2013-06-28
2013-06-08
Against Our Values—And Bad at Keeping Us Safe
That's the punchline: the low volume of terrorist attacks both makes it difficult to find patterns and fools us into thinking that becoming the Stasi keeps us secure. A win-win for Team Information Retrieval!
2013-05-28
2013-04-06
The Station Agent
Many people will tell you that this quiet little movie is about the difficulty of making friendships, or small-town ennui, or perhaps the sublime beauty of trainspotting. They are wrong. The message of this movie is Phones Ruin Everything.
Fin (Peter Dinklage) doesn't have a phone, and doesn't seem to want one, despite the fact that on the phone no one could tell that he is a dwarf. Fin has resigned himself to double-takes, awkward silences, and puerile taunts, but he also reflexively keeps people at a distance. When we meet him, his life has been fraught with inertia; his place and movements have been meticulously laid out.
We have to imagine how Fin became coupled to Henry (Paul Benjamin), his friend, employer, and perhaps landlord, but it's a comfortable life for Fin. When Henry suddenly dies, his business is sold and Fin is left jobless and (we suspect) homeless. But Henry's will leaves Fin a defunct train depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey (there's more than one?), and Fin apparently walks all the way from Hoboken.
Fin's new neighborhood isn't any more tactful in its reception of someone of Fin's stature, and now he has to put up with the cell phone conversations of Joe (Bobby Cannavale) in his front yard and the distracted driving of Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) on the sidewalk-less rural roads. Joe and Olivia aren't really natives, either, but initially none of these refugees is able to maintain a connection to another.
By sheer daily proximity, Joe starts to bring the three of them together, only to be interrupted by his phone. Olivia is haunted by her phones, and flees them whenver she can. Joe's ebullience is the catalyst for the connections, but their relationships develop more when no one is speaking. Of course, when people aren't talking they're usually smoking, so it's a bit of a race between friendship and lung cancer.
Fin and Olivia address their respective griefs, but I expected the big redemption to be occasioned by the passing of Joe's ailing father, who appears only by phone. The movie ended before that, however; we leave these three friends in the wistful small hours of their second acts.
Don't pick up.
Fin (Peter Dinklage) doesn't have a phone, and doesn't seem to want one, despite the fact that on the phone no one could tell that he is a dwarf. Fin has resigned himself to double-takes, awkward silences, and puerile taunts, but he also reflexively keeps people at a distance. When we meet him, his life has been fraught with inertia; his place and movements have been meticulously laid out.
We have to imagine how Fin became coupled to Henry (Paul Benjamin), his friend, employer, and perhaps landlord, but it's a comfortable life for Fin. When Henry suddenly dies, his business is sold and Fin is left jobless and (we suspect) homeless. But Henry's will leaves Fin a defunct train depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey (there's more than one?), and Fin apparently walks all the way from Hoboken.
Fin's new neighborhood isn't any more tactful in its reception of someone of Fin's stature, and now he has to put up with the cell phone conversations of Joe (Bobby Cannavale) in his front yard and the distracted driving of Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) on the sidewalk-less rural roads. Joe and Olivia aren't really natives, either, but initially none of these refugees is able to maintain a connection to another.
By sheer daily proximity, Joe starts to bring the three of them together, only to be interrupted by his phone. Olivia is haunted by her phones, and flees them whenver she can. Joe's ebullience is the catalyst for the connections, but their relationships develop more when no one is speaking. Of course, when people aren't talking they're usually smoking, so it's a bit of a race between friendship and lung cancer.
Fin and Olivia address their respective griefs, but I expected the big redemption to be occasioned by the passing of Joe's ailing father, who appears only by phone. The movie ended before that, however; we leave these three friends in the wistful small hours of their second acts.
Don't pick up.
2013-03-29
2013-03-20
2013-02-10
2013-02-03
2012-11-11
Kulturkrieg
The Blue Meanies lost this election. After the delicious Schadenfreude and gloating, well-meaning liberals have been admonishing conservatives that we all would benefit if they learned from their errors. This is the civic-minded, Gallant thing to say.
I don't want them to learn anything. These people fear modernity, and they fear complexity. Their entire philosophy is grounded in keeping the mass of humanity in a perpetual state of fear, ignorance, and cruelty. They are not going to turn to each other and say, "I always knew there was solid evidence for climate change," or "It doesn't affect me if other people form a same-sex marriage or get an abortion." At most, they'll swallow hard and claim that America welcomes all hard-working immigrants (particularly if they're Catholic).
The notion that a polity requires "two healthy competing ideologies" is a conceit of those who profit from presenting the spectacle of this "competition." Compromise junkies like Obama look on decades of reactionary obstructionism and conclude that—this time—accommodation will be met with reconciliation. In fact, despite fleeting moments of clarity, cultural conservatives are preparing to bury their heads even deeper up their own hateful asses, and hoping they will learn anything other than to be more adroit liars is fruitless.
Demographically, they are doomed. The sooner they become an electoral irrelevancy the better. For all of us.
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