Red State (2011)

HERE

Time Capsule

The New Rules by Bill Maher (2005): Man, it's like a time machine, this collection of Maher's TV rants from 2005. Bush the Younger had just won re-election, the Democrats were in total disarray, America was fighting two wars and mumbling about a third with Iran, and Dick Cheney was still the power behind the throne. Good times!!!

The sell-by date on some of the rants included here may have already expired by the time the book came out -- celebrity stuff often wanes with great rapidity. We know that Britney Spears and Kevin Federline were still a topic of conversation in 2005. Lindsay Lohan had already become a joke. Pope Benedict has just become Pope among revelations he'd been a member of the Hitler Youth. How time flies!

There are still a lot of laughs here from Maher and his stable of TV writers, many of them now bitter, long-after-the-fact laughs at the dark days of Bush and Cheney. And it's a short book, obviously, and one you'll probably only find in used bookstores. So it'll be cheap! I got mine for 50 cents!!! Lightly recommended.

The Great McGinty

The Great McGinty: written and directed by Preston Sturges; starring Brian Donlevy (Dan McGinty), Muriel Angelus (Catherine McGinty), Akim Tamiroff (The Boss) and William Demarest (Skeeters) (1940): Zippy political comedy from the great writer-director Preston Sturges. Indeed, this was his first directorial effort, and it won the Oscar for best screenplay.

Set in a city that seems an awful lot like Chicago but is never named, The Great McGinty shows the rise and fall of, well, Dan McGinty. We first see him as a grifter and a drifter. But once he attracts the eye of backroom political power The Boss, McGinty's rise to the governorship of his state is assured.

Political corruption is taken as a given in this movie, which may surprise people who are unaware that political corruption wasn't created in the year 2000. Sturges was something of a cynic, though he held out hope that a person's good nature could be put to decent use, just so long as that person didn't end up owing the wrong people money.

Brian Donlevy is solid as the tough, hard-luck McGinty, and Muriel Angelus is mostly fine as his secretary/wife-of-convenience, though her odd mid-Atlantic accent can occasionally distract one from what she's saying. Akim Tamiroff blusters, sweats, and yells entertainingly as The Boss, the Eastern European mobster with a heart of lead. This isn't Sturges' best film performing double duty, but it is fun and entertaining and blessedly short and fast-moving, clocking in at under 90 minutes. Recommended.