Month: October 2014

Saturday Night at the Movies

Songs in the key of grief: Rudderless

By Dennis Hartley

Sad fact #3,476: Mass shootings have become as American as apple pie; so much so that they have spurred their own unique (and identifiably post-Columbine) film subgenre (Bang Bang You’re Dead, Zero Day,Elephant, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Beautiful Boy, etc.). Not that its progenitor, the Grieving Parent Drama, hasn’t been a Hollywood staple over previous decades; films like Don’t Look Now, Ordinary People, The Sweet Hereafter, and The Accidental Tourist deal with the soul-crushing survivor’s guilt that results from the loss of a child. The child’s demise in those dramas was usually attributed to an accident, or a terminal illness. But it’s a different world now. And so it is that we can addWilliam H. Macy’s Rudderless to the former list, with a shrug and a sigh.

There is only brief exposition in the film’s opening scene that alludes to the tragedy which lies at the heart of the story. A college student named Josh (Miles Heizer) sits alone in his dorm room with guitar in hand, playing and singing with fiery intensity as he records a demo of an original song into his laptop. He is visibly perturbed when he is interrupted; first by a fellow student who ducks his head in the door to say hey, then by a phone call from his father, an ad exec named Sam (Billy Crudup), who tries to talk his son into ducking his next class so he can join him to help celebrate the fact that he’s just landed a big account (or something of that nature). When we next see Sam, he’s alone at the bar, glancing at his watch…indicating Josh was a no-show. As he prepares to leave, something catches his eye on the bar’s TV. There’s been a mass shooting at Josh’s college.

Josh, we hardly knew ye. But we will get to know him…through his songs, which Sam discovers after his ex-wife (Felicity Huffman) drops off a car load of their late son’s musical equipment and cassette demos. It’s now two years after the incident, and a decidedly more Jimmy Buffetized Sam is living on his docked boat, working odd jobs and wasting away every night in Margaritaville. He eventually steels himself to sift though Josh’s demos, and discovers that his son not only had a gift for writing soulful lyrics, but for coming up with good hooks. He learns to play and sing Josh’s tunes. At first, he does it as personal grief therapy, then one night he features one of the songs in an open-mic performance. A young musician (Anton Yelchin) is so taken that he hounds Sam until he forms a band with him (or are they really “forming” a father and son bond?)

 Perhaps not surprisingly, Macy’s directorial debut is very much an “actor’s movie”, beautifully played by the entire cast (which also includes Laurence Fishburne, Selena Gomez, Ben Kweller, and Macy as a club manager). Crudup is a particular standout; this is his most nuanced turn since his breakout performance in the 1999 character study Jesus’ Son. The script (co-written by the director along with Casey Twenter and Jeff Robison) could have used a little tightening (by the time the Big Reveal arrives in the third act, it lacks the intended dramatic import due to the overabundance of telegraphing that precedes it). Certain elements of the narrative reminded me of Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark 2009 sleeper, World’s Greatest Dad (recommended, especially for Robin Williams fans). Still, despite some hiccups and predictable plot points, Macy has fashioned an absorbing, moving drama, with a great soundtrack (composed by Eef Barzelay, Charlton Pettus, and Simon Steadman). The songs performed by the band are catchy…in a mid-1990s, Chapel Hill alt-rock kinda way. Macy’s film is a sad song, but you can dance to it.

Previous posts with related themes:

Torn/ The Broken Circle Breakdown

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

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This war on leaks is unbelievable

by digby

Speaking of James Risen, get a load of this from the ACLU:

James Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He’s also currently under subpoena, possibly facing jail time, because of his reporting.

Specifically, he’s being investigated because of an article on a CIA ploy to hinder Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb that went epically sideways and may have actually helped Iran along. 60 Minutes ran a great story on him this weekend, during which they cited a well-known statistic: the Obama administration has prosecuted more national security “leakers” than all other presidencies combined, eight to three.

But the story also prompted me to look into another figure, which is less well known and potentially more dramatic. Partially because of press freedom concerns, sentencing in media leak cases has historically been relatively light. Not so under President Obama. When it comes to sending these folks to jail, the Obama administration blows every other presidency combined out of the water – by a lot.

By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution.

That’s quite a record wouldn’t you say?

Read on for the details. They will probably surprise you.

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James Risen, the New York Times reporter responsible in part for the 2005 Times bombshell on the Bush administration’s use of warrantless surveillance — which is widely seen as one of the seminal pieces of journalism of its era — has plenty of experience when it comes to battling the federal government. Not only in his celebrated investigative reports but, perhaps more prominently, in the courts, where for years he’s held his ground in refusing government demands that he reveal a confidential source. 

For Risen, in other words, fighting the post-9/11 national security state is a full-time job, albeit one for which he never truly applied. But while he may be at a profound disadvantage when it comes to defending himself (and, some would say, his profession) in our federal courts, “Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War,” his new exposé of the malfeasance and waste behind the war on terror, offers ample evidence that he’s still a Pulitzer Prize winner when it comes to combat on the page… 

So here we are, more than a decade into the war on terror, and I’d guess that a lot of people think that at this point they know everything they need to know about how our government conducts counterterrorism and the growth of the national security state. But considering you wrote this book — which features a lot of new information — I’m guessing you’d disagree. 

Yes. I felt like we had this whole period, 13 years now, where we essentially “took the gloves off,” in Dick Cheney’s famous words, in order to fight a global war on terror. And what Cheney meant by that was deregulating national security, and what that meant was eliminating or reducing or relaxing the rules that had been put in place for 30 years, from the post-Watergate era, which were

At the same time, we were pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the war on terror, and what, to me, had not been getting much attention is how the combination of deregulating national security while pouring massive amounts of money into a new national security state was having enormous unintended consequences and leading to bizarre operations and a runaway new national security state. And I felt like that was not being reflected in a lot of the things people were writing about.
It just seemed to me the war on terror was becoming increasingly bizarre, and I didn’t feel like that was being captured in the press.

Read on …

I can’t wait to read his book because this subject is what animates me the most as I think about the War on Terror and America’s role in it — this idea of the expansions of the Deep State, without restraint, oversight or accountability. It’s not just about money, it’s about this organism (for lack of a better word) just operating on its own, with its own logic at the hands of individuals who might each have perfectly good motives but which ends up creating a monster nonetheless.

The problem is the empire and until we grapple with that we’ll just be trying to contain this around the edges. It’s important to try to contain it, of course. Every effort from the press or from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden helps curb its power. But we won’t solve this without a thorough reassessment of our place in the world. And I have no idea how that’s going to happen.

Anyway, it’s good to see that Risen is talking about this.  It’s not new but the post 9/11 ramp up after a period of slight calm after our long Cold War was over needs to be discussed.

As I said, it’s not new…

Let’s party like it’s 1988

by digby

Willie Horton rides again:

[T]he reality is that Nebraska has a longstanding framework of relatively long prison sentences that are moderated by the good time law. Ashford has only played a minor role in shaping this framework, and the 2011 amendment that Ashford co-sponsored enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the state’s GOP governor. There is now an important debate going on in Nebraska about whether the state’s good time law should be amended once again, as Heineman argues, or whether the errors which led to Jenkins being released are best addressed within the Corrections Department, as Ashford appears to believe.

But it is absurd to suggest, as the GOP ad does, that Ashford is responsible for Jenkins’ release and the tragedy that soon followed. If his support for the state’s good time law makes Ashford responsible for Jenkins’ crimes, then Heineman and numerous other state lawmakers share that blame.

This one’s right out of the Nixonian “law and order” racist appeal handbook. And it’s depressing to see it deployed by the Republican party itself which I’ve been reassured by libertarians and moderate liberals everywhere is no longer a partisan issue since they are all on board with criminal justice reform. And I’m sure some of them are. But the minute it becomes useful to tickle the racist lizard brain with this stuff, they will not hesitate. It’s evergreen.

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Who’s the civic illiterate, George?

by digby

Gird your loins ladies, George Will is wading into women’s issues again:

One of the wonders of this political moment is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics. Government, encouraging academic administrations to micromanage campus sexual interactions, now assumes that, absent a script, women cannot cope. And the Democrats’ trope about the Republicans’ “war on women” clearly assumes that women are civic illiterates.

Access to contraception has been a constitutional right for 49 years (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The judiciary has controlled abortion policy for 41 years (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Yet the Democratic Party thinks women can be panicked into voting about mythical menaces to these things.

Right:

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.

The johns, that’s right. We would be the johns — no! We’re not the johns. Well — yeah, that’s right. Pimp’s not the right word.

OK, so, she’s not a slut. She’s round-heeled. I take it back. [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 2/29/12]

Uh huh:

The Family Research Council hosted a panel discussion Wednesday on religious liberty in America. If you have paid any attention at all to the frantic warnings from FRC’s Tony Perkins that tyranny is on the march, you could have guessed what was coming. The overall theme of the conversation was that the HHS mandate for insurance coverage of contraception is a dire threat to religious freedom in America. So are the advance of marriage equality and laws against anti-gay discrimination – or the “sexual liberty agenda.”

Yep:

“I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.”

Santorum:

One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”


It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, they are supposed to be for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also [inaudible], but also procreative.

Romney:

“This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost,” Romney said.

Newt:

There has been a lot of talk about the Obama administration’s attack on the Catholic church,” Gingrich said. “The fact is Governor Romney insisted that Catholic hospitals give out abortion pills against their religious belief when he was governor. So you have a similar pattern.”

Now maybe there’s little chance that any of these men are serious about banning birth control. Some of them, like Gingrich and Romney, seem to be using the term “abortion pill” as a red meat sleight of hand to entice their voters. Nonetheless, all of those quotes are sufficient to give the “civic illiterates” cause to think that any pro-life Republican who votes for “personhood” might be a tad hostile to contraception. After all, while it’s true that the right to access contraception has been the law of the land for more than 40 years so has the right to have an abortion. And I don’t think even George Will is so out of touch that he doesn’t know that Republicans are as serious as a heart attack about reversing that right. Why should we believe they are only kidding when it comes to birth control? After all, people as different as Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum seem to think that women who use birth control are either sluts who “can hardly walk” or are unfortunately driven by their base desires and refuse to see that sex is supposed to be procreative.

The basis of the objection to abortion is an objection to women’s agency. Reproductive freedom is intrinsic to that. There is no reason to assume that the people who are trying to end abortion rights are any less serious about ending the right to contraception. Any woman would be a fool to take that chance.

Oh, and George Will understands women’s issues about as well as I understand video games. He makes a fool of himself every time.

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Vox explains:

Each country seems to equate the greatest threat to them or their region with the greatest global threat. So what this ends up showing, in effect, are the largest threats to each of the polled countries, according to popular opinion. And, in that sense, many of these are pretty good assessments. 

Fairly developed countries, where economic inequality tends to be a problem — Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Argentina — tend to be worried about inequality. Ukraine and Pakistan see nukes as a big threat; both have gone to war relatively recently with adjacent nuclear powers (Russia and India). Japan, the only country to have been attacked by nuclear weapons, is still worried about them. 

Middle Eastern countries tend to be more worried about ethnic and religious tensions. Rapidly developing but polluted East Asia is concerned about the environment (an unsurprising fact if you’ve visited Beijing or Manila). And sub-Saharan African countries, where HIV infection rates are by far the highest, often see AIDS and other diseases as the world’s biggest problems. People, it turns out, are pretty good at figuring out their country and region’s own biggest problems — but then they generalize those problems to the rest of the world.

The US is equally terrified of religious and ethnic hatred, inequality and nuclear weapons.  We don’t seem to fear environmental problems or disease although I’d guess that’s changed in the last few weeks.

And the truth is that these are all problems for all of us.

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QOTD: Amity Schlaes

by digby

There is apparently some kind of kerfuffle between some right wing economists and Paul Krugman which is not worth pursuing because it’s stupid. But this quote from the perpetually wrong Amity Schlaes (the Laurie Mylroie of wingnut economics) is one for the ages:

[I and some others] signed a letter a few years ago suggesting that Fed policy might be off, and that inflation might result. Well, inflation hasn’t come on a big scale, apparently. Or not yet. Still, a lot of us remain comfortable with that letter, since we figure someone in the world ought always to warn about the possibility of inflation. Even if what the Fed is doing is not inflationary, the arbitrary fashion in which our central bank responds to markets betrays a lack of concern about inflation. And that behavior by monetary authorities is enough to make markets expect inflation in future.

Krugman must be laughing his ass off.  They cannot prove his point any more starkly than that.

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Six Degrees of Ebola
by Tom Sullivan

Is America playing Six Degrees of Ebola yet? Connect yourself to someone on Amber Vinson’s Frontier Airlines flight in six steps or fewer, then run around freaking out? (Something to play on a cruise, maybe?)

Best wishes for a swift recovery, of course, to the two caregivers infected in Texas. Yet Ebola fever (the psychological kind) has so gripped the country that articles are popping up with titles like, Ebola hysteria is going viral. Don’t fall for these 5 myths. Fox News’ Shepard Smith went off script the other day and urged viewers, “Do not listen to the hysterical voices on the radio and television or read the fear provoking words online.” Michael Hiltzik felt it necessary to write 6 ways to avoid being stupid about Ebola in this week’s L.A. Times. His number five is pithy:

5. Listening to Rush Limbaugh may be hazardous to your health. As a one-stop shop of Ebola misinformation, you can’t beat the guy. Limbaugh’s only purpose is to stir up fear, alarm and mistrust of government among his listeners. Inform them, not so much.

But informing listeners was never the point. Fear, mistrust, alarm, and misinformation is right-wing talk’s business model. It’s what listeners tune in for. It’s just not church in some circles — you haven’t been touched by the spirit — unless the preacher works up the congregation with a mind-numbing, shouted cant into a hair-standing-on-end, ecstatic state followed by emotional catharsis.

Right-wing talk works the same way. A kind of addictive drug, maybe it has begun to lose its zing (along with Limbaugh’s ratings). Perhaps over the years, the ginned-up, faux outrage peddled every day by Rush and his kin has lost its punch. Perhaps the fear-addicted (and fear peddlers) hungering for stronger stuff to give them that old rush again just found it in an ISIS and Ebola cocktail?

That and, as Digby pointed out yesterday, it’s crazy season.

Because it’s been that kind of week

by digby

… you need some red panda blogging:

A Dutch tabby cat nurses an orphaned red panda cub in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The panda’s mother, Gladys, rejected her two cubs after they were born. The zoo-keepers initially put the cubs in an incubator, but one keeper’s tabby cat had just given birth to four kittens, and the housecat was willing to nurse the newcomers.

QOTD: a bunch of lunatics

by digby

We had people who, I’ll repeat it, the creed of Hamas: We value death more than you value life. What? That’s their creed. Okay, well, part of their creed would be to bring persons who have Ebola into our country. It would promote their creed. And all this could be avoided by sealing the border, thoroughly. C’mon, this is the 21st century.

That’s Congressman Joe Wilson.

Dave Weigel has gathered quotes from a whole cavalcade of lunatics spouting similar nonsense:

“What’s to stop a jihadist from going to Liberia, getting himself infected, and then flying to New York and riding the subway until he keels over? This is just the biological warfare version of a suicide bomb. Can you imagine the consequences if someone with Ebola vomited in a New York City subway car? A flight from Roberts International in Monrovia to JFK in New York is less than $2,000, meaning that the planning and infrastructure needed for such an attack is relatively trivial. This scenario may be highly unlikely. But so were the September 11 attacks and the Richard Reid attempted shoe bombing, both of which resulted in the creation of a permanent security apparatus around airports.”

That’s the National Review.

Ok, I have to tune out for the rest of the day…

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