Proposed locations for the two Aegis Ashore systems being purchased by Japan
Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the Aegis Ashore anti-missile system that Japan says it will set up in Akita and Yamaguchi Prefectures. The bulk of the column references a conversation between journalists Shunji Taoka and Osamu Aoki on the latter’s J-Wave FM radio show, but only partially. Though the two reporters only talked for about 20 minutes, Taoka covered a lot of ground that should be aired more widely in other media. As usual, the nuance and detail of this kind of research and analysis tends to get lost on mainstream media, and there are enough broad arguments against the Aegis Ashore system to provoke skepticism among the general public as to its necessity, especially with regards to the outrageous cost of the whole thing. But for the record, here are some other points Taoka brought up.
-The Defense Ministry rationale for the kind of “vigilance” afforded by Aegis Ashore is that North Korea’s missile launch capability is pretty much complete, but Taoka says the technology being used by NK is already outmoded and very easy to detect.
-The U.S. Defense Department initial estimate of the cost of the two systems was ¥160 billion. Presently, the estimate is ¥466 billion, not including the missiles themselves, which cost up to ¥4 million a piece, and the standard order is for 24 missiles per system. That means, the real cost is at least ¥700 billion, but given that the systems won’t be installed for a number of years, the price will surely go up, because it always does with weapons bought from the U.S. And Japan always pays what the U.S. demands without trying to bargain the price down.
-The Self-Defense Forces never requested the Aegis Ashore system. The U.S. basically told Japan that it needs it.
-The Aegis Ashore and other security-related purchases are not factored into U.S.-Japan trade balance figures.
-Japan is required to pay for the systems before they are delivered, and they are almost never delivered on time.
-Money for Aegis Ashore will come out of the GSDF budget, which is fixed, so the government will have to eliminate a large number of items already budgeted in order to pay for it.
-When Abe started his second stint as prime minister, Japan paid ¥130 billion a year to the U.S. for weapons. It’s now ¥650 billion. Japanese defense contractors have lost business since he took office. (But this, in fact, may be a good thing, because as a result many contractors, like Mitsubishi Heavy Industry, have decided to get out of the weapons business.)
-The Self-Defense Forces do not want the Aegis Ashore because of the above-mentioned budget problems, and it would also likely increase tensions with locals in areas where the systems are installed. As for the fear of electromagnetic radiation, the radar used by the system requires 400,000 times the amount of power required for a standard wi-fi signal, which is what the Defense Ministry is comparing the radar signal to. Taoka doesn’t say if this is a health hazard or not. He simply wants to point out that the government isn’t being forthright on the matter.
It’s tempting to imagine that the British director Andrew Haigh is encountering the milieu of his latest film with the same kind of fresh awareness that the audience encounters it as it watches his movie. There’s something about this depiction of the seedier parts of Portland, Oregon, that feels almost shocking in its unexpectedness. Based on a novel by the songwriter Willy Vlautin, whose band the Delines covers much the same kind of rustic waywardness as that put forth in the film, Haigh’s script always seems to be in the process of unfolding truths that don’t come easy. It keeps you off balance, and slightly on edge.
Though I rarely acknowledge such matters, Paul Schrader was royally screwed last February when he failed to receive the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his latest film. It was bad enough that Ethan Hawke, who won all sorts of awards from critics’ groups for his performance in the lead role, wasn’t even nominated, but Schrader was a screenwriter before he was a director, and First Reformed may be the most cogent realization of his distinct world view and approach to cinematic storytelling. In fact, the most brilliant detail in his screenplay is the provenance of the First Reformed Church that provides the setting for the story. Its main appeal in the 21st century is not its status as a sanctuary from material suffering or the lucid world view of its sympathetic pastor, Reverend Toller (Hawke), but its historical relevance as a main stop in upstate New York on the Underground Railroad during the days of slavery. It’s a tourist attraction, which pretty much sums up the way Schrader has come to rationalize his fundamentalist upbringing and the state of his own faith.
The comic challenge for Adam McKay, who made his name with Will Ferrell vehicles, in depicting the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney is not that no amount of satire could make the George W. Bush administration seem more ridiculous than it was, but that we already have a near perfect lampoon of the venality of Washington D.C. as represented by the second-in-command: Veep. Granted, McKay, as he did with The Big Short, is attempting to graft semi-serious real life matters onto frat boy stock situations, and there certainly wasn’t a bigger mess of frat boy toxicity than the Bush II White House. The real problem with this kind of approach is that the actors seem to be having much more fun than the audience is.
The time frame of Paul McGuigan’s slice-of-life biopic of actress Gloria Grahame isn’t specifically stated, though the first scene takes place in a rundown dressing room in Liverpool in 1981 as Grahame (Annette Bening), long washed-up as a film actress, prepares to take the stage for yet another performance of The Glass Menagerie. She has already met and fallen in love with a local aspiring actor, Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), who is much younger than she is, and McGuigan hints throughout the movie that Grahame had a penchant for much younger men, even for boys. However, the film focuses on her relationship with Turner, which is limiting in terms of what it tells us of Grahame’s life as an artist and a human being. It’s also dramatically lazy, since the plot is a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards that seem to cover a long period of time but actually only cover a few years, and the development is just one drunken fight after another, many in Liverpool, where Turner was raised, but also in New York and Los Angeles, all followed by desperate reconciliations and punctuated by the recurrence of the breast cancer that eventually killed her at the age of 57.
Here’s 
At this writing, the new CGI live-action Dumbo is being slated as a likely box office smash, thus justifying Disney’s faith in director Tim Burton as the kind of edgy filmmaker they can trust with their family fare. Inherent in this proposition is the idea that, of course, there is no intention of supplanting the original animated version of the story, but rather to simply give it more relevance for an audience whose tastes in technology are presumably more sophisticated than they were in 1941, but that’s a load of bull. Disney owns the story and the images and thus controls how those elements are reconfigured for a new generation. The real idea is to exploit a property, and nobody expects Burton, regardless of his reputation for the weird and the wondrous, to make anything other than what Disney approves of. And if you hold Alice in Wonderland up as an example of what Burton can do in the face of corporate control, remember that it was probably the worst reviewed film of his career. Neither Burton nor Disney seems willing to test each other in the same way this time.
The big reveal at the end of the first LEGO Movie was one of the most brilliant in the history of animated films, since it capped a fairly hilarious mock-dystopian story with a credibly affecting framing device that not only put the mock-dystopian story into proper perspective, but gave it an emotional force that you couldn’t have expected given the overall comic thrust of the movie. Obviously, the sequel isn’t going to be able to deliver the same kind of thrill. As they used to joke in the old Looney Tunes shorts when the guy blows himself up to impress a vaudeville talent agent, yeah, it’s great, but you can only do it once.
In the wake of the recent Mueller report and the disappointment felt by those who hoped it would hasten the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, Rob Reiner’s earnest paean to the old-fashioned virtues of hard-hitting newspaper journalism may, in fact, only serve to rub salt in those wounds being nursed by liberals like Reiner himself. Shock and Awe chronicles the painstaking research that the Knight Ridder newspaper group carried out to prove that the weapons of mass destruction Bush II posited as the reason for invadeing Iraq in 2003 were essentially made up. Almost every other media outlet in America bought the administration story, so Knight Ridder should have come to represent what’s left of responsible journalism, but for the most part journalism didn’t survive the Bush years, as we can easily tell by the shrill tone used to cover both the Obama and Trump administrations. The lesson the Trump folks want us to take away from Mueller is that the mainstream press can’t be trusted, which is also what Shock and Awe tries to tell us.
Given her current role in keeping the U.S. Constitution on an even keel during these politically stormy times, it’s not surprising that there are two feature-length films about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and by most lights the Oscar-nominated RBG is the more rigorous of the two simply because it’s a documentary. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a better movie. RBG is mostly a tribute to Ginsburg as a guiding personality for the 21st century, and while it explains her accomplishments and their effect on not only the legal landscape of America but the status of women, it does so in a manner that highlights her qualities as a woman rather than her mind. On the Basis of Sex is a dramatic recounting of Ginsburg’s early career centered on the case that brought her attention as the leading gender rights advocate of the 20th century, and while it tends toward easily processed characterizations in the mode of Hollywood biopics, it gets into the nitty-gritty of legal procedures more deeply than RBG does. When the phrase “radical social change” comes up—more than once—it has genuine meaning.
philipbrasor.com 