Detroit City Council President-Broke and Busted

I don't know about you but I like to model my behavior after those who are successful at what they do. If I need to lose weight I'm not going to pick a doctor, dietitian or personal trainer who's morbidly obese. If I want career advice I won't listen to some fellow that has been in the same job without promotion for his whole life. And if I want to be successful with the opposite sex I certainly wouldn't seek counsel from a man that hasn't been on a date since the Reagan Administration. But that's just me. Evidently some good citizens of the city of Detroit feel differently.


STORY
At a time when the City of Detroit faces bleak choices of bankruptcy, the imposition of some form of emergency manager or consent agreement and/or massive cutbacks and layoffs, the voters decided that they would sleep easier knowing that the City Council President was a man who had already demonstrated repeated inability to pay his bills on time as agreed.

Detroit— City Council President Charles Pugh is facing foreclosure and says he likely will abandon his $385,000 Brush Park condominium. His personal financial struggles come as he and council colleagues fight to bail Detroit out of its own fiscal crisis.
On Friday, Pugh said he can't afford to pay his mortgage after taking a pay cut and leaving a high-paying TV career to run for the City Council.
"Making my mortgage payments has been a struggle for me," Pugh wrote in an email. "I fought hard to stay in my condo because I had an attachment to it, but I can no longer afford to do so."
The mortgage issue is the latest financial problem facing Pugh, 40, a former Fox 2 television anchor and radio show host who was the top vote-getter in the 2009 election. He is paid $76,500 as council president.
"I am devoted to this city and helping us to move forward despite wage cuts and personal sacrifices such as foreclosing on my own home," Pugh said. "These are the tough choices Detroiters make every day, and I am no different."

Well no. Sorry there Chuckie but you are different. Most Detroiters do not earn and will not ever earn $240,000/yr which was Mr. Pugh's approximate salary as a Fox 2 anchor before he quit his job to run for City Council. Now $240K may not be all that much money on the coasts but out here in flyover country it's a pretty nice salary. In fact, per NYT research that salary put Pugh in the top 3% of earners in Metro Detroit.

I am sympathetic to people whose financial situation changes unexpectedly. If my boss were to announce today that my salary would be cut by two-thirds because he thought that was commensurate with my actual production (ahem), well I'd be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. But if I decided on my own to quit my job and go sell T-shirts outside of Comerica Park  can I really demand sympathy? Shouldn't I have thought about how to pay my mortgage before I chose a new job with smaller salary? If I went to my mortgage holder, what would they say to me?


The difference is that unlike with his personal finances, in which the only people hurt by default will be Pugh and/or his creditor(s) and neighbors,  if the City of Detroit were to go bankrupt or have an emergency manager imposed, there would be thousands, if not millions of people negatively impacted. If everyone in Detroit did what Pugh is doing (and many have) the bottom would fall out of the sickly housing market and the moribund tax base would die.
That said there are more people who are walking away from their mortgage and some intellectuals even think that this action may be both moral and in your best interest. So this is very mixed up with an individual's concept of right and wrong and their bottom line self-interest. I was raised to consider that the time to ruthlessly pursue your self-interest is BEFORE you sign your name to a contract. Once you've agreed to terms, you should live to those terms. Pugh was making more than enough money to make a larger down payment on that condo or get a place just as nice for a little bit less money.  And it appears that Pugh's chaotic personal finances may be shading over into his political finances.

Judging by his personal life Pugh seems to not understand the link between cause and effect, present action and future consequences. That would bother me if I were a Detroit resident relying in part on Pugh to help find a solution to the financial crisis.
QUESTIONS
1) Do Pugh's personal financial troubles have anything to do with his job overseeing the city finances?
2) Is it okay to walk away from a house or condo that you can no longer afford?
3) Does a leader have a responsibility to set a standard for financial probity?
4) If someone owed you money but said that times were bad now and therefore they wouldn't be paying you back, would you be understanding and accepting?

Book Reviews-Rethinking A Dance with Dragons, Just After Sunset and more

Rethinking A Dance With Dragons

A good friend started George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series on my recommendation and has read the first four books. She is finishing book five, A Dance with Dragons (ADWD). To put it mildly, so far she is less than impressed. "Dumb, Dumb, Dumb" were her exact words.

We agreed that the first three books were excellent, but that there were a few stumbles in book 4, A Feast for Crows (AFFC). I think AFFC is worse than ADWD but having now reread and discussed ADWD I would make a few additions to my original lukewarm positive review. I briefly touched on these points before but didn't emphasize them.
There are some spoilers from the first book although I will generally avoid spoilers from the other books. If you figure stuff out on your own well I can't help that. Have a cookie because you're smarter than the average bear!


PACING
This is the biggest problem with ADWD. It  is just under 1000 pages.  Despite the length, the story moves forward only haltingly. In book one, we ended with Ned Stark's execution and the North's secession under Robb Stark, the new King in the North. In book two we saw feuding between two brothers, special challenges faced by Sansa &Arya Stark, Tyrion given a chance to lead, and an invasion. In book three, well just read it. These stories moved. They were tight and you couldn't wait to turn the page.

But in ADWD we get incredibly detailed histories on which princess married which noble and why certain great families have been warring for years but the story doesn't move much past where it was in AFFC. Because ADWD and AFFC were originally supposed to be one book this is understandable but somewhat frustrating. This leads directly into the next issue.

EDITING
There are 5-6 critical storylines that make up the series theme. These are

• What's going on beyond the Wall?
• Will the Stark children be reunited and have revenge on their family's enemies?
• Will Daenerys become Queen?
• Will Jon discover who his mother was?
• Will the roles of Littlefinger and other chessmasters ever be revealed?
• What does it mean to be rightful heir?

I don't expect complete resolution now. But after five books I would like to see some progress towards answers. Instead ADWD features many chapters on people whining about their responsibilities or quixotic quests by flat characters in boring new settings. This could have been ruthlessly chopped from ADWD. There are over 20 different points of view between ADWD and AFFC. This harms the narrative flow. Imagine if Lord of the Rings were told from the point of view of Grima Wormtongue and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. That might be an interesting diversion for a while but now imagine that Tolkien had spent a full third of the book detailing the various adventures those relatively minor personages had, what they ate for breakfast, where they used the toilet and what they thought about their one great love who got away.

TIMING

It looks like GRRM has written himself into a pickle here. I know he's talented enough to get out of it but his incredible attention to detail and every little thing that's happening in a story, combined with a penchant for cliffhangers that end every book means that in ADWD many of the characters we care most about are still too young to have much impact on events. What was needed was a five or seven year break, which would have fit PERFECTLY after the horrific events in A Storm of Swords. Many events in ADWD could have been described in flashback where suitable. The harsh training that Arya and Bran are each undergoing is not necessarily something that needs great painstaking detail. Speaking of specific characters leads me to my last point.

CHARACTERIZATION

Many characters that we've come to know and love act in ways that simply don't ring true. In some cases they regress. In A Game of Thrones we see Daenerys transition from a frightened girl who is molested by her brother and sold to her husband to a defiant leader who has dragons. In books two and three, people that underestimate her tend to regret it. She's wiser than people realize and combines a savvy realpolitik with a caring nature.
In ADWD she's changed to a horny teenager who is distracted by butterflies and blue beards (don't ask). Whenever a serious decision or deep analysis is needed she runs off to ride the train.

Jon Snow, who famously put (and kept putting) duty and his word above his love and loyalty for his family has turned into an emo moping teen. My friend calls him "Eeyore" and honestly that's a pretty accurate description. He has reason to be depressed (events in books one through three) but still. Of course character growth or degradation is part of a storyline but these are EXTREMELY sudden transitions that don't ring true. Tyrion suffers the most from this. In ADWD Tyrion is definitely the butt monkey.

All in all I STILL THINK ADWD is a worthwhile read. It's just not as good as the first three books. It shares a lack of focus with AFFC. ADWD has sections which compare favorably with the first three books; there's just too few of them. Unsurprisingly the best prose is centered around Jon Snow and the political situation in the North. I wish Martin had made that the central storyline.

I hope that ADWD is just a "transitional" book and the next book gets back to the stripped down churning storylines that made the earlier books so amazing. Martin is still the man. If AFFC was a swing and miss, ADWD is a single. Because Martin's earlier at bats were all grand slams, people notice the difference.

Just After Sunset
by Stephen King

This is a recent collection of short stories by the famed horror author. I picked this up after Full Dark although Just After Sunset is the earlier release. In the foreword King explains that he had lost his taste for creating short stories and was a bit worried about it. He did not feel that his financial success was a fair trade.

After editing another collection of short stories, King felt inspired to write (and in some cases rewrite) some more short stories of his own and Just After Sunset was the result. King is a extraordinary writer of course but I didn't enjoy this book as much as I did Full Dark.

The stories here seem to be connected by fears of loss, aging, disease and dying. If you are the sort of person who is REALLY bothered by the fact that at some time over the next thirty years your body will greatly deteriorate, you may contract some chronic disgusting disease or condition, and you will eventually pass into non-existence, this probably isn't the book for you. King only goes for the disgusting gross-out once in "A Very Tight Place" which details the battle of a man trapped in a port-a-potty by a vindictive neighbor. More typical though is "Willa", a ghost story told from the POV of ghosts, "Rest Stop" in which a wimpy author tries to find the courage to confront an abusive husband or "The Things They Left Behind" which directly confronts the 9/11 horror.

It's a mug's game trying to figure out what was going through a writer's mind when he wrote a story or how much of himself he put into it. King is sympathetic to that point of view but does nevertheless include some afterword notes on each story. I was grateful for that. It is always fascinating to get a peek under the hood so to speak, into the mind of a creative person to see how it works. Little things that the rest of us ignore or take for granted are seeds for that person's inspiration.

The Pigman
by Paul Zindel

There are some books that may be written for teens but really have a lot to say to us all. The Pigman is such a book. When I think of books that influenced me to become the cynical, distrusting person that I am The Pigman would have to be near the top of that list. In some stories the author uses examples to try to convince people to live a better life.  I'm not sure that Zindel did that with The Pigman.

The novella is pretty depressing actually. In some respects it was both forerunner for more realistic books aimed at young adults and really a downsized noir novel. It's about two high school students, high spirited troublemakers, John Conlan and Lorraine Jensen who enjoy among other pranks, making calls to people pretending to be charity workers looking for money. One of the people they call is Angelo Pignati -an old man who is desperate for human contact. John and Lorraine go over to his house to pick up the money but find that Mr. Pignati is such a great guy that they become good friends with him.

This relationship starts out in a lie of course but becomes real as neither John or Lorraine know as much about life as they think they do and since Mr. Pignati is widowed his only friend besides the teens is a baboon at the zoo. The story ends on a very dark down note. There's something to be said for the idea that we come into the world alone and leave alone. But maybe while we're here we can add a little happiness. I don't know. I know what I took from this novella was not to trust people so easily.

The Way of the Wiseguy
by Donnie Brasco (Joe Pistone)

Joe Pistone is an Italian-American former FBI agent who worked undercover for over six years infiltrating the NY Mafia. He started out with small time hoodlums associated with one Family.
Using skills learned in the FBI but mostly from his own experiences growing up in an Italian-American New Jersey neighborhood, Pistone reinvented himself as "Donnie Brasco"-jewel thief, occasional drug dealer, and all around tough guy. He infiltrated the Bonanno Crime Family and was in fact proposed for membership. The fact that Pistone survived undercover as long as he did without losing sight of who he was was amazing. He was after all working closely with people for whom killing was second nature.  His cover was so good that in fact when he was pulled from the assignment and his FBI status revealed to mobsters, many mobsters who worked closely with him refused to believe it and thought that the FBI must have kidnapped and brainwashed "Donnie".

Although it's somewhat arguable as to how many mobsters are in jail because of Pistone-he claims over 100- what's beyond debate is that for six years he swam with some of the biggest sharks in the ocean of organized crime and didn't get bit. So he may know a little bit about how Italian-American gangsters (or as they like to call themselves "wiseguys") behave.

The Way of the Wiseguy is his second book on the topic. Here he's more relaxed and less "on" as an FBI agent. We get to see more of Pistone's own nature and thoughts come out. He repeats throughout the book that there is nothing honorable or decent about wiseguys. They are the scum of the earth and he had no problem putting them in jail.  He says he's pretty much the same person coming out of the assignment as he was before-same values, beliefs and goals. But he does admit to this though:

The one thing that did stick with me long after I ceased being Donnie Brasco was the wiseguy attitude. Not backing down from confrontations, standing up for yourself, taking no sh**, cutting corners here and there. I'm not talking about acting like a tough guy or throwing your weight around or doing anything illegal or unethical. I'm talking about being someone who understands how the world works and makes it work for him. Nobody's sucker. A guy who knows his way around.

There was one instance where Pistone was working with his mob mentor Lefty to close a deal with a corrupt bank exec. The exec got scared and backed out. The exec told Lefty that he was scared of "Donnie's killer eyes". Pistone was impressed, relieved and miffed that his acting was so good. Lefty had been involved in over twenty murders and evidently didn't scare the executive as much as an FBI agent pretending to be a mobster.

The book is a short (200 page) but revealing and to the point discussion of how wiseguys differ from normal people. Pistone explains Mafia protocol, how wiseguys make their money, why wiseguys aren't nice people, their typical day, why you should never ever ever let a wiseguy do you a favor, what their hierarchy is, how wiseguys relate to women and other such questions you may have. The book also has some CD transcripts of discussions between "Donnie Brasco" and Lefty in which Lefty had noticed some inconsistencies in what "Donnie" had done and was trying to determine if this might lead to "Donnie's" murder or, more importantly from Lefty's POV, his own.

Movie Reviews-Ink, Contagion and more

Ink

Have you ever had a particularly vivid dream, woke up and wondered where it came from?

Do you have sudden benevolent urges to give that indigent money, help an older person to cross the street or hold the door open for someone carrying packages? Or do you sometimes have feelings of paranoia or aggression. Do you humiliate the waitress for getting your order wrong or make a co-worker feel like crap for making a mistake? Do you lie awake thinking about what you SHOULD have said or done to someone who offended you, how angry you are that you may not see that person again and how you're not going to take it anymore?

There are some flicks which shamelessly steal from other movies and yet still manage to be inventive in their own right. Ink is such a movie. It is also a film which answers the questions posed above. Like its influences The Matrix, Dark City, Donnie Darko and a few others, Ink posits a reality that exists alongside our own and has impact on us, though we may never touch it. The movie makes a nod to the strange world of quantum physics. Ink is also at the same time a real fairy tale that may touch your internal sentimental child.

Athough Ink does not use explicit religious dogma (God is only mentioned in passing) in this film it's clear that evil and good are discrete things, not just ideas. When we sleep we are visited by two distinct type of entities. The Storytellers may be selfless servants of God (angels). They provide dreams and visions which inspire our higher feelings and capacities. They appear in flashes of light. The Incubi (devils) are working for the Other Side. They give us nightmares and visions of pain and fear, designed to cause us to behave in selfish and ultimately self-destructive ways. The Incubi are twisted and foul. The Storytellers all appear human.

Under normal conditions neither the Incubi nor the Storytellers can physically interact with humanity. But they fight each other ALL the time. John (Chris Kelly) is a harried businessman who dreams of playing with his young daughter Emma (Quinn Hunchar) though in real life he does not live with the girl. In the dreamworld a monstrous entity known only as Ink successfully kidnaps Emma's soul, fighting off her Storyteller defenders. In our world this causes Emma to slip into a coma. Ink intends to hand over Emma to the Incubi so that he may become one of them and thus become numb to pain, regret, fear, and anything else that is human and moral.

The Storytellers counterattack on two fronts-sending one of their most powerful number Liev, (Jessica Duffy) to follow Ink and Emma, while they also enlist the help of the blind Pathfinder Jacob (Jeremy Make) a rare Storyteller who is able to effect physical change in our world. They want to break John out of the path he's on and convince him to save his daughter.

This independent film was written, directed, scored and produced by the husband and wife team of Jamin and Kiowa Winans. It's an excellent example of how a good story and intelligent use of camera and effects can make up for a limited budget. Ink also has a lot to say about how we're all connected to each other thru the various choices we make or don't make each and every day. The music and lighting in this film were VERY well done. Ink makes incredibly stylized usage of light and darkness, shadow and color. Much of this is achieved via judicious use of oversaturation. The SFX were all done on a Mac. Go figure. They work though. Ink is both limited by its budget and a good example of how to make every dollar count.

The quantum physics (each choice creating a separate universe of existence) was a nice touch. Give this movie a look. It is something very different from bloated effects extravaganzas like Cowboys and Aliens. It is definitely something you will think about afterwards. Although it has some action it is nowhere near as action packed as the trailer would indicate. This is definitely the thinking (wo)man's film. It drags a little from time to time; it also would have been nice to get a little more insight into the motivations of the Storytellers and Incubi. But nothing's perfect.   TRAILER

Contagion

This film was written and directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Syriana) and will be immediately familiar to fans of his style. Although it is about the spreading of an unknown and seemingly unstoppable disease, that's really just the hook to get the people watching. The film's real story is detailing how people react to each other in times of stress and how intimately we're all connected to each other, whether we realize it or not.

This is an ensemble cast. All of the actors get a chance to shine. Contagion opens up with a business executive returning home from an overseas trip to Hong Kong. As is often the case, being away from home has made this person a bit randy and they decide to enjoy a little adulterous sex before going back to their spouse and child. This executive , Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) has a cold/flu of some sort though. This sickness worsens until she has a seizure and dies in front of her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and child.

Paltrow was patient zero. In a very short period of time many of the people she came into contact with have also become sick. And since we live in the era of easy cross border travel, that's a lot of people. Once the authorities figure out that this is something serious, hundreds of thousands have already been infected. And before they can even start the detective work , overseen by CDC head Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), millions are at risk.

As mentioned, the focus is not really on the physical effects of the disease (which are not shown all that much) but on the fear, depression, paranoia, greed and also the love and sacrifice which the pandemic causes. Would you kill someone to get their vaccine for yourself or a loved one? If you had inside information would you share it with your loved ones? Could you make very cold decisions about shooting people who escaped quarantine? Those are the "horror" elements of this movie. If you're looking for lots of blood and gore, this film doesn't have that. It does have a very good story along with good actors, great sets and an increasing sense of panicked paranoia. This movie could give you OCD about touching other people or even being around folks.

Along with the aforementioned actors the cast also includes Kate Winslet, Elliot Gould, Sanaa Lathan, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Jennifer Ehle and Bryan Cranston.
TRAILER


Election

In any organized crime group when the time comes to select a new leader, things can get a little bit hectic. Aggressive violent men who are used to having their own way and don't mind hurting or killing to get it don't always make the best followers. The Hong Kong Triads are no different. Every two years(which seems a bit short) the Wo Sing Triad elects a new chairman. This chairman is both simultaneously a boss and a front man. Much of the real power in the Triad is held by various "Uncles" who oversee and control different aspects of the Triad's business. The Uncles are usually older semi-retired men. The chairman is always chosen from among the younger up and coming gangsters.

For this election the choice is between Big D (Tony Leung) -a brash gangster who is prone to temper tantrums and violence and Lok (Simon Yam)-a more stable hoodlum with a reputation for cleverness. Both gangsters have their subordinates plead their case to the various Uncles as well as make a few side deals or spread some cash when needed. Lok wins the election. The fact that Big D had mistakenly ordered an assault on an Uncle who he thought was moving in on his territory didn't help his chances.

However before the forward looking and seemingly genial Lok can formally be recognized as Triad Chairman, Big D, who is the very definition of a sore loser, refuses to accept Lok as chairman. Big D kidnaps some of the gangsters who voted against him and threatens to start his own Triad -thus ensuring a bloody war-if he is not made chairman. Throughout the film the police are constantly harassing the Triad members and threatening to do worse if the dispute is not resolved quickly and quietly.

The wiser leaders of any large organized crime group realize that the primary purpose of their group is to continue to exist and earn money. Feuds are bad for business though they are of course sometime unavoidable. The question in this movie is whether the calm and urbane Lok has the guts and viciousness to fight for what is rightfully his and whether the brash and violent Big D is really so proud and unyielding that he would destroy the Triad in a bloody war, rather than submit to another and make a lot of money. This film has subtitles. There is much less violence than one would expect but what violence does exist is not cartoonish. You actually feel for the people involved.
TRAILER

Outpost

This was another low-budget movie about deathless Nazi soldiers. Outpost lacked the humor and spirit that was in Dead Snow but it was also quite a bit creepier. In the present day Balkans, while a war is raging, a mysterious businessman Hunt (Julian Waldman) hires a British mercenary DC (Ray Stevenson) and his ethnically diverse group of soldiers for hire to escort Hunt to a WW2 era deserted SS bunker where Hunt intends to obtain some minerals for an unnamed consortium. Now DC didn't survive as long as he did by believing everything he was told. But the money is too good to pass up and Hunt assures them they'll be in and out in 2 days, max.


When the men enter the bunker they find dozens of dead bodies and one survivor, who they assume has survived the current ethnic cleansing going on in the area. This man does not talk. Later that night the men seemingly come under attack from all sides. Despite an impressive display of firepower the mercenaries kill no one. Afterwards their only casualty is a man shot with a bullet that went out of production in the 1940's. Their unease rises to panic when two of their number disappear and are found dead in the morning. And they're seeing strange things. DC demands answers from Hunt who informs him that no he wasn't looking for gold. He was looking for and has found a Nazi machine that via zero-point-energy or quantum physics was able to change the plane on which human beings existed. The Nazis successfully carried out experiments on Waffen SS soldiers (shown in a particularly spooky B&W film sequence) which allowed them to exist simultaneously in different dimensions and more or less be immune to death. And the mercs' arrival at the bunker has attracted the Nazis' attention. This ruins DC's day of course and the remainder of the movie is a combination of mercs dying one by one or making a last stand against opponents that are indifferent to bullets and not constrained by time or space.


Modest fun but not great. But it does have some legitimate scares. The bunker is very dark and exactly the sort of place where a grinning Nazi ghost materializes out of nowhere to stab you from behind.
TRAILER

Movie Reviews-Straw Dogs (2011), Fright Night(2011) and more

Straw Dogs(2011)

This remake tells the story of a man , David (James Marsden) and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) who move to Amy's culturally distinct Mississippi home town-Blackwater. (Shades of backwater or Blackwater Group??) David is a screenwriter and Amy is an actress. David is writing a book on the 1943 battle of Stalingrad.

Like its 1971 predecessor, Rod Lurie's remake poses some questions.
What does it mean to be a man? Can you change a tire? Re-roof a house?  Break down and clean a firearm? Overhaul a transmission? Do you even know the proper color of your car's transmission fluid?  Put up a fence? Kill an animal? Stand up for yourself? Fix your refrigerator coils? Physically intimidate other men? Enjoy or perform physically violent sports? Speak directly and with bass/baritone in your voice? Bench press multiples of your body weight? Are you a good partner for your wife/girlfriend/friend with benefits? Can she rely on you for protection?


David can't do any of these things. This almost immediately invites the contempt of the town's workers, including his wife's ex-boyfriend. This being the South though their contempt is initially expressed under a thin veneer of excessive politeness, deference and blink-and-you'll-miss-it-sarcasm. When David tells Charlie that Charlie and his crew are taking too long to re-roof the barn, Charlie replies with seeming actual kindness and curiosity "How long, in your experience, should it take to re-roof a barn, sir?".
The story is roughly faithful to the 1971 version discussed here with a few changes.

As I suspected, the portions of Peckinpah film which so troubled some viewers, especially feminists, have been toned down or removed altogether. Amy is still provocative in her dress (going braless for a lengthy run and later deliberately flashing the workers) but this is explicitly tied up with some sort of grrlpower activism. The infamous rape scene still occurs but it is clearly depicted as rape-there is NO enjoyment or ambiguity expressed. It can not possibly be thought of as crude seduction. When the couple is besieged David does not slap his hysterical wife and tell her to do as she's told. These changes probably make the film a bit more palatable to modern filmgoers but they do rob the movie of the shock value and intensity that the original had. Lurie said “I think you will see that one of the reasons for remaking was to turn it into a feminist film.” He may have succeeded in that goal but it wasn't needed. The film is thus deliberately neutered. 

Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) is more of an eye candy object than Amy is in this film. In addition, the remake removes the slight tension between Amy and David. We never get the feeling that she thinks she settled, which was rather important to the events. There isn't a real hint of Amy's revolt against David's prissiness and peculiarities. 


In the original David was more or less clueless to the cultural norms of the small English village he was visiting. In this film he is still clueless but is willing to at least try to adapt. This makes him a more sympathetic protagonist while more openly painting his tormentors as stereotypical good old boy bullies. 

The movie's irony is that both David and Charlie react to what they think each other's stereotypes are and then in seeming self-defense, become those stereotypes. Under different circumstances the self-described "rednecks" might actually have been interested in the minutiae of World War Two battles while David could have learned to enjoy high calorie down home chili and the rhythmic cadence of a Southern preacher. Marsden is not as slight or nebbishy as Hoffman so the ending violence lacks the original's surprise. 


Word to the wise: the best time to handle problems is when they start. If a strange man who you later find out is your wife's ex walks up to her, ignores you and calls her by an obviously sexual diminutive while trying to play with her hair, you might as well shoot him right then and there. Start as you mean to finish I always say. Save yourself some time and hassle. If this film's story interests you, just see the original instead. James Woods and Dominic Purcell also have roles.
TRAILER


Fright Night (2011)

Another remake, this movie tells the story of a vampire living (and feasting) in suburbia.
Like Straw Dogs this version makes some important changes to the storyline but unlike Straw Dogs these changes actually work. I wouldn't say it was better than the original just different. Financially however, this film was pretty much a flop. 


The primary difference is that the hero Charley Brewster, (Anton Yelchin) a former geek who is transforming into one of the cool kids, discovers VERY early on that his next door neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. The film's most impressive scene has Charley realize this fact when Jerry -who is unable to enter a home without invitation-does his best to manipulate Charley into inviting him in. The slight Farrell does a bang up job of conveying menace and increasing frustration while Yelchin shows growing panic that there is a monster on the other side of the doorstep. This movie also precisely captures the sad emptiness of some of these semi-rural suburban subdivisions. 

Unfortunately I guess when you show all the goods early there's no excitement left.  This film had no tease. Perhaps it's because modern viewers have such short attention spans?

The film has some great special effects but there just wasn't enough fright or humor to have made this worthwhile for a theater viewing. It may find a second life on VOD and DVD. Who knows.

The vampire hunter Peter Vincent (David Tennant) is reimagined as a somewhat fey Las Vegas magician. Toni Collette, Sandra Vergara,  and Imogen Poots also star. Chris Sarandon (the vampire in the original version) has a cameo.

TRAILER


Brotherhood of the Wolf

For fans of the fine feminine form of Monica Bellucci this French film is worth watching for her alone. For everyone else this isn't a bad little adventure/drama/mystery/period flick that is chock full of court intrigues, duels, forbidden romance, sexual perversion, murders, supernatural(?) events and martial arts-18th century style.


This kitchen sink approach would normally make a movie feel ridiculous but I think it worked for this film. The cinematography of the film is quite close to Blade 2 or even The Matrix, with similar action sequences and lighting. The film has lots of blue or dark scenes occasionally transposed with lighter more upbeat ones. This film won a host of awards and was financially successful in the US as well, no small feat for a subtitled movie with a running length of over 2 hours. The film hit the sweet spot of being able to appeal to both men and women, drama fans and action fans, conspiracy theorists and romance junkies, film snobs and people that just want to escape reality for a while. And the costumes weren't bad either. The film is based on (really more extrapolated from) real events.


The opening story is that a French knight , Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and his Iroquois partner Mani (Mark Dacascos) return to France from North America in order to hunt and kill a strange beast that is terrorizing the countryside. They also intend to enjoy the favors of the sort of women that aren't found in North America. Fronsac in particular is something of a player and almost immediately takes up with the mysterious Italian prostitute Sylvia (Monica Bellucci) while simultaneously romancing a local young noblewoman Marianne (Emile Dequenne). Mani knows kung-fu and is something of a a$$-kicker. Like the Starks in A Game of Thrones, Mani has a wolf as his totem animal and is virtually psychically linked with wolves. And he doesn't think the beast doing the killing is a wolf.

This beast seems to primarily attack and kill young girls. Fronsac and Mani find this strange to say the least. Additionally the footprints and bite marks of the beast are much larger and more powerful than any wolf. Some witnesses have sworn the beast was controlled by an evil wizard. The killings have become so common that people are attempting to use them as a religious symbol that God has withdrawn his favor from the French king. So the pressure is on Fronsac and Mani to solve this case FAST. They are overseen and occasionally mocked by the one armed Jean-Francois (Mr. Monica Bellucci aka Vincent Cassel), Marianne's brother, who seems to know more about the beast's behavior than he should. And the plot thickens from there. I don't want to say more because that would involve spoilers. I'll just say that this was a very satisfying film. Check it out.
TRAILER


Final Destination 5

This sequel closes the loop and does so in some pretty ingenious ways. If you've never seen any of the Final Destination movies I won't say you've missed a whole lot. It's basically an upscale Faces of Death. The storyline is always the same. One member of a group of attractive well scrubbed ethnically diverse youths has a premonition of impending death, freaks out and convinces some of his/her friends to get off the plane/bus/train/rollercoaster/ship or whatever they are on. The friends do so reluctantly, primarily so they can complain to each other about what a loser their freakout friend is. After the small group has left the area then the exact catastrophe which the psychic friend foresaw occurs.


The person comes to the attention of the local authorities or more usually the FBI, who can't believe the person didn't cause the tragedy somehow. Soon after the brush with death though, the survivors all start to perish in seemingly random and quite improbable ways. The local coroner (Tony Todd) who may or may not be an avatar of Death, shows up to warn the psychic that Death won't be mocked and the group's only hope of survival is to somehow break the pattern.


The real appeal of these movies is to detail all the numerous ways in which death can strike us all at anytime. Food that goes down the wrong way causes choking and asphyxiation instead of a cough. You slip and fall the wrong way on a wet bathroom floor and hit your head. Everything that can go wrong with a LASIK treatment does. The guy sitting next to you at a baseball game doesn't catch the foul ball but you do-right in the face. This may or not be your cup of tea but FD5 is consistent and is exactly like the previous four movies. See one, you've seen them all.
TRAILER

Book Reviews- Night Watch, Salem's Lot and more

Night Watch
by Sergei Lukyankenko

There are of course just tons of books about the battle between Good and Evil. You might say in some respects that's a central human feature. What makes an act good or evil? Is there any real difference? Who has enough foresight to tell? Is it all a question of point of view or does actual good and evil exist independent of our actions? After all if cattle could talk they would no doubt say, with some justification that human beings are pure evil and nothing but that. These questions and  many more are explored in Night Watch, an entertaining opening to a fantastic fiction tetralogy by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko.


Night Watch is thematically somewhat similar to Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series but Night Watch is quite firmly written for adults. There is a subset of superhumans who have always existed alongside humanity. These people call themselves Others and are the source for all of the myths about angels, demons, and other supernatural creatures. Others may not initially be aware of their powers but by natural events or training usually become familiar with them before adulthood in most cases. Others are divided into good (Light) and evil (Dark) and have roughly equivalent powers.


Thousands of years ago the Light Others and Dark Others gathered for a final cataclysmic battle to decide the fate of the world. However each leader realized that the two sides were too evenly matched and to fight it out would destroy the world. A truce was reached and a treaty signed. This allowed each side minor licenses to behave according to their nature-for example a Light Other Magician could heal people but then a Dark Other vampire could get a free hand in attacking someone. Each side created police forces to monitor the other side for treaty violations or unauthorized magic. The Light Others created the Night Watch while the Dark Others created the Day Watch.

The book opens in Moscow with the cynical Light Other, Anton Gorodetsky, being taken from his mundane desk job and thrust into field work-something he claims to be no good at but soon develops surprising aptitude for. Anton's first assignment involves a normal seeming human boy who can nonetheless enter levels of reality that should only be accessible to Others as well as trying to find out who cursed a beautiful young woman and if that curse is powerful enough to destroy all Moscow. 


Anton is cynical because his ultimate boss, Gesar (head of the Night Watch) never tells anyone the whole story and will not hesitate to manipulate or sacrifice his troops if that is what some unknown objective requires. Anton's cynicism deepens when he learns that some of the good he does rebounds to the Dark's benefit. And Anton nearly loses it when he discovers that some of the 20th century's worst regimes, wars and genocides were actually started or helped along by the Light, which was ineptly attempting to bring about heaven on earth. The Dark is always growing stronger, thanks in part to the nature of humanity. Anton and his fellow Night Watch agents are always struggling not to break the Great Truce or just take control of people and MAKE them do right-which is of course exactly the sort of thing that Dark Others do. Night Watch is an interesting read which places some deftly hidden philosophical musings inside of urban fantasy.


Salem's Lot
by Stephen King

This was the second Stephen King book I ever read and probably hooked me for good on his prose style. King has an uncanny skill to depict realistic characters, get inside their heads to let you know what they're thinking and make them react in very honest ways to some fantastic situations. In some respects this is a resetting of the Dracula story in 1970's America but it's not just about supernatural evil.


It's also about all the everyday evils that occur day in towns large and small across America whether they are acted upon or not: greed, spousal abuse, adultery, bullying, child rape and abuse, bigotry and closed mindedness, lust, poverty,  substance abuse and murder. These things all have more impact on us than a singular Evil. In one of the book's ironies, before the true nature of the supernatural evil visiting the town has before apparent, a Catholic priest, Father Callahan bitterly resents the newfangled Church , which is concerned with feminism and civil rights and anti-war issues. He wants to confront Evil with a capital "E". Later, he gets his chance but the results are not quite to his liking.


If you haven't read this book, well you should. And if you have already, heck it's worth a read again.The book is divided up into four sections:

a) the introductions of the main characters and a sketching of the past evil that afflicted the town and may have attracted Barlow; 

b) the unsettling arrival of Straker, who is a sort of John The Baptist to his vampire master Barlow, in that he prepares the town for Barlow's coming;  

c) The arrival of Barlow and the growing number of dead  or turned citizens even as most people can't believe what's going on; 

d) The rejection of subterfuge as Barlow openly declares himself and battle is joined.  

The vampire here, Barlow, is not one of the modern pansexual pretty boy vamps that flitter and flutter in and out of Twilight or True Blood. Barlow is made of much meaner, uglier and forceful stuff. He's not looking for his lost love nor he is going to fall in love. He does not simper. He's an undead killing machine who enjoys doing what he does-pure monster. It's a shame that the modern version of the vampire myth has swung so far away from its core-a dead thing that drinks blood-but thankfully that's the trope that King used here.


Again, King created a very wide array of characters who all deal with this threat in different ways. Some deny; some leave town, some hide, and a very few decide to fight back. This book was a very worthwhile addition to the modern vampire mythos. Salem's Lot is one of the scariest vampire books ever written and if you have an overactive imagination it's probably not something you should read at dusk or at darkest midnight.


Frenzy
by Rex Miller

The late Rex Miller was certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Although he was associated with the splatterpunk genre, that description was too limiting. His writing as he freely admitted, came from some painful places, some of which he didn't care to describe in depth. As he wrote in a Dark Muse piece, "..evil exists. [It] needs to be cut out of the herd and incarcerated."


Frenzy is a short novel that is a battle of wits between two Midwestern men, Jack Eichord, a detective who specializes in taking down serial killers and Frank Spain, a mild mannered St. Louis based man who also happens to be the country's best hit man. Spain is primarily associated with the Midwest Organized Crime Families (St. Louis, Kansas City, and ultimately Chicago). Spain takes no pleasure in his job. It is just something that he does. Spain does not let his wife know of his business which unfortunately turns out to be a mistake and later a tragedy for Spain.


His wife Pat, is tired of Frank's constant absences and infrequent amorous attention. She comes to believe he's a wimp so she cheats on him with their insurance salesman. He catches her but does not kill her as he still loves her and Frank only kills on business. Pat leaves and takes their teen daughter Tiffany with her. Under her mother's less than attentive care, Tiffany falls in with a fast crowd. On a visit from Tiffany , Frank tries to correct this but overreacts. Tiffany runs away with her no-good boyfriend who turns her out into prostitution and later much worse activities. Ultimately she's murdered. Frank is devastated. 


However Frank is beyond enraged when he discovers that the people who murdered his daughter ultimately worked for the same Mafia group HE did. As far as Frank is concerned they're ALL responsible and they're ALL going to pay. The Mafia's number one murder machine goes off the reservation, leaves sanity behind and comes to the attention of Eichord, who doesn't understand at first that this is an intensely personal killing spree that he's trying to stop.
This book was short (300 pages) and to the point.


332nd Fighter Group-Tuskegee Airmen
by Chris Bucholtz

Something that many black professionals hear starting out is that you have to be better than your white counterparts in order to get the same level of recognition. This is real. And although Herman Cain's aborted farcical Presidential campaign shows the custom may be subsiding somewhat this requirement was almost literally law in the 1940's. 


The fact that the men of the 332nd Fighter Group rose to this unfair and harmful rule was impressive. That they did so while literally fighting for their lives was actually amazing. The Tuskegee Airmen experiment was actually designed to fail. Many people wanted to show that blacks lacked the ability to lead, the intelligence to process vast amounts of information quickly, and above all the guts to tangle with the enemy.


The 332nd Fighter Group-an all Black group proved all of their doubters wrong and actually made a reputation for themselves as an elite fighting group. They were able to boast of over 111 confirmed aerial kills, the sinking of a German destroyer and most importantly of never having lost any bomber they escorted to enemy attack (though this last has recently been questioned by some revisionist historians).

This was an enjoyable book to read and showed a side of World War 2 that is virtually always left out of history books and movies-the dashing, devil may care, cigar chomping, flight scarf bedecked fighter pilot-who is black. This book makes liberal use of primary and secondary interviews with Tuskegee Airmen as well as tons of photos and information from the National Museum of the United States Air Force.  One reason for the success of the 332nd Fighter Group, besides the intense desire of the men involved to prove their detractors wrong,  was the command presence of the group's leader, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis (pictured here) who made it crystal clear to his men that their primary mission was to protect the bombers no matter what. 

Obama's Indefinite Detention Bill

President Obama is poised to sign a bill (The National Defense Authorization Act-NDAA) which really honestly leaves me almost unable to write because I'm so angry. To put it mildly this is a very bad bill.
It codifies and regularizes indefinite detention of American citizens without trial within the United States of America. Yes that's right. Theoretically you could be minding your own business, running your blog, sending naughty IM's to your SO, chatting with various people across the blog-o-sphere and suddenly jackbooted black helmeted thugs could break down your door, tase you and seize your pc and other private effects and documents, blind you, gag you and prevent you from hearing anything and leisurely drag you off to the local military base (or as far as I know private detention center) where military or national security personnel could keep you imprisoned for as long as they like.

Lawyers? Warrants? Habeas corpus? Bump all that!!!! Of course I'm sure that they wouldn't like torture you or threaten to torture your loved ones because that would be illegal. And with the effective right to a speedy trial guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment , your rights to due process and protection against self-incrimination guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment and especially your protection against warrantless arrest and search guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment you can certainly tell the large humorless men with guns and nightsticks that as they have NO right to hold you you're walking out of there. Yes.


Of course before they start the waterboarding they will probably inform you that under the NDAA the country just collectively squatted and relieved itself over the Bill of Rights. The military, law enforcement and national security personnel don't need to worry about such quaint details anymore. And if THEY don't YOU certainly don't.


It is ironic that people from across the political spectrum from left-wing black nationalists to white racist paleocons to right leaning libertarians to classical liberals to radical socialists can all see the dangers in this bill, soon to become law. Unfortunately the larger American citizenry doesn't see the danger because otherwise something like this would never have been passed in the first place. Certainly the bipartisan Beltway elite don't care because as they well know this bill is not aimed at THEM. It's aimed at YOU.

Laws like this are usually passed because politicians claim to want to keep us safe. The problem is there is no such thing as complete safety. And by trying to reach it you inevitably attack freedom. We all know the Benjamin Franklin quote.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

But it's worse than that. It's not just well-intentioned people making mistakes out of fear. President Obama may or may not possess the discipline and wisdom to use "responsibly" the powers granted in this new bill. But what about future Presidents? Based on his statements about arresting judges who rule in ways that he finds faulty do you think a President Gingrich could be trusted not to indefinitely detain a few "pointy headed liberals" he doesn't care for? Would a future President Chris Christie find it amusing to indefinitely detain national union leaders who wouldn't sign on to his Social Security plan?  Would a future feminist President order a dismantling of the men's rights movement? Heck, were I President, could I be trusted not to immediately detain Gloria Allred?

Seriously the point is that NO ONE should have to ask those kinds of questions. The entire point of this republic is that no one (wo)man should have that power. Power is supposed to be limited and split among the three branches of government-with the balance held by the people. When one branch of government (or one person) has that kind of power the temptation to use it against political enemies is overwhelming. The act of doing so becomes inevitable. It's not just cheap hyperbole to say that this is the twilight of the republic. On this issue it doesn't matter whether it's Bush or Obama. They are both horrible on civil liberties. Frankly, Obama is sliding into "worse" territory.


There is an excellent analysis of this bill's dangers by legal scholar Glenn Greenwald here. I implore you all to go read it in full as he has the legal knowledge which I lack to put all this into depressing perspective. Some highlights

• The NDAA codifies into law indefinite detention
• The NDAA does not exclude American citizens
• The NDAA permanently expands the scope of the War on Terror.

What’s particularly ironic (and revealing) about all of this is that former White House counsel Greg Craig assured The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer back in February, 2009 that it’s “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” Four months later, President Obama proposed exactly such a law — one that The New York Times described as “a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free” — and now he will sign such a scheme into law.

So far I've only seen one national political figure who has the stones to speak out against this new bill. You may not like him for other reasons but on this issue he's dead on target.

Ron Paul speaks out.

h/t Jonathan Turley

QUESTIONS
1) Do you think President Obama will sign this bill? If so why?
2) Are civil liberties a concern for you personally? Why or why not?
3) Do you think American citizens should be immune from military detention without trial?