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Review: It Chapter Two

The best kind of monster, of course, is one that’s little-seen. Steven Spielberg demonstrated this in Jaws, when he famously had to find a way to not show too much of his crappy looking shark. And just a few months ago Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, told the trade mag Variety, “You don’t show the monster too many times because you’ll get used to him and you never want to get used to him—ever. The best screening room in the world is the space between your ears…your brain.”

I’m not sure Andy Muschietti got this memo. Not recently, anyway. Muschietti’s 2017 film It, his excellent adaptation of about half of Stephen King’s 1986 novel, was a model of monster economy. The director deployed his killer clown, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), in scenes carefully shaped for maximum terror – but also gave him bench time whenever gentler, more Spielbergian concerns had to be given play. In the new It Chapter Two, however, the bulb-headed freak is everywhere. After the first hour— and this is a movie that runs nearly three hours—he starts to wear out his welcome. Horrible stuff keeps happening, but inevitably monotony sets in, and by the end you’re gasping for fresh invention. (This is the kind of movie in which the camera angles generally tip you off that something appalling is about to happen, usually in the background of a shot.)

Okay, it’s hard to adapt an 1100-page novel. But here, even with stuff left out (for fans to gripe about), it still feels like too much has been left in. First of all, the cast is now a crowd. The story begins with the final scene in the previous film, set in the late 1980s, in which the young members of the Losers’ Club, having dispatched Pennywise at least temporarily, vow to come back to their hometown of Derry, Maine, and fight him anew if he ever returns. When he does (it happens every 27 years), and children start to go missing again, Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa)—the only member of the club who’s remained in Derry—puts in a call to each of his onetime fellow Losers, now all grown up and scattered.

Stuttery Bill Denbrough, for example, has become a successful author (and is now played by James McAvoy). Bill’s long-ago crush Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) is a fashion designer married to a guy who beats her. Wise guy Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) has become, unsurprisingly, a standup comic. Tightly wound hypochondriac Eddie (James Ransone) works for an insurance company. And once-chubby Ben (Jay Ryan), now an architect, has dropped much childhood weight and currently resembles an Athenian deity. (“You look amazing,” says Richie. “What the fuck happened?”) Then there’s troubled Stanley Uris (Andy Bean)—let’s say he’s still troubled.

Most of the Losers heed Mike’s rallying call and make the trip home to Derry, where they gather at a Chinese restaurant for a gaudy gross-out scene (there are some very yucky things on the menu). Before long the original kids from the first movie—Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, et al.—start weighing in as well, in a steady procession of ’80s flashbacks. This makes for a certain degree of narrative clutter. And when it is decided that the group should not stick together in pursuit of the fear-savoring Pennywise, but should instead split up and face their own fears separately, the movie begins to bog down seriously.

There are gripping stretches, of course: the sight of a demented clown biting into someone’s chest or chewing off someone’s face is naturally entertaining. And the long scene in which grown-up Beverly pays a visit to a majorly strange old woman is a terror classic—too bad it was already released almost in its entirety in a trailer last spring.

The actors, both young and old, make quite a bit of the movie worth watching. (Bill Hader is so sharp that there’s already been Oscar talk about his performance—even though he’s given more to work with on any random episode of his HBO show Barry than he gets here.) But the picture is crippled by its inordinate length, a problem swollen by its time-sucking search for a solid ending. (Ironically, a recurrent theme in the film is the lousy endings of Bill Denbrough’s books—a charge driven home in a meta way at one point by a cameoing Stephen King himself.) The story has no tension because we know what has to happen—the Losers have to triumph over Pennywise once again. And no matter how bloated the digital effects become—and they become hugely bloated, with Pennywise swelling up to the size of a small building in a conclusion that feels like it’ll never, ever end—they stir no awe…only a desire to be done with this thing, and then gone.

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State AGs Launch New Anti-Trust Probes Against Big Tech

Not long after Facebook reached a record $5 billion settlement with the FTC in a federal antitrust probe (while the DoJ continues to build its anti-monopoly case against Google), WSJ reports that two large, bipartisan groups of states’ Attorneys General are preparing to launch separate antitrust probes against Google parent Alphabet and Facebook.

An investigation into Alphabet will be led by Texas AG Ken Paxton, a Republican. The bipartisan group will meet in front of the Supreme Court on Monday to officially announce the probe. Meanwhile, an overlapping group of Bipartisan AGs, led by Democratic New York AG Letitia James, will launch an investigation into Facebook.

“We continue to engage in bipartisan conversations about the unchecked power of large tech companies,” Ms. James said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal when asked for comment on the probe. “The attorneys general involved have concerns over the control of personal data by large tech companies and will hold them accountable for anticompetitive practices that endanger privacy and consumer data.”

As we mentioned above, FB recently shelled out $5 billion to settle allegations that it used deceptive disclosure opt-in practices to trick users into sharing personal information, which FB then used in its targeted advertising algorithms. It remains under scrutiny regarding its decision to buy Instagram, which some have anti-trust experts claim was a blatant violation of anti-trust law that should have been stopped – but now must be unwound.

It’s widely expected that these investigations, part of the Trump Administration’s crackdown on big tech, are only the beginning, and that no matter who wins the White House in 2020, the tech industry is almost guaranteed to face more anti-trust scrutiny. After all: Public opinion polls suggest Americans are growing increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry.

Policy makers are also concerned about the dominance of a handful of tech companies, particularly in the realm of social media.

“The extreme concentration in the technology industry is bad for the consumer, and in our opinion it’s bad for America,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III said at a June hearing on antitrust concerns in the tech industry, flanked by two other state attorneys general. “The concentration has stifled innovation with market distortions [in] research and development, as entrepreneurs avoid competing with Google and Facebook and other tech giants. So we need to do something about that.”

For now, it appears unlikely the state and federal investigations will be formally coordinated. But the federal enforcers have been meeting with state attorneys general, and closer cooperation could develop as the probes move forward.

“The FTC values our cooperative relationship with the AGs and routinely coordinates on tech and antitrust issues,” a spokeswoman for the FTC said.

Typically, the involvement of states’ attorneys’ general doesn’t bode well for the targets of the investigation, as it increases the complexity of the cases. The last major anti-trust case against a major American tech firm threatened to destabilize Microsoft roughly 20 years ago, though the company eventually agreed to an array of conditions, including making is Windows platform more widely accessible to third-party eve

But the sheer number of AGs involved from both parties is potentially problematic. At a minimum, it will add to the costs and complexity of the case. But if nothing else, it’s a warning: Anti-trust scrutiny of big tech won’t just ‘go away’. Investigations will keep coming and coming until the biggest firms are broken up.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZENSLT Tyler Durden

The Lavender Scare

Pride Month this June commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village, where gay men and women fought back against police raids. Stonewall is often associated with the start of the modern LGBT rights movement, but in actuality, efforts to stop government mistreatment of gay people went back more than a decade before 1969.

The Lavender Scare, which aired on PBS during Pride Month, documents President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order launching an official purge of homosexual federal employees. In the midst of fears of Communist spies infecting the government, gay men and women were declared to be security risks because their secret lives made them susceptible to blackmail.

This move was of course heaping injury upon injury, as the cultural belief at the time that homosexuality was a form of psychological perversion was what made gays feel they needed to keep that part of their identities secret. At any rate, there was little evidence to justify the blackmail fears, but thousands of Americans were hounded out of their jobs and had their careers ruined. Some, like astronomer and activist Frank Kameny, fought back, picketing the White House years before Stonewall. It would take decades for the order to be fully rescinded under President Bill Clinton.

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The Lavender Scare

Pride Month this June commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village, where gay men and women fought back against police raids. Stonewall is often associated with the start of the modern LGBT rights movement, but in actuality, efforts to stop government mistreatment of gay people went back more than a decade before 1969.

The Lavender Scare, which aired on PBS during Pride Month, documents President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order launching an official purge of homosexual federal employees. In the midst of fears of Communist spies infecting the government, gay men and women were declared to be security risks because their secret lives made them susceptible to blackmail.

This move was of course heaping injury upon injury, as the cultural belief at the time that homosexuality was a form of psychological perversion was what made gays feel they needed to keep that part of their identities secret. At any rate, there was little evidence to justify the blackmail fears, but thousands of Americans were hounded out of their jobs and had their careers ruined. Some, like astronomer and activist Frank Kameny, fought back, picketing the White House years before Stonewall. It would take decades for the order to be fully rescinded under President Bill Clinton.

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Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game

What if politics were a strategic, underhanded, zero-sum game that was actually kind of fun? Welcome to Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.

Developed by Lafair Family Games and funded via Kickstarter, the board game is supposed to simulate the cutthroat stakes of the once-per-decade reapportionment process in which states redraw their congressional districts. In June, the Supreme Court ended a yearslong constitutionality debate by deciding that “gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” So now it’s your turn to try. Four players pick their parties—Elephants, Donkeys, Leaves, or Porcupines—and take turns drawing segments of a congressional district border that must include at least four of the 73 “counties” on the board.

Each county contains a randomly assigned vote tally for one of the four parties. Once a prospective district is fully enclosed, the party with the highest vote total inside the boundaries wins it. Win the most districts and you win the game.

Mapmaker presents an overly optimistic scenario. The Porcupines and Leaves, for example, are given equal opportunity to draw district lines. Compared to reality—where gerrymandering serves as a way for the two major parties to entrench their duopoly—the game offers a surprisingly fair exercise in democracy.

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Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game

What if politics were a strategic, underhanded, zero-sum game that was actually kind of fun? Welcome to Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.

Developed by Lafair Family Games and funded via Kickstarter, the board game is supposed to simulate the cutthroat stakes of the once-per-decade reapportionment process in which states redraw their congressional districts. In June, the Supreme Court ended a yearslong constitutionality debate by deciding that “gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” So now it’s your turn to try. Four players pick their parties—Elephants, Donkeys, Leaves, or Porcupines—and take turns drawing segments of a congressional district border that must include at least four of the 73 “counties” on the board.

Each county contains a randomly assigned vote tally for one of the four parties. Once a prospective district is fully enclosed, the party with the highest vote total inside the boundaries wins it. Win the most districts and you win the game.

Mapmaker presents an overly optimistic scenario. The Porcupines and Leaves, for example, are given equal opportunity to draw district lines. Compared to reality—where gerrymandering serves as a way for the two major parties to entrench their duopoly—the game offers a surprisingly fair exercise in democracy.

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Longtime Zimbabwean Strongman Robert Mugabe Dies At 95

Visiting dignitaries were given gifts of his portrait, and rightfully so: To many Zimbabweans, Robert Mugabe, the strongman who ruled the East African nation for 30 years until he was ousted in a bloodless coup two years ago, was a complex figure. He was a symbol of liberation and hope – a leader of the quasi-Communist ZANU-PF who helped free his country from oppressive British rule, according to the NYT.

Mugabe was 95 at the time of his death.

Later, when food stocks started to run low, Mugabe’s true nature became apparent. He authorized oppressive crackdowns and indefinite detentions of suspected political opponents. Some suspected him of torture and unspeakable treatment of suspected political opponents.

But Mugabe wasn’t alone in this. Many in his generation of African revolutionary political leaders believed that, since they had freed the country from colonial rule, it was theirs to govern – as Mugabe put it – “until God says ‘come.'”

And he almost made it. In November 2017, army officers, fearing that Mugabe would anoint his second wife, Grace Mugabe (some 40 years his junior), as his political heir, moved against him. Within a dramatic few days he was placed under house arrest and forced by his political party, ZANU-PF, to step down.

Yet remarkably for a Continent where strongmen leaders are typically shown little, if any, mercy, Mugabe and his wife were treated well by his successor and the party he had formerly led. The military insisted that Mugabe’s ouster wasn’t tantamount to a coup.

Mugabe’s death was announced by his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who issued the following statement on Twitter, praising Mugabe as a competent

“It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday, using the abbreviation for comrade. “Mugabe was an icon of liberation, a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people. His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten.”

Last month, Zimbabwe’s government had disclosed that Mugabe had spent several months in Singapore undergoing treatment for an undisclosed illness.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HRdlrj Tyler Durden

An Open Letter To ‘Pearl-Clutchers’, Re: No-Deal Brexit

Authored by Catte Black via Off-Guardian.org,

Dear Pearl Clutcher,

I know you’re very preoccupied panic-buying essential drugs and spare body bags (for when some of your family members inevitably die following a no-deal Brexit).

I know you’re seething with social-media-meme-induced rage about – well, you aren’t totally clear but you know BoJo is behind it all – and are too busy hammering out hysterical status updates to think too much. Even if thinking were your strong suit, which, let’s be honest Pearl, it isn’t.

I know you’re worn out from listening to that nice Owen Jones squeaking about ‘democracy’ at all those #stopthecoup rallies you went to with your Guardianista chums. And you have a dozen ready meals to prepare for the freezer (for when the EU takes away all our food), and biofuel to buy for the generator (for when the EU turns off the electricity).

But can I just grab a quick moment of your time, Pearl? Just to point out one small fact you might want to consider.

Here’s a thought experiment for you.

* * *

You are a landlord.

A not very nice landlord.

One day one of your tenants comes to you and says he wants to leave. He asks for his deposit back in full.

You say actually he forfeited his deposit because his dog wrecked the carpets and there’s paint on the kitchen tiles. But you’ll agree to him having a partial refund, provided he lets you keep his furniture.

The tenant says ‘but my furniture is worth more than the deposit, so no thanks.’

You say, ‘well that’s the deal, take it or leave it.’

The tenant says ‘I’ll leave it thanks.’

He leaves it and moves out with his furniture

* * *

Now re-run that scenario, only THIS time a new law means the tenant can’t leave without accepting a deal.

What will you do now? Bear in mind, YOU can refuse the deal, but HE can’t. YOU can offer almost any terms you want. HIS only option is to ask nice for something better. So, will you:

  1. Offer him better terms than before because he asks nice?

  2. Screw him every frickin which way you can and give him an even worse deal than before – because he literally can’t refuse?

With this in mind, what do you think the media hysteria about No Deal might actually be about?

Do you still believe neoliberal warmonger austerity-fan Hilary Benn was thinking about YOU when he tabled that bill?

I know the Guardian and its shrieking sisters have all been telling you that No Deal Brexit is even worse than just regular Brexit, and that probably it will mean everyone in the country dies (instead of just most of us), the sun boils and the Kraken wakes from the depths to devour all those who still breathe upon our shores.

But you see, Pearl, that’s reductionist garbage.

Forget Boogeyman BoJo and the blaring Carnival of Fear, and think. In the real world outside the perceptual insanity of media memes being able to walk away with No Deal is an essential part of any negotiation isn’t it? Without it you can’t deal at all.

And if you’re negotiating with a jerk who refuses to budge from his unacceptable terms then walking away is all you can do.

It’s definitely not better to say ‘oh well, I can’t have no deal so I guess I just take whatever you got.’

All Boris’s antics and Hilary’s timely intervention has done is bring us to this pass where the UK population is cheering the fact they have handed themselves over to the oligarchs wholesale.

Oh and, according to George Galloway, John McDonnell et al even persuaded Corbyn to vote against an election – against his own best instincts.

The media will tell you this was sound tactics because Corbyn would certainly lose.

Well, maybe, but let’s not forget if Corbyn loses an election, the old Blairite rump get to force a leadership contest and maybe foist Benn or Phillips on us. And let’s not forget Phillips and others are on record saying they don’t want a Corbyn government.

So, I suggest it’s possible the Labour Right doesn’t want an election because they know Corbyn could win.

Further they’ve managed to spin this so that Corbyn is now associated with Remain – thus alienating much of his natural base.

It’s all round so far a victory for the status quo, the centrists, the anti-democrats, the 1%.

BoJo seems passing good at not getting what he allegedly wants but what the ruling elite need, doesn’t he?

So, Pearl, do you feel silly now for basically campaigning for the oligarchs to shaft you?

Yup, you should.

How long before the cheering Left clue into the silent coup just pulled on them?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZUxkeK Tyler Durden

It’s Happening Again: Maersk Halts Asia-Europe Loop Amid Global Slowdown  

Growth in the world continues to collapse into late summer, so much so that Maersk and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) had to “temporarily suspend” their AE2/Swan Asia to North Europe loop until mid-November, removing 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) a week from trade, reported The Loadstar.

Collapsing demand and plunging shipping container rates have led to pain for carriers who sail their vessels along the route. This is the second time Maersk and MSC have suspended the circuit, and the last time this happened was last fall.

Maersk and MSC said it’s working hard to “balance its network to match reduced market demand for the upcoming [Chinese factory shutdown] Golden Week.”

Maersk and MSC said the AE2/Swan suspension would “help us to match capacity with the expected weaker demand for shipping services” from Asia to Europe.

Maersk and MSC said the service would resume “in line with demand pickup,” suggesting the suspension could be extended into 1H20 as global trade isn’t expected to pick up for the next six to eight months. 

Maersk and MSC adopted a similar strategy last year, suspending AE2/Swan Asia to North Europe loop from September to December, this was right around the time when stock markets across the world crashed from October to December, on fears the world economy was slowing. It just so happens that the global synchronized slowdown is much worse this year, likely the world has entered a manufacturing/trade recession in late summer 2019.

The suspension of AE2/Swan loop will see 12 17,800-20,500 TEU vessels idled for the next several months. 

The last time the AE2/Swan loop was halted, it was during the period when world stocks collapsed last fall.

Freightos freight data for China to Europe 40 ft shipping containers shows muted price recovery over the last several years.

Global rates for 40 ft shipping containers also show depressed prices, which usually means global trade is weak.

As for global trade, the Merchandise World Trade Monitor by CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis shows peak globalization in 2017 and 2018, and the index is now sliding for the first time since the financial crisis.

It should be no mystery why the world’s largest shipping companies are idling vessels – it’s because a global recession has likely started.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZEEY0V Tyler Durden

Brickbat: Hard Labor

Diana Sanchez spent five hours in labor, screaming in pain and calling for help, before giving birth in a Denver jail cell last year. In a statement, the sheriff’s office noted that the cell was in the jail’s medical unit but says it has changed its policies so “pregnant inmates who are in any stage of labor are now transported immediately to the hospital.”

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