You know what would be great? To take Hitler down? And stop the gassing and the conquest and the thing and the guy? Would be an audacious hotshot with the guts to get in there and do it. A guy so good he could do it with one eye tied behind his back. A guy so good he counts his blown-off right-hand as an asset because he can "Heil Hitler" ironically and you can never really call him on it. And I know just the actor to play him.

Stauffenberg hatching his plan.

Stauffenberg selling his plan to Nazis who are starting to question this Third Reich thing, circa 1944.

Stauffenberg psyching himself up for the dangerous mission.

Stauffenberg expressing self-doubt. (deleted scene)

Stauffenberg expressing absolute confidence in the mission and himself.

Stauffenberg upon being told that his paperwork must be signed by the Führer.

Stauffenberg insisting that he blew Hitler up but only after the paperwork was signed.

Stauffenberg, God bless him, expressing outrage that Op Valk was not engaged as planned, wasting the three precious hours that he'd previously gained through ingenuity.

Stauffenberg taking even more charge than he'd taken previously. Must he do everything single-handedly? Time to school these chumps; the only problem is that he lacks a pupil.

Stauffenberg running the German government with an eye toward Berlin.

'Do you think he has a sense of humor?' 'I think his optometrist has a sense of humor.'

Stauffenberg inquiring after the safety of his wife, Frau Stauffenberg.

Stauffenberg coming to the conclusion that Hitler was not blown up and wondering if the mistake was due to faulty depth perception on the part of one of his peers.

Stauffenberg about to be executed but only after naming a name to clarify that the failure was not his but that of Shiva the God of the Wrong Person's Death.

Stauffenberg as remembered by the footnotes of history, steely.

Valkyrie is based on a true story, which I know because the screen says so at the beginning of the film in German. And I know that it says so at the beginning of the film in German because the letters morph into English before they go away. Then we hear the hotshot writing his diary in German, which eventually morphs (audibly) into the English words of Tom Cruise who seems almost frustrated by the cumbersome translation process, as if the hotshot can't be bothered to continue in German when something more serious is at stake. Also: we hear what he writes. Linguistic efficiencies could and will be made.

And the movie's off. A sequence in the middle of the film involves putting a bomb at the Führer's feet, and I quite liked the suspense, even though throughout that stretch I was thinking, "I wish Eddie Izzard were taking down the Führer instead of nervously making a phone call in the background." That's what's nice about this movie. It gives you time to think about what you're seeing. Like: Is Tom Wilkinson speaking only his dependent clauses with a British accent? Is that Peter Cushing back there? And, say, who do you think would win in a peaked-cap face-off between Grand Moff Tarkin, General Zod, and let's say Hitler? That kind of thing.

Then more morphing, this time in the face of the sometimes eye-patched, sometimes digitally walleyed Tom Cruise. It's his steely performance, his 1,000 faces that carry the film, each one revealing a facet of Hotshot Claus von Stauffenberg, each of them determined, each of them steely. If it weren't for that Germano-English text up front, I'd think this guy could probably pull it off. Ice the Führer, engage Operation Valkyrie to gain control of Berlin, gain control of Germany, gain control of Europe, and finally install Field Marshall Goose just in time to put the egg back on the mantel before the Allies arrive to say, "Yo, what the?"

Alas, he had no strafing partner, this hotshot. The rest is footnoted history and symphonic strings.

His wife lived and raised their kids without incident. Did I mention his wife? No matter.

Summit Entertainment

Bella is the new girl in town, and Twilight waits a full hour before revealing to her what the rest of us knew from the moment he strode pale-faced into the school cafeteria: the quiet, glowering boy in her grade is a vampire. It's the skin, it's the brooding look, it's the magnificently gelled hair, it's the slo-mo entrance. Dead giveaways. He doesn't talk to anybody, ever, but, alas, he locks into Bella's gaze, and she smolders for the rest of the film, usually in tight shots that alternate with close-ups of his burning unrest.

Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) sees the humor in the portrayal, and her whiffs of wit carry a long, slow setup. When the vampire, Edward, is seated in biology class -- still brooding, ever brooding -- Hardwicke positions a stuffed bird on the shelf behind him, spreading its wings so they seem to be attached to the scruff of his neck. In Magnolia, P.T. Anderson used a caduceus painted on a back wall to make the sad boy genius in the foreground even more angelic, even more Falconetti-esque, and in Twilight Hardwicke evokes genuine, giddy laughter with the shots of first one wing, then two, the pair growing in prominence as Edward senses Bella's approach through the bio-science doorway.

“It's a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels.”

But Edward is not, in fact, happy to see her. He holds his head low like the reluctant angel in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. This blue-lipped, aggressively plucked boy is not a reluctant angel, of course, but a reluctant vampire smitten by the girl who should be his prey.

Therein lies his conflict, and therein lies hers, and from the two a familiar story emerges: love at first sight needs no justification; opposites attract; beautiful people attract; dangerous boys attract bold girls who, in time, will benefit from the protection provided by their speed, strength, mystique, and wisdom (or, here, telepathy). Protection from what? It matters not; girls need protecting. From reckless drivers. Rival vampires. What have you.

But -- here's the rub -- if the boy loses control of himself in the heat of passion he could destroy her. She has an intoxicating scent. She's filled with blood-red deliciousness. Perhaps he would not retract his teeth were they ever to take hold. It's the story of a thousand romances, of two thousand movie teens who struggle against chastity, and it's a story not altogether different from that of poor Peter Parker who cannot declare his love for whatshername because certain ne'er-do-wells would then use her as Spider-Man bait. In short, nothing attracts boys like somebody else's letter jacket. But in this case, the ne'er-do-well is Edward himself. Stuff that duality into your Spidey tights, Peter.

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It's quick summary week in the Elsewhere department:

• At McSweeney's: Fifty Years of Popular Songs Condensed into Single Sentences
• At AlterNet: Why Al Franken Will be Minnesota's Next Senator
• And in the video below, 100 movies spoiled in just five minutes by the Fine Brothers [via SpoutBlog]:

Ishika Mohan / Fox Searchlight / Lol Crawley

Left: Danny Boyle in India. Right: JimMyron Ross and Tarra Riggs in Ballast.

On this edition of the Plastic Podcast, Robert Davis first talks with Danny Boyle about his new film, Slumdog Millionaire. Among other things, they chat about what drew him to the project, his impression of India, working with his co-director Loveleen Tandan, his strategy for editing multiple timelines, and the film's surprising depiction of torture — over a game show.

Then Rob talks with Lance Hammer whose debut film, Ballast, is moving gradually around the country. They talk about the music he almost added, the eye of an art director, the impact of Godard and the Dardenne brothers on the film, the way he gleaned dialogue from his extensive, "architectural" process of rehearsal and improvisation, and the tone of the Mississippi delta.

0:00 Intro
3:09 Interview: Danny Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire
17:24 Interview: Lance Hammer on Ballast
33:43 Outro

Further Reading and Listening

• We talked about Slumdog Millionare on our Toronto podcast, and J. Robert Parks reviewed it in his Toronto diary.
• We talked about Ballast on our Sundance podcast, and Rob reviewed it here.
• In the interview, Danny Boyle refers to the book Maximum City.
• And Rob referred to the audio books When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris and The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.
• Someone said something about A Silver Mt. Zion.

Update: 15 December 2008
Excerpts from the interview with Lance Hammer appear at pastemagazine.com.

Colin Powell Reacts to Obama Victory:

More video clips:

• President Bush on the White House lawn
• Condoleezza Rice's comments
• McCain's gracious concession speech
• Obama's excellent acceptance speech

Update:

• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announce the winner, trying to maintain composure

Listen, people. Can't Wellington the Wiggly Worm and Booker T. Bluebird live together in peace?

Google is constantly updating and tinkering with its search algorithms, and most of the time we never notice. The service is a black box, and what goes on inside is anybody's guess.

But I've noticed something in the last week that's going to affect the way I type queries. About a decade ago (cripes), I picked up the habit from Robot Wisdom, the granddaddy of all blogs, of searching for a phrase by typing periods between the words instead of the more common way of surrounding the phrase with quotation marks. It's much easier to touch-type

three.one.two

than

"three one two"

especially when you're searching for two phrases at once, which I sometimes do when I'm looking up lyrics, bits of dialogue, or something I remember from a news article. Typing quotation marks requires pressing shift and moving your hands, but periods are easy. And until very recently, the results were identical.

This no doubt exploited some quirk of Google's punctuation handling, and I can see that there aren't many people who do this, so the side effect was bound to disappear at some point. I'm just surprised it has lasted this long. I'm sure this latest change includes lots of invisible improvements that we'll all grow accustomed to without realizing it, so I won't complain that this now produces different results from this.

Time to retrain my fingers.

Some advice for people who talk to exit pollsters:

Little more than three years ago, the greatest engineering disaster since Chernobyl according to one expert occurred in the city of New Orleans, blamed by three different teams of investigators on misfeasance and malfeasance by an agency of the United States federal government. ["a system in name only" says the Corps' own report.]

Not a word about it in this presidential campaign. It didn't happen. We dreamed it. They must have dreamed it down there.

Not a word. Why? No, not evil. Not malice. Not any of that good stuff. You and I know the reason, ladies and gentlemen: it didn't show up in the polls.

The candidates decided what to talk about based on what people in the polls say they're concerned about, and it wasn't even in the top ten. So, you know, I don't care whether you vote or not. It's no skin off any part of my anatomy. But I will say this: if you are going to some place on Tuesday and you're going behind a little curtain and you're casting what you think will be a secret ballot. And you then decide, the minute you leave that private booth, to go out and talk to a total stranger and tell him how you voted, how much money you make, and what religion you are, just make sure when he asks what demographic group you belong to, you say "genius."

— Harry Shearer

Does the Army Corps of Engineers have a project near you?

After a few days of being sick and then a few more days studying for and taking the Illinois drivers test and/or supporting a spouse doing the same, I managed to catch a handful of films at the Chicago International Film Festival, mostly movies that I'd missed at previous festivals. I'm sure I'll have more to say at some point about those films, but in the meantime you can monitor our quick reactions to recent screenings on our sidebar, Twitter, and -- for reactions to new films in theaters -- the grid.

Plus, we have a drift of interviews coming up here and on the podcast, with the likes of Claire Denis, Darren Aronofsky, Rian Johnson, Danny Boyle, and Arnaud Desplechin, each of them offering do-it-yourself instructions for performing some type of automotive repair, just in time for winter. Be there or be stranded. On yet another future episode, J. Robert Parks will go out of his way to try to convince me to watch a few classics that I've never seen, and vice-versa.

It's a pretty exciting queue of items, and I'm just glad we decided to call our site Occasional Plastic instead of one of the other, more demanding names we'd considered, which might have required us to type more consistently, read less exhaustively, and chew less safely. whew

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to get work done the last few weeks. I sit down to start grading papers or write that review, and instead I find an excuse to start surfing politico.com or MSNBC’s First Read or any of the dozens of political websites I’ve tripped over this election season.

I’ve been a political junkie for most of my life. I distinctly remember being enthralled with the 1976 presidential primaries when my third-grade teacher decided to put a big chart on the wall. I had no idea who Reagan or Carter were, but the steadily building numbers of delegates seemed almost mystical. A few years later I discovered a game about presidential campaigns and electoral votes at a friend’s house. I’m embarrassed to say I’d sometimes ignore him just so I could finish the game that he’d got bored of.

In high school, I became passionate about Model UN, and my political interests broadened. Ever since, my reading has revolved around newspapers and magazines that let me indulge my passion for understanding how the world--especially the political world--works and doesn’t work.

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