With a backlog of magazines accumulating on our nightstand (we don't know who ordered us the gift subscription to The Plushisist, but that's not our furry bag, baby), we apologize for not having gotten to Los Angeles magazine's Movie Issue sooner. Had we done so, we might have already noted their epic profile of Paul Haggis—the two-time Academy Award-winning writer/director who rocked the Hollywood firmament with Progressive Auto Insurance commercial-cum-racism allegory Crash, a film in which Sandra Bullock did some of her best Latino-locksmith-discriminating work to date. Haggis followed that with the even grimmer Iraq war drama In The Valley of Elah (a John Kerry DVD Club Selection of the Month™!), a film that only further cemented his reputation as suffering from an acute case of auteur's anhedonia:

We had no idea that former presidential candidate John Kerry offers a movie recommendation service, but a subscriber who's already ponying up the $9.95 monthly fee to receive the Senator's film picks has let us know that he's somewhat predictably followed previous selections of blockbuster eco-thrillers An Inconvenient Truth and the Eleventh Hour with another politically minded feature, the Paul Haggis Iraq war drama In The Valley of Elah. (Would it have killed him to go with Michael Clayton? Clooney could really use the help.) After the jump, the e-mail describing how the writer/director grabbed Kerry's heartstrings with his Oscar-winning heavy hands from the opening scene and wouldn't let go until the final credits stopped rolling: