Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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As the financial markets pull the entire economy into utter despair, it’s difficult to think about Christmas shopping. It’s tempting to shove your life savings into your mattress and ride this thing out in a homemade bunker, but holiday shopping is more important now than ever before. I’m not saying this with the hope that a boost in retail sales will jolt the sinking markets, that will never work. Think about it, they’re racking up trillions in debt and you’re going to help by buying an iPod? Nice try.

No, the reason you need to stuff stockings like crazy is because this will be the last Christmas on Earth, at least as we know it. A trifecta of economic, nuclear, and environmental apocalypses will surely befall our poor planet in the coming year, leaving a small band of survivors to fend off death in the savage wastes of our once great world. But don’t worry! You and yours will be prepared for this dark tomorrow, if you follow our handy Post-Apocalyptic Gift Guide:

Puppy

This is a classic Christmas gift, and it’s surprising useful in a post-apocalyptic environment. While watching post-apocalyptic movies in preparation for a life wandering the ruins civilization (cf. I Am Legend, The Road Warrior, and A Boy And His Dog), you’ll notice that many heroes keep a trusty K-9. The obvious reason is companionship, as going months without seeing another human can be maddening. While dogs do need to be fed, a tough breed can eat trash and carrion that you wouldn’t go near. The right kind of dog (larger breeds are best) can also offer protection and help with hunting, assuming natural flora and fauna still exist. Lastly, and I hate to say this, Fido can even become a meal if the situation gets desperate enough.

Solar Gadget Charger

Second only to clean water, a key to survival in a post-apocalyptic environment is the ability to watch movies. Classics like Tank Girl, Six String Samurai, and The Postman offer invaluable tips for survival in the wastelands. Luckily, portable solar-power devices have become more affordable. The 30 Watt Mono-crystalline Portable Briefcase Solar Panel 12V Charger is a bit pricey, but with it’s 25+ year life-span and ability to charge not only laptops but also any other gadget that can be plugged into a car cigarette lighter, it’s a must-have. Portable game systems, rechargeable flashlights, even GPS units (assuming the satellites haven’t been shot down by invading aliens), could be used for years after the collapse of the power grid.

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Last week, Roger Ebert finally got around to destroying reviewing Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Ebert’s rant is as cerebral as it is merciless, and it’s worth a read even if you haven’t seen the film. He makes some good points about how the film completely misunderstands the concepts of probability and selection, forming flashy but ultimately useless argument.

Ebert’s rage is thinly veiled. He’s obviously upset that clear logical fallacies can go unnoticed by so many people. Sure, misreading Darwin while attempting to refute him is a lame move when engaging in scientific debate, but the practice is quite common when it comes to filmmaking. When movies deal with evolution, there’s an unspoken understanding that they can completely distort the theory beyond recognition. It’s kind of like calling someone a pedophile during a Friar’s Club Roast, everyone knows it isn’t true, and it’s all in good fun.

When you look at it in this way, Expelled is just the latest in a long line of films that distort the theory of evolution to make a buck. Here are 5 more that are guilty of crimes against the origin of humanity:

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Nerds the world over have been juggling feelings of confusion and excitement over the laundry list of projects reportedly attached to their favored son, Guillermo del Toro. The list of films he is rumored (if not confirmed) to direct and/or produce are as follows: The Hobbit, Pinocchio, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Slaughterhouse-Five, At the Mountains of Madness, The Champions, Drood, Frankenstein, Hellboy III, Hater, Crimson Peak, Dr. Strange, and a segment of a new Heavy Metal film.

Many have wondered how it’s possible to have so many irons in the fire. Is he going to shoot Frankenstein on his cell phone during the 14-hour flight from New Zealand after meeting with Peter Jackson? Is the Heavy Metal segment just going to be a deleted scene from Hellboy III? No, the truth is much more exciting. Del Toro recently lost one of his legendary sketchbooks, in which he constantly records his many ideas. We have obtained that sketchbook. Amid the detailed sketches of demons, faeries, and man-eating toads, we found the secret to his insane schedule: All thirteen aforementioned projects are actually a single film. A fantastic eight-hour epic the likes of which cinema has never seen!

The following is the pitch Mr. del Toro delivered to the executives of Universal Studios, as transcribed in his sketchbook:

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I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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WASHINGTON, July 31 (Xinhua) — U.S. President George W. Bush said Wednesday that U.S.-China relations are good and important, and he is “honored” to be invited to attend the Beijing premiere of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, a new Jet Li/Brendan Fraser fantasy film.

“The fact that both countries are honoring the 30th anniversary of the relationship is a statement about good relations,” he told reporters from China, South Korea and Thailand at the White House ahead of his upcoming trip to the three countries. Also, the fact that both China and the United States are opening new Magic Johnson Theaters in each other’s capitals is “a signal of how important the relationship is,” Bush added.

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That Troma propaganda/war satire clip that Lloyd Kaufman showed at Comic-Con? It’s on YouTube, natch––and it’s apparently super old. Oh well––new to us! It’s embedded above.

Can he do this? Is this legal? How does he do it? What interview questions does he ask? What does he tell publicists he’s going to do? Will any of them ever let him do it again?

All of those questions, and surely more, are sparked by Jamie Stuart’s latest video, In Spring. Described as a tribute to Bunuel and Dali, it’s a highly stylized document of Stuart’s visit to the New York offices of embattled distributor THINKFilm to interview Werner Herzog about his latest film, Encounters at the End of the World. Except Herzog is playing “Gunter Merkwurdigeliebe, THINKfilm Chairman, CEO and President.” Except I don’t think he knows that. After the interview, Stuart’s voiceover inform us, his “crew took part in snorting lines of Grade A Bolivian cocaine with the executives,” an experience which led them to conclude that “the film industry is as solid and secure as ever.” Well, after all that, who wouldn’t?

Watch it here.

The Onion headline: MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again. The fake-quote gem:

“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”

Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.

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War, Inc is a debacle. Starring, co-written and produced by John Cusack, it’s an impotent, cheap-looking political satire that longs for relevance, but feels years stale. (It has, in fact, been around for awhile––it was once titled Brand Hauser, it went into production in fall 2006, it was rumored to have been set up for premiere slots at both Toronto 2007 and Sundance 2008, neither of which, for whatever reason, ever happened.) It’s a sign that Hollywood filmmaking about the current war and its associated politics has fatally passed over from merely irrelevant preaching to the choir, to a kind of solipsistic naivete that should make anyone with an intellectually-rooted anti-war position feel embarrassed to have their politics associated with it. War, Inc personally makes me want to put my head in my hands in shame. The Left deserves to be mocked as much as the Neo-Cons, but nobody deserves to have their reputations sullied by indefensible garbage like this.

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Paul interviews Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, opening tonight), which inadvertently pushes Paul & Kevin on to a road trip–metaphoricaly speaking–from a Whites Only saloon in the old west to the ghettos of Canada where a mathematician is changing the world and a legendary filmmaker brings them to enlightenment.

(Also under discussion EMPz 4 Life)

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch #67 - Wisdom of Kumar

*Note: The phone number announced in the show has technical problems. If you want to leave a message, call:

1-800-749-0632
Channel: 8838
Password: 1111

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, EMPz 4 Life

I had nearly forgotten about The Onion Movie. The sketch-comedy-formatted film spin-off of the brilliant newspaper satire was made about four years ago and then was abandoned by original distributor Fox Searchlight. According to Wikipedia, it performed badly with test audiences, and when it was shelved and then dropped by the studio, the filmmakers — co-directors Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire and screenwriter Robert Siegel (formerly editor of The Onion) — also walked away from the project. It spent the next few years involved in attempted rescue operations by New Regency and actor-writer Scott Aukerman (Run Ronnie Run!). Now, finally this trailer has shown up on the DVD of Fox Searchlight’s The Darjeeling Limited, implying that the studio will be dumping it to DVD sometime this year.

As you can see, there was good reason for Fox to have initially distanced itself from the movie. It makes the similar-structured The Kentucky Fried Movie look like a masterpiece (I understand it’s considered a classic for some, but it’s by no means a masterpiece). And, well, it even makes the recent parody films like Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans seem like masterpieces. Considering that after 20 years in print and 12 years online, the actual newspaper is consistently intelligent, cutting-edge, relevant and, most of all, hilarious, it’s quite disappointing to see how stale are the gags in the film. While it may be funny to see the decapitation caused by a neckbelt, the concept as a whole is illogical and unimaginative. And the smoking ban joke? Maybe topical in 2004, but even then the gag would have been put to better use in a Tonight Show monologue.

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