Rest. Rest. Rest.

When Drew came back from picking up the mail today, Jody and I were holding the fort at the store. As the staff level was adequate (not to mention that Drew was awaiting the arrival of a friend who will be helping out at the store, and whose skills we'll be using to do a little remodeling), I went home and went to sleep after eating a bowl of the soup I made last night. The past couple of days had been somewhat hard.

I fell asleep after watching a little of Minority Report, owing to heavy eyelids, not to boredom. When I woke up I watched the rest of the film, and was impressed. It reminds me a little of a film I watched the other night starring Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne, called Just Cause, which like Minority Report presents the viewer with a false climax, after which the plot acquires a second wind and things start to really crackle.

The difference, though, is that in Minority Report, there is no plodding to a predictable climax, as was the case in Just Cause (although it's interesting to see what JC does to a number of common stereotypes). In MR, the viewer is at a complete loss to understand how the hero has been set up (as, understandibly, he is, too). When the time comes for the denouement, though, things snap into place like a Marine guard coming to attention for the President. It all makes sense, on several levels.

And having been let up for air, so to speak, the viewer is immediately whisked back down into the murk for "the rest of the story."

Some might not like the somewhat cerebral tone of the movie, especially after this false climax, but I thought it was very interesting, and important, although perhaps not entirely realistic. At times, I found myself noting aspects of our projected world of 2054 (the year of the film, if memory serves), and wondering if, perhaps, they were understated.

But overall, the film was good, which is what I fully expect of any film based on a story by Phillip K. Dick (who gave us the stories that resulted in Blade Runner and Total Recall, among others). If Dick's name had not been mentioned in connection with this film, it's doubtful that Cruise's "star power" would have garnered my attention.

* * *I took advantage of DirecTV's capability to allow customers to modify their programming over the web and dropped the Showtime package in favor of HBO, as I kept looking at the programming offered by the latter and thought it better than the former. As advertised, the change took effect after only a few minutes.

This evening, I watched The Gathering Storm, with Albert Finney playing Winston Churchill in the period between 1934 and his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty after Britain declared war on Germany, followed by Little Boy and Fat Man, starring Paul Neuman as Gen. Leslie Groves and Dwight Schultz as J. Robert Oppenheimer in the period of the Manhattan Project.

Each movie seemed to have a drum to beat, but it was harder to grok the latter flick, as I think it tried to bite off too large a portion of history - and deliver too long of a sermon - for one movie.

* * *There's an interesting article by Condoleezza Rice in today's International Herald Tribune (or at least in the online version). In it, she compares and contrasts the way some other countries have undertaken disarmament, to the path chosen by Iraq:

The world knows from examples set by South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan what it looks like when a government decides that it will give up its weapons of mass destruction. The critical common elements of these efforts include a high-level political commitment to disarm, national initiatives to dismantle weapons programs and full cooperation and transparency. In 1989, South Africa made the strategic decision to dismantle its covert nuclear weapons program. It destroyed its arsenal of seven weapons and later submitted to rigorous verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Inspectors were given complete access to all nuclear facilities (operating and defunct) and the people who worked there. They were also presented with thousands of documents detailing, for example, the daily operation of uranium enrichment facilities.

Ukraine and Kazakhstan demonstrated a similar pattern of cooperation when they decided to rid themselves of the nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and heavy bombers inherited from the Soviet Union. [...] Nuclear warheads were returned to Russia. Missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed or dismantled - once in a ceremony attended by the American and Russian defense chiefs. In one instance, Kazakhstan revealed the existence of a ton of highly enriched uranium and asked the United States to remove it, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

Early on in the rest of the article, Rice's assessment of Iraq's approach to disarmament highlights Iraq's having filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.

For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles that it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations concerning more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.

Iraq's declaration even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word for word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text. Far from informing, the declaration is intended to cloud and confuse the true picture of Iraq's arsenal.

We live in interesting times.

Cheers...