Check out Keith Olbermann's commentary on Proposition 8, which aired recently on msnbc. Here's the link from youtube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVUecPhQPqY&feature=related

Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of history Tuesday night by winning election as the first African-American president of the United States.

A crowd of nearly a quarter-million jammed Grant Park and the surrounding area in Chicago, where Obama addressed the nation for the first time as its president-elect at midnight ET. Hundreds of thousands more — Mayor Richard Daley said he would not be surprised if a million Chicagoans jammed the streets — watched on a large television screen outside the park.

“If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama declared.

“Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states,” he said. “We have been and always will be the United States of America.

“It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America,” he said to a long roar.

California's fiercely contested gay marriage ban passed in a closely contested race, after one of the most expensive and closely watched campaigns in the nation divided voters across religious and political lines.

With 95 percent of the precincts reporting, more than 52 percent voted to ban gay marriage.

Pitched as a critical moral question of our time by supporters, and an issue of equality and justice by opponents, Proposition 8 aroused the most passion of any state ballot measure this year.

The measure drew huge national attention as volunteers and millions of dollars in donations poured in from other states to support or defeat the measure.

From Catholics and celebrities to Democrats and Republicans, the initiative divided some groups and united others in a pitched, sometimes ugly political fight. Both sides spent a combined $70 million to reach undecided voters through rallies, television ads, the Internet and marathon-paced phone banks.

Proponents of the ban said it restored traditional values and acts as a moral compass to steer California's society in the right direction. Opponents said it discriminated against a section of the population, denying them the same right as opposite-sex couples to economic, social and other benefits of marriage.

Locally, No on Proposition 8 supporters ratcheted up their efforts throughout Election Day and into the night Tuesday to reach voters at the polls. The Yes campaign fought hard, meanwhile, to draw out the vote, relying heavily on ads that said children would be forced to learn about gay marriage in public schools. The Yes on 8 campaign reached out to religious groups and others in and outside California to support the ban.

The status of thousands of same-sex couples who have legally married since June remains uncertain. According to the No campaign, the next phase in guaranteeing those marriages remain legal may come from federal court input and potentially the U.S. Supreme Court.

The No campaign promised before the final vote was tallied that it would file an emergency injunction to stay any decisions on the marriages that have already taken place, said John Duran, president of Equality California, the biggest contributor to the No on 8 campaign.

Nancy Huang of Pasadena, who voted Tuesday and is an organizer with the Save Marriage and Family coalition, a grass-roots group, said her effort to help rally thousands of Chinese-Americans and Latinos was motivated by keeping marriage strictly defined as between man and woman.

"This is not a civil-rights issue," Huang said. "It's a moral issue. It's a democratic issue. Gays and lesbians already have all the rights and benefits equivalent to marriage, except we cannot allow them to redefine marriage for 97 percent of the population."

Every October 31st I treat myself to John Carpenter’s classic horror film "Halloween". For me it is the quintessential scary movie. It’s everything a horror film should be. In today’s age of blood and gore "Halloween" is proof that all an effective horror film needs is suspense, mood and atmosphere.

Filmed on a budget of only $350,000 and shot in a matter of weeks, "Halloween" marked the arrival of director John Carpenter. Though he had made student films in graduate school and had directed two features ("The Dark Star", 1974 and "Assault on Precinct 13", 1976), "Halloween" brought him both critical and financial success. Sadly, though he has directed several films since "Halloween" in 1978, none have been as successful as his excursion into middle-America fear and terror (though you can find some fine moments in both "The Fog", 1980 and his remake of "The Thing", 1982). Carpenter’s masterpiece is, and more than likely always will be, "Halloween", a simple story about a young woman brutally murdered one Halloween night in 1963. Her killer is institutionalized, only to escape fifteen years later to return to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, bringing with him more murder and mayhem. “The Night He Came Home,” screamed the movie’s tag line. Sometimes the best movies hinge on slight stories with uncomplicated plots. In "Halloween" the story is secondary to the action. This is not an actor’s movie, it’s a director’s movie, in whiche style and technique outweigh the script and acting. Carpenter relies on carefully chosen camera angles and subdued, shadowy lighting to weave his tale. We also see much of the action unfold through the eyes of his characters. Rarely in the history of film has there been so much subjective camerawork. By employing this technique Carpenter (like Alfred Hitchcock) makes voyeurs of us all. It also gives the film a slightly claustrophobic feel, and the action is more immediate. On that level, "Halloween" is nearly a visceral experience.

Hitchcock once said he enjoyed playing the audience like a piano. John Carpenter may be playing the same tune. There’s a weird sense of humor at work in "Halloween", from the opening credits that include a grinning, glowing jack-o-lantern, to Carpenter’s decision to exploit the innocence of a child, as his killer claims his first victim at the age of six….and dressed in a clown suit. In Carpenter’s vision of middle-America evil is masked behind the eyes of a seemingly wholesome child.

"Halloween" has many striking images that set it apart from the average, run-of-the-mill horror film. It quickly establishes that there is, in fact, a bogey man lurking in every corner. He is omnipresent, a ghostly apparition that is reinforced by Carpenter throughout the film. The killer, Michael Myers (referred to simply as ‘The Shape’ in the end credits, a send-up no doubt of those 1950’s horror monsters like ‘The Thing’ and ‘The Blob’), escapes while clad in a white hospital gown. The heroine, Laurie, sits in class gazing out the window, where she sees a tall man wearing a white mask. She looks down, then out the window again only to find him gone. She later sees the same man standing by some bushes; again he vanishes. Moments later she sees him standing in a neighbor’s backyard, between some flapping bedsheets on a clothesline. Someone is playing tricks on Laurie…and the audience. Later the image of the killer-as-ghost comes full circle. In an inspired scene, a young girl lies in bed waiting for her boyfriend to return. The bedroom door opens and The Shape stands motionless, a white sheet over its body and the boyfriend’s glasses over its face. Carpenter’s ghost image is fully realized. When the girl, assuming her boyfriend is playing a trick on her, jokes, “What’s the matter, can’t I get your ghost?”, a devilish smile may form on our lips. We know what’s under the sheet; she doesn’t. It’s a wonderful moment of dramatic irony.

There are, in fact, plenty of inspired moments in "Halloween". A tombstone is taken from a cemetery, only to be used later as a girl lies dead, the tombstone looming behind her like a cruel epitaph. A young boy sees The Shape carrying a lifeless body across the lawn and into a dark house. A sequence in which a young woman finds her car door locked, goes back for her keys, and returns only to now find the door unlocked. And a long passage in which the character of Laurie, sensing something is terribly wrong, crosses a wide-lined street and toward a big dark house. The camera follows her at an agonizingly slow pace. It recalls a similar scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho in which character Lila Crane walks toward Norman Bates’ menacing Victorian home. Hitchcock had Crane move at a brisk pace, whereas Carpenter lets the scene play longer. With each slow step Laurie takes the audience grows more restless because it knows what horrors await her across the street.

Finally, there is the cruelest joke of all, the slam-bang ending in which Carpenter plays the ultimate trick. He lets the final minutes unfold like a nightmare that never ends. Just when we think The Shape is dead, It vanishes into the night. The terror will continue because, as one young boy says, “You can’t kill the bogey man.”

Though "Halloween" was praised by many critics when it was released (“the scariest movie since 'Psycho',” screamed Us magazine), it also received a good deal of criticism because of the host of gory, witless imitators it spawned, including the "Friday the 13th" series which started two years after "Halloween’s" release. "Halloween" may have kick-started the “dead teenager movie” craze of the 1980’s, but long before Carpenter’s film there was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) and "Night of the Living Dead" (1968). The drive-in monster horror craze of the 1950’s may be the best place to start if you want to blame something for the modern horror film. Critics may also be quick to forget that despite its violence, "Halloween" contains very little on-screen gore and a surprisingly low body count. It relies on suspense (as well as its memorable synthesizer-like music, composed by Carpenter himself) to get its much-deserved jolts. "Halloween" did not invent the slasher film. It may, however, have perfected it.

"Halloween" remains one of the greatest horror films of all time. Director John Carpenter takes his audience into a netherworld painted in drab daylight (to emphasize ordinary, daily life) and ominous, penetrating night (to tap into our fears and anxieties of the dark). The film is a prime example of “director” movie-making, with the camera being the primary star. It’s an extra-sensory masterpiece filled with humor and horror, and plenty of in-joke references for film buffs. Our characters sit in darkened living rooms watching The Thing, while a TV announcer warns, “Lock your doors…bolt your windows…and turn out the lights…” Carpenter lets his audience in on the jokes, but turns the tables on his characters. With Halloween Carpenter takes us on a journey into midwestern American fear. Our very own homes become stalking grounds. Our own children become evil incarnate. And the bogey man is everywhere. For a first-rate exercise in terror and a strong example of low-budget, high-fright filmmaking, treat yourself to another viewing of John Carpenter’s "Halloween". Thirty years after its release, it remains the ultimate frightfest.

Thrills and Chills,
Darren M.

10. A body blow to racial identity politics. An end to the era of Jesse Jackson in black America.

9. Less debt. Yes, Obama will raise taxes on those earning over a quarter of a million. And he will spend on healthcare, Iraq, Afghanistan and the environment. But so will McCain. He plans more spending on health, the environment and won't touch defense of entitlements. And his refusal to touch taxes means an extra $4 trillion in debt over the massive increase presided over by Bush. And the CBO estimates that McCain's plans will add more to the debt over four years than Obama's. Fiscal conservatives have a clear choice.

8. A return to realism and prudence in foreign policy. Obama has consistently cited the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush as his inspiration. McCain's knee-jerk reaction to the Georgian conflict, his commitment to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and his brinksmanship over Iran's nuclear ambitions make him a far riskier choice for conservatives. The choice between Obama and McCain is like the choice between George H.W. Bush's first term and George W.'s.

7. An ability to understand the difference between listening to generals and delegating foreign policy to them.

6. Temperament. Obama has the coolest, calmest demeanor of any president since Eisenhower. Conservatism values that kind of constancy, especially compared with the hot-headed, irrational impulsiveness of McCain.

5. Faith. Obama's fusion of Christianity and reason, his non-fundamentalist faith, is a critical bridge between the new atheism and the new Christianism.

4. A truce in the culture war. Obama takes us past the debilitating boomer warfare that has raged since the 1960s. Nothing has distorted our politics so gravely; nothing has made a rational politics more elusive.

3. Two words: President Palin.

2. Conservative reform. Until conservatism can get a distance from the big-spending, privacy-busting, debt-ridden, crony-laden, fundamentalist, intolerant, incompetent and arrogant faux conservatism of the Bush-Cheney years, it will never regain a coherent message to actually govern this country again. The survival of conservatism requires a temporary eclipse of today's Republicanism. Losing would be the best thing to happen to conservatism since 1964. Back then, conservatives lost in a landslide for the right reasons. Now, Republicans are losing in a landslide for the wrong reasons.

1. The War Against Islamist terror. The strategy deployed by Bush and Cheney has failed. It has failed to destroy al Qaeda, except in a country, Iraq, where their presence was minimal before the US invasion. It has failed to bring any of the terrorists to justice, instead creating the excresence of Gitmo, torture, secret sites, and the collapse of America's reputation abroad. It has empowered Iran, allowed al Qaeda to regroup in Pakistan, made the next vast generation of Muslims loathe America, and imperiled our alliances. We need smarter leadership of the war: balancing force with diplomacy, hard power with better p.r., deploying strategy rather than mere tactics, and self-confidence rather than a bunker mentality.

Those conservatives who remain convinced, as I do, that Islamist terror remains the greatest threat to the West cannot risk a perpetuation of the failed Manichean worldview of the past eight years, and cannot risk the possibility of McCain making rash decisions in the middle of a potentially catastrophic global conflict. If you are serious about the war on terror and believe it is a war we have to win, the only serious candidate is Barack Obama.

-- Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish

On the heels of an announcement that talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres would be starring in her own PSA urging Californians to vote against Prop. 8 comes the news the gay community has been waiting for -- she’s giving money to the campaign by paying for the ad to air on television.

The No on 8 campaign announced Friday that DeGeneres had purchased an initial $100,000 in airtime for the ad. YouTube postings of the PSA have already racked up 80,000 views and counting.

Equality California said DeGeneres filmed the PSA earlier this week and advised the LGBT media of the importance of voters' seeing No on 8 messages to counteract the high visibility of Yes on 8 ads. According to No on 8, when voters are exposed to both sides equally, they find the No on 8 message more persuasive.

DeGeneres has been a vocal opponent of Prop. 8 in recent months. In addition to appearing on Jay Leno’s late-night talk show to discuss the proposed constitutional amendment, she took John McCain to task on her own show for not supporting marriage equality.

Go Ellen! And just think...five years ago she was written off by the public and the media. "She'll never work in this town again." Now...I think she owns it.

Darren.

The Seventies may be regarded as the Golden Age of horror, but strictly speaking the seeds were sown in 1968, when a small group of independent commercial directors from Pittsburgh released a feature called "Night Of The Living Dead" on an unsuspecting public and changed the genre forever.

Till then, B-grade chillers were typically set in stylised castles, mansions or villas, far from the everyday experience of the average viewer. Yet in the late Sixties, as the Vietnam war raged on and the Civil Rights movement polarised America's North and South, George A Romero recognised that his nation was, for the first time, looking nervously in upon itself and tapped into these anxieties by bringing terror right to the neighbourhood doorstep. Romero's decision to place his characters in an ordinary farmhouse was no doubt influenced in part by his severe budgetary constraints, but he was also establishing a principle that would reverberate throughout the following decade, and beyond: that the most familiar location can often be the most claustrophobically terrifying.

Though shot on cheap black-and-white film stock, NOTLD was the film that would turn the whole horror genre blood red, with its innovative use of graphically realistic gore effects, and its "ghouls", shuffling undead driven by a hunger for human flesh, set the template for the modern cinematic zombie, even if the word never appears in the film. No matter whether the rise of these murderous creatures results from a space probe mission to Mars, or from the disintegration of religious faith and respect for the dead, or from some other, equally abstract cause, Romero's verite focus remains tightly fixed on how easily the veneer of civilisation could be torn apart in a single night. His beleaguered human characters are their own worst enemy, threatened as much by each other as by the ghoulish peril outside.

Clearly reflecting the divisions that dominated the political landscape of Sixties America, in the farmhouse Romero pits his black protagonist (Duane Jones) against a white patriarch (Karl Hardman) and a young daughter-turned-zombie (Kyra Schon) against her conservative parents. The posse of rednecks who shoot and burn the "ghouls" are patently modelled on the Southern lynch mobs who were so familiar from TV news at the time and their final action in the film is a bleakly potent image of the human cost of America's war with itself.

At the same time, Romero sets himself against horror convention. At the very start he introduces a classic heroine figure, the platinum blonde Barbra (Judith O'Dea), only to reduce her from early on to a state of catatonic trauma from which she never recovers. The real hero turns out to be the resourceful Ben (Jones), but not before he has been seen rushing out of the dark, slapping a hysterical Barbra and looming over her unconscious body in a series of postures that seem to reinforce racist stereotypes of the time, and yet are easily justified in context. This is horror at its most probing, subversive and socially aware, with a truly harrowing ending that reveals the dangers of misdirected fear and prejudice. While it may have been an allegory very much for the times in which it was made, it still fits surprisingly well into our own post-9/11 world, where Moslem civilians continue to be the primary casualties ( "collateral damage") of the so-called War On Terror.

You may have seen Tom Savini's gorier, all-colour remake in 1990. You may have seen Romero's sequels ("Dawn Of The Dead" in 1978, "Day Of The Dead" in 1985, "Land Of The Dead" in 2005). You may have seen co-writer John Russo's truly execrable 1998 "30th Anniversary Edition," with the insertion of newly filmed material that almost studiously dilutes the spirit of the original, and you will certainly have seen many of the countless imitations that Romero's film spawned, but to see the original "Night of the Living Dead", and in such a beautifully restored print, is enough to make you believe that there is life yet in intelligent independent horror.

--Anton Bitel, Eye for Film

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Sen. Barack Obama,
D-Ill., for president on Sunday, criticizing his own Republican Party for what he called its narrow focus on irrelevant personal attacks over a serious approach to challenges he called unprecedented.

Powell, who for many years was considered the most likely candidate to become the first African-American president, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was not supporting Obama because of his race. He said he had watched both Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for many months and thought “either one of them would be a good president.”

But he said McCain’s choices in the last few weeks — especially his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his vice presidential running mate — had raised questions in his mind about McCain’s judgment.

“I don’t believe [Palin] is ready to be president of the United States,” Powell said flatly. By contrast, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, “is ready to be president on day one.”

Powell also said he was “troubled” by Republican personal attacks on Obama, especially false intimations that Obama was Muslim and Republicans’ recent focus on Obama’s alleged connections to William Ayers, the founder of the radical ’60 Weather Underground.

Stressing that Obama was a lifelong Christian, Powell denounced Republican tactics that he said were insulting not only to to Obama but also to Muslims.

“The really right answer is what if he is?” Powell said, praising the contributions of millions of Muslim citizens to American society.

“I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me,” Powell said. “Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower.”

In an interview Sunday on Fox News, McCain said he was not surprised by the announcement.

“I’ve always admired and respected General Powell,” said McCain, who cited the endorsements he had received from former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. “We have a respectful disagreement.”

Powell, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush before becoming secretary of state in the current administration, is one of the most highly decorated military officers of modern times and an admired figure in both parties. The Obama campaign is likely to cite the endorsement as an answer to critics and undecided voters who have questioned the foreign policy credential of Obama, a first-term senator whose national experience amounts to four years in the Senate.

Powell said a major part of his decision to turn his back on his own party was his conclusion that Obama was the better option to repair frayed U.S. relations with allies overseas.

“This is the time for outreach,” Powell said, saying the next president would have to “reach out and show the world there is a new administration that is willing to reach out.”

In particular, he said, he welcomed Obama’s president to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” a reference to Obama’s controversial pledge to hold talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I think that [Obama] has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said.

As recently as a month ago, Powell said that electing an African-American president would be “electrifying” for the world but that he remained undecided. The unsteadiness of the Republican campaign in recent weeks, especially on the economic crisis, went a long way toward pushing him off the fence, he said.

“It isn’t easy for me to disappoint Senator McCain as I have this morning,” said Powell, who emphasized that he would not campaign for Obama because of his admiration for McCain’s long record of service in the military and in Congress.

But as he examined both campaigns in the last few weeks, he said, he became “concerned” that “in the case of Mr. McCain, he was a little unsure how to deal with the economic problems.”

“Every day, there was a different approach,” he said, adding that he also “would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.”

McCain would be a good president, Powell said, but Obama is “a transformational figure” who would be an “exceptional” leader.

“I truly believe that at this point in Amserica’s history we need a president who will not just continue ... basically the policies we have followed in recent years,” he said. “We need a president with transformational qualities.”

For that reason, he said, “I will be voting for Barack Obama.”

By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com

If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's "Deliverance" from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor--and we're glad that he's dead, too.

But before he goes, Franklin lays the groundwork for the rest of the picture. In his confinement to a chair and ignoble expulsion from it he echoes a monstrous family's ossified Grandpa (John Dugan); and in his imprisonment rolling around the back of a sweltering van, he predicts the claustrophobia of the farmhouse/abattoir that will comprise the bulk of the picture's last hour. His tales of closed-down slaughterhouses and traditional methods of butchering build tension for the fate of his compatriots before they happen. His gross-out discussion of unsavoury food products with a crazed Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) sets the table for the legendary dinner sequence finale (the Hitchhiker appears to realize their kinship and thus initiates an improvised "blood brother" ceremony). And, most poignantly, his desire to gain attention at any cost predicts the abuse ladled upon his doppelgänger, Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), who, likewise, is only doing his best to be noticed and appreciated by his family and friends. Taking Franklin's death as the moment he's reborn as Leatherface (and his refusal to erase the blood on the side of the van marking him as prey as tacit invitation to that metamorphosis), there's fascinating grist in the observation that this role of Sally's burden transforms from verbal to non-verbal, merely emotionally-violent to physically violent as well as immobile to impending. Of course, it's also possible that Leatherface becomes simply the literalization of the impossibility of Sally's situation (the personal shadow to the collective shadow of Romero's horde of shambling zombies from Night of the Living Dead)--a monkey on her back she loves but abhors, embraces but is embarrassed of, and is tied to as intimately as the blood rite in which she finally finds herself the centerpiece. Sally is the emotional pivot of the film (just as the similarly nurturing Laurie Strode of John Carpenter's later "Halloween" is of that film): it's on her that hinge all these themes of arrest and potential, of regression and expansion, of duty and escape.

To expand Sally's psychic torment in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" to a larger context is tempting (and it's hard to imagine that the film could have existed--or that it could have captured the cult following it has--in a different time or place), but if Watergate, Vietnam, and the death of the idealism of the 1960s provide the loam, the picture is possibly best served by discussing it as a piece about nostalgia for an era that was at least perceived in the rear-view as simpler, rural--Edenic. The real triumph of Hooper's film is that the monstrous family at its centre represents a tight social group steeped in tradition and pride and jealous of its privacy. That although nostalgia is generally misplaced (the good ol' days of Norman Rockwell and celebrated anti-Semite Henry Ford were also the good ol' days of Joe McCarthy, the third incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, and Ed Gein), what's true in "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's" reverie is the strength of the family bond. These heartland Sawney Beans are a fully-functioning unit in the Southern United States, a perhaps ironic but vibrant American family aware of its duties to maintain consanguinity ("Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do," says the great Jim Siedow as the cannibal clan's voice of reason), willing to go to any length to protect the family reserve and greatly agitated by the smallest disturbance to their insularity. A scene where Leatherface, after making what is essentially the third of his four kills in the film, throws open the curtains and panics at this sudden, puzzling intrusion of strangers into his domain is familiar to the point of touching. It's oddly contemporary to our own Iraq in that a sudden, puzzling intrusion seems to have turned us into a violent, panicked, inexorable monster.

For the uninitiated, the story proper concerns a quintet of teens traveling through a scorching Texas summer to visit the decrepit ramshackle house willed to Sally and Franklin by their late grandfather. Were "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" as simple as an elegy for the death of Grant Wood's already-perverse America, such examples of rural decay would be the focus. Instead, as imagined by Hooper and production designer Robert A. Burns, the film is about fecundity in the midst of this decay--bones and skin re-purposed into furniture and art (a nail through a stop-watch a particular show-stopper of surrealist imagery and loaded thematic content) in a cyclical brown study of death and rebirth underscored by cinematographer Daniel Pearl's pauses on the moon and the sun. Once there, Franklin is abandoned by his able-bodied compatriots and expresses his frustration with a churlish monologue punctuated by a humiliation played as catharsis for an audience that, speaking for myself, begins to feel uncomfortable in facilitating an understanding of why he's acting this way while doing little to engender sympathy for him. Soon, in search of oil, the kids cross paths with a hulking, murderous, unemployed butcher called Leatherface (for the masks of flesh he wears)--whom we immediately connect to a slaughterhouse Franklin has described earlier in the trip--and are summarily butchered and, we presume, devoured by Leatherface's clan. The main reason for the failure of the recent prequel "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning" is the suggestion that Leatherface (or Franklin) has a "backstory" when their endurance depends on their usefulness as allegorical bogeys for the play's "normals." When two of the kids joke about Franklin being carried on someone's back when he was "little," the double-edged punchline is, of course, that Franklin was never little.

The film is unpleasant, brutally nihilistic, and frankly gruelling, yet it's not misanthropic, which makes it that much more difficult to endure. It believes in both Sally's devotion to the increasingly insufferable Franklin (making the transference of Franklin-to-Leatherface a heartbreaking black fantasy projection of Sally's feelings of entrapment, fear, and loathing) and the cannibal family's implicit devotion to one another to carry on their trade in their own space regardless of the strictures of societal convention. The dinner sequence that climaxes the film sees the "sons" of decrepit Grandpa feeding him and, in an indelible passage, trying to help him wield a hammer against a squirming, desperate Sally, held screaming over a rusty bucket. It's a testament to "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's" power that no matter how much you hope Sally escapes, there's a part of you rooting for the old boy to muster up the strength for one last shot at his former glory.

For all the scholarship thrown up around "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", its nihilism ultimately rests in the idea that we're meat--that when a pretty girl (Teri McMinn) in hotpants walks in the foreground of an iconic extended tracking shot up to a farmhouse in search of her murdered boyfriend (William Vail), we simultaneously feel a twinge of sexual heat and a pang of loss and pity for what she doesn't know. It's a similar pang at the equivalent moment in the much-reviled remake that accounts for a good deal of my fondness for that film, that one punctuated by the discovery of a wedding ring. (Of course, there's my belief that "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", whose insectile hive antagonists are as sleek and symbolic as its heroes, is more a redux of Aliens.) Without question, though, the original's love/death cocktail is stickier and more potent.

-- Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central

On Wednesday, October 7, 1998, Matthew Shepard was found tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie, barely alive, his skull fractured and his brain stem crushed. Comatose, he was taken first to a Laramie hospital, then to a better-equipped one in Fort Collins, Colo., where he died five days later. We may never know what his killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, intended to do when they first approached Shepard at Laramie’s Fireside Lounge. We only know that, whatever their intention, they ended up murdering him.

Almost instantly, his death became a flash point in this country’s reckoning with gay people, and the cute, clean-cut 21-year-old became a symbol of the ravages of intolerance. The tragedy sparked vigils around the world and led to federal hate-crimes legislation that bears Shepard’s name, currently pending in Congress. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has promised to sign the bill if elected.

www.matthewshepard.org