Monsieur Spade

 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should resign, calling him an obstacle to a two-state solution. 

Like a neighbor wandering into your house and rearranging your furniture.



Monsieur Spade

From a review of Monsieur Spade, a series on Prime:

It starts with a great premise, twenty years after the events of “The Maltese Falcon,” Sam Spade has retired in a small town in southern France still riven by World War II and Algeria. Clive Owen is excellent as Spade and there are some good noir lines:


Henri Thibaut: You were in the army, Mr. Spade?

Sam Spade: No, I was a conscientious objector.

Henri Thibaut: You don’t believe in killing your fellow man?

Sam Spade: Oh, I think there’s plenty of men worth killing, as well as plenty of wars worth fighting, I’d just rather choose myself.

Yet for all the promise, I didn’t finish the series. In addition to being set in France, Monsieur Spade has a French cinema atmosphere, boring, long, vaguely pretentious. There is also a weird fascination with smoking, does it pay off with anything? I don’t know. Didn’t finish it.

Bros

de Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws is the second most referenced book by the American Founders. The first most referenced is Deuteronomy.

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How do electric vehicles work during an evacuation, like the recent Florida hurricane, for example? (from w.e.)

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The federal government's attack on lobstermen in Maine may be a classic example of government destructive manufactured highmindedness.

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Bros

The movie "Bros," with a gay theme, is not doing well in attendance. Several editorials have appeared debating whether its economic failure is the "fault" of straight people. 

Apparently, some groups have a claim on the attention and finances of strangers. And this claim seemingly supersedes quality or interest.

Casting LOTR

“We don’t claim to know what other ignorant men are sure of.”--Clarence Darrow, lawyer and civil libertarian


Chris and Alyssa went to Philly to visit Matt and Sarah.
The Pens were terrible last night.

Data is available that shows the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees. If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.

Is a homeowner more likely to align with capital rather than labor interests? And are pension holders likely to do the same?

Sin-eater: A custom that disappeared. Puckle (Bertram S. Puckle, a British scholar, and author of Funeral Customs, Their Origin and Development) tells of a curious functionary, a sort of male scapegoat called the “sin-eater.” It was believed in some places that by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over a corpse, and by accepting a six-pence, a man was able to take unto himself the sins of the deceased, whose ghost thereafter would no longer wander.--from The History of American Funeral Directing, by Robert Habenstein and William Lamers

Say it is a given that "hate speech" is an evil thing. Is there in history any example of where a people have been fortunate for allowing any politician to ban speech he did not like?

It was a sad day when politicians discovered arithmetic. Some of them say that Latin American immigration lowers the average education level in the U.S. True, but to what effect? What difference does that "average" make? Did things get better for the American Indians because the better educated Europeans arrived and raised the education average of the Americas?

There is a report that Leonardo DiCaprio and WWF sent large amounts of money to organizations that earned their living by starting fires and then selling pictures of the fires to environmental news outlets.

Sine qua non: a necessary condition without which something is not possible. e.g. An interest in children is a sine qua non of teaching.

The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation. The members of the Plymouth colony had arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership. Reflecting the current opinion of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, their charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared. You probably will not be surprised to hear that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else’s children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women’s husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted. Famine came as soon as they ate through their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. Unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes, giving each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. The colonists threw off the statist intellectual fashions of their day. The results were overwhelmingly beneficial. Men worked hard, even though before they had constantly pleaded illness. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash, and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.--Bower

                             Casting LOTR

From an article by Gary O'Conner on the origin of parts in LOTR:

How each actor was chosen is the first of many epic stories surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings. Ian Holm became Bilbo, in part because Jackson had heard him portray Frodo in the BBC radio adaptation; Christopher Lee was cast as Saruman as a result of reading for Gandalf; Elijah Wood, to prove his claim to play Frodo, produced a video of himself dressed as a hobbit in Hollywood Hills woodland locale. The model-turned-actress Liv Tyler was Arwen, for which her tall, long-limbed grace, flawless skin and dazzling blue eyes were a perfect match. She calls this the result of the decision of Jackson and the writer that “there wasn’t nearly enough female energy” in Tolkien’s books, indeed “the only female energy came from the big Black Spider that kills everybody . . .” So Arwen became the love interest, the only blockbuster sine qua non. Ian, never one to drop the idea, suggested impishly there might be some love interest for Gandalf (with, say, the dwarf Gimli).

This rejection of roles was duplicated with other characters. Daniel Day-Lewis was offered Aragorn but turned it down. Timothy Spall at one stage was due to be Gimli the dwarf; David Bowie wanted to play the elf Lord Elrond, but this never happened. Then Stuart Townsend was relieved of his part after two weeks of shooting as Aragorn—he was considered too young by Jackson—and replaced by Viggo Mortensen. But “they say” McKellen was “lured”—the word Brian Appleyard used—into The Lord of the Rings by the arrival at his home in Limehouse of Jackson with Fran, his wife, who had flown to London to meet and choose the cast.

"The Crown" and "The Post"

Noonan: "The Crown" and "The Post"

Peggy Noonan wrote a piece about "The Crown" and "The Post." She has a patrician air and a schoolmarm pedantry but in this case she might be right.

She objects to several factual errors in both productions. Anthony Eden comes off much more nasty than naïve and there is a part where JFK has animosity towards his wife over her political success; neither are true. They do provide some drama, excusable in historical fiction, but the problem is  that such artificial and insincere drama is almost always an effort to provide motive where, in real life, there is none. And guilt where there is none.

Her take on "The Post" is probably more important and it is more than a simple slanting of personal character, "The Post" creates a story about the Pentagon Papers--which revealed the mendacity underlying the Viet Nam War that was created entirely by the U.S. Government--and the Washington Post' efforts to expose it. This was and is a very important story; the whole Viet Nam period scarred the younger generation and most will not recover. The story's opponent is President Richard Nixon. The problem is that The Pentagon Papers were published one year before Nixon was president and that his efforts to suppress them--which were real--did not benefit him.

Here is her comment:

"President Nixon is portrayed as the villain of the story. And that is the opposite of the truth. Nixon did not start the Vietnam War, he ended it. His administration was not even mentioned in the Pentagon Papers, which were finished before he took office.

When that dark, sad man tried to halt publication of the document, he was protecting not his own reputation but in effect those of others. Those others were his political adversaries—Lyndon Johnson and Ben Bradlee’s friend JFK—who the papers revealed had misled the public. If Nixon had been merely self-interested, he would have faked umbrage and done nothing to stop their publication. Even cleverer, he could have decried the leaking of government secrets while declaring and bowing to the public’s right to know. Instead, he did what he thought was the right thing—went to court to prevent the publication of secrets that might harm America’s diplomatic standing while it attempted to extricate itself from a war….His attempt to stop publication was wrong—the public did have a right to know. But he did what he thought was the responsible thing, and of course pays for it to this day.

Were the makers of “The Post” ignorant of all this? You might think so if it weren’t for the little coda they tag on to the end. Suddenly a movie about the Pentagon Papers is depicting the Watergate break-in, which would take place a year later. As if to say: OK, Nixon isn’t really the villain of our story, but he became a villain soon enough. It struck me not as a failed attempt at resolving a drama but an admission of a perpetrated injustice."

O.K., maybe historical fiction. But there seems to be a lot of that going around.

Those who control the past control the future, George Orwell said.

Condor

A number of years ago, when the country was considerably younger in spirit, there was a movie called "Three Days of the Condor." It is about an academic guy (Robert Redford) who works as a reader for the CIA looking for interesting themes and ideas that might appear in books and journals. He discovers the possibility that a CIA unit has separated itself and gone rogue with its own agenda and policy. Redford, with the help of an unconvincing Faye Dunaway, struggle to identify and expose the CIA unit as that unit hunts them.

After some clever investigations, the bad guys are revealed but the CIA has concerns that its integrity will be undermined if Redford exposes them. So there is the threat that the CIA will protect itself by killing him.
Redford triumphantly brings his information to The New York Times, clearly a beacon of honest, righteous American thinking. Checkmate.

Can you imagine with all the NYT has done over the recent years that an American audience would not laugh themselves silly if presented with that resolution now?

Jason Bourne: A Review

The Bourne franchise has been fun and exciting; even the Renner substitution was entertaining. Identity. The strength of one individual. The organization that loses its soul. But the new Bourne with Matt Damon is a disappointment. Somehow all the same ingredients do not create the same taste and satiation.
There is the same frantic activity, the same savage combat, the same dark intensity--all of it well done. But there is something missing in this iteration. It opens as Bourne is staying alive in fight clubs while his old contact, Nicky Parsons (Julia Styles), gets wrapped up in an underground quasi-revolutionary group devoted to exposing the corruption of governments. She stumbles upon some information that might further explain Bourne's background, information that opens a new level of bad guys.
And they're off!
What develops is a weak and unbelievable plot line strung together with close-ups of violence, travel and a lot of walking around with surveillance. Some of the important motives are unclear even at the end and some allegiances are so uncertain they are simply ignored. One element is particularly difficult: There are virtually no good guys in this story. The entire government is a collection of misguided political fanatics or psychopaths. Their loosely organized opponents are cut from the same cloth. Even the clever Styles character has lost her warmth. The audience can not care much when the only smile is cynical. 
The technology is a problem as well. The audience is never sure of the capabilities of the gadgets in the story. One part of the story is a company with great surveillance possibilities. Are they real? Is the government using extraordinary real technologies or is it sci-fi? Bourne as a man in search for an identity is very different than a Bourne in a dystopic society.
The action scenes are good. The opening scene in a riot is terrific as are the mandatory chase scenes. But there is an element of repetition here, good but scenes we've seen before.
I have always liked Damon and this series and this movie was enjoyable. But there is a dissatisfaction in the mind of the audience when intensity is substituted for drama, drama I had grown to expect. Perhaps we already have had too many answers and the new questions were simply not enough to continue on. Perhaps, in true post-modern form, Bourne has become more important to himself than he is to us.
But it was good enough for a few hours in the afternoon.

"Weiner"

"Weiner" is a difficult film. Really a documentary from Showtime, it follows the strange Anthony Weiner in his efforts to win the nomination for N.Y. Mayor on the Democrat ticket, a campaign launched less than two years after the sexting scandal that forced his resignation from Congress. After a brief stint at the top of the polls--he was doing remarkably well-- the endeavor collapses under the fallout from a fresh round of revelations that Weiner had returned to his old ways, using the pseudonym “Carlos Danger.” It is certainly interesting, in a "I can't look away" manner, as Weiner shows the obsessive and exhibitionist cravings essential to politics and his perversity.
Somehow the documentary is haunted by American Politics, Hillary and her problems with Bill, forgiveness and bigotry, with just enough farce to prevent anyone in the audience from settling in. No one come out well, not even Huma who did approve of this and does gamely participate in the strangeness until the end. You walk away wondering how the system creates these people and how we can escape them.

It is not an enjoyable 90 minutes. But there is an enjoyable and entertaining speculative curiosity, one reminiscent of the obscene phone caller. He has a focal madness, a narrow perversion via the camera phone. Where does this perversion come from? We have ancient genes molded by ancient encounters and pressures. Those pressures did not include electronics. Electronics are a late circumstance for us; it never shaped us. So what genetic predisposition does Weiner's weirdness--or the obscene phone caller--tap into?  It must be an extension of something ancient. What? Or is it some epigenetic creation, a screwy diversion of some genetic open-mindedness?

SPECTER

From some site on the net on SPECTER:

What does SPECTRE stand for?

Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion

Goals:

Profiteering from conflict between the superpowers, eventual world domination

Methods:

Counter-intelligence, brainwashing, murder, extortion using weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological and orbital)

Leader:

Criminal genius Ernst Stavro Blofeld

Executive cabinet:

21 people including former Gestapo members, Soviet spy group SMERSH, Josep Tito's secret police, Italian, Corsican and Turkish organised crime gangs 

Prominent members:

Dr Julius No, Emilio Largo, Irma Bunt, Rosa Klebb, Mr Osatu, Fiona Volpe

Address:

136 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris; also SPECTRE Island

Front organisation:

International Brotherhood for the Assistance of Stateless Persons, a refugee charity

Appears in:

Dr No, Thunderball, From Russia With Love, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, SPECTRE 

Last seen:

Diamonds Are Forever (film), 1971

Why the long break?

A long-running copyright dispute between the Fleming estate and producer Kevin McClory

Did you know?

Bond author Ian Fleming invented SPECTRE in 1959 to replace James Bond's usual, Soviet, enemies. Fleming believed the Cold War might be about to end and wanted to keep his spy thrillers relevant

Three Reviews: Short/Martian/Revenant

"The Big Short" is a docudrama of the Lewis book. I had little hopes for it; the book describes a complex financial story, the elements of the 2008 financial collapse, and I thought would be hard to do. The movie is pretty successful. They accepted the difficulties and simply announced them to the audience. Then they did self-effacing stage whispers and asides to explain the tough parts. While the awful people come across as awful, the victims are a bit removed. (It is tough when so many people--even the average guy--are benefiting right up to when the music stops. Everyone saw the advantages of the free money.) The guys who spotted the problem are well done. They are, dramatically, the most difficult because, as Lewis emphasizes, the only people with clear vision are true outsiders and they, as a rule, are not attractive people or heroes. I thought Bale was particularly good in the difficult role of the unfortunate Burry. My only grouse was the story was a bit sanitized. These people were really terrible people and were unbelievably cruel, much crueler than portrayed. And the government's part was diminished with only the SEC and the ratings people criticized; the easy money government policies and the sub-prime impetus were never really mentioned, as if this occurred in a governmental vacuum rather than the result of a conscious, complicit effort on the part of legislators.

"The Martian" is the result of a thought experiment: What would happen if a knowledgeable scientist was abandoned on Mars? One man shows--like "Castaway"--can be wearying but there is enough variety in the plot-line not to burden Matt Damon too much. It is clever enough and certainly dramatic--several people watching shouted out with dismay at anxious moments. There are some peculiar elements that seem a bit forced--the prominence of female action heroes (of the four hundred seventy or so astronauts with astronaut badges signifying flight at greater than fifty miles from earth, forty are women), the surprising assistance of known and sworn political enemies--and are noticeable (and the movie had a disclaimer at the end--something I can not remember seeing before but perhaps I was just sensitive to the circumstance.) Generally a fun movie.

"The Revenant" is a mixed survivalist-revenge movie with astonishing and relentless action pursued by furious and dangerous men, some pathological. DiCaprio is good, Hardy, whose part is juicier, is terrific. The opening minutes are unforgettable. There are some clear problems. There is no relief for the audience; the terrors are non-stop, relieved only by periodic reloading. You know it is a tough movie when starvation is a respite. And there is some irresolution--a strange quality in so riveting a story played out by men of such intensity. And finally there is the theme; anything named "The Revenant" has a heavy burden, especially when the man returning from the grave has visions. Regrettably the people who made the movie seemed content to create the question and leave it at that.

Cuckoo

John Wyndham was the pen name of John Wyndham Harris, a successful science fiction writer. His famous book was The Day of the Triffids(1951) which became a sci-fi movie classic. His other very successful book was The Midwich Cuckoos, a story about an English village where everyone falls asleep for several hours one afternoon and the women of childbearing age are found to be pregnant, conception dating from that day, several months later. The phenomenon is found to have been duplicated in several other areas in the world and the children, at birth, reveal extraordinary powers. The movie called Village of the Damned was very good. The lead role of Professor Gordon Zellaby was played by George Sanders.
A sequel, Children of the Damned, followed in 1963, and a remake--not as good--starring Christopher Reeve was released in 1995, also called Village of the Damned.
Interestingly, the first Village of the Damned, a very British-looking creation, had been originally developed as an American film but, when the plot was publicized, it was opposed by the very Catholic Legion of Decency on the principle that the story line was reminiscent of the of Mary's virgin conception. For some reason the film being done in Britain made them more comfortable.

"Ides of March" Movie Review

Directed by George Clooney (who headlines along with a powerhouse cast that includes Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei and Jeffrey Wright)

"The Ides of March" is a new film co-written and directed by George Clooney, a film adapted from a play called "Farragut North," (the name of a Washington D.C. Metro stop). It is a gripping, well acted film. It opens with Ryan Gosling mishandling a political debate question in a darkened room. It is soon apparent that it is a practice setting for a future debate and Gosling is merely testing the mechanics of the debate. He is not even the candidate. Let the deception and the "Everything is not what it seems" begin.

The cast includes Gosling, Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei and someone new (to me) Evan Rachel Wood. The setting is the Ohio Democratic primary between two presidential candidates and the winner probably will become the national candidate, the endorsement by the North Carolina Senator will probably deliver the nomination regardless of who wins the primary. Clooney is the modern, thoughtful and apparently moral candidate and his second assistant is Gosling. His campaign staff chief is Hoffman and their opponent's is Giamatti. The battle lines center on the competition for the Ohio votes, the Senator's (Wright) endorsement, and the complex manipulation of people by both sides as well as the inevitable secrets of explosive potential. The story ostensibly is the story of Gosling's maturity in the hard world of politics.

Everyone in this story is terrific; Wood is a special surprise and Tomei's character is defining for the story. But there are a number of problems in the story--not the acting--that hamper it. There are a number of crucial coincidences, deadly ones that generate the story. In the modern world, no story should hinge on the ability to get a phone call.

One would like a struggle in the changing characters; the process from good guy to bad guy is not an evolution, it should be a crisis that is poorly resolved. People in this story accept their circumstances. There is no struggle except in the effort of characters to extricate themselves from trouble. Goslin's development is more of a change of clothes; he merely changes style.

The notion that politics is seamy is a given in modern society; no one is surprised by it and it will not carry a plot. Hypocrisy, insincerity and moral danger are powerful in the hands of good actors. But, in itself, it is not enough. And with a title like "The Ides of March" you have set a high bar, too high here.

The Girl with the Blue Velvet Tattoo

I saw the Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo recently. It was clearer and more focused than the book but, distilled, was a bit less enjoyable. I was reminded of the old David Lynch film, Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet was well cast and well done but a painful film nonetheless. It is a story about sadism, masochism, gratuitous brutality and the people who enjoy that. Worse, inherent in the story is the belief that this kind of behavior is intertwined with the American culture and stains everyone in it. A story with that viewpoint is demanding on the audience; the audience must be at least open-minded enough to accept the generality as a possibility. Most mysteries and action stories treat such criminals and perverts as criminals and perverts, a subset of the culture; such stories rarely proclaim the criminals as an integral part of the culture and the pathology as a general characteristic unless, like The Godfather, the lens is very narrow. After all, not all Germans in the Second World War were Nazis and not every frenchman is a wine snob. Unless the accusation is close to the truth the filmmaker asks the audience to be a bigot and assume the worst of the people it describes. Blue Velvet did that and so does Dragon Tattoo.

In Dragon Tattoo Sweden is awash in misogynism, bigotry and cruelty. The good guy is like as pacifist in a Viking war camp. The other good guys are too old to be dangerous. The bad guys are sometimes too horrible to watch. But, like The Godfather, as the atmosphere and culture are consistently brutal, the behavior is somehow consistent and believable. Blue Velvet failed to sell the consistency and consequently the brutality seemed without context and pornographic.

There is a moment in Dragon Tattoo where Lisa Salander revenges herself on her abuser by raping him. It is said that the movie audience response to this scene is usually cheers.

On second thought, maybe Lynch was right.