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After Ghost Ship Fire, Tupac’s Old Lawyer Is Helping Artists Fight Eviction

by DMPKellevsd Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, California, that claimed 36 lives earlier this month, the inhabitants of live-work artist warehouses all over America have been receiving eviction threats and notices. In Oakland and San Francisco, residents of at least five such spaces are now facing eviction. Warehouses in Baltimore and Denver have been shuttered since the fire, and others are facing increased scrutiny in Nashville, Philadelphia, and Dallas, as well as Indianapolis, Indiana, and New Haven, Connecticut. Many worry that this activity is related less to safety concerns than to property owners’ desire to expel low-wage artists in favor of wealthier tenants.

Bay Area artists, at least, have a high-profile defender—the civil rights lawyer John Burris, who has stepped up to act as a liaison between tenants and local government code enforcers. Burris, whose name pops up in many a lawsuit regarding abusive practices by local police, is best known for representing Rodney King, Tupac Shakur, and the family of Oscar Grant—who was killed by a BART police officer, inspiring the movie Fruitvale Station. Standing up for low-rent artists seemed a little off the beaten track for Burris, so I reached out to him and his housing guru, James Cook, to see what was afoot.

Mother Jones: What inspired you to help artists facing eviction after the fire?

John Burris: My daughter lost two friends. I knew she has spent time in the Bay Area’s artist warehouses, so I called her immediately when I heard the news. She had two friends who were missing, later confirmed dead. I feel her pain, but I’m pained just as a community person as well. The loss of 36 lives is just outrageous. So we thought, how can we help?

MJ: How are you helping? Are you filing a lawsuit?

JB: No. It’s not clear that the city can be held liable for the fire. But the eviction issue came up very quickly. We invited people in the affected community to sit around our table and tell us their stories. That’s what we do in civil rights law—we hear stories, and the stories move us to action. We said we don’t think we can do what we would traditionally do, which is file a lawsuit, but maybe there’s something else. Now we’re facilitating communication between the city and the artistic community. Ultimately we’ll have to bring in real estate people as well, because they hold the aces. Our goal is to make sure people know their rights, and make policy adjustments if needed to protect people from eviction.

MJ: Why is it important to you that these artists stay put?

JB: We’re concerned that this may turn into a boondoggle for landowners and real estate interests, who will use this tragedy to evict artists and members of alternative communities—including LGBT people. We fear they will legally be able to put people out by saying they need to get a building up to code for safety reasons, and then turn around and rent it for a lot of money to someone else. This practice is not uncommon. Take African American communities—often developers will come in and renovate a neighborhood, driving up rents, and the city fails to take action on behalf of the community, which eventually has to move out. The African American population is declining in Oakland, as it has already declined in San Francisco. So the question is, will this particular event cause that process to occur with respect to the artistic community, here and elsewhere?

MJ: Doesn’t the city have a responsibility to enforce housing codes?

JB: The city has a responsibility to make sure a living space is not harmful. But that doesn’t mean it has to be up to every code, in which case landlords would have reason to put people out left and right. Basic requirements of safety have to be maintained, but we have to preserve the affordable housing stock, too, and respect people’s right to stay in their homes.

MJ: Why would cities want to stop gentrification?

James Cook: We use the term “legacy community” to talk about a community that’s part of a city’s cultural, historical, and economic fabric. For good reason, we have housing laws in many cities designed to keep legacy communities in place, and to create some sort of economic structure to help those communities survive. If you can maintain legacy communities, the theory is that cities will thrive economically, thrive politically, thrive intellectually, thrive culturally. In the Bay Area, artists and LGBT people are legacy communities that we want to sustain.

MJ: Do you think a city has a special responsibility to its current residents, as opposed to potential future ones?

JB: Yes, a community is defined by those who are already here, not those whom you want to attract.

JC: Housing is the next dimension of civil rights law. There’s actually a constitutional case to be made for this. The Constitution says you have the right to a notice and a hearing before your property can be taken away. Some people may say that if you’re a tenant and you don’t own your house, this shouldn’t necessarily apply to you. But housing rights advocates argue that the law applies because you own a stake in the property as a leaseholder. Across the country, we increasingly have laws that mimic the 14th Amendment for tenants.

MJ: Does protecting these artists have implications for other legacy communities?

JB: Yes. Decreasing one type of diversity usually leads to decreasing other types. So if rents go up because the artistic community is expelled, African Americans will suffer too. Forward-thinking leaders of cities value diversity for many reasons, including economic ones. So if something comes along that threatens that diversity, the city has a responsibility to do what it can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

John Burris, right, stands with Tanti Martinez, whose asthmatic son died while incarcerated in California.

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After Ghost Ship Fire, Tupac’s Old Lawyer Is Helping Artists Fight Eviction

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

by Hermine1266 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Reuters reports on lead poisoning:

ST. JOSEPH, Missouri — On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

In explanation, she pointed to the peeling paint on her old house. Kadin, she said, has been diagnosed with lead poisoning. He has lots of company: Within 15 blocks of his house, at least 120 small children have been poisoned since 2010, making the neighborhood among the most toxic in Missouri.

Of course, it’s not just St. Joseph. Reuters got hold of neighborhood-level lead testing records and found thousands of high-lead communities across the country:

Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city’s contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.

Here’s a map of the worst hotspots in the country:

The whole piece is worth reading. My only disappointment is that the authors spent most of the article talking about the dangers of lead paint. That’s worth talking about, but lead-saturated soil is even more worth talking about. That’s why Lauranda Mignery doesn’t want her son digging in their front yard: there may not be any paint there, but there’s probably lots of old lead that settled in the soil decades ago when we were all burning leaded gasoline.

Sadly, there’s barely any money in the federal budget these days for testing, let alone remediation. It would cost tens of billions of dollars to clean up all the old lead, which is mostly a problem in poor communities populated by people of color. And though it’s not polite to say this, nobody cares enough about them to spend tens of billions of dollars.

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Reuters: 3,000 Neighborhoods Have Higher Lead Levels Than Flint

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Donald Trump’s Mafia Approach to Governing Has Officially Started

by BlairMullah Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Judd Legum of ThinkProgress reports that “members of the Trump Organization” pressured the government of Kuwait to switch their annual National Day celebration from the Four Seasons to the Trump International:

In the early fall, the Kuwaiti Embassy signed a contract with the Four Seasons. But after the election, members of the Trump Organization contacted the Ambassador of Kuwait, Salem Al-Sabah, and encouraged him to move his event to Trump’s D.C. hotel, the source said.

Kuwait has now signed a contract with the Trump International Hotel, the source said, adding that a representative with the embassy described the decision as political. Invitations to the event are typically sent out in January.

Abdulaziz Alqadfan, First Secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, told ThinkProgress last week that he couldn’t “confirm or deny” that the National Day event would be held at the Trump Hotel. Reached again Monday afternoon, Alqadfan did not offer any comment. An email sent directly to Ambassador Al-Sabah was not immediately returned.

Legum writes that his source is a person “who has direct knowledge of the arrangements between the hotels and the embassy,” and that he was able to “review documentary evidence confirming the source’s account.” I have a feeling that a lot of foreign governments are going to be getting phone calls from the Trump Organization over the next four years.

Now, Trump’s defense, if he bothers to offer one, will be that nothing happened. Someone in his company made a sales call to the Kuwaiti government, offered them a deal they couldn’t refuse, and closed the business. What’s wrong with that? But Newt Gingrich has a whole different idea about how Trump should deal with potential violations of the law:

“We’ve never seen this kind of wealth in the White House, and so traditional rules don’t work,” Gingrich said Monday during an appearance on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” about the president-elect’s business interests. “We’re going to have to think up a whole new approach.”

And should someone in the Trump administration cross the line, Gingrich has a potential answer for that too.

“In the case of the president, he has a broad ability to organize the White House the way he wants to. He also has, frankly, the power of the pardon,” Gingrich said. “It’s a totally open power. He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period. Technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”

Jeez, it’s too bad we didn’t have this Newt Gingrich around in the 90s. He and Bill Clinton would have gotten along a lot better if he’d had this kind of charitable attitude toward presidential ethics back then.

On a more serious note: Are you fucking kidding me? The Trump Organization is going to poach business away by “encouraging” foreign governments to see the benefits of holding their events at a Trump property? And Newt Gingrich thinks we should just go ahead and change the law to allow this kind of thing? And if nobody salutes when that gets run up the old flagpole, then Trump should just go ahead and issue pardons to anyone who gets harassed by overzealous prosecutors.

What country do I live in, anyway?

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Donald Trump’s Mafia Approach to Governing Has Officially Started

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The Right Time For Chocolate Is All the Time

by WilhemiCollocott Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the Wall Street Journal today:

Oh come on. They’re just trolling us, right?

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The Right Time For Chocolate Is All the Time

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

by CoyYlgpzorgdmw Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mick Mulvaney, the ultra-conservative South Carolina congressman whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his budget director, has questioned whether the federal government should spend any money on scientific research.

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney, a deficit hawk who recently spoke before a chapter of the right-wing-fringe John Birch Society, would be in charge of crafting Trump’s budget and overseeing the functioning of federal agencies. One thing he seems to believe the budget and the agencies should not be funding is research into diseases like the Zika virus.

Two weeks before Congress finally passed more than $1 billion to fight the spread of Zika and its effects, Mulvaney questioned whether the government should fund any scientific research. “Do we need government-funded research at all,” he wrote in a Facebook post on September 9 unearthed by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge. Mulvaney appears to have deleted his Facebook page since then.

In the post, he justified his position on government-funded research by questioning the scientific consensus that Zika causes the birth defect microcephaly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded in April that the Zika virus causes microcephaly and other defects. But Mulvaney wrote:

And before you inundate me with pictures of children with birth defects, consider this:

Brazil’s microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery — if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? According to a new report from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and elsewhere raises serious questions about the assumed connection between Zika and microcephaly.

According to the New York Times, the relatively low rate of microcephaly in Colombia has indeed puzzled some researchers, who point to the fact that many women likely delayed pregnancy or had abortions when testing revealed the birth defect. But that doesn’t change the scientific consensus linking Zika to microcephaly.

Here’s the full post from Mulvaney:

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

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ERP Blogstorm Part 4: Miscellaneous

by GloriaSocha0239 Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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The fourth and final part of our series of charts from the Economic Report of the President has no theme. It’s just three unrelated charts that I felt like posting. First up, here is the IMF’s forecast of global growth over the six years since the end of the Great Recession:

Every year they think the decline in growth is over and the global economy will pick up again. And every year they’re wrong. Now they’re forecasting the same thing in 2016. Next year we’ll find out if they’re finally right.

Next up is a chart that shows how oil prices affect national economies in the Middle East:

Kuwait can balance its budget with an oil price of $50 per barrel. Saudi Arabia needs about $70. Bahrain needs $90. And Libya needs to start spending less.

Finally, here’s a chart I’ve put up in various forms several times over the years:

We’ve grown used to thinking of health care costs as spiraling out of control, but that wasn’t a regular fact of life until the early 80s. Then, for the next 20 years, health care inflation ran way higher than overall inflation. However, the gap started narrowing as early as the mid-90s. Here’s a chart of my own that shows the gap directly:

Using a 10-year rolling average helps smooth out the spikes so we can focus on the trend instead. Medical inflation was fairly moderate in the late 50s and then declined fairly steadily to even lower levels until the early 80s. Then it skyrocketed, and this is the era we’re most familiar with. But by the early aughts it had fallen back to its previous level in the 60s and 70s, and it’s stayed there for the past 15 years.

The authors of the report try to make a case that the subdued medical inflation of the past few years is due to Obamacare, but they try too hard. Obamacare has likely had some effect, but basically it just had the good luck to go into effect at a time when medical inflation was already pretty low.

What this all shows is that we should change how we think of medical inflation. Most of us think of it as something that’s out of control, and we hope that the recent slowdown isn’t just a blip. Instead, we should think of the period from 1980-2000 as a blip. Except for those two decades, medical inflation has run steadily at about 1.5 percent above overall inflation, and there’s no special reason to think this will change. That’s the normal rate for the postwar era.

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ERP Blogstorm Part 4: Miscellaneous

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ERP Blogstorm Part 3: Banking

by GrantBramlett Posted on December 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Part three of our series of charts from the Economic Report of the President is all about banking. Mostly, it’s a trip down memory lane. Here’s a look at the worldwide market in derivatives over the past couple of decades:

The volume of derivatives went from $10 trillion to $35 trillion in two years starting right before the market crashed. Here’s another perspective on that:

In 1990, shadow banking was about the same size as the traditional banking sector. By 2007 it was more than twice as big. Just before the crash, shadow banking comprised two-thirds of the entire banking industry and it was almost entirely unregulated. This is why I was happy that Hillary Clinton at least mentioned shadow banking during the campaign.

Here’s how all this affected tradition banks:

In 2007, losses from trading amounted to about $30 billion. By 2009 that had skyrocketed to about $100 billion—and that’s in addition to about $40 billion in traditional loan losses. This is what happens when you start with a housing market that’s already in bubble territory and then egg it on with insane levels of rocket science derivatives, most of them unregulated bastard offspring of the shadow banking sector.

So what’s happened since then? We had a huge crash, the Fed instituted higher capital ratios for “systemically important financial institutions,” and we passed the Dodd-Frank reforms. Here’s what banks look like now:

Before the Great Recession, the biggest banks (green line) had Tier 1 equity ratios of about 7 percent. That’s why they couldn’t weather the crash. Today they’re above 12 percent. Is that enough? Maybe not. But it’s a helluva lot better than it used to be.

Finally, here’s an intriguing chart that shows one of the specific consequences of Dodd-Frank:

Most single-name derivatives are now cleared through a central clearinghouse, which makes it easy for traders to cancel out mirror-image positions they hold. This is called “compression,” and it reduces the total volume of derivatives and increases the safety of the financial system. Today, derivatives worth $200 trillion (notional) are compressed out of existence each year.

Needless to say, Republicans are hellbent on repealing Dodd-Frank. Sure, it makes the banking system safer and helps protect consumers, but big banks don’t like it, so that’s that. The party of Donald Trump, the working man’s president, will do whatever Wall Street tells them to do. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

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ERP Blogstorm Part 3: Banking

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Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

by Hadwin Partize Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

In its waning days, President Barack Obama’s US Department of Agriculture injected an extra dose of drama into President-elect Donald Trump’s chaotic transition of the ag department this week.

The USDA issued a blunt assessment of the state of the poultry industry, portraying it as dominated by a handful of chicken processors that “often wield market power” against the farmers who raise the nations’ chickens, “treating them unfairly, suppressing how much they are paid, or pitting them against each other.” The USDA has a point, as Christopher Leonard showed in his excellent 2014 book The Meat Racket (my review here): Farmers own the growing facilities and are responsible for upgrading them according to the companies’ whims, while the companies supply the chicks and the feed and dictate the price farmers are paid.

And it put substance behind the critique, rolling out long-delayed proposed rules designed to give chicken farmers “protections against the most egregious retaliatory practices” used by the big companies. The USDA has been required to release a version of these rules, known as GIPSA, since being charged to do so by the 2008 farm bill, but GOP stalwarts in the US House have been pushing back ever since, using legislative chicanery to block them. This 2015 Washington Monthly piece by Lina Khan details the Obama USDA’s tortured and—until now—failed attempts to release the rules. The farmers’ rights group RAFI has a good summary of what’s in them.

But there’s a catch—the new rules can’t go into effect until a 60-day comment period has passed. And that means it will be up to the Trump USDA to implement and enforce them—or choose not to.

And that plunges GIPSA into the dark heart of Trump’s USDA transition. For weeks, as I reported here, Team Trump has been floating Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), a moderate Democrat, as his top pick to take the USDA helm. But the motley crew of right-wing farm state pols, agribiz flacks, and donors who make up Trump’s agricultural advisory committee has been pushing back hard against Heitkamp—and the GIPSA rules will likely heighten their fervor. They could spell the end of the Heitkamp trial balloon.

According to the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Heitkamp has “consistently supported” strong GIPSA rules, and in 2014, “she opposed industry efforts to put a provision in the farm bill that would have prohibited USDA from issuing the regulations.” If Heitkamp were to get the job, Agri-Pulse reported, “she would immediately face a confrontation with livestock and poultry groups over the new contracting rules.”

Indeed, the meat industry is acting like an aggrieved rooster in response to the GIPSA rules. The National Chicken Chicken Council, a trade group for the big poultry packers, declared that the rules “threaten to upend the structure of the livestock and poultry industries, raise the price of meat/poultry and cost jobs in rural America.” These claims are nonsense. According to the USDA’s economic analysis, the GIPSA rules, once implemented, will likely trigger “price increases of approximately one-hundredth of a cent or less in retail prices for beef, pork, and poultry,” because the “increase in total industry costs triggered by the GIPSA rules is very small in relation to overall industry costs.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Trump team appears to be moving on from Heitkamp and is now looking at Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, Politico reports. A “74-year-old cowboy hat-wearing Republican,” as Politico puts it, Otter is likely to be friendly to meat industry interests if he takes the USDA helm. Regarding the GIPSA rules, the National Meat Institute quotes Otter like this: “Why are we trying to fix something that isn’t broken? Anybody ought to be free to sell at any price that they want to whomever they want.”

And back in 2014, Otter signed into law one of those infamous “ag gag” bills, championed by Big Ag, that make it a crime to secretly document conditions inside livestock farms. The Idaho law was so overreaching that a federal judge struck it down in 2015, declaring that its only purpose was to “limit and punish those who speak out on topics relating to the agricultural industry, striking at the heart of important First Amendment values.” While serving in the US House from 2002 to 2006, Otter was a magnet for agribusiness cash. And he’s a former executive at Simplot, the enormous potato-processing company founded by Otter’s ex-wife.

Otter sounds like a man after Trump’s heart—and that of his ag advisers.

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Obama’s USDA Just Played Chicken With the Trump Transition Team

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Pig Farms Can Control When You Get the Flu

by BrigitteHarmon Posted on December 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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For a fascinating new study, Duke researchers looked at flu patterns over four years across North Carolina, a state with high concentrations of intensive hog farming in some regions, and very little on others. The idea was to determine whether living near large-scale hog farms affects the way communities experience flu—a key question, because many flu strains mutate quickly and jump easily between people and hogs. The answer, in short, is yes.

To understand the findings, it’s important to note that each flu season brings different dominant strains that infect people. Some years, pig-adapted strains proliferate among people; other years, strains that aren’t adapted to those farm beasts do. Pig-adapted flu strains became more common after 2009, when H1N1 emerged and caused a global pandemic. It has been circulating ever since, and in some flu seasons (like 2015-’16) it is the predominant strain affecting people.

Over the study period, two of the flu seasons were dominated by pig strains—and in both, the flu season peaked earlier in hog-intensive counties, measured by the number of reported cases among people. In the other two non-pig flu years, flu seasons across North Carolina’s counties showed no such pattern.

Infectious-diseases writer Maryn McKenna has an excellent explainer on FERN’s Ag Insider:

What likely happened, they the authors say, is that the virus circulating in those flu seasons was carried onto farms by workers and spread to the pigs — and as it passed from pig to pig, the virus had a chance to reproduce in a manner that would not have happened in the absence of CAFOs. That much larger amount of virus spread back out into surrounding community, spiking the number of flu cases earlier in the flu season.

The upshot, the researchers say, is that vaccine strategies should expand. Currently, public health authorities target kids, elderly people, and people with compromised immune systems for flu-shot campaigns. People who work on and live near hog farms should also be encouraged to achieve “universal influenza vaccination,” they say.

Fair enough. But it also seems worth asking whether it’s a smart idea to concentrate hog farming so tightly. Every year, North Carolina’s confinement facilities churning out 10 million pigs—14.5 percent of total US production—the vast majority of which is crammed into a few eastern counties. These hyper-concentration of hogs creates what the authors call a “crucible for human influenza epidemics.”

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Pig Farms Can Control When You Get the Flu

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Review: "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" Isn’t Even About Two Stars That Go to War

by BenjamingBolton Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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About a year ago Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out and Mother Jones’ Edwin Rios and Ben Dreyfuss had a chat certifying that it was, in fact, wonderful. Today, we are back again to discuss the latest entry in the universe, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There are a lot of spoilers in this.

Ben Dreyfuss: Eddie! We’re doing this again. It’s becoming a tradition. We talk about the Star Wars films Friday after having seen late Thursday night showings. Maybe next year we’ll have the foresight to see an advance press screening.

Edwin Rios: Alright, let’s jump right in, because this new Star Wars flick was…something. Where do we begin?

BD: OK, Rogue One! So it’s set like right before A New Hope and some people are going to steal the plans for the Death Star so that Luke and friends can destroy it. And we start on some planet where Hannibal Lecter from the NBC show Hannibal is farming with his wife and daughter and an evil general comes to fetch him because Hannibal is the only person smart enough to build the evil general’s evil Death Star but Hannibal really doesn’t want to because Hannibal has a soul so to convince him to come they kill Hannibal’s wife, like you do, and his daughter runs away and then Hannibal goes “OK, OK, I’ll build the Death Star” and some many years later the daughter is in prison and the rebels, they need her, because of reasons, and…and…I am so bored even describing this movie.

ER: It doesn’t make sense why the rebels would capture the daughter of the guy who knows how to build the Death Star. To lure him out?

BD: Also, like why was she even in jail? Why didn’t Hannibal rescue her? Did they bother to explain any of that?

ER: No. I mean, it’s implied that he’s been holed up with a group of researchers on that one planet finalizing the plans for the Death Star. But that comes later. My question: Why didn’t Forest Whitaker just stick around and help Jyn.

BD: Oh shit that was Forest Whitaker? I thought it might have been but he had a bunch of space makeup on. (I also have clearly not done any research for this chat).

ER: Yeah, man. I thought he was pretty good, given how poor the writing was.

BD: Yeah, he was good. I think all the actors were actually pretty good. The girl, who’s the star, and also Diego Luna who is a Rebel fighter and also her bae.

ER: Ha, right. One of the movie’s issues: I didn’t feel emotionally invested in the characters. At all. The actors were stuck with a script that A.O. Scott called “surprisingly hackish.” They didn’t get the chance to connect with the audience. Like, Riz Ahmed (The Night Of) barely said anything of substance. He handed the message to Whitaker and was like, “Believe me!” Also, I guess he came up with the movie’s title…

BD: That moment was weird, but I actually didn’t mind it. But yeah him the guy from Nightcrawler. He was fine, too. But he had nothing to do but fly the plane and come up with the title of the film and die.

ER: And for most of the film, the droid and Captain Cassian (Diego Luna) flew the ship from planet to planet. So many planets. So Riz’s moment of greatness arose at the end of the film, like everyone else.

BD: So anyway, Diego Luna and Hannibal’s daughter and the guy from Nightcrawler and a blind man all team up to steal the plans to the Death Star and they spend a very long time sort of like not finding those plans and then in the last hour of the film do in fact find them in a big climactic battle scene.

ER: As far as Star Wars battle scenes go, that was pretty epic.

BD: Totally agree. There was this minor Twitter outrage about a Vox headline that said like “Rogue One is the first Star Wars movie to acknowledge that the whole franchise is about war.” And people were like, “ha ha WAR is in the title, Vox!” But I sort of get the writer’s point. Rogue One is a war film, and not a space opera.

ER: It’s no Saving Private Ryan. But at the heart of Rogue One is the side story we tend to forget about in the rest of the Star Wars series. A ragtag group of rebels have to find a way to upend the Empire. It was refreshing to see that, but the execution overall wasn’t great.

BD: I cannot stress how much I disliked the first half of this movie. It was so boring. I didn’t give a shit at all and on a scene level it wasn’t engaging.

ER: There were moments when I would get drawn to the characters, like when Felicity Jones has to watch the message from her father. But then she gave that cliché speech in front of the rest of the rebels, and I was like, shaking my head.

BD: OK, but all of that said: I did really enjoy the second half of the film. It was a very well done war movie, when they stopped talking about dumb bullshit and just got on with it.

ER: Definitely. Really, when Darth Vader showed up, I was thinking, “I can get back into this.” But the CGI recreations of that important imperial general guy and the very last one (I won’t spoil it) threw me off.

BD: Right, but also, what was with Darth Vader’s voice? I know they can’t have James Earl Jones do the same one again but this one felt like a weird slightly off imitation.

ER: I thought it was still James?

BD: Oh maybe it was but it still sounded different to me? But maybe I just am remembering his voice differently. Let’s talk about the droid.

ER: He was the only likeable character in that movie.

BD: I hated that droid in the beginning. He was making all those dumb remarks and I was like “why don’t they just shoot the droid?” Also because in The Force Awakens the ball robot is the best part. That ball stole the show. But then in the end of this one the droid had grown on me.

ER: His final scene was the moment I knew we’d be in for something surprising. What did you think about the fact that SPOILER everyone died?

BD: So I was trying to remember the line in A New Hope that sets this story up where someone is like “a band of brave people stole the Death Star plans” and I kept wondering if the line actually was “a band of brave people gave their lives stealing the Death Star plans” so the whole time I was like they are probably going to die.

ER: See, I couldn’t remember either if there was a reference in A New Hope. But it was a fitting end to a cast of lousy characters that died valiantly to protect the rest of the Rebel Alliance. Like, once K-2SO fell, I was thinking, “It’s time for everyone else to die.” But if you took the execution from the last battle scene and spread it throughout the movie, you’d have a pretty epic part of the Star Wars universe.

BD: So you’re a Star Wars fan. I’m not a huge fan. I really loved The Force Awakens but the others I thought were dumb. But did this movie not being great put you off future one-off Star Wars Universe side stories?

ER: That’s a good question, and I had been thinking about that last night. It made me question how good the Han Solo story is going to be. Say what you want about The Force Awakens, it set the standard for what a modern-day Star Wars film should be—packed with action, filled with emotion, and fueled by nostalgia. Rogue One felt like it was trying really hard to be part of that universe, but fell flat. It’s a story that needed to be told, but it wasn’t told well.

BD: Right, except for the second half battle. The second half was so much better than the first half that it made me believe that they can get these stories right. They just didn’t this time.

ER: No offense to the director and writers, but please change the director and writers next time.

BD: Hahaha. The director, whatever his name is, made that movie about the monster, whatever it was called. The monster who lives in the ocean. From Japan. And it like is made by nuclear bombs? And then attacks Hawaii?

ER: Godzilla.

BD: Godzilla! Yeah! Godzilla!

ER: We can’t not talk about some of the choice lines in this movie. Like, when Darth Vader made a pun about choking when choking that imperial dude. I seriously wish I could remember it.

BD: “I hope you don’t choke on your aspirations.”

ER: OMFG. I threw my head in my hands, shook my head, and whispered, “Nooooo.” I felt like I was watching an episode of Bob’s Burgers. (which I love.)

BD: Haha. I mean I think that the original movies had a lot of terrible lines as well. But I totally agree that that was terrible. Also the prequels! Remember when Anakin and Natalie Portman were like “we will make love in the field for freedom!” or something.

ER: Absolutely. No question. But, Ben, “Rebellions are built on hope.”

BD: Haha. I think that that clunker of a line is something that we can apply to this film universe. A lot of hope! This one didn’t make good on that hope though.

ER: I honestly thought K-2SO summed it up best with his quip: “I find that answer vague and unconvincing.” I found this movie, for the most part, vague and unconvincing. Like, would I watch again? Maybe once it comes up on the Apple TV queue.

BD: I’ll watch the last half again, but not the first half. But vague and unconvincing it definitely was.

ER: One more thing: How the heck did that hammer-headed ship destroy TWO imperial ships??

BD: Yeah I mean that whole thing was so hilariously stupid lol. But in conclusion we agree: not a great movie, but we’ll be back next year to watch the next Star Wars film.

ER: Shout-out to our colleague and fellow Star Wars fan, Pat Caldwell, who couldn’t make it to this chat. We asked him what he thought. What did he say?

BD: “Just know that it is the best movie ever and you are both WRONG…(actually, it is not that great, but solid popcorn viewing).” So, dear reader, we were going to have a fan who liked the movie in here for balance but even he admitted it was not very good and backed out at the last second.

ER: See you next year.

Link – 

Review: "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" Isn’t Even About Two Stars That Go to War

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