Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.7

My expectations going in were low and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a relatively solid movie. It was also solidly based on the origin story of Captain America, right down to pretty much every major character. Chris Evans was good as the Captain, Stanley Tucci added class as always (as the inventor of the Super-Soldier Serum, Erskine) and Hugo Weaving was the Red Skull, who is a really good villain (complete with eerily Ah-nuld–like accent).[1] Props also to Tommy Lee Jones as crusty old Colonel Phillips and Dominic Cooper as a young Howard Stark (Tony’s father). The sets & costumes were a wonderful blend of WWII period articles mixed with enough fantastical technology to remain faithful to the comic books. The whole look and feel of the film was pretty consistent, playing like a WWII-era propaganda film and really sticking the landing. Even Hayley Atwell looked like she just stepped out of a pin-up poster. The special effects were very good and pretty tight; I honestly don’t see what was wrong with it. The jingoism wasn’t over the top—it was barely present at all, actually—I mean, it was about the Americans fighting the Nazis i.e. Hydra. The movie was based on comic books that started out as propaganda for the U.S. Army. The movie told that story faithfully and well. Unlike the Green Lantern, the back-story was interesting and fun to watch. This was an actual movie and delivered what it promised—even the ordinarily more difficult moments for such films (love interest, etc.) were handled with aplomb. I’m looking forward to the next one. Highly recommended for action-movie fans.

Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn take a ride on the African Queen, a small riverboat in 1914 Africa. They get to know each other as they make their way along untraveled byways and untamed rivers to play their part in the war against the Germans. Katherine Hepburn starts off the film as a repressed sister of a pastor (shades of The Poisonwood Bible) who commandeers Mr. Allnut’s boat—she bogart’s it, if you will. But not before she does unconscionable things to Mr. Allnut’s gin and self-righteously accuses him of being a coward and a liar. Truly pleasant company, this bible-thumper. And then, once he’s capitulated in every way, they are ready to fall in love. They make their way further and further down the river, all acted out in a two-person play in the classic style. Katherine Hepburn has the perfect voice for such a bossy lady. The music is, for a modern ear, sometimes quite martial and incongruously jaunty for some situations—almost more like the music from old silent movies, like Nosferatu. I like to think of this movie as if Rosie doesn’t even exist—only in poor, old Allnut’s fevered mind, slowly being eaten by a combination of the heat, the Tse-tse fly, malaria, dehydration and perhaps syphilis. If you watch it like that, it all makes sense. And, if you look closely, you’ll see that she never casts a shadow. Not once. The Germans are, of course, portrayed as utterly amoral arseholes. Here’s the text of the kangaroo court—untranslated in the film and unavailable in the subtitles, but transcribed and translated by yours truly.

Prosecutor: Das ist der gesamte Beweisematerial der Anklage (That’s all the evidence from the prosecution)
Judge: Fahren sie fort mit der Verteidigung (The defense may commence)
Defense: Jawohl. Das Beweisematerial der Anklage war ungenügend. Wir haben nichts als Indizienbeweise gehört. Die Verteidigung kann hier kaum etwas hinzufügen. (Yessir. The evidence presented by the prosecution was insufficient. We heard nothing but circumstantial evidence. The defense has nothing to add.)
Judge: The court sentences you to death by hanging.

The last line elicited a guffaw in its incongruity with the German lines delivered just before.

The film has a cool concept in which people’s lives are valued in only time rather than mostly money. It’s set in the future where everyone stops aging at 25 and every year beyond your 26th birthday must be paid for with time that you earn. Your account is shown on your arm; when the counter drops to zero, you die. It’s a great excuse to people the film with hot 25-year-olds and to be able to show the plight of the poor without actually showing the poor as they really appear.

Pay-day lenders, uncaring people on the bus for a woman who doesn’t have enough time, the gated communities that cost so much to get into, the perpetuation of the system by everyone thinking that they’ll be one of the rich, all are present. It’s a relatively crude analogy to money but pretty well-done. Transactions of time are made by bringing the watches into proximity with one another. All of the high-time people have guards and are exceedingly careful with their bodies so as not to be killed or die accidentally. The time-rich are afraid to live and pity themselves for it, trying to live forever.

Timberlake is typically good as is Cillian Murphy as the Timekeeper. Amanda Seyfried was also decent, but damn is she pushing the boundary of weight-loss: her knees and shins were practically skeletal in the back of the hearse.

And now, because it’s a sci-fi movie, on to the silly plot holes. There seems to be little to no security on your time account. It’s unclear how a transaction is authorized but the police lifted a millennium as pretty as you please in just seconds. In a world where everyone has a time clock implanted in their arm, no one has a cell phone or any other smart bio-hardware? They have to use a pay phone? Those still exist? It’s interesting as well that all classes of society wear their wealth on their sleeve, although the rich store some of their wealth in banks.

But why are there no safeguards on the time-clocks at all? It’s as if you they’ve never heard of pin codes. In that sense, the “fights” are utterly asinine. That said, the conclusion to Will’s fight was pretty bad-ass. And why do the gangsters brandish guns when they can kill by stealing time? And “Is it it stealing if it’s already stolen?” is just the sort of superficial and quasi-philosophical horseshit I expect to hear dribbled from the mouth of a partially educated millenial. How are babies born with time-clocks? And how the hell is Seyfried still wearing those shoes as a fugitive? She positively sprints in those high-heels. And why is the newsest guy on the time-force put in charge after the chief Timekeeper dies?

I like that the movie stayed relatively low-budget, investing in the story rather than the effects.
So everyone is still driving cars and using normal guns; the low-tech approach is kind of nice. The architecture was also quite nice, with a very cool building in LA standing in for the Weis headquarters.

A documentary about he obesity epidemic in America. Eat less, exercise more, eat better: those are not enough. The movie makes the point that a major contributor to obesity is fear and stress, overwork and lack of sleep—that obesity is as much an emotional and psychological and addiction problem as a physical one. There are interviews with thinner people who used to be fat, relating their stories.

One lady, when she was younger, would buy a ridiculously huge breakfast at McDonalds and another at Burger King every morning and then do it again at lunch. She skipped school to eat and avoid ridicule for four months and her parents were none the wiser. The question I have is: where on Earth did she get the money for all of that food? She had no job, so her parent must have provided her with $20 a day just to buy fast food. But they claim not to have known a thing about it. A driver for this problem is that kids have too much money available—unless taking away that money would lead them to a life of crime just to buy those McFlurries and Hash Browns.

It’s a decent story, culminating in an indictment of the oil, corn and pharmaceutical industries for distorting American society for profit: corn pulls in subsidies, grown with oil-based fertilizers and harvested by huge machines and then the pharma companies swoop in to assuage the psychological damage created by it all and loop the cycle back around. Michael Pollan features heavily, as you might expect. Ralph Nader also makes a couple of welcome appearances.

Another major contributor to obesity in kids is that much of their world is online: many leave the house only to go to school and all other interaction is through cell phones or chat or X-Boxes. One teacher said that “40-50% of his first-year students run as if they’ve never run before, had never developed the skill of running”.

There is an awesome militant lunch lady (so designated in her caption) who’s very, very eloquent. I transcribed part of her interview below:

“The USDA is allocating $7 billion a year to feed 30 million children a day. What it comes down to, on a plate, is the government gives schools $2.42 for lunch. And, of that, 2/3, in most schools, goes to overhead and payroll. That means there’s less than 80¢, absolutely less than a dollar, to feed a child lunch. Now, in the state of California alone, the prison system costs us $9 billion. We’re spending more on keeping people in jail in California than we are on feeding every child in America lunch for a year. What are we thinking? It isn’t that we can’t afford it; it isn’t that we can’t do it; it’s that we are choosing, in America, to prioritize other things besides our children’s health.”

With only 80¢ per day for “real” food, kids spend several times that on sodas and junk food from vending machines. A contributing factor is that schools cost money to run, their budgets are restricted every year and capitalizing on their students’ addictions is an easy way of filling the budget gap. Another win for capitalism, really. When Schwarzenegger banned vending machines in schools in California, there was backlash (of course), but some of it came from parents, who helped their sweeties get their sweeties, despite the ban. The brainwashing of Madison Avenue strikes deep and has already captured several generations. Douglas Rushkopf and Dr. Susan Linn were very good. Here’s Rushkopf, describing how marketing to children works:

“You wanna get the child alone, so you can market to him without the filter and the governance of someone who actually cares about the child as something other than discretionary income. It’s the same strategy that a lion will use or a pack of wolves will use against Bambi: you know, you isolate the baby child from the parent that can protect it in order to get it. It’s pure old-fashioned hunting.”

And here’s Linn describing the onslaught with which even the most balanced parent have to contend:

“So when the food industry or the marketing industry says ‘parents should just say no’, I think they’re being disingenuous because, you know, meanwhile, people like me are telling parents that they should pick their battles, but which commercially created battle should parents pick? Should they pick the food battle? Or should the pick the precocious, irresponsible sexuality battle? If you have an eight-year–old girl who’s dressing like a hooker, my guess is that that’s the battle you’re going to pick.”

Rushkopf again:

“When you look at something as simple to understand as America obesity, what’s you’re seeing is the result of two or three generations of programming designed to make us consume more.”

The assault is so wide-ranging that people really have no chance of winning: they’re like Cambodians trying to avoid Kissinger’s carpet-bombing. Some of the statistics are gob-smacking: “when offered fast food for lunch, the average calories consumed by a teenager was 1652Kc.” That’s more than the maintenance level of calories for the entire day—for just one meal—for people who don’t don’t participate in any or very little activity. Another is that, “[i]n 2006, the [CDC] reported that obesity kills more than 112,000 Americans a year”, and many of those are presumably lives of long, slow decline and suffering caused by obesity-related illnesses. You die of obesity, but you never really get to live—you’re depressed, sluggish, inactive—because of it as well.

One junk-food and soda vendor’s arguments were extremely persuasive: keep machines in the schools so that the schools profit instead of the local Quickie-Mart, bottles with screwtops are better than the open drinks available there—no messes in carpeted schools (who carpets a school?)—and kids driving to the Quickie-Mart are at risk of car accidents. The vendor argued that the kids were addicted already and would move heaven and Earth to get that cookie, so you might as well keep it in the building. Oh the seductive, dulcet tones put forth by a forked tongue.

When you see the interconnection between all of the different things that are wrong with America, it’s hard not to think that it’s a country peopled by and run by the utterly stupid who are constantly amazed by the wholly foreseeable deleterious effects of their actions.