Retreading

Conditions: Cold


Pitching A Strike

Mutadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who so memorably threw his shoe at President Bush during a press conference, was recently released from jail. He's made a statement about it all here.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.
[...]

One last word. I say to the government: It is a trust that I carry from my fellow detainees. They said, 'Muntadhar, if you get out, tell of our plight to the omnipotent powers' -- I know that only God is omnipotent and I pray to Him -- 'remind them that there are dozens, hundreds, of victims rotting in prisons because of an informant's word.'

They have been there for years, they have not been charged or tried.

They've only been snatched up from the streets and put into these prisons. And now, in front of you, and in the presence of God, I hope they can hear me or see me. I have now made good on my promise of reminding the government and the officials and the politicians to look into what's happening inside the prisons. The injustice that's caused by the delay in the judicial system.

- alternet.org/

Film Review: The Taking of Pelham 123

And suddenly, it's the nineties again. Tony Scott directs Denzel Washington and John Travolta in a New York heist movie. Ok, let's be honest, this isn't really anything all that special. The film itself is a remake, and even if it wasn't, it still feels like one. It's a familiar turn down a well-traveled road, but despite it all, at the end of the day it is an entertaining film, even in spite of itself at times. Tony Scott actually reins himself in enough to tell the story without making the audience want to keep it's collective eyes shut. He's still doing his hyper-reality thing, but it's not as all-invasive as it has been. Denzel Washington is also reined in, playing a Train Dispatcher, albeit one who's been demoted from the front office, and is very downplayed and quiet for most of the film. In contrast, Travolta has been let loose, and his wildly unpredictable Ryder steals the show, basically by default.

You want to like the guy, because it's Travolta with a cool tattoo, a gun, a plan, and some sidekicks. But he zigs from "Mr Easy Going" to "Hulk Smash" in about half a second, and shoots people without a care in the world. Bad Guys still need to be reasonable, and Travolta's Ryder is just a little too far over the edge. Most of the movie is dialog between Travolta and Washington on the radio, which makes the dynamic between the two a little shallow. What's also difficult to accept is at the end where Denzel picks up a gun and goes after Travolta. This basically comes out of nowhere, and doesn't really fit the character, or be based in anything that was said between the two. You could argue Washintgon feared for his families future with Travolta on the loose, but why should we have to assume that? In fact, there's a number of things that are unnecessarily glossed over here, like the henchmen for instance, who get about two lines of dialog between them. Or why they even bother lugging the measly ransom around with them at all when you realize the point of the whole plot.

There's an overriding subtext about New York and the subway system, and how great it is, and how great the people who ride it are, and how great the city is, with the subway as it's lifeblood. I'm not sure if this is genuine, or payment for the city helping the film out with locations, but it does define a sort of class-thing, where the subway is more real that the above-ground world. But ultimately, it's just an old heist film that's been tarted up a bit. Fun, but a little more shallow than it should have been. Three Random Gandolfini Yawns out of Five.


- Peace out

Raising The Stakes By Lowering Them

Conditions: Reflective.


Some Sense At Last.

Finally, the American President has scrapped the demented push to force a missile defense shield into Europe under the cover of protecting it against rogue nations or groups. Not only was it unlikely to be effective, it also hacked off the likes of Russia, who were uneasy about America installing missile batteries along their border. But instead of scrapping the plan entirely, the missiles will instead emigrate onto ships and become some kind of mobile defense system. That's not actually as much of a solution as I had hoped.

Viewed from the perspective of defense priorities, what the Administration has done is shift resources away from building a costly, immovable and as yet unproven shield in central Europe to counter the potential threat of Iran's developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead allocating them to deploying ships carrying proven interceptor systems nearer to Iran to counter the current threat of its medium-range-missile arsenal.

Among other advantages, the ships can sail freely in international waters to meet evolving threats without obtaining consent from host countries (the Czech parliament, for example, had yet to approve the deployment of the now canceled system). What's more, they can perform missions other than missile defense, and they are considerably cheaper. "This system gives us a much more significant and robust capability to adapt to the threat as it actually emerges," Marine General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday, Sept. 17.

Part of the furor over Obama's decision results from the fact that ever since President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. Star Wars) 26 years ago, the notion of a global missile shield has become an obsession for many of his ideological acolytes. They tend to view any retreat as surrendering to the forces of evil, even though Obama's decision was blessed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates — who had originally recommended the European scheme in 2006 while serving as Defense Secretary to President George W. Bush. In justifying the move, Gates and others cite intelligence reports that Iran — ostensibly the key target of the European shield — is emphasizing shorter-range missiles that couldn't be shot down from Poland.

Sigh. Why is it so many people have to suffer so that a certain type of people can feel as if they're always winning?

The U.S. has spent well north of $100 billion in the effort to create a technological shield to protect its mainland from incoming missiles — much of it on long-forgotten and never used systems such as Nike, Nike Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel and Safeguard. The grandest of these, the Safeguard system, was built nearly 40 years ago in Nekoma, N.D. Huge earth-moving machines dug up 1.75 million cu. yd. of rich, black loam from the 470-acre site. Contractors built the base with 160,000 cu. yd. of concrete and 12,000 tons of steel. They crowned their work with a partly buried, 123-ft.-tall pyramid containing the system's key radar. Each of its four "eyes" had sprinklers to wash away any potential radioactive debris from collisions between the nearby nuclear-tipped interceptors and incoming Soviet missiles.

The government shut the system down after just four months in service, because of its high cost and doubts about its utility. At least when sea-launched interceptor systems are stood down, they can sail away to new assignments.

- www.time.com/

Well that's great. From a standpoint of sense and peace, the one thing worse than fixed missile batteries is ones that float around. At least the fixed ones have an enforced stability to them that ships bobbing about in the ocean can not have. Is this an effort to try and make things even more dangerous, like blindfolding yourself during a game of chicken?



Film Review: Up.

It says something about Pixar that they can portray a relationship between a husband and wife in a 10 minute montage and pack enough emotion to get the whole audience sniffling. I'm glad Pixar is a force for good, because that kind of power is scary. This relationship is just the beginning of the story of Up, because when the wife, Ellie, passes away she leaves Karl lost and sad. The two of them had always been adventurers at heart, but had never gone on that one great adventure to South America. So now with nothing left to lose, Karl fills his house with helium balloons and takes off. Along the way he'll pick up a young boyscout hitchhiker, encounter eccentric animals and tangle with another adventurer, who'll stop at nothing to put himself back in the spotlight.

Up is an odd affair. Karl, old and driven by his memories of Ellie, gruffly endures the childish antics of boyscout Russell. Gradually he becomes fond of the lad, but there's always a sense of distance between the two, even at the end of the film. I can't really tell if Russell is a sidekick or a proper character in his own right. He does rebel against Karl at one point, but it's only brief. The actual tension comes from Charles Muntz, an old adventurer whose exploits inspired both Karl and Ellie when they were young. Disgraced by the professional community for bringing back the skeliton of a bird they contend is fake, he's banished himself back to the jungle, along with his army of talking dogs, until he captures a live one. When not hunting or crafting electronic leashes for his dogs, he seemingly entertains himself by murdering other adventurers who come south, in the belief they're trying to steal the bird he's after.

Karl and Russell fall right into the middle of this, and despite Karl just wanting to land his house and be left alone, he eventually has to let go of his old life and fight for what's right. It's an odd film, very assured in it's look of course, and as fully-developed as we've come to expect from Pixar. But maybe it's focused a bit more on plot than character in the second half. I kind of feel like front-loading the film with that much emotion is a little like the explosion that goes off at the start of the movie Swordfish: it kind of overshadows all the other explosions that come later on. Still, overall it's another triumph. Three and a Half Balloons out of Five.


- Peace out.

Inglourious Indeed

Conditions: Tense.


Still Making The Same Mistakes.

So guess what happened in a small Afghani village once NATO forces located two fuel tankers there that had just been hijacked by the Taliban? If you guessed something sensible like local law enforcement being contacted to watch the truck and identify the hijackers, you'd be wrong. Instead, the exact opposite happened.

The hijacking, on Thursday night, was reported to the German Nato soldiers garrisoned nearby, who spotted the lorries this morning. At some point the German commander called in an air strike to deal with the problem. Estimates differ as to how many people were killed in the fireball, but they range from a few score to more than a hundred.
[...]

Nato's International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) initially discounted reports that civilians were among the dead. "After assessing that only insurgents were in the area, the local Isaf commander ordered an air strike, which destroyed the fuel trucks, and a large number of insurgents were reportedly killed and injured," the first Isaf statement said.

That line was amended when the badly burned survivors started turning up at the local hospital.

Brigadier General Eric Tremblay told Reuters news agency: "It would appear that many civilian casualties are being evacuated and treated in the local hospitals. There is perhaps a direct link with the incident that has occurred around the two fuel trucks."

An investigation was launched into the incident which will focus on the decision by the German commander to call in the air strike. It happened in the same week the American commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal delivered a strategic assessment on the state of the war to Rasmussen and to Washington. It is known that one of its main thrusts was a change of emphasis from killing the Taliban to protecting civilians. Nato officers have been told that if they have Taliban fighters in their sights but there is a risk of civilian casualties they are to hold fire.

Now, what we have here is, failure to communicate. Sadly, it's all been said before. Bad calls by commanders faced with difficult situations resulting in massive and random loss of life. How can we still be doing this? And it gets worse.

The site of the incident is also likely to be a cause for concern. Until recently, Kunduz province was considered relatively tranquil. events have demonstrated there are Taliban-controlled zones on the outskirts of the main city.

Alongside a Taliban resurgence, there have also been reports of Uzbek groups operating in affiliation with al-Qaida. Security on the roads connecting Afghanistan to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is crucial to the Nato war effort after the route through the Khyber pass was crippled last year.

- guardian.co.uk/

Well, that's just great. The bad guys kill a few people and steal a truck. The good guys blow everyone up. Same shit. Different day.




Film Review: Inglourious Basterds.

Every Quentin Tarantino film lives in a special version of the world, one that's based on reality but is slightly twisted, slightly fantastical. Here we've returned to World War 2, for a glorious romp through occupied France with a tale that's only partly about a bunch of American Jewish Nazi-hunting soldiers, weaved together with a tale about a Jewish girl running a movie theater in Paris who's presented with a chance of revenge for her murdered family. It's a bit of an odd duck of a film. A western in theme and style, with a lot of subtitles, and featuring Hitler and Goebbels, it has moments of light-heartedness as well as moments of vicious brutality. It's a war film where you have a 30-minute scene in a French pub where a bunch of Nazi's sit around playing that game with the famous name on a card that you stick on your forehead, that ends in a short, brutal gunfight. Tarantino has a great focus on building characters, and an almost childish glee in tearing his worlds apart.

But violence against Nazis is kind of different than normal violence, or at least that's the idea. There's definitely a large meta subtext going on here, when you have the audience whooping it up over a massacre in a movie theater carried out by the "good guys". Having a dirty-dozen kind of scenario, headed up by Brad Pitt, hamming it up big time, who are tasked to terrorize the Germans by killing and scalping Nazis, is much more fun than it should really be. The other plot about Shoshanna, who has a chance to kill off the entire Nazi high command, has a bit more dramatic meat about it. It's also interesting to contemplate how far from reality this film strays, emphasizing just how much of a romp this is. Quentin wants this film to be a fun what-if scenario, a chance to excercise the true power of the cinema and story telling to craft a new version of history so we can just sit back and enjoy.

It's certainly been crafted well. Quentin makes a good film, there's no shaky camera or shoddy choices here, and the music is pretty great as well. Ok, some of the scenes might drag on a little, which personally I think is more a deliberate choice rather than bloat that a famous director can get away with. As characters sit around firing dialog back and forth, the undercurrent of tension and violence gets stronger and stronger. Despite it's almost cartoonish premise, the major characters are all shaded in quite well. All in all, it's a brash, bold and fun experiment in alternate history story telling. Four Scalps out of Five.



- Peace out