Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Scrib and Brenda watched a movie called The Last Shot, about an FBI agent pretending to be a movie producer to sting a mobster into offering a bribe to the Teamsters. Joan Cusack was so funny they ordered Grosse Pointe Blank.
They were disappointed in Grosse Point Blank. For one thing, they didn’t like the music. For another, the idea of a professional killer at his high school reunion wasn’t funny to Scrib. Everybody was a professional killer, including the real estate salesman and the rent-a-cop; just, some of them were doing better than others.
They also rented War, Inc. from Netflix.
War, Inc. was a different story. It was good.
Why hadn’t they heard of it?
It was good. But it was based on Naomi Klein’s magazine article in Harper’s, “Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in Pursuit of a Neocon Utopia.”
Can you say that in a movie?
Year zero reminds one of patient zero in the book about the origin of AIDS, The Band Played On. A scourge, the band plays on. Think of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
A plague, the band plays on.
The Bush-Enron
Administration,
Now that we have a new administration, the Obama Administration, we’ll see how things unfold differently.
Well, the War on
Terror shifted from
And the tsunami
in
We’ll see how that plays out.
Katrina? Katrina is old news. Yesterday’s news. The Saints went to the Super Bowl, didn’t
they? Buddy Diliberto walked down
When Scrib was a student, anthropologists called missionaries plaguesters, because they gave Indians Western diseases. But also, because Western ideas were a plague, to traditional cultures.
We’ll see how
this plays out in
We’ll see how
disaster capitalism plays out in
What do you want to attract—surfers?
Dirtballs and hippies?
A disaster like an earthquake makes war unnecessary.
War makes a disaster like an earthquake unnecessary.
Giant, multinational corporations move in. Globalization and privatization cherry-pick the assets, and the public can choose: Burger King or McDonald’s.
Coke or Pepsi.
Syphilis or yaws. Wait until the water-borne diseases start, the dysentery, the dehydration.
Let them drink Pepsi. They need assistance to buy Pepsi. Your dollars will help Pepsi.
John Cusack goes into a country that has just been invaded to assassinate the owner of a gas company in another country, under cover of being the producer of a trade show, and Joan Cusack, his administrative assistant, finally gets to put her degree in communications to work.
A lot of women have degrees in communications. They have to work at something.
Might as well be an administrative assistant to an assassin, posing as a trade show producer.
Or an administrative assistant to a realtor. Or a lady realtor.
Marisa Tomei plays a left-wing journalist who smells a rat.
She is suspicious of corporations. She thinks John Cusack is up to no good.
She is right. Maybe she is Naomi Klein.
Maybe she will write No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
Maybe she will write The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Maybe she will be compared to Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
Maybe she will go on television, promoting her book.
Hilary Duff, who played a pop singer, was the only cast member who did any publicity for War, Inc.
She was on Ellen, TRL, Today, Jimmy Kimmel, and Regis and Kelly.
Cusack limited his television appearances to Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Maybe War, Inc. will do some business on DVD.