I am watching Angels in America while looking at hyper-Christian Candace “Full House” Cameron’s website. These two entertainment statements are only at odds if you will have them be. Both are strange and sincere meditations on faith, spirit, and political commitment– though on opposite sides of the political divide– but the important thing is, they are connected. Through the TV and film producer & director T.L. Trang. Look it up. Also, look at Angels in America.

A few thoughts on why I love the best studio-propaganda clip movie ever made, the 1974 MGM masterwork “That’s Entertainment!” There is a chance you might have missed “That’s Entertainment!”, as some of you have never been a queeny, sequined old cabaret singer with a taste for the well-arched eyebrow, strong cocktails, Technicolor, and Gene Kelly, as I have been since the age of four. For those of you untouched by the gods of drama-fags, some background: In the 1970’s, the big studios couldn’t seem to get their heads around the young auteurs of American film, they couldn’t control the lives and careers of their stars, and MGM was essentially being bought and sold for parts by large corporations uninterested in movies. What was MGM to do? Why put together a filmic testament to their enduring greatness of course! A movie intended to capture the glory not only of the big studio musical, but of the studio system itself! Hence “That’s Entertainment!”, a montage of MGM musical clips from the studios Golden Age (1928-1960ish) introduced by some of the dream factory’s greatest stars: porcine old men in ascots and softly-lit old women with big hair and barbituated purrs.

Mickey Rooney, looking every inch the toupeed blueberry in a navy leisure suit, toddles towards us on a sound stage in front of the ORIGINAL Andy Hardy house in order to speak a little bit about his hit musicals (please remember, Andy Rooney was once THE BIGGEST STAR IN THE WORLD! AND HE BANGED AVA GARDNER! BEFORE SHE COULD EVEN GET A WALK ON IN ONE OF HIS SENSATIONAL MOVING PICTURES! THE DOLLS LOVED HIM BECAUSE HE WAS THE BIGGEST BRIGHTEST SHINING STAR IN THE MGM GALAXY! ) Thankfully Mr. Rooney here refrains from waxing creepy on his famous conquests. Instead he introduces a bit about the Mickey & Judy musicals and his frequent co-star, Ms. Judy Garland. “That’s Entertainment!” was released five years after Judy overdosed on the uppers and downers she’d been addicted to since her teens. But here’s why “That’s Entertainment!” is the finest in studio system delusion: Andy Rooney, putting his all into a fine imitation of youthful naiveté, exclaims, “Where we got all that energy, I’ll never know!” Boy, Mr. Rooney, I don’t know either! Maybe it’s just the excitement of putting on a show with the whole gang! I sure would like to see some clips from those pictures, testaments to the incredible energy reserves available to adolescents kept on a strict studio-enforced amphetamine regimen. Oh yes, l’il Rooney, I would love to see some clips! Boy, that was a simpler time, wasn’t it? Look at the soda shops, look at the hay dances, look at the black-face number. Wait. Oh. Yup, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a fantastic song-and-dance number in which Rooney and thirty other male dancers are in blackface. This is awkward. Maybe we could go back to the more comfortable terrain of drugging adolescent girls.

The fantastic stupidity of “That’s Entertainment!” is that scenes like this are not rare, and that there is absolutely no self-consciousness about their offensiveness. We wouldn’t want to tarnish the studio’s name by mentioning that Uncle Louis B. gave little Judy magical thin’n'perky pills, but there’s nothing wrong with showing you some of our fantastic, dazzling blackface numbers! What? What’s wrong? Oh look, here’s Peter Lawford, one of our galaxy of stars you’re not really familiar with. He’s apparently gone for the Charlton Heston aging-salve: the ascot. He speaks about the “original look of an MGM musical” while we see clips: lots of Technicolor feathers and sequins, show-stopping dance numbers full of challenging choreography made even more amazing by the heels and gowns involved, complicated aerial shots and, oh no, not again. Cut to further evidence of “unique look”: two white dancers in black face, doing a “native” dance in front of a sound stage tiki god. Wow! The splendor of choreographed racism! Since I am limiting myself to the first of the “That’s Entertainment!” trilogy, I won’t go into too much detail about the Joan Crawford in blackface musical number featured in “That’s Entertainment III”. A scene like this exists, and you have to sleep at night knowing that.

There is just so much to love in “That’s Entertainment!” BEHOLD: Donald O’Connor, pretending to be straight and wishing he could have worked with the “lovely figured” Esther Williams (who oddly gets a huge amount of screen time. I had no idea she was such a big star, or that she was married to a Lamas). GAZE UPON: Elizabeth Taylor, as she descends a perfectly backlit staircase covered in jewels and a diaphanous blue gown, her black hair bouffanted to the heavens, her heavily lidded eyes filled with barbituates and regret. Hearing her use that kitteny/tipsy voice to expound on MGM musicals as though she’s singing “Is that all there is?” is like gazing into the eyes of pure, intoxicating gay iconhood. But before you start getting too worried about whether Liz can stay awake long enough to introduce her clips, BE CHARMED by little Ms. Spunk herself, the incomparable Ms. Debbie Reynolds! Just writing about Ms. Debbie Reynolds is exhausting, and as much as I like her, I am distrustful of such unfailing adorability. It’s like she’s still on Uncle Louis’ happy pills, which, given the 1974 release date, is a distinct possibility.

All sarcasm aside, I love many of these musicals, and I am perfectly capable of watching “That’s Entertainment!” 1, 2, & 3 back-to-back for the clips of Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly alone, and because I am capable of many great feats of movie nerdery. All of the “That’s Entertainment!” pictures feature long montages dedicated to Garland (the first is introduced by Liza!), and you really do have to be a heartless bastard not to love her. It’s awful that the same studio responsible for hooking Judy on dope and dumping her when the drugs ultimately (some twenty years later) hurt her performances can then take so much credit for her career, but her history makes the absurdity of MGM’s back-slapping clear. And though you know how horribly it all turned out, watching Judy Garland sing on screen makes all the Dazzling! aspects of the MGM musicals fall away, because all she needs is her voice to make the movie. Whitewashing, far too many utterly awful musical numbers, and too much Esther Williams? Oh yes. But also: more stars than there are in the heavens, the dream factory’s self-regard on Uncle Louis’ speed, & Singin’ in the Rain.

For those without French and/or Spanish, my coined, creatively spelled (and copywrited) name for last night’s test-run stuffing loosely translates into “corn mash with sausage” which, I think we can all agree, sounds a lot better in French-Spanish.

I was not instrumental in its creation, as I had some very important “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” to review. My hypothesis: Courtney B. Vance’s DA character never, ever wants to actually try cases. Every episode of the Vincent D’Onofrio hour (last night our man dipped into his pool of knowledge to hold forth on the 1930’s American Cup winners, Argentinian-Jewish dialects, 19th century poisoning methods, and Siddhartha, and that was just two episodes) comes to a momentum-killing standstill when Mr. DA man shows up to reject Vincent’s brilliance. This mid-hour buzz-kill is as reliable as the final, utterly satisfying 8 minutes of the show, when D’Onofrio gloriously chews all visible scenery while needling, stuttering, screaming, and spasming full confessions out of supposed criminal master-minds. Because he is THAT smart, and he is always right.

So why, given Vincent’s 98% success rate (lest we forget his near-misses with his nemesis and symbolic other half, the psychopathic and very charming “Nicole”), does the DA always refuse to lift even a finger to help Vincent attain a warrant/arrest/known criminal? I understand that his role within the drama is to be the naysayer/bureaucrat whose inability to grasp even the simplest theory of a murder case that OBVIOUSLY centers on a 17th century theological debate forces Vincent to plumb even greater depths of ephemera, but it gets very tired. Mr. DA doesn’t just refuse to help; he is openly hostile with our brillliant, if socially awkward, D’Onofrio, and seems to want him to stop investigating and simmer down. It’s almost like he hates our man Vincent, and I think it is clouding his DA perspective. Last night he wanted to CLOSE a case that was very clearly about a mind-controlling young Herman Hesse-acolyte using his asexual charms on the ghonnorrea-plagued teenaged girls of his island community in order to get them to kill people and, when necessary to cover his tracks, themselves. He didn’t even hide his derision for D’Onofrio’s completely lucid theory, which really gets my goat every time. Here is me halfway through each C.I.: “How many murderers have you found using your freakishly superior intellect, Mr. DA man? None! That’s right, so get that smug ‘I don’t want to hear about mini-Mansons on the Channel Islands’ look off your face! Why are you the DA? Are you really just a very patient defense attorney in DA costume? Why are they making you (I am now hopping the fourth wall and addressing the very talented actor Courtney B. Vance here) do this same scene again and again?! You are better than this! None of the other Law and Orders treat thier DAs with this kind of derision! Stand up for yourself, Courtney B. Vance, for you are married to Angela Basset, and she stood up to Ike Turner!’”

All of this, and so much more, has led me to my hypothesis: Mr. Courtney B. Vance DA hates trying cases, and is a depressed man desperately in need of a mid-life career change. Mr. DA man does not like his job, and he is very irritated with this twitching police detective who keeps wanting him to actually try people for murder. He complains about D’Onofrio to Mrs. DA every night. Can’t this jittery Rain Man po-po see that trying people for murder without an elaborate full confession is hard? Why should he, the DA for New York, have to, like, ask questions, or build a theory of the case, or present evidence? If he could, he would settle every single murder case, and then retire upstate to a nice farm, maybe raise a couple head of cattle, focus on those neat model trains he’s always admired.

So after I collected the necessary nightly CI report and yelled about Courtney B. Vance while swilling a very minerally white wine, I had some of the stuffing Dan had been making while I’d been “studying” the TV. Though the polenta was not firm enough to be cubed as the recipe requested (their mistake– THEIRS!– as the time they allotted for chilling in the recipe as written was insufficient), it was nonetheless delicious, as Dan’s polenta is the finest I have ever tasted. It is full-bodied and creamy, with a complex and rich flavor that I find unusual in the often one-note world of polenta. Since the polenta wasn’t firm, however, the stuffing was more of a mash, hence my (COPYWRITED) recipe name. The sausage gave it a great kick, and though the recipe called for sweet sausage as opposed to the spicy style we used, I liked the mild spice. In fact, my only note is that without the spicy sausage, the taste is a bit too mild. I would definitely recommend using this recipe, especially with some quality spicy italian sausage and firmer polenta. I would also recommend that the producers of Criminal Intent either a) let the DA excitedly issue a warrant and express his delight at the prospect of a big old-fashioned jury trial or b) throw him a festive retirement party, at which D’Onofrio grudgingly presents a specially iced cake (he probably studied the art of the medieval gateau in culinary school) to his old sparring partner before they share an awkward but heartfelt man-embrace.