Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 66

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Is All Spectacle and No Heart

Not long after the novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was published in 2011, it started drawing comparisons to Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. On the one hand, many popular young-adult books get compared to one of those series at some point. But on the other, it made a lot of sense: Miss Peregrine is at its heart a dark, Gothic-tinged story about an ordinary boy discovering an extraordinary dimension to his life, one that whisks him away to a marvelous new world populated with marvelous inhabitants.

Given all the eerie fantasy elements at work, it’s little surprise then that Tim Burton was tasked with directing the film adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s first Miss Peregrine book. The director seems completely at home telling a story about a an enchanted wartime children’s orphanage, terrifying invisible monsters, and waif-like youths with giant eyes. The result is 124 minutes worth of CGI-embellished, time-traveling adventure that’s ambitious in scope and exasperating in execution. Part of that is because of the sheer amount of magical logic and backstory there is to explain, and the film’s wildly veering tone and pace. But perhaps most lacking in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is something the best children’s movies always have—a genuine emotional center. Or, put more simply, heart.

The film follows Jake Portman (played by an uninspired Asa Butterfield), a regular Joe Teenager living in suburban Florida with his awful parents and working a glum supermarket job. His banal existence lies in direct contrast to the exciting stories he heard growing up from his grandfather, Abe (Terence Stamp), who as a child was sent from his home in Poland to live on a Welsh island during World War Two. Jake eventually dismissed them as fantastic tall tales (despite the intriguing photographic evidence his grandpa offered). But these stories about monsters and special children suddenly seem like they might hold some dark truth to them after a strange tragedy befalls his family.

All this set-up early on in Miss Peregrine feels rushed and too exposition-heavy to make viewers care. After a few false starts, Jake ends up in Wales hunting down the mysterious children’s home, and in a creepy turn of events, finds it. Running the facility is Miss Peregrine herself, played by Eva Green, who adopts bird-like tics and speaks in a clipped but kind sort of way. Then there are her young charges known as “peculiars,” who have a wide variety of intriguing (but not always useful) powers: superhuman strength, invisibility, the ability to control air, the ability to project dreams through one’s eyes, the ability to host living bees inside one’s body. Their oddities are indeed remarkable, but as Jake, Butterfield beholds his new companions with all the awe of someone feigning polite interest in dinner-party small talk.

At its best, Miss Peregrine is a flawed but acceptable thrill ride.

Now for some of the good: Miss Peregrine has some truly frightening imagery, the kind likely to brand nightmares into the minds of younger viewers. There’s a giant Cthulhu-Slenderman hybrid monster with tentacle-tongues and scythe-like hands. Mute twins wearing identical clown-like costumes. Eyeless corpses, and shelves filled with jarred organs, and a dead boy who, unfortunately, can come to life under certain circumstances. As the good-versus-evil stakes of the film become clearer in the second half, there are more action sequences to inject some much-needed suspense. A climactic battle—set in a crowded, snow-blanketed theme park, scored to electronic dance music—is a particularly cathartic highlight (one that almost feels pulled from the Swedish black comedy Force Majeure).

Rounding out the cast are a few surprising faces. Allison Janney has a cameo as Jake’s therapist Dr. Golan (who’s a man in the novel), and Judi Dench makes a brief appearance as a long-lost ally of Miss Peregrine. Samuel L. Jackson plays the film’s antagonist, a power-hungry, time-hopping Big Bad whose appeal will depend heavily on the audience’s appetite for exaggerated villainy mixed with juvenile comedy. The campy, sentimental turn the film eventually takes may feel odd for a movie that began with a fairly serious discussion about real-life monsters—and how horrifying creatures can function as metaphors for evil for traumatized children and adults alike. (Especially meaningful in the context of Grandpa Portman’s lucky escape from the Nazis.)

At its best, Miss Peregrine is a flawed but acceptable thrill ride, ideal for those content to be led through a spooky, beautiful labyrinth that more often than not makes little sense. Story mechanics aside, Miss Peregrine does have undeniable visual appeal: Burton takes care to shoot the dreary but lovely Welsh countryside, the vintage charm of the orphanage, even the samey Florida suburbs. But this beauty is all superficial, as is the love the film has for its most important characters. The young peculiars have names—Bronwyn, Victor, Emma, Millard, Enoch—but they don’t get much by way of backstory or personality. Despite the movie’s insistence that they are special, Miss Peregrine ultimately reduces them to the very thing the world rejected them for: their peculiarities. It’s a sad, quiet failure, and one the film can’t make up for with pretty seascapes and cool monsters.

Why One NBA Star Skipped a Dinner With Army Cadets

NEWS BRIEF One of the stars of the New York Knicks skipped an annual team dinner with Army cadets at the West Point Military Academy this week because of his pacifist views.

Joakim Noah, who was recently joined the team from the Chicago Bulls, opposes war and says he felt uncomfortable with the setting. He also did not attend a speech given by a retired colonel.

This is the third year the Knicks held their training camp at the academy.

Noah explained to ESPN:

It’s hard for me a little bit. I have a lot of respect for the kids who are out here fighting. But it’s hard for me to understand why we have to go to war, why kids have to kill kids around the world. So I have mixed feelings about being here. I’m very proud of this country. I love America but I just don’t understand kids killing kids around the world.

He did speak with some of the cadets this week, but he says the conversation was “very sad.”

Conversation pic.twitter.com/dhc61pDaIE

— NY_KnicksPR (@NY_KnicksPR) October 1, 2016

Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said he supported Noah’s right to miss the dinner.

While his absence from the dinner was not an attempt to make a political statement, he says, Noah has not shied away from getting involved in advocacy in the past. His foundation, Noah’s Arc, was active in Chicago and other cities to reduce gun violence.

What a Video of the El Cajon Police Shooting Shows

NEWS BRIEF Police in a San Diego suburb released video Friday of the officer-involved fatal shooting of an unarmed black man that happened earlier this week.

Alfred Olango was killed Tuesday afternoon after El Cajon police responded to calls of a man who was acting “erratically.” There has since been speculation and different accounts of how the shooting unfolded.

The video was recorded by someone in a fast-food restaurant looking out the drive-through window. According to CNN, it shows:

Officer Richard Gonsalves firing four shots at Alfred Olango, an unarmed man, who was pointing a vaping device at officers earlier this week. A woman can be heard screaming as the shots are fired.

The video is not available online yet.

Police say there has not been a decision on filing criminal charges against the officer involved in the shooting. Officials also said Friday that a psychiatric emergency response team was en route to the scene, but arrived after Olango had already been shot.

Demonstrators took to the El Cajon streets to protest several times this week, reports The San Diego Union-Tribune. Five people were arrested during protests Thursday night, while police used tear gas to disperse crowds.

A Chess Championship Boycott Over the Hijab

NEWS BRIEF Some of the best female chess players in the world are calling for a boycott of next year’s world championship being held in Iran, protesting the mandatory use of the hijab. But one Iranian grandmaster is pleading for those chess players to reconsider.

Mitra Hejazipour, the winner of the 2015 Asian continental women’s championship, said a boycott could set back efforts to promote female participation in sports in Iran. She told The Guardian on Friday:

This is going to be the biggest sporting event women in Iran have ever seen; we haven’t been able to host any world championship in other sporting fields for women in the past. It’s not right to call for a boycott. These games are important for women in Iran; it’s an opportunity for us to show our strength.

The move, she says, would isolate Iran and ignore progress that Iranian women have made in the country.

Other top chess players are remaining firm on their boycott threat, saying the headscarf is a symbol of oppression for women. Nazi Paikidze-Barnes, the American champion, told CNN:

If the venue of the championship is not changed, I will not be participating. I am deeply upset by this. I feel privileged to have qualified to represent the US at the Women's World Chess Championship and to not be able to due to religious, sexist, and political issues is very disappointing.

The hijab has been an Iranian policy since the 1979 revolution, which brought strict religious laws to public life.

Amanda Knox and the 21st-Century Witch Hunt

Late in Amanda Knox, a new documentary by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn that premieres this week on Netflix, the woman who’s at the center of the film asks a question. “What’s more likely,” she says, “that I get together this boyfriend who I’ve had for five days, and this guy [who] I don’t even know his name, tell them to rape my roommate and then I stab her to death? Or that a guy who regularly committed burglaries broke into my home, found Meredith, took advantage of her, killed her, and ran off?”

It’s a straightforward enough inquiry, but it’s one that somehow escaped the prosecutors, the tabloids, and the general public in 2007, when Knox was arrested for the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher in the small Italian town of Perugia. Over the next four years, while Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were convicted twice and then acquitted twice, the dominant media narrative was that Knox was a sex-crazed freak who used her wiles to persuade two men to kill her innocent English roommate in a deviant orgy gone wrong. Few thought to ask what her motive might have been, or how probable it was that a goofy college student might also be a psychopathic murderer.

Amanda Knox joins a number of recent true-crime documentaries and fictionalized retellings that have revisited splashy crimes from the past 25 years, but its focus isn’t on who killed Kercher. Rather, the movie considers how a 20-year-old linguistics major could have become the focus of such a frenzied and hysterical witch hunt, not to mention one of the most notorious murder suspects of the 21st century. If this particular focus has a flaw, it’s that it sidelines Kercher, who’s little more than a image throughout the movie. But as an indictment of a number of institutions than failed dismally in their mission to uncover the truth about who killed her, Amanda Knox is sharp, and frequently enraging.

In its opening scenes, the movie revisits the salient details of the crime, splicing crime-scene footage of Kercher’s body left in her bedroom with old home videos of Amanda newly arrived in Italy. But the most notable feature is Knox herself, with short hair and a simple boatnecked shirt in the present day, talking directly to the camera about the events leading up to the murder. At the time, she explains, “I was quirky, and I was okay with that, and I was ridiculous, and I was okay with that.” Arriving in Perugia, and finding her school schedule to be much lighter than she’d expected, she got a job in a bar, and soon met Sollecito at a concert, after which they fell in love and spent five nights together at his house, including the night Kercher was murdered.

So much of the suspicion around Knox at the time seemed to stem from the fact that she didn’t respond to the death of her roommate the way people thought she should have—that she kissed Sollecito outside the house while investigators were casing the scene, and did cartwheels in the police station while the pair were being interviewed. Later, after being interviewed into the middle of the night, told that Sollecito had turned on her, and slapped by the officers interrogating her, Knox falsely told them that she had been at the house, and had seen her boss, the bar owner Patrick Lumumba there. It was at this point that both prosecutors and the media seemed to decide she was guilty, despite the fact that false confessions are remarkably common under duress. “Of course she did it, she’s mad, a complete and utter loon,” is how the journalist Nick Pisa sums up reactions to Knox’s strange behavior to the camera. “Who behaves like that?”

The brilliance of Amanda Knox is how much leeway Blackhurst and McGinn give Pisa, a journalist for The Daily Mail at the time, and Giuliano Mignini, a public prosecutor, to indict themselves. Both, in interviews, express how proud they were to be able to advance their careers so publicly by working on such a high-profile case. In Britain, Kercher’s home country, readers ate up the most salacious details about a case Pisa describes as a dream story, filled with murder, intrigue, and mystery. In Perugia, the public wanted an arrest as soon as possible, and the fact that Kercher’s body had been covered with a blanket by her killer, coupled with Knox’s strange behavior, led Mignini to deduce that Knox had killed her roommate in a “sex game gone wrong.” His team leaked the information to the tabloids. “We managed to get it out to the British press before anyone else,” Pisa describes, gleefully.

“I am convinced that Rudy and Sollecito were trying to indulge Amanda that night,” Mignini tells the camera. “Pleasure at all cost.”

Some of the details the film reveals are mind-boggling: In prison, Knox had a blood test, after which doctors told her she was HIV-positive. The diagnosis was false, and was essentially a mind game devised by the police and the prosecution, but before it was corrected Knox wrote a diary detailing all seven of the lovers she’d had, wondering which one could have given her the disease. The diary was naturally given to the press. Even after DNA evidence pointed to the murderer being neither Knox nor Sollecito but a convicted criminal named Rudy Guede who’d recently fled Perugia, Mignini and the press remained convinced that Knox had somehow been involved. Knox was thus reinvented in the public sphere as “Foxy Knoxy” (her MySpace name at the time), a sexually rapacious and perverted killer who’d persuded both Guede and Sollecito to kill Kercher. “I am convinced that Rudy and Sollecito were trying to indulge Amanda that night,” Mignini tells the camera. “Pleasure at all cost.”

The media maelstrom wasn’t limited to the U.K., although in the U.S. there was more of a hope that Knox might be innocent. Archive footage features a male newscaster lamenting that Knox looks pale and unglamorous in court, saying, “She probably could use hair and makeup, but I guess you don’t get that in jail.” Donald Trump even has a cameo, wherein he calls for the president to get involved, and for Americans to boycott Italy. After Amanda is finally released, a TV journalist tells her father that the longer she waits to sell her story, the lower the price will be. “I’m not really looking at her as a hot property,” the shell-shocked Mr. Knox responds.

Although there’s a happy ending of sorts, the impact the case has had on both Knox and Sollecito is starkly visible. The filmmakers also point fleetingly to the ways in which the botched investigation has affected Kercher’s family, most of whom seem convinced of Knox’s guilt, and thus have to live with knowing that the person most famously accused of killing their daughter walks free. While Amanda Knox is clear on who’s to blame, it doesn’t offer neat conclusions, or any insight into how another 21st-century witch hunt like this one can be avoided. “I think people love monsters, and when they get the chance, they want to see them,” Knox tells the camera, mulling what happened to her. “We’re all afraid, and fear makes people crazy.”

The Category 5 Hurricane Hitting the Caribbean

Updated at 11:05 p.m.

NEWS BRIEF Hurricane Matthew strengthened to a Category 5 on Friday, as the storm with maximum winds of 160 miles per hour intensifies in the central Caribbean Sea.

The storm is projected to hit Jamaica on Monday as a Category 3 hurricane, and will continue on to Hispaniola, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Matthew may also hit the U.S. later in the week.

#Matthew is now a category 5 #hurricane, the first in the Atlantic basin since Felix of 2007. More info: https://t.co/T8bABTTyjI pic.twitter.com/vAJCRIyLPn

— NHC Atlantic Ops (@NHC_Atlantic) October 1, 2016

The Weather Channel reports:

Strengthening is forecast into Saturday, but when this current rapid intensification phase will end is unclear.

First up, given the southern track, outer bands of rain and winds to tropical storm force are likely in portions of coastal Colombia to the Venezuela border through early Saturday.

The path of the hurricane is still unclear. This is the fifth hurricane of the 2016 season.

The Category 4 Hurricane Hitting the Caribbean

NEWS BRIEF Hurricane Matthew strengthened to a Category 4 on Friday, as the storm with maximum winds of 140 miles per hour intensifies in the central Caribbean Sea.

The storm is projected to hit Jamaica on Monday as a Category 3 hurricane, and will continue on to Hispaniola, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Matthew may also hit the U.S. later in the week.

NEW: Hurricane #Matthew now a category 4 storm with 140 mph winds. #wcvb pic.twitter.com/cQ04c5mxVE

— Harvey Leonard (@HarveyWCVB) September 30, 2016

The Weather Channel reports:

Strengthening is forecast into Saturday, but when this current rapid intensification phase will end is unclear.

First up, given the southern track, outer bands of rain and winds to tropical storm force are likely in portions of coastal Colombia to the Venezuela border through early Saturday.

The path of the hurricane is still unclear. This is the fifth hurricane of the 2016 season.

Could Deutsche Bank Collapse?

European stocks—battered this week amid concerns over the health of Deutsche Bank—closed up Friday after its CEO said Germany’s largest bank had strong financial fundamentals, and news reports suggested it was close to a deal with the U.S. Justice Department over its $14 billion fine.  

In a memo to Deutsche Bank employees, John Cryan, the CEO, acknowledged the “bank has become subject to speculation. Ongoing rumors are causing significant swings in our stock price.” Indeed, the bank’s stock price slumped this week over concerns about its health. Still, Cryan pointed to “strong fundamentals” at the bank, adding: “We are and remain a strong Deutsche Bank.” Deutsche Bank shares rose sharply Friday. That rise was also helped by news reports that the bank was close to a deal with the U.S. Justice Department on its $14 billion fine over mortgage-backed securities during the 2008 financial crisis. Agence France-Presse reported Friday that Deutsche Bank would pay $5.4 billion instead. Neither the bank nor the Justice Department commented on the report, which buoyed investors who had been wary after the German government and European banking regulators declined to bail out the bank amid reports it was having a liquidity crisis.

The bank’s failure would be significant and have broader implications for Europe and global markets, which have only just recovered from the banking collapse of 2008. The International Monetary Fund said in June: “Deutsche Bank appears to be the most important net contributor to systemic risks” in the global market.

Deutsche Bank has lost ground for years. It once earned much of its money from investment banking, but now deals in derivatives, which are seen as more risky. The Justice Department’s $14 billion to settle an investigation into the bank’s role in the U.S. housing collapse added to worries about its future. A price tag that high would likely ruin the bank. It’s a scenario that has drawn apocalyptic comparisons to the “drawn-out death spiral” of U.S. banking giant Lehman Brothers, which collapsed and filed bankruptcy in 2008.

Lehman became the largest victim of the U.S. financial crisis—induced by the same shaky subprime mortgages Deutsche Bank is being investigated for. Lehman had $639 billion in assets when it collapsed, and it’s failure is attributed as the dirge that announced the global financial crisis. It was this lesson that led Deutsche Bank investors to believe that if the worst should happen, Germany would bail the Deutsche Bank out. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly said there would be no bailout, no matter what. With Merkel’s latest reaffirmation this Thursday that there’d be no financial lifeboat, Deutsche Bank’s stock plummeted, slumping below 10 euro for the first time in history.

Would Merkel really let that happen?

It’s hard to say. Market Watch wrote that if Merkel kept her word, it meant she “has no idea how the financial markets work, and no appreciation of how much damage the unfolding Deutsche crisis is already doing to the markets and the eurozone economy.” On the other hand, a bailout has been called political suicide for Merkel and would likely ruin her party’s chance in next year’s election. It would probably swing votes to the right-wing populist party, which increasingly views European adhesion as a risk to Germany.

An alternative to failure would be a bail-in. After the 2008 crisis, the European Central Bank instituted rules that greatly reduce a bank from becoming “too big to fail,” and set up bail-in process that forces banks to sell off assets before the government steps in. That, however, would still land Deutsche Bank in trouble. Beyond capital, it would lose trust—and trust from investors is what a bank relies on.

Those who do not believe the sky is falling have said a more likely scenario is that Berlin will pressure the U.S. to lower the $14 billion settlement request. Even without political intervention, that seemed already to be the outcome.

Trump Was Apparently Right About the Debate Microphone

After critics savaged his performance at Monday’s first presidential debate, Republican nominee Donald Trump alighted on several culprits: Hillary Clinton, the moderator, and especially his microphone.

The claim was met with some skepticism, but on Friday afternoon, the Commission on Presidential Debates seemed to confirm his claim, at least in part. The commission, which controls the debates, released a cryptic statement that reads in full:

Statement about first debate

Sep 30, 2016

Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall.

We’ve called the commission to ask what that means, but have not heard back yet. Presumably, they are receiving dozens of such queries.

After the debate, Trump told reporters, “They gave me a defective mic. Did you notice that? My mic was defective within the room. I wonder, was that on purpose? Was that on purpose? But I had a mic that didn't work properly.”

The next day he repeated the complaint. “I had a problem with a microphone that didn't work. I don't know if you saw that in the room. My microphone was terrible. I wonder was it set up that way on purpose. My microphone in the room, they couldn't hear me, you know, it was going on and off. Which isn't exactly great. I wonder if it was set up that way, but it was terrible. When I tested, it was beautiful, like an hour before, I said what a great mic.”

Trump’s comments were viewed with skepticism. He’s blamed bad equipment for gaffes in the past; the feed on national television (and in the filing center where journalists attending the debate watched) had Trump loud and clear; and besides, the critique of Trump’s performance was largely about the content of what he said, not the audibility of it.

But a keystone of Trump’s approach, both in business and politics, is feeding off an audience. As my colleague James Fallows wrote in the essential debate-preview piece, Trump observers note “his ability to read a room, to sense when he is losing an audience, and to try the tone or theme that will win them back.” That could throw the candidate off, even with an audience that has been told strictly not to clap, like the crowd at Hofstra University.

With luck, the CPD will offer some clarification about what the audio problems were and why they occurred. For now, we’re left in the dark about whether Trump was left silent.

Roy Moore's 'Suspension From Office'

NEWS BRIEF An Alabama court indefinitely suspended Roy Moore, the state’s controversial chief justice, from office Friday for ordering probate judges to defy federal court rulings on same-sex marriage bans.

The Alabama Court of the Judiciary found Moore guilty on all six counts filed against him, including failure to “uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary.”

In its ruling, the court said a majority of its judges wanted to remove Moore from office, but that removal requires unanimity among them. His suspension without pay will last for the remainder of his six-year term in office, which ends in 2019.

The legal saga began in January when Moore, an outspoken social conservative, issued an order to Alabama’s probate judges instructing them to not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Moore framed his order as an attempt to end “confusion and uncertainty” over the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges seven months earlier, which had struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide.

But a federal district court had already issued its own order to the state’s probate judges, instructing them to not deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By contradicting the district court, Moore had effectively ordered the probate judges to defy the federal judiciary.

In May, the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission filed six charges against Moore for violating judicial ethics, saying the chief justice had “flagrantly disregarded and abused his authority.”

This isn’t the first time Moore’s defiance has resulted in sanctions. In 2003, a federal judge ordered Moore to remove a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state supreme-court building. Moore refused, and the Court of the Judiciary removed him from office. Alabamans voted to return him to the chief justiceship in 2012.