Saturday, June 01, 2002

Technology Marchs On

Watching a tape of "Soylent Green" and some hot chick is playing some Asteroid (1970's) type video game fifty years in the future. Considering how long it takes a person to mature and die, how much Soylent Green can one extract?

More Movie Reviews

"The Sum of All Fears" opens and it's a bomb. The most obvious distortion is changing improbable Arab terrorist for common place neo-Nazis. It gets dissected in the Weekly Standard
In "The Sum of All Fears" Affleck plays Jack Ryan, a Marine turned Ph.D. It really, really doesn't work. In his most pensive moments, while he's unraveling the mysteries that will prevent nuclear holocaust, he looks as though he's about to say, "Hey Prez, is it Schlitz'o'clock yet?" And while he's utterly implausible as a Ph.D., he's equally implausible as a former Marine. Or a movie star, for that matter. He's too dim to play smart, too pretty to play tough, and too self-satisfied to play charming. Stepping into a role previously inhabited by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, he lacks both Baldwin's accessibility and Ford's gristle. Thanks, in part, to Affleck's performance, "The Sum of All Fears" is a disaster of a movie.

But then again, Clancy's characters are pretty cardboard anyways, compared to old gung ho Hollywood. Then Jon Last chomps into Hollywood's tough guy liberalism vis a vis 9-11:
This season "The West Wing" opened with an episode about terrorism where the Secret Service suspected that a member of the White House staff might be a terrorist. The Middle Eastern fellow was detained by the Secret Service and questioned at length by the president's chief-of-staff. Naturally, since the show is written and produced by Aaron Sorkin, the episode centered around questions of freedom and racial profiling. The Arab staffer is indignant that he is singled out. Sorkin sets up a conservative straw man in the chief-of-staff who voices concerns about national security, but his arguments are methodically taken apart by the more enlightened members of the cast. And then, at the end of the episode, we find out that the staffer is innocent, that he was just doing his job. The chief-of-staff looks at him sadly (I forget whether or not he apologizes). Lesson learned.

What I don't get, with all the Jews in Hollywood, why the Arabs and Islam don't get trashed enough? Where's the Zionists when you need them the most?