Over at the Volkh Conspiracy, my favorite heavy weight legal blog, Dave Kopel, heavy weight Second Amendment lawyer, posts a very favorable review of Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. You should see it without reading reviews, or learning anything about the film beforehand. For those of you who have seen it, some thoughts about various meanings are below the fold.
I don’t know about “one of the greatest [movies] of all time” but it is very fine. I absolutely agree you should go see it, and see it in the big theater.
Heiko van der Scherm . . . Writer, Director, Design, Modeling
Bernhard Haux . . . . . . . . .Character TD Flower main actors
Goro Fujita. . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Animator
Making Of video; this was a surprisingly complex project — and was done on a very tight schedule. I’m extremely impressed by the tools that had to be rolled out for this.
And just for fun, one of my favorite incidental opera scenes, from The Music Teacher, featuring, by coinkydink, another piece from La Traviata, “Follie!… Sempre libera”:
It’s an extraordinary movie, and the power of this scene is vastly undercut by being out of context. When I saw it, it was like a thunderbolt.
From the note at YouTube:
An excerpt from the movie by Gerard Corbiau, Le Maitre de Musique (1988) which captures the heart of operatic passion in a cinematic medium, earning it an Oscar nomination. Young love, life and death; a story about integrity, power, and struggle wrapped up with intense beauty, and set in a world in transition. The old world order recedes ungraciously, but its not over until the old man sings.
Anne Roussel plays Sophie Maurier, sung by Dinah Bryant; Jérôme Pruett plays Jean, sung by Philippe Volter.
I have never seen an episode of Mad Men, but I may have to watch it on DVD if it’s all this good. [embedding is disabled by AMC. Idiots: this clip in incredibly potent advertising in its own right. I guess I should be happy they didn't order it taken down from YouTube.]
The clicking of the projector gave me twinges. I swear, even the color balance of the slides seemed to strike a chord. I had no idea I’d internalized that.
Once upon a time there was Murder One, but realistic TV dramas with innocent defendants have been thin on the ground lately. The problem with the government getting it right all the time on TV (well, one of the problems) is that the people who watch TV get conditioned to assume that the government gets it right all the time in real life. (I once asked a jury panel what their favorite lawyer TV show was, and weeded out the Law & Order watchers while keeping the Boston Legal fans.)
I have to wonder what he’d do with me. I’ve pretty much given up on cop and lawyer shows because depending on the show, I can predict whether or not the defendant in the dock is innocent or guilty. As Bennett correctly points out, most shows are from the cop/prosecutor standpoint, and the defendant is therefore guilty; if he gets off, it’s because of unscrupulous trickery on the part of the defense. In the rare shows and movies standing on the side of the defense, the very existence of the police and courts is an affront to the innocent, and indeed, to “justice and liberty for all”.
I want a show that looks at the whole system, where at least 50% of the time, I cannot know which way the jury decides until the verdict is rendered. On the same damn show, I want cops fudging evidence to close a case; defense and prosecution warring over technicalities without regard to defendant or victim; innocent people getting railroaded because they didn’t know the Magic Dance needed to deal with the police, or tried to act pro se; obviously guilty people getting off because the police acted badly; people being convicted of crimes they’re actually guilty of, but had no idea that their (seemingly reasonable in the circumstances) actions were in fact illegal; juries being held in contempt for attempting nullification or being shocked to find that nullification was even possible for an offense they regarded as fundamentally unjust; judges occasionally being obtuse, arrogant, and vindictive, although mostly patient, learned, wise and just — the whole range of American jurisprudence, good and bad.
Oh, and two more things:
Every now and then, I want to see armed but unlicensed citizens protecting themselves against both thugs and tyrants with unregistered firearms. They can land in court, but I want to see the issue honestly discussed — I am sick to death of disgusted cops rolling their eyes at freely armed citizens, with the implication that of course only cops should be armed. Instead, I want Sir Bobby’s dictum that “The police are the people, and the people are the police” to be a regular mantra.
Finally, and most important, every show, every damn show, should teach the audience something about living under American law and protecting themselves under the Constitution. I am sick to death of learning that honest citizenssubjects help the police with their inquiries by answering every question, and consenting to searches; only crooks remain silent or withhold consent. I want the underlying philosophy of the show to be that citizens are capable of running their own lives, and are competent to understand and exercise their rights and responsibilities if given half a chance; that our current legal system does its best to render citizens helpless children; and that, yes, bad people are out there, on all sides, and game the system for their personal benefit, but that most cops, lawyers, and judges honestly want equal justice under the law — they just forget, sometimes, that liberty for all is the best path to justice for all.
I’ll watch that show religiously.
I seriously doubt I’ll ever see even one movie, much less a regular TV show, taking that stance. I’ve never heard of one.
[update]
No, wait, I just remembered one: Judge Bone on Picket Fences. I didn’t always agree with the man, but he tried, by golly, to judge fairly in very hard cases.
My mom’s book club watched this today, and she loved it. I saw it when it first came out, and am surprised to find I don’t have it here on the blog. It’s a wonderful piece, well worth watching. In any event, I wanted to save references to it so we could find it again.
Monty at Ace of Spades posts the crucial clip from Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, and says of it, “William Munny speaks the creed of our age.”
[Fuller cut of the last scene here.]
There’s some chatter in the comments there, questioning Munny’s assessment of “deserve”. The general consensus is that Little Bill deserved what he got; why’s Munny neglecting that?
My reply:
No question, Bill needed to be put down, like the rabid dog he was. And like Bill, a rabid dog may not deserve what’s happening to him.
Bill, and the rabid dog, are positive hazards to those around him. Bill’s an active threat, and needs to be stopped.
But Munny’s not passing judgment on Bill’s character. He himself doesn’t have the standing to do that; he knows he’s no better than Bill. (In the extended scene, he admits to having killed women and children, “just about everything that walks or crawls”.) Maybe, given their respective past, Bill’s the better man in the balance. “Got nothing to do with it,” now.
Munny knows what needs to be done, but knows that he, too, is…unforgiven.
I only wish that were the “creed of the age”.
The liberal mistake is precisely having imperfect humans trying to decide who deserves what, rather than deciding what right and wrong actions are, based on which actions cause undue harm to others.
Bill pleads rule of Man. Munny enforces the rule of Law.
Hot girls working it, shaking their boobies and their booties. That is, what little they’ve got; these are preschoolers. OK, Maybe first graders.
Preschoolers Do Stripper Dance
[Click on still to watch Youtube video. Embedding disabled by Youtube.][And, yes, I recognize the double-entendre of "embedding" in this context.]
Understand, if you don’t have the guts to watch this damned thing, that it is a professional production on a real stage in front of a huge studio audience, not some neighborhood girls entertaining their families in somebody’s living room, or even some deranged school show. Evidently connected with the World Of Dance tour, sponsored by Paul Mitchell shampoo.
Via, of all places, Roissy in DC, who is not in the least pleased:
I really wonder what goes through the minds of parents who would skank up their five year old daughters. Preparing them for a world of assholes, players and game? That reasoning would at least make some sense. When you are saturated in a femicentric culture that places no obligation on women, removes all slut shaming, and releases them from dependence on men’s resources, then the natural result is a race to the base that exalts women’s good-to-go sexuality far above all other values, as that is the last standing value that has any currency left in a wide open, marriage-averse mating market. And what better way to make sure your little angel knows the right moves to get more attention from the boys than the other whorelets than by decking her out in bra and panties onstage and teaching her the fine art of suctioning her privates to the floor. I bet single moms are more prone to doing this sort of experimentation with their bastard spawn.
I’ve downloaded this clip as evidence that it actually appeared. I’ll post here, in full, if Youtube deletes it.
Shocking. Appalling. I can’t watch more than a few seconds at a time.
Feminists? Hello? Anybody care to speak up for the right of these girlswomyn to celebrate their sexuality?
[update]
Welcome, Other McCain readers! And thanks for the link!
Disturbing commentary about a disturbing phenomenon. Beyond its satirical value, National Offend a Feminist Week sometimes provokes discussion of serious issues and this is certainly one of those. This particular discussion, however, deserves a much larger and more serious venue.
rickety at name of blog dot com
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