Night of the Pod People

In a thrilling election week like this, one almost forgets to think about movies. Fortunately Andrew O'Hehir, my old friend and a crackerjack critic, watched Fox News on election night so you wouldn't have to, and turned out a sidesplitting report on the right-wing meltdown. It includes this cinematic description of the "new" John McCain:

Before long Sen. John McCain came on the show, supposedly to talk about how the Republicans would land on their feet. Of course this is the new, improved McCain, a pod person hatched in some Karl Rove greenhouse who at some point in 2005 replaced the old tough-as-nails, indie-Republican model. I have long felt that I'd actually prefer McCain to Hillary Clinton in '08, but, jeez Louise, have you seen this guy lately? He sits there in a chair with all the lifelike vividness of Lenin's corpse, smiling in this ghastly, dead way and reading from a script, with no evident conviction or even awareness. I'm not positive his lips move. Sca-a-ry.

Scary indeed. But Karl Rove's greenhouse has at last been torched — a surprise happy ending to one overlong horror movie.

Comments

[Andy Horbal!]

O'Hehir's "Beyond the Multiplex" column is, with Dave Kehr's DVD column in the Times, one of the few recurring newspaper features about film that I'd call truly indispensible.

He's an excellent writer and every week he manages to unite a theoretically unmanageable and unruly mob of disparate films under an iron fist of clear, concise, organized prose. This is the first non-film piece of his that I've read, but I'm not surprised to find that it's excellent!