Thursday, August 15, 2002
Only the Bushies....
The head of Bush's anti Corporate Corruption force, is being sued for Corporate fraud.
Tomorrow the Bush Administration will announce the new head of UNICEF..
Reverend Paul Shanley!
Score one for the god guys.
I'm amazed that the Bush adminsitration's "Unlawful Combatant" stance is getting so overlooked. The United States Government has declared that the President can have any American citizen sent to jail for as long as he wants, without bringing any charges against him, or giving him access to a lawyer. There is no court review, nothing.
We are no better than Communist Cuba. Yet other than the ABA and some Civil Rights groups, theres nothing in the news on it. Apparently Larry King is more interested in talking to Patrick Duffy than the erosion of one of our basic constitutional rights.
Finally we have a judge who is willing to put a stop to it. Robert J. Doumar.
An excerpt:
In a typical exchange, Doumar asked, "Can the military do anything they want with him, without a tribunal?"
"The present detention is lawful," Garre said.
Doumar asked again, "What restraints are there?" Garre said Hamdi had asked to speak to diplomats from Saudi Arabia, where he was raised.
"Can I beg you to answer my question?" Doumar then said. "If the military sat him in boiling oil, would that be lawful?" Garre said he didn't think anyone had suggested that.
Doumar said it seemed too easy to call someone an unlawful combatant and use it to hold someone indefinitely: "If the man next door to you is an unlawful combatant, maybe Mr. Mobbs could say you're an enemy combatant."
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
The Bond Project: Dr. No
The first in the series, although not the first book. (Casino Royale was actually the first book in the series, and one of my favorite of the novels. It introduces Bond to us, and explains why he is the way he is (At the end of the book he falls in love and is then forced to Kill, the woman he loves, thus hardening his heart towards women for the future). But it is probably best that it wasn’t made into a film as the plotting is off (Fleming himself admitted his climax happened too early and consisted entirely of a card game).
Dr. No ranks squarely in the middle in terms of excellence to me. Watching it, the first impression you get is that you’re watching a series find its voice. The second impression is how dated it’s become, which to me isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Being a fan of the Fleming books which took place in the late fifties, I enjoyed the fact that the movie was set squarely in the same period. It gave me a sense of nostalgia.
The plot is refreshingly bare bones. A MI6 agent named Strangways is investigating a lead regarding interference with a planned Cape Canaveral missile launch using radio beams (or at least I think so. More on this later). Assassins murder him and Bond is sent to investigate what he was doing that got him killed, and who killed him.
Along the way he meets some allies. Here we see the first meeting between Bond and his American alter ego CIA agent Felix Leiter (played by the great Jack Lord). Along with the local fisherman Quarrel, they try to find out who the mysteries Dr. No is and what he is doing in Crab Key, all the while dodging various assasination attempts.
Which brings me to my first criticism of the film. There are plot threads that are left dangling throughout. When Bond first arrives on the island there is an attempt on his life. Someone leaked that he was coming. Who? The film never really says. What exactly is Dr. No trying to do? Steal rockets? Blow them up? We never really find out.
The other problem is the blatant chauvinism of the film. I’m not overly PC by any stretch but its kind of absurd today to watch Bond literally just grab a woman who is a complete stranger, kiss her and have her melt in his arms.
The music consists of the famous Bond theme essentially repeated over and over again. The only other recognixzable songs are a raggae 3 Blind Mice and the awful Underneath the Mango Tree.
Despite this, the first half of the film is quite entertaining, and Jamaica is always my favorite Bond location (Fleming wrote all his novels there on his estate Goldeneye). The film starts to fall apart however, once they get to the Crab Key island.
Here Bond meets up with the beautiful, and empty headed, Honey Ryder played by Ursula Andress. A lousy performance by an actress who essentially serves no purpose other than running around in a (at the time) risqué bikini.
What follows is one awkward scene after another including one with a decidedly slow moving and non threatening looking “dragon”, and a climax that essentially consists of Bond thwarting the enemy by turning a dial. Thankfully the climax is over quickly and the heroes are off for the obligatory “we’ve conquered the bad guy now lets do it” scene.
A promising start hampered by a lackluster finish. Thankfully many of the problems evident in the film would be fixed by the next one, From Russia With Love.
And for the inspiration to the whole Bond project, read Terminus's take on Dr. No
Sunday, August 11, 2002
Will Charlton Heston be forced to give up his guns?
Yes, according to Slate.
Now about that "from my cold dead hands" statement there Chuck?
(And how bad is his toupee in that picture?)
