John Kerry Says: Elect a New People

Eminentoes

By Ken Blackwell on 11.1.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is frustrated. He recently spoke to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and complained that we are in "a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don't weigh in. It's all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics." He'd really like to elect a new people.

Now, that last bit -- cheap-seat politics -- is the kicker. How truly awful it must be for the Senate's richest man -- wealthier than the Senate's Rockefeller -- to have to put up with those of us in the cheap seats. Brahmins from Boston have been complaining about democracy since Thomas Jefferson was elected. And that Andrew Jackson fellow -- talk about the cheap seats running things! When he was elected, mobs of frontiersmen -- wild and woolly -- descended on Washington. They nearly crushed the Hero of New Orleans in the mob scene at the White House reception on Inauguration Day, 1829. Bostonian John Q. Adams had left the White House that morning, unwilling to witness the triumph of the cheap seats.

NEW YORK - OCTOBER 29: Senator John Kerry and actress Bette Midler attend the 15th annual Bette Midler's New York Restoration Project's Hulaween at The Waldorf Astoria on October 29, 2010 in New York City. (Getty Images)

Kerry was most gracious in addressing the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, speaking in person to an audience that was not sitting in the cheap seats. The frosty aristocrat spends a lot of his time on the deck of his yacht -- moored in Rhode Island to avoid the sky-high taxes that Kerry's liberal friends impose on the cheap seat folks in Massachusetts.

Kerry was particularly incensed that his yeoman work on the Cap and Trade legislation had collapsed in the Senate. The House passed this unwisest of bills earlier this year. Many members of the House were forced to walk that plank by their leadership. Many of those who voted for Cap and Trade may not be returned next Tuesday. They will be especially vulnerable if their constituents mine coal, drill for oil, or manufacture anything at all.

Cap and Trade has been called an invitation to massive corruption by Britain's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Lawson. Now, someone who sits in the House of Lords can hardly be accused of squatting down in one of those cheap seats Kerry despises. Lord Lawson says if you really want to deal with carbon emissions, tax carbon emissions. And give tax credits to the poor so they can cope. That's not my preferred option, but it's not Kerry's, either.

What Cap and Trade would do, of course, is nationalize all American enterprise. It would have the federal government control all decisions about what to produce, where to produce it, when to produce, where to market it, and how.

This is the reason why Europeans -- those smarter folks Kerry likes more than he likes our "know-nothing" voters -- teasingly call the Greens watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.

Are we against science and truth merely because we object to Kerry's Cap and Trade legislation? Bjorn Lomborg, the famed "Skeptical Environmentalist," has said Cap and Trade is the worst way to go about dealing with Global Warming.

Even if we imposed Cap and Trade, with all of its ability to straightjacket the already paralyzed economy, Lomborg says it would result in barely a 1-degree difference in Global Warming by the end of this century.

Now, Lomborg agrees with Kerry that Global Warming is occurring. He agrees that it is a problem. And he agrees that some of all of it is man-caused. But he has produced a new documentary called "Cool It," urging his fellow environmentalists to cool the rhetoric about Global Warming as an existential threat to the planet.

Lomborg's thesis is subject to a lot of reasoned debate. You can tell Lomborg is liberal. One, he's a Dane. Two, he calls the earth the planet. Only liberals call it the planet.

When John Kerry says we've abandoned science and truth, we can only ask: If the truth was so compelling, why did the environmentalists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit have to perform their usual "tricks" to "hide the decline"?

The funniest part of Kerry's anguished cry is his complaint that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are responsible for this rise in what he calls "know nothingism." If you add all of Rush's listeners -- and they are legion -- to all of Glenn Beck's viewers, you still don't come close to the tens of millions of voters who are expected tomorrow to render a verdict on Kerry liberalism.

So why doesn't Kerry start his own TV show or go on radio? Why do you think Al Franken escaped from his sinking Hot Air America gig and snuck into the Senate on a disputed vote? It's a lot easier to bloviate in the Senate than to attract and hold an audience. The only reason Kerry and Franken are sitting in the Senate is that its seats are not the cheaper seats.

Ken Blackwell is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.

Justification by Faith

By PETER KREEFT
http://www.catholiceducation.org/

Martin Luther monument, Worms, Germany

The Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic monk rediscovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book.

The Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic monk rediscovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book. The monk, of course, was Luther; the doctrine was justification by faith; and the book was the Bible. One of the tragic ironies of Christian history is that the deepest split in the history of the Church, and the one that has occasioned the most persecution, hatred, and bloody wars on both sides, from the Peasants’ War of Luther’s day through the Thirty Years’ War, which claimed a larger percentage of the population of many parts of central Europe than any other war in history, including the two world wars, to the present-day agony in Northern Ireland — this split between Protestant and Catholic originated in a misunderstanding. And to this day many Catholics and many Protestants still do not realize that fact.

Luther’s story is well known. Passionate, impetuous, demanding, sensitive, and pessimistic in temperament, Luther had never been able to find inner peace. He could not overcome his sense of guilt despite all his good works, prayers, penances, and alms. His confessor advised him to read Romans. No more historically momentous advice was ever given by a confessor. In Romans Luther discovered the simple bombshell truth that God had forgiven his sins freely, not because of Luther’s works in Germany but because of Christ’s work on Calvary. That discovery freed Luther’s spirit and ignited a fire that swept over Europe. The watchword of the Reformation became Saint Paul’s summary of the gospel: “The just (justified, saved) shall live [have eternal life] by faith [in Christ]” (Rom 1: 17)

Where then do good works come in? In Christian Liberty, Luther explains that after the great liberation about faith — that we are saved by faith in Christ’s work, not by our works — comes a great liberation about works: they need not be done slavishly, to buy our way into heaven, to pile up merits or Brownie points with God, but can be done freely and spontaneously and naturally, out of gratitude to God — not to get to heaven but because heaven has already gotten to us. Thus they can be done for the sake of our neighbor, not for our own sake, to purchase salvation. And this is winsome. No one wants to be loved as someone else’s good deed for the day.

The origin of the Reformation is often said to be Luther’s act of nailing ninety-five theses against the sale of indulgences to the door of the church in Wittenberg. This event is celebrated as Reformation Day (October 31, 1517). Luther’s decision to go public was occasioned by the scandal of Tetzel, a Dominican monk who shamelessly peddled forgiveness of sins for a fee. He even had a singing commercial: “Sobald das Geld im Kasten klingt,/Die Seele aus dem Fegfeuer springt!” (“As soon as the money clinks in the casket, the soul springs free from the fires of purgatory!”) The story was told of the thief who asked Tetzel whether he could buy forgiveness for all his future sins as well as his past sins. Tetzel said yes, but it would cost him a thousand gold pieces. The thief paid the money, took the indulgence, and then stole back the money from Tetzel!

But the scandal of selling indulgences was only the catalyst, not the cause, of the Reformation. The Church soon cleaned up its act and forbade the sale of indulgences at the Council of Trent, agreeing with Luther on this point. But one does not split the Church over a practice; one splits the Church over a doctrine, for the Church can change its practice but never its doctrine. To change a practice, one stays in the Church; to change a doctrine, one must start a new Church.

Luther eventually came to reject many Catholic doctrines that he thought he could not find in Scripture. But only one justified his bold words before the Diet of Worms, which condemned him: “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.” The doctrine was justification by faith. The justification of Luther’s faith, he thought, was the doctrine of justification by faith.

For everything is at stake here. The question is nothing less than how to get to heaven. Luther thought the Catholic Church was teaching not only heresy (heretics always call orthodoxy heresy, by the way) but another religion, another way of salvation, “another gospel” (Gal 1:6). That’s about as serious a charge as you can imagine. We need to examine this charge very carefully to justify the surprising claim that the fundamental dispute between Protestants and Catholics was due to a misunderstanding.

It certainly doesn’t look like a misunderstanding. It looks like a flat-out contradiction: the Catholic Church taught that we are saved by faith and good works, while Luther taught that we are saved by faith alone (sola fide). But appearances may be deceiving.

For one thing, even if the two sides did disagree about the relationship between faith and works, they both agreed (1) that faith is absolutely necessary for salvation and (2) that we are absolutely commanded by God to do good works. Both these two points are unmistakably clear in Scripture.

For another thing, the terms of the dispute are ambiguous or used in two different senses. When terms are ambiguous, the two sides may really disagree when they seem to agree because they agree only on the word, not the concept. Or the two sides may really agree when they seem to disagree because they agree on the concept but not the word. The latter holds true here.

When Luther taught that we are saved by faith alone, he meant by salvation only the initial step, justification, being put right with God. But when Trent said we are saved by good works as well as faith, they meant by salvation the whole process by which God brings us to our eternal destiny and that process includes repentance, faith, hope, and charity, the works of love.

The word faith was also used in two different senses. Luther used it in the broad sense of the person’s acceptance of God’s offer of salvation. It included repentance, faith, hope, and charity. This is the sense Saint Paul uses in Romans. But in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul uses it in a more specific sense, as just one of the three theological virtues, with hope and charity added to it. In this narrower sense faith alone is not sufficient for salvation, for hope and charity must be present also. That is the sense used by the old Baltimore Catechism too: faith is “an act of the intellect, prompted by the will, by which we believe what has been revealed on the grounds of the authority of God, who revealed it”.

This “faith”, though prompted by the will, is an act of the intellect. Though necessary for salvation, it is not sufficient. Even the devils have this faith, as Saint James writes: “Do you believe that there is only one God? Good! The demons also believe — and tremble with fear” (James 2: 19). That is why James says, “it is by his actions that a person is put right with God, and not by his faith alone” (James 2:24). Luther, however, called James’ epistle “an epistle of straw”. He did not understand James’ point (applied to Abraham’s faith): “Can’t you see? His faith and his action worked together; his faith was made perfect through his actions” (James 2:2 2).

Faith is the root, the necessary beginning. Hope is the stem, the energy that makes the plant grow. Love is the fruit, the flower, the visible product, the bottom line. The plant of our new life in Christ is one; the life of God comes into us by faith, through us by hope, and out of us by the works of love. That is clearly the biblical view, and when Protestants and Catholics who know and believe the Bible discuss the issue sincerely, it is amazing how quickly and easily they come to understand and agree with each other on this, the fundamental divisive issue. Try it some time with your Protestant friend.

But many Catholics to this day have not learned the Catholic and biblical doctrine. They think we are saved by good intentions or being nice or sincere or trying a little harder or doing a sufficient number of good deeds. Over the past twenty-five years I have asked hundreds of Catholic college students the question: If you should die tonight and God asks you why he should let you into heaven, what would you answer? The vast majority of them simply do not know the right answer to this, the most important of all questions, the very essence of Christianity. They usually do not even mention Jesus!

Until we Catholics know the foundation, Protestants are not going to listen to us when we try to teach them about the upper stories of the building. Perhaps God allows the Protestant/Catholic division to persist not only because Protestants have abandoned many precious truths taught by the Church but also because many Catholics have never been taught the most precious truth of all, that salvation is a free gift of grace, accepted by faith. I remember vividly the thrill of discovery when, as a young Protestant at Calvin College, I read Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent on justification. I did not find what I had been told I would find, “another gospel” of do-it-yourself salvation by works, but a clear and forceful statement that we can do nothing without God’s grace, and that this grace, accepted by faith, is what saves us.

The split of the Protestant Reformation began when a Catholic discovered a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book. It can end only when both Protestants and Catholics do the same thing today and understand what they are doing: discovering a Catholic doctrine in a Catholic book.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Kreeft, Peter. “Justification by Faith.” Chapter 44 in Fundamentals of the Faith. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 277-281.

Reprinted by permission of Ignatius Press. All rights reserved. Fundamentals of the Faith - ISBN 0-89870-202-X.

THE AUTHOR

Peter Kreeft has written extensively (over 25 books) in the areas of Christian apologetics. Link to all of Peter Kreeft's books at: http://www.peterkreeft.com/books.htm

Peter Kreeft teaches at Boston College in Boston Massachusetts. He is on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Educator's Resource Center.

Copyright © 1988 Ignatius Press

Reformation Day and Schism

By Francis J. Beckwith
http://www.thecatholicthing.org/
October 29, 2010

Luther Before the Diet of Worms by Anton von Werner, 1870

Sunday, October 31, is Reformation Day. It marks 493 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the famous church door in Wittenberg, Germany. The Augustinian monk set in motion a sequence of events that reverberated through Western Christendom and continues to mark and separate us today.

Since returning to the Catholic Church in late April 2007, I find Reformation Day has taken on a different meaning than when I stood on the other side of the Tiber. Nevertheless, even as a Protestant, my enthusiasm for October 31 never rose higher than modest appreciation for what I thought were Luther’s, and later Calvin’s, significant contributions in helping Western Christians to retrieve what had been lost. I say “modest appreciation,” since it always seemed to me rather unseemly to get too excited about schism and mutual charges of apostasy and heresy. It would be like celebrating the tenth anniversary of your divorce. You may think that the divorce was a good idea, but not because you think divorce itself is the proper end of a marriage.

Luther himself, though excommunicated, never saw his movement as anything more than a renewal movement within the Church. We, of course, know now that the movement he started had a life of its own, resulting in scores of different and often conflicting understandings of Scripture, sacrament, and Church, and each finding something in Christianity’s traditions to challenge.

But in order to arrive at this present state of theological diversity and ecclesial fragmentation, you needed more Luthers, of which there has been an endless supply. His success made Luther a towering example to emulate. Combine that with an ever-diminishing memory of a unified Western Christianity, along with the spirit of the Enlightenment – which suggested that detachment from familial, ecclesial, and cultural traditions is the beginning of reason – and schism then becomes a sort of secular sacrament. Although Luther argued that justification is by “faith alone,” it is clear that he did not anticipate or support the modern idea that the Church is by “the faithful alone.”

It is not surprising, then, why it is sometimes difficult for both Protestants and Catholics to think of ecclesial unity as the proper state of Christ’s Church. Because we are modern people, we tend to think of the Church as a collection of individual choosers, each with his own autonomy that may not legitimately be subject to something outside itself without good reason. That is, we assume that the burden of proving the necessity of ecclesial unity is not on the individual believer, but rather on the corporate entity that demands his allegiance. The Church, in that sense, becomes the enemy of faith, an unwelcome intruder into the believer’s pious solitude. For the modern mind, it would be like the commodity choosing the buyer, since religion, like sex and commerce, is just another act between consenting adults, which by implication makes the authority of creeds the doctrinal equivalent of annoying chaperones.

Ironically, this sort of mindset, which sees schism as proper and unity as unnatural, is one of the conceptual catalysts that helped lead me back to the Catholic Church. For I began to see that the whole idea of theology as something that is mine to choose – like a pair of slacks that I can have tailored for my own specifications – was precisely the problem. As long as “Church” was something that was under me rather than me under it, I was doomed to a life of ecclesiastical promiscuity despite my best efforts to practice safe sects.

Once I had become convinced that Catholicism, and the Catholic doctrines that Protestants often reject (e.g., apostolic succession, infusion of grace, Eucharistic realism, and so forth), were legitimate understandings widely and uncontroversially held in the Christian world until the time of the Reformation, Catholicism became to me, for the first time since I was a youngster, a “live option,” as William James would have put it. But not only that, it was an option that I could not ignore, for it was both forced and momentous (to cite James again). That is, I had to make a decision – Protestantism or Catholicism – and I could not not choose. And whichever I chose, the decision would change the trajectory of my life. Thus, it was momentous. I had to either walk into, or away from, the Confessional. There was not, and could not be, a third option. For this reason, it did not seem anymore that I was choosing a church; it seemed now that the Church was choosing me.

It was a book review by a Protestant professor, Carl Trueman of Westminster Theological Seminary, that crystallized this for me:

Every year I tell my Reformation history class that Roman Catholicism is, at least in the West, the default position. Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is evangelicalism; in the light of these facts, therefore, we need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in others words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day. It would seem, however, that . . . many who call themselves evangelical really lack any good reason for such an act of will; and the obvious conclusion, therefore, should be that they do the decent thing and rejoin the Roman Catholic Church.

I knew then that the burden was on me, and not on the Church, to show why I should remain in schism with the Catholic Communion in which my parents baptized me. I could think of no incorrigible reason to continue as a Protestant. And then I knelt; I could do no other.

Soli Deo Gloria

- Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He tells the story of his journey from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again in his book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic. He blogs at http://www.patheos.com/community/returntorome.

At the grill, time stands still

BY JOSH SHAFFER - Staff Writer
The News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
October 31, 2010


RALEIGH -- After 70 years, the Roast Grill still burns its wieners black, still abides by a strict no-fries, no-chips, no-ketchup policy and still accepts no payment other than cash on the countertop.

Nothing inside this closet-size restaurant suggests the 21st century.

Check the yellowed business cards tacked to the bulletin boards and you'll see numbers for politicians who have either retired or died since they last wiped Roast Grill chili off their ties.

But on its birthday, downtown Raleigh's antique hot-dog joint stands its ground on West Street like a kindly but stern grandpa with garters on his socks.

And just as in 1940, the Roast Grill can draw a line of frank-lovers that stretches down the block, hungry mouths waiting to yell, "Two all the way! Burnt!"

"Grandma told me not to change anything but the prices," said owner George Poniros, wearing a sheriff's hat for the Saturday birthday party. "And never put ketchup in there. We spend too much time making delicious chili for people to ruin it with ketchup."

The Roast Grill began with George and Mary Charles, Greek immigrants who changed the name Chalikis when they hit American soil. "He spoke seven languages," said their son Ernest, uncle to Poniros. "She spoke Greek and a half. All she needed to know was onions, mustard and chili."

The Great Depression wrecked their fortunes and closed their first restaurant on Martin Street. But in 1939, Mary Charles hit on the idea of converting the front porch of their West Street house into a grill. Her husband died young, and she worked there 53 years until she was just shy of 90.

"She only got robbed one time," said Ernest Charles. "She was working alone, and a man came in and said 'Give me all the money!' I think he had a knife. She told him in her broken English to sit down and have a hot dog. Then she gave him $5 and a hug, and he left."

It's the unchanged quality that still draws crowds. The Roast Grill still serves Cokes in little bottles.

"They know what I want when I walk in the door," said Don Ledford, a regular eating with his 7-year-old daughter, Grace, and his 5-year-old son, Luke. "I get a fat boy. That's two plain, burnt, on the same bun. My kids like it because they get a free Tootsie Roll."

Bill Cosby sneaked in

Seven decades of hot dogs slathered in original-recipe chili will build a wide following. A family friend, Randy Bryant, recalls seeing Bill Cosby there munching a dog under a hat, sneaking in lunch after giving a commencement address.

"The General Assembly, they had three Democrats and two Republicans hammering out the budget in here," Bryant said.

On Saturday, Mayor Charles Meeker sent a proclamation praising the Roast Grill for persisting in an era of "chains and homogeneity," and Gov. Beverly Perdue sent along a similar document thanking the family for lending Raleigh some atmosphere.

But the 70th birthday party drew a few newcomers, too. When one of them ordered a dog with ketchup, the whole line behind him snickered.

Whippersnapper.

Josh.shaffer@newsobserver.com or 829-4818

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/10/31/771638/at-the-grill-time-stands-still.html

The Rangers’ Clean and Sober Batting Champion

By KAREN CROUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
October 29, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — If anybody is equipped to lead a team back from a two-games-to-none deficit in the World Series, it is Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton, who has climbed out of a deeper and darker abyss.

Five Octobers ago, Hamilton was out of baseball and on his grandmother’s doorstep, strung out and gaunt. No player has bared more on baseball’s biggest stage than Hamilton, who speaks openly about an addiction to alcohol and drugs that cost him nearly four years of his baseball career and almost destroyed his life.

That type of public exposure Hamilton handles with aplomb. He was much less comfortable the other day when he emerged from his postgame shower at AT&T Park with a butter-colored bath towel wrapped around his midsection and spotted several reporters ringing his locker.

There’s nothing like having to dress in front of cameramen and assorted other strangers, including a few women, to make a guy self-conscious.

“It’s kind of a weird deal, man,” Hamilton said, his clear blue eyes scanning the two dozen faces staring at him.

SAN FRANCISCO - OCTOBER 27: Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers grounds out in the first inning against the San Francisco Giants in Game One of the 2010 MLB World Series at AT&T Park on October 27, 2010 in San Francisco, California.(Getty Images)

The spotlight’s glare can be blinding to someone on the path to a clean and sober life, but Hamilton, who led the American League this year with a .359 batting average, is determined not to stumble. He has his Bible verses to calm him, one of his favorites being a passage from the Book of James: “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.”

Hamilton’s teammates have done their part, dousing him with ginger ale instead of alcohol during their postseason celebrations. He also leans heavily on his support group, which includes his wife, Katie, and his adviser and confidant, Johnny Narron, a Rangers coach who watched from the periphery as Hamilton conducted his postgame World Series press conferences, then walked out with him to the team bus at the end of each night.

Another mentor is Dwight Gooden, the former Mets pitcher who has waged a public battle with drug addiction. Gooden, a Tampa, Fla., resident, followed Hamilton’s career after he was drafted by the Rays and reached out to him when he heard he was struggling with sobriety.

“I could relate,” Gooden, 45, said by telephone. “When you’re a high draft pick, so much is put on you and the expectations are so high, when you have a downfall, you’re crushed more than anybody. A lot of times you’ll isolate yourself, and when you do that you’re setting yourself up for failure. I didn’t want to see him do that.”

Gooden and Hamilton talk every couple of weeks, sometimes more, Gooden said.

Hamilton said, “I think it’s a good thing to talk to people who know what the temptations are like and the pressures are like to be a pro athlete.”

The Rangers, who are appearing in the first World Series in the franchise’s 50-year history, have not looked like the team that eliminated the Yankees.

“I think maybe we’re saying we’re having fun,” Hamilton said, “but we’re not having fun. We’re tightening up.”

Hamilton, 29, a leading candidate for the American League Most Valuable Player award, has produced one hit in eight World Series at-bats. His timing has been slightly off, but his sense of the absurd is as sharp as ever.

After going 0 for 4 with a walk in the first game, Hamilton laughed about being assaulted in center field by the pungent aroma of marijuana wafting down from the stands.

“It was crazy,” he said.

Asked whether the smell triggered any yearnings or flashbacks, Hamilton said it did not. “That wasn’t my drug of choice,” he said.

From a dependency on cocaine and Crown Royal to the high of being on baseball’s biggest stage, Hamilton’s journey since 2005 has been both remarkable and surreal.

Nolan Ryan, the Rangers president, said: “I don’t think that I can truly appreciate what he’s overcome and the way he’s handled it. To me, it’s a phenomenal story.”

Hamilton, drafted first over all by Tampa Bay in 1999, was well on his way to the majors in 2001 when he was in a car accident during the first month of spring training. He injured his back and was unable to play.

Without the game to anchor his days, Hamilton was adrift. He started abusing drugs and alcohol, and a habit that he said was born of boredom quickly became a compulsion. Eight trips to rehab followed, but Hamilton said he did not begin to turn his life around until he became a devout Christian.

He returned to baseball in 2006, made the Cincinnati Reds’ opening day roster in 2007, moved to Texas via trade for the 2008 season and has been named to the American League All-Star team the past three years. He submits to drug tests three times a week, and except for one drunken episode in Phoenix before spring training in 2009, he appears to have maintained his sobriety.

“I feel very blessed,” Hamilton said. “A lot of people don’t get second chances with drugs and alcohol.”

Anthony Hargrove, a defensive tackle for the reigning Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints, is another athlete who got a second chance. Hargrove, who was suspended for the 2008 N.F.L. season after failing multiple drug tests, described Hamilton as “a light for those in the dark.”

In an e-mail, Hargrove wrote: “He was my motivation when I was coming back. I had an article of him his first season back and for me he was the person I felt close with even though we didn’t know each other.”

Hamilton keeps his story in play so he can reach as many people as possible. During batting practice before the two games in San Francisco, he signed autographs for people, some of whom shared their tales of addiction and recovery and thanked him for going public with his.

“I talked to a couple of fans who were clean and sober for 14 months,” Hamilton said. “Hats off to them.”

Early in his recovery, Hamilton couldn’t handle the testimonials of others. “I’d hear stories that would trigger things that I didn’t want to be thinking about,” he said. “I’d go sit in the meeting and hear about someone using and I’d leave and want to go use. Once I got that thought in my head, I was obsessed with it until I’d use.”

Now, when his mind gets stuck on a thought, Hamilton recites a passage from Scripture, often provided by Narron. Hamilton’s coping strategies were tested this summer when he sat out most of September with two broken ribs that continue to bother him.

Hamilton said that when he was sidelined with the back injury, “alcohol and drugs were the closest thing I could find to getting that feeling when I was playing the game.”

“That was one reason it was so tough to kick the habit,” he said.

He said it was not difficult for him to stay away from drugs and alcohol this time. When asked why, he pointed at Narron and said: “He’s been a great accountability partner on the road. He’s been a blessing for me.”

Narron, who grew close to Hamilton when they both worked for the Reds, is paid by the Rangers and listed as a special assignment coach. On road trips, he eats most meals with Hamilton and holds on to his cash and major league per diem money. Hamilton never carries more than $40 in his pocket.

Asked about Narron’s salary, Ryan said, “Basically, we look at it as an insurance policy.”

The giant fishbowl that is the World Series would seem to be a huge stressor for a recovering addict, but Hamilton sees it differently. “Being around the game, it’s something that occupies your time,” he said. “It’s good for my recovery.”

Fatal Consequences

“The Red Riding Trilogy.”

by David Denby
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/
February 15, 2010


“This is the North—we do what we want.” These defiantly jocular words are spoken by a policeman as he throws a young reporter out the back of a van. The scene takes place in “Red Riding: 1974,” the first in a series of films, “The Red Riding Trilogy,” made last year for British television’s Channel 4, and now released in theatres as a mammoth, sensationally violent and beautiful five-hour movie. (The trilogy is also available on cable, as a video on demand under the rubric “IFC in Theaters.”) The North in the policeman’s boast is West Yorkshire—the city of Leeds, mostly, but also featureless pale-green moors and, among them, small, rubbly towns with dead-looking brown houses. “The Red Riding Trilogy” is based on a quartet of books (one was dropped for the TV adaptation) written by the British noir specialist David Peace, who, starting in 1999, fictionalized some of England’s most notorious recent crimes. Elements of the following find their way into the movie: the “Moors murders,” of five children, between July, 1963, and October, 1965; the murder of thirteen women by Peter William Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, between 1975 and 1980; and a miscarriage of justice that saw Stefan Kiszko, a twenty-six-year-old tax clerk from Rochdale, serve sixteen years for a 1975 murder that he did not commit. Believe it or not, the series is an entertainment.

Most of the trilogy is about the wavering attempts to get at the truth of botched police investigations—ineptitudes that the novels and the movie turn into an interlocking system of corruption. You don’t see any of the murders, but there are shadows of death everywhere: pale corpses, brutality and cynicism, and hints of perversion and obsession—a sense of violation fouling the terrain. One writer, Tony Grisoni, did the adaptation, but each film has a different director and a different look. A few scenes in each episode—the repeated use of swans’ wings as a portent, some fancy camerawork—border on the pretentious, but the dark power and the flowing organization of the material pull you into the narrative, which moves forward and backward in a single skein of visionary filmmaking. Forgoing digital effects, or any presence of the supernatural, “The Red Riding Trilogy” nevertheless achieves a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children’s story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil.

Grisoni retained Peace’s noir fatalism, his colloquial, bitter pungency—the gibes and roughhousing of male camaraderie and rivalry—and he filled out the social background. Pummelled by the repeated crimes, the population seems as cursed as the landscape, which has been stripped of its famous beauty. Many of the women are frightened or grieving, many of the men vaguely or openly guilty, even those who haven’t done anything, whose only crime is being fallible or knowing things that trouble them. As in any mystery, we’re eager for the truth, and “Red Riding” finally delivers: inexplicable acts and cryptic conversations, baffling at first, are recapitulated, interpreted, and resolved; characters who hover meekly in the background of the first film grow in importance later in the series, sometimes by means of flashback or moments from the past opened up and made clear. For Peace and Grisoni, the primal sin, which sets in motion the years of nasty behavior, is greed. In the first film, the fictional top inspectors of the West Yorkshire police have been bought by a powerful real-estate developer, John Dawson (Sean Bean), who is himself criminal in his appetites. As the series goes on, the police commit crimes to cover their relationship with Dawson, and then more crimes to cover the earlier ones. The series suggests that, when the Ripper was still at large, the police imitated his gruesome method of killing so that their acts would be taken as his. In other words, the serial crimes of the insane create a kind of protective shell for the rational crimes of the merely greedy, a deeply unsettling idea.

A few hard-pressed idealists try to clear out the spreading rot. In the first film, the cocky reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a tall, good-looking young man with sideburns and warm brown eyes, takes on this dirty world. Little girls are being murdered, and, as far as Dunford can see, the police are too compromised to catch anyone. He braves the rancid atmosphere around police headquarters and also at his newspaper, the Yorkshire Post, whose editor colludes with Dawson. Careless and randy, Dunford has an affair with Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), who has lost her young daughter to the killer. But Garland has also been bought off by Dawson (she’s his mistress), and the wonderful Hall makes her soulfully masochistic—an intelligent but lost woman trapped in a life gone wrong. Garland wants to be saved, but Dunford, a likably ambitious and libidinous descendant of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, is too reckless to be effective. He gets laid a lot, but also beaten up a lot; he lacks the instincts of a survivor. The director, Julian Jarrold (“Becoming Jane”), tells the story entirely from Dunford’s point of view; we’re close to his pleasures and risks, which is both satisfying and unnerving. And Jarrold, I would guess, has taken a good look at David Lynch’s work. He has a taste for lowering gray skies and dark roads barely penetrated by sparse headlights. His hero falls into trances, as if the truth could be found in his unconscious.

Andrew Garfield and Rebecca Hall as a reporter and the mother of a missing child.

In the second film, “Red Riding: 1980,” the Ripper is rampaging all over Leeds, and the Home Office sends an inspector from Manchester to find the killer and clean up the mess in the police department. Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is a more experienced and disciplined figure than Eddie Dunford, and the director of this episode, James Marsh (“Man on Wire”), in keeping with Hunter’s cool, has a more settled and purposefully matter-of-fact style. We’re more firmly anchored in reality this time: the episode begins with documentary footage from the Ripper years. Caught at last, the Ripper, played with bizarre calm by Joseph Mawle, describes one of his killings to the assembled West Yorkshire police. Everyone listens with a kind of horrified awe; the police may be stunned, in part, because they can no longer hide their own crimes behind the Ripper’s. Still, even with the Ripper out of commission, the curse on the North isn’t lifted. Hunter has already been stymied in his attempt to wipe out corruption. Again and again, he runs into the obscurantist rancor of a crooked officer named Bob Craven, played by the eerily intense Sean Harris, who literally goes nose to nose with Paddy Considine’s Hunter, pushing him back physically with his face. Frozen out, discredited, and dealing with problems of his own, Hunter begins to fall apart. The light for a number of scenes is an eerie white, as if we had entered a twilight zone where certainty fails.

In the final episode, “Red Riding: 1983,” directed by Anand Tucker (“Hilary and Jackie”), the random forces of goodness at last assemble their feeble powers. Another girl disappears, and the crime, which has obvious similarities to the disappearances and the deaths of a decade earlier, sickens one of the police higher-ups, a solemnly imposing man, Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), who has been in on the fix all along. Jobson, mumbling and tentative, undergoes a gradual awakening, the first sign of police effectiveness. He is joined in the fight for clarity by a shabby lawyer, John Piggott (Mark Addy), a stout and morose failure who is stricken by his own family connection to the Yorkshire violence. The two men have another partner whom neither is aware of. Years earlier, there was a secondary sin: a young boy was turned into a prostitute by a local man whom we see throughout the series. The hustler, B.J. (Robert Sheehan), who witnessed some of the crimes, also floats in and out of all three episodes, a softly lyrical insinuation, too scared to tell more than a little of what he knows. It is B.J., professionally a criminal but morally an innocent, who narrates the surprise conclusion in which, after much misery, a seeming resurrection takes place. The stray bits of white light seen in parts two and three are gathered into a powerful shaft, and the cycle of murder and corruption is brought to a close.

David Peace has written that “crime is brutal, harrowing and devastating for everyone involved,” and this certainly comes through in the adaptation. But a high degree of art and show-business savvy has been applied to the unspeakable. The expressiveness of even the minor actors, for instance, warms the bleak atmosphere. “The Red Riding Trilogy” is an exhausting, morbidly fascinating, and finally thrilling experience. The hardiest viewers may want to brave the five-hour marathon in the theatres, but most people, I believe, would be happier seeing it one episode at a time, savoring its complex turns, its perversities and occasional beauties, over a number of sweetly troubled days. ♦

Review: 'Red Riding' trilogy

To view this gritty, gripping series is to enter a devil's bargain: Watch and you'll never forget.

By KENNETH TURAN, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
http://www.latimes.com/
February 12, 2010

The powerfully disturbing "Red Riding" trilogy will haunt you waking and sleeping, night and day. If you survive the watching of it, that is, which is no easy thing.

It's not the five-hours-plus length of this trio of devastatingly bleak modern British noir films that's daunting. Far from it. Strongly made by three different directors with three different crews but using scripts from the same writer and the same cast for its recurring characters, these films are put together with so much ability and skill that the time simply melts away.

Rather, the hard paradox of this project is that what makes these merciless films at times almost unbearable to watch also makes them frankly impossible to get out of your mind. Not only do they create a gritty, compelling world thick with the fetid air of venality, corruption and desperation, but they also periodically traffic in ghastly and horrific torture, sometimes shown, sometimes merely described, but always circling back to a series of sadistic, soul-destroying murders of women and little girls.

All this and more comes from a quartet of intense, chaotic novels by David Peace ("fictions torn from facts that illuminate the truth," he says) that in turn were inspired by events surrounding northern England's real-life Yorkshire Ripper murders.

While each book was initially supposed to get its own film, budget cuts at British TV giant Channel 4 meant that only three could be made. Each novel is named after a year, but when the film title comes up on-screen, the phrase "In the Year of Our Lord" is added, as if to ironically remind us that we are entering a world where godly behavior is going to be difficult to find.

Though the search for murderers is the engine of Tony Grisoni's driving scripts, that's not what the "Red Riding" films are about. With the meaning or even exactly what's happening in specific moments often intentionally unclear, these are unsettling, multi-layered investigations of character and society, described by the screenwriter as akin to "Dickens on bad acid." In this thoroughly corrupt society, no one is pure enough to cast the first stone, but the drive to end unspeakable evil is still a powerful one, even if it runs through fatally compromised individuals.

These intensely atmospheric pieces are set in Leeds and embedded root and branch in what the films present as the brutal culture of the North of England, where accents are hard to decipher, where the cold -- spiritual as well as physical -- gets in your bones and where the motto of the police is "This is the North, where we do what we want." The "Red Riding" title comes from the Ridings, a trio of administrative areas in Yorkshire, with the addition of red likely calling attention to the violence of the murders and the allusion to the fairy tale, reminding us that young girls were involved.

The first part, "1974," directed by Julian Jarrold, follows cocky and ambitious young Yorkshire Post crime reporter Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) as he starts to suspect that the torture deaths of little girls over several years could be linked. His investigations lead him to surly chief detective Billy "The Badger" Molloy (Warren Clarke), powerful developer John Dawson ( Sean Bean), local vicar Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), mysterious rent boy BJ (Robert Sheehan) and the beautiful, haunted young widow Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall). But no good will come of it, no good at all.

Directed by James Marsh, the second part, "1980," involves a second series of murders, the ghastly Ripper attacks on women. The Home Office, worried about the pace of the Yorkshire Police investigation, sends in a key operative from Manchester, Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine), to try to figure out what's going on. He comes up against a resentful, resistant police culture, typified by the sadistic detective Bob Craven ( Sean Harris). "How deep does the rot go?" Hunter wonders. "Who stops it?"

Attempting to answer that question, the third part, Anand Tucker's "1983," follows two characters, solicitor John Piggott (Mark Addy) and top cop Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), as they both are compelled against their better judgment and even their self-interest to staunch the flood of corruption, to attempt to get to the source of evil that always seems just out of reach.

Though there are differences in visual and directorial style in the three parts, on a first viewing at least they seem all of a piece, more united by themes, scripts and actors than divided by individual flourishes. The acting is exceptionally convincing and adds an air of verisimilitude. It's remarkable to find out that Hall, almost unrecognizable as a North Country Marilyn Monroe type, came directly from Woody Allen's fluffy "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" to this, which must have been the most mind-bending of transitions.

Though the sadism and torture laced throughout the "Red Riding" trilogy is only fitfully present, when it does arrive it is graphic and upsetting enough to make watching this exceptionally well-made series very much a devil's bargain. You take the risk and hope the price you pay is worth it. Which, given the agonizing subject matter, is perhaps just as it should be.

kenneth.turan @latimes.com


Red Riding Trilogy

BY ROGER EBERT
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
March 10, 2010

"Red Riding Trilogy" is an immersive experience like "The Best of Youth," "Brideshead Revisited" or "Nicholas Nickleby." Over the course of 302 minutes, we sink into a virtual world: the corrupt police and establishment figures of West Yorkshire in England, at the time of the real-life "Yorkshire Ripper." Peter Sutcliffe, the Ripper, was convicted of killing 13 women, and may have killed more. The fictional Ripper here enjoys the same inexplicable immunity to police investigation.

This is the sort of undertaking the UK's Channel 4 excels at, and is approached in the United States only by ambitious cable TV series. The experience could give you the impression that the three parts were filmed at separate times. The visual style proceeds from 16mm to 35mm to high-def video, different actors play some of the characters at different times, and there are three directors, each with a distinctive style. But that was all part of Channel 4's plan, and the completed trilogy aired in March 2009.

A large cast of characters is involved in a complex series of events. Few viewers could be blamed for failing a test on what happens, and who (in addition to the Ripper) is guilty. Strict continuity is sidestepped to such a degree that some characters do not quite seem to remain dead. This is a way to reflect the shifting nature of reality in which there are many concealed motives, and the police version of events is fabricated entirely for their own convenience.

The police have their reasons, chillingly dramatized in a scene where conspirators drink a toast to "the North!" Yorkshire is in northern England, traditionally hostile to the South (London), but what does that have to do with a license for corruption? The toast is an example of the human willingness to excuse behavior by evoking meaningless abstractions (The South! The Young! Partytime! Der Fuehrer!) Where they are is irrelevant to what they do.

They are in a society that seems, to our North American eyes, clearly distinct from other parts of Britain. In some segments, the Yorkshire accents are so pronounced that Channel 4 wisely adds subtitles. We are inhabiting a subculture. In the early scenes, our attention is focused on an investigative reporter, new in town, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), who looks deeper into the murders, but is unlucky enough to get personally involved with a woman linked to a separate series of crimes. Their intimate scenes together are the closest the trilogy will come to human kindness.

Dunford is an unalloyed hero. Much of the rest of the story involves conspirators who plot among and against themselves. Any sense of objective morality is lacking. We get the sense that no one rises high in the police without knowing the rules and playing by them. They arrange for their own immunity.

There is a public outcry as the Ripper continues to kill and evade capture. It was the same in real life. Scotland Yard was brought in, represented indirectly here by a veteran cop named Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine). He makes little progress, largely because the officers he's working with have guilt to conceal and much to cover up.

Without revealing anything crucial, the reality is that the Ripper murders are invisibly connected to a police cover-up of a deadly real estate conspiracy, and if you pull a string from the Ripper, the whole ball of yarn of the larger conspiracy may unravel. A central figure becomes a vile chief of police, played by David Morrissey, who is so alarming that one searches the Web to discover he looks like a nice enough man in real life. The casting here and throughout is essential to the trilogy's effect.

All this time a mentally challenged suspect has been held as the alleged Ripper. He has even confessed, which after police interrogation in Yorkshire is a foregone conclusion. His guilt is convincingly challenged, which leads to a reopening of the case, as well it might, because the murders didn't stop with his imprisonment.

One wants to believe no police department in North America has even been as corrupt as this one from Yorkshire. That may not be true, but the chances of a television trilogy about it are slim. "Red Riding Trilogy" hammers at the dark souls of its villains until they crack open, and it is a fascinating sight. We're in so deep by the final third that there can hardly be a character whose hidden evil comes as a surprise: Can innocence exist in this environment?

The directors, who worked on their segments more or less simultaneously, have impressive credits that do not, however, suggest the different feels they bring to their segments. "Red Riding: 1974" is by Julian Jarrold, whose "Brideshead Revisited," "Becoming Jane" and "Kinky Boots" are all some distance from the immediacy of his 16mm film.

"Red Riding: 1980" is by James Marsh, whose documentaries "Man on Wire" and "Wisconsin Death Trip" don't suggest the 35mm feature feel of his segment. Anand Tucker ("Shopgirl," "Hilary and Jackie"), who directed "Red Riding 1983," is a specialist in clearly delineated ambiguity, at odds with the moral anarchy of his segment. I gather they were not hired to reproduce their strengths, but to find the right approach for this material.

I have given only the sketchiest of plot outlines here. The trilogy isn't so much about what happens objectively (which can sometimes be hard to determine), but about the world in which it takes place, a miasma of greed and evil. I have no idea whether the real Yorkshire police were led by monsters such as these. Someone must have thought so. Channel 4 aired these segments as they stand.



Men and Terror Run Wild

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
February 5, 2010
Andrew Garfield in "1974"

The blood that runs through the “Red Riding” trilogy — three movies based on four crime books by the British author David Peace — begins as a river that races and then rages until it floods this dank, dark, pitiless world in misery. By the time the third movie finishes, some half dozen young girls will have been murdered, along with more than a dozen women. Men will have died as well, tormented by other men wearing smiles and sneers, and wielding fists, drills, lighted cigarettes, the usual guns and even a rat that ends splattered against a wall.

That rat is a reminder that the first book in Mr. Peace’s “Red Riding” quartet, titled “Nineteen Seventy-Four,” is an explicit nod to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and its infamous rodent of terror. The title of Mr. Peace’s book and the quartet as a whole — the other titles are “Nineteen Seventy-Seven,” “Nineteen Eighty” and “Nineteen Eighty-Three” — work as an obvious point of connection with that Orwell masterpiece, though there are more similarities, notably an enveloping sense of dread and a criminal gang that maintains its grip on the population through sadistic violence, all faithfully reproduced in the movies. Throw Irish hunger strikers and Thatcherism into the mix and set the whole thing in Yorkshire, the northern county birthplace of certain puddings and terriers and apparently endless horror. Stir.

The trilogy was adapted by Tony Grisoni, who has contributed to a few films by Terry Gilliam, including “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and so has an acquaintance with excess. And the three movies, each directed by a different filmmaker for a combined 305 minutes, are nothing if not extreme: along with all the female corpses and the dead and wounded men, there are off-screen miscarriages, multiple instances of child abuse, intimations of incest, a firebombed house and several cremations, all shot from inside the chamber, no less, as if the camera were perched in the pyre. Shortly after the first film opens, the main character attends a wake. The second movie ends in a cemetery. There’s a wedding, but it looks like a downer.

Made for British television, the “Red Riding” trilogy is the latest in an estimable line of crime entertainments from across the pond, like the “Prime Suspect” cycle, with Helen Mirren as a supremely human detective, and the more recent mini-series “Five Days,” about a missing mother. The trilogy’s pulp-literary pedigree, one further buffed by several high-profile festival showings — last October it played in the New York Film Festival, where it was presented rather hopefully as “one of this year’s great cinematic events” — partly explains why it is being released in theaters in America. Starting on Friday, the movies will play back to back, with intermissions, for a week at the IFC Center in New York. Thereafter, they will be shown separately and also open elsewhere. (They’re already available on video on demand in some areas.)

Despite this unusual sendoff, the trilogy affords a fairly familiar immersion in contemporary British cinematic miserablism, where men and terror run wild, and beauty exists only in the cinematography and some of the performances. All else is horror. Certainly that’s true in the trilogy, which, starting with “Red Riding: 1974,” leaps into the void when a young Yorkshire journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, not up to the leading-man task), realizes that the murder of a girl might be connected to a few earlier deaths, an insight that finds him first chasing after clues and then being chased in turn. The director Julian Jarrold shot the film in Super 16 millimeter, which gives the images atmospheric grit and swirling grain that, with the almost comically ubiquitous cigarette smoke, nicely thickens the air.

The second movie, “Red Riding: 1980,” glossed up with 35-millimeter film and directed by James Marsh with an elegant, self-conscious visual style at odds with the grunge milieu and desperate crimes — dead bodies are as attractively framed as some clouds reflected in a window — pivots on Peter Hunter (a solid Paddy Considine). An outsider brought into Yorkshire to conduct an internal review of the police investigation of the so-called (true life) Yorkshire Ripper murders, Hunter soon enough becomes the hunted. At the same time, a local detective, Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), who appears in the background of the first movie, steps closer to the center, while a clergyman, Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), edges further into view. Both men become focal points in the final movie.

As the trilogy unwinds, the violence keeps the action hopping and you occasionally gagging, either in revulsion at its severity or at the tender, loving care with which it has been art directed. Meanwhile, some of the actors, notably Mark Addy, who plays a lawyer unkindly named Piggott in the third movie, and Rebecca Hall, who plays a grieving mother in the first, firmly hold your attention, which is striking, given that the story’s totalizing worldview doesn’t allow for much variation in human behavior. In a universe populated by victims and victimizers, there is screaming and shouting, but no joy, little laughter, barely any pleasure: when Piggott tells a joke, it proves more of a jolt than any death because it’s comparatively rare.

If the characters are generally deprived of life’s small and large pleasures, there is some enjoyment for the viewer, who can admire how different characters melt in and out of the trilogy, gaining and fading in importance, as supporting players in one movie become the star attractions in the next, and vice versa. A relatively minor player in the first film, for instance, a male hustler, B J (Robert Sheehan), steps forward in the second chapter only to jump into the spotlight in the third, becoming a force of change, an intermittent narrator and (weak) voice of conscience. Several members of the police force remain constants, including two professional sociopaths, Bob (an excellent, terrifying Sean Harris) and Tommy (Tony Mooney).

If you stick through to the end of the trilogy, you will be treated to further brutal displays, now in digital, as Anand Tucker, the director of the third movie, “Red Riding: 1983,” attempts to tie up the ragged ends through the combined efforts of B J, Maurice and Piggott, who each hurtle down to their own private hells via flurries of flashbacks. Although Mr. Tucker brings welcome warmth and unexpected humor to the series (thanks mainly to Mr. Addy), he stumbles badly when, after a teasing buildup, he reveals the marble-white body of a murdered girl who, while grossly disfigured, also looks as beautiful as a carved Della Robbia angel. The murderer has turned her ravaged body into an aesthetic exhibit, an assault Mr. Tucker mimics.

The “Red Riding” trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent. What matters most in the books is Mr. Peace’s scatting prose and imaginative hijacking of real tragedies for his Grand Guignol fantasies, which brings to mind James Ellroy (“L.A. Confidential”), but danker and without the obvious glee that Mr. Ellroy takes in his own work. What matters in the movies are some of the performances and the slickly packaged sadism. Nothing else on screen is at stake, certainly not life or hope.

In 1940, a year after Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Orwell wrote that ours was a “shrinking world” in which, the “ ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire.” In the “Red Riding” movies that world has shrunk to the size of a pebble: it’s hard, unblemished by variation and very, very small. And the democratic vistas aren’t behind barbed wire: they’re nonexistent, which makes for entertaining nightmares but not dreams.

“There is less feeling of creation and growth,” Orwell continued, “less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude — even ‘decadent,’ if that word means anything.”

"Red Riding" is a trilogy of films commissioned by Channel 4, based on the novels by David Peace. Each film is directed by a different directors, (l to r) Julian Jarrold, Anand Tucker and James Marsh, photographed at the Covent Garden Hotel, London Photograph: Karen Robinson

RED RIDING TRILOGY

Red Riding: 1974

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Julian Jarrold; written by Tony Grisoni, adapted from the novels by David Peace; director of photography, Rob Hardy; edited by Andrew Hulme; music by Adrian Johnston; production designer, Cristina Casali; produced by Andrew Eaton, Anita Overland and Wendy Brazington; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Sean Bean (John Dawson), Warren Clarke (Bill Molloy), Andrew Garfield (Eddie Dunford), David Morrissey (Maurice Jobson), Peter Mullan (Martin Laws), Robert Sheehan (B J), Sean Harris (Bob Craven), Tony Mooney (Tommy Douglas) and Rebecca Hall (Paula Garland).


Red Riding: 1980

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by James Marsh; written by Tony Grisoni, adapted from the novels by David Peace; director of photography, Igor Martinovic; edited by Jinx Godfrey; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; production designer, Tomas Burton; produced by Andrew Eaton, Anita Overland and Wendy Brazington; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Paddy Considine (Peter Hunter), Maxine Peake (Helen Marshall), Andrew Garfield (Eddie Dunford), David Morrissey (Maurice Jobson), Tony Pitts (John Nolan), Peter Mullan (Martin Laws), Robert Sheehan (B J), Sean Harris (Bob Craven) and Tony Mooney (Tommy Douglas).



Red Riding: 1983

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Anand Tucker; written by Tony Grisoni, adapted from the novels by David Peace; director of photography, David Higgs; edited by Trevor Waite; music by Barrington Pheloung; production designer, Alison Dominitz; produced by Andrew Eaton, Anita Overland and Wendy Brazington; released by IFC Films. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Mark Addy (John Piggott), Andrew Garfield (Eddie Dunford), David Morrissey (Maurice Jobson), Peter Mullan (Martin Laws), Robert Sheehan (B J), Sean Harris (Bob Craven), and Tony Mooney (Tommy Douglas).


Film

Giving Serial Killings Serial Treatment

By NICOLAS RAPOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 31, 2010

Sean Bean in "1974"

“IT’S getting dead murky, isn’t it?” says a detective in the “Red Riding” crime trilogy, a voyage into the decaying heart of Northern England in the 1970s and ’80s. This adaptation of three novels of the four-book series by the Yorkshire-born writer David Peace is an ambitious endeavor: it is shot by three directors, shares characters (though the protagonists shift) and mingles invention and fact. Like David Fincher’s 2007 serial-killer drama “Zodiac,” the “Red Riding” films are more about capturing an era than solving a mystery.

“Certain crimes allow you to examine a particular time and place,” Mr. Peace said when reached by telephone in West Yorkshire. He was speaking of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, in which a man named Peter Sutcliffe was jailed in 1981 for the deaths of 13 women over five years in Yorkshire and neighboring counties and whose crimes inspire the atmosphere and the events in Mr. Peace’s books and their three-part adaptation.

“What I was trying to figure out,” Mr. Peace continued, “was why did this happen here, and was there something in the way we behaved that made us somehow culpable? Or were we very unfortunate, that here was this evil man?”

The “Red Riding” trilogy, which opens Friday at the IFC Center but had its premiere last March on British television, conjures life in a benighted world of corrupt police and missing children, of weird secrets and guilt-ridden romance.

Eddie Dunford, the brash, callow reporter played by Andrew Garfield in the first of the three films, “Red Riding: 1974,” is only the first to question the established disorder. In the second, “Red Riding: 1980,” a detective (Paddy Considine) from Manchester is assigned to review the Ripper investigation, while “1983” tracks a feckless lawyer (Mark Addy) and a wavering cop (David Morrissey) in the aftermath.

The hellish experiences of these four characters are rendered through an unusual experiment in comparative style: each picture had its own director. Julian Jarrold, who shot “1974” on Super 16, creates a twisted noir and fuguelike atmosphere to depict Dunford’s investigation and doomed romance with a victim’s mother (Rebecca Hall).

On the telephone from London Mr. Jarrold, who also adapted “Brideshead Revisited” and “Crime and Punishment,” said that for one shot he told his director of photography “to come back with a ‘Lost Highway’ shot,” referring to David Lynch’s twisted and textured 1997 film.

Shot in Leeds, “1974” and its follow-ups delve into the notoriety of “the North” against a backdrop of block houses, humble sitting rooms, nuclear power plants, offices and pubs. The Northern creed and manner — tough and often humorously blunt — are epitomized in the films by the police and their allies. (According to the films’ screenwriter, Tony Grisoni, it’s all analogous to “what Jacobean English dramatists thought of Sicily.”)

The casts’ British stalwarts include Warren Clarke (once a droog in “A Clockwork Orange”) as a stonewalling police chief, Sean Bean as a cocksure developer, and Mr. Morrissey (who played Gordon Brown in “The Deal”).

“In Northern England it was quite grim, quite hard,” said Mr. Morrissey, who grew up in Liverpool in the ’70s. “There was a very white, working-class male world, which was very insular, and it was a very violent place.”

Mr. Morrissey, who stars in “1983” but appears in all three films, recalled the specter that seemed to hang over those years: “There was a sense that one world was closing and the other one was not ready to open.”

Because of budgetary restraints (all three films were done for a lean $9 million), the book that deals most directly with the Ripper, “Nineteen Seventy-Seven” was not filmed. But the haunting presence of the crimes feeds into the dread of “Red Riding: 1980,” which focuses on Peter Hunter (Mr. Considine), a Manchester detective who is investigating the local handling of the case. A creeping paranoia becomes the film’s dominant mood as Hunter’s inquiry is thwarted through misdirection and violence; meager solace comes from a wistful affair with a colleague.

Seeking to offset the nebulous threats working against the protagonist, the director, James Marsh, chose a clean, wide-screen look for this involuted middle story, shooting on 35 millimeter.

“I felt that Peter’s character was a very straight arrow, and I wanted the film to be really clear,” Mr. Marsh said in an interview in Manhattan.

Mr. Marsh is best known for the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” but he also made “Wisconsin Death Trip,” which examined a Midwest town struck by myriad tragedies at the end of the 19th century. His “Red Riding” opens with an audiovisual overture of actual and fabricated radio and television reports of the crimes combined with recreated photos of victims.

(Mr. Peace, 43, who came of age at the height of the investigation into the Yorkshire murders, recalls the efforts to solicit the help of ordinary citizens: “They set up temporary sheds in every bus station where you could go in and listen to tape recordings of what they thought was the Ripper’s voice.”)

The unsolved killings in “Red Riding” and the portrait of Northern masculinity, brutality and corruption suggest a terrible sins-of-the-father burden borne by a beleaguered society. The full scope of the institutional rot always seems just out of reach, as if — in Mr. Grisoni words — “you’re seeing a tiny fraction, in the same way a child would.”

For the conclusion of the grim saga, “1983,” its director, Anand Tucker, used a Red One digital camera and introduces golden sunshine and a lighter touch. But horrific secrets still emerge in this story about a struggling lawyer (Mr. Addy) and a police officer (Mr. Morrissey), who grows shocked by the unsavory sides of his colleague’s extracurricular endeavors.

“I wanted an anti-noir, a light noir,” said Mr. Tucker, who made the homicide-free “Shopgirl” and “Leap Year.” “It’s two characters struggling to find the light, to find some hope or redemption.”

Taken together these varied visual formats and the ambitious historical canvas lend a cinematic scope that belies the trilogy’s original broadcast in three installments on Channel 4 in Britain. Andrew Eaton, its producer for Revolution Films, confirmed in an interview that theatrical distribution was always their ambition. For the American release IFC Films plans, at least initially, to release all 305 minutes of the films as “Red Riding: Special Roadshow Edition” with two intermissions, though they will also be available individually through video-on-demand.

The trilogy has already found interest from the director Ridley Scott for an American remake, which sounds like an unusual bit of cultural transposition until you learn that Mr. Peace himself wrote the source novels while abroad. From 1994 until recently he lived in Japan and taught English while writing.

Some inspiration for his “Red Riding” quartet came from the case of child killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was sentenced in 1997 and later executed for a series of grotesque murders, and Mr. Peace also recalls going to “Se7en” and “Zodiac” during his stay. It was also in Japan that he wrote other North-set novels, including “The Damned United” (which was adapted for film last fall) and “GB84” (awaiting production).

“I wrote six books, all about West Yorkshire,” Mr. Peace said, who has since returned to his storied hometown to be close to family. “It must have been a kind of homesickness. Although the West Yorkshire tourist board are not as proud of the Red Riding books.”

Best-Selling Author Vince Flynn: Hollywood Needs to Stop Making America the Bad Guy

by Dan Gagliasso
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
October 27, 2010

Last week after a packed book signing and lecture at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, best-selling political thriller author Vince Flynn (American Assassin, Pursuit of Honor) generously took a few minutes to fill me in on his thoughts about dealing with Hollywood and what looks like his finally soon to go into production first film project.

“Most of Hollywood thinks it has a ‘moral’ mandate to defend the leftist status quo.” Flynn (pictured at left) tells me with conviction. “Their leftist bias won’t allow them to do anything other then make crappy anti-American war movies where America is the bad guy.” Movies nobody goes to see. I get the strong impression that what he’d really like to say is, “When are these snobby elitists going to get their heads out of their asses.”

Flynn published his first book Term Limits fifteen years ago, and it was a runaway hit. So why hasn’t even one of his twelve hugely popular novels made it the screen? He remembers with not a little irony, “After Memorial Day was published (dealing with a possible nuclear attack by terrorists on American soil) Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount called me and said, ‘I read your book and I hated it. It’s more Bush then Bush.’ My response was ‘Can we at least get on the same page that terrorists blowing up Washington D.C. or New York City would really be a bad thing?’” Lansing meekly agreed.

The first thing that crosses my mind upon meeting the New York Times best-selling writer is that he just might be the real life inspiration for his fictional CIA black ops specialist Mitch Rapp. He’s tall, rugged-looking and likes to shoot – evidently pretty well. If it wasn’t for his friendly and down to earth demeanor you get the idea he could be pretty damn intimidating, too. He would probably make a really great Agency black ops type, except for the fact that such types need to be under the radar and Flynn’s commanding bearing would attract attention in any crowd. Unlike more passive writers Flynn can also raconteur up some really great anecdotes. If Flynn were an actor any studio exec worth his six-figure plus salary would be a fool not to cast him as the provocative and appealing character he has created.

Flynn’s books are so popular they have sold over 12.5 million copies worldwide. “I was one of the writers at a recent gathering of Barnes and Noble’s top ten selling authors. My sales are always up, each book sells better then the last one and except for one new writer I was the only one there who hasn’t had a movie made from one of their books.”

CBS Films and producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura are on the verge of changing that Hollywood slight. Flynn’s Consent to Kill, dealing with a high-end duo of freelance assassins hired by a revenge-seeking Saudi prince, who attempt to eliminate Mitch Rapp has been adapted by screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin and is about to swing into high gear. “Les Moonves at CBS purchased the feature film rights to the Mitch Rapp franchise. It’s taken five years but this is a good group of people, they get it.” Says Flynn with appreciation. Antoine Fuqua of Training Day fame will direct with Gerard Butler and Eric Bana amongst others being considered as Rapp. Though he has no problem with either actor his personal choice would be Bruce Willis, “He’s a little old for the part, but he’s my favorite actor and he could make it work.”

Flynn has had to deal with a lot of foolish film industry types who used to come up with crazy ideas for casting the Mitch Rapp character with some left wing loon like Sean Penn. He shakes his head and gives a sardonic grin, “Like I’m going to let that happen.” Hollywood types should think more then twice before ever trying to cross this writer and his millions of dedicated fans.

From the political backgrounds to CIA field operations, every one of his books is so well researched and excitingly written that his fans include former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as a huge number of intelligence, law enforcement and special operations types. His encyclopedic knowledge of the underbelly of international affairs even landed him a gig consulting on a season of conservative producer Joel Surnow’s hit Fox television series “24” several years ago.

When American lives are at stake, Flynn’s Mitch Rapp has no compunction about doing whatever it takes, and I do mean whatever it takes to stop a terrorist or get him to talk. Duplicitous political types, foolish Justice Department investigations and idiotic laws be damned. Yet Flynn’s books are not quickly churned out jingoistic pulp fantasies. Real issues involving everything from interrogation techniques, loyal U.S. Muslims and radical Mosques on American soil, assassination and justified retribution against a fanatical enemy along with their enablers are given complex moral depth and consideration that you don’t find in other War on Terror-themed novels. The deadly solutions Flynn’s characters subscribe to would seem horrifying to naïve, hand-wringing left wingers, but bringing final justice to those who visit terror on innocents and civilians, often Muslim victims in fact, is the author’s brand of common sense national self-preservation.

Flynn came to his fictionalizing of the war on terror in such knowledgeable and realistic terms through common sense and passionate curiosity. “Remember back in the eighties when that one guy on the news held up an AK-47 and hollered ‘Death to America!’ I took him at his word, it wasn’t real hard.”

This was in the aftermath of the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut that cost almost 300 American and French lives preceded by the Lockerbie Pan Am attack and others similar deadly terrorist incidents, many of which have worked into the back story of Flynn’s characters. His incredible knowledge of true-to-life espionage and the war on terror has made him a reluctant, but thoughtful prognosticator of terrorist events. His Extreme Measures dealing with Al Qaeda suicide attacks in Washington D.C. was published literally only a month before the similar and deadly Mumbai, India attacks in November of 2008. Transfer of Power published in 1999 dealt with a similar attack on the White House.

His sober prediction for the future, “Unfortunately, I believe we are probably only a year or a year-and-a-half away from a Mumbai-style attack on American soil. Mumbai and other attacks, those were just test runs, things could really get ugly.”

A Crossroads Election

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.townhall.com
October 29, 2010

Most elections are about particular policies, particular scandals or particular personalities. But these issues don't mean as much this year-- not because they are not important, but because this election is a crossroads election, one that can decide what path this country will take for many years to come.

Runaway "stimulus" spending, high unemployment and ObamaCare are all legitimate and important issues. It is just that freedom and survival are more important.

For all its sweeping and scary provisions, ObamaCare is not nearly as important as the way it was passed. If legislation can become laws passed without either the public or the Congress knowing what is in those laws, then the fundamental principle of a free, self-governing people is completely undermined.

Some members of Congress who voted for ObamaCare, and who are now telling us that they realize this legislation has flaws which they intend to correct, are missing the point.

The very reason for holding hearings on pending legislation, listening to witnesses on all sides of the issue, and having Congressional debates that will be reported and commented on in the media, is so that problems can be explored and alternatives considered before the legislation is voted into law.

Rushing ObamaCare into law too fast for anyone to have read it served no other purpose than to prevent this very process from taking place. The rush to pass this law that would not take effect until after the next two elections simply cut the voters out of the loop-- and that is painfully close to ruling by decree.

Other actions and proposals by this administration likewise represent moves in the direction of arbitrary rule, worthy of a banana republic, with only a mocking facade of freedom.

These include threats against people who simply choose to express opinions counter to administration policy, such as a warning to an insurance company that there would be "zero tolerance" for "misinformation" when the insurance company said that ObamaCare would create costs that force up premiums.

Zero tolerance for the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution?

This warning comes from an administration with arbitrary powers that can impose ruinous costs on a given business.

Those who are constantly telling us that our economic problems are caused by not enough "regulation" never distinguish between regulation which simply enforces known rules, as contrasted with regulation that gives arbitrary powers to the government to force others to knuckle under to demands that have nothing to do with the ostensible purposes of the regulation.

As more businesses reveal that they are considering no longer buying health insurance for their employees, as a result of higher costs resulting from ObamaCare legislation, the administration has announced that it can grant waivers that reduce these costs.

But the power to grant waivers is the power to withhold waivers-- an arbitrary power that can impose millions of dollars in costs on businesses that the administration doesn't like.

Recent proposals from the Obama administration to force disclosure of the names of people who sponsor election ads would likewise open all who disagree with Obama to retaliation by the government itself, as well as by community activists and others.

History tells us where giving government one arbitrary power after another leads. It is like going into a Venus fly-trap, which is easy to enter and nearly impossible to get out of.

The headstrong, know-it-all willfulness of this administration, which threatens our freedom at home, also threatens our survival in the international jungle, because Obama seems determined to do nothing that will stop Iran from going nuclear.

The Obama administration goes through all sorts of charades at the U.N. and signs international agreements on sanctions that have been watered down to the point where they are not about to bring Iran's nuclear weapons program to a halt. The purpose is not to stop Iran but to stop the American people from realizing what Obama is doing or not doing.

We have a strange man in the White House. This election is a crossroads, because either his power will be curbed by depriving him of his huge Congressional majorities or he will continue on a road that jeopardizes both our freedom and our survival.

All Quiet on the Black-Ops Front

Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
October 29, 2010 12:00 A.M.


I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?

In case you didn’t know, Assange is the Australian computer programmer behind WikiLeaks, a massive — and massively successful — effort to disclose secret or classified information. In a series of recent dumps, he unveiled thousands upon thousands of classified documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military and other government officials insist that WikiLeaks is doing serious damage to American national security and is going to get people killed, including brave Iraqis and Afghans who’ve risked their lives and the lives of their families to help us.

Even Assange agrees. He told the New Yorker earlier this year that he fully understands innocent people might die as a result of the “collateral damage” of his work and that WikiLeaks may have “blood on our hands.” WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb.

So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It’s a serious question.

Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks website holds up a copy of The Guardian newspaper as he speaks to reporters in front of a Don McCullin Vietnam war photograph at The Front Line Club on July 26, 2010 in London, England. The WikiLeaks website has published 90,000 secret US Military records. (Getty Images)

In almost every corner of the popular culture, there are people who assume incredible competence on the part of our intelligence agencies. We take it as a given that spooks can, in the immortal words of Elvis, take care of business in a flash. In the Jason Bourne movies, say the wrong word into your cell phone, and assassins will find you at the train station in minutes. In AMC’s Rubicon, if you pay too close attention to crossword puzzles, your train will be “accidentally” derailed. In Three Days of the Condor, if you ask your bosses the wrong question, a postman with an ice-bullet-shooting machine gun will pay you a visit.

Of course, that’s just Hollywood. But if you read left-wing accounts of the intelligence community, two versions dominate. The CIA and similar outfits are either evil and incompetent, or evil and super-competent. Sometimes the folks at The Nation will mock the CIA for trying to blow up Castro with an exploding cigar. Other times some Oliver Stone type will insist that the military, or the CIA, or the NSA, or rogue elements from those quarters, managed to assassinate JFK and pin it on a Marxist dupe named Lee Harvey Oswald.

Under either scenario, you’d think Assange, super-whistle-blower of the international Left, would be a greasy stain on the autobahn already.

Meanwhile, conservatives have something like a mirror-image view of the black-ops crowd. We tend to think they’re either well-intentioned bunglers or noble ninjas in London fog trench coats. Again, either way, Assange’s shrimp-on-the-barbie should have had Strontium-90 in it years before anyone heard his name.

Oh, and it’s not just nation-states that are threatened by WikiLeaks. These guys spend much of their time going after big corporations that, we’re often told — at least by Hollywood and the people who e-mail me in ALL CAPS — routinely rub out gadflies and whistle-blowers who try to let the world know the electric car was perfected in 1920, or that milk companies are making millions by poisoning their customers (that was the actual plot of I Love Trouble, by the way).

Now, I know there are many solid answers to my question. For starters, the world isn’t nearly so dramatic as novelists, bloggers, self-important journalists, and nostalgic former spies often claim it is. The main evidence that the U.S. government didn’t bring down the World Trade Center on 9/11 is that no one has the ability to pull off a conspiracy like that. And the people who come closest — i.e., those very same spies — are too decent and patriotic even to imagine trying.

Indeed, most of the documents from WikiLeaks debunk the vast majority of conspiracy theories that fueled so much idiocy on the left for the last decade. No sinister plots involving Halliburton or Israel have been exposed — because they only existed in the fevered fantasies of some coffee-shop dissidents.

Second, Assange is essentially hiding behind his celebrity and the fact that it wouldn’t do any good to kill him, given the nature of the Web. Even if the CIA wanted to take him out, they couldn’t without massive controversy.

That’s because assassinating a hipster Australian Web guru as opposed to a Muslim terrorist is the kind of controversy no official dares invite.

That’s fine. And it’s the law. Ultimately, I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him. Alas, as of now, the plan seems to be to do nothing at all.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.