Sunday, August 30, 2009

The Weather Man (2005)


Another great Nicholas Cage movie. I can't even believe that I used to think he was a bad actor because I keep watching his movies and he nails the role every time. I must have mistaken him for a bad actor because of his unenthusiastic face and boring voice, and most of all his embarrassing acting in The Wicker Man. At face value, Nick Cage is unremarkable. Yet, if you roll with his style a bit, his simplistic and unassuming personality seems very appropriate. His narrations here are brilliant. The combination of his disparaging face and his flat voice delivers a succinct but illuminating message.

This movie is highly underrated. Nick Cage's depressing appearance goes well with the fact that his acting career at the time was sucking.
Rating: 80%

Friday, August 14, 2009

Four Brothers (2005)


I didn't really like this. I can tell its a quality movie because Mark Wahlberg is in it, but I've been watching some really good movies lately and this one's a relatively low point in my viewing sequence. One of hollywood's favorite mantras is, "Even bad men love their mothers." So that's where this starts, with the four brothers returning to Detroit to avenge their moms's untimely death.

Hey come to think of it, this was ridiculously similar to the plot of GTA: San Andreas. They might even have the same storyboard.

Both stories start with a dead mother, (what could be more dramatic than that) and pick up with the search for mom's killer. So the movie is just a bunch of hoodies + Wahlberg going around hustling various neighborhood characters. Man are there really people on earth that are this hardcore? The brothers are the toughest of the tough guys.

Mark Wahlberg's urban gangster walk in this movie is retarded. His arms are swinging around like crazy and he bobbs up and down like he's on a merry-go-round. No one in real life would ever have that kind of gait.
Rating: 30%

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Lord of War (2005)


I was looking for a light hearted movie, and Nicholas Cage would surely provide it. Going in, I believed that Lord of War was going to be a brusque, shoot the bad guys movie with a shitty plot and a shittier display of acting . Instead, I got an incredibly deep tale of woe about the creed of weapons dealing. Nick Cage's sullen voice narrated the movie, supplying quick justifications behind his character's complex moral decisions.

He starts as a nobody. One day he rationalizes that restaurants will always exist because people will always need to eat. Therefore, weapons dealers will always exist because people will always need to fight each other. "Besides, the margins are better", says Cage. Shrewd reasoning if you ask me. Margins and Need. Ask anyone why they choose their profession and it will be one of those, either good margins or great need.

So Cage goes out into the world and makes his name by selling weapons to one side of a conflict, then the other. Every war in recent history becomes a lucrative business opportunity. His big break came with the dissolution of the USSR, giving him ample armament to flood the market with Soviet military surplus.

So basically, we get a profound explanation for the causes of all modern armed conflict. This movie says that all those blood diamonds and child soldiers are simply byproducts of the war economy surplus. We were in fact responsible for fueling the violence with weapons that we manufactured, packed up, and sold.

Great acting by Nicholas Cage again. Why have his more recent movie sucked so much?
Rating:90%

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Lucky # Slevin (2006)


Welcome to the world of crisp, cool crime stories where innocent little Josh Hartnett has to deal with a bunch of brunt gangsters that want money from him. You have to listen to all of them talk their heads off, even if they're not directly related to the plot. You will have to watch the portrayal of a Jewish mafia, which is borderline anti-semitic. You will watch Morgan Freeman be a gangster too, as head of a mob with his matter-of-factly facial expressions. Less words and more staring at your constipated face, is the name of the game.
The girl next door is Lucy Liu, who (is tiny in stature and) spends the movie fawning over Josh Hartnett. She just can't get enough of this guy. Is she really that small? It didn't seem that way in Charlie's Angels.
Anyway in the end, the good guy kills the bad guy, so happily ever after right? Naw, pretty much every character in this movie was a fucker. The bad guy loses, the good guy wins, and I lose for watching this faggoty movie.

Rating: 40%

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Babel (2006)


When I first discovered Apple Trailers, I watched a segment for this and was intrigued. I wondered how this one movie could weave together some tribals in Afghanistan, a blond couple on vacation, Mexico, and some Japanese people. Well they did it. They're lives are all related in some weird way, and the tribals are in Morroco, not in the Afghans. Could Babel be about globalization? Language barriers? The story has more to do with Babelfish than the Tower of Babel. In fact, language barriers hardly come into play in the story, and most of the plot is moved along by the unintended aspects of human individual ambition. Cool movie, but I don't see a moral. Oh, and Brad Pitts in it. He's cool.

Rating: 60%

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Wall Street (1989)


So I guess this is what the financial market was like in the 80's. Man, look at those shitty computers, and are those ledgers? How did they manage to do all this market trading stuff on a green screen? The dress code looks the same. The snide, slightly restrained douchebaggery is also the same. But my god, look at all that paper! Nobody uses paper anymore, in fact, I think all that stock market data is computer generated. So now I'm wondering why brokers are so busy these days, when the computers are doing all the work for them. Can you imagine calling your broker to ask for a price check? HAHAHA nobody would ever do that.
Oh, I almost forgot. This is basically Boiler Room but with Micheal Douglas instead of Ben Affleck. The similarity is remarkable but this is the original.

Style is too old.
Rating: 40%

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Honor Among Charities

Every time I see a TV advert for the cause of a charity I vomit internally. How counterproductive is that? They're spending donated money on advertisements in hopes of netting even more donated money. It seems predatory, even fraudulent in my eyes.

The modern charity has its roots in religious tithing. The devout would give a portion of their income (usually around 20%) to the church, which would in turn, give it to the poor and needy and whoever. But before doing just that, the clergy would take a portion of that money for themselves, using the funds to build an even more grandiose church with more buttresses and stained glass, thus attracting more to their flock. The power of the churches grew and grew, eventually leading to centuries of religious war and other bullshit.

Following the decline of the religious powers, nation states often took over the role running charities. Unfortunately, this system worked poorly as well, mostly due to the dampening effects of corruption and excessive bureaucracy that shunted the donated money to other places, such as war funds, royal coffers, and back to those damn churches.

As the world approached modernity, people increasingly distrustful of big government would take on the role of charitymaker themselves, founding philanthropist organizations that would serve as the agents of action for giving to the poor and needy. That's where we are now. But starting last year, everything changed.

The current economic recession not only pulled back on consumer spending, but also cut private donations. In effect, the cash flow to these houses of charity dried up. And that is why almost every day, I have to hear from charities begging for money. I am tired of hearing people pandering for chump change and constantly shouting "GIVE" in my face. For me, this recession has exposed great flaws in the modern charitable organization. Charities suck and they're annoying. Starting this year, they've also become desperate, in addition to being an annoyance to me.

When a person says "I donated $1000 to charity", that is incorrect. He is actually saying, "I donated about ($1000 * 0.65) to charity and I unknowingly gave ($1000 * 0.35) to some strangers that don't even need the cash but took it anyway."

Rather than constantly asking people to blindly give them chunks of money, they should be required to use a more honest approach. Charitable organizations should have a 0% expense ratio requirement. Instead of stealing cash from their own donation bins, they should charge an expense fee for donating money to their cause. For example, if you donate $1000 towards the Sudan, $1000 of your dollars would be spent on procuring food staples for the Sundanese. A separate fee would be charged by the organization to take your money. Similarly, if you donate $1000 to researching cures for disease, $1000 should be spent on medical research, and not 50% into funding research and 50% into a stupid candlelit relay race at a track and field.

Imagine what this would do for the world of philanthropy. Donations would be properly segregated into charitable money and wasted money. Charities would have to openly reveal how much of your donation they bite off when they charge you the expense fee, incentivizing them to keep internal waste to a minimum. Shitty charities would die off, leaving only legitimate charity organizations behind. Television adverts would stop. Door to door clipboard artists would cease to exist. There would be no guy dressed in a Santa suit ringing a bell for your coins.

And that's how the system should be working. Personal donations aren't some cash cow. A donation is money given in goodwill to a total stranger on the promise that it will be used for a beneficial cause. The middleman needs to be kept honest to stay a middleman.