Monthly Archives: May 2013

What’s Wrong with the New Star Trek Movie?

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Star Trek: Into DarknessComing into the movie theater, my wife said, “I’ll only like it if there’s a tribble in it.” She liked it. I guessed the key plot element when I saw the cute, furry ball. I liked it less.

“Into Darkness,” the new Star Trek movie directed by J. J. Abrams, is recycled, but plays well, at least some of the time, with the teenager in all of us. With the whole universe to toy with, literally, Abrams can only give us a rehashed, refried-bean sort of plot, or is it tri-fried? As in “Super 8,” Abrams gives us bits and pieces of other movies, or in this case, mostly Star Trek movies and TV shows.

The opening sequence, a high-action chase scene, whether derivative or an inside joke, is eerily reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which Indiana Jones is chased by South American Indians. While an obviously expensive scene to film, the aboriginals’ faces here look like five and dime store paper mache masks.

With its recycled plot, “Into Darkness” is still exciting but not awe inspiring. If I could speak with J. J. Abrams, I would tell him he needs to show us the wonder of the universe as well as the foibles of its inhabitants. If Star Trek doesn’t boldly go where no one has gone before, it’s a dud.

With the villain’s superhuman strength and brains, you would think he would be a more complex character, one with a depth of feeling and understanding, yet he is little more than a shadow puppet. A couple of times it appears our déjà vu villain is about to become interesting, but the director always reels him in.

In this attempt, Kirk is the arrogant young man who knows it all; Spock is the monotone hybrid Pinocchio, while Bones is the man of feeling. Uhura is emotive and sexy, so why does she like Spock? Scotty is bland, while Sulu grows a pair when necessary, but the other characters are mostly cardboard cutouts. If their names weren’t called out when they appear, you wouldn’t know who they are.

There is a great movie in there somewhere, but it doesn’t get a chance to develop. If Abrams is going to direct another Star Trek movie, he needs to speak with, and I say this in all humility, someone like me. Star Trek movies need excitement and humor, but they also need awe, irony and blowback.

That is not to say the movie is bad. In fact it’s quite good and highly exciting at points, with great sets and decent 3D effects. Yet, it disappoints. Abrams appears to still be writing for 13 year olds, like in “Super 8,” but some of us have grown up. We want a little wonder with our popcorn and soda.

Model Christy Turlington Burns Says Childbirth Deaths Are Avoidable

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Christy Turlington BurnsShe’s on the cover of the June/July 2013 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. She’s one of Fast Company’s most creative people of 2013. And she’s determined to stop women from dying in childbirth.

Every day, roughly one thousand women die from the complications of pregnancy or childbirth, yet most of these deaths are preventable. That’s the message of model and activist Christy Turlington Burns’ documentary “No Woman, No Cry.”

The first-time filmmaker’s own experience with post-partum hemorrhaging after the birth of her daughter, Grace, and a 2005 visit to El Salvador, her mother’s homeland, inspired Turlington Burns to document maternal mortality worldwide.

“It’s a global tragedy,” she said at a screening of the film in New York City, so she decided to tell the stories of women in four different countries.

Turlington Burns first takes us to Tanzania, where a very pregnant Janet must walk five miles to reach a small clinic. She has no food with her, and the clinic provides none. Because her labor has not progressed enough, the health care worker sends her home. When Janet returns to the clinic, she’s so weak that she’s told she must now get to a hospital, a one-hour drive away. The van to take her costs $30, more than one month’s income for Janet’s family. Turlington Burns provides the money, and Janet gives birth to a healthy boy.

Tanzania lacks adequate health care facilities and medical personnel, as do most developing nations, with only one obstetrician for every 2.5 million people. With more and better facilities, women like Janet don’t need to die, as she surely would have if the film crew had not been there.

In Bangladesh, the issues are different. Health care facilities are often close by, yet most women will not use them because of the social stigma attached: it’s considered shameful to give birth outside the home. With proper education, however, attitudes can change. When a health care worker counsels Monica, who is ashamed to seek medical help, she finally agrees to have her baby in a hospital, leading to a happy outcome – the birth of a son.

In Guatemala, Turlington Burns encounters yet another issue. Abortion is illegal, even in cases of rape and incest. So when a young woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape, her illegal abortion almost kills her; it takes nearly six weeks of hospitalization for her to recover. Changing religiously based norms is probably the toughest challenge regarding maternal health, but it can happen, Turlington Burns argues.

Although 99 percent of childbirth-related deaths occur in the developing world, the United States has vast room for improvement, ranking 50th in maternal mortality. Women of color are especially vulnerable, as are those who have no health insurance.

“Being uninsured and pregnant is a disaster,” said Jennie Joseph, a Florida midwife featured in the film.

Ironically, the only woman who dies of childbirth-related complications in the documentary is an American woman who succumbs to an amniotic fluid aneurism. Turlington Burns shows the toll her death takes on her family with sensitivity and compassion.

Two years in the making, “” can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon.

We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

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We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikileaksIf you’re looking for a Michael Moore style documentary where you know the good guys from the bad guys, then this movie is not for you. While the first fifteen minutes appeared to detail the heroism of Julian Assange against the misdeeds of the U.S. government, the following two hours depicted a far more complex reality in which people may do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things with laudable goals in mind. Director Alex Gibney doesn’t give us a Moore fable or an Oliver Stone lesson in propaganda, but rather a complex study of an Icarus-themed Assange and a tortured but saint-like Private Bradley Manning.

When Assange dumped thousands of documents about the U.S.’s handling of the Afghanistan war without redacting the names of the locals who worked with the U.S. government, Assange went from hero to arrogant bastard. For him it was more important to get the word out regardless of whom it hurt or killed. Admittedly, Assange’s WikiLeaks turns out to be more a one-man organization than a dedicated band of Robin Hoods who steal from the U.S. government to give to the world. Did Assange care that people might die to facilitate the better free flow of information, or was he simply unable to redact the affected peoples names with a lack of staff and approaching deadlines for the release of information? We may never know.

As we delve into the personalities of Assange, and Private Manning who illegally downloaded hundreds of thousand of documents from the U.S. government, we find that both men are damaged goods. Assange was an unloved child whose mother divorced several times and who was shunted around more than thirty residences in Australia. Manning was a small, slightly effeminate gay who was bullied in school and not sure of his gender. From a divorced family with an alcoholic mother, he also felt himself very much alone. Whatever their environment and resultant personality failures, both were computer geniuses.

But overarching questions remain. When can the most powerful government in the world keep information hidden, and when must it release it? Is the embarrassment of inadvertently killing journalists in Iraq enough of a reason? Is potentially outing collaborators sufficient, and who decides and why and how?

In the Army, you’re supposed to follow orders, not your conscience. So, for Private Manning, it was a three-fer, not only was he a lonely homosexual with a stronger conscience because of what he had experienced, but he also felt that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body – and he had no one to turn to for help. The only surprise was how long it took him to unravel or to grow a pair – it all depends on your point of view.

So, if there is a hero in this mess, it’s probably not Julian Assange, whose dark side was more fitted to playing Darth Vader than Han Solo. Two damaged boys grow up to be damaged young men who want to get even with society, or, from a rosier point of view, men who want to change society and the U.S. government into something it isn’t. Beware of what you wish for: The consequences may be more severe than you imagined.

The Jerusalem Post Conference and Caroline Glick

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Caroline GlickThe second annual Jerusalem Post Conference, subtitled Fighting for the Zionist Dream, was held in New York City rather than Jerusalem – probably to attract the widest possible audience of supporters of Zionism and Israel.

The highlight of the conference was the speech and later panel appearance by the polarizing senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post and editor of Latma, Caroline Glick.

Latma, which is similar in concept to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show except with satirical songs thrown in, depicts two leftist and clueless television reporters editorializing on the current Israel-related news. Cutting through all the propaganda surrounding events, such as the Mavi Marmara flotilla, the songs can be devastatingly funny and spot-on accurate. The flotilla song We Con the World (sung to the tune of We are the World) drew millions of hits and was worth more to the Israeli side than any hasbara, as it countered the exasperated horror routinely expected from the Arab world and the EU. To say that Ms. Glick is an Israeli national treasure would be an understatement.

Born into a middle-class Jewish home in Chicago, she was raised in a traditional left-leaning liberal environment. After making aliyah to Israel, she claimed to have come to understand realpolitik. To her, leftists are fools who wish for a world that doesn’t and will never exist. For example, the fact that Israelis, Americans, and the European countries want there to be peace in the Middle East and want there to be a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, doesn’t mean that the Palestinians or the Arab world wants the same. She believes that the Palestinians will never give up the idea of the destruction of Israel and at best will yield to a two-stage solution in which the Jewish state is first stripped of defensible borders and is then attacked with missiles and bombs until it is defeated, whether it takes decades or centuries. She has a long-term strategist’s view of the Middle East that is not pleasant, but certainly devastating.

Thus, when she speaks even to a pro-Israel audience, she can be condescending, and when she replies to other speakers, she can be dripping with sarcasm and animus. She is like an elementary school teacher who must tell a clueless kindergartner over and over again not to place his wet hand over an electrical outlet. Like the greater public, the student never quite gets the danger even if he is shocked over and over.

Like Snidely Whiplash, the evil enemy of Dudley Do-Right in Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, she curled her lip in a snarl that said it all. Except in this version, she was the hero and Dudley was a dud who didn’t know what he was doing. She is brilliant, incisive, cutting and just a shade paranoid. But in the world she lives in, paranoia can be life saving.

So is she the wunderkind of Israeli politics or just the enfant terrible? Maybe she is just an acerbic Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, against the wishes of his superiors, railed at the UN against the passing of the Zionism is Racism resolution in 1975. I believe she is a brilliant person – with a blind spot. That is, she doesn’t see that we Americans do see what an impossible and unfair situation Israel is in. Where anything Jews do is biased and under-handed, whereas whatever their opponents do is above-board and laudable. Where suicide bombing and indiscriminate rockets are simply tools of resistance, but Israeli defense is a war crime. Where an American Jew is accused of dual loyalty if he supports Israel, but an Irish American is just supporting his heritage when he supports Ireland. Where 12 million Jews are said to control the world, while a billion Moslems are helpless and a billion Christians wring their hands in silence. In such a world, it is not surprising that Caroline Glick is angry and frustrated. It is only surprising that more of us citizens of the world are not.

Glick does not think too highly of Americans. When she started her presentation, she stated that she would much rather speak on another topic, but that we Americans needed to hear her. She said that the purpose of the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) movement was the destruction of the state of Israel, not just the elimination of Israel from the West Bank. She asked why Jews are inviting anti-Semites, including former President Carter and BDS members to speak at Jewish forums? Are we fools and dupes?

After the 1973 Israeli–Arab war in which Israel conquered the West Bank, part of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, the international left abandoned Israel. Leftist Jews now join with Israel’s enemies to destroy it, while stating how courageous they are. But Israel and American Jews need each other, and might not survive without each other. There is an unwillingness to call things by their names. These are uncomfortable truths. Glick is very angry but still hopeful.

My problem with Caroline Glick is that I think the majority of Americans, including a majority of Jews, do understand Israeli-Arab problems and the unremitting prejudice against Israel from the Arab world, many EU countries, and especially the UN. I see a perceptible turning to Israel even among the twenty-somethings who are traditionally more to the left of the political spectrum. , the contemporary news site of the young, has gotten consistently more pro-Israel in its reader comments.  Several years ago, the majority of the readers’ comments were anti-Israel; today, the majority are either pro-Israel or at least understanding of its positions. In fact, I see that Israel today is in a far stronger position than its friends think and its enemies desire.