Netflix Queue: My Favorite Streaming Movies of 2010

Turns out we watched a ton of Netflix Instant during 2010. What's great about the service is that it's easy to explore esoteric or classic movies at the touch of a mousepad. Here were my favorite streaming movies of 2010 -- the list doesn't include the fact that I watched the entire series run of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," and or other TV series, and I'm not including movies I'd already seen but re-watched during the year. This is just the most notable stuff I saw for the first time this year, thanks to streaming video:

• AFTER THE THIN MAN: The first movie we watched in 2010. I don't even remember what it was about. But Nick and Nora are always delightful and almost always drunk. A fine start to the year.

• DEAD SNOW: Watched this because it had the most awesome trailer ever. The movie is more of the same.

• TYSON: James Toback's largely sympathetic documentary about his friend, Mike Tyson. I came away with a bewildering mix of contempt and pity for the man.

• LET THE RIGHT ONE IN: One of the better vampire movies of recent years--possibly because of its Swedish provenance--remade in America this year as "Let Me In." This is a movie I still feel myself pondering from time to time.

• YOJIMBO: In which I discovered that Clint Eastwood stole his shtick from Toshiro Mifune.

• NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU: Is it great? No. But this anthology of short films set in NYC made me nostalgic for a city I never lived in. And an Eli Wallach sighting is always welcome.

• METROPOLIS: No, not the famous Fritz Lang film. The animé ripoff, which contained one of the most extraordinary climaxes to a movie I've seen this year. (Spoiler.)

• RED CLIFF: John Woo goes back to China to make a historical epic. Only the truncated version was available on Netflix Instant, but it still kicked ass.

• MOON: Nice, quiet Sam Rockwell movie that hearkens back to "2001."

• VON RYAN'S EXPRESS: Frank Sinatra escapes from the Nazis, buddy boy, and does it with panache.

• THE QUICK AND THE DEAD: Sam Raimi + Sharon Stone at her peak + Great Cast + Western = Surprisingly entertaining flick.

• THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW: No, I'd never seen it before. Let's do the Time Warp again.

• CASINO: It's as though Martin Scorcese was trying to make an homage to Martin Scorcese. A lesser work, but still fun and macho.

• IP MAN: The last movie of the year, a biopic about the real-life mentor to Bruce Lee, set in the 1930s as Ip Man kicks Japanese butt during the occupation of China. Great movie? Probably not. Lots of fun fight sequences, though.

 

Three habits I'd like to adopt in 2011

Here are three habits I'd like to adopt in 2011. I don't call them "resolutions," because that word implies the goal to me instead of the means. Here, I'm focusing on means. And instead of making grand pronouncements about weight or career that aren't really in my control, I'd like to focus on creating routines that help me be a better me.

Also: I won't cheat. I'm not going to try to make a resolution to read more or write more because, well, I do quite a bit of both already.

Without further adieu: My three goals:

• Walk two miles a day.

• Limit myself to meat at one meal per day.

• Commit 30 minutes a day to housecleaning.

Obviously, I won't be perfect on this. But they seem doable, and good habits to adopt on my way to a healthier life.

Endless war is ripping America apart from the inside

Devastating story in today's New York Times, about how military deployments affect the families left behind. Aside from the sad, sad anecdotes, we can see that a decade of war could end up producing real social problems:

Social scientists are just beginning to document the rippling effects of multiple combat deployments on families — effects that those families themselves have intimately understood for years. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January found that wives of deployed soldiers sought mental health services more often than other Army wives.

They were also more likely to report mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and sleep disorder, the longer the deployments lasted.

And a paper published in the journal Pediatrics in late 2009 found that children in military families were more likely to report anxiety than children in civilian families. The longer a parent had been deployed in the previous three years, the researchers found, the more likely the children were to have had difficulties in school and at home.

Even though the military is composed of a relatively narrow swath of American society, the shear length and breadth of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq means that more than a million families have had to deal with long-term deployments abroad. Think about those problems described above, then mulitiply them by a million and then send them cascading down through the coming decades. We're creating a damaged generation.

This might be worth it -- if America were truly in some sort of civilizational peril. But it's not. 

It never was, in the case of Iraq. A better case can be made for Afghanistan -- the attacks of 9/11, frankly, disabused me of my complete pacifism though I remain very, very dovish. But a decade later we're still tied down in that country when all the available evidence tells us we can't create a satisfactory outcome there and we're probably not making ourselves safer by being there.

The damage we're doing ourself goes beyond wasted blood and treasure, goes beyond the America-in-decline inevitabilities that come from fighting wars on Chinese credit. We're treating the souls of a million families like they're cheap, trifling things. And as with the rest of it, we will pay the price for this. I don't see how the cost is justified.

Why I'm glad I no longer own a car

According to travel organization AAA, the average price of regular gasoline in the U.S. is $3.071, up from $2.854 one month ago and $2.623 one year ago. The data from the D.C. region closely mirror the national data, with prices here averaging $3.079. Both numbers are a long way from the record average price of $4.114, which was recorded in October 2008 during the height of the financial crisis. But still, the surge in recent weeks to average prices above $3 marks the first time prices have crossed that threshold since 2008.

And some experts are predicting those numbers will continue to tick upward. John Hofmeister, chief executive of the nonprofit organization Citizens for Affordable Energy and a former Shell executive, said in a recent interview with Platts Energy Week that he expects gas prices to hit $5 a gallon by 2012.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

Now, there's an economic ripple effect to super-high gas prices that I'll no doubt feel, even though I don't own a car. We still take the bus and, occasionally, a taxi. But living in Center City Philadelphia and walking lots of places works pretty well too, and insulates us from the shock and pain that a lot of people will be feeling this year.

Can privatization save us from the TSA? (Probably not.)

Some of the nation's biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security screening by weighing whether they should hire private firms such as Covenant to replace the Transportation Security Administration. Sixteen airports, including San Francisco and Kansas City International Airport, have made the switch since 2002. One Orlando airport has approved the change but needs to select a contractor, and several others are seriously considering it.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which governs Dulles International and Reagan National airports, is studying the option, spokeswoman Tara Hamilton said.

For airports, the change isn't about money. At issue, airport managers and security experts say, is the unwieldy size and bureaucracy of the federal aviation security system. Private firms may be able to do the job more efficiently and with a personal touch, they argue.

via washingtonpost.com

Sounds good, but as the story later notes: "procedures in airport security lines do not change" if a private corporation takes over the screening process. There's still the see-through-your-clothes-scanning and junk-touching that the federal government peforms. So I'm not sure -- as a flier -- what the benefit would be. The government outsourcing its intrusions onto my person to a private company actually makes me feel worse about about those intrusions, not better.

Charles Ramsey on Philly's police corruption

A nice year-end police interview with Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey in today's Daily News. He says all the right things about battling corruption in the department, and I've no reason to disbelieve him. But the glimpses I've had of Philly police culture -- not just that there's corruption, but that it's routinely abusive of and alienated from the community in ways that don't always technically violate the law -- tell me he's battling something entrenched. And it's worth noting that the police union re-elected John McNesby as its president in 2010 -- a man whose main public accomplishment is to defend cops against charges of abuse, regardless of what the evidence says, and with few public words about the need for integrity on the force. (He's also very public, to be fair, when it comes to offering rewards to entice the public to help police solve crimes.) I suspect that he's closer to the heart of the Philly PD, and that doesn't give me much optimism about a renaissance in the ranks.

The ESPN anchor and journalism: Smart journalists know to paraphrase their stolen material

Will Selva, an ESPNews anchor, has been sidelined after apparently plagiarizing several sentences of an Orange County Register newspaper column on Tuesday night.

Mr. Selva said in a statement that he had made a “horrible mistake” by copy-and-pasting the text of the story and forgetting to then write a script in his own words.

Television networks often rely on newspapers for reporting, but using the same words without attribution is a violation of journalistic standards. The words were originally written by Kevin Ding, who covers the Los Angeles Lakers for the Register.

via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

I don't ever expect this to change, but: I'm still not sure why it's ok to steal reporting but not writing. Often, radios and TV networks at least attribute the report they're stealing -- but not always. And that's a bit of a breach of decorum, but nobody ever really gets fired for it. Steal a phrase or a few sentences, though, and your career is over. Smart journalists know that they can stay employed if they paraphrase somebody else's work.

Why does Sarah Palin want our soldiers to be fat, slow and vulnerable?

The soda machines in mess halls have been removed and replaced with milk and juice. Drill sergeants are encouraging new soldiers to choose a serving of fruits instead of coffee and a candy bar for energy. White bread and pasta is being replaced with whole grains, sunflower seeds, yogurt, and salsa.

"This is not (just) an Army problem," said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. "This is a civilian problem that we're receiving and fixing."

via planetgreen.discovery.com

I'm joking with my headline, but Palin's much-publicized critique of Michele Obama's anti-obesity initiative, um, objectively puts her on the side of fat-assery*. And fat-assery isn't good for the nation! It's not good for our soldiers, nor our health, nor our medical bills! If Mrs. Obama was spearheading a BMI requirement that would require Americans to hit their optimum bodyweight or else face fines or some other santion, I'd understand Palin's objections. Instead, it looks like she's being churlish in the face of a real problem.

* Which, granted, puts her on the side of ... me.

(Hat-tip: PhillyGrrl)

Gridlock or bipartisanship in 2011?

Those seem to be the choices facing our representatives in Washington during this coming year of divided government. Ben and I contemplate the possibilities in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

 

During Obama's first two years in office, it became apparent that each party had its own definition of "bipartisanship." For Democrats, it meant trying to adjust their governing priorities to address Republican concerns -- which is why the stimulus was smaller than proposed, the health reform bill included no "public option," and why the recent tax bill included unnecessary tax cuts for the rich.

For Republicans, however, "bipartisanship" has clearly meant that Democrats should completely abandon their projects and principles and adopt the GOP platform as their own. Even when that has happened, though, Republicans have abandoned their previously held positions in order to deny Obama a political victory of any sort -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was an ardent proponent of a deficit-reduction commission right up to the moment the president backed the proposal. Then he became an opponent.

Such attitudes are a recipe for gridlock. Any sane definition of the word "bipartisanship" includes some mention of compromise. But it's clear that Republicans intend to continue their "Party of No" strategy.

On election night, incoming House Speaker John Boehner told supporters that "it is the president who sets the agenda for our government." That's not exactly true -- Congress, after all, is a co-equal branch of government. Constitutional illiteracy aside, the goal is clear: Republicans plan to prevent government from getting anything done for two more years, then hope the voters blame Obama in 2012.

Gridlock, it is clear, is the last refuge of the cynical and power-hungry.

Americans should hope for some bipartisanship, if only because the challenges facing the nation are so huge that they won't be met by only one party working to craft solutions. Unfortunately, it's probably more realistic to expect gridlock.

Ben, meanwhile, praises the possibilities of "gridlock, sweet gridlock."

 

It's possible I've become too techy

It's possible I've become too techy

Tobias lines up traffic.

Today in inequality reading: Risks and rewards

The book "Winner-Take-All Politics" is on my list of must-reads for my year of reading about income inequality. The other day, I expressed concern that growing inequality was proof that the U.S. economic system isn't properly distributing its rewards. But today's Foreign Affairs review of "WTAP" crystalizes my concerns further: It's not just that the rewards aren't properly distributed -- neither are the risks:

The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else's income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class.

There's more to the review and the book to wrestle with, but this is the point I'm pondering for now.

Undocumented workers, illegal immigrants and AP style

Leave it to Fox News to make an opinion I hold seem utterly distasteful to me:

Plenty of conservatives are pretty upset over a campaign by the Society of Professional Journalists to convince reporters to stop using the terms "illegal aliens" and "illegal immigrants" in favor of "undocumented immigrant." But none are as livid as perpetually outraged Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who on Wednesday afternoon asked if journalists were going to start calling rapists "non-consensual sex partners" next.

"You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes," Kelly said. "So how far could you take this?"

As it happens, I discussed this issue back in July in response to a post at the Feministing blog. What I said then bears repeating now:

I get it: There's a desire to use language to create dignity for people by separating humanity's inherent characteristics from the conditions that afflict them and the actions they take. So there's no more "disabled person." It's now "person with disabilities." The emphasis is on personhood. And that's nice. Laudable. But it does clutter the language: Two words become three. (Similarly, I know from painful experience that there's any number of neutered-but-nice terms for "homeless people.") Pile up enough similar examples, and over time, the cluttering of language tends to obscure more than it reveals. 

Which is the case with Feministing's snit: "Undocumented" reduces the issues at play to nothing more than a paperwork problem. (And it's not necessarily more accurate as shorthand; surely many if not most of these folks have, say, birth certificates or driver's licenses or whatnot in their home countries. What kind of documentation are we talking about?) "Illegal" more immediately conveys the sum and substance of the controversy -- and references to illegal immigration are almost always a reference to the controversy -- many people (and their American employers) have chosen to break the laws of this country by crossing the borders to work here. I think those laws should change; I don't think playing games with the language is the way to do it.

As I suggested, any kind of shorthand -- whether it's "undocumented immigrant" or "illegal immigrant" -- is always going to be overly reductive and, in the end, at leastsomewhat imprecise. Some shorthand phrases, though, are more imprecise and convey less information than others. And those phrases should generally be avoided.

Republicans don't really care about the deficit

Under pay-as-you-go rules adopted by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in 2007, tax cuts or increases in entitlement spending must be offset by tax increases or entitlement cuts. Entitlements include big health programs like Medicare and Medicaid, for which spending is on autopilot, as well as some other programs for veterans and low-income Americans. (Discretionary spending, which includes defense, is approved separately by Congress annually.)

The new Republican rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts. In effect, the new rules will codify the Republican fantasy that tax cuts do not deepen the deficit.

via nytimes.com

I think I'd admire the Republican rules if they required that a tax cut be accompanied by an equivalent reduction in spending. I wouldn't like it, but I'd respect it. As it stands, the rules let the GOP cut taxes to their heart's content without making sure those cuts don't deepen the deficit somehow.

We'll see how this plays out. But there's no evidence to support the idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible. At all.

The stimulus was good for Philadelphia

The federal reporting rules make an exact stimulus-created jobs figure for city residents very difficult to calculate, but a conservative estimate would be in the thousands. A recent report from the Keystone Research Center estimates that Philadelphia's unemployment rate would have shot to 20 percent without the stimulus. Instead, the rate at the end of October was 11.5 percent.

via philly.com

The money hasn't always been spent efficiently -- or, as the story notes, spent at all. But I'd take an 8.5 percent drop in unemployment any day.

Me at Metropolis: On the rootlessness of our Webified world

I'm published today at the Metropolis, pondering the ways that Internet culture can make it difficult to connect to your local community:

So when it came time to move to Philadelphia, we got rid of everything that would help us connect with the world immediately around us: the radio and the television and the newspaper subscription. Our computers would work for all those things. Right?

What I found out is this: The miracle of the Internet is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. The curse of the Internet, it turns out, is that it can bring you news, music and video from anywhere on the planet. It's easy to avoid the local culture. In my eagerness to abandon the provincialism of my youth, I forgot that you can only live where you live.

This might seem a strange essay coming from me, since I've built my (ahem) career over the last decade by jumping with both feet into what is still sometimes called "New Media." That's served me well, as has my ability to connect to the broader culture in the ways I describe. I wouldn't take it back. But those benefits don't -- haven't -- come entirely without costs, even to me personally. I'm trying to figure out how to find the best balance my life -- and my parenting -- so that I can embrace the best of what Internet Culture has created without untethering myself entirely from the analog world. I don't want to become a Luddite, reading dusty texts by candlelight, but I don't want to live inside a Tron video game either. It's a daily struggle. 

But please, follow the link. Give it a thumbs-up and comment, so Tom Ferrick will be inclined to run my stuff again in the future. 

Tucker Carlson's talent: We'd rather be on Michael Vick's side

Carlson differentiated between Vick and others because Vick "killed dogs...in a heartless and cruel way." This is true. But what Carlson believed to be the proper punishment for Vick is sure to get some attention:

"I think, personally, he should have been executed for that."

via tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com

Christopher Beam is wrong to say libertarians own the heritage of the Founders

In his much-discussed and mostly pretty-good overview of libertarianism for New York Magazine, Christopher Beam makes a statement I think is just flat-out wrong:

Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. 

Beam might be right, as far as the Revolution goes. But the people who created and advocated for the adoption of the Constitution weren't really the libertarians of their day. They were trying to consolidate power for a national government, and even gave it unlimited power of taxation! The libertarians of the day were the Antifederalists, who thought that the power of taxation and the ability to create a standing army -- powers granted the government by the new Constitution -- were a dangerous threat to their hard-won liberty. Heck, the reason I even know of the Antifederalists is due to the proddings of a libertarian friend of mine. The Constitution might've restrained the powers of government compared to, say, the British monarchy -- but it was a lot more than limited-government types of the era felt entirely comfortable with. Granting libertarians a stronger purchase on the history of the Founders is simply incorrect.

Even Stanley Kurtz doesn't buy Jonah Goldberg's defense of red-baiting Stanley Kurtz

Remember last week, when Jonah Goldberg said that Stanley Kurtz's new book calling Obama a socialist isn't the same thing as calling him a communist -- and it's those oversensitive liberals who are conflating communism and socialism? Remember that?

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

I responded by noting that the cover of Kurtz's book actually features Obama's face superimposed on a red star. But it turns out you don't need to read into the cover symbolism to believe that Kurtz is doing a bit of red-baiting here. Here's Kurtz himself, today: 

There’s no doubt that Radical-in-Chief’s cover art draws the reader’s eye with a spectacular symbol of classic Marxist socialism. It would have been tough to put a picture of the Midwest Academy on the book, since no-one’s ever heard of it, and since the Midwest Academy keeps its socialism secret in any case. I get at the stealthy, pragmatic, and incremental Midwest Academy-style socialism the reader will learn about inside through the book’s subtitle.

But the fact is that a lot of Radical-in-Chief is about good old fashioned Marxism. There’s the story of Reverend Wright’s adventures in Cuba, for example, which drew Obama to Wright’s church, I claim. And Obama himself was a revolutionary Marxist at Occidental College. Also, many of the Swedish-style socialist organizers who trained and sponsored Obama supported Marxist regimes like Cuba and Nicaragua. Alice Palmer, who chose Obama to be her successor in the Illinois State Senate, was a fan of the Soviet Union. Bill Ayers often wears the red star. Despite their democratic professions, many of Obama’s stealth-socialist community organizer colleagues believed that a violent socialist revolution would be necessary in the future. And some of Obama’s mentors favored Swedish social experiments that skirted the boundary between democratic socialism and outright authoritarianism. Even Obama’s most gradualist mentors saw their ideological stealth as a modern version of Communist Party strategy during the Popular Front period.

So while American socialism definitely changed during its turn to community organizing in the eighties and nineties, the hard-core Marxist past was never entirely shed. The book grapples with that complexity. The Swedish alternative is real, but the links to the bad old Marxist days remain. That’s part of what makes even reformed socialism a matter of legitimate concern to those who love liberty.

Now, maybe this isn't directly calling Obama a communist. But he's certainly making a direct case that at one point, at least, Obama was a Marxist. (Can we agree that word is a synonym for Communist, or is more parsing called for?) And he's certainly making the case that Obama is so tied to and enmeshed with Marxists that his presidency endangers our country. I'm not sure that Goldberg's effort at pedantry -- communism is different from socialism, and Democrats are getting their feelings hurt because of their own inability to make distinctions -- really stands up at all in light of Kurtz's own words.

In any case, if Obama's a socialist, he's a damned lousy one. Tax cuts for the rich? Putting GM back on the market after saving it? Passing health reform by keeping insurance entirely in the hands of private companies? No doubt Kurtz and others will view this as Alinskyite go-slow subversion of free markets, but most of the rest of us don't see a president who looks all that radical.