And This Guy Worked for Reagan!

Anyone who still thinks that out-sourcing is a good thing, or that Thomas Friedman's World is Flat is anything other than nonsense needs to read this:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N2A5217BC

A Couple Quick Movie Reviews

CRASH

I finally got to see this when my writing group, in lieu of having any new material to present to one another, decided to have a movie night. I wanted to like this movie more than I did. The writing was tight, the performances were outstanding, and the direction, cinematography, and music were all in place. So why did it leave me cold?

As an examination of race relations in present-day Los Angeles, I found the story to be facile and unconvincing. Most of the characters hold at least one racial bias and are willing to sound off about them at the drop of a hat, hitting us over the head with the theme.

To its credit, these characters are also presented as being neither completely good nor completely evil. In one scene, Matt Dillon's racist cop heroically saves the same woman he molested during a DWB incident the night before. But these coincidences, wherein all the characters randomly interact with one another over the course of the film, become a little hard to swallow. What are the odds that the daughter of the Persian shop keeper is also the coroner handling the body of the carjacker who happens to be the brother of Don Cheadle's character and also happens to be killed by the cop partnering with Matt Dillon's character, etc? Pretty good, I'd say, in a Los Angeles with a population of only two dozen people.

So, the movie doesn't really work as a story of race relations. As a story about people living in fear, however, the movie makes more sense. I wish it had focused more on that angle.

Mick LaSalle's review of Crash in the San Francisco Chronicle sums up my feelings pretty well. Read it here.

Good Night and Good Luck

I really liked this movie, which is not to say I didn't have some criticisms as a would-be screenwriter. As presented, Edward R. Murrow doesn't have much of a character arc, and there's no sense that he's in any real danger from his pursuit of Senator McCarthy. There are sub-plots that go nowhere (for example with Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson's characters).

That said, the two things that made the movie for me were the message -- that it's the media's responsibility to report the truth and that sometimes it comes down to one person to decide to do that -- and the performances, especially David Strathairn's Murrow.

The movie felt like an old Playhouse 90, something Rod Serling might have written back in the golden age of television, simply told and with a strong moral theme.

Did I Say "War Mongering Corporate Whore" Out Loud?

Every couple of years, a book appears which becomes the literary darling of Silicon Valley. Ten years ago it was ethically neutral books on marketing strategy like "Crossing the Chasm". More recently, the books capturing the imagination of the technorati are those that help them justify bad behavior.

A couple of years ago, it was "Who Moved My Cheese", an odious "self-help" book whose surface message is simply "shit happens; deal with it", but whose disturbing subtextual message to workers is this: "You are nothing more than rats in a maze; getting screwed by your corporate masters is the natural order of things, and there is nothing you can do about it."

The latest entry on the reading list for soul-less corporate automata is Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat." According to today's Mercury News, the book is the hot seller in the Valley, with tech executives giving copies to their minions and even so-called Progressives like Steve Westly singing its praises. For the record, I have not read Friedman's book but I have been a regular reader of his New York Times column (at least until the Times started charging for electronic access). My dislike for Friedman stems from both his support for the war and for his simple-minded reduction of complex global issues to glib catch-phrases.

Friedman's incessant cheer-leading for the positive aspects of globalization, while constantly ignoring the negative impacts on the American middle-class, gives the group-thinking CEOs license to continue the stupid, greedy, short-sighted policies that are propelling American society downward in the race to the bottom.

Idiots.

Write Angry

I now know the secret to getting a letter-to-the-editor printed by the Mercury News: write angry. Up until now I've had no success in getting reasonably-argued missives into print. On Wednesday, my wife and I wrote an angry letter in response to Cindy Sheehan's arrest at the State of the Union Address. The good news is that the paper printed the letter. The bad news is that they printed it three days after I sent it, after the DC cops admitted that they made a mistake. (Which doesn't excuse their action, but which does make it harder to justify angry rhetoric!)