Headlines that pretty much guarantee you’re going to read what’s underneath:

Missing college student led a double life as online porn star

There’s not a clause in that sentence that doesn’t say “hello, sailor.” “Missing college student” establishes the mystery and implies a deeper tragedy; she wasn’t just a young woman, she was a young woman with a bright future, because she went to college. “Led a double life” is wish fulfillment, as every one of us leads a double, triple, quadruple or perhaps quintuple life, if only in our heads. (At the moment, I’m Nancy Nall, Competent Mother, because I managed to get my kid off to school on time AND with a brown-bag lunch for the field trip.) And then there’s the payoff — “online porn star.” I love how stardom is guaranteed in pornography; it just wouldn’t have the same punch if it read “porn bit player,” would it? As far as I can tell from this story and the Google, this girl had a website where she displayed nude photos of herself (“I’m a spunky little teen with a super sexy side!”). This constitutes stardom in porn. Linda Lovelace wept.

Anyway, it sounds as though this woman’s college and acting career are both over:

Sander was last seen leaving a bar in El Dorado, about 30 miles from Wichita, with a man identified as Israel Mireles, 24, authorities said. Sander and Mireles had met that night at the bar, according to Watson.

After Mireles did not show up Saturday at his job at an Italian restaurant, his employer went to the motel room where he was staying.

“His motel room was found to appear in great disarray, and a large quantity of blood was found in the room,” Boren said. “Bed clothing was found to be missing. The police were called.”

I expect Geraldo Rivera is on the case. Not to make light of what is shaping up to be a tragedy, but young ladies, this is what you call a cautionary tale.

Oy, the week limps toward its end. I remain a Word Machine, makin’ words for dolla bills, y’all, although my invoice appears to have cooled on the client’s desk, this time. I’m assuming I got caught between billing cycles, because these are stand-up people, but still — I’m starting to see why “cash flow” is something of an oxymoron in freelancing. It’s like standing in front of a faucet that sometimes gushes, and sometimes just coughs a little. “Flow” is an aspiration, not a reality. For me, anyway.

I finally caught “Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry” on HBO. Not terrible, not even half-bad, but it failed to get at what I maintain — [brandishing index finger to make a windy point] — is the essential truth of this matchup, i.e., its one-sidedness. At least one Michigan sportswriter saw it as “more tailored to a Columbus setting,” and he’s right — there’s more of this story in Ohio than in Michigan, because there’s more to film in Ohio than in Michigan. Buckeyes simply care more, a lot more, about this rivalry than Wolverines do. Saying so would have diminished the premise of the film, however, and the nuts and bolts of why that is true doesn’t lend itself to a slow-tempo violin-solo versions of the fight song, all that sports-film crapola about tradition and trophies and bragging rights.

If I were making a list, I’d start with the differences between Columbus and Ann Arbor — one a large city that lives and breathes Buckeye football because for decades it was the quite literally the only game in town, the other just a college town. The whole state of Ohio is invested in the Buckeyes to some extent; it’s the only Big Ten school in the state, the flagship school of the public-university system, the giant diploma factory in the middle of everything. The University of Michigan competes for gridiron loyalty with Michigan State, just for starters. Ann Arbor’s closest large city, Detroit, supports four major-league sports, with media attention divided between them. And here’s something no one in Columbus wants to hear (they will cut you off if you even bring it up, trust me, I know): Michigan maintains at least two other major football rivalries, with Notre Dame and Michigan State. Admittedly neither is as big as Ohio State, but they have their partisans, and that divides attention somewhat. On UM/OSU game days, you can always find a few extra Spartans flags flying around my neighborhood, as the third constituency roots against the Arrogant Assholes, as Ann Arbor is known hereabouts.

In Columbus, they have Hate Michigan rallies on campus that would make Joseph Goebbels spin in his grave. If they have them in Ann Arbor, I missed them the year I was there. Maybe among the Greek constituencies. But not at the Michigan Theater, where they were probably showing some art film that week.

That was 2003 by the way. Michigan won.

(Oh, and by the way: Several of the talking-head interviews in the film were shot at Wallace House, the clubhouse for my beloved J-fellow program. All the Michigan interviews with the gleaming woodwork and a tasteful flower arrangement out of focus in the background? I suspect this is the Mark of Birgit, the program administrator.)

OK, back to work. And bloggage:

If you live outside the area and haven’t been reading the foreclosure series in the News this week, I can’t blame you, even though the story is a national one, albeit extra-bad here at Ground Zero. Parts two and three concentrated on what you don’t hear about so much — the outright fraud and criminal activity involved in this disaster. It’s easy to say, “Well, people should have known what they were getting into,” but when what they were getting into involved a quitclaim deed slipped into a pile of documents and signed by an old poor lady, touching off the outright theft of her house, well, that’s a different thing, isn’t it?

Today’s installment starts with the Full French, a one-two punch:

As Michigan’s foreclosure crisis was growing in the fall of 2006, state legislators jumped into action.

They took money away from the state office that investigates mortgage fraud.

Take that, libertarians.

Finally, I don’t want to forget this before the week slips away: On Monday, the NYT did a story on the foundry in India where Con Ed, the electrical utility, gets its manhole covers. There were many photos, which weren’t pretty: Workers stood barefoot and shirtless, waiting to receive molten metal in buckets, which were then hand-carried to molds. The temperatures were punishing. The conditions, 19th-century. DetNews columnist Laura Berman used the story as a peg to write a column about East Jordan Iron Works, which makes manhole covers in northern Michigan under, as you might expect, drastically different conditions.

Globalization isn’t something you can argue with; it’s simply a fact of the world’s economy. But I’m grateful for stories like both of these, which remind us all that we do things differently here, and for good reasons, and that it’s not a bad thing. Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong. safe. safer.

It’s pretty clear our wonderful little dog is losing his hearing. He responds to sharp hand claps or stomps on the floor, but not much else. I’ve considered he might be indulging in the traditional right of the elderly — selective hearing — but increasingly it seems he just doesn’t. The other day I took him for a quick walk when we were traveling, and as we circled around back to the car, the sight of Alan made him put his ears up, in a “that shape looks familiar, but I just can’t place it” sort of way, so I suppose he doesn’t see too well, either. Ah, the depredations of age. On the other hand, he still has a lust for life, and an interest in his environment, only now he relies on his sense of taste; if I let him, he’ll lick my hand for 20 minutes straight. I’m grateful shorts season is over, because for a while this summer, he was fond of tasting all our guests as they stood in the foyer, and let me tell you, it takes a serious dog person to put up with that for very long.

Needless to say, I won’t be taking him to Partridge Creek, the latest open-air mall to open in the neighborhood, which advertises itself as dog-friendly. (The billboards feature a dog with its head out the window of a car, with the legend, “Are we there yet?”) I was there today, and wondered about the wisdom of both the policy and the sorts of people who think it’s a good idea to take a giant Labrador retriever to a packed pedestrian space for no good reason other than that you can. I suppose the idea was conceived as a way to attract the Paris Hilton purse-dog contingent, but yesterday there were at least a dozen enormous breeds on display, including a few excitable specimens that really should have been somewhere else. I suppose it’s possible the owners were training their dogs to be around big crowds, but when I see an 80-pound Lab barely controlled by a 150-pound man — man in a semi-crouch, holding the leash with both hands, spluttering impotently at the pooch — I’m not reassured. Either get a collar that works, a trainer with a clue, or leave the beast at home.

Not much of a weekend, otherwise. Wrangled the last of Kate’s Halloween costume, took a couple long naps, sat poolside during a kid’s birthday party — the usual. Rented “Knocked Up” on Friday with great anticipation of yet another Apatow sweet-raunchfest, and came away disappointed. It was too long by many minutes and lurched jarringly from comedy to not-comedy. I found myself snapping my fingers for a cut, but then, am I a genius director? No, I’m just the person who has to sit through a two-hour-and-14-minute sex comedy that had not enough of either. I hope “Superbad” is better.

One of our stops Saturday was the American Apparel store, where I offered my child as a model. Ha ha kidding — I was really on my never-ending quest for a simple, well-cut, white T-shirt made of fabric thick enough you can’t read your watch through it. The verdict: The search goes on. But hey, I found a scoop-neck, cap-sleeve specimen seemingly spun by anorexic spiders for the low low price of $30. Forget reading your watch through it; you could have read the box scores from the agate page through it, which I suppose is the point, but jeez, it’s a damn T-shirt. HOW HARD IS IT TO GET THIS ITEM CORRECT? It’s like a cup of coffee. Two ingredients, an infinite number of ways to screw it up. This should be a Project Runway assignment. A grateful nation would make the winner rich.

Bloggage:

I was thinking if I were Mitch Albom’s editor, how easy my work would be. Take today’s. It begins:

When did adults start dressing for Halloween?

I’d write, “About 30 years ago, by my reckoning. Thanks for noticing, but see if you can’t do better by deadline. — Ed.” Then a big red X through the next 600 words, and careful placement in the middle of his desk.

Only it doesn’t work that way, not anymore. I doubt Albom has a desk in the newsroom, and anyway, no editor bosses him around, and anyway, he has an excuse — his other Sunday column, the one in Sports, lets everyone know just who has the biggest d–, er, book sales in the newsroom, who’s been on Oprah, and who better look the other way when three out of four nine out of ten nearly all the Sunday Metro columns are lame-ass. (Cf: iPods: What’s up with that? or School shootings: What’s up with that?)

Ah, well. I’m not one to talk, am I?

Here’s a somewhat meatier story, an oldie but goodie: Mark Jacobson’s 2000 profile of Frank Lucas, currently being played by Denzel Washington in “American Gangster.” Many choice passages, much rich detail, lots of heroin.

Finally, Fox Business anchor or porn star? I only got 50 percent right on this quiz. It’s that difficult.

The “Sex and the City” movie (motto: “Like watching four episodes back-to-back”) is shooting in where-else this month, and not many days go by without one of the gossip rags or websites featuring a photo taken on-set. The good news (I guess): Nothing really changes. Carrie isn’t wearing jeans and polos, or even sweats with an Hermes-scarf-as-halter-top. But it’s a good thing this is a movie, because you’re going to need one wiiiide screen for this getup.

The other day the NYPost reported the crew was shooting the Big/Carrie wedding scenes at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which I forwarded to Amy, because if there’s anything that brightens an orthodox Catholic’s day, it’s news that the One True Church has allowed a production celebrating guilt-free, non-marital fornication to use one of its most famous North American cathedrals as a location.

But we may have to get the Pope involved, after all:

I’m thinking a papal bull condemning stylist Patricia Field is called for here. She has plainly lost her mind.

Never mind the propriety of dressing a woman on the far side of 40 in a dress last worn by the 20-year-old Princess Diana — this is a cathedral wedding, after all. Never mind the horror it makes of SJP’s bony, chicken chest. What is that thing on her head?

I told Amy it was either a Bride of Frankenstein riff or else an abstract representation of the Holy Spirit. Your guess is as good as mine.

As we have recently entered the Journey of Orthodontia, Alan signed up for a Healthcare Spending Account this year. I know, I know, we should have done it years ago, but we’re stupid. That big caveat they tell you at the informational meeting — all funds not spent by December 31 are forfeit — always put us off the idea, although in our defense that was before we knew the money could be spent on bourbon, as long as you filed a signed letter saying your doctor told you to relax more.

Once we took the plunge, it was a revelation. They sent us a debit card that we could use to tap the funds at will — pure genius — and I started toting it to the orthodontist’s office, where every month I use it to make a payment on our daughter’s steadily improving smile.

Then a letter arrived: Please document the following purchases, blah blah blah, or risk the deactivation of your card. Apparently the debit-card tapping from an orthodontist’s office sent up the red flags. I understand. I might have been trying to launder that $100 per month through a Roseville ortho’s office by buying little rubber bands, which I then might sell on the street and spend the cash on crack or something. You can’t be too careful.

At our next appointment, I trudged back to the ortho and asked the receptionist for a printout of all my payments so far, so I could make copies, highlight the disputed payments and fax everything back to HQ, so that I could go on spending my own money. She was familiar with my plight.

“This isn’t really bad, as these things go,” she said, indicating it happens quite often. “A lot of plans make it much harder. They’re hoping you just give up, so they can keep the money.”

Every so often, in my health-care news farming, I come across an editorial in which some conservative airily dismisses all concerns about our current system by saying, well, this is what happens when consumers are divorced from the true cost of things, by having everything paid by their insurance. The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last year in which the writer praised those savvy Amish, who don’t have insurance and don’t carry debt, and hence go doctor to doctor haggling for the best price on having a rotten tooth pulled or some other elective procedure. What to do when the patient has crushing chest pain is conveniently not explained, nor is the Amish fondness for Mexican border-town doctors, herbalists and other low-cost options that may or may not quack like a duck. The last grafs of these pieces are generally spent genuflecting in the direction of “the market” and its holy healing power.

I wonder what the line item for “abandoned funds” is for this particular company. I wonder what accountant crunched that number. I wonder who came up with the idea. I wonder how they sold it in the meeting.

OK, Grumpypants rant over. It’s a gorgeous day.

Shall we wrangle some bloggage? Get along, little bloggies:

I really don’t want to get into the habit of deconstructing op-ed columnists at my alma mater; Tim Goeglein is enough for me. But I read this piece with a sense of deepening wonder, trying to guess how long it would take the writer to get to the point. I imported it into Word so I could nail it precisely: 582 words. Talk about Grumpypants.

A nice NYT op-ed on what happens to Detroit factories when they close down. Short answer: They’re exported. The longer answer is much more interesting:

In the Budd plant, “press” means stamping presses, and many of them still stand, a couple of stories high, in numbered lines of half a dozen presses each. A Spanish auto supplier, Gestamp, has bought 16 Line for one of its Mexican plants. A couple of Mexican engineers from Gestamp, along with German engineers from Müller Weingarten, the press maker that Gestamp contracted to oversee the 16 Line’s installation in Mexico, have been observing the disassembly. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” said Duane Krukowski, General Rigging’s electrical foreman.

For moms only, every word that comes out of our mouths in 24 hours, distilled to two minutes and set to the William Tell Overture. A YouTube link, of course. Funny. Wholesome funny.

There’s nothing a staff writer likes more than an in-joke. In newspapers, we make elaborate fake front pages when people leave or retire. For TV shows, scenes that won’t be shot, but should. For fans of “The Wire,” with a new catch phrase (“meta motherfuckers”), thanks to Ashley.

I’ve come to believe that any movie with Chris Cooper in it won’t let me down, but man, when the NYT calls “The Kingdom” “‘Syriana’ for dummies,” dude, that is cold.

Anyway, if I’m movie-bound at all this weekend, it’s to see “Eastern Promises.”

Lance Mannion takes a look at “On the Road,” and does a better job of it than most people paid to do so.

And that is all. Have a swell weekend.

I’ve been blessed — as an agnostic, I don’t use that word lightly — with good health all my life. I come from a sturdy line of people who generally live into their ninth decade, with no chronic diseases other than those time carries in its reeking baggage. My medical-history interviews are a chorus of no, no, no. Lucky me.

Lately it has occurred to me I won’t live forever, and may in fact see my lucky streak end with the usual degradations of cancer or heart disease or stroke or multiple blunt-force trauma in a bicycle accident. I’ve always had health insurance through my/our employers, but lately those employers aren’t looking so healthy themselves, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about more. So you might say I was ready for “Sicko,” and when someone offered me a screener copy, of course I said yes.Everything you’ve already read about the movie is true, so we don’t need to go into greater depth here: Yes, it’s entertaining propaganda. Yes, the Cuba sequences were ridiculous. Yes, Michael Moore is still fat. But hey, guess what else: It’s also a pretty excellent movie. Moore is at his most self-effacing and crafty, deliberately dialing down the childishness in favor of sincerity.

By concentrating not on the uninsured, but the badly insured, he makes it hard to distance yourself from the problem. If 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance, that means 250 million have at least something standing between them and a $250,000 hospital bill, and “Sicko” only confirms what many of us long suspected: There but for the grace of God, etc.There’s the woman whose ambulance ride after a car accident was denied, because it wasn’t pre-approved.  The woman whose husband was denied a bone-marrow transplant, and died. (And she worked at a hospital!) And there’s the woman who was denied cervical-cancer treatment, because she was too young to get cervical cancer, in her insurer’s opinion.

You can’t help but wonder how long before something like this happens to you. This isn’t journalism; it’s not even-handed. When he goes to France, and England, and Canada, and looks at the happy people there, we know there are others who aren’t. Mention universal health care in this country, and within seconds someone will bring up the eight-month waiting list for a hernia repair in the UK, or whatever. No one does this in “Sicko,” granted.But here’s something I don’t notice happening in Canada, either: People saying, “Let’s dump our system and adopt that of the United States, because that’s one that works like a Swiss watch.”

No one’s saying the National Health Service is a bowl of cherries, but at least after waiting your eight months or whatever, you can walk out of the hospital with the shirt on your back. Nothing is really free, and when Moore keeps calling government-subsidized care by that name you want to correct him — they’re all paying one way or another. But maybe this is what you can afford when you’re not flushing billions down the Pentagon’s toilets, too.

I know I quote Roy too often here, but I think he got to the heart of it with his post on the film, a few weeks ago:

 But there aren’t a lot of “gotcha” ambush moments. Instead, halfway through the film Moore seems to abandon the litany of despair to go to other countries where we meet people who are well-served by their systems, because their governments acknowledge that health care is a human right. And hearing their stories, and especially observing their lives outside the hospitals and clinics, we come to realize that health care is only part of the difference. What’s remarkable (and sometimes infuriating) about these subjects’ attitudes is that they take their superior care for granted. They expect more from their governments than we do — and, the film implies, that’s why they have it and we don’t.  Even hostile reviewers seem to pick up on this. The claim by National Review’s Rich Lowry that Moore is “the Riefenstahl of socialism” is hysterical but telling. Lowry is acknowledging the power of SiCKO’s real story — the story of a civilized world that, in some important ways, has left America behind, not by dint of socialism but by a different understanding of what the old Labourite Tony Benn calls by its right name: democracy.     

We look, after Moore’s propaganda film, like people who can’t quite let go of the other propaganda we’ve had sowed in our brains since birth: That the government can’t do anything right, and the market does everything better. Ask yourself if that’s true the next time you find your COBRA running out.

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?

Alice Cooper: Well, I’m a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.

Pete: Hey, isn’t “Milwaukee” an Indian name?

Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact, it was originally an Algonquin term meaning “the good land.”

Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.

Alice Cooper: I think one of the most interesting things about Milwaukee is that it’s the only American city to elect three Socialist mayors.

Wayne Campbell: [to the camera] Does this guy know how to party or what?

Guess where I’m going this weekend. Yepper, it’s wheels up for the good land Friday morning. Off to visit my BFF Deb, and then on to Madison for dinner with Dr. Frank and his consort, the lovely Cindy. It’s a weekend in the Dairy State — do I live an exciting life, or what? (Although, truly, I think it’s fascinating that Milwaukee has elected three Socialist mayors.)

Cheese for all!

So, apres-memo, here’s the plot of “The Last Kiss,” starring Zach Braff, whom someone who died made Voice of Generation Y:

Zach is a Prius-driving architect in Washington D.C., about to turn 30, with a girlfriend of long standing. She’s beautiful, smart, a PhD candidate, and pregnant. The movie opens with dinner at her parents’, played by Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson, who appears to be in pain. He’s in pain (the movie tells us) because his marriage is lousy, but we know (because we’re smarter than Paul Haggis, the screenwriter), that he’s in pain because he made a bad career choice when he signed the contract to be in this stinker.

So everyone’s at dinner, and Jenna, the beautiful doctoral candidate, makes her big I’m-pregnant announcement. Everyone is thrilled. No one asks about when they’re getting married, although Jenna brings it up, and says they’ve just been so busy, they haven’t been able to fit a wedding into their plans. But that’s OK, because they’re committed to one another, and parents in movies like this never ask such rude questions. Blythe Danner calls for a toast, and runs off to find a bottle of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge she just happens to have in the fridge.

Who are these mutants? Already I hate their guts.

Then we have a few short scenes where Jenna gazes into Zach’s eyes and asks him if he’s happy, and he assures her he’s deliriously happy and loves her to death, his mouth forming the words, his eyes darting toward the nearest exit. I wonder what Jenna is getting her doctorate in? Probably math, because she appears to have been studying trigonometry when the rest of us girls were learning to spot a liar.

The next big scene is at a wedding, where we’re introduced to the rest of Zach’s posse — the sex maniac, the perpetual middle-schooler and the guy who married a bitch. She’s a bitch because when she sees her husband holding their crying baby, she immediately yells at him for not calming the child down, and because his diaper is dirty. And then she appears — the other woman. She’s still in college, and she’s beautiful, and she was on “The O.C.,” so of course I don’t know her name. (Googling … Rachel Bilson.) Because she’s 20 and beautiful, and Jenna is 30 and beautiful, Jenna immediately looks like an old hag to Zach. It would be one thing if Rachel had anything to offer other than her adoring puppy-dog eyes, but she doesn’t. She makes stupid statements that sound profound to a 20-year-old, and, worse, does stupid things, like call her friends at the same wedding on their cell phones, plotting when they can blow this boring scene with the free food and booze and go have some real fun. Zach is smitten.

Again: Who ARE these mutants? Thirty is, perhaps, the time when men and women are closest to one another in their sex drives, at the peak of their physical attractiveness, are starting to gain some sophistication in their worldview and opinions; there is no reason in the world for a 30-year-old man with half a brain and a beautiful girlfriend his own age to go running after a 20-year-old dim bulb. Plus, the girlfriend is pregnant! He’s about to learn the dirty secret of pregnancy, i.e., there is nothing in the world hornier than a pregnant woman, and she’s going to be growing out of her B-cup bras. She is about to wear him down to a stub if he gives her half a chance. But he won’t, because immediately he starts chasing after Rachel Bilson.

To be sure, it isn’t just a physical thing for Zach. See, he’s afraid. Not of the impending birth of his child, which would make sense; he’s afraid that “nothing is going to happen” to him for the rest of his life, that he “knows how it will turn out.” And reader, I swear, no one smacks his ignorant face for saying this bullshit out loud. How did he get through grad school?

Well, you know how the rest of this goes. There are some subplots too boring to recap, all of which boil down to this elusive life lesson: Relationships are hard. Duh. The mid-movie setback comes when Zach goes out with Rachel, kisses her passionately but doesn’t take her to bed, and goes home to Jenna, who has figured out where he’s been. She throws him out of the house. Guess what he does? Yes, goes back to Rachel and fucks her. I’m thinking, “Jenna, run. Run run run run run. Take your doctorate to some normal city like Detroit, find a normal guy and get him to adopt your baby.” Does she listen? Noooo.

So, drama drama drama, Zach swears it will never, ever happen again, and the movie ends with — oh, sorry, this is a spoiler — Jenna letting him back in the house. No obviously happy ending, but a strong implication that they will soldier on, sadder but wiser.

If I were writing the sequel — “The Last Kiss, Really” — they’ll both be killed in a car crash on the way home from the hospital. The carseat will protect the baby, who can find a nice normal adoptive family and have a chance for happiness. Although, overloaded with two preceding generations of stupid genes, the deck is certainly stacked against it.

I just wrote a long post about the upcoming fall movie season, and my browser quit when I visited the website for “Rendition,” a film about the CIA secret prison program starring well-known Arab-Americans Reese Witherspoon, Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin. Reese plays the wife of a man named Ali or Ahmet or something, played by Some Swarthy Guy.

When the browser quit, I lost the whole thing. And now I really don’t want to see it.

There was also a capsule review of “Last Kiss.” I’ll give you the capsule-capsule review: It sucked.

And now I’ve eaten up my designated blogging time, and have to go rewrite a stupid memo.

Have I mentioned it rained torrentially overnight and it’s supposed to be 90 degrees today?

Not my day, not so far. Play amongst yourselves. I’ll see what I can do post-memo.

Alan made a baldfaced, shocking statement the other day. He said Al Pacino was a lousy actor. He said he’s nothing but an arm-waving scenery-chewer, and then he dropped a bomb: “Face it, he hasn’t been in a decent movie since ‘The Godfather.'”

Well.

That’s some pretty strong meat there. His IMDb entry, admittedly written by some fanboy, begins, One of the greatest actors in all of film history… and no one has posted jeering rejoinders. This wasn’t an in-depth debate — I believe the context was whether to indulge me in my 4,592nd viewing or partial viewing of “Heat” or to keep clicking the remote — but I got that feeling of itchy doubt that suggested he might have a point. So I stopped reading the biography and clicked over to the filmography.

Alan wasn’t entirely correct; some of the best performances of Pacino’s career were made after “The Godfather,” but not long after. Two-thirds of the ones that made his bones, IMHO — “Panic in Needle Park,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” — were after the first “Godfather.” But by 1979 he was already showing us what could happen to Michael Corleone without a good director telling him to dial it down by 54 percent on take two: “…And Justice For All,” an embarrassment; “Cruising,” ditto; “Author! Author!,” a steaming pile; and, of course, the bad performance next to which all other bad performances must stand and be judged not-even-close, “Scarface.”

Then came, what? “Sea of Love,” in which we’re asked to believe Ellen Barkin is driven into a state of cross-eyed lust at the very sight of him. (I remember their hot coupling scenes, this blonde goddess of steam and the little homunculus.) “Glengarry Glen Ross” was a brief return to the early promise, and then came the headfirst slide into caricature: “Scent of a Woman,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and, God help us all, “Any Given Sunday,” in which Oliver Stone not only indulged the worst instincts of his star but encouraged others in the cast to play along. I remember watching that on the couch with Alan. True to Stone form, it was not only too long, there was another 15 minutes after the big climax, where the wounded-warrior player gets his redemption. I went to bed after the redemption scene, and as Alan crawled in half an hour later, I asked what happened.

“Al Pacino gets another job, and boy, was Cameron Diaz mad,” he said. Poor Cameron had to play every scene at 11; I guess she couldn’t even mellow after they won the big game.

I liked “Heat,” mostly because it had De Niro, Saint Val of the Chiseled Jaw, and a decent turn by Ashley Judd, and the precious Ted Levine and Diane Venora; even Tom Sizemore did work to be proud of in that thing. But now all I see are the scenes when Pacino gives it 110 percent; you want to tell him, “Keep your dignity. Stop yelling so much. Small men should command with authority, not volume, or everyone thinks they’re an asshole.” But noooo.

“Angels in America,” OK, the exception that proves the rule. He’s capable of so much more that when he sucks, it’s his own fault.

My sister saw Pacino on Broadway, in “American Buffalo.” “We were close enough that his spit went all over us when he got cranked up,” she said at the time.

I guess Alan wins this one. Make a contrary case, or nominate your own entry. I have to work on a newsletter.

Today’s question: How the hell did Michael Medved get his job, and how the hell does he keep it?

Really. His Wikipedia entry, for whatever it’s worth, paints the outlines of a real hustler, a guy who’s made artful leaps from one rock to another in the course of making his living, ranging from political speechwriting to novelty publishing to this to that. He hosted “Sneak Previews” after Siskel and Ebert left, a little like being the guy who followed Greg Kinnear on “Talk Soup,” but never mind. At some point, he seems to have crossed that invisible line in today’s media world, the one after which you cannot fail.

We’ve all known people like this, ambitious souls who never seem to do great work, or even good work, but always fail upward. Medved’s like that. He had the advantage of basing his career in film criticism, which doesn’t take a lot of specialized knowledge to do a halfway-OK job. As long as you’re reasonably telegenic and good with a catch phrase, it doesn’t really matter if you know what you’re talking about. You’re just another guy with an opinion. I mean, Richard Roeper is a film critic. How hard can it be?

(To my film-criticizing friends, I don’t mean for a second that the work isn’t serious. It’s just easy to be good-OK or good-enough. Greatness is as rare as it is anywhere.)

Medved brings something extra to the table: His “values.” I welcome someone who can talk about art and culture from a religious perspective, if only more of them did. I always find Amy’s thoughts on TV and movies interesting; she writes from an intellectual Catholic POV, puts some sweat into the effort, and never takes the easy way out. In the end, you have to have something to say other than, “God told me this is wrong, and so it is.” More important, you have to respect the art, to understand that it’s art, not propaganda, and judge it accordingly. But Medved plays dirty. Remember his crusade against “Million Dollar Baby”? He felt moved to mount his soapbox not because the story took a turn he disapproved of, but because (or so he said) he felt it was advertised dishonestly. He thought the trailers promised something uplifting, and it turned out to be a big downer about quadriplegia. He was only thinking of those clueless moviegoers who might be fooled into spending $10 on something that wasn’t “Rocky” with girls.

But even knowing what a duplicitous fellow he is, even I was shocked by this column in USA Today. Perhaps shocked by its honesty; he seems to be dropping all pretense of being a critic, and promoting himself straight to Minister of Cinema in the Republic of Gilead:

Why would Hollywood release a controversial feature film about alleged Mormon terrorists of 150 years ago while all but ignoring the dangerous Muslim terrorists of today?

For the same reason “Hollywood” made a movie about the sinking of the Titanic and not a fatal wreck at the Indy 500, about the 1980 Olympic hockey team and not the 2003 Detroit Tigers, about a rat that cooks and not an elephant elected to Congress, I suppose — because that’s what the movie’s about.

But to answer the question honestly would mean a one-paragraph column, and Medved has space to fill. And so on he goes, accusing “Tinseltown” of having too much “respect for Muslim sensibilities” and that “Hollywood’s reluctance to portray Islamo-Nazi killers remains difficult, if not impossible, to explain.” (Islamo-Nazis? Is that what we’re calling them these days?)

I guess Medved left “Syriana” before George Clooney got his thumbnails pulled out by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe “Black Hawk Down” passed him by. “Three Kings” was probably too easy on ’em. I understand.

He makes the case that Americans shouldn’t be making movies about American religious terrorists as long as there are still movies to be made about Islamic religious terrorists, and they shouldn’t be making movies that make Mormons look bad as long as there’s a Mormon running for president. OK. Medved has a background in screenwriting, connections to vastly wealthy people who share his feelings and a nationwide soapbox to publicize his efforts. What’s he waiting for?

Seriously. Wouldn’t you think a person who’s made his living writing about the movie business would have a clue or two about how it works, starting with the fact there is no “Hollywood” monolith that decides which movies will be made? (Or is there some committee I’m unaware of? It’s possible.) If Medved and his buds want to see movies about bloodthirsty Ay-rabs, the Screen Actors Guild has quite a few swarthy types in their files, and I’m sure they could find plenty for the cast.

You know this rant. I’m bored already.

Here’s something, though: We’ll see movies about Islamic terrorists, eventually. And I predict the best ones will be made by Muslims. They’ll certainly have the deepest understanding of the culture, societies and institutions that breed Islamic extremism, just as an American might feel they’d bring something to a story about American religious extremism. Just sayin’.

Do I have bloggage? Only this:

I’m so old, I used one of these. Filed stories on it, although I preferred the next generation, with the tilt-up screen, so you could see more than four lines at a time. I think it had a 128-baud modem; you stuck the phone into two giant cups on top.