I just found this Watch Mojo video, Top 10 Worst Best Picture Oscar-Winning Movies. I thought it would be fun, but it only annoyed me. I probably should have guessed. Because there is one thing that I thought all people who really like movies as an art form agree on: the Academy Awards are a joke. So the video implicitly gives them status as though we should be surprised that they don’t stand up to the smallest amount of scrutiny.

My favorite example of this is that All That Jazz did not get the Best Picture award. What else was nominated? Well, there were three really good films: Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away, and Norma Rae. But the winner? Kramer vs Kramer. You know, the one film nominated that could have been a Movie of the Week or perhaps better, Afternoon Special. What’s particularly wonderful (awful) about the film is how the court finds in the mother’s favor. But then they tack on a happy ending where the mother just gives the kid back. It’s the worst kind of melodrama and that’s what the Academy likes!

But our friends at Watch Mojo didn’t even mention the 1980 Academy Awards. But they did get some that are notable. For example, they did mention 1942. This was the year that How Green Was My Valley won. Actually, it is not a bad film at all. Certainly Citizen Kane should have won. But the video also complains that The Maltese Falcon didn’t win. I love the film, but its candy—not important in any way. I certainly think that two other nominees, Suspicion and The Little Foxes, were more deserving of the award. But the makers of the video seem more concerned about which film is the most entertaining or at least has the best reputation.

That’s especially true for Around the World in Eighty Days. Now I’ll admit that it isn’t a great film. And one of the films up against it was Giant, which is a great film. But the video also complains because The King and I and The Ten Commandments did not win. Really?! What other than the fact that the people at Watch Mojo have heard about the films makes them better than Around the World in Eighty Days? What’s more, they seem to think that Giant is great because James Dean was in it. What idiots!

It says that ET should have beat Gandhi. That may be true. Gandhi is rather an uninspired film. But the other film they mention is Tootsie. Good God! Both the other films nominated are better than it: Missing and The Verdict.

That last example was part of a pattern. The video is quite biased toward certain filmmakers. One is Martin Scorsese. Now he is a great director, but it is notable that they didn’t mention any of his best films. And then there was Steven Spielberg. The video even said that Shakespeare in Love should have lost to Saving Private Ryan. It’s just over the top. Just because a war film is realistic does mean it was good. Give it the Academy Award for best makeup effects.

The implication throughout the video is that the Best Picture Oscar should be for the most popular film. I don’t see the point of that. We already have such an award: it’s called the “box office” and it is a cash award. What’s more, popular by what standards? A lot of really fun films were never popular because the studio killed them for one reason or another. And many films aren’t even noticed by the Academy. Orson Welles won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Othello the year the Academy didn’t even notice it.

I understand that such videos are always going to be, in some sense, silly. But they ought to try not to be boring. Anyone could have made this list—And done it better!—going through each year and seeing what films are now held in high regard. But I will admit, The English Patient is a dreadfully slow film.

Last night, I watched In Bruges from writer-director Martin McDonagh, probably best known for the recent Seven Psychopaths. It’s interesting that his films are so visually interesting when he is, at heart, a playwright. But the thing about filmmaking is that it is a group effort. I know if someone were foolish enough to have me direct a film, I would hire a great cinematographer and carmeraman and listen to them very carefully. And for all I know, MCDonagh does the same thing.

The one thing that really does dominate the film is that it is shot in Bruges, which apparently is one of the most beautiful towns in the world. And great care is taken to make every shot beautiful. This is distinctly different from Seven Psychopaths, which was quite obviously meant to be ugly. All things equal, I’d rather watch a beautiful film. And In Bruges shows that pretty images don’t hurt a black comedy. In fact, I think they heightened the effect.

The plot of the film is simple: after accidentally killing a young boy during an assassination, a rookie hitman is sent to Bruges by a crime boss, where he will be murdered. The film lives in its own moral universe that has nothing to do with our world. But if that isn’t a problem, it’s a charming story. The crime boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), sends the rookie hitman, Ray (Colin Farrell), to Burges to give him a little joy before he has him killed. The hitman hates Burges, however. The other more experienced hitman, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), just loves Bruges. And along the way, they meet up with thieves, drug dealers, prostitutes, and an angry American dwarf who is very racist when he’s on cocaine.

It’s a bit of a problem that Ray dances on the edge of being completely unlikable. I found myself wishing through most of the film that Ken would just kill him so we could get back to our nice holiday with the entirely likable older hitman. But it never got too bad because Ray always seemed to shift back onto the likable side of that line. Even Harry with his queer notions of morality was often hard to dislike. In fact, there is a funny scene at the hotel where Ray and Harry negotiate how they will continue their gun fight outside so that they don’t accidentally harm the pregnant owner.

The problems with the film are confined to the ending. Even by its own terms, it gets far fetched. One character jumps off Belfry of Bruges to save another character before dying. It’s got to be ten stories high! There is no way anyone is going to survive for even a second after that fall—especially after losing most of his blood from a gunshot wound. But that is forgivable. In fact, it almost seems reasonable in the film. But the final couple of minutes change the filming style to make it all seem like a dream. This is done for thematically defensible reasons. But I don’t really think it works. What’s more, it is a hasty ending to a film that was deliberately (and enjoyably) paced.

Despite blowing the ending, I thought the film worked really well. I especially liked spending the time with Ken. I felt very connected with him: an older man who has lived a mixed life and who now just wants to enjoy the little things that are left. Part of that is Gleeson’s performance. And another part is the great chemistry between Ken and Ray. Ray’s constant juvenile complaints and Ken’s responses are what give the film much of its charm. And ultimately, it is a very positive film. Or at least as positive as a film can be that involves three murders, a drug dealer, and a racist dwarf.

Update (18 March 2014 5:27 pm)

I had meant to note that I think the Dwarf’s racist rant was meant to be a parody of Quentin Tarantino. That made it all the funnier to me.

Digby highlighted a National Journal article this morning, Did Social Security Cost Democrats a Seat In Florida? It highlights how the Florida 13th district has one of the highest percentages of people over 65 years old. So the Democrat, Sink, tried to use the Republican Jolly’s support for privatizing Social Security against him. But as the article put it, “Jolly had an easy comeback: he denied wanting to privatize Social Security, and fired back by noting that Sink voiced some support for the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction plan, which included cuts to Social Security.” Ah yes, the Grand Bargain!

What Digby focused on is that support for the Grand Bargain is bad politics. Social Security and Medicare should be a winning issue for Democrats. Remember during the vice-presidential debate in 2012? Joe Biden delivered what I think of as the best line of the whole campaign, “Folks: use your common sense! Who do you trust on this?!” But that doesn’t work when the Democrats run around everywhere pretending to be Very Serious People wanting to cut benefits with absurd mechanisms like chained-CPI. As Digby noted, there is no political advantage to such a deal “unless you count Villagers extolling them for being ‘grown-ups’ which should get them at least a hundred votes in Virginia.”

Last year, I wrote, The Terrible Bargain. It is mostly about how the Grand Bargain is a bad idea just based upon the economics. As usual, what all the Very Serious People just know to be true isn’t. It all comes down to the idea that if something is painful for you, it must be good. Of course, note how cruel these people are: the pain suffered is never by the people pushing these policies. And the notion is ridiculous. Hacking off your hand with a meat cleaver is painful and does no good unless you are in Evil Dead II.

But more to the point, the politics are even worse than the economics. The idea of the Grand Bargain is to raise taxes in exchange for lowering entitlement spending. So it is a lose-lose. No one likes raising taxes and no one likes cutting benefits. And it is especially stupid given that the Republicans will never swap tax increases for entitlement cuts. Now I’m not at all convinced that Sink lost the election because she didn’t have the Social Security issue with which to beat up Jolly. But it certainly would have helped.

As Dibgy noted, some Democrats are waking up to the issue. Not only can Democrats be the party for protecting entitlements, they can be the party for expanding them. After all, the Republican argument is that they are protecting the programs by cutting them. And they are always absolutely clear that they won’t cut benefits for people currently on the programs. But the fact is that our benefits are about the stingiest in the developed world. They ought to be expanded. And if Democrats took up this cause, the voters would have a clear choice.

I really like Robert Reich as a public intellectual. In fact, right now, I have a tab open with an article by him that I want to write about. And he’s a great speaker. So I was very keen to see his documentary Inequality for All. But I was disappointed today when I finally got to see it.

The spine of the film is very good. It comes back again and again to Reich speaking to his class at Berkeley on inequality. There are also various interview segments with Reich outside the classroom. But even in these, the focus is scattered. There is a strong case made that the decline in unionization has been the cause of rising inequality since the 1970s. But he goes off on tangents like the effect of education on inequality that greatly distract. I understand what he’s getting at: the society as a whole needs to invest in education. But in the context of inequality, it feeds a tired myth that inequality is just a story of education. It is like having a segment about bicycle accidents in a film about the causes of spontaneous abortions: it gives the viewer the wrong idea.

But the film really goes off track when it gets away from Reich. There are two extended segments with families. One of them dealing with a father having been laid off and another involving a conservative Mormon family involved with trying to get a union started at work. Each are interesting in their way, but they go nowhere. The viewer is left wondering what the point was. That times are bad? That conservatives support unions too? I really don’t know.

Some of the expert interviews were interesting, and I was pleased to see the work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. And Nick Hanauer is always entertaining doing his “rich people only wear one pair of pants at a time” thing. But all of that was more than offset by Robert Reich palling around with Alan Simpson. I don’t mind that Simpson exists or that he is in the movie. But to refer to him as a liberal, is over the top. What Simpson is is an old fashioned (1990s) Republican. Just because the current Republican Party is a hair’s breadth away from fascism, doesn’t mean we should start referring to people like Simpson as anything other than a conservative.

A big part of the film is its use of graphics, which are all excellent. The following screenshot highlights a point that doesn’t get made enough. It shows that things are much worse than stagnant wages would indicate, because the cost of living has been going up relentlessly.

There is also a great animation that shows wages and productivity rising together until around 1970 when the wages stagnate while the productivity gains continue up and up. So the film has a lot of interesting and important information. And in the end, I enjoyed it. It’s hard not to given just how charming Reich is. But I did expect more.

On this day in 1950, the musician Michael Been was born. He is best known as the lead singer and bass player of the bad The Call. I always thought that Been was a big time Christian, but there’s not a lot of mention of it online. It is certainly the case that he wrote songs with a whole lot of Christian imagery and theology. In fact, this tended to ruin most of The Call’s albums for me. But one got the mix perfect: Reconciled.

The song “Blood Red (America)” particularly appealed to me. The refrain is: “He says, ‘We’ll walk in the front door and proudly raise our heads.’ I say, ‘Man you must be joking, our hands are covered in blood red.” I thought that it was a comment about the very common belief that all a Christian has to do is to believe in Jesus and he will enter the kingdom of heaven. So I thought Been was saying that if we neglected the injustice in the world and thought we would go to heaven, we are crazy. Sadly, I don’t think he’s saying that at all.

In the song, “he” is Jesus Christ. The singer is saying, “How can we get into heaven with all this suffering that we are responsible for?” And Jesus says, “It’s easy!” And by the end of the song, he has accepted this easy salvation. So Michael Been is pushing the same “salvation on the cheap” claptrap that is so common among Born Again Christians the world over.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This is very much in keeping with another song from that album, “I Still Believe.” But that one isn’t about how all one need do is accept God’s love and everything will be fixed. It takes it as a given that belief is not easy. All of life is a struggle, the singer says, and despite that he still believes that God loves him. That’s a much more compelling message that even an atheist like me can appreciate. So Here’s the song performed live:

I saw The Call once live. It was at a small club. They were very good. But Been spent the entire concert bitching at the sound engineer in the balcony about problems with the monitors. I think he was used to playing in better and bigger venues. But he still came off as a dick.

Happy birthday Michael Been!

It’s St Patrick’s Day! Time to get sloshed on some distinctly non-Irish beer. Of course, if we are to believe Ballykissangel, the Irish don’t drink much Irish beer. One thing’s for certain: Americans don’t much care for Guinness, although they do up their consumption on St Patrick’s day.

I saw a statistic about St Patrick’s Day that was supposed to scare me: 80% of St Patty’s Day drunk driving deaths involve drivers who are over twice the legal limit. I have known lots of people who have be caught drunk driving and not one of them has killed anyone. Yet they almost all had over twice the legal limit. Remember: the legal limit is 0.08%. It used to be 0.12%. The fact most fatalities involve people over 0.16% is hardly surprising.

Having said that, I am very much against people driving at all while intoxicated. As one who walks a lot, I am already concerned about the sober drivers. I don’t need drunk drivers to worry about. Just the same, if I were to walk down the street to the bar, get drunk, and walk back home, I would be breaking the law. The truth is that we live in an authoritarian state were just about anything you do is against the law. And so the laws are never enforced—until you piss off someone. I’m good at pissing off people—especially people in power.

But there are a lot more reasons to avoid the holiday than just that a whole bunch of people get drunk and kill people. Perhaps a bigger problem is that America is more Irish than Ireland. Until the 1970s, St Patrick’s Day was a minor religious holiday in Ireland. It was America that turned it into the green stained whiskey soaked monstrosity that we’ve all know. Personally, I’m fond of Ireland, but not especially so. I’m no more excited about celebrating the Irish than I am celebrating the Swedish. And I am a fair chunk Irish and not at all Swedish.

Four years ago, Matthew Schmitz wrote, My Problem with St. Patrick’s Day. In it, he argues that the reason that we celebrate the Irish and not, say, the Germans, is that the Irish are the last white group that can plausibly claim the mantle of oppression:

So add a subtext of racism to your enjoyment of the day! But as Schmitz notes, there are real reasons to love the Irish. And here’s one, even though it was first written in French:

Nothing to be done but to wish you a happy St Patrick’s Day. Try not to kill anyone.

Afterword

Can we at least agree to stop saying that corned beef and cabbage is a traditional Irish dish?! Eat some shepherd’s pie for God’s sake!

Gretchen Morgenson calls the lie to all the nonsense we’ve heard from the Obama administration this last five years about how hard they were working on financial crime that led to the global economic crisis of 2008, A Loan Fraud War That’s Short on Combat. “If there had been cases to make,” people from the administration would say, “We would have made them!” Well, it turns out—Contain your shock!—this is not true. Last week, the inspector general of the Justice Department issued a report, Audit of the Department of Justice’s Efforts to Address Mortgage Fraud (pdf). Morgenson sums up the report’s conclusion, “Complex financial crimes were the lowest priority for the criminal investigative division.”

This is not a surprise. I’m very cynical when it comes to this kind of stuff. It is very simple: the power elite do not go after the power elite. The law is meant to keep the little guy in line. The logic is that simple. But that doesn’t mean that we should accept things the way they are. But things will continue to be this way as long as we continue to elect people like Barack Obama whose call for “hope and change” was really about hoping that nothing changes. And no one should have been surprised. He never claimed to be anything but an establishment kind of guy. He was the candidate of the Wall Street bankers and so no one should have been surprised that he’s the president of the Wall Street bankers.

Dean Baker followed up Morgenson’s reporting with an analysis of his own, Locking Up the Banksters: It’s Not Hard. In it, he goes through the basics of building a case against systemic fraud: from the bottom up. That’s because at every level except the top, there was someone telling a subordinate to misbehave. And if the government were handing out prison terms, there would have been a whole lot of people who were not willing to fall on their swords for the sake of their bosses.

I have a personal example that is related, although I’m unsure where exactly it fits in the pantheon of financial crime. My wife and I owned a condo and owed about $80,000 on it. We were interested in refinancing and so we worked with someone who I think was representing Ameriquest, but I could be wrong. They printed out the loan offer and sent it to us. I went over it and noticed a problem. The fees were so high on the loan that despite the lower interest rate, we would end up paying more in interest over the term of the loan. I told this to the loan officer and I got almost no push back from her. She was well aware that she was offering me a terrible loan. She acted the way any con artist would when discovered: she made a hasty exit.

I tell this story to point out that the bankers knew exactly what they were doing. Of course, when it comes to the packaging of subprime mortgages, the con is baked right in. It was like a game of hot potato: get the bad loan and pass it off on someone else as fast as possible. Of course, the report itself didn’t even deal with securities fraud. So as bad as it shows the system to be, it is far worse.

Morgenson finishes her article by quoting former Delaware Senator Edward Kaufman, “The report fits a pattern that is scary for a democracy, that there really are two levels of justice in this country, one for the people with power and money and one for everyone else. And that eats at the heart of what I think makes this country great.” This is the basis of all our country’s problems. The powerful cannot be punished. The rich cannot lose money. The United States is well on its way to complete destruction. Sadly, our enormous military will prop it up for a while longer, during which we will do untold damage to our own people and people throughout the world.