I get frequent hits by search engines to this entry. It’s worth re-publishing.
Category: Uncategorized
Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The opening credits were not even done and I was already lost. I never recovered. The rest of the movie was boring and I literally nodded off a few times. I didn’t know what was going on, who was where, whether the action was in Budapest, London, Moscow or Paris, and why all the hoopla. At home I would have simply turned the thing off. But having just paid full price in a movie theater, I stuck with it, hoping against reason that something would come of it.
Most of the action takes place in London in smoke-filled rooms or dreary government buildings. A few people get killed. A lot of whispering spy stuff is going on, but none of it makes much sense.
Based on a spy novel by John Le Carre, it plays in the early 1970ies in Europe. The British figure out that there must be a mole in the highest echelon of the MI6, the Britisch intelligence organization. The story is about who it is.
The best line in the movie is when an aged retired female operative sits down with one of her former colleages, sees a young couple necking across the room, and says: “I don’t know about you, but I feel seriously underfucked.”
I am sure all the pieces fit together like a 1000 piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle, but to construct it I’d have to watch the movie another five times and take written notes. But please, once was enough, and a second time would be torture.
I imagine the novel might be riveting. However, this is proof that some novels should not become movies.
Rating: zero stars.
Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible is a Thriller Impossible, with one action scene after the other, each of them impossible. Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, the agent of the IMF, who is sent on impossible missions in exotic places. This movie starts in a Russian prison, moves around Moscow some, makes its way to Dubai, for no discernible plot reason other than the presence of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, which plays a special effects part in the story, until finally moving on to Mumbai, India. As expected in Mission: Impossible movies, Ethan has to save the world. This time, a loosely connected terrorist group launches a nuclear missile in an attempt to instigate all-out nuclear war. Ethan must foil the plot.
The movie is a string of special effects of large things exploding, Ethan falling off buildings, onto trucks and cars, bouncing off objects onto sidewalks. Each fall would be fatal in the real world, but these characters are made of rubber so they just bounce right on. There is also a lot of hand to hand combat. All the protagonists are expert martial arts fighters. When they hit each other, loud noises echo in the theater. I saw this in IMAX, no less, so the noises when they hit were so loud, they vibrated in my diaphragm and I could feel the punches.
There are also many impossible situations. For instance, the terrorists launch the fatal missile from a computer room. After the bird is in the air and on its way, they tear down the computers, ripping cables out of drives and patch panels, sparks fly, the power goes off. The good guys get there just a few minutes too late, just after the bad guys leave, and now one of them gets tasked to “rewire the machine” and get it back up and running within the 30 minutes it takes the missile to reach its destination – they need the computers to deactivate the warhead. Of course, it would take weeks to bring up a computer system that was ripped apart physically, if it could be done at all, but in Mission: Impossible, we don’t expect such petty delays.
I also get a kick out of where all the gear comes from. When they find themselves in the Burj Khalifa and realize Ethan must climb up the outside vertical glass wall over 130 stories up, they magically have glass suction gloves designed to just do the job and turn Ethan into spiderman. The gear just seems to materialize when it’s needed, whether that’s a magnetic suit, suction gloves, a private jet, a high-tech railcar, or a Moscow telephone booth that uses iris scanners and then self-destructs after it delivers a message.
Of course, I am criticizing the basic premise of Mission: Impossible, where impossible things can happen. For more than two hours, one impossible thing after another happens every 30 seconds or so, and it forces me to turn off the analytical part of my brain, the scientific part of my brain, the martial artist part of my brain, and the plotweaving part of my brain – and only leave the “enjoy the special effects” part of my brain on and on high alert.
Mission: Impossible is an impossible ride that can be enjoyable if you’re out for nothing but the ride, sort of like a bad-ass roller coaster. Most viewers apparently can turn off all of those other parts of their brains, because Mission: Impossible is a highly rated movie, both by audiences and critics. I enjoyed the ride, like I would a roller coaster, but I generally look for more than explosions, loud sounds and rubber bouncy people in a movie.
Rating: **
Steve Jobs’ Plateless Car
Steve Jobs drove a silver 2007 Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG without a license plate.
Here is an article that explains – somewhat.
Bachmann’s Wishful Thinking or Lying?
Check out statements by Michele Bachmann and the comparative truth.
Memorial Day – Take Two
When in England , at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of empire building by George Bush.
He answered by saying: “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.”
Wells Fargo Credit Card Account – Float Pay Scheme
After finding disturbing money float issues with Chase, I checked our company’s Wells Fargo credit card account for the Float Pay Scheme I outlined before. Sure enough, it is used by Wells Fargo, too. I really should be calling it the Float Pay Scam.
It turns out we made a payment of the balance in full late in March for $3,600. The payment shows as “posted” on 4/1/2011 in the online account register. Curiously, it was not included in the “available credit” total. So I called yesterday, April 15.
The agent told me that the payment was in hold and would be posted “tomorrow.”
I said: “No, it shows as posted on 4/1/2011, right here?”
She said: “Yes, that’s when we received it.”
“Why does it show posted when it really isn’t posted?” I asked.
“It’s probably because you didn’t use a Wells Fargo checking account to pay. So we hold until the check clears the bank.”
I checked our checking account. The check cleared on 04/04/2011. The evidence is that Wells Fargo took our payment, received the money, and did not make that money available to us through the credit line until twelve days after the check cleared the bank. My first reaction is that this is illegal, a scam. But when I think about it, essentially, there is probably nothing wrong with this, since it’s a credit line and it’s their money that they are lending out. So they are lending it just a little later.
What is really going on it that they are using our money to lend it to others at high interest rates. What’s wrong with this is that they are lending it to us just a little later. If we are paying off our entire balances this is not a problem, because we are not paying interest. However, if we are paying interest on this money, are they collecting double interest? There is no way to tell, from the account statements, when they are charging interest for our money to us, and to others, through the float.
For us consumers, it would be much better to get prepaid cards, which would be like debit cards, and our own money would be available without restrictions to ourselves the moment we make the payment.
What is REALLY wrong is that the credit card companies are now doing this without consumers knowing about it – and rejected credit cards at hotel desks are very embarrassing.
Defense Spending by Country
This list is based on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Military Expenditure Database which calculates military expenditure data for 2009 (in constant 2008 US$).
Looking at it another way for the top five defense spenders:
Shove the Donuts
From the Houston Chronicle, March 14:
Roger Aksamit, an attorney with Thompson & Knight, speaking about a Houston man who won a year’s supply of coupons from a donut shop as one of the lucky prize-winners during an Astros Fan Appreciation Day. The Internal Revenue Service sent the man a Form 1099, informing him that he owed taxes on $927.61.
This is one of the things that I believe is so badly wrong with our tax code, it borders on the ludicrous.
The man isn’t going to go to that donut shop and get a free donut and coffee 365 days of the year. He will give some coupons away and he will abandon many at the end of the year. Paying the government $927 in taxes for this great win is a slap in the face. He would be better off buying the donuts and coffee as often as he felt like it. I am certain that would not add up to $927.
The problem is, as soon as you accept such an award, you owe taxes, this appears to be no backing out.
Lesson: Do not accept winnings of anything but cash, as you owe cash in taxes for the privilege of winning.