A selection of bite-sized items for your perusal:

• Movies! Three items:
  • I’ll recommend interested viewers check out Marlene, the unconventional documentary about the legendary Ms. Dietrich. It’s really a fascinating film–she doesn’t appear on camera because of her idiosyncratic refusal to do so, but her acerbic personality more than picks up the slack. It’s a frequently hilarious movie, and Dietrich alternates between bullshit and truth, between prickliness and tenderness, so frequently it’s exhilarating. She’s such a towering figure that the arbitrary constraints of the film somehow do the subject justice. Do investigate.
  • Also, I must say, I’m very impressed with the Blu-Rays of the Alien movies. Aliens looks about 100% better than on the DVD release–the fuzziness is completely gone, which James Cameron had said was a limitation of the source material, so I don’t know how they did it. I still maintain it’s Cameron’s best screenplay–this time through I noticed even a few more clever writing choices that I hadn’t before. After that it would be a pretty steady downward spiral, though unlike George Lucas, Cameron hasn’t lost a step as a director and is still a master in that respect.
  • Relatedly, I have to give 20th Century Fox some credit on the Alien³ Blu-Ray. The “assembly cut” (now apparently known as the special edition) of the film from the DVD compilation was much better than the theatrical version. Allow me to explain. The theatrical version is barely a movie. There isn’t so much a “story” to it, just a premise with some setup and then a herky-jerky skip to the endgame. The special edition actually featured a basic storytelling device known as a build, along with what is commonly called character development, but it featured a lot of technical issues since it was pieced together from a bunch of incomplete, cutting-room floor material. But the studio, perhaps realizing that the special edition is bound to be the definitive version of the film going forward since it is, in fact, watchable, actually spent some money to rerecord dialog and clean up a few things, vastly improving the whole experience. So, kudos to them. The film as it stands is a flawed masterpiece that I absolutely love, and well worth puzzling over.
• Barack Obama’s controversial plan to attack his opponents’ major weaknesses is working. Color me surprised. I don’t blame Bill Clinton for this stupid “controversy” because the guy has been on both sides of every issue for twenty years now, and my real problem with Booker’s comments was that it was insipid, “Negativity is bad let’s just be positive!” junk that passes for liberalism in some quarters. Obama was wise to ignore them.
• I won’t offer an official Supreme Court/ACA prediction, but my guess is 60% that they strike down the mandate only or keep the bill completely intact, and 40% that they go further. Whatever the outcome, I think it’s well past time liberals reviewed the concept of judicial review of legislation, a power which is granted to the Supreme Court nowhere in the Constitution or the Judiciary Act, and which, civil rights aside, has been almost uniformly used to strike down progressive legislation (and was also the vehicle for some good late-1800s bigotry too: the only post-Reconstruction civil rights bill was struck down, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc.). The memory of the Warren Court looms large, but that’s not typically how it’s been. At the very least, some additional checks on the power of the judiciary would be nice, like mandatory retirement at 70, a twelve-year term, maybe others. I thought it was ridiculous that Nixon would be able to have an impact on the Court 30 years after he left office, in Rehnquist.