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.