The Life of Julia --- The Cutting-Room-Floor Slide

The Obama 2012 election machine has introduced a slide show they call "The Life of Julia."

There are those of us who fundamentally disagree with this vision of a Nanny State government that promises to provide all kinds of free stuff to its citizens "from womb to tomb," at the expense of nebulous corporations that the government can tax into prosperity.

 Since they started by borrowing from the title of a beloved work of British comedy "The Life of Brian" I have decided to merge the memes in graphic form as the slide the campaign left on the cutting-room floor. Click the image for a larger version and readable text.

Gregory Alan Isakov - In Tall Buildings

The 2012 Oscar Reviews, Part the Second

 I'm coming up against deadline here, with five titles left to complete before the red carpet shows up on the screen tonight. So without further introduction....

● It's a few months ago now that I watched Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" and so I did a read-through of Roger Ebert's review. I am a forgiving viewer and will wait for a good while for a director to get into the meat of a story, but even for me there are limits. When Ebert writes that it reminded him of "2001: A Space Oydessy" I immediately knew I was in good company because that was my comparison as well, from the initial 20 minutes being an exercise in "Am I in the right movie?!?" and shortly joined by a dis-temporal, ethereal and often confusing mish-mash of story. Malick was simply trying very hard to be artsy and deep, playing with camera movement and effects, and  hoping that this would catch Oscar voters like "2001..." did. I get the use of the cosmos, of natural history with dinosaurs and geologic formation with volcanic lava steam clouds, then the story of the O'Brien family with its normalcy and tragedy and coming-of-age of not just the boy, Jack, but of a whole family --- not least of which, a father (Brad Pitt) whose strict nature sometimes sends him over the edge (but which, as we glimpse in another family's home, isn't wholly uncommon) who must still learn what is important, what is not and how to let go of envy and a sense of injustice. This is not lost on me in reflection of my own life, which I volunteer could use more of the grace described in some of the early voice-over narration. [I would just like to note at this moment, after having written about George Clooney's hack job at the start of "The Descendents" that this is how narration is done --- with feeling and as if it were not being recorded literally the first time the actor was reading the words.] Then we have a grown version of Jack (Sea Penn) seen coping with a death anniversary of one of his brothers --- I never figured out which --- and following through a doorway and a faint blip into a version of a re-connective family-outing afterlife on a beach, in sculptural desert caves like we saw in "127 Hours" last year, and finally more cosmos. Of course, this did not happen linearly but it was mostly coherent. But I keep coming back to a basic question: What was the point of this film? What was it really trying to say? I never got a firm grasp on an answer to that. I'd probably have to see it again.

● I found Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" to be a trite piece in the tradition of "Old Yeller," shot with modern equipment and with a much larger budget. It's among a number of recent films ("Hugo" for example) where a big-name American director brought his show to England. I suppose this is what happens as the American industry and economy is retracting and --- depending on whom one listens to, believes and sees with ones' own eyes --- is falling apart. What we do know is that films from the Continent are regaining traction after a long period of barely being noticed beyond a few directors that critics feted but large audiences here didn't watch.

As for the story: boy raises horse, boy loses horse, horse gets anthropomorphized on-screen, boy finds horse. I'm not going to say this movie wasn't entertaining, that it didn't have some very poignant moments (perhaps most of all, as the young officer's eyes project the absolute fear of 'Oh Lord, I'm going to die' as prancing showmanship in training, outmoded tactics, and naked bravado was mowed down without mercy by WWI machine gun technology. Not the first time this truism has been shown, and certainly not the last.

I am not a clock-watcher when it comes to movies and yet, there I was opening my cell discreetly to see how many more handlers on both sides of the conflict would steer Joey (the horse) through the war. It didn't help anything that I chose a hard seat. Of course, there is the obligatory German army officer unmoved by the loss of life of horse or man, as long as his heavy black machinery of destruction is dragged up an astoundingly steep hill. But, so too, we get to see a German grunt who hates what's being done to the horses but can offer little or no protest. Spielberg, even in a movie about WWI, cannot help but establish a Germany that by its nature is a destroyer of life in its quest for dominion above the suffering and small cries of some. I am in no way a Holocaust denier; I merely dislike narratives that try to smack viewers upside the head to belabor a point.

The 2012 Oscar Reviews

● The George Clooney voice-over that started "The Descendents" had me initially regretting my choice. There are few people who can pull off movie narration and Clooney is not among them. After this forced delivery, though, it did get better.

With Matt King's wife in a three-month-long coma that we come to find out is a permanent condition and triggers a living will order to remove life support machinery, the family must shortly come to terms with certain dealings. Among them, the fact that Elizabeth had been having an affair before her accident. A revelation like that, as one could imagine, delivers a real body blow to the grief process and we watch as these people struggle with how to feel and how to interact with family and friends who don't need to know the details. It's vexing when they can't have a conversation where Elizabeth tries to explain why, shows remorse, or even demands a divorce. There's not going to be any kind response, because the spark of life is gone. But that's not entirely accurate because their daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, who put in a very good performance here), had spotted her mother during a tryst some time before the accident and it had been a bone of contention between them. Elizabeth apparently continued with the affair, and Alexandra evidently took to recreational drinking at her boarding school. So there was a chance for everyone to come clean and work things out, but it wasn't taken.

Matt King, despite being the head of a landed well-to-do family (they descended from Hawaiian kings, literally), works as an accountant and holds dear to the Warren Buffett ethos of living simply but comfortably (even though Buffet's plea to have taxes for "the rich / the 1%" is a hypocritical crock of shit ... but we're not here to talk about Warren). He has loads of money, but doesn't use it to laze around and spoil his family. Isn't that so often the dichotomy with movie characters --- they had or have tons of money but for the general public to be able to identify with them, they need to live the lives of working stiffs --- by choice. (At least Jane Austen had an excuse when she used this meme so often.) Anyway, Matt's cousins are more or less a bunch of hedonistic do-nothings living off of trust funds and who wish to sell the family land to a developer --- before some kind of usage deadline runs out in 7 years --- to get their portion of the windfall and be done with it. And so, it's two problems in Matt's life that are confounded by legal documents that designate a certain end date. What do you do with the time you have left?

Matt and Alexandra (joined by her stoner-type boyfriend of sorts, Sid) decide to try to find the man Elizabeth had been having an affair with, to give him the chance to say goodbye. Just so happens, this man turns out to be a real estate agent connected to the fore-mentioned developer and stands to make a ton of money if Matt approves the sale. I'll stop myself here because I don't need to get into every nook and cranny of the plot --- go see it for yourself! --- but there are a few things to mention. When Matt wakes in the middle of the night and goes by Sid on the couch, the entire audience just knew Alexandra would be there. She wasn't. Instead, there was a glimpse of Sid's humanity and a reason why Alexandra may want him along on this journey. We don't live in a world where everyone is all good or all bad, we're just left to try to understand and sift through the consequences when someone we love makes bad decisions. Some of us will blame the dead, some will take it out on the living, some will internalize it for a time. But eventually, you have to not try to understand anymore and simply let go.

I'm not sure how George Clooney got an Oscar nod for this other than as a sympathy f--- from Hollywood as a way to promote the sense that the town still has some vestige of the glitz and glamor of the '50s and '60s. In my opinion, that's what they have Lifetime Achievement Oscars for, and that's where I believe he is headed. His hasn't been a bad career, he makes a ton of money, but it's hard to separate his characters from himself when you see his face up on the screen. A lot of the time, I'm seeing scenes with him primarily as an actor who is acting, which spoils things a bit. On Oscar night, you're asking, 'Does he deserve this... or is he getting it for being George Clooney?'

● "Midnight in Paris" is one of those movies whose fantastic cover art, concept and wonderful atmosphere / scenery / cinematography are besmirched when it adds in the people actually playing the parts. I have to admit to not being an Owen Wilson fan because every character he plays is fundamentally the same. Many of the other actors have nice resumes and yet this piece didn't come together in that area. They came across in the dialogue as stuffy and pretentious and revoltingly stereotypical --- these are not firsts for a Woody Allen film. This had a lot of Romantic and nostalgic potential and it struck out swinging for me. (Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of films out there that strike out not swinging.)

● On that note, let's move on to "Moneyball." I honestly didn't walk into this movie expecting much but I came away really impressed. Brad Pitt in the role of Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, worked past the problem I had with not being able to easily separate Clooney from the character. Maybe it was a combination of the lighting and his look being different from how he's appeared in the media over the past several years. Pitt re-invents his style.

For any fan of sports, there are visualizations of what it would be like to work in a front office of a favorite team. Where we get these mental images and imagined scenarios from depends on our sports coverage source, I guess. But for anyone who thought that every team even since just 10 years ago is filled with suit-wearing executives fresh out of a fraternity house, "Moneyball" dispels that notion, picks it up off the floor, smacks it around and tosses it against the wall. It is the gritty reality reality of big-market versus small-market teams, the haves and the have-nots. The clubs that can afford to sign any player they could possibly want to multimillion dollar deals and those that have to scrounge every penny and hope to compete with players who have more heart than talent. Beane was among the few who came to believe in the statistical approach to determining a player's worth to a club; rather than a vague evaluation by scouts, everything gets put to numbers. It changed the game of baseball and how front offices worked. Pitt did a great job displaying the attitude of someone who knows he's bucking 150 years of history and facing resistance at every turn (including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe, a manager who refused to play the guys Beane wants in the line-up until his hand is forced by Billy trading away every other player at the position) and Jonah Hill brings it as the quiet numbers guy, Peter Brand. Both are up for individual acting Oscars in their respective categories.

As a longtime fan of the Buffalo Bills, I nodded wistfully when Billy says "The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us. It's an unfair game. And now we're being gutted, organ donors for the rich." The failure of baseball to have a salary cap is one of its biggest problems in terms of parity of competition. I mean, a small-market team can undercut the big boys for only so long. Once the statistical method became de rigueur around the league, the advantage from that was pretty much gone. And yet, the A's are often still in the running late in the season....

I shouldn't really be surprised about this movie, given that Aaron Sorkin had a part in writing the script. As I've read, it was a weird process where several people worked on it, and the script Oscar nomination being termed "Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin" means that Sorkin's writing came in after Zallian's script was finished, rather than "Steven Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin" which would mean they co-wrote in a team. However it was achieved, a big part of the film's success comes in scene pacing, and the at-times subtle and at-times no-holds dialogue in the script. It was fun to watch. I know it's kind of weird to say that about a movie, but it's a pretty rare occurrence for me with all the dreck out there these days.

● I had heard good things about "Hugo." I heard that it was visually fantastic like "Amelie," that its story was simple enough for kids to follow but interesting enough for adults to be entertained. Also noted were that Ben Kingsley gives a great performance (not really news) and Sasha Baron Cohen showed a surprising dramatic ability.

"Amelie" it was not, but take some consolation that there aren't many that can either pull off works like that or have digitally-enhanced greens, reds, yellows and blues fit so well into the scheme of a director wanting his audience to smile almost the entire film. Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is not quite that kind of movie. It is a little darker, mysterious and has a different moral from which candy-coloring would detract. It is visually fantastic in its own way. To point out the scene where Hugo (Asa Butterfield) shows Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) the panorama of the Parisian nighttime skyline from the clock tower. The car lights buzzing around creating streaks of yellow and red and, of course, the spire of the Eiffel Tower right there at the heart was a sweet metaphor Hugo used to explain a deeply-held hope that he existed for a purpose and that even though he didn't know where he fit, he was an important part in the living machine that is the world.

It's tough to gauge how the Academy will receive this film. Movies that have children as a primary audience don't have a strong track record when it comes to taking home Best Picture Oscars. And with two of the main characters being so young, a win there would surely be a surprise, but anything could happen. If it doesn't win in that category, I could see Scorsese winning for Best Director if voting members want to spread the gold around more than they have in recent years. That remains doubtful, and wins for any of its 11 nominations will likely be coming from the artistic side of the awards (e.g. cinematography, art direction, sound editing). With the tour de force of the Harry Potter series having come to its end this year without major recognition from Hollywood, it's saying something that "Hugo" got these kinds of nominations.

Otherwise, the story follows a bit of meta-film-making by bringing in Kingsley's character of Georges Méliès, one of film's first visionaries... but a director whose studio had failed, whose movies were lost, and whom no one really remembered. Scorsese must have loved making this little love note to one of his medium's true pioneers.

“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep... but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
--- C.S. Lewis

The 2012 Oscar List

It's Oscar time again, with a fresh roster of films to review: "The Artist"; "The Descendants"; "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"; "The Help"; "Hugo"; "Midnight in Paris"; "Moneyball"; "The Tree of Life"; "War Horse." The list of Best Picture seems much less stylistically diverse than last year, and for me, a lot less enjoyable from a horse-race perspective. Again, I will be commenting on all of the Best Picture nominees... or as many of the as I can catch before they start handing out the short gold trophies. In the meantime, here's a review of one I saw just recently.

● It seemed like whoever wrote and directed "The Iron Lady" had such a dislike for Thatcher, that they tried to temper it by making her something pitiable. And so it was less biography than a 'Look how the mighty have fallen!' uppercut. The interspersing timeline and flashback narrative style doesn't allow for us to get an undistracted glimpse of her glory years. There's always this slap in the face that the woman is now senile, physically seeing her deceased husband and thinking she's still the PM. But even then, they took to task that metaphor of the "Iron Lady," careerist, giving her own children the cold shoulder, and the requisite "shop-keeper's daughter" quips. It would be like a film of Ronald Reagan's life concentrating hard and viewed through the extrapolated, exaggerated prism of his secluded Alzheimer's years that few people would even be able to speak of --- but that would be more appropriate, given that some of the signs did show in public. There weren't more important things to focus on that happened in her longest reign as PM? They had to assault her with this, during her lifetime? Yes, some people get old and some people develop dementia, but the decline is not the most important part of someone's life. I fundamentally disagree with this period of Thatcher's life being used as the basis.

I suppose the excuse would be that it's a "King Lear"-like drama that focuses on the final fall of its subject, laying out where he'd gone wrong and the ignominy of no longer having power coupled with the loss of wit and vigor. But Shakespeare with a quill and moving his players, this was not. The performances were good with what they were given, but it's a shame that Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent were used so ill here.

No surprise that Hollywood gave it a political nomination. As Sean Penn himself said after he won for "Milk" in 2009, God knows they can't resist lauding "commies and homos." And, I would add, the cutting-off-at-the-knees of strong women who happen to be politically conservative --- just about the only thing most Academy members do judge to be an unnatural abomination.

Frankly, it looks like they hope to use the cachet of "The King's Speech" win last year (Firth's performance aside, something I was very disappointed with, given the screenplay's reductive and overwhelmingly fast and loose portrayal of history) and hope that a film about a British upper-cruster's personal battle with disorder can catch lightning for Ms. Streep in the Kodak ______ Theater a second time in the "Best Actress" category.

"When Envy breeds unkind division:
There comes the ruin, there begins confusion."

--- William Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, Act IV.i.195-6

Can You Hear Me Now?

After having AT&T landline phone and DSL Internet service for about 10 years, which amounted to ~$52 per month, we decided it was time for a change. The plan was to switch our longtime phone number over to a cell phone for an add-on $10 per month with an existing Verizon account and switch over to an Internet plan that didn't require phone service.

The phone switch, which the Verizon vendor called "porting" the number, was a fairly easy process. Verizon has great coverage, there's the convenience and portability of having a cell, and the price was a no-brainer.

But then came the Internet switch. As mentioned above, we had AT&T for a long time and to go along with Verizon FiOS Internet being unavailable in this area, there was a sense of brand loyalty to Ma Bell as I first tried their "High Speed Internet Direct Elite" plan ("DSL Without a Land Line!") that advertised 6mbps (megabytes per second) download speeds. It also had a virtually unlimited usage allowance, which is important with Netflix Streaming being about 1-2GB per movie. I called and ordered and wrote down what numbers I was given. This brand loyalty was put to the test and failed. First, the technician that showed up was in and out of here in a whirlwind and left without my computer being connected to the Internet because I wasn't given the correct account number that had to be entered for access. It took two phone calls to AT&T customer service to find this account number out. The first of these calls was to someone who had a heavy India accent when I could hear her over the digitally-garbled connection, which at times was like listening to and trying to decipher Peter Frampton's lyrics over his synthesizer machine. "Samantha" was wholly unhelpful, somehow kept getting the account number wrong (either through the bad connection or a bad interpretation) and yet she evidently was able to have my account information because she knew the name and phone number on the account, and then after about 20 minutes, most of which I spent on hold and muzak three times after calmly explaining that "I really can't tell you anything else because this is the account number I was given when I ordered. This is the only information I have." Then, she hung up on me. After fuming for a little bit and trying the account # as the log-in one more time and still getting nothing, I called AT&T customer service again. This time I got a clear connection and a friendly Southern accent. I told her my name and account # that I had been given and that it wasn't working as a log-in, and she immediately said that this was wrong number and gave me the right one. I entered it in and was shortly connected. How AT&T can justify such a variance in customer service quality for the sake of saving some money by outsourcing these jobs, I'll never understand. It's what makes it too large a company for its own good.

The actual AT&T Internet service was another point of dissatisfaction. The 6mbps speeds turned out to be just 400-600kbps over my wireless router, and ~1.5mbps when I used a wired connection to the modem/gateway, according to several tests on a reputable speed test site. A slower-than-advertised rate is not uncommon, but this was not worth $48/month. Granted that part of the problem may have been the age of our gateway/router unit. But AT&T recommends using their approved brands (and doesn't offer support for brands not listed), and it becomes a problem when all of these are old and none have the N-wireless connection that has become the standard. How AT&T can operate using outdated equipment and not contracting with a manufacturer to produce new ones as technology changes (and even then, N-wireless connection has been around for a while), I do understand. They produce X amount of units and sell them until they're gone and then maybe they'll produce a new one with newer specifications. The rudder turns slowly and again proved to me that AT&T is too large for its own good. The accompanying picture of a modified logo neatly sums up the company.

So, I was a little upset quite pissed at this point. I endured it for a couple of weeks. And then I remembered about Charter Communications, the local cable company in our area. I had totally forgotten to check out their plans (just to note --- this is very uncharacteristic of me) and upon talking to someone who has service with them and seeing a quick demonstration of the speed, I was interested. Among their plans was Charter Internet Express 15mpbs service (with unlimited usage) for $34/month, and an introductory deal with the first 12 months for $19.99 per month when ordered online. More speed for less $. I bit. Rather than renting a cable modem and router from Charter for $10/month extra, I went down to Best Buy and picked up a Motorola SURFboard Gateway SBG6580 unit that consolidates the cable modem and router, has good specifications for it lasting and was on sale for $134 down from $160. Score! In a year-plus, it'll pay for itself. The installation was three days later, went very smoothly (despite the inconvenience of electing to take down some tools and temporarily move some pegboard on in our utility area for access b/c the techs are not allowed to fish wires through walls... and despite the guy absolutely reeking of cigarettes... and despite me getting a bloody nose (from the dry winter air) right as he was finishing up and I had to sign the paperwork), and I was flying with a ~35mbps download speed. We called and cancelled AT&T service; I'm just glad there was no term commitment or early termination fee with them. Just about two weeks in, I'm still loving Charter.

It was something of an odyssey, but we should have done this a long time ago.

(Photo illustration © David Beren. Link.)