A reader castigates Andrew Sullivan—and his fellow members of the MSM (I hesitate to call them journalists) [e.a.]:

I see you quote with approval Maureen Dowd’s column on Clinton’s tears. Every day you tell us how much we need Obama’s reasonable, fresh, high-minded vision of unity, and every day you pour gas on the fire by elaborating, just like Dowd, all of your personal resentments about Clinton and her husband. You know all about how selfish and arrogant they are, you know they pressure people, pull levers, and operate a merciless machine, you know their motives, their hidden motives, their secret motives, and even the ultimate motives behind all their other motives. Is such intimate knowledge standard ethical equipment for a journalist? Do you see no contradiction between the qualities you praise in Obama and the very different qualities you display yourself?  …

I’d like to see Obama president myself. I want to vote for him. But I know that if you take all the bad the Clintons have ever done and piled it up in a heap, it just doesn’t equal one month of the horror of the current administration. Are you a deeply self-deceiving man, or just a deeply cynical one? Do you people in the media take no responsibility for the poison of the last fifteen years? How do you expect to change the air in Washington when you sit down on Sunday morning with Chris Matthews and smile at his pathological hostility?

To his credit, Sullivan feels slightly ashamed of himself:

I have to say this email has brought me up short in ways others have not. It isn’t so much the content of my criticisms but the tone. I will probably fail to get the better of my emotions when it comes to the good Senator and ex-president. I’m a human being writing in real time with no filters. That’s blogging. But, while not stinting on legitimate criticism, I’m going to try a little harder to be a little more temperate. Goodbye to all that, eh? 

Sure, sure. I’ll believe it when I see it.

One of my favorite stories about ham acting was told (on himself) by Omar Sharif (he of the wet eyes in Dr. Zhivago). In 1995, he was interviewed for the New York Times and talked about his tendency to overdo his swooniness on camera

and the director David Lean telling him to cut the crap [e.a.]:

Mr. Sharif is always romantic. Eternally romantic.

“When we were making ‘Zhivago,’ ” he recalls, “David Lean, the director, used to say: ‘Omar, please take out the violins. I hear 28 violins.’ And I would say, ‘But I can’t!’ Then I would do the scene again and he would say, ‘Only eight violins this time.’ And I would say, ‘Eight violins is my minimum.’ “

David Lean was right, of course: less is always more—unless you’re director Jonathan Demme and you are attempting to beatify Jimmy Carter in your new “documentary” [e.a.]:

Forgive Jonathan Demme for approaching Jimmy Carter with so much nostalgia.  … [His film] mostly focuses on the publication of Carter’s book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” in late 2006 and the controversial book tour that followed. The movie is a consistently fascinating, if too long, account of the unapologetic former president facing charges of anti-Semitism because of his belief that Israel is keeping the Palestinians prisoners on their own land [really? is that the meaning of "apartheid"?  ---ed.]

In that case, you want to turn up the violins [e.a.]:

Does Demme overstep his role of fly on the wall? Probably. Note that during some of Carter’s speeches, he places a faint fiddle and piano in the background to punctuate his subject’s sincerity. That’s too bad because the director has done some of his best work in the documentary field, most recently with 2006’s “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” without this kind of fawning.

Cheap sentiment from Jonathan Demme? No a surprise. His best work is far, far behind him anyway. Now he’s just given over to cheap cinematic tricks, not to mention blind faith in Saint Jimmy’s halo and general stupidity.