Category: Asia

Heck of a Job, Sully.

“I do think she is so into this that she sees it from the inside out…And I’m not sure she adequately grasps all the mistakes we have made.” The NYT profiles Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. “In Baghdad, American Embassy officials sometimes use the phrase, ‘Let’s not Meghan-ize the problem,’ meaning, let’s not try to impose order on the chaos of Iraq with one of her five-point presentations.” But, to be fair to O’Sullivan, the fellow she’s briefing every day hasn’t shown a propensity for understandiing anything more complex. In fact, five points may be stretching the limits of the presidential curiosity.

Pyongyang Redux?

“It’s ironic that President Bush is now endorsing a diplomatic stance toward Iran so similar to the stance that President Clinton took toward North Korea. When he first took office, Bush so feverishly opposed the Agreed Framework with North Korea in large part because Clinton had produced it.” Slate‘s Fred Kaplan wonders whether President Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea might help to contain Iran. The verdict? Possibly maybe, particularly given that we have no real alternatives.

Pas de vingt-sept. / Yuri + 45.

A very happy belated birthday to my sister Gillian, who turned 27 yesterday. (We celebrated on Monday, but, as y’all might know, I haven’t posted here since then.) Update: Also, a very happy Yuri’s Night to you and yours — tonight is the 45th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first-ever trip into space, as well as the 25th anniversary of the first space shuttle mission. (By way of Blivet.)

Report Card: Incomplete.

By way of a friend, the State Department releases its mandated yearly human rights report for 2005 (here), finding cause for alarm in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Burma, North Korea, Belarus and Zimbabwe and (surprise, surprise) progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report doesn’t delve into human rights violations here at home (although China tries to fill that gap in response every year), but it does unequivocally state — in bold, no less — that “countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world’s most systematic human rights violators.” Hey y’all might be on to something. Deadpans the head of Amnesty International: “The Bush administration’s practice of transferring detainees in the ‘war on terror’ to countries cited by the State Department for their appalling human rights records actually turns the report into a manual for the outsourcing of torture.”

Fore!

“Is this the right message to be sending to taxpayers in America, Russia, Europe and Japan — that it’s OK to do a stunt like this?” The Russian space agency weighs the financial pros and safety cons of an orbital chip shot from the ISS. “The golf shot is hardly the first commercial venture in space. The cash-strapped Russian space agency has taken three ‘space tourists’ to the orbiting laboratory for a reported $20 million apiece. An Israeli company, Tnuva Food Industries, paid the Russians $450,000 to show two cosmonauts drinking milk, and Pizza Hut paid $1 million to slap a logo on the side of a Proton rocket and have cosmonauts deliver a pizza to the space station. The Russians aren’t alone. Last year, the Japanese space agency arranged for the filming of an instant ramen noodle commercial on the space station.”

You like the rug?

“For whatever reason, Bush seems fixated on his rug. Virtually all visitors to the Oval Office find him regaling them about how it was chosen and what it represents. Turns out, he always says, the first decision any president makes is what carpet he wants in his office…Sometimes Bush describes it as a metaphor for leadership. Sometimes he relates how Russian President Vladimir Putin admired the carpet. Sometimes he seems most taken by the lighting qualities.” Ah, the glory days…I guess it was only after that tough second decision — the drapes, maybe? — that the job started getting to Dubya.

Tel Aviv Tea and Moscow Moolah.

File this one next to Red Scorpion: The Boston Globe uncovers that, among Casino Jack’s various other projects, Abramoff wanted to dig for oil in Israel, and had established a company, First Gate Resources, with some Russian investors to do so. It seems these investors, “energy company executives of a Moscow firm called Naftasib,” may also have paid for a 1997 DeLay-Abramoff boondoggle to Moscow. Also, the Feds “have sought information about Naftasib’s interest in congressional support for Russian projects financed through the International Monetary Fund.” The plot thickens…

Armies of the Night.

As an afternoon chaser to a morning spent at the NY Comic-Con (I posted some pics over at Flickr), my brother, sister-in-law, and I took in the Russian cinema sensation of 2004, Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch. On one hand, it includes some really strange and arresting visual moments, and from very early on seems like a film in which pretty much anything can happen. But, frankly, I wasn’t feeling it. Even despite all the exposition in the early going, the movie makes very little sense, even by the laxer standards one accords fantasy films. And Night Watch wears out its welcome well before the end — To be honest, I kinda wish I’d just watched the two-and-a-half-minute version at the official site.

After a brief prologue describing the establishment of a centuries-old Truce between the Others, spectral forces of Light and Dark, Night Watch moves to the Moscow of twelve years ago, where a Ringo-haired Joe Flaherty look-alike named Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) seeks out a Love Potion #9 from an unsettling Russian crone. Soon, after consuming a concoction of blood, vodka, and lemonade, Anton flirts with the idea of causing a paranormal stillbirth in his now ex-girlfriend, which draws the attention of the Night Watch, a diplomatic police force of Others assigned (with their counterparts, the Day Watch) to ensure compliance with the Truce. Flash forward to the present, when Anton — as it turns out, himself an Other — has joined the Night Watch and now spends his days quaffing blood and chasing down vampires who kill without a license. (Did I mention this film was Russian? Even supernatural forces, it seems, rely on bureaucrats.)

Now that’s only the first twenty-five minutes or so — Night Watch takes several more baroque jags that involve, among other things, a prophecy of a Great Other precipitating a Last Battle between Good and Evil (Yes, this Film Demands a lot of Gratuitous Capitalization), a lovely Virgin and her ancient, unfortunate curse, an all-consuming vortex of bad mojo that rips rivets from planes and plunges them into your coffee, and a young child who draws the attention of a newly-minted vampire (at right). And, true, many of these new elements are introduced with clever visual flourishes — I particularly liked the aging secret, the spider-doll, and the world of the Gloom. But what is the Gloom, exactly, and how the heck does it work? What was the point of the Owl-woman? Why doesn’t the starving vampire chick feed on someone — anyone — else? Why did Der Evil Commissar give Anton the charmed necklace? And so on, so on. There’s something to be said for inscrutability at times, but Night Watch spends too much time making capital-R Rules only to break or ignore them in the later going.

Finally — and this is a more unforgivable sin — for a movie that occasionally moves at a bloody, visceral blur, Night Watch really drags at times. Given the thoroughly bizarre set-up and its fanboy grounding, I really wanted to like this film, but in all honesty I found my attention wavering within forty-five minutes (right about the time the Rammsteinish death metal accompanies the speeding Other-truck with the nifty gear-shift) and was kinda bored after an hour or so. There are some moody, memorable moments throughout, but they added up to a better trailer than they did a film. Apparently, the sequel Day Watch — is in the can, but I doubt I’ll revisit this particular world, or at least not without more vodka on hand.