Word: fatalism
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...worthless. There will be calls for regional diplomatic conferences and partition plans and new Iraqi power-sharing deals, plans to increase and plans to diminish the level of U.S. troops or to deploy them differently. Expert advocates will brilliantly argue all these possibilities, but each will have a fatal flaw: the expectation of a rational, cooperative reaction from the Iraqis. That is no longer possible. Iraq no longer exists as a coherent governmental entity. It is being atomized, according to cia Director Michael Hayden, into "smaller and smaller groups fighting over smaller and smaller issues over smaller and smaller pieces...
...this is not exactly crystal clear throughout the movie. While Tomas (Hugh Jackman in 16th-century form) fights Mayan warriors in his quest to find the Fountain of Youth, Tommy (21st-century Jackman) races against time to find a cure for his wife’s (Rachel Weisz) fatal cancer, and Tom (26th-century Jackman) meditates on the meaning of life as he floats towards Xibalba, a nebula/mythical Mayan underworld. If this sounds a bit trippy, rest assured, it is. But, there is something deliciously intriguing about the story, even if the clichéd search for the Fountain...
...brutality is on display in the first scene, which hews to the previous films' text by providing a daring exploit and a minor league kill before the stylized opening credits. This time, though, the fatal confrontation is shown in monochrome and takes place in a Saw-style bathroom. The killing is grimly realistic, as if to suggest that this Bond operates in the real world of real pain and has wounds that may never heal. A later scene, with a naked Bond getting his testicles whipped, inevitably calls up Abu Ghraib atrocities (and should have earned the film...
Until now, almost nothing has been written about the inner workings of the ADX. Since 9/11, journalists have been routinely denied access to the facility, its staff and inmates. But Eric Robert Rudolph, who is serving life without parole at the prison for the fatal bombings at the Atlanta Olympics and an abortion clinic in Alabama, has written letters to me, the author of a book about his case, and to his mother Patricia Rudolph, who has shared them with me. These missives offer a unique first-hand account of life on Bombers...
...against their best instincts. Here, Jigsaw has two rationales for his eccentric behavior. One is to punish people he believes are moral transgressors, though his judgments tend to be hasty and draconian. The other is more personal: Jigsaw, eventually revealed as John Kramer (Tobin Bell), is suffering from a fatal brain tumor, and he wants to prove that only having faced death can a man truly savor life. Or, as he puts it a bit more proscriptively in Saw II, "Those who don't appreciate life do not deserve life...