Spicoli to play Richard Clarke

Sean Penn may be a fine dramatic actor but in recent years he's joined a club of others who've allowed their leftist politics to outshine their performances.

Word from Brian Ross's ABC News blog (wow, he sure is popular these days) is that Penn will play former government counter-terrorism czar Richard "Against all Enemies" Clarke, most recently made famous for his apology to the victims' families during the 9/11 commission hearings.

Of course, any film about Clarke should begin with Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Yasin bombing the World Trade Towers in 1993. The next sequence could be cruise missiles raining down on Saddam's Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad, with Penn in the background explaining why. Perhaps then it could flash forward to Clarke's role in the White House command center after TWA800 crashed and a dream sequence on how he came up with the goofy zoom-climb theory, later turned into video by the CIA.

Then it could go into his advisory role on bombing Baghdad again in 1998, and his dissertation on Bin Laden's Fatwar. And of course any Clarke movie wouldn't be complete without his role in fruitlessly chasing Bin Laden all over the Middle East after the Africa Embassy bombings, ending with that crazy comment about how the bearded one just might "boogie to Baghdad" if they fired at him and missed.

Canadian maverick Paul Haggis of "Crash" fame will direct. Since one of his previous films was "Flags of Our Fathers", which was about the Iwo Jima flag raising event, this might be a patriotic movie about the GWoT, right? We can't exactly predict the screenplay, but based on Penn's pre-war trips to Iraq, and based on this:

Haggis is also co-founder of Artists for Peace and Justice, a member of the board of directors for the Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, the Environmental Media Association, the President's Council of the Defenders of Wildlife and the advisory board of the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Violence.

Somehow it seems likely they'll focus more on Condi, Rummy and Bush. It's just a feeling.

ZEITGEIST, ANYONE? 5/18/06

The movie "American Zeitgeist", a documentary on the roots behind the WoT, will premiere in New York City on June 15. Richard Clarke and Noam Chomsky are among the honored guests invited to speak, along with a debate between Hitchens and Mahmood Mamdani after the flick.

The film begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, evidently attempting to explain how things came to be in 2006. Personally I think they should have gone back to the creation of Israel in 1948, but that's just me.

But don't second guess yet. Here's what the web site has to say about "Fahrenheit 9/11":

As for Michael Moore, his Fahrenheit 9/11—apart from the salute it may deserve as the most financially successful documentary ever made—is the work of a bloviating idiot. It would have been worthwhile if he had attempted to apply a dose of real research before taking on a topic he knows nothing about. There, it has been said. A 3-minute cartoon-style cowboy sequence to explain the situation in Afghanistan? C'mon!

Maybe they're just trying to sucker us conservatives in..