Frédérik Sisa

Amidst all the healthcare brouhaha, you may have missed the story of an airplane hijacked in Mexico just as it was leaving Cancun. Thankfully, the 100 passengers were safe and the hijackers were arrested. What makes the story newsworthy is the lead hijacker’s motive. Apparently, preacher Jose Mar Flores received a divine revelation to hijack the plane as a way of warning President Felipe Calderon of an impending earthquake. Mr. Flores apparently told police that Sept. 9, 2009, (9-9-9), is the Satanic number 666 turned upside down. This could all be dismissed as the result of a sad case of deluded thinking and tenth-rate numerology, but it actually illustrates a rather hefty question: Why, and how, do we put trust in religious experiences?

Like the tonally similar Easy Virtue, My One And Only is a layered film that puts a comic veneer on some form of pathology. The difference is that where Easy Virtue’s wit is droll and mordant, My One And Only is more caustic and poignant, a shift that comes from focusing on the dysfunction of a broken family rather than Noel Coward’s barbed observations of class hypocrisy.

A bumper sticker summary might read “chick flick for guys,” but that would be a glib description for a film that inverts Hollywood’s usual cut-and-paste gender roles on-screen romances. This time around, it falls to the guy – played with a sparkling despair by Joseph Gordon-Levitt that almost makes us forget his part in the trashy G.I. Joe – to fulfill the thankless, tormented role of a lovesick romeo.

After years of litigation and appeals, the US Box of Business (US BoB) v. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) finally reaches the Supreme Court. Chief Justice: It’s my understanding, Mr. Moneybags, that the US Box of Business believes NASA should hold public hearings on the science underlying the law of gravity. Is this correct? Do I understand your position?

Lampooning the George W. Bush presidency can feel a lot like taking shots at the broadside of a barn. The former President’s inarticulate expression and body language struck some as folksy and others as just plain goofy – few politicians were so ready-made for cartooning. And that, of course, is even before controversial policies that left the body politic divided against itself, a situation ripe for sharp-tongued, poison-pen satire.

People have nothing to say – but that won’t stop them from saying it at ear-bleeding, migraine-inducing volume. That pretty much sums up this tragic joke we call the healthcare debate. The punchline: There is no plan. There are various blobs masquerading at plans in various stages of nebulosity in the House and a few Senate committees. There are pages and pages of possible-maybe-kinda-sorta legislation that won’t survive intact once we reach that singular mythical event, the final vote. But there’s no plan-plan, and that gives people an excuse to set aside that supremely annoying thing, reality, when discussing healthcare in America. After all, why let facts get in the way of wishful opinion?

One of the best lines in Monster vs. Aliens was the crack about how the US is the only place in which aliens seem to land. Fans of Doctor Who would beg to differ, of course, but nevertheless, Hollywood’s US-centric vision of alien contact gets a decisive rebuke from District 9, which sets the aliens’ arrival in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The science-fiction film District 9 earns its R-rating. Bursting heads, exploding bodies, beatings. None of it gratuitous or sensational. Nevertheless, there it is on the screen; graphic, bloody violence. As my wife and I watched the film, we were surprised to hear a child in the row behind. A child! Who brings a child to an R-rated film? But that isn’t what really shocked us.

Buzz for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” came with news of fans reportedly unhappy about the inclusion of human-enhancing “accelerator suits.” Since the film, much like the series it adapts, is bursting with futuristic military technology that includes mind control, invisibility, nano-technology disintegration and energy weapons, the use of accelerator suits by two characters for a fraction of an action sequence seems like a rather feeble complaint. Such is the nature of fandom. Insofar as the general question of faithfulness goes the double-edge is: G.I. Joe, the movie, is every bit the infantile militaristic fantasy soap-opera of the cartoon series.

With the Gates incident and first-ever “Beer Summit” stoking the national obsession, it’s time to confuse the national racial dialogue with a bit of armchair philosophizing. The impetus comes by way of Ron Reagan, my favourite of Air America’s current lineup, who recently asked listeners about what shape the national dialogue on race should take. It’s a great question. What do we expect a national dialogue on race to accomplish? My question is: Is it even possible to have a national dialogue?