As “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” descends upon the multiplexes, it would be so easy, cheap and déclassé to unload on the whole phenomenon. Like Edward, the chaste vampire star of the movies and the books, I should resist the temptation.

Oh wait. I’m not Edward. And I’d like to talk about our disturbing attraction to fascism.   

Understanding Twilightmania requires that we understand the raging intensity of heart and hormones during the teen and tween years. We should also appreciate its Bollywoodesque code of sexual restraint: Edward is love with Bella, a non-vampire. He suppresses his desire to dentally mainline her blood supply because he loves her. The idea seems to be that it takes one J.C. of a man (must be physically gorgeous, as a metaphor for his inner beauty) to rein in his animal side -- the elephant in the room in so many relationships. Edward amounts to a celestial Ben Hur of his sex drive, keeping those Arabian steeds in picturesque lock step. Not having sex is so much sexier than having it. Suppression is the new black. A fascism over the libido. If there was a Latin term, it might be anorexia schtuppia. But here’s another take: The success of the original movie (based on Stephenie Meyer’s wildly successful book series) and the excitement over “Full Moon” is really about our unfathomably stupid desire to join two of the most enslaved, tyrannical worlds in which anyone could find themselves: high school and the world of vampires. Forget the freedoms our forefathers fought for. We can’t wait to gird the orange prison suits and leg irons of slave membership. Yes, both movies make it all seem so attractive to be part of this sub-world of vampires and werewolves -- or Team Edward and Team Jacob. Both tribes boast a cast of fetching, ripped, youthful players, including Taylor Lautner, a werewolf who becomes a romantic contender in the new movie. But to vicariously join this group is to assume immediate second-class membership, unless we happen to be gorgeous.    Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart -- Edward and Bella -- represent that beautiful couple we remember from our own high-school years. Remember them? The Golden Two. The ones we watched -- jealously and resentfully -- from our lonely corners in the food hall, as they smooched and canoodled over their chocolate milk. They slurped tongues and lips, we slurped Jell-O. We were so second class. Take a look again. Stewart and Pattinson? Ridiculously hot. Elite hot. Above us. Not. Us. How good do we feel? Why are we drawn to Edward and Bella, even though they act like the outsiders many of us have felt like? Why do we want in? When does our fun start? Join either of these teams and, hello, relinquish yourself. You are a slave to your need to feed. You must be forever connected to your fellow hunters. There is no more individualism. You are there for unlife. Feel like going off on your own, American style? No, sir. No individualism here. You’ll have to stick with your fanged, socialistic pals.   Speaking of socialism, and our innate propensity to sign up for fascist membership, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is upon us. And this seems the right time to ponder a connecting cultural puzzler: Why are we embracing the very tyrannies the former East Germany was built around? I speak of our whole Facebook culture in which nothing is too banal, insignificant and personal that we can’t share it with the world. Why do we choose to share with the world the sex we had with our boyfriend Kevin on Dad’s favorite golf course at midnight? Why do we sext our friends? Why does it not freak us out that everyone, including Dad, can check out those pictures forever? Do we think we can opt for some version of the Witness Relocation program if we post a little too much? The jackbooted goons of the former East Germany would have paid billions for that kind of transparency. Who would need Stasi -- their secret police, which constitute a significant part of the population during the Cold War -- when the citizens are doing such a fine job of ratting on themselves? The disconcerting conclusion is that we are eager to join societies that would make slaves of us. Maybe we have too much freedom. Maybe we create the invisible states of Textopia and Vampiria out of sheer boredom. Or maybe the “Twilight” movies and books are just fun. Whatever the reason, it’s at least instructive to ask ourselves, as often as possible, if privacy and individualism are still part of the equation when we speak of freedom.     

The blog pulpit today officially enshrines insincerity and melodrama as the new black -- same as the old black. (Sorry, Pete Townshend.)  

You see, I have just emerged from the nearly three-hour “2012,” the latest disaster spectacle from German director Roland Emmerich, in which we watch our own earthly demise in a dizzying, trashy entertainment package of bad acting, second-choice talent (John Cusack, pick up that ghetto-blaster and make another “Say Anything” ... we miss you as a cute kid) and computer-generated spectacle.

You can find perfectly good reviews of this movie elsewhere. (That was insincere, and you know it). But this was my take-home. Yep. I speak of the card-carrying B.S. that has become the Esperanto of our daily lives, and the cheesy, soapy genre known as melodrama. Both work so beautifully together, part and parcel of the American Experience. At first blush, we think of both as bad things. But here’s the rub: We only think we think we do. It’s time to give both notions our fullest measure of love, respect and appreciation. It’s time to admit they have long been -- perhaps have always been -- the way we process almost everything. It’s time to realize how as a culture we can only process reality or entertainment (both of which have long become interchangeable notions) with at least one or both. Basically, we need everything to be over the top -- and we also want the truth to be rinsed off everything, like Alar off an apple. We understand B.S. to be B.S. We know it’s our common parlance. Thus, as I walked out after the preview screening of this movie, the usual cluster of very nice, underpaid publicity representatives waited eagerly outside -- clipboards and pens at the ready -- for critics' comments. They were eager to write down words like “fabulous,” “awesome” and “sick” for their corporate bosses. They wanted to tell the distributor that the crowd “loved” it. They were waiting for that hyperbole the way a crack addict waits for his daily rock. And everyone emerging understood the kind of B.S. they were supposed to spout. After all, we are all literate in the discourse of quotidian insincerity (“Hey, what’s new with you?” “You have yourself a great day, okay?”) and movie hype. (“Best Disaster Movie Since ‘The Day After Tomorrow!!!’”). And so they did.   My way of dealing with the reps, who are nice people after all, was to say, “We saved the world! We saved the world!” To me, this implied the insincerity and hype they wanted, plus I didn’t feel too dirty about the transaction. Insincerity and melodrama have been interchangeable in the movies since D.W. Griffith used outright racism and melodramatic treacle in 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Ditto for our “dialogue” and “conversation” in political life. (Town Hall Screamfests anyone? And then there’s the political ad that concludes with “This is Senator Marlon Q. Snakeoil and I approve this message.”) Same for television, whether it’s “serious” "John Adams"-type drama, or a detergent commercial, or an infomercial, or even one of those CNN  banners heralding the latest Crisis/Flood/Earthquake/Shooting in the Heartland/Along the Border/In Afghanistan/Anyplace USA. All B.S. all the time, no matter how “highbrow” someone or something pretends to be. We wallow in a corn-sweetened cesspool of insincerity, hype and over-the-top drama. And for one fleeting moment during the movie, I forgot that. You see, I had a true emotional response. Just for a second. But it was a breach of the moviegoing rules -- almost as momentous as Lucifer entertaining the momentary notion he was as great as the Almighty and getting shuttled off to hell.   I should have remembered I was supposed to watch the wholesale destruction of the world as a popcorn spectacle. I was supposed to ignore the bad one liners, or the fact that Cusack and his family drive through an ongoing blitzkrieg of widening cracks in the earth, and molten lava projectiles without so much as a mark on their faces. What happened is, I watched a tsunami rise above the White House and waste it. In one computer-generated maneuver, the Casa Blanca became instant mush. I found it very disconcerting. No fun to watch at all because -- HELLO! -- it is a national treasure. And yes, even in a secular no-sacred-cows world, this felt wrong. When someone appropriates a virginal image from you, you feel spiritually pawed or mauled or something. And for one sad moment, I mourned the loss of this American institution. And then I thought: “What are you thinking? You idiot!” Sorry, folks. Won’t happen again. I’m all the wiser now. And you have yourself a great weekend.    

George Clooney staring intensely at a goat -- and willing it to die -- should be funny, right?

I mean, in a movie, not real life.

There he is -- in the self-explanatorily titled “The Men Who Stare at Goats” – eyes narrowed, as he tries to kill a tethered critter with his mind. Here’s man and beast united in a spaghetti western confrontation. Watching this, we should be falling about. So why aren’t we?

I believe it’s the corn.

I believe corn has become the bane of our food supply -- and our brains. If you’re with me on this, we’ll connect this terrible development to bad satire. And we’ll touch upon “Dr. Strangelove” and the documentary “Food Inc.” on the way.

If you watch the informative documentary “Food Inc.,” you’ll see that just about everything that flows into our brains comes from corn. Mush in our hamburgers and virtually all foods. Corn syrup in our sodas. Even our meat eats corn mush.

The food industry, bent on profit, feeds corn mush now to our cattle. And corn mush to our chickens. That means corn in our burgers, hot dogs, chicken salad, eggs, you name it.

The movie shows you how the chickens are so undernourished by this Brave New Diet, they can’t even stand on their legs. They just lie there like those slobs wallowing poolside in “Wall-E.”

“Goats” -- the movie, based on Jon Ronson’s 2004 nonfiction book -- reflects our corn-fueled mediocracy of the moment: a pop culture that’s all sweet, all bland, all the time. We’re so conditioned to blandness and sweetness everywhere, it stands to reason we ask for it in our comedy, too.

When it comes to casting, “Goats” packs in the sucrose: Lovable George, who has the left-wing version of the frat-boy smirk that got George Bush elected for two terms. Jeff Bridges, who was so effortlessly funny in “The Big Lebowski.” Ewan McGregor, the young Obi Wan Kenobi of the “Star Wars” franchise.

Set in Iraq circa 2003, the movie follows a newspaper reporter, Bob Wilton (McGregor), as he goes to the war zone in search of a good story. He discovers Lyn Casady (Clooney), a self-described “Jedi” who believes he has mind-reading powers and a special technique called “sparkly eyes.”

Little by little, Wilton learns about the military program of yore that trained Lyn, and its creator, a flower-powery, outside-the-box thinker named Django (Bridges) who hands flowers to his boot-camp soldiers.

Sweet! We want to find the movie funny already. And yet, most of the time, we feel as if we’re in one of those uncomfortable situations in which a friend (in this case, a Big Screen Friend like Clooney) is telling us an unfunny joke and we’re duty-bound to laugh.

You’d think this project would be foolproof, judging from the source material. Ronson’s book detailed a series of real military R&D programs that advocated turning soldiers into holistic “warrior monks” capable of telepathy, psychokinesis and teleportation.

But the movie’s as bland as a Cornburger with CornPepsi and Cornfries.

When I watched Clooney stare at that goat, I thought about how we’ve all slipped down the Darwin ladder a rung or two. The same mush that feeds these two opponents feeds the filmmakers, too. Feeds us, too.

They -- and we -- think anything’s funny, if it’s sweet enough. And without noticing it, humankind slips a ring or two on the unforgiving Darwin ladder.

Back in the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern created a bleak-comedy masterpiece called “Dr. Strangelove” by focusing squarely -- and without reaching for cheap laughs -- on the very real notion of the world’s mutually assured destruction. All they needed to do was twist one teeny tiny little bit, and the result was hysterical. But “Goats,” even though it tries to be deadpan, is too tickled with itself to work.

If you can Netflix or YouTube it -- and don’t U love life’s gnu new postmodern verbs? -- there’s a 1974 Italian comedy called “Bread and Chocolate” set among the migrant worker population of Naples. And there’s a hilarious scene in which the central character stumbles into a henhouse, to meet an entire community of impoverished immigrant workers who collect eggs and are forced to live among the chickens. One of the henhouse dwellers (whose pointed face and nose suggest a chicken) starts doing chicken imitations. And all the others join in -- a bunch of men and women buk-buk-beKAP’ing away. It’s as terrifying as it is hilarious. And it seems to herald what we are becoming.

Please start eating grass-fed beef, if you are a meat eater. Watch the corn in your life. Get your brain back. Throw out the soda. Demand your congressmen and congresswomen stop catering to the food industry’s corn programs.

And if you’re looking for funny, check out films made in the pre-corn era. Like “Bread and Chocolate.”
 

We are complicated. We are the best of people and, moments later, the worst. Can we ever calculate our full moral totality? Can we ever draw up a satisfying ledger balance of ourselves -- or anyone else?

And what if that “anyone else” happens to be the most eccentric, compelling pop figure of our time?

I speak of The Gloved One. The Man in the Mirror. Prince Moonwalk. The ethereal figure with the ski-jump nose, the Fletcher Christian hair, the painted-on shades, the Sgt. Pepper jacket -- and ownership of the Beatles catalog to match.

Yes, Michael Jackson, now officially bookended: Born Aug 29, 1958. Died June 25, 2009. 

“This is the final curtain call,” says the late pop star, at the beginning of “This Is It,” a making-of movie and a taking-leave movie all rolled into one. It’s March 2009. And he’s announcing the forthcoming “This Is It” tour, starting at London's O2 Arena.

As we watch this hagiographic record of his rehearsals leading up to that tour, we note -- we can’t help ourselves -- that he has already made $90 million in posthumous royalties and assorted rights, according to a Forbes list. That list places Jackson third on the all-time dead celebrities’ money-making list. He’s third to Yves Saint Laurent and Rodgers & Hammerstein. But he’s ahead of fourth-placed Elvis.

And we also reflect on the dissonance that underscored his life. Even Jackson’s staunchest fans surely admit their revered Michael was never far from controversy. His life was a disconcerting blend of major and minor chords. For every thrilling, percussively stirring single, and for every exciting gyration of his fluid body, there was a groan-inducing negative detail to endure.

There was Nice Michael: The snub-nosed kid at the head of the Jackson 5 (“When I had you to myself…”). The lithe genius who gave us “Thriller” -- only the most successful album of all time. The sensational performer who electrified everyone at the 25th anniversary of Motown. The co-writer of “We Are the World.”

The charity donations. The kids he visited in hospital. All that great music. All that great dancing.   

But then there was Tabloid Michael, a mixture of fact and fabrication. What was true? After a while, we accepted the worst allegations because it all seemed to fit. The allegations of sexual abuse of teenagers ended with no charges (for the first case in 1993) and acquittal (for the second one in 2005). The alleged abuse from his father.

His changing face -- bleached or suffering from vitiligo? The hyperbaric oxygen chamber designed to slow his aging. He denied it on "Oprah" in 1993, as well as bleaching his skin. He also denied buying the bones of the Elephant Man. But we all saw him dangling the baby over the hotel railing four stories up.

We say goodbye to both Michaels, now. We take all that weird but mostly sad baggage. And we dump it. We don’t think about the cardiac arrest, the reports of propofol, lorazepam and midazolam (he went from creating chemistry to becoming it), and charges of homicide. 

We dump it all, because death asks our forbearance. Death forces us to say goodbye to what was good. Watching Jackson in rehearsal, it’s hardly a stretch. To watch him in this movie is to see -- and yet never quite fully capture, and that’s the mystique of it -- what all the fuss has always been about.

Just watch the shoes. I did that for a while. The way the heel rises like a metronome. The way those feet squiggle so that he seems to ice skate everywhere. Then try to watch the wave that goes from his flicking fingers through the hips, along the legs and back to those shoes again.

You’ll never get it. It’s ineffable, what he does. What he did. There’s a reason he’s up there and we’re all down here.

It’s saddening and touching to see him so completely at home in such a public place. You realize he only ever had one home: the stage. His real homes, like Neverland, they were the nightmares. So it’s oddly comforting to see him caught in time, still seemingly alive, as he works tirelessly to perfect those steps. As he leaves such a powerful effect on the dancers, choreographers, musicians and other support people around him.

The applause they give him is spontaneous and full-hearted. And amid this warm bath of appreciation, it’s easy to celebrate the pure joy at the heart of this little boy, this 50-year-old boy, forever moon walking in the skies outside Wendy Darling’s bedroom window.

It’s a bitter human irony that we can be at our ugliest when we’re fighting for our most passionate verities, including democracy, freedom and the American dream. And it seems to happen most often in the politics of immigration.

Most of us are good people when we’re sitting around the dinner table. What happens to us as soon as we step up to the public podium? If there’s one movie that shows the worst -- but also the best -- in that regard, it’s a documentary you’ve probably never heard of. As of now, it's unreleased. Like many other independently made documentaries, “9500 Liberty” doesn’t have a distributor. That ought to change.  So far, it has been on the festival circuit with forthcoming stops at the San Diego Asian Festival (Oct. 27), the San Francisco’s Sundance Kabuki Theater (Oct. 29), and festivals in Virginia, Austin and St. Louis in November. And it lit up the virtual nation of Youtubia when filmmakers Annabel Park and Eric Byler posted their movie in progress.    In the summer of 2007, Park and Byler took their cameras to Prince William County, Virginia, where an explosive debate was taking place. In response to the burgeoning influx of Hispanics, the local board of supervisors was considering legislation that would require police officers to stop and question anyone who gave them “probable cause” to suspect was an illegal alien.   The film follows the interaction within the board, out in the community and over the Internet, as the issue attracts increasingly inflamed and widespread debate. And as we watch events unfold, we can’t help noticing this is all taking place in Manassas, the hallowed battleground site where another racially charged matter divided the political nation. This postmodern version of civil war may not have the musketry and the spectacular loss of life of its predecessor. But it doesn't lack for absorbing drama. And a memorable cast of characters. There’s Corey A. Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County, who is spearheading the legislation. A family man with an easy smile, his forthcoming campaign slogan later that year would be “Fighting Illegal Immigration.” And there’s Stewart’s staunchest supporter, Greg Letiecq, a local activist-blogger and president of Help Save Manassas, who (at one point in the movie) advocates sending illegal aliens back to their countries of origin “with love.” Their political opponents include Gaudencio Fernandez, whose graffiti-style protest on a standing wall on his centrally located property (its street address is the movie’s title) becomes a controversial focal point for the community.   But the most crucial drama takes place in the political middle ground, where we meet characters such as Chief Charlie T. Deane, the longest serving police chief in the region. Obliged to carry out the law, he attempts to do so with neutrality and honor. But even a servant of the law can become a political player where he tries to reach out to the Spanish speaking community. There is also Elena Schlossberg, a former fundraiser for Stewart and a self described Independent. As the forces of contention become starker and uglier, she begins to have her own personal change of opinion. And finally, there is Republican supervisor Marty Nohe, who finds himself in a crucial position when it comes to voting for or against the Probable Cause mandate. Even though the filmmakers’ political sentiments aren’t too hard to identify, there’s something to watch for viewers of any political stripe. “9500 Liberty” is local, yet powerfully American. And not unlike Marshall Curry’s excellent 2002 documentary “Street Fight,” which chronicled the stunning rise to power of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, it shows us politics where the rubber meets the road. With an uplifting turn of events and some extraordinary acts of conscience, “9500 Liberty” is as dramatically charged as any fiction movie. And ultimately, it’s as powerful a booster of the democratic process as anything Frank Capra ever imprinted into our collective memory.  

It just so happens that I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” a few weeks before my students -- I am teaching them a college course in American movies this semester -- are due to watch Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

My brain registered the obvious: that both movies have “Wild” in the title. But being the overactive organ that it -- thankfully -- still is, the same brain started to make other connections. Which is why “health care” and “town hall meetings” also entered the anything-goes domain of this unedited thinking process.   “Wild Things,” which Spike (“Being John Malkovich”) Jonze directed, is the adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s inspired and brief 1963 bedtimer about a young boy whose primal urges make him a sort of persona non grata in the eyes of his mother. He is screaming, howling and carrying on, the way boys do. The way animals do. And in doing so, he is connecting -- without any self consciousness -- to the wild side of his nature. He still has a viable link with the primeval. So his mother, that benevolent martinet of civilization, that id basher, sends him to bed without supper. So the boy retreats deep into his imagination and goes to find a world that does not fear the wild side -- that fully embraces it. And he sets sail for a land where Wild Things live. He meets all manner of furry monsters and he becomes their leader. He celebrates their monster lifestyle with a royally declarative “Let the wild rumpus start!” and he enjoys a sort of primeval lost weekend. After an untold amount of time, he returns home, emotionally readjusted, in time for his still-hot dinner. Mom is there, all hugs, smiles and reconciliation. Sendak’s story was deceptively simple and brief, but it played such deep human chords, parents and children have been resonating, bedside, ever since. It seems to me that “The Wild Bunch,” Peckinpah’s 1969 movie, is simply the adult version of the same thing. It’s a lament for man’s uncivilized side, and yet it’s also an implied admonishment for man’s tendency towards violence. In the movie, a gang of professional thieves find themselves caught in the precipitous gap between two social stages in the American story -- the era of lawless independence and the coming of the motor car, the train and the technology of a commercially and socially and morally interdependent society. The men in “The Wild Bunch” are essentially grown-up, chin-stubbled, snaggle-toothed, hard-drinking, gun-toting versions of Max. They are always looking for a wild rumpus. But in this emerging world, wild rumpuses are becoming illegal. If they continue to rob banks and kill anyone who gets in their way, they are going to be sent to a different kind of bed -- the wooden kind that’s buried underground.        Both movies lament the sanctity of the id, yet acknowledge it needs serious monitoring. Man is inherently aggressive and even needs to be. But there are consequences, without those government (read Mom) controls. On a larger scale, both movies understand that society is constantly caught in a disconcerting dialogue between its human and animal side. Both movies have their indirect roots in the growing social tumult of the 1960s. Sendak’s book was published in 1963, the same year President John F. Kennedy would be shot. (Sendak, born of Eastern European Jewish parents, was also powerfully aware that the Nazis slaughtered several of his paternal relatives during the Holocaust.) “The Wild Bunch” arrived in theaters in 1969, as brutal images of the Vietnam war had become commonplace on America’s living room TV screens. Peckinpah declared that he wanted to draw peoples' attention to the war, and that he wanted to open up the experience of violence for moviegoers -- make them understand that guns aren’t toys. They kill viscerally.     All of which is to say: You mess with the human id at your peril. It’s necessary to exercise our wild sides. It’s inevitable and perhaps even necessary for those crazy people to cause disturbances in those health-care town hall meetings. They need to honor their wild sides, the kind that is illogical and undisciplined and emotional.   They need to do this before their more rational sides -- or perhaps other people around them with calmer, more deeply reflective qualities -- can step in and negotiate a more balanced approach to life. We are a society of Maxes and Moms, and it’s good we have them both.

Is pessimism any more distorted a perspective on life than optimism?  Isn't it centered in fact much more so than a sunny perspective?

So why not enjoy comedies that work from a misanthropic view of the universe -- yet leaven the gloom with a sort of philosophical levity?

By this, I refer to shows such as Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Ricky Gervais’ British version of “The Office.” Even “Entourage” operates from this bleak world view. But mainly, I speak of the Coen brothers. Ethan and Joel, to be specific. Their darkly observed humor becomes a sort of philosophy. It invites the audience to laugh with existential recognition -- and appreciate the fact that they can. As mortals, we’re on a helter skelter ride to physical disintegration and oblivion. We might as well chuckle all the way down. And if we can go to movies that understand this, well, once in a while maybe we can appreciate the spirit in which they come. It may not be the most comforting form of entertainment, but it’s potentially more satisfying. Call them misanthropes, call their films witheringly dismissive of humanity -- as one New Yorker critic did recently -- but also know that few other American moviemakers have created such consistently provocative and original work. In a culture – especially the moviemaking one -- that is equally dismissive about art, they have found the perfect bridge between art and entertainment. Let’s quickly scroll through their best known titles to cursorily illustrate what I am talking about:  “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Miller’s Crossing,” “The Big Lebowsky,” “Fargo,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “No Country for Old Men.” Watching their movies, you can feel entertainment artists at work, who have mastered the form and who impose their view of the universe on the audience. Their movies unfold with often nasty surprise, but they are always revelatory. You leave with the sense that you have been moved, amused, horrified, startled and provoked into deep reflection -- all in the passing moments. It takes at least another viewing to appreciate all the intricacies. Yet, their movies also feel quintessentially American: aware of the verities, such as piety and patriotism, but also deeply aware of the indolent corruptions and constant ironies of being human. And now there is “A Serious Man,” in which a prologue about a Russian Jewish dybbuk -- the mythical figure that is a walking dead man -- segues into a quasi-autobiographical satire about becoming a mensch in a Jewish American family in suburban tract Minnesota. Surprise is their stock and trade. As usual, you have absolutely no idea where the story is going. But, boy, do you keep watching. The Coens define their end of American cinema as powerfully as Steven Spielberg defines his. Spielberg makes us look at the American Way of Life at a rapturous, Vaseline-coated focal distance. He offers great films that are the movie equivalent of Norman Rockwell images, both quintessentially American but also fabled. They are about what we want to believe about ourselves but, deep down, willfully ignore the conflicting evidence. The Coens focus squarely on that unmentionable evidence. They gleefully uncover the dust bunnies Spielberg (and his disciple, Ron Howard) shoves under the rug.   But the Coens’ vision is equally American -- it’s just closer in, so that when you focus more squarely on the flag you can see the joins, the seams and the texture of the material -- and you are forever within and without the enveloping experience of feeling American. You are stuck in the glorious and imaginative, as well as the banal and the mundane. The simultaneously appealing and disconcerting. They are the un-Spielbergs, the collective antidote to genial, universalized banality and, in being so, they perform the artistic equivalent of a civic service. They tell moviegoers that all does not have to be humanistic and Rockwellian to be American. That movies don’t have to be laid out as clear as Cliffs Notes. That mysterious and the unfathomable are as much a part of the American experience as familiarity and commonly shared and understood rituals. That suburban homes hide pain, distress and unhappiness; they’re not just the settings for adorable teenagers who hide sweet little aliens in their bedroom closets.  And that endings that make you say, “What the … ?” have as much validity as those uplifting, hammer-between-the-eyes conclusions that have become a virtual contract between movie maker and audience.   For all their dyspeptic cynicism, the Coens’ movies are like wild flowers. They take in the carbon monoxide of modern existence and they belch fresh air all over the audience.  

I’m a fool for zombies.

That’s right: the dead guys – and gals. Love to watch them in any movie -- make that almost any movie. It’s not like I’m a dedicated fanboy, who has zombie screensavers and can reference zombie scenes at you all day. But I do dig the post-mortem shufflers.

In the movies, zombies run the gamut, of course. They're B-movie flesh-eaters, as they are in my favorite z-flick, 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead.” Or they’re voodoo types, under the spell of an evil master. Or they’re super powered alien freakazoids. Or they’re the equivalent of feral dogs, as in “28 Days Later.” Usually doesn’t matter to me.   They’re all good.   They’re all dead.   As many have observed before me, zombies lend themselves beautifully to metaphor. They can stand for consumerism, jealousy, man’s heedlessness to the environment, God’s punishment for man-made Armageddon or just the sheer arbitrariness of marauding evil.   They are invariably the punishment for something societal. Some horrible version of ourselves. Some moral comeuppance we all deserve. We have seen the enemies and it’s us -- dead.   They fascinated me from early days. When I heard the biblical story of Lazarus -- the one that Jesus Christ raised from the dead -- I was intrigued. Not so much for the miracle the Good Book said it was. But because the dude was a New Testament zombie!   Man. If I’d been around when that happened, I would not have yelled, “It’s a miracle!” I would have yelled “It’s a zombie. Run for your lives!”   What I like about the z-peeps is that sense of otherworldly animation. They have that been-to-Hell-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-T-shirt campiness, sure. But they also agitate something in the Jungian soul. They have supernatural pizzazz, they’re post-sepulchrally spooky.   The way they shuffle! A little off balance. Like drunks for whom last call is an arm and a leg. Love those slack-jawed, open mouths, messy from the last human meal. Love those thousand-yard stares, too. In their eyes, you see nothing. Just the void. A terrible sadness about them, too.   I’d love to have a few of them over sometime. But, you know, I feel like the dinner would go horribly wrong. I’d find myself shuffling into the darkness. The neighbors would start talking. I’d hate that. So I keep my distance, even though -- as they say in Hollywood -- I love their work.   Speaking of Hollywood, I caught that “Zombieland” flick, the one starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin (the girl from “Little Miss Sunshine”) and Amber Heard. I’m reeling off all those names to emphasize what’s wrong with the picture. If I were a zombie (hey, suddenly, I sound like an undead Zero Mostel), I’d be appalled.   Is there a Zombie Anti-Defamation League? This movie pretends to pay homage to the silent ones. But it’s really just a vehicle for some Hollywood slumming.   Filmmakers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ruben Fleischer have taken this B-movie genre and turned it into a sort of perky gorefest for the multiplex set. I won’t be surprised if it makes decent, if not great, money. It’s filled with violent slapstick and the kind of quippy dialogue that makes audiences feel smart and midnight-madness-hip for chuckling.   And the characters doing the quipping onscreen -- a small band of human survivors in a post apocalyptic world overrun by zombies -- are recognizable stars. They’re there to comfort us. They’re making it officially cool -- almost user-friendly -- to be in zombie territory.     And it’s no coincidence that the sports utility truck they drive, at one point, is the same color as the family van in “Little Miss Sunshine.” All this movie is missing is an old-fashioned TV laugh track. (Speaking of which, do you realize, when you watch old reruns of “The Honeymooners” or “The Andy Griffith Show,” most of the people whose canned laughter you hear are now dead? Sorta zombie-creepy, don’t you think?)   I have nothing against filmmakers making zombies their own. I loved Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s “Shaun of the Dead,” which placed amusing British characters in a London filled with commuter and work-slave zombies. But “Zombieland” wanders too far into opportunistic, exploitative land. And it devalues the b-movie currency of one of the movies’ greatest creations.   I look forward to the next generation of zombie filmmakers, going back to the basics. Making it creepy, not fuzzily adorable, to be a zombie again.