Monthly Archives: December 2010

UPDATED: “The Secret In Their Eyes”

Aesthetics, Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

Imagine a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists, congratulating themselves on their American exceptionalism (and sensitivity). Imagine a film with a plot you don’t figure out in the first minute of the movie (because it’s a fairly typical ad hoc abomination, like “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie). Imagine actresses sans silicone who act rather than act-out. Imagine actors who transport you into a world that goes beyond their bathroom mirrors (and every other surface that reflects … their image). Imagine no political correctness—no invisible wagging finger suggesting The Right Political Perspective; no ideology, only a story, and interactions between the sexes that are positive and natural; the kind that happened before women became menaces and men were made over in their image.

“The Secret In Their Eyes,” directed by writer-director Juan José Campanella, is such a film. It “won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards [2009], making Argentina the first country in Latin America to win it twice …” (Wikipedia.)

The New York Times’ review of this exceptional film did not do it justice. American film reviewers labor under the chauvinistic impression that Hollywood is where it all begins, and that there is no filmic life outside it. I guess this could blind a reviewer to excellence elsewhere.

The New Yorker gets it, writing that this “legal thriller” is “powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism.”

Writer-director, Juan José Campanella, working with the screenwriter and novelist Eduardo Sacheri, sends us deeper into mystery and passion; the movie presses forward with a rhapsodic urgency and with flashes of violence and pungent humor. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a finely wrought, labyrinthine entertainment whose corners and passageways will be discussed by moviegoers for hours afterward as they exit into the cool night air.

Watch it. It’s achingly beautiful and deep, “an effortless mastery, from moment to moment, of whatever the dramatic situation requires.”

UPDATE: And imagine wit and humor, organic to a situation— as people use colloquially—instead of the American, “I kicked him in the butt, ha, ha, ha, ha. I’m Brad Pitt.” Funny conversational lines from the better-than-decent effort that is “The Secret In Their Eyes”:

“Hurry up or you’ll find not a crime scene but a wake.”

The hero’s “antic partner,” Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), answers the phone in the criminal-court office (he doesn’t really want to answer): “No, wrong number, this is the sperm bank …”

The love object, the lovely Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant, must get hero Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín) off the hook for his investigative zeal. She mentions having had to win some official over with her smile (she’s being self-deprecating). Espósito (who loves her deeply and desperately), a subordinate, teases her gently: “What is this smile? Have I seen it?”

There is a powerful scene in which Irene walks in on Espósito’s interrogation of the killer. It’s amateurish if penetrating compared to the American power protocol.

Sensitive woman that she is, she catches the creep undressing her with his eyes. Then and there “she turns the questioning into a sexual duel, taunting Gomez’s manhood, her words more wounding and more effective than a beating with brass knuckles.” She’s brave, smart and politically incorrect.

There is also considerable depth to perceptions related; ordinary conversation which make you say to yourself, “That’s so true.” The victim’s husband, “a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life,” is relating to Espósito how he knows no longer if his memories of his beloved are true memories or memories of memories. (How often have you wondered whether what you remember even happened?)

Sandoval, a drunk, gives his life for his friend, Espósito. An opportunity presents itself, and out of the delirium of drunkenness, Sandoval finds the presence of mind to do a great thing. Or did he really? So subtle and unassuming is this act of sacrifice performed by a flawed, if delightful, character, that it almost goes unnoticed. It is certainly not accompanied by the soaring, sentimental f-cking sound/music/noise that masks similar, but staged, moments in your typical Hollywood production.

I don’t want to sully my impressions of this gem of a movie, but watching “Salt” last night was unsettling. America’s XBox, special effects, language-less movie culture reflects a certain reality-averse atavism. Up-close, Jolie the star is frightening. She has cultivated a comic-book look with a newly sculptured nose and cheekbones that might have been enhanced. Her mouth is hemorrhoidal. The chick is scary. And her come-hither glances! A CIA agent, or whatever she is supposed to be in this moronic movie, struts her stuff in a skirt slit up to her panties, which she promptly removes to make a bomb (an underwear bomber). My G-d; that’s not even Avatar-like clever. (Well, they say Avatar was clever. I don’t know; I would never watch such far-removed rubbish about a blue people fighting for their invaded fairy forest.)

Fashion Police (http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/fashion/index.html)

UPDATED: Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed’ (More Gloom)

Barack Obama, Bush, Conservatism, Debt, Democrats, Fascism, Homeland Security, Liberty, Paleoconservatism, Political Economy, Republicans, The State

The following excerpt is from “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” my new WND.COM column:

“Last week, this column explained the divide between Americans and their ‘Overlords Who Art in D.C.’ I asked that you quit invoking words too weak to describe that divide. ‘Disconnect,’ ‘disrespect’: These are soft designations; they don’t begin to bridge the moat that separates you from your sovereigns.

Proper metaphors for the relationship between The Great Unwashed and the government that literally has them by the genitals is that of ruled and ruler, Rome and its provinces, Imperial China and its peasants.

If you’re a tax payer — at least 50 percent of Americans are tax consumers — you are the Beltway’s bitch.

So stop beseeching sinecured statists for ‘hope’ and ‘change.’ They will never know what it’s like to slum it in your neighborhoods. They’ll never experience the effects of inflation and rising prices as you will; they’ve voted themselves salaries twice as high as yours and pensions in perpetuity. You’re paying.

Think of yourself as a servant, your nose pressed against your master’s mansion windows. That’s how I felt as I drove through the suburbs of Northern Virginia, in October of this year. I saw what Peggy Noonan lushly described in her Wall Street Journal column, excerpted by John Derbyshire in his full and fair assessment of the tottering American experiment, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism …

The complete column is “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed,” now on WND.COM.

Avail yourself of my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, on Kindle.

Merry Xmas to all,
ILANA

UPDATE (Dec. 25): “IT’S GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME” (as the Beatles lyrics go). The Powers that Be thought “Claire Hirschkind, 56, who says she is a rape victim” (and also happens to have “the equivalent of a pacemaker”), needed a reminder of her ordeal.

Hirschkind said because of the device in her body, she was led to a female TSA employee and three Austin police officers. She says she was told she was going to be patted down.
“I turned to the police officer and said, ‘I have given no due cause to give up my constitutional rights. You can wand me,'” and they said, ‘No, you have to do this,'” she said.
Hirschkind agreed to the pat down, but on one condition.
“I told them, ‘No, I’m not going to have my breasts felt,’ and she said, ‘Yes, you are,'” said Hirschkind.
When Hirschkind refused, she says that “the police actually pushed me to the floor, (and) handcuffed me. I was crying by then. They drug me 25 yards across the floor in front of the whole security.”
An ABIA spokesman says it is TSA policy that anyone activating a security alarm has two options. One is to opt out and not fly, and the other option is to subject themselves to an enhanced pat down. Hirschkind refused both and was arrested.

Hey, what do you know: A noisy, irate, flying public has changed the behavior of their sovereigns not a whit. Who would have thunk? (See “Derb Is Right: ‘We Are Doomed.”)

And what do memebers of the sheep herd say about a middle aged, ill American lady being mauled by rabid TSA dogs?

“I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it,” said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

It matters not a bit that “less than three percent of travelers get a pat-down.” This practice is a matter of policy, not happenstance. Theoretically, everyone could be molested, very many are. No freedom loving individual should be consoled by the repulsive, “rare-occurrence” excuse.

O.J.-Like Evidence Could Exonerate Noxious Knox

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Europe, Foreign Policy, Justice, Law

O.J.-LIKE EVIDENCE CONVICTED NOXIOUS (AMANDA) KNOX, which, due to US pressure on the Italians, could well mean that O.J.-like evidence might exonerate her of the murder of Meredith Kercher, the English girl with whom Knox had shared student accommodation in Perugia, Italy. Her throat slit, Meredith had expired in slow agony.

At the time I wrote the following:

Knox, Sollecito and Rudy Guede, a local drifter born in the Ivory Coast and known to Knox, were convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Kercher. CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, on and on—all have united in advocating for Amanda, “An Innocent Abroad.”

Going against the grain of American-style boosterism, Barbie Nadeau of Newsweek stuck with “journalism” to detail the ample evidence against the pair, downplayed or downright suppressed in the American media. For one, “Neither suspect [had] a credible alibi for the night of the murder, and both told a variety of lies about that night.” Knox changed her alibi, not once or twice, but several times. In the process, she accused Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese bar owner, of the crime. Based on the convincing yarn Knox spun, Lumumba spent time in jail before being released.

After Knox had cast her pal Lumumba aside, she tried to implicate her lover of two weeks, venturing: “I think it is possible Raffaele went to Meredith’s house, raped her, then killed her and then when he got home, while I was sleeping, he pressed my fingerprints on the knife. …

“Theatrics aside,” wrote Newsweek’s Nadeau, “the Amanda Knox trial comes down to forensics. … Among the most damning evidence against Sollecito is his DNA on the metal clasp of the bra that was cut from Kercher after she died.”

Also revealed with Luminol was a bloody footprint at the crime scene that matched Sollecito’s. “Key forensic evidence against Knox includes her footprint in blood in the hallway outside Kercher’s room. There [were] also mixed traces of Knox’s DNA and Kercher’s blood on the fixtures in the bathroom the girls shared. And a knife was found in Sollecito’s apartment with Knox’s DNA on the handle and … Kercher’s DNA in a groove on the blade.”

Like the original “Dream Team,” defense attorneys for Knox, “who at one time admitted to being at home when the murder took place,” alleged contamination (even though the crime scene was sealed off in-between searches), character assassination and insufficient amounts of DNA (it’s the type of DNA that matters, not the amount).

[SNIP]

The latest from Perugia, Italy, via CNN is that the “American … has won a major victory Saturday in her appeal of the murder conviction in the death of her British roommate when an Italian appellate judge granted approval of independent forensic reviews on two key pieces of evidence.”

“Why do you need to review the forensic evidence when this conviction is based on much more than the knife and the bra clasp?” Prosecutor Manuela Comodi argued before the court began deliberating.
She then reminded the court that Knox and Sollecito don’t have an alibi for the night of the killing, adding that there was “ample” evidence of a staged break-in.
Francesco Maresca, an attorney for the Kercher family, said he was “disappointed” with the decision, suggesting that the ruling was political in the face of pressure from the United States.

UPDATED: Net Neutrality Odyssey

Business, Constitution, Fascism, Free Markets, Internet, Private Property, Technology

If they are not, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules sound awfully like price fixing, or a kind of Internet Civil Rights Act, where everyone must be allowed access to everything without discrimination based on, well, what and how much you purchase.

Ruled by regulators we certainly are.

Article I, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, provides that:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

So what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doing regulating the Internet? Nothing out of the ordinary is the answer. The FCC is just doing what all America’s extra-Constitutional government agencies do: manage all aspects of American life. Hence the term “The Managerial State.”

ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, calls the FCC’s unconstitutional power grab a “jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah”; a bypasses of “branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation.”

Let us not forget that the Net Neutrality odyssey began with that bastard Bush. As Wired reports, “In 2005, then-FCC chairman Michael Powell issued a set of principles, the so-called Four Freedoms, which said that internet users had the right to use the lawful software and services they want to on the internet, access their choice of content, use whatever devices they like, and get meaningful information about how their online service plan works.”

Note the Bush boy’s UN-like language: “Four Freedoms.”

This is important: “Both wireless and fixed broadband service providers will have to explain how they manage congestion on their networks. Cable and DSL companies will have to let you use the applications, online services and devices that you want to. Meanwhile, wireless companies will be prohibited from blocking websites and internet telephony services like Skype. Cable and DSL providers would be barred from ‘unreasonably’ discriminating against various online services.”

An Internet Civil Rights Act of sorts.

The one thing that bothers me is this: Is Comcast, for example, not a franchise (“a privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government”)? The kind of areal monopoly they enjoy and less-than-optimal service they provide in the market seems to suggest that possibility.

Franchise status might also explain why, as Wired observed, “There was one group … which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. They’ve been making the rounds in recent weeks signaling their support for Chairman Julius Genachowski’s compromise deal.”

UPDATE (Dec. 22): GREAT MINDS. Michelle Malkin also finds Civil Rights language to be the appropriate source of metaphor to describe the impetus of laws that’ll mandate equal Internet access to all irrespective of the cost of a product or service.

Under the FCC’s new regime, the market will be fattened and socialized and the price system sundered. This means worse service for all paying customers as the incentive to innovate are removed. When will Out “Overlords Who Art in DC” UNDERSTAND that the price and profit system is the key to prosperity? The correct answer is “never.”

VIA MICHELLE:

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”