Their website is finally active at Death Star PR.

By the way, for all of you ordering your Amazon stuff through this site–thank you.

It’s much appreciated.

(For those who don’t know what I’m talking about–I get a kick-back from Amazon for anything purchased using that little search box over on the right.)

Update: From Galley Friend P.G.:

You should note that anyone who uses Firefox or Chrome and uses AdBlock Plus will not see the Amazon box. They should make an exemption for this site in AdBlock Plus.

Thanks.

I think I may have a piece about Hunstman’s chances over at The Daily. In case you, too, are iPad-less, here’s the short version: He could do very well, depending.

Amazingly enough, I saw X-Men: First Class yesterday and, like everyone else, liked it quite a bit. It’s not Matthew Vaughn’s best movie, or the best comic-book movie, but it ranks pretty high on the list and was, by most any standard, an enormous amount of fun. Some thoughts:

* Henry Jackman’s score had an eerily similar feel to the score in Layer Cake. It was great; catchy and interesting.

* Also great: Any time Michael Ironside appears. But for some reason he was credited as “M. Ironside”. Wonder why.

* Has Kevin Bacon ever been more fun? Not that I can think of off the top of my head. He was fabulous.

* Yes, Michael Fassbender should take over the Bond mantle as soon as Daniel Craig is ready to move on. It’s funny: In Layer Cake, Vaughn included a little moment of Craig moving around a corner with a handgun almost as an overt audition for the role. And he does the same for Fassbender here, especially in the bar in Argentina.

* A point made by Galley Friend Mike Russell: To get a PG-13, you can only use the word “fuck” once. This was the single greatest MPAA-targeted use of the word in the history of film.

* Vaughn did lots of things right, but the biggest was the skill in sketching characters in just enough detail that the movie could be both ensemble and character-driven. He balanced spending the right amount of time with each. That can’t have been easy.

* Now a longer point: I’d argue that X-Men: First Class is really about Mystique. Charles and Erik are the two poles of the film, each making a slightly-complicated moral argument. Their dialogues are pitched exactly to Mystique, who is the archetype of the mutant every-girl. She is the movie’s heart: Winning us over when we first meet her as a scared and hungry little girl. Throughout the film, she’s the most likable character: Sabotaging Charles’ attempt to seduce a girl at the bar; drinking Cokes while he pounds the hard stuff; curling up in his arms to sleep, not quite the way a little sister would, but even more comfortably than a child-hood best-friend; longing for Hank McCoy to look up from his test-tubes and kiss her. And not only is she the most endearing character, she’s also the only character with a real arc: Charles and Erik’s minds are made up from the moment they meet one another. They have a friendship–a real one–but neither is ever in danger of actually falling for the other’s worldview.

But the most important thing about Mystique is that, more than any other mutant in the film, she embodies both sides of the Charles-Erik divide. Charles understands that homo sapiens will be afraid of the power of mutants, and Mystique’s power is uniquely threatening to society. (More on this in a moment.) This is why he urges accommodation. Erik understands that mutants will be outcasts because of their powers, and Mystique’s appearance is exactly the sort of burden which marks her for specially unpleasant treatment. Unlike Beast, whose appearance marks him as mutant, but whose powers are unthreatening; or Charles and Erik, whose appearances are normal, but whose powers are destabilizingly dangerous, Mystique has the worst of both worlds. That the most sympathetic character should have to bear this double burden makes her situation all the more affecting.

And when Mystique chooses Erik’s path–chooses it despite her conflicted heart and very real love of Charles–it makes X-Men: First Class a work of real tragedy.

* Also, Jennifer Lawrence was great in the role, giving it exactly the right blend of sweetness and melancholy. I’m now totally on board with her as Katniss in Hunger Games.

* It’s been well-remarked on that it’s interesting to see the early Magneto, but it’s equally interesting to see the early Professor X. Later in the comics, Professor X is not always a teddy bear. He has to make hard choices and when he does, he can be quite ruthless. Watching him flirt with girls in a bar carried the same sort of sadness that you feel at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo is playing sweetly in the grass with not a care in the world.

* Finally, one serious complaint. The biggest weakness of the X-Men world is the inability to take seriously the concerns humans might have about homo superior. That’s okay so far as it goes–this is comic book material and we’re meant to identify with the mutants. But if there really were X-Men-style mutants, society–any society–would have a hard time figuring out what to do. Not with most of the mutants–Beast and Angel and Cyclops and Toad don’t represent existential threats to a stable society. But some mutants–Charles, Erik, Mystique–do. In a world where Charles Xavier can freeze people, blank their memories, and read their minds, how could you trust the stock market, the justice system, or elections? In a world with Mystique, how could any identity be secure? In a world with Magneto, we all exist only subject to his whim–in Ultimatum, he pulls the earth slightly off its magnetic poles, making him a walking, talking, doomsday device.

You don’t have to be Senator Kelly, the bigoted sponsor of the Mutant Registration Act, or some other generic black-hat trotted out by Marvel to have very real concerns as to how society might remain liberal and functional in a world with Mystique and Charles and Erik. Maybe there’s a way. Maybe there isn’t. (Maybe there’s a third alternative, like giving mutants their own homeland, Genosha-style.)

But neither the comics nor the films ever take these concerns seriously. Instead, mutants are mere civil rights champions struggling for acceptance against a cruel and bigoted world of “mutie” haters. It’s all “mutant pride” and Malcolm-Martin arguments, as if the ability to end the world or make the courts, elections, and financial markets unworkable were no different than skin color or sexual orientation.

I don’t mean to make too much of this point–as I said, I love the X-Men and this is what they are. But in the same way that The Dark Knight was able to transcend comic-book material by grappling honestly with a Big Question (Can liberalism protect the liberal order?), I suspect that X-Men stories would be even richer and more interesting if they dealt more honestly with the question of why society would be threatened by mutants.

Two reviews over the weekend, one of George Weigel’s The End and The Beginning, the other of Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection. Both are very important books, though in radically different ways. Weigel’s essentially reading for all who love John Paul the Great. Hvistendahl, on the other hand, has written what may be the most (unintentionally) consequential anti-abortion book ever published. Unnatural Selection is pitched toward the middle-of-the-road abortion supporter, and it creates something like the following:

“Choice” has led to the killing of 163 million baby girls solely on account of their gender. In addition to the moral repugnancy, this is likely to have bad-to-dire real-world consequences. So you either get on board with this kind of “choosing,” or you hop off the abortion train. Because there is no in-between.

Both books are well worth your time and dollars.

There’s no print button and it’s got to be 7,000 words, but none of that matters: Treat yourself to this amazing Ed Caesar piece on Isner-Mahut. Make an appointment, schedule the time. Even if you have to put it on your calendar for a week from now. There’s so much in here. Just a sample:

* My favourite statistic, though, is that in the fifth set, Mahut successfully served to stay in the match 64 games in a row . . .

* Isner was a late developer. Despite having been a gifted teenage player, he didn’t have a growth spurt until he was 16 – and, at 18, he wasn’t “strong enough, or good enough” to turn professional. Instead, he went to the University of Georgia on a tennis scholarship, where there were “a lot of good parties, and a lot of pretty girls”, and later captained his college team to the national championship watched by 6,000 drunken student fans. “It was pretty awesome,” he recalls.

* Mahut’s enjoyment, he says, was triggered by more than competition. After the many frustrations in his career, his pleasure came from fulfilling his potential. Mahut’s description is similar to what the French cyclist of the Fifties, Jean Bobet, calls “la volupté”: a sensual state of perfect sporting execution. “La volupté,” wrote Bobet, “is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.”

How did it feel to play tennis like that? “It was the biggest moment of my life,” says Mahut, gravely. “It was magical.”

* At 58-all, Isner called a bathroom break. Mahut decided to leave the court, too. As they walked, Isner spoke to his opponent for the first time in two days of tennis. He apologised for calling the break, because he knew it might affect Mahut’s concentration. At that moment, despite the state of the match, the Frenchman felt a surge of goodwill towards his opponent. It was the beginning of a great friendship.

* Mahut, meanwhile, felt sprightly. At the conclusion of play, he went to the gym to warm down for 15 minutes, before returning to his hotel, and eating a small dinner of chicken and pasta at a nearby restaurant. Unable to sleep, he stayed up chatting – “kind of about the match, but also about other things”, remembers Vallejo – before crashing at 1.30am. At 5.30am, he sent Vallejo a text message saying, “I can’t sleep; you want to go for a walk?” On their morning stroll, Mahut tried to avoid all news of the match. But, having bought L’Equipe to check on the football World Cup, he found his picture on the front page. “I didn’t read any of it,” he says.

* Mahut still finds the moment of defeat difficult to discuss, nearly a year on. “In my mind, it was the only tennis match I have ever played where I knew I could not lose,” he says. “So, when I did…”

Go. Soak it all in.

Over the last few months, I’d say that Jonah Goldberg has probably been one of the two best columnists working in print, but his piece on the “Gay Girl in Damascus” is exceptional, even by those standards. Goldberg writes with real, not recycled, funny and then nails a deep point that everyone else somehow missed. You need the set up to get the hammer-close:

CNN interviewed “her” — by email — for a story about gay rights and the Arab Spring. “She” said things were going great for gays. The feedback, even from Muslims, for her blog was “almost entirely positive.”

But the CNN story troubled her. The outlet encouraged the sin of “pink washing” — a term used by some anti-Israel critics to decry any attempt to compare Israel’s treatment of gays with that of Arab states. Israel is tolerant, even celebratory, of gay rights (Israel recently launched a gay tourism campaign with the slogan “Tel Aviv Gay Vibe — Free; Fun; Fabulous”). Syria punishes homosexual activity with three years in prison (In Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran, the punishment is death).

Who cares, Amina angrily responds. In fact, how dare “advocates of war, occupation, dispossession and apartheid” use Arab and Muslim hostility to gays as “‘evidence that the primitive sand-people don’t deserve anything other than killing by the enlightened children of the West.”

Besides, “she” has never been harassed by Arabs for being gay. But in America, “she” has been “struck by strangers for being an Arab” and “had dung thrown at me” for wearing the hijab.

Except that is a lie.

Worse, it’s propaganda. McMaster’s fake-but-accurate lesbian was perfectly pitched to Western liberals desperate to alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance. No longer must you think too hard or make tough choices if you’re, say, anti-Israel and pro-democracy or pro-gay rights and in favor of the self-determination of Muslim fanatics. Heck, you can even stop worrying and love a lesbian feminist who sees no big deal in wearing a religiously required sack over her head.

That’s an upper-deck shot.

Despite the scary release date (September),  Moneyball looks pretty interesting.