Deja Vu, Thy Name is Eleventh Hour

Somewhere in the ether I have bits and drabs of a post about the British series Eleventh Hour (starring Patrick Stewart) which I got from Netflix this last Summer. I remember thinking that it was more a series of one-hour movie specials than a series, kind of like one of the Miss Marple movies on PBS (where she goes somewhere different each mystery, sees entirely different people, and the friends she talks about are disjoint from the friends mentioned in other movies). I thought some of the Eleventh Hour stories were vaguely interesting, but Patrick Stewart was not especially believable as top of the game at most major sciences. (Scientists, in my experience, tend to get stentorian as their grasp on the cusp of discovery laxes.) Some of the stories were blatantly offensive, especially the first one about human cloning.

Now, fast forward out of flashback, Eleventh Hour was remade for American audiences and the premiere episode aired this week. It’s starring Rufus Sewell, famed in song and dance as being eye candy to a lot of my female friends of a certain age. He was more believable as the scientist because his knowledge was more of the “You would need X years of specialization to do this, so it cannot be this suspect.” type. Plus he doesn’t bring that stage actors’ tendency to play to the rafters.

However, the show was almost word for word the exact same script as the first episode of the British version. They changed the main character’s name from Ian to Jacob— but surprisingly he hasn’t gone all Biblical yet (that’s the only reason I can think of to make the change, to make his character more Christian seeming.) And there was a lot less dialogue and interplay between supporting characters. But they preserved all the diatribe about how cloning humans is an abomination before God but cloning sheep is not. And they preserved all the plot about how the surrogate mother is willing to risk her life so her son is not taken away from her, even though he would undoubtedly be better off with adoptive parents. (She’s 19 in the show, her son is 4, she doesn’t have parents in the picture, you know she has zero prospects.)

I found it was hard to sit through a show I’d already seen. Deja Vu the whole way through. The second problem is that I really didn’t understand why the man who lost his son would spend a billion dollars trying to have him cloned. Perhaps because my expenditures are all the other way, toward preventing pregnancy, I find myself completely flummoxed by the concept. Why on Earth would someone want a child enough to waste a billion dollars cloning it? Wouldn’t the world be better off if the rich dude had spent the money funding a private orphanage to creche 10,000 unwanted babies? Or traditionally adopting 10 and actually being their dad?

It’s a bizarre story to have started a show with unless you wanted to get your show cancelled.

Wrist Cutters: A Love Story

Wristcutters: A Love Story
a comedic movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +2 (because my expectations were artificially lowered)
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Sometimes a movie I was not sure I wanted to see works its way up in the queue. This was one of those, because really, who wants to watch a movie about suicidal teens? But it was kind of cute, kind of funny, and kind of epic (on a small scale). I liked the resolution to the story. I even liked the cinematography, despite the atmospheric washout. The subtitles did not suck hugely. Pretty much there wasn’t anything wrong with this movie.

It was well done, it was what it promises to be (a love story about suicidal teenagers).

And I still cannot believe I watched it.

Given a choice, I prefer this a lot more than I did Juno, but they’re kind of the same premise where someone young and powerless screws up hugely and attempts to deal with it. Wristcutters is better than Juno in a few ways, there aren’t logistical faults like wondering how someone without a job can afford a case of tictacs. There are some bizarre logistical faults in this, but they’re intentional, plot-relevant, and funny— for example, the car they take their road trip through the world of the “offed” has a bermuda triangle kind of thing under the passenger seat, so things are lost forever if the passenger drops them. The main character in this has a job, he works at Kamikaze Pizza. I thought that was hilarious.

The story in Wristcutters was tight. The writing was solid. That’s why I found some parts of it funny. If something is slapped together, I am never sure if it was supposed to be funny.

If I were younger, I think I might have enjoyed this more than I did.

Wolf’s Blood

I finished the last book in Jane Lindskold’s wolf girl series. This is definitely an epic fantasy series and I enjoyed all the books. The final book in the series was a fairly satisfying conclusion to the series overall.

My favorite is still the first book, because of the potential. But the plot arc in the final book was better than any of the others. The series suffers a lot from its epic scale and fantasy tropes being super-imposed. The first book reminded me of that first Jacqueline Carey book, where the first part was really interesting when we met the characters, but then there was this random half a book crammed in the middle where they go off to have a war. I didn’t bother reading any of the other Carey books because I hated her main character.

Lindskold’s main character is my favorite character in the series; clearly the books should have been centered around her. That is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself. Usually I feel like a series should be orbiting someone else. Harry Potter was the loser doofus in that whole series and he’s pretty much the same guy at the end. He goes through 7 books to be mostly unchanged. There’s an authorial rule of thumb that says the story belongs to the character who changes the most. So Rowling really fell down on that aspect. Then there is Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series. (She really limited herself with that name, eh? Kind of like Sabrina the Teenage Witch when Sabrina was 24.) I loathe Anita. I think honestly if the series was set around anyone else I would like it better. Anita doesn’t really change either, she’s come up in the world through no efforts of her own (just coattail politics) but she’s still got the same hangups and quirks she started with, so I don’t know why the books are about her.

Lindskold’s Firekeeper is an honorable woman who makes her way in 5 different human societies after having been raised by wolves. She’s strong, but she got that way from chasing down food to eat, not because of some otherworldly gift. She gets along with people even when she doesn’t understand them because she is able to see how her life-rules can be applied and adapted for the situation. Other people see her as taking the hard way to live by her own rules even when no one would know if she cheated, so she gets respect for her honor and for her hard-won abilities. Throughout the series, Firekeeper gets stronger, but she’s grown from being 8 or 10 years old to being 22, so we would expect some physical improvements.

I really enjoyed reading her story. The half a book of random war stuff that kept appearing in each book was extremely annoying, but many fantasy novelists cannot let go of that “one big crisis” plot arc. I think all the books are worth reading, but the series did add weight to that argument that plot really sucks if you’re a character in a book. And the concluding volume resolved most of the outstanding issues with characters without making the final chapter feel like a clip show.

High Society

High Society
a musical movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 2/10
Meets Expectations: -4
Apparent Rating: 0/10

Guh. My complaints about Philadelphia Story and its bizarre need to refer to the Hepburn woman as “Red” even though the movie was black and white generated a recommendation for High Society, which is a musical remake.

There are a number of really crushingly bad things about this movie. First, the subtitles do not include any of the musical lyrics even though roughly half the conversation in the story is sung. Second, the music in this is the dreaded jazz type that sounds like the musicians are making shit up as they go along and the lyricist thinks Dr Seuss is a god among poets… every song in this movie is pure doggerel with cacaphony. Third, they managed to rip the soul of the story out of it to the point where no one cares if the stick woman marries the stick man and everyone just wishes the house would get firebombed so we could go watch something else.

This managed to make the characters of the story completely unsympathetic. I wasn’t rooting for things to work out “the way they should”. If we had had to choose, this is the movie that should have been made in black and white, preferably before movies were “talkies”, and the previous version should have been shot in Technicolor.

The movie opens with Louis Armstrong sitting in the back of a bus. That’s a pretty good metaphor for the whole thing.

If you have not seen Philadelphia Story, I would recommend you see that instead. Even though it’s in black and white. That was the movie that convinced me classic movies could be classics for a reason. The story is excellent, but High Society seems to have lost that.

Rating is minus infinity for ruining a good story.

Miss Potter

Miss Potter
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 8/10

Overall, I enjoyed Miss Potter. It is one of those docudrama movies where it is supposed to be historical and based on a real person’s life, but I don’t have any clue how much of it was true. I enjoyed all the costumes but I think what I liked about this was how Beatrix Potter toed the line of convention and her parents’ desires while carving out a life and freedoms for herself.

The movie says it has animation in it. The animation is light-handed and well integrated.

One of the most impressive things about this as a story is that it was easy to see how Miss Potter ended up where she did. Each step of her life’s journey makes sense. She draws because it pleases her to take after her father. She meets with publishers and expects the rounds of rejection. When one finally takes on her book, she is surprised and shrewd about it, but agrees. When she begins seeing her publisher, it is clear why because we have seen their courting in the guise of official business. In the end when she buys the farm, it feels like coming home, even to the viewer. Each and every step is clear and is the kind of decision the viewer would make in that situation.

I felt there could have been more detail in a number of areas of the story, but the plot pulls it along.

This was a rare case where a real person’s story was as interesting as one purely imagined by the author.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer
a fantasy-action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1/-1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Overall, this movie was good. Considering the dearth of non-fluffy source material and the quality of the underpinnings, the movie was excellent.

There are a lot of things in this movie that were impressive and very few failures if you have accepted the general premise. The general premise is ludicrous, of course, and the beginning of the movie does nothing to submerge a skeptical adult’s psyche in the fantasy world.

That lack of solid beginning would be my main complaint. It took me probably 25-30 minutes to overcome the first scene. The movie is about fanasty car racing, the kind of racing where cars can jump into the air and do loop-the-loops and jumps and dives on tracks that rival modern-day roller coasters. So why did they start with a lumpy looking kid filling out a multiple choice test form? It did nothing for setting the stage and convinced me that the kid was some sort of defective jerk whose sole purpose on the Earth is to keep other children from learning and succeeding in life. I was shocked that was the same character from the cartoon, where Speed is presented as some sort of brilliant prodigy and an upstanding man.

This school stuff continued a lot longer than it should have too, because we had to know that Trixie (who flew a helicopter in the cartoons and acted as Speed’s spotter for rally races) had been with Speed from almost the beginning. Mostly it seemed like an egregious pandering, “If there are kids in the movie, kids will love it!”

Then the movie starts and the whole thing is a ride as wild as the track.

The main actor, Emile Hirsch also starred in Into the Wild and he definitely has a real career ahead of him. I’m not sure I would have noticed his performance as a performance if I hadn’t seen Into the Wild before Speed Racer, but he brought real acting chops to the part. A lot of the movie was CGI, so they must have shot it in a soundstage against a green-screen, but even knowing that intellectually, I thought it looked as real as it could have. Speed really looks like he’s driving and Hirsch brings it home.

John Goodman does an excellent job as Pops Racer, though too many points he went over-the-top to the cartoony style of the original. In a very strange way, Pops Racer looked like Fred Flintstone, with that sense of “I’m an actor playing a ridiculous role and you shouldn’t take me seriously.” If it had been played straight, there should have been more focus on Pops, with the constant tongue-in-cheek attitude, I’m glad they minimized it. Spritle and Chim Chim were ridiculous sops to the original cartoon and really could have been omitted in my opinion. The girl playing adult-Trixie was not good (her counterpart during the childhood/schoolyard scenes was better.) Whoever she is, she’s a lousy actress. Her part had real solid meat in it and she couldn’t sell it. It’s the inverse of Natalie Portman in Star Wars where Portman was a decent actress and had nothing to demonstrate that with. Trixie was a real role played by someone who is good at standing around looking pretty but nothing more. Susan Sarandon was good at the acting but she didn’t jive with the rest of the look— she looked ancient. The main villain, Royston was good but way too obvious. It looked like he’d been told to camp it up.

The other racers managed to make themselves caricatures. Rex and Racer X did not get much screen time and were played by different actors. No opinion. Taejo was not as bad, there was a lot more to his part and he managed it, but he was still a cartoon.

The car modellers and costumers and CGI people were brilliant in this. I wish the movie had been edited so there were whole scenes of racing without flashbacks or cutaways and I’m not one for watching competitions.

Someone saved this movie from being campy, someone said, “Let’s play this straight and let the audience find the humor themselves.” And that made it a really fine piece of entertainment whenever that shone through. I wish it had been done that way throughout with intent. Whenever there was campy humor and “We know you’re not taking us seriously!” it was disasterous.

It could have been better if they’d been making the movie for real throughout. They had the actors and the script and the CGI and the models and the special effects. But a lot of people brought that “This is humor, I don’t have to be professional.” attitude to the movie. It is, at its heart, a fantasy. For all the action, for all the mechanics, the story is one about a magician who goes on an epic quest to save his family. And you cannot have a successful fantasy without convincing the audience to suspend disbelief. But humor requires bringing external knowledge to the experience and is contrary to suspending disbelief. Humor pulls people out of the immersive experience. And Speed Racer, despite succeeding on many levels, failed at providing an immersion for me.

It could have been an 8 or even 9 out of 10 for me, with the story they had and the material/resources. I liked it, 6/10 or so, but I resent that quarter/third of a movie experience I didn’t get. Obviously most people don’t see turning in merely good work as a failure. I see this movie as taking a great idea and wasting half of it on this product. If they had taken the great idea and really rolled with it, this could have been a phenomenal experience. +1 for some great acting, -1 for wasting an idea.

To Every Season, Turn Turn Turn (the channel)

This has been a season for heavy television watching. The summer mini-season from cable networks kicked in right before the fall season from broadcast started. I have to say that I love the summer mini-season idea. There was so much stuff, especially with the marathon of Tru Calling, that I never even noticed the olympics were on, much less the political conventions.

I loathe the Olympics. We’ll get that out of the way right now. But it doesn’t hold a candle to my rage about the political conventions. We knew who the nominees were before each convention started. It’s not like there were going to be any surprises. It wasn’t “news”. They could have put the transcripts out on the web in advance so people could read them and someone could sum up. The whole thing would have taken about 15 minutes per party. Instead everything was disrupted for weeks while people read their canned patter of lies to the world. It’s a waste of time. And I don’t mind if people want to have pep rallies to get supporters jazzed up, but I really mind that it pre-empts stuff I want to see—- like the actual news.

Speaking of news, the MSNBC scheduling department really sucks. Constantly they’ve changed their timeslots around for the new Rachel Maddow Show and not bothered to tell anyone about it. So I get random crap instead of the show I was expecting. If someone has a recommendation for non-political news from a liberal slant, I could really go for that. I like Countdown because it’s actually talking about stuff I don’t hear about otherwise—- though they’ve been slow lately, scooped by The Daily Show for most major stories. But the sheer volume of fluff makes me crazy. I hate that liberal news must be tempered by humor lest someone take it as criticism of the king— if the news media must play the court jester, then it’s not news.

Burn Notice was my favorite show of last season. This year, I’ve been bored. It seems like Michael is spinning his wheels and making no progress toward finding out who burned him. So we see him interacting with his mother and she’s horrible enough to justify ignoring. We see him taking yet another case just like the previous ones. The caliber of the writing has really faltered. The show is still good, but it lacks the desperation to get the contract renewed quality that it used to have.

I watched the season finale of In Plain Sight, (yeah, I’m a little slow) but was told the rest of the episodes weren’t like that. If they were all like that last 2-parter, eh, it’s okay.

The new series of Bones has been strange with all the Zack replacements and the season opener in London.

I enjoy Eureka, but I wish they would go back to the emphasis on smart people that the show started with. Lately it’s been a lot too much normalcy. But the huge problem is that the plots are not just telegraphed or foreshadowed, the writers made a metaphorical video and served it up canned so everything that happens is dead-obvious and feels almost plagiarized. About 5 minutes into an episode, I know what’s going to happen, that the “unblamable villain” will be that guy we’ve never seen before (they don’t wear red shirts, but they might as well).

((I’m still kind of appalled that they let a man (the character Sheriff Carter) have custody of his child-of-statutory-rape (seriously, the character bios originally showed that Carter could not have been more than 16.5 when his daughter was conceived.) After a while, someone else must have noticed because the ages were not both incremented for the next season. It’s really hard to take him seriously as a parent because he says he expects his daughter to take after him and be an upstanding citizen, except she’d have a baby now if she’d followed his example. I would like it if they got rid of the whole Carter family on the show and just concentrated on everyone else.))

We attempted to pick up some new shows for the season, Raising the Bar… lawyers on opposing sides of every case shown were in a relationship with their opposing counsel. I don’t know much about law or NYC, but it rather seems like someone would notice how they’d paired up and claim malfeasance. My comment was, “Doesn’t that seem a little incestuous?”

I’ve got a flag out for Santuary and Leverage. First ep recordings scheduled for the new Knight Rider and The Mentalist. Saw the Fringe thing, thought it was terrible, though if I’d known the guy who did Lost was behind it, I wouldn’t have bothered. If I’d known they were marketing it as akin to X-Files I wouldn’t have bothered.

With all this, I have not watched many movies. I finished the last DVDs of Cadfael, I can see why they stopped, really scraping the bottom of the barrel there. We got The Last Detective and thought it was OK enough to get more.

Forthcoming new episodes of NCIS, Chuck, NUMB3RS, and a handful of other things. If I’d been wise, I’d have put my Netflix subscription on hold, but I really thought I was going to need material to bridge the month-long gap of content from the Olympics and the political conventions. I wish Netflix and TiVo could have gotten together so I could download movies to my TV… instead there’s the business with Amazon downloads (which confuse me) and TiVo makes a stand-alone device. My TV doesn’t have any more input device slots though.

I have read a stack of books lately, but between those reviews being hard to write and my not feeling like anyone cares what I think of them (true among friends, let alone strangers)— I find myself lacking in ambition. So I close one and start the next without commentary and that has taken away from blogging about them.

Forbidden Kingdom

Forbidden Kingdom
a fantasy/kung-fu movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

This is my kind of story. I did not think it would be because I have very little enthusiasm for kung-fu as a movie genre. But the story was about a young man in the inner city who is transported to this magical realm while unconscious from a fight.

While he’s there, he learns to fight in several animal styles of kung fu fighting and completes a quest to save the world. He learns what it is to sacrifice for his friends, what it costs the hero to save the world, how to have deep feelings for a woman, and what the bonds connecting him to others mean. He becomes a man and we can see it.

It’s probably my favorite plot.

Unfortunately it’s really badly implemented here. Jackie Chan comes off a lot like Shaggy in the Scooby Doo movies. Jet Li is well, I’m not really sure which character was Jet Li, but all the other ones were cardboard. The girl manages to sound like she doesn’t speak English and we’re supposed to believe she’s stoically trying to avenge her family, but mostly she sounds retarded because she speaks of herself in the third person. The worst part about this is the pacing. The story can’t develop because we rush through all the plot to watch yet another ridiculous fight scene. And the fight scenes are all “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” style where suddenly they have lunar gravity for no apparent reason, so it’s stupid and pointless and wastes gobs of film time.

If we had actually seen the story told, with the building of personality so the characters’ motivations were clear, that would have been an awesome experience.

Some of the humorous parts of the movie require external knowledge of previous kung fu classics, so unless you have seen some of the Drunken Master series, or the ones with Aunt 13, or whatever that one with the emperor of the desert was, you’re not going to get the joke. But the dialog and most of the scenes are blocked with the intent that the audience is going to be laughing along with the cast. I did not find it even vaguely humorous, even when I got the joke.

This was a great story, wasted on this telling. I enjoyed it, but you probably won’t. If you’re a fan of kung fu movies, you’re likely going to be offended by their tongue-in-cheek treatment of the genre. If you’re not a fan of kung fu movies, most of the movie will go over your head and you’ll get to the end frustrated and feeling taunted. However, if you like superhero movies and can put up with the attitude problems the people making the movie have, it was entertaining.

Smart People

Smart People
a drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4

I did not particularly like Smart People. I liked it better than Netflix thought I would, since they said I would give it 1.5 stars at most. There were several things that made this underwhelming, mostly that none of the characters seemed really catchy. I can’t tell if that is because the acting was mediocre, the script was bad, or because the intended characters just suck.

We have the bitch-dad who cares about no one except how they can be demeaned and insulted. He’s a teacher who manages to not teach and to turn all his students off his subject while complaining that no one really wants to know English and its literature. We have the daughter who is fulfilling the wifely roles in all but affection, while trying to graduate high school and make a life for herself. We have the stoner brother/uncle. We have the son/brother who is in college where dad works. None of these people struck me as especially brainy or brilliant or insightful, so we have only the title to tell us they’re “smart people”.

In my experience really smart people do not need to study. They read the material, they listen to the lectures, they do the required assignments which exist for idiots who need to drum things in even though it’s just busywork, and then when they want to learn something they do outside work. So the daughter who was studying for her SATs struck me as rather dumb. Plus everyone knows the SATs have been watered down until the scores are meaningless.

There was not a lot of real plot in this movie. We have the daughter who hits on an older man. We have the son who is secretly a published poet. We have the father who thinks he wants to be head of the English department and whose book has been rejected. Then we have the father gets a girlfriend plot. That was the really repulsive aspect.

The girlfriend is a doctor. Their first date went so badly she walked out and he had to plead piteously to get a second chance because she really does not like him. They shag on the second date and although they use a condom she gets pregnant. It is my understanding that unmarried women who are sexually active and non-monogamous take contraceptive pills as a matter of course, even though everyone engaging in risky behavior should use barrier methods as well. Condoms break, fall off, or there are user errors. Having sex with a man who has been chaste for a decade (since his wife died) who freely admits he has not used a condom before– well, I think any woman who did that is taking a foolish risk. Any woman who gets pregnant with a man she does not like is criminally stupid. There really is no rational reason for how an educated woman could bring an unwanted child into the world.

I have no idea how I would have felt about the movie without the problems it had. If the writers had actually known smart people, not just assholes who were smarter than the writers, and if a supposedly intelligent woman who can write prescriptions could have done the right thing and gotten herself emergency contraception—- I think I might have enjoyed this thoroughly. But that’s a completely different movie.

And a note about the rating, I think most average people are turned off by movies about (supposedly) smart people, so I think they would inherently expect this to be a 2/10. So my -2 rating is actually down from my expected rating of at least 6/10. And I do really think it was a 4/10 for most people. Most people seem to think that an unwanted baby makes everything better so they would consider that to have been a happy ending which is worth about +2.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
a movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4/10

If you go into National Treasure or the sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets with the understanding that it is an action movie and the plot was never intended to make sense, you are likely to be averagely pleased with the experience. You’d never go into a toilet-level comedy expecting great dramatic acting or intelligent reactions from the characters— the idea is that the people in those movies are as butt-stupid as people can be while still standing upright. The National Treasure movies purport to be about really smart people who have treasure hunting adventures, but for the most part, they make bizarre leaps of logic and there is zero rationale for their behavior. The characters are smart because the writers said they were smart, not because we can see it.

I watched the sequel telling myself that it was going to be dumbed down for the average pre-teen to enjoy. There couldn’t be any real science in it. There couldn’t be any real philosophy. There couldn’t be real relationships. So there would be action and violence and mediocre efforts from actors who know that any good work will spoil the mood.

Even with that understanding, this was worse than I expected. The plot is ludicrous. It didn’t make sense and it makes smart people look like they have no loyalty or sense of fair play. The acting is actually worse than in the original. The conspiracy theory crud this is centered around is much weaker than the first movie. But the worst part is how the plot moves forward— there is a scene where an inscription is translated from French by random policemen on the street in Paris. They go from “the determined twins” to “resolute twins”. Because that exact word was chosen, the main character makes this leap to the HMS Resolute, from which desks for the Queen of England and the President of the United States were made. But I cannot name a single person who would have chosen “resolute” as a synonym for determined. I’m pretty sure if I asked a dozen people on the street, 11 of them couldn’t tell you what “resolute” means. It’s not common enough that a policeman’s translation would ever have come up with it.

I was also really disturbed by the movie showing a break-in and theft at Buckingham Palace being something that they’re not at all bothered to be doing, but breaking into the Oval Office is horrifying. The room the desk was in in Buckingham Palace was also an oval, but no one drew any sort of connection between them. It’s like they didn’t think England was a real sovereign country where that kind of behavior wouldn’t cause an international incident if they’d been caught. It was completely shocking, but not in an entertaining way.

There was one part of the movie I found really interesting, it’s when the main character talks about why he admires Abraham Lincoln, he said that before Lincoln, people said, “The United States are….” and after Lincoln they said, “The United States is….” He credits Lincoln with making us a single nation in everyone’s eyes. I really think that was an interesting discussion topic. Personally I think Lincoln was kind of horrible— he suspended the rights of all Americans because we were “at war”. He undermined Congress and the Supreme Court because they didn’t agree with him. His insistence on sudden emancipation destroyed the economies of a dozen states and the war reparations severely undermined the infrastructure and economic investment for those states. On one hand, we have an on-going atrocity that no one involved has any interest in stopping. On the other hand, war wasn’t the right answer. And certainly stripping everyone else of their rights in order to fight the war was hugely immoral. But the way we forgot to treat the losing states as part of our country after they lost did not help. It took another hundred years before we started enforcing legislation saying people who looked like former slaves were actually fully human. So it’s not like the Civil War really improved anything. If we’d skipped the war and spent the next 100 years fixing the Southern economies and changing how things worked, it would have been more effective and cheaper. So in my mind Lincoln was a fool and stirred up a ruckus for no real reason except he needed to be remembered.

I think I disliked this movie somewhat because it glorifies a President whose ego was already the size of Mount Rushmore.

I did not particularly like this movie, though it was somewhat amusing in parts. It can’t be any worse than a Will Farrell movie.