There is a simple answer to Ayn Rand and the entire neoliberal project. Summarized in the idea of a public thoroughfare, even the inherent suggestion of freedom from restrictions implied by the language of the term paradoxically negates independent initiative and self-reliant achievement. We cannot have public roads without community accord, a socialist perspective, and we cannot have community accord without negotiation and agreement, more socialist perspectives. A public road is not a free-enterprise operation. Among the many conflicted institutions called into existence by the founding fathers that we so readily turn to for validation, public roads, like freedom of speech and religion, require consensus for application. The founding fathers realized early on that for property owners to practice absolute control of access to their property would not work to anybody's advantage. Paying a toll at every property line would make travel for any purpose impossible, so they agreed to modify property rights for the good of the community, and created public roads, a totally socialist idea. A public road is a pretty difficult socialist idea to get around without a private helicopter and a place to land. When anyone mentions the moral and political superiority of Ayn Rand, ask them about public roads, and where they parked their private helicopters, at least until we figure out how to collect for the use of private airspace. Wouldn’t that make Ayn dance with glee?
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Monday, November 14, 2011
Sniffing around the Hydrant
UCF has its own share of accountability issues with the Erik Plancher problem and now the NCAA sniffing around the mother hydrant of recruiting violations, but it’s hard to ignore the tribulations of JoePa at Penn State, venerable veteran of six decades in the noble service of athletic achievement for the Lions, unless you count getting distracted while your friends victimize disadvantaged children in some of the worst possible ways. All I can say is there are sick puppies out there in the Pennsylvania hills, and they don’t wear coveralls to work. It half reminds me of that old science fiction story about the kid they keep in the basement so their lives can be beautiful on the outside.
JoePa gets a million or so a year to choreograph this wonderful pageant that is athletics and send promising athletes on their way to equally lucrative careers in professional sports to the cheers of adoring throngs whose lives are made better by the joyful melee, while we sacrifice a few helpless misfit pre-adolescents for the personal amusement of his pedophile friends. Where’s the harm in that, JoePa? Isn’t that the question his morally bankrupt student posse asks when they tear up Happy Town in retaliation for facing reality? Where’s the harm in that? Is that what the employees of Enron said to Kenneth Lay? You didn’t really know what your people were doing, so it was okay? Look at all the good JoePa did for the school and those athletes and the psychic karma of the nation. Where’s the harm in that, and there’s nothing to do but state the obvious, what JoePa knows better than any of them, that you could not pack enough money on a team bus to fix what has been done and who did it. As more victims come forward, that is a condition with which the Pennsylvania school will be very familiar very soon. They need to be retaining the Catholic Church for consultation. Cheap shot.
In the end (so to speak), can I have sympathy for a sixty-year career going down in flames over what is a pretty nominal violation of basic human rights compared to Somalia and Sudan? Sure I can. Where does responsibility end? Does it end with JoePa? Does it end with an administration that failed or preferred not to investigate? Does it end with a board of governors that chose idiots for administrators, a state legislature that funds perverts, an electorate that empowered the legislature that mandated the institution that funded the program that JoePa built? Does it even end with a nation that pledges allegiance to a Constitution that authorizes state legislatures in the first place? Maybe we could argue the limits of knowledge and some kind of responsibility to know, but isn’t that really what Kenneth Lay and JoePa and you and me are all about?
Not so deep down, we are all JoePa. We all have kids in the basement, and we are all going to pay for it. Sure, I can sympathize, and that’s the part of the JoePa justice that really stinks. JoePa will never get out of it. It’s offensive on an intuitive moral level. It’s going to cost a fortune, and no matter how much we try to blame it on somebody, there’s no way out for any of us.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
JoePa gets a million or so a year to choreograph this wonderful pageant that is athletics and send promising athletes on their way to equally lucrative careers in professional sports to the cheers of adoring throngs whose lives are made better by the joyful melee, while we sacrifice a few helpless misfit pre-adolescents for the personal amusement of his pedophile friends. Where’s the harm in that, JoePa? Isn’t that the question his morally bankrupt student posse asks when they tear up Happy Town in retaliation for facing reality? Where’s the harm in that? Is that what the employees of Enron said to Kenneth Lay? You didn’t really know what your people were doing, so it was okay? Look at all the good JoePa did for the school and those athletes and the psychic karma of the nation. Where’s the harm in that, and there’s nothing to do but state the obvious, what JoePa knows better than any of them, that you could not pack enough money on a team bus to fix what has been done and who did it. As more victims come forward, that is a condition with which the Pennsylvania school will be very familiar very soon. They need to be retaining the Catholic Church for consultation. Cheap shot.
In the end (so to speak), can I have sympathy for a sixty-year career going down in flames over what is a pretty nominal violation of basic human rights compared to Somalia and Sudan? Sure I can. Where does responsibility end? Does it end with JoePa? Does it end with an administration that failed or preferred not to investigate? Does it end with a board of governors that chose idiots for administrators, a state legislature that funds perverts, an electorate that empowered the legislature that mandated the institution that funded the program that JoePa built? Does it even end with a nation that pledges allegiance to a Constitution that authorizes state legislatures in the first place? Maybe we could argue the limits of knowledge and some kind of responsibility to know, but isn’t that really what Kenneth Lay and JoePa and you and me are all about?
Not so deep down, we are all JoePa. We all have kids in the basement, and we are all going to pay for it. Sure, I can sympathize, and that’s the part of the JoePa justice that really stinks. JoePa will never get out of it. It’s offensive on an intuitive moral level. It’s going to cost a fortune, and no matter how much we try to blame it on somebody, there’s no way out for any of us.
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
Monday, October 3, 2011
Okay Bubba
Okay, Bubba Boehner (and Bubba Ryan and Bubba McConnell). For once the republicans are spot on, and why don’t we admit it? Yes, this is a class war. It’s a class war between the people who make wealth possible and the people who want the benefits without the responsibility. People with money want somebody to keep foreign threats away from them, protect them from fraud, secure their person and property for them at home, maintain their public rights of way, inspect their food, and recover their bodies when they crash their private planes. Like Warren Buffet says, their needs are out of proportion to the rest of us, but do they want to pay in proportion to their demands? No, and why should they want to pay? If they had to pay for everything they benefit from, they wouldn’t have any more money than anybody else, and then what would be the use of a class war?
I’m just asking.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=food+fight&hl=en&sa=G&gbv=2&tbm=isch&tbnid=-mGFdE2v7vrdQM:&imgrefurl=http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/menus/food-fighting-101.htm&docid=docWqKZTfze4SM&w=400&h=300&ei=QW53TuC7PM6htwez19iyDA&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=546&page=5&tbnh=113&tbnw=161&start=74&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:15,s:74&tx=97&ty=77&biw=1280&bih=784
http://if.ucf.edu/files/2011/07/JIF1Final.pdf
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Obama Against the World, or at Least a Significant Part
The only way he can win now is if things turn around, and I don’t think for a minute that the republicans are going to let things turn around. Why should they? They have plenty of money. It’s like the Great Depression. There’s lots of money, but it’s controlled by a small part of the population.
The rich are even spending money, but they’re spending it on artwork, exotic cars, and other luxury kinds of stuff. To be fair, that largesse probably trickles down to create half a dozen jobs for more of the beautiful people in the in crowd, some of which worked hard to get there, and working hard, you would think they would have some appreciation for people who work hard, but no, you’re only appreciated if you work hard and make a lot of money. If you don’t make a lot of money, they have another word for you, loser.
There are some elements in the Republican party, such as military veterans, with limited resources, who are comfortable with the appellation of loser because they learned (in the case of the military), that real men (or whatever) do not complain, do not question authority, and make do with what they are given. Anything else is a character defect.In this way, the haves are able to keep what they have by virtue of someone else’s willingness to sacrifice for the rights of the haves to have. Those who really made the sacrifices earned the right to drive around in secondhand delivery vans, collecting charitable contributions of stained mattresses, because they have inadequate compensation, inadequate health care, and less than inadequate recognition for what they sacrificed.
The military elite fit in with the Republican elite because they have the opportunity to accumulate money with a minimum of sacrifice by exploiting military contracts in some way, a well recognized principle of republican enterprise. Even some of those elite, such as John McCain, recognize the inconsistency, but as John discovered, if you complain too loudly about the injustice involved, you will find yourself without a voice.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
The rich are even spending money, but they’re spending it on artwork, exotic cars, and other luxury kinds of stuff. To be fair, that largesse probably trickles down to create half a dozen jobs for more of the beautiful people in the in crowd, some of which worked hard to get there, and working hard, you would think they would have some appreciation for people who work hard, but no, you’re only appreciated if you work hard and make a lot of money. If you don’t make a lot of money, they have another word for you, loser.
There are some elements in the Republican party, such as military veterans, with limited resources, who are comfortable with the appellation of loser because they learned (in the case of the military), that real men (or whatever) do not complain, do not question authority, and make do with what they are given. Anything else is a character defect.In this way, the haves are able to keep what they have by virtue of someone else’s willingness to sacrifice for the rights of the haves to have. Those who really made the sacrifices earned the right to drive around in secondhand delivery vans, collecting charitable contributions of stained mattresses, because they have inadequate compensation, inadequate health care, and less than inadequate recognition for what they sacrificed.
The military elite fit in with the Republican elite because they have the opportunity to accumulate money with a minimum of sacrifice by exploiting military contracts in some way, a well recognized principle of republican enterprise. Even some of those elite, such as John McCain, recognize the inconsistency, but as John discovered, if you complain too loudly about the injustice involved, you will find yourself without a voice.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
Cowboys and Aliens, the Prequel
Sorry folks. Cowboys and Aliens just didn’t do it for me. The reviews I read were promisng, and I wanted to believe, but there were too many things going on that didn’t make sense. One reviewer said we’re past the idea of aliens as strictly evil. Maybe that’s part of the problem. These aliens are grotesquely ugly in a conventional reptilian way and apparently motivated pretty much by greed, which is a one-dimensional moral lesson in the tradition of the Western for human observers, but maybe that’s one of those simplistic portrayals we’re past. An intriguing thing about District 9, for instance, is the hint that the aliens are more complex than humans give them credit for.
No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.
Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.
That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.
Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.
Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.
No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.
Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.
That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.
Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.
Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Nude Women on Facebook
If I was Casey Anthony, I’d probably be in big trouble again, because somebody would want to know why I was using my computer to search for Nude Women on Facebook, which is exactly the point. What I was searching for wasn’t actually Nude Women on Facebook. What I was searching for was an article about women who post nude pictures of themselves on their Facebook pages, which are then hacked, and the pictures end up for sale somewhere as amateur adult entertainment, which gets sort of embarrassing for Ms.Universe contestants, Dental Technicians, and Supreme Court Justice Nominees. What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had nude law school photos floating around on the Net. Would anybody take her seriously in that robe? And that goes double for Clarence Thomas.
From the publicity, you would think that women have some kind of Freudian compulsion, or maybe just a compulsion, to post nude pictures of themselves (or pictures of themselves nude) on the first available web page, as if the social expectation of attraction requires validation by visual display. Now don’t get me wrong, in principle, I approve, but as a matter of personal security, I reluctantly suggest this is not a good idea.
People underestimate how fast and how far things can go bad with personal information on the net.
http://www.wesh.com/video/28690471/detail.html
Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=women&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADRA_enUS393&tbm=isch&tbnid=aTb23Rbd8vt6zM:&imgrefurl=http://video.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Abyssmia/tag/women/&docid=Ah6Qx5bJuLu9qM&w=1680&h=1050&ei=xH8xTqugKojL0QHbyYSjDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=126&vpy=161&dur=1716&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=179&ty=96&page=5&tbnh=128&tbnw=171&start=97&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:18,s:97&biw=1117&bih=713
Monday, July 18, 2011
Whose Wand was it Anyway?
As my previous Harry Potter reviews have explained, I’m not a raging Harry Potter fan (actually not much of a movie fan at all, but my wife makes me, so I’m sort of a reluctant critic, the most objective kind). Maybe my response is best described by the scene in the movie where the loyal defenders of Hogwarts gather and unite in resistance to the evil horde, draw their weapons, and what they raise over their heads in defiance is a fringe of silly little sticks. I nearly fell over laughing.
You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.
As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.
Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.
Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.
As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.
Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.
Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.
Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy
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