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Yes, loyal reader, Serious Popcorn has been suffering from neglect lately.

This is because I have spent the summer and autumn slogging through the final revisions of my book, now tentatively titled America's Cultural Footprint: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

But speaking of footprints -- and slogging -- allow me to recommend the 2001 German film, As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me, based on the true story of a German POW sentenced to 25 years hard labor in the Siberian gulag.  Knowing that the alternative is death, Clemens Forell (a pseudonym) escapes and begins a desperate 8,000 trek across Siberia and Central Asia, eluding the Soviet security forces and barely surviving at times, until he crosses into Iran and is identified by an uncle summoned by the Tehran authorities.

At that point, three years after his escape, Forell returns home and is reunited with his wife and children in a scene that, like many others, is as emotionally powerful as it is swift and direct.  There are some Hollywood touches here, notably the added subplot about the camp commander pursuing Forell the way Javert pursues Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.  But for the most part, the film is true to the 1955 book by the German writer Josef Bauer.

This modern Odyssey is not well known in the US, perhaps because the central character is, after all, an officer in Hitler's army.  All I can say is, the tellers of this tale have clearly thought about that, because the best part of the film is the way it portrays the broad swathe of humanity Forell meets along the way, including a Jewish merchant  in Kazakhstan whose family were wiped out by the Nazis.   If these people were willing to risk their lives to help a good man, then the least we can do is watch.

Do Americans live in a "parallel universe" separate from the rest of humanity?  To judge by this item from Agence France-Presse, the answer is yes.

Imagine Brad Pitt being stopped in an airport and questioned by people who don't know who he is, and you might conclude that those people live in a different cosmos.  Well, that is what 3 billion Bollywood fans (2 billion of them outside India) may now conclude about the USA, because India's biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, was recently stopped and interrogated for two hours in Newark Liberty Airport.

It could be a PR stunt, because Khan is apparently about to release his first US-made film, which according to AFP "features the contentious subject of racial profiling."  But Khan is right about one thing: American moviegoers live in a parallel universe where everyone speaks English and foreign countries are mostly backdrop to our well known stars.  OK, I won't try to fight that.  But maybe we should ponder the fact that Hollywood's global audience is only 2.6 billion ...

Invited by the Wall Street Journal to do a short piece on Woodstock, this is what I came up with:

"Both a Dream and a Nightmare"

The 1969 Woodstock festival wasn't held in Woodstock, N.Y., but in a dairy-farming hamlet 43 miles away with the evocative name of Bethel. On the 40th anniversary of what has clearly become a milestone in American cultural history, there is a surprising resonance between the meanings we take from Woodstock and Bethel as mentioned in the Bible.

Bethel first appears in Genesis as the place in Canaan where Jacob dreams of a stairway to heaven with "messengers of God . . . going up and coming down it." This resonates with the notion of Woodstock as a vision of ideal community, where all may enjoy total freedom because all are committed to peace, love and harmony.

The second mention is in 1 Kings, where Bethel is one of two sites where the ruler Jeroboam corrupts his people by erecting a shrine to the Golden Calf. To less starry-eyed observers of Woodstock, this reference evokes a nightmare vision of human beings given over to self-indulgence, debauchery and destruction.

Which is the true picture? Most Americans embrace one and reject the other, a reflection of how polarized we have been ever since that summer when Jimi Hendrix kissed the sky and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Yet one reason for the continuing allure (not to mention commercialization) of Woodstock is that it was neither all dream nor all nightmare. It was both.

On the dream side, the first performer of the weekend, folk singer Richie Havens, recalls looking out at the sea of humanity and feeling "at the exact center of true freedom." Asked to keep playing until the next act could arrive, Mr. Havens heroically obliged, ending a three-hour set with an improvised medley of the old spiritual "Motherless Child" and a rousing chorus consisting of one word: "Freedom!"

Watching this inspired performance, it's hard not to think of certain subsequent mass meetings--in Krakow, East Berlin, Beijing, Kiev, Tehran--that expressed the same primal urge to break free of all restraint. Some cultures fear and distrust this urge, but American culture applauds it--even though our political tradition teaches that true freedom is not the total lack of restraint but the capacity to substitute self-restraint for the chains of arbitrary power.

Surprisingly, this lesson was in evidence at Woodstock. The event was banned from two other upstate communities because of dire predictions of "maddened youths" rampaging through the streets. Given the violent demonstrations, assassinations and bizarre crimes occurring at the time, these predictions were not paranoid. Yet Woodstock proved them wrong, largely through the efforts of the Hog Farm, an exceptionally well-organized hippie commune whose members, in the words of local merchant Art Vassner, "kept the peace. They were dirty, but they were nice."

Yet chaos was never far from the surface. Abbie Hoffman, leader of the anarchist Youth International Party (Yippies), grabbed the microphone during a performance by the Who to make a political speech. And it quickly became obvious that any attempt to restrict admission would result in a riot, so the sale of tickets was abandoned, along with the fence surrounding the concert area.

Among the various parties taking credit for cutting that fence was another anarchist group called Up Against the Wall Motherf**kers. Significantly, UAW/MF emerged not from any organized political movement but from the arty fringes of Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the priority was not to end racism or war but to ridicule and attack "bourgeois" figures such as Andy Warhol and rock impresario Bill Graham.

A few years later, such adolescent nihilism would produce its own species of music: punk rock. But at Woodstock, this had not yet happened. Indeed, one of the main forces keeping the peace was the relatively upbeat tone of the music. From folk acts like Joan Baez to rock groups such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, the performers drew on a rich and varied array of vernacular American sounds, ending with Jimi Hendrix's fractured "Star-Spangled Banner," a brilliant virtuoso piece that says more about the temper of the times than a hundred political tirades.

Still, the unhappy fate of Hendrix, who died the following year, brings us back to the Golden Calf. In the late 1960s drugs were held up as a quick and easy path to spiritual transcendence. At Woodstock, the worship of this particular false idol peaked during the performance of Sly and the Family Stone. Watching Sly Stone power his way through "I Want to Take You Higher," it is obvious that his roots lay in the Pentecostal Church. But on this occasion he was not referring to the Holy Spirit.

It is a curious irony that most of the nostalgic films about the Woodstock era, from "Forrest Gump" to "Across the Universe," are love stories, because true love was hardly the watchword of the time. On the contrary, the motto was "If it feels good, do it." Of the trio "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," the first item remains the most divisive. This is because while the orgy at Woodstock may not have reached biblical proportions, it did encourage the 1960s generation to regard sexual fidelity as an antiquated Puritan notion, and erotic liberation as the key to sanity and happiness. It would take another generation for that to show up as a really bad trip.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

How do you know who your friends are in Washington?  They're the ones who stab you in the chest.

That old joke captures the hard-edged quality of political combat in the nation's capital better than most Hollywood films, perhaps because Hollywood tends to portray power not as it is actually wielded but as a dark, comic-book conspiracy.

One recent exception to this rule is Nothing But the Truth, a 2008 film based loosely on the 2005 story of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who went to jail rather than name the source who leaked to her the identity of NOC (non-official cover) CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But I almost hesitate to mention the Miller-Plame case, because this film goes far beyond it, to a realm that in its quiet, minimally violent way is truly unnerving.  This is due to no-nonsense writing and directing by Rod Lurie.  But it is even more the achievement of the actors.

As the reporter who suffers a grimmer fate than Miller did, Kate Beckinsdale is solid if uninspired.  But that doesn't matter, because she is surrounded by amazing performances: Matt Dillon as the friendly but feral special prosecutor who goes after her; Alan Alda as the preening but (in the end) principled lawyer who defends her; Vera Farmiga as the changeling spy; and (surprise) prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams as the judge.

This all may sound like standard fare, but it is not.  These characters are more real, and more intimidating, than those in almost all other political thrillers.  Maybe that's because the issue at stake is also more genuine.

Now that everyone has had a chance to woof about the latest RRT (Racial Rorschach Test), let me recommend 5 minutes of comic relief: the brief but memorable skit by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live called "White Like Me" ...

I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the recent incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, being one of the few people around who have ties to both of the worlds that collided that morning.  I am a graduate of Harvard and former instructor there, but I also spent four years teaching in the public schools of Cambridge, which for all its phalanxes of professors is still in many ways a blue-collar city.  (And no, with very few exceptions most professors' kids do not attend the Cambridge schools.)

But rather than write an editorial here, I refer you to this excellent piece by Boston Globe writer Joan Venocchi.  They should not have given it the title they did, because it is not about "machismo," it is about prominent, entitled people venting their frustrations on police -- and two of the examples she gives are of women.  Her point is that race may be part of the mix, but in places like Cambridge, class and town-gown divisions are just as important and sometimes more so.

As for Professor Gates and his reaction to Officer Crowley, we can all relate.  The flight from China to Boston is agonizingly long, and when you get home and your front door is jammed, the last thing you need is a cop asking you to show him your ID.
 
It seems to me obvious that Gates lost it -- I might have, too.  But as everyone (including the average white person) knows, it is not wise to mouth off at a police officer.

Unless, of course, you're a Harvard professor.  Then you get to climb on your high horse and refuse to get off.  But as Venocchi points out, that high horse is the real issue.

The best comment I've seen so far -- much better than President Obama's -- came from William Carter, the neighbor who snapped the photo posted here.  "I know he [Gates] was tired and upset, but someone of his stature and education should be a little more understanding."

Amen.

There was a time when German film makers scorned the formulas of American movies and (horrors) TV dramas.  On the contrary, the postwar struggle to depict -- or not depict -- the horrors of the Nazi past kept obsessively clear of anything that smacked of Hollywood.

I am not sure exactly when that changed, but one milestone was the American TV miniseries Holocaust, which despite being lambasted by critics, drew a massive audience in West Germany in 1979 and opened an unprecedented public discussion of the topic.

Since then, German TV has become very adept at making American-style miniseries, borrowing every trick in the book, including the much scorned device of placing a love story center stage, with cataclysmic historical events as backdrop.  What the critics miss, though, is that a formula does not determine the quality of the result.  Artistry does.

In the right hands, the TV miniseries can do amazing things.  Case in point: the 2006 German production Dresden, now available on DVD in the US.  The cataclysmic backdrop is the firebombing of that city, said to be the most beautiful in Germany, by the British Royal Air Force in 1945 -- an act that some have compared with America's dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Predictably in a production that carefully weighs the guilt of both sides, the love story is between an English pilot shot down over Dresden a few days before the firebombing and a German nurse who helps him.  Conveniently, the pilot (John Light) is the German-speaking son of a German mother; so he and the lovely Anna (Felicitas Woll) have no trouble communicating their way into romance.

I was not one of the critics who disliked Holocaust.  Of course it did not do justice to its topic.  But surely some awareness in the popular mind is better than none.  And the same can be said of Dresden.  If your reaction to that immense act of destruction was "they deserved it," I won't argue.  But see this film anyway.  It treads a delicate path between showing the evil of the regime (the scales tip deeply toward Germany's greater guilt) and reminding us that along with a horrendous load of guilt, Germany carries a horrendous memory of suffering.  And compared with some countries in the world, the Germans work very hard at coming to terms with both.  Even at the price of borrowing formulas from the USA.

Two young Latino men in a souped-up car, laughing and preening about their good looks and nice clothes ... what do we expect to see next?  A drug deal?  A sexy woman pushed around by macho men?  Maybe a hail of gunfire and spurts of blood on the nice upholstery?

Bella (2006) steps into none of these cliches.  Instead, it drives that flashy car right into a real-life tragedy followed by a beautifully drawn process of real-life redemption.  The debut film of Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde and starring another young Mexican, Eduardo Verastegui, Bella deftly weaves together the fates of a lonely young waitress (Tammy Blanchard) unable to imagine any outcome to her unwanted pregnancy but abortion, and her co-worker (Verastegui) who tries, for reasons of his own, to expand the range of her imagining.

Things are still boiling in Iran, and I cannot presume to know what's really going on under the lid.  But I can explain why some of the chitter-chatter about it seems silly to me.  This piece appeared in the Boston Globe, then was picked up by the International Herald Tribune.

The protests in Iran have been dubbed the "Twitter Revolution'' because the latest social-networking tools proved useful in organizing demonstrations and uploading eyewitness texts, images, and videos to the Internet. Indeed, the shooting death of 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan became an icon after the "citizen journalist'' who captured it on video sent the link to a friend outside Iran, who posted it on YouTube and forwarded it to the Persian-language service of the Voice of America. Finally, at the end of what is now a turbo-boosted news cycle, the video appeared on CNN.

But what if this sudden deployment of media technology doesn't move the regime?

What did the King of Pop bequeath to the world?  Your answer will probably depend on your view of American pop music.

If you take the view that American pop music is nothing but a manufactured product designed to exploit human lust and desire, then you will focus on the seamy side of Jackson's career: the occasionally risque song lyrics and video images; the strangely whitened skin (caused by a disease called vitiligo, which destroys pigment); the bizarre cosmetic surgery that left him with an eerie mask-like appearance; and the tortured private life, tarnished by unproven but damning accusations of child molestation. Like Elvis Presley, Jackson became a superstar when he was too young to handle it, and by the time of his early death, he had become a freak.

But there is another side to Jackson.  If you take the view that American pop music grows out of a rich tradition of song, dance, and showmanship created by African Americans but now practiced by performers of all backgrounds, then you will focus on the highlights of Jackson's career: the irresistible 10-year-old star of the Jackson 5; the gifted vocalist of Thriller (the 1982 album that has sold almost 65 million copies worldwide); the astonishing dancer whom critics compared with Fred Astaire and Rudolph Nureyev; the creator of artful music videos; and finally, the master of the extravagant live stage show.

What is the relationship between these two sides of Michael Jackson?  The answer lies in the larger cultural context within which he lived.  If Jackson had been born 50 years or even 25 years earlier, he would have joined a long list of extraordinary African-American musicians working in a succession of popular but also challenging styles: ragtime at the turn of the 20th century, jazz in the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, rhythm and blues in the 1940s, rock and roll in the 1950s.  Or perhaps, coming as he did from a religious family (his mother is a devout Jehovah's Witness), Jackson would have been one of the century's great gospel singers.

Any of these styles would have kept Jackson close to what is best in American music.  Indeed, he got his start within that tradition: the all-male singing group put together by his father has a long pedigree in both religious and secular realms.  But Jackson was born in 1958 and began his career a decade later, during the tumultuous late 1960s, when pop music was changing very quickly - and not always for the better.

The greatest frustration of Jackson's life was that he never repeated his early success with Thriller.  He tried, and several of his later albums sold millions of copies.  But there was something magical about Thriller that seemed to elude him for years afterward.  What was the source of that magic?  I would say Quincy Jones, the older man who produced Jackson's first three solo albums.

Quincy Jones was born in 1933 and is still going strong, a trumpeter, arranger, producer, and all-around master who got his start playing and arranging for superb artists: Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie.  Not only that, but he studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen in Paris.  Few people on this earth know African-American music as well as Jones, and he wove that knowledge into every track of Thriller.

But nothing succeeds like success, and after his next album, Bad, Jackson decided that he did not need Jones any more, and the two parted company.  The magic went out of Jackson's music at that point, and in my opinion, it stayed out.  And Jackson let this happen because, after all, this was the 1980s, and there was more to being a superstar than just singing and dancing.  There was MTV.

Amazing as it sounds, MTV in the early 1980s played mostly white acts, and for a while refused to air Jackson's videos.  Finally his record company threatened MTV, and they yielded, only to discover that their largely white audience adored Michael Jackson.  After this triumph, Jackson vowed to break every other barrier as well, and be accepted as a major artistic talent.

But unfortunately, Jackson's universe did not include the culturally sophisticated attitudes of the dominant musical style of the 1980s: the British New Wave.  With its roots in punk, the visual arts, and trendy downtown fashion, the New Wave depended less on artistry than on attitude - a campy, ironic attitude that mocked commercial success while also pursuing it.  This kind of thing was beyond Jackson's comprehension, and when the British press dubbed him "Wacko Jacko," he was deeply hurt.

Here we find the real explanation for Jackson's weird, sentimental notion of himself as a "spiritual" artist, a veritable angel of love.  It was the only way he could fight back against the dark, cynical tone of the musical styles that surrounded him: punk, grunge, alternative, gangsta rap.  It was a hit with people all around the world.  (See comments from former Soviet bloc countries on the RFE-RL website.)  But this was never enough.  Jackson also longed to be taken as seriously at home, as seriously as the stars of these cynical styles.  But he never was.  The critics dismissed him as "pop," and the rest of the media focused on his eccentricities, not his genius.

Perhaps now that Michael Jackson has passed from the scene, it will be possible to reverse these priorities.