If you’ve been looking for a good reason to get hot and bothered about the state of America’s healthcare system, look no further. While The New York Times’ current series on diabetes is occasionally redundant, today’s article illuminates the stark realities of insurance coverage for diabetics.  As insurers refuse to pay the costs of preventative care, such as nutritional counseling or podiatry appointments, diabetics — predominantly poor populations and /or racial and ethnic minorities — are left to flounder until the gravity of their disease requires amputations or other drastic surgeries. As Dr. Bernstein of Beth Israel Hospital stated, “Until we address the financing and the reimbursement structure, this disease is going to rage out of control.”

As the Times reports, diabetes is already out of control. Without preventative care, the epidemic crippling America’s poor will become a plague.

llouison

Director Marco Siega’s Pretty Persuasion begins with an essential fake-out of its mood, leading you on to believe that it’s just a slightly edgier take on the cut-throat puberty politics immortalized in Heathers. By the time the movie reaches its tragic, gutting ending, you realize that the film’s slicing superficiality belied a far darker core just as its lead character, Kimberly, wasn’t so much a misguided popular girl as a sociopath in bloom.

It’s easy to criticize this movie for biting off more than it could possibly chew, and in the end, the cultural criticisms levied in the story would be far better serviced if not embedded in the Hannibal Lecter rewrite of Mean Girls. But at least Pretty Persuasion tries to envision why the exporting of American values could prove traumatizing as it’s the story of Muslim transfer student, Randa Azzouni, who ends up at the martyred end of a web of sex, lies, drugs, and the trampling pursuit of fame.

Granted, this Muslim innocent eaten by the American devil-girl reeks of a simplicity that assumes being a woman in the Muslim world doesn’t come with its own indigenous trauma. Yet, watching her life rended into meaningless at the cross-section of our institutions — high school, the media, and the courtroom — it was difficult not to feel like perhaps our obsessions, our shames, and our pecking orders that reward pathology make living life from an authentically spiritual center next to impossible. Or, at the very least, fruitless.

Pretty Persuasion also seems to be asking us to consider our culture as an incubator for sociopathic behavior. As Kimberly, the main character, manipulates the school, her friends, family, and the entire media with oral sex and a marionette’s instinct for the pettiness of humankind, one wonders why these institutions seem ready-made for psychotic pliance. From the gullible jurors to the narcissistic journalist who can’t wait to get Kimberly into bed, everyone in the movie seems too morally compromised to be able to figure out the truth before Kimberly is ready to have the truth revealed.

As with most movies, the plot’s message amounts to little more than boxy clichés, and it’s the characters who carry the real weight and nuance. The final scene crops close to Kimberly’s face as we watch her discover that she’s imperially unparalleled in manipulation but emotionally barren. She quietly implodes under the weight of her own amoral, absolute power while never allowing her howling realization to disturb a single grain in her beautifully crafted surface. While it’s easy to pick at the film for its crass reductions of a complicated conflict in cultures, Pretty Persuasion deserves credit for showing us with disturbing clarity how easily high school can be paradigmatic for the entire world.  

Terry Sawyer

The holiday season is always inundated with new releases — big-budget spectacles and smaller indies vying both for your attendance and the tiny attention spans of Motion Picture Academy members — but usually inside the stockings all hung with care is a film that fits in the middle and deserves to be seen.  The Family Stone is 2005’s holiday “happy” — a well-crafted film that doesn’t hit you over the head with visual effects a la King Kong or try to nip at social norms like Brokeback Mountain.  It’s just a fun film to enjoy in the moment before moving on to fulfilling your New Year’s resolutions.

Though it has been out several weeks and overshadowed by the other big films of the season, this funny but surprisingly touching dysfunctional family dramedy deserves a viewing now that the holiday season has come and gone.  The Family Stone revolves around the Stones’ Christmas holiday in a tony Westchester County suburb as stalwart sibling Everett (Durmot Mulroney) brings home his intended fiancée Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to meet the family even though he knows that they will find her rather waspish nature difficult to handle.  What he doesn’t know is that his sister Amy (Rachel McAdams), who has already met Meredith, has painted a rather unflattering picture of her to parents Kelly and Sybil (Craig T. Nelson & Diane Keaton) and the rest of her family, which includes a deaf, gay brother (Tyrone Giodarno) and his African-American partner (Brian J. White).  The fish out of stormy water is the primary plot element and source of most of the humor, but as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that everyone in the family has some kind of quirk or issue that equals that of Meredith and makes the audience feel very much at home.

When Meredith’s easy-going sister Julie (Claire Danes) arrives to help cope with the desperate situation, her self-assuredness and sanity is like a dose of strong medicine that forces a recovery for a family that didn’t realize they needed help.  The Family Stone graciously balances serious, emotional family dynamics with the almost farce-like humor, allowing the audience to experience empathy for all of the characters in the end, even Meredith, because to most of us, our own families aren’t much saner than the Stones — and are probably far worse.

As for the cast Diane Keaton stands out as the post-sixties open-minded but stubborn matriarch who only wants her kids to have happy lives.  The underrated Craig T. Nelson has the difficult task of being ringmaster when he himself must battle his own fears while masking it all from his kids.  Sarah Jessica Parker does her best Wall Street careerwoman impression but shines even more when slacker brother Ben (Luke Wilson) melts away her frozen veneer.  The best performance goes to Rachel McAdams whose acerbic Amy is out to defrock her brother’s fiancée at all costs only because she knows in her heart Meredith isn’t the girl for him.  The rest of the cast excels in their own way, giving their characters a full life even with less screen time.

The Family Stone may not win during this year’s award season, but it’s a fun film that will stave off the winter blues.  So take a break from your own family’s trials and tribulations to experience the enjoyable chaos that is The Family Stone.  In theaters nationwide.

Rich Burlingham

Reporters Without Borders reports that 2005 was a brutal year for journalists; 63 journalists and five media assistants were killed, while 1,308 were assaulted or threatened. Iraq, where 24 journalists and five media assistants were killed, was the most treacherous location for journalists, having claimed the lives of 76 journalists and media assistants since the beginning of the conflict there in March of 2003.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Much of the progressive left in America believes that the state should not legislate on sexuality.  Because we cannot all agree on what is moral, it is a private concern.  In this sense it is an anti-moral position.  Being pro-choice relies on a similar argument.  Because we do not all agree on when life begins, the state should back away and let individuals make up their own minds.  In the broadest sense, these are applications and extensions of the historic liberal argument for the separation of church and state.  Where there is disagreement on morals and no individual is being harmed by another, the state should not impose one view.  This logic is part of a grand tradition associated with John Locke.

Most of the left also believes that diversity in the population is broadly good.  This can be purely for aesthetic reasons.  New York City is simply more exciting than Topeka.  (I know this from personal experience.)  However, this argument can be taken further.  The claim can be made that diversity is necessary to a basic freedom to develop ourselves as individuals in the way that we desire.  For this freedom to be meaningful, there must be options.  Were everyone the same, there would no longer be any choice.  This is an elaboration on principles articulated most artfully by John Stuart Mill.

A principled libertarian would be unlikely to take issue with these ideas.  Progressives would also want to agree.  Unfortunately, they would be wrong.

True diversity implies disagreements on moral questions.  The liberal solution is to make these private rather than public.  As diversity increases, this necessarily means that the range of public morality decreases.  One can imagine the conclusion — it becomes impossible to impose any morality at all.  This seems fine for the left when the question is one of gay rights.  However, there is no reason to stop there.  Why should the broader society be responsible for helping the unfortunate?  This is a moral position as well.

The contemporary left approaches this in two ways.  The most common is to press for state support of their particular progressive beliefs.  This contradicts the first principle, as many individuals are forced to support with their taxes a morality they do not agree with.  The second is to reduce diversity.  In other words, make everybody a progressive.  Perhaps effective propaganda could make the entire country into Cambridge or the Upper West Side.  But what would happen to our freedom of choice then?

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma.  What appears to be happening in the United States is a slow but steady erosion of the possibility of public morality.  One might celebrate the decline of the repressive establishment.  But nothing has replaced it.  The right responds to the vacuum by trying to eliminate the church/state separation, reduce diversity, and prevent the ascension of the progressive ideal.  The basic contradictions in progressive politics makes this battle difficult to fight.  Without new ideas of politics and society, it seems unlikely that it can be won.

Pete DeWan

Pennsylvania residents earlier voted out all of the school board members who supported the decision that public schools be forced to present “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Yesterday the new Dover Area School Board, bolstered by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s decision that intelligent design is a religious — and not a scientific — concept, threw out the policy to introduce intelligent design in science classrooms.

Intelligent design, in its simplest terms, is a theory that questions the legitimacy of evolution and suggests the universe has been formulated, in all its complexity, by a higher power.  U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the previous school board desired “to promote religion in the public school classroom,” in clear violation of the principle of the separation of church and state.

Mimi Hanaoka

There will be no more Playboy. Or at least no more Playboy as we know it, sort of; the magazine is now concocting plans to launch an Indian edition, complete with models and pin ups who will be clothed to suit Indian norms and laws.

Apparently nobody reads Playboy for the articles anymore, and few Americans even read the magazine at all; in 2004 magazine sales shrank one percent domestically, while sales rose by 13 percent abroad. The magazine’s parent company’s primary sources of revenue are extra-literary — video games, porn, DVDs, television, and the like. The answer, then, is to sell overseas, and with approximately 200 million people reading magazines, India should be a prime target. Except that India bans having or peddling goods of “lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest,” barring material that can be redeemed by virtue of its value as art, literature, or religious content. And Playboy, as we know it, certainly fails all three of those criteria.

So what will Playboy look like without its signature nude playmates? Playboy Enterprises’ Chief Executive Christie Hefner stated that the Indian magazine, which may not even be called Playboy, “would be an extension of Playboy that would be focused around the lifestyle, pop culture, celebrity, fashion, sports and interview elements of Playboy.”

The idea is, apparently, that sex doesn’t haven’t to be American, or even western, to sell. Good luck, Playboy.

Mimi Hanaoka

Woody Allen films have conveniently fallen into one of two categories — the humorous, character-driven, self-mocking comedies and the serious, character-driven, life-mocking dramas.  Only a few have achieved an adroit balance of both, and those have come to be his greatest films: Oscar-winners Annie Hall and Hannah and her Sisters.  His latest film, Match Point, joins those two films in the upper tier of Mr. Allen’s cinematic repertoire and is one of the best films of 2005.

Match Point’s theme centers on the belief that luck plays an important role in life and one never knows which way that luck will go — good or bad.  The key to this film’s success lies with the excellent cast — smartly deprived of the tried and true neurotic Woody — who play off each other like a tightly choreographed Gilbert & Sullivan operetta directed by Ingmar Bergman.  Leading the cast is a subdued but chillingly charming performance by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (Bend It Like Beckham) as one-time tennis pro Chris Wilton, who by shear luck enters the world of London’s upper crust by letting the daughter of a wealthy industrialist fall in love with him.  The genius of the character, from both a written and performance standpoint, is the fact that Chris doesn’t intentionally try to weasel into a better life — it just happens, and he actually falls in love with the daughter, Chloe.  The only obstacle to Chris’ lucky situation comes in the form of a voluptuous American actress named Nola (Scarlett Johansson), the fiancée of Chloe’s brother Tom (Matthew Goode), who was the first to befriend Chris while seeking tennis lessons.  Nola neither tries to encourage Chris’ lust for her nor tries perpetuate what becomes an unfortunate affair.  

Match Point could have easily turned into a melodramatic family soap opera in the hands of a lesser-experienced writer-director, but Mr. Allen so deftly lets his actors naturally unfold the characters’ lives within the context of the story that it all feels organic and believable.  But what elevates this film isn’t the Greek tragedy you’re expecting but a right turn during the end of the second act that takes the film in a whole other direction.  Without spilling the beans, I can say it is quite thrilling.

Johansson is sexy and vulnerable, sad and hopeful, all at once but without outshining the rest of the cast.  Goode, while taking a bit of Hugh Grant and a touch of Rupert Everett, gives a vision of a 21st-century British rich kid who you wouldn’t mind being your best friend.  Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton play the parents like a privileged-class Stiller and Meara, with subtly amusing exchanges providing just the right amount of comic relief.  Chloe is the clueless plain Jane who can’t believe she snagged the cute jock, but the way Emily Mortimer plays her, you never feel sorrow or envy towards the character. The best kudos go to Rhys-Meyers who plays Chris like a poor kid in a candy store who can’t believe he’s surrounded by goodies but also can’t quite enjoy them until he’s told he’s allowed to indulge himself.

Mr. Allen deserves a lot of credit for writing a superb screenplay full of pathos, charm, and tragedy and is one of the few films of 2005 to make you ponder the particulars of life in a very engaging manner.  Match Point is one of the year’s best mature films, combining drama and humor elements in a simple but unique way.  Match Point is in theaters now.

Rich Burlingham

U.S. government tallied 844 American servicemen and women killed in Iraq in 2005, upping the total killed in since the conflict officially erupted in March of 2003 to 2,178.  The number of Americans wounded during the same period is 15,955. Iraq Body Count puts the number of Iraqi deaths at about 30,000 since the war began in 2003.

Mimi Hanaoka