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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.1

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Manufactured Landscapes (2006) — 9/10

This is a documentary about manufacturing—mostly in China—about the world that humanity creates for itself and about the lives that people live in this world. The film starts with a long, slow pan along a factory floor that seems to last for kilometers. It is equal parts horrifying to think of how people can live and work in places like this and awe-inspiring to think what gigantic structures man has created. The documentary also acknowledges its own effect: it shows how the workers are being lined up outside of the factory, but for maximal effect. If you’d only seen the end, where the workers are lined up into infinity, you’d have a different impression than after you’d just seen them being lined up like that by the director.

Another scene shows a woman using her wonderfully nimble human hands—and all of her human potential—to twist a bit of wire around a plastic part. One after another after another. That she earns nothing is the insult added to the injury of wasting her life doing this work, day after day after day. Not only is her life boiling away to make cheap crap, but she’s not even paid well for that sacrifice. There are several well-shot scenes like this, just showing nimble hands assembling products incredibly quickly and accurately, like machines. One lady who made a breaker said she can assemble 400 per day; though there is doubtless a small feeling of success after finishing one, there are hundreds to follow.

They are followed by workers in a tremendous trash heap, where all of the stuff being so painstakingly and life-wastingly made in the factory ends up just a few short years later. Workers pick through it for materials. The materials come to China, make products that we in the West use for a few years, then throw away or recycle, after which the materials are shipped back to China for re-manufacturing. So these amazing bits of hand-assembled technology, this work and energy and life invested by people, is thrown away. Is this utterly stifling? Or is it good to have a steady job that is challenging enough but not too challenging? The factories don’t look very rewarding in the medium- or long-term, but that’s as an outside observer who longs for and can do creative work. Perhaps they are, after their own fashion, happy.

The next scene is at the shore, at a wharf, where ships are both being built and dismantled. The people are insignificantly small, chipping away at these behemoths with welding torches that are at once gigantic (to them) and puny (to the ship). A day’s work may involve stripping a single piece of the hull from one of the massive ships in what amounts to a mosquito bite. So much effort and energy and material went into building these ships and now more effort rips them apart to provide raw materials for the next fleet. The ebb and flow of entropy.

The next stop is the Three Gorges Dam, which is utterly massive as well. Science-fiction come to life. Literally square miles of manufactured landscape, all organized and being built, with materials flowing in, waste flowing out and buildings going up and other buildings going down. The film visits the valley floor where former residents are working to flatten out their old homes to make way for ships when the valley is flooded.

The last stop is in Shanghai, interviewing a real-estate agent and touring her home. Interleaved with this interview is one with an older resident of old Shanghai, which is being rapidly recycled to make high-rises and more modern homes to accommodate the millions of new residents. It’s really a classic situation—out with the old, in with the new—but at a nearly unimaginably massive scale.

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs are beautiful. At the end, he explicitly avoids passing judgment on whether this change is good or bad, just that humanity is changing its landscape significantly. This fact cannot be ignored.

Objectified (2009) — 9/10

This is a short documentary about design, especially the design of modern furniture and gadgets. The ideas, however, apply as well to everything else that we see: it’s all been designed in one way or another, down to the tiniest detail. The design is not just the appearance, but the ability to be recycled, the number of materials and amount of each, how easily it can be repaired, weight, availability of materials, cost, marketing appeal, etc. A tremendous amount of effort goes into the design of even everyday things, like the handles of garden shears, the angle at which glass is cut, even a toothpick in one memorable segment. Every nodule, every crease, it’s all designed. The documentary covers design of computers (with Apple’s Jon Ivy), car design, furniture design and design designers—analyzers of trends who try to predict what people will want, whether it be something new or something new that looks like something old, etc. Karim Rashid was an interesting interview:

“We have advanced technologically so far and yet somehow, it’s almost some sort of paranoia where we’re afraid to really say ‘we live in the third technological revolution.’ I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then somehow, I end up going home and sitting on wood-spindle, Wittengale-like chairs. So, in a way, you could argue that we’re building all these kind-of really kitsch stage-sets that have absolutely nothing to do with the age in which we live in. […] It’d be like, imagine right now, I’m sitting at my laptop, and I say ‘oh, I’ve got to go out’, what am I going to do? Go out and get my horse and carriage? No, of course not.”
Karim Rashid

Of course, that attitude addresses only the richer, more advanced part of the planet. A lot of non techno-organic design can be useful to 90% of the planet.

About an hour into the film, we get this money quote that gets right to the heart of non-dilettantish design:

“Arguably, the biggest single challenge facing every area of design right now is sustainability. It’s no longer possible for designers to ignore the implications of continuing to produce more and more new stuff that sometimes we need and sometimes we don’t need. Designers spend most of their time designing products and services for the 10% of the world’s population that already own too much when 90% don’t even have basic products and services to lead a subsistent life. Though a lot of designers believe emotionally and intellectually in sustainability, they and the manufacturers they work for are finding it very, very difficult to come to terms with. Because sustainability isn’t just a sort of pretty, glamorous process of using recycled materials to design something that may or may not come in the color green. It’s about redesigning every single aspect, from sourcing materials to designing to production to shipping and then eventually designing a way that those products can be disposed of responsibly. That’s a mammoth task, so it’s no wonder that designers and manufacturers are finding it so difficult.”
Alice Rawsthorn

And the following part by Tim Brown echoes part of Žižek’s soliloquy from The Examined Life (see Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.9).

“If one’s really honest with oneself, most of what we design ends up in a landfill somewhere. And I’m pretty sure most of the products that I have designed in my career, most instances of that, of the millions of things that have been produced are probably in landfills today. That isn’t something that I was conscious of when I started working in design. It didn’t even really sort-of occur to me because it doesn’t really occur to us as a society, I think. Now, to be a designer, you have to take that into consideration because we have to think about these complex systems in which our products exist.”
Tim Brown
“If the shelf life of a high-tech object is less than eleven months, it should be all 100% disposable. You know, I think my laptop, in a way, should be made of cardboard or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard or it could be just made out of something like, I don’t know, sugar cane or some bio-plastic, etc. Why on Earth does anything have to be built to be permanent?”
Karim Rashid
“If I think of my admiration for Eames, it was an admiration for his ability to identify the qualities of new materials, which could be used to create new objects, but nobody worried about whether fiberglass was going to cause disease or going to be difficult to dispose of. I mean, life was a little simpler for him, in that regard. He could just think about using those materials for their best design attributes. But now, we have to face this idea that what we do is not just the way we create some individual design, it’s what happens afterwards, when we’ve finished our design, [after] people have used it.”
Davin Stowell

On the subject of designing for use or for ego:

“[…] Am I playing a game to show that I can differentiate [myself from other designers]? Or am I actually really doing something that is contributive? Because the big issue with design is: are the things we are doing really making an effect and making change? 78% of the world is completely impractical; 78% of the world is uncomfortable. You feel it. You know, you feel that hotel rooms are poorly designed, you sit in chairs that are very uncomfortable and it’s crazy. You imagine, if you design a million chairs to date, or how many chairs have been done in the world, why on Earth would we have an uncomfortable chair? There’s like no excuse, whatsoever.”
Karim Rashid

It’s a bit uneven in quality and depth, but it’s good enough and though-provoking enough to recommend it. Pair it with Manufactured Landscapes to see the result of this endless cascade of design as well as the Žižek segment in The Examined Life on garbage and leftovers produced by our society. It’s primarily in English, with sections in Dutch, German and French.

Total Recall – Extended Director’s Cut (2012) — 8/10

Excellent effects, interesting back-story, cool future technology, etc. Kate Beckinsale is an unstoppable war machine who seems to take no damage. She’s implacably and stupidly one-dimensional with an indestructibility I haven’t seen since Maggie Q in Die Hard 4 (which was also directed by Len Wiseman, so he seems to like this kind of “strong” woman). It’s unknown whether she’s a robot. There are a lot of those around as well: implacable killing machines that are always conveniently not around when Colin Farrell or Jessica Biel needs to clear a room quickly. And the rooms tend to get cleared without a lot of bullet holes and bloodshed. For all the gun and hand-to-hand combat, there isn’t a lot of damage. I mean, at one point, Kate Beckinsale cracks Jessica Biel in the mouth with a gun hard enough to knock her over; when she gets up, though, not a scratch on her. I guess we have the MPAA to thank for that.

Pretty much everything is up in the air because you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. It’s an interesting riposte to accusations of incoherency and plot holes: it’s not really happening, so you can’t complain that it’s nonsensical. People show up too quickly, things happen too coincidentally, but it’s all either part of corrupted memories—the unreliable past is “a construct of the mind. It blinds us. It fools us into believing it.”—or a guided tour of a spy story provided by the Rekall corporation. The cityscapes are wonderful, lush and relatively coherent, somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner but without the dirt and dreck—almost too perfect and clean. Still, lovely effects, both interior and exterior. And the central construction, “The Fall” is a gigantic gravity elevator that transports a workforce from the Colony (Australia) to England every day. Unfortunately, they use Bryan Cranston poorly, with his soliloquy supposedly filling in all the blanks, deviating from the movie maxim of “show, don’t tell”.

What is kind of interesting is the film’s depiction of the people in the Colony, who are about to be invaded and settled by an invading army from Great Britain. It gives you a bit of the feeling of helpless horror that a people has when they are invaded without reason—or with false reason over which they have no control. Think weapons of mass destruction in the case of Iraq or any number of fictitious reasons for Gaza. To be clear, the plot is about Great Britain invading Australia—straight through the planetary core—to eradicate them for more Lebensraum, their own large-scale Nakba. But does it even happen? It’s not clear as people are not who they seem thanks to digital masquerading and Farrell’s memories are far from reliable (the classic Unreliable Narrator). And there’s that nagging missing tattoo, no? Or is the memory of it false? All in all, I found it quite good both as an action movie and a science-fiction movie. Recommended, but make sure you get the Director’s Cut—I’ve read that the theatrical version was utter garbage.

Bernie (2011) — 5/10
Jack Black stars as Bernie, an assistant funeral home director in Carthage, Texas. It’s based on the true story of Bernie, for whom the accusation of murder doesn’t match his giving, friendly personality. Mrs. Nugent has some absolutely beautiful stained-glass lamps; Bernie also has a nice stained-glass Jesus hanging in his office. I’m not sure if that’s significant. Matthew McConaughey is the ADA who eventually prosecutes Bernie, but in a different county because no one in town would prosecute him. Richard Linklater directs. An excellent performance by Black, showing his chops outside of the hyperbolic comedy world, but otherwise hard to recommend.
Wrath of the Titans (2012) — 5/10
Sam Worthington returns as Perseus, leading the titans on a quest to same the Gods from themselves as Hades teams with Ares to wake the father of all the Gods, Cronos, who is wonderfully rendered as just mountain-sized and embedded in rock before his resurrection. The effects are decent, but a lot of the battle scenes—with the demon army—was reminiscent of the incoherent and nearly unwatchable Transformer movies. It passed the time, but I can’t really recommend it.
Flow: For Love of Water (2008) — 8/10

A documentary about fresh water, with emphasis on pollution, privatization and industrial/agricultural use and misuse as well as the effects of dams on local communities and water quality. Documentary is primarily in English, with longer sections in French and Spanish.

First, there are the facts of who’s taken the lion’s share of water:

“70% of water worldwide is used by agriculture. 20% is used by industry. 10% by us. So it’s because of agricultural and industrial users, that we need more and more water to grow things that should not grow in these places. And sure enough, to grow all of this, you need a lot of pesticides and chemicals. And sure enough, all those chemicals with water, in the earth…it’s not a good marriage. (Spoken in French, “10% by us” in the subtitles should actually have been “10% domestic usage”.)”
Jean-Luc Touly

And then there are the social and political realities about the direction in which water usage is going. With increasing scarcity, sources are appropriated from the poor and sold back to them.

“’Cost recovery’ is our new bible that we have in South Africa. That everybody must pay for what service you get. And for rich people, that’s obviously not a problem. But, when it comes to the really poor, you wouldn’t believe it, but five rand, which is less than a dollar, is a lot of money for a rural community. So you find that the poorest of the poor, they’re only taking one bucket, but if you work out how much they’ve paid for that bucket, it’s actually more than a richer person would have paid in an urban community for that water. And it’s unjust.”
David Hemson
“By telling a woman who’s got nothing, in order to get your water, you must put in a card that takes your meager amount of money. [angry] What is she going to do but go to the river and take that dirty water, and die of cholera and then you say that people don’t know how to practice hygiene.
Ashwin Desai
“What we did was, we said let’s go back in time and look at who owned the water 1000 years ago in Rome [sic] and how has the civil law in Europe and other cultures handled this question of water ownership and use. And what we found was that water has always had a public aspect to it. Water has always been considered not owned by anybody. Today we think, well, isn’t that profound. It’s not profound at all. It’s just common sense. You look at the sun; do you own the sun? Water is this transient gift on Earth for life, moving and flowing and inherent in its transient nature is the idea of commons. Things that are transient in nature, like this pen, you can pick up and own. Things that are transient, you don’t own.”
Jim Olson
“In 1854, the American Indian chief of Seattle replies to an offer from the white government of the United States to “buy” […] a large area of Indian land. How can you buy or sell the sky? The warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? You don’t own them. Every part of this Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. This beautiful Earth is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The rivers are our brothers. We give the rivers the kindness we would give to any brother. But the white man does not understand our ways. He is a stranger who takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother but his enemy. And when he has conquered it, he moves on. He kidnaps the Earth from his children and he does not care. I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways.”
Siddharaj Dhadda
The End of the Line (2009) — 8/10

A documentary about the collapse of global fisheries due to high-tech industrialized fishing. The blue-fin tuna is taken as an example: 10k tons per year would allow the stocks to rebound modestly; 15k tons maintains the current population; 30k tons is the EU limit, clearly a political value. Even this political value doesn’t matter because the fishing industry ignores it and takes out twice that, 60k tons, which is 1/3 of the entire estimated remaining stock. In one year.

“Fishing is one of the most wasteful practices on Earth. Every year, more than 7 million tons—a tenth of the world’s catch—goes back over the side, dead. This includes hundreds of thousands of turtles, seabirds, sharks, whales and dolphin.”
Ted Danson (narrator)
“I think that man is not going to change and the sea is going to be dead. Because man is crazy, crazy. Our world is crazy world.”
Haidar El Ali (diver, Senegal)

On the fact that endangered species of fish are sold in upscale restaurants:

“If you’ve got orangutans and cheetahs and lions and tigers and things on that menu, I mean, people would, you know, they’d be walking away. There would be huge scandals, there’d be tabloid stories about it. People would be execrated, people would be, there’d be turds on people’s doorsteps, envelopes shoved through them. People would burn each other’s houses down, scratch their cars. And yet, we’re doing it to things in the sea and it’s the same thing.”
Charles Clover

And, finally, a voice of reason in an interview with an Alaskan fisherman. In Alaska, fishing is much more strictly regulated—with very positive effects so far.

“If you look at it from just a personal perspective, sometimes there’s a personal sacrifice. But if you look at it from the big picture, you gotta take a cut in the harvest but you take that knowing that it gives you an opportunity to maybe have a better season two, three, four, five years from now. We just don’t want to catch that fish this year, next year, we can’t to catch it ten, fifteen, twenty years from now.”
Matthew Moir
Drunken Master (1978) — 6/10
Jackie Chan’s classic about a wise-ass youth who, after a long series of fights and minor scuffles, gets thrown out of his father’s home and is assigned to learn real kung fu from a drunken master. The choreography is a bit dated, but still quite good and the movie’s kind of funny, but also a bit over-the-top—especially in the synchronized English version I saw. Some of the training exercises Chan does in the nearly obligatory transformation from naif to warrior are really good. He does push-ups from a bench, flipping from palms-down to palms-up. He does sit-ups from a chin-up bar—as many as it takes to scoop water from two buckets below to fill a bucket behind his legs and then as many as it takes to empty it again. The plot is the same as that of Karate Kid. As with Fist of Fury, it takes over an hour before we see any of Chan’s drunken-boxing style. It’s really quite nice and there’s no cable-work that I could see. He’s in fantastic shape, very athletic and acrobatic and his forms are elegant—very artistic. The final fight is a bit long-winded, though. Way better than Fist of Fury, but still hard to recommend.
Killer Elite (2011) — 5/10
Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert DeNiro star as super agents/spies. The fight sequence between Cilve Owen reminded me of the one from the Bourne Identity: two elite killers who can’t punch hard enough to hurt the other guy or even draw blood. Neither of them stays dazed for more than a second; you can hit Owen in the head as hard as you want, but nothing hurts him. Even a pair of surgical scissors stuck in his ear not only fails to slow him down an iota, it doesn’t even draw blood. Getting hit in the balls slows him down, finally. Until the end, I was unaware that this was based on a true story, about the British SAS involvement in the Oman War.
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) — 6/10
I didn’t read this one but I can only presume that it more-or-less stuck to the plot of the book. The actors are the same, which is good, and it’s pretty entertaining though not as good as the first one. Lisbet seeks out her father, whom she’d already tried to kill once. At the same time, she is accused of the murder of three others who were recently killed by the cabal of which her father is a part. A gory end-scene with a bit of a cliffhanger ending that would be resolved in the next film. Saw it in Swedish with English subtitles.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009) — 7/10
The final part of the trilogy, in which Lisbet slowly recovers from the injuries she sustained at the end of the last film while the conspiracy that she and Mikhail were uncovering continues to unravel and expose a larger and larger cancer at the heart of the Swedish government and justice system. Saw it in synchronized English, which was done quite well for once.
Being There (1978) — 7/10

A strange comedy starring Peter Sellers as a shut-in gardener whose employer of 50 years dies, leaving him to take his chances in the real world armed only with a simpleton’s mind informed entirely by television blurbs. This is mistaken for wisdom. For example, the following sequence is representative:

Ron Steigler: Mr. Gardner, uh, my editors and I have been wondering if you would consider writing a book for us, something about your um, political philosophy, what do you say?
Chance the Gardener: I can’t write.
Ron Steigler: Heh, heh, of course not, who can nowadays? Listen, I have trouble writing a postcard to my children. Look uhh, we can give you a six figure advance, I’ll provide you with the very best ghost-writer, proof-readers…
Chance the Gardener: I can’t read.
Ron Steigler: Of course you can’t! No one has the time! We, we glance at things, we watch television…
Chance the Gardener: I like to watch TV.
Ron Steigler: Oh, oh, oh sure you do. No one reads!

He is then propositioned by a few people, among them Eve, the wife of his benefactor, Ben:

Eve: [After kissing for a bit] Chauncey, what is it? What’s wrong? What’s the matter, Chauncey. [crying] I don’t know what you like! [sniff]
Chance: I like to watch, Eve.
Eve: What do you mean, you like to watch?
Chance: I like to watch.
Eve: […] Oh. You mean…you’d like to watch me…do it?
Chance: It’s very good, Eve.”

She assumes that he’s being risqué when he’s actually just talking about television. She continues with a strip-tease and follows up with self-pleasuring that Sellers almost completely ignores. It was to be Sellers’s last performance on film.

Up the Yangtze (2007) — 7/10

A documentary about the Yangtze river and the impending completion of the Three Gorges Dam. The story focuses on a poor farming family that has already moved out of the Ghost City—which will be flooded soon—to a shack on the opposite shore. The shack should survive but the farmland they’ve cultivated will be flooded. Their oldest daughter has completed her basic education and would like to continue but the family can’t afford it. So they send her off into the world to earn money, probably working on a boat showing tourists the wonders of the Yangtze. It’s not easy for any of them; the mother says to her daughter:

“We don’t even have anything to eat; how can we afford to rent a house? I know you don’t want your parents to suffer. Your hard work will pay off. I know it’s because your father and I don’t have any skills that we have to exploit you. If we had a choice, how could we do this to you? You know your father isn’t educated. He can’t read. Whatever clothing you need, buy a little bit. The rest of the money, send back to your parents. We’ll put it aside. In your daily life, eat well. Don’t save money on that, okay? When you spend money on food, don’t worry about us too much.”

Both of the parents are illiterate—the girl speaks both Mandarin and English. The father is very thin; the mother is crying.

The girl—she’s really small and young-looking—leaves home and the city, with its glowing advertising and neon and teeming millions strikes such a stark contrast to the farm whence she came.

One store owner in a village that will be flooded started his interview with cool diffidence and soon broke down almost completely.

“There will always be people who need to make sacrifices. It’s impossible to stop the building of the Three Gorges Dam because of my own needs. Sacrificing the little family for the big family. [conversation outside turns to beatings] It’s hard being a human but being a common person in China is even more difficult. [starts to break down] China is too hard for common people. Some officials are like bandits: Beating, smashing, robbing… Even wanting a roof over our heads is difficult. When we had to move, we were dragged and beaten. No money to bribe the officials, so they gave us a hard time. For common people living day-by-day…it’s really not easy.”

As for the cruise ship? I’d rather never see China or the Yangtze than to have to see it like that or accompanied by those tourists. Watching the worlds collide is at times very unsettling, as when the nigh-sycophantic hosts speak to the tourists or the girl’s parents visit her on the boat. And some of the conversations! Painful! One lady says to a cruise worker, at the end of the journey, “I congratulate you; you were less obtrusive than I thought you were going to be.”

At the end: moving day. The father struggles up a mountain with a gigantic piece of furniture on his back, carrying it above the 175m line. Emaciated or not, that dude is strong. The family helps slog their worldly possessions up a long and winding road to the same spot.

Pandorum (2009) — 8/10
Two soldiers awake on a spaceship after a long time in hypersleep, disoriented and unsure of their names, missions and capacities. They slowly investigate the ship, finding bodies and seeing fleeting movement. It turns into a space-zombie movie for a bit, or maybe like The Time Machine, with the eloi and the morlocks. The explorer meets people, each seemingly from a different tribe speaking a different language, all from the wrong work shifts and times. How long have they been adrift? How can you tell? How can you know? Are the zombies really zombies? Or are they former crew members? How could they mutate so quickly? Or … how freaking long have they been adrift? How many times have they woken, and forgotten? What happened to Earth? It’s gone, the ship is all that is left of humanity. Hallucinations abound, memories fade and return, the creatures are real, but what else? Are they still underway? Did they ever take off or have they already arrived? What is their purpose now that all of humanity is gone or transformed? It’s a good story even if the execution is a bit plodding at times. A decent sci-fi flick. Recommended.
The End of Poverty? (2008) — 8/10

A documentary about the roots of poverty throughout the world. Those roots almost inevitably lead to European colonialism. Europeans would arrive in foreign lands, declare that they can’t find a central authority and expropriate said lands by dint of massively superior force of arms. Next, since all of the land belongs to them—check the deed![1]—the people living on it should pay rent and/or taxes. With taxes leveed and unpaid, the debt is passed down from generation to generation. This is slavery, justified by capitalist hand-waving. With enough remove from the original theft, the thieves will claim that the poor cannot just be freed from their debt, else they’ll never learn how to be true moral beings in modern society. The irony is thick.

They interview cane-cutters in South America. One says that those poor without a house or a family to feed, who are homeless and beg for a living, that those are considered the “rich” poor because at least they have no debt to land-owners. Another says “this is no way to live” and says it’s no wonder so many turn to crime. He’s been a cane-cutter for 17 years and seems to only be waiting to die.

South American economists from Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela discuss how colonial liberation and independence was in name only. The capitalist system still ensures that their erstwhile masters receive the majority of the benefit from their natural resources. The economic colonialism continues unabated, though sometimes with new masters (e.g. the U.S. stepping in for England). Europe and the U.S. use the force of trade agreements—signed by puppet or corrupt governments—to maintain control over these peoples and force them to purchase their exports. In this way, the benefits of South American labor go not to the laborers themselves, but up the chain, to their masters, who are in the same relationship with their masters, outside of the country. A chain of exploitation that is a glory to behold because that is, essentially, what the standard form of capitalism is. As one gentleman put it: “capitalism does not work without colonialism”. The same thing is happening today in the States, as in Don’t Slave Your Life Away: Why America Should Embrace a 4-Day Work Week by Bill Ivey (AlterNet), which writes that “underwater mortgages have made it impossible for millions of workers to sell houses to relocate in search of new jobs.”

Joseph Stiglitz, Chalmers Johnson and John Perkins are featured in interviews.

He’s not featured in the film, but the interview An Interview with Cornel West on Occupy, Obama and Marx by Shozab Raza and Parmbir Gill (CounterPunch) included the following, which sums it up nicely.

“I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensable because how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx.”
Cornel West

This is also something from an article We Call This Progress by Arundhati Roy (Guernica Magazine) that I just read that ties in well.

“Today, India has more people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together. It has 80 percent of its population living on less than twenty rupees a day, which is less than fifty cents a day. That is the atmosphere in which the resistance movements are operating.”
“Poverty and terrorism have been conflated. In the Northeastern states we have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows soldiers to kill on suspicion. In all of India we have the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which basically makes even thinking an anti government thought a criminal offense, for which you can be jailed for up to than seven years.”
“In so many ways, we have regressed. Even the most radical politics are practiced by people that are privileged enough to have land. There are millions and millions of people who don’t have land, who now just live as pools of underpaid wage labor on the edges of these huge megalopolises that make up India now. The politics of land in one way is radical, but in another way it has left out the poorest people, because they are out of the equation. We don’t talk about justice anymore. None of us do; we just talk about human rights or survival. We don’t talk about redistribution. In America, four hundred people own more wealth than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it.”
“For local people, the bauxite in the mountain is the source of their life and their future, their religion and everything. For the aluminum company, the mountain is just a cheap storage facility. They’ve already sold it, so the bauxite has to come out, either peacefully or violently.”

Now that’s a more nuanced question: how much of the land surrounding a population can that population declare as vital to their survival and thus sacrosanct? Can they expect an entire mountain to remain untouched simply because they live within miles of its base and benefit from the runoff?

Again from Roy’s article:

“While many of us believe in revolution, and believe that the system must be brought down, right now, the least we can ask for to begin with is a cap on all of this. I’m a cappist and a liddite. We do need to say a few things: one is that no individual can have an unlimited amount of wealth. No corporation can have an unlimited amount of wealth. This sort of cross-ownership of businesses really has to stop.”
Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States (S01E07) (2012) — 10/10

This episode picks up with Johnson’s stepping in for Kennedy and his subsequent reelection. U.S. support for worldwide slaughter—in Indonesia as well as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—is rampant. The Indonesians killed suspected communists, lists of which were conveniently provided by the U.S. and allies. In Vietnam, not only were 2-4 million people outright killed, anywhere from 5-7 million were transferred to internment camps. Johnson’s lowbrow and racist approach to life—his statements are almost comically crude—reflects that of Truman before him and that of Bush Jr. to come later.

The CIA domestic spying program to entrap war-protesters ran for seven years. It would be mimicked later by the NSA programs still in place now—and made fully legal by the Patriot Act. Nixon, like Johnson before him, campaigned as the president of peace, then escalated the war immensely. In this, he presaged his predecessors, including Bush—“I don’t want to be the world’s policeman” and Obama, who orates about peace but switches tactics rather than ending war. When Sy Hersh broke the My Lai story, a poll showed that “65% of Americans were not bothered by the news.”

The U.S. promised to pay $3 billion in reparations, but later reneged.

War spread to Laos. Cambodia was ruined, bombed for five years with extraordinary amounts of ordnance. The U.S. military was in a shambles, with mass defections and widespread drug use. Millions and millions of Asians dead by U.S. guns, no progress in the war, the Khmer Rouge unleashed on Cambodia as a direct result of U.S. bombings. Was it time to reassess? Nope. America reelected Nixon in a landslide over anti-war candidate George McGovern. People ask when America will wake up, they ask how much is too much. That point cannot be reached. We are a nation of assholes. We are a virus.

Reflecting the sentiments of The End of Poverty, Salvador Allende spoke to the UN in December of 1972:

“We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows without a flag, with powerful weapons provided by positions of great influence. We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.”
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) — 6/10
It’s the fighting style, cable work and magic of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon combined with the plot of The Wizard of Oz with Back to the Future vibes. Starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li as well as Michael Angarano reprising his role of unsympathetic dork from Gentleman Broncos. It was more of a kid’s movie—definitely OK for kids—but still pretty entertaining. Saw it in English and Mandarin with sub-titles.
Joe Rogan: Live (2006) — 7/10
A 50-minute standup routine by Joe Rogan (YouTube) that is quite good in its own right. A lot of his material is, while not thematically unique, new enough in its approach to feel fresh and funny. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to more.
Russell Brand: Scandalous (2009) — 7/10
This is the show that Brand did in England after being fired by/resigning from the BBC for having crossed the line on his radio show. He’s quite funny and outrageous and is out-and-out entertaining even when his material fails him, which it does far less toward the end of the show, where he hits his stride nicely.
Oldboy (2003) — 10/10
A highly stylized and well-made Korean movie about, well, it’s a bit hard to pin down. It’s about what happens when craziness collides with human nature and rumor, I guess? There are gangland and martial-arts elements to it, but that’s not the focus. The focus is the relatively complex and unpredictable plot as well as the strong dialogue and lovely, lovely set-design and camera work. The fight scene in the hallway is how all fight scenes should look. It’s not an action movie; action is incidental, as with Tarantino movies. There are no clear heroes. The film tries to convince you at first that Oldboy is the hero—and he even trains up in martial arts—but they are useless against his real enemy, whom he cannot touch in that way. His enemy; is he the hero? Yes and no. He, too, is ostensibly covered in sin, earned when he was very young. Is he insane? His plan is over-the-top sadistic. The prison is a twisted fantasy of isolation. Fifteen years. Then release—into the greater, outer prison. Oldboy’s capitulation is in some ways expected and in others wholly not. What an interesting story, utterly unique and covered in grays. Not for the faint-hearted with no tolerance for broken taboos, I warn you now. And there are a few scenes that induced cringing even in my scarred and cynical innards. This is, however, not the focus of the film; it is a part of it, inextricable and necessary. The whole film was quite powerful, but the last fifteen minutes were jaw-dropping. I would watch this again, if only to see if there’s anything I missed in the story and for the visuals. Highly recommended.
The Art of the Steal (2009) — 6/10
A documentary about the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, started by the eccentric Barnes, who bought an enormous number of paintings from European modernists and impressionists who had yet to become famous, but whose names would balloon the collection’s value to billions. The collection would sit on a country estate in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia until he died. By all accounts, he was not well-loved among the the rich and powerful. His foundation was established with very limited visiting privileges for the public but relatively open access for historians and art students. The movie is about various machinations to make money from the collection, from making it more of a tourist destination—not allowed by residential zoning laws—to the piece de resistance: moving the whole collection to Philadelphia. While this would open the collection to more people (the primary goal, in my view), it was being done for the benefit of the other Philadelphia elite. Essentially, I agree that the collection should be made more available to the public but, as they say, not like this. Not with so much corruption and the benefit flowing to these dirty, greedy people. Still, these are essentially rich-people problems, if not for the culture (the paintings) that hang in the balance.


[1] The Catholic Pope generously bequeathed Africa to Portugal and South America to Spain. As for England and Holland, they took much of Asia without bothering to ask God, they simply expropriated it. Eddie Izzard addresses this practice in his famous bit about England invading India that includes “Well,…have you got a flag?”