At the Movies

Alpha Dog (2006)

The Good German (2006)

Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)

Miss Potter (2006)

Night at the Museum (2006)

Notes on a Scandal (2006)

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

I am not the only one giving advice to Ms. Karen Hughes in public. Here is another one from Roger Cohen in today's NYT

Now he's (David Beckham of Real Madrid) out to change America's Major League Soccer, or MLS, which has fizzled over the past dozen years. I doubt he'll do that through his dwindling skills on the pitch. But Beckham in Hollywood is a powerful planetary lure that's likely to bring America closer to the world more effectively than anything Karen Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, has been able to dream up.

Hughes, who has been trying without much luck to burnish America's image in the age of the Iraq war, and who last year named the figure skater Michelle Kwan as a worldwide good- will ambassador, would be well advised to take note of Beckham's arrival in California.
Why not fast-forward the naturalization process and name Beckham as an ambassador to explain America to the world? He's a self-made man, an image merchant, a constant reinventor of himself: in other words, he's American to the core. Nothing against Kwan, but figure skating rates closer to the World Darts Championship in global appeal than it does to the World Cup.
Beckham has already shown through his successful fund-raising for the United Nations Children's Fund that he thrives on international ambassadorial work. He may have to fine- tune his understanding of Iraq, but he has grasped that Spain is now small potatoes for his ambitions and America the natural home for his talents.

Speaking of Iraq, I once had a hard time getting out of the country at night because the Kuwaiti border was closed. The guards were unmoved by my pleas until it somehow transpired that one of them shared my passion for the Chelsea football club. That did it: the barriers swung open and a lively conversation about goals by Didier Drogba accompanied my passage by car to the other side.

Hughes should take note: football opens doors. If Beckham can indeed bring the MLS to life, he will be bridge-building. America's "otherness" has been attributed to many things in recent years - its churchgoing, its military-industrial complex, its insensitivity to global warming - but its failure to fall in love with what the rest of world calls football strikes billions of people as weird.

In a similar way, Saddam Hussein’s regime was an abominable authoritarian state, guilty of many crimes, mostly toward its own people. However, one should note the strange but key fact that, when the United States representatives and the Iraqi prosecutors were enumerating his evil deeds, they systematically omitted what was undoubtedly his greatest crime in terms of human suffering and of violating international justice: his invasion of Iran. Why? Because the United States and the majority of foreign states were actively helping Iraq in this aggression.

And now the United States is continuing, through other means, this greatest crime of Saddam Hussein: his never-ending attempt to topple the Iranian government. This is the price you have to pay when the struggle against the enemies is the struggle against the evil ghosts in your own closet: you don’t even control yourself.

From an editorial by Slavoj Zizek in the NYT