Month: December 2014
Forty.
Feels much the same on this end (so far), but then again I rolled the clock over in my head somewhere around 37, and dissertation-writing happens in dog years anyway. Onward and upward.
Only Cineastes Left Alive.
I’m currently working on my own year-end list, as per GitM tradition, and be advised: I’ll probably give myself a few more weeks into 2015 since I have so many holes still to plug. (Even if I was in top movie-going form at the moment, which I’m not, DC is still a second tier town in terms of the release schedule.)
But in the meantime, and also as in year’s past, David Ehrlich has assembled another very impressive Best of the Year video with his choices. I disagree mightily with some of his picks — let’s just say Nymphomaniac won’t be cracking my list — but, once again, Ehrlich’s infectiously fun Super-Cut makes me wish I’d seen more movies this year.
The Harsh Light of Cromnibus.
As the terrible-idea-filled, regulation-gutting “CRomnibus” became law earlier this month — thanks to a tag-team lobbying operation by Barack Obama and Jamie Dimon — The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy laments what it means for American democracy: Namely, the banks clearly write the laws. “‘It’s morally reprehensible,’ Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, told reporters. ‘They’re saying government bailouts are back.'”
By the way, if the bad news is too much to handle these days, there was one silver lining to the godawful CRomnibus: Crom may laugh at the four winds, but it does alright by space. Otherwise, well…
The Secret History of TARP.
This one’s been in the bookmarks for awhile, but in very related news, Matt Stoller surveys the troubling backstory of the bailouts emerging from what should be a sideshow: AIG shareholder Hank Greenberg suing the government for unfair treatment. (He only got half a sweetheart deal.) “Greenberg’s case is revealing that the bailouts were done selectively, and there was an attempt to cover up what happened…bailout opponents were largely correct, and the bailout apologists were lying and/or wrong.”
America’s Moral Collapse.
Like countless others, I have been railing about the Bush-era CIA torture regime here for over a decade now. So this isn’t a breaking story. Still, the recent Senate Report — which the “most transparent administration in history” fought tooth and nail to bury — ably covers all we’ve known to date, and includes a number of horrifying new revelations.
For example, so it turns out that we — you and I — paid foreign governments $300 million to construct and maintain our dungeons.
Another detainee froze to death during his Room 101 session.
And on top of everything else, Americans approve of all of this by 2-1.
So, what is there to say? The illegality here is black and white, the crimes abhorrent, the moral corruption pervasive…and yet we all just collectively shrug. The sad and hilarious thing about The Onion‘s recent minotaur video — “That hungry half-man, half-bull kept us safe from the terrorists!” — is this is basically the world we live in now.
Makes me sick, m*therf*cker, how far we done fell.
Awakenings.
Self-explanatory. The on-the-button Serkis voiceover threatens lameness, but I like John Boyega’s urgency, and was surprised to see Oscar Isaac in an X-Wing (given that I heard/presumed he was the Han of the new cast.) Show me more!
Update These characters’ names are released on throwback-style Topps cards: Boyega is “Finn,” Ridley “Rey,” Isaac “Poe Dameron,” the shadowy Sith fellow “Kylo Ren,” and the wheeldroid is BB-8. But who is Tenzing Norgay?