Love, As Always, Pete

The Weekly Letters, by A. Pedersen Wood

November 6, 2008

Dear Everyone:

So Barack Obama won the election and will be the first African American President of the United States.  As Whoopi Goldberg said, upon becoming the first African-American to win the Academy Award for Best Actress since Gone With the Wind, "It's about time."

Here in California, the Initiative for a High-Speed Train system won (Yeah!).  Number 4, an attempt to force frightened, pregnant teenage girls to confide in their abusive parents failed (Yeah!).  Number 8, which will change the state constitution to "protect" marriage won (Boo!).  And apparently, egg-laying chickens will now be able to spread their wings, but not fly away (really, really couldn’t care less.)

In the meantime...

“Jeannie” and I had spent an entire weekend together in Las Vegas.  The following weekend, we agreed to spend some time apart and I went to see W., Oliver Stone's depiction of what one critic called the national trauma, i.e., the eight years of the Bush Administration.  George W. Bush is portrayed by actor Josh Brolin.  Never heard of him?

He's the son of actor James Brolin (Marcus Welby, M.D., Hotel, latest husband of Barbra Streisand).  Josh played the older brother in Goonies (filmed in Astoria, Oregon) and played James Butler (later "Wild Bill") Hickok on The Young Riders, a television series about the Pony Express that lasted longer than the Pony Express did (they got preempted by the continental telegraph.)

I can see why Stone cast Brolin:  He needed a relatively "unknown" actor who still had the chops to play "W" from his drunken college frat days through the decision to declare war on a country that wasn't a threat to us.  Brolin delivers an excellent performance.  I'm looking forward to seeing him play Dan White in Milk which opens the first week in December.

James Cromwell plays Bush 41, with Ellen Burstyn as "the silver fox" Barbara Bush.  Because this film is really about George W., Karl Rove, the Machiavellian architect of the Republican party that put the Shrub in the White House comes across as a little weasel of a guy who always seems to have piles of reports in his hands.  Richard Dreyfuss plays Dick Cheney.  Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) and Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) show up in the modern track along with a barely recognizable Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton.)  While the others are portrayed as strong people, “Condy” is portrayed as timid and diffident.  Hardly the woman who sat on the Company Board of Directors for a number of years and had a supertanker named after her.  (They renamed it when she joined the Bush Administration.)

But this is Stone’s film and thus is seen through Stone’s filter.  Nevertheless, it’s very entertaining.  They even made an effort to include some of the better known “Bushisms” (“He misunderestimated me”).

(The Complete Bushisms – Updated Frequently can be found at http://www.slate.com/id/76886/)

In other news…

We got a good wet storm through here last Monday, but the California Drought continues, so everybody please continue to pray for rain and lots of snow in the mountains.

Love, as always,

 

Pete

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