"'Mongol' might as well be called 'Braveheart in a Yurt.'"

Ha ha. So writes Michael Phillips. That's what I thought: This is like "Braveheart," right down to the deep, minimalistic love story.

There's a lot in this war movie — the coming of age of Genghis Khan — that women can love. Beautifully photographed landscapes. Fabulous fashion. (Those hats!) Horses galore. Feisty kids. Manly men who sing in that amazing overtone voice. Beautiful women who make the first move, stand their ground, and accomplish daring feats. Lovers separated and united. Bondage. (Do you know what a cangue is?) Tribal customs from the 12th century. Lots of eating and drinking. (Meat carved off the bone and eaten from a knife and endless bowls of (occasionally poisoned) liquid). Also a lot of knives, arrows, and blood.

"Mongol" should count as a law movie too. Temudgin (Genghis Khan) comes up with the big idea: "Mongols need laws." And that related idea: "I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them." He also happens to say: "Mongols have the right to choose."

Here's Stanley Kauffmann:

... Immediately we think of... John Ford's The Searchers ...

Other reminders of Ford abound, as well as reminders of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia... Olivier's Henry V and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky must also be tucked away in [the director Sergei] Bodrov's head...

"Genghis Khan/He could not keep/All his men/Supplied with sheep."

Robert Christgau, utterly seduced by Maria Muldaur singing Bob Dylan songs, says: "I got a whole new idea of what those sheep are for."

Uh, yeah, but officially the lyrics to "You Ain't Going Nowhere" are:

Genghis Khan
He could not keep
All his kings
Supplied with sleep

Christgau's smitten. Touting Muldaur's sexiness, Christgau is pretty insulting to the Byrds -- "anything but sensual" -- and Linda Ronstadt -- "an ambitious ingenue at best."

(And if those "You Ain't Going Nowhere" lyrics made you think of John Kerry... should I be mean and say (Christgauchely): you're anything but sensual?)

Anyway, I've loved Maria Muldaur since the 60s, when I had all the Jim Kweskin Jug Band records, played them constantly, and made my friends care about them. On the clip at the first link, you can hear Maria singing "I'm a Woman," from back in those days.

Christgau's review is too much about how Maria found so much sex in Bob Dylan's lyrics, as if Maria and only Maria knows the true depth of sexuality. It makes him seem a little silly, but she still sounds great.

"As you build a free society in the heart of Central Asia, the American people stand with you."

The first President to go to Mongolia:

President Bush, buffeted by unrelenting criticism at home over Iraq, on Monday saluted Mongolia's "fearless warriors" for helping his embattled effort to establish democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

That's the first sentence of the AP report. I feel proud to see our President go to this remote place, to thank its people for standing with us in the war and to hearten them in the cause of freedom in their own country, where they have abandoned communism and adopted Western-style democracy. I'm disgusted that the editors saw fit to shoehorn the phrase "buffeted by unrelenting criticism at home over Iraq" into that sentence. The inability of news organizations to cover the President's trip without inserting commentary like that is embarrassing.

Being in Mongolia, Bush did some classic Mongolian things. He drank fermented mare's milk and listened throat singing. "He was greeted at the Government House by flower-toting children in traditional Mongolian robes and soldiers in bright red, blue and yellow overcoats." He met with the president, Nambaryn Enkhbayar, in a white tent -- a ger -- with "a red-and-yellow design on the roof and red wood doors."

Inside were red brocade chairs, tapestries, Oriental carpets and a towering, white statue of Genghis Khan, the legendary horseman-warrior and country founder whose empire once stretched as far south as Southeast Asia and west to Hungary.

Beautiful. I note that the AP declines to shoehorn in any criticism of Khan.