Always Democrat Votes Found

Isn't it odd that every time someone discovers an uncounted batch of votes in a close election, they are overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrat?  You would think that it would be just as likely to break either way in a close election but time after time, it breaks Democrat.  Why is that?  Can't be voter fraud.  It has been repeatedly pointed out that there is no voter fraud and laws requiring photo ID to vote are racist and suppress votes,  because minorities don't know how to get photo IDs.  Um, who's the racist?  After the debacle of the 2000 election in Florida, how is it that the state didn't address that to prevent the current repeat?  Someone must like this state of affairs if no one bothered to fix it after 18 years.  Maybe this time they will fix the problem so we don't see another fiasco in 2036.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Halloween

The new Halloween dismisses all but the original 1978 movie.  It is explained that after having crawled away from the house where he nearly killed Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael was arrested by a young policeman who prevented Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasance) from finishing the job.  Since then, Michael has been in a mental institution.  Enter Aaron and Dana, a pair of Brits who have a true crime podcast.  They attempt to interview Michael but he says not a word.  He is soon to be transferred to a more prison-like facility where it will not be possible to interview him.  Next, they interview Laurie, finding her at a secure compound in the woods.  Her life has been one of paranoia and marital failure.  Her only daughter was taken from her.  She scoffs at them when they suggest she confront Michael at the institution and get him to talk.  Yes, the Brits have notions of finally rehabilitating Michael or at least getting him to explain himself.  Ha.  Of course, Michael escapes during the transfer and makes his way to Haddonfield where he recommences his murderous ways.  Laurie grabs some guns and goes hunting!  First, she checks on her estranged daughter (Judy Greer) before looking for Michael.  Like Ripley in the Aliens series or Sarah Connor in Terminator, Laurie has become a badass.  Badass grandma! 

Though it discards all the sequels prior to it, it does offer the occasional homage.  The idea of Laurie being Michael's sister is mentioned and dismissed as a rumor.  At one point, Laurie falls off a balcony and is lying on the ground but when Michael looks again, she's gone!  I was reminded of a Chuck Norris movie - Silent Rage - where an unkillable baddie was on a murder rampage but Chuck kept trying to kill him anyway.

It was awkward to have both a daughter and a granddaughter, which really watered down the character conflict between parent and child.  However, it was necessary to have teens for Michael to slaughter and Laurie is a bit old to have a teenager at this point.  As such, the daughter gets to have angry arguments with her mom and flashbacks to her childhood of being trained for combat while the granddaughter gets to run from Michael while all her classmates are sliced and diced.

 

I do miss Doctor Loomis.  The psychiatrist running around with his Colt .45 trying to kill his former patient was awesome, definitely Donald Pleasance's most defining role in my view.

 

This is a good sequel to the original.  Thumbs up.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo is too ambitious, serving more as an origin story than a good adventure story.  The movie starts on Corellia where Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a low level goon in a criminal underworld ruled by a swamp dragon.  He is in love with Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke).  They try to escape but she is caught.  Han is forced to join the Empire and enrolls in flight school.  However, next we see him, he is a grunt on some random planet, rating somewhere below a storm trooper.  Trying to go AWOL, he is caught and tossed into a cage with the beast.  He sees the remains of the beast's previous victims.  The beast proves to be Chewbacca and Han speaks just enough Wookiee to join forces to escape.  Next, the pair join Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his band of rogues.  Beckett needs to get his hands on some coaxium, a miracle fuel.  They go to yet another planet where they try to hijack a coaxium shipment but everything goes sideways when a rival band intervenes.  Beckett takes them to another planet to meet with Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) to work out another means of delivering the promised coaxium.  To his amazement, Han encounters Qi'ra there!  With Qi'ra now joining them, Beckett, Han, and Chewie recruit Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his crazy android, L3-37.  They fly to Kessel, where coaxium is mined.  The Kessel run requires a circuitous 20 parsec flight path to navigate a dangerous nebula.  Han took a shortcut on the way out, thus his claim of doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.  The movie has more twists and turns to go after that.  There is too much to digest.

There are a series of villains and the story can't settle on one overarching bad guy.  We start with the swamp dragon and her minions, move onto the Empire that he is trying to abandon, then there are the rival raiders, Dryden Vos, slavers, and more still.  Dryden is the closest to a main villain but he is introduced late and has a worse bark than bite.  Combined with the constant change of venue and the series of 'jobs' that almost always fail, it contributes to the lack of focus.

Han comes across as hapless.  Pretending a rock is a thermal detonator was cheesy.  Why is he a pro at Star Wars poker?  We've had no hint that he is a good gambler prior to his joining the card game.  That he later walks in and trounces everyone makes you wonder why he doesn't just become a gambler rather than risk being a smuggler.  The way Han wins the Millennium Falcon from Lando is much different from what I had pictured based on the comments in The Empire Strikes Back.  Han repeatedly tries to talk his way out of things and it fails miserable, mostly humiliating our hero.  Once, okay.  But it happens several times.

Beckett was the best character of the bunch.  He is kind of like Han Solo from Star Wars (1977), so it is unsurprising that he serves as a mentor to Han.  And like Han, he is beset by bad luck.  Where future Han is in hock to Jabba, Beckett is in hock to Dryden Vos.  Looks like Han chose the wrong mentor.  Yeah, yet another bad move by young Han.

Qi'ra is a mystery that is not solved.  Exactly what happened to her in the years since Han left her on Corellia is implied but not spelled out.  She repeatedly tells him that she has changed though he doesn't take her word for it.  Her ambition outweighs any feelings she has for Han, which dampens the romance qualities of their relationship.  Han is deluding himself that they have a future, showing yet again that he is clueless.

L3-37 is annoying from her first appearance.  Look, it's a droid that wants equal rights and jeopardizes the mission because of it.  Now that we have successfully infiltrated, how about I remove the restraining bolts from every droid and encourage them to revolt.  So much for stealth.  She entirely earns being blasted.  Lando risks life and limb to rescue the remains and has to 'save' her by integrating her with the Falcon.  Um, shouldn't you just need to get replacement parts?  Chewie was able to reassemble C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back.

In the end, Han aids the seeds of the rebellion, putting him in the good guy camp because he needs to demonstrate selflessness.  That undermines his transformation in the original trilogy.  He's been a rebel sympathizer all along.  Heck, he infused them with a huge fortune when Luke and Leia were children.

The movie ends with a clear intent for a sequel.  Han and Chewie plan to go to Tattooine and do a job for one of the Huts while Qi'ra is off to join the leader of Crimson Dawn, none other than Darth Maul.  Based on the box office, that presumed sequel may not come to pass.  Ron Howard should have streamlined this movie and cut as much of the non-essentials as possible.  Make it a stand alone adventure story that doesn't have a constantly rotating cast of characters.

Fun but not great.

The Poet

Jack McEvoy learns that his twin brother Sean has committed suicide.  He finds this difficult to accept though all the evidence makes any other conclusion seem impossible.  His brother was a Denver PD homicide detective who had been working on the gruesome murder of Theresa Lofton, a college student.  As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Jack had tried to get his brother to tell him about the case but he had refused.  Now that Sean was dead, he was more determined to find out about the murder that drove his brother to suicide.  His efforts led him to doubt his brother committed suicide and he soon convinced the Denver PD to reopen the case.  Searching for other cops who had committed suicide, he travelled to Chicago and found a similar combination of a homicide detective who committed suicide while investigating a gruesome murder.  Chicago PD also reopened that case.  On to Washington DC to get information from a study of police suicides.  By now, he has attracted the attention of the FBI who try to get him to shelve the story while they hunt for a serial killer who disguises his murders as suicides.  Thanks to suicide notes that turned out to be excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe, the killer is dubbed The Poet.

 

The story is mostly told in the first-person from Jack's point of view.  This often proves to be annoying since Jack is not a very likable character.  Though he has a talent for digging up the story and making connections, he comes across as whiner.  When he gets involved with FBI Agent Rachel Walling, he becomes near intolerable.  When he's with her it's puppy love and when she is absent, he is disconsolate and thinks she has left him.  Ugh.  That she hopped in the sack with this guy only a day after meeting him doesn't speak too highly of her.

 

The book switches to third person when following other characters which was odd.  I wonder if Connelly had written the book in the first person and afterwards decided that he needed to detail the most recent crimes of the quarry to make the confrontation between them have more payoff.  Yes, had the Gladden parts been left out, the encounter between them would have seemed very odd.

 

The story is quite good but the protagonist is hard to like.  I think I would have liked it better if he had been written in the third person.  It is interesting that the book concludes in Los Angeles and Jack even went to Hollywood Homicide to meet with a detective.  I almost expected to see Harry Bosch sitting there.  Nope.  At least, not yet.

 

Munk Debate: The Future is Populist?

The Munk Debates are semi-annual debates on big issues of our time that are held in Toronto, Canada.  I have only watched the two most recent and have greatly enjoyed both.  Last week, Steve Bannon and David Frum debated the following statement:

Be it resolved, the future of western politics is populist not liberal.

The audience had the opportunity to vote at the beginning of the debate.  They were 28% in favor of the resolution and 72% against.

Steve Bannon argued in favor.  He frequently referenced President Trump during the debate, mostly getting groans when he did so, the worst being when he brought up NAFTA.  Trump is not popular in Canada.  Bannon argued that the foundation of Trump's populism was laid during the financial crisis of 2008.  When the elites of Washington demanded $1 trillion to bail out Wall Street, that was billed to the 'little people.'  The elites have done wonderfully for the last decade but the people of middle America have descended to such a point that Trump looked like the best option.  As such, Bannon described the divide as between elites and 'deplorables.'  Populism is the future and it will either take the form of Bernie Sanders' socialist populism or Trump's capitalist populism.  Either the leviathan of the administrative state would be dismantled or it would continue to grow and lead to American decline.

David Frum argued against.  A former member of the Bush Administration, Frum described populists as divisive by their nature, fueling hatred and excluding some people.  He argued that the exclusion was based on race.  Though he granted that many of the complaints that spurred the populist wave were valid, he held that it was more likely to wreck America than to restore it.  Frum spent most of his effort to vilify Trump rather than argue in favor of liberal politics.

 

Bannon heckled by the audience and got repeated negative reactions from the audience to his various claims.  However, he took this with good humor and offered a fair amount of commentary that provoked laughs.  He came across as a happy warrior.  By contrast, Frum received a lot of positive reactions from the crowd but seemed on the verge of tears.  His constant vilification of Trump made him seem very negative.  Too often, Frum's arguments were ad hominem.

 

At the debate's conclusion, the audience voted again.  57% were in favor and 43% against, a decisive victory for Bannon.  This was more a result of Frum's failure to defend the liberal politics rather than Bannon's powerful arguments.  Bannon made good points and Frum mostly said Trump bad.  Bannon offered arguments for populism and Frum offered no reasons for the status quo ante Trump.