text:
Russia 'using phosphorous bombs' to break Aleppo
Tom Coghlan, Beirut
June 27 2016, 12:01am
The last rebel lifeline to Aleppo has been battered by some of the heaviest airstrikes of the war, amid growing concerns that Russia is using phosphorous and cluster bombs against the city.
Russian and Syrian jets have mounted ten days of intense bombing as government troops attack areas north of the city in an attempt to complete the siege.
"What's been happening in Aleppo in the last two days is surely unprecedented," said Bibars Mishal, a civil defence volunteer in the city. "The warplanes never leave the skies of Aleppo and its countryside, it's crazy and terrifying." More...
It is recognized that these are tumultuous times for the British media and The Times is to be congratulated for publishing this story in spite all the other demands for its ink the week after Brexit. It is an important story although it is one on which both the western media and the world's politicians would rather pretend doesn't exist. Aleppo isn't just burning. This isn't a forest fire or some other natural disaster. Aleppo is being fire bombed by Russian and Syrian war planes. Like the US campaign in Vietnam that killed 3 million, they claim to be taking out only "bad guys," when they are in fact targeting the whole civilian population. Like the US campaign in Vietnam that killed 3 million, they are using incendiary weapons and cluster bombs to commit mass murder.
Of course Russia and Syria deny that this is what they are doing, but facts keep stubbornly bubbling to the surface, as in this Telegraph report from last week:
Aleppo was once Syria's largest city. For many years now, much of it, nearly half, has been cleared of government control, liberated, in the terms of the Syrian revolution. In spite of the years of attacks, they still hang on, organized in the local coordinating committees [LCCs], White Helmet volunteer rescuers, community organizations looking after the day to day needs in the neighborhoods, and Free Syrian Army fighters looking after their defense.
Russia 'caught out' using incendiary weapons
in Syria by its own channel Russia Today
By Josie Ensor, Beirut
Credit: RT
22 June 2016 • 4:34pm
Russia has been caught using incendiary weapons in Syria by its own TV channel Russia Today, which later tried to edit the footage out of its broadcast.
The Kremlin has previously denied that its warplanes were carrying these bombs, which are restricted by an international convention.
The English-language news station, which is funded by Moscow, broadcast footage of Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, visiting Hmeymim airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia last Saturday.
A pilot can be seen next to a plane loaded with munitions marked with identifying numbers.
Experts from Human Rights Watch, and Conflict Intelligence Team, an open-source intelligence group based in Russia, concluded that it showed incendiary weapons mounted on a Su-34 ground attack aircraft – specifically RBK-500 ZAB-2.5SM bombs.
They said they believed the weapons contained a metal powder fuel known as thermite that ignites while falling, which has led witnesses of attacks to describe them as "fireballs." It is the hottest burning man-made substance in the world. More...
Now the Assad regime and its allies are waging a campaign of carnage unprecedented, even in the Syrian conflict, to destroy liberated Aleppo with fire while hundreds of thousands of civilians still live there. Although Europe and the United States may see fit to ignore what is happening in Aleppo, they can't ignore the consequences. They can fail to mention this mass murder of Arabs, now being done largely by Russians, on US TV, and they can refuse to do anything to stop it.
|Aleppo today
Ever since the beginning of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response to popular demands for an end to his family's 40 year dictatorship, politicians of all stripes in the West, on both the Left and the Right, thought it safe to ignore what was going on and the rising death toll that was being caused by what Assad's supporters excuse as his "over reaction." They thought what was happening in Syria would stay in Syria. Now one has to wonder if the FSA had been allowed MANPADS [ man portable anti-aircraft systems] when they asked for them in 2012, or if any effective measures had been taken to stop the Assad regime from simply clearing liberated areas from the air, would we in 2016 still be looking at the Brexit vote and the Donald Truman presidential campaign? The twin reactions behind them both are the refugees and the ISIS terrorists. Both have strong roots in the Syrian conflict. The Syrian refugees are fleeing that cesspool of war that has also allowed Daesh to breed, particularly in the Raqqa safe haven granted to them by President Assad.
One of the reasons Assad has been able to get away with murder for so long is that western governments have always supported rule by fear and violence, "free world" rhetoric to the contrary. Also President Barack Obama has always been a closet supporter of Bashar al-Assad, in spite of his numerous and obligatory calls for Assad to "step down." I detailed many of the reasons for this almost four years ago in Barack Obama's Courtship of Bashar al-Assad. So while the United States government may have made loud protests to the ongoing slaughter through diplomatic channels and even sprinkled a little money around for some military hardware and training, under Obama's leadership, it also made sure the Syrian's being bombed got no effective anti-aircraft weapons while those doing the bombing enjoyed a free fly zone. That's what the CIA was doing in Benghazi. One thing we can be certain of, they weren't helping the Syrian opposition get Gaddafi's MANPADS because we've seen only a few in rebel hands. Obama may have played "Good Cop" to his opposition, but as the person that was suppose to be leading international opposition to the Syrian regime's bloodletting, Barack Obama was just what the Doctor ordered.
President Obama's policy of toothless action and benign neglect towards the Syrian people, as their body count rose from a few hundred to half a million and the conflict morphed into the first holocaust of the 21st century, has not been without opposition, even from within his own State Department. Ten days ago the New York Times published a draft version of a State Department memo that was very critical of Obama's Syria policy. The memo was signed by 51 diplomats and was sent through a "dissent channel" that was established to air internal opposition during the Vietnam War. Most controversially, the memo calls for,
the use of military force as an option to enforce the Cessation of Hostilities (CoH) and compel the Syrian regime to abide by its termsIt calls for an enforced no-fly zone to stop the bombing, saying
Assad's systemic violations against the Syrian people are the root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.They call on the International Syrian Support Group (ISSG) to,
end the daily mass killing of civilians and egregious violations of human rights, cajole the warring parties to make necessary compromises at the negotiating table, bolster moderate rebel groups' role in defeating Da'esh, and help bring an end to the broader instability the conflict generates.They argue that allowing this carnage to continue is bad:
With over 400,000 people dead, hundreds of thousands still at risk from regime sieges, and 12 million people from a population of 23 million displaced from their homes, we believe the moral rationale for taking steps to end the deaths and suffering in Syria, after five years of brutal war, is evident and unquestionable. The regime's actions directly result in broader instability and undermine the international system responsible for protection of civilians, prevention of mass atrocities, and accountability for grave violations.Then they lay out what they expect can be achieved with this more interventionist policy in Syria:
5. (SBU) First, with the regime deploying tactics that overwhelmingly target civilians (barrel bombs and air strikes in cities) to achieve battlefield objectives and undermine support for the moderate opposition, impeding or ending such atrocities will not only save lives but further our political objectives.That last bit is obviously a nod to the rise of Donald Trump, who is not a supporter of Obama but is a fan of Putin. Needless to say, supporters of President Obama's current policy, as well as supporters of the Assad regime, have been very critical of this memo.
6. (SBU) Secondly, a more assertive U.S. role to protect and preserve opposition-held communities, by defending them from Asad's air force and artillery, presents the best chance for defeating Da'esh in Syria. The prospects for rolling back Da'esh's hold on territory are bleak without the Sunni Arabs, who the regime continues to bomb and starve.
7. (SBU) Third, putting additional constraints on the regime's ability to bomb and shell both fighting forces and the unambiguously civilian targets would have a direct, mitigating impact on the refugee and IDP crisis. This crisis has deeply affected Syria's neighbors for years and is now impacting our European partners in far-reaching ways that may ultimately jeopardize their very character as open, unified, and democratic societies. Even in the United States, the crisis in Syria has lent credence to prejudiced ideologies that we thought had been discredited years ago.
Into this fray has jumped the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. You may remember them from their defense of Assad after he was accused of killing more than 1400 people, including hundreds of children, with sarin on 21 August 2013 in East Ghouta and other Damascus suburbs.
many conventional attacks by the Assad regime on East Ghouta or the many other chemical weapons attack he has conduct in many locations in Syria before and since. They didn't address the findings of the Syrian activists in East Ghouta, the doctors who treated the victims or the local Free Syrian Army. They treated the matter as if only the US govt was making the charge that Assad had used sarin and they responded to the claims only from that doubtful source.
The statement they signed and claimed to have written was actually plagiarized from one written by an Assad family insider and published on the pro-Putin Global Research five days earlier. This is a very serious charge of intellectual dishonesty so please allow me to provide links as well as a brief example. This is an excerpt from "Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?" written by Yossef Bodansky and published by Global Research on 01 September 2013:
On August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major and irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish, and US Intelligence ["Mukhabarat Amriki"] took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.This is from the VIPS memo: Is Syria a Trap? published on 06 September 2013:
on August 13-14, 2013, Western-sponsored opposition forces in Turkey started advance preparations for a major, irregular military surge. Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and Qatari, Turkish and U.S. intelligence officials took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, now used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors.Do you see the same violation of copyright laws that I see? Sure they removed the tattletale Syrian security service term for US intelligence, but other than that, the wording is almost exactly the same. That is no accident! And there's a lot more where that came from. I didn't want to bore you but do check it for yourself.
The combination of Obama's promise of 20 August 2012 that if Assad ever did use "a whole bunch of chemical weapons" it would cross a "red-line" that would trigger a US military response and his reneging on that promise when Assad did exactly that precisely a year later, did much to dishearten Assad's opposition, boaster the regime and fill the ranks of Daesh with demoralized fighters from the Free Syrian Army and other more democratic forces.
VIPS and its chief spokesman, Ray McGovern, did everything they could to discourage any military response to Assad's continuing carnage back then when the body count was less than 150K and they have prevailed. They stuck by their claim that Assad was innocent and his opposition had attacked its own people with sarin in a "false flag" grab for headlines.
One of the few good things to come out of this episode was that Assad was forced to give up some of his chemical weapons stockpiles. After he had done that, in 2014, and the UN had those sarin stockpiles to compare to the samples taken in the attack, they where able to make this extremely important observation:
In Al-Ghouta, significant quantities of sarin were used in a well-planned indiscriminate attack targeting civilian-inhabited areas, causing mass casualties. The evidence available concerning the nature, quality and quantity of the agents used on 21 August indicated that the perpetrators likely had access to the chemical weapons stockpile of the Syrian military, as well as the expertise and equipment necessary to manipulate safely large amount of chemical agents.In other words, not the imaginary "homemade" sarin VIPS talks about.
I've added the bold because the UN was actually prohibited by the Russian veto from naming a perpetrator but this is pretty damn close. Still this finding is ignored by VIPS, Veterans for Peace and many others on the Left that have converted the conspiracy theory that it was a false flag attack carried out by anybody but Assad into an article of faith. When I learned that Ray McGovern would be speaking at the Veterans for Peace National convention in August 2015, I commission a large banner to challenge him on this very point.
You can see the UN quote in the upper left corner and the charge of plagiarism in the lower left. Ray McGovern walked by this banner many times during the convention but he never addressed these issues. Then in December 22, 2015 VIPS published A Call for Proof on Syria-Sarin Attack in which they claimed again that there was no evidence linking the Assad regime to that attack but again they failed to address or even mention this determinate report from the UN's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. That means the title of their piece is a lie.
Now VIPS has come out again. This time its to attack these 51 State Department dissents that are opposed to US government policy on Syria. Neither Assad nor Putin has been terribly troubled by Obama's policy on Syria, and they don't want to see it become more interventionist. VIPs also doesn't want to see this change, so on Saturday they published Intel Vets Call 'Dissent Memo' on Syria 'Reckless'
Whether you agree with the dissenting diplomats call for a no-fly zone or other forms of US military action in Syria, it is clear that they are concerned about the plight of the Syrian civilians that are being slaughtered. VIPS can't say that, at least not based on the content of their memo. They never mention this aspect of the problem, choosing instead to paint the dissent diplomats as bullies, saying:
that 51 "State Department Diplomats" signed a dissent letter advocating direct U.S. bombing as a tool to force Syria into submission to our government's dictates.They add:
Unfortunately the dissent signers are calling for America to threaten, and if our bluff is called, commit acts of overt, aggressive war against the forces of a sovereign nation on its own territory.Even if it is committing genocide on its own territory? Genocide or not, the hundreds of thousands of dead Syrian get no mention from VIPS, instead they say:
The line of thought — that it is America's right and duty to employ large-scale death to enforce its leaders' will on other peoples.They refuse to mention the Syrians dying or already dead because Assad and Putin think they have a right to employ large-scale death to enforce their will. Instead they talk about hypothetical deaths that might be caused by any attempt to halt this carnage, because if stopping Assad's barrel bombs from falling is merely an exercise in American Power for these diplomats, then there is really no need for VIPS to dwell on "the government's barrel bombing of civilians."
From the VIPS point of view, what is being done to and by ordinary Syrians is of little concern. While the memo they are critiquing speaks of the death and destruction suffered by these people, the VIPS memo does not. They don't see a Syrian freedom movement worth defending and they don't dwell on the regime's civilian causalities. To them any honest Syrians in Assad's opposition are the dupes in a great game being orchestrated by foreign powers:
It's true that the initial phase of the Syrian Spring seems to have been largely spontaneous. Facts show, however, that outside interveners — primarily the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia — cooperated in lighting the match that brought the inferno of civil war. Covert funding and provision of weapons and other material support to opposition groups for strikes against the Syrian Government provoked a military reaction by Assad...This also happens to be the Baathist and Russian view of what happened but it is not what happened.
There are other important differences between VIPS and the diplomats on the terrorist threat. While the dissenting diplomats refer to jihadi terrorists that have emerged from Assad's prisons to threaten the whole world as Daesh, the name given to them by the Syrian opposition and most who oppose it, VIPS honors it with its propaganda name, ISIS, although it is neither Islamic nor a state.
Since the beginning to the civil war, Assad has claimed that the only opposition that he faced was from terrorists. Putin has echoed him. VIPS also promotes this view, but they base it on,
Pentagon claims that the opposition and Nusra are one in the same.Then they go on to say,
We are astonished. After 15 years of strident rhetoric about waging a war on Al Qaeda, we have now come full circle to witness the CIA and a vocal bloc within the State Department advocate to arm and train an Al Qaeda affiliated group.They sum up Obama's history on Syria,
the President appeared to support the overthrow of Assad but then backed away from the precipice of militarily taking him out.That's what the Good Cop does every time. Only a fool or supporter of his Good Cop deception would continue to argue that he ever really supported the overthrow of the Assad regime.
|Matthew Heimbach, wearing red hat and pushing black woman out of Trump rally.
"While President Obama says he is fighting terrorism, he is actively supporting it by continuing to flood money, training and arms to Syrian rebels. President Obama also says that he is working to topple Assad, the only force in Syria stopping the advance of the Islamic State."It must be a real embarrassment to VIPS, Veterans for Peace and other "anti-imperialists" to find that with regards to Syria, they are on the same team as scum like that.
UPDATE 3 July 2016 {Closing the Circle}
|Click to enlarge
Coleen Rowley I agree it [Sander's nomination] is a longshot but it is the best option. And what would be the alternative? More war and chaos via Killary? Or taking a longshot on Trump, who may well be the lesser evil as he's publicly states he's against war on Russia, but still a huge gamble?Over time we can expect to see growing support for Trump from those on the "Left" that currently support Gaddafi, Assad and Putin. This should surprise no one.


text:
Nirav Patel wanted to listen to music in his car, but was having trouble with the tape adapter used to plug in his phone. Instead of just switching to a FM transmitter or getting a new stereo, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and modded the stereo to enable an auxiliary input. After some incidents involving the tape player, lots of troubleshooting, and a small fire, he was able to get everything working.
I performed a similar hack on the factory radio in my own car a couple of years ago, but for a slightly different reason- the aftermarket stereos with CD players that I installed kept getting stolen. Once I replaced it with an old tape deck unit with a secret auxiliary input, no one wanted to take it!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
5 for the Day: Animals
Animals have a spontaneity, a naturalism, a genuine screen presence.
No sooner had I finished reading Vicki Myron's lovely if titularly overstated Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World when word came of a screen version in the works with Meryl Streep set to star. Hype moves so fast these days that there's scarcely a chance to envision the adaptation that you would like to see. There is a lot of potential in the book's premise, and I say that not just as the owner of a precocious two-year-old tabby (named Renko, after the main character in Martin Cruz Smith's series of detective novels, beginning with Gorky Park). Dewey begins as a mythic origins tale with a kitten found in an Iowa library's book depository on the coldest winter morning of the year, deepens into a bond between a cat and an owner who endures more than her share of health and family troubles, then broadens its scope into a twenty-year epic about the economic ravages inside the American Heartland. While a capable director and screenwriter could convey all of this, I fear the makers of Dewey will go for the cutesy tearjerking of Marley & Me—soften up the audience before landing the body-blows—as well as overplay the opposition to the shocking notion of a cat living in a library. Expect the shrill woman who threatens to walk her cow through town (given only a cursory mention in Myron's book) to be elevated to supervillain status.
"Never work with animals or children," W.C. Fields famously opined, but he had nothing to worry about. Movies about animals have been relatively few, and good movies about animals even fewer. Much of the reason, I think, is a reluctance or refusal to take animals on their own terms. Documentarians can plant down their cameras in the tall grass and wait (and whatever you do, don't intervene on behalf of that poor gazelle), but dramatists rarely have that luxury. Of course I mean "luxury" facetiously: nature filmmakers typically endure innumerable hardships and risk injury or death, but that's nothing from the narrow prism of a studio director pulling out his hair in frustration because the damn collie won't hit her mark. Movie-lore is riddled with tales of uncooperative beasts causing all kinds of burdens, so that by the umpteenth take it's understandable, the temptation, to just pack up and leave Timmy down that well. No, it's become far easier to animate and anthropomorphize animals onscreen. Anything with penguins is virtually guaranteed a green-light; and if they can talk, so much the better.
Yet animals, for all their difficulties, can be enthrallingly cinematic. Animals have a spontaneity, a naturalism, a genuine screen presence. They can be protagonists or antagonists, the stars of the show or reliable scene-stealers. Some are reliable jokers; others have touching gravitas. While the verdict on Dewey will have to wait, there are still plenty of possibilities to consider for this post. Here are my five animal-themed movies:
1. The Black Stallion (1979): Carroll Ballard is the undisputed master of the genre. Four of the six feature films to his credit involve animals in major roles, and all would be worthy candidates for this list. I chose to exclude Never Cry Wolf (1983) because the movie, while very well-made, feels a little dated and remote (although a dream screening with Ashley Judd and Sarah Palin would spice things up). Fly Away Home (1996) is beautiful but suffers from the retroactive squirminess of Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin playing father and daughter before their less-wholesome relationship in The Squid and the Whale (which, it should be emphasized, is about neither squids nor whales). His most recent film, the barely-released Duma (2005), puts an engaging spin on The Call of the Wild in charting an adopted cheetah's return to its natural habitat. Duma makes for an interesting bookend with The Black Stallion, Ballard's first movie and still his best.
Comparisons to Jack London are apt. Thematically, The Black Stallion is Ballard's version of White Fang, a journey from the wild to society. An untamed Arabian horse survives a shipwreck, lands on a deserted island with a ten-year-old boy (Kelly Reno), returns with him to the States, and becomes a semi-domesticated racing champ under the tutelage of Mickey Rooney. The second half of the film, though entertaining, is nonetheless a bit of a letdown following the spellbinding first hour, which begins on the ship with the boy's doomed father (the wonderful Hoyt Axton, incontrovertibly setting the tone) and continues through the wordless twenty-five minute island passage, as boy and horse gradually form a bond. A director who always takes nature on its own terms, Ballard's visual style (fully realized by the great cinematographer Caleb Deschanel) blends contradictory impulses into a singular whole. At once naturalistic and mythic, sensual and muscular, his accomplishment with this film was championed relentlessly by Pauline Kael, who closed her epochal essay "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers," with an anecdote about seeing The Black Stallion that reflected my own experience and has since become my own litmus test for movies aimed at kids. "There was a hushed, attentive audience, with no running up and down the aisles and no traffic to the popcorn counter," she wrote, "and even when the closing credits came on, the children sat quietly looking at the images behind the names. There may be a separate God for the movies, at that."
2. White Hunter, Black Heart (1990): Clint Eastwood abandons his orangutan drinking buddy for a different kind of animal in this ambitious film, which he directed during a creatively fertile period right after Bird (not about birds) and right before Unforgiven. A thinly-veiled chronicle of the behind-the-scenes making of The African Queen, Eastwood initially seems to have miscast himself as the expansive, loquacious, pathologically reckless director John
Huston Wilson; yet like Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast, he settles into the role the further he goes outside of his comfort zone. Arriving in Africa with one of his screenwriters (virtual non-entity Jeff Fahey) to finish the script and scout locations, Wilson goes on safari and develops an unhinged obsession with shooting an elephant that threatens to sink the production before it starts.
White Hunter's witty, incisive script (co-written by Peter Viertel, based on the book he wrote about his experiences on The African Queen) depicts Hollywood jackals out of their element within the actual animal kingdom. Animal motifs flow through the film (a monkey snatches the screenplay's pages from an anxious producer, a daft wannabe writer pitches an idea about a movie starring a dog with a case of "mistaken identity"), and the elephants themselves are more of a psychological state until the anger of one confronted tusker becomes terrifyingly real. Invariably dismissive of Eastwood's work, Kael never would have lauded him with the same praise she bestowed on Ballard: that he makes you feel "as though (you're) rediscovering the emotional sources of mystery and enchantment." Yet Eastwood, overreaching on his own compelling terms, is onto something ineffable, best expressed in a scene where another character claims that killing an elephant is a crime, and Wilson counters that it's something more. "It's a sin … a sin you can get a license for and go out and do," he declares. "That's why I want to do it before I do anything else … Do you understand me? Of course you don't. How could you? I don't understand myself." A bracing admission from one of our most self-aware screen icons.
3. Babe: Pig in the City (1998): Hollywood doesn't make disasters like it used to. Nowadays publicists are in such firm command of their craft that even a movie that's universally mocked or reviled can recoup most of its cost; but arguably it was this film (or possibly Bennifer's Gigli) that became the last truly epic box-office bomb. George Miller, who produced the adored original Babe, took the helm in directing this full-throttled sequel, which takes risks in a deliriously unstable manner that would have earned the approval of John Huston but was off-putting to audiences seeking the comforts of family fare. James Cromwell's kindly Farmer Hoggett is horrifyingly injured in the first five minutes, prompting Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) to take their famed sheep-pig to the Big City (a dazzling amalgam of New York, Paris, Sydney, and other metropolises) in order to avoid foreclosure. The movie's central set-piece in a (literally) fleabag hotel drops Babe into a menagerie of fellow animals, who are led by a couple of chimps owned by a circus clown. (Mickey Rooney, unbelievably, again.) The stakes from the first Babe are raised even higher this time around, with dangers ranging from animal control officers (in a scene reminiscent of the military personnel invading the home in E.T.) to a chef with an insatiable taste for ham.
Miller (who recently bounced back with an Oscar-winning hit featuring animated penguins—good instincts, George) pushes his idiosyncratic vision so aggressively that at times it becomes exhausting. Yet like Stephanie Zacharek, I found myself mesmerized by the movie's "spell of craziness" and admiring Pig in the City as a talking-animal movie that refuses to anthropomorphize its creatures, treating them as worthy of respect. Miller is especially good at getting inside their heads, as regular House commenter Bruce Reid noted regarding the film's "rapturous glimpse of doggie heaven" from the point-of-view of an unconscious canine. Speaking of comfort zones, taking the audience out of theirs is clearly where Miller finds his own.
4. Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986): Pets, while commonplace in movies, usually do nothing more than hover along the fringes of the story or are used as cheap plot devices. (A friend's daughter calls them "dead dog movies.") Paul Mazursky's buoyant comedy Down and Out in Beverly Hills (a loose remake of the French film Boudu Saved from Drowning) is one of only a few I can think of that treats an animal—in this case, a remarkable dog named Mike—as a legitimate part of the ensemble. Mazursky had already somewhat achieved this years earlier with Harry and Tonto (not about Indians); but in portraying Matisse, the spoiled, neurotic pet of the mindbogglingly affluent and dysfunctional Whiteman family (led by an equally nimble Richard Dreyfusss and Bette Midler), Mike is alloted more personality and nuance than almost anybody passing for human in contemporary farce. When a homeless man (Nick Nolte, in one of his unsung great performances) loses his own beloved pooch and tries to drown himself in the Whitemans' pool, Matisse consoles him in a moment that's deeply affecting. Nolte's Jerry, a pathological liar with highbrow taste, moves in at the insistence of Dreyfuss's Dan, a success in the coat-hanging business (an amusing touch) who feels guilty about his wealth. A memorable scene at the beach climaxes with Jerry, who claims to have been an actor, reciting Hamlet's soliloquy "What a piece of work is man"; and indeed, this paragon of animals takes over the Whiteman household with Matisse perpetually at his side.
A moment where Midler's Barb quotes her New Age guru's philosophy about everyone being part of the same continuum is intended as a laugh line; but there's no better description of Mazursky's generous worldview, which he demonstrates by including Matisse within the framework of nearly every scene, often panning seamlessly from dog to human or vice-versa rather than always relying on edited inserts. (There are some of these too.) The comic high-water mark occurs when Jerry breaks down Barb's considerable defenses with a full-body massage that turns into a desperate tumble on the bed. Nolte seduces her, as he does everyone else; and Mike's reaction to Midler's earth-shaking orgasm may be the funniest moment I've ever seen from an animal on film.
5. Winged Migration (2001): In recent years a smattering of documentaries about animals have enjoyed success beyond the Discovery Channel, and this one about the migratory patterns of birds is the most exhilarating. Less overbearing (sorry) than Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and less rote than March of the Penguins (one critic observed that "Morgan Freeman narrates a little too knowingly, as if he'd had previous experience being a penguin himself"), Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is best viewed—according to one of the filmmakers on the "Making Of" DVD featurette—as neither documentary nor fiction, but rather an impressionistic "nature tale." This framework is helpful in overlooking some of the film's contrivances; yet while there is integrity in depicting the myriad dangers of flight, it gets undercut by the lack of clarity as to whether or not these threats (hunters, combines, crabs) are staged. Overall, though, the movie's poetic spirit transcends all flaws. A sequence following a flock of Canadian geese through Monument Valley down to a near-futile search for water around a jalopy abandoned along a desert highway is a trajectory through the cinematic landscape of John Ford to something resembling an ominous moment from the Coens. Winged Migration captivates by depicting something that's easy to take for granted. To put a spin on the original Superman's tagline, you will believe that a bird can fly.
Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets Is an Elegiac Mosaic of Disillusionment
It's in certain characters' trajectories that the Ross brothers locate the tragic soul of the bar.3.5
In a 1946 essay for London's Evening Standard, George Orwell wrote: "And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it." In other words, the British author was on the lookout for the ideal watering hole, which he argues requires a combination of these specific offerings as well as more ineffable qualities. But the article's thrust isn't so simple, as Orwell spends the first three-quarters of it describing in detail a bar that doesn't exist, referred to by the fictitious moniker of "The Moon Under Water." You might think that you're reading a rare lifestyle report from your favorite anti-totalitarian author, only to suddenly be made aware of your victimhood in a little literary sleight of hand.
Orwell's playful essay provides the inspiration for Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, a quasi-real-time portrait of what might be seen as an ideal dive bar by today's standards, though filmmaker brothers Bill and Turner Ross eschew Orwell's rug-pulling. Here, we're never let in on the fact that the Roaring 20s, the Las Vegas haunt that serves as the film's setting, is actually located in the Rosses' hometown of New Orleans, or that its denizens are actually a motley crew of Louisiana drinkers (one looks like Elliott Gould, another like Seymour Cassel) that the filmmakers recruited and primed for their roles. This edifice of fakery is critical to the film's meaning. As Orwell opined for a more perfect world where such a social space could exist, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets fabricates its own rosy vision of social unity, drunkenly commiseration, and aesthetic perfection, if only to deliberately undercut this idealism through the staging of its narrative around the bar's final night and the election of Donald Trump.
The Roaring 20s may not be everyone's idea of perfection. After an Altmanesque credit sequence establishing the bar's exterior in zooming telephoto shots, the audience's first glimpse at the interior finds custodian-cum-freeloader Michael Martin being broken from his early-afternoon slumber by the arriving bartenders and helped promptly to a swig of whiskey, and events from this point forward tap into a similar reservoir of pity and humor. Where the beauty emerges is in the intimacy and familiarity with which the patrons are able to relate to one another as more and more alcohol is consumed. For much of the film, egos, tempers, and prejudices fall away as more and more regulars pile into the bar, increasingly constituting a diverse cross section of what appear to be outer Vegas wanderers and failures.
Limiting views of the surrounding city to brief, bleary interludes shot on an un-color-calibrated Panasonic DVX100b, the Ross brothers center the action squarely around the bar, lending everything a brownish pink patina that suggests the view through a bottle of Fireball and draping every hangable surface with off-season Christmas lights. Taken as part of a dialogue with such gems from the canon of booze-soaked cinema as Lionel Rogosin's On the Bowery and Eagle Pennell's Last Night at the Alamo, this auburn glow distinguishes Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets as more texturally expressive than photographically verisimilar—a film that approximates a night of inebriation rather than merely memorializing it.
Having used two cameras over the course of their 18-hour shoot, the Rosses are able to rely on montage editing to foster a sense of omniscience without losing the feeling of temporal continuity. The result is a film whose attention jumps sporadically to different bits of conversation and activity just as the beer-saturated brain of your average pub-dweller might. Part of this seamless integration of perspectives has to do with the film's dynamic and precise use of music, which blends non-diegetic Rhodes-piano noodlings from composer Casey Wayne McAllister with popular songs heard within the bar both on the jukebox and in impromptu sing-alongs. Unconcerned with airs of documentary objectivity, the Ross brothers allow themselves to essentially play disc jockeys, and within this framework many of their choices for background needle drops land with a certain poetic gravitas, complementing, contradicting, or in some cases even guiding the emotional temperature of the room.
Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler" is heard twice, first played by a bartender on an acoustic guitar to get the early evening energy going and later on the jukebox when much of that energy has dissipated, while Jhené Aiko's desolate breakup ballad "Comfort Inn Ending" provides contrapuntal accompaniment to the evening's one flare-up of macho tempers. Most affecting is when A$AP Rocky's "Fuckin' Problems" underscores a shot of an embittered but tender war vet, Bruce Hadnot, glowering at the end of the bar—a lengthily held beat that will be relatable to anyone who's ever found introspection in the midst of pummeling noise. Each example hints at the melancholy direction that the film ultimately takes, and like any DJ worth their salt, the Rosses manage the transition from euphoria to pathos gradually and imperceptibly.
While all who enter the Roaring 20s achieve some kind of emotional arc before departing thanks to the filmmakers' democratic distribution of their attentions, there are a few who emerge as main characters, and it's in their trajectories that Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets locates the tragic soul of the bar. Michael is one of them. Beginning the day as a freewheeling conversationalist, ripping drinks and catching up with whoever rolls through, he spends the dwindling hours of the night in a dazed stupor on a corner sofa, pathetically asserting to a fellow bar patron that "there is nothing more boring than someone who used to do stuff and just sits in a bar." In a few instances, the Ross brothers cede the floor to the bar's security cameras, whose detachment and "objectivity" eschew the warmth of the filmmakers' ground-level cameras, rendering the bar as little more than a physical space. Seen from this cold, inhuman eye, Michael registers as lonely, beaten-down, and insignificant.
Similarly positioned on the margins of the sociable space created by the Roaring 20s, and often identified by its more imposing and strange attractions (such as the Stratosphere and Pyramid casinos), Las Vegas plays a role analogous to the bar's security cameras. As seen through a motion-blurred, sepia-toned camera, the city represents a reality of false hopes that's failed the film's humble pleasure seekers—whether in the form of dead-end jobs that have led them away from their passions or in a military industrial complex that treats its servants as interchangeable. At one point, Bruce brings up Trump on the occasion of his recent election, confidently proffering grave predictions for his presidency. The subject doesn't get touched again, but it's a subtext for the whole film—not the Trump presidency per se, but the mere fact of pessimism in the face of leadership. Like Orwell's "The Moon Under Water," the Roaring 20s seen in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets doesn't really exist. Even if it did, no one would save it, which makes the desperation with which its denizens hang on to it all the more touching.
Director: Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross Distributor: Utopia Running Time: 98 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Relic Is a Lushly Metaphoric Vision of a Splintered Family
The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.2.5
Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), don't say much on the drive to Grandma Edna's (Robyn Nevin) house. The old woman is missing, and when Sam crawls through the doggy door into the home, she looks around with concern, absorbed until Kay knocks impatiently at the door to be let in. Still no words. The women of Relic aren't exactly close, as evidenced by the palpable coldness between Kay and Sam as they look through this cluttered abode. Edna's forgetfulness having grown exhausting, Kay tells a cop that she hasn't spoken to her eightysomething mother in weeks. And the guilt is written on Kay's face, even in the distant shot that frames her within the walls of the police station.
Though Relic is her debut feature, Natalie Erika James demonstrates a confident grasp of tone and imagery throughout the film. She and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff strikingly conjure an ominous stillness, particularly in the scenes set inside Edna's increasingly unfamiliar home, where the characters appear as if they're being suffocated by the walls, railing, low ceilings, and doorways. Relic fixates on rotting wood, the monolithic scope of the Australian woods, and the colors on Edna's front door's stained-glass window that meld, eventually, into a single dark spill, as though the house is infected by the old cabin that haunts Kay's dreams.
Edna soon reappears, unable to explain where she's been and complicating an already distant family dynamic. The interactions between the three women are marked by an exhaustion that's clearly informed by past experience—a feeling that Edna's disappearance was almost expected. But not even James's command behind the camera can quite elevate just how hard Relic falls into the shorthand of too many horror movies with old people at their center: the unthinking self-harm, the wandering about in the night, the pissing of oneself.
The film remains restrained almost to a fault, revealing little about its characters and their shared histories. Though some of this vagueness could be attributed to Relic's central metaphor about dementia, the general lack of specificity only grows more apparent in the face of the film's oldsploitation standbys, leaving us with precious little character to latch onto.
But such familiar elements belie Relic's truly inventive climax, an abrupt shift into a visceral nightmare that tears apart notions of body and space and then sews them back together in a new, ghastly form. James resists bringing the film's subtext to the forefront, in the process imbuing her enigmatic images with a lasting power, turning them into ciphers of broader ideas like abandonment, responsibility, and resentment as they relate to the withering human figure. Never relenting with its atmosphere of suffocating decay, the final stretch of Relic, if nothing else, heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.
Cast: Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, Bella Heathcote Director: Natalie Erika James Screenwriter: Natalie Erika James, Christian White Distributor: IFC Midnight Running Time: 89 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Love Before the Virus: Arthur J. Bressan Jr.'s Newly Restored Passing Strangers
The film's characters are simultaneously horny and melancholic. They seem to want plenty of sex but also love.
One of the many pleasures to be had in watching Arthur J. Bressan Jr.'s newly restored Passing Strangers derives from its status as a historical document, or a piece of queer ethnography. The 1974 film allows us to see but also feel what life was like for gay men during what some have called the golden age of unbridled sex before the AIDS epidemic. Bressan Jr.'s portrait of this history is simultaneously attuned to its sartorial, mediatic, erotic, and affective dimensions, which may come as a surprise to those unaccustomed to explicit sexual imagery being paired with social commentary. Pornography and poetry aren't counterparts here. Rather, they're bedfellows, one the logical continuation of the other. Money shots, for instance, aren't accompanied by moaning or groaning, but by the sounds of a violin.
The film's characters are simultaneously horny and melancholic. They seem to want plenty of sex but also love. They devote so much of their lives to picking up strangers for sex, briefly and by the dozens, but not without secretly wishing that one of them might eventually stay. In this they may not differ much from their contemporary cruising heirs, though they do in their approach. It turns out that asking for a pen pal's photo before a meetup in 1974 was considered creepy, and using Walt Whitman's poetry as part of a sex ad was quite fruitful.
That's exactly what 28-year-old Tom (Robert Carnagey), a bath-house habitué and telephone company worker living in San Francisco, does in the hopes of attracting something long term. The literal poetics of cruising speaks to 18-year-old Robert (Robert Adams), who responds to Tom's newspaper ad right way. They meet in person and begin a love affair that could only be described as bucolic, including making love in fields of grass, on top of a picnic blanket, to the sound of waves and piano notes, and riding their bikes around town, much like the sero-discordant love birds of Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo do after partaking in a gangbang. In retrospect, promiscuity gains the tinge of an obsessive auditioning of "the one," who, in Bressan Jr.'s sensual fairy tale, is bound to come along and save us from ourselves.
Passing Strangers, which originally screened at adult cinemas and gay film festivals, recalls Francis Savel's 1980 porno Equation to an Unknown in how smut and romance are so intimately bound in the forms of queer intimacy that the film depicts. This may also be due to the dearth of gay cinematic representation at the time—of gay men perhaps needing to dream of prince charming and of bareback anal sex in the same movie session, satisfying the itch for love and for filth in one fell swoop. But while Equation to an Unknown is completely wrapped up in a fantasy glow, there's something more realistic, or pragmatic, about Passing Strangers.
Tom's voiceover narration, which takes the shape of disaffected epistolary exchanges with his newfound beloved, orients us through the action. Motivations are explained. At times, however, Bressan Jr. indulges in experimental detours. These are precisely the most beautiful, and atemporal, sequences in the film—scenes where sex is juxtaposed with the sound of a construction site or the buzzing of a pesky mosquito, or one where an audience of orgy participants give a round of applause after somebody ejaculates. And the film's surrendering to moments of inexplicable poesis reaches its apex in a shot of a boy in clown makeup holding his mouth agape. It's an exquisitely brief shot, indelible in its strangeness.
Newly restored from the original negative in a 2K scan, Passing Strangers is now available to stream on PinkLabel as part of The Bressan Project.
Review: Tom Hanks Stubbornly Steers Greyhound into Sentimental Waters
With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.1.5
With his almost supernatural likeability, impeccable reputation, and penchant for appearing in films rooted in American history, Tom Hanks has become a national father figure. The actor's ongoing project, particularly urgent as we seek to redefine our relationship with our history and iconography, is to remind us of when the United States actually rose to the occasion. Unsurprisingly, this project often centers on World War II, one of the least controversial pinnacles of American collaboration on the world stage.
Continuing this tradition, Aaron Schneider's Greyhound concerns the efforts to provide Britain with troops and supplies via Allied naval convoys on the Atlantic, which German U-boat "wolf packs" stalk and sink, attempting to break a Western blockade. Adapted by Hanks from C.S. Forester's novel The Good Shephard, the film is a celebration of duty and competency that's so quaint it's almost abstract, as it arrives at a time of chaos, selfish and blinkered American governing, and a growing bad faith in our notion of our own legacy.
Set over a few days in 1942, the film dramatizes a fictionalized skirmish in the real-life, years-long Battle of the Atlantic. The American destroyer Greyhound, leader of a convoy that includes Canadian and British vessels, is commanded by Ernest Krause (Hanks), an aging naval officer with no experience in battle. Text at the start of the film explains that there's a portion of the Atlantic that's out of the range of air protection, called the Black Pit, in which convoys are especially vulnerable to the wolf packs. For 50 hours, Krause and his crew will be tested and severely endangered as they seek to cross this treacherous stretch of the sea.
This skeletal scenario has potential as a visceral thriller and as a celebration of Allied ingenuity and daring. Unfortunately, Hanks's script never adds any meat to the skeleton. One can see Hanks's passion for history in the loving details—in the references to depth charge supply, to windshield wipers freezing up, to the specific spatial relationships that are established (more through text than choreography) via the various vessels in this convoy. What Hanks loses is any sense of human dimension. In The Good Shephard, Krause is frazzled and insecure about leading men who're all more experienced in battle than himself. By contrast, Krause's inexperience is only mentioned in Greyhound as a testament to his remarkable, readymade leadership. The film's version of Krause is stolid, undeterred, unshakably decent ol' Tom Hanks, national sweetheart. As such, Greyhound suffers from the retrospective sense of inevitability that often mars simplified WWII films.
Greyhound's version of Krause lacks the tormented grace of Hanks's remarkable performance in Clint Eastwood's Sully. This Krause also lacks the palpable bitterness of Hanks's character in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, as well as the slyness that the actor brought to both Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can and Bridge of Spies. In Greyhound, Hanks falls prey to the sentimentality for which his detractors have often unfairly maligned him, fetishizing Krause's selflessness in a manner that scans as ironically vain. As a screenwriter, Hanks throws in several writerly "bits" to show how wonderful Krause is, such as his ongoing refusal to eat during the Greyhound's war with U-boats. (A three-day battle on an empty stomach seems like a bad idea.) Meanwhile, the crew is reduced to anonymous faces who are tasked with spouting jargon, and they are, of course, unquestionably worshipful of their commander, as are the voices that are heard from the other vessels in the convoy.
Schneider lends this pabulum a few eerie visual touches, as in the slinky speed of the German torpedoes as they barely miss the Greyhound, but the film is largely devoid of poetry. The stand-offs between the vessels are competently staged, but after a while you may suspect that if you've seen one torpedo or depth charge detonation you've seen them all. With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play. In short, Greyhound takes a fascinating bit of WWII history and turns it into a blockbuster version of bathtub war.
Cast: Tom Hanks, Karl Glusman, Stephen Graham, Elisabeth Shue, Tom Brittney, Devin Druid, Rob Morgan, Lee Norris, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Maximilian Osinski, Matthew Zuk, Michael Benz Director: Aaron Schneider Screenwriter: Tom Hanks Distributor: Apple TV+ Running Time: 91 min Rating: 2020 Year: PG-13
Review: The Beach House's Moodiness Is Dissipated by Shaky Characterization
The character drama becomes afterthought as it's superseded by action.2
Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain, in which a satellite crashes to Earth with an alien virus on board, is an expression of Space Age anxieties, about how the zeal to reach the stars could have unintended and dangerous consequences. In Jeffrey A. Brown's The Beach House, something lethal instead rises from the depths of the ocean, a kind of "alien" invasion coming up from below rather than down from the cosmos, better reflecting the environmental anxieties of our present day. It still feels like comeuppance for human hubris, but this time in the form of intraterrestrial, not extraterrestrial, revenge.
The potentially extinction-level event is played on a chamber scale as domestic drama. Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros) are college sweethearts who go to his family's beach house during the off-season, in a seemingly abandoned town, to work on their personal problems. They're unexpectedly joined there by Mitch (Jake Weber) and Jane (Maryann Nagel), old friends of Randall's father, and the four agree to have dinner together. It's then that Emily, an aspiring astrobiologist, conveniently provides some context for what's about to happen, as she makes reverential conversation at the table about the mysterious depths of the sea and the sometimes extreme conditions in which new life can be created and thrive.
That night, while tripping balls on edibles, the couples look out and marvel at the sparkling, purple-tinged landscape outside their beach house. (The smell is less gloriously described as being like that of sewage and rotten eggs.) It's not a hallucination, though, because whatever ocean-formed particulate is turning the night sky into a psychedelic dreamscape and the air cloudy is also making the characters sick. There's some interesting and serendipitous overlap between the film's central horror and our present Covid-19 crisis, as the malady seems to be airborne, affecting the lungs and making the characters cough. It also affects older people more quickly than the young, with the milder symptoms including exhaustion.
Brown emphasizes the oddness of nature with an eye for detail focused in close-up on, say, the eerie gooeyness of oysters, and by vivifying the film's settings with bold colors: On the second night, the air glows mustard and red, recalling recent California wildfires. The ubiquitous haze also evokes John Carpenter's The Fog and Frank Darabont's The Mist, but other genre influences are also on display, from Cronenbergian body horror, as in the gory removal of a skin-burrowing worm, to zombie flicks, given the slowness of the hideously infected victims.
There's not a lot of exposition about the illness, as Brown's screenplay is primarily focused on Randall and Emily's fight to survive the mysterious onslaught. But you probably won't care if they do. The character drama becomes afterthought as it's superseded by action. The Beach House had convincingly argued that these two people shouldn't be together, that their relationship has long passed its prime. He mocks her plans for advanced study and calls her life goals bullshit, even though he has none himself; he suggests that they move into the beach house, to live in a state of permanent vacation, while he tries to figure out what life means. When she's high and getting sick and asking him for help, he dismisses her, lest it harsh his mellow. But instead of engineering his downfall, Midsommar-style, Emily does everything she can in the last third to help save him. It feels sudden, unearned, and unconvincing—enough to make you root for the monsters from the ocean floor.
Cast: Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, Maryann Nagel, Jake Weber Director: Jeffrey A. Brown Screenwriter: Jeffrey A. Brown Distributor: Shudder Running Time: 88 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: The Old Guard Is a Would-Be Franchise Starter with No New Moves
Smartly prioritizing the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.2
Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard is a modestly successful attempt to build a new fountain of franchise content out of a comic series with nearly limitless potential for spin-offs. The story kicks into motion with a team of four mercenaries with unique powers and an ancient bond setting off to rescue some kidnapped girls in South Sudan. Charlize Theron brings her customarily steely intensity to the role of the group's cynical, burnt-out leader, Andy, who isn't crazy about the idea since she doesn't trust Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the ex-C.I.A. agent who hired them. Given how long it turns out that Andy has been doing this sort of thing, you would imagine that her comrades would listen.
The mission turns out to be a set-up, and the would-be rescuers are wiped out in a barrage of bullets. Except not, because Andy and her team are pretty much unkillable. So as their enemies are slapping each other on the back and conveniently looking the other way, the mercenaries haul themselves to their feet, bodies healing almost instantaneously, bullets popping out of closing wounds. Payback is swift but interesting, because for reasons likely having to do with their being many centuries old—the youngest, Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), fought for Napoleon—the four quasi-immortals like to use swords in addition to automatic weaponry.
Written with glints of pulpy panache by Greg Rucka, the comic's originator, The Old Guard sets up a high-potential premise and proceeds to do not very much with it. Rucka's conceit is that this tiny group are among the very few people on Earth to have been born essentially immortal. This can be a good thing, but it can also prove problematic, as it means that they watch everybody they know age and die—a trope that was already somewhat worn by the time Anne Rice used it throughout her novels about ever-suffering vampires.
The plot of the film does relatively little after the showdown in South Sudan besides introduce a new member of the mercenary team, Nile (KiKi Layne), establish that Andy is tiring of the wandering warrior life, and show the group plotting revenge on Copley only to have that turn into a rescue mission that conveniently brings them all back together again. As part of the run-up to that mission, new recruit Nile, a Marine who goes AWOL from Afghanistan with Andy after her fellow soldiers see her seemingly fatal knife wound magically heal and treat her as some kind of witch, is introduced to life as a nearly invincible eternal warrior.
That rescue plot is simple to the point of being rote. Billionaire Big Pharma bro Merrick (Harry Melling), seemingly made up of equal parts Lex Luthor and Martin Shkreli, kidnaps two of Andy's team in the hope of harvesting their DNA for blockbuster anti-aging drugs. Unfortunately for the film, that takes two of its most personable characters temporarily out of action. Nicky (Luca Marinelli) and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) had their meet-cute while fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades and have been wildly in love ever since. After the two are captured and mocked by Merrick's homophobic gunsels, Joe delivers a pocket soliloquy on his poetic yearning: "His kiss still thrills me after a millennium." The moment's romantic burn is more poignant by being clipped to its bare-minimal length and presented with the casual confidence one would expect from a man old enough to remember Pope Urban II.
In other ways, however, The Old Guard fails to explore the effects of living such lengthy lives. Asked by Nile whether they are "good guys or bad guys," Booker answers that "it depends on the century." While Rucka's hard-boiled lines like that can help energize the narrative, it can also suggest a certain flippancy. When the film does deal with crushing weight of historical memory, it focuses primarily on Andy, who's been around so long that her name is shortened from Andromache the Scythian (suggesting she was once the Amazon warrior queen who fought in the battle of Troy). Except for a brief flashback illustrating the centuries-long escapades of Andy and Quynh (Veronica Ngo) fighting for vaguely defined positive principles (one involved rescuing women accused of witchcraft), we don't see much of their past. Similarly, except for Andy's increasing cynicism about the positive impact of their roaming the Earth like do-gooder ronin, they seem to exist largely in the present.
That present is largely taken up with combat, particularly as Booker, Andy, and Nile gear up to rescue Nicky and Joe. Prince-Bythewood handles these scenes with a degree of John Wick-esque flair: Why just shoot a Big Pharma hired gun once when you can shoot him, flip him over, and then stab and shoot him again for good measure? However tight, though, the action scenes' staging is unremarkable, with the exception of one climactic moment that's so well-choreographed from an emotional standpoint that the impossibility of a multiplex crowd hooting and clapping in response makes the film feel stifled by being limited to streaming.
Smartly prioritizing the bond of relationships over action in the way of the modern franchise series—doing so more organically than the Fast and the Furious series but missing the self-aware comedic patter of the Avengers films—The Old Guard is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts. That will likely not stop further iterations from finding ways to plug these characters and their like into any historical moment that has room in it for high-minded mercenaries with marketable skills and a few centuries to kill.
Cast: Charlize Theron, Matthias Schoenaerts, KiKi Layne, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Harry Melling, Veronica Ngo Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood Screenwriter: Greg Rucka Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 118 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief
The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.3
Makoto Nagahisa's We Are Little Zombies follows the exploits of a group of tweens who meet at the funeral home where their deceased parents are being cremated. But, surprisingly, Hitari (Keita Ninomiya), Takemura (Mondo Okumura), Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno), and Ikiko (Satoshi Mizuno) are united less by sorrow and more by cool indifference, as they see their parents' deaths as yet another tragedy in what they collectively agree is pretty much a "shit life." As the socially awkward Hitari claims matter-of-factly in voiceover, "Babies cry to signal they need help. Since no one can help me, there's no point in crying."
Through a series of extended flashbacks, Nagahisa relates the kids' troubled lives, never stooping to pitying or sentimentalizing them or their utter dismay with the adult world. The new friends' deeply internalized grief and hopelessness are filtered wildly through a hyperreal aesthetic lens that's indebted to all things pop, from psychedelia to role-playing games. It's Nagashisa's vibrant means of expressing the disconnect between the kids' troubled lives and their emotionless reactions to the various tragedies that have befallen them.
With its chiptunes-laden soundtrack and chapter-like form, which mimics the levels of a video game, We Are Little Zombies will draw understandable comparisons to Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. But it's Nagisa Oshima's Three Resurrected Drunkards that offers a more precise analogue to this film's provocative rhyming of stylistic zaniness and extreme youthful alienation. Oshima's anarchically playful farce stars the real-life members of the Folk Crusaders as a disaffected group of rebellious musicians, and when the kids of We Are Little Zombies decide to form a band to express themselves, they even perform a bossa nova version of the Folk Crusaders's theme song for the 1968 film. This and the many other cultural touchstones in We Are Little Zombies are seamlessly weaved by Nagahisa into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries, be they social media or a dizzying glut of pop-cultural creations.
Nagahisa's aesthetic mirrors his main characters' disconnect from reality, incorporating everything from stop-motion animation to pixelated scenes and overhead shots that replicate the stylings of 8-bit RPGs. At one point in We Are Little Zombies, an unsettling talk show appearance brings to mind what it would be like to have a bad acid trip on the set of an old MTV news program. Nagahisa accepts that the kids' over-engagement with screen-based technology is inextricably embedded in their experience of reality and ultimately celebrates the sense of camaraderie and belonging that the foursome finds in pop artifacts and detritus. This is particularly evident once their band, the Little Zombies of the film's title, starts to explore their antipathy toward and frustrations with a seemingly indifferent world.
The Little Zombies wield the same charming punk spirit as the film, and once instant fame reveals its viciously sharp teeth, Nagahisa doesn't hold back from peering into the nihilistic abyss that stands before the kids. As in Three Resurrected Drunkards, We Are Little Zombies's most despairing notes are couched in the distinctive language of pop culture. Hitari's attempts to grab essential items before running away from the home of a relative (Eriko Hatsune) are staged as a video game mission. The band's hit song—titled, of course, "We Are Little Zombies"—is an infectious, delightfully melodic banger all about their dispassionate existence. There's even a fake death scene of the kids that, as in Three Resurrected Drunkards, effectively restarts the film's narrative, allowing the characters to once again test their fate.
For all of this film's reliance on the stylistic ticks of video games, its narrative arc isn't limited to the typically linear journey embarked upon by many a gaming protagonist, and the foursome's path leads neither to enlightenment nor even happiness per se. What they've discovered in the months since their parents' deaths is a solidarity with one another, and rather than have them conquer their fears and anxieties, Nagahisa wisely acknowledges that their social disconnection will remain an ongoing struggle. He understands that by tapping into the unifying, rather than alienating, powers of pop culture, they're better equipped to deal with whatever additional hard knocks that the modern world will inevitably throw their way.
Cast: Keita Ninomiya, Satoshi Mizuno, Mondo Okumura, Sena Nakajima, Kuranosukie Sasaki, Youki Kudoh, Sosuke Ikematsu, Eriko Hatsune, Jun Murakami, Naomi Nishida Director: Makoto Nagahisa Screenwriter: Makoto Nagahisa Distributor: Oscilloscope Running Time: 120 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Palm Springs Puts a Fresh Spin on the Time-Loop Rom-Com
The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.3
The pitch for Palm Springs likely went: "Edge of Tomorrow meets Groundhog Day but with a cool Coachella rom-com vibe." All of those components are present and accounted for in Max Barbakow's film, about two people forced to endure the same day of a Palm Springs wedding over and over again after getting stuck in a time loop. But even though the concept might feel secondhand, the execution is confident, funny, and thoughtful.
Palm Springs starts without much of a hook, sidling into its story with the same lassitude as its protagonist, Nyles (Andy Samberg). First seen having desultory sex with his shallow and always peeved girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), Nyles spends the rest of the film's opening stretch wandering around the resort where guests are gathered for the wedding of Misty's friend, Tala (Camila Mendes), lazing around the pool and drinking a seemingly endless number of beers. "Oh yeah, Misty's boyfriend" is how most refer to him with casual annoyance, and then he gives a winning wedding speech that one doesn't expect from a plus-one.
The reason for why everything at the wedding seems so familiar to Nyles, and why that speech is so perfectly delivered, becomes clear after he entices the bride's sister and maid of honor, Sarah (Cristin Milioti), to follow him out to the desert for a make-out session. In quick succession, Nyles is shot with an arrow by a mysterious figure (J.K. Simmons), Sarah is accidentally sucked into the same glowing vortex that trapped Nyles in his time loop, and she wakes up on the morning of the not-so-great day that she just lived through.
Although Palm Springs eventually digs into the knottier philosophical quandaries of this highly elaborate meet-cute, it takes an appealingly blasé approach to providing answers to the scenario's curiosities. What initially led Nyles to the mysterious glowing cave in the desert? How has he maintained any semblance of sanity over what appears to be many years of this nightmare existence? How come certain people say "thank you" in Arabic?
This attitude of floating along the sea of life's mysteries without worry parallels Nyles's shrugging attitude about the abyss facing them. In response to Sarah's panicked queries about why they are living the same day on repeat, Nyles throws out a random collection of theories: "one of those infinite time loop situations….purgatory….a glitch in the simulation we're all in." His ideas seem half-baked at first. But as time passes, it becomes clear that Nyles has been trapped at the wedding so long that not only has he lost all concept of time or even who he was before it began, his lackadaisical approach to eternity seems more like wisdom.
Darkly cantankerous, Sarah takes a while to come around to that way of thinking. Her version of the Kübler-Ross model starts in anger and shifts to denial (testing the limits of their time-loop trap, she drives home to Texas, only to snap back to morning in Palm Springs when she finally dozes off) before pivoting to acceptance. This segment, where Nyles introduces Sarah to all the people and things he's found in the nooks and crannies of the world he's been able to explore in one waking day, plays like a quantum physics rom-com with a video-game-y sense of immortality. After learning the ropes from Nyles (death is no escape, so try to avoid the slow, agonizing deaths), Sarah happily takes part in his Sisyphean games of the drunk and unkillable, ranging from breaking into houses to stealing and crashing a plane.
As places to be trapped for all eternity, this idyll doesn't seem half bad at first. Barbakow's fast-paced take on the pleasingly daffy material helps, as does the balancing of Milioti's angry agita with Samberg's who-cares recklessness. Eventually the story moves out of endlessly looping stasis into the problem-solution phase, with Sarah deciding she can't waste away in Palm Springs for eternity. But while the question of whether or not they can escape via Sarah's device for bridging the multiverse takes over the narrative to some degree, Palm Springs is far more interesting when it ruminates lightly on which puzzle they're better off solving: pinning their hopes on escape or cracking another beer and figuring out how to be happy in purgatory. Palm Springs isn't daring by any stretch, but it smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle that's similar to Groundhog Day but without that film's reassuring belief that a day can be lived perfectly rather than simply endured.
Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Millioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mendez, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang Director: Max Barbakow Screenwriter: Andy Siara Distributor: Neon, Hulu Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Hamilton Comes Home, Still Holding Conflicting Truths at Once
The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage.3.5
The actual physical production of Hamilton has never been at the heart of the show's fandom. Its lyrics have been memorized en masse, Hamilton-inspired history courses have been created across grade levels, and its references have invaded the vernacular, but, for most, Hamilton's liveness has been inaccessible, whether due to geography or unaffordability. Hamilton the film, recorded over two Broadway performances in 2016 with most of the original Broadway cast, winningly celebrates the still-surprisingly rich density of Lin-Manuel Miranda's score and the show's much-heralded actors. But this new iteration is most stunning in its devotion to translating Hamilton's swirling, churning storytelling—the work of director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler—to the screen.
Most films of live theater feel partial and remote. There's usually a sense that with every move of the camera we're missing out on something happening elsewhere on stage. The autonomy of attending theater in person—the ability to choose what to focus on—is stripped away. But instead of delimiting what we see of Hamilton, this film opens up our options. Even when the camera (one of many installed around, behind, and above the stage) homes in on a lone singer, the shots tend to frame the soloists in a larger context: We can watch Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), but we can also track the characters behind him or on the walkways above him. Every shot is rife with detail and movement: the rowers escorting Alexander Hamilton's (Miranda) body to shore, Maria Reynolds (Jasmine Cephas Jones) hovering beneath a stairway as Hamilton confesses his infidelities to Burr, ensemble members dancing in the shadows of David Korins's imposing set. There's no space to wonder what might be happening beyond the camera's gaze.
Off-setting the cast album's appropriate spotlight on the show's stars, the film, also directed by Kail, constantly centers the ensemble, even when they're not singing, as they enact battles and balls or symbolically fly letters back and forth between Hamilton and Burr. Audiences who mainly know the show's music may be surprised by how often the entire cast is on stage, and even those who've seen Hamilton live on stage will be delighted by the highlighted, quirky individuality of each ensemble member's often-silent storytelling.
Kail shows impressive restraint, withholding aerial views and shots from aboard the spinning turntables at the center of the stage until they can be most potent. The film also convincingly offers Hamilton's design as a stunning work of visual art, showcasing Howell Binkley's lighting—the sharp yellows as the Schuyler Sisters take the town and the slowly warming blues as Hamilton seeks his wife's forgiveness—just as thoughtfully as it does the performances.
And when the cameras do go in for a close-up, they shade lyrics we may know by heart with new meaning. In "Wait for It," Burr's paean to practicing patience rather than impulsiveness, Odom (who won a Tony for the role) clenches his eyes shut as he sings, "I am inimitable, I am an original," tensing as if battling to convince himself that his passivity is a sign of strength and not cowardice. When Eliza Hamilton (Philippa Soo) glances upward and away from her ever-ascendant husband as she asks him, "If I could grant you peace of mind, would that be enough?," it's suddenly crystal clear that she's wondering whether taking care of Alexander would be enough for herself, not for him, her searching eyes foreshadowing her eventual self-reliance. And there's an icky intimacy unachievable in person when Jonathan Groff's mad King George literally foams at the mouth in response to the ingratitude of his colonies.
The production's less understated performances, like Daveed Diggs's show-stealing turn (also Tony-winning) in the dual roles of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and Renée Elise Goldsberry's fiery embodiment (yes, also Tony-winning) of the shrewd, self-sacrificing Angelica Schuyler Church, benefit, too, from the way that the film's pacing latches onto Miranda's propulsive writing. In Jefferson's return home, "What'd I Miss," the camera angles change swiftly as if to keep up with Diggs's buoyancy.
Despite Christopher Jackson's warm and gorgeous-voiced performance, George Washington remains Hamilton's central sticking point. While Jefferson receives a dressing down from Hamilton for practicing slavery, Washington, who once enslaved over 200 people at one time at Mount Vernon, shows up in Hamilton as a spotless hero who might as well be king if he wasn't so noble as to step down. There's a tricky tension at Hamilton's core: Casting performers of color as white founding "heroes" allows the master narrative to be reclaimed, but it's still a master narrative. For audiences familiar with the facts, the casting of black actors as slave owners (not just Jefferson) is an unstated, powerful act of artistic resistance against the truths of the nation's founding. But for those learning their history from Hamilton, especially young audiences, they will still believe in Washington's moral purity, even if they walk away picturing the first president as Christopher Jackson.
But Hamilton is complex and monumental enough of a work to hold conflicting truths at once. In attempting to recraft our understanding of America's founding, it may fall short. In forcibly transforming the expectations for who can tell what stories on which stages, Hamilton has been a game-changer. And as a feat of musical theater high-wire acts, Miranda's dexterity in navigating decades of historical detail while weaving his characters' personal and political paths tightly together is matched only by his own ingenuity as a composer and lyricist of songs that showcase his characters' brilliance without distractingly drawing attention to his own.
Dynamized by its narrative-reclaiming, race-conscious casting and hip-hop score, and built around timeline-bending reminders that America may be perpetually in the "battle for our nation's very soul," Hamilton, of course, also lends itself particularly easily to 2020 connections. But the greater gift is that Hamilton will swivel from untouchability as Broadway's most elusive, priciest ticket to mass accessibility at a moment of keen awareness that, to paraphrase George Washington, history has its eyes on us. The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage. That we are sharing Hamilton here and now offers as much hope as Hamilton itself.
Cast: Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, Phillipa Soo Director: Thomas Kail Screenwriter: Ron Chernow, Lin-Manuel Miranda Distributor: Disney+ Running Time: 160 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
Review: In Family Romance, LLC, Reality and Fantasy Affectingly Collide
Throughout, it's as though Werner Herzog were more witness than author, simply registering Japan being Japan.3
Werner Herzog's Family Romance, LLC presents Japan as a place where the technological follies of modernity that many see as embryonic in the West are allowed to blossom unabashedly. The Orientalism inherent to this myth, that of Japan as a high-tech dystopia where human alienation reaches its pathetic zenith, is somewhat masked here by the film's style, which inhabits that strangely pleasurable cusp between fact and fiction. We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it's as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.
The film is centered around Ishii Yuichi, playing a version of himself, who owns a business that rents out human beings to act like paparazzi, family members, lovers, or bearers of good (albeit fake) news. One of his clients, for example, is a woman who wants to relive the moment when she won the lottery. We follow Ishii as he travels to his business calls, which may consist of going to a funeral home that offers coffin rentals by the hour for people to test out, or to a hotel where the clerks behind the helpdesk and the fish in the aquarium are robots.
The camera, otherwise, follows Ishii's encounters with his 12-year-old "daughter," Mahiro (Mahiro). The girl's mother, Miki (Miki Fujimaki), has enlisted Ishii to play Mahiro's missing father, who abandoned her when she was two, and make it seem as if he's suddenly resurfaced. The film's most interesting moments don't arise from its largely obvious critiques of simulation, but from the human relationship between Ishii and Mahiro. In the end, the film's smartest trick is getting the audience to genuinely feel for this young girl on screen, acting for us, all while scoffing at Ishii's clients for scripting their own emotional experiences.
We know the relationship between Mahiro and Ishii to be false on multiple levels. They may not be professional actors, but they are very much acting, and their interactions nonetheless tap into something quite authentic and emotional. Although their kinship is an act of make-believe, it's driven by similar malaises that plague "real" father-daughter relationships. Mahiro, who doesn't meet Ishii until she's a pre-teen and is presumably unaware that it's all just an act, struggles to articulate feelings that overwhelm her. Asking for a hug from Ishii is a Herculean task for her. But granting her the hug is also a Herculean task for Ishii, who ultimately confesses to wondering whether his real family, too, has been paid by someone else to raise him. Must a father's hug be so clinical even when he's getting paid to do it?
Such moments as that awkward father-daughter hug, a scene where Mahiro gives Ishii an origami animal that she made for him ("It's delicate, so be careful," she says), and another where she confesses that she likes a boy all point to the ways in which feeling slips out of even the most perfectly scripted protocols. That's a relief for the kind of society that Family Romance, LLC aims to critique, one where tidy transactions are meant to neuter the messy unpredictability of human interactions but fail. Emotion slips out despite diligent attempts to master it, forcing even those who stand to gain the most from hyper-controlled environments to eventually face the shakiness of their own ground. Ishii, for instance, is forced to reconsider his business model when Mahiro's demand for love starts to affect him. Ishii's fear that he may also have been swindled by actors posing as parents tells us that authors are subjects, too, and that the equation between reality and fantasy is never quite settled.
Cast: Ishii Yuichi, Mahiro, Miki Fujimaki, Umetani Hideyasu, Shun Ishigaki Director: Werner Herzog Screenwriter: Werner Herzog Distributor: MUBI Running Time: 89 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Old Guard Is a Would-Be Franchise Starter with No New Moves
Review: On Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths Cloak Heartbreak in Bright Pop Hooks
Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief
Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets Is an Elegiac Mosaic of Disillusionment
Review: Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire on Criterion Blu-ray
Review: Peacock's The Capture Wears Its Topicality Impersonally on Its Sleeve
Review: Superhot: Mind Control Delete Takes Killer Aim at Gamer Expectations
Two Classic (and Remastered) Paul Bartel Comedies Now on Kino Lorber Blu-ray
Review: Pop Smoke's Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon Is a Half-Baked Epitaph
Review: Iron Man VR Handles Great and Digs Deep into a Hero's Roots
- Film6 days ago
Review: The Old Guard Is a Would-Be Franchise Starter with No New Moves
- Music6 days ago
Review: On Jump Rope Gazers, the Beths Cloak Heartbreak in Bright Pop Hooks
- Film7 days ago
Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief
- Film2 days ago
Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets Is an Elegiac Mosaic of Disillusionment


text:
Top Pirate Party Member Has DMCA Takedown Notices Issued In Her Name
from the thinking-it-through dept
Julia Schramm is one of the rising stars of the German Pirate Party: in April, when she was just 27 years old, she was elected to the national party's executive committee. No surprise, then, that she is against copyright: in a podcast she described intellectual property as "disgusting" (original in German.) More surprising is that, despite this, she signed a contract with Knaus-Verlag, part of the publishing giant Random House group, to write a book. Perhaps the $130,000 advance had something to do with it.
The book is called "Click me: confessions of an Internet exhibitionist", and sells for around $22 ($18 for the Kindle version), which seems a bit pricey for just 208 pages. That wouldn't matter if the contents were of particularly high quality. Alas, it seems that many feel they are not: at the time of writing, the book has 10 one-star reviews on Amazon.de, some of which are pretty damning -- "it's really a shame about the trees that were cut down for this book" -- just two five stars, and one three stars. The German magazine Der Spiegel called the book "a disaster."
Schramm can probably live with the reviews (after all, she still has that $130,000 advance.) What's slightly more problematic for her career as one of the top Pirates is the fact that just one day after the book appeared, her publisher sent a takedown request to a site that was hosting a, er, pirate copy -- and in her name:
"This file is no longer available due to a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by Julia Schramm Autorin der Verlagsgruppe Random House."
Given her background and stated views, some might say that's pretty, well, disgusting....
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: click me, copyright, dmca, germany, julia schramm, pirate party
Companies: random house


text:
Model X Reservation Tally
Model X Reservation Tally
mrkplatt's reservation number is 24 further on the next day, which brings the figure to 20-25 per day, which is bound to pick up as soon as some production version vehicles hit the stores. I think it is possible for this to happen before signature deliveries, although they most likely be of limited production for certain key markets, and not for sale until after all signature deliveries have been completed and full scale production has commenced.
@BrianH your original estimate was pretty close, all things considered.
Still amazed that Tesla can get 10,000 cash deposit reservations on a car you can't yet see the production design or drive and deliveries are still months away.
I ordered awhile ago but still find this almost unheard of in automotive history.
I am hoping that after the annual meeting the order configuration page will go live for Sigs at least. You can't blame a guy for wistful thinking.
X Res #9710 May 5 to pair with my P85
Norway, model X Signature #273. Is this a national number or a world wide number?
Gratulere Svein.
My number is #34 ordered in 2012, and i think this is an european number, but i cant say for sure.
signatur x
Definitely not a world wide number. I am in the U.S. and have Sig 631 and reserved it months ago. Also the U.S. is over 1,200 sigs and is no longer taking signature reservations.
Might be a national number, might be European.
#320 Model X Signature, Finland
Can't wait! Res #9733
New York
Since my reservation April 30, there has been ~160 US reservations. That is an average of ~32 reservations/day compared to ~26 reservations per day in April!!!!!!! Hmmmmm.....could this be the start of a real ramp up in daily reservations? I think so. Those who have been waiting better get off the fence or their wait time is going to increase significantly with every passing month.
Ya, that's what happened with the MS, but it was quite lumpy for the first year or so. Plateaued at various levels between 40-70/day for various stretches.
@Sevin: Your SiG number is part of the European Sig Tally. US Sig reservations were closed a month or so ago at just over 1,200.
I guess I got in under the wire with #1256 Sig.
I just got European reservation #422 Sig. I have been informed there will be 500 total in Europe (which includes Norway of course).
@ageorge97 - When did you reserve your sig?
Model X reservation #9779, placed May 8th. That looks like 155 reservations from 5/2 to 5/8.
Not going to hold my breath on this one; figure I'll see it when I see it (late 2015?). Of course, anticipating a MS delivery in late June certainly makes the wait more palatable.
I am somewhere in the 9,500 range and agree, I would consider a Fall/Winter 2015 delivery a huge success.
Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if it slipped to early 2016.
#9889 just now, May 12th.
Model X, seq. nr. 1973, Norway.
Not sure how many sigs in Canada, but about 500 combined and US 9900 P and 1200 S. Then add close to 2000 P and 450 S in the EU. Total 14050 (Rough Estimate). Who knows how many Chinese reservations there may already be!
10009. Almost got 10,000
10,010. Seems like a lucky number.
We passed 10,000 US orders a week ago. Any updates on new orders out there.
I was 10,053 yesterday morning. It seems to have slowed down slightly from the past couple weeks.
Got 10,084 today.
Just reserved. 10,085.
10087 last night
10,123. This will make us a double Tesla family! So excited.
Model X Signature #341 since today (germany)
Only few Signatures left for the EU....
fischca: Congratulations! You need to help more of your countrymen
catch the Tesla Grin bug. TM needs Germany, especially once it is no longer supply constrained.
@AIMc: Thanks! The germans need a little more time to understand the turning point of fossil energy, but they will...
In my home: Model S P85 since 11/2013 and Opel Ampera (=Volt) since 6/2012, both charging from solar panels on the roof of our home (plus LiIon-Battery in cellar and combined-heat/power unit for winter)
@fischca, I'm surprised to hear that Germany "needs more time to understand the turning point of fossil energy". From North America, it seems that Germany is at the forefront of green energy, pushing forward wind turbines and solar panels. I suspect that Germany is ahead of us here in North America at understanding the need to switch to sustainable energy.
Short offtopic, sorry...
We have a lot of solar arrays on private and commercial buildings, a lot of wind energy. But the german car companys, esp. Volkswagen/Audi, are pure ICE companys => No EV support from government and no support from german automobil press => only small numbers of EV sells in germany until today. But we are learning, BMW released the i3 a few months ago. And Tesla Model s are now showing on the streets => A lot head turning every day :-)
Very interested to hear the German perspective. How will you feel about 120-135 mph speed limit on long trips?
Even in ICE cars, such speeds are punctuated by frequent refuelling, up to 10+ gal/hr. And reputedly are permitted or possible on fewer and fewer roadways.
Sorry for offtopic again: The unlimited speed on the autobahn costs a lot of fossil energy, it is really dangerous for drivers and passengers and it is not worthing for time saving on long trips. If you compare driving on interstates in the US with driving on the autobahn you will notice a big difference: aggressive and hectical driving on the autobahn, smooth driving on the interstate. The unlimited speed makes no sense.
The best decision would be a speed limit at 75 or 85 mph. But it is an emotional, political thing: A politician with an agenda for a speed limit will loose the next election.... And everybody knows: It would be a good decision.
Maybe it is the same emotional problem with the legal guns in private homes in the US.
Just got in line for Tesla #2:
US - 10,323 - 01 Jun 14
Congrats omar!
There's one difference, fischa. Less gun control → Less crime (including murder). More gun control → More crime (including murder).
Really Brian?
Can you somehow prove what you're saying?
I thought the US had the most inmates per xxxx inhabitants?
About the speedlimit (or lack thereoff) on highways (the autobahn), I think speedlimits should be dynamic. There's no point in limiting someone's speed when nobody else is on the road. Measure the amount of vehicles and change the speed based on how many vehicles and how fast they're driving. The danger isn't necessarily in high speeds, it's mostly in differences in speed.
Brian H: More People You Shoot → Fewer People to Shoot at You → Fewer People to Target with Your Next Shot...
It's such a vicious cycle.
Full of diminishing returns.
If only people wouldn't get shot when you shoot at them.
Or, if people would carry guns all the time, because everyone knows that having a gun on you automatically protects you from getting shot -- it makes you bullet proof. The NRA said so -- on the internet. It must be true!
Unsafe at Any Slowness...
Actually, the majority of fatal traffic accidents happen on surface streets at speeds of less than 40 MPH, and usually within two miles of one's home. Despite the longtime marketing ploy that '55 Saves Lives', it was proven two decades ago that driving at a higher speed on US Highways is safer overall. Every state that raised their speed limits incrementally (60, 65, 70, 75...), despite warnings from EPA & NHTSA that it would adversely affect their Federal Highway funding allowance, saw lower incidences of traffic accidents overall, and a severe drop in fatal accidents over time. Eventually, the NHTSA verified the data and moved for the 55 MPH national speed limit to be voided.
The majority of traffic accidents are caused by Driver error, such as:
Driving during inclimate weather conditions.
Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.
Driving under emotional distress, such as anger or depression.
It has nothing to do with speed whatsoever. Just like with guns... The danger of automotive transport is about personal responsibility, or the absence of it.
Artificially low speed limits are more fatal than those that allow people to drive at a reasonable rate. People forget (or don't know?) that America's highway system was originally dubbed the 'SUPERHIGHWAY'. They were designed to be 'safe' at speeds up to 90 MPH, in cars that had rear drum brakes and bias ply tires as the height of safety technology. That was before the advent of safety glass, disc brakes, crumple zones, ABS, seat belts, air bags... Police officers know full well the roads are safe at higher speeds, because they drive that way all the time, even when off duty.
@Red Sage, Whenever I drove on the Autobahn I could not get anything else done. At those speeds I was forced to keep both hands on the wheel and pay 110% attention. When Porsche's came up behind me like I was standing still it required full concentration just to make safe lane changes and get out of the way.
In America, at the Jimmy Carter 55 max speed, it was so much better. I could drink my coffe, eat a sandwich and read a book while occasionally glancing at the road to see if anything needed my attention then back to more productive things.
Not sure what that had to do with X orders Oh well. Gotta do something while we kill time waiting to configure and finalize our X orders.
I wonder why insane nut jobs in America always choose to go out in a blaze of glory killing unarmed people in GUN FREE ZONES. I have never heard of a mass shooting in a gun store. You would think with that many guns in one place they would happen on a daily basis.
Roamer: LOL! Where was I? Oh, 'War and Peace', chapter 12, page 742... ;-)
I can agree only that unlimited speed cost us more fossile fuels, but that's all. I don't know how often you drive on autobahn, but for us it is really nice to have that option... And, you know, not all people on autobahn drive 200 km/h and not all parts are limitless...
That is nice about it, you don't have to drive fast if you don't want to, just keep it nice and slow in the right line at about 100-130 km/h if you want.
And regarding the time saves... well, you don't know what you are talking about...
@Jolinar: you can be sure, I know what I am talking about: Driving almost every day on german autobahn. Just try to drive maximum 85 mph on a working day and you will not loose more the a few minutes on your trip => The typical speed is not even higher because of crowded lanes. But the aggressive speeding of a few people makes it dangerous and hectical all the time. It is not the end of the world to loose this last silly freedom on german autobahn and I hope will see the speed limit in the future.
Did you ever a longer trip in the US? I did it a few times and it was a much safer and nicer way to travel. And the wasting of fossil energy is not the little problem you mentioned. It is the central point of Tesla Motors philosophy and the community here...
The falcon doors preclude an eye-aimed turret on top.
1) reservation number: 10,348/ date received: June 2, 2014
2) region: Northern California
3) type: General Production.
I'm excited. This is really something to look forward too.
@Jolinar and Fischca,
In the US Southwest there are many routes that would be perfect for no posted speed driving. Years ago the state of Nevada had no posted speed limit outside city boundaries. But at the same time every car was forced to drive completly thru town at slow speed so you would stop at the local casino. Then back on the road at high speed to the next town.
Across the Arizona deserts higher speed would work just fine. But then people would need to buy better cars and spend more for better tires.
I thought this forum post was for a tally
seems like some have gotten off topic.
@Lubdubdoc, Going off topic to remind everyone we are off topic, is that then off topic.