I watched a good movie the other night.  One of the best things about it was the music.  As soon as the movie was over, I wanted that music.  I jumped on the Net, and in minutes I had it on my computer.  Legally.  I'm listening to it as I write this. 

I’ve gotten used to that now.  It’s surprising how much fun it is to be able to hear any song at all any time at all.  What is an old favorite song of yours that you haven’t heard for a while?  Something by the Beatles?  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young?  Or maybe the March from Prokofiev’s Love For Three Oranges?  Wouldn’t it be fun to listen to that song right this minute? 

It started on the Internet in the mid-1990s, with the advent and wide use of the “mp3” file.  A song in this format plays on a computer with roughly the same quality as a CD.  You can send them around as attachments like a Word file or an Excel file, or you can download them from anyplace that will let you.  Mp3 files have other advantages too.  You can get many more of them on a CD than you can songs that are in the standard CD format.  You can put them on little machines the size of cell phones or smaller, and use them like a Walkman – but they are solid state, they’re lighter, the music doesn’t “jiggle” when you hit a bump or jog, and the devices hold more music than several CDs.  Last but not least, the mp3 file carries data.  So on your computer you can see the name of the song and the artist, how long it is, even sometimes data about the song, even in some cases a picture of the album cover on your computer screen when the song is playing.  You can move them around, or delete them.  You can buy that album you love that has one song you hate.  You can delete the song you hate and listen the rest of the album.  The list of advantages goes on and on.

Computer geeks who also loved music quickly figured out what a new world the mp3 file created.  Web sites popped up, such as mp3.com, where an artist looking for exposure could place his music to be downloaded by others.  It was fun to go in to sites like this a see what was available.  I had a close friend who posted some music up on a site like this for a while. 

One time I found a female artist on mp3.com that had a hot little Latin salsa band (Cecelia Noel).  I liked the music so much I looked up her web site, and found out she performs regularly on the Sunset Strip.  So I went to hear her band, and liked it so much I took friends back.  I finally heard her group three times and bought two of her albums.  All because I first was able to download those little mp3 files and find out what she was like.  As far as I know she is not “signed” by a record company, even today.

As young people began to understand this medium the phenomenon snowballed.  The demand for availability of mp3 files went through the roof.  But the record industry was afraid of the phenomenon, or ignored it, or something.  There was no legitimate way to get an mp3 file of any well-known popular artist. 

For people who had discovered how convenient these files are and how much fun it is to pick up individual songs that you like, the record industry’s attitude was a brick wall.  Enter Napster. 

Napster was a controversial software that created a community of people who wanted to share mp3 files.  Napster was soon shot down by the record industry in court, for promoting copyright violations, but the horse was out of the barn.  Other companies began to proliferate, with slightly altered systems that skirted the legal decision that killed Napster.  A user downloaded a copy of one of these softwares, then he could do a search for a song, and if it was on somebody else’s computer who was on line, he could download it directly from their computer.  At the same time, the mp3 files on his computer were visible to others, and they could download from him.

People created mp3 files by using computer programs to transform their CD tracks into mp3 tracks and putting them on their computers.  One might “rip” his Beatles CD into mp3 files on his computer, and another could “rip” his Chili Peppers CD, then both could go online, and could get each other’s songs – even if they lived in different countries or continents and didn’t even know one another. 

When this started happening, I was perplexed that there was no place to do this legally.  If I wanted to listen to an old Frank Sinatra song, like New York, New York, why couldn’t I put in a credit card, pay 99 cents, or something, and download the tune?  (One of the advantages of this mp3 system is you don’t have to buy a whole album to get that one song you want to hear.)

A few years ago I read an article about singer Shania Twain, then saw her picture on about five magazine covers the same week.  I’m not much of a fan of Country and Western music generally, but I like some of it.  This girl obviously created quite an effect.  I was curious.  I had four choices:  1) Live with being curious and hope I found out more someday; 2) Order one of her many albums, groping in the dark, and pay about $17.00 for the privilege of seeing whether I like the music or not – and wait for it to come via Amazon.com, or drive to a store and buy it (I don’t hang around music stores much); 3) Listen to a C&W music station in my car until I heard her (Not!); or 4) download a couple of tunes from the net in a few minutes and check her out.  I did the latter.  I found her music cheerful and pleasing, but it wasn’t my thing.  I deleted the files.  I did that with other artists.  When I found one I liked, I made a point of buying the albums, otherwise I deleted the files.  I actually wound up buying a lot more music than I had been in previous years because I could learn about the artists and the tunes this way.  I would have happily paid some fee per tune or some subscription to get those tunes.  But it wasn’t an option.  There was no official way to get those tunes on the net.  But there was a well established, well grooved-in method for getting them through these various softwares. 

The recording industry staunchly resisted.  They have been on the attack ever since the practice began, but they have never offered an alternative.  I sincerely sympathize with their concern over copyright violations.  But they are missing the point.  They should be leading the world into the computer-music era not trying to stop it.  They aren’t going to be able to stop it.

The demand for a legal and ethical product is there.  Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, started a service called iTunes where users can buy and download music legally.  He made deals with record producers, and got the rights to publish music and sell it song by song.  Others such services have popped up.  I now subscribe to two of them.  I have my credit card registered and I am billed a few bucks per month, or sometimes many bucks if I do a lot of it.  It works great and it feels good to be tapping into this ethically.  But the choices are still somewhat limited.  Not all labels and artists are playing the game.

But the music industry, who stonewalled the inevitable for a decade, then begrudgingly began to allow it little by little in sites such as iTunes is not so bashful about attacking people who go around them.  Instead of seeing the handwriting on the wall, and making the switch from buggies to automobiles, they continue to try to sue the newer technology out of business. 

204 more people were sued on Friday and Monday by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) for stealing downloaded music files using software designed for the purpose.  This is the second round.  Several hundred were sued weeks ago by the RIAA for the same reason.  

In one case an elderly woman from Boston convinced a judge she had no idea how to download music on the Internet and someone must have stolen her electronic identity to do it.  She dodged the bullet.  In many other cases, typical moms and pops around the U.S. are suddenly being sued for large sums of money, and are finding out for the first time that their sons and daughters have indeed been doing this in their bedrooms.  It’s hard for them to defend and the practice of suing these people is making a bitter public.  It doesn’t help when they find out that what their son or daughter was doing is also being done by most or all of their friends at school.

In his Policy Letter “The Responsibilities of Leaders”, L. Ron Hubbard said, “Life is lived by lots of people.  And if you lead, you must either let them get on with it or lead them on with it actively.”  In the same Policy Letter, he said, “When the game or the show is over, there must be a new game or a new show.  If there isn’t, somebody else is jolly well going to start one, and if you won’t let anyone do it, the game will become “getting you”.

The recording industry is right about the sanctity of their copyrights.  But they need to be fiercely ambitious about building a way for people to enjoy this new superior technology instead of refusing to allow it, then attacking anyone who comes up with an alternative.  At this point, the industry is complaining that CD sales are significantly down, and they’re blaming it on theft of mp3 files on the Internet.  I’ve heard some of what is being passed off as music these days, and I’m not sure that’s the only reason they aren’t selling CDs.  But they do have a point. 

I for one will happily drop my coin in the slot for my mp3 song.  Just give me a way to do it.

I hope the RIAA develops a concomitant program to develop legal and easy-to-use methods of enjoying mp3 files on a pay-per-download basis.  That would solve the situation.  Most people don’t really want to cheat.

Witty banter, incredible sight gags and fantastic musical dance productions make this 1934 movie a must-see if you’re sick of the “news”, tired of suicide bombers, strikes and kids on psychiatric drugs carrying guns to school and drilling their classmates.  It was a more innocent America, and the imprimatur of the age was that series of instant classics, the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. 

Hollywood’s most famous singing and dancing couple only made 9 movies together.  With two exceptions, these are among the happiest and most charming films ever made in Tinseltown. 

The Gay Divorcee was number two.  The country had fallen in love with the couple in number one, Flying Down To Rio, a song and dance spectacular that won an Oscar for its musical production, and started a national dance craze, the “carioca”. 

But The Gay Divorcee was more professional and better put together.  It established a sleek style they would carry through many of their following films, like Top Hat, Swing Time, and Follow The Fleet.  The sets were art deco [a style of architecture, interior design, and jewelry most popular in the 1930s that used geometrical designs and bold colors and outlines Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2003. © 1993-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved] the clothes were exquisite, and couldn’t have been modeled better than by graceful platinum blonde Ginger and the most elegant male dancer in Hollywood history, Fred Astaire. 

Ginger:  “Please don’t ask me to stay!”

Fred:  “Okay I won’t.  Please don’t go!”

Assisted by their standby comic supporting actors Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore, and employing in this film the incredible gift of a little-known actor from Oklahoma named Erik Rhodes, who made a career out of playing comic Italians, they fashioned a movie that will alternately have you on the floor with it’s comic situations, and breathless at the apparently effortless dance sequences, choreographed by Fred.

Fred is in England on a tour as a dancer.  He runs into Ginger by chance, and instantly falls in love.  She responds and both of them begin to glow with the banked fires of a budding romance

Unbeknownst to Fred, Ginger is trying to get a divorce from her British husband.  The laws in Britain in those days left the option of divorce up to the husband only, so the only way a wife could fashion a divorce was to embarrass her husband into it.  Hence there was a cottage industry in “correspondents”, or hired lover-boys who would arrange to be caught in compromising situations with hopeful wives, splashing about in such a craven way their husbands would have to divorce to save face. 

Ginger is off to a seaside resort to meet her “correspondent”, with whom she expects to share a room for the weekend, to establish the apparent extra-marital relationship her husband will not be able to live with.  She has a password – a special greeting by which she will know who he is.

Fred goes to the same resort for other reasons, runs into Ginger, and unwittingly utters the passphrase Ginger is expecting from her sleazy lothario.  After getting sweet but demure treatment from Ginger until this point in the movie, Fred is completely puzzled by her transformation.  She turns cold as ice and matter-of-factly invites him to her room for the night. 

The movie never falters. 

Room service waiter, discussing geology:  “That’s an igneous intrusion.”

Fred:  “You’re an igneous intrusion yourself.” 

The scenes with the real correspondent, an English-challenged Italian dandy, are a scream.  He makes his way around the resort looking for his client, mispronouncing the passphrase, butchering English expressions in such a way they come out suggestive or insulting, and coming on to woman sitting alone, getting his face slapped, his ego deflated and generally having a very bad time of it. 

The movie was the film debut of a young dancer named Betty Grable, who would become the number one pin-up girl of WW II only a decade later. 

The huge signature dance scene, “the Continental”, started another dance craze and is mesmerizing. 

The movie was named when the word “gay” was still in common use as dictionary definition number one, happy and carefree.  Fred’s only love interest was Ginger, and Ginger only wanted Fred.  We’re not sure about the waiter, though. 

Cary Grant is walking down the stairs, half-carrying semi-conscious Ingrid Bergman, one step at a time, mumbling something about taking her to the hospital.  Six or eight Nazis are looking on, trying to make sense of the scene.  Classic evil guy Claude Raines is the only Nazi that knows.  He knows that Ingrid Bergman, his wife, is an American spy.  He knows Cary Grant is her CIA handler/lover.  But he doesn’t dare speak.  He’d be shot by the others if they knew. 

Cary Grant knows Raines can’t tell the other Nazis.  That’s his only chance to get the two of them out alive. 

That’s the reason Raines has been poisoning her – slowly – trying to make it look like disease; trying to get rid of her before the others found out she was a spy.

By this time, you’re near the climax of one of the best Hitchcock thrillers made; which is saying a lot.  Hitchcock was the undisputed master of the genre. 

This particular film, Notorious, was made in, and set in, the late 1940s after World War II.  A nest of wealthy and highly placed Nazi spies and ex-patriots has set up a group in Rio De Janeiro.  Their activities are suspicious.  American spy Cary Grant has to find a way to get inside.  He recruits Bergman, an American-born young woman whose German father has been executed as a Nazi spy in the U.S.  Grant knows Bergman is not a Nazi, but her infamous father should give her the credentials she needs to get in with the Brazilian heel-clickers.  But it’s not as easy as all that.  To accomplish it, she finally marries the leader of the pack.  That may not be what military people describe as the “ultimate sacrifice”, but it comes close.  It’s such an extreme measure that Cary Grant’s superiors begin to doubt her as a source.  They begin to wonder if she is in fact a double agent.

I could go on and on about this story.  Every paragraph would drip with the same breathless suspense imbued into this entire film.  The first time I saw it I never quite touched the seat of the chair.  I just crouched, frozen, half sitting, with a death grip on the armrests.  It’s no harm telling anyone what happened.  You can’t spoil this story.  It’s so well told, you’ll want to watch it again.  And when you do, you’ll have the same reaction. 

This film was the second to last made by Hitchcock under his contract with famous producer David O. Selznick.  Selznick was a bit of a shooting star, who became a golden boy in the mid-1940s, only to drop like a meteor the next decade by micromanaging his crews and running hobby-horse big-budget box office bombs until he fell off the edge, fading from view. 

Hitchcock’s contract with Selznick got him out of England and into Hollywood.  His films benefited immediately from the bigger budgets and better technology of Hollywood films.  If nothing else, you can understand the sound tracks.  His earlier English films use low-grade recording techniques and with heavy British accents, you wind up watching them with your head at a 45-degree angle to the screen as you try to pick up the dialogue.  They are still good films, and I love them all.  But the jump to Hollywood puts Hitch at a new level. 

Selznick, however, was a different story.  Hitchcock had a three-movie deal with Selznick.  By the end of the first one, Hitch was ready to take the next boat back to Southampton.  During the second one, Notorious, Selznick was off in the desert, shooting a high-budget Western that would eventually flop at the box office.  Hitchcock was left alone, and produced this, one of his greatest gems.  Selznick then came back and started kibitzing on Hitchcock’s next film, The Paradine Case with Gregory Peck.  Hitchcock’s solution to the contest of wills was to back off and let Selznick do whatever he wanted.  After this film he would be free from his contract, and he would have not trouble getting the backing he needed to continue directing in Hollywood.  He sometimes didn’t even come to the set.  When he did come, he would fall asleep in the director’s chair and let the film run itself.  It’s widely considered to be one of the worst films with Hitchcock’s name on it.  After that the two men went their separate ways:  Selznick to divorce, financial ruin and obscurity, Hitchcock to become arguably Hollywoods greatest and most durable success – a director that put out one hit after another until he finally ran out of steam in the late 1970s.  The Internet Movie Database has 67 titles attributed to Hitchcock as a director.  That’s an enormous amount of production for a director, especially one that also ran a hit TV series throughout much of the 1950s.  By comparison, Steven Spielberg has directed 47 movies.  Hitchcock’s films were consistently successful.  His specialty was keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. 

Back to Notorious.  There is a love scene in this movie in which Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss on a balcony, fully clothed.  It is a long kiss and it’s done so well, it’s a turn-on.  The censors thought it was a turn-on too, and there was a widely publicized attempt to force Hitch to edit the scene to something a little less steamy.  Hitch refused, and won the day.  As a result, part of the box office impetus was this controversy, and a lot of people either did or didn’t go to the movie based on their reaction to this highly publicized sexy scene.  Today it’s very interesting that a kiss between two fully clothed actors on a balcony would prompt this kind of reaction.  It’s a credit to Hitchcock, who knew, more than most directors before or since, how to tell a story.  It wasn’t exposed body parts or deviated sex that made the scene provocative – it was the story. 

In my opinion, this particular story is one of his best.  And the movie is in my all-time top ten.

I downloaded this little French film from Movielink.com.  This is a nice way to carry a movie or two on your computer to watch on airplanes or in hotel rooms.  It seems to me that downloaded movies are less of a drain on my computer battery, probably because playing them back from the hard drive requires less juice than operating a DVD drive.  So I always drag down a couple when I’m going somewhere.

I picked this one up because it stars Audrey Tautou.  It’s my guess the film made it to America for this reason.  A lot of people are Audrey Tautou crazy since her charming film Amelie, a really special movie that broke a lot of molds and made a lot of people smile.  This film didn’t really break any molds, and it’s also my guess that without Audrey’s participation this one wouldn’t have even broken out of France. 

The movie does have an interesting mechanism.  The first half of the film is from the viewpoint of Tautou, and is her recounting of a love affair in which she is unceremoniously jilted by the man of her dreams.  The other half of the movie is from the viewpoint of the man, and it’s a completely different story as he is stalked by Tautou, in whom he has no real interest, but who manages to virtually ruin his life.  It’s a clever idea – a rewind and roll forward from the other point of view. 

The film was too slow, though.  That’s a complaint I have about many French films.    A character is recounting something that happened in great detail, and it doesn’t flow with the film.  In fact it is not unusual (and it occurs in this film) for a character to tell someone a story that is completely non sequitur to the film.  “When I was little, I had a toy horse… blah blah blah.”  I suppose if you want to get T.S. Eliot about it you might find some symbolism or some kind of parallel to the real situation or some kind of character motivation.  Maybe it’s my American viewpoint.  I want a story to start somewhere, move along and eventually get there with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It isn’t that you have to have every specific occurrence in the film relate directly to the story line, but it should do so at least indirectly.  Even when Rhett Butler is shopping with Scarlet, we’re seeing what kind of person she is and we’re establishing the nature of their relationship.  But when Audrey Tautou tells a bedtime story to her friend’s daughter, I failed to see the point. 

In my opinion, this clever film idea is ripe for a rewrite in Hollywood.  I usually balk at that.  Three Men And A Baby was a good film, but not really a great improvement on Trois hommes et un couffin.  And the French Film La Femme Nikita is one of the great films of all time.  The Bridget Fonda remake was not as good, and the TV show is a pale shadow of the original concept.  But in this case, let’s do it.  I like the idea.  Let’s get hold of it, put in some good witty dialogue, and move the story along!

Let’s set the stage.  It’s 1939.  We’re in a rough-and-tumble port in a banana republic, and the deep voice of a ship’s foghorn paints a forlorn canvas behind the mariachi music and the tin-pan piano in the bar.  The ship comes in and pretty Jean Arthur gets off – just to stretch her legs until the ship leaves again.  She finds the local bar and grill, and it’s right next to the airfield.  By the time her ship leaves, she has fallen in love with chief pilot Cary Grant, who wears an Indiana Jones outfit, along with the rest of his crew.  Pistols, broad-brimmed hats and hard liquor make life bearable for these aviation pioneers in this God-forsaken outpost of civilization.

The airline business is tough in this exotic but foggy little town.  Grant’s company has to carry the mail nightly for 6 months without fail to get the big contract.  It will bail them out.  They haven’t missed for almost six months, and they’ve only got a few days to go.  But the weather isn’t cooperating.  Tough seat-of-the-pants pilots flying biplanes through typhoons and zero-visibility cloudbanks in high mountain passes with rubber hoses hanging out one side of the mouth for oxygen die like flies as planes crash and burn trying to achieve the seemingly impossible – the contract that will save the company and make them all rich.  It’s not for the faint of heart.

On the next boat is Grant’s latest replacement pilot, who, it turns out, is married to Grant’s old flame – Rita Hayworth.  Now the heat and the humidity aren’t the only things making Cary sweat. 

Can it get any better than this? 

I dunno, but it’s pretty good stuff.  Director Howard Hawks was the master of high adventure.  This is great drama.  It’s emotional but not maudlin.  The dialogue is brisk and humorous but never silly, and the story is as chock full of excitement, adventure, heroism and sacrifice as you can get this side of Errol Flynn.  

Star Wars proved you could spend a lot of money on a movie and get it back.  It ended a drought about 20 years long in which the movie industry was afraid to do that.  The result was a rebirth for film. 

From the beginning of the movie industry, producers have also known that star power was capable of selling movies.  But Lucas put out Star Wars without any really big stars, and took the brass ring.  (No, Harrison Ford doesn’t count.  He wasn’t a star yet.)

But today, studios and producers fall all over themselves creating SFX (special effects) CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) and even fully animated features that aren’t about a duck and a rabbit …  They also still use the power of big stars to suck in the fans.  By the time you have big stars walking on Mars being chased by aliens while dodging ray guns, you are supposed to have a bulletproof concoction that will rake in the dough so fast it’s in the black before it goes to video.

But it doesn’t always work.

So how do you explain movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Bend It Like Beckham?  No big stars, no special effects, just competent basic cinematography and relatively unknown competent actors and a wonderful story that makes you realize how great life is and how much you love people…

One thing is still basic:  The story has to be good.  A good story will sell a film that has neither the biggest effects nor the biggest stars, and a super-production with a bad story can die a sorry death. 

Bend It Like Beckham is one of those heart-warming films that has so much of what a good story is all about, nothing else matters.  You can’t help getting caught up in this great little tale about a talented young Indian woman in Britain who wants to become a soccer star (that’s “football” to you non-Americans) and endeavors to make it go right in spite of her very traditional Sikh parents who have a much more hide-bound notion of how her life should be and a wicked reaction to the idea of her running around on a field kicking a ball “with her legs showing”. 

Her partner in crime is actually a pretty big star!  But she wasn’t when this movie was made.  Keira Knightly was the damsel in distress in the blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean.  But Beckham came out before Pirates.  So it's like seeing unknown Harrison Ford in Star Wars or unknown Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza.  The entire film was made for 3.5 million dollars – chicken feed by today’s standards, when 75 million is common and 200 million is not unheard of.  Big stars bloat the budget by 5-20 million each before you even stop by Kodak to pick up the film.  But Beckham has made much more than 10 times it’s original investment.  After a meek opening weekend of only about $190,000.00, it began to grow by word of mouth, mostly.  You can count on the fact there wasn’t a lot of publicity in a 3.5 million-dollar budget. 

Like it’s beautiful little star Parminder Nagra, who played the Indian soccer phenom, the film finally “showed its legs” and walked through months of hanging around in the top 20 box office successes while jillion-dollar blockbusters came and went in a few weekends.  Now it’s finally gone to video.

If that doesn’t make you want to see the video yourself, then let me add one detail.  Right in the teeth of everyone who makes fun of “feel good” movies, I’ll tell you that this is indeed a “feel good” movie!  In my lexicon, that’s a good thing, not a bad one.

Just to clear up your next question, “Beckham” is the name of a current British soccer super-star that was worshipped by the girls, and “Bend It” is a soccer phrase, at least in Britain, that has to do with putting some kind of spin on the ball, as nearly as I can tell.  So the phrase “Bend It Like Beckham” is something like a baseball fan saying, “Slam it like Sammy Sosa” or a basketball fan saying, “Dunk It Like Shaq”. 

Brian De Palma earned his reputation with his best-known films: Scarface, Dressed To Kill, The Untouchables, Mission To Mars, Mission Impossible.  His films are stylish and well made.  He is good at suspense, and is a devotee of Hitchcock – in fact has made documentaries about the great one.  He also started buddy Robert De Niro’s career by putting him in a couple of his early low-budget shows. 

I just saw Femme Fatale.  I was afraid to watch it, actually.  The name is almost too lurid, and it sounds like somebody is piggybacking on Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction.  But it’s unique.  The title may be a remake but the film is not.  It’s original and a great ride.

Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote and siren Rebecca Romijn-Stamos play the primary roles. 

Romijn-Stamos is an All-American girl, despite her European-sounding name.  She grew up in Berkeley, California.  At nearly six feet, she is a natural model.  She got her start with Victoria’s Secret, Christian Dior and Sports Illustrated.   She got a few starter parts, including the one in The Spy Who Shagged Me, but her breakout was her romp as slinky blue Mystique in X-Men, a role she reprised in X2.  Her model’s body and good ability as an actress have secured for her a place in Hollywood, probably for a long time to come. 

The movie opens with Romijn-Stamos’ character watching Double Indemnity on TV – the 1940s film noir with Barbara Stanwyck as the evil gold digger who buys an insurance policy on her husband’s life from Fred McMurray, then talks Fred into helping her murder the man.  It’s a chilling start for a film that looks like it’s going to be the same kind of story.  It begins with a contorted plot to steal the diamonds – one of those heist things where the mastermind has got it down to the exact minute when each player does his high-tech part.  It all seems to come off, but it goes sideways – at least for the conspirators other than Romijn-Stamos, who makes off with all the diamonds. 

Then the movie takes off on a ride through various plot twists, including coincidences, body doubles, impossible mixing of identities and other mechanisms that only happen well in Shakespeare.  But De Palma gets by with it, because the story is always interesting – filled with intrigue and suspense – and because it is tied together well in a surprise ending that is really a lot of fun. 

Sexy Antonio Banderas plays down his usually in-control persona, and slips into the spell of the conniving Romijn-Stamos, who towers over him by a few inches.  De Palma doesn’t correct that difference, underlining Banderas’ role as the patsy. 

I highly recommend the film.  It’s a lot of fun.

The Great State of Kah-lee-foa-nia (his pronunciation) has a new Governor.  He’s not a politician.  He’s apparently not on the take – he’s got more money than the rest of the politicians in Sacramento put together.  He ran as a Republican, but he’s not a hard-line right-winger that alienates everyone but a small core of extremists.  He says he wants to reach out – to represent all the people. 

He’s Capra-esque.

Frank Capra was one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, and arguably the most inspiring director of all.  At Christmas time, everyone watches his masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life.  We’ve all seen it before.  It’s 50 years old.  But it’s always fresh and it’s always a reminder of the importance of the spiritual side of life.

Capra made a lot of other good movies.  The hallmark of his films was a sense of love and spirit and honor, and faith in America and the common man. 

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington was a story about a naïve, honest good-guy scout leader who is elected to the Senate.  When he gets to Washington, what he finds is not the hallowed halls of Jefferson and Lincoln, but the cynical world of graft and corruption.  Refusing to play along, he is sorely tested – cajoled, threatened, and deceived until he begins to doubt himself.  But he hangs on to his ideals and wins in the end.  Played by Jimmy Stewart – the same actor that Capra used in It’s A Wonderful Life, Senator Smith is a prototype for the image of Schwarzenegger.  The outsider who says he wants to do it right. 

Schwarzenegger’s speech tonight was assailed by at least two commentators I heard on the basis it was too general and idealistic; didn’t contain enough detail and specific information.  But there’s nothing wrong with that, because the ideals, the goals and the purposes, have to precede the details and specifics.  The reason he won is because he appealed to the better side of men – he inspired hope and trust.  You can attack him for being idealistic.  But the people he ran against are anything but idealistic.  They’re hard core professional coin-operated politicians.  Paranthetically, that also goes for most of the commentators, in my opinion.

Will he live up to it?  He might.  It’s hard not to believe he’s going to try his best.  But whatever else happens, this election, which has been discounted and attacked nationally as another circus from the land of fruits and nuts, is actually democracy at its best.  It’s the adjustment mechanism we are privileged to have in America.  If we don’t like our leaders, we can throw the bums out!  If you don’t believe us, just watch!  And you don’t have to belong to any special fraternities or special groups to run for office here.  You just have to make enough people believe.  Although it’s been done, it’s hard to make a lot of people believe if you don’t believe it yourself.  As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time.  But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” 

There have been good politicians.  There have been politicians that helped.  Let’s hope Ahhnold is one of them.

Here are some trivia questions.  Okay, maybe it’s not really trivia.  It’s history.  And it’s fascinating.

1. Who was the man who led U.S. forces to military victory to take California from Mexico during the Mexican-American war in 1845? 
2. Who was the first governor of California?
3. Who was the first Republican candidate for President (didn’t win – Lincoln was the first Republican president.)
4. Who was the first governor of Arizona?

They were all the same guy, of course – John C. Fremont; the man after whom Fremont, California is named, along with probably about a dozen other cities, rivers and mountains in the U.S.

Fremont’s history is about as stormy and heroic as it gets in the old West.  If someone wrote the story as fiction it would sound like it was artificially manufactured for its incredible proportions. 

Fremont’s mother came from a “good family” in Virginia, but she fell in with a vagabond French dance teacher named Fremón  (the “t” was added later by John C. Fremont to Americanize the name).  Her family disowned her.  So she wandered around the Southeast with her lover and bore to him a son, while living in Savannah, Georgia.  Fremón died at an early age, and John’s mother continued to work at odd jobs and support her family.  As a child Fremont was very bright and in his teen years fell in with a mentor named Poinsett, who was a respected world traveler, adventurer and politician.  Poinsett had returned from Mexico at one point with a newly discovered unnamed red flower – so it was called the “poinsettia” in his honor. 

Although he lived in the South, Poinsett was an ardent opponent of slavery, and Fremont picked up his views, and in fact had a black girlfriend for a time during his teen years, in defiance of the environment.

Fremont began his adventurous adult life as an Army explorer and mapmaker.  His accomplishments in this area are vast.  He led parties that mapped a large part of the area west of the Mississippi.  He found a winter route through the Sierra Nevadas, found the mouth of the Mississippi river, and turned in a large quantity of good work in this capacity.  One of his confederates in those years was the well-known frontier scout Kit Carson.

In his travels, he met and fell in love with Jessie Benton, the daughter of another well-known frontiersman/politician, Thomas Hart Benton, the Senator from Missouri.  Considered gorgeous in her day, Jessie Benton Fremont was also brilliant, and would become a luminary in her own right as a writer and reporter. 

In the 1840s he was on a mapmaking expedition in California and got word that the United States had gone to war with Mexico.  He and his men decided on their own to go pick a fight with the local Mexican fort.  They won, and proclaimed California as a part of the United States right on the spot.  They designed and ran up the original “bear flag” that is still the flag for the State of California.  He then hooked up with an American Naval Admiral Stockton, who had sailed up the Sacramento River to what is now Stockton, California, and put together an army.  He went through California on the attack and took the state from Mexico.  Two of the primary battles took place right in the middle of what is now the Greater Los Angeles area, and the final peace agreement was signed in Cahuenga Pass, in the shadow of what is now Universal Studios.  Fremont was an enlightened leader, and didn’t ask the Mexicans for anything more than political control but allowed them to go ahead with their lives as before, much to their surprise.  The leader of the Mexican forces, Pio Pico, was convinced he and all his lieutenants would be executed by the Americans.  In the end, many of the “Dons” (a Spanish term that is equivalent to something like a “Lord” or “Earl” – a landowner who had been granted his property by the King of Spain) continued to operate their huge ranches for many years, gradually selling off small parts for cash.  Some of them still lived in huge estates in the Los Angeles area as late as the 1880s.

Admiral Stockton appointed Fremont as the first Territorial Governor of California, then sailed off.

An Army General named Kearny arrived in California soon after with orders to take the area from Mexico.  Communications were slow at that time, and Kearny was upset to find the job had already been taken care of.  He tried to take over the scene.  Fremont, who gathered a reputation as a hardhead as the years went by, refused to back down or compromise, and the result was Kearny, who had strong connections in Washington, had Fremont taken back to the East and court-marshaled.  Fremont would have gone to prison or lost his life, except for the intervention of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his wife’s illustrious father.  (Kearny, parenthetically, died about a year later of yellow fever in Mexico during the continuing Mexican-American war.)

Disgusted with his treatment by the army, Fremont went back to California as a civilian, did some real estate deals and became a multi-millionaire during the time of the California gold rush, about 1849.  In 1850 he was elected as one of the new state’s first two Senators.  He was nominated for the presidency in 1856 – the first Republican candidate for that office.  The Republican Party was growing stronger in those days as an anti-slavery party.  He lost the election to Southern Democrat James Buchanan, the corrupt and womanizing Southern sympathizer who preceded Abraham Lincoln. 

Just prior to the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Fremont as a General for the “Army of the West” based in Missouri.  Fremont, always the pioneer, took things into his own hands immediately, and issued an edict proclaiming slavery illegal in Missouri, then began arresting pro-slavery men and throwing them in jail.  This was highly inflammatory in the highly explosive atmosphere preceding the Civil War.  Lincoln was still trying to prevent the war, so he ordered Fremont to back off.  Fremont refused, so Lincoln fired him. 

Fremont subsequently decided to go for broke in the railroad business.  He invested poorly and lost the fortune he had made earlier.  His talented wife supported them for a while as a writer, even publishing her own newspaper.  He had friends in the East who endeavored to help him and he was appointed as Governor of the new Arizona Territory.  He recovered his solvency and retired to New York City, where he finally died at the age of 77.