Thursday, March 31, 2005

Consumer-Driven

In my line of work, I hear a lot about health care and consumers. The new rage, especially in the insurance industry, is "consumer-driven" health care, that is, health care in which the consumer takes on more responsibility for decision-making—as well as more financial responsibility, in many cases.

This sounds good, and I don’t think there are too many people who don’t agree that consumers should be as involved as possible in their health care decision-making.

However, some odd twists come out of this new model. I was recently talking to a Medicare official about a new Web-based quality measurement site that gives consumers information on hospitals and their performance in certain specific areas. The Medicare official was talking about how consumers could use this information to decide what hospital to use. Again, sounds good.

But when I looked at the information being provided, most of it was in the area of heart attack treatment. And this thought occurred to me: If I’m having a heart attack, am I going to crawl over to my computer and do some quick Web surfing to compare hospitals? Probably not.

Now, we could say for the sake of argument that someone could plan ahead for a heart attack, although that doesn’t really sound too realistic to me. Or we could say that overall, this kind of thing should be encouraged because eventually a lot more medical conditions will be covered, and (for example) knee replacement surgery will be more practical to comparison-shop for than a heart attack.

But I still wonder if this approach isn’t a little backwards. Instead of saying to people that health care is a supermarket and you have to figure out the best products, shouldn’t we work on making sure that the system is of a uniformly high quality to start with? And in reality, isn’t it true that the quality of health care we receive in this country often has much to do with our socio-economic status to begin with? How will consumer-directed health care solve that problem?

Health care is the most complicated field I know of when it comes to making decisions. More information is good. But finding time in our busy lives to do the amount of research necessary to make informed decisions about every health care problem that our family encounters, well, I don’t know how we get to that point. Do you?

No, Not San Francisco!

My favorite Science Fiction movies.

I’m a lifelong fan of science fiction (OK, maybe not lifelong. I was probably, like, 7 or 8 before I started reading it seriously), and I have to say, science fiction as a literary genre often has not translated well to film. Happily, there are exceptions, and the possibilities for transforming the ideas of science fiction into visual stories seem to be expanding on an almost daily basis. For example, The Lord of the Rings, which I don’t consider science fiction but which nonetheless poses many of the same visualization problems of science fiction (I can’t bring myself to type "sci-fi". Wait a minute, I just did…) has been re-created magnificently by Peter Jackson and his crew. So the prospects of some of the great science fiction classics being successfully transferred to film is improving. That doesn’t mean that Hollywood won’t completely botch things up, as I, Robot proves. But I prefer to be hopeful.
So, here’s a list of my favorite SF movies. (oooh, that’s better.)

2001, A Space Odyssey
Kubrick and Clarke proved to be one of the most inspired teams in cinema history, even if they only collaborated on this one film. The sweep of the story, from humanity’s first consciousness to its first encounter with a race that is both technologically and spiritually advanced (with Clarke, the one often is paired with the other) is perhaps the most audacious of any movie I've seen. The visuals, matched with an inspired score, are stunning and unforgettable. The sparse dialogue and seemingly detached performances suggest the difficulties of the techno/spiritual balance that I mentioned before. It’s been noted many times that the most human character in the movie is the HAL 9000 computer. (Tangential: if Kubrick were Lucas (and still alive) the HAL 9000 would be changed in future releases to a DELL 9000).
So many of the classic SF themes are rolled into this movie: the impact of technology on the human condition; the evolution of machine intelligence—and the conflicts that may arise from that; the first encounter with an alien species; the difficulties and dangers—as well as the wonder—of space travel.
I personally think the "trip" at the end of the movie goes on a bit long, and the ending is ambiguous, even more so than in the novel. But those two quibbles (and any complaints about the pace of the movie I hereby dismiss with a disdainful look) are very minor. One of the great artistic accomplishments of cinema.

The Andromeda Strain
The best movie based on a Michael Crichton book, decades before he sold his soul and began taking potshots at environmentalists. (You’ll note that Jurassic Park, an amusing monster movie with good special effects, is not on this list.)
This movie, released during the height of the cold war, does a great job of capturing the military/scientific establishment reaction to a possible alien microorganism running amok in the American southwest. Sort of War of the Worlds with germs. The suspense is Hitchcockesque, with an entire town wiped out at the movie’s beginning, and bewildered scientists (looking like aliens themselves in their decontamination suits) trying to piece together some clue as to what has happened. The scientists end up in a high tech bomb shelter with very cool toys and eventually a very uncool ticking bomb at their feet.
A suspenseful plot, great acting, and sharp writing make this a classic. The casting is notable as well. Today they would’ve put a pair of glasses on Selma Hayek or Gwenneth Paltrow and made her The Woman Scientist. Thank goodness they had a little more spine (and probably an older average theater audience) back then.

Blade Runner
You know, for all the debate about the original release with Harrison Ford’s voiceover narration versus the director’s cut (without, plus other minor changes), I’ve never had a strong preference either way. I enjoy the movie when it fills in the blanks, and I enjoy it when it doesn’t.
Either version is a film with perhaps the most thoroughly detailed future ever seen in a movie. The constant rain, the crushing crowds, the flying cars (cool!!!) … it all fits together seamlessly. Oh, and the androids. They’re pretty cool to, with a full share of existential angst thrown in to make them that much more interesting. "Then we’re stupid, and we’ll die," says Pris at one point, and it’s a line I sometimes (in my more cynical moments) think applies to the human race as well.
I don’t know if Harrison Ford’s performance here is as good as, say, in Air Force One, but it’s pretty amusing to see him as the Tuff Detective, getting beaten to a pulp in about every other scene. He must have had fun reading the script… "Ok, here I get strangled, here I get my eyes almost poked out, here’s a scene where my hand is crushed…"
Considering the Hollywood tendency to beat dead horses, kudos to Ridley Scott for not making Blade Runner II.

The Matrix
Toss the two sequels off the list completely (maybe not fair: I haven’t seen part 3, but to put it bluntly, who cares?). The first was enough to cement the directors’ reputations. (A reputation so firmly established that I can’t remember their names … oh yeah, the Wachowski Brothers. Who could remember such a clumsy handle?)
Anyhow, it’s a great movie, based on that classic premise that most 12-year-olds stumble across at some point: What if the world we see is all an elaborate fake? The WBs take this premise and really run with it, stringing some mumbo jumbo about blue and red pills, and a coppertop battery (riiiiiiiight) along with some awesome kung fu … Dude! What more could you ask for???
For me the movie’s greatest character is Agent Smith ("MIST-er Anderson") and his dry-ice monologues, not the least of which is the "you stink" speech he gives to Morpheus, right before Neo drops by with machine gun blazing (and manages to miss Morpheus, who is SITTING RIGHT IN THE WAY!) (Sorry).
Logic and rational plotlines aside, what makes this movie is the really groundbreaking visuals: the frozen slow-mo kicks, the bullets whizzing by a windmilling Neo, the incredible shot of the helicopter crashing into the office building, Neo’s reflection in Morpheus’ shades (what this movie did for Foster Grant I can’t imagine), the desperate escape down the INSIDE wall of a building … People will be imitating this movie for years. Actually, they already have been…

Star Wars
This franchise of course had to be on the list, and for many people it would top the list. There is no denying the impact of the first Star Wars movie, both culturally and on the movie industry itself.
The problem is that this accomplishment, for all its glory, is not aging well. There is no doubt that the revisionism that has crept into our view of the Star Wars series has been largely the result of the mind-crushing awfulness of the second trilogy. (Note: at the time of this writing only Episode I and II are out. As bad as Episode I was, I find it curious that I remember it much better than Episode II, which I thought to be a better movie, though still pretty bad. I wonder why that is. Star Wars Fatigue?)
But it’s not just the Jar Jar Binks era that taints this movie series. You can see the problems coming in the third SW movie, The Return of the Jedi. The re-hashing of old ideas, the safe reliance on special effects (improbable high-speed chase scene through a forest, anyone?), the truly baffling affinity Lucas has for "cute" aliens. I know that these films at heart are action movies for kids, but Lucas at times seems to cross the line into infantile. His visual genius has never faltered, but somewhere along the line, this filmmaker became incapable of telling an interesting story. It’s a shame.

T2
We can’t have a discussion about science fiction movies without mentioning Ahhhnold … or that James Cameron guy, I suppose. I really like the first two Terminator movies; an interesting premise (stolen, apparently, from SF legend Harlan Ellison), even if they do squeeze it for every bit of over-the-top violence they can get. The first movie is good; the second is better, with the most menacing Terminator ever. Linda Hamilton sure got into her role as Spookycrazy Mom, she scared the crap out of me, and I was just watching the movie at home. Good minimalist dialogue, brisk action, efficient and believable special effects. If you put aside the fact that time travel is impossible, you can buy this story and the motivations of its characters. Which for me is the sign of a good escapist movie.

Alien and Aliens
OK, these are monster movies. But they both, especially the second, are monster movies that rely on a futuristic setting to tell their stories. For suspenseful horror, you simply can’t beat the first movie. For a compelling story, you can’t beat the second. "Game over, man! Game over!"

Star Trek II –Wrath of Kahn
I hesitate to put the Star Trek franchise on this list, believe it or not. Of course I’m a huge fan, but I’m just not sure the best parts of Trek, in any of its incarnations, has ever been captured in a feature-length movie.
But there’s no doubt this one comes the closest to getting it right. Just two words: Ricardo Montalban. His Khan is a character for the ages, preposterous pectorals and all. And he has some great lines, delivered with the bombast they deserve. Really, the writing in this movie is exceptionally well done. Kirk bitches about getting old, Kahn quotes Milton, and Spock meets his end with the dignity that you would expect from a green-blooded, pointy-eared Vulcan.

Planet of the Apes
I include this series in the list because my wife LOVES Planet of the Apes. The original, of course. Chuck Heston looks much cooler in a loincloth than Marky Mark. And he emotes so much better. "You MANIACS!"

Starman
A whole range of actors have tried the "alien stranded on earth" role in works as diverse as Man Facing Southwest, K-PAX, and Mork and Mindy. But has anyone done it as well as Jeff Bridges? The guy who’s played a President, a shock jock and the world’s greatest slacker makes the challenge seem easy, and delivers a memorable performance (as usual). (Oh, and doing my Google check I found he was also in K-PAX. How ironic. Sorta like rain on a sunny day…)

Predator
Ok, another monster movie. But what an interesting premise: an alien goes on safari on primitive Earth, hunting man (the best prey of all, according to Predator alum Jesse V.). There are a couple of quibbles: do they all blow themselves up if they are captured? And what about their spaceships? But hey, why spoil the movie over little details?
I think this could be Ahhnold’s best role ever. Yeah, the Terminator will be what he’s remembered for (well, that and possibly the redistricting of California’s electoral precincts. Terminator sounds cooler). But here he matches wits with one extremely badass, technologically superior alien, adapts to a hostile environment, and tries (mostly in vain) to shepherd his little special ops/terrorist platoon through the movie in one piece. You feel for the guy. Which is almost a first in Ahhhnold films.

Contact
I include this one only because of its excellent soundtrack (inside joke). More a commendable failure than a SF classic, this movie builds well right up until Jodie Foster’s character gets that first big phone call from the sky. After that it’s politicians this and NASA that and how in the world they expect us to swallow the idea that the person who ran the radiotelescopes would be the chosen to actually go visit the aliens is beyond me. I mean, we didn’t send Van Braun to the moon. A big budget demonstration of how Hollywood can mess up even a decent story and likable characters.

Science Fiction, sort of:
Brother from Another Planet
Great movie, not really much SF. Alien who is completely compatible with the modern New Yorkers he moves in with, views our culture from his perspective, teaches some Valuable Lessons to those around him (especially the drug dealer, who does not recover) and finally finds some of his own kind. Nicely crafted film from John Sayles, who has a cameo.

Repo Man
"Let’s do some crimes!" There are so many great lines in this movie… LA punk becomes a Repo Man and tracks down a mad scientist with aliens in the trunk of his car. Best cameo by Jimmy Buffet ever!

Brazil
One of Terry Gilliam's great fantasies, this is a wistful, sad film about a small man trying to transcend his totalitarian society. Trust me, it’s more enjoyable than that sounds. But probably not for everyone. Personal trivia: I once dated a girl who really enjoyed the amount of ductwork in this movie. And since I seem to be into cameos: Robert Di Niro pops in as a rebel plumber.


And finally,

Mars is Hell
What is it about Mars that makes filmmakers go stupid? Has there ever been a good movie made about Mars? All I know is that in the past couple of decades the red planet has inspired some of the worst SF movies ever made, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars, Mars Attacks! Perhaps none are sillier than (sing it with me) Total Recall, again with Ahhhnold. But the thing about Total Recall is that it at least has a sense of humor. (Ok, Mars Attacks! was supposed to have a sense of humor. Didn’t work.) TR really is a funny movie, with cartoon villains and cartoonish makeup (the mutants look like they bought cheap masks and melted them in the microwave). And the tracking device in the nose, oh boy … nice touch. It’s strange; some of the best SF books have been about Mars, but the movies have either been jokes or disasters.

(p.s. I see that Spielberg is taking on the Mars curse, along with Tom Cruise, in War of the Worlds. Please, by all that is holy, don’t let it be as bad as A.I.)

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Terry Schiavo

Out of the really terrible tragedy of the Terry Schiavo case, I can see some positives developing. The main thing I am seeing here, I think, is that the conservative movement has over-reached in the past month or so. The first setback was the clear failure of the Bush Administration to convince the American public that we needed to scrap Social Security and replace it with something riskier and more expensive. With the Schiavo case, we are seeing the public rebel against the notion that a "culture of life," whatever that means, should allow government to intrude into our most personal and painful decisions. This whole circus has given some clarity to the concepts and cliches that the media have been trotting out. In addition to illustrating how far the "culture of life" followers will go in their beliefs, it also shows how silly the concept of "activist judges" is. The judges in this case have deliberated for years about the fate of TS, and have come to common sense conclusions that the vast majority of people can understand and agree with. If anything, it is the Republican legislators that look like activists, singling out a particular family to swoop down on and "help" with intrusive and medically ignorant legislation. Now that the far right has labeled these judges "activist," maybe the public will think twice about swallowing that term when it's used for other judges, whose real crime is simply not agreeing with the religious right.

Test

This is a test. More to come.