take it. Instead, before the scene reaches any real pitch, Jim Carrey starts doing his “I-am-not-Jim-Carrey” bit, and says, “It’s OK,” and the scene kind of dribbles away lamely.

Really, though. Carrey did a fine job of not being Jim Carrey. Unfortunately, he clearly expended all his efforts on not being Jim Carrey, leaving very little energy left to act, or inhabit an actual recognizable or empathetic character, or any of that stuff that actual actors have to do. I submit, and Robin will quibble, but I submit that really any genuine dramatic talent could have done a better job in Carrey’s role than Carrey, because he would have done something more with it than pretend he wasn’t a manic comedian trying desperately to play against type.

OK, except Tobey Maguire, who I believe has genuine dramatic talent, which unfortunately is only good for playing one role. Which unfortunately people keep hiring him to play. And no, I didn’t see Seabiscuit. Yes, I’m sure it was a good movie. But so was Wonder Boys and so was Cider House Rules and so was October Sky, and the fact remains that Tobey Maguire has played exactly one role in his overearnest and unassuming career.

Last point: DO NOT READ ANY OTHER REVIEWS OF THIS MOVIE. Seriously. I thought the film critics were revealing minor plot elements, but they were casually dropping endings and major plot twists. I would have enjoyed the movie even more without that foreknowledge.

This article promises more than it delivers, but it’s worth reading anyway. It’s about efforts to induce and detect emotion in video game players. The argument is undeniable

We haven’t heard the last of the final analyses of Dean’s rise and fall, I’m sure, but we’ve probably gotten the last of the ones you should read, if you’re interested in what happened. This is an early-bird edition of an article that will be in May’s Atlantic Monthly, and it’s written by Dean’s own pollster, Paul Maslin.

Maslin writes clearly and evocatively. He takes you through the excitement and the drama of a campaign as well as any journalist I’ve seen. There’s strong foreshadowing, fleshy, warm characters with real flaws, vivid dialogue, structure, you name it.

And what does the article say? Everything that our newspapers probably don’t have enough time or access to present: that there was no single, simple reason for Dean’s rise and fall. Any campaign is a walk along a greased tightrope, a constant play of gambles and negotiations. Dean’s campaign especially was a movement with dense variables swinging every which way — his Internet base, his volatile campaign manager, the other candidates, Dean himself.

The next thing I’m looking for is Howard Dean’s own account of the experience, but I won’t hold my breath. Although he speaks his mind constantly, he seems to withhold his feelings. And if his article in Vanity Fair was any indication, he’s not much of an absorbing writer. But what a character.

I posted this on a blog I maintain for work, but I’m kind of amused by it, so I’m reposting here:

Today’s story idea is resolutions. The House of Representatives seems to make a lot of them. 

So far today, from what I can tell from the current floor summary, the House did this:

They met at 12:30 p.m., had 27 minutes of rollicking “Morning-Hour Debates” (whatever those are), then took a break. Then, they reconvened at 2 p.m., and spent the next 68 minutes debating resolutions. There’s one resolution thanking C-SPAN for 25 years of service. One resolution from the Senate permitting the use of the Capitol Building’s rotunda for next year’s Inauguration Ceremony. Another to rename a Kansas post office the Myron V. George Post Office. Yet another to honor the life and legacy of FDR, it being his 122nd birthday.

Then the House took another break, and they’re supposed to reconvene at 6:30, possibly to vote on yet more resolutions.

Tomorrow, according to CQ’s Midday Update, the House will consider a resolution to commend our soldiers in Iraq for the good job they’ve done and assert that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein’s regime deposed. (Note: CQ is owned by The Poynter Institute, which owns this website.)

Why all these resolutions? Is this a typical day? Given that there are 435 members of the House of Representatives, each of whom makes a not insubstantial yearly salary, how much does it cost taxpayers to have these folks spend an hour renaming post offices and singing “Happy Birthday” to FDR? How much effort do House staffers spend drawing up these resolutions?

A quick gander at Georgia’s list of recent House resolutions shows that state Congresses are probably the same story.

After I read this Wired article, I was grooving on DARPA for a good little while. If you haven’t heard about DARPA’s Grand Challenge, here’s the dish. They posted a prize of $1 million for any engineering team that could make an unmanned vehicle capable of driving from L.A. to Las Vegas. The Grand Challenge was a race for all the qualifying vehicles, to see which was the best.

Such a great idea, right? There’s no way to spark innovation like a contest. The favored teams would all spend two and three times $1 million to build their vehicles anyway, so this was all about the thrill and prestige of victory. And DARPA could pick and choose from all the technological wonderworks these teams would dream up to make something truly revolutionary.

And on top of it all, DARPA’s Grand Challenge website was fun and happy-looking; not at all what you’d expect from some stuffy government project. The FAQ included down-home humor, like: “it is expected that most teams will modify existing off-road vehicles for the Challenge, although who knows what could slither or crawl across the starting line.”

Well, the race was Saturday. None of the vehicles got even eight miles past the starting point. So, it was kind of a bust. But good times were had.

Still kind of grooving on DARPA … until I read this article. Eerie reminder of Total Information Awareness. Reports of DARPA’s plans to build a giant floating surveillance blimp to watch entire cities and track individual civilians. And, creepiest of all (to me at least), notes about DARPA’s research into technology that can grow and heal itself.

The rational, naive side of me says, “No, this is good. Self-repairing humanoid machines can clearly only be used for totally benign purposes, and will of course remain at all times under human control, despite DARPA’s efforts to produce military technology that can mimic humans’ heuristic capacities and awareness of their environment.” The even more rational, and now utterly paranoid, side of me says, “The Terminator is now governing California.”

Step three: panic!

UPDATE:Another article on DARPAranoia.

I ought to start tracking the your-mother jokes being tossed back and forth in the Presidential election. Here’s one from The Washington Post:

“SEN. JOHN KERRY’s Economic Policies Would Cost Jobs in Ohio,” a headline on the Bush campaign Web site asserts. “The most crooked, you know, lying group I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kerry says of his Republican adversaries. “Sen. Kerry Flip-Flops on Israel,” says the Bush campaign. “Once again, George Bush is misleading America,” a Kerry advertisement charges. “So’s your mom,” says — no, wait. We haven’t seen that one yet.

If you’d written off the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow after seeing the trailer, dust off your interest and read this preview, from the NYT Magazine. Not only does the movie sound excellent, the article’s a blast, too:

For [Kerry Conran, creator of Sky Captain], the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of ”Sky Captain” began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring — extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn’t touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ”Risky Business” and directing ”Fried Green Tomatoes” but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don’t think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran created the entire universe of the movie using computers. I mean, I guess it’s not that rare in the age of Pixar, but the live actors involved (including Gwyneth, Jude, and Angelina) worked in front of blue screens the entire time. That seems big, somehow.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow’s arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

We forget sometimes what a ridiculously amazing speaker Bill Clinton could be. If the man didn’t have so many serious character flaws, despite the fact that his Presidency’s successes, whatever they were, have been mostly frittered away and his failures amplified, I’d seriously consider handing the dictator-for-life baton over, just on the strength of his speeches. No other politician can do that to me. I hate it when politicians speak. Their words are so cheap. But his are so wonderful. Bleh. Just read the incredible speech. (Via MY.)

Salon is opening up a new bureau in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Sidney Blumenthal:

“The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.” Under Blumenthal’s leadership, Salon’s new Washington bureau will produce a flow of revealing stories about the Bush administration and the election.

How are they planning to penetrate the famously secretive White House? I mean, come on, this is Salon. It’s being run by the former press secretary of Bill Clinton. And they’ve clearly stated their intention to air President Bush’s dirty laundry. Any “senior administration official” caught talking to them will be disembowled, lightly seasoned, and fed to Karl Rove for brunch.

Maybe they’re hoping to find more people like this former Pentagonian.* Maybe Sidney Blumenthal will discover what Dana Milbank could not. At any rate, they must think they’re going to get something. I’m interested.

Also — dude. A new Salon bureau? But isn’t Salon dead?

Maybe I’ll fire off an e-mail to my buddy Sid and get to the bottom of it.

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