Curmudgeon.

Conditions: So Very Tired.


Iran Still Being Iran-ish.

Over the last few months a lot of heat has been brought to bear on Iran. Accused over and over again by other nations of developing, or at least wanting to develop, nuclear weapons, they have been forced to issue multiple denials, and agree to inspections. The latest deal surrounds an offer made to have Iran's uranium processed in France and then shipped back to Iran so they can use it in their reactors. This is so the powers that be can be absolutely sure that the Uranium can only be used for power, and not for a weapon. And despite the fact that this really is kind of an overbearing big-brotherish sort of insulting thing to have to agree to, Iran is currently mulling it over. How dare they!

Tehran says it needs more time to decide. It may be playing for better terms, but in wavering on the Iran nuclear deal, it could lay the groundwork for sanctions.

Washington - Is Iran doing its customary diplomatic haggling – or preparing to slam the door on the international community?

By balking at a Friday deadline for a decision on a plan to move much of its enriched-uranium stockpile out of the country, Iran may be playing for better terms in a deal it will ultimately accept.

But by standing up the three world powers – the United States, Russia, and France – that had already accepted the deal negotiated with Iranian officials earlier this week, Iran may be unwittingly laying the groundwork for tougher international sanctions aimed at its nuclear program.

- truthout.org/

Yes, despite all the backdowns and the bending-over backwards that Iran has been doing to satisfy the international community that they are not in fact a bunch of insane suicidal fanatics, the thrust of the news stories has consistently been that Iran is evilly dragging it's evil heels, trying to find an evil way out of the spotlight so that they can go back to their evil plan of evil. Seriously, is there anything Iran could do that would make the international community relax?




Film Review: Surrogates

Back in the nineties this new fad called the internet started to catch on, and people began spending a lot of time online, and a lot of people warned about us all becoming a generation of shut ins. Surrogates is sort of a half-baked attempt to take that idea to it's ultimate conclusion, positing a world where people (well, rich people) live their lives in their houses, sitting in chairs wearing equipment that allows them to interact with the world using robots, that happen to look better than they do. The idea is that society becomes a safer place, an idea that's totally undermined when a couple of robots are gunned down in the street, and the weapon used also turns out to have killed the operators at the same time. It's up to FBI agent Bruce Willis to figure out what's going on.

Sigh.

There just doesn't seem to be much of a spark here. Jonathon Mostow directs this "weak tea" of a Sci Fi action film and, much as he did with Terminator 3, he makes a pedestrian affair out of an interesting concept. It's based on a graphic novel, yet it's the flatest, dullest looking film I've seen in a while. And while it does star Bruce Willis, it's the sad, old Bruce Willis. Sad Willis is no fun. Angry Willis is fun. Wisecracking Willis is fun. Sad Willis is just a downer. Now, that can work when the characters are balanced, but he's the sole focus of this film, and there's not much going on without him. He shouldn't be the sole focus of the film, there's enough stuff going on here to warrant an extra 20-30 minutes of running time and expand out some of the other characters, but instead it's all tamped down and buttoned up.

Naturally the plot is fairly convoluted. The guy who invented the technology, initially for crippled people to be able to interact "normally" again, was kicked out of his company because he hates the idea of normal-people using robots and avatars. It's James Cromwell essentially revisiting his I, Robot character. So he decides to invent this weapon for the purposes of killing everyone who's using a Surrogate. Ok, that's a spoiler, but I don't much care. See, it's the switch from being a kindly old inventor to a mass-murdering sociopath that is both a little surprising and completely unexplained here. A good movie bad guy needs to make sense, and here he just flat out does not. And when it's time for him to finally explain himself, he kills himself instead. Thanks very much. Two eye sockets out of Five.


- Peace out