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Movie Review: Good Will Hunting (1997)

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“Just playing”… with a little help from his friends

Will: Beethoven, okay. He looked at a piano, and it just made sense to him. He could just play.
Skylar: So what are you saying? You play the piano?
Will: No, not a lick. I mean, I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn’t paint you a picture, I probably can’t hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can’t play the piano.
Skylar: But you can do my o-chem paper in under an hour.
Will: Right. Well, I mean when it came to stuff like that… I could always just play.

For a subtitle, I was going to use something like political-romantic, psych thriller buddy movie, but the quote above suggests the more descriptive “I could just play.” Both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at that time in their careers (1997) have been in front of a camera a few times… and they’re smarter than the average bears. Who knows how the creative process works? Just as Sylvester Stallone hit a grand-slam home run his first time at the plate, writing and acting Rocky, Damon and Affleck do the same with Good Will Hunting… and they hit their monster homer at Fenway Park in Boston, no less, where they actually grew up as friends. Continue reading →

Guest Column: Global Warming Wrapup

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Key questions for the liberty-minded concerned about man-made envirodamage
by Paul Craig Roberts [Original column here]

The mental convolutions in which some will engage in order to ignore the evidence that the polar ice caps are melting—and if not from warming from what?—is as astounding as the convolutions and denial of basic facts that characterize those who believe the government’s official 9/11 fairy tale.

If all the science is rigged, as a few of you say, by the Bilderbergs, Rockefeller, or the Rothschilds, then where does your science, your information come from? If there is no reliable scientific information about climate change, what is the basis for your argument? Why are only carbon industry spokespersons honest? How come the Rothschilds didn’t rig them also?

Yes, the carbon tax is another way of following the money, but it obviously leads in the opposite direction of where a few want to take it. The carbon tax is not a solution offered by climate scientists. It is the industry solution backed by the industry’s free market libertarian allies and Wall St, which sees it as another profitable trading vehicle. The industry sees it as a replacement for regulation and emphasis on alternative green energy sources.

The readers who assured me that the polar ice always melts in summer and refreezes in winter did not know that more melts than refreezes and that the polar ice cap is shrinking dramatically. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: Speaking of “A Christmas Story”…

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2: Previous column, “To  Change a Tire,” unleashes a golden memory or three
Brian R. Wright

[Link to Episode 1]

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. The series starts here. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

In that column, I was referring to a rite of passage from boyhood into teenhood, which was the simple act of learning to successfully change out a flat tire on the family car. And I pointed to the scene in A Christmas Story, where Ralphie Parker goes to help his dad to do just that… having a slight misadventure in the process. 🙂 The movie and that funny little sequence conjure up a remembrance of my own nuclear family life in middle America, and one of my very first images…

… where my little brother Forrest, the would- be passenger in the photo right, tries to turn his tricycle into an airplane! It was 1951, or thereabouts. The Wrights had just rented a small flat in Kansas City, as we waited for our home to be built ‘out in the country’ of suburban Overland Park. Dad had been promoted to a sales job for paper products of the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment (KVP) company, for whom he had worked since coming back from the service (WW2) then graduating from Western Michigan University (go Broncos!).

It occurs to me now that we were well off enough to be able to afford to give both Forrest and me fairly new and modestly appointed tricycles at a young age. [My parents, as many of the aspiring middle class of those days, were Sears & Roebuck mail order fans. Sears typically had three models of everything, from wagons to lawn mowers: 3) the cheap, economy version, 2) the reasonably priced, higher quality, middle of the road option, and 1) the highest priced, bordering on bragging rights, top of the line Sears product. Mom and Dad always bought the #2 model.] On this fateful night I was about 3 1/2 and Bro had just turned 2. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Talladega Nights (2006)

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Modest effort at NASCAR satire/comedy (5/10)
Original Coffee Coaster review on March 16, 2007

Continuing in review of some of the movies that amazingly did not show up at the Academy—I mean who actually watches movies like The Queen, Letters from Iwo Jima, or The Departed, anyway?—I thought the story of Ricky Bobby warranted an evaluation.

Candidly, I like the way the title sounds!

Was the effort modest… or feeble? Who knows?  But I have to say up front Ferrell movies (e.g. Old School and Anchorman) have the same look and feel of one another.  (The first few Adam Sandler movies are like that, too: basically cookie-cutter juvenile gross-out escapades that contain possibly two genuinely comic scenes among them.)

And gross it does! I’m not sure what Ferrell’s box office is, compared to, say, George Clooney’s movies, but I’ll bet it’s on the order of viewership of professional wrestling compared to girls’ basketball.

Popularity is no reason to hold anything against someone, Ferrell included.  In this movie he teams up with Adam McKay of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman, fame to tell the story of a boy who has racing in his blood and lives to fulfill his father’s motto: “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

The first scene conveys the delivery of young Ricky Bobby.  While his mother is in labor in the back seat, his dad, Reese (Gary Cole), pops the clutch in his Chevelle Super Sport to expel… well I don’t want to spoil it for you.  Qua plot, that’s more or less a high point. Continue reading →

Guest Column: FBI’s Conspiracy Theory Has No Clothes

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Lack of evidence of Putin/Trump collusion doesn’t stop Presstitute Media
By Paul Craig Roberts

Unable to provide an ounce of evidence that a Trump/Putin conspiracy stole the presidential election from Hillary Clinton, the corrupt US “intelligence” agencies are shifting their focus to social media and to Internet sites such as Alex Jones and Breitbart. Little doubt the FBI investigation will trickle down to Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept, Zero Hedge, the Ron Paul Institute, Nomi Prins, Naked Capitalism, Lew Rockwell, Global Research, antiwar.com, and to others on the PropOrNot, Harvard Library, and Le Monde lists, such as top Reagan administration officials David Stockman and myself. It is extraordinary that the FBI is so desperate to protect the budget of the military/security complex that it brings such embarrassment to itself. Who in the future will believe any FBI report or anything a FBI official says?

Those behind this “investigation” understand that it is so ridiculous that they must give it gravity and credibility. They selected two reporters, Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, in the McClatchy News Washington Bureau, who fit Udo Ulfkotte’s definition of “bought journalists.” Hiding behind anonymous sources—“two people familiar with the inquiry” and “sources who spoke on condition of anonymity”—the presstitutes fell in with the attack on independent media, reporting that one former US intelligence official said: “This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence.” http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article139695453.html

Wow! A totally ridiculous “investigation” is one of the most important in history. The implication is that the Russians are operating through scores or hundreds of independent media sites to control how Americans vote.

There was once a time in America when people were skeptical of anonymous sources. It was widely understood that anyone could tell a reporter anything and that a reporter could claim an anonymous source whether or not the source existed. Perhaps it was the Watergate “investigation” by the Washington Post that gave anonymity credibility. The Post’s reports made it sound like any sources ratting on Nixon’s perfidy was at risk of their lives, and the subtle emphasis on risk gave anonymity credibility. Continue reading →

Brian’s Column: To Change a Tire

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1: Ode to a onetime necessity and dimming rite of passage
Brian R. Wright

Note: These columns are a series, I will make into a volume of my memoirs. You may follow the links at top and bottom of page to go to preceding or succeeding episodes. {If the [Link to Episode <next>] at the  bottom of the column does not show an active hyperlink, then the <next> column has yet to be written.}

Let’s see if I can tweak the famous Jack London’s opening paragraph from his short story, “To Build a Fire,” to describe my experience this morning:

My fast is broken at Kerby’s Coney, ordinary fare, exceedingly ordinary, and I turn north on the Haggerty Trail, climbing the bank approaching Nine Mile, a rise where in the right lane- less-traveled sits obscured an Oakland-County spring pothole the size of a moon crater. Wrong pair of glasses, yet were it not for a brief self-excused glance at the watch, I’d have seen the damned thing and missed it by an inch to the left. Right tire hits the far edge, far up, at 40 mph, like a balloon on the blade of a dull butter knife. No worries, I have a jack, a spare, and instructions.

Okay, enough inspiration from Mr. Jack. Survival is not at stake, just a routine flat. The thing is, here in AD 2017 already, that I don’t even think to call road service. I’m a man, for chrissakes, tho of 67 well-tread years, and in this family of one we take care of our own problems, by golly! Just a routine change of a tire it is. Except for the extra effort, heavy breathing, and kneeling on pavement—I drive on the flat for half a mile into a CVS drugstore parking lot to do the work—in half an hour I’ve gone through the ‘to change a tire’ motions like a pro. [Yes, to answer some readers, I AM successful in this enterprise. “I may be dumb but I’m slow.”]

Note: the clipart image above is entitled “young good-looking man changes a tire,” I kid you not. And undoubtedly that’s the automated image I had of myself before getting down to it. Clearly, for self-preservation purposes, I need to to realize that those days are gone, and I need at least to pace myself.

Continue reading →

Movie Review: American Sniper (2014)

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Competent though wretched fare pandering to American Exceptionalism (3/10)
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

As with most of Clint Eastwood’s cinematic efforts, American Sniper is good moviemaking; he gives you solid plot and engaging action. Also, in this case, Bradley Cooper turns in an excellent, believable performance as the Navy S.E.A.L. super sniper Chris Kyle.

Along with many in the peace and anti-imperialist community, I balked at watching this film. Even though the work is first rate and you are drawn into caring for the principal characters—gotta keep your war buddies from being killed and gotta handle the psychological problems of adjusting to nonwar life— the overwhelming question sweeps over you like a tsunami: “What in the hell are we doing here?!” Why are groups of brawny American men with guns and grenades going door to door in neighborhoods that US jets and artillery have bombed into pieces… and rousting scrawny remnants of once-thriving civilians, that OUR freedom forces have brutalized beyond recognition, clinging to life by a thread?

The magnitude of American wrongdoing in Iraq (and now all the other countries as part of the Greater Israel Project) is so depressing as to be an indictment of any enterprise associated with it, including, nay especially, Hollywood apologia. The fact that that the predominant USA! USA! booboosie masses are inflated by such barbarism directed against ‘the helpless other’ only serves to make American Sniper even more disgusting to anyone with the moral sensitivity or intelligence above a toilet seat. Continue reading →