Flesh-eating Joe McCarthy

In which the Vega feels a field trip to NYC coming on.

All hail the silliest cast of the year! Tony Todd stars as Shadow, a resurrected serial killer with a half-baked back-story, a posse full of zombies and a neat metal spigot he uses to drink people like juice boxes. Carla Greene plays Solitaire, a taciturn soul sister with hidden reserves of superhuman skill beneath her form-fitting pastel tracksuit. Co-starring (and relentlessly scene-stealing) as the alpha inmate Mondo, Tatianna Butler is all bleached-blond sass and bodacious bodybuilding — a cross between Lil' Kim and the rocky orange Thing.

And the plot? Women. Prison. Zombies. The end.

"Shadow" comes on like the low-budget love child of "Evil Dead" and "Reform School Girls," a crazy camp blitzkrieg of lockdown melodrama, kung fu catfights, black-magic corniness, exploding torsos, perverted doctors, impromptu zombie childbirth and bountiful lesbian shower scenes. It's a (cell) block party as funky as Dave Chappelle's, and the best reason you'll ever have to visit the ImaginAsian, the specialty cinema at 239 East 59th Street, where the movie lurches, splats and jiggles to life today.

On a more serious note, finally saw "Good Night, and Good Luck." Extremely well done, though it compresses history quite a bit to make Murrow the solitary hero in bringing McCarthy down, when in fact McCarthy was getting gored from a number of angles by the time Murrow and Friendly joined the bullfight. Nevertheless it was a pleasure to watch a cast of inspired actors (Straithorn's ability to get Murrow's cadence is uncanny, though Madame Cura had trouble differentiating his Murrow from his Mr. Wegler). And intense, beautiful cinematography -- you could almost smell the Chesterfields. The movie is almost hushed, conspiriatorial; the parallel conspiracy going on within the newsroom between the Wershbas is a nice touch.

Anyway, having now seen it, I do think Steve Goldman, stretching his legs outside the usual confines of the ballpark, probably has written the most interesting review of the film that I've yet read. He doesn't have permalinks until they're archived, so here it is, mostly in full.

First, the movie is spectacularly well acted. The four leads — Strathairn, Clooney, Frank Langella, and Joe McCarthy — are all terrific, especially McCarthy, who required little coaching to convey his full, alcoholic, ranting glory. I appreciate Clooney's reminding the corporate press that it used to make an effort to think for itself, despite being a creature of big business.

The film conveyed with subtlety one of the underappreciated aspects of the McCarthy era: its persistence. Discussing this is going to require bringing up some history, which is not the same as being partisan, though it involves the political parties. After the mid-term elections of 1934, the Republican Party was nearly dead. They held only 25 of 96 Senate seats, their lowest number ever. They had only 103 seats in the House of 435. Roughly a half-dozen state governors were not Democrats.

All of these losses were the result of domestic policy in the Great Depression. It would be decades before anyone really bought the Republican line on domestic policy (polls supported the political divide of domestic and foreign affairs between the two parties into the 1980s) and until the end of World War II, no one really cared about foreign policy. All politics was local, to paraphrase Tip O'Neill. The Cold War and the A-bomb changed that. Suddenly the world was local, and that gave the Republicans a wedge. McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and others found the way — impugn your opponent on security and you'll win. The sour outcome of the Yalta negotiations, the "loss" of China, the bungled Korean War, and the Alger Hiss case meant that it the security issue wasn't just demagoguery-there were indeed things that could have been handled better (though all of these would have been tough nuts to crack regardless of who was in power).

Security issues brought the Republican party back from the edge of extinction. That and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that's another story. As a rhetorical device, it seems to work brilliantly, blowing away everyone from Helen Gahagan to John Kerry, from the Cold War to the Iraq War. This is a point that also comes across in Haynes Johnson's recent "The Age of Anxiety," which more explicitly compares the McCarthy period to the present one. The difference between Nixon and McCarthy is that McCarthy heated his anti-Communism to the boiling point of hysteria.

The film doesn't get into much of this, but it's there if you're hip to the context. The film (or Clooney as co-writer and director) does not establish these things for the masses of people who might not be familiar with the stories or the parallels to the present day. Indeed, on the DVD commentary, Clooney says that test audiences commented that the guy playing McCarthy was over the top. All the footage of McCarthy in the film was authentic, so that would suggest that some scene-setting was required. The movie doesn't do that, so I would imagine that many coming to it without a strong sense of what was at stake in the Ed Murrow — McCarthy confrontation might not ever grasp what was really happening in the country at the time, or how the attack on, say, the first amendment then might relate to the evisceration of the fourth amendment now.

In fact, even the way in which McCarthy fell is fudged, both by the dramatic necessity of compressing time and the need to give Murrow disproportionate credit for his bravery, which was important, but not key. In the end, the government tolerated McCarthy for a long time, but when he attacked the Army he went too far, and the government responded by using the bizarre antics of his counsel Roy Cohn as a way to bring him down. Murrow was a contributor to that story, but McCarthy himself was the author.

Still, the film is worth seeing for the portrayals of real people caught in a real crisis, for its portrait of an underappreciated era that is still with us, one we don't hear too much about in school. Strathairn's Murrow is inspirational. When he and his staff waver about confronting the junior Senator from Wisconsin because he will inevitably tar them as "Red," Strathairn says something that the real Murrow said at that moment: "If none of us had ever read a dangerous book, or had a friend who was different, or never joined an organization that advocated change we'd all be just the kind of people that Joe McCarthy wants. We're gonna go with the story, because the terror is right here in this room."

That's a real American line, one that should be right up there with "Damn the torpedoes," "I have not yet begun to fight," and "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

I find it curious that most baseball writers, at least those found on the internets, are (IMHO) politically and historically well-informed...and intensely liberal. Wonder what that means.