Lost In The Details

Conditions: Sah-weet!

Wrong Priority
Currently in the military prison at Guantánamo there are a bunch of prisoners undergoing a hunger strike, protesting over the fact that they’re still stuck in Guantánamo. To combat this the guards are force-feeding the prisoners, to prevent them dying. Apparently the U.N considers this forced feeding to be torture.

Force-feeding ducks prompts moral outrage. Force-feeding humans against their will: next-level outrage? It can be medically justified, though, if it is considered suicide prevention. Are 100 detainees suicidal? Even if suicidality is defined as any instance where someone would rather die than endure their current circumstances, when it happens simultaneously in 100 people, it is difficult to diagnose them all as being of mentally ill.

Brian Mishara, Director of the Center for Research and Intervention on Suicide and Euthanasia in the Psychology Department at the University of Quebec, put it succinctly in The New York Times: "In the case of Guantánamo, intervening to save or prolong a person's life without trying to change the person's reasons for wanting to die cannot be considered suicide prevention. Suicide prevention would involve intervening to change the person's desire to die (despite his circumstances) or changing the situation that he feels is intolerable. From the news reports I have seen, those steps are both absent, and therefore the military's force-feeding does not constitute suicide prevention."

- theatlantic.com/health

I think that’s bullshit. The simple act of saving a persons life who is trying to die is suicide prevention. Stopping someone from jumping off a bridge is a prevention of suicide, even if the saver doesn’t then take steps to fix the problems in the jumpers life that led him to the bridge in the first place. Of course the situation in Guantánamo is horrible, and ridiculous, and needs to be cleared up like yesterday, but stupid hand-wringing over whether or not to stop a bunch of people starving themselves to death does not help the situation.



Film Review: Iron Man 3

It’s a hell of a surprise, but I have to say that I really don’t get the latest Iron Man film. Directed this time by Shane Black (who keeps his obsession with Christmas intact), the film seems to set out with the intention of breaking every single rule or idea that has been set in the previous Iron Man films. The Iron Man is meant to be a suit of armor that Tony wears? Here he’s developed technology that allows them to both be driven remotely, and automatically. The suit can stand up to almost anything? Well, not to punching apparently. Or trucks. Tony wants to be in complete control of his suits? The U.S military has their own. And Pepper can wear a suit! The president can wear a suit! The bad guys can hack a suit to control it! What?! Even the central concept of Tony having shrapnel in his chest and needing a power system to run an electromagnet to keep him alive is ripped away. Hell, the bad guy is a fake! And the point of the film is about some kind of ...thing, that allows people to regrow their arms and glow red hot. The hell? And when it goes wrong they blow up. Somehow. Which is then covered up by the bad guy by having them be claimed as terrorist attacks. And furthermore, the guy behind it all is the guy who has apparently been setting things up since the first film. Huh? But there’s no explanation, no analysis, no sense at all. I just don’t get it. It’s like someone’s set out to make the anti-Iron Man film, with lots of action sequences and Robert Downey Jr, but the actual themes and central ideas are twisted upside down, or ripped out and thrown away, and for what?

I get that they need to come up with something to knock Tony down with, in order to have him fight his way back. And Downey jr himself does a great job playing the eccentric genius. But the film doesn’t hold to its own rules that have been established. Early on Tony’s house is blown up by the bad guys using missiles after he called them out on T.V. How is this even possible? You’d think it would be a fairly simple thing for an ex-weapons manufacturer genius who lives in a house that has A.I, and also is a superhero by the way, to cater for someone firing some missiles at his house. But instead everything gets blown up. He spends a lot of the rest of the film figuring out what’s going on, and struggling to fight with the one damaged suit he got away in. Then at the end he presses a button and in the wreckage of his house like 20 suits power up and fly off to him, so he can have a big finale. Why the hell didn’t he get one earlier when he was stuck up north, dragging his other dead suit through the snow? And then when it’s over he decides to have them all self destruct! Because he’s decided that he’s still Iron Man even without the suit! This ...just doesn’t make any sense.

An important theme is Tony having some anxiety attacks over the events that happened during the Avengers film. But the problem is that Tony is such a closed-off character that even when he’s facing the camera and in the middle of such an attack, there’s no dynamic, no insight, no character, just Tony breathing for a bit then he’s back to normal. I can’t find a way into this film, it’s like well made but totally incorrect. As if they decided that since the audience was going to show up anyway then they could all just relax and make some kind of unfocused and offbeat action film, to try and shake everything up. Well I don’t like it. I don’t like that the bad guy was a fake, it seems like the big reveal actually makes the movie weaker. I don’t like that Tony can now run Iron Men from outside of the suit, this idea goes against the whole point of Iron Man. And I don’t like that in the finale we see Iron Men getting smashed by people punching them or hitting them with things. Isn’t the whole point of this thing is that it is totally armoured? How many times have we seen this suit stand up to enormous forces in past movies? But this time the thing shatters when it gets hit by a truck. Basically this film is a mess, going out of its way to turn everything on its head, which isn’t actually a good thing. And don’t bother sitting through the 20 minutes of credits for the stinger, it’s not worth it either. One villainous beard out of five.



- Peace out