Moving on

Not that I was great at keeping this blog updated, but I've made a new one. This is more for company purposes but there is also a blog I will help maintain.

Click here si tu veux.

Movie Review: Killing Them Softly

Simple, awesome poster.

I'm a fan of Brad Pitt, I'm a fan of the director, Andrew Dominik, whose first film, "Chopper," is some kind of wonder. His second, "The Assassination of Jesse James," also very, very good. This movie I found satisfying, if a little slight.

It follows the aftermath of a small-time robbery. A mob-run poker game gets knocked over, and Brad Pitt is sent to find and punish the guilty parties.

What I really like about the movie is that it's uncoventional in many ways. It's not a straight up, clean story filled with cliches and bad guys that line up to die. In the first place, every character feels real -- from the body-punching thugs, to Pitt, to the thieves.

And I like how it's shot. Sometimes long takes, sometimes, slo-mo, always beautiful. I like the unbroken take when Ray Liotta's character gets beat up throughout his house -- and it's actually Ray Liotta going throw the window.

I like the effect when one character gets high -- we get a sense of his drug-induced state. And it's a good scene because the other character in the scene is trying to get important information out of his partner, and he's in no condition to answer them.

Throughout the movie, there are references on TV by President Bush and Senator Obama on the state of the bad economy. Even the crooks are feeling it. Money for hits isn't what it used to be. Everyone is taking a cut.

It's a punchy, dark, smartly written movie that successfully avoids many conventions.

Savages

Caution: May include scientific research that doesn't sit with one's liberal ideas

Thanks to books like Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" and the upcoming "Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon, the places on the Internet I frequent are debating what contemporary tribes tell us about primitive man and, indeed, human nature.

Groups like Survival International (SI) lambaste Diamond and like thinkers in suggesting that tribes are a window into the past, and writing that tribes, ancient and modern, are on the whole more violent than states or societies without a central government.

Their first claim against Diamond is that he says groups like SI deny unpleasant aspects of "traditional" societies. SI they don't, and even link to an article acknowledging infanticide among a traditional society.

But the link is worth reading because the person being interviewed admits there is infanticide, but claims it is rare, tries to explain it away, and labels our culture with the same practice, which is true -- some mothers (and fathers) kill their babies. The question is how often relative to population size, what is the punishment, and what are the motives? And although the link is posed as a Q&A, it is not said who is asking the questions. So they do acknowledge this ugly aspect of traditional societies, but in a way that basically says "Yeah, but..."

So in their link to explain unpleasantness in traditional societies, the article actually tries to explain it away, or minimize it, bolstering Diamond's argument that SI and like groups practice a kind of denial. If you want to know what they really think of tribes, look no further than their blog where they have pictures of happy shiny tribal folk with homilies like "I live in the Earth and the Earth in me." They don't directly say "noble savage," but that is the picture they paint.

They reject the decline in violence a central government brings by pointing out the atrocities of the past. Undoubtedly much of Western expansion was done in an ugly way -- through force, conquering, unintended (or intended) spreading of disease. But this does not discount the decline in violence in today's modern societies.

And nor is it a very persuasive argument to point to the Papua Conflict, decades in the making and execution, and point to this as a sign governments are bad as a rule. And, like most disputes, this one doesn't seem to be just a marching order execution of tribes, but rather a dispute over a resource (land). Do the operators of SI live in a state? If they are so opposed to government, have they left them and live in places without a central one?

SI says it cannot be proved traditional societies are more violent than non, but really what they are saying is "we reject the studies and data that shows they are."

They also say Diamond says traditional people are more violent than we are. This is only true insomuch that when I have a dispute to settle, I can call the cops. Traditional societies cannot. They have to settle their disputes among themselves, either through non-violent means or violent ones (and I guess more often resort to the latter). It is not that they are a more violent kind (how could they be? We are the same species) but that they have to, by virtue of their culture, resort to violence with a greater frequency. This makes sense. This seems to be backed up by people like Diamond that has actually spent time studying and researching these people.

The same could be said of gangs. Gangs are a kind of tribe. They operate outside of Leviathan (government). So they have to settle their own disputes, like ones around territory. The statistic is true that violence is more prevalent among people of color. This does not mean people of color are more violent. Every human being has the same capacity for violence, on the whole. It simply means they have to personally engage in it more frequently because they cannot turn to the police for help.

I accept Hobbes's thesis that without a strong, central government, life is nasty, short, and brutish. I believe the Enlightenment ushered in values that have made my life safer and better. No culture is perfect, but some certainly have objective benefits over another. There's a reason why so many of the ancient skeletons we dig up show signs of physical trauma -- they were constantly fighting over resources: food, land, and women.

I find it odd many feminists I know are critics of Diamond and view him as a new kind of colonialist. What do they think women's rights are in traditional societies?

Movie review: Deadfall

Between Deadfall and (the much better) Hanna, I bet Eric Bana is tired of movies set in snowy places.

I don't recall how I heard about this movie. As far as I can tell it did not play in theaters. I wanted to see it because it stars Eric Bana, an actor I admire. Then I learned it was directed by the same person that directed "The Counterfeiters," a great drama set in a concentration camp.

Although overall I thought it was middling, it did have some strong moments. I liked the fight scene between Bana and the old Native he finds on the road. I liked the other main character, the boxer, and his earnestness. I liked the attempt at giving each character an arch, even though I don't feel like it came together as a satisfying whole.

The least of the storylines is the female cop looked down on by her boss/father and the others in the department. Undoubtedly sexism exists in police work (as it does in any other work, but especially of those male-dominated), but every character is just a whole hog sexists. She can do no wrong, they can do no right. It just felt clumsy and easy to make her such a victim.

The next least is the other female character, Bana's sister, who is a crook with a heart of gold. Bad parenting, you see. I like that she develops feelings for the boxer character, and wishes to spare him the fury of her brother, but the scenes where she exorcises her demons just ring false. She unpacks her hearts with words and they don't feel sincere. We are less invested in her than other characters, by mere virtue of the way movies work. So to hear her backstory is inherently less interesting than that of our lead(s). Also, we get two sex scenes with her set to two pop songs. One would have sufficed.

The four main characters are given enough screen time that I would not say this is any one person's story. But if it's anyone's, it's the boxer's. One because we are rooting for him to move beyond the mistakes of the past. We fear this girl is going to lead him down another path. But he really isn't given much to do besides try to get home for Thanksgiving. So if he is our protagonist, we don't spend enough time with him, or have much shared hope with him, beyond a generic hope he doesn't go back to jail. And his whole fleeing what he thinks is a murder is a plot hole -- he didn't check the pulse of the guy he knocked out?

Bana isn't the hero -- we learn that early on when he shoots a cop. We are not rooting for his success. And the unseemly attraction for his sister feels a little bit like pop psychology. I don't buy it.  And although the script tries to humanize him, in the way he murders a spouse abuser, and how he promises not to hurt the boxer's family, it comes at an expense of credibility. Rather than the friendly chat he has with the boxer's mom, down the barrel of a gun, I think it's more believable he ties her to a chair and hides her away while he finishes his trek across the border.

Moar guns

It's not violent video games or violent movies. It's not novels, magazines, music or the evening news, for that matter. Or competitive sports.

It's men with bad ideas with access to weapons. We should limit their access to weapons. A hammer can be a weapon, yes, but it's also a handy tool, so it's dumb to compare a gun to a hammer. And no one can commit a mass murder with a hammer. Except the guy from "Oldboy."

Culture is not the problem. Men are the problem. We can't get rid of men. We can limit the means they have to kill innocent people.

Cars and Guns

What sane, educated person wants to own one of these?

I've seen people making the argument that cars kill more people than guns, and we don't ban cars.

It should be self-evident this is a poor argument, but in case it's not:

Cars have enabled us to improve our lives. Most of us use one every day, to run errands, get to work, and travel. We have expanded our cities, rather than being crammed into a small area (although this expansion has problems of its own). Our world is not longer limited to a few square miles.

There are more cars in use every day than guns. So of course the number of car-related fatalities will be higher.

When a car accident results in a person's death, it's an accident. Something has gone wrong, usually user error. A car is a poor weapon.

We accept the risks of driving knowing that the benefit of cars outweighs the unlikely chase we will be killed in an accident. We also have safety measures like seat belts and airbags.

Guns have not made our lives better in the same ways cars have. The only reason I can see wanting to own a gun is for recreation and hunting (and self-defense, but I am happy to leave that to a trained police force).

Those pastimes do not require magazines that can hold 15-30 rounds.

When a gun kills someone, it has served its intended function. Guns are made to kill and that is all they do. Cars are made to facilitate travel. To try to compare them is a poor argument.

Piracy

Piracy is stealing. Stealing is a crime. I can't think of any exeptions to that syllogism.

As a reader of video game news sites, I find a disturbing number of people happy to defend pirating copyrighted material. This is just a bit of what I would say to them if I could remember my log in and password to those sites:

To the people arguing piracy is nothing more than "trying before you buy," show me any statistic that piracy leads to a purchase.

The cost of not knowing what a game is like is not knowing what a game is like, not pirating it.

You wouldn't walk into a Best Buy, tuck a game under your shirt, and walk out. How is that any different than downloading a copy of a game or movie you did not purchase? Would you say to the arresting officer "I didn't want to blind-buy?"

And I've heard the excuse "They didn't lose my money because I wouldn't have played/watched it anyway." The price of not seeing something is not seeing something, not finding a way to see it and not pay for it.

And to the people who say it doesn't hurt the industry -- of course it does. A certain segment of the population is stealing instead of paying. That is lost revenue by any measure.