How Your Pet Sees The World

How Your Pet Sees The World

Movie Reviews: Gringo, Fourteen Hours

Gringo
directed by Nash Edgerton
Uneven film with plenty of stereotypes. It has its moments but the cast was better than the writing.

I expected a little more from this film based on the cast. Most of the top listed cast actors/actresses have been a lead actor or actress in other successful films. So I knew they could act. I can't remember the exact quote which came to mind after I watched this movie. It could be apocryphal but I believe it was football star turned black action movie star Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, who in response to sixties and seventies Hollywood racial stereotypes insisted that if he were going to star in a film at least one of and preferably all of three things would have to happen. (1) He survives until the end (2) He wins the fights (3) He gets the girl. All of things are still uncommon for unambiguously Black male actors in large budget mainstream American films. Those plot points are the obvious indication that the lead actor is the hero, someone with whom the viewer should identify.

I'm not sure Gringo would satisfy all of Williamson's criteria. This is a very uneven sardonic black comedy showcasing people with few redeeming qualities. Maybe the better way to look at this film isn't necessarily through a lens of heroism but of confusion. Why, if there is a perfect, all knowing and all powerful God is there evil in the world? Worse, why does it seem that many people who have the moral impulses of a hungry shark do well in the world while moral people suffer. People have asked these questions for years and do so explicitly in this film. Ultimately it comes down to your religious and moral beliefs. Harold (David Oyelowo) is a devout Christian Nigerian immigrant to America. Harold wears his optimism and faith on his sleeve, something that makes people-particularly his bosses- think that he's not really that bright. 

Supreme Court Decision : Ohio Voting Rolls

If you live in Ohio, skip a few elections, and don't respond to state inquiries, you will be purged from the voting rolls. And the Supreme Court agreed that there's no problem with this.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls. The court ruled that a state may kick people off the rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state election officials. The vote was 5 to 4, with the more conservative justices in the majority. The case concerned Larry Harmon, a software engineer and Navy veteran who lives near Akron, Ohio. He voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but did not vote in 2012, saying he was unimpressed by the candidates. He also sat out the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. 

But in 2015, Mr. Harmon did want to vote against a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and found that his name had been stricken from the voting rolls. Ohio is the only state that commences such a process based on the failure to vote in a single federal election cycle,” said a brief from the League of Women Voters and the Brennan Center for Justice. “Literally every other state uses a different, and more voter-protective, practice.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled in favor of Mr. Harmon in 2016, saying that Ohio had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by using the failure to vote as a “trigger” for sending the notices.

A Reuters study in 2016 found that at least 144,000 people were removed from the voting rolls in recent years in Ohio’s three largest counties, which are home to Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus.

Movie Reviews: Feral

Feral
directed by Mark Young
unimaginative and boring even for the genre

How many times do we see people traipse off into the wilderness, discover they have no way of communicating with the outside world, encounter a challenge that will leave some of them dead, do stuff that's incredibly stupid, and reveal hidden capacities for leadership or endurance that will keep a few of them alive to tell the tale. Well pretty often. It's a big part of the Hero's Journey. This motif pops up not just in horror stories but in a great many other tales. It's part of human (mostly male) stories. So the problem with this movie wasn't that it used a common theme. The problem wasn't that it attempted to gender switch everything. The problem wasn't even that it was cheaply made with limited sets. No. All of those things are common in the horror genre. The problem was that the writing and characterization and yes even some of the acting was bad. I mean really bad. I mean this is akin to elementary school plays that you only attend because someone related to you is acting in them and your cousin, in-law, or sibling will be hurt if you don't show up.

There are ways to humorously and succinctly reveal that someone has hidden capabilities without ruining the storyline. In the Beverly Hills Cops movies the baby faced younger cop is shown to be a very well armed and eager gun nut, something which causes his partners some unease and promises of "We're gonna have to talk later". In The 13th Warrior, when the Vikings ask their Arab companion where he (suddenly) learned their language, he replies contemptuously "I listened!". And so on. I 'm sure you can think of more cinematic or literary examples. But in this movie it's a bit much to swallow that certain characters suddenly have skill sets more commonly found among Army Rangers or Navy SEALs or that they got them from Girl Scouts. YMMV.

Miguel Cabrera and Child Support

You ought to marry the person who will help you promote your genes into the next generation. But many people aren't invested in the concept of "Until death do us part" or even marriage itself as a precursor to having children. Lust and love affect your judgment. What do you owe your children? Society has laws to ensure that non-custodial parents can't duck their financial responsibilities to their children who live with the custodial parent. Theoretically, this is good. But the devil is in the details. If a man is wealthy does it automatically follow that his children must live extravagantly? I would say no. I have known relatively impoverished people who spent every dime they could beg, borrow, or steal so their children could live high on the hog. I have also known millionaires who live frugally and send their children to public schools. These are parental decisions. But when the parents are not married, disagree with one another, and/or live apart, such decisions become public.

Belkis Rodriguez is the ex-mistress of Detroit Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera. She has two children by Cabrera. Both Belkis and Cabrera were married to other people when they started their relationship. Cabrera has been paying Belkis between $12,000 and $15,000 per month in child support not including other payments. Cabrera was paying more in child support than the judge had ordered. Well no good deed goes unpunished. Belkis is suing Cabrera for $100,000/month in child support.

Miguel Cabrera has a delicate balancing act on his hands: He's trying to appease one woman while pleasing another. One is his wife and high school sweetheart; the other an ex-mistress. Caught in the cross hairs are five innocent children — three from his marriage, two from the affair. For the $30-million-a-year baseball superstar embroiled in a legal fiasco that has so far been about money, a bigger perhaps more important issue remains: Can he be a good father to all five children, and does the law require that?

Book Reviews: The Outsider

The Outsider
by Stephen King

King's most recent book shares a title with Camus' famous 1942 existentialist novel and makes a slight head fake at some of the ideas bandied about in that book. But this is King, not Camus, so you already know that things such as the human element, the desire to express and receive love, and pity for those lacking such connections will eventually show up. And they do. I have the opportunity to read as often as I used to do but I can't think of too many horror novelists or  even popular novelists who can so quickly and seamlessly build true life characters as King. There have been King plots I didn't care for and occasionally some settings or themes I wasn't crazy about. But his characters have always leapt off the page, at least for me. And this book was no different.

Here, King moved the setting from his beloved Maine to set the action in small town Oklahoma and Texas. YMMV on this. King did the research. None of the characters employ Maine drawls or aphorisms. On the other hand, although the book is set in the present day, some of the adult characters, mostly in their thirties, forties or fifties, have memories of key events in their lives that would really be more in line with key events of the life of a seventy year old writer from Maine. A 45 year old in 2018 probably won't remember where they were or what they were doing when John Lennon was assassinated. You will notice this occasional dissonance.

Something which I would prefer not to believe but which physics shows to be true is that matter, in the form of electrons, can be in two separate places at the same time. Even more weirdly, observing one electron can impact the behavior of its "twin", at a distance. Apparently this only happens at measurements that are far too small for humans to perceive. In our reality I can't be simultaneously at home writing this blog post and also doing the same thing at work. 

Book Reviews: Rising Sun

Rising Sun
by Robert Conroy

I hadn't read any books by this late writer of alternate history for a long time. I had this one on the list of books to read for a while so I decided to give it a shot. The prose is very short, punchy, and for lack of a better descriptor, male. This is something Mickey Spillane would have felt at ease reading and possibly even writing. There are no flowery long examinations of how someone felt or what did someone really mean when they said so-and-so. Conroy doesn't provide a lot of examination or deconstruction of character motivations. Character doesn't drive this book. Plot does.

Although the US victory at 1942 Battle of Midway was in hindsight a forgone conclusion given that the US had cracked the Japanese naval communications code and had a pretty good idea of where and when the Japanese hammer would fall, allowing the Americans to prepare countermeasures and ambushes, in real life the Americans also benefited from luck. The Japanese commanders, unaware of the true American strength and torn between searching for more American ships and launching attacks on American ground bases, were atypically indecisive. Repeated contradictory orders about whether to load aircraft with bombs (ground attack) or torpedoes (ship attack) left the Japanese carrier task force with carrier decks crowded with armed and fueled planes, while the small number of fighter planes were chasing off American torpedo bombers at sea level. 

The Japanese fleet was therefore a sitting duck for bombing attacks launched from American carriers the Japanese hadn't even known were in the area. Four Japanese carriers were sunk. Over 3000 Japanese sailors or soldiers were killed. The Japanese lost the strategic offensive against the Americans.