What a mildly amusing trifle—emphasis on mildly and trifle. A black-and-white* silent film that is an homage to silent films, with a retro aspect ratio to boot. Got it. A silent movie star (Jean Dujardin) in 1929 Hollywoodland finds his career in tatters with the advent of sound. A young former costar (Berenice Bejo) with whom he had enjoyed a serious flirtation goes with the technological flow and becomes a bigger-than-life screen goddess with her first talkie. Think seriously dumbed-down versions of A Star Is Born meets Singin’ in the Rain meets Sunset Boulevard meets about a half hour too long. (Seriously: This film would have been much more impressive if it had taken half the time to tell the same story.)

Never before have I seen a film so desperately in need of some comic relief—even though most of this melodrama is intended to be comical. How this overlong exercise in nostalgia could have used a Harpo Marx skitting across the frame, stealing a scene or two. There’s a giggle here and there, mostly because of a preternaturally charismatic doggie, but otherwise there’s neither wit nor originality to either the story or its illustration. Director Michel Hazanavicius composes his shots with all the visual elan of a series of court sketches. Yes, there’s the odd canted angle and playing with camera height in a couple of scenes, but otherwise his compositions make Jim Jarmusch look like Sergei Eisenstein.

The only saving graces are the performances by its two stars. Dujardin brings a Latin panache to his disaffected leading man, a second-rate Valentino kicking against the goads, who fears sound like some fear death (for a reason that becomes all too obvious in the film’s one genuinely charming moment, really a punchline). Bejo is a delight — light on her feet, with a winsome smile and airy appeal. Imagine a magical mix of Lena Horne, Irene Cara, Myrna Loy, and Thandie Newton. And yes, there’s Uggi, the almost-human pup. Normally, I resist cute pets in films like Hal 2000 resisted opening the pod-bay doors. But the dog comes close to achieving the kind of comic scene-stealing this film craved.

If the Academy is in a sentimental mood regarding Old Cinema, please please let them reward Hugo. As for you, my dear readers, if you want a taste of real silent genius, yes, there’s Eisenstein. And Sherlock Jr. And King Vidor’s The Crowd. If you want a really entertaining modern take on the silent film with a Latin twist, try Ettore Scola’s Le Bal. And there’s always Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie, with its manic energy and emphatic “No!” uttered by none other than Marcel Marceau.

As for The Artist, I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “Just say no.” It’s not a bad film by any means. At it’s best, it’s a one-off oddity, a distraction from the MI:4s. At it’s worst, it’s look-at-your-watch time. I certainly can’t imagine sitting through it again. I’m rather surprised I sat through it once.

*Actually, this is a study in gray. It’s impossible to reproduce the same texture of black-and-white films of, say, the noir era. Film stock and processing are simply not the same.

His most profound childhood memories were of a German soldier waving a bayonet in his mother’s face, dead Allied soldiers, severe hunger, and children from his town losing limbs to scattered grenades.

When old enough he tried to emigrate to Australia, but a grudge against his family led someone to report, falsely, to the Australian authorities that he was a member of the Communist Party, and his visa was denied.

He turned to America, and booked steerage on an ocean liner, but at the last minute, fearing more sabotage, he canceled his ticket and took a plane, though he hated to fly.

Although he had wanted to be a lawyer, the war and the Italian government’s dilatory response to rebuilding the worst war-torn parts of the South left him with a fifth-grade education. After work in construction, he taught himself the intricacies of locksmithing such that we was called to repair the night depositories, safe-depository boxes, and time locks in banks throughout New York State.

One of his more memorable jobs was servicing the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Downtown Manhattan. He traveled what seemed like a mile underground to a vault whose door was so thick it was impossible to move manually. He disassembled and repaired the time lock so it would once again open and close on schedule and automatically.

He left the Catholicism of his early years for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod so he could receive the sacraments with his family.

He performed his responsibilities as a father and husband with unfailing rigor and consistency. Not a day passed that his family did not know where he was. Never did they worry that a single one of his paychecks would go toward anything but bills.

He had two fears in life: being without work and aging in such a way that he would be totally dependent on someone else.

He asked very little of life, being happy to have survived a brutal childhood and content with the necessities and only the occasional indulgence. Life gave very little back. He was poorly paid all his working life and received nothing in the way of benefits.

At the age of 62, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, though both his parents lived into their mid-80s and his grandparents into their 90s without signs of dementia.

The disease would finally force him to retire when still capable of experiencing profoundly the loss of his much-loved work. As his condition worsened, his only lingering memories were of his childhood, namely, the war and having to remain very quiet for fear of the enemy during the days of occupation.

When finally confined to a nursing home, his wife would drive from Whitestone to Far Rockaway almost daily to see and care for him, then back home to Bayside. Anyone who knows Queens knows how wearying this could be day after day. She picked a nursing home in an “inconvenient” location because it was very clean, bright, and provided state-of-the-art care, or so she had been led to believe. A previous facility saw him being robbed of his cross and chain his first day there.

Despite the attention he received, he began to lose weight at an alarming rate, causing his family to suspect that the nursing-home attendants did not have the patience to sit and feed him and that, just as in childhood, he was slowly starving.

The Providence that saw him safely through a war and to the shores of the New World handed him over to his worst fear for the end of his life and stripped him of his dignity and personality.

He died just short of his 69th birthday, from pneumonia, not uncommon in Alzheimer’s patients.

His wife assumed he would die on the 13th of the month. Her mother had died August 13. Her father, May 13. Her younger brother, December 13.

He died January 13, 2001. (She, however, did not die on the 13th. She died on December 31, 2009.)

I can count the number of arguments I had with him on the fingers of one hand.

He loved soccer and hockey, and I tried to love them too.

He enjoyed spy novels, biographies, and the folk tales of Ignazio SIlone.

He played the guitar and loved opera. His car often resounded with arias on cassette, the inevitable birthday and Christmas present.

Every morning he bought the New York Daily News and read it over lunch. It was the working-man’s paper.

I worked with him one summer. We traveled to a bank on Long Island so he could repair the combination lock on the small safe that held the day’s cash, which was lodged inside the main vault. He tipped the safe over to empty it of literally tens of thousands of dollars in neatly wrapped bills. A bank employee was standing at the vault entrance watching, of course (the only cameras, at least in those days, were outside). And then she said, “Let me know when you’re finished, Tony”—and walked away. My father’s reputation for honesty was that indelible. No number of sermons could possibly have impressed me as much as that incident.

We had thoroughly memorized the dialogue from Young Frankenstein and would break out into snippets of it at odd moments, to the puzzlement of onlookers.

I can remember virtually every movie we ever saw together and the theater we saw it in. And there was a time when we were going to the movies together once a week. (The first Star Trek, the Astoria Theater; Animal House, same theater; Rocky, Five Towns Theater on Long Island; Raiders of the Lost Ark, the RKO Keith’s in Flushing; Rollerball, the Fresh Meadows, where we also saw Network and Terminator II; Blade Runner, the Sutton on 57th Street; Bicycle Thief and Miracle in Milan, the Thalia Soho, then we walked the few blocks to the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy; Alien (special screening), the Loews Twin on Second Avenue; The Seven Percent Solution (special screening), the New Yorker on the Upper West Side; Apocalypse Now (special screening), the Ziegfeld; The Deer Hunter (special screening), the Baronet/Coronet; The Abyss (special screening), Radio City Music Hall. I could do this all day.)

I wish he had lived to see my byline side by side with Sylvester Stallone’s, something he would have gotten the biggest kick out of.

Midway through his illness, when he was still able to live at home, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I came to stay in the house to care for him in her absence. He asked me repeatedly, “Why would the Lord allow this to happen to her? She’s such a good woman.” “To her.” Never “to me.” Never. He never complained. Even though he must have been terrified. (My mother recovered in such miraculous fashion that her case made the pages of an oncology journal.)

I still have the very first Bible he ever owned. It was given to him by a Lutheran pastor. It’s in Italian.

Not a day passes that I don’t miss him.

His name was Anthony Sacramone Sr. He was my father. And he would have been 80 today.

And I wanted someone to know.

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a “new atheism” as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins’s “aggressive” and “destructive” approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, De Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

“Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha, but you can build a temple to anything that’s positive and good,” he said. “That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens atheism has become known as a destructive force. But there are lots of people who don’t believe but aren’t aggressive towards religions.”

But the aforementioned meanie Richard Dawkins is playing spoilsport:

“Atheists don’t need temples,” the author of The God Delusion said. “I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.”

Oh, poo. I say it should be built. Think of all the fun stuff that would be constituent elements of such an unholy space: the Altar of Eugenics, the Statue of the Goddess Reason, instructions on how to celebrate the Feast of Brutus, organized pilgrimages to The 104th, the Enver Hoxha Library of Burned Books, and Mao Zedong “Great Leap Forward” sack races for the kids!

It would be made entirely of smoked glass, with no foundation or floor plan. Negotiating the space would be an act of sheer will and chance, and only the smartest and strongest will make it through the entire structure, although even they will be left with a nagging feeling that it was all ultimately futile and for no good purpose.

A waste of money? I think not. Before something can be wasted, it must have some endogenous purpose, no?

This spirit [of Lutheran freedom] should above all give one a certain distance from one’s cultural context and thus protection against becoming captive to it. But in the current American situation, it seems to me that the two central ideas of Lutheranism could provide guidance . . . both for a critique of the current situation and for a constructive stance.

1. A conviction that salvation occurs sola fide and the much-maligned doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, which of course rests on the distinction of law and gospel. Those are two core Lutheran ideas, and I think they are tremendously important if there is to be a Lutheran identity and Lutheran witness in this socio-cultural context, and political context. Now in this perspective, I think, all . . . sectors of the current cultural and religious scene can be subsumed under the category of works righteousness, as a violation of the anthropological understanding that the Christian as simul justus et peccator. How so?

Well . . . against the tepid moralism and the utilitarian psychologism of mainline Protestantism, the Lutheran witness would  reiterate the core of the gospel, which is not a new law, however tolerant or relaxed, but the triumphant breaking in of redemption into the world. The gospel does not provide a new moral code or a therapeutic spirituality. . . .

[I]n Arabic, the same word din (deen) applies both to religion and to law . . . so if an Arab asks you, “What is your religion?” in fact he is asking, “What is your law?” And I think the Christian answer is, “I don’t have a law.” This is not what the gospel is. The gospel does not provide a new law or a therapeutic spirituality of some sort. Rather it testifies to a cosmic transformation inaugurated by the Resurrection of Christ and moving toward its ultimate realization in his coming again. . . . Of course, this does not imply an antinomianism in which everything is permitted. Let me refer here to another Lutheran idea, that of the Three Uses of the Law. But it sharply relativizes the moral codes of any society or any age.

Berger self-identifies as a Lutheran, but also as a theological liberal (and politically mildly conservative), so you may not be able to embrace his entire argument. (I dare say, the use of historical criticism in studying the Scriptures may have been an act of intellectual or academic freedom (certainly Luther would have found it strange to attach his name to it); but it also brought with it certain presuppositions that did as much harm as good in understanding how the Scriptures were intended to be read by their human authors, to the extent such an investigation could prove fruitful or even possible. It is one thing to say that the gospel writers were rooted in a certain cultural context; it’s quite another to reduce them to it.)

Found on the Gnesio Lectures & Sermons page.

Robert Hegyes, who played the Puerto Rican Jew Juan Epstein (and who was himself of Hungarian-Italian extract), was both Chico and Harpo to Gabe Kaplan’s Groucho. Overshadowed by John Travolta, who would go on to stupid-super-stardom, and even Ron Palillo, who looked like he was game for a small career as the perennial whiny next-door neighbor, a poorer man’s Rob Schneider, Hegyes never quite gained the career traction his talent warranted.

I was sorry to hear that he died today at age 60.

My high school friends and I used to repeat their routines in class, including turning our desks around 180 degrees when our math teacher came into the room. That may not sound like much to brag about in the way of rebellion, but this was a small, strict Lutheran parochial school, and so it was tantamount to Italianate chaos destroying the machine-like efficiency of a Teutonic institution of lower learning.

Vinnie (“What?”) Barbarino, Juan, Freddie “Boom Boom” (“Hi, there”) Washington, and Arnold (“Ooh! Ooh!”) Horshack would be labeled “special needs” today, with a touch of Asperger’s and a side of Prozac, but they were just adolescent mentalities trapped in post-adolescent bodies.

So, in honor of the late great Juan Epstein, here are a few moments from the show that taught us all to say: “Up your nose with a rubber hose.” (And oh yeah: Remind me to tell you the story of how I got roped into keeping a somewhat “tipsy” Ron Palillo from feeling up the guests at a “Where Are They Now?” party thrown by Biography Magazine back in 1998. I also got my picture taken with Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island — our arms around each other. Yeah, you heard me. This was before I met my wife, so it was OK. So take that you Ginger lovers…)

So here’s my take on this whole I hate religion/love Jesus thing: the kid’s basically right, and everyone should stop getting their Roman collars and Geneva bands in a twist about it.

It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that a young evangelical hates religion but loves Jesus. Anyone who has spent any time in the evangelical world, which I did for many years, knows the familiar trope: Religion kills. Not in the Inquisition/Crusades/Thirty Years War kinda way (although that too). It kills the spirit. It’s the stuff of rite and ritual, litany and lethargy, pious sighs and disappointment.

Evangelical churches are filled with people who got fed up with religion, especially the religion of their youth. They wanted something more. They wanted a personal relationship with God. They wanted union with God. They wanted something that meant more that going through the diocesan or synodically approved motions. They no longer wanted the church, which had become falsely equated with religion, as their mediator — they wanted Christ. And Christ is a person, not a religion.

Religion can be looked at from another angle, as a kind of magical thinking: it makes demands of God in passive/aggressive ways. It makes deals and trade-offs, so much self-denial for so much blessing, so many good works for so many answered prayers. I have the power to wring from the Master of the Universe whatever I want, whatever I need, so long as I appease him in just the right manner. And when I begin to burn out from all that appeasing, and begin to doubt whether God is coming through with the goods, it’s easy to get bitter and to become filled with self-loathing, which then gets projected onto others who don’t seem to be making the same heroic efforts at heroic virtue that I’ve been making. And vóila: the church lady (and gentleman) is born.

I like to say that I’m neither religious nor spiritual — I’m a Lutheran. It’s more than just left of pithy; it’s true. I have zero interest in religion. I had plenty of it as a kid. Sunday school; religion classes in my Lutheran parochial schools; confirmation classes. I was an acolyte and a winner of some religion-essay contest at the tender age of 9. And then there was church. And the inevitable Monday morning role call. Every Monday, our home room teacher would ask whether we had gone to church, Sunday school, both, or neither. After about age 11 I was racking up an impressive list of neithers. I would do anything to get out of going. To this day, I cannot remember a single word any pastor ever preached on any text. Church was something to endure. And among many of the Lutherans of my childhood, it didn’t seem to matter. They subscribed to Woody Allen’s shallow philosophy: just showing up was good enough.

And when I was finally confirmed, I was not just an adult in the eyes of the church; I was also free. Free never to have to endure the brain-sapping banality that was my religion. And we’re not talking about a denomination exactly given to legalism. In fact, it had very few rules. Really, it had just one: show up. Just show up. And that was enough to make my religion unbearable. Because I wanted to be anywhere but there.

If only someone had told me to read Luther. Real Luther, not Sunday school Luther. The Luther who killed religion.

Quick question: Exactly what religion did Jesus start? Christianity? Jesus neither wrote a sacred text nor created coveted hierarchies. He threatened to destroy the one sacred space that his people would travel from around the Greco-Roman world to inhabit. He broke the rules because the rules were no longer what they were intended to be — signs. They had become ends in themselves.

Jesus came to do something else. Not start a new religion or reform an old one. He came to die. And ultimately to take as many people with him as he could. Ever tried fitting flying buttresses in a grave?

What exactly did the religious folk want of Jesus? They wanted a king. And Jesus gave them one “in the form of a slave.” They wanted relief from oppression, and they got parables. They wanted a kingdom, and they got the cross — a young Jewish man of dubious parentage apparently crushed by the collision of church and state but in reality bearing the iniquity of us all to reconcile us to a holy God, to inoculate us against sin, death, and the devil, to bury us alongside him, so he could raise us to eternal life. Their prayers were answered in the most startlingly appalling way: they received not power but promises.

Christianity isn’t a religion. It’s a conundrum. And no one has ever wrestled with and wrung the truth out of that conundrum better than Martin Luther. And it took a class at NYU to introduce me to his inimitable voice.

Luther hated that God who demanded perfect righteousness from an original sinner but who had already rigged the game with election. How could this possibly be good news? Where was hope of being a saint when you were still a sinner? How could a perfect God understand the weight of guilt, the pain of betrayal, the agony of a broken body? Luther had failed to bridge the chasm between a wrathful God and lowly, raging, libidinous man with his fastings and law keeping. How could he possibly get from despair to hope?

It was in the communication of properties — the dual nature of Christ understood such that we can speak of the death of the Son of God and the true union of God and man — that Luther saw a way out and was able slowly to forge the key to the Christian conundrum: Jesus takes my sin and gives me his righteousness. His righteousness. There is real union, but it is predicated on faith, trust in the promises, not an ascent on our part, but a condescension on his. We are passive recipients of a gift, which is Christ’s own flesh. He really took our sin into his own flesh on Calvary and he really communicates his favor and forgiveness by feeding us that same flesh. Because life is in the blood. The worst crime in history — he who called heaven and earth into being with his Word fixed immobile to two cross beams — is the only hope anyone has of true freedom.

The church should be the place where you hear the promises of God, and embrace them as your own. The Father’s wrath at his broken law should terrify you such that you run from him to Jesus, from the Just Judge to the Righteous Redeemer, who delivers not a sentence but his own self. If what you get instead is therapy or law or even encouragement to try harder, climb higher, or even to just show up, then you have religion, and you are doomed.

Luther knew that even the so-called rituals of religion, the sacraments, were meant to be transformed into promises in water, bread, and wine, not by the power of priests but by the power of the Word. Do you believe the promises? That God saves sinners? That God died to take away the sins of the world — your sin? That eternal life and a kingdom that shall have no end is yours by grace through faith? Do you believe them is such a personal way that you do not need religion anymore? Do you filter every decision, every day, through those promises? Are the promises of God — his salvation, his presence, his incorruptible kingdom, true freedom to serve your neighbor — so real to you that no vocation is so lowly as not to be holy ground because your gratitude alone is an acceptable sacrifice?

That personal relationship, that union with Christ, that evangelicals, young and old, are looking for can be found in the church of the original Evangelicals. But it must return to its roots, which is not merely catechisms and Books of Concord, but also (and I would say primarily) powerful preaching. The preached Word creates faith, seals promises, renews hearts, and opens minds to new possibilities in old places.

Who needs religion? Yeah, yeah, I know the dictionary definition too. Like Jesus came to confirm what people already knew. And there are plenty of evangelical churches that morph into religions quickly enough. They form their own rituals, their own rules of don’t touch this and don’t do that. And they easily fall into their own kind of magical thinking, with health-and-wealth hokum that turns faith into a work. But cut this Jefferson Bethke some slack. Granted, some of his knocks against the church sound more like talking points from a New Atheists’ Winter Solstice pot luck, and Rev. Fisk deals with them handily. But in the end, Bethke’s trusting in the promises. Who knows where he’ll be in his spiritual journey in 20 years?

So much of this blowback seems like just the kind of thing you’d expect from, you know … religious people.

Chuck your religion. Trust in the promises. And showing up will no longer be a chore but an opportunity for hope renewed.

Thus endeth the lesson. And will whoever saw where I parked a black Impala with a dented air foil please leave a comment and let me know?

“You shall not go out with haste, . . . for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard” —Isaiah 52:12

Security from Yesterday. “. . . God requires an account of what is past” (Ecclesiastes 3:15). At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise when we remember our yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace tends to be lessened by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present.

Security for Tomorrow. “. . . the Lord will go before you . . . .” This is a gracious revelation— that God will send His forces out where we have failed to do so. He will keep watch so that we will not be tripped up again by the same failures, as would undoubtedly happen if He were not our “rear guard.” And God’s hand reaches back to the past, settling all the claims against our conscience.

Security for Today. “You shall not go out with haste . . . .” As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, forgetful delight, nor with the quickness of impulsive thoughtlessness. But let us go out with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us. Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.

Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.

From all of us at Strange Herring, to all of you wherever you are, as the new year dawns, please remember: it could always be worse, and frequently is.

I thank you.

And so, in an effort to keep you, my beloved readers, not only informed and entertained but also convinced that you need someone like me to brings stuff like this to people like you, I do hereby present the Ten Most Important Stories of 2011:

10. Champion Feed & Supply relocates to 1115 Industrial Road in Kearny. Kearny!

9. Despite chatter to the contrary, PV’s FCCLA attends conference. Wackiness ensues.

8. Spirited city council meeting covers wide range of issues.

7. Mystery object found in Ely, Minnesota, putting the lie to the hateful canard that nothing interesting ever happens in Ely.

6. The Mattawa Shell station in Mattawa, Washington, now offers “Oriental” food and an inside-seating Laundromat to its Occidental customers. Get that lo mein stain out of your khakis while you fill up.

5. Basin Republican Rambler scoops AP on Basin Library Children’s Time candy-treat dispersal.

4. Crocketts Bluff residents “question” post office closure. Will FedEx be next?

3. Kayla Kisner will vie for Distinguished Young Woman title of 2012, ending rumors that she would sit this year out.

2. The Grand Saline Sun opens up can of worms with great PB&J controversy.

And the No. 1 story of 2011:

1. Utility shed measuring 8′x8′x8′ will, repeat, will benefit the Canistota Fire Department.

To those who would argue that these small-town stories cannot possibly compete with the execution of Osama bin Laden, the death of Steve Jobs, the end of the Iraq war, or the cancellation of Bored to Death, I say there are no small towns or small stories…only small fonts.

After all, what affected your day-to-day existence more: the death of Apple’s  founder or your kid’s prom?

Via “Believe in the Stars,” episode 2, season 3, of 30 Rock, written by Robert Carlock.

If we can stop [Moriarty], we shall prevent the collapse of Western civilization… No pressure.

War, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing — unless you’re in the arms business, of course. Or an anarchist hoping to sit back and watch the Old World Order bleed. Both Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and MI:4—Ghost Protocol revolve around plots to set the world on fire by turning would-be allies into adversaries. Wackiness, of course, ensues.

This time out our old friend Sherlock (Robert Downey Jr.), a master of disguise and the martial arts, is out to discover who’s really behind the recent terror attacks in London town. Anarchists! it is said. Yes — but we know who the true mastermind is, who it always is, the blasted Moriarty. With the help of his recently married partner, the good doctor Watson (Jude Law) and a gypsy companion (played by the original Dragon Tattoo‘s Noomi Rapace) whose brother has become a pawn in Moriarty’s sinister game, not to mention his older brother Mycroft (the indefatigable Stephen Fry), Sherlock must get to the evil doctor, the father of the military-industrial complex, it seems, before a highly anticipated international peace conference in Switzerland becomes the a tinderbox that ignites world war.

The first half of Sherlock Holmes II is a rather raucous mishmash, and no one will ever confuse this screenplay with a carefully crafted film narrative. But the film’s second hour makes for some rather brilliant entertainment. Guy Ritchie has evolved into a quite deft and imaginative action director, and the set design is spectacularly involving and beautiful in its own right. 1891 London and a Europe that in a generation will be scarred forever by the trench warfare of WWI has never looked so rich and inviting … and menacing and daunting.

This is a film that in the hands of any other moviemakers could have taken itself and its antiwar message way too seriously, to the point of ponderous speechifying. But Guy Ritchie and his band of merry men are way too busy having fun to let a little thing like the fate of the West weigh them down. Downey is all wrong for the part of Sherlock Holmes, always was, and yet once again he charms and chatters his way through the kinds of beatings and bloodlettings that only a two-dimensional projected image could endure. His preternatural ability to anticipate how some very painful encounters will play themselves out, a kind of sixth sense that’s supposed to explain in some way his powers of deduction (but don’t really), is, again, an extremely effective update to the iconic character. Which is to say, he’s a blast.

There’s a very British cross-dressing bromance that may more than hint at the prescient detective’s more than platonic affection for a befuddled and infuriated Watson, whose new bride Holmes has defenstrated from a moving train. But with Downey’s marred makeup making him resemble Heath Ledger’s Joker, I wouldn’t take it, or anything else about this raucous romp, too seriously.

Except, of course, the boom-boom, bang-bang stuff, because that, as we know, would prove only too too real.

As for MI:4—Ghost Protocol, the plot reads like something that was kicking around for a Bond flick in the 1980s: a group of recycled Eurotrash needs “the codes” to launch a nuclear strike that will pit Russia against the U.S. and set the whole world on fire. Shades of SPECTRE!

The flick starts off promisingly enough, with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) virtually dancing his way through an IMF-engineered prison break, Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” playing in the background. (Almost anything can be made better with Dino playing on the soundtrack, I have learned.)

Once freed, Hunt pulls together his crew of uber-spies to hunt down the aforementioned bad guys, led by a mega-genius named Hendricks (played by Dragon Tattoo‘s original good-guy journalist Michael Nyqvist), excommunicated from the scientific fraternity for also being a maniac without written permission from the King of Denmark or something. Things go badly when the Kremlin is blown up. Things go very very badly when the IMF is blamed and the White House calls for a ghost protocol — a disavowal not just of an IMF mission or a particular agent but of the entire agency.

As the Russians think some rogue Americans are blowing up the joint, setting the entire geopolitical chessboard on “check,” Hunt & Co. must not only prove their innocence but also stop the disappointingly one-dimensional and extremely dull archfiend Hendricks from initiating a nuclear holocaust.

Again, no pressure.

The much ballyhooed scaling of the world’s tallest building in Dubai proved rather predictable and flat, and less interesting visually than Ethan’s mountain mounting in director John Woo’s MI:2. Throw in a ludicrous car chase through a — wait for it — sandstorm, in which the relative positions of the cars is determined by a — wait for it again — Droid GPS, and you have an example of way overthinking an action sequence in the pursuit of being “original.”

But again, as with Holmes, it’s the second half of the film that saves this picture, when the race to the nuclear button kicks into hyperdrive, and a clever turn on the original MI‘s dangling Ethan sequence is re-enacted — without the wires. Director Brad Bird (Iron Giant, The Incredibles) no doubt has a hit on his hands, and so has now entered the ranks of go-to action helmsmen, his ability to render wide vistas balanced nicely with little touches like sly asides and giveaway gestures, necessary to make vaguely credible some of the plot twists.

Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is a nice addition to the IMF crew and a fit counterpart to Cruise’s Hunt, as is Paula Patton, another kick-ass gal who’s having trouble keeping the murder of her lover, another agent, from affecting her judgment. Simon Pegg is the A-lister’s sidekick of choice, a rich man’s Rob Schneider. The “doubling” gimmick — when IMF agents don masks that enable them to assume the identities of their nemeses — is finally dropped in this iteration, thank goodness. The doubling redoubled sequences in that Woo MI:2 multiplied ridiculously until you couldn’t help but feel you could show up onscreen at any moment.

As with Holmes, I wish the script had been run through the laptop one more draft: a little less running around, a little more attention to narrative cohesiveness and character development, and this would have been a better picture. As is, it’s just enough of a joy ride, with an unexpected and touching kicker, to make it worth taking the trip.

CODA: Both these films suffer from the industry’s overreliance on computers. Yeah, yeah, they’re supposed to awesome and mind-blowing  and eye-popping. But with the aid of CGI, anything can be slapped up on the screen. And when anything can happen, nothing really happens, which is to say, the characters become just another special effect and may as well be duking it out on Pluto or in John Malkovich’s head. And great characters — whether Sherlock Holmes or Connery’s Bond — begin to fade into memory with every stroke of the keyboard. (Ethan Hunt never reached iconic status, I don’t think.)

With that said, I still look forward to a Sherlock Holmes III, assuming everyone involved can keep up the energy and joi de vivre, and hopefully with Stephen Fry on board once again (fully clothed, though, please). But despite a couple of nicely turned set pieces, I fear the MI series is played out, regardless of the glowing reviews of the mainstream media. But money talks, and all I ask is that if there must be a Part V, please, pretty please, bring back Ving Rhames. I mean, for real. And maybe Quentin Tarantino as director. Or Woody Allen. I’d pay to see Woody Allen’s MI:5, with a cold open of Hunt on a psychiatrist’s couch having imagined the first four films as an escape from his mind-numbing job in the social security claims office…

The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.

There may be life somewhere else.

But there isn’t.

It’s a comedy, you see. Or at least I hope so. Because if Melancholia, the much-ballyhooed dirge from controversial Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier, is intended to be tragedy, then we have here a disaster that makes the German Peasants War of 1524 look like an episode of Curb Appeal.

Cold open. Very cold. Deep space. Deep, deep space. Planets. Colliding. People. Fleeing. Nature. Unhinged. A bride. Entangled. In tree roots. Everything. Moving. Slowly. Until. Planets. Go. Boom. Blackout.

A terrifying dream? The nocturnal effluvia of a melancholic personality? Or a presage of terrible things to come, a foreordained and predestined end of everything. Make that Everything.

Justine. Played by Kirsten Dunst. It’s her wedding day. She and her groom are two hours late to the reception owing to the incompetence of a limo driver who won his license at a Middle School raffle.

Justine’s sister, Claire, played by the painfully pained Charlotte Gainsbourg, is more angry than relieved, having gone to great pains to create a party to end all wedding parties at an estate that features an 18-hole golf course and onion soup. Justine’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a bitter, pissy woman who declaims to all the attendees how she hates marriage, which is why she didn’t go to the church. And who can blame her, when her ex husband (the great John Hurt), has shown up with two dates, both named Betty.

Justine’s boss, Stellan Skarsgard (real-life dad of Alexander, who plays the pathetic groom), is the head of an advertising agency and offers her as a wedding gift a promotion to art director from that of copy writer. There’s just one catch: he needs a tagline for a new ad campaign. Before the honeymoon begins. In an hour of so. And to ensure that he gets the goods, he has just hired his nephew to get that tagline out of the otherwise preoccupied Justine before evening’s end, lest he lose said job.

So how is Justine holding up under all this wackadoodle? Not well. She is trying, poor thing. Putting on a brave face. Insisting that this extravagant celebration is exactly what she wanted. Then why does she keep walking out? Why does she leave the table to go take a bath? Why does she leave her poor schmuck of a clueless husband to hump the boss’s nephew on the golf course? Why does she then tell the boss off in a fit of worker revolt not seen since Keep the Aspidistra Flying?

Why has she used her wedding day to blow up everything “good” in her life?

Because life on earth is evil.

After the wedding guests have all gone home, Justine plunges deeper into near catatonic depression, to the point where she can’t even bath herself without help from Claire. Her put-upon sister, too, is limp with anxiety, not only because her sibling, who she hates as well as pities, can’t help checking on the progress of that planet seen in the opening sequence, subtly called Melancholia. Is it going to hit planet Earth, or simply provide a once-in-a-lifetime fly-by, as her fabulously wealthy scientist husband (Kiefer Sutherland) insists.

And so we wait. Is science right? Will earth survive this near calamity of flirting orbs? Or will all on Earth be reduced to ashes, rendering the best and the brightest a bunch of boobies who can’t even get the Apocalypse right? And if so, what were all those putative good things — like love and family and work and estates with golf courses and onion soup — for? What did they mean? Were they always meaningless, as Justine and Claire’s mother never tires of declaiming? Or do they just become meaningless in the face of mass extinction, which is just personal extinction with more running around?

Melancholia is an exercise in crapulous angst — not to be mistaken for existential angst. A tipsy filmmaker, a poor man’s Ingmar Bergman, assuming that poor man was Woody Allen on the set of Interiors, has decided to exorcise his demons by giving Charlotte Gainsbourg a role in which she’s not forced to perform her own clitoridectomy. Instead, the audience is forced to perform a lobotomy, at least if they’re to take the critics’ fawning over this empty pretentious twaddle seriously.

As for Kirsten Dunst, who won Best Actress at Cannes: She’s suitably morose and self-absorbed. And she’s nude in two scenes. And she stares out into the distance with an intensity not seen since Deepak Chopra’s cameo in The Love Guru. If she beats out Meryl Streep’s sure-to-be-spot-on but soulless imitation of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, I’ll punch a mime.

How seriously are we supposed to take these empty, two-dimensional, dullwitted characters? If they’re truly representative of humanity, at least a humanity with a net worth in the mid eight figures, who wouldn’t want to see them obliterated? Even their pain is boring. That’s the problem with a “dramatic” exercise in the meaningless of all things: your attempt to be meaningful is itself meaningless.

Don’t look for any religious undertones or spiritual yearning or even last-gasp efforts to seek the will or face of God. This universe is as empty as an Episcopal church on Stewardship Sunday. The very last image, of Justine, Claire, and Claire’s little boy huddling together under a teepee configuration of sticks with no external covering, is supposed to sum it all up in some pathetic way: all our attempts to hide from reality are merely so many twigs in a tornado. OK. Thanks for sharing.

This could have been an intriguing look at clinical depression from the inside — you feel like the world is coming to an end and you just don’t care about anyone or anything and why won’t it all end already. That may have been what initially motivated Von Trier, given statements he has made in interviews. The finished product, however, is not that. It’s clinical depression as the only grown-up way of looking at life full stop. And the only reason I don’t kill myself if because you won’t all join in and thus confirm how smart I am.

Again, I tried to imagine this as a comedy whose punch line was “Beware happy people, they don’t have enough information.” And perhaps Von Trier is, in fact, having us on. He’s known for being a prankster, pulling the public’s whiskers for a laugh.

Or maybe this is just a piece sullen, sulky dribble dressed up as a great meditation on the human condition and the inevitable planet that hits us all — death.

I’m sticking with dribble. So bring a lobster bib.

(Via episode 10, season 8 of The Office, written by Mindy Kaling)

[Y]ou simply have to be good for your word. Your seeing the movie was conditional on your honoring the embargo, which you agreed to do. The needs of the magazine cannot trump your word. The fact that the review is good is immaterial, as I suspect you know. You’ve very badly damaged the movie by doing this, and I could not in good conscience invite you to see another movie of mine again, Daldry or otherwise. I can’t ignore this, and I expect that you wouldn’t either if the situation were reversed. I’m really not interested in why you did this except that you did — and you must at least own that, purely and simply, you broke your word to us and that that is a deeply lousy and immoral thing to have done.

Early screenings are sometimes opened to critics on the condition that they embargo their reviews until a certain date, even if the reviews are good. Often the filmmakers are still tinkering at the time of the screenings, and the review may be based on a version of the film that audiences will never see.

Denby has a point, but Rudin is right. The New Yorker critic agreed to play by the rules and he didn’t, and not just because there’s a bottleneck of “adult” films at the end of the year and the magazine had tight deadlines. He also wanted to be one of the first critics out there with a word on an eagerly anticipated thriller, a re-visioning of the bestselling Stieg Larsson novel that had already been terrifyingly adapted for the screen by Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev.

Oh well. Denby can always stand on line opening day like the rest of the 99 percent…

“The Department was quite properly concerned about having any school in this diverse city identified with one particular religious belief or practice,” said Jane Gordon, senior counsel for the New York City Law Dept. “”The Court of Appeals correctly upheld the Department of Education’s policy not to allow the City’s public schools to be used as houses of worship.  This case has been litigated for 16 years, and we’re gratified that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear it.  We view this as a victory for the City’s school children and their families.”

The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case leaves in place a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the city’s policy.

The court case involved the Bronx Household of Faith – a church that paid weekly rent to hold worship services at a public school since 2002. The church, along with five dozen other congregations, was allowed to continue worshipping at public schools pending the outcome of the lawsuit.

It’s a sad day for religious liberty,” said Jordan Lorence, the church’s attorney and senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. “Churches and religious other groups should be allowed to meet in public buildings on the same terms as other community groups and they’re being denied that in New York City.”

You have to love this reasoning:

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that allowing churches to use schools resulted in an “unintended bias in favor of Christian religions” – since most Christian churches worship on Sunday.

“Jews and Muslims generally cannot use school facilities for their services because the facilities are often unavailable on the days that their religions principally prescribe for services,” Judge Pierre Leval declared.

Who knew Christians worshiped on Sunday, as opposed to Jews and Muslims? Amazing what you learn after 2,000 years.

Do you have any idea how many congregations use public school facilities on Sunday in New York City? For about ten years I sat in more public schools for Sunday worship than I did in traditional church buildings. Mainline churches are dying, many of them supporting paltry weekly attendance, yet vibrant evangelical congregations, which also provide aid to the homeless and needy regardless of religion, are now left homeless because they worship on Sunday. Redeemer Presbyterian rents Hunter College for two of its five services every Sunday. Will it have to move now? Does this ruling apply to public colleges as well as elementary and high schools?

And what about the income those schools get from the churches? Here was found money when the buildings were otherwise empty and dark. How stupid is this?

I think the real fear at work here has nothing to do with the “establishment” of a religious bias in favor of Christianity (puh-leeze) but that the continued and growing presence of Christianity in the halls of academia was depressing to those who keep waiting for the death of religion in favor of what a public school education has to offer. (crickets)

Via @seancurnyn.

But is the film really as good as the press?

Yes. And then some.

Hugo Cabret is a little boy who lives in a Parisian train station. Having lost his beloved father, a fixer, a mechanic, in an accident, he is taken in by a drunk of an uncle whose job it is to wind all the clocks in the station. When the uncle takes off one day, Hugo continues winding the clocks lest someone notice that he is all alone  and – off to the orphanage for him.

When he isn’t dodging the station guard, played with an almost Germanic rigidity by Sasha Baron Cohen, he’s pilfering food and, more important, spare mechanical parts from vendors in the station. One such vendor, a seller of toys, catches him in the act, and forces him to empty his pockets. Along with the gears and springs and screws Hugo has accumulated is a notebook filled with sketches of what looks like a robot. The toy seller, Monsieur Georges (played by the pitch-perfect Ben Kingsley), is horrified by the book and snatches it away, refusing to return it, despite the boy’s tearful entreaties.

That notebook holds the key to the one thing Hugo has left from his late father – an automaton, found in a museum, but that is in a poor state of repair. Hugo is determined to fix the broken machine and see whether it holds some hidden message from his father – and some clue as to his own destiny.

It most certainly does, especially when it is learned that the surly toy seller is none other than the great French film magician George Melies, fallen on hard times, and that the notebook was originally his. After the First World War destroyed his career, such that hundreds of his “sci-fi” and fantasy films were destroyed or lost, Melies is reduced to selling trinkets and trying to forget his true vocation, lost forever.

But both Hugo and Melies were brought together for a reason: both will ensure that past tragedies are redeemed and that the future still holds surprises and hope – the hope of realizing one’s true calling despite all the obstacles a cruel world throws in one’s way.

Scorsese moves his characters through the train station and each other’s lives with such dexterity and death-defying grace as to render you speechless at times. Moving, fun, and wise, Hugo will give you both a catch in your throat and much to think about. As Hugo ponders the meaning of the mechanical man he has been left by his father, he comes to see that machines work because each and every part, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, has a role to play in the larger scheme of things. Everything, in other words, has a purpose. Including the little orphan boy Hugo.

Sounds inspiring enough, until you contemplate the consequences for a bit. Doesn’t this reduce us all to mere cogs in a great machine? Doesn’t this risk viewing humanity as a grove of  clockwork oranges, with some parts damaged beyond repair, to be thrown on an overly efficient society’s junk heap, and others to be “fixed” in such a way that they become not their true selves but merely gears in the works of the rich and powerful?

While the film does not, Western Union–like, state it in so many words, certainly the implicit message is that such a fear, which literally haunts Hugo as a nightmare, can be assuaged by how we dream. Our imagination is what raises us above the mere machinery of the Industrial Age. Our ability to envision worlds yet to come, that may never come, at least in this life, so enlarges our perspective that we can never be merely useful. The dreamers are what keep us from being crushed by technology, even as that technology magnifies our capacity to realize and share those dreams.

Why hasn’t Hugo done better at the box office? Because it’s a kids’ film for adults. What kid has a love of the old – old movies, old books, old tales of adventure and daring do. Not the telling of the tales – but the mere remembering of the tales, and the world in which they were first conjured.

It’s also a film about the “magic” of the mechanical, the makeshift, and the gear-laden. The 1920s saw machines beginning to dominate industry, manufacturing – newfangled automobiles and automation and auto-everthing would at the close of another war see even more home-spun dreariness evaporate with the click of a switch. Yes, there was a time when one could still marvel at the possibilities.

Now we take this all for granted. What is there for kids to truly stare wide-eyed at anymore? With videogames and iPods and digital this and 3D that, any six-year-old can download an app or piece of software and zoink! — the miraculous right before his or her already bored eyes! The only advance is how quickly you can pull the rabbit out of your high-def hat.

To remember a time of such innocence, for lack of a better word, or perhaps the quotidian, when a wind-up toy, a mechanical man, and the movies as movies could still beguile is not for kids of 10 or 14. You’d have to at least remember buying records and videotape players and roll-up windows in cars. And what a big deal Star Wars and the first Superman were – You’ll believe a man can fly! Sheesh, today, you’d better make me believe I can fly.

So with or without the kids, run and see Hugo today. I’m hoping word of mouth will keep this in theaters long enough to see a decent return on investment. I see no real advantage of the 3D version over the 2D, by the way. As far as I’m concerned, if I was already convinced that 3D is a waste of money and Tylenol, Hugo did nothing to dissuade me. Talk about gilding the lily. The “magic” of 3D is a bit of a cheat and adds nothing to what the story – and the stories within the stories, those of Melies, and Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and all the great innovators and early artists of the silent-film era – already provides. 3D can never replicate the feeling those first movie audiences had when it looked like a train driving into a station was going to burst through the screen and plow right into them! We’re too jaundiced for that. Hugo is best experienced by way of God’s greatest special effect: the unaided human eye, and of course, imagination.

His stand-up act, captured in the two-record set Woody Allen: The Nightclub Years, enjoys more original, brilliant self-deprecating one-liners than most comics could pay for in a lifetime, and I played the grooves off those albums through my high school years. (Recently, I found a paper I wrote in high school on Allen’s worldview as advanced in his humor. I got an A-; I lost some credit for not quoting other authors and critics sufficiently.)

The first Woody Allen film I remember seeing was Take the Money and Run, which ran as part of a double feature with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother. Anyone who could even conceive of a guy playing a cello in a marching band was destined to be someone who would have a seminal influence on my life. Other favorites include, predictably, Love and Death, Bananas, Play It Again Sam, Annie Hall, and Radio Days. Films that grew on me over time include Small Time Crooks, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Scoop. Two films I absolutely despise are Deconstructing Harry and Whatever Works. The nihilism is acrid.

The most overrated: Hannah and Her Sisters, an opinion that will get you thrown out of some of the best bagel shops on the Upper West Side.

I would eventually come to blanch at his uncharacteristically simple-minded and cliched view of religion, as a mere anodyne solution to the anxiety produced by the realization of our mortality, as well as the aforementioned nihilism, which Allen uses to rationalize almost any kind of behavior among his characters so long as it helps them get through their night terrors. (Of course, he could also parody mercilessly the phony philosophizing and intellectual pretensions of his New York and Hollywood peers.)

I say all this as an introduction to the PBS two-part American Masters documentary on the former Allen Stewart Konigsberg. What makes this film so interesting is that Allen played an integral role in its production (as did his sister, to whom he has remained quite devoted, and his many co-stars). The stuff about his early life, rise to fame and acclaim, and writing process are well worth your time if you count any of his films among your favorites.

Part One aired last night, and Part Two airs tonight at 9.

Buried deep in a lengthy tome, Licona opined that Matthew 27:52-53, that strange passage about tombs breaking open and saints being raised and entering the holy city, may be a case of apocalyptic language and not to be taken literally. Frankly, I thought this was old news as far as acceptable interpretations went.

Of course not. Norman Geisler and Albert Mohler, to name the two most noisome of Licona’s opponents, vigorously criticized this supposed threat to the inerrancy of Scripture and the foundation of everything pious and pure.

Well, Licona has struck back, with this little talk at EPS. It’s easy to see why someone like this makes fundamentalists uneasy. I mean, the lesson in ancient rhetoric is enough to send them into seizures. He may as well have been quoting Fr. Raymond Brown.

But it the recording of J.I. Packer, about 26 minutes into Licona’s talk, discussing the various ways in which to interpret Genesis 1-3, that’s most telling. Wake me when the Digital Torquemadas go after the author of Knowing God.

Via Boar’s Head Tavern.

When I read this.

Hell, had they held a similar debate back when I was trolling the hallowed halls of the then nonexistent Skirball Center, I would have proved the world was better off without religion by lobbing a Kit-Kat bar or two at Wolpe and D’Souza. (King’s College my left tonsil. Why it doesn’t even have a decent campus! Unless you count the Walgreens on Fifth and 34th.)

I’m glad that’s over with. Now we can get on with the serious work of assisted suicide, euthanasia, infanticide, health-care rationing, polymorphous perversity*, and confiscatory taxes to keep the gulags churning.

*For the record, I have no problem with monomorphous perversity, unless it entails actually catching mono.

Mississippi is not alone in the modern debate over the sanctity of life. More than 4,000 miles away, the Netherlands is caught up in its own controversy over a proposal from the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) to expand the definition of who may qualify for assisted suicide — including for the first time such nonmedical factors as loneliness and financial struggles.

“Many older people have various afflictions that are not actually life-threatening but do make them vulnerable,” wrote the KNMG in a ten-year study report published in October.

“Vulnerability stems not only from health problems and the ensuing limitations, but also the measure in which people have social skills, financial resources and a social network.”

Why limit it to the elderly? I know a lot of college students who have no social skills, financial resources, or a social network worth the name. I mean, if Facebook is your only “social network,” then you could argue you have only a virtual quality of life, making 99% of the Occupy folks prime meat for the euthanasia chefs.

Wesley J. Smith, call your office.

He couldn’t play the song in the original Back to the Future, but he can play it now.

Read about the event here.

Of course, he was subjected to the Strange Herring Circle of Pain™, from which he’s currently recovering at St. Delfin of the Fey Lute Mission to Stray Belgians Hospitelle and Cafe in Camden, New Jersey (Kiosk #6, if you care to send a little note).

Quick religion news update: CofE votes to consecrate women bishops. Next thing you know, they’ll be a female monarch. Then women race-car drivers. Then female women. It’s one of those damn slippery slope/domino thingees.

And Gene Veith adverts to a Julia Duin piece on snake handling and Newt Gingrich. (There should probably be a comma in there somewhere.) In case you were wondering, I think snake handling is the sine qua non of assurance of salvation. That and dying and going to heaven, my personal preference.

Speaking of wishing I were dead: I hardly had time to shake a new day’s spittle from my face when I encountered an egregiousness  that, like child cruelty, cruel children, and low-fat ice cream, threatens my faith in Ultimate Goodness. That is the lowercase “is” in headlines. I wasn’t online for more than 10 seconds before I saw an example of this on a website that should know better.

To the uninformed, uninitiated, and just plain uninterested (which probably comprises 99.9% of you), headline or title case means you initial cap the first and last words in a headline, as well as all verbs, proper nouns (natch), adverbs, and adjectives.

The only time word length comes into play is when dealing with prepositions. Some would keep lowercase all prepositions, no matter length (academic publishers often indulge this fetish). Some would initial-cap preps four letters or longer; some, five letters or longer.

Articles are always lowercase, except, as noted above, when beginning or ending a headline.

Now, I don’t give a hoot in Hooters what your definition of Is is. What I do know is that it is a verb. And so, though a mere two letters long, it should be initial-capped in headlines, I am begging you.

You stay classy, San Diego.

Another prime minister who knew how to swing...at the end of a rope, finally

Having lost his majority, Silvio Berlusconi is offering to do the somewhat honorable thing and step down…before he makes a greater mess of things.

Far to the west, another titanic figure may be signing off — or shown the door — but for far different reasons.

In other news, Smokin’ Joe Frazier has in fact left the building, leaving little behind but a monster left hook that knocked the great Ali on his ass.

“This is absolutely horrifying,” said Laura King, a social psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “We are talking about research that has major impact in the field of social cognition.”

“Our field is one where a great deal of currency is placed on surprising you,” says University of Connecticut psychologist Hart Blanton. …

Exactly. SURPRISE!