An observation about the election… As the primaries and caucuses narrow the field down to three candidates – Dubya Two, Lady MacBeth, and Barry Half-White – I find myself overcome by feelings of revulsion for the pundits, the candidates, and the electorate itself, who together make it such a misery to be in full possession of one's faculties.

As the press and liberals swoon over Barry – he stands for change, you know – the man with the empty smile ejects more programmed statements that mean nothing and lead nowhere.  He is certain that a massive influx of foreign peasants will have no ill consequences and panders to them in their native tongue (as our dear Dubya used to do) – and the electorate asks no better of him than to whisper more of these sweet nothings in their ear.  And oh how he does:  complete troop withdrawal from Iraq, "require" states to improve education, support job creation, and – wait for it – middle class tax cuts!  You've never heard of such daring changes before.  Why, Barry is supporting the creation of new jobs – unlike all the other candidates, who want you to starve and die.  Really, you have never seen more empty rhetoric and shallow policy recommendations in your life until you've actually read one of Barry Hussein Obama Christ's issue statements.  His asinine slogan, "Change you can believe in", suggests a return to the era of faith-based social programs pioneered by earnest liberals in the 70s.

Not that the alternatives to Barry are any less preposterous.  The best of them is probably Hillary, if only because her android-like shrewdness and desperate grasping for power make her unlikely to do anything unexpected.  Indeed, beyond perhaps nominating Bella Abzug to the Supreme Court,* it's difficult to identify just what over the past seven years she might have done differently – perhaps not choking on a pretzel.  I rather long for a leader who will restrict her forays into disastrous policies to tried-and-true disastrous policies (unlike Barry, I desperately fear the sort of change promised by politicians).  Ironically, while Barry is redoing Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Hillary is running on a platform of experienced leadership – her main experience being married to a president who made the same promises using the same rhetoric of uplift to the same audience of giddy partisans years ago.

But if you liked the past eight years you'll love candidate #3, the Vietnam vet who has waited in line just like Bob Dole did, so come on, America, let's vote for him!  (For some reason Republican voters – never the brightest bulbs around – love this appeal.)  He is essentially Dubya's clone and it's even harder to discern what he would have done differently over the past eight years – not freeze up during television interviews, perhaps.  In this sense it is difficult to conceive of McCain as a credible contender, for even the easily confused electorate must realize that although he has a different hairdo and can probably list all 50 states without naming a Mexican province, Dubya Two's policies are exactly the same as those of the current, extremely unpopular president, Dubya One.  Just in case you were still on the fence:  both Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz support him.

Surely this comical procession of inane figures is no way to choose a president.  But I fear that since at least the 1988 election, which was as fully fatuous as any normal person could stand, the American elite have perfected a formula for presidential elections that is equal part catchphrases, phony issues, and drama of the dinner theater variety.  Think back.  Has politics not been getting dumber and dumber all your life?  Yet there is nothing to be done about it, except make life difficult for the next partisan or pundit you run into.  I suppose this is how great countries cease to be great.   

Juno… So.  The chief problem with Jason Reitman's Juno is its repellent nihilism, but building up to this larger shortcoming is an array of lesser sins (among spare virtues) that render it unfit as drama or comedy or commentary.

The story here is that 16-year-old Juno (Ellen Page) has gotten pregnant by her dull wrestler boyfriend, played perhaps too exactingly by chinless wonder Michael Cera (of Superbad, where he was equally inert).

After some phony grappling with the abortion option (see also Knocked Up), Juno decides to give the baby up for adoption to a local couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) whose excrutiatingly appointed home is straight out of a Crate & Barrel photo shoot.  Meanwhile Juno must find the strength to break the news to her unflappable prole parents, whose low expectations are instant comic fodder, and she must deal with the usual teen fantasies of everlasting romantic love with whoever her lab partner happens to be this year.

The movie disappoints on nearly every level.  To get the superficials out of the way first, the soundtrack is nauseating, the sort of tuneless indie aural vomit produced by turning a dial and pressing a button AND OUT COMES QUIRKY.  In a similar vein the opening credits are done the way only six figure designers pretending to be first year art students can manage, a tired indie staple along with kooky dialogue, odd-looking characters, and sass-talking eight-year-olds.  Just having to look at Michael Cera onscreen for more than a few seconds is a depressing experience, never mind the stomach-churning sex scene he has with Page – which is not quite a sex scene but nonetheless is thoroughly unappetizing.

The adolescents in the movie speak through so many layers of sardonic detachment that it is impossible to like them or care what decisions they end up making.  Even this oldest of teen crisis gags is shrugged off with zero emotional depth, as if everything in their lives is just one big postmodern spoof that they need only respond to with the appropriate ironic youth jargon.  Their sole motivation in life is to produce flippant commentary about it.  It is difficult to conceive of a more profound emotional disassociation.

In one of the movie's few unintentional ironies, it is the neurotic yuppie couple who are the most human and consequently the most sympathetic characters in the story.  Jennifer Garner, in a surprising performance, is painfully anxious about her prospective adoptive motherhood, having been burned once before by another presumably less formulaically jaded teen mother.  Jason Bateman's comic timing is on display, as highlighted by the movie's trailer, but also of note is his understated portrayal of a failed husband.

But the movie's good points end there.  It is all resolved in a tidy, feel-good ending that manages two saccharine lies where it could have got by with only one.  It is moreso an affront in that it pretends to offer some serious or credible perspective on its subject matter, where it really has only glib patter and counter-patter, like a long cocktail party conversation as imagined by a narcissist with himself.   

3:10 to Nausea… A better title for 3:10 to Yuma would have been Unforgiven Redux, as once again we get the postmodern Western treatment with Christian Bale as a one-legged failure who hasn't fucked his wife in years and whose only comfort is indulgent self-pity.  In place of life as it was lived or simply a rousing story, the audience is led through a rote series of "deconstructions" of genre and character formulated by some hack screenwriter who is pissy all the time about who fucking cares.

Due to a ridiculous series of events too boring to relate here even in summary form, Bale is asked to help escort a stagecoach robber played by Russell Crowe to Yuma to be tried and hanged.  Crowe is the Western version of Hannibal Lecter, a superhuman ruffian who is cultured, artistic, witty, sensual, a great hit with the ladies,* and the fastest, deadest shot in the West.  And so very politically correct – when questioned about all the men he's killed and families he's destroyed, Crowe replies with all the sanctimony of a faggot screenwriter about the horrible injustices done to the Red Man.

This dynamic rascal couldn't be more different than the one-legged rancher, right?  But wait you're so wrong, the cripple and the ruffian end up forming a deep bond because the cripple is sad that his son doesn't respect him.

This is no joke:  Crowe actually stops in the middle of choking Bale to death as Bale blubbers his dark secret (that he lost his leg by turning tail in battle and getting shot by someone on his own side).  Deeply moved by this incontinent confession, Crowe resolves right there that he's going to make a hero out of Bale by marching onboard that train through a hail of bullets if he has to.  As preposterous as that sounds, it only gets worse, reaching an apotheosis of eye-rolling contrivance as Crowe shoots down his entire gang in a confused effort to patch up Bale's father-son relationship.

Bale has one good line, "For making me nervous," but everything else he says makes you want to punch him in the face.  Go back to playing psychos, Bale, you suck as a pussy suffering in silence.

If you like this movie and you are a guy then I'm sorry but you are quite simply gay and should have rented Brokeback Mountain instead.  What is the point of reinventing Westerns and filling them with pussies and cardboard villains (Crowe of course isn't the real villain, he is the cultured antihero; the real villains are garden variety bounty hunters and crooked lawmen who just want to turn in Crowe for the money).

Naturally the critics slurp up all this postmodern faggotry.  The only part I liked was a cameo by Luke Wilson as a Chinaman-busting railroad guy, a first for Wilson in that at no point do you hear him creak like old floorboards.