We're almost a full week into the Trump Presidency and so far, it's looking like it's going to be as bad as most expected. Some of it was funny, like how Trump used an image from Obama's inauguration to make his Twitter profile look more impressive, or how he even stole the fucking cake design, because, if you're going to be petty and unoriginal, might as well fully commit to it. The best part, though, was sending his press secretary out to lie about everything as if the whole, sad spectacle wasn't recorded for posterity on every news network and social media platform available. Sadly, these are but unimportant distractions, and Trump is doing actual work to ruin pretty much anything he can get his baby hands on.
For starters, Congress is making serious in-roads at repealing the ACA. Now, the ACA was always one of those things the Obama administration did that I didn't particularity care for but, when considering the alternative, was better than nothing. The CBO estimated that if the repeal goes through, 32 million people will lose their insurance over ten years, with 18 million losing it in the first year alone. Naturally, Republicans started whinging that the estimate didn't include all the people who would be covered by their totally awesome, super-duper replacement. Thing is though, the CBO can't really take into account a policy that doesn't actually exist. It's weird that a party that has spent almost seven years lambasting something doesn't have something in the wings to replace said policy, but, there you go. The only real alternative that the Republicans have ever put out there is allowing insurance companies to sell their products across state lines.
The idea is that the increased competition will drive prices lower, but for that to work, you would need companies to actually show up and ply their trade. So far, Maine, Georgia, and Wyoming are the only states who allow out-of-state companies to sell insurance to their residents. Problem is, literally no one has showed up to take advantage of this. Low population densities and the cost of establishing a network were the main reasons Maine and Wyoming health officials gave for the failure of the policy to take off, and there's no reason to believe that those same problems will play out across the country. Granted, it must be hard for Republicans to come up with a "free-market" alternative to the ACA given that the ACA, when it was conceived by the Heritage Foundation, is the free-market alternative.
The whole system of state level exchanges was created to push the companies best situated to provide insurance coverage against each other and the individual mandate was created to make sure enough healthy people where forced into the system as a counterweight to all the sick people the insurance companies would suddenly be required to cover. But as we've seen, this still leaves a lot of holes to fall through and an almost hilarious inconsistency in the level of coverage provided. Universal coverage just isn't something private insurers have any actual means or incentive to provide and maybe, after all those millions of people lose their coverage and the ones who still have coverage get reminded that gigantic premium hikes weren't an Obamacare invention (and they were actually bigger), maybe, finally, there will enough of an outcry for us to get a universal-health program like the rest of the world and we can finally done with this bullshit.
Up next is that idiot fucking wall. Trump signed an executive order to began construction on it, but there's still that pesky "making Mexico pay for it" thing to deal with. Today, Trump proposed a 20% tariff on all Mexican imports to pay for the thing, but, how well that is going to work is, shall we say, controversial. Mexico is our third-largest trading partner, and any tariff imposed on their goods is guaranteed to be matched by Enrique Pena Nieto's government to counter-act it. There's also the issue of assuming that Mexico will maintain it's current level of trade with us with the full knowledge that said trade is financing something that's supposed to be a direct punishment to its citizens. If trade where to suddenly drop off, then, well, Trump would have to find another way to finance his little vanity project. There's also the issue of getting such a tariff passed in the first place; I seriously doubt that a free-trade loving Republican Congress will rush into a trade war, but if they don't, there are legal ways for Trump to impose the tariff directly. How well that will go over though, is, again, seriously in question.
I admit, it's depressing to see a party who used to tout the fall of the Berlin Wall-that international symbol of fear and oppression- as one of its main political accomplishments be reduced to such a fearful and pathetic state that they are basically clamoring for their own version on a grander scale. Then again, given the rash of proposed bills in Republican state houses that effectively criminalize mass protests Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and the Women's March all make use of, maybe the Republican Party realized that maybe all those Communist dictators they used to lambaste where really on to something when they made any mass expression of dissent a crime. Who really cares about Freedom of Speech or Assembly if all people use it for is to show how much they hate you?
Thee's been a steady, global trend of fascism in right wing parties around the world, and the Republican Party is showing that it isn't immune to this. So the real question becomes, what are the Democrats going to do about it? The Democratic Party is in a really, really bad way. Under the Obama administration, the Party lost almost every State legislature and Governor's house in the country, so their ability to make changes on a state level against any Trump's agenda is basically null. It'll be two years until they can even hope to take a majority in either house of Congress, so they won't be of much good on a Federal level, either. So, now would be a really good time to re-evaluate how they do things.
My suggestion is that they become a Party that actually does something for people again. For decades, the Democratic platform has been "We aren't as bad as Republicans." Sure, whispering sweet nothings into people's ears while you fuck them over is considerate on some level, it isn't actually all that helpful. And, honestly, if you run a candidate who's only real claim to the Presidency is "She's not as bad as Trump" and that candidate loses, that whole strategy has proven itself worthless. Because, really, if it can't beat him, what good is it?
If Democrats ever want to regain their prestige, they have to champion things that give tangible, concrete benefits to their citizens. things like universal healthcare, union jobs, a better public education system including tuition-free college and trade schools, all of these things will build better lives for anyone living under them. Democrats will not survive if they continue to be the party of social tolerance and elite financial interests, the unavoidable compromises of that position are what drove so many people into the arms of third-party candidates in the first place and if Democrats keep doing what they've been doing, that trend will only increase. The worst part of it all, though, is that those seemingly radical proposals are stupidly popular, so if Democrats actually found the integrity to run on a platform based of those policies, they'd have no problem winning back the country. But, those campaign checks cash really well, and they do have lots of zeroes, so, you know, maybe all they need to do is keep calling Republicans racists and rude, right? Right?
So that's where we are, a country lead by increasingly tyrannical conservatives with a petulant child as their leader, and an opposition so hampered by their own contradictions they can't actually muster a valid alternative. It's nice to be great again.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Rogue One Review
The final hour is one of the best hours in any Star Wars movie, period. But it takes a really long and meandering time to get there. Full review and spoilers below the cut
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Russians and Putin and Bears, Oh My.
It's a story that practically writes itself: A blundering idiot of a candidate calls out for a foreign government to hack his rival's email and splash it across the media landscape. There are emails of substance, others less so, suddenly leaked, damaging the rival's campaign. Rival loses, idiot becomes President.
On the surface, it's not hard to accept the story on face value. Trump's second campaign manager was a lobbyist for the Russian government in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State pick is an oil executive who has cried many a public tear over the sanctions imposed on the Russians in the wake of their seizure of Crimea and their on-going backing of the Ukrainian rebels. Trump himself has yet to find an unkind word to say about Putin or his government, so all-in-all, things are looking pretty good for Russia in the wake of the elections. This is the strongest and only proof needed apparently that Putin twiddled with our sacred democratic process.
But I've never really bought the liberal narrative that Russia played a direct and malignant role in the 2016 election. The story has struck me from the very beginning as a way for Democrats to blame their massive political failure on literally anything other than their own terrible decisions over the last 25 years or so. Hillary couldn't have lost because she was the worst possible candidate to run in a populist political era, obviously. It also couldn't have been the fact that she was widely and deeply hated by the people she needed to win and did nothing at all to win them over. Nope, can't be that. And it most certainly isn't because the Clintons have spear-headed the Democratic Party's strategy of feeding their old middle-class base to rich in return for political power which embittered said base against her and left for the first person to actually acknowledge that they'd been fucked over. Naturally, all these reasons had to be dismissed out of hand, because it's hard to embrace the outlandish when the blatantly obvious keeps getting in the way.
More importantly, no one has ever actually submitted or aired any kind of actual proof that the Russians have done, well, anything. Wikileaks has said from the beginning that the Podesta emails were leaked to them by an internal source, not the product of a Russian hack. Considering that Wikileaks has always run on whistle-blower leaks, I don't see a reason to doubt it. And there's also the small matter of, you know, anyone anywhere finding any evidence to the contrary. The CIA's big report "confirming" Russian involvement has been all over the news lately, but, again, literally none of the stories mention specifically how the Russians tipped the scales and since the report is classified, we can't even see the evidence the CIA is basing their conclusion on. Not to denigrate a national institution or anything, but the CIA has a solid history lying about, well, everything, so I wouldn't exactly count them as a trustworthy source.
Say it's true, though. The report is accurate and the CIA has known about Russia's play for months. Well, now you have to deal with the question "Why didn't anyone do anything?" Harry Reid is blaming James Comey, because why not. Reid alleges that Comey sat on evidence that proves everything for... reasons. Well, fine, let's say that's true, too, that the head of the nation's largest law enforcement agency is deliberately allowing a foreign power to directly manipulate the government he works for for no apparent reason. Sure, okay. This kicks us up to the final level, and the thing pretty much everyone's been avoiding, why didn't Barack Obama say something? One assumes the intelligence community would've briefed their boss about Putin fucking with who would be his successor; and yet, Obama didn't do much of anything to counter or even mention this supposed incursion against his political ally. I'd call that an odd move.
The only way to explain why people kept their mouths shut and nothing was revealed until now is to weave so many layers of conspiracy on top of each other that you may as well start listening to Alex Jones as a "how-to" series.
Honestly, though, even if my skepticism is proven wrong, even if there's actual concrete evidence out there that indisputably proves Putin played in active role in getting his fellow cunt supreme elected, I can't really find the energy to be outraged. Nothing Russia is being accused of is any different from all the times that we have interfered with, manipulated, or flat-out disregarded democratic elections to make them suit our favor. Why should we be immune from that? What makes us so fucking special that we should always be the ones breaking the world but never face any consequences for doing so?
The worst aspect of this whole thing, for me, is that Democrats will become so wrapped up in making this Russia thing The Real Story of this election and blustering about how anyone who doesn't believe them is just an idiot or a fool or blah blah blah. This will inevitably prevent them from changing anything and instead of getting their shit together to nominate someone worth voting for, they'll throw out another Clintonite candidate which saddles us with a full eight-fucking-year Trump Presidency. Just once I'd like the Democratic Party to figure out that to get people to vote for you, you actually have to give them a platform worth believing in. That really shouldn't be so much to ask for, should it?
On the surface, it's not hard to accept the story on face value. Trump's second campaign manager was a lobbyist for the Russian government in Ukraine, and his Secretary of State pick is an oil executive who has cried many a public tear over the sanctions imposed on the Russians in the wake of their seizure of Crimea and their on-going backing of the Ukrainian rebels. Trump himself has yet to find an unkind word to say about Putin or his government, so all-in-all, things are looking pretty good for Russia in the wake of the elections. This is the strongest and only proof needed apparently that Putin twiddled with our sacred democratic process.
But I've never really bought the liberal narrative that Russia played a direct and malignant role in the 2016 election. The story has struck me from the very beginning as a way for Democrats to blame their massive political failure on literally anything other than their own terrible decisions over the last 25 years or so. Hillary couldn't have lost because she was the worst possible candidate to run in a populist political era, obviously. It also couldn't have been the fact that she was widely and deeply hated by the people she needed to win and did nothing at all to win them over. Nope, can't be that. And it most certainly isn't because the Clintons have spear-headed the Democratic Party's strategy of feeding their old middle-class base to rich in return for political power which embittered said base against her and left for the first person to actually acknowledge that they'd been fucked over. Naturally, all these reasons had to be dismissed out of hand, because it's hard to embrace the outlandish when the blatantly obvious keeps getting in the way.
More importantly, no one has ever actually submitted or aired any kind of actual proof that the Russians have done, well, anything. Wikileaks has said from the beginning that the Podesta emails were leaked to them by an internal source, not the product of a Russian hack. Considering that Wikileaks has always run on whistle-blower leaks, I don't see a reason to doubt it. And there's also the small matter of, you know, anyone anywhere finding any evidence to the contrary. The CIA's big report "confirming" Russian involvement has been all over the news lately, but, again, literally none of the stories mention specifically how the Russians tipped the scales and since the report is classified, we can't even see the evidence the CIA is basing their conclusion on. Not to denigrate a national institution or anything, but the CIA has a solid history lying about, well, everything, so I wouldn't exactly count them as a trustworthy source.
Say it's true, though. The report is accurate and the CIA has known about Russia's play for months. Well, now you have to deal with the question "Why didn't anyone do anything?" Harry Reid is blaming James Comey, because why not. Reid alleges that Comey sat on evidence that proves everything for... reasons. Well, fine, let's say that's true, too, that the head of the nation's largest law enforcement agency is deliberately allowing a foreign power to directly manipulate the government he works for for no apparent reason. Sure, okay. This kicks us up to the final level, and the thing pretty much everyone's been avoiding, why didn't Barack Obama say something? One assumes the intelligence community would've briefed their boss about Putin fucking with who would be his successor; and yet, Obama didn't do much of anything to counter or even mention this supposed incursion against his political ally. I'd call that an odd move.
The only way to explain why people kept their mouths shut and nothing was revealed until now is to weave so many layers of conspiracy on top of each other that you may as well start listening to Alex Jones as a "how-to" series.
Honestly, though, even if my skepticism is proven wrong, even if there's actual concrete evidence out there that indisputably proves Putin played in active role in getting his fellow cunt supreme elected, I can't really find the energy to be outraged. Nothing Russia is being accused of is any different from all the times that we have interfered with, manipulated, or flat-out disregarded democratic elections to make them suit our favor. Why should we be immune from that? What makes us so fucking special that we should always be the ones breaking the world but never face any consequences for doing so?
The worst aspect of this whole thing, for me, is that Democrats will become so wrapped up in making this Russia thing The Real Story of this election and blustering about how anyone who doesn't believe them is just an idiot or a fool or blah blah blah. This will inevitably prevent them from changing anything and instead of getting their shit together to nominate someone worth voting for, they'll throw out another Clintonite candidate which saddles us with a full eight-fucking-year Trump Presidency. Just once I'd like the Democratic Party to figure out that to get people to vote for you, you actually have to give them a platform worth believing in. That really shouldn't be so much to ask for, should it?
Friday, December 9, 2016
One Month Down, So Many More to Go
So, we've now had one month of President-Elect Trump and, at this point, I think it's fair to say that his Presidency will be as awful as most of us expected it to be.
Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers. And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick. Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents. It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.
Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks? Me neither.
Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too. I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it. The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.
But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit. Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping. In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it. On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers. Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon. Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.
This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too. Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale. Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all. For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800. For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana. Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road. And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing. Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?
Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here. Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave. And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?
It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears. A con man is nothing without his marks, after all. So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.
Exhibit A is his cabinet picks, which, so far, are one bag of awful after another. His picks for Secretaries of Education, Labor, and the head of the EPA are all people who spent their careers being actively hostile to the mission of the agencies they will now be leading. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire Republican donor who has literally spent decades and millions of dollars trying to destroy public education, Scott Pruitt made his name in the environmental game by repeatedly suing the EPA over its environmental regulations and is a full fledged climate-change denier, his latest pick, Andrew Puzder is the CEO of CKE, the company that owns Carl's Jr., has been repeatedly named in class action lawsuits over failure to pay overtime to restaurant managers. And then there's Steven Mnuchin as the Treasury pick. Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs executive who wanted to pad his Bond-villian resume, so he got into the foreclosure industry where he once foreclose on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents. It almost seems a shame that he doesnt have a mustache to twirl.
Remember how Trump was going to drain the Washington swamp of all the donors and politically connected CEOS that got top cabinet picks? Me neither.
Trump also has taken the opportunity to start flinging his weight around on the foreign policy front, too. I do think controversy over the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is largely overblown, mostly because I don't think there's anything real behind it. The Washington Post reports that the call had been in the works for some time, and initially, I thought the call was another one of those situations where Trump does something while being completely ignorant of its consequences.
But when he named Iowa governor Terry Branstad as the Chinese ambassador, I changed my mind a bit. Branstad has known Chinese President Xi Jinping since 1985, so in that sense, he knows the lay of the land and how to best approach Jinping. In a larger context, I think this another example of Trump talking out of both sides of his mouth and getting away with it. On the one side, he gets the China hardliners nice and stiff by thumbing his nose at a decades long policy specifically designed not to ruffle any Chinese feathers. Then, out the other side, he nominates a man with a deeply established relationship to the same Chinese government he's supposedly dead set on snubbing, so I wouldn't expect any follow through on Trump's blowhard attitudes towards China anytime soon. Remember, Trump is and always has been about the projection, not the actual substance.
This carries over to Trump's main claim to domestic affairs, too. Trump is parading the Carrier plant deal as real, concrete evidence that he can save jobs on a mass scale. Trouble is, dig into the details a bit, and he really didn't save much at all. For one thing, he didn't save 1,100 jobs- that number is closer to 800. For another, Carrier's parent company is still going to fire 1,300 people in Indiana. Oh, also, Carrier is going to invest $16 million to automate the plant in question so it can fire more people down the road. And, as the cherry-on-top, Carrier is going to get a $7 million tax break, courtesy of the good people of Indiana that they're so busy firing. Truly, how have we managed without such an obvious economic genius to guide us?
Again, though, the pomp matters more than the circumstance here. Because even though it's a rather hollow "victory" we're talking about, it's still a sideshow that gives people who have largely been abandoned the top billing they desperately crave. And hey, it's working out for him, polling wise, so why should he change anything?
It's not really Trump's fault that the American people, by and large, only have time to browse news headlines and not get into the gory details which just makes it easier to pull the wool over their eyes until it all ends in tears. A con man is nothing without his marks, after all. So Trump will continue to bask in the glory of his propaganda moves while the world continues to rot behind him and he'll get cheered for it all the through. At least we'll get the schadenfreude of Trumpgrets.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
Hardwired... To Self-Destruct Review
It may have taken eight years, but finally, the world has a new Metallica album again. Hardwired... To Self-Destruct sees the band continue to indulge their thrash heritage that they returned to on Death Magnetic; and while the mixing is, thankfully, less abrasive this time around, Hardwired feels less like an album and more like a really well put together mix-tape.
Starting with the landmark Master of Puppets, each Metallica album, including St. Anger, had a central purpose, a core idea or attitude that the band explored or played around with. Hardwired doesn't achieve that level of cohesion, the album is split into two separate six song sets that don't feel related to or gel together at all, and, also, the theme of addictive self-destructive behavior is a road so well traveled by Metallica that nothing here feels new, exactly. Almost every song on this album sounds like it would be a really strong track three or six from their Ride the Lighting to ...And Justice for All prime in the 80's, but on their own, they have a hard time carrying the weight of an entire album.
That isn't to say the songs are bad. Individually, the songs on the album are the some of the most solid and consistent the band as ever put together; "Atlas, Rise!" is the most Maideny twin guitar harmony song the band has done in a good long while, "Am I Savage?" shows the band learned a lot of lessons about slithery guitar riffs from their much maligned Load and Reload period and continues to put those lessons to good use. The album's closer, "Spit Out The Bone" is an instant classic, it's easily one of the most ferocious songs the band has ever done, that they can still produce something that's as ambitious as the things they did in their prime is testament enough that the band isn't just coasting along or plodding through old glories without the old enthusiasm. It's just that, well... it takes a long time for the album to get to that point, and by then, even a song as awesome as "Spit Out The Bone" can't inject everything that came before it with that same kind of life or energy.
So while I'm disappointed that the album feels less like something made to listen to all the way through and more like "Hey, here's a bunch of songs that will be good for a Spotify playlist," it's still good to have music made by a classic band still pushing and reaching for something new and different, even if they don't quite get there.
Grade: B
Starting with the landmark Master of Puppets, each Metallica album, including St. Anger, had a central purpose, a core idea or attitude that the band explored or played around with. Hardwired doesn't achieve that level of cohesion, the album is split into two separate six song sets that don't feel related to or gel together at all, and, also, the theme of addictive self-destructive behavior is a road so well traveled by Metallica that nothing here feels new, exactly. Almost every song on this album sounds like it would be a really strong track three or six from their Ride the Lighting to ...And Justice for All prime in the 80's, but on their own, they have a hard time carrying the weight of an entire album.
That isn't to say the songs are bad. Individually, the songs on the album are the some of the most solid and consistent the band as ever put together; "Atlas, Rise!" is the most Maideny twin guitar harmony song the band has done in a good long while, "Am I Savage?" shows the band learned a lot of lessons about slithery guitar riffs from their much maligned Load and Reload period and continues to put those lessons to good use. The album's closer, "Spit Out The Bone" is an instant classic, it's easily one of the most ferocious songs the band has ever done, that they can still produce something that's as ambitious as the things they did in their prime is testament enough that the band isn't just coasting along or plodding through old glories without the old enthusiasm. It's just that, well... it takes a long time for the album to get to that point, and by then, even a song as awesome as "Spit Out The Bone" can't inject everything that came before it with that same kind of life or energy.
So while I'm disappointed that the album feels less like something made to listen to all the way through and more like "Hey, here's a bunch of songs that will be good for a Spotify playlist," it's still good to have music made by a classic band still pushing and reaching for something new and different, even if they don't quite get there.
Grade: B
Friday, November 18, 2016
Doctor Strange Review
Magic has come to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Guardians of the Galaxy
brought in the cosmic aspect of the Marvel comics, but where that movie
used inventive and surprising casting to bring life to its standard
plot line, Doctor Strange is bogged down by the utter predictability of its storytelling.
We meet Dr. Stephen Strange at the height of his life; performing routine miracle surgeries, respected, rich, and totally aware of the magnificence that is him. That is, until a car crash destroys his hands, robing him of the very thing that made him the man he was. Broken, beaten, and crushed under the weight of so many failed surgeries to restore his hands, he finds his way to Nepal and joins a sorcerer's club where he learns magic and the true nature of the universe(s).
The sad thing is that you know exactly how the movie will play out within the first five minutes. Haughty, prideful hero is crippled and humbled, said haughty hero finds new thing which he initially sucks at but quickly masters, wise, magnanimous mentor turns out to be not so wise or pure, best friend/sub-mentor begins the road to evil and enmity, great and terrible forces threaten existence but are repelled in the end with tactics haughty hero incorporates after lessons in humility, the end. The casting is as boring as the plot; Cumberbatch adds materialism and an American accent to his Sherlock ticks, Tilda Swinton and Mads Mikkelson pull off their roles as the sage mentor and evil harbinger just by showing up and speaking into the camera. There's no real shading or depth of character here except for Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo, who gets some actual motivation for his eventual break from the hero's path instead of the usual mustache-twirling evil that makes up the entirety of his characterization in the comics. That they didn't waste an actor of Ejiofor's caliber is pretty much the only good thing I can say about how this movie's writing.
Which is a shame, because the hollowness of the story and characters neuters the actually pretty amazing visual tapestry the movie plays out on. The magical constructs all feel like real-world objects, and watching people battle it out on warped, bent over backwards buildings that constantly alter perspective is a marvel (sorry) to take in. The highlight is an astral projection fight between Strange and a Monk of Evil in a hospital, which has some of the most fluid and impressive lighting and effects work I've seen in a movie in a long time.
It's just too bad that no one thought to apply that same sense of dazzling, no-holds-barred attitude to literally any other aspect of this movie.
Grade: B-
We meet Dr. Stephen Strange at the height of his life; performing routine miracle surgeries, respected, rich, and totally aware of the magnificence that is him. That is, until a car crash destroys his hands, robing him of the very thing that made him the man he was. Broken, beaten, and crushed under the weight of so many failed surgeries to restore his hands, he finds his way to Nepal and joins a sorcerer's club where he learns magic and the true nature of the universe(s).
The sad thing is that you know exactly how the movie will play out within the first five minutes. Haughty, prideful hero is crippled and humbled, said haughty hero finds new thing which he initially sucks at but quickly masters, wise, magnanimous mentor turns out to be not so wise or pure, best friend/sub-mentor begins the road to evil and enmity, great and terrible forces threaten existence but are repelled in the end with tactics haughty hero incorporates after lessons in humility, the end. The casting is as boring as the plot; Cumberbatch adds materialism and an American accent to his Sherlock ticks, Tilda Swinton and Mads Mikkelson pull off their roles as the sage mentor and evil harbinger just by showing up and speaking into the camera. There's no real shading or depth of character here except for Chiwetel Ejiofor's Mordo, who gets some actual motivation for his eventual break from the hero's path instead of the usual mustache-twirling evil that makes up the entirety of his characterization in the comics. That they didn't waste an actor of Ejiofor's caliber is pretty much the only good thing I can say about how this movie's writing.
Which is a shame, because the hollowness of the story and characters neuters the actually pretty amazing visual tapestry the movie plays out on. The magical constructs all feel like real-world objects, and watching people battle it out on warped, bent over backwards buildings that constantly alter perspective is a marvel (sorry) to take in. The highlight is an astral projection fight between Strange and a Monk of Evil in a hospital, which has some of the most fluid and impressive lighting and effects work I've seen in a movie in a long time.
It's just too bad that no one thought to apply that same sense of dazzling, no-holds-barred attitude to literally any other aspect of this movie.
Grade: B-
Sunday, November 13, 2016
So That Happened
So... Donald Trump is going to be President. Right. That's still a crazy sentence to write, but, what're you gonna do? There's been a lot of posts over the last week trying to sift through the debris and figure out just what the hell went wrong, but the answer isn't all that complicated: Hillary Clinton had massive flaws as a candidate that she barely cared to recognize, let alone fix, and it cost her the election. She did very little to bridge the wide policy divide between herself and young voters, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise that those voters declined to vote for her.
The Clinton team also laid the blame for their defeat on James Comey, but, again, if the mere existence of more emails is enough to topple a campaign that'd gone on for two years, that campaign has more substantial problems than politically-minded FBI agents. It's not like Clinton wasn't warned, repeatedly, about these faults and how to correct them; it's just that, in the end, she decided that saying Trump is incredibly uncouth would be enough to win the day and we're just going have to live with the aftereffects of that decision for longer than any one term in office.
Which brings us to the question on everyone's mind: What happens now? Trump is about to find out that when you ride the anger of a mob to victory, that mob expects you to deliver. And now that Republicans control both Congress and the White House, I expect the GOP as a whole to slowly realize that now that there isn't an "Other" for them to point to, there's nothing to separate them from the anger of their voter base, should they fail to do so.
And fail they most definitely will. Anyone expecting an economic miracle from massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations need only look at Kansas, which has been in a perpetual state of budget crisis since Sam Brownback cut taxes down to nearly nothing and got exactly fuck-all in return. W. Bush pushed through what was then the largest tax cut in history which produced the worse economic growth since the Great Depression. But maybe, this time, it'll work out the way Republicans always say it will, and then, we can all go buy ourselves some ponies with the windfall.
Also on the "guaranteed disasters" policy list is the intention to gut all the financial regulations that came from the Dodd-Frank bill. Now, that bill has a litany of problems, but it at least acknowledges that having an unrestricted financial sector is a bad thing and maybe we should at least try to rein it in. Republicans, obviously, disagree, and think an industry with such a sterling record of money laundering, identity theft, collusion, and good old-fashioned theft is best left to its own devices in policing and monitoring its own behavior. And if 2007 taught us anything, it's that nothing can ever, ever go wrong when nobody pays attention to what the financial industry is doing. Nope. They've got it all covered.
But wait, Trump said that one time that he would reinstate Glass-Steagall. To which I say, if anyone really believes that a virulently anti-regulation party is going to reinstate one of the most famous and stringent banking regulation bills in our country's history, than their ability for self-delusion borders on the professional and we should all be appropriately impressed.
And then we have the Obamacare plans. Trump recently said that there are parts of the law he likes, but his Congress and his base sure as fuck will still hate it and will expect him to follow through on his "Repeal and Replace" promise in the first 100 days. That most of those people will suddenly find themselves without health insurance is, of course, not something they're thinking about, but, hey, a Democrat did it so by definition it must be the worst thing ever. What will be really interesting to see is if Republicans actually follow through on Paul Ryan's plan to dismantle Medicare. Now, Medicare is the most popular government program, ever. Attacking it is the surest form of political suicide and that's before you factor in that Medicare is usually the single biggest factor that the GOP's aging voter base is even alive. I've never thought much of Republican politicians mental prowess, but even I think they can't possibly be so stupid as to directly attack a huge and loyal part of their base so brazenly.
*Speaking of the little shit, I'll be legitimately surprised if Paul Ryan is still Speaker of the House come January. The only way I see Ryan keeping his position is if he goes through a humiliating and debasing apology gauntlet Trump will put in front of him to prove his loyalty. I don't doubt that Ryan will submit himself to said gauntlet, but I wonder if it will be enough to save him, in the end.
I also think you can toss the whole "drain the swamp" ethos out with the garbage, too, especially since the people running Trump's transition team are the same kind of swamp things he spent so much time railing against like, three weeks ago. As usual, it's not that Washington is full of political insiders that's the problem, the problem is those insiders aren't working for your side. Appointing Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff is a pretty telling move, namely, that the main qualifications to serve in a Trump cabinet are less about your political abilities and more about your loyalty to Trump. I'd also bet money that the other big reason Priebus has the job is that Trump needs a conduit to the mega-donors and other party elites that hate his guts. So it'll be interesting to see how Trump fills out the rest of his cabinet, which I'm sure, will provide no shortage of horror shows in the years to come.
All of this and I haven't even touched on the threats to women's rights, the LGBT community, Muslims, Hispanics, the Supreme Court, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement, the cuts to renewable energy, immigration, education, or what will happen to protestors like those standing against the DAPL. It's simply too much to process all in one go. But, I do know this, the poor, the broken middle class, the working man who barely scrapes enough to get by, all those people who voted for Trump are going to be fed to the wolves on a silver platter by that pampered and spoiled child. Trump, if left unchecked, will usher in the world as they always thought it should be, and, far from being masters of their own destinies, they'll be ground to dust by corporations and the rich in a economic system that keeps them around because shit doesn't clean itself. This wouldn't be so terrible, if not for the fact that we'll all be trapped in that world, too.
*This paragraph has been edited to clarify the point I was making.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)