• That waitress who naively turned her $12k tip over to the cops? She’s getting her money back despite police claims that the cash … um, yeah, um … “smells like marijuana so we have to keep it, you know, for your own good.” (Amazing how self-congratulatory the jerks manage to be even after the whole country beat up on them for stealing from the poor woman.)
• Oh, Arizona, the silliness of your legislators never ends, does it? Now they’re trying to declare that you can be pregnant up to two weeks before having sex.
• Too late! Too late! You missed your chance to buy Buford, Wyoming.
• Did you know that (among other things) inability to think is now a federally protected disability? And it just gets weirder and weirder.
• If you liked Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games or Winter’s Bone you might like her even better in real life. :-) (Tip o’ hat to EN.)
• TaxKilla and Occupy the IRS. The aim: to teach the 99% how to use one of the tax advantages of the 1%. It’s just using Schedule C, which all us self-employed types already know. But it’s using it with Attitude. (You have to have JavaScript enabled to read the manifesto. Wish they wouldn’t do that, but it’s worth it.)
• I’m sorry the man’s dead. But he really was the George W. Bush of art.

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• Your hilarious dog story of the day, courtesy of naturegirl. (Which probably would have ended up much less hilarious had American cops been the ones doing the window smashing.)
• And so I don’t neglect you cat people, here. It’s not funny or even particularly dramatic. Just cuuuuuuuuute.
• Not so cute: The U.S. standard of living has fallen more than 50 percent. Depending on how you look at it.
• I hope I don’t ever have to do that. Especially when I’m 80.
• A big hurtful, annoying EFF-U to Arizona, spoken as only Ken from Popehat can speak write.
• Two for the movie buffs: six common arguments people make about movies that are always wrong; and seven ridiculously out-of-date things movies always show. (Yeah; why do they still keep dressing nuns that way?)
  
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Here’s the movie based on John Silveira’s famous (or at least semi-famous) Backwoods Home classified. After making a big splash at Sundance, it’s headed for theaters this summer. Yayyyyyy, John!

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• Legally blind and a successful photographer.
• Now here’s a growing profession for you: consultants who coach white-collar criminals on how to get along in prison.
• The sagebrush rebellion rises again.
• Brothels. They’re now legal in Ontario, Canada. And for some pretty good reasons.
• “When we were making V we thought the mask might be popular at parties.”

And yet another intriguing trailer for Silver Circle. The coins are real; you can buy them from the movie’s store and Ron Paul was photographed last month using one to make a point.

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I just watched a 2009 indie called American Violet. If The Hunger Games (as Brian said in the comments on that film) might have been made by “a right-wing splinter group,” this one could have come from an ACLU production company.

But we’re talking about the good side of the ACLU here.

Do you remember the phony drug-war busts in Tulia and Hearne, Texas, a decade or so ago? Mass roundups of innocent blacks based on phony evidence? Cases that eventually fell apart en masse under national scrutiny?

Well, American Violet is a fictionalized version of the case that eventually became Regina Kelly v John Paschall (.pdf). Kelly was one of the innocent people targeted and she had the guts to fight back even though she had a lot to lose.

Here, she’s called Dee Roberts (played very well by first-timer Nicole Beharie), a single mother of four who gets arrested on trumped up charges and is relentlessly pressured to plea bargain — which she will not do.

The movie itself is a straightforward narrative. It’s good but not great — about on par with a decent TV movie, though it has pretty strong acting from the likes of Tim Blake Nelson as an ACLU lawyer and Alfre Woodard as Dee’s mother.

Where it shines is in its unflinching indictment of drug-war and justice-system abuses. It states openly that the feds provide financial incentive to encourage coerced pleas. It talks about the huge percentage of people who give up their rights to jury trials out of fear and pressure. It notes the shameful size of the U.S. prison population. Ultimately, it dwells on the racist aspects of the drug war — appropriate since the busts in Hearne and Tulia were blatantly race-based, as is so much of the awful WoD. Although it uses the 2000 presidential election to establish time and the “tough on crime” rhetoric of the moment, it never goes partisan; it just sticks to its issues.

American Violet never appeared on more than 61 screens during its theatrical release, so it was basically an invisible movie and probably didn’t even make back its production budget. But it’s worth a look.

Especially when you know that the corrupt District Attorney behind the real Hearne busts was so upset by it he tried to suppress it when it showed locally.

That makes it worth something right there. :-)

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The Hunger Games is good. It hits you in the gut. It’s well-acted. It ought to get Oscar nominations for costume, art direction, and sound editing, as well as another best actress nomination for Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence is Katniss Everdeen. Woody Harrelson is a perfect Haymitch Abernathy. Josh Hutcherson (once I got past him being noticeably shorter than Lawrence) is an appealing and believable Peeta Mellark. The young actresses playing Prim and Rue are spot on.

It’s a really very, very good movie — but not great. I have to agree with the reviewers who’ve noted there’s something missing — a little passion, a lot of outrage that it doesn’t quite have. After all, this is a about a decadent, tyrannical government that forces teenagers to slaughter each other for its own entertainment and to cow the populace. We should be leaving the theater burning with a “tear down the wall, m———r!” spirit.

I didn’t see that. Except in Katniss’s eyes.

Also (particularly in the beginning) there’s a lot of “shaky-cam” work and a dizzying number of cuts that don’t add anything but vertigo and annoyance.

Still, I was engaged and never bored through its entire 2-1/2-hour length. I think this is a “see it in theaters” movie, as opposed to a “wait for the DVD” movie simply because (as water lily wrote in a comment) even if you don’t go to theaters, you make exceptions for anti-government movies. And this is surely that.

There is one scene, where a lovable young character dies and Katniss raises a hand in defiance to the cameras she knows are observing the games — and an entire district goes mad with rage.

There should have been more moments on that level. I suspect there will be in movie two. In the meantime, though, this movie will do. It lays the groundwork. And if it can’t be called great, it’s surely worth an afternoon or evening of your time.

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I’m off to do a little Wal-Martery, then catch a late-morning showing of The Hunger Games. See you when I return.

Meantime, here’s a cool challenge. The folks at Silver Circle Underground are giving away five Guy Fawkes masks over the next five weeks. This week’s contest: write rebel poetry.

Haiku? A sonnet? An ode? Or just your own version of the famous “Remember, remember …” verses. Have at it. Should be fun.

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The movie The Hunger Games comes out this Friday. If you’ve read the books(s) you know this isn’t going to be the Twilight-style teen flick that’s being marketed.

Can’t blame Lionsgate for the marketing; they want to make money and the Katniss-Peeta-Gale triangle offers a hook to the silly-but-moneymaking Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle that no marketer could resist. At least they’ve been doing their marketing very, very well; it’s been an elegantly teasing campaign. Have you noticed that, never once during all the buildup, have they actually showed the Hunger Games part of The Hunger Games?

Marketing aside, it looks like Lionsgate has made a damnfine movie. I’ll be headed to the Big City to see it soon as I can.

But the point is that this isn’t just a good-looking or entertaining movie. This is a meme, building on other memes, and this is about freedom.

Or at least, as John Tamny notes, it’s about the horrors of big government.

If you’re old enough, you remember when movies and TV shows never, ever, but never said a bad thing about government or its agents. The Soviet government or the Nazis, yes. But the U.S. government was always the Noble Protector. Its agents never lied, never cheated, never raped, never murdered, were never more violent than absolutely required. Government was approachable, responsive, humane, and preternaturally wise.

Then there came a few movies (e.g. Serpico) that showed something like a good cop crusading against bad cops. But that, of course, supported the “only a few bad apples” meme.

The first movie I ever recall showing a U.S. government agent being just plain bad, stupid, and destructive with no caveats was — oddly enough — Ghostbusters. Remember, it’s the Environmental Protection Agency man who pulls the switch that releases mayhem on the city while the unabashedly free-market Ghostbusters try to stop him.

I remember seeing that and being happily shocked. One of the most popular movies of all time said government could be arrogant, stupid, and destructive.

Well … gone are the days when government on the screen was all-holy. Now we see plenty of bad government actors. But only recently is cinema (does that sound like a hoity-toity term? I just don’t want to keep repeating the words movie, film, and flick) beginning to go into deeper territory: government — and specifically a U.S. government — as pure, unadulterated evil in its very essence.

V for Vendetta did it. But the government was English and the movie a cult hit more than a mainstream blockbuster.

Now The Hunger Games has dared to say it straight out. The country may be called Panem (“bread”), but the place is a recognizable future America. And its government is pure, stripped-down evil. It exists for its own sake and holds power by starving, terrorizing, and murdering its own citizens — even by forcing its young to murder each other.

Here’s the best review I’ve seen so far. It’s not a political review. It’s just one that says this is a big, good, important movie and not only for teens.

I’m not going to print any spoilers here. But if you haven’t yet read the books and are curious about this very anti-government movie, just know that in book three (and presumably movie three four), the message that free people don’t submit to government gets driven home even more … shall we say, pointedly.

The real point is that this is a meme building on other memes. We hear about the latest evil executive order or spy “enhancement” and we despair. But look around. A major studio makes a major film in which a government ruling over Americans is depicted as utterly, irredeemably evil.

That counts for a lot more than whatever bad news just flickered or twittered past our eyes today. Mindset is 90 percent of the battle — and mindset is changing right before our well-entertained eyes.

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