A year of great B Movies

Film, Uncategorized

OK, maybe B Movie is not the best way to describe movies that costs somewhere between $150,000,000 and $225,000,000. But this has been a great year for big, overblown, Hollywood-blockbuster, movies. Movies that pretend to have no ambition to being art but – of course – are hugely ambitious.

About twenty years ago, the late, great, Robert Altman made a movie about, death, power, taste, and fame in Hollywood. A subplot concerned a writer pitching a movie that sounds great but mutates as it goes through the movie making sausage machine. It goes from being an art film to being a vapid blockbuster (with an implication that vapid and blockbuster are redundant). One proposed scene is of a vigil outside of San Quentin with each person holding a candle under a small, backlit, umbrella: the glowing umbrellas floating in the dark.  Of course, in the Altman movie, it gets cut. Almost at the end of Apocalypse, Captain Willard is floating up river to Kurtz with burning torches on the sides of the river.

Somehow, in Skyfall – the latest James Bond movie – both images are combined as Bond goes to a casino: standing on a slowly floating boat as it exits a lit dragon mouth. The whole scene is seemingly lit by glowing lanterns that float – and reflect – on the still, ink-black, water. It is a stunning scene, but far from the only stunning scene in the movie (and Skyfall is far from the only blockbuster with great cinematography). Somehow, Skyfall And it does this while keeping all the James Bond cliches and re-setting the Bond story. In one of the early scenes, Bond meets the new Q – who seems to be a very young 21 – in front of a Turner painting depicting the Temeraire – a  famous British warship being tugged to the scrapyard. In one of the last scenes, Temeraire is shown helping win the Battle of  Trafalgar won – of course, against all odds – by British resourcefulness and unconventional tactics. It could be the outline of the movie.

But Skyfall isn’t the only far-from-vapid blockbuster this year. It really has been a year of great blockbuster movies. In the summer, we had Prometheus by Ridley Scott which was not for everybody but, scene after scene, image after image, Prometheus is a stunning art film. Then there is the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, with its vision of a dark,  dystopian, Gotham rotting from the inside. My favorite line from Dark Knight  – and the most visible reference to today – whispered in Bruce Wayne’s ear by Anne Hathaway was There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. 

Out of nowhere – meaning they were not part of a series – came the engrossing and suspenseful Argo which was every bit as much a comment on Hollywood as The Player (except it was much more optimistic; I suspect the floating candles would have stayed in Argo). And Looper, a surprisingly moving science fiction movie, with no floating candles but a twisting plot with an unHollywood ending.

Then there was Cloud Atlas that I think was trying not to be a B Movie and seemed to succeed in not being a blockbuster and The Cabin In The Woods, directed by Drew Goddard but, really, writer Joss Whedon’s art film pretending to be a B Movie. The Avengers, Whedon’s B Movie that almost become an art movie (except for the end).

I know that I have left off some winners, but the point is, movies are just better than ever.

 

 

 

Some thoughts on the military

Americana, War

We Americans love our troops and especially the commanding generals. We always have. Washington was our first commanding general and our first President and the tradition has remained strong that a winning general could ride the adulation to the White House (even before it was the White House). Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all became Presidents and – if rumors are true – Obama was worried so much about David Petraeus running for President that he made him head of the CIA rather than head of the Joint Chiefs.

But I think we are starting to get carried away with our idolatry. Or, it may be more accurate to say, everybody, including the generals, are starting to believe the bullshit. During the Vietnam war, I read and heard lots of stories of civilians – maybe mostly college students – dissing and taunting Soldiers (and Marines, Sailors, and whatever Air Force GIs are called). As an aside; I do want to emphasize that I was not a recipient of hazing although I was in the Army during the run-up to the biggest part of the war in Vietnam and I was dating a woman who lived in the Haight-Ashbury. End aside.

I think the difference was that people were afraid of being drafted, of being sent to Vietnam, and took it out on everybody from President Johnson on down. Now nobody has to do military service and people feel guilty about sending those poor bastards – over, and over, and over  again – into the grinder, so they overcompensate with reverence. And, as the military has gotten smaller and more elite, the top officers, especially the generals, have become incredibly entitled.

During the Civil War, the commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, had been a civilian just a couple of years before. Much of the time, he wore a privates uniform with his stars pinned on the shoulders, and – more to the point I am trying to make – he had a staff of only eight people and he didn’t wear his medals (he had lots of them). During World war II, Dwight D. Eisenhower wore a simple uniform and only wore his top three medals. Eisenhower had a civilian driver and a small military staff. At the end of my so-called military career, I was a driver for a three-star, General Andrew Lolly, and he had a total staff of three (me, the sergeant/driver, a Captain, and a Colonel). Now it is an entirely different story.

Former defense secretary, Robert Gates, complained I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time. Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss. General Petraeus, who wears every medal he ever got – of which, by the way, only ONE is for bravery under fire – had a staff of fifty when he was the commanding general in Afghanistan.

When there was a draft, there was more exposure  of the average person to the military and more exposure to the average person by the military. The military priesthood was not as strong and isolated as it is now.

This lack of a draft has led to an isolation and the resulting arrogance that is hurting the military and our country.  I think we should bring back the draft and reading an article by Tom Ricks, sent to me by Richard Taylor, has only reinforced that belief. The thrust of the article which starts by quoting General McChrystal saying I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn’t be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population. I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game. is how it will help the country. (The article really promotes a two year National Service for everybody with only some people going into the military.) Ours is a time when almost nobody contributes to the National Collective and the sign of a good American is wearing a flag pin and paying as little taxes as possible and the article paints an alternative that I think would make us a better country. I suggest you read it.

But, maybe even more importantly, a Draft would also help end the isolation that is currently ruining the military. The Army hasn’t fired a general for not doing a good job in a long, long time.  General Petraeus, even with his staff of fifty, didn’t win the war in Afghanistan or anywhere else for that matter. The military has ceased to be accountable and guys like Petraeus keep getting less accountable.

 

 

The Ironic Election II

Politics, Psychological Musings

The conventional wisdom is that Romney lost the election for alot of reasons – fellow Republican’s boorish behavior towards women that bleed into public perception about Romney, an inability to identify with people outside of his class, being forced by the primary to go anti-Hispanic, his refusal to release his taxes and information on his offshore bank accounts, his robotic demeanor, and on and on – but incompetence was never on the list. He did save the Olympics after all ( yea! sure! with $400M in Federal help, but still).

I suggest that  incompetence should be at the top of the list,  incompetence driven by hubris. For months, leading up to election, the Romney campaign had touted their super high-tech voter monitoring operation to use on Election Day. It would identify which of their committed supporters have voted so they could then get the slackards to the polls. This super high-tech voter monitoring operation was called the Orca Project. Orca because the Obama operation was named Narwhal and Orcas eat Narwhals (cute, huh?).

In theory, Romney is against centralized government and centralized power but, they centralized Orca, controlling everything from Boston (in contrast, the Obama organization pushed the control of their GOTV – get out the vote or ground game – way down the food chain). When Election Day comes, the precincts start sending tons of data to Boston and Orca crashes. What a shock. The structured, tightly controlled, Romney organization is left without a head and like any very structured, tightly controlled, organization with the head removed, it becomes almost useless. Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on over-centralization. Meanwhile, the decentralized Obama Organization preformed flawlessly.

As an aside, Romney also thought their precinct workers – mostly members of conservative religious groups – would be more numerous at 36,000 and much better motivated than the Obama precinct workers who they thought were mostly professionals (read mercenaries, I think). Why anybody would think this after 2008 or after spending five minutes thinking about Obama as an community organizer – maybe it is related to Rudy Giuliani’s comment Community Organizer? What’s that? – is beyond me. I would think that a numbers guy would realize that 36,000 is smaller than the Obama’s estimated 8,000,000. End aside.

Meanwhile, John  McCain skipped the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he was being kept in the dark about Benghazi and it was a cover-up. What a douche.

Finally – I hope, but probably not – Romney confirms that it wasn’t his fault he lost the election. He says that his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama” and he only lost because Obama gave “gifts” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters.

The Ironic Election

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

 

 

It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. Karl Rove in the WSJ.

This is what happens when people who don’t know the facts can vote. An after election tweet from a surprised – shocked, really –__fill in the  blank__ completely missing the irony of not knowing that Obama had been leading in the polls for weeks.

….BTW,  one of the more confusing election statistics is the reported 3M conservative voters who did not show up and vote for Romney. I have no idea how to approach understanding this situation. from a couple of emails from an Conservative acquaintance.

Looking at the fantasy map, above, seeing how many states Romney had to win to get the Presidency  I realize – even more – how difficult a time Romney was going to have to win the election. But every strong Conservative I talked to – by email, usually – was surprised by the result. Most were astounded. Stephen Colbert often remarks that Facts have a liberal bias. and that was a bias that the Conservatives refused to see. Romney and Ryan were promoted as numbers guys, promoted as the nation’s saviors  because they were realists. In the end, they were wrong.

They were wrong because they didn’t – or couldn’t – see the actual numbers. They had, along with their fellow Conservatives, lost track of reality.

I have seen this before; in 1966, a Republican actor, Ronald Reagan, ran against two-time governor Pat Brown for governor of California. As the election got close, all the polls showed Reagan leading but my dad, who was a close friend of Brown and one of his biggest fans, thought Brown was going to win in a landslide. In 1966, polls weren’t as accurate as now, but they were accurate enough so that it was obvious to me that Reagan was going to win, but my dad was only looking at the crowds from inside the bubble. This election, the Conservatives were looking at the data from  inside the bubble on a national scale.

That is better, I guess, than Peggy Noonan who thought Romney was going to win because he had more yard signs. Yard signs, it turns out were not the way to predict an election and I would have thought Noonan would know that. But I think that the right was predisposed to ignore all the signals.  Not just the polls but the advantage Obama had in thousands of Obama for America ground volunteers (a Community Organizer, after all, should be pretty good at organizing communities).  Not just the volunteers, but the increasingly large demographic advantage. Not just the volunteers and demographic advantage, but a campaign staff that really knew their stuff. That checked on reality five times a day.

Bleeding heart Liberals are supposed to be unrealistic but the Obama campaign was a hard-headed, tough, ass kicking machine and, very importantly, that is what the soft-hearted Liberals wanted. When Obama did poorly in the first debate, every Liberal I know, complained about it as if it were a personal affront, when Romney did poorly in the second debate, every Conservative I know thought he did great. The Liberals didn’t want to feel good, they wanted to win and, this time around, the Conservatives seemed to just wanted to feel good (they hated Obama so much, I think they thought it would be easy to beat him). Eventually, even Fox’s Megyn Kelly couldn’t take the right’s pundit bullshit anymore, asking Karl Rove if his blather about the number-crunching was just “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.”

 

 

Veterans Day

Americana, Politics, War

Korean War Memorial at the western end of the National Mall, Washington DC       

Washington is full of war memorials; it makes me sad that there are so many. On the east end of the Mall, is the The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial  facing toward the Lincoln Memorial at the west end. They unite the Mall like they united the country. In between are newer monuments: World War II, The Korean Conflict – named Conflict or Police Action so Congress didn’t have to vote for it – The Vietnam War. We are becoming an Empire, filling our capitol with memorials to our distant, empirical, wars.

It is nice we honor our Veterans – I am a Veteran and am proud of it, maybe too much at times, considering that I have never heard a shot fired in anger – but I fear that the Honoring is covering up national policies we shouldn’t have. I fear that the Honoring is covering up the debate and discussion on whether we should even be fighting these wars. I fear that the Honoring is covering up our neglect of the shattered bodies and psyches that are the waste products of these empirical wars.

In all the wars, in each war, young men and, now, women – or old boys and, now girls,  depending on your point of view – have been sent to distant places by old men to kill people whose names they don’t know and, in most cases, can pronounce. They are sent to places we don’t really know or understand. It is not making us great, it is not making us rich, it is not making us safe.