<dl dt_class="field"> Blade: Trinity (2004) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359013/">7/10</a> Wesley Snipes stars as the daywalker in the third film of the trilogy. Instead of just Kris Kristofferson's Whistler, he's aided by the Nightstalkers, a band of vampire hunters comprising Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel and Patton Oswalt (Oswalt was clearly thrown in for balance because Biel and Reynolds were apparently way too much eye candy). Parker Posey (Louie's girlfriend in the TV show <i>Louie</i>) is off the rails as the leader of the vampire gang, which comes up with the great idea of resurrecting Dracula. Is there a showdown between Blade and Dracula? You betcha. Can you tell who wins if you also know that this is the last movie? You cannot: if Blade dies, no more Blade movies; if Dracula dies, no more Blade movies. After all, where can you go from killing Dracula? Snipes does his choreography well; Reynolds and Biel weren't bad either. Not the first time I've seen it, but still recommended. The Prestige (2006) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/">10/10</a> Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star as 19th-century magicians whose fates are intertwined and whose rivalry clenches its fist ever more tightly around them until the bitter end. Scarlett Johansson is the ingénue who starts off with one but ends up with the other. Initially, Bale's deftness trumps Jackman's arrogant charisma but each raises the ante with ever more magnificent magic until Jackman presents us with which is sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic (brought to him by that most amazing of Croatians <a href="http://www.badassoftheweek.com/tesla.html">Nikola Tesla</a>. Directed by Christopher Nolan and written by him and his younger brother, the story is absolutely top-notch. Also starring Michael Caine as Jackman's older manager and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. Best magic movie ever; highly recommended. Saw it in German. Skyfall (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1074638/">6/10</a> <div>Daniel Craig stars in his third James Bond movie and continues taking the series in a more rugged, less flashy direction (a most welcome one IMHO). Judy Dench reprises her role as M and it sadly takes---spoiler alert---two hours and twenty minutes to finally kill her.<fn> Javier Bardem plays Silva, an MI6 agent gone rogue, and he quite frankly saves the film from utter ignominy. Craig is good; he's just fine. It's the script, the pacing and the dialogue that are just tough to swallow. The film just draaaaaags in some places. A lot of places. I can't quite put my finger on why, but this film reminded me of the Batman reboot by Christopher Nolan. Perhaps it was the insistence on explaining every last detail so that even the most inattentive of moviegoers could follow along. The overall story arc was very much more like a Bourne movie than a Bond movie (i.e. it was based on rogue super-agents heading back to the nest). There was no super-enemy with a big base of operations---I miss S.P.E.C.T.R.E. so much. It is, in fairness, a gorgeous film. The initial chase sequence was standard fare, but the titles were amazing and set the tone for some jaw-dropping scenes. It only has two colors---say it with me: orange and blue! But it is beautiful nonetheless---the framing and composition of so many shots are really good. Roger Deakins is to be commended. But I was so rooting for Silva to kill M. Just make her stop talking. Actually, it would have been nice if everyone but Silva stopped talking. Bardem has the only dialogue worth listening to. The scene on his island was, hands down, the best fifteen minutes of the movie. That was quite entertaining. It was so pretty that I was at times fooled into thinking I was watching a Coen Brothers movie---until a character opened his or her mouth and burped out the next flaccid line. The rest of the characters spoke for pure exposition or to explain things that were already blindingly obvious for those paying even a bit of attention. Or, even worse, to explain some totally unknowable fact or circumstance that was needed to propel the film along. God help me if you were about to compliment the script on a little implicit twist that went unexplained---five seconds later, it was thoroughly explicated by one or the other character. Eve was utterly awful as well and her on-screen interaction with Bond elicited anything but sexual tension---her performance reminded me of the utter wooden awfulness of Halle Berry in X-Men. And the opening sequence---what a horrific joke. Instead of a stolid Bond pursuing his prey (as so wonderfully done in <i>Casino Royale</i>), he was accompanied by Eve and had the entire MI6 home office on his back via radio, with them constantly exhorting the two agents to explain every detail of what's going on during the chase. It was utterly vapid and irritating and I might have called it quits right there. I fear, however, that I'm more sensitive to this "remote participation" phenomenon---I think the rest of the first-world mobile generation is quite accustomed to the idea of their being people who play out a scene and that others participate via uplink, unreasonably demanding to be kept in the loop like spoiled children---and making the decisions like insipid dungeon masters on a ludicrously inadequate amount of information. Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently swept away by the seriousness of the situation---and perhaps that it showed how poor beleaguered Western nations are forced to fight these days. This theme would appear again later with M chastising Parliamentarians who failed to see that we were at war with <iq>those in the shadows</iq>. The irony that the shadowy evil against which M must defend is actually blowback sown by her own division was lost on pretty much everyone. Just make a f$&king Bond movie without trying to simultaneously convince me that Bond is doing it not only for Queen and Country, but quite literally and almost solely <i>for my own good</i>. And then Q showed up and, instead of a venerable John Cleese, it's some Justin-Bieber--looking smart-ass computer geek who's utterly arrogant about his l33t hacker skills but proves to be stupid enough to plug an enemy laptop directly into his main systems without a firewall. Oops. And it's Bond who sees the f'in Matrix like he's channeling John Nash from <i>A Beautiful Mind</i> instead of the super computer-geek who becomes more and more incompetent as the film goes on. They'd have done much better to bring back Boris from <i>GoldenEye</i>. And then Q does some secret work for Bond, but on a 40-foot screen on the main floor of the MI6 offices. Super-secret stuff, eh? Bond seemingly forgets to bring any weapons whatsoever with him as he races to Scotland, leading Silva into a trap. But he channels Macgyver to improvise with some shotgun shells, light bulbs, propane tanks and some dynamite. And Bond is, once again, utterly impervious to the cold, falling into what must be near-freezing water and languorously swimming around, getting out and not even shivering a little bit. 'Cause it wasn't cold outside or anything. Would it have killed them to make him shiver a bit? And why shouldn't he be impervious? He was shot in the opening scene and it didn't slow him down <i>one bit</i>. He didn't even favor that <i>side</i>. And these are the kind of super-spies who try sneaking off into the night over an open moor <i>with a flashlight</i>, making it nearly impossible for all but an enemy gifted with sight to track them. An enemy who survived the simultaneous explosion of an entire castle and helicopter from a distance of about twenty feet---completely unscathed. The conclusion? A beautiful movie with excellent cinematography and mostly horrific acting and dialogue. It wasn't even really funny and the only redeeming character was Bardem's. I was hoping for someone to kill M from the very beginning of the film. Eve, too. One out of two ain't bad.</div> Flight (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1907668/">8/10</a> <div>Denzel Washington plays a pilot named "Whip", a pilot who is still very much a Denzel-Washington character. To avoid too much controversy, he flies a fictitious plane for a fictitious airline. He has a bit of a drinking problem that he straightens out with cocaine. Easy-peasy. He shows up to work plastered and, just before landing, his plane starts to fall apart: the elevator gets stuck in "dive" position and one after another engine goes. Whip stays calm and manages to keep the plane in the air long enough to land in an open field, killing only 6 of 104. In the ensuing investigations, his feat cannot be repeated by other pilot. Don Cheadle plays a high-priced lawyer assigned to clean up any possible criminal liability due to Whip's pretty blatant alcoholism. John Goodman plays a bit part as Whip's dealer. It's a Robert Zemeckis film, so it's well-made and interesting, but also pretty straightforward. When Whip manages to stay dry for nine days preceding his hearing but falls hard when he gets access to a mini-bar, Goodman comes to the rescue. I had a brief hope that the film would end with Whip triumphantly passing the hearing blazed, coked and drunk out of his mind. After all, if he can fly a plane super-drunk better than anyone, then he should be able to get through a hearing, right? But it was not to be and the film ended on a more family-friendly note. As an aside, I wondered how criminal liability could even possibly come up---if his case went to trial, his lawyer could easily point out that Whip landed the plane better than anyone else could have, drunk or not. Is the court really going to make the argument that he could have saved even more lives had he been sober? Naturally, he could be prosecuted for gross negligence, but the extenuating circumstances---that he saved 98 lives despite proven, massive hardware failure---would likely result in a drastically reduced sentence.</div> Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E09) (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/">10/10</a> <div>This episode covers Bush I and Clinton, documenting Bush's belligerence toward Iraq. It was as good as the others, but covered a lot of history that I already knew, though I was unaware of the level of Bush the elder's war expertise before taking office as president. His belligerence was unbelievable but his team was much better at fabricating a pretense for invasion than his son's would prove to be (see <i>Hubris</i> below). I'd also forgotten how Clinton had won by the skin of his teeth---and then only because Ross Perot siphoned off nearly 20% of the vote. Stone covers the history of Prescott Bush, Bush the elder's father and Junior's grandfather, who built the family fortune by helping Germany during World War II. Stone details many other major U.S. firms that benefited from war profiteering in deals with Hitler's Germany and how much of the post-war wealth in the U.S.---the great fortunes---were built on fascism (as Honoré de Balzac said: <iq>The secret of great fortunes without an apparent source is a crime forgotten, because it was done properly</iq>).<fn> Stone and his co-author also give a proper place in history for the greatness of Gorbachev, who nearly single-handedly architected the first---and heretofore only---bloodless revolution when he saw to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Reagan was a warmonger who did nothing but get in the way with his vapid jingoism---or take credit once he saw which way the wind was blowing. The peace dividend would, however, definitely not be forthcoming, at least in the US. In the former USSR, whatever peace dividend might have been was quickly gobbled up by a wave of kleptocrats and Western "advisers" from the Friedman school. This episode also covers how the seeds of 9--11 were sown with the emplacement of military bases in Saudi Arabia. Despite promises to Gorbachev, the U.S. continued to expand Nato, rebuilding the former Eastern bloc as a NATO bloc encircling Russia instead. After Clinton came Bush, who disdained both Clinton and Bush for being too weak. With a cold-war crew in his cabinet, he was ready when 9--11 came. Many clips of Bush's speeches are included, included one from the campaign trail---the famous one where he claimed to not want to be the world's policeman---as well as speeches to Congress and the U.N. in which he depicts a simplistic and utterly skewed world-view.</div> Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E10) (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/">10/10</a> This episode covers the Bush years and Obama's first term. This is much more recent history, which I have already thoroughly documented in <a href="{app}view_folder.php?id=15" source="earthli.com">Public Policy & Politics</a>. This final episode covers the mendacity of the Bush administration, the naked contempt for rule of law, the torture. Following Bush, Obama continued to widen US military presence, opening more bases in Australia and providing weapons to Taiwan (antagonizing and encircling the Chinese) while further tightening the NATO noose around Russia and Iran. Stone also covers the expansion of Obama's drone program as well as cyber warfare, the incessant expansion of power, of brutality, of empire. The series wraps up with a plea for America to become the country it has always claimed itself to be---to be the country that a Henry Wallace could have perhaps made. Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War (2013) <div>Rachel Maddow hosts this one-hour documentary based on the book of the same name. Her introduction asks whether the men who perpetrated the lies that led to the Iraq War will have those lies written into their obituaries. But her other example, Lyndon Johnson, was not defined by the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin, was he? Of course not. Almost no one knows that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie, even to this day. The only reason we know is because documents were revealed 30 years after the fact. The Bush administration will be the same. And why? Because no one gets prosecuted for their lies. Tonkin never caused Johnson any personal problems, no fines, no loss of stature, no prison time. It's the same with everyone involved in the Bush administration. They all remain highly regarded and well-compensated members of the American landscape, so why should they be judged by their Iraq lies when they die? Did Rumsfeld hear about it when he peddled his book? He did not. Why? Because he wouldn't grant interviews to non-friendly news organizations? Perhaps that's part of it. But a lot of it is because the Obama administration just dropped the whole issue as soon as it got into office. Obama covered their asses for them, just like Ford covered Nixon's ass, Bush covered Scooter Libby's and Clinton covered Marc Rich's. Obama kept the stigma of charges, trials and prosecution---hell, even jail time---off of the Bush administration. That said, her introduction's not completely bad---and will likely be a good introduction to what will sound like completely new material for those who weren't paying attention during the last decade. She asked how we are to prevent such lies from happening again. If history may be our guide, documentaries produced by people that can be disregarded as left-wingers with an agenda aren't likely to have an impact at all. I was missing a conclusion, where she should have made the point that prison sentences or any form of repercussions at all might have been a good place to start. The Obama administration's refusal to do so on our behalf---it's betrayal of justice for these crimes---would have been a more than appropriate coda for this documentary. As it stands, the documentary just fades out, leaving one with the impression that the issue is unresolved. It's not unresolved; all of the people in that film have been exonerated and nothing will ever happen to them. That, I think, should have been the greater point of the episode: that justice was not served and nothing prevents it from happening again. The way that both the Obama administration and the press bang the war drums for Iran or Syria nearly every day indicates that they have certainly not learned any lessons. On a side note, the post <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/msnbc-axelrod-gibbs-obama" source="The Guardian" author="Glenn Greenwald">MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole</a> writes: <bq>A Pew poll found that in the week leading up to the 2012 election, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of the President or a single positive story about Romney - not a single one [...]</bq> Perhaps it's that attitude that explains why the Obama administration was not blamed. </div> The Bourne Legacy (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194173/">7/10</a> <div>I was a bit concerned about a Bourne film without Matt Damon, but I needn't have been. The Bourne Legacy is in good hands with Jeremy Renner. He's an agent in another Treadstone-like program, another super-soldier program where the latest biomedical advancements in gene therapy and viral manipulation lend soldiers increased strength, agility, speed, endurance and resistance to pain as well as mental acuity. Renner is in the middle of nowhere in Alaska, traveling alone through the wilderness when his program is shut down---meaning that his minders try to take him out with a cruise missile. At the same time, the lab that was creating all of the drugs and medical advances is also taken out, with all but one scientist dead: Rachel Weisz. He finds her and together they flee for their lives, being all cool and Bourne-like but surprisingly down-to-Earth. A totally steady camera and reasonably wide angles on chase and fight scenes were a welcome and refreshing relief from the latest trends in filming. The story was pretty interesting though the technology on display was a bit too much---it veered heavily into aweome-government-tech-porn territory. It was hard to tell whether this was a fantasy about competent government or an attempt to make people believe that secret agencies really can do all of these things, or whether it was just the easiest way to have people sitting in a command center be able to find two people on the other side of the world even though, for all intents and purposes, they'd disappeared without a trace. One minute, you see them using Canadian forestry satellite footage to find a black blob that is "probably" their car and next we see a bunch of people on phones demanding information about a red Buick LeSabre. And I suppose that was also a bit unbelievable: the degree to which people at airports, rental car agencies, hotels and foreign police departments would just cooperate with the CIA <i>just because they were told to</i>. And, even given that they would be willing---for whatever reasons---to cooperate, the level of competence depicted on everyone's part makes you wonder why it took ten years to find bin Laden. Just sayin'. Still, a fun flick and definitely recommended if you like the genre; it easily stands with the others.</div> The Untouchables (2013) A <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables">PBS Frontline documentary</a> about the utter lack of prosecution for Wall Street bank employees---especially those in the boardrooms. Many interviews with the assessors in the trenches reveal that fraud was definitely widespread. The higher they went, the more skeptical people became that intent was too hard to prove. In the end, the prosecutors admit that their cases should be slam dunks but that they are all mysteriously quashed. Lanny Breuer seems to be trying to do more than his job: will a prosecution result in an economic collapse? Will prosecuting a bank cause a collapse? If the bank can't prosecuted, then it can't be controlled. And isn't it just convenient that Breuer has these considerations when it comes to the rich and powerful being prosecuted? This was really an excellent documentary; highly recommended. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E08) (2012) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/">10/10</a> <div>This episode starts with Nixon's fall and Ford's pardon of all of his crimes. Somehow bolstered by this utterly ignominious moment, The Republicans renewed their goal of privatization. The country wasn't ready yet and elected Carter. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the weight that pulled the Carter administration's foreign policy to the right, though Carter started off much more open. Advised by Brzezinski, Kissinger and David Rockefeller, Carter arguably chose advisers more poorly than Obama. Late in his presidency, Nicaragua blew up and the right-wing hawks naturally worried that its revolution would foment change in the near-monarchies in neighboring countries. It was, however, the US-instigated Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that would mark Carter's only invasion---which led to the US boycotting the 1980 summer Olympics and to Carter's doubling of nuclear warheads rather than halving them as initially promised. He would also repudiate his previous criticisms of Vietnam is what was an almost total capitulation while still in office. Reagan was up next, a man who hated communism and loved military might. He was, by all accounts, not a bright man. Reagan too had some interesting advisers, the craziest of whom was William Casey, head of the CIA, an organization so inept that they never saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming. Reagan's two administrations oversaw U.S. insurgency in several countries in Central America. This run of terror by America's greatest president culminated in the Iran-Contra deals, with all parties involved lying through their teeth and getting off scot free (George Bush I was also involved but slithered away, and was elected president in time to pardon all of his cohorts). Reagan would make a career of lying about and misrepresenting the Soviet threat in the most apocalyptic terms that seem frankly laughable but were swallowed wholesale by a public eager to be terrified and hungry for blood. He was a tyrant, diverting funds from domestic spending to the military, living in a high-society bubble in Washington while attacking unions, the working class and the poor (most of whom probably helped reelect him). Stone utterly idolizes Gorbachev, comparing him to the U.S.'s Henry Wallace, crediting him---and rightly so---with Perestroika and the end of the Cold War. Reagan ended up spoiling the deal in Reykjavik because his adviser Richard Perle feared a revitalization of the Soviet economy due to its no longer being sapped by excessive military spending. Not only that, but Reagan's precious SDI was also on the chopping block, so Gorbachev went home with empty hands---because Reagan wanted to militarize space. Reagan was a blithering mess at the end and admitted the Iran Contra affair with the following statement: <iq>A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.</iq> Faced with either admitting complicity or senility, he took the coward's way out. He doubled the military budget and changed the U.S. from the leading creditor to the leading borrower in just four years. He left office having massively increased both the debt and the deficit and oversaw the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression---the S&L bailout---brought about by his deregulation. It was the Reagan administration that was the real springboard for the modern right-wing stranglehold on America. </div> Ghost Rider (2007) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259324/">5/10</a> The cast is not bad: Nicolas Cage, Eve Mendes, Peter Fonda and Sam Elliot. The plot is half-baked and pretty low-key for a super-hero movie. Nicolas Cage takes a little while to warm up and he never gets very good. It's an utter mystery to me what Peter Fonda was doing in that film. (Other than that he perhaps hadn't played a devil yet?) The effects are middle-of-the-road and the movie's about a guy who makes a deal with the devil for an awesome stunt-rider career. When the devil comes to collect his due, he makes him the "Ghost Rider", the right arm of retribution of the devil, sent to collect evil souls that have escaped Hell. Oh, and he turns into a flaming skeleton. Not gay flaming, like literally on fire. Saw it in German. The Big Lebowski (1998) --- <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/">10/10</a> Saw it for what must be the sixth of seventh time and it's one of the few movies that doesn't get old. The dialogue is superb; written and directed by the Coen brothers, it's chock-full of what have by now become classic lines (it has one of the longest <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes">IMDb quote pages</a> I've ever seen). It's the story of an unemployed amateur bowler---the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges---with a special predilection for cursing, drinking White Russians (Caucasians) and smoking pot. He and his bowling buddies---Walter, played by John Goodman and Donnie, played by Steve Buscemi---become embroiled in a complicated plot that involves a millionaire, his assistant (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), another bowler named Jesus (John Turturro) a porno king, a nymphomaniac, three German nihilists (their leader played by Peter Stormare and Flea plays another), an avant-garde heiress/artist played by Julianne Moore and Sam Elliot as an occasional narrator. Highly recommended. </dl> <hr> <ft>Out of curiosity, I looked up <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121107/REVIEWS/121109990" source="Chicago Sun Times" author="">Roger Ebert's review</a> and he loved the film and loved Dench in it, deeming her role as <iq>a dead-serious M (Judi Dench), following the action from MI6 in London and making a fateful decision.</iq> Later, he says the film <iq>provides a role worthy of Judi Dench, one of the best actors of her generation. She is all but the co-star of the film, with a lot of screen time, poignant dialogue, and a character who is far more complex and sympathetic than we expect in this series.</iq> It just shows how subjective this all is; <iq>complex</iq> and <iq>sympatheic</iq> are two of the last words I would have used to describe her portrayal. As in the other films, I found her attempts to be a hard-ass laughable and unconvincing.</ft> <ft>After some digging around, I found an article---<a href="http://mfrontere.blog.lemonde.fr/2006/05/20/2006_05_la_recherche_de/" source="Le Monde" author="Michel Frontère">Balzac et l’obsession de l’origine des fortunes</a>---with the original citation in French, which states that it was written in <i>Le Père Goriot</i> (1835) and reads: <bq>Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait</bq> The commonly cited version in English---<iq>Behind every great fortune there is a crime</iq>---pales, I think, in comparison.</ft>