Month: June 2012

Saturday Night at the Movies

I apologize, gentle reader, but I really need to get this out of the way first. “From the director of Blade Runner.” Really? Really, marketing mavens at 20th Century Fox? That’s your best tag line? I think we both know, in our heart of hearts that Mr. Scott is not likely to concoct another genre film as note perfect in the choice of source material, its writing, casting and directing, and rendered with its particularly seamless blend of hard sci-fi and existential noir. That counts as his “Sorry, only one per career” grant from the Movie Genie. Besides, virtually no one makes that kind of sci-fi anymore: just enough CGI to render a futuristic tone, yet on the whole, believably organic. You’re setting the bar way too high. So don’t tease. OK…I feel better now. On with the review.

As we teeter on the cusp of that special movie season I like to call Big, Dumb & Loud, hope may have arrived for sci-fi geeks. It is in the form of the latest film from director Ridley Scott, returning to the (rather profitable) universe of the “Alien quadrilogy” (his own franchise kickoff Alien, James Cameron’s Aliens , David Fincher’s Alien 3 and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection) with a prequel called Prometheus. Does it live up to the hype? Since I coughed up top dollar to see it (in 3-D IMAX), I feel justified in paraphrasing J.R.R. Tolkien: I liked half of it half as well as I should have liked, and less than half of it as well as it deserved. And if that is akin to saying that it isn’t as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet not as bad as Plan 9 From Outer Space , well…then so be it.

While Prometheus is imbued with a similar sense of fear and dread that informed his 1979 film (thanks in large part to the visual tone set by DP Dariusz Wolski, whose previous credits include darkly atmospheric sci-fi/fantasy thrillers like The Crow and Dark City), Scott has largely eschewed the classic horror film tropes in this outing; opting for a more ambitious script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof) that tackles bigger themes. In other words, he isn’t providing an “origin story” that merely serves to explain the alternate Alien universe; he’s suggesting an alternate version of THE origin story (Where did mankind come from? What does it all mean?). However, as the film progresses, it becomes apparent that he’s taken on more than he can handle in 2 hours. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Scott is ultimately beholden to his Alien universe, and that for the disappointing finale, he acquiesces to the season of Big Dumb and Loud.

There are positives about the film. Performances are solid; Rapace (sort of the ‘Ripley’ character here) displays an ability to flex her instrument beyond the indelible persona she created as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Fassbender brings subtle complexity to his android that transcends the level of the material he’s given to work with. From a technical standpoint, I have no complaints. Scott is a filmmaker with a very deep understanding of filmic language; he meticulously composes every frame for maximum effect (I consider his 1977 debut, The Duellists, to be second only to Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon Lyndon as cinema’s most visually stunning period piece). That being said, you still have to tell a cohesive story, and this one is all over that star map. There’s also too much dialog devoted to spelling everything out for the audience. Sometimes it’s good to leave a little mystery, especially in sci-fi (why do you think that 44 years after its release, people are still debating the meaning of 2001?). As Rod Serling said, sci-fi is “…a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.” In other words, what Serling (and Kubrick, and Tarkovsky) knew, and what Scott may have forgotten, is that while the best sci-fi has a lot of imagination behind it, the best sci-fi leaves a lot to the imagination.

The films: It Came from Outer Space, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Also recommended: The Ray Bradbury Theater: the Complete Series, The Martian Chronicles (TV mini-series).

They’re just like you and me

by digby

…if we were rich enough to be able to deduct our dressage horse expenses:

As millions tune into the Olympics in prime time this summer, just before Mr. Romney will be reintroducing himself to the nation at the Republican convention, viewers are likely to see “up close and personal” segments on NBC about the Romneys and dressage, a sport of six-figure horses and $1,000 saddles. The Romneys declared a loss of $77,000 on their 2010 tax returns for the share in the care and feeding of Rafalca, which Mrs. Romney owns with Mr. Ebeling’s wife, Amy, and a family friend, Beth Meyers.

As Matt Yglesias observes:

It’s of course true that curbing the deductibility of expenses related to the care and feeding of dressage horses might inhibit investment in the critical dressage sector of the economy. But I’m skeptical that incentivizing capital formation in this particular area is all that vital to the long-term prosperity of the country.

Now mind you, if these horses want to prance around in circles with their tails in the air that’s their business. But I don’t see why I should have to pay for it. Where’s my religious liberty?

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QOTD

by digby

No really:

The RightOnline conservative bloggers conference opened Friday evening with a tribute to Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative pundit known for his pugilistic journalism and confrontations with the left.

“He’s really going to be missed. He seemed to be able to voice concerns with a good sense of humor,” said Debbie McEachnin from Tulsa, Okla.

“He had a really good attitude that made him really effective,” her husband Scott said.

“He was an exciting guy, always positive, made sure his tactics were fun for the people who used them,” said Prentice Rodgers, from Seattle, Wash.

“When he wrote or broke news, I knew we could trust him,” his wife Susan added.

Not as smart as they think they are

by digby

Chris Hayes:

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon went before the Senate Banking Committee this week in what should have been a kind of ritual apology tour. Dimon has spent much of the last year and a half dismissing and belittling critics of Wall Street and harshly criticizing the major financial regulatory reform legislation that President Obama signed into law. The message has been: you guys in Washington don’t understand our business, so you should keep to yourself and let the professionals like us, the smartest guys in the room, do what we do best.

Which is why it was more than a little embarrassing for Dimon when it was revealed that a single unit of JP Morgan Chase, indeed a single trader in a division of the firm that Dimon personally oversaw, had somehow managed to lose about $3 billion and counting on a huge bet on credit derivatives…

This is the specter that haunts us after the spectacle of what I refer to in my book as “the fail decade.” The notion that we can’t simply trust our elites, the big decision-makers like Jamie Dimon, to actually run their institutions competently. And we know that if they screw up, we’re likely all screwed. Dimon opened his testimony by eating some crow, but what followed in the hearing was downright bizarre.

While Dimon was there to apologize, many of the senators– Republicans especially, but not exclusively– were there to apologize to him, to seek his wise counsel.

Chris talks about all this in his book. I don’t have the answe, but I do know that people who are this willing to court danger and kill their own golden goose are either blind with greed or a lot dumber than they think they are.

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From George Packer’s recent New Yorker profile of President Obama:

As one former aide told me, Hillary Clinton ran on issues, while Obama ran on character, apparently not seeing how the two should reinforce each other. “Axelrod will tell you they won because of character, not issues,” the former aide said. “It’s a touchstone for how they think about the world… Ideas aren’t that important to them.”

That rings true. I’ve seen President Obama as a technocrat who depends upon his personal story rather than vision to inspire from the beginning. And truthfully, the symbolism of his ascent to the top is inspiring. But it only takes you so far. Unfortunately for him, technocrats are not doing very well in the current crisis.

George Will openly rejects judicial restraint

by David Atkins

They don’t even try to hide the hypocrisy anymore. Here’s George Will, if you have the stomach for it:

Because judicial decisions have propelled American history and because a long-standing judicial mistake needs to be rectified, the most compelling of the many reasons for electing Mitt Romney is that presidential elections shape two of the federal government’s three branches. Conservatives, however, cannot coherently make the case for Romney as a shaper of the judicial branch until they wean themselves, and perhaps him, from excessive respect for judicial “restraint” and condemnation of “activism.”

In eight years, Ronald Reagan appointed 49 percent of the federal judiciary; Bill Clinton appointed 43 percent. Clint Bolick says that the power to nominate federal judges has become “the grand prize in presidential elections,” because presidents now choose appointees with special attention to judicial philosophy and because human longevity has increased…

[A] conservative majority might rectify the court’s still-reverberating mistake in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases. It then took a cramped view of the 14th Amendment’s protection of Americans’ “privileges or immunities,” saying these did not include private property rights, freedom of contract and freedom from arbitrary government interference with the right to engage in enterprise. This led in the 1930s to the court formally declaring economic rights to be inferior to “fundamental” rights. This begot pernicious judicial restraint — tolerance of capricious government abridgements of economic liberty.

One hopes that Romney knows that on today’s court the leading advocate of judicial “restraint” is the liberal Breyer, who calls it “judicial modesty.” Contemporary liberalism regards government power equably, so the waxing of the state seems generally benign. Yet Romney promises to appoint “restrained” judges. If, however, the protection of liberty is the court’s principal purpose, it must not understand restraint as a dominant inclination to (in the language of Romney’s Web site) “leave the governance of the nation to elected representatives.”

Although Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch because it has “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” it is dangerous to liberty when it is unreasonably restrained. One hopes Romney recognizes that judicial deference to elected representatives can be dereliction of judicial duty.

In other words, since the people’s representatives might have the temerity to restrain the “economic freedom” of corporations and billionaires to enslave the entire population, it’s important for “conservatives” to throw Burkean modesty overboard in favor of judicial activism.

Of course, we already knew that this was the modern-day conservative position. But it’s jaw-dropping to watch everyone’s favorite bow-tied, supposedly “reasonable” conservative state the reversal so openly in a major newspaper.

The only way for political activists not to become sullen with rage in the face of this sort of thing is to develop the ability to laugh darkly while steeling their resolve.

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QOTD: Grover

And proudly retweeted by the man himself:

This was Grover at the Faith and Family Conference, by the way, expressing his Religious Freedom.

Update: John Fund also spoke and said that the Democrats stole the Senate. Just a guess, but I’d expect to hear more of this sort of thing. All this voter fraud work not only suppresses the vote but delegitimizes the outcomes they don’t like. It’s very useful.

Fortnight for Fabricators

by digby

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting very excited. The Fortnight for Freedom is almost upon us. You’ll recall that it’s supposed to feature mass demonstrations the likes of which we haven’t seen for 40 years. I can’t wait.

You may have thought this was clear before, but it wasn’t. And the right wingers have spent 50 years trying to roll the law back so that the states could discriminate on the basis of religious belief. And when you read the Perlstein article you’ll see just how mendacious and frankly, immoral, their arguments are.

Propaganda is the real secret to their success and now they have all the money in the world at their disposal to disseminate it. The good news is that we are really awesome at twitter …

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Glenn Beck wants to make out with the left… or something

by digby

Via RWW:

It was a year ago I was watching the show Glee with my wife and we watched it like this—[gasp]—I mean, it’s horrifying some of the things that they are teaching high schoolers, but it’s brilliantly done, it’s brilliantly done. It’s produced brilliantly. It’s music, brilliant; it’s acting, brilliant; it’s cinematography, brilliant. I said this to her at the end, this was a year or a year and a half ago, ‘We lose, there is no way to beat that.’

Well, yes there is. We spent about a year now trying to put together a push back with artists, with music. Not the stereotypical conservative Lee Greenwood music, I call it my Oedipus project because the left will be making out with me and they will never see it coming. Somebody will say, ‘don’t you know who produced that music?’ ‘No, I really like it, it’s great.’ Oh yes, yes it is.

I’ve heard about this. It’s a musical/thriller called “Don’t Tease the Panther.”

(Whatever you do don’t tell him about iTunes. Or the i-n-t-e-r-n-e-t.)

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Moving to the left for the general election?

by David Atkins

It’s a truism in American politics that one governs and campaigns from the base, and then moves to the center for general election politics. We’ve seen it from Mitt Romney this cycle, and from both Republicans and Democrats in both previous election cycles.

Of course, President Obama doesn’t have a significant primary from which to shift to the center. But it’s remarkable that the President has been making shifts to the left on hot button from marriage equality to immigration in the approach to the general election. It’s an extremely unusual phenomenon in the realm of Presidential politics, particularly on the left.

There are a few ways of looking at it. One is to cheer that the Left is increasing in power and political acceptance such that the President is able and willing to take bold positions. But it’s also equally valid to angry at the President for not taking these sorts of stands earlier.

After all, if it’s good policy to affirm the right of loving couples to marry and allow blameless DREAMers to remain in the U.S. in June 2012, wasn’t it good policy in June 2010 as well? If the Obama Administration is doing this in order to shore up base support for its own reelection bid, why did it not do likewise to preserve Democratic Congressional majorities in 2010?

There’s another disturbing point here: all of these moves are carefully calculated based on polling and focus groups. In order for the President to feel comfortable taking these stands, one of two things (or both) must be true: either the LGBT and Latino base is furious enough with the President to cost him his election, and/or those all-important “moderates” in swing states like Ohio must not care that badly about deporting DREAMers or letting gays get married.

If the former, how is it that the President wasn’t aware of this problem earlier? It’s been brewing for years. If the latter, why take more centrist stands in the first place? And why not be unafraid to lead in any case?

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