pop culture

YOU MAY NOT remember this, but "The Matrix" earned a respectable, yet modest $27 million during its opening weekend way back in 1999. It went on to gross $171 million domestically, an impressive total. (As a rule of thumb, movies typically end up grossing about three times their opening weekend. In many ways this "multiple" is a better indicator of a movie's impact than its opening weekend performance.

THE STARDUMB word of the week is "agreeance." We shout out a thanks to Fred Dunce of Limp Bizkit for the contribution, which he ad-libbed on stage at the Grammys, in defiance of the English language and rumors of a gag order handed down from CBS. Without him, we wouldn't have a Stardumb word of the week. So, thanks Fred.

Dunce's full comment was, "I hope we all are in agreeance that this war should go away as soon as possible."

Stardumb Hypothesis 4: Although celebrity is often used to advance an overlooked cause, the dynamic works the other way, too.

JUST AS THERE ARE Elvis men and Beatles men, there are DC men and Marvel men. Perhaps "men" is too strong a word, but nonetheless, among comic aficionados, there are two distinct camps. It has been a rough decade for DC lovers. The company has fallen on hard times and its properties have met with a string of failures in Hollywood: The Superman franchise petered out and the Batman franchise devolved, after a promising start, into something worse than its '60s Adam West incarnation.

SURELY THERE IS much sociology to be done on the buddy-cop movie. So far as my informal, non-academic training can pinpoint it, the buddy-cop genre crawled out of the primordial celluloid soup in the early 1980s with the seminal Eddie Murphy / Nick Nolte film "48 Hrs."

A gigantic hit, "48 Hrs." spawned the usual cavalcade of imitators, each following the same basic formula: Two men of differing temperaments and backgrounds are thrown together by circumstance and must learn to work together in order to solve the murder/expose the crooked police chief/save the world/etc.

SHOWDITZ JANEANE GAROFALO told the Washington Post this week that a pro-war corporatist media encourages stars to speak out against war in Iraq in order to marginalize the peace movement.

IT'S ALL RATHER COMPLICATED. You see, there are West-coast Straussians and East-coast Straussians, and the West-coast Straussians think that the East-coast Straussians . . . except that Harvey Mansfield . . . still, back at the University of Chicago . . . in Xenophon . . . but when Allan Bloom and Fr. Fortin were in Paris . . . the esoteric . . . and if you compare the Seventh Letter with Aristotle's account of Plato's unwritten doctrines . . . Harry Jaffa . . . Machiavelli . . . the Federalist Papers. . . .

Oh, never mind.

SPIKE LEE is an artist, but he's like a painter who cares just a little more about his signature than what occupies the rest of the canvas.

He subordinates characters to the almighty importance of his own political views. He pushes the actual story offstage to trot out pet themes, like his beloved New York City, his one great subject (other than himself).

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor.

I WON'T SEE "CHICAGO."

There, I said it. I'm sure it's a wonderful movie. John Podhoretz says so. Everyone says so. And besides, it stars Renée Zellweger, who will always be dear to my heart because she was a scrappy point guard in high school. But "Chicago" is going to win the Oscar for Best Picture and once again Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" is going to be overlooked.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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Parity stinks. Mediocrity is dull. Excellence will always be the standard to strive for (Max Boot, A Level Playing Field). I have been a die hard New York Giants fan since 1961 (the tail end of the glory years)and watch every week on the satellite. But for many years the Giants were god-awful.

LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times magazine published a document so amazing, I assumed that it would set off a world-wide sensation, a great cacophony of breast-beating, disillusion, and internal crisis. It was a letter Jimmy Hendrix wrote to his father in August 1965. The letter describes the marketing strategy Hendrix planned to use to get rich.

The Democrats' Flag Fantasy

THE WAR ROOM LIVES! Within minutes of Trent Lott's statement that he was stepping down as majority leader, Democrats were repeating their headquarters-dictated talking points--make that talking point: The GOP is the party of the Old Confederacy.

Nancy Pelosi, top House Democrat, said: "The Republicans have repeatedly exploited the issue of race, as recently as the election in November in Georgia, where their successful campaigns for U.S. senator and governor centered on the Confederate flag."

A letter from John Conyers Jr.