Madcow Movie Review -SKYFALL

After the pathetic Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall is the worthy follow-up that Casino Royale (2006) deserved. While the previous film was saddled with what appeared to be an unfinished screenplay and a less-than-qualified director, the new one has stepped up its game with a solid script, first-class director (Oscar-winner Sam Mendes) an all-time great cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and some set design and art direction that would make all of this year's literary adaptations dry up and blow away.

As with some of the more recent Bond films, the opening teaser -- co-starring Naomie Harris -- actually ties into the story, and it ends with a shock, before going into Adele's much-celebrated title song. From there, the plot has to do with a stolen hard drive containing the names of all the undercover MI6 agents implanted in terrorist cells around the world. James Bond (Daniel Craig) finds a suspect, and collects a gambling chip that leads him to a fancy casino (of course!). There he drinks his requisite martini (and not the Heinekin an early report led us to believe), and chats with a beautiful girl (Bérénice Marlohe). She has ties to the bad guy, Silva (Javier Bardem). After a brawl with some bodyguards, Bond is off to save the day. Unfortunately, Silva is one of his most challenging foes.

In addition, Ralph Fiennes joins the cast as a new bureaucrat in the MI6 office, and Ben Whishaw is the new "Q," complete with a series of "young vs. old" jokes. Albert Finney also stars, though his role comes in later in the story and is best left undisclosed.

For this entry, director Mendes tends to slow things down, allows the mix to thicken. Rather than faster and louder chase/fight scenes, he now allows them to be snappy and clever. One fight scene takes place in an astonishing setting: an upper floor of a Shanghai high-rise, with glass walls everywhere, multi-colored city lights reflected in every one of them. Mendes shoots a quick brawl in one shot, with the players in silhouette, culminating in a breaking window.

Another fight takes place in a casino/nightclub; Bond and his assailant fall into a decorative pit filled with giant Gila Monsters. The fight is over rather shortly.

Even the Bond girls in this one don't hang around for long. They serve their purpose, which is sometimes rather dark, and then they move on. This Bond is too brooding and self-centered to get too cuddly with any one woman. Indeed, a couple of well-placed lines of dialogue reveal more about Bond's character than in any other previous movie. He now seems sadder than ever before, trapped and damaged, rather than just cool and aloof.

To be sure, the movie gets a bit ridiculous during its final showdown, but that's to be expected. Mendes doesn't mess too much with the formula, overall, and it goes to show that he's probably better with unpretentious material than he is trying to get important on us (see Revolutionary Road). Skyfall happens to arrive very near the 50th anniversary of Dr. No (1962), the very first James Bond movie, and it suggests an exciting, mature new direction for the series. These movies don't have to be trashy and cheap. They can be exciting and exotic, to be sure. But now they're also relevant.

On This Day in History

 Nov 9, 1938:
Nazis launch Kristallnacht



On this day in 1938, in an event that would foreshadow the Holocaust, German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed "Kristallnacht," or "Night of Broken Glass," after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany. Kristallnacht represented a dramatic escalation of the campaign started by Adolf Hitler in 1933 when he became chancellor to purge Germany of its Jewish population.

The Nazis used the murder of a low-level German diplomat in Paris by a 17-year-old Polish Jew as an excuse to carry out the Kristallnacht attacks. On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath was shot outside the German embassy by Herschel Grynszpan, who wanted revenge for his parents' sudden deportation from Germany to Poland, along with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews. Following vom Rath's death, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered German storm troopers to carry out violent riots disguised as "spontaneous demonstrations" against Jewish citizens. Local police and fire departments were told not to interfere. In the face of all the devastation, some Jews, including entire families, committed suicide.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazis blamed the Jews and fined them 1 billion marks (or $400 million in 1938 dollars) for vom Rath's death. As repayment, the government seized Jewish property and kept insurance money owed to Jewish people. In its quest to create a master Aryan race, the Nazi government enacted further discriminatory policies that essentially excluded Jews from all aspects of public life.

Over 100,000 Jews fled Germany for other countries after Kristallnacht. The international community was outraged by the violent events of November 9 and 10. Some countries broke off diplomatic relations in protest, but the Nazis suffered no serious consequences, leading them to believe they could get away with the mass murder that was the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million European Jews died.

Madcow Book Review

One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season
Tony La Russa with Rick Hummel

Tony La Russa is a baseball lifer. He began his career in the minors; had an unproductive stint as a major leaguer, batting .199 over six seasons as a utility infielder; and made a name for himself as one of the best managers in the game. He won six pennants and three World Series over a 33-year span for the Oakland Athletics, Chicago White Sox and, most recently, St. Louis Cardinals. He ranks third in wins behind Hall of Fame managers Connie Mack and John McGraw, and trails only Mack in games at the helm with 5,097. There is no doubt that La Russa will earn his own plaque in Cooperstown when he becomes eligible.

La Russa decided during the 2011 campaign that it would be his last as a field leader. As with many of his generation, the demands of the game, both in terms of production and handling the younger and more expensive players, started to take their toll on the enjoyment of the profession for the 67-year-old. And even though he couldn’t have predicted it at the time, what better way to go out than on top? La Russa directed the Cardinals to a thrilling pennant race, as the subtitle indicates, and defeated the Texas Rangers for the World Championship.

Aided by Rick Hummel, an award-winning journalist who spent four decades with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, La Russa lets fans into the secret world of managing, with its acid-churning decisions, thought processes, and personnel (and personal) issues. They guide readers over the last few months of the season --- with mere passing references to La Russa’s years as a player and manager of the A’s and White Sox --- as the Cardinals clawed their way back from a deep deficit and unexpectedly beat what was considered a superior team in the Series.

Cards fans who have an intimate knowledge of the players will no doubt consider ONE LAST STRIKE an essential part of their baseball library, as will those who are interested in a manager’s mental manipulations, which have to take into consideration who’s hot and who’s not, both on your team and your opponent’s. Then there are the work-arounds when it comes to who’s injured physically or who’s having a tough time mentally (La Russa’s long-time coach and friend Dave Duncan was going through family health issues), which the authors use to show that these are human beings and not athletic robots.

La Russa is all business. You won’t find any locker room gossip or even derogatory remarks about his charges, although you know there has to have been some disagreements along the way. Just about everyone in his eyes deserves the benefit of the doubt, leading to ho-hum descriptions that Player A really knows how to play the game of baseball or Player B is a true major leaguer. That might be a disappointment to those who really want the dirt (La Russa even glosses over the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs).

Another potential problem is that La Russa is a craftsperson, and as such loves to talk about his work as if he was in the presence of other craftspeople. A long-used “baseballism” is that the worst players make the best managers because they spend so much time on the bench that they can become adept students of the game. Some of the narrative borders on jargon (an appendix includes photos of various paperwork that would give the code-breakers of World War II fits). Of course, this is completely comprehensible to La Russa’s peers and uber-fans, but a mystery and perhaps a bit off-putting to the casual reader.

On This Day in History

 Nov 7, 1940:
Tacoma Bridge collapses



Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse.

When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to the Gig Harbor Peninsula, the bridge spanned 2,800 feet and took three years to build. To save cost, the principle engineer, Leon Moisseiff, designed the bridge with an unusually slender frame that measured 39 feet and accommodated just two vehicular lanes.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare on July 1, 1940. Human traffic across the waters of the Tacoma Narrows increased dramatically, but many drivers were drawn to the toll bridge not by convenience but by an unusual characteristic of the structure. When moderate to high winds blew, as they invariably do in the Tacoma Narrows, the bridge roadway would sway from side to side and sometimes suffer excessive vertical undulations. Some drivers reported that vehicles ahead of them would disappear and reappear several times as they crossed the bridge. On a windy day, tourists treated the bridge toll as the fee paid to ride a roller-coaster ride, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earned the nickname "Galloping Gertie."

Attempts were made to stabilize the structure, but they were in vain. On November 7, with a steady wind blowing at 42 mph, the roadway began to twist back and forth in an increasingly violent fashion. Before closing the span, the toll keeper on the bridge's west side let one last motorist pass, Tacoma News Tribune copy editor Leonard Coatsworth. Halfway across the bridge, Coatsworth lost control of his car. When the roadway tipped so sharply that it seemed his car would topple off, he decided to flee on foot. He tried to retrieve his daughter's black cocker spaniel from the back seat of the car, but the dog snapped at him and refused to budge. Coatsworth ran to safety and called the Tribune, who dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene.

Tribune photographer Howard Clifford was the last man on the bridge before the center span broke off at 11 a.m. and plunged 190 feet into the turbulent Tacoma Narrows. Trapped on the suddenly destabilized side spans, he narrowly avoided being thrown off and ran to safety. The sole casualty of the disaster was the cocker spaniel in Coatsworth's car, which fell into the Narrows and disappeared beneath the foam.

At the time, the engineering community was perplexed about how a bridge designed to withstand winds of up to 120 mph could collapse in a wind of 42 mph. Experts still disagree on the exact cause of the bridge's destruction, but most agree the collapse was related to resonance, a phenomenon that also comes into play when a soprano shatters a glass with her voice. In the case of the Tacoma Narrows, the wind resonated with the natural frequency of the structure, causing a steady increase in amplitude until the bridge was destroyed.

After the Tacoma Narrows disaster, bridge builders took care to incorporate aerodynamics into their designs and build structures with complex frequencies. Wind-tunnel testing of bridge designs eventually became mandatory. A new Tacoma Narrows Bridge was finally erected in 1950, complete with a wider roadway, deep stiffening trusses under the roadway, and other features designed to dampen the effect of wind. In 1992, the remains of Galloping Gertie in the Tacoma Narrows were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On This Day in History

Nov 6, 1860:

Abraham Lincoln elected president

 

Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.
Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig representative to Congress, first gained national stature during his campaign against Stephen Douglas of Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the slavery issue, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery, while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, Lincoln won the party's presidential nomination.
In the November 1860 election, Lincoln again faced Douglas, who represented the Northern faction of a heavily divided Democratic Party, as well as Breckinridge and Bell. The announcement of Lincoln's victory signaled the secession of the Southern states, which since the beginning of the year had been publicly threatening secession if the Republicans gained the White House.
By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In 1863, as the tide turned against the Confederacy, Lincoln emancipated the slaves and in 1864 won reelection. In April 1865, he was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after the American Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.
For preserving the Union and bringing an end to slavery, and for his unique character and powerful oratory, Lincoln is hailed as one of the greatest American presidents.

 

 

Has Sandy saved President Obama?

This US Air Force photo shows an aerial view of the rollercoaster from the Seaside Heights amusement park on the New Jersey shore submerged in surf

Has Sandy saved President Obama? Comforter-in-chief takes center stage in Atlantic City (while Romney is left on sidelines)

• President takes one-hour helicopter tour over Atlantic Coast, viewing flooded homes and wrecked buildings
• Superstorm Sandy has claimed lives of at least 76 people on East Coast with New Jersey and NYC badly affected
• Obama skipped campaigning in battleground states in favour of visit to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's state
• Gov Christie: 'We've got a big task ahead of us that we have to do together. This is what New Jerseyans are built for'
• Obama will return to campaign trail today with trips to Green Bay, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado;and Las Vegas

President Obama took time out from the campaign trail yesterday to visit a stretch of the devastated New Jersey coast and take on a role of comforter-in-chief that could be a major boost to his hopes of re-election next week.
The President was accompanied by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican bruiser and Mitt Romney backer who showered him with effusive praise for his handling of Superstorm Sandy, giving President Obama a bipartisan sheen that aides believe could help him secure victory on Tuesday. 
Leaving Republican presidential candidate Mr Romney on the sidelines holding campaign events in Florida in which he had to pull his punches and barely featured on TV, President Obama travelled to Atlantic City in New Jersey to get an aerial view of the widespread damage caused by the storm.

On This Day in History

 Nov 4, 1928:
One of New York's most notorious gamblers is shot to death



Arnold Rothstein, New York's most notorious gambler, is shot and killed during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. After finding Rothstein bleeding profusely at the service entrance of the hotel, police followed his trail of blood back to a suite where a group of men were playing cards. Reportedly, Rothstein had nothing good in his final hand.

From an early age, Rothstein had a talent for playing numbers. As a teenager, he built a small fortune gambling in craps and poker games, and by age 20 he owned and operated his own casino. Rothstein became a legendary figure in New York because of his unparalleled winning streak in bets and card games. However, it is believed that he usually won by fixing the events. The most famous instance of this was in 1919 when the World Series was fixed. Abe Attell, a friend and employee of Rothstein, paid some of the key players on the Chicago White Sox to throw the games. When the scandal was uncovered, Rothstein fiercely denied any involvement to a grand jury and escaped indictment. In private, however, Rothstein never denied his role, preferring to enjoy the outlaw image.

In the 1920's, Rothstein began purchasing nightclubs, racehorses, and brothels. He had such a formidable presence in the criminal underworld that he was reportedly once paid half a million dollars to mediate a gang war. As Rothstein's fortune grew to an estimated $50 million, he became a high-level loan shark, liberally padding the pockets of police and judges to evade the law. He is fabled to have carried around $200,000 in pocket money at all times.

Rothstein's luck finally ran out in 1928 when he encountered an unprecedented losing streak. At a poker game in September with "Hump" McManus, "Nigger Nate" Raymond, and "Titanic" Thompson, Rothstein lost a cool $320,000 and then refused to pay on the grounds that the game had been rigged. Two months later, McManus invited Rothstein to play what would be his final poker game.

Asked who had shot him before dying, Rothstein reportedly put his finger to his lips, keeping the gangsters' code of silence. McManus was later tried and acquitted of the crime.