a notion deep inside: Talk to Me (Cheadle, McCarthy, and Obama)

Last night, I stayed up late and watched Talk to Me, the flick from last year with Don Cheadle playing Petey Greene, a influential Washington DC, DJ.

Cheadle, who stars in Traitor (out tomorrow) was incredible... as usual. Folks, if you've never seen Boogie Nights, do yourself a favor and check it out ... sure, subject matter is porn -- ostensibly -- but what it's really about is growing up and (re-) discovering family... and it has a simply beautiful performance by Cheadle: comic, dramatic, heartbreaking.

Talk to Me tanked at the box office (just over 4.5 million... which isn't even a good opening weekend), and didn't do anything at the major awards (it took home one Independent Spirit award for Chiwetel Ejiofor in the supporting role of Greene's friend, confidante, and later manager, Hughes (Cheadle was nominated for lead actor, but lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman [another Boogie Nights alumn] for The Savages]. But it is a solid film. It feels like a 70s or 80s biopic, with a cursory survey of the life with larger set-pieces on major moments in Greene's life (Lisa, in just passing by the TV on the way to bed, said it felt like an TV movie... a pretty apt description), and it has trouble in the last 20 minutes when the film skips over 10 years and momentarily focuses on the Hughes character. But if you're a Cheadle fan, and you want to see another great performance, check it out.

-----------------------------------

The Road continues to haunt me (as it did Lisa as she read it last week)... I feel like I need to read it again soon.

-----------------------------------

On a completely different subject, the Dem convention ends tonight. Hil's speech on Tuesday was about as good as we could expect (as I don't think she hides her feelings well), hitting most of the items of the pro-Obama checklist in her appeal to her voters to back Obama--though she left off "leadership," an omission that the Fox-olytes jumped on immediately. For a moment there yesterday, it felt like John Oliver of The Daily Show was right about the Dems being a circus clown car, armed with a self-destruct button, and the fun was just waiting for it to get pushed: the completely clumsy handling by Pelosi of the acclimation vote was pitiful (the embarassing part is at the very end of the 1 hour long clip... jump to the end). Thankfully, President Clinton was there to give a rousing speech, extolling Obama's leadership. His speech, too, was as great as we could expect from him (because he CAN had his feelings, masking them behind solid speech-ifying). And Biden... he was awesome, even with some Freudian slips.

So tonight, it's Obama. At Mile High Stadium, with 70,000 in attendance. The Republicans are sure to continue their completely childish Messianic criticisms, but we'll see if Obama can succeed in calling on the ghosts of great past leaders in inspiring the nation about the future: this is the 45th anniversay of MLK's "I have a dream" speech (and Obama will be framed on his stage's set by neo-Classical columns meant to evoke those of the Lincoln Memorial, before which MLK delivered the address);

and doing what JFK did in '60, moving from the indoor Dem convention to deliver his acceptance speech at the LA Coliseum. In that speech he began for the first time to discuss the "New Frontier" [a mainstay of his administration] and urged voters:

"I hope that no American, considering the really critical issues facing this country, will waste his franchise by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant. I want to stress, what some other political or religious leader may have said on this subject. It is not relevant what abuses may have existed in other countries or in other times. It is not relevant what pressures, if any, might conceivably be brought to bear on me. I am telling you now what you are entitled to know: that my decisions on any public policy will be my own—as an American, a Democrat and a free man."