Maybe he should just change his name to Kitty Kat, because today Tiger Woods looked for all the world like a contrite (read eviscerated), chastened (read "brought into line by corporate America and its lackey media"), and cajone-less pussycat. And for what? Why is he standing before the global media apologizing for his private life. When did his private life become anyone's business except for his and his family's?
Personally, I could not care less that he violated his marriage vows by acting like a male slut. I care only about his driving and putting. He is the greatest golfer the world has ever seen, and I used to get a kick out of seeing him stick it to the figurative man: he regularly scorched the lilly white-Republican PGA tour by blowing past all his milquetoast competitors. A black man bringing a conservative, hypocritical-Puritan institution to its knees...now that's must-see TV.
Now that's all gone, because today Tiger kowtowed to the man. My feeling is that he does not give a rat's ass what we think about his behavior; it's his corporate masters he must please. Since his "ho-ing" became public knowledge, Tiger has lost most of his corporate endorsements, worth billions of dollars. It is to them he must submit and conform. It is to them that he must erect a facade of what shareholders and consumers consider acceptable. In doing so, Tiger proves that he is not so different from you and me. He even said, "...the same rules that apply to you, apply to me." We are all captives of corporate America.
Here's the speech I wish Tiger had delivered:
"I have called you together to announce that I am today resuming my golf career, and that I no longer consider it appropriate for any media person to pry into my private life. I apologize for nothing I have done; My behavior is no one's business but mine and my wife's. If infidelity were a basis for a man to be disqualified from competing on the PGA tour, we'd have no one left but the fucking caddies. Therefore, I will grant no further interviews to any TV, print, internet, or radio outlet. Furthermore, I am putting you on notice that if you say or write one false thing about me or my family, I will hire some bulldog lawyers to sue your asses with my very deep pockets. And one more thing, all you cowardly, white, pseudo-Christian golfers, who said bad things about me when I was gone: you'd better take cover. I'm going to kick your ass in every tournament we play, from now until the day I retire."
But that's just me; I'm poor enough and obscure enough to not give a damn what others think of me.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Anatomy of a Great Idea Ruined by the Right and Big Insurance Companies
About a year ago, poll after poll showed health care reform, as advocated by Barack Obama and proposed by progressive Democrats, was favored by almost 80% of Americans. 80%! Today, as a Republican prepares to replace Ted Kennedy, every media outlet in the country is declaring the death of health care reform. And Gallup polls show the majority of Americans are opposed to health care reform. What the hell happened in a year's time? I'll tell you what happened, giant insurance companies, with the help of the radical right and a bunch of psycho-aggressive paid/fake protestors and lazy media enablers, used their money and power to cram the evil status quo health system down our throats and make us like it.
In a time when downsizing (the offspring of a Bush/Cheney-ravaged economy)has caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance, there was never a better time to pass the most humane, moral legislation since FDR's NRA. And the people agreed...until those loud, vicious "tea-fascists" started showing up at town hall meetings--shouting down reason, bullying compassion, and assaulting the truth. The networks and newspapers reported this paid-for-play acting like it was a real story, and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America swallowed it whole. Never was it reported that this "grassroots" movement was bought and paid for by insurance companies, trying to kill the competition, i.e., a government-supported public health care option.
By summer, the tide had turned. Reformers and anti-reformers were split down the middle; still, the House passed a watered-down bill and the Senate had ratification in its final stages, when Massachusetts voters turned redcoat on us.
Now the millions who are without health care are out in the cold again. Literally, big corporations and the right wing will be the death of them all. Or as one liberal wag put it, "The GOP is in the pockets of the health insurance lobby, and their health care plan is this: Don't get sick...and if you do, die quickly."
In a time when downsizing (the offspring of a Bush/Cheney-ravaged economy)has caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs, and thus their health insurance, there was never a better time to pass the most humane, moral legislation since FDR's NRA. And the people agreed...until those loud, vicious "tea-fascists" started showing up at town hall meetings--shouting down reason, bullying compassion, and assaulting the truth. The networks and newspapers reported this paid-for-play acting like it was a real story, and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America swallowed it whole. Never was it reported that this "grassroots" movement was bought and paid for by insurance companies, trying to kill the competition, i.e., a government-supported public health care option.
By summer, the tide had turned. Reformers and anti-reformers were split down the middle; still, the House passed a watered-down bill and the Senate had ratification in its final stages, when Massachusetts voters turned redcoat on us.
Now the millions who are without health care are out in the cold again. Literally, big corporations and the right wing will be the death of them all. Or as one liberal wag put it, "The GOP is in the pockets of the health insurance lobby, and their health care plan is this: Don't get sick...and if you do, die quickly."
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Back From The American Southwest...And Down In The Dumps
Take my advice--if you live in a cold-weather climate, do not travel the American Southwest in January. You'll never want to come back home.
As my wife and I traveled through Phoenix, the Nevada/California desert, Los Angeles, San Clemente, Palm Springs, and Twenty-Nine Palms, we kept getting reports of minus-zero wind chill back home. This made the sunny and 75-degree weather of southern California feel like bliss. We got lost in a "desert reverie" of dreamy days and glorious sunsets. Calm and warmth seeped into our pores.
Now we're back home, and the weather is as dreary as ever. January and February in the Midwest make me wonder why in god's name our forebears ever settled here. Didn't they know what they were in for? Yes, I know California is having floods right now, but they won't last. And it won't rain there again until June.
What's worse, Ted Kennedy's old seat has been taken over by a Republican. Now the bastards have enough votes to block health care reform. What has become of the world when you can't even count on Massachusetts any more?
It's going to be a long, cold winter.
As my wife and I traveled through Phoenix, the Nevada/California desert, Los Angeles, San Clemente, Palm Springs, and Twenty-Nine Palms, we kept getting reports of minus-zero wind chill back home. This made the sunny and 75-degree weather of southern California feel like bliss. We got lost in a "desert reverie" of dreamy days and glorious sunsets. Calm and warmth seeped into our pores.
Now we're back home, and the weather is as dreary as ever. January and February in the Midwest make me wonder why in god's name our forebears ever settled here. Didn't they know what they were in for? Yes, I know California is having floods right now, but they won't last. And it won't rain there again until June.
What's worse, Ted Kennedy's old seat has been taken over by a Republican. Now the bastards have enough votes to block health care reform. What has become of the world when you can't even count on Massachusetts any more?
It's going to be a long, cold winter.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
My Response To Lone-Nutter McAdams' Review Of Douglass Book
The following review of the book "JFK And The Unspeakable," by James Douglass, is being reprinted here, verbatim, with my response. John McAdams, the reviewer, is a long-time obfuscator and Warren Commission defender. His politics, naturally, are slightly right of Dick Cheney.
John McAdams: Another "Unspeakably Awful" Book About the JFK Assassination
Source: Washington Decoded website (run by Max Holland) (12-12-09)
James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1]
What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage unfamiliar to JFK assassination buffs. Most authors of books on the assassination Jwd attempt to cloak their political views, and pretend to arrive at the truth about the assassination after a supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Douglass wears his politics on his sleeve. He is a Catholic “peace activist” and disciple of Thomas Merton, whose observations infuse the book. Self-styled activists like Douglass have a long history of being opposed to the use of military power by the United States, although they don’t seem to mind as much when military power is used by America’s adversaries. And while they employ religious rhetoric to justify and rationalize their unilateral pacifism, their worldview, ultimately, is indistinguishable from that of secular leftists like Oliver Stone (who, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Douglass’s book).
Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”[2] How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.
JFK and the Unspeakable is structured so that it develops two parallel but supposedly complementary narratives: Kennedy’s statements and actions regarding Vietnam (in public, private, and in policy-making circles), and, simultaneously, the machinations of those who are conspiring to kill Kennedy. Both story lines are chock full of problems and cannot withstand elementary scrutiny. Long before Kennedy ever arrives in Dallas, Texas, and the strands finally come together, the book ceases to be non-fiction and enters the realm of a self-indulgent political fantasy.
The first narrative tries to portray Kennedy as a politician who started out a Cold Warrior, but broke through to a “deeper, more universal humanity” during his brief time in office.[3] This is not as easy to pull off as it might sound, because Douglass knows full well that many of Kennedy’s statements, as late as the morning of his death, were anti-Communist in thrust and substance. Accordingly, Douglass has to fudge and equivocate constantly, as he tries to depict Kennedy as “trapped in the contradiction between the mandate of peace . . . and the continuing Cold War dogmas of his national security state.”[4]
One particular trick Douglass uses is to conceal sources that show Kennedy to be a Cold War liberal. Douglass devotes page after page of analysis to Kennedy’s American University commencement address from June 1963, and the president’s admonition in this speech that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Coming eight months after the Cuban missile crisis, the address was an inspiring call for keeping the peace in the hair-trigger nuclear age. But Douglass conspicuously fails to mention some other remarks Kennedy made in the same breath. “It is discouraging to think that [the Soviet Union’s] leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write,” Kennedy noted; moreover, the “Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.”[5]
There is none of the moral equivalence here, in short, that suffuses Douglass’s view of the Cold War, nor any hint of the idea that America’s military-industrial-intelligence complex was primarily responsible for the superpowers’ nuclear brinksmanship. Indeed, on the morning of November 22, during his breakfast address in Fort Worth, Kennedy hailed that city’s role as an arsenal in the Cold War, though one would not know that from reading Douglass’s book.[6]...
My response:McAdams,
Like all disinformationists and lone nutters, you must ignore a mountain of evidence and an ocean of coincidence to expound your dishonest version of events. You excoriate others' work on the matter in the same way. What you left out of your review of Douglass's book is his stunningly rational and meticulously documented evidence for conspiracy.
McAdams, I do not know what your motives are, but you are an unspeakable monster. Each time you open your mouth or tap on your keyboard, you deliver a right cross to the truth. You want names instead of "military-industrial complex"? How about Curtis Lemay, Lyman Lemnitzer, McGeorge Bundy, D.H. Byrd, Kellogg, Brown and Root, and Bell Helicopter (Michael Paine and Walter Dornberger). You want names instead of vague intelligence operatives? How about Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, Charles Cabell, Ed Lansdale, and David Atlee Phillips.
John McAdams: Another "Unspeakably Awful" Book About the JFK Assassination
Source: Washington Decoded website (run by Max Holland) (12-12-09)
James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1]
What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage unfamiliar to JFK assassination buffs. Most authors of books on the assassination Jwd attempt to cloak their political views, and pretend to arrive at the truth about the assassination after a supposedly objective analysis of the facts. Douglass wears his politics on his sleeve. He is a Catholic “peace activist” and disciple of Thomas Merton, whose observations infuse the book. Self-styled activists like Douglass have a long history of being opposed to the use of military power by the United States, although they don’t seem to mind as much when military power is used by America’s adversaries. And while they employ religious rhetoric to justify and rationalize their unilateral pacifism, their worldview, ultimately, is indistinguishable from that of secular leftists like Oliver Stone (who, not surprisingly, is a big fan of Douglass’s book).
Douglass’s key villain—the “Unspeakable” of his title—turns out to be the same kind of opaque nemesis that Stone is fond of conjuring up. The best identification Douglass can offer is “shadowy intelligence agencies using intermediaries and scapegoats under the cover of ‘plausible deniability,’” and even more vaguely, “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”[2] How convenient: a culprit who is indescribable. In essence, though, Douglass’s evil-doer is indistinguishable from that bogeyman of vulgar, atheistic, and leftist radicals from the ‘60s: the “military-industrial complex,” except that he adds to the stew the Central Intelligence Agency.
JFK and the Unspeakable is structured so that it develops two parallel but supposedly complementary narratives: Kennedy’s statements and actions regarding Vietnam (in public, private, and in policy-making circles), and, simultaneously, the machinations of those who are conspiring to kill Kennedy. Both story lines are chock full of problems and cannot withstand elementary scrutiny. Long before Kennedy ever arrives in Dallas, Texas, and the strands finally come together, the book ceases to be non-fiction and enters the realm of a self-indulgent political fantasy.
The first narrative tries to portray Kennedy as a politician who started out a Cold Warrior, but broke through to a “deeper, more universal humanity” during his brief time in office.[3] This is not as easy to pull off as it might sound, because Douglass knows full well that many of Kennedy’s statements, as late as the morning of his death, were anti-Communist in thrust and substance. Accordingly, Douglass has to fudge and equivocate constantly, as he tries to depict Kennedy as “trapped in the contradiction between the mandate of peace . . . and the continuing Cold War dogmas of his national security state.”[4]
One particular trick Douglass uses is to conceal sources that show Kennedy to be a Cold War liberal. Douglass devotes page after page of analysis to Kennedy’s American University commencement address from June 1963, and the president’s admonition in this speech that “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Coming eight months after the Cuban missile crisis, the address was an inspiring call for keeping the peace in the hair-trigger nuclear age. But Douglass conspicuously fails to mention some other remarks Kennedy made in the same breath. “It is discouraging to think that [the Soviet Union’s] leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write,” Kennedy noted; moreover, the “Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.”[5]
There is none of the moral equivalence here, in short, that suffuses Douglass’s view of the Cold War, nor any hint of the idea that America’s military-industrial-intelligence complex was primarily responsible for the superpowers’ nuclear brinksmanship. Indeed, on the morning of November 22, during his breakfast address in Fort Worth, Kennedy hailed that city’s role as an arsenal in the Cold War, though one would not know that from reading Douglass’s book.[6]...
My response:McAdams,
Like all disinformationists and lone nutters, you must ignore a mountain of evidence and an ocean of coincidence to expound your dishonest version of events. You excoriate others' work on the matter in the same way. What you left out of your review of Douglass's book is his stunningly rational and meticulously documented evidence for conspiracy.
McAdams, I do not know what your motives are, but you are an unspeakable monster. Each time you open your mouth or tap on your keyboard, you deliver a right cross to the truth. You want names instead of "military-industrial complex"? How about Curtis Lemay, Lyman Lemnitzer, McGeorge Bundy, D.H. Byrd, Kellogg, Brown and Root, and Bell Helicopter (Michael Paine and Walter Dornberger). You want names instead of vague intelligence operatives? How about Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, Charles Cabell, Ed Lansdale, and David Atlee Phillips.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
General McHugh Lied; He DID leave JFK's Coffin Unattended
Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, military aide to President Kennedy, always publicly maintained that he never left the dead president's coffin unattended from the time it left Parkland Hospital in Dallas on November 22, 1963, until it arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital near Washington, DC, that evening. This assertion always made me doubt David Lifton's "body alteration" thesis. Lifton, in 1981, published his book Best Evidence, which asserted that JFK's body had been altered sometime between Dallas and Washington on the day he was murdered, by conspirators who were intent on making it look as if he had been shot from the back instead of the front. This was how, according to Lifton, Lee Harvey Oswald was framed. Lifton had much evidence to support his theory: 1) the wounds as described by the Parkland doctors were not the same wounds described by the Bethesda doctors; in other words, the wounds changed between Dallas and DC; 2) JFK's body arrived in a coffin at Bethesda that was considerably different from the one in which it departed Parkland; 3) James Humes, Bethesda autopsist, stated that "...surgery of the head, namely in the top of the skull..." had been performed before the body arrived at Bethesda; the problem was, no such surgery had been performed by the Dallas doctors. Lifton theorizes that someone got access to the body as it lay aboard Air Force One awaiting departure to Washington after the assassination. This required the coffin containing the president's body be unattended for a period of time. All who were aboard the plane, including Jackie Kennedy, admitted that they were not coffin-side for the entire time the plane idled on the runway at Dallas Love Field...except for one General Godfrey McHugh. McHugh never left his dead president's side, or so he said.
A new book makes McHugh out to be a liar. According to Steven Gillon's just published The Kennedy Assassination 24 Hours After: LBJ's Pivotal First Day As President, McHugh DID leave the coffin. He furiously roamed around the plane as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field, demanding to know what was causing the delay in takeoff. When the pilot told him they were waiting for the judge to arrive aboard Air Force One to swear in LBJ, McHugh confronted Johnson in the plane's bathroom where the new president was babbling nervously about a worldwide plot. "It's a conspiracy. They're going to kill us all," LBJ sputtered. McHugh was shocked by what he saw, but was oblivious to its real significance. LBJ's erratic behavior might have been a ruse to distract the one person who was most loyal to JFK, thus leaving the coffin unattended for conspirators to highjack the body. What did they do with the body? Lifton thinks they either smuggled it aboard Air Force Two where it was flown to Washington surreptitiously for body alteration at Walter Reed Medical Center...or it was simply hidden aboard Air Force One, and then pirated off the plane when it landed at Andrews AFB. From there it was airlifted by helicopter to Walter Reed. Either way, JFK's wounds, according to the sworn statements of attending physicians who treated him at Parkland and performed the autopsy at Bethesda, changed dramatically between Dallas and DC. Of this there is no question. How did this happen...and why?
As wild as the theory seems, Lifton's book is well worth the read.
A new book makes McHugh out to be a liar. According to Steven Gillon's just published The Kennedy Assassination 24 Hours After: LBJ's Pivotal First Day As President, McHugh DID leave the coffin. He furiously roamed around the plane as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field, demanding to know what was causing the delay in takeoff. When the pilot told him they were waiting for the judge to arrive aboard Air Force One to swear in LBJ, McHugh confronted Johnson in the plane's bathroom where the new president was babbling nervously about a worldwide plot. "It's a conspiracy. They're going to kill us all," LBJ sputtered. McHugh was shocked by what he saw, but was oblivious to its real significance. LBJ's erratic behavior might have been a ruse to distract the one person who was most loyal to JFK, thus leaving the coffin unattended for conspirators to highjack the body. What did they do with the body? Lifton thinks they either smuggled it aboard Air Force Two where it was flown to Washington surreptitiously for body alteration at Walter Reed Medical Center...or it was simply hidden aboard Air Force One, and then pirated off the plane when it landed at Andrews AFB. From there it was airlifted by helicopter to Walter Reed. Either way, JFK's wounds, according to the sworn statements of attending physicians who treated him at Parkland and performed the autopsy at Bethesda, changed dramatically between Dallas and DC. Of this there is no question. How did this happen...and why?
As wild as the theory seems, Lifton's book is well worth the read.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Keith Law Declares Kansas City Royals MLB Champs for 2009
Defying conventional wisdom, ESPN baseball analyst and statistical expert Keith Law has named the Kansas City Royals as baseball's best team in 2009. "It's not even close; by almost all statistical standards, the Royals lapped the field in 2009."
Reaction in New York, where the Yankees had apparently won the 2009 World Series, was irate. Sports call-in shows were flooded with angry callers demanding to know how Law arrived at his decision. But at least one New York sports talk host, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed with Law. "When you look at KC's LAW RAT (Leveraged and Averaged Win Ratio), there's no comparison. The Royals had a LAW RAT of 19.762; the next closest was the Nationals with 17.118."
Law defended his decision by citing the numbers. "Greinke's WACKY (Win Average Coefficient per Strikeout Yield) was off the charts, the Royals' bullpen's Average Saves In Nine Innings (ASININE) led the league, and their Defensive Uncategorized Errors (DUNCE) score was first in the AL."
When an AP reporter reminded Law that the game was played on the field and not on sabremetician's spread sheets, and that the Yankees had actually won the world championship, Law responded, "The World Series is an invalid determinant of the best team. What you saw was an illusion. The complex variables that go into an assessment of which team is better has nothing to do with vague and amorphous things like a pitcher's stuff, quality at-bats, momentum, fielders' instincts, and managerial decisions. To put it in terms the layman can understand, it's about what players could do...not what they do do."
Meanwhile in Kansas City, the mayor has scheduled a belated victory parade through the downtown district on Tuesday, and Bud Selig is expected to award the Commissioner's trophy to the Royals organization on that occasion.
Law, who has an MBA from Harvard and once worked as a consultant for the Toronto Blue Jays, drew similar ire when he voted Javier Vazquez second on his Cy Young ballot and omitted St. Louis's Chris Carpenter, despite Carpenter's apparent statistical advantage over Vazquez. "Any dope can cite ERA and wins; that's not what determines good pitching. I look at Games Over Ongoing Fielding Yield (GOOFY) average."
When asked who should win the world championship in 2010, Law responded, "Well, right now I'm favoring the Pirates. Their Cosine Rating At Position (CRAP) is astronomical."
Reaction in New York, where the Yankees had apparently won the 2009 World Series, was irate. Sports call-in shows were flooded with angry callers demanding to know how Law arrived at his decision. But at least one New York sports talk host, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed with Law. "When you look at KC's LAW RAT (Leveraged and Averaged Win Ratio), there's no comparison. The Royals had a LAW RAT of 19.762; the next closest was the Nationals with 17.118."
Law defended his decision by citing the numbers. "Greinke's WACKY (Win Average Coefficient per Strikeout Yield) was off the charts, the Royals' bullpen's Average Saves In Nine Innings (ASININE) led the league, and their Defensive Uncategorized Errors (DUNCE) score was first in the AL."
When an AP reporter reminded Law that the game was played on the field and not on sabremetician's spread sheets, and that the Yankees had actually won the world championship, Law responded, "The World Series is an invalid determinant of the best team. What you saw was an illusion. The complex variables that go into an assessment of which team is better has nothing to do with vague and amorphous things like a pitcher's stuff, quality at-bats, momentum, fielders' instincts, and managerial decisions. To put it in terms the layman can understand, it's about what players could do...not what they do do."
Meanwhile in Kansas City, the mayor has scheduled a belated victory parade through the downtown district on Tuesday, and Bud Selig is expected to award the Commissioner's trophy to the Royals organization on that occasion.
Law, who has an MBA from Harvard and once worked as a consultant for the Toronto Blue Jays, drew similar ire when he voted Javier Vazquez second on his Cy Young ballot and omitted St. Louis's Chris Carpenter, despite Carpenter's apparent statistical advantage over Vazquez. "Any dope can cite ERA and wins; that's not what determines good pitching. I look at Games Over Ongoing Fielding Yield (GOOFY) average."
When asked who should win the world championship in 2010, Law responded, "Well, right now I'm favoring the Pirates. Their Cosine Rating At Position (CRAP) is astronomical."
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
"Amelia" Lacks Excitement; How Is That Possible?
Part of the allure of the Amelia Earhart story is the mystery of how it ended. World-renowned as the first successful female aviator, she attempted to circle the globe in 1937, but her flight vanished somewhere over (or in?) the Pacific Ocean just as she was about to finish the last leg of her journey. I love bios, especially those with a good mystery attached, so I entered the theater drooling with anticipation. I left the theatre needing a poke in the ribs from my wife to stay awake. How did this happen? One can lay the blame on director Mira Nair's unimaginative direction, Hilary Swank's acting, and a script that does not even attempt to speculate on what became of Amelia's last flight.
Hilary Swank's impersonation of Earhart is dead-on (no pun intended). She looks, acts, and speaks like the real Amelia...so much so that I was diverted by it several times during the film. I mean, I thought I was watching a resurrection of Earhart rather than an interpretation of her life. In other words, Swank's mechanics are impeccable, but they dominate the performance to the point that the viewer comes away wondering what Earhart was really like. Somehow Swank did not capture the elan and verve of Earhart. There was no soul in the machine.
Nair makes the same mistake. She touches all the bases of Earhart's life without hitting a home run. All the dates, times, names, and places are accurate, but it adds up to not much more than a National Geographic special. I didn't feel anything for the characters and their plights.
But all this could have be redeemed by a boffo ending. They couldn't screw that up, right? Earhart's fate has been the subject of innumerable theories and wild conjecture for over 70 years. Hundreds of books, articles, and essays have been written about her death. All of them trying to solve the mystery in an original way. There was no dearth of material from which the director and writer could choose. Some say Amelia and Fred Noonan (her co-pilot) landed safely on a remote Pacific island and lived there for years. Some say the Japanese captured and tortured and imprisoned them during World War II. Some say the flight just vanished into thin air, a victim of a South Pacific/Bermuda triangle. Whatever happened, no trace of the plane was ever found despite a massive search. So how did the film deal with all this? It ignored it entirely. The movie ends without an ending. Amelia is running low on fuel and people look worried, but no conclusion is drawn. Credits come up, and hopes crash.
Like the life and last flight of its eponymous heroine, "Amelia" is unfinished business.
Hilary Swank's impersonation of Earhart is dead-on (no pun intended). She looks, acts, and speaks like the real Amelia...so much so that I was diverted by it several times during the film. I mean, I thought I was watching a resurrection of Earhart rather than an interpretation of her life. In other words, Swank's mechanics are impeccable, but they dominate the performance to the point that the viewer comes away wondering what Earhart was really like. Somehow Swank did not capture the elan and verve of Earhart. There was no soul in the machine.
Nair makes the same mistake. She touches all the bases of Earhart's life without hitting a home run. All the dates, times, names, and places are accurate, but it adds up to not much more than a National Geographic special. I didn't feel anything for the characters and their plights.
But all this could have be redeemed by a boffo ending. They couldn't screw that up, right? Earhart's fate has been the subject of innumerable theories and wild conjecture for over 70 years. Hundreds of books, articles, and essays have been written about her death. All of them trying to solve the mystery in an original way. There was no dearth of material from which the director and writer could choose. Some say Amelia and Fred Noonan (her co-pilot) landed safely on a remote Pacific island and lived there for years. Some say the Japanese captured and tortured and imprisoned them during World War II. Some say the flight just vanished into thin air, a victim of a South Pacific/Bermuda triangle. Whatever happened, no trace of the plane was ever found despite a massive search. So how did the film deal with all this? It ignored it entirely. The movie ends without an ending. Amelia is running low on fuel and people look worried, but no conclusion is drawn. Credits come up, and hopes crash.
Like the life and last flight of its eponymous heroine, "Amelia" is unfinished business.
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