I just watched Rog and Fake Gene (aka Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper) analyze Gus Van Sant's Elephant on last week's "Rog & Fake Gene Show." (Listen here if you like.)

They praised the ghastly film for making no attempt to explain the killers motives. That was a good thing, they said, because in Fake Gene's words, "There is no explanation."

How the hell would he know? He's just a really bad columnist and a worse movie critic. He says he went to Columbine and wrote columns about it, but I seriously doubt he's done much research into the killers.

I expect that kind of thing from Fake Gene--he is one of the most annoying simpletons on TV. But Rog. The guy is really smart. (If you don't think so, attend one of his annual film workshops in Boulder. Great stuff, quick mind. Or just read his reviews. Yes, his tastes run a little mainstream for me, but there's a lot of great writing and great thinking there.)

I don't expect Rog to know what caused Columbine, but for God's sake. There is a lot of explanation for Columbine. He should take a look at Zero Day, which doesn't exactly explain it, but provides a much more illuminating characterization than anything I've seen.

So Columbine happened for no reason--just one more in a long, long list of Columbine myths.

One of these days, I hope to set more of them straight.

From BoxOfficeGuru:

Opening at Zero Hour on Wednesday, The Matrix Revolutions took in an estimated $50.1M over the Friday-to-Sunday period, and $85.4M since opening day.  The weekend total was 45% less than the opening weekend of The Matrix Reloaded, which bowed to $91.7M over the three day weekend, and a stunning $134M over its first four days (including night before previews).  Revolutions per screen average was $14,322, or 43.7% less than Reloaded's opening weekend average of $25,471.  It feels odd to say that an opening north of $50M is disappointing, but with this being the final chapter in a popular trilogy, Warner Brothers must have been hoping for a larger opening weekend and can only hope that word of mouth helps propel Revolutions in the weeks to come.  Overall, the $50.1M debut places Revolutions 34th on the all-time opening weekend chart, just ahead of Scary Movie 3 from a couple of weeks ago.

He had predicted an $80 million gross this weekend.

George Stephanopolous and ABC's political director just discussed Howard Dean on This Week, marvelling at how dominant the campaign had grown. Even coming off its worst blow in the entire campaign early in the week--the ridiculous rebel-flag-Democrats flap--Dean surged so hard immediately after that he turned it into one of the best weeks in his campaign. He ended the week with two huge labor endorsements, massive coverage over the self-funding vote and $5 million in three days that the latter helped generate.

But then George said he'd been chatting up a long list of Dem leaders late in the week and the reaction to Dean's dominance was nearly universal: depression.

They're sure Howard Dean is going to lead them to disaster.

Good lord. Those idiots.

Maybe they should be depressed about their own pathetic track record. Poll after poll shows the country agrees with them on issue after issue, yet in election after election, they keep losing ground to the Republicans. At the federal level, they have lost the executive branch, both houses of congress, and they're just one appointment away from losing the Supreme Court. They've lost most of the state legislatures and governorships, including nearly all the big state governors. And they continue losing ground.

If they stand for what the majority wants, but the majority keeps throwing them out, perhaps there's a problem with the messenger. A huge fucking problem with the messenger!

Finally A Messenger emerges who can put the Republican liars in their place, and these dildos running the Dem party run for cover, just like they have run from every fight for years.

Why don't these spineless weanies who have needlessly lost most of the American government step aside and let the voice they couldn't muster lead this party and this country back to where it wants to go?

The crucial Des Moines Register is out with their first statewide poll in three months, and Dean Gephardt has dramatically surged ahead.

The breakdown of support, with previous (late July) results in parentheses:

Gephardt 27 (21)
Dean 20 (23)
Kerry 15 (14)
Edwards 5 (5)
Lieberman 5 (10)
Clark 4 (-)
Kucinich 3 (3)
Braun 1 (1)
Sharpton 1 (1)

Bad, bad news for Dean. The one-two punch of Iowa-New Hampshire was the knockout that could have all but ended the race in January. It would also effectively knock out two of his biggest opponents, who would see everything dry up when they failed to win on their own home turf.

There's still lots of time, and numbers will rise and fall many times in Iowa, but this is the first time Dean has significantly lost the momentum in either of the two big early states.

Hopefully he will win it back.

There's a lot of in-depth analysis in the piece, which runs 1600 words. The good news for Dean, starting with the second paragraph of the story:

However, Gephardt's 7-percentage-point lead over Dean in the Iowa Poll appears a little wobbly. More of Dean's supporters say their minds are made up and they are certain of their participation in the Democratic caucuses, which launch the presidential nominating season for the nation.

. . .

In addition, 49 percent of Dean's supporters say they definitely will go to the caucuses, compared with 27 percent of Gephardt's supporters and 37 percent of Kerry's supporters. The rest of those polled say they probably will attend the Jan. 19 caucuses.

Best piece of writing I've seen on Howard Dean in weeks slips in this morning from Oregon, in an insightful piece titled Why Dean can win next November.

It's nice to see a story worthy of my Dean Story of the Day again. Not worthy on every count--you'll have to wade through a load of cheeseball colunnist crap to get to the good stuff--but hard to imagine how refreshing it is to read people who can cut through all the minutia and grasp what's really going on. And why Howard Dean is a real threat to Republicans.

And nearly all the insights in this piece comes from Republicans--a pair of "respected Republican pollsters -- Bob Moore and Hans Kaiser." That assessment from Oregonian Associate Editor David Reinhard, who wrote the column, and hopefully knows the local smartypants. Clearly he does in this case. 

The opening assessment:

"Let us not be fooled by misguided conventional wisdom. [Howard] Dean is a threat and Republicans better not ignore him."

This is all from local guys, but they nail the Dean appeal:

"Howard Dean can win because he believes in what he is saying, because he can semi-legitimately spin his record as governor into one of fiscal conservatism, and because he comes across as if he actually cares about people . . ." they wrote, continuing a bit later: "The difference between Howard Dean and the rest of the Democratic candidates is that Dean comes across as a true believer to the base but he will not appear threatening to folks in the middle."

Later, the comparisons get more remarkable (just a little more hackneyed set-up prose to get there):

But won't Republicans paint him as a hopeless "left-winger"? The prospect makes many Republicans giddy and Democrats who fret about Dean's electability jittery. Moore and Kaiser counter with a parallel that will likely fluster Republicans and Democrats:

"Dean's appeal is closer to Ronald Reagan's than any other Democrat running today. . . . The Democratic party used to chuckle about Reagan and his gaffes, which they believed would marginalize him to the far-right dustbin of history. But when his opponents tried to attack him for some of his more outlandish statements, the folks in the middle simply ignored them. Voters . . . looked to the bigger picture, where they saw a man of conviction who cared about them and had solutions for their problems."

Yup. Hard not to cringe at the comparison to Uncle Ronnie, but the guy did galvanize a public the pundits assured us he was way, way, way to extremist to connect with.

Liberal, conservative, those characterizations do still mean something, but they don't mean everything. The true-believers on either side will reject the opposing views out of hand, but that huge mass in the middle is mostly yearning for a true believer who actually believes in something.

Really nice column this morning from Frank Rich, as usual. He returned to the NYT's Sunday Arts section earlier this year, where he has been even better than he was on the op-ed page. If you have not been reading his column, you're missing out. You can find it on the paper copy, or free online for a week. Every Sunday.

(And I have a special link to him in the left column. It's a dynamic search which always brings up his most recent work, latest on top.)

The title of today's piece--Pfc. Jessica Lynch Isn't Rambo Anymore--thoroughly turned me off. I have seen and read far too much about that bit player already. But of course he transcended 99% of what had been written before, and used the coverage of her story to tell a much broader tale.

My favorite moment, concerning the suprisingly accurate documdrama NBC is airing tonight:

What does it say that "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage on the war?

And the reason comes just a few lines later:

The movie even pays a dramatic price for its integrity; a reasonable approximation of the truth is less exciting than the bogus reports of Lynch-as-John Wayne.

He's just as powerful when he widens his scope to bring in the Bush Administration's attempts to choreograph this quagmire of a war:

In broadcasting the first reports of "Chinook Down" last Sunday morning, the normally unflappable Bob Schieffer of CBS News raised his voice as he said, "If this is winning, you have to ask the question: How much more of this winning can we stand?" Later that day, on ABC's "World News Tonight," the correspondent John Berman captured a "M*A*S*H" moment when a military medic attending the American wounded looked directly at the camera and said, " `All major combat operations have ceased' " — after which he winked and, with a roll of his eyes, added a sarcastic, "Right!"

And he ends on his usual trenchant note:

Two weeks ago, after spending the day visiting the wounded at Walter Reed, the same hospital where Private Lynch recuperated upon returning to the United States, Cher, of all people, crystallized the game plan. She called into C-Span to tell of her experience talking with "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms" and then asked: "Why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I don't understand why these guys are so hidden and why there aren't pictures of them."

The answer is clear enough: the fewer of these images we see, someone hopes, the less likely we'll realize the story that goes with them. Certainly the new plot they tell is simple enough: what began as a war at a time of our choosing has become a war at the time of the enemy's choosing. It may be asking too much of even a patriot like Private Lynch to pretty up this picture as she takes her show on the road.