I’m not exactly on the ball here, as this movie was released in 1990, but the prof screened it today as part of an all-day MO 512 negotiations class simulation that was based on the events depicted in American Dream. I must say it was a pretty tangential thing to watch in negotiations class, but the movie was, in a word, real. It’s all about the strike at a Hormel processing plant in Austin, Minn., in 1985-86 and the relationships and conflicts that take place between management, the local union leadership, national leaders at the United Food and Commercial Workers — in a random personal fact, I was once a member of the UFCW — union rank-and-file and other interested parties. It’s tragic and sad to see, and yet by avoiding taking any particular side in the story, the film is more effectively illustrative of the Reagan-era decline of unions and the real-world impact that had on workers and their families. The meat-processing scenes will also make you want to take some time away from pork, but appetite for bacon is a small price to pay for one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.

Too many people here at b-school like to stereotype union members as greedy, obstructionist ogres, which gets old fast to a dude from Pittsburgh with union family and friends. (This is at one of the more liberal and friendly b-schools; I can only imagine the vitriol going around elsewhere.) I’d recommend this movie to them: unions can go too far and have self-interested leaders, just like management, but there are real people on both sides of the divide and that’s an important thing to keep in mind as a future business leader.

So go rent American Dream; you’ll be glad you did.

Trent Reznor: Saw him at the Pittsburgh airport. (He grew up about an hour north, in Meadville.) He got his own bags. Short dude, but cool hair.

Jeremy Piven and Adrian Grenier: Driving an SUV and heading to a fried-seafood restaurant with a really skinny girlfriend, respectively. For some reason that trip to L.A. became the “see people from Entourage” trip. I also saw Mrs. Ari Gold on the trip before that one.

Whoopi Goldberg: She was walking up Sixth Avenue. That’s pretty much it.

Jim Lehrer: At a book-launch party in D.C. at Ben Bradlee‘s house. (I met him too, but that’s an interesting anecdote for another time.) Lehrer = super nice and introduced himself as if the rest of us would have no idea who he is. (“Hi, Jim Lehrer, nice to meet you.”)

L.L. Cool J: Walking through O’Hare airport. The woman ringing up my gum bailed in the middle of our transaction to go stare at him.

Dennis Kucinich: Strangely, in 2.5 years in D.C., and even having lived on Capitol Hill, Dennis Kucinich was the only recognizable politician I encountered. (Presidential motorcades don’t count.) I was out on a run and the Rep from Ohio was walking with some staff. Seriously short dude.

Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour: I met them at the CNN 25th anniversary party in Atlanta. Wolf is pretty short, and Christiane drinks Miller Lite.

Bill Cobbs: I didn’t know his name either, but I just now learned it when I looked up the guy from Night at the Museum that I saw waiting for a car in NYC.

Joey Porter: Saw him in NYC when the gate agent called for “Passenger Porter, Joey.” He flew coach. I told him “Nice game” and he said “Thanks.” It was craziness!

Joe Biden: Getting on a plane to D.C. in LaGuardia. Since I saw him in NYC, he doesn’t count for D.C. politician sightings. Tall, and mo old.

Chris Noth: Eating lunch with some homeless-looking guy in the same Hell’s Kitchen restaurant as me and two female friends. The two friends completely flipped out. Chicks.

Blair Underwood: He was waiting to cross the street in NYC, then I think he got on a bus. But why would Blair Underwood ride the bus? So I’m only 90 percent sure it was him, rather than 100 percent. But if it was Underwood, I would say he has, in fact, gotten on a bus.

Don Cheadle: On the five-hours-later-than-scheduled flight I finally caught to D.C. on the same day as the Biden sighting. A coworker on the flight, sitting directly behind Cheadle, completely missed him even with all the people mysteriously hanging around his seat. Short dude.

Michael Stipe, Christina Ricci, Mike Tyson and Heather Graham: All seen at a Guggenheim benefit party in NYC that I attended thanks to a helpful friend who worked there. Unfortunately I was a bit out of place: me and Mike Tyson were the only people not in suits, and I’m pretty sure that he’s the one of the two of us who could pull that off. Whoops. But I did make eye contact with Heather Graham. She and Mike Tyson later went on to star together in The Hangover. Coincidence?!??!?!

Updated Omissions 8/19:

Michael Phelps: A recent addition; I was watching the first Presidential debate with some UMich sectionmates at The Blue Leprechaun bar, then Phelps rolled in with an entourage of 15 college-age party types and the bar owner kicked us out of our spot. When we left 10 minutes later, there was a line around the block to get in.

Ted Turner: He was down the hall at one of the TIME conferences. I also saw Bill Clinton and Bill Gates at this thing, but they were scheduled speakers, which would be cheating to include.

Bob Novak: I’m surprised I forgot him, since he just died yesterday. Saw him at the restaurant where I was eating dinner with some coworkers. No CIA secrets were revealed to me.

• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.

• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.

In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.

• Key line from this good budget deficit rundown:

If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.

True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.

And on to frivolous stuff:

• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.

• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.

• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)

Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.

The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.

Man, what a week for news. It’s been a while since we had such a contrast of the important (Iran) and the junk-ridden (Transformers 2 = 2nd highest grossing opening ever).

• My vote for biggest story: Considering that I live in the U.S., it has to be the start of American withdrawal from Iraqi cities. There’s the potential for the sectarian pot to boil over again now that American troops won’t be piled onto the lid anymore, but the alternative of policing the country forever isn’t going to work. This is all after the fighting there has been all but forgotten by the general public. I’d put Iran second, and the dramatic turnaround the nation’s opinion of Michael Jackson third, but in my mind it was a return to the big story of the decade.
• Michael Jackson: it’s sad that the guy fell so far from the heights of the ’80s and never made it back, but the country this week seemed to forget the past 15 years in a single afternoon. This is the same thing that happened when Richard Nixon died — granted, Nixon did real harm to the country, while Jackson was just weird — but I wonder if it’s a uniquely American thing for national opinion of a controversial guy to turn on a dime whenever that guy passes on.
• I first heard about Jackson’s death on Twitter myself, but this is just incorrect. You know what I did after I first read that whiff of the story on Twitter? Started hitting the NY Times, CNN and BBC news sites. You can’t note that people check the “respected” news outlets before they really believe an account of something, then turn around and say that this proves those respected news outlets are pointless. Plus, I don’t get the comment about TMZ representing “the new realities of journalism” when they got their scoop through old-fashioned reporting. The truth is that the base of all news will always be reporting, and obviously you don’t have to be a giant, 100-year-old paper to do that, but it still has to happen somewhere along the line.
  
  Let’s also face the fact that TMZ had nothing to lose by claiming Jackson was dead at the very first moment there was speculation. He’s not actually dead? “Well, they’re just a tabloid anyway.” He died? “Brilliant job getting the story!”
• Guy who benefited the most from Michael Jackson’s death: Mark Sanford.
  
  Guys who benefited the least: Anybody out on the street in Iran. Just as the Iranian government counter-reaction gets ugly, too.
• Gail Collins said it better than I can on Sanford: it’s not that he committed an affair or that he’s a total moral hypocrite that makes him a bad governor; it’s the fact that by definition, bailing out on being governor tends to make one a bad governor. And no, I don’t feel bad for him, even if I give him credit for a more human response than most politicians caught cheating.
• And speaking of red-state moralists, who knew that Utah has the highest rate of subscription to pornographic sites?
• Transformers 2 has been a lot of fun for me, and I haven’t even seen it: every critic has sharpened the knife for the review, so at that point it’s a contest to see who can get it the sharpest. Naturally Roger Ebert’s review is brilliantly written, but I also liked Dana Stevens in Slate and The A.V. Club. I like my wit dry, with just a hint of acid.
  
  The funniest part of it all is that Transformers 2 has been critically hated-on more than any movie I can remember, yet it also had the second-highest opening of all time. (Thankfully for the American cultural soul, Dark Knight barely kept the top slot.) One of the commercials this week even ran a bunch of critical excerpts with the tiniest possible font for attribution. Interesting move by the studio to do a Terrell Owens on the Dallas 50-yard line.
• R.I.P., Billy Mays. As I felt the need to tell anyone each time he showed up on TV, the dude was from Pittsburgh. The guy sold some bizarre products, but he was the rare salesman where I enjoyed the pitch.

  As a tribute to the man, I will republish that in the style he knew best:

  R.I.P. BILLY MAYS! AS I FELT THE NEED TO TELL ANYONE EACH TIME HE SHOWED UP ON TV, THE DUDE WAS FROM PITTSBURGH! THE GUY SOLD SOME BIZARRE PRODUCTS, BUT HE WAS THE RARE SALESMAN WHERE I ENJOYED THE PITCH!

  The TV world lost a truly fun character. Vince from ShamWow just isn’t the same.

And here’s the original if you missed it. In the meantime, the new Terminator movie still looks awesome.

My verdict: it seems worth skipping. There isn’t really any big plot twist, because the nature of the beast becomes evident pretty early on. Maybe it would be cooler if it’s shot well, but that’s a stretch. Once the bad guy is revealed, the screenplay is little more than horror-movie imagery and a pretty ridiculous resolution.

So take it from your blogging friend who’s prejudging the entire film based on an unverifiable script: it’s probably not a great movie.

(And as an intellectual-property business guy, I recognize that I’m undermining my own business model by reading a leaked script. But is it really so different than a critic’s sneak preview? Rationalizations are great fun.)

Writing that last post about political messages in movies reminded me to note the really odd political points that 300 made last year. Before someone chimes in with, “But you’re supposed to abandon that and enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations,” I will note that I acknowledge the movie as a groundbreaking action / cinematography movie, and I truly did enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations and giant killer rhinos. Still, I think it’s notable that the movie conveys the following viewpoints:

• Those who aren’t white, physically attractive and within sexual norms are the enemy and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
• Those with physical disabilities must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as they grow up to become traitors.
• Nine-foot-tall gay men with robotically deep voices are nothing but trouble. They are dangerous and tend to lead armies of non-whites (see above). Terminate with extreme prejudice, assuming you aren’t first terminated by arrows.
• City-states that appreciate culture and science, even if they still terminate fools with extreme prejudice, are pedophiles. And that’s true even when their navy does more to win the war.
• “This! Is! Spahta!”

Still, those CGI battle scenes were pretty sweet. Four phats for those. The moral of the movie only gets half a phat, which I will award for its doctrine of standing up as a nation.

CGI battles:
Moral message:

This Saturday my amigo Andre and I decided to see Be Kind Rewind at the Landmark E Street Theater in fabulous Washington, D.C. We got there and they were down to one ticket. Thus ends my tale.

In a quick backup idea, we opted for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century capitalist epic loosely based on muckraker icon Upton Sinclair‘s Oil! In a word: hmm.

My Slate D.C. coworker Tim Noah hit the nail on the head when he noted that the film divides into two halves: a first half that sets up the nerve-jangling expectation that this film will have some sort of awesome, morally complex message about business and religion in America, and a “WTF” second half that abandons that conceit and decides to concentrate on making Daniel Plainview into an unredeemable psycho. Andre and I both left the final scene — it’s really thrown in there out of left field — wondering what the hell just happened, and I think this was a common reaction among the other theatergoers present.

There was so much about this movie that was great: the Oscar committee should cancel the Best Actor award each year that Daniel Day-Lewis does a movie and just hand him the statue. (He has done a great deal to associate mustaches with bad-assedness in his past two roles.) The musical score annoyed the hell out of me with its loudness and horror-movie tone, but after I left I thought back on it and realized that the music really worked. PTA also did a phat job of making this a period piece, and the sweeping shots of the empty California landscape — though the movie was actually filmed in Texas — really established the sense of isolation and hardscrabble individualism reflected in Plainview’s life. Lots of reviewers have praised the dialogue-free first 20 minutes, and that’s warranted because it was amazing.

The supporting cast was decent — guy who played Plainview’s brother, good; kid who played H.W. Plainview, quite good; vow-of-silence dude from Little Miss Sunshine who played the crazy preacher, not convincing at all in conveying religious fervor. But I just can’t get past the letdown that was the movie’s lack of message. Boogie Nights and Magnolia both had a lot to say about the importance of being genuinely connected to others, and while TWBB touched on that a little bit, it just didn’t deliver enough.

Sorry, PTA: I love your stuff, but not as much this time. Three phats out of five:

I don’t think this show would have the same audience if it weren’t for I Am Legend coming out last month, what with both being all deer-in-Times-Square and whatnot. Those two are in turn a hell of a lot like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. Add in the upcoming movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — now shooting near Pittsburgh, though that isn’t quite so flattering when they’re evoking a post-apocalyptic landscape — and we have an end-of-it-all trend. Sounds like a certain nation is rocking some sort of end-of-empire vibe.

I can’t predict the possibility that any of this stuff will come true, but then if I could, waiting around for it wouldn’t be fun either. I certainly hope we don’t end up with The Road, because that book single-handedly messed up my Road Warrior-based distant concept of civilizational collapse — featuring crazy football-padded dudes fighting in the desert — and turned it into existential nightmare No. 1. (It was really not a fun book. Tremendously well-written, but relentlessly disturbing.)

So I’d like to make two points about this whole cultural trend:

1. Everybody dying, while probably good for the Earth, would not be cool at all.

2. If we’re watching decline-and-fall shows here in the “declining” U.S. — as much as a nation of 300 million entrepreneurially oriented people can decline without suffering some society-immolating event — do you suppose rising powers India and China are rocking Hindi / Mandarin shows about Romulus and Remus getting Rome off the ground?