Five or so years from now when we've traded our boring war in Iraq for a much more exciting conflagration with China, I wonder if all the folks who helped push Jet Li's openly propagandistic Fearless past $20 million in U.S. box office will stop for a second and scratch their heads. I snuck into it over the weekend with a friend who goes for this stuff and while it's not the most egregiously bad film I've seen in the past few weeks (that would, of course, be Little Children), it still pushes pretty hard on the rah-rah nationalism button and its "rally-the-nation the West's a-plunderin' us" message left me a hair queasy in my comfortable seat at the local AMC. I guess with enough wire work and wushu you can get folks to look past just about anything (like, say, massive human right abuses). Though I can't image Berliners circa 1938 rushing out to catch Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise...

Oh, and I know we're supposed to be all outraged over the recent Gotham Awards nomination of Scorsese's decidedly studio-produced The Departed, but I think this minor debate's missing the larger elephant in the room: Even if Marty's latest isn't "indie," at least it's great, unlike Todd Field's Little Children which is a ridiculous disaster at any budget level. And not to burst a few more indie bubbles, but Half Nelson's pretty silly as well. Please direct your indignation here, thx.