Merry Christmas
All posts by Steve Stern
“News has to be new” deteriorating into a ramble on the AK-47
When I turned my computer on this morning, to check the news, the headline on my Google News Page was Ever defiant, freed Pussy Riot members slam Putin’s amnesty from The Christian Science Monitor. In the back of my mind, the thought, Almost Christmas, not much is happening, rattled around. Intellectually, I know that stuff is happening all over the world, but lots of people are off for the holidays so stuff like Benghazi suicide bomb kills 14 just sort of disappears.
After I read my morning Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes, I went back to read the morning paper in a little more detail. Now the headline was Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94. I found it a little sad that Pussy Riot got bumped by the death of the guy who invented the most ubiquitous killing machine in history. But the Pussy Riot piece was just a filler , we all knew they would remain defiant, we didn’t know that Kalashnikov was even still alive. As an aside, Why are so many brave people young women? Shit! we men seem to only get Mr. Duck-breath and Kalashnikov; the women get Malala Yousafzai and Pussy Riot. And as an aside to the aside, Did Putin have any idea he was releasing Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, of Pussy Riot, on the anniversary of Andrei Sakharov’s release from the gulag? End asides.
But, the essential ingredient of The News is that it is out of the ordinary and new (although nothing is more fun than reading about news we have witnessed, that is why it is so fun to watch a game our team won and then read about it). So, last week, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47 is still alive, would be down in human interest somewhere. Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 74 is interesting because it is new, change, a milestone.
The AK-47 was a brilliant idea with a brilliant execution. There had been handheld automatic weapons before but they all used pistol bullets, think of the Tommy Gun – M1921 Thompson Submachine Gun to the military, Tommy gun to Chicago mobsters – or the M3A1 “grease gun” used by American tankers. The problem is, that because they used pistol bullets, they were not very accurate and did not carry enough punching power. Automatic rifles wouldn’t work because the large, rifle, ammunition made them too hard to handle. Kalashnikov came up with the simple – but out of the box – idea of making the ammunition bigger than pistol ammunition but smaller than that used in regular rifles.
Regular rifles are still more accurate, but the AK-47 makes up for that it is easy to carry and has a high rate of fire. The genius of the AK-47 is that because it is not accurate in the first place, it can be made with loose-fitting parts, like the old, cheap, Timex watch that took a beating and kept on ticking. It was designed to be reliable when used by people who were not very well-trained and did not have a history of using and maintaining mechanical devices. That is not a easy thing to do. It is easier to use and cheaper to make, but the AK-47 was harder to design.
The American equivalent assault rifle, the M16A1 is a better weapon but much more complex, takes more maintenance, and is much more expensive (about $150 vs. $670). Ironically enough, when we wanted to arm militias in Afghanistan and Iraq, we ran up against the problem that the militias were not composed of mechanically sophisticated troops, so we supplied them with AK-47’s. Whom we bought them from, I don’t know. As an aside, I am reminded of a story that was going around when we were in the Space Race with the Soviets. NASA spent something like 30 Million dollars developing a ballpoint pen that could write in zero-gravity; the Soviets used a pencil. End aside.
Anyway, Mikhail Kalashnikov is dead and the AK-47 lives on with over 100,000,000 out there.
American Hustle
“Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. “American Hustle” offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. David Denby The New Yorker
I want to get the bad news out first, I was disappointed in American Hustle; it was not the greatest movie in the history of mankind. Even walking into the theater, I knew that nothing could match my internalized amping of the critical acclaim I had been reading. All that said, it was masterfully directed and had the best acting I have seen in a long time.
From stage left to right, Jennifer Lawrence was so sexy and looney, it was impossible to take my eyes off of her. Anytime she was on-screen, she stole the show. There was no relation to Katnis Everdeen or Ree. Christian Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld – who, I assume, is cast as Jewish but doesn’t come across as Jewish to my Jewdar – and is so distinctive in the role that, on leaving the theater, I told Michele I couldn’t think of a movie in which I had seen him before. When Michele mentioned the brooding Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, I thought she must be mistaken.
Jeremy Renner is the mayor just trying to do good and he bears no resemblance to any part I have seen him play and certainly not Sergeant James, in the Hurt Locker. To me, he was the most sympathetic character, the one I like the most, but the genius of the film is that they are all likable. Of all the actors, Bradley Cooper’s FBI Agent DiMaso is the closest to his previous characters but he brings a sense of going off the rails that carries much of the film.
And Amy Adams is terrific as a woman trying to fight her way out of going nowhere, when we meet her, in a voice over, she mulls over being a stripper, There’s a boldness to it. But where would that boldness take me? In a way, that sums up the whole movie. For me, a major character – although uncredited – was Miss Adams’ dress. In any world with gravity and/or centrifugal force, her boobs would have popped out in almost every scene.
I want to say that this is a David O. Russell movie because I like him as a director – it started with Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings is still one of my favorite movies – but this is really a star movie like Ocean’s Eleven and it has a similar, light, inconsequential vibe. It got me wondering, What is a Star? My first thought is that part of it is coming out of nowhere, very fast, very young. But, in American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence is the only really young actor (although they are all pretty young from my age). But the Stars do come out of nowhere. They have a bit part, maybe a couple, and then get a lucky break in a Winter’s Bone, or Hangover, or Hurt Locker, and we all know them. We probably all over-looked them when they played a bit, deep in a movie, like Robin the Luggage Boy in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V or a minor part like Sack Lodge in Wedding Crashers.
I am not sure that an actor has always had to be a great actor to be a Star, but today, Stars all seem to be great actors. I think that, for an actor to make that jump to Star, they must have something more. They have to attract us, make us fall in love, at least for a couple of hours, even if it is only in the dark. What I like most about Hollywood, is what so many people like the least, the alleged superficiality.
To make it in Hollywood, people have to be attractive – often confused with good-looking, but not really the same, think Danny DeVito – but they also have to be hardworking and talented. It doesn’t matter where somebody is from – from stage left to right – Louisville, Kentucky; Haverfordwest, Wales; Modesto, California; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Castle Rock, Colorado. It doesn’t matter who your parents were, children’s camp manager, a circus performer, bowling alley manager, a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, a semi-professional bodybuilder. It is that meritocracy, the democracy of it all that I like.
In this movie, full of Stars – who weren’t born Stars, who had to hustle to become Stars – playing hustlers, it comes full circle. It is fun to watch.
Happy Solstice: day and night
Well, this is embarrassing continued
Yesterday – in a change of pace, for him – or maybe the day before, Obama granted clemency to 21 people. He issued commutations – which I think means he reduced their sentences – for eight of them and pardoned 13 more. It is a start.
Two or three days before, according to Wired, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in the District of Columbia declared that NSA’s wholesale collection of data is illegal, saying, I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systemic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval…Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to be aware ‘the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,’ would be aghast.
Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing back. I can even imagine a country where Edward Snowden is given amnesty because of the public service he did for all of us.