Goines On: Leveler

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Mostly low in spirits for several days, Goines wasn’t going to turn away inspiration from any direction it approached him, even if he didn’t recognize it immediately. This morning, as often happened, Mrs. Goines was already tearing into the NY Times and the Washington Post on her iPad as he finally finished preparing his own breakfast and sat down to it.

Always on Sunday: The Iron Lady[: A love story]

Sundays feature a movie review. The column's title is a play on the title of Jules Dassin's 1960 film, Never on Sunday.

I first laid eyes on Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, in the Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, Vermont, which beautiful town I remembered fondly in yesterday's post. I read the memoir last year, and one of the many passages that fascinated me was Hitchens's account of meeting Margaret Thatcher. It must have been in 1974 (when Hitchens was 25 years old), soon after she became the leader of the Conservative opposition:

Another movie tie-in to current events

As the black humor of Adam's Apples reflected the unruly weirdness of the Biblical basis of support for the marriage amendment, so did the plot line of the 2011 movie Margin Call reflect (or at least bring strongly to mind) the plot of the recently reported failure of JPMorgan Chase.

Margin Call (2011: J.C. Chandor) [Follows the key people at an investment bank, over a 24-hour period, during the early stages of the financial crisis] [E] 5-2?-2012

    New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott wrote on October 20, 2011 ("Number Crunching at the Apocalypse") that

There have been reports of hurt feelings among the bankers and brokers who have been the focus of public ire and Occupy Wall Street protests. And it is true that those poor, hard-working souls have been demonized and caricatured. Surely the much-reviled 1 percent does not consist of plutocrats in top hats or predators in blue suits, but of human beings just like the other 99 percent of us, albeit with more money and perhaps more to answer for.
    That, in a way, is the message of J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call, which does a great deal to humanize the authors—and beneficiaries—of the 2008 financial crisis. But the film, relentless in its honesty and shrewd in its insights and techniques, is unlikely to soothe the wounded pride of the actual or aspiring ruling class. It is a tale of greed, vanity, myopia, and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize.

    To what extent greed, vanity, myopia, and expediency played roles in the recent failure, I'm not able to say, not being much of an observer of such matters. I'm just saying.
    And recommending Margin Call as an excellent film deserving of your serious attention and cinematic enjoyment. It's blackly comic, too, in a way.

Michael Moore's funniest movie to date, not

It may be too late for a Must See (MS) recommendation for a 2007 documentary, but if you still don't know (but care) what are some of the salient issues in the "health care debate," then Michael Moore's "Sicko" is a film you must see.
    However, I don't get the blurbs on the Special Edition DVD. "You'll laugh till it hurts"? (Peter Travers) "Michael Moore's funniest movie to date"? (A.O. Scott)
    Not. Not.
    No, I agree with D. Maass, who wrote on November 6, 2007:

"Sicko" is about shame. The shame we should all feel as a country for allowing a health care system where profit's made by not providing care. The shame we should all feel for not standing up to it, for shrugging off the tremendous influence insurance and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists swing and wield with our elected officials. The shame we should all feel for not caring for every human being within our borders. And perhaps, the most American shame of all: the shame of falling far behind the rest of the Western world.

Knowing the film's main conclusions from other sources, except for some of its squeamy details (like the man who sawed off two of his fingers and had to choose which finger he could afford to have reattached), I found the documentary a challenge to watch. Funny it's not, except possibly some of the shenanigans gotten up to by the liars who have been bought off by insurance or pharmaceutical companies. But these portrayals incite more to anger than to laughter.

I said some of the salient issues. One Moore overlooks is the question of America's being "overtreated," to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Nortin M. Hadler, M.D.'s indispensable book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (2008, University of North Carolina Press).
    If you have to choose between a Must See movie and a Must Read book, read Worried Sick. You'll learn infinitely more to your own personal advantage. And it's an enjoyable read, Hadler's right there with you, mind to mind.