Best Movies of the 00s

2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004)
Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)
Dolls (Takeshi Kitano, 2002)
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
Howl's Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004)
In Praise of Love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)
Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
What Time Is It There? & The Skywalk is Gone (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001/2002)
Unknown Pleasures (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2002)

Darkness at Noon

46 years and counting . . .

Unlike the circumstances surrounding "9/11" -- an event which made an already vicious, criminal, stupid, narcissistic nation even more vicious, criminal, stupid, and narcissistic -- November 22nd, 1963 really did change everything. It broke the country's heart; and it destroyed for good all faith in our Empire as a just and open one. As I wrote in a post about David Talbot's necessary book Brothers:

Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff ourselves up, the assumption that people are basically good, and the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. And that is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from "Brothers" will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.

Yet we dream. And we hope. (Two most human longings brilliantly and ruthlessly exploited by conman Barack Obama in '07 and '08.) John F. Kennedy often spoke about his own dreams and hopes for a better America, and never so eloquently as his tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College, October 26th, 1963.

"There's No Bringing Her Back"

At the end of Vertigo (1958), immediately before its jaw-dropping finale, James Stewart stands before Kim Novak, who has given him her soul. (Along with her hair color, wardrobe, and manner of speaking.) She stands stripped and naked, willfully transformed back into his dream image.

The madman doesn't even see her.

If anyone proves that movie actresses are born and not made, it is Kim Novak. Often mistaken for just another dumb blonde-with-big-breasts, a product of Harry Cohn's enormous casting couch, she is in fact the loving spirit of 1950s cinema, the tender germ in the living plasma of the Studio System as it was passing away.

Her training was nil. And it seems as if she did not know what she was getting into, moving to Hollywood from Chicago in 1952. But the camera knew, and was very glad to give us her first wonderment.

There it is, pure Novak: earnest, open, longing, without a trace of narcissism or ego. How many of our greatest movie stars happened by miracle? Mitchum, Lancaster, Wayne, Grant, Stanwyck, Astaire, Cagney, Cooper, Vivien Leigh. And Novak. The heart wants what it wants, she says to us. And so does the camera. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of our movie transformation from the Studio to the market-obsessed vampires now in charge of our culture is that happy accidents and miracles are no longer possible.

Her natural ardor became more fully formed as Frank Sinatra's girlfriend in 1955's Man with the Golden Arm, where she recaptures her Chicago accent.

Vertigo, the first conversation.

She is at the heart of perhaps the most radical story moment in theatrical movie history. (Ultimate spoiler ahead.)

Stewart's madman has lost his love object (he thinks to death), yet he sees someone on the street who sort of looks like her. He follows the woman to a small hotel room where she lives. Up to this point in Vertigo, Hitchcock has kept us deep within the Stewart character. Then, it all changes.

Now, we are inside her. Until then, almost 100 minutes into the film, we have cared deeply and obsessively for the Stewart character, dreaming with him as a romantic. Inside Novak until her end and the movie's end, we experience Stewart for what in fact he is: a sick exploiter of this woman purely for his own ego needs. Look again at the ending. ("I heard voices.") She has made herself over for him, head to toe, and what does he care about? Nothing, except how she tricked him. And in her final descent into movie eternity, he returns -- in full crucifixion, martyr pose -- to his land of self-pity and loss. Not caring a damn for the dead woman below.

Hitchcock is often looked at as a cold and calculating manipulator of movie characters and movie audiences. Yet he is also the greatest director of female suffering not named Mizoguchi or Ophuls or Dreyer: Bergman in Notorious; Janet Leigh in Psycho; Suzanne Pleshette in The Birds; Tippi Hedren in Marnie and The Birds. And perhaps most spiritually with Vera Miles as the wife in The Wrong Man, a film not about Catholic guilt or confused identity or the horrors of jail, but a movie about the sufferings of an average 1950s housewife. (Just watch the first scene between husband and wife, when he arrives home near dawn and she is still up with a "toothache." Hitchcock shoots it to make it seem like they are on different moons. And ends it with Henry Fonda swooping down on Miles's neck like a vampire. Before his arrest.) Miles, of course, was Hitchcock's first choice for Vertigo. Lucky for us, she became pregnant and backed out of the role. Without Novak's woundedness, sorrow and operatic desire, Vertigo would have been much less.

The Fifties were over. But in 1960, producer/director Richard Quine cast Novak in Strangers When We Meet -- a suburban soap opera about infidelity. It stars Ernie Kovacs and the incredibly wooden Kirk Douglas, but the movie is all Novak, as a housewife who has an affair with Douglas. Joshua Logan, director of Picnic, once said that Kim Novak wore her beauty "like a crown of thorns" -- a crown on full display here.

Kinuyo-san at 100

Our best film critic Chris Fujiwara has written a love letter to the greatest movie actress of all time.

As Fujiwara points out, she made 15 movies with Kenji Mizoguchi, 19 with Hiroshi Shimizu, 20 with Gosho, 9 with Kinoshita, 10 with Ozu, 6 with Mikio Naruse. So it is safe to say that no actor or actress in movie history has ever (or will ever) work as regularly with as many great directors as did Kinuyo Tanaka.

She began at the age of 14 in 1924 and would go on to act in over 200 movies. (The exact number is unknown due to the extermination of so many Japanese films [and human beings] in the US carpet-bombings of Tokyo.) She was the first female movie director in Japan, an achievement which cost her the deep emotional and professional relationship she'd had with Mizoguchi, who had no patience for woman directors.

At the centenary of her birth, where does one begin to choose a handful of tributary scenes, among the dozens (or hundreds) of possibilities? One thing Tanaka fans know: she was a great closer. If the most difficult thing for a filmmaker (or novelist) is the creation of a miracle ending that sums up all that came before, who better to call on then she?

David Thomson on Army (1944):

    Kinuyo Tanaka is a mother, whose son is going off to war. At first, she refuses to accept what's happening. Then, away in the distance, she hears the new recruits parading and she starts running through the empty streets until she reaches the avenue where they're marching. Rushing frantically through the crowd, she dodges and pushes her way until she finds her son. The emotion builds in a long tracking shot, and (because film stock was so scarce by then) it had to be done in one take. That was all Tanaka needed.

Then came the Occupation and General Douglas MacArthur, who ordered all filmmakers to dig deep and find that liberal/humanist, democratic, socially-conscious center at the heart of Japanese society, mostly by showing the corruption and rot of everything which had come before, before the society was starved and carpet-bombed and nuked (in the midst of surrender pleas) by the democratic humanist Americans. Still, we're talking about Ozu and Mizoguchi, who managed to find greatness.

A Hen in the Wind (1948) is Yasujiro Ozu's Mizoguchi movie. (Can one imagine, even under Occupation, Mizoguchi making an Ozu film?) Tanaka plays a loving wife left at home by a drafted husband, one missing-in-action and presumed dead. Because of the American extermination of Japanese society, Tanaka must do all she can to take care of herself and her son -- including GI prostitution. When the husband unexpectedly returns, the wife is joyous and grateful, for herself and the boy -- but she must confess what she has done. Ozu ends the scene (and the story) with one of the most stunning shots in movie history.

Also from '48, a real Mizoguchi, with an ending perhaps the closest movies have come to religious opera: Women of the Night. Tanaka and her little sister have been separated by the US-created hell of postwar Japan, Tanaka forced into street prostitution, her sister merely wandering. Eventually, they come together, in a bombed-out area surrounded by the remains of what once a church. Tanaka recognizes the sister, and recognizes what imouto-chan has started to become.

Ugetsu (1953) -- perhaps the greatest of Japanese movies. Tanaka again plays a devoted and dutiful wife, to a genius potter who must seek other things, during country-wide war. Midway through the film, during the husband/artist's long absence, we see her wounded by a warrior, as she is carrying home her small boy. At last, the husband returns, oblivious to what may have occurred.

Gilbert Adair: "Sansho the Bailiff (1954) is one of those films for which cinema exists — just as it perhaps exists for the sake of its last scene.” A mother and son are forcibly separated for decades, the son becoming a powerful progressive governor (power eventually renounced by him), the mother sold into slavery and prostitution. She is now blind and decrepit, her feet broken to keep her from escaping.

The son finds her.

Dog on Back with Paws in Air

Here we have Richard Nixon, in what is probably the most loathsome (and certainly most groveling) speech ever made by a 20th-Century American national candidate. (Actually, forget the "probably.")

It is 1952 and 39-year-old first-term California Senator Richard Milhous Nixon -- known to the country mainly for his post-New Deal union-busting and championing of anti-Communist hysteria -- has strangely been nominated for Vice President by popular Republican presidential candidate General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not long after the nomination, newspapers report that Republican campaign donors were buying influence with Nixon by providing him with a secret slush fund for his personal use. Republicans, including many within the Eisenhower campaign, pressure Ike to drop Nixon from the ticket. Using his own money, Nixon buys national TV time for a response.

He ran out of time. When Nixon realized he was cut off and could not finish, the little jerk burst into tears.

But it worked. Eisenhower backed off, Richard Nixon was elected Vice President in 1952, and again in '56. The rest is criminal and genocidal history.

Full speech, go here.

Oh, What a Life It Was!

TimeWarner in partnership with Google (we're definitely heading toward a place where we'll feel perfectly fine saying things like "My baby was born, in partnership with Google" and "I went to the bathroom in partnership with Google" or "I got my girlfriend off last night in partnership with Google") --

Where was I? TimeWarner in partnership with Google has released the entire Life Magazine Archive from 1936 - 1972.

Politically, the issues are a Cold War mess, but still. Looking at these covers and words and images (and ads!), one can only ask: "What happened here? Where is this vivid, colorful, funny, masculine, confident, feminine, stylish, warm, sexy, youthful, bright, completely self-involved yet still modest nation?"

How did we get so old and so stupid so fast?

Murakami Scrapes Bottom

Perhaps the worst book ever written by a (formerly) major writer -- and truly amazing someone was paid to "write" this 180-page scribble. But then the publishing world is like the yakuza: once you're in, you're in. (Or you're dead.)

Open a page, any page. 24:

It's August 14th, a Sunday. This morning I ran an hour and fifteen minutes listening to Carla Thomas and Otis Redding on my MD player. In the afternoon I swam 1,400 yards at the pool and in the evening swam at the beach. And after that I had dinner--beer and fish--at the Hanalea Dolphin Restaurant just outside the town of Hanalea. The dish I have is walu, a kind of white fish. They grill it for me over charcoal, and I eat it with soy sauce. The side dish is vegetable kababs, plus a large salad.

No desert?

Page 139: 

There were torrential rains in parts of [Japan], and a lot of people died. They say it's all because of global warming. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Some experts claim it is, some claim it isn't. There's some proof that it is, some proof that it isn't. But still people say that most of the problems the earth is facing are, more or less, due to global warming. When sales of apparel go down, when tons of driftwood wash up on the shore, when there are floods and droughts, when consumer prices go up, most of the fault is scribed to global warming. What the world needs is a set villain that people can point at and say, "It's all your fault!"

If only Karl Marx had such understanding.

88:

Young girls in revealing bikinis are sunbathing in beach towels, listening to their Walkmen or iPods. An ice cream van stops and sets up shop. Someone's playing a guitar, an old Neil Young tune, and a long-haired dog is single-mindedly chasing a Frisbee. A Democrat psychiatrist (at least that's who I think he is) drives along the river road in a russet-colored Saab convertible.

A Democrat psychiatrist -- "a least that's who I think he is." Since Murakami long ago stopped being able to perceive anyone beyond his or her Yuppie externals, how interesting. As Truman Capote once said of Kerouac "This isn't writing. It's typing."

And from page 99:

If possible, I'd like to avoid ... literary burnout. My idea of literature is something more spontaneous, more cohesive, something with a kind of natural, positive vitality. For me, writing a novel is like climbing a mountain, struggling up the face of the cliff, reaching the summit after a long and arduous ordeal. . . That's my aim as a novelist. And besides, at this point I don't have the leisure to be burned out. Which is exactly why even though people say 'He's no artist,' I keep on running.

Literary burnout?? This guy's become a cross between one of Billy Crystal's writing students in Throw Momma from the Train and John Cassavetes at the end of The Fury.

What happened?

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle remains not only one of the great late-20th Century novels, but for me one of the most important private books. I was lucky enough to find it, or it found me, during a time of brutal divorce. I read the book three times and it helped me to heal and to grieve. And there are other lovely achievements: Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border and the short story masterpiece "Tony Takitani." What happened to Murakami is right here in this flyspeck of a running book: the man now revels in his own navel-gazing narcissism. Has there ever been a writer as in love with his own thought process as Murakami? Okay, sure: Mailer, Miller, Lawrence, Henry James, Simone Weil, Goethe. But in Murakami's case, we're talking about a meatball mind. He seems very hip to the notion that one must push one's strengths and forget about what one was not blessed with. And when his beautiful craft and strangeness carried the day, he produced beautiful works. Since things began to fall apart at about the moment he became a Big Time Literary Celebrity, whatever balance he once had between the unconscious magic of creation and his own "ideas" was trashed by new found fame. The ideas became predominant. And trash is what he's produced since.

But he sure knows his audience -- evidently as self-involved and as incapable (or unwilling) to engage something outside themselves as is Murakami. He knows the happiness or sadness of every muscle in his body. Yet what about fatherhood, Haru-san? You've been married to the same lovely devoted woman since you were both in college, and you have all the yen in the world. Where are your children? Instead of wasting time on 62-mile Ubermarathons, try helping the poor. Try fighting in a war. Maybe try homelessness for a month, sort of a modern day Sullivan's Travels. Prison helps the soul, so they say. Try it.

Anything. But stop eating your damn walu.

Where's My Nobel Prize?

I realize the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has historically committed occasional acts of insanity. Arafat? Elie Weisel?? Henry Kissinger???

But what in holy heck has Barack Hussein Obama done in these past nine months to deserve this? There are almost as many US troops in Iraq (and certainly no lessening of the throat-grip the US has on the country), he's expanded the war in Afghanistan and brought it to Pakistan, he's let Israel punk him on settlements, Iran has blown up in his face (because he wants it that way), the Pentagon budget is again the largest in world history, and not one damned nuke has been destroyed. Besides sending thousands of storm troopers to Pittsburgh for the G-20. . .

WTF?

But heck -- I want peace so much, and not just in the Middle East, but everywhere!!

Plus: people must stop chopping trees, fishing out the seas, driving SUVs, eating meat, slapping kids and they have to start walking their dogs more, being nice to their wives, husbands, parents and neighbors and pick up some litter, while singing and smiling and wearing way less polyester. And just so many other noble, Nobel things. More yoga for example, and fruit and veggies and up with local farming and let's have more respect for non-white people -- and white people and even Muslims and, what the hell, Jews too! And poor Africans. And cats and chickens and some bacteria, the good ones. But not viruses. Better schools, end bullying, free healthcare. All that and tons more of only good things. And everyone floss more and ride a bike.

Ok, my eyes are closed, hands are out: Prize, please.

Who's Being Naive, Vince?

I have no doubt, none, that John F. Kennedy was murdered by his own national security state, a state (or significant parts of it) which -- because he was moving to end the Cold War and set America on a different sort of historical journey: politically, culturally, and morally -- saw the man as a traitor. So the fetid, life-hating, sex-hating scum -- let's picture them as this summer's Town Hall missing-links, only with lots and lots of power -- arranged to have his head blown off. At this point in our evaluation of the crime, the Warrenistas and the reality-based community both have a Mount Everest of facts and "factoids" to support their theory (any theory): because of how much time has passed, because of the mind-numbing amount of information available, because of how each and every piece of evidence in the case has been politicized (is it just a coincidence that almost all Warren-supporters -- on the left we have Chomsky and punk Alex Cockburn, on the right we have... well everyone -- hate JFK?), because of serious new information continually being released -- we must choose. We must choose our narrative and any narrative at this point must leave out many things. For me, the atmosphere of early-1960s Cold War provides a much more logical generator of the crime than does psychobabble about Krazy Kommie Oswald doing the deed, simply because God/Marx/Marina's period caused Jack Kennedy to drive by Oswald's open window.

 

Vince Bugliosi disagrees and this 3,000 page monument to True Believing in Official Fairy Tales is the result. Unlike 90% of Reclaiming History wags, I've actually read all 1,700 text pages, 1,000 pages of endnotes (just print them out from the CD based on what chapter you're in -- great endnotes!), hundreds of source-note pages, plus two photo sections. You must hand it to Mr. Bugliosi -- he sure is the Joan of Arc of this event. Regardless of POV -- and of course his POV is to basically suffocate and de-mystify the mysterious -- one cannot but admire his passion and hard work. And, he is a very funny writer. His various descriptions of Oswald the Cheapskate, Oswald the Potential Jet Hijacker ("jumping around the house in his underwear, preparing athletically for the hijacking, only caused baby June to think he was playing with her"), Marina the Sex Maniac, Marguerite the Harpy (and the Sex Maniac). His best humor (and his nastiest spite) is left for the real chuckleheads in the research community: the pathetic Robert Groden (VB's telling of Groden's self-destruction over O.J.'s shoes is almost worth the price of the book), the hapless "photo expert" Jack White, Mark Lane's endless sliminess and self-promotion etc.

But the problem with the book is its boy scout level worship of everything Official. Bugliosi discredits most everything he writes because from early on we see that his prism is exactly what one would expect from an establishment-based former D.A. (From Los Angeles of all places! L.A. law enforcement may not be the cesspool that Dallas's was in the early-1960s, but it was [and remains] pretty close.) The book is a valentine to the honor of Gerald Ford, Earl Warren, J.Edgar Hoover, David Belin, Arlen Specter, Henry Wade(!), Jesse Curry, Will Fritz, Allen Dulles(!!), every member of the Dallas Police Department (except Roger Craig, of course), every member of the FBI, every member of the Clark Panel/Rockefeller Commission/HSCA/ARRB, every member of the Secret Service (except Abraham Bolden), every member of the mainstream media circa 1963-64, the Bethesda autopsy doctors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dick Helms and James Angleton, those fine patriots David Atlee Phillips, David Morales, Sam Halpern and Guy Bannister, plus every official crime lab Vince could think of.

How touching. (Or as VB would say, "my, my.") Yes, my-my indeed. What sort of world does Bugliosi live in? Are we really supposed to take on faith -- which is what one must do to accept much of the evidence he provides -- the honor of people involved in investigating such a history-changing event? Yes, we are. There must be a 1,000 instances in the text and endnotes along the lines of: "What kind of loonie-bird could believe [fill-in-the-blank] would jeopardize his life/career/reputation/freedom by covering up murder?"

Well, where do we start? Sadly, the history of the world is one long continuing account of people in power doing exactly that in order to remain in power, exactly to keep their reputations/freedoms/careers. If a bunch of dime-a-dozen Ivy League legal hustlers (and oh boy how VB loves the Ivy League!) trying to make their bones are faced with the challenge of covering up a crime which if exposed would crack in two the very establishment they wish to enter and dominate, and if there is already plenty of proof that being offered that gig and turning it down for some kind of pusillanimous and righteous reason may lead to harmful effects (Ruby/Oswald being Exhibit A), the really confusing and naive conclusion would be to assume the hustlers would not grab for the brass ring. And to assume some sort of holy righteousness on the part of the apparatchiks who made up the Warren Commission, a personal morality that would lead John McCloy to stand up and say "Hey, Mr. Chief Justice. This stinks. And the odor is coming from my pal James Angleton's death-squad offices down at Langley, and from our Mexico City Station" -- to quote that great philosopher Michael Corleone: "Who's being naive, Vince?"

If only the world and the powerful were that way. We know they are not. And surely former D.A. Bugliosi knows they are not. So one wonders what private ghosts he's trying to exorcise with this book. He's a brilliant man with a great sense of humor -- he can't possibly believe in the automatic honor of these people, can he? Is he trying to convince himself in a late stage of life that everything he did in service to establishment power was not so much sound and fury, signifying nothing? Is Mr. Bugliosi trying to make up for not becoming a revolutionary? Is he trying to avoid the same feeling Dave "Maurice Bishop" Phillips felt on his death bed, when he confessed to his estranged brother that "Yes" he was in Dallas on 11/22/63? -- the kind of feeling one gets when one looks toward eternity?

I believe Mr. Bugliosi is -- unlike practically all members of great power elites -- an honorable man. There is no way someone creates this sort of work for the money. And it is heroic how far he went with his obsession. (In medieval times, like his role model Joan of Arc, he would've been burned at the stake.) Next time, sir, see a psychiatrist.

(And for what really happened that day in Dallas: James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable has the answers.)

Stars in My Crown

What a Golden Age of Kennedy Assassination history and interpretation! Masterpieces of writing and research: Gerald McKnight's brilliantly argued Breach of Trust; Professor Joan Mellen's white-hot Farewell to Justice; and the tributary hymn-of-despair in David Talbot's Brothers. (We've also had the occasional fly-in-the-ointment from hall monitors and disinformationists: Waldron, Myers, Russo, Sturdivan, Bugliosi, Robert Stone. And it is amusing how virulently, predictably, and cowardly the mainstream media -- the Cerberai of the Unspeakable - continue to bark at the moon. As Lyndon Johnson once said: "Throw your bread upon the waters, and the sharks will get it.")

James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable is also a hymn, in a way a companion piece to the Talbot book. But Douglass's sound is a hymn of belief, hope, and transcendence. In Kennedy's murder by the forces of the Unspeakable, a contemporary crucifixion, Douglass sees meaning beyond the resulting Vietnam genocide, beyond the takeover of our society by back-stabbers, soul-crushers and ghouls, beyond the shifting of cultural meaning toward something hideously empty and narcissistic -- meaning in the symbol of a man willing to die for his beliefs, for his (in Douglass's term) "turning." One can argue with this, for at the heart of Douglass's profoundly spiritual argument, there is something anti-political. Rather than viewing John Kennedy's murder as a political and economic act by men who saw themselves only in those terms, we experience it through Douglass's writing as a modern day Stations of the Cross. First Station: Kennedy refuses war with Laos. Second Station: Kennedy refuses invasion and air attacks during the Bay of Pigs; Third Station: Berlin Wall goes up, Kennedy lets it stand. Etc. It is an agony, as we follow Kennedy's turning and his movement toward the Golgotha of Dallas.

So what do we do? Much can be said for acceptance and a belief in transcendence, a belief in Grace. But as Jack Kennedy said: "Here on earth, God's work must truly be our own." Do we let this crucifixion stand? Do we accept the vampires now in almost complete control? Do we try to protect a man who may soon be experiencing his own turning, Barack Obama? (Not necessary.) Do we take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Can they ever be ended here on earth? Do we let Catholicism be defined by Hitler-Jugend Joseph Ratzinger, the man who led the war against Liberation Theology? Do we let Christianity be defined by Tim LaHaye and his life-haters?

Such questions. That JFK and the Unspeakable forces us to ask them marks the Douglass book as a rare and beautiful masterpiece, one I'll be going back to many times through the years.

The Glory and the Sorrow

 

The most beautifully written, most passionate, and probably the saddest of all the books in the canon. As a reader of most everything released on John and Robert Kennedy and their murders, I certainly never expected to pick up a Kennedy book and find myself thinking on almost every page: "Man, I never knew that." You'll find yourself thinking the same throughout Brothers.

The book rejects all irony, camp, narcissism, deconstructionism, moral relativism, nihilism, sexual prurience and other malignancies of our time. (`Though the word "Bush" is mentioned.) John and Robert Kennedy were heroes. They were murdered by evil men. End of story.

David Talbot takes the top off the cesspool of enemies who brought down the US Government in 1963 and murdered the leading Presidential candidate of 1968. Who were the enemies? Sex haters, race haters, America-Firsters, oil junkies, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Dick Helms and Des FitzGerald, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Goldwaterites. (Basically the sum and substance of the Bush Reich.) And that's the horror of the book. Forty years later, what is left on a popular or establishment level of the idea that society and government must be judged by the way the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of?

The answer is: nothing. There is nothing left of that. Which is why the sense of doom and sorrow one takes from Brothers will be long lasting. The worst of our history murdered the best and got away with it. Scott free. Not only did they get away with it, but they've created the sort of society diametrically opposed to everything JFK and RFK stood for: a country where the least human and most nakedly aggressive dominate everything. This was the newer world others' sought. Born from the gore of Dealey Plaza, they've achieved it.

For a bracing and deeply moving reminder of what was lost, one cannot do better than David Talbot's magnificent book.

Saint Joan

The United States of America has never really had its J'Accuse! -- until now. While the Dreyfus Affair was mere curiosity compared to the permanent, global-reaching effects of the national security state execution of President John F. Kennedy (don't think they're permanent? -- pick up a newspaper), quite a few books on the crime have been labeled Zolaesque: Rush to Judgment, Weisberg's Whitewash, Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After the Fact (a worthy forerunner to Farewell to Justice -- Meagher and Mellen being sisters of heart, toughness, and understanding -- if not conclusion), Anthony Summers's Conspiracy and, of course, Gerald Posner's Case Closed. (Just kidding). But they were not, because they couldn't be. The cover-up of the crime continued well into the 1990s and -- like the film or not -- it was Stone's JFK which caused the break in the dam. The wave of the past couple decades, beginning with the publication and media-embrace of the malignant Case Closed, has been intensely anti-conspiracy. As all US society has seemingly moved toward the worship of power for power's sake, leading to the establishment of the Bush/Cheney Reich, anti-conspiracy ideology has become its own form of totalitarianism: in the power-saturated universe of Millennial America, seething with plots, anti-plot pronouncements have become as necessary as squeals in a slaughterhouse. But there has been a counterwave, now tidal. More fresh evidence regarding 11/22/63 has become available these past years than was available to the Warren Commission, Jim Garrison, or the House Select Committee on Assassinations when they were conducting their investigations/cover-ups. We've had to be patient, and now it's pay-off time: Christopher Lawford on the family, Gareth Porter and John Newman on JFK and Vietnam, Bradley Ayers and Richard Whalen on Kennedy and Cuba, Gerald McKnight on the Commission, and David Talbot's coming book on Bobby and the murder (`though the Mellen book may've made that release somewhat compromised).

Farewell to Justice is the book we've been waiting for since the day the music died. Professor Joan Mellen's always been one of the world's best film critics, a magnificent biographer (Kay Boyle, Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Knight!), and a great writing teacher. Now she has broken the case. There's no guessing here. No theoretical chapters on the validity of the Zapruder Film, the DalTex Building vs. a storm-drain opening, no jacket holes or bullet fragments. Just the moment-by-moment narrative of what happened to Jack Kennedy, 46 years ago. And best of all, why it happened. The names are here: initiators, designers, middle-managers, and the mechanics. Mellen is also overwhelming in her recapture of what was really happening in the early 1960s. Not only those who care not about history relive it. As Americans, all of us re-live Dallas every day of our lives. Everywhere we look, we can see the ghost of John F. Kennedy -- and the shadows of the men and women who killed him. There is only one way to finally let him -- and us -- rest in peace: a cleaning-out from power of all those directly and indirectly responsible for the murder, and of all those who have knowingly benefited from it. Germany could only put the ghosts of the Third Reich to rest through a complete de-Nazification. The United States must do the same.

There is also sadness in the book, for those of us who see the Kennedys as true heroes. (And they were.) Mellen has solved many mysteries in the book and one of the most startling is her clinching the case as to whether or not Robert Kennedy knew of the Castro murder plots. As Mellen demonstrates, his involvement went beyond mere knowledge. By answering this question, she also answers the question as to why the Kennedy Family has been so forceful in impairing post-Warren investigations of the crime.

Mellen's passion, brilliance, understanding, writing talent and just-plain-sleuthing-genius has resulted in a book which will change history. The corporate media will no doubt try to burn her at the stake. They will fail. Because there is no answer to this book. Except justice and revenge.