Patent Zero: Why readily available health care for every person in America, via a nationalized single-payer system, is a national security issue.

I'm certainly glad that the Supreme Court upheld the vast majority of the Affordable Care Act, although once again it is disconcerting to have an incredible amount of power in the hands of one person.  Usually that person is Justice Anthony Kennedy, but this time it was Chief Justice John Roberts who differed with the four 'liberal' Justices by upholding the Individual Mandate not via the Commerce Clause but by its theoretical virtue as a tax, which Congress of course has the power to levy.  I'm glad that the many good things in the law will remain on the books and it is unlikely that these changes are going anywhere anytime soon.  Say what you will about the overall popularity of 'Obamacare', the vast majority of citizens of all political stripes approve of most of the specific portions of the law (no more lifetime caps for benefits, no more denying children coverage for pre-existing conditions, no rescinding of coverage upon serious illness, the ability for young adults to stay on their parents' plans until 26, etc.).  So now that the Affordable Care Act is set in stone, the next step is the provision contained which allows individual states to choose how best to implement the law.  Vermont has already chosen to take the initiative of crafting what amounts to a Single-Payer healthcare system, and hopefully California may do so as well.  And that's precisely the road that each and every state should take as soon as possible.  I say this not for humanitarian reasons, not for economic reasons, but for national security reasons.

Review: Contagion (2011) stumbles by giving us Cliff Notes to much grander story.

Contagion
2011
105 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

The 106-minute cut of Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a generally engaging and always intelligent film.  It is clearly Soderbergh's attempt to play around in the Irwin Allen disaster genre in a style that befits the director's more buttoned-down and vérité style.  But like Traffic before it, this would-be epic feels like the abridged version of a much longer film.  Traffic was supposed to be an all-encompassing look at the futility of America's Drug War and the damage that it causes at home and abroad, but it played out like as a choppy, unfocused, 'highlights-only' variation of the British mini-series from which it was based.  Contagion, which is not based on any prior source but rather an original Scott Z. Burns screenplay, has the same problem, even more so because it is nearly an hour shorter than Traffic.  Contagion is more successful in imposing its viewpoint on the audience, and it's arguably a better film, but I still can't help but wonder how much more effective the 150-minute version of Contagion would have been.

Weekend Box Office (09/11/11): Contagion easily tops, Warrior tragically fumbles, Creature hilariously tanks.

It was good news/bad news at the box office this weekend.  Two critically-acclaimed adult entries squared off and only only came out shining.  The winner for the weekend was Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (review), grossing $22.4 million from 3,222 screens.  The all-star pandemic thriller fits squarely into the realm of Soderbergh's 'commercial ventures'.  With the exception of Erin Brockovich (which was a Julia Roberts vehicle), Soderbergh alternates between artier and sometimes experimental fare of varying quality (Bubble, The Limey, King of the Hill - good!  The Girlfriend Experience, The Good German, Full Frontal - bad!) and all-star genre entries that are inherently populist and commercial even with their occasional artier sensibilities (Ocean's 11, Traffic, Out of Sight, etc).  But even his commercial ventures are generally aimed at adults with adult sensibilities, so the solid opening weekend is to be celebrated.  The well-reviewed film played mostly to the over-25 set, which means it has a chance at solid legs as the younger kids check it out over the next month. It earned a B- from Cinemascore, which is probably owed to the fact that it's genuinely unnerving in its plausibility (audiences claim to love horror but don't like to be actually disturbed or frightened) and artier than its trailer lets on. I haven't seen it yet as my son had a contagious infection over the weekend.  We considered taking him on Friday afternoon and hoping he would cough in all the right places for maximum comedy, but we thought better of it (we saw it Sunday evening instead).

Weekend Box Office (09/04/11): Adult films trash the cheap exploitation fare and dominate Labor Day weekend, as The Help and The Debt defeat Shark Night and Apollo 18.

Summer must be over, as grownups as seemingly returning to the marketplace.  In what was always going to be a light moviegoing holiday weekend, the low-key adult thriller (on 1,826 screens) defeated the more heavily advertised and wider-playing genre entries.  First of all, The Help once again topped the box office for the third weekend in a row ($19 million for its four-day holiday weekend, with a $14.6 million Fri-Sun total, actually rising 0.5% from last weekend).  I'm not sure what the record is for the most consecutive weekends at number one for a movie that did not debut in first place, but the crowd-pleasing period drama has to be high on the would-be list.  With $123 million in a month, the film now sits as the eighth-highest grossing drama of all-time released in the summer, a list that becomes even shorter when you discount war-themed action pictures (Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, Gladiator).  It is still outpacing Bridesmaids by a significant margin ($106 million after four weekends) and could very well flirt with $180 million if it can hold onto screens and fend off adult-skewing pictures (Warrior, Contagion, Moneyball) in the next month.