Continuations

This weekend I went to see “The Hunger Games” with our oldest son (12). His twin sister separately saw the movie as part of a friend’s birthday party. For anyone who has been behind a gigantic rock, er, I mean doesn’t have children who are fans of Suzanne Collins’s novel on which the movie is based, here is a brief plot summary. The Hunger Games is set in a post-apocalyptic version North America. The region is now divided into 12 districts and ruled by a dictatorship located in the “Capitol.”...

On Saturday, I went to see Hugo by Martin Scorsese with our two boys and my Mom who is visiting from Germany. It was my Mom’s first 3D movie and she was thoroughly enchanted by the effects, reaching for floating elements several times and loudly oohing. The 3D was used well throughout and with only a few “poke at the audience” moments that all more or less worked. As an aside: I noticed that the 3D glasses these days are less strongly polarized than I remember them and the movie felt relative...

We went to see Jobs on Saturday night with our older son who is interested in being an entrepreneur. I had heard that the reviews had been largely bad and didn’t have high expectations going in. I left the movie quite impressed and wanting more. It is easy to fault the movie for omitting many important parts of Steve Jobs’s life and accomplishments. But then again let’s keep in mind that he did accomplish way more than most and that Isaacson’s biography clocks in at 656 pages. In the end I th...

I started writing this review last night with the Oscars still going on, having seen Zero Dark Thirty the night before (I will have some separate comments on other Oscar choices). I went to see it despite having some trepidation about doing so. On the one hand, I had enjoyed Hurt Locker a lot. On the other, I have resented the zealous pursuit of folks who illegally downloaded Hurt Locker (which still is *not* available for streaming on Vudu) and much more importantly was concerned about Zero ...

I am still working on my third post about employment. As part of that I have been reading up on the rise of inequality in the US and its effects on society. In that process I came across this interesting chart from a Morgan Stanley research report: It shows that rising income inequality has been highly correlated with increased political polarization since the mid 1970s (found via Business Insider). Then just a few minutes ago I saw in my Tumblr dashboard that Robert Reich is making a documen...