Cuz We Said So

Wealth Gap

2012-01-25T15:50:06-06:00

I was thinking about this topic even before Obama showcased it in his SOTU (which I haven't listened to yet). But, here goes:

I don't want to get into a huge ideological argument about redistribution of wealth or job creation. But I am curious about the widening wealth gap, particularly in this country, though this applies over most of the world.

I have no problem with a free labor market, but I am forced to wonder why rich and poor are further apart than they've been since before the Great Depression. What about the market has driven this gap? I have a couple of theories, but none ring true:

Wealth sliding up the scale is an inevitable emergent property of any free market. Money has its own gravity, and it seeks to pool. Artificial interference (income taxes, a culture of philanthropic giving, etc) is required to reverse the trend. I hope we can all agree that uncontrolled upwardly sliding wealth isn't healthy for the economy. Bill Gates needs someone to sell Windows to.

Problem with this theory: It's not an answer. It's an appeal to a mysterious force. I want to understand that mysterious force.

The emergence of India, China, Brazil, et.al. is devaluing most every job that can hop overseas, and company officers are about the only jobs that can't. (Yet.)

Problem with this theory: This would imply that people like plumbers, mechanics, doctors and nurses, people who can't be outsourced, aren't being impacted. I find that unlikely.

It's just temporary, because of the recession. Jobs at the top (and people who are independently wealthy) are disproportionately buffered from the effects.

Problem with this theory: It's got to be a factor, but I don't believe it's the whole story.

Some shift in the culture of compensation at most organizations has driven dollars upward, and the rank-and-file don't have the leverage (job-hopability) to reverse it.

Problem with this theory: I'm not sure how so many organizations all over the country could be impacted similarly, unless this is an unintended consequence of some federal regulation or tax code.

I do think it's ridiculous that a secretary can pay a higher total tax rate than her boss... that's just dumb policy. But I also don't think we need to return to 90% top marginal rate. (Even though that's what it was in the US's crazy-boom-50s.) I'm not interested in taking money away from people. I'm interested in the tweaks that need to be made to the overall system to encourage money, via the market, to find it's way to more people. Maybe that's a pipe dream. But it does seem that something is needed to keep everything sustainable. Another couple of decades like we've just been through, and the US is going to start looking like a third world country.

Russell on the Super Committee

2011-11-03T08:00:44-05:00

Here's my take on the most (and least) likely scenarios of how the Super Committee will handle the debt reduction project:

Least Likely -- They find a solution that both sides can live with, which equitably addresses the problem. My version? (Though certainly not the only one that fits these criteria.) Increase the retirement age, reduce SS and drug benefits for the top earners, cut the military by 25%, institute a new, unloopholeable 50% tax on golden parachutes. (You want to make a ton of cash at a company? Stick around and earn it, jerk!)

Average Likely -- They deadlock and the predetermined $1.2 trillion cuts go into effect. (Which wouldn't make me cry, incidentally.)

Most Likely -- They weasel out somehow. I mean, they passed the Budget Control Act, they can always repeal it. Or, they can fudge the numbers to make it look like they're cutting, but they're really significantly overstating future economic growth, or underestimating defense spending, or some other accounting BS.

Why is that one the most likely? It's not like the debt is top of mind like it was a few months ago. I mean, come on! There's a sex scandal in the Republican nominating field and Kim Kardashian just got divorced. Divorced! They can quietly screw over our financial future. And the quieter the better, if you're going the weasel route. I've got to think that the sheer volume of doom-saying coming out of Washington probably had something to do with those rating drops.

That's just my entirely unfounded opinion.

The Teadrop Tea Infuser

2011-05-08T16:05:41-05:00

Teadrop, a tea infuser that combines a timer and a filter to make a consistently perfect cup of tea, is the brain child of Michael DiStefano. It’s currently in the funding phase on Kickstarter.com; I heard about it via Twitter from noted tea fanatic Kevin Rose, and signed up as a backer. Looks like a neat little gadget.

Red Riding Hood and Battle: Los Angeles

2011-03-18T15:52:54-05:00

You might wonder, "Russell, why are you reviewing Red Riding Hood and Battle: Los Angles in the same post?" And I would respond, "Mind your own business! This is my review!"

Okay, not really. What I would say is that in one sense these are two diametrically opposite films, but in another, they're really quite similar.

Red Riding Hood is director Catherine Hardwicke's attempt to recapture her Twilight glory (if you can stomach the use of the word "glory" when refering to Twilight). This tale of a small town in the snowy woods has a young girl as a protagonist who is being courted by two very different guys, both of whom are hot, and neither of whom is particularly interesting. (Sound familiar?) But at the same time, the film is trying to be a twisty-turny murder mystery. "Who is the wolf?!"

I certainly can't fault Amanda Seyfried. (What big eyes she has!) She turns in as good a performance as she can with the teen-soap/fairy-tale dialoge. It's her job to use those enormous eyes to be FRIGHTENED in every other shot. Gary Oldman also steals every scene he's in as a clergyman with a dark history with werewolves and some unsavory methods for getting the information he needs. (Metaphor for the War on Terror anyone?)

They get all the bits in you need: the creepy scene with the Grandma and her teeth, the actual red riding hood, the heroic woodsman. But I really couldn't have cared less about the love triangle, and while the reveal of the mystery was pretty interesting, it still didn't have the visceral thrill you want when people are getting slashed by a metamorphosizing wolf. Everything was too slick and clean and Hollywoodized to have any real horrific punch. All in all, this movie pretty much blew.

Battle: Los Angeles, on the other hand, is the anti-Hollywood film of the month. For every TV-drama boring camera move in Red Riding Hood, there's a queasy shaky-cam shot in Battle: LA. For every character with "depth" in RRH, there's a one-dimensional military movie cliche character in BLA. And to balance the fear of government overreaching that percolates under RRH, there's a blatant rah-rah patriotism that suffuses every frame of BLA.

Also like the previous film, Battle: LA is a fusion of two very different kinds of movies. In this case, it's even more on the nose: Independence Day and Black Hawk Down. While this melange is handled far more deftly in this movie than in Hardwicke's attempt, the end result is still disappointing when compared to the film's inspirations.

Aaron Eckhart does a nice enough job as Staff Sergeant Nantz, the aging Marine who was just about to retire when ALIENS ATTACK! This is definitley a grunt's eye view of an interstellar conflict, with a lot of gunfire and precious little sci-fi. (Thankfully it doesn't suck the way the similarly themed Skyline did. Man, was that a bad film!)

On the whole I did enjoy BLA, though I didn't love it. The dialogue wasn't half as bad as some of the reviews I've read would suggest. And the effects were stunning. I loved in particular how gritty and un-sleek the alien's technology was. At times, it seemed not to even work particularly well.

Just to finish up the comparison of the films, there's also a couple of, to me, glaring logical errors that throw a real wrench into both movies. Note to the screenwriters:

If you're trying to figure out who in a small town is a werewolf, just put all the people in one room and wait for the full moon. Whichever one turns into a wolf is the one you're looking for.

If you're trying to steal water from a planet filled with warlike people, don't land near the cities where the people are. Drop down into the middle of the largest ocean and suck up all the water you need before people know you're even there.

Fringe Dodges a Bullet

2011-02-19T16:29:22-06:00

I think Fringe is one of the smartest shows on TV. They're juggling a freaky premise (two alternate universes are trying to survive under the shadow of possible demise) and some subtle character work at the same time.

But the multiverse they've constructed assumes that for every person 'here', there's an exact duplicate 'there'. Same looks, same age, same name. That makes it fun for the actors, most of whom get to play alternate versions of themselves. But that also presupposes that every couple has their children at the exact same time... and has for all of history. If any one person has a different set of offspring anywhere in history, the entire doppelganger concept falls apart.

In the recent episode "6B", the climax relied on the situation of an elderly couple having children in one universe, and no children in the other. In fact, they had at least two, since they were referred to as "the girls". Uh-oh! The entire construction of this multiverse may be faulty!

But wait. The Walter from 'here' broke into 'there' to steal Peter. That, theortically, means that everything from that moment on (in 1985) is up for grabs. Children born after 1985 wouldn't necessarily have doppelgangers.

In the episode, the old woman claim to have been with her husband since they were 20, and said they were together "almost 45 years". That means she's almost 65. 1985 was twenty-six years ago, when she was almost 39. She might have had two children (even twins) at such an age.

Bullet dodged! All is right with the multiverse!

Of course, I haven't dodged the bullet of excessive geekiness. But that's okay, too. That ship sailed long before 1985.

What Ive Been Reading

2011-01-30T12:46:17-06:00

Russell's 2010 Movie Wrap Up

2011-01-23T20:38:24-06:00

What am I waiting for?!

The Great

Toy Story 3
Inception
The Book of Eli
The Social Network -- A remarkable piece of work. Jesse Eisenberg is fantastic, and Justin Timberlake is surprisingly good at being smarmy. Kudos also to David Fincher for dialing down the Fincher.
Tron: Legacy -- Does exactly what I wanted: it updates and surpasses the look and feel (and story) of the original 1982 film without tossing out the mythology. And the 3D for this one looked gorgeous.
Predators -- A more than worthy follow up to the original film, and way better than that thing with Danny Glover or either of the alien crossover films. Adrian Brody as a bad ass? Who knew?
Kick-Ass -- I can't believe I didn't already review this. This is to underground comics what The Dark Knight is to mainstream. Unbelievably violent and funny.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Countdown to Zero

The Good

Iron Man 2
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
The Karate Kid
Shutter Island -- Nifty little psychological drama. Nice to see Scorsese still has it.
The Other Guys
Salt
Robin Hood
Date Night
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps
Black Swan -- Creepy! I realize marrying ballet and body horror is kind of obvious, but Aronofsky does it with style! Best performance I've ever seen from Natalie Portman.
True Grit -- Nice visuals and solid performances of an essentially one-note revenge story. But a much more enjoyable Coen Brothers western than No Country for Old Men.
Machete

The Okay

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Clash of the Titans
The Expendables
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Red -- Gotta love old people kicking young punks' asses.
Unstoppable -- Wanna bet they stop the train?
The A-Team
The Wolf Man --Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are good, but the story is a little boring.
Daybreakers
Repo Men -- The premise alone is worth watching the film. If you're not squeamish.
Let Me In -- Liked it until the ending. Predictable.

The Meh

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief -- What if Harry Potter and Bella Swan had an illegitimate child... who kind of sucked...
Knight and Day -- Oh, Tom, you're better than this. So are you, Cameron.
Legion -- What's fascinating is that the character moments are better than the action sequences. But not by much.
From Paris with Love -- Honestly, I don't remember anything about this movie. So there's that.

The Terrible

Skyline

2010-12-29T02:44:33-06:00

The sky is far from the limit.

There are so many things to dislike about this film, I have to address them in the order that they appear on screen. (This review will have many spoilers. If you want the spoiler free version, here it is: "Don't see it. The best stuff is in the trailer.")

First of all, there's the title. It makes no sense, except insofar as the skyline available to the characters never changes because practically the entire film takes place in one apartment building. You see, Terry (Donald "Scrubs" Faison) is having a rad birthday party and lives the high life in LA (which means he has a penthouse apartment near the marina and cool automatic window shades) and he invites his bestest friend, Jarrod (Eric "24" Balfour) out for the festivities. There's some pointless, overengineered drama about "moving to LA" and the excesses of the movie star life and blah blah blah.

Soon enough, the aliens send down their freaky light-show drones that bathe humans in mind altering UV rays. That's actually a nifty conceit, that the lights brainwash you into helplessness, so the aliens can suck you up into their ships. (Why? More on that later.)

So now Jarrod and his useless girlfriend and Terry and his useless wife and his even more useless mistress are stuck in the apartment as alien ships zip around Los Angeles looking for every last human to suck up into their mother vessel. (It's at this point I wonder why they would go to that much trouble...) There's a lot of very cliche bather about "should we stay or should we go". This could have been acceptable, if not for the kernel of the conflict. Terry wants to go to the marina, because "the aliens aren't over the water." Brilliant. Except for the fact that the aliens can FLY.

An attempt to make a run for it does achieve a pretty decent action sequence, involving (a) a close up meeting with one of the creepy, tentacled alien drones, (b) a car-crunching encounter with a sort of elephantine alien with weird mouths on the bottoms of its feet and awesome blue-glowing eyes, (c) a shot of the aliens extracting an unexpectedly blue-glowing brain from a hapless victim, and (d) a deftly accomplished slow-motion chase. So, not everything about this film angers me. I particularly enjoyed the alien designs, even though they were an obvious amalgam of ideas from The Matrix, Cloverfield and Independence Day.

The death of one of the characters (I think it was Terry, but at this point do I really care?) and the introduction of another character means that the basic conflict (stay or go) remains, just with different proponents. And also, the aborted escape means they're back in the same frickin' apartment for the next act of the film.

While the bulk of the movie is supposed to play like War of the Worlds or Cloverfield (everyman's viewpoint), a conveniently place telescope/TV camera in Terry's apartment gives the filmmakers the motivation to throw in some ID4 style fighter sequences, up to and including a nuclear attack on the mothership. I would have liked this movie so much more if they hadn't done the same thing as Independence Day: the nuclear attack just makes the aliens MAD!

Some other characters die (I really can't remember how), and Jarrod and his useless (and pregnant!) girlfriend are on the roof trying to get the attention of some conveniently placed Army soldiers. Early on in the film (I didn't mention this) Jarrod got a facefull of alien-mind-light, but he was snapped out of its pull. Ever since, he's had these creepy black things on his skin. Oh, and he feels "powerful". So, when one of the tentacled drones attacks and tries to eat his useless girlfriend, he hulks out and... get this... punches the alien a bunch of times! No, really. Will Smith got away with a single punch in ID4 after the alien had survived what was probably a very disorienting crash. Here, it doesn't work at all. He finally kills the drone by tearing out its stolen blue-glowing human brain!

Jarrod and his useless girlfriend are now on the roof of the superawesome apartment complex near the marina, and the aliens are moving off to savage the carrier fleet that's been attacking them. The mothership flies directly over Jarrod and his useless girlfriend, sucking them up into its alien belly. On the way, two things happen. First, they both see the light again and start to get all black-eyed and creepy-ensnared. But, second, even though they're currently being brainwashed, they share a final kiss. (My wife laughed out loud at this moment.)

You think that's the end? That's not the end! Jarrod's useless girlfriend wakes up inside the hellish (though remarkably high-ceilinged) belly of the alien mothership in time to see Jarrod have his brain removed and carried away by a brain-carrying alien. When it's her turn... they realize she's pregnant! She is sucked up by what I assume is the pregnant-lady-sucking-tube, and sent to the pregnant-lady-forced-abortion chamber of the ship.

Meanwhile, even though every human brain we've seen to this point in the film glows blue, Jarrod's is RED! While it is never made clear why Jarrod's brain is red, I assume it's because he shook off the alien-mind-light. (Though, if that's the case, I would have to also assume that there are thousands, perhaps millions of other humans that have his same red-brain condition.) Jarrod's red brain is implanted into a strangely humanoid alien/creature/cyborg/whatever. Jarrod's red brain overpowers his captor. We know this because its eyes are RED! Now, the Jarrod-powered alien/creature/cyborg/whatever saves his useless pregnant girlfriend from the alien abortion machine and, as the credits roll, carries her off to... safety, I guess? Whatever.

So, as a final dig, I have to ask, is it really reasonable to imagine that these aliens would go to this amount of trouble just for human brains? And are the brains used as actual consciousness (maybe like outboard memory) or as a power source? And couldn't they have just flown away after they got a couple billion brains in the opening salvo of the invasion? Is the cost-to-benefit ratio really worth it to send out what I have to assume are MILLIONS of drones to search EVERY building in EVERY city around the world to get EVERY brain?

I guess I shouldn't have expected a better film from a team that calls themselves The Brothers Krause. Even the Wachowski Brothers aren't that pretentious.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

2010-12-29T02:35:13-06:00

Oh, Gordon, how we’ve missed you!

(This review is kind of out of date, but I wanted to get it up before I did my year end wrap up...)

In 1987, Gordon Gekko taught us that “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” Nobody remembers the whole quote. All they remember is “Greed is good.” And this sequel is kind of like that memory. It’s not as complex and engaging and filled with family drama and angst as the original. It’s a simpler tale, told well all the same.

Gekko has done his time in prison, and is now hawking his new book which (prophetically, since this takes place in 2008) anticipates the sub-prime bust that dropped us smack dab into the Great Recession. (Do you hate that term as much as I do?)

Gekko’s daughter Winnie (played by the remarkable Carey Mulligan) has tried to put her father’s troubles behind her, mostly by starting up a left-wing activist website with the terrible name “The Frozen Truth”. But she certainly hasn’t backed away from Wall Street enough to, you know, leave New York. Or not date Jake (Shia LaBeouf) who is (you guessed it) a Wall Street analyst. And just so we are reminded of the whole Enron debacle, the screenwriters made Jake an expert in energy.

The film juggles quite a few plot balls. Jake is on a quest to avenge the professional destruction of his mentor (Frank Langella) by a sort of mini-Gekko (Josh Brolin). He’s trying to wean his mother (Susan Sarandon) off of her real estate tweaking. He’s trying to marry Winnie. He’s trying to finance the next phase of human development in laser-assisted fusion. But all of these are secondary to his primary fascination: Gordon Gekko.

Ostensibly to help heal the rift between Gekko and his fiancé, Jake befriends Gordon. But it’s clear from the outset that he worships the guy. The central mystery of the film isn’t whether Jake will get the girl or destroy the bad guy or save the world. The central mystery is whether Gekko has really been rehabilitated, whether he’ll help Jake or screw him over.

This is a pretty clever construction. It gives all the heavy lifting to Shia, and leaves Michael Douglas to come in a few minutes at a time and be awesome. And awesome he is. By the climax of the film, I was really not sure which way he’d jump. Some things he said and did were just like the Gordon of old, and others were a picture of an old man trying desperately to reconnect with anything from his pre-incarceration life.

Oliver Stone has done many superior films, not to mention some real turdballs (I’m looking at you, Natural Born Killers), but this one is, I think, certainly above average.

Resolved: Less Legal Spam for David in 2011

2010-12-25T21:49:28-06:00

I just finished my annual year-end inbox cleanup, and wow, was I irritated to discover how much “legal spam” there was. You know the stuff I mean—commercial e-mail from organizations I’ve done business with, but that I really never wanted. There were thousands and thousands of messages, literally: nearly 70 percent of the 7000+ messages I received that didn’t end up in Gmail's Spam Folder before I even saw them.

Resolved: next year I’m going to be a lot more aggressive about unsubscribing from most things and deleting everything else after a quick look-see. If you’re sending me e-mail I didn’t explicitly opt in to, you’d better be sending me cash—a lot of cash—or your message is history.