I’ve been posting the TV and movie reviews I do for the print-only edition of the newspaper I work for as kind of a place holder, and because I think they’re kind of good in a mostly-inconsequential way. At least they appear to be the stuff I get the most complimentary remarks about from readers and fellow-journalists.

But what I’ve been really busy with, and haven’t chosen to unveil until now, it trying to become a self-syndicated columnist.

Some know I had a weekly column at my last newspaper. Well, now I’m at a bigger paper with a bigger staff, and they say, “Blog.” I have posted some of my newspaper blog stuff and will probably do some more, but I’m kind of uneasy about putting up a lot of stuff on my site that I do on company time.

After having gotten polite brush-offs from major syndicates, I discovered Minnesota’s own Jill Pertler, who is a self-syndicated columnist.

Soooo, what I’ve been doing is cranking out a column every week. I have a source list of Minnesota newspapers with contact data. Every week I cut about 20 from that list, and send a column to each of them with a contact letter, addressed personally to the editor. Then I add each to my long list of Minnesota editors, and send each weeks submission to the whole list.

It’s a bit tedious to be sure. But, I’ve gotten one contract so far and several nibbles. Pretty good after a couple months. Pertler said try it for six!

I haven’t been posting my stuff yet, because of course you don’t want to give away for free what you’re trying to sell. Not until a decent interval has passed for sure. And besides, the blog format is a bit different from newspaper column style. However I’m going to start posting after that decent interval has passed, just to archive these and make them available to potential subscribers.

So without further ado, here’s one from a couple weeks ago>

Slim majorities
By Steve Browne

President Obama is currently being roasted for an apparent gaff about the Supreme Court.

In regards to the current case before the court concerning the constitutionality of Obamacare, the president said on April 2, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Right wing pundits are having a field day bludgeoning Obama, a graduate of Harvard law school, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and one-time lecturer (not a professor) on constitutional law with Marbury v Madison, the 1803 case that established the principle of judicial review. Not to mention the fact Obamacare passed by seven votes, hardly a “strong majority.”

What is bothering me is less the president’s views on judicial review than those seven votes.

What occurred to me while thinking about this issue was Thomas Jefferson’s remark, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

Jefferson of course, could toss off more profound observations in an offhand remark than most of today’s political thinkers can in a book.

This is what is bothering me about an awful lot of issues these days: energy policy, foreign policy, healthcare, etc.

Everyone can see these issues split the country right down the middle – and that’s precisely why we should be treading carefully here.

These proposed policies tend to be of the top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway kind. There’s little room for significant decision-making on the state and local level – or individual choice for that matter. You pays your taxes, you get your marching orders.

Now some decisions by government necessarily have to be of this kind. If we’re going to war, you don’t get to say, “No thanks, not my war,” and continue to trade with, travel to, or even send letters to the enemy country. There’s a word for that – treason.

Or for that matter, try opting out of using the roads.

But the issues we’re dealing with today are a lot less pressing than eminent war. Sorry, you may believe the climate is causing the seas to rise and flood Miami, but it’s not happening on a time scale equal to the Pearl Harbor attack, nor is it quite so obvious to all that the threat is looming as rapidly as some passionately believe.

People are not dying en mass in the streets from lack of health insurance, whatever the proponents of nationalized single-payer insurance say.

Yes it is possible man-caused climate change may have serious consequences down the road. Yes there are many individual hardships caused by skyrocketing medical costs. But the point is, these are complex issues, with wide range for honest disagreement among honest men. We are not going to solve them with government-mandated policies crafted slap-dash in six months!

And we are not going to make the acrimony go away by half the population forcing the policy down the throats of the other half. If the differences of opinion on any significant issue amount to a few percentage points (and in fact, in the case of Obamacare, polls show it’s a lot more unpopular than that,) then heck, that’s the percentage of people who change their minds six times before breakfast!

Consider World War II, the last war we had a nearly universal consensus for, versus Vietnam. Ask why the British traitor Lord Haw-Haw was executed and Tokyo Rose imprisoned, while Jane Fonda returned from making propaganda tours in North Vietnam and nobody dared lay a finger on her?

Precisely because WWII had universal approval, while Vietnam was so deeply divisive.

One of the principles of constitutionally limited government is that all decisions which can be left to individual citizens – should be. And for precisely this reason. Deeply divisive issues wind up being decided on slender majorities, and those decisions rend our society and breed contempt for all authority and all law.

So what else can I tell you?

I can tell you that unless you go see it for yourself you won’t know just how REALLY GREAT it is!

“The Avengers” is the apex of a story arc of five previous movies, bringing together six Marvel Comics characters to form a superhero team and save the world.

Development on “The Avengers” began in 2005. After many delays Joss Whedon was brought on board in 2010 to rewrite the screenplay and direct.

This is the culmination of the life work of one Stanley Martin Lieber, who went to work for his cousin’s husband at Timely Comics in 1939 as a 17-year-old gofer. He adopted the name of Stan Lee because he had ambitions of writing serious novels under his birth name. Then in 1941 he was allowed to contribute the text filler for Captain America Comics #3, and the rest is history.

Marvel Comics have been turned into movies as early as 1944, as well as cartoons, and TV series. Now Marvel characters on film have caught on in a big way and a new generation of fans has experienced the Marvel universe primarily from the movies.

They’re baaaaack.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is back from Asgaard, because his evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has returned to Earth from exile via the mysterious Tesseract, introduced in Captain America.

Loki is coming with an army of powerful aliens to conquer the world. Fury brings Captain America (Chris Evans,) Thor, and reluctantly Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) on board, and dispatches Agent Natasha Romanov “The Black Widow” (Scarlett Johansson) to fetch Bruce Banner and his alter ego The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo.)

To complicate things Agent Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner,) who has history with Romanov, and Thor’s friend Professor Erik Selvik (Stellan Skarsgård,) have been turned into Loki’s brainwashed slaves.

That sets the stage for a slam-bang CGI battle in the canyons of New York between the superhero team and aliens on flying motorcycles and giant scaly-fish-looking flying battleships.

It shouldn’t work – but it does.

There’s the banter. It’s witty, quick, in character, and they keep it coming.

Tony Stark is at his cynical, wisecracking best. Thor talks like a refugee from Shakespeare in the Park, and Captain America captures the earnest, unembarrassed idealism of the World War II era, but they’ve got great quips and comebacks too.

The characters are a bickering, mismatched bunch brought together by common danger, duty, the Machiavellian manipulation of Fury, and the natural leadership qualities of Captain America.

The super powers aren’t believable, but the heroism is.

And so is the villainy.

Loki announces his return very appropriately, in Germany, “Kneel before me. I said? KNEEL! Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.”

If you can’t imagine there are real people who think like that, you’ve led a very fortunate life. But I assure you there are, and they’re more common than we’d like.

Fortunately so are the kind of people like Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) who can’t match the powers of his idol Captain America, but matches his courage and sacrifice. Or tarnished, conscience-stricken, Romanov who is willing to wash out the blood on her ledger with her own if necessary.

And yes, the morally ambiguous Fury, who realizes the terrible danger of using the power of the Tesseract to make weapons, but takes the risk because the universe is after all a very dangerous place to face unarmed.

On the surface the battle seems to be a face-off between demigods Thor and Loki and their respective allies. But the real pairing is between Loki, the master of slaves, and Captain America, who when the chips are down far more powerful superheroes choose to follow, because he is a natural leader of free men.

I could go on, but I won’t. Just see it.

I suppose I’m dating myself, but I can remember when you could expect to run into The Three Stooges pretty much daily on your black and white TV.

The Stooges started as a vaudeville act in 1925, composed of two brothers of Lithuanian Jewish origin, Moses and Samuel Horwitz, a.k.a. Moe and Shemp Howard, and friend Louis Feinberg or “Larry Fine,” scion of a Russian Jewish family.

If you find that surprising, did you know Larry was an amateur boxer and a talented violinist?

Shemp later left to pursue a solo career, and was replaced by another brother Jerome, who wanted into the act so badly he shaved his long flowing locks to become “Curly.” After Curly suffered a stroke in 1946, Shemp rejoined the team until his own death in 1955.

Shemp was replaced by Curly look-alike Joe Besser, and later by Joe DeRita as “Curly Joe.”

Altogether the Stooges made 220 films, most of them shorts that played alongside feature films in movie theaters.

Their humor was noted for broad slapstick, violent and often cruel. But there was also an “us against the world” solidarity, and a lot of clever wordplay. Such as when you see the Stooges outside the law office of “Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe.”

Now after 10 years in the making, mostly spent looking for the ideal cast, the new Three Stooges has arrived, featuring Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe, Sean Hayes as Larry, and Will Sasso as Curly.

Briefly, the trio are on a quest to save the orphanage they were raised in, to the ruin of the institution and the despair of the nuns that run it. They have a month to raise $830,000. They get involved in the machinations of would-be black widow Lydia (Sofia Vergara,) who wants them to murder her husband Teddy (Kirby Heyborne,) who turns out to be an fellow alumnus of the orphanage.

So how does it stack up to the original gang?

In a word – uncanny. These guys have got the Stooges down. The voices, the mannerisms, even Curly’s “nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk” and “woo-woo-woo-woo.”

The resemblance is so strong it sometimes makes one uncomfortable to see it’s not the original Three Stooges after all.

All of the trademark slapstick tropes are there. They only one they seem to have missed is the board-over-the-shoulder-and-abruptly-turning-around, but perhaps I blinked and missed it.

Of course my 10-year-old son laughed all the way through it.

So how is it different from the original Stooges?

Well as you might expect in this day and age, it’s bawdier and a little crude in spots.

Sofia Vergara displays a generous amount of cleavage, and uses it for comic effect. The original Stooges did the lobster-attaching-itself-to-the-face thing, but wouldn’t have stuffed it down someone’s pants.

Moe gets invited to join the cast of “Jersey Shore” to slap the cast around, and who wouldn’t like to see that?

And did I mention the fart joke?

All of that probably won’t raise many eyebrows, but there’s the Catholic thing.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue commented, “The Stooges are depicted seeking to raise money for their orphanage; it is run by habit-wearing, stereotypical nuns. One of the sisters is played by swimsuit model Kate Upton; she is shown wearing a “nun bikini” with a large rosary around her neck. Another nun, Sister Mary-Mengele, named after the Nazi war criminal, is played by Seinfeld creator Larry David.”

I’m not Catholic, but it irritates me to see Hollywood congratulating itself for its courage in fighting a battle that was won a long time ago. The Legion of Decency has been moribund for a long time folks, get over it.

And there’s a scene where Lydia is reading the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard in bed. Subtle – NOT.

There’s a nod to social responsibility at the end where the makers explain how the stunts are done and caution kids about the eye poke and hitting people on the head with hammers.

Oh come on! Was there ever a verifiable case where anybody was actually harmed imitating the Stooges? Give the kids’ intelligence a little credit guys.

Gal in the same boat as myself, separated, not yet formally divorced single parent.

Not quite ready to move on, but I thought there was a spark there. We got to moving to quickly, backed off a bit.

Then she texted me and said she’d missed my company and invited me to a movie. Hey great!

But beforehand, she texted and said a girlfriend was trying to invite herself along. Now this girlfriend is married, but my girlfriend-in-potentia says she keeps hitting on her.

She texted, “Ewww! She keeps hitting on me!”

Went to meet her at the movies, and was a little late. Got in, and there the two of them were sitting. Lady friend waved “Hi” I sat down, and the two of them put their heads together and got up giggling and left about 10 minutes into the movie!

What the heck was this, make fun of the straight guy?

Reminded me of what a bitter friend once told me about his dating experience, “About half the time when a woman shows an interest, she’s setting you up for humiliation.”

It wasn’t that bad actually. When she texted with a quasi-apology I just told her to buzz off.

So Monday noon I’m at the staff meeting at the paper and talking about my review for this week. I don’t really want to review “American Reunion,” and decided to take my son to the new “Three Stooges.”

Then a colleague came in from an assignment taking pictures at a circus.

She’d just gotten pissed on by a lion.

Damn, topped my story big time!

This will tend to put one in uncomfortable and embarrassing situations from time to time. If you for example, defend the free speech rights of neo-Nazis, you know people are going to accuse you of being one.

Legendary journalist and uncompromising defender of freedom H.L. Mencken said, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

I don’t think you find much of that kind of integrity around these days. There seem to be an awful lot of people in public life who condemn the same actions of people they dislike, that they excuse or actively justify in people they like.

We all remember the story of the Boston Massacre from our American History classes. The incident in 1750 when British soldiers fired on a mob, killing five men. The incident was used as propaganda by the pro-independence party to raise the tensions that led to the outbreak of revolution five years later.

I wonder how many people remember that the soldiers were defended on murder charges by John Adams, a fierce patriot and later first vice-president and second president of the United States?

Adams won the acquittal of six of the soldiers and succeeded in getting the sentence of two reduced to manslaughter, punished by a branding on the hand.

Adams wanted independence, but genuinely believed the soldiers were innocent of the charges. He was willing to kill them on the field of battle, but would not sully the cause of independence with an injustice, nor corrupt the law to serve an agenda.

But I’ve just found a contemporary example. Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative publication National Review, has an article, “John Edwards: Slimy, not criminal.”

Edwards is currently facing some pretty serious charges of violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to his mistress and mother of his love child, while his wife was dying of cancer.

In the public sphere he has essentially no defenders. His own party has dropped him like a hot rock, and former friends and aids are testifying against him.

Lowry makes no secret of the fact that he thinks Edwards is a detestable human being. But he also lays out in detail why Edwards’ actions, though morally reprehensible, are not criminal.

“If Edwards were being prosecuted for shameful dereliction of duty as a husband and father, he’d deserve 30 years of hard labor. If he were on trial for extreme oleaginous insincerity, he’d deserve to be sent to the nearest supermax prison. If he could be charged with running two faux-populist presidential campaigns (first in 2004, then in 2008) that were all about stroking his own ego, he’d deserve to hang at dawn.

“None of these things is a criminal offense, though. And neither is paying hush money to your mistress. In the case of United States of America v. Johnny Reid Edwards, it is the United States of America that is out of line…

“The prosecution is a naked exercise in attempting to punish a loathsome man for his loathsomeness. As such, it is an offense against the rule of law, which depends on clear rules and dispassionate judgments. Every wrong — even flagrant wrongs, played out in public and involving mind-boggling deceit — is not a crime. By stretching the laws to try to reach Edwards, the government is creating the precedent for future ambiguous, politicized prosecutions, perhaps of figures much less blameworthy than the reviled man currently in the dock.

“John Edwards belongs under a rock, but not in jail.”

Good for you Lowry! Whether one agrees or disagrees with your politics, that shows integrity and ethical consistency.

And hey, you gotta love a writer who can use phrases like, “oleaginous insincerity.”

Wallace was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 9, 1918, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents originally named Wallik, and his life only got more interesting from there on.

Wallace was one of the few remaining survivors of the beginnings of broadcast journalism, back when it was common to have a wider variety of experience than is even possible today. He was at various times a commercial pitchman, a game show host, radio narrator for shows such as the original Sky King and The Green Hornet, sportscaster, and stand-up comic (didn’t know that one did you?)

He also served as a communications officer on a U.S. Navy sub tender during World War II.

I feel safe in saying no journalist starting out these days could ever amass a resume like that.

My first memories of Mike Wallace were from the half-hour documentary Biography, which featured informative and interesting, but mostly softball pocket bios of prominent people, living and dead.

In 1959 Wallace and Louis Lomax produced The Hate That Hate Produced, a five-part documentary on The Nation of Islam, featuring one Louis X, later known as Louis Farrakhan.

Wallace began, “While city officials, state agencies, white liberals, and sober-minded Negroes stand idly by, a group of Negro dissenters is taking to street-corner step ladders, church pulpits, sports arenas, and ballroom platforms across the United States, to preach a gospel of hate that would set off a federal investigation if it were preached by Southern whites.”

With Farrakhan responding, “I charge the white man with being the greatest liar on earth! I charge the white man with being the greatest drunkard on earth…. I charge the white man with being the greatest gambler on earth. I charge the white man, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest peace-breaker on earth…. I charge the white man with being the greatest robber on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest deceiver on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest trouble-maker on earth. So therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, bring back a verdict of guilty as charged!”

It would not be the last time Wallace and Farrakhan clashed on air.

Contemporary critics have called the documentary a “caricature,” “one-sided,” and even “yellow journalism,” but The Nation of Islam and Farrakhan have no reason to complain. Farrkhan and Malcolm X were catapulted to fame and became frequent interview subjects, college speakers, and talk show guests (before Malcolm X’s assassination,) and the Nation of Islam’s membership doubled to 60,000 in the weeks after the broadcast.

Whether one regards that as a desirable outcome or not, it illustrates something about Wallace as an interviewer. He let his subjects have their say.

Well yes, but isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

Ideally yes, but in this day and age there are an awful lot of so-called journalists who constantly interrupt their subjects, cut them off, argue with them, and shamefully edit their responses.

Wallace did a great service to a lot of people when he revealed he had been treated for severe clinical depression, including a suicide attempt. He said it took him a while to acknowledge because he thought of it as a shameful weakness.

He was one of the founders of 60 Minutes, which created the genre of TV news magazine.

Wallace could be startlingly naive at times. In one interview he spoke of his long professional relationship with Yasser Arafat, and how he’d come to admire him. This from an intelligent, mostly well-informed Jewish journalist would be a little like hearing Walter Lippman profess his admiration for Adolf Hitler. It should serve as a cautionary tale, that journalists get out and about a lot, but our experience on any given subject tends towards the superficial.

Wallace’s surviving son Chris is a journalist at FOX News. Mighty big shoes to fill, I must say.

Good by Mike. Somehow it doesn’t feel like TV News without you.

After a number of so-so to absolutely dreadful adaptations of classical myths over the past few years, finally there’s a movie that does an intelligent job of adapting myth to screen.

A living myth resonates enough to be reinterpreted in subsequent generations. In this case Theseus and the Minotaur, the story of the seven youths and seven maidens Athens was forced to give to Minos, King of Crete to be fed to a monster.

“The Hunger Games,” based on the book by Suzanne Collins, is set in a post-apocalyptic future. The 12 districts of Panem are ruled from The Capitol in the Rocky Mountains. The Capitol is rich and conspicuously decadent, the districts that feed it are grindingly poor.

Every year two “tributes,” a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18, are chosen by lot from each district to participate in The Hunger Games. The twenty-four contestants are released in a wilderness area to fight for survival, until only one is left.

District 12 resident, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a dirt-poor woods girl and huntress who volunteers for the games in place of her 12-year-old sister Primrose (Willow Shields.)

The other tribute from District 12 is an upper-class (for the district) boy Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson,) who has been seriously crushing on Katniss for a long time. But even if they both survive all the other contestants, they’ll have to fight it out among themselves. This lends itself to a certain amount of romantic tension.

Oh yes, and while Peeta is crazy about Katniss, Katniss is sort of attached to a boy back home.

Katniss and Peeta are escorted to The Capitol where they are mentored by Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson,) the only living winner of the games from District 12. Their district hasn’t won in a long time, and whiskey-swilling Haymitch tells them up-front he doesn’t expect that to change any time soon.
Nonetheless, someting about Katniss inspires Haymitch, and Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) an image-consultant who volunteers to groom her and teach her how to win the masses over.

OK, that takes you through the first 15-20 minutes, before you’re even in the Game. The set-up is very skillfully done, and now you’re at ease in Panem.

Aside from the story of Theseus, the movie owes much to previous murderous-game-shows-in-a-dystopian future movies, such as “The Running Man,” and numerous reality shows.

There’s an underlying theme exploring what the role of mass entertainment is in keeping the masses subjugated. “Panem” is an anagram of the Latin, “panem et circenses,” (bread and circuses,”) referring to the dole and gladiatorial games the rulers of ancient Rome kept the masses content with. It doesn’t beat you over the head with pop-sociology though, thank you very much!

Lawrence is convincing as Katniss. She learned to skin squirrels, chop wood, and fight for her role in Winter’s Bone (2010) and it shows. Watch for her in the future. She’s better than beautiful, she’s talented.

Donald Sutherland has a cool, understated presence as President Coriolanus Snow. Harrelson is great as the survivor anesthetizing his pain with liquor, redeemed by a chance to strike back at the system that wounded him almost to madness. Kravitz can act, who knew? And Hutcherson is an adorably goofy love-struck teen.

There have been questions raised about how appropriate it is for children to see teenagers killing each other. My first reaction was, “What do you think war is but teenagers killing each other?”

But the violence is mostly shown with a soft focus or indirect angle, with some exception. I am of two minds about this, caught midway between a disgust with violence porn, and worry that sanitized violence gives an unrealistic idea of what violent death really looks like. (Katniss shoots an enemy with a bow, and the guy drops dead right there and then. Ask any bow hunter how likely that is.)

At any rate, it looks like you’ll have an opportunity to find out for yourselves. The movie played to a packed house, and there are two sequels: “Catching Fire,” and “Mockingjay,” in Collins’ trilogy.

“The Woman in Black,” based on the 1983 novle by Susan Hill, is Daniel Radcliffe’s first feature film after the conclusion of the “Harry Potter” series, and also stars fellow Hogwarts alumnus Ciaran Hinds.

Harry Potter made Radcliffe a very, very rich young man, and put him in the enviable position for an actor of being able to pursue art for arts sake for the rest of his life.

He does not disappoint.

Judging from this film, and the 2007 made for TV movie “My Boy Jack,” Radcliffe has taken his craft very seriously. Here he takes on a role where there are
long extended scenes with no dialog and he has to act with his face and body language.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a soliciter in Edwardian England, who is sent by his firm to settle the estate of a reclusive woman who has just died. The estate is Eel Marsh House, a rambling wreck of a place on an island in a salt marsh which is cut off from the coast when the tide is high.

Kipps’ backstory is revealed in flashbacks and instruction from his boss. Kipps is falling apart personally and professionally after his wife died giving birth to his now four-year-old son, and this assignment is a make-or-break for him.

The backstory of Eel Marsh House and the nearby village is the place is haunted by the aparition of a woman in black, whose appearance always means children are going to die.

The setting couldn’t be more appropriate, the sky is nearly always overcast and the area either fog-bound or rain-drenched. The London scenes, the house, the village, the train, and the train station have a remarkable authenticity. Any prop department can knock together a period piece set, but how did they get the look of the scarred wooden windowsill on the train for a scene of a few seconds length?

There is nothing original in the plot, which is entirely appropriate. There are no original ghost stories, just variations on a theme that is very old.

Herein there is madness, old scandal, surly suspicious villagers, suicide, unburied dead, possession, a vengeful ghost, and a vulnerable adult. Shades of “The Haunting” via “The Ring.”

There are things that move by themselves, windup toys that start to play themselves, doors that won’t open until they’re good and ready to open, bumps in the night, and corpse-like faces and figures illuminated by flashes of lighting.

I know, I know, “Been there, seen that.”

Just take my word for it, if this genre is your cup of tea – see it. I really can’t tell you a lot about the plot and the events without spoilers. But I can tell you this is the first movie in a long time that made me jump in my seat, not once but several times, and literally sent chills down my spine.
(That is by the way, is why it’s a great date movie – but I’m still glad I saw a matinee and came out of the theater into the bright sunlight.)

If I have any criticism it’s that the richest guy in the county Sam Daily (Hinds,) is skeptical beyond reason, given all that’s happened. The convention is to have the Skeptic bow to the overwhelming weight of evidence slowly and reluctantly. Sam just caves in to belief in the supernatural nature of the events too easily.

Like I said, see it. Kids? I don’t know. My 10-year-old is into giant shark and monster movies at present, but this is a whole ‘nother thing. I don’t know how he’d deal with supernatural horror/ghost stories. Use your judgment.

As a youthful fan of Edgar Rice Burroungs wonderful Mars books, I, like every other would-be pathan (soldier of fortune) of Barsoom (Mars) awaited the opening of “John Carter” with mixed feelings of anticipation and dread.

Well dread not. In spite of a lot of bad reviews, it’s not terrible.

On the other hand, it’s not terribly good either.

It’s not doing very well at the box office. “John Carter” cost around $350 million to make, and made a paltry $30 million its opening weekend.

We fans had to wait for the CGI technology to film the stories of Capt. John Carter of Virginia, formerly of the Confederate States Army cavalry. His
better-known literary sibling Tarzan, who also first appeared in 1912 (!!!) could be filmed on a studio tricked up to look like a jungle, with lots of African-American extras. (Or if there was even a hint of physical attraction between characters, Hispanic extras standing in for hitherto-unknown light-skinned African tribes.)

But Capt. Carter’s best friend is a nine-foot-tall four-armed green giant. He rides eight-legged thoats, and has a pet that’s kind of a cross between a dog and a frog, but is nonetheles adorable.

So now they’ve got the tech. And they had for a director Andrew Stanton, who previously directed “Finding Nemo,” and “Wall-E,” produced “Monsters Inc.” and “Up,” and wrote the “Toy Story” trilogy.

So what went wrong?

Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross said, “Moviemaking does not come without risk. It’s still an art, not a science, and there is no proven formula for success.”

Well there may not be a surefire formula for a hit, BUT YOU COULD TRY STICKING TO THE STORY YOU MORON!

Firstly, John Carter is immortal, ageless, and does not remember a childhood. He is nonetheless some kind of uncle to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a Virginian.

He is also the (self-confessed) best swordsman of two worlds.

Native Virginians to this day have distinct accents, manners, and mannerisms. Believe me, my mother is a Virginian.

Taylor Kitsch is young, and it shows. He can’t do a Virginia accent, or couldn’t be bothered, and his fight scenes are CGI enhanced “wire-Fu” rather than fencing.

Lynn Collins however does look rather like what I imagined what Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium to be. They’ve made her a professor and given her skills with a sword to satisfy modern conventions of female heroism, but the Princess of Mars was always courageous and clever.

Still I confess I miss the old corny dialog, “Fly Sola! Dejah Thoris stays to die with the man she loves!”

In the original trilogy of what eventually became a series of 11 books, the Therns were one of the ancient races of Mars (which aside from the dominant red race included black, white, and yellow humanoids) who were running a very long religious con. For some reason Disney chose to recast them as shape-shifting aliens from somewhere outside the solar system, who are exploiting both Earth and Mars for their own nefarious designs.

To be said for the film, visually it’s Barsoom brought to life. The cities, fliers, the green men and strange animals do not disappoint. My son thought it was great, so perhaps this will be his gateway into Burroughs’ Barsoom.

Burroughs was, to paraphrase George Orwell about Rudyard Kipling, a writer of good bad literature. His incredible imagination and ability to paint vivid word pictures made you suspend disbelief in scientific absurdities like flying boats kept aloft by tanks filled with mysterious “rays.” You never stop to wonder why warriors who have pistols and rifles that can fire “radium bullets” to the horizon prefer to fight with swords. You aren’t even taken aback by earthmen who mate with beautiful women who look human but lay eggs. You just enjoy.

Starting in 1918 with “Tarzan of the Apes,” Burroughs’ adventures set in the jungles of Africa, on Mars, Venus, inside the hollow Earth, and in hidden lands in Antarctica have been filmed many times, but seldom if ever with scripts that stick to the stories.

Do you suppose that would be too much to ask?

“The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.”
Lt. Gen. Sir William Francis Butler (1838-1910)

Act of Valor is going to make movie history and is already generating a huge amount of critical controversy.

The film about Navy SEALs on a mission to stop a terrorist threat was made with the full cooperation of the Navy, and featured actual SEALs and Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen in the major roles, and a lot of really cool gear. This of course raises questions of how beholden the directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh were to the Navy for the content.

The Navy did in fact exercise a right of final cut over the film for security purposes, and kept some footage for training purposes. Though that itself speaks to the realism of the film.

For another, it was an Indy film with a production budget estimated at $15 to $18 million. Though this begs the question of whether the use of the Navy’s expensive equipment on training exercises should be counted as a subsidy.

Compare that to $250 million for “The Dark Knight Rises,” and $270 million for each of the two parts of “The Hobbit,” to cite two guaranteed blockbusters.

Many action scenes were filmed with Cannon Eos 5d mark 2 digital cameras mounted on helmets, motorcycles, etc. That’s a $2,299 camera! Not cheap but well within reach of anyone serious about making Indies.

Can you feel the major studios starting to get nervous?

Professional reviewers have generally not been kind to the movie. Of 90-odd reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, there was a 29 percent approval rating.

But a lot of people like it. “Act” opened at $24.7 million the first weekend.

It is no secret that among the intellectual and artistic community, a significant faction openly despises the profession of arms. Hollywood continues to invest considerable capital in movies that portray the military and intelligence community in an unfavorable light, despite the fact they tend to do poorly at the box office compared to patriotic-themed movies.

Critics of “Act of Valor” have called it “recruitment propaganda.”

So what does that have to do with the artistic merits of the film? Many classics made during the Second World War as war propaganda have stood the test of time. “Destination Tokyo” with Cary Grant is a rollicking good adventure story, as well as a deeply idealistic and thoughtful movie.

There has also been criticism of the “wooden” acting.

I grew up around sailors and marines and have interviewed a fair number of active-duty soldiers. What I saw was the demeanor common among professional military men, far more “realistic” than Cary Grant.

But don’t take my word for it.

“I respectfully disagree with those reviews. Considering they were not professional actors, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the acting and almost all of the movie was very realistic,” said Anthony T. O’Brien Sr., Lieut. Cdr., U.S. Navy Seals (Ret.)

Obviously what is going on here is an argument about world view.

One of the severest critics, Chuck Koplinski, Illinois Times, entitled his review, “Simplistic Valor lacks the courage to face reality.”
Yet Koplinski’s sneering criticism is just flat wrong on a number of points.

“They have gathered 16 Filipino Jihadists (yes, you read that right) and outfitted them with explosive vests that contain 500 ceramic ball bearings.”

Has Koplinski never heard of Abu Sayaf, the Filipino chapter of Al-Qaeda? Does he deny that jihadists do in fact support R&D to develop better means of killing us? Or the existence of working alliances between terrorist groups and smugglers?

Koplinski echos a number of critics in calling the drug smuggler Christo who hires out to terrorists, “one dimensional.”

“Christo has no problem giving the order to have her (CIA Agent Morales) tortured until she talks…” but, “when captured and given a “veiled threat towards the smuggler, promising him he’ll be locked away for the rest of his life and miss the key moments in his daughter’s life. Wouldn’t you know it, the guy folds like a house of cards.”

Hmmm, a ruthless gangster, who is by the way a Russian Jew allied with Chechen jihadists, capable of unspeakable cruelty yet genuinely loves his wife and daughter. Sounds pretty complex to me, and unfortunately all too realistic.

So with such pronounced disagreement among reviewers, and between reviewers and moviegoers, there is only one thing for me to tell you.
Go see it for yourself and make up your own mind. What you think will say a lot about yourself.

Footnote: One of the events in the movie that Koplinski and others have poured scorn upon is a scene (minor spoiler) where a SEAL is shot not quite point blank with an RPG, which fails to detonate. Wow, what luck ( pouring scorn.)

To be fair, the movie doesn’t explain, they just pass it off as a dud. The fact is, an RPB is designed to detonate only when it hits something HARD. As in concrete or steel hard. Some Swedish biker gangs discovered this when they acquired some RPGs to use on each other a few years back. (See how well gun control works in Europe?) A stray RPG went through the window of a grade school class – and just lay on the floor thank God, because the window didn’t offer enough of a barrier to detonate it.