Snowpocalypse last December was only the beginning. Now, it's Snomageddon. (And unfortunately, I uncorked all my tauntaun jokes back in 2003.) Anyway, yeah, we in DC have taken a massive snow hit -- at least 2 feet already -- and it's still coming down strong.
As you can see from the pics above and below, at least Berk's been having great fun with it, although he may feel differently if I take him to the 2pm Dupont shootout.
That other "vaguely religious-themed movie" I mentioned I saw between The Book of Eli and Legion? That would be Peter Jackson's well-meaning, meandering adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. And in all honesty, given the atrocious reviews it received, The Lovely Bones was better and more enjoyable than I had feared going in. Still, it works better as What Dreams May Come-style eye candy than as a movie on its own terms.
Put simply, the main problem here is the source material. Even more than John Hillcoat's take on The Road, which I thought was an admirable adaptation of a so-so tome, The Lovely Bones the movie is, imho, about a good a film as you could make from such a lousy and overrated book. Now, I understand Sebold's novel has spoken to a lot of people. But I am not one of those people. I found it to be ghastly, overwritten. Oprahesque nonsense, and finishing the durned thing felt like a chore. And even with PJ at the helm, sadly, The Lovely Bones remains several hours of mostly needless despair-pr0n.
If you haven't read the book, the gist is this: It's early December, 1973, and our 14-year-old narrator, Susie Salmon (here, a very good Saiorse Ronan, formerly of Atonement), one day makes the mistake of following her creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci) into his newly-constructed evil underground lair. There, she is raped and murdered. (This grisly event takes us to about page 20, iirc.) Susie goes to Heaven -- or a Heaven-like Limbo, in any event -- while her family grieves and gnashes and laments and wails for 300 pages. Oh, and eventually there's some ghost sex. Yes, really.
Fair enough, but how do they gnash and wail? Well, Ma Salmon (Rachel Weisz) refuses to deal with the loss and its consequences -- She turns Susie's room into an untouched tomb, has an escapist affair with the detective on the case (Michael Imperioli), and eventually runs off to pick grapes somewhere. Pa Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) handles it even worse -- The murder upsets his primal sense of order about the universe, and he obsessively tracks down the killer on his own for years to come. Grandma (Susan Sarandon) moves in to try to fill the void left by the distant parents, when she's sober. And Susie's siblings, Lindsey (Rose McIver) and Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale), grow up and live their lives, although Lindsey has some sneaking suspicions about the creep next door...
Peter Jackson and his LotR writing team (Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) have made a few changes here and there. Most notably (and very thankfully), Susie's rape is now only vaguely implied rather than shown. (To those who question this change, I'm with Ronan: What in blue blazes is wrong with you?) Here, Susie's murder is quite gracefully handled, although I could've done with less spider-toying-with-the-fly type stuff before the horrible deed is committed. And Ma Salmon's romance with the detective is gone -- now it's just occasional long looks. Otherwise, they follow what I remember of the book pretty closely here.
Which is a lot of the problem. Like the book, The Lovely Bones is mostly inchoate and shapeless. As in the novel, there's no real through-line or sense of momentum in the story. It moves without purpose -- Time passes, stuff happens. Look, Susie is playing in her beautiful heaven...oh wait, she's sad...hey, let's have a grandma montage...ok, Tucci is still creepy...hey, look, more heaven....oooh, Marky Mark is on the warpath...and so on. I suspect folks who complain about the last thirty minutes of Return of the King will not have much fun with this one -- the whole movie has that languid, meandering, "oh and another thing" feel to it.
That being said, The Lovely Bones is quite pretty to look at. (Thanks, Team WETA!) Despite the awfulness of the subject matter, Bones has a very crisp and colorful presentation that soothes the eye even as the story bogs down. And the performances are all pretty good here -- especially Ronan -- with one minor exception. His Oscar nod aside, Stanley Tucci is probably the weak link here. Like Peter Sarsgaard in An Education, he's way too much of an off-putting mouth-breather to take seriously. Playing the killer as more sociable and self-assured -- like Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in the original version of The Vanishing -- would've added a lot more menace to this thankless character.
So, given what he had to work with here, I thought Peter Jackson et al actually turned in a pretty quality product. (The real problem was trying to adapt Sebold's book in the first place.) So, no harm, no foul, so to speak: The Lovely Bones is by no means a bad movie -- It just sorta is. If you really want to see Peter Jackson tackle a story involving fantastical visions, teenage girls, and unspeakable acts of murder, I'd recommend his earlier classic, Heavenly Creatures. As for Bones, my thoughts on it are pretty much akin to my sneaking suspicions about a film I haven't yet seen, Lee Daniels' Precious. In this world, sadly, really horrible things happen to good and innocent people every single day...but that doesn't mean we have to wallow in the fact.
"A statement released Friday by Virgin Limited Edition, the luxury arm of Virgin Hotels, described the Nymph's launch like a plane's takeoff. 'Gliding on the water's surface like an aeroplane on a runway, one of the three pilots will operate the joystick to smoothly dive down.'" The irrepressible Richard Branson unveils Virgin's newest ride, the Necker Nymph. "The underwater plane uses the downward pressure on its wings to fly through the water for up to two hours at a time, while an open cockpit will give riders a 360-degree view. The Necker Nymph's typical speed is 2 to 5 nautical miles per hour and it can dive more than 100 feet."
As it turns out, I've recently made plans to join a gaggle of good friends on a week-long BVI sailing expedition this coming Spring. So I would start begging for donations here at GitM for the $400,000 required to stay on Necker Island for a week and enjoy this submersive Nymph. But, in all honesty, I'd probably just take that money and put it towards a jaunt on SpaceShipTwo. Priorities, people.
]]>
"The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon. There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all." As expected (and feared) earlier this year, the Obama administration's proposed NASA budget for the next five years cancels any and all plans to go to the moon anytime soon. "'We certainly don't need to go back to the moon,' said one administration official."
Sigh.
Ok, first off, the administration official who uttered the last sentence should be filed away next to Mr. Left of the Left and Ms. Pajamas as people who should no longer speak for the White House in any capacity whatsoever. Full stop, end of story. Putting my speechwriter cap on for a second: In most any political situation, ridiculing the dreams of an entire generation does not make for particularly good messaging.
Anyway, anonymous WH official aside, NASA administrator Charles Bolden sounded a better note about all this: "We're not abandoning anything. We're probably on a new course but human space flight is in our DNA. We are not abandoning human space flight by any stretch of the imagination. We have companies telling us they're excited to get humans off this planet and into orbit. I think we're going to get there and perhaps quicker than we would have done before."
And, to be clear, the administration's NASA budget increases the agency's funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The new budget ups research and development spending into cheaper heavy launch mechanisms, emphasizes more robotic exploration missions and observational experiments into climate change, extends the life of the ISS (although, with only five more shuttle missions remaining, other nations will have to help service it), and works to promote the various commercial space enterprises moving along right now.
All of this is well and good, but it would be nice to see some recognition of the civic importance of manned space flight by this administration. In their words, NASA is scrapping Constellation on account of it being "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies." And, given that we still had a lot of the expenditures before us, I suppose now was as good a time as any to kill the program if it's not the right direction to go in.
That being said, how many more times are we going to do this? We keep stopping and starting and stopping and starting our post-Shuttle plans for space, so that now, after five final shuttle missions this coming year, we will longer have the capability anymore as a nation to send men and women into orbit. "If implemented, the NASA a few years from now would be fundamentally different from NASA today. The space agency would no longer operate its own spacecraft, but essentially buy tickets for its astronauts." Forty-one years after we first reached the moon, that's just plain sad.
Ultimately, the central finding of the Augustine commission's final report, released this past October after extensive study of NASA's current situation, is a sound one: "The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." In other words, we've been trying to talk the talk without walking the walk. If we're going to get serious about manned space flight, we need to stop piecemealing NASA and start making manned exploration a funding priority.
In total, the agency is slated to get $100 billion over the next five years. To put that number in perspective, that's less than a fifth of our defense budget for 2011 alone, and that's going by the most conservative numbers around -- NASA's five-year budget could be closer to a tenth of next year's defense spending. (For its part, the Augustine commission set a price tag of $3 billion a year to get serious about manned exploration.)
If we had put anywhere near that kind of money into exploration and R&D over the years, would we now be in this position, where we face the Hobson's choice of replicating expensive 50-year-old launch tech or being completely grounded as a nation? The lack of thinking about our long-term priorities sometimes is staggering to me. I've said this before, but I still believe it holds true: Short of possibly genomic research and advances in AI, nothing we do right now will matter more centuries or millennia hence than establishing a presence off-world...if we even have that long. Not to get all Jor-El up in here, but we really have to start getting serious about this.
]]>Hey, you said it, Judge. According to the good folks at SCOTUSblog, the doors to unfettered campaign cash are open in a big way in the minds of the DC District Court after Citizens United: "From the opening moment of the 65-minute hearing, most of the nine judges on the en banc Court treated the Supreme Court's ruling...as the beginning, not the end, of expansion of those freedoms. When an FEC lawyer tried to bring up, and rely on, older precedents, he was reminded repeatedly that those came before Citizens United."
President Obama's stern words about the decision in his State of the Union address may have induced Justice Alito to expose himself as a partisan hack, but it seems, alas, that the Justice and his four conservative contemporaries will have the last laugh.
]]>
"According to The Center for Responsive Politics, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its national subsidiaries spent $144.5 million in 2009, far more than the RNC and more than double the expenditures by the DNC." But corporate spending isn't a problem or anything.
]]>"The Reid poll found little difference in partisan attitudes...Sixty-six percent of Democrats either "moderately" or "strongly" disagreed with the ruling, but so did 63 percent of Republicans. A whopping 72 percent of Independents disagreed with the Supremes' decision." One wonders how those numbers might've moved if we started using Citizen United's full name to discuss this case...
You stay classy, GOP. And folks thought "teabagger" was ugly.
]]>
"I know that we haven't agreed on every issue thus far, and there are surely times in the future when we will part ways. But I also know that every American who is sitting here tonight loves this country and wants it to succeed. That must be the starting point for every debate we have in the coming months, and where we return after those debates are done. That is the foundation on which the American people expect us to build common ground."
They do? I thought they expected change we can believe in. But worn-out nods to an elusive, ephemeral, and, given the current GOP, often undesirable bipartisanship does not constitute such. In any event, so concluded the President's State of the Union address last Thursday. This is old news at this point, so I'll keep it brief. Suffice to say, while it got better as it went along, I thought the speech was merely ok, and often troubling. Throughout the evening, the president's remarks had that excessively-poll-tested, small-bore feel that conjured up grim odors of 1995 and 1996. Throw on a flannel and fire up the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, y'all: One year into the Obama era, are we already back to V-chips and school uniforms?
Part of the president's problem is that the Senate is looking like the elephant's graveyard of progressive-minded legislation right now. The president called for an energy reform bill. The House went out on a limb to pass one last June. The president called for a financial reform bill. The House passed one in December. The president called for a new jobs bill. The House also passed one in December. All of these bills, and many, many others, are languishing in the Senate right now, as Sen. Reid and others try to figure out how to somehow get something -- anything! -- passed with a larger majority than Dubya ever enjoyed.
The Senate issue aside, there were other problems in the President's speech, including far too many nods and feints in the direction of ridiculous deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg and Evan Bayh. First off, at the risk of sounding like Dick Cheney, I tend to think that deficits are troubling, but, even in the best of times, they shouldn't really be the foremost driving concern of our government policy. If we run a deficit to invest in education now, we'll save money down the road and improve Americans' quality-of-life to boot. (Put in somewhat ugly fashion, it's invest in schools now or prisons later.)
And that being said, right now is emphatically not the best of times. We know exactly what happens when you cut spending too quickly after a virulent recession -- It was called the 1937 Roosevelt recession, and it would be flagrantly idiotic to repeat it. Just because the GOP doesn't seem to understand basic Keynesian economics doesn't mean we should follow them down the rabbit hole of flat-earth thinking, just so we can look bipartisan.
No, the problem with deficits isn't necessarily the running of a deficit. It's the running-up of massive deficits for patently stupid reasons -- like, say, prosecuting a war of choice in Iraq, or doling out excessive tax breaks to multi-millionaires. And that's why some of the President's nods in that direction were so irritating last Thursday. Calling for a spending freeze on discretionary spending, without touching the exorbitant "security-related" budget (cute euphemism, that), is kabuki theater at best. And at worst, you're balancing the books at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. (I tend to agree with Candidate Obama on this issue anyway.)
Similarly, this deficit commission which the president plans to foist on Congress by executive order after the Senate killed it, is, again, at best kabuki theater and at worst trouble. It's clear to everyone involved that the entire point of this commission is CYA: i.e, to create political cover for raids on entitlement spending, while once again ignoring the grotesquely swollen defense budget. (Altho', to be fair, Secretary Gates has at least tried to rein in growth in this sector.) In other words, this commission will basically just be a chance for deficit peacocks to pretend they're Serious People and "make tough decisions," while in fact the one really tough idea that actually needs to be tackled -- reining in defense spending -- will be completely avoided.
In any event, all this discussion of the deficit ignores the larger problem. Obviously, one of the president's biggest charges coming into office was to restore economic sanity after eight years of Dubyaite excess. That being said, people were not looking to President Obama for this sort of deficit tsk-tsking and small-bore, fiddling around the margins. You'd think we Dems would have learned this by now. But curling up into a fetal position and mouthing moderate GOP-lite bromides will not stop the Republicans from kicking us, ever.
We have a Democratic president, an 18-seat majority in the Senate, and a 79-seat majority in the House. In short, we Dems need to keep thinking big or we will pay dearly at the polls this November. Perhaps the dysfunction of the Senate is the central problem Obama faces right now, but his speech nonetheless suggests that we're getting dangerously close to Eisenhower Republican territory now, and not even in the good "the military-industrial complex is completely frakked" kinda way. Without vision, the people perish. So too will our party, if we keep up with this thin gruel, triangulation schtick. At the advice of the careerist DLC-types over the years, we have tried this path several times over -- Put simply, it does not work.
]]>My issues with the SotU notwithstanding, the president's sallying back-and-forth with House Republicans on Friday clearly indicate that, whatever our problems are within the party, the GOP are just not ready for prime-time right now. (I also get the sense that this will mark the definitive end of the Republican's goofy "teleprompter" meme.) [Full transcript.]
To his credit, the president made his political opponents seem like the blatantly hypocritical ideologues they in fact are. Which begs the "common ground" question once again: Why should we try to meet the "Party of No" halfway, particularly when we know that they move the goalposts every single time you try to take them seriously?
(With all apologies to Father McGruder.) Yes, y'all, the End of Days has come. There is a hole in the sky. John Cusack is off floating on his ark. Hobo Viggo and son are somewhere on I-95, "carrying the fire." And, for their part, bad-ass evangelist Denzel Washington is apparently the last Jehovah's Witness on Earth, and the fallen angel Paul Bettany is trying to take his broken wings and learn to fly again. (Did you know that every time a bell rings, an angel is shooting somebody in the face?)
In any event, I saw Allen and Albert Hughes' The Book of Eli and Scott Stewart's Legion on subsequent weekends (with another vaguely religious-themed movie in between, which I'll get to in a bit), and they seem like they merit discussing together. Both are post-apocalyptic B-movies, and, weirdly enough, that's B as in Bible: Both use Judeo-Christian themes as a pretext for ninety minutes or so of Matrix-y ass-kicking. And neither are as smart, entertaining or satisfying in their B-movieness as the Spierig's recent Daybreakers. Of the two, Legion probably comes closer to finding that popcorn movie groove, just because it makes no bones about being unabashedly dumb -- but it too slips off the rails in the final half-hour.
More on that in a bit. Let's take the Hughes' Book of Eli first. I should start by saying that I'm glad to see the Hughes brothers making a movie again, although I wish it was one a good deal better than this goofy drek. Their assured, eminently quotable 1993 debut Menace II Society is one of my favorite films of the nineties, and in a perfect world it should have gotten all the many props that went to John Singleton's more Hollywood'y Boyz n the Hood of 1991. ("Now O-Dog was America's worst nightmare: Young, black, and don't give a f**k.") And their take on From Hell in 2001 was laudably strange and decently compelling -- It's definitely not the worst Alan Moore adaptation out there, by a long shot.
To their credit, the Hughes give this post-apocalyptic America a bleached-out, Big Sky look that's eye-catching...for the first half-hour of so. (After awhile, there get to be way too many slo-mo hero shots of Denzel and his eventual protege, Mila Kunis.) And, during that opening half-hour, it seems like Book of Eli might make for a pretty solid spaghetti western or samurai flick. There are two kinetic six-or-seven-on-one melees in particular, wherein a motley assortment of Borderlands-style goons and Mad Max castoffs meet the business end of Denzel's machete, that suggest The Book of Eli will make for a pretty fun B-movie ride.
But then it all starts falling apart, mainly as a result of terrible writing. For it soon becomes clear that Denzel, a.k.a. Eli, is attracting attention in this World Gone Wrong because he is carrying -- I kid you not -- the Last King James Bible on Earth. Yes, somehow -- only thirty years after the nukes fell -- every single bible out of every single house, apartment, bookstore, mega-mart, and motel room on the planet has been destroyed...but one. This is apparently, it is said, because the survivors blamed the Bible for the End Times coming and destroyed them all. How the few remaining survivors managed to relay this message all around the world after communications had stopped is left unexplained. Nor do they show the poor irradiated schmoes who were forced to wander from burnt-out church to broken-down motel over those thirty years, scouring the Earth for the estimated 7.5 billion copies of the world's most reproduced book. And they only missed one!
But that's not all. So, Denzel is toting around that last Good Book, and the Big Bad of the local Bartertown -- Gary Oldman -- wants its immense persuasive power for his own. I forget the exact wording, but he does some monologuing to the effect of: Only with that bible in my possession will I have the words to exert my domination over the remnants of humankind! So, in other words, if he gets the Book under his thrall, Oldman will be the new prophet-king of social control. To which I say...huh? First off, at the risk of offending certain readers' religious sensibilities -- move along, Tom Cruise -- hasn't Oldman's character ever heard of L. Ron Hubbard or Dianetics? (Or seen Zardoz, for that matter?) If you want to set up a new religion with yourself at its center, you don't really need a KJV bible to do it. Second, it's made abundantly clear that Oldman knows the bible pretty well from his early days anyway. He can't just...wing it? How much more would you need other than the stories, which everybody knows, and a few choice excerpts like the Lord's Prayer?
Not to give the game away, but The Book of Eli also suffers from a truly dumb Shyamalan ending which I will not disclose here. (Suffice to say, A Clockwork Orange notwithstanding, Malcolm McDowell showing up in the late going of any film isn't usually a mark of quality. And if you really want to know the final turn, I'll give a hint in spoiler-vision: "What do Rutger Hauer and Zhang Ziyi have in common?") Now, to be fair to The Book of Eli (and as an AICN commenter pointed out), a lot of sci-fi and fantasy B-movies have plot devices that make it hard to sustain disbelief -- time-traveling robots from the future, for example. True, Eli's central conceit is roughly similar to the plot of the very good A Canticle for Leibowitz (although that book takes place centuries after the nuclear holocaust, and the Catholic priests involved aren't trying to preserve the Bible per se.) And, even the next movie I'm about to discuss makes less sense up front than Book of Eli's goofy "all the Bibles are gone!" schtick.
The difference is, in those other movies (Legion aside), once you accept the premise that robots can time-travel, Earth is now populated by damn dirty apes, vampires have taken over or whathaveyou, the rest of the story makes decent sense in that world, and is pretty darned entertaining to boot. The Book of Eli...not so much. For one, Denzel's character is too superhuman throughout -- After the first few fracases, there's no sense at all that he ever might be in danger. More problematically, perhaps realizing that fundamental problem, the screenwriter (Gary Whitta) instead decides to punctuate pretty much every scene with women in sexual peril, a decision which is supremely lazy and, after awhile, borderline misogynistic. (Were you to play a drinking game involving one beverage for every time Mila Kunis, Jennifer Beals, or any other woman in The Book of Eli is threatened with rape or violence, or those threats are acted upon, you may just end up drunk enough to stop wondering what the hell is wrong with Gary Whitta.)
Anyway, all that aside, there are a few small glimmers of entertainment here and there in the later going, although they're mostly meta moments: Michael Gambon and Frances De La Tour escape Hogwarts long enough to show up as gun-totin' redneck cannibals, and both play it like they're on some kind of dare. And Dracula does get to share another scene with his Renfeld, the inimitable Tom Waits. (Oldman and Washington are professionals anyway -- neither condescend to this lousy material.) In the end, though, The Book of Eli is a bad movie with a dumb premise that doesn't even seem to understand how bad or dumb it is. And that ultimately just makes it worse.
Now Scott Stewart's Legion, on the other hand, wears its B-movie badness like a badge of honor, and that gets some points from me. I mean, Dennis Quaid and Charles Dutton as two short-order cooks, fending off demons in their middle-of-nowhere diner (in a place called Paradise Falls, no less)? These guys are hardened veterans of this sort of thing. They know the score, and they help bring the right sense of proportion to the rest of the survivors, including Adrianne Palicki, Tyrese, Kate Walsh, Willa Holland, and the underrated Lucas Black (who, on Sling Blade alone, really should've played Jake Lloyd's part in The Phantom Menace.) In every scene they're in, Quaid and Dutton manage to wordlessly convey their understanding that: Look at best, we're making Tremors here, people.
In Legion, the End of Days wasn't a man-made screw-up this time. Rather, in a fit of Old Testament wrath, our Father who art in Heaven decides that the whole mankind experiment has totally and utterly failed (maybe He caught wind of the whole reality-TV thing) and thus sends down a few plagues -- locusts, angels, and whatnot -- to smote us all into oblivion. Fortunately for us, the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) isn't down with the new program, and so he clips his wings, dons some choice duds and a ridiculous amount of firepower, and becomes humankind's protector, or at least the protector of an unborn child that apparently will be some kind of second Messiah. (Think John Connor, but biblical.) And if he can save a few diner patrons while he's at it, well the more the merrier.
So, in other words, if The Book of Eli was a post-apocalyptic western -- a Stranger comes to Town and all that -- Legion is really more of a zombie movie. It's a bunch of random strangers thrown together by crisis, trying to survive against impossible supernatural odds without killing each other. Or, in other words, it's The Prophecy meets Night of the Living Dead meets The Terminator meets Assault on Precinct 13. (At times, it also feels a lot like the considerably better Prince of Darkness, but without Alice Cooper around to play the possessed folk.) And, even more than with Eli, I vibed into its flagrant b-movieness for the first hour or so of its run.
The problem is, Stewart and co-writer Peter Schink don't really seem to know where they want to take this thing. You know that old saw about throwing a bunch of characters together in a room and pretty soon they start to write themselves? Well, if Legion is any indication, sometimes they don't. And so the movie starts to lose its early head of B-movie steam by the middle going, as the various survivors pair off and spin their wheels with "character-building" conversations that go nowhere. There are a few funny exchanges, most of which made it into the ubiquitous trailer. ("I don't even believe in God!" "That's ok, He doesn't believe in you either.") But even more than in most of these flicks, I found myself sitting around waiting for the next attack just to get things moving once more.
And that brings us to the other big problem. The ground rules here don't make a whole lot of sense. So these zombies are angels? Clearly, gunfire cuts through them like butter, so they don't seem any different from, you know, zombies. And why are they attacking in waves like this? What's the plan here? I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but...is He really one for acid-drenched booby traps? Schink and Stewart have one clever conceit here -- that the most innocuous-looking people around are the ones you'll really need to worry about to go bugnuts evil at the drop of a hat. But they just keep reusing it. When an old lady attacks (again, as per the trailer), it's a clever reversal of expectations. But when little kids and the ice cream man later do the same, it all gets a bit redundant.
By the time the archangel Gabriel (Kevin Durand, seeming, in all honesty, pretty straight-to-video) shows up in the last half-hour, Legion just gives up any pretense of coherence. I can barely explain anything that happens after the remaining few souls scramble out of the diner, other than to say it really isn't worth trying to explain anyway. To its credit, Legion may not suffer from the dreary self-seriousness of The Book of Eli, but the last reel is just as convoluted and nonsensical. And, as such, both movies end up feeling a bit like the lurid daydreams of an ADD-afflicted teenager, one who's fallen asleep after way too much Red Bull, Bible Study, and Modern Warfare 2. It's time to wrap this up, so if you'll forgive a really terrible pun: Lacking conviction and passionate intensity, sadly, neither of these flicks are worth a second coming.
And, speaking of big losers, Gordon Gekko has done his time and wants back in the big game -- maybe with a new cellphone -- in the teaser for Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, also with Shia LaBoeuf, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, Eli Wallach, Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Ferlito, Frank Langella, and -- word has it -- Charlie Sheen. Might have to give the first one another whirl beforehand.
]]>
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.
"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to." -- J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010. [The Onion mourns.]
"You're not an actor if you're just a person that fits into a cute costume. You're a prop." -- Zelda Rubenstein, 1933-2010.
]]>To its credit and as a result of the Citizens United decision (which the organization has previously lawyered and lobbied for), the ACLU convenes a weekend summit to discuss its campaign finance reform position. "'The ACLU's version of democracy is from the ground-up,' one civil rights lawyer, David Gans, told the ACLU's board, which was assembled downtown at One New York Plaza. 'Now Exxon Mobil can spend 2% of its money and blow that all up.'"
Here's hoping the reformers win the day -- or walk out CIO-style if they don't. Imho, the stance that unlimited corporate funding of our elections is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment has always been the Achilles' heel of an otherwise superb organization. I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, their reasoning relies on two unfortunate bugs in the legal code -- corporate personhood and the conflation of money with speech -- that they too often deem fundamental First Amendment principles. I would argue they're not.
For why the former -- corporate personhood -- has obvious problems, just read Justice Stevens' dissent from Thursday:
"The basic premise underlying the Court's ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker's identity, including its 'identity; as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law....
Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters. The financial resources, legal structure,and instrumental orientation of corporations raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races."
For the latter -- the ruinous conflation of money and speech in Buckley v. Valeo -- check out Stevens' concurrence in Nixon v. Shrink Government Pact (2000), where he says how he'd come down if Buckley were reopened:
"In response to [Justice Kennedy's] call for a new beginning, therefore, I make one simple point. Money is property; it is not speech.
Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results...
Telling a grandmother that she may not use her own property to provide shelter to a grandchild -- or to hire mercenaries to work in that grandchild's campaign for public office -- raises important constitutional concerns that are unrelated to the First Amendment."
But somewhere along the line and for whatever reason, the ACLU latched on to both of these unwise shibboleths, and have since been arguing that corporate personhood and the idea of money as speech are both enshrined in the First Amendment. Uh...really?
To see what kind of damage these two bogus ideas have wrought, one need only to go over to Salon and read through Glenn Greenwald's ugly meltdown on Citzens United the past few days. As anyone who visits GitM regularly knows, I link to Greenwald pretty much constantly. On a host of issues, from Obama's terrible record on civil liberties to the broken-down state of our journalism, he's been remarkably on point, and one of my favorite columnists to read. I used to wonder if there was anything I disagreed with him on. Well, it turns out, there is. And, apparently, I'm a "partisan hack" for thinking different.
For the Cliff Notes version of this whole conversation, I wrote up a snarky summation of it here yesterday, well after things had gone south. But, basically, Glenn -- on "homework assignment" -- argued on Friday that, all the negative consequences that will ensue aside, the Majority in Citizen's United decided the case correctly, that this was a victory for the first amendment, and that people who disagree with their decision are practicing "outcome-based law." (He also made the dubious and unprovable assertion that things can't get any worse anyway. Really? We'll see.)
Well, this assessment did not sit right with a lot of people. Some questioned his reading of the case. Others pointed out that law is always outcome-based, even the Majority's ruling in Citizens. (The concerned outcome for Justice Kennedy here is that blogs might get banned someday, somehow, if this ruling isn't made. I'll take my chances.) And, others, such as myself, questioned these two principles -- corporations are people, money is speech -- that the ruling was based on.
Well, suffice to say, Greenwald did not take criticism well. He adamantly refused to engage either notion -- money isn't speech, corporations aren't people -- as having any merit whatsoever, eventually trying to write off both with some dubious 1L hypotheticals. (All were answered to his disadvantage, several times over.) He went on to ridicule the folks who disagreed with him in a "check out the Big Brain on me" kinda way. (He argued his lawyerly creds just means he knows better.) He ignored Stevens' actual dissent throughout. And he accused folks of being just like Dubya on torture for deigning to disagree with him on the decision.
This embarrassing conceit -- those with disagree with me are Dubyaites, end of story -- formed the extraordinarily condescending introduction of Greenwald's follow-up to his first post. Still ignoring the legitimate criticisms people were making of the two assertions above -- money=speech and corporations=people, Glenn instead pulled one line from Justice Stevens' ninety pages of dissent to argue that all nine Justices agreed with both of these propositions. (This even though both Ginsburg and Sotomayor questioned the corporate personhood idea in oral arguments, and that Stevens explicitly said he did not agree with the money=speech proposition in Nixon v. Shrink, an argument Glenn would not touch.) As it turns out, the one line Glenn pulled from Stevens' dissent proved neither assertion. Nonetheless, he returned to his shell, refusing to even consider the notion that "money=speech" or "corporations=people" might be lousy interpretations or legal accidents, or that they aren't necessarily covered by the First Amendment.
When I shared the above ACLU story this morning, Greenwald blew another gasket:
The ACLU has a long history of standing up to and defying people [like] you: those who pretend to believe in the Constitution and civil liberties only when it can be used as a weapon to advance your partisan and political agenda.
If they didn't reverse themselves on the First Amendment rights of Nazis in the wake of huge numbers of people like you (those who only believe in the Constitution when it suits them) cutting off funding and leaving the organization, I highly doubt they will do so now....
But what has made the ACLU such an important and unique organization is that they have stood their ground on principle and resisted the efforts of people like you to turn it into a partisan tool rather than an organization devoted to the Constitution."
I guess he figured I'd forget what "people like me" means from paragraph to paragraph. And, yes, y'all, I've been writing on politics and progressivism here for ten years because I've always wanted to subvert the Constitution to my own ends. And I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for that nasty Greenwald!
Anyway, when I then reminded Greenwald that people of principle can disagree on these issues, and that it may even be possible that the ACLU reformers might even be the right ones in this story, that's when I got called an Orwellian partisan hack once more. (FWIW, here's my kissoff. I particularly like "paddock of principle and certitude.")
Throughout this whole back-and-forth, there was not even the remotest possibility that any other interpretation on these two questions had merit for Greenwald: Corporations have first amendment rights. Money is speech. Both are obviously enshrined in the First Amendment. And arguing anything else is ridiculous and deserving of scorn (even if Supreme Court justices have argued differently in the past, including as recently as Thursday.) So let it be written, so let it be done.
Uh...really? Who knows...perhaps it's a lawyer thing. Nonetheless, this myopic, bullish way of thinking -- I hold the only correct possible interpretation of the law, and you're either with me or you're with the Dubyaites -- isn't very satisfying on either personal or argumentative grounds. And Greenwald's constant doubling down on his original argument, even as more and more holes were poked in it by various responders, makes me question not only his temperament but his writing in general. He usually provides a valuable public service, no doubt, but he seems to have bought into his own hype as an Incorruptible Defender of Liberty. If you can't think outside of yourself once in awhile, or find some way to weigh arguments you may not necessarily agree with without deeming them unprincipled, you're really not much use to anyone.
Update: Looks like Greenwald addressed this topic one more time this morning. Here's what he said:
"'Money is not speech' is an idiot bumper sticker slogan, not a meaningful argument which resolves anything. 'Corporations have no constitutional rights' is such an extreme and dangerous position (it endorses the constitutionality of the FBI's searching whatever corporate offices they want and seizing all corporate documents with no search warrants or probable cause, or the Congress' imposing $10 million fines on corporations every time they criticize the government, among other things) that it's frivolous in the extreme. Despite that, I spent substantial time all weekend addressing and responding to those frivolous bumper sticker slogans."
So there you have it. An "idiot bumper sticker slogan"...repeated verbatim by Justice Stevens in 2000. (And, for what it's worth, Greenwald referred to civil rights lawyer David Kairys' piece on these two questions, linked several times above, as "stupid and ill-informed.") Class act, Glenn.
]]>