Latest Parries
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
Israel, the Bad So Far
I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.
S aw Shooter. Been hankering to see a blockbuster action movie at the cinema, complete with prescreening junkfood meal. Last time was Casino Royale which was about four months ago. So we took a nice meandering walk through Kemp Town, the grungier and gayer east side of Brighton, and ended up at the rather forlorn Brighton Marina and the multiplex there. Warning: spoilers ahead.
I was disappointed but fair enough, I should have looked not just at the star but at the screenwriter (Red Planet, Lethal Weapon 4) and the director (King Arthur, From Toni with Love: The Video Collection). The opening scenes were promising indeed, but my first inkling that not all’s well was our hero Mark Wahlberg doing firing practice with his dog sitting three feet away. He was wearing protective headgear but the dog was not, nor did he warn his acutely-eared companion that he was about to shoot. Then when he leaves his house in the mountains for a few days to fly to big cities he leaves the dog alone in or around the house. You can do that with a cat but it’s just not standard practice with a dog. In reality you’d drop the dog off with a dogsitter in town on your way to the airport. This is not the way a man with a dog behaves.
Then, the bodyguard of the colonel who visits him is just too scummy. Are there really people like that hanging around senior figures? I doubt it. It spoke too much of evil henchman. I smell schloch.
As Wahlberg sits down to his computer to read the news, a 9/11 book is at his desk, and he asks himself aloud: “What lies are they going to tell us today?” The unstated implication is that the official 9/11 story is a hoax. By dint of its production values and the cachet of its star this movie gets away with pandering to and promoting hideous nutjob views of the world.
More unpleasant digs against the Bush Administration follow. The wise old man in the woods cackles about the falseness of the WMD pretext for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Ostensibly clever and sophisticated, this movie is perfect-pitch liberal Hollywoodness, the producers’ contempt for the audience becoming increasingly obvious. After being set up to take the fall for assassinating a foreign leader, our hero is wounded and on the run and seeks refuge with the former fiance of his fallen army comrade from the prologue. Yet once she’s fixed him up he leaves her at home, even though it’s quite obvious the bad guys ae going to find, capture and hold her hostage. From such a promising start, the movie falls into the pit of Stupid Plot, wherein forward momentum relies on characters doing uncharacteristically stupid things.
A saving grace was the unconventional casting of the sidekick, who is bored with his field job to the point of incompetence, though it turns out he’s an excellent detective. I guess that’s a cliche as well, but at least during the first half he lent some human color to the exercise.
Ugh. I feel despoiled having watched this. I wonder what others have said…
Well, the user comments at IMDB are mostly positive, with the caveat that “it’s only a movie”. The Village Voice, often a source of genuinely good movie reviews, gives it total kids glove treatment, limiting itself to plot summary then saying it’s “a surprisingly deft satire about Americans’ loss of faith in their government.” Satire? This is not satire, it’s panderment.
Together with the feeling of being ripped off at the sweetie shop (£6.10 for popcorn and Coke!), I think we’ll be holding off on the movie theatre for a while.
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Franklin or Jonah?
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Short Stuff