Category: reason

Ford v Ferrari Is Thrilling, Excellent, and Not a Superhero Movie

Watching James Mangold’s vastly entertaining new race-car drama, Ford v Ferrari, I couldn’t help but think of Martin Scorsese. 

Scorsese is one of my favorite filmmakers: It’s possible I’ve watched his 1976 film Taxi Driver more often than any other movie, and I count Goodfellas as one of a handful of genuinely flawless films. Currently, he is promoting a new movie, The Irishman, which is playing in select theaters and garnering rave reviews. But he’s probably made more news for his recent comments about the wildly popular franchise of comic-book movies made by Marvel, which is owned by Disney. Those movies, he said, are “not cinema.” 

Cinema, Scorsese wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, was “about revelation—aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” 

Movies, in this view, exist to tell stories that explore and reveal human nature. They are about people—their struggles, their flaws, and their essential qualities. And they take tonal and stylistic risks that franchise blockbusters typically avoid. 

Scorsese’s worry was that in the age of Marvel and Disney, movies had become something else, something less human, less interesting, and more rote. Moviegoers, he warned, have few alternatives at the multiplex, and filmmakers struggle to get risky, difficult movies made. Superhero franchises are crowding out everything else. 

From time to time, I have complained about the ubiquity and generic competence of Marvel superhero movies, and I still wish the studio would do more to vary its aesthetic universe. (That’s especially true of its action sequences, which too often feel weightless and perfunctory, like the mass-produced exercises in generic spectacle they are.) And there are certainly ways in which it has grown more difficult to make a medium-budget movie at a major studio. 

Yet it’s hardly the case that there are no alternatives, no choices for viewers who want to see something different. Which brings me back to Ford v Ferrari. The film stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale as a car designer and driver working for Ford to build a racecar that could beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1966, and it is a model of classic Hollywood delights—the sort of film that Scorsese worries is being lost to superhero movie sameness. 

Built around a handful of sublimely thrilling race sequences and a pair of endearing, magnetic, incredibly watchable movie-star performances, it is part buddy movie, part action film, part exploration of a particular and deeply male form of determination and drive. 

Mangold, whose previous films include the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line and the Sylvester Stallone crime drama Copland, has always been interested in a certain sort of taciturn middle-aged man and his ambitions, the way that male anxiety and mid-life regret can fuel vision, achievement, conflict, and disappointment. Tellingly, the inciting incident occurs when the head of Ferrari compares Henry Ford II to his father; Damon’s character, Carroll Shelby, is a former driver turned engineer who can no longer race due to health complications. In Mangold’s world, men are always looking anxiously backwards, struggling to live up to their own impossible expectations for themselves. 

Ford v. Ferrari isn’t a Martin Scorsese movie; it’s more upbeat, more eager to please, more willing to give in to the demands of Hollywood conventionality. Yet it is the kind of movie that Scorsese fears viewers can no longer see, and the kind of movie he wants to see made—visually striking, emotionally complex, focused on the real world and the ways that real people behave within it. 

Nor is it the first 2019 film to succeed along these lines: In many ways Ford v. Ferrari reminded me of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, another ruminative, distinctive, period film constructed around the friendship of two middle-aged men played by movie stars with shine to spare. Both are movies about time and permanence, and both manage to extract a surprising amount of cinematic enjoyment out of long, luxurious shots of their leading men driving gorgeous old cars, backlit by the fading light of California sunsets. 

These two films are far better than most of their competition, but they are not exceptions that prove a rule. The end-of-year release calendar is packed with ambitious non-superhero films aimed at adults: Knives Out, The Report, Dark Waters, 1917, Uncut Gems, Richard Jewell, just to name a few. It’s true, of course, that there’s also a new Star Wars film and a sequel to Frozen on the way, and it is a foregone conclusion that both will do outsized business at the box office. But alternatives exist; indeed, they account for the vast majority of theatrical releases. Of the 758 films released theatrically last year, just 10 were Disney films. Just three were made by Marvel. 

It is worth noting, too, that Mangold’s two previous films—The Wolverine and Logan—were about a superhero drawn from the world of Marvel comics. Like many of Mangold’s other films, they were both elegiac and stylish, somber depictions of a man dealing with age and rage. Although they were produced by Fox and not set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they were demonstrations of the ways that superhero movies, at their best, can do all the things that Scorsese wants cinema to do. 

In many ways, I am sympathetic to Scorsese’s concerns about the sameness of studio filmmaking, about the way risk-aversion drives choices about which stories get told and how, and about how the rise of streaming services affect big-screen theatrical viewing. 

Yet as a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable of movie studio heads makes clear, it’s only because of a spend-happy streaming service that Scorsese’s new film—a three and a half hour movie starring a trio of actors in their 70s that cost nearly $200 million to make—was made at all. Without Netflix, which is often positioned as one of the biggest threats to theatrical viewing, it’s quite possible the movie would never have gotten a greenlight. The new, weird era of streaming and superhero movies isn’t perfect, and certainly isn’t beyond criticism or complaint. But it isn’t destroying the cinema that Scorsese loves; it is, thank goodness, ensuring that it continues to exist. 

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Ford v Ferrari Is Thrilling, Excellent, and Not a Superhero Movie

Watching James Mangold’s vastly entertaining new race-car drama, Ford v Ferrari, I couldn’t help but think of Martin Scorsese. 

Scorsese is one of my favorite filmmakers: It’s possible I’ve watched his 1976 film Taxi Driver more often than any other movie, and I count Goodfellas as one of a handful of genuinely flawless films. Currently, he is promoting a new movie, The Irishman, which is playing in select theaters and garnering rave reviews. But he’s probably made more news for his recent comments about the wildly popular franchise of comic-book movies made by Marvel, which is owned by Disney. Those movies, he said, are “not cinema.” 

Cinema, Scorsese wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, was “about revelation—aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” 

Movies, in this view, exist to tell stories that explore and reveal human nature. They are about people—their struggles, their flaws, and their essential qualities. And they take tonal and stylistic risks that franchise blockbusters typically avoid. 

Scorsese’s worry was that in the age of Marvel and Disney, movies had become something else, something less human, less interesting, and more rote. Moviegoers, he warned, have few alternatives at the multiplex, and filmmakers struggle to get risky, difficult movies made. Superhero franchises are crowding out everything else. 

From time to time, I have complained about the ubiquity and generic competence of Marvel superhero movies, and I still wish the studio would do more to vary its aesthetic universe. (That’s especially true of its action sequences, which too often feel weightless and perfunctory, like the mass-produced exercises in generic spectacle they are.) And there are certainly ways in which it has grown more difficult to make a medium-budget movie at a major studio. 

Yet it’s hardly the case that there are no alternatives, no choices for viewers who want to see something different. Which brings me back to Ford v Ferrari. The film stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale as a car designer and driver working for Ford to build a racecar that could beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1966, and it is a model of classic Hollywood delights—the sort of film that Scorsese worries is being lost to superhero movie sameness. 

Built around a handful of sublimely thrilling race sequences and a pair of endearing, magnetic, incredibly watchable movie-star performances, it is part buddy movie, part action film, part exploration of a particular and deeply male form of determination and drive. 

Mangold, whose previous films include the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line and the Sylvester Stallone crime drama Copland, has always been interested in a certain sort of taciturn middle-aged man and his ambitions, the way that male anxiety and mid-life regret can fuel vision, achievement, conflict, and disappointment. Tellingly, the inciting incident occurs when the head of Ferrari compares Henry Ford II to his father; Damon’s character, Carroll Shelby, is a former driver turned engineer who can no longer race due to health complications. In Mangold’s world, men are always looking anxiously backwards, struggling to live up to their own impossible expectations for themselves. 

Ford v. Ferrari isn’t a Martin Scorsese movie; it’s more upbeat, more eager to please, more willing to give in to the demands of Hollywood conventionality. Yet it is the kind of movie that Scorsese fears viewers can no longer see, and the kind of movie he wants to see made—visually striking, emotionally complex, focused on the real world and the ways that real people behave within it. 

Nor is it the first 2019 film to succeed along these lines: In many ways Ford v. Ferrari reminded me of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, another ruminative, distinctive, period film constructed around the friendship of two middle-aged men played by movie stars with shine to spare. Both are movies about time and permanence, and both manage to extract a surprising amount of cinematic enjoyment out of long, luxurious shots of their leading men driving gorgeous old cars, backlit by the fading light of California sunsets. 

These two films are far better than most of their competition, but they are not exceptions that prove a rule. The end-of-year release calendar is packed with ambitious non-superhero films aimed at adults: Knives Out, The Report, Dark Waters, 1917, Uncut Gems, Richard Jewell, just to name a few. It’s true, of course, that there’s also a new Star Wars film and a sequel to Frozen on the way, and it is a foregone conclusion that both will do outsized business at the box office. But alternatives exist; indeed, they account for the vast majority of theatrical releases. Of the 758 films released theatrically last year, just 10 were Disney films. Just three were made by Marvel. 

It is worth noting, too, that Mangold’s two previous films—The Wolverine and Logan—were about a superhero drawn from the world of Marvel comics. Like many of Mangold’s other films, they were both elegiac and stylish, somber depictions of a man dealing with age and rage. Although they were produced by Fox and not set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they were demonstrations of the ways that superhero movies, at their best, can do all the things that Scorsese wants cinema to do. 

In many ways, I am sympathetic to Scorsese’s concerns about the sameness of studio filmmaking, about the way risk-aversion drives choices about which stories get told and how, and about how the rise of streaming services affect big-screen theatrical viewing. 

Yet as a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable of movie studio heads makes clear, it’s only because of a spend-happy streaming service that Scorsese’s new film—a three and a half hour movie starring a trio of actors in their 70s that cost nearly $200 million to make—was made at all. Without Netflix, which is often positioned as one of the biggest threats to theatrical viewing, it’s quite possible the movie would never have gotten a greenlight. The new, weird era of streaming and superhero movies isn’t perfect, and certainly isn’t beyond criticism or complaint. But it isn’t destroying the cinema that Scorsese loves; it is, thank goodness, ensuring that it continues to exist. 

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Georgia Prosecutors Seized a Crab Shack Over Gambling Charges. A State Supreme Court Ruling Could Decide the Fate of Gaming in the State.

It’s been more than four years since Georgia authorities raided Captain Jack’s Crab Shack and arrested the elderly owners, Ronnie and Lee Bartlett, on commercial gambling violations. Since then, the couple has lost their businesses, declared bankruptcy, and Ronnie Bartlett, 75, has been wearing an ankle bracelet for the past two years. 

Prosecutors insist the Bartletts operated illegal video gambling machines out of their Macon-area restaurant and gave illicit cash payouts to winners. However, the Bartletts’ attorneys say prosecutors have been shaking down businesses like Captain Jack’s Crab Shack for more than a decade by hiring private attorneys who specialize in civil asset forfeiture to go after their money.

Now the Georgia Supreme Court will decide whether the crab shack was a den of iniquity or a legitimate business under state law. Its answer could vindicate prosecutors who’ve targeted gambling in the Peach State, or it could throw into question the legitimacy of dozens of similar cases, many of which involved the seizure of millions of dollars.

In the meantime, one of the Bartletts’ lawyers says the elderly couple has been impoverished.

“Their lives have been devastated,” says attorney Chris Anulewicz. “Their businesses have been taken away. They’ve basically been made paupers. And then my poor guy has had to wear an ankle bracelet for two years. He’s confined to his home county, pending this decision by the Georgia Supreme Court.”

The Bartlett case, besides having huge implications for the couple, is also a proxy in a larger fight in Georgia between local prosecutors and operators of “coin-operated amusement machines.”

Commercial gambling is illegal in Georgia, but there is an exception for video gaming machines that include an element of skill. Usually they are like slot machines but require players to press buttons to create winning combinations. Cash payouts are forbidden; winners must instead be given in-store credit or merchandise. There are roughly 22,000 such machines scattered through Georgia in gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats, and other businesses. Each one is licensed by the Georgia Lottery Commission and connected to a system that monitors money going in and out.

In dozens of cases similar to the Bartletts’, Georgia district attorneys have gone after small businesses owners and companies that lease the machines, accusing them of underreporting revenues, money laundering, and giving illegal cash payouts to players. 

In June, a multi-jurisdiction investigation led to a $14 million civil forfeiture settlement against a gambling machine company that owned machines in 130 different storefronts. In 2014, Bibb County authorities seized 10 gas stations and convenience stores in a coordinated gambling raid. In 2015, Bibb County prosecutors reached a $1.6 million settlement with another gaming company. 

The Bartletts’ current legal trouble started in May 2015, when law enforcement agents raided Captain Jack’s Crab Shack. Michael Lambros, a special assistant district attorney hired by Macon District Attorney David Cooke, filed a civil forfeiture complaint against the Bartletts under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, seizing their businesses along with $24,000 in cash, and freezing their bank accounts.

Most defendants in these cases opt to settle, forfeiting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars to avoid criminal prosecution.

“The incentive to settle is enormous,” says Paul Oleand, a Georgia attorney who said he’s represented about a dozen defendants, most of them South Asian immigrants, who had their stores seized and bank accounts frozen in gambling machine cases prosecuted by Lambros.

“I had a client one time who had an investment account that he was using to pay for his daughter’s tuition to go to Georgia State, and they froze that,” Oleand says. “It’s almost impossible for ordinary folks to be able to fund their defense and pay mortgage and make payroll and everything else when their assets are frozen.”

All of Oleand’s clients settled, but the Bartletts fought back. In 2016 they filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that Cooke and Lambros directed the raid on their restaurant, seized their cash and businesses, froze their bank accounts, and forced them into bankruptcy, despite knowing the machines in Captain Jack’s Crab Shack were state-licensed and perfectly legal. 

The suit claims prosecutors knew when they secured a warrant for the raid that there was no evidence to support allegations of money laundering or under-reporting winnings, and they knew that any cash payouts “were simply a misdemeanor under Georgia law that could not support a Georgia RICO indictment or claim.” 

The Bartlett’s lawsuit alleges that Lambros and Cook “typically extort a resolution with the location owners that allow [them] to keep a portion of the money improperly seized—all while threatening location owners with criminal prosecution.”

Two months after the Bartletts’ filed their lawsuit—and 17 months after the initial raid—a grand jury indicted Ronnie and Lee Bartlett on charges of racketeering, commercial gambling, possession of a gambling device, and keeping a gambling place. The criminal case put the Bartletts’ civil lawsuit on hold, and it’s been in limbo ever since. The Bartletts claim Cooke’s office filed criminal charges against them in retaliation for their civil suit.

A jury convicted Ronnie Bartlett in 2018 of commercial gambling violations, and a judge sentenced him to two years in prison. However, a Georgia appeals court reversed his conviction this June. 

The appeals court rejected the prosecution’s argument that, by giving cash payouts to winners, the crab shack had essentially converted its games into illegal gambling machines. It found the games were bona fide coin-operated amusement machines, inspected and licensed by the Georgia Lottery Commission. Georgia law explicitly exempts such machines from the state’s criminal code regarding commercial gambling, and lists cash payouts as a mere misdemeanor.  As such, the court ruled the evidence against Bartlett “was insufficient as a matter of law,” to support his felony convictions.

Cooke disagrees and has appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court. “Really it’s very plain,” he says. “You can’t run a slot machine in Georgia. A lot of people are standing on their heads to look at this in a skewed kind of way.”

Cooke has called the machines “a cancer on our society.” He says they’re predatory and addictive. He also says the gaming machines are tied to bribery, tax evasion, money laundering, and illegal cash payouts. So far, investigations by Cooke’s office have also snared a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy and a Georgia Department of Revenue agent who was allegedly on the take.

“It looks right now like that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Cooke says. “There’s so much money that flows through that the corruption angle is huge. When you have this much illegal cash flowing through any business, the only way to operate is to bribe public officials.”

The Georgia Amusement and Music Operators Association (GAMOA), a trade group representing the industry, directed a request for comment back to the Bartletts’ attorney, Anulewicz.

What Georgia prosecutors and GAMOA are fighting over is not just the technical definition of a coin-operated amusement machine, but an enormous amount of money flowing out of Georgians’ pockets and through the industry. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that these machines rake in an estimated $200 to $600 million a year in revenues. Court records show Captain Jack’s Crab Shack netted $398,176 in profits from its machines between 2013 and 2015. 

Both sides in the Bartletts’ bitter and long-running legal dispute—which in addition to the Georgia court system has wound through federal bankruptcy court and a U.S. District Court in Atlanta—accuse each other of being waist-deep in corruption.

“Defendant Lambros is paid through the improperly seized funds—in violation of Georgia law,” the lawsuit continued. “Defendant Cooke creates an unaccountable fund with the revenues generated from these improper seizures, minus the monies paid to Defendant Lambros …”

In 2016, Cooke announced his office would begin posting asset forfeiture data on its website to show how much forfeiture revenue it was bringing in, as well as what it was spending that money on.

“I’ve never been a big forfeiture guy,” Cooke says of his career as a prosecutor. “I’ve never been a big drug prosecution guy. I have always been, for my entire career, a violent crime guy.” 

Cooke’s career has been heavily focused on sex crimes and crimes against children. He was one of several Georgia prosecutors who said they would not prosecute women who violated the state’s controversial anti-abortion “heartbeat” bill passed earlier this year, and his office recently announced it was expanding a diversion program to keep juveniles out of the criminal justice system. (When Reason spoke with him, he was at a conference on juvenile justice reform.)

Cooke says he began taking on gaming machine cases after hearing too many stories from people whose lives had been ruined by gambling addiction. And if he was only interested in seizing money, he argues, why would he be urging the state legislature to completely outlaw gambling machines, cutting off his most steady source of forfeiture revenue?

But for private attorneys hired by Cooke and other local prosecutors to pursue forfeitures like the one against the Bartletts, these cases have been a very lucrative venture.

When local Georgia prosecutors wants to pursue a forfeiture case against a gambling machine operator or location under Georgia’s racketeering statutes, they often turn to the law firm of Michael Lambros and his partner, Andrew Ekonomou. Lambros’ firm has carved out a niche pursuing forfeiture cases as contracted “special assistant district attorneys.” (WRAL reported last year that Ekonomou had also been brought onto President Donald Trump’s legal team.)

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors can seize assets suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner has not been convicted or even charged with a crime. That’s why Lambros, acting under the authority of Cooke’s office, could seize the Bartletts’ businesses more than year before the couple was ever charged with a crime.

When Lambros and Ekonomou first began taking on forfeiture cases against gaming machine operators, local district attorneys guaranteed them a cut of the assets seized—up to one-third of the proceeds in some cases.

In 2012, a Georgia appeals court ruled that such overt “contingency fees” violated state public policy and called the practice “repugnant” to the principle that prosecutors should avoid the appearance of financial interest in cases.

Anulewicz claims that Lambros now simply works without written contracts and still receives lump sums in exchange for successful forfeiture prosecutions. 

In an unsuccessful motion attempting to get Lambros thrown off the Bartletts’ case, Anulewicz cited public records showing that between April 2016 and August 2017, Lambros was paid $710,000 after he secured more than $3.3 million in asset seizures in Cooke’s jurisdiction, far more than his hourly rate as a special prosecutor. 

Cooke says hiring special prosecutors makes sense because they have expertise in complicated forfeiture cases, and it frees up his regular prosecutors to pursue other, more serious cases.

Earlier this year, Lambros and Ekonomou were hit with another lawsuit by Noel Chua with similar allegations as the Bartletts’. Chua is a former Georgia doctor who was convicted of felony murder in 2007 for giving his housemate painkillers that contributed to his fatal overdose. In addition to charging Chua with felony murder and violations of Georgia’s drug laws, the Brunswick district attorney hired Lambros as as special prosecutor to pursue a RICO forfeiture case against Chua’s considerable assets. Lambros was also the court-appointed receiver for those seized assets.

Following Chua’s conviction, and after a two-and-half-year public records battle, Chua’s attorney uncovered a memo in the prosecution’s files from his trial that advised the lead attorney to avoid impaneling any black jurors. Racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional. When the memo came to light, prosecutors struck a plea deal with Chua, who was released on time served in 2017. 

However, Chua’s lawsuit alleges that by the time he got out of prison, Lambros’ firm had stripped him of nearly $2 million, of which only about $14,000 was remaining.

It’s unclear what the Bartletts will have left if they prevail at the Georgia Supreme Court, besides Ronnie Bartlett’s freedom. Their restaurants have all been shuttered for years now. Even that won’t be the end of their legal odyssey, though. The Bartletts’ civil suit will likely recommence either way, and the fight over a Macon-area crab shack will continue in federal court.   

Lambros did not return requests for comment for this story.

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Review: Charlie’s Angels

The new Charlie’s Angels makes its familiar point for the first of several times right at the beginning, when we see badass Angel Sabina Wilson (badass Kristen Stewart) strangulating some intercontinental creep with a curtain. Pausing to point out the obvious to this guy, Sabina says, “I think women can do anything…I want all my options available so I can decide for myself.” There follows a montage of feisty females around the world doing whatever they damn well please. Depending on your trash-cinema tastes and your gender decisions, you will find this either “empowering”—in the old “go girl!” way—or eye-rollingly banal.

This is not a terrible movie; it’s just not a terribly good one. The three Angels at the center of the action—Stewart’s neo-punky Sabina, Ella Balinska’s sleek-but-lethal Jane, and Naomi Scott’s brainiac hacker Elena (actually a sort of Angel-in-waiting)—are a personable trio, not without chemistry. But the action itself—a blur of predictable kicks, throws and headbutts laced with bursts of gunfire—is a hyper-choppy mess. (Director Elizabeth Banks, who also wrote the script and plays one of the main characters, might not be a natural action filmmaker; she does, however, have a distinctive feeling for the rhythms of female friendship.)

The plot is what you’d expect. Once upon a time, back in 1976, when the original Charlie’s Angels burst onto network TV for a five-season run, the Angels were three model-esque women with fabulous hair and bouncy body parts employed as investigators at an LA detective agency run by a mysterious character named Charlie Townsend, who delivered case instructions to the girls and their overseer, John Bosley, via speakerphone. This basic setup was continued 20 years later in a pair of feature films that introduced a new generation of Angels played by Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. Now, in this latest iteration, the Townsend Agency has gone international, with squads of Angels stationed all over the globe and many Bosleys, too (the name has become a rank). Banks is one of these Bosleys (she’s a sort of Angels den mother), and twinkly Patrick Stewart is another (he’s retiring, but don’t count him out). There’s also a turncoat agent, which complicates things usefully.

The Angels’ latest case gets underway in Hamburg, where tech developer Elena has come up with a MacGuffin called Calisto, a dingus that can do various cool things but can also be used as an assassination device. Elena wants her smarmy boss (Nat Faxon) to give her time to iron out the lethal kinks in this product, but he wants to market it right away. Alarmed, Elena seeks help from the local Bosley (Djimon Hounsou) at a café where Jane is working undercover. Soon they’re all being chased through the streets of the city by a tattooed assassin called Hodak (Jonathan Tucker), in a sequence that adds nothing fresh to the annals of car-chase uproar. In the aftermath of this pursuit, Banks’s Bosley pulls up. Seeing that the Angels are a little freaked out about having almost died, she says, “Hugs work”—a phrase heretofore unheard in the halls of badassery.

Director Banks constructs a series of ambitious set-piece scenes, some not bad, some not especially good. There’s a sequence in which the three Angels infiltrate a research facility in identical wigs and lab coats (they drive bad guys batty trying to track the women on surveillance cameras) which is pretty cute, even if it goes on too long. More fun is a big dance bash in the French Alps—an elaborate glitz-wallow set to a remix of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”—which appears to exist solely to allow Stewart and Balinska to look great in glittery little party dresses. And hey, why not—aspirational glamour is an important part of the Angels DNA.

It’s hard to imagine this movie existing without Kristen Stewart, who brings a charismatic bratty energy to her scenes (and a smidge of girl-girl flirtation, too). She can’t carry the whole picture, though, and the movie’s slightly dated feminist cheerleading sometimes becomes an annoyance. One nicely conceived scene, set in Istanbul and drawn from the real world, involves a bombed-out clinic for unwed mothers and a van full of tampons and birth control pills that’s being donated to it by the Angels. But then we also have a sneering bad guy saying to Banks’s Bosley, “You’re outmanned—you always have been.” And later we’re informed that among the many Angels who have passed through the Townsend Agency, one was…I don’t want to spoil anything here, but…let’s say a notorious American jurist.

I hope the sequel, should there be one, is a little bit better than this movie.

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Georgia Prosecutors Seized a Crab Shack Over Gambling Charges. A State Supreme Court Ruling Could Decide the Fate of Gaming in the State.

It’s been more than four years since Georgia authorities raided Captain Jack’s Crab Shack and arrested the elderly owners, Ronnie and Lee Bartlett, on commercial gambling violations. Since then, the couple has lost their businesses, declared bankruptcy, and Ronnie Bartlett, 75, has been wearing an ankle bracelet for the past two years. 

Prosecutors insist the Bartletts operated illegal video gambling machines out of their Macon-area restaurant and gave illicit cash payouts to winners. However, the Bartletts’ attorneys say prosecutors have been shaking down businesses like Captain Jack’s Crab Shack for more than a decade by hiring private attorneys who specialize in civil asset forfeiture to go after their money.

Now the Georgia Supreme Court will decide whether the crab shack was a den of iniquity or a legitimate business under state law. Its answer could vindicate prosecutors who’ve targeted gambling in the Peach State, or it could throw into question the legitimacy of dozens of similar cases, many of which involved the seizure of millions of dollars.

In the meantime, one of the Bartletts’ lawyers says the elderly couple has been impoverished.

“Their lives have been devastated,” says attorney Chris Anulewicz. “Their businesses have been taken away. They’ve basically been made paupers. And then my poor guy has had to wear an ankle bracelet for two years. He’s confined to his home county, pending this decision by the Georgia Supreme Court.”

The Bartlett case, besides having huge implications for the couple, is also a proxy in a larger fight in Georgia between local prosecutors and operators of “coin-operated amusement machines.”

Commercial gambling is illegal in Georgia, but there is an exception for video gaming machines that include an element of skill. Usually they are like slot machines but require players to press buttons to create winning combinations. Cash payouts are forbidden; winners must instead be given in-store credit or merchandise. There are roughly 22,000 such machines scattered through Georgia in gas stations, convenience stores, laundromats, and other businesses. Each one is licensed by the Georgia Lottery Commission and connected to a system that monitors money going in and out.

In dozens of cases similar to the Bartletts’, Georgia district attorneys have gone after small businesses owners and companies that lease the machines, accusing them of underreporting revenues, money laundering, and giving illegal cash payouts to players. 

In June, a multi-jurisdiction investigation led to a $14 million civil forfeiture settlement against a gambling machine company that owned machines in 130 different storefronts. In 2014, Bibb County authorities seized 10 gas stations and convenience stores in a coordinated gambling raid. In 2015, Bibb County prosecutors reached a $1.6 million settlement with another gaming company. 

The Bartletts’ current legal trouble started in May 2015, when law enforcement agents raided Captain Jack’s Crab Shack. Michael Lambros, a special assistant district attorney hired by Macon District Attorney David Cooke, filed a civil forfeiture complaint against the Bartletts under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, seizing their businesses along with $24,000 in cash, and freezing their bank accounts.

Most defendants in these cases opt to settle, forfeiting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars to avoid criminal prosecution.

“The incentive to settle is enormous,” says Paul Oleand, a Georgia attorney who said he’s represented about a dozen defendants, most of them South Asian immigrants, who had their stores seized and bank accounts frozen in gambling machine cases prosecuted by Lambros.

“I had a client one time who had an investment account that he was using to pay for his daughter’s tuition to go to Georgia State, and they froze that,” Oleand says. “It’s almost impossible for ordinary folks to be able to fund their defense and pay mortgage and make payroll and everything else when their assets are frozen.”

All of Oleand’s clients settled, but the Bartletts fought back. In 2016 they filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that Cooke and Lambros directed the raid on their restaurant, seized their cash and businesses, froze their bank accounts, and forced them into bankruptcy, despite knowing the machines in Captain Jack’s Crab Shack were state-licensed and perfectly legal. 

The suit claims prosecutors knew when they secured a warrant for the raid that there was no evidence to support allegations of money laundering or under-reporting winnings, and they knew that any cash payouts “were simply a misdemeanor under Georgia law that could not support a Georgia RICO indictment or claim.” 

The Bartlett’s lawsuit alleges that Lambros and Cook “typically extort a resolution with the location owners that allow [them] to keep a portion of the money improperly seized—all while threatening location owners with criminal prosecution.”

Two months after the Bartletts’ filed their lawsuit—and 17 months after the initial raid—a grand jury indicted Ronnie and Lee Bartlett on charges of racketeering, commercial gambling, possession of a gambling device, and keeping a gambling place. The criminal case put the Bartletts’ civil lawsuit on hold, and it’s been in limbo ever since. The Bartletts claim Cooke’s office filed criminal charges against them in retaliation for their civil suit.

A jury convicted Ronnie Bartlett in 2018 of commercial gambling violations, and a judge sentenced him to two years in prison. However, a Georgia appeals court reversed his conviction this June. 

The appeals court rejected the prosecution’s argument that, by giving cash payouts to winners, the crab shack had essentially converted its games into illegal gambling machines. It found the games were bona fide coin-operated amusement machines, inspected and licensed by the Georgia Lottery Commission. Georgia law explicitly exempts such machines from the state’s criminal code regarding commercial gambling, and lists cash payouts as a mere misdemeanor.  As such, the court ruled the evidence against Bartlett “was insufficient as a matter of law,” to support his felony convictions.

Cooke disagrees and has appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court. “Really it’s very plain,” he says. “You can’t run a slot machine in Georgia. A lot of people are standing on their heads to look at this in a skewed kind of way.”

Cooke has called the machines “a cancer on our society.” He says they’re predatory and addictive. He also says the gaming machines are tied to bribery, tax evasion, money laundering, and illegal cash payouts. So far, investigations by Cooke’s office have also snared a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy and a Georgia Department of Revenue agent who was allegedly on the take.

“It looks right now like that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Cooke says. “There’s so much money that flows through that the corruption angle is huge. When you have this much illegal cash flowing through any business, the only way to operate is to bribe public officials.”

The Georgia Amusement and Music Operators Association (GAMOA), a trade group representing the industry, directed a request for comment back to the Bartletts’ attorney, Anulewicz.

What Georgia prosecutors and GAMOA are fighting over is not just the technical definition of a coin-operated amusement machine, but an enormous amount of money flowing out of Georgians’ pockets and through the industry. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that these machines rake in an estimated $200 to $600 million a year in revenues. Court records show Captain Jack’s Crab Shack netted $398,176 in profits from its machines between 2013 and 2015. 

Both sides in the Bartletts’ bitter and long-running legal dispute—which in addition to the Georgia court system has wound through federal bankruptcy court and a U.S. District Court in Atlanta—accuse each other of being waist-deep in corruption.

“Defendant Lambros is paid through the improperly seized funds—in violation of Georgia law,” the lawsuit continued. “Defendant Cooke creates an unaccountable fund with the revenues generated from these improper seizures, minus the monies paid to Defendant Lambros …”

In 2016, Cooke announced his office would begin posting asset forfeiture data on its website to show how much forfeiture revenue it was bringing in, as well as what it was spending that money on.

“I’ve never been a big forfeiture guy,” Cooke says of his career as a prosecutor. “I’ve never been a big drug prosecution guy. I have always been, for my entire career, a violent crime guy.” 

Cooke’s career has been heavily focused on sex crimes and crimes against children. He was one of several Georgia prosecutors who said they would not prosecute women who violated the state’s controversial anti-abortion “heartbeat” bill passed earlier this year, and his office recently announced it was expanding a diversion program to keep juveniles out of the criminal justice system. (When Reason spoke with him, he was at a conference on juvenile justice reform.)

Cooke says he began taking on gaming machine cases after hearing too many stories from people whose lives had been ruined by gambling addiction. And if he was only interested in seizing money, he argues, why would he be urging the state legislature to completely outlaw gambling machines, cutting off his most steady source of forfeiture revenue?

But for private attorneys hired by Cooke and other local prosecutors to pursue forfeitures like the one against the Bartletts, these cases have been a very lucrative venture.

When local Georgia prosecutors wants to pursue a forfeiture case against a gambling machine operator or location under Georgia’s racketeering statutes, they often turn to the law firm of Michael Lambros and his partner, Andrew Ekonomou. Lambros’ firm has carved out a niche pursuing forfeiture cases as contracted “special assistant district attorneys.” (WRAL reported last year that Ekonomou had also been brought onto President Donald Trump’s legal team.)

Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors can seize assets suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner has not been convicted or even charged with a crime. That’s why Lambros, acting under the authority of Cooke’s office, could seize the Bartletts’ businesses more than year before the couple was ever charged with a crime.

When Lambros and Ekonomou first began taking on forfeiture cases against gaming machine operators, local district attorneys guaranteed them a cut of the assets seized—up to one-third of the proceeds in some cases.

In 2012, a Georgia appeals court ruled that such overt “contingency fees” violated state public policy and called the practice “repugnant” to the principle that prosecutors should avoid the appearance of financial interest in cases.

Anulewicz claims that Lambros now simply works without written contracts and still receives lump sums in exchange for successful forfeiture prosecutions. 

In an unsuccessful motion attempting to get Lambros thrown off the Bartletts’ case, Anulewicz cited public records showing that between April 2016 and August 2017, Lambros was paid $710,000 after he secured more than $3.3 million in asset seizures in Cooke’s jurisdiction, far more than his hourly rate as a special prosecutor. 

Cooke says hiring special prosecutors makes sense because they have expertise in complicated forfeiture cases, and it frees up his regular prosecutors to pursue other, more serious cases.

Earlier this year, Lambros and Ekonomou were hit with another lawsuit by Noel Chua with similar allegations as the Bartletts’. Chua is a former Georgia doctor who was convicted of felony murder in 2007 for giving his housemate painkillers that contributed to his fatal overdose. In addition to charging Chua with felony murder and violations of Georgia’s drug laws, the Brunswick district attorney hired Lambros as as special prosecutor to pursue a RICO forfeiture case against Chua’s considerable assets. Lambros was also the court-appointed receiver for those seized assets.

Following Chua’s conviction, and after a two-and-half-year public records battle, Chua’s attorney uncovered a memo in the prosecution’s files from his trial that advised the lead attorney to avoid impaneling any black jurors. Racial discrimination in jury selection is unconstitutional. When the memo came to light, prosecutors struck a plea deal with Chua, who was released on time served in 2017. 

However, Chua’s lawsuit alleges that by the time he got out of prison, Lambros’ firm had stripped him of nearly $2 million, of which only about $14,000 was remaining.

It’s unclear what the Bartletts will have left if they prevail at the Georgia Supreme Court, besides Ronnie Bartlett’s freedom. Their restaurants have all been shuttered for years now. Even that won’t be the end of their legal odyssey, though. The Bartletts’ civil suit will likely recommence either way, and the fight over a Macon-area crab shack will continue in federal court.   

Lambros did not return requests for comment for this story.

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Review: Charlie’s Angels

The new Charlie’s Angels makes its familiar point for the first of several times right at the beginning, when we see badass Angel Sabina Wilson (badass Kristen Stewart) strangulating some intercontinental creep with a curtain. Pausing to point out the obvious to this guy, Sabina says, “I think women can do anything…I want all my options available so I can decide for myself.” There follows a montage of feisty females around the world doing whatever they damn well please. Depending on your trash-cinema tastes and your gender decisions, you will find this either “empowering”—in the old “go girl!” way—or eye-rollingly banal.

This is not a terrible movie; it’s just not a terribly good one. The three Angels at the center of the action—Stewart’s neo-punky Sabina, Ella Balinska’s sleek-but-lethal Jane, and Naomi Scott’s brainiac hacker Elena (actually a sort of Angel-in-waiting)—are a personable trio, not without chemistry. But the action itself—a blur of predictable kicks, throws and headbutts laced with bursts of gunfire—is a hyper-choppy mess. (Director Elizabeth Banks, who also wrote the script and plays one of the main characters, might not be a natural action filmmaker; she does, however, have a distinctive feeling for the rhythms of female friendship.)

The plot is what you’d expect. Once upon a time, back in 1976, when the original Charlie’s Angels burst onto network TV for a five-season run, the Angels were three model-esque women with fabulous hair and bouncy body parts employed as investigators at an LA detective agency run by a mysterious character named Charlie Townsend, who delivered case instructions to the girls and their overseer, John Bosley, via speakerphone. This basic setup was continued 20 years later in a pair of feature films that introduced a new generation of Angels played by Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. Now, in this latest iteration, the Townsend Agency has gone international, with squads of Angels stationed all over the globe and many Bosleys, too (the name has become a rank). Banks is one of these Bosleys (she’s a sort of Angels den mother), and twinkly Patrick Stewart is another (he’s retiring, but don’t count him out). There’s also a turncoat agent, which complicates things usefully.

The Angels’ latest case gets underway in Hamburg, where tech developer Elena has come up with a MacGuffin called Calisto, a dingus that can do various cool things but can also be used as an assassination device. Elena wants her smarmy boss (Nat Faxon) to give her time to iron out the lethal kinks in this product, but he wants to market it right away. Alarmed, Elena seeks help from the local Bosley (Djimon Hounsou) at a café where Jane is working undercover. Soon they’re all being chased through the streets of the city by a tattooed assassin called Hodak (Jonathan Tucker), in a sequence that adds nothing fresh to the annals of car-chase uproar. In the aftermath of this pursuit, Banks’s Bosley pulls up. Seeing that the Angels are a little freaked out about having almost died, she says, “Hugs work”—a phrase heretofore unheard in the halls of badassery.

Director Banks constructs a series of ambitious set-piece scenes, some not bad, some not especially good. There’s a sequence in which the three Angels infiltrate a research facility in identical wigs and lab coats (they drive bad guys batty trying to track the women on surveillance cameras) which is pretty cute, even if it goes on too long. More fun is a big dance bash in the French Alps—an elaborate glitz-wallow set to a remix of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls”—which appears to exist solely to allow Stewart and Balinska to look great in glittery little party dresses. And hey, why not—aspirational glamour is an important part of the Angels DNA.

It’s hard to imagine this movie existing without Kristen Stewart, who brings a charismatic bratty energy to her scenes (and a smidge of girl-girl flirtation, too). She can’t carry the whole picture, though, and the movie’s slightly dated feminist cheerleading sometimes becomes an annoyance. One nicely conceived scene, set in Istanbul and drawn from the real world, involves a bombed-out clinic for unwed mothers and a van full of tampons and birth control pills that’s being donated to it by the Angels. But then we also have a sneering bad guy saying to Banks’s Bosley, “You’re outmanned—you always have been.” And later we’re informed that among the many Angels who have passed through the Townsend Agency, one was…I don’t want to spoil anything here, but…let’s say a notorious American jurist.

I hope the sequel, should there be one, is a little bit better than this movie.

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The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

A darkness hangs over The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Netflix’s prequel to the wonderfully weird 1982 Jim Henson film.

The original movie still stands as a technical masterpiece amid Muppet master Henson’s goofier, more well-known productions. The new series is even more remarkable. It uses more than 100 puppets and an impressive voice cast to tell a sprawling story that deepens the lush, creepy fantasy world invented by Henson and artist Brian Froud.

At the center of the story are the terrifying half-bird, half-lizard Skeksis, who rule the planet of Thra. They control the titular crystal, which possesses a life-giving force they’ve corrupted for nefarious purposes. A group of Gelflings—think half-hobbit, half-elf—revolt against Skeksis’ rule.

The Gelflings’ world is as beautiful as it is doomed. The heroes of the original film were two survivors of a holocaust brought on by the Skeksis. Ruins and prophecies were the only connection they had to a once-vibrant Gelfling culture.

The rebellion is led by Rian (voice: Taron Egerton; puppeteer: Neil Sterenberg), a Skeksis castle guard who flees his post after discovering the depth of his masters’ evil plans; Deet (Nathalie Emmanuel; Beccy Henderson), who is literally pushed into the story by the living spirit of Thra; and Brea (Anya Taylor-Joy; Alice Dinnean), a princess who gets woke about the unfairness and cronyism at the heart of—wait for it—the Skeksis’ tax system.

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The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

A darkness hangs over The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Netflix’s prequel to the wonderfully weird 1982 Jim Henson film.

The original movie still stands as a technical masterpiece amid Muppet master Henson’s goofier, more well-known productions. The new series is even more remarkable. It uses more than 100 puppets and an impressive voice cast to tell a sprawling story that deepens the lush, creepy fantasy world invented by Henson and artist Brian Froud.

At the center of the story are the terrifying half-bird, half-lizard Skeksis, who rule the planet of Thra. They control the titular crystal, which possesses a life-giving force they’ve corrupted for nefarious purposes. A group of Gelflings—think half-hobbit, half-elf—revolt against Skeksis’ rule.

The Gelflings’ world is as beautiful as it is doomed. The heroes of the original film were two survivors of a holocaust brought on by the Skeksis. Ruins and prophecies were the only connection they had to a once-vibrant Gelfling culture.

The rebellion is led by Rian (voice: Taron Egerton; puppeteer: Neil Sterenberg), a Skeksis castle guard who flees his post after discovering the depth of his masters’ evil plans; Deet (Nathalie Emmanuel; Beccy Henderson), who is literally pushed into the story by the living spirit of Thra; and Brea (Anya Taylor-Joy; Alice Dinnean), a princess who gets woke about the unfairness and cronyism at the heart of—wait for it—the Skeksis’ tax system.

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