I'm at The Batman. And yeah. It might actually be better than The Dark Knight, no slight to Heath Ledger intended. I can't believe I'm saying this. I am ... overcome.
Colin Ferrell is utterly unrecognizable and brilliant. Zoe Kravitz is brilliant, and more than eye candy. But the movie revolves around Pattinson confronting the tarnished ideal of the hero.
This movie will be discussed.
The director plainly took his tone from The Joker. This is a dark film. There are essentially no concessions to comedy.
There are, however, concessions to comic book combat. Batman is basically suicidal, at one point taking an explosion face first that doesn't kill him, though it does knock him out. No one unmasks him while he is out. It's less unrealistic than recent movies with Batman, though.
The thing that's going to keep me up thinking about this film is how -- no spoilers-- it contemplates the basic Batman question: why, if you have billions of dollars, aren't you using that money to reduce crime directly? The answer: Batman is screwing up, and knows it at the end.
That confrontation with the consequences of being a billionaire in a society where orphans die unseen is at the heart of the film, and what makes it better, perhaps, than The Dark Knight. The Batman looks at this in a way that serves the story.
It's not a tacked-on element of the story. It's not forced. We are not at a Batman movie for Great Moral Lessons. It's more of an "oh ... of course" thing that speaks to how society is contending with wealth and poverty right now.
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What the hell is this. This legislation came out of nowhere 10 days ago. It appears on its face to prohibit municipalities from providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness.
Some state senator drove by encampments on the way to the capitol and decided the best thing he could do is to force them to sleep in the cars they don't have or in pillboxes instead of, you know, an actual apartment.
It prohibits spending more than $35,000 per unit on shelter, exclusive of land costs. Which is to say, it prohibits building an actual home within 100 miles of Atlanta.
It also treats Atlanta in fundamentally different ways than the rest of Georgia. Because white Republicans.
As we wrestle with the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, remember that all wars are borne from miscalculation.
America's far-right believes that it has no path forward with politics; that the bullet will supplant the ballot, soon.
They believe if it comes to a gunfight, they'll win.
They're wrong. They're wildly outnumbered and deeply unpopular. Open armed conflict will result in a unified effort to crush them.
But the Rittenhouse verdict will bolster militants. They can now argue their chances on guns to people looking for an excuse to kill.
On its own, I think we could write this verdict off as a product of specific conditions. But consider how it interfaces with the "Stop the Steal" rhetoric of the right.
So, @nprdina and @vicwj, ye of the three-naméd news reporters, we need to talk about this story.
I'm a writer in Atlanta. I have been covering political extremism here for about a decade. And I am horrified at the journalistic malpractice on display.
"Bruno Cua was best known in his small town of Milton, Ga., as a great builder of treehouses. These were big, elaborate creations with ladders and trapdoors and framed-out windows."
WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS COME FROM.
Milton, Ga. is one of the most affluent parts of Atlanta, if not America. The average household income is about $130,000 a year.
Bruno Cua's father is a vice president at Intercontinental Hotels and is likely in the $250,000+ a year range. Their house is worth about $750,000.
This is fascinating. A lot of you know that I was, for years, ADID's social impact director. I helped formulate ADID's formal policies on public food distribution. I have strong feelings about this stuff. But this situation is ... complicated.
Let's start here: Atlanta is desperately, horrifyingly unequal, leaving thousands of people in Dickensian poverty while we get all worked up about Ludacris' car getting stolen or metal detectors at Phipps Plaza. /2
Poverty here is crushing in ways that people who grew up in middle-class families -- in working-class families -- simply cannot understand without direct contact. And direct contact doesn't happen here any more. Morningside may as well be Mars for a kid in Lakewood Heights. /3
So, in past riots, one has watched and wondered why rioters don't go to wealthy neighborhoods and attack things, instead of burning down the local corner store. Folks on the street in Atlanta got that memo.
Buckhead. Lenox Mall. Gucci and Prada stores. Yes, yes. Property damage bad. Riot bad. Bad rioter. I can't lie: I'm chuckling a little at the logic of it, though.
Buckhead is luxury apartments paid for by mommy and daddy's money: a solid 10 percent of white people in their 20's here have significant inherited wealth. Buckhead is these same trust fund kids committing crimes and then blaming black people. fox5atlanta.com/news/police-at…
I was on a teleconference this morning with Mark Butler, commissioner of the Department of Labor. He was asked about the solvency of the unemployment trust fund.
"We're good," he said, laughing. "We've got this."
I am not so sure.
The state has $2.6 billion in the unemployment trust fund. It's paid out $300 million so far this year, he said: twice as much as the entire previous year. Last week, the trust fund paid out $41.8 million, on about 400,000 claims. We're up to a million claims now. So triple that.
If the state is consistently paying out around $100 million a week, that's 26 weeks in the bank. That assumes things don't actually get worse.
(Hint: things are still going to get worse.)
But Butler said we can borrow money from the federal government if we spend it all down.