Random Insanity

Back in civilization

A 20 dollar gift card does not get you very far at Trader Joes. But damn their wine selection was nice. Times like this make me regret making to the move to the farmland.

Avatar Sucked (and you seriously need to see it)

It made a bazillion dollars in 10 minutes and it’s the greatest thing to come along since…apparently Titanic.  Unfortunately, there are times when it’s awful.  Like, really, really, really, awful.

So steel ye courage, there be spoilers ahead.

Problem #1:  If you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, you’ve seen this movie.  The plot arc is identical.  Normally, this isn’t such a bad thing; “White guy goes native” has been done time and time again.  But if you’re going to spend 20 years and the GDP of most countries to make this thing, at least devote some more time to the script than it takes to Zerox and change some names.

Problem #2: The bad guys in this movie were Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi.  These two guys are a couple of the best actors around today.  And they tried, you could tell.  But their characters had the depth of a kiddie pool, and it’s difficult to breathe life to something when all the oxygen is missing from the room to begin with.  Granted, this is James Cameron, whose hatred of all things that start with a C and rhyme with…um…dorporate run deep and hard.  But it would have been better if Mr. Ribisi’s character Parker Selfridge (really?  ‘self’ in his name?) was trying to fight for the Na’vi against his shareholders, but knew what would happen if he showed his dissension to the employees, so instead comes off as a dick.  Meaning, he’s a selfish guy who’s out for himself, but he’s not a complete animal.  And Stephen Lang….ho-ly-crap how did you manage to make him look one-dimensional?  Col. Quaritch had potential to be a great character, but they didn’t even bother to ask the questions, just give him lame lines, like at the end: “This isn’t over until I stop breathing”.  Ick.  Might as well have had him say, “This is the climax of the movie, and you need to kill me so there’s dramatic closure”.

Problem #3: Tsu’tey had basically 3 lines, and everything about him was predictable.  The main character, Jake Sulley had some cool development, but it was stilted.  All of the characters were cardboard, even with the opportunities that this place presented.

Okay.  Now here’s why you seriously need to see this movie:

Ho-ly shit, you will leave this theater pissed Pandora doesn’t exist.  It is so real, so visceral, every detail so unbelievably perfect that the 3D is just candy.  If I saw this movie in 2D I would still be blown away.  For example, all of the animals have 6 limbs.  Which makes sense; if some little creature millions of years ago had 6 limbs, and it made it a better survivor, then every creature that came after would have 6 limbs.  It’s the same thing on Earth; we all have 4 for a reason.

The 3D is at times magnificent, other times not so much.  And it seems to be more down to the fact that filmmakers are still kind of ironing out the kinks.  There are 3 scenes that come to mind that illustrate this.  First one, there was a leaf that traveled horizontally very near the camera, and it had this weird strobe-like effect where it was kind of jittery and blinking in and out almost.  Another scene had something blurred in the foreground so you could focus on the subject in the distance, the only thing is, the foreground object is ‘close’ to you, so when you look at it, you’d expect it to come into focus.  Only it obviously doesn’t.  Not sure what you’d really do about that, but there ya go.  Now, the best part: drop the gimmicks and shoot every movie in 3D.  There was a scene where the main character was opening a locker.  That’s it, opening a locker in a room.  But because it’s something I’ve done countless times before in places that would be familiar to me, it made sense, and 3D completely sucked me in.  The only way I could tell was the sudden sense of ‘realness’ it all took on.  Completely banal scene where the character is getting a shirt, and it’s one of my favorites from the movie.

James Cameron said he was willing to revisit this in a sequel, which gives me hope.  See, all of my complaints were story-based (as they usually are, I can forgive a lot if it’s got a good script behind it), which kind of makes sense.  This movie was taking up a lot of time and resources, so to go super-conservative on the script is somewhat forgivable; he was taking us to places and showing us things in ways we’ve never seen before, to ruin it by doing something strange with the story, he runs the risk of alienating (ha!) the audience entirely.  But if he goes into the second movie with the idea of, ‘okay, you know what you’re getting going in, now I can take you on a good journey’ then that movie may be one of the greatest of all time.  But only if you know how he’s going to present it to you.

And that is why you seriously need to see this movie.

Real Health Care Reform

Ronald Bailey is a contributor to Reason magazine, and is probably one of the more sane voices when it comes to unfortunately politicized topics like Climate Change and Health Care.  Everyone agrees that our Health Care system in America is ‘broken’ (although it seems if you asked them how it was broken, they’d just parrot talking points from morning cable news), but why does the solution have to come from D.C.?   How exactly does putting an R, D, or I at the end of your name make you more qualified than someone who’s livelihood depends on it?

Honestly, I began to wonder why Health Insurance is any different than Homeowners, Renters, or Car insurance.  They basically operate the same way; I pay a company money each month betting that something will happen to my house or I’ll get into an accident of some kind.  They’re betting against me hoping that I’ll sail on by without any of those problems (deep down, so am I, honestly).  But the main thing is, i found the company, I shopped around, I pay for it directly, and I can easily recall exactly how much these policies cost me.  Now, why can’t I do that with Health insurance?  Well, Mr. Bailey pretty much nails it:

Right now, thanks to incentives built into the tax code, patients are locked into the health plans their employers choose. Consequently, most of us don’t have a clue what our health insurance and health care cost. We have no way to reduce those costs and no incentive to do so even if we could. Worse yet, it’s precisely when you need the system the most that it fails you. In the words of the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt, “when you’re down on your luck, you’re unemployed, you lose your insurance.…Only the devil could ever have invented such a system.”

reason.com

See, the thing is, I don’t actually buy my health insurance; my company does.  So I have no real way to shop around for other insurance companies and have them compete for my money.  Not only that, but they’d have to limit any wrong-doing on their part knowing that at any time I could jump ship and go with a competitor.

Many government-proponents seem to think that if the health insurance industry was left to its own devices, it would end up being far worse than it is now.  But seeing how they can spend millions of dollars buying legislation that favors them - not me, influencing regulations to give themselves an edge, and stifling competition to keep prices artificially high by their enforced monopoly, I honestly don’t see how it could be any worse.

I want to see them compete.  I want them to fight themselves to come up with better rates.  I want to see a hot, chipper, raven-haired woman on TV work in a metaphorical store and offer to compare rates of different health insurance companies in order to get at my money.

Unfortunately for me, 500 people in D.C. are easier to buy than 300 million are to compete for.