The Draft

The draft (i.e. Selective Service) has been ruled unconstitutional in that it only applies to men.  Either both sexes need to be subject or the draft needs to be abolished.  I prefer option 2.  By its very nature, a draft is essentially slavery.  Either risk your life for meager wages or go to jail.  But some might say that a draft is necessary to save the country in times of war.  Any country that can't muster enough volunteers to risk life and limb to save it deserves to fall.  The draft hasn't been used since Vietnam and the US has managed to engage in plenty of wars with volunteers.  Here is the perfect opportunity to abolish it.  Rather than conscripting women too, end conscription altogether.

Cherry 2000 (1987)

In the distant future year of 2017, Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) drives his topless 3-wheeled car home from work in Anaheim and is greeted by Cherry (Pamela Gridley).  She is gorgeous but not terribly bright but Sam loves her.  After an awkward dinner, he starts making love to her on the kitchen floor as the sink overflows in a cascade of bubbles.  Then Cherry short-circuits!  Sam is devastated.  The Cherry 2000 is a classic model that is no longer in production.  There are tales of Cherry 2000s in Zone 7 but that would be dangerous.  If he can put her memory disk in an identical model, she'll be back as good as ever.  Sam heads east to Glory Hole, the last settlement where law still functions.  He needs a tracker, a person who braves the lawless zones.  Sam hires E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith), a heavily armed redhead with a tricked-out 1965 Chevy Mustang.  Unsurprisingly, Sam slowly falls for the real woman on his quest for his sex robot.

 

This is a post-apocalyptic future with some strange features.  Much of manufacturing was destroyed in an unexplained apocalypse and recycling is a huge industry.  Sam is a workaholic at a recycling center.  There are multiple clubs where one can go to find a sex partner for the night but not before extensive legal documents are signed.  Laurence Fishburne has a small role as a lawyer drafting a contract for a couple of Sam's co-workers to have sex that night, outlining what is okay and what is off-limits.  No wonder Sam has a sexbot.

 

There is plentiful A-Team like action where lots of bullets and rockets are fired but our heroes are never harmed.  The craziest sequence is when the Mustang is lifted by a crane and held high over the desert for all the goons to blast it.  E, which proves to be short for Edith, intentionally drove into this 'trap' because it was the easiest way to cross the river.  What?  Why didn't the crane operator just drop them after he lifted them a hundred feet in the air?  Why did he keep them moving and thus make them a tougher target for his allies?  Why did multiple rockets hit the Mustang and cause no damage?  Very campy at times.

 

Melanie Griffith is horribly cast in this movie.  She has this little girl voice that does not fit a hardened veteran of the lawless lands beyond the bounds of civilization.  Many of her lines are comical rather than bad-ass.  David Andrews is rather wooden and doesn't really know what to do with the character.  He goes from dopy business executive to action hero, which is okay but it is revealed late in the movie that he is a veteran of the Border Wars.  His claim of being a veteran was a big surprise because he is such a hapless oaf in the first act.  Pamela Gridley is great at Cherry.  This early role only demands she be pretty.  Her flat delivery is great for a robot.

 

Lester (Tim Thomerson) is a quirky warlord who has a 50s-style motel for a base where the guys wear colorful bowling shirts and the ladies lounge by the pool.  There is this idyllic feel to the place until Lester puts an arrow through the head of a captive.  Lester has a short fuse and enjoys killing.  Thanks to the blandness of the two leads, he shines by comparison.

 

Elaine/Ginger (Cameron Milzer) is Lester's quirky girlfriend.  It turns out that Elaine is Sam's ex-girlfriend and changed her name to Ginger upon moving to the zone.  She is the only person who can interact in complete safety with Lester.  She has sandwiches ready and counsels a go along and get along policy even while Lester is killing trespassers.  She is unflappable and entirely unconcerned by the violence around her.

 

This is clearly a movie of the 80s and fits with movies such as Slipstream, Cyborg, Steel Dawn, or Road Warrior.  Goofy but fun.

Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

Ryan (Phi Vu) wakes up in his car at Bayfield University and immediately heads back to his dorm.  He enters to find Tree (Jessica Rothe) and Carter (Israel Broussard) making out.  He is immediately run out of the room and he heads to his lab.  He is working on a device that will slow time though it hasn't works so far.  However, his fellow students on the project show that the device had a huge power spike last night.  Huh.  What was that about.  Moments later, Dean Roger Bronson arrives to shut down the project on account of the power outages.  Then, Ryan is murdered!

Ryan wakes up in his car at Bayfield University and is confused.  As he heads to the dorm, all the same encounters repeat.  Weird.  By the time he enters the dorm, he is freaking out and refuses to leave.  He explains to Tree and Carter that he was just murdered.  Tree knows exactly what this means.  She briefly recaps her experiences and organizes everyone to find Ryan's murderer before he is killed again.  When she sees Ryan's project, she suddenly understands why she was stuck in a loop the previous day.  Rather than save Ryan, Tree gets thrown back into her loop!  Worse, everything is a little different so she has to start all over to solve the mystery.

 

Despite playing the same situation with the same character, there are enough new twists and reveals to make this a surprisingly good sequel.  It even ends on a teaser for a third entry.  It plays as less of a horror than the last one and plays up the romance between Tree and Carter, giving it a bizarre Rom-Com vibe at times.  The one gripe is the switch from Ryan to Tree.  Having completely forgotten Carter's ill-treated roommate from the previous movie, it wasn't until he entered the dorm that I realized he was a return character.  And though they uncover his murderer, that entire plotline vanishes the moment Tree is shoved back into her loop.  Maybe that will be explored in the next movie.

 

Thumbs up!

The Virtue of Nationalism

Yoram Hazony was a guest on EconTalk and discussed his recent book that argues in favor of nationalism.  He contrasts nationalism with imperialism.  Before the Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the 30 Years War, empires were the standard.  This was a culmination of earlier hints of national self-determinism such as Henry VIII enacting the first Brexit when he founded the Anglican Church to escape the supremacy of Rome.  Empires seek a one size fits all approach to governance and culture.  Nationalism provides a people with a shared history and culture to rule themselves.   He has an idealistic vision of nationalism as a sort of global federalism, which he links to American federalism of the Constitution.

 

Among his more shocking claims are that freedom can only exist as a byproduct of ingrained mutual loyalty.  He declares John Locke's ideas clearly false and mostly idealistic.  In fact, he places Hobbes and Rousseau in the same ideological boat of liberals in the more classical sense of that word.  They approached politics like mathematicians, positing axioms that do not describe any government that had existed or currently exists.  Their ideas are aspirational rather than historical.  Yes, it would be ideal if civil society was based on the consent of each person but it isn't.  No one chooses their family or the country in which they are born.  Considerable loyalty to one's family, clan, tribe, and nation is developed long before one can engage in thoughtful consent.

 

Hazony argues that the current push toward globalism and borderless nations is founded on the benefits of economic freedom.  The fewer barriers to trade, the wealthier all societies become.  However, what works for economic theory does not work for political theory.  Nations built on mutual loyalty are better and healthier than diverse peoples bound together under an imperial authority.  So says Yoram Hazony.

 

It is a fascinating discussion and worth a look.  I may have to buy the book.

 

Stan & Ollie (2018)

Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly) are at the peak of their success in 1937.  In fact, Stan thinks they should strike out on their own and found their own studio, like Charlie Chaplin.  Stan jumps ship when the time comes but Ollie balks; he stays with Hal Roach and makes a film without Stan.  Sixteen years later, the two go on tour in England.  Despite having made many films together in the intervening years, Stan is still irked that Ollie didn't follow him.  They're popularity never reached that same level and now Abbot and Costello are the headliners.

 

The movie explores the final tour of the famed duo and showcases their classic skits and homely humor.  I've never been a fan of Steve Coogan but he is outstanding as Stan Laurel.  John C. Reilly is positively amazing as Oliver Hardy.  If these two got together to make a new Laurel and Hardy movie, I would see it.  The support cast is also impressive, especially the wives.  Nina Arianda is hilarious as the self-flattering Russian Ida Laurel while Shirley Henderson as Lucille Hardy plays it straight in the frequent exchanges between them.  The banter between the wives was far more cutting than that between their husbands.

 

Terrific film and highly recommended.

Hoaxed (2019)

Hoaxed is a movie about the fake news, mainly told by fringe figures of the media landscape.  Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, Scott Adams, Jordan Peterson, James O'Keefe, Tim Pool, and other online personalities provide their perspectives.  Having read two of Scott Adams' books, Jordan Peterson's book, and being a regular viewer of Tim Pool's YouTube channel, I was familiar with most of the complaints leveled.  Of course, the leftist slant of the media is covered, which was old news to me.  However, there were some surprises.

 

Cassie Jaye, an actress turned documentary director, had some success with feminist films.  She decided to tackle the men's rights movement in her next film.  Though she expected to uncover bigotry and misogyny, her interviews and research led her to different conclusions.  To her surprise, she was attacked by former allies for creating a pro-male film and abandoning feminism.  Though I have not seen the film, I did watch her Ted Talk.  She diverged from the party line and was attacked.

 

Multiple personalities noted that the media highlights conflict because it leads to more viewers on TV or more clicks on the internet.  If it bleeds, it leads.  That's hardly a surprise.  However, a Black Lives Matter activist was interviewed.  While in Washington DC with his group, he had seen some All Lives Matter folks and things looked tense.  But he was invited to speak and the two groups found common ground.  He was cheered by the crowd.  Here was the feel-good story of the day and somehow it didn't make it into the news.  The BLM activist was asked if he had heard of Dylan Roof storming into a black church in South Carolina.  Of course.  How about Emanuel Samson (a black man) storming into a church and shooting white people in Tennessee?  No, had not heard that story.  Nor had I.  One fits the America is racist narrative and the other doesn't.

 

The big surprise was that the media hypes conflict.  Conflict generates viewers and viewers generate money.  A war provides a 24/7 news cycle and high ratings.  Does the media provide fake news to lead to war?  The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.  The media floated the government line and Vietnam escalated dramatically.  Was the media more circumspect the next time government pushed for war?  Well, it has since been proven that the babies being yanked from incubators story that turned opinion for the first Gulf War (1991) was false.  Never happened.  Again, the media was fooled.  Or were they?  CNN had awesome ratings throughout the Gulf War.  Was Saddam really trying to build nukes as George W Bush said?  Judith Miller was eventually dumped by the New York Times because her stories about weapons of mass destruction proved inaccurate.  Oh, but the ratings were fabulous.  This is a really dark view of the media.

 

This only scratches the surface of topics from the two-hour movie.  It is an exploration of what the media has become.  The media has become an echo chamber - best exemplified by Twitter - and it thrives on conflict.  Rather than providing news, it sows division.  At least, that is what is argued here.  Check it out.