The curse of surprise film endings

I recently watched two films The Prestige (2006) and Now You See Me (2013). The former was recommended to me as one of Hugh Jackman’s better films to observe his acting capabilities and he does give a good performance. In fact, both films have excellent actors (the great Michael Caine appears in both) and one is never bored while watching. But what I want to focus on these two films is how otherwise pretty good films get ruined for me by the desire of the filmmakers to spring surprise endings on the viewer, even if those endings ruin the credibility of what came before. (There will be major spoilers for The Prestige after the jump. In fact, I pretty much give away the whole story.) [Read more…]

There are no rogue elephants

Now that opinion is increasingly turning against the NSA’s spying activities, the supposed supervisors and watchdogs of these programs in the White House and Congress are scurrying to deflect blame from themselves and we are seeing the familiar ‘rogue elephant’ theory emerging, suggesting that the NSA was doing things on its own initiative and that the policy makers at the top were unaware. [Read more…]

Book review: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright

Reader Norm kindly sent me a copy of the above book and said that he had enjoyed it and I must say that it was a real page-turner. I had intended to write a full review but I came across a good one by Diane Johnson in the New York Review of Books, along with a review of a memoir by Jenna Miscavige Hill (the niece of the current Scientology leader David Miscavige) who defected from the church, that captured much of what I wanted to say so I will just refer you to that review and add some thoughts of my own. [Read more…]

Trouble for Chris Christie

New Jersey governor Chris Christie clearly has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2016. It is also clear that he is pushing the ‘maverick’ shtick that worked for John McCain, at least as far as getting the Republican nomination was concerned, and to aim for the support of the party establishment, territory that is open since all the other putative candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Crux, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry) seem to be angling for the Tea Party wing’s support. He clearly wants to be portrayed as the straight-talking, no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, not-totally-nuts kind of guy. [Read more…]

Support for Snowden grows

Leading Germans, including some from chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party, are calling for Germany to give Edward Snowden asylum, with the former general secretary saying “Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him.” This suggests that the tide is definitely shifting in his favor, despite a massive US effort to portray Snowden as a traitor and a criminal. [Read more…]

Cleveland in the news, and not in a good way

The Cleveland area has been the scene of an appalling sequence of crimes recently. We had one case of a serial killer Anthony Sowell who preyed on poor women, raping and killing them and burying them on the premises. Then we had the case of Ariel Castro who kidnapped and held captive three women for about a decade, fathering a child with one. Now we have another person accused of being a serial killer too. [Read more…]