Can't Go Home Again

Conditions: Bloody Freezing

Plugging the Leak

In the wake of the latest news from the Gulf of Mexico is an announcement that another kind of leak has also been plugged. This time on Wall street, home of the really big disasters.

The US Senate passed the biggest overhaul of financial-industry regulation since the Great Depression, sending a bill inspired by the 2008 credit crisis to the White House for President Barack Obama's signature.

Senators voted 60-39 yesterday in favour of the top-to-bottom rewrite of rules governing Wall St firms, ending a year of partisan wrangling over protections for consumers and investors.
[...]

The bill will create a mechanism for liquidating failing financial firms whose collapse could roil markets, a council of regulators to police firms for threats to the economic system and a consumer bureau at the Federal Reserve to monitor banks for credit-card and mortgage lending abuses.

So is this really going to work? Will this prevent another blow out? Well let's see what the opposition says:

Most Senate Republicans voted against the measure, saying it doesn't go far enough to prevent future taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall St firms and creates an unnecessary new bureaucracy in the consumer bureau.

Measured against Wall St excesses that nearly toppled the global financial system two years ago, some analysts saw the bill as tinkering at the edges of banking practices rather than forcing fundamental changes to the industry.

- nzherald.co.nz/

Hmmm, so the overall vibe seems to be that, while a cap has been put in place, we don';t yet really know how strong it is, and how it will standup under pressure. They better keep working on that relief-well then, or what ever the metaphorical equivalent to that is.



Fim Review: Shrek Forever After.

After the surprise hit of the first Shrek, the filmakers responded with a slew of sequels, naturally. What was unnatural, however, was that those sequels were quite different in nature to the first film, which was a fairytale adventure. Despite this, people kept buying tickets, which is how we've ended up with four of them. The latest film is something of a step back in the right direction as it tries to address the problem with this franchise: Shrek being tied down with a family. He wishes for a day when he could go back to being a lone ogre again, and gets his wish by the evil Rumpelstiltskin, who's something of a fast-talking con man and sets up an alternate reality where essentially the first three films didn't happen.

This gives us a plot where the Ogres of the forest are under attack from King Rumpelstiltskin's army, and are being led by fierce warrior-ogre Fiona. Shrek has one night to get Fiona to kiss him or he'll be wiped from existence. Can he do so whist in the middle of a revolution? Well what do you think? You know, probably the most surprising aspect of this film is how short it is. I think it comes out at like 70 minutes or so. And the film feels it, always in a rush to move the plot forward.

There's some laughs, there's some exciting bits, a dance sequence or two, and there's even a bit of the old magic between the old castmates, plus a somewhat interesting plot to follow. Everyone is doing their best. It's no Shrek 1, but then again, what is. Two and a half snappy tunes out of five.




Film Review: Predators

And so after two terrible Alien versus Predator movies, the franchise is rebooted again with Robert Rodriguez overseeing a little-known director named Nimrod Atal to do what is effectively Predator 3. This one is set on another planet, with a group of tough individuals thrown together with a variety of weapons in order to be hunted by a team of three predators. Leading the cast is Adrien Brody, which is the biggest surprise of the entire film, except perhaps for the point that he actually manages to come across fairly well as a mercenary bad ass. This not so merry band of soldiers, convicts, and a "doctor" explore their jungle, and eventually get whittled down by the invisible hunters. But this really is a film that is so busy paying homage to it's predecessors, that it seems to not be able to do anything for itself.

Now, I'm an enormous fan of the first film. In fact, I firmly believe that decades from now it will rightly take it's place alongside Casablanca and Citizen Kane as one of the best films ever made. But a sequel to anything really needs to try and stand on it's own, no matter how daunting the task may be. Predators just doesn't really have enough in it to do that. And the most surprising thing it lacks, is a plot. Sure, you have this idea of a Predator Game Reserve, but that's basically it. The first film had a plot, as did the second. Hell even AvP had a plot. Why they gave up on this one is a bit of a mystery, especially since the film isn't actually that bad.

It's properly R-rated, it's got a reasonably good cast, the effects are pretty good, and of course you have one of the most iconic movie bad guys ever. It's even shot pretty well, no awful shaky cam or bad moments. It's just that at the end of the film, it all kind of falls away. The reason most films work is because you have characters that are trying to do things, and you end up caring for them. In this case, because these characters don't even have names let alone personalities or any kind of drive (other than "want to go home"), you don't really care about them. Or their deaths. Throw in some character decisions that don't make any sense and you end up with a pizza consisting of some good cheese, but no base. Three dots out of five.


- Peace Out