This is another quota fulfiller, so stop now if you think that stupid.

Today I semi-watched one of my favorite silly films on TV, Turner and Hooch. This is the one about a dog that witnesses a murder and has to be chaperoned by Tom Hanks. Hanks is a very tidy policeman, and the dog is a slob who trashes Hanks' house. Hanks is a good actor. Often he plays a slob. Whoever he plays, you believe it.

Later in the evening they played another favourite of mine, The American President, which I have on tape and have watched quite enough already for this decade. In this film Michael Douglas plays a President with Clintonian policies, but without Clintonian domestic morals. He is widowed. He gets himself a sweet girlfield who stays the night, and both his Republican opponent and large tracts of the USA react as if he had got himself a blowjob with an intern in the Oval Office. All the stupid behaviour of Republicans that really happened, plus all the dignity of their man that didn't, in other words. Preposterous. And at the end, President Michael Douglas goes for a huge cut in globe-warming gases and a hugely more repressive anti-gun law, egged on by that little weasel Michael J. Fox, who I thought was a Republican, in public anyway. Dream on guys. The romance is a model of mundane plausibility when set beside the politics of the thing. But Douglas and Annette Bening are both charming and I still enjoy it.

In the later TV version of this movie, The West Wing, done by the same gang of people I strongly suspect (lead by Aaron Sorkin?), the President does Behave Badly, unlike Michael Douglas in The American President. I guess there was too much derision aimed at the movie for their comfort. But this time the President's Bad Behaviour takes the form of covering up, not a sordid sex life, but a Terminal Illness, which is much more profound and dignified. That way, all the same White House manoevrings can be recreated, but in a less depressing cause.

The American President still running, so to remind me of it for this I'm listening to Michael Douglas' big press conference speech at the end, and oh, the Democratic joy of it. He is as morally upright as Clinton wasn't and as verbally fluent and felicitous as Gore wasn't.

"We've got serious problems and we need serious people. ... My name is Andrew Shepherd and I am the President." And now he's got the girl. Aaaaah!!!!

Well, these people are entitled to their dreams. They lost the next Presidential election in a dead heat, and now they are having to live with the nightmare that is George W. Bush jnr. Now he really is serious. And for real.