Exhibit 12.2

This Palin pick is a bit of disaster for McCain, right? It really seems like the only logical reason to pick her would be to A) Appease social conservatives and B) Try to attract Hillary voters. Fair enough except:

-Nobody gives a damn about social conservatives this election (or, really, any election when the economy is bad).

-She's adamantly pro-life, pro-guns, and pro-beauty pageants. Which of those things is supposed to appeal to these alleged armies of disaffected Hillary voters? Oh, right, she's a woman. Well, that settles it then. If I know women--and I don't--they love nothing more than being pandered to by old, white grandfather figures.

-It completely undercuts any arguments he wants to make about experience. She was mayor of a town of 8,000 people and has been governor for less than two years. Um, good luck with that. The worst part is, since he's the one who opened this argument in the campaign, the Democrats are going to be able to bring it up without looking sexist.

-She has an ongoing corruption scandal that apparently involves her office going out of their way to fire her sister's ex-husband. This is under investigation by an independent committee...um, like, right now.

-Her resume outside of politics is pretty laughable in the context of Obama, Biden, and even McCain himself. Not to be an elitist about it, but she makes Pawlenty look like a Nobel laureate. Being a journalism major at the University of Idaho is great and all--Go Vandals!--but having a varied career as a fisherwoman and a sportscaster before getting into small town Alaska politics isn't going to play very well to the glass ceiling breaking Hillary supporters or, really, to anyone else.

-Mainland Americans don't like Alaska. Or the film Mystery, Alaska.

-She's going to look John McCain's daughter standing next to him. Or worse. (For what it's worth, McCain has a child five years older than she is).

That said, she does seem like a fun lady in that crazy Alaskan sort of way, and, though I've never heard her speak, one assumes she has some charisma and intelligence. Her debate with Biden is going to be a bloodbath and she has more than a little Dan Quayle potential, but it's easy to see the media loving this pick and treating her with the kid gloves that they never gave, say, Hillary. For all the talk sure to come from the Republican side about how they want to finish the job the Democrats started, it's likely that this pick is going to be more notable for how it subverts the smart, accomplished woman in politics for a non-careerist, outdoorsy version of femininity. Why anyone would think that would appeal to a large percentage of the female electorate is beyond me, but what do I know.

She seems like a character Aaron Sorkin would write only he'd have had her go to Harvard on the beauty pageant scholarship and then to have worked on a fishing boat while doing legal aid for indigenous peoples. Instead, she's just got the beauty pageant and the fishing boat. Doesn't seem like that's enough.

UPDATE: I got a chance to catch some of her appearance and the reaction to her selection at lunch and nothing I saw changed my mind. She comes across as very, very unpresidential and small potatoes on camera and whether it's fair or not that accent is going to get mercilessly mocked on SNL. Also, she's been picked by exactly the wrong candidate to be going around talking about being in the PTA. Her "hockey mom" schtick is getting a lot of love from the talking heads who are bizarrely claiming this to be a history making choice--um, why exactly? We've had female VP candidates before--and Palin herself went directly after Hillary supporters. To me, that spells disaster, but I'm not an expert. The reaction from actual voters seems to be shock/apprehension but the media loves it. No surprises there.

That debate with Biden looms large, and it's hard to imagine her not making a foreign policy mistake between now and the election. Even if she doesn't, it's going to be tough for her. The last time most people heard an accent like hers was in Fargo and nothing about her resume or willfully smalltown demeanor is going to contradict that sentiment.

Exhibit 1.10

Song Kang-ho

I spent half of The Host trying to figure out if the sweet, stunted father was the same actor who played the loquacious, bull-headed cop in Bong Joon-ho's last movie (Memories of a Murder). It is the same actor, and he's fantastic. So are both the movies, for what it's worth.

Memories of a Murder notable for how it re-imagines--at least to this American--the cop-drama, making it less about psychological horror and investigative brilliance than frustration and entropy. Confronted with the country's first real serial killer, Song Kang-ho's character is an aggressively cocky oaf initially more concerned with appearing to be a clever investigator than actually being one. As the murders continue and he doesn't find answers in his slapdash borrowing from film and television police procedurals, his violence becomes increasingly out of control while the killer's is undertaken with an opposite dispassion. It would be easy to say the movie is about this small Korean town's loss of innocence at the hands of "unspeakable evil," but Song Kang-ho's character makes it clear the murders--and the government's impotence in stopping them--is an inevitability of the country's rapid industrialization and erratic political situation at the time the film was set (mid-1980s). That Song--like the killer, like the government--preys on the weak seems all too natural for him.

Likewise The Host takes what is otherwise a genre movie and instills it with a political awareness, both of S. Korea's own democratization and of America's international motivations. As much as the monster, America is the bad guy here (though S. Korea's government doesn't exactly get a free pass). That said, the politics are really just background to a thoroughly engaging creature feature. Here Song plays an almost man-child whose first interactions with his 13-year-old daughter go from her telling him about parents' day (which his brother attended instead of him), her laughing at his attempts to save dimes to buy her a new cellphone, and then him sweetly giving her a beer. Both roles require an intense physical presence, but where Song's character in Memories is a leaky powder keg, his character here is so soft at times it's as if he is going to collapse, blob-like, into himself.

Much more could be said for the direction of Bong Joon-ho's direction was is beautiful, disturbing, and highly accessible. Without insult I might think of Bong as a kind-of Korean Spielberg, but I can't begin to think of an actor like Song in American cinema. Russell Crowe, maybe, but Song has more of a doughy false bravado where as Russell Crowe probably actually does believe he could take down the Roman Empire single-handedly. And that comparison only really works in Memories. I can't see Russell playing down like Song does in The Host.

Paul Giamatti? Philip Seymour Hoffman? But I can't see either of them mercilessly beating suspects and pulling it off. I'm at a loss. Would love to hear suggestions.

P.S. If you have Netflix you can stream Memories of a Murder. Do it. Now.