Jupiter Ascending (2015): Movie Reviews from the Sidelines

There is no movie that seems better designed to drive critics nuts than Jupiter Ascending (2015).

Seriously, you have stunning but cluttered visuals, quirky acting, and a movie that clearly should have been at least an hour and a half longer than what it was. But that's not the story here. The story should be that Jupiter Ascending is an awesomely risky movie set in a fascinating universe that revolves around an ordinary girl from our (non-post-apocalyptic) planet.

In this gorgeous film, a young cleaning lady by the name of Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is found to have the exact genetic sequence of a noblewoman from outer space. This apparently happens because...science. In any case, many of the upper class from this extraterrestrial society, which is populated by humans (actually, our ancestors), tend to view this as a sort of "reincarnation" and even go so far as to leave trusts for such individuals in their will, leaving meek Jupiter to inherit the earth. What do the space-humans want with the earth? Well, that's complicated, but let's just say that we are the crops, and they are the consumers. 

The adventure part of this begins when the heirs of that noblewoman all seek to claim for themselves the inherited treasure of their mother from Jupiter. They all have their various ways, of course, but all of them pretty much center around Jupiter being dead. Enter her faithful (and hunky) protector Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) who risks his life to save hers. Most of the action centers around Channing Tatum, er, Caine, being heroic and making Jupiter weak in the knees.

It would be SO easy to hate this film. Eddie Redmayne, for example, one of the heirs trying to knock Jupiter out of the royal orbit, gives one of the strangest performances to ever hit the big screen, whispering some of his lines and switching from listless mumbling to screaming tantrums. And yet, one really must wonder how entitled nobility who live thousands of years and harvest human beings for profit ought to behave. It is genius that he manages to even show vulnerability in such an emotionally remote character. In fact, he gives one of the only possible depictions of such a character that anyone could give, if the aim were verisimilitude.

At the same time, Mila Kunis, whose main problem in this film is a slight aversion to opening her mouth while she speaks, is nonetheless the perfect "hero" to take on this role. Admittedly, it isn't one of the most female-empowering roles ever created, but she still manages to embody her character: a quirky, discontented twenty-something who is both terrified and fascinated with her surroundings. I can't see any obvious flaws.
The plot is overly complicated. No one can deny that. It has a backstory that would require an HBO miniseries to explain (which would be--geek alert--TOTALLY AWESOME), but it is not incomprehensible, whatever some may say.  In fact, the world is so beautiful and the idea behind its existence such a compelling tale that this reviewer was hungry for more plots set in this classical medieval steampunk dystopia. Any critic that doesn't agree with that sentiment is not worth my dear readers' time.

My Rating: B+ (Go see it.)

Don't Smile (A Lullaby)

Don't smile, little feet, don't smile,
Hold onto that frown a while;
The covers are taken away;
The night did not last all day;
And who should be moved from rest,
By sweet at a milky breast?
So wail, little feet, and scream,
And never give way to a dream!

Speak Honestly (A Sonnet)

From women like yourself a gentle word
Can make me feel that I am built of lead;
Like scotch, your compliments are full of guile,
Smooth going down, but rushing to the head;
Then drowsily the thought of you takes flight
To where I see myself in cape and hood;
Admiring thus, in faerie shades of light,
I cannot see by you aught else but good.
So fleeting loves will flitter to the clouds,
And drunken dreams goad drunks to jealousy,
But hung at rosy-fingered dawn their vows
Are blown away like mists of fantasy.
    Your honest speech which baser minds disdain
    Is all my hope to honestly remain.


             -Clayton Orr

The Presidential Veto Amendment - A Proposal to Restore the Three Branches

Everybody learns in school that our government is composed of three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. They also learn that these three supposedly "distinct" and "independent" branches are given a system of complex checks and balances that is meant to insure that one branch does not try to become too powerful and upset the system. Thus, for example, the judicial branch has the power to overrule unconstitutional laws passed by the legislature, the legislature can impeach and remove any of the other branches, and the president has the veto power over the legislature, which they can overcome by a mere 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress. Moreover, all money spent by the executive must be approved by law in the Congress.

Of course, as the recent immigration debacle has demonstrated, checks and balances cease to be actual checks or balances when a President commands enough of his party members to prevent the Congress from checking him. (For the record, I agree with the President on immigration and would have liked to see Congress pass a law that did legally what he did illegally. The problem is that the President as EXECUTIVE is not meant to execute merely the laws that he likes.) Thus, for example, when a President acts in a way contrary to the will of Congress, Congress indeed has the power to prevent him from doing so, but only with the force of legislation, which he can then proceed to veto, protected by a significant minority in either House. The President becomes the only politician in government who is able to actually effect his will, meanwhile controlling judiciary appointments and prosecutions, setting the agenda on the legislative branch using his extensive veto powers, and exercising his commander-in-chief functions almost without limitation by the people who are supposed to represent us.

Of course, this would be of no consequence if Congress would ever actually stick up for itself. But a President, endowed with such powers to govern the direction of the country, can hardly be blamed for making it a priority to ensure that party discipline protects his agenda, which he perceives (quite wrongly, as it turns out) as being a mandate of the people. People do not very often elect agendas, particularly in our system. They elect people. And the people that elect are, more often than not, specifically elected to either implement or prevent the President's agenda, which makes him legislator-in-chief as much as commander-in-chief.

I have given this lecture numerous times to my students, which I usually start with, "If the President is the Chief Executive, why are all the candidates, even the so-called constitutionalist or libertarian ones, running on a legislative agenda?" And of course, they generally have no answer, except to conclude with me that the three-branch system is a sham which, presently, is used to shift blame between different branches of government for not responding to the actual will of those who elected them.

By the way, I agree with having separate branches with checks and balances on one another. But a check and a balance is supposed to cause thought, discussion, and compromise, not deadlock. Otherwise, the party that is most decisive will always be the winner, and, in general, a President is more decisive and effective than the Congress, while the Congress can hardly get a two-thirds majority to agree on the day of the month, much less their legislative priority.

So that is why I argue for two overriding checks on the federal government: first, a system of direct democracy, so that the states and people can bypass federal deadlock and enact laws for their good, whatever the cost to a politician's political capital; second, the reduction of the threshold needed to override the President's veto to a simple majority, such as is had in a large number of state governments. What follows is how I would word such a text.

The Presidential Veto Amendment

Article I
Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on the Journal and proceed to reconsider it. If after such consideration a majority of the whole number of members of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House by which it shall likewise be considered, and if approved by a majority of the whole number of members of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays and federal holidays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not become a law.

Article II
Every Order, Resolution or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take effect shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be passed again by a majority of the whole number of members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

Article III
Congress shall have power to enforce this Amendment by necessary and proper legislation.

Pretty Things (A Sonnet)

Most working days the solitude obscures
My view on life- not sad and not depressed,
But hidden. Then some ray of beauty lures
My thoughts to open spaces with the rest--
Unbuckles me from safety like a coat;
Then cold desire, that biting draft, attacks
And makes me feel what had been so remote,
For thoughtful men can hide from painful facts.
Then as your light retreats again from view--
My sun, my eastern star--I hate the light
Which makes me miss its warmth the more, and you
Who made my swollen eyes recall lost sight.

O beauty changing peace to thoughtless rage,
Remain, and all my lonely wounds assuage.

On Limited Government, Unlimited Government, and Immigration Reform

I thought about posting this as a Facebook status, but then it got longwinded and I realized that I had already given this perspective multiple times to past Civics (or, in our school, American Government) students, albeit in a somewhat altered form.

Recently, there has been a lot of coverage of the President's decision to extend amnesty, using the powers of the executive branch, (although, given that he is merely not enforcing the law against those accused rather than forgiving them, amnesty is not a very precise term) to certain classes of undocumented immigrants. The battle cry on the part of many Republicans has been "separation of powers" and "executive overreach" for this illegal action. And it does, in fact, raise questions about the effectiveness of our system of checks and balances in stopping the President from deciding when he will and will not carry out the law.

Although there are many different forms of government--constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, parliamentary democracy, semi-presidential democracy, absolute monarchy, federal, etc--there are in fact only two different approaches to government: limited and unlimited. These two different approaches are not particularly tied to one form or another, although it is difficult (outside of the realm of Tolkien's Middle Earth, perhaps) to imagine an absolute monarchy in a limited government or a presidential republic in an unlimited government. 

These two approaches will eventually color the entire system of governance. A limited approach to government basically assumes the autonomy of the individual units of a society: the citizen, the family, the business, the Church, etc. The government, considered as the sum total of those who, through various offices, control the secular state, is therefore limited to specific roles, and in those roles, constantly scrutinized through a redundancy of various branches. Thus, for example, the executive branch, which has the duty of carrying out the law, will be checked by the judicial branch before they can actually carry out the law in terms of punishment, and the legislative branch will be prevented from enacting whatever laws it wants by, on the one hand, the right of the judiciary to make sure that the laws correspond with the appropriate powers of government, for example, by making sure that laws are in accordance with the Constitution, while most limited constitutions provide for some kind of veto exercised by the executive branch. It is equally important, in terms of maintaining a limited government, that each of the various branches, however they are divided, are elected or appointed by separate procedures. This is the system that we have in the United States.

An unlimited government, on the other hand, assumes that the State is a total entity, consisting of various parts: the Church, the secular government, the family, etc. All of these are units of the whole, usually represented (at least ceremonially) by a single figure, such as a King, or in socialist countries, by the Party. In democracies, the People would take this role. In an unlimited system, the various branches are checked by a single entity, sometimes not the entity that is actually invested with responsibility for the whole state, as for example in Great Britain where Parliament holds near-absolute power, through the Crown, over Church, State, family, individual, etc.

The difference between these when it comes to issues like the one that I mentioned above cannot be overstated. If a Prime Minister, against the wishes of a majority in the U.K. House of Commons, went ahead with overlooking the execution of this or that immigration law, he would probably be subject to a vote of no confidence, have to tender his resignation, and conduct new elections for the House. He is always checked by that higher authority which, it is assumed, represents the majority of the people's interests (whether it does or not). Likewise, if the House of Commons decided that judges were interpreting laws a bit too liberally, they might dissolve an entire court system and choose a new one with new judges who would behave like they wanted them to.

On the other hand, in our limited system, if the Congress wishes to prevent the President from carrying out a law in a particular manner, the Constitution gives them very little recourse, since the execution of laws (the very laws that they write, oddly enough) is assumed not to be any of their business. They are given basically four options: they can sue the President in the courts (which almost never works because of the assumed separation of powers), they can deny funding to his executive priorities (which also never works because they would have to pass a law to that effect, which the President would almost certainly veto), they can subpoena his officers (who will probably plead "executive privilege") and make his life difficult for items on his legislative agenda (which he will just do back to them), or they can impeach and remove him (which they almost never have enough votes to pass and has never been done in the two hundred twenty-five years of our Constitution).  Likewise, if they don't like how the courts are interpreting the law, they can basically complain and hope for the appointment of better ones after the next election.

To summarize, we can say this: In an unlimited system of government, a particular branch has almost total control of the state, but no one component of the state is ever unchecked by that one component. While in a limited system of government, despite the fact that checks and balances exist, the individual branches are pretty much left to aggregate power on their own, unchecked. This power will usually fall on the branch of government that appears to have the clearest mandate from the electorate, whether that electorate is the people or a junta of military leaders or a King.

That is ultimately the source of this, and almost every, conflict that has occurred as a result of an expansive or "imperial" Presidency in the United States. Contrary to the arguments which one can read in the Federalist Papers, the Presidency is actually a sort of German  monarchy, limited in its ability to enact its agenda by certain Constitutional forms, but ultimately holding the position of supremacy over the government. In fact, one might argue that, although the Federalists were politically motivated to argue that separation of powers would lead to real checks on the various branches, many of them, especially Hamilton, already saw that the state which they had created would be led by a single, powerful (and unelected) President with powers that were limited only by formal procedures. Certainly Hamilton had no great love for democracy.

A limited government will ultimately only function as a group of bodies checking and balancing one another if, and this is the key, all of the members of each branch of government are agreed that this is what they should be doing. In other words, they all must agree, amongst themselves, not to try to score political points by failing to check one another. For example, too often the Congressmen  are worried about putting a  President of their own party in an awkward political position so that he can't carry out the party agenda as effectively, while on the other side of the aisle, and adverse Congress will pass laws that are popular but clearly opposed to the President's ideology just to embarrass him and score political points. This particularly happens when the two parties differ widely on fundamental values (as they do in American politics). We cannot, as a society, even agree when life begins or whether a dead person has finally escaped from taxation. Moreover, our society is so media-saturated that politicians are not eking out political power in Washington, D.C. anymore by causing other politicians trouble, they are scrambling for it in opinion polls and 24-hour news networks, which means that they feel even less safe leaving the boundaries of party orthodoxy.

The only way for Congress to restore balance to our system, then, is to try to become as popular as the President, not an easy task for a body that regularly polls at less than 15% favorability or less. People like democracy, but they don't particularly like watching it happen, which is part of the reason for this discrepancy. The Congress must act in such a way that they show that they can lead the government, that the majority of people have confidence in them, and that the Presidency is a useless position without the help of the legislative branch. That is a very tall order.

Now let's make an assessment of the President's decision and what should be done about it. I would say that Congress has only one way to make itself the representatives of the People and so fight the President for leadership of the government, which is, in fact, what this fight is all about. They should de-fund the President's amnesty program and pass one of their own, protecting the same people (if not more) and accomplishing the same goals, but forcing the President to appoint new officers to the various administrative positions that this type of law would entail. This would make him have to submit to Congress on the timing of the implementation and give the voters a chance to make their voices heard as regards those officers. I don't think that Constitutional bickering will accomplish anything in terms of restoring the balance of power unless they actually appeal to the people on whose sovereignty the constitution depends.

Movie Reviews from the Sidelines: Interstellar (2014)

Lots of sci-fi movies begin in cornfields or country roads, with a whole lot of hicks being either confused, invaded, and, in general, stereotyped. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) manages to avoid that and actually make one of them into a hero, deftly incorporating Matthew McConaughey's beautiful Southern drawl.

The film opens in a post-apocalyptic dustbowl. Not only are earthlings trying to fight adverse weather and low population, but even the crops that are growing die off one-by-one from diseases that attack entire species. Pretty much, everyone is left either eating fried corn or boiled corn. In the midst of that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a former pilot/engineer turned unwilling farmer,  attempts to raise a family in a world where scientific innovation is no longer welcome.

One scientist (Michael Caine), however, has a solution: a vehicle capable of exploiting wormholes to rocket across galaxies to habitable worlds. The science is a little fuzzy, but suffice it to say the problem with travelling a really long way really fast is that everyone else moves along just as quickly through time, while the crew does not. Amazing, this turns a three-hour movie into a race against time.

Travelling to distant worlds and alien environments, the crew, including Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Doyle (Wes Bentley), Romilly (David Gyasi) and a few robot companions,  soon discover something unexpected at the end of the galaxy: human cowardice and treachery.

Just like the character's names-short, flat, and uninteresting-the movie itself suffers from one-dimensional characterization and stuffy dialogue. Basically, although we get to see the struggles of various characters and hear them pontificate upon this or that aspect of their world and its struggle, we don't really get to explore them as fully-developed human beings. They occupy stock roles in a drama which, while beautifully realized, expends its most dramatic moments ruminating on our place in the stars. It causes some problems for the actors, who are trying to choke down deep-sounding lines in the midst of a drama that should be affecting the characters more than what it is.

On the other hand, the tale IS extremely gripping and tense. An Apollo 13-meets-Armageddon aesthetic reigns through the space sequences, and the alien worlds which the explorers visit range from the stunning to the surreal. The realism of the props and visual effects subtly draw you in to a story full of twists and surprises.

If it sounds like a paltry reward for poor characterization and scripting, don't let that discourage you. The fact is that you will come out of the movie wishing that another twenty minutes had been tacked on the end. The premise works that well.

I personally hope to see more films like this being taken on by Matthew McConaughey in the future. He makes about the most perfect starship captain you can imagine, with plenty of swagger and hidden depths--a Texan Capt. Picard. Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, is the Will Riker of this movie: love her, hate her, everyone will have an unswayable opinion. In this picture, I tended towards the latter. Where was Sandra Bullock when they were casting this movie? 

My Grade: B (Go see it. Take the older kids with you.)