Monthly Archives: September 2014

Here’s A Litmus Test For Obama Derangement Syndrome

Forbes Magazine has an article out showing that President Obama’s term in office has economically outperformed President Reagan’s in pretty much every category.  Oh, and he also has shrunk the deficit and reduced government.  The deficit grew dramatically under Reagan and the size of government increased as well.  I don’t see this as a “take that Reagan lovers!” article as much as it’s a “take that imaginary history!” article.

Here’s the problem with idols; your image of them is grossly distorted from their reality.  In fact, your image of them is more a reflection on yourself than reality.  Reagan is the epitome of this.  Everything good under the sun is attributed to Reagan even though a very simple analysis of the data would show that he wasn’t really that great.  Lots of bad stuff happened under his watch.  Unforgivable stuff.  Some good stuff happened too, but most of the good stuff is made up from whole cloth.

Maybe twenty years from now, the image of Obama will be like that of Reagan today.  Who knows?  I doubt it, though.  Obama will likely go down in history as the perfectly adequate politician that he was.  A pragmatist to Reagan’s idealism.  And that’s the story of Republicanism in the United States these days.  Idealism divorced from reality.  It works wonderfully for short-term gains.  Everyone loves people who pretend to be idealists.  The next Presidential election will be full of them.  Pretty much everyone that is expected to run for the Republican ticket is a pretender and so is likely next POTUS Hillary Clinton.  Sadly, that’s how you win elections.  Even Obama ran on a very idealist platform while all the time showing himself to be a pragmatist’s pragmatist.  The results have been mostly good with some bad thrown in.  Seriously, ignore the faux-scandals and make a list of all the stuff that was accomplished.  You know, stuff that was passed.  Here, let me help you (caution, swears).  List them in two columns, ones that are good and ones that are bad.  You would be hard pressed to come up with a list containing more bad than good.

Movie Review: The November Man

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: Weak, confusing plot.  Some half decent action.  Every spy thriller trope known to man is thrown at the screen and nothing sticks.

Spy thrillers require a suspension of disbelief.  Violence is used at a drop of a hat.  Near misses are just around every corner.  Complicated plans are used to solve complicated problems that would never exist in real life.  “The November Man” contains all of that, but the plot makes it very hard to suspend your disbelief.

Spy thrillers seem to come in two varieties these days; master versus student and come with me if you want to live.  With “The November Man” we get both.  Pierce Brosnan plays Deveraux, the master spy, and does a decent enough job of it for the material he is given.  Deveraux is calm, cold, and collected.  His student, Mason (Luke Bracey) is bold, brash, and something else that begins with the letter B.  In the intro, Mason does something bold and brash against the instructions of Deveraux, who is pretending to be a high value assassination target despite not looking anything like the target.  Assassins must be hard to find these days because one would think the number one rule of assassination is to know the face of your target.  This sets the stage for a recurring theme in the movie about people’s motivations being completely unclear almost all the time.

We then fast-forward some years to Deveraux in retirement and being visited by his old handler who wants him to do just one more mission (trope!).  The mission is to help a woman escape (come with me if you want to live) from Russia with valuable data that will jeopardize Federov’s (the next Russian President) political ambitions.  During this rescue attempt, Deveraux runs into his old student, Mason, and events put them on opposite sides.

Deveraux leaves Russia with only the name of the woman who has the information to bring Federov down.  This leads to yet another come with me if you want to live situation.  Unlike the first damsel in distress (trope!), this second one has absolutely no reason to believe Deveraux and yet she follows him lambishly.  What then follows is a series of chases and plot twists that don’t really make much sense.  You have bad guys being put back into power on the flimsiest of excuses, good guys turning against the bad guys and suffering no consequences despite the bad guys being in absolute power, women making extremely poor decisions so we can have yet another damsel in distress situation, information that has been kept secret for decades suddenly being brought to light afer a very brief database search, and yet another damsel in distress used to bring everyone back together.

As you can see, “The November Man” is quite the mess.  My recommendation is to go see another Pierce Brosnan spy movie.  “The Thomas Crown Affair”, for example.

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Ukranian Crisis*

*But were afraid to ask…

Max Fisher over at Vox has a pretty good summary of what’s going on in Ukraine and who all the players are.  I’m in the “Putin’s dug a hole he can’t get himself out of” camp myself.  Things in Russia have been pretty crappy since the Great Recession and there’s nothing like a little nationalism and a bit of war to distract the people from their problems.  Putin’s approval ratings are through the roof since Russia “annexed” the Crimean Peninsula.  It’s kind of creepy how easily world leaders can use unabashed nationalism to get citizens to completely ignore facts and fall in line with what the leaders want to accomplish. *cough* Iraq War *cough*

Movie Review: Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: A mess of a movie.  The only draw is the stylized violence and that isn’t even very good in most cases.

Wow, talk about your box office bomb of the summer.  As of this writing, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” has only grossed $12M.  And with good reason too.  The storyline is a complete mess.  I remember liking the first “Sin City” movie, but watching this second incarnation, I was reminded at how little of the actual story stayed with me.  We are introduced again to Senator Roark, who I do not remember from the first movie at all, who you may (or may not, like me) remember, is the father of that yellow-faced guy who was the main baddie from the first movie.  The dude had a yellow face and when he was shown in a picture, I had only a vague recollection of him being in the first movie.  All this leads me to the conclusion that the first movie was all style and very little substance.  But still, at least the style was there.  “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” contains a piddling amount of style and absolutely no substance.

As with the first movie, we have a few different story lines that somewhat converge on each other in that everyone tends to gather at the same stripper bar and cross paths there.  There are three basic stories going on.  One of them is incredibly boring and completely useless except to make the script an acceptable movie length.  It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a gambler with the best luck in the world, able to take a dollar and turn it into a suitcase full of cash in no time, who decides that he needs to take on Senator Roark in a gambling match and humiliate him by taking all his money.  There’s a reason for it, but there is no build up to it or allusions to it until it’s spat out as a throw away line by Senator Roark which you could easily miss if you weren’t paying attention, which is likely because of how slow this story plods along.

Story number two is the only one that really holds any water (Ha!  This is funny because of the inordinate amount of time spent on the femme fatale climbing naked in and out of bodies of water).  The entire movie is supposed to have a noir-ish feel to it, but this story is really the only one that succeeds.  It has the classic theme of a damsel in distress who turns out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It also features the best stylized violence, but only in bits and pieces.  Mostly, it’s still just severed heads rolling of bodies in black and white cartoonish fashion.

Story three is kind of meh and suffers from the same problem as the gambler story in that you could easily miss the motivations behind what follows if you aren’t paying attention.  In it, Marv (who I am guessing is creator Frank Miller’s id) helps Nancy exact revenge on Senator Roark for Hartigan’s death from the first movie.  Again, some decent stylized violence in this one, but I got tired of rolling my eyes the amount of times that Marv walks slowly towards people with guns who seem to forget how to use them for the exact amount of time it takes Marv to come and bash their heads together.

When I see a movie that is this bad I like to think up a more apt name for the movie.  My best so far is calling “There Will Be Blood” “There Will Be Boring”.  This one, I think I will call “Snooze City: A Movie to Sleep Through”.  It really is that bad.  Luckily, with the anemic box office draw, we have likely seen the last of the “Sin City” movies.