One of the Great Musical DVDs, a Metaphor for Life as Well
August 26, 2007
Joaquin Phoenix
This is one of the really great musical DVDs; I list others below but because of Amazon's limitations, I can only list ten.
This is NOT a complex biographical DVD. This DVD captures the essence of love within music. It is a glorious story of a man who married well but whose wife did not “compute” music, and of the love that grew “on the road” between Johnny Cash and his eventual bride (who got him off drugs and helped him “walk the line”).
The underlying theme, of going from uncotrolled use of drugs to a straight existence within reality powered by love, is uplifting.
If you like both music and romance, this DVD is a “must have.” Below I list a few others.
This DVD was recommended to me by one of the Amazonians that follows my reivews, and as I often do with intelligent recommendations, I bought it.
The movie is both brilliant and funny. The stage setting is incredibly cool. The minds behind this movie have brought us an absolutely first rate combination of great actors depicting stupidity in the future, of “future” scenes that are both complex and credible, and of an outcome that is rather endearing.
It depicts what happens when the smart people put off having babies (by all means including abortion), and the poor less educated people, for whatever reason, keep having babies.
Wow. Over 250 Reviews. My wife was there, my third son loves this movie as do I
August 22, 2007
Denzel Washington
I have three sons, one of whom is a traditional wide receiver fellow. He loves this movie, as do I. My wife was attending Marshall High School at the time that the Titans were integrated, so this is a very personal movie of us.
I will never ever be able to thank the United States Marine Corps enough for putting me in a barracks with “dark green” Marines. The USMC settled for me, once and for all, the brotherhood of man in all colors. This movie is uplifting, and I have tears in my eyes as I think about it.
I use this movie in classes training international officers. This is the ULTIMATE teamwork DVD. It is in a class of its own, and a treasure of lasting value.
Note: I don't recommend We Are Marshall (Full Screen Edition) unless you know up front that the first half of the movie is about the death of the entire team and the struggle to recover.
I have taken an interest in firefighers every since they did their all to save the victims of 9-11, only to be betrayed by murderer Rudy Gulliani, with Larry Silverstein, the avaricous Jew, and Dick Cheney, the naked amoral thief, as the other principle actors.
Firefights are God's gift to mankind. They are the good guys. It literally brings tears to my eyes to contemplate the evidence of one surviving firefighter from 9-11, to wit, that bombs were exploding BELOW him as he made his way up toward the fires from the airplanes.
Rudy Gulliani, called “scoop and dump” Gulliani by the firefighters of New York, who rioted over his treasonous agility in destroying the crime scene and covering up the world's greatest insurance scam, $7 billion for Larry Silverstein, Rudy Gulliani, Dick Cheney, and the two unethical witless insurance company executives who thought we would notice.
This movie is about honest Americans. I hope, from the heart, that Gulliani, Cheney, and Silversttein hang one day, after a legal trial. Firefighters: salt of the earth. Gulliani, Silverstein, and Cheney: the traitors, the liars, the scum of the Earth.
Early Technicolor, Brilliant, Moving, Just Utterly First Class
August 3, 2007
Ingrid Bergman
EDIT of 18 Oct 08 to delete erroneous reference to colorization.
This is such a beautiful film. The color is vivid, technicolor, but nothing can be better than Yule Brenner and Ingred Birgman with a quiet love that comes to fruition.
I am an unabashed romantic, and this DVD is my top ten list.
Do NOT fall for the Meg Ryan version! That is animated pap. I love Meg Ryan but this (Yule Brenner and Ingred Bergman) is the only real thing).
This movie was a perfect evening in every sense of the word.
You Can Read This More Than Once, and Learn Each Time
July 22, 2007
Ralph Peters
Ralph Peters is one of a handful of individuals whose every work I must read. See some others I recommend at the end of this review. Ralph stands alone as a warrior-philosopher who actually walks the trail, reads the sign, and offers up ground truth.
This book is deep look at the nuances and the dangers of what he calls the wars of blood and faith. The introduction is superb, and frames the book by highlighting these core matters:
* Washington has forgotten how to think.
* The age of ideology is over. Ethnic identity will rule.
* Globalization has contradictory effects. Internet spreads hatred and dangerous knowledge (e.g. how to make an improvised explosive device).
* The post-colonial era has begun.
* Women's freedom is the defining issue of our time.
* There is no way to wage a bloodless war.
* The media can now determine the war's outcome. I don't agree with the author on everything, this is one such case. If the government does not lie, the cause is just, and the endeavor is effectively managed, We the People can be steadfast.
A couple of expansions. I recently posted a list of the top ten timeless books at the request of a Stanford '09, and i7 includes Philip Allott's The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State. Deeper in the book the author has an item on Blood Borders, and it tallies perfectly with Allott's erudite view that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake–instead of creating artificial states (5000 distinct ethnic groups crammed into 189+ artificial political entities) we should have gone instead with Peoples and especially Indigenous Peoples whose lands and resources could not be stolen, only negotiated for peacefully. Had the USA not squandered a half trillion dollars and so many lives and so much good will, a global truth and reconciliation commission, combined with a free cell phone to every woman among the five billion poor (see next paragraph) could conceivably have achieved a peaceful reinvigoration of the planet with liberty and justice for peoples rather than power and wealth for a handful.
The author's views on the importance of women stem from decades of observation and are supported by Michael O'Hanlon's book, A Half Penny on the Federal Dollar: The Future of Development Aid, in which he documents that the single best return on investment for any dollar is in the education of women. They tend to be secular, appreciate sanitation and nutrition and moderation in all things. The men are more sober, responsible, and productive when their women are educated. THIS, not unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism, should be the heart of our foreign policy.
The book is organized into sections I was not expecting but that both make sense, and add to the whole. Part I is 17 short pieces addressing the Twenty-First Century Military. Here the author focuses on the strategic, lambastes Rumsfeld for not listening, and generally overlooks the fact that all our generals and admirals failed to be loyal to the Constitution and instead accepted illegal orders based on lies.
In Part II, Iraq and Its Neighbors, we have 24 pieces. The best piece by far in terms of provocative strategic value is “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look.” Curiously he does not address Syria or Lebanon, but I expect he will since the Syrians just evacuated Lebanon and Syria and Iran appear to be planning for a pincer movement on Baghdad after they cut the ground supply line from Kuwait.
A handful of pieces, 5 in all, are grouped in Part III, The Home Front. The best two for me were “Our Strategic Intelligence Problem” in which he points out that more money and more technology are NOT going to make us smarter, it is humans with history, culture, language, and eyes on the target that will tease out the nuances no satellite can handle. He also points out how easily our satellites are deceived. I share his anguish in the piece on “Lynching the Marines.” I called and emailed the Colonel at HQMC in charge of the defense, and offered a heat stress defense that I had just learned about from a NASA engineer helping firefighters. If the body gets too hot, the brain starts to fry, and irrational behavior is the norm. The Colonel declined to acknowledge. That told me all I needed to know about how the Marines were all too eager to hang their own.
Part V was the most unfamiliar to me, covering Israel and Hezbollah. In 17 pieces, the author, an avowed supporter of Israel, pulls no punches, tarring and feathering the Israelis for being corrupt (selling off their military supplies on the black market (to whom, one wonders, since the only people in the market are terrorists?) confident the US will resupply them) and militarily and politically incompetent. To which I would add economically stupid and morally challenged–Stealing 50% of the water Israel uses to do farming that is under 5% of the GDP is both nuts and short-sighted. See the brief by Chuck Spinney at OSS.Net.
Part V, The World Beyond, is a philosophical tour of the horizon, from water wars and plagues (see my lists for books on each of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers), to precision knifing of Russia, France, and Europe. Darfur, one of over 15 genocides being ignored right now (Darfur because Sudan pretends to be helping on terrorism and the US does not have the will or the means to be effective there) is touched on.
The book ends marvelously with a piece on “The Return of the Tribes,” a piece that emphasizes the role of religion and the exclusivity of cults and specific localized tribes. They don't want to be integrated nor do they want new members.
Erudite, Incisive, But Mostly Text and Few Photos, July 4, 2007
This is not the book I was expecting. For that, go to Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which I rate at five stars and which so sickened me that I thought of Ike Eisenhower ordering that all those living near the death camps be ordered to march past slowly to see what they tolerated in their midst.
This is without question a very respected academic work, an one line jumps out from the first chapter “On Looking.” It captures the essence of this book perfectly:
“The power and seduction of specatacle lynching, and its social and moral legitimacy as the embodiment of communal values of law and order, white masculine affirmation, family honor, and white supremacy, depended on the crowd's act of looking.” (page 15).
My mind swirled around this, thinking of other books (listed below), of genocide, of eugenics (Henry Kissinger's favorite word), of injustice, of moral perversion and cowardliness, of those who allowed the Jews to be persecuted by the Nazis.
I am reminded of at least one other author, it may have been Francis Lappe Moore in Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life, who noted that “white supremacy” has been the death of democracy in America. To that I would add the perversion of the corporation, which stole a legacy intended for freed people of color, and turned into a lifetime license to steal from all.
Where this book lost me was in its emphasis in the remainder of the book on how lynching are depicted in art–the wood cuttings and other art images outnumber the actual photographs. All very worthy, to be sure, but at this point the book moves into the realm of the academic rather than the visceral, which is why if you buy only one book, I recommend Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America instead.
I won;'t even try to get into today's continued injustice, including red lining black districts to turn them into ghettos, then buying up the real estate at a fraction of its true value, before gentryfing it for resale and much higher prices.
My bottom line: we need two Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in America, the first to bring out in the open all of the evils that the white race has inflicted on people of color from the Native Americans to the black slaves to the Chinese slaves to the current dispossessed that now include a heavy leavening of poor whites. The second, with Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew as co-chairs, can examine the history of the UK and US as colonial powers, unilateral militarists, and predatory capitalists looting the commonwealths of all other lesser developed nations, with the consequence that we have five billion poor instead of seven billion billionaires.
One of the Great Musical DVDs, a Metaphor for Life as Well
