taxi to the dark side

Rather than watch the Cold Case marathon on France 1 or 2, I decided to watch a documentary on Arte TV, a French-German network. It's a documentary by Alex Gibney discussing the torture policy implemented at Abu Ghraib and at Gitmo.

I don't want to say much about it because it's so depressing. But one thing that has struck me is how the "techniques" involved simply amounted to rationalized sadism. A person who has resisted interrogation for 8 months is not going to suddenly "crack" because the sadistic, perverse side of the interrogators has been given free reign.

And that doesn't address the question of just what kind of information can be obtained from a person who has already been detained for 8 months. Surely we're well beyond any "ticking time bomb" scenario at that time. Indeed, given the disconnect between the prisoner and Al Qaeda at that point, it's hard to imagine any valuable operational intel would be unearthed at that point.

OTOH, if you were engaged in the practice of trying to get people to confess to crimes to justify the detainment, I can see the desire to continue pressing with harder and harder techniques. This is, of course, the problem of moving backwards from the conclusion to the evidence. But if there is any common thread to the madness that has consumed a certain part of the US in recent years, it's the tendency to conflate "knowing" with feeling a strong prejudgment.

Oh, and when all is said and done, a good number of the people detained have yet to charged with anything and would presumably be considered innocent. And that leads to the title of the film, which concerns a taxi driver taken, tortured, and killed by American troops.

goddamn Blogger

first it insists on giving me everything in French, and then it diches my edits to the review I was writing.

*sigh*

Now to finish the review for the THIRD TIME.

(message to be deleted when I'm less annoyed with Blogger)

an antidote to the glorification of crime in cinema

In the distant past, back when the Rat Pack was walking the street, there was made a film called Ocean's Eleven. The film was basically an excuse for Sinatra and his buddies to be in Las Vegas for a few weeks and get paid while they were partying all night. The film is somewhat forgettable, and is only noteworthy today for the remake which was made a few years ago.

In the original Ocean's Eleven, the bad guys lose all the money at the end of the film. That ending was in line with the dominant moral philosophy of the time, which said that crime must not be shown to be lucrative in film. After all, every film must demonstrate the truth of the notion that crime doesn't pay.

The remake with Clooney, Pitt and the gang had a much different ending, as I'm sure everybody reading this knows. Indeed, in recent years films like the Oceans' Eleven series, Entrapment, the Italian Job remake, The Score, etc. Indeed, the fantasy theft caper is a booming genre in Hollywood these days.

So, I decided to see an English-language film in Montpellier, after sitting through Shoot 'Em Up in French a couple weekends past. (Oh, I'm sure I missed the subtleties of that film because of the language barrier!) This evening I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, and Marisa Tomei.

I really liked this film. I recommend it highly to everybody. It is an antidote to the trend of glamorizing crime in films of recent years.

(minor spoilers follow)

This film concerns a robbery planned by a man named Andy, played by Hoffman, and his brother named Hank, played by Hawke. Andy and Hank are both short on cash, so they decide to rob a small jewelry store in a suburban strip mall, a "Mom and Pop" place. The film starts with the robbery, which goes horribly wrong when the robber, who is a third man, is shot by the old woman alone in the store. In retaliation he shoots her back, critically injuring her, before she shoots him again and he flies through the glass door of the store, startling Hank, who has been waiting outside in a car in a curious moustache, wig, hat and glasses disguise. Hank drives off, swearing.

The film is told from three points of view, those of Hank, Andy, and their father, Charles. The magnitude of the fiasco is slowly revealed.

First, we find out that the store was not just any "Mom and Pop" store. It turns out that the Mom and Pop were Charles and his wife, Nannette. The plan was to hit the store when the place was manned by a nearsighted employee, Doris.

Then it's revealed that it wasn't Doris there after all.

As even more secrets become revealed, the fiasco slowly crushes all of the people involved. Decisions that seem initially innocuous ultimately turn out to have drastic implications.

I am a fan of realism in films, and the crime genre has been in need of a jolt of reality to the fantasy fare that audience have been gobbling up in recent years. What this film underscores is that crime is borne of selfishness and hatred, and the path taken can have severe consequences. Thankfully, this film does not fall into the opposite trap common in serial killer films (and much of TV crime), namely viewing life through a "good guys vs. bad guys" filter, where there are a certain number of "crazy" or "evil" people out there just waiting to prey on the weak and innocent. This other genre feeds the police state mentality, while the caper genre feeds the guilt-free capitalist mentality.

Come to papa!

After 16 days, my Barclays' debit card, which my mother mailed via US priority mail from Loo-zee-anna to Paris to try to catch me before I left for Montpellier, has finally arrived chez ma souer.

Go go postal service!

Looks like this guy was in charge:



(And a hello to the new visitor, Jolene!)

In case anybody was wondering

I have very little to say about the baseball situation, other than it was nice to wake up this morning, my fifth morning in Montpellier, and the first when I didn't check the scores to see that the Red Sox lost and the Yankees won.

Of course, neither played yesterday. But I'll take what I can get.

In a very real sense, it hardly matters now whether the Sox win the playoffs or not. The Yankees have so clearly been the better team for the past two months that I really have low expectations for the playoffs. With the best four hitters on the Red Sox all injured and the bullpen running out of steam, it could get ugly.

That will be my only comment for a while, as my German readers don't want to read about baseball.

Talk like a pirate day!

Garrh! Avast ye maties!

Some resources for your pirate inclined.

The homepage, your handy Talk Like a Pirate Day translator, and a YouTube clip featuring everybody's favorite movie pirate!

No, not Captain Jack Sparrow! It's Steve the Pirate!

RIP, Robert Jordan

Sad news.

Lesson for other authors: do not overestimate your ability to stay alive indefinitely, when choosing to add exponentially many characters and plot twists to your fantasy series. In the early 90s, Jordan put out the Wheel of Time books at a pace of about one every year to 18 months. And then the books started getting longer and longer, with more and more (mostly identical) characters, pursuing ever more uninteresting plot lines.

And now the series remains unfinished.

*sigh*

OK, this post is in poor taste. So be it.