Sunday, September 09, 2018

Stop Brett Kavanaugh (Time is running out!) Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris<moveon-help@list.moveon.org>
To  
Dear MoveOn member,
Leaked emails show that Brett Kavanaugh misled the American people about his views on Roe v. Wade and his opinion of it as "settled law."
And that’s just the beginning of Kavanaugh’s misleading testimony. Brett Kavanaugh is not telling us the whole truth.
I'm fighting with everything I've got to make sure that Brett Kavanaugh never gets to sit on the Supreme Court. So are MoveOn and the protesters inside and outside the Senate chamber.
This is a lifetime appointment. After the Senate votes on his nomination, there's no going back.
But I'll be blunt: Time is running out, and we need your help.
I am so grateful for all of the work that MoveOn members have been doing to build the energy and urgency of this fight—and I can honestly tell you that it is having a big impact inside the halls of Congress.
Over the past week, MoveOn members have made tens of thousands of calls to Senate offices. I've heard from thousands of MoveOn members myself, with messages of support and encouragement to fight! These calls are critical to senators’ decision-making. They are how we gauge how our constituents are feeling, and as we saw last year in the fight to protect health care, they can be a deciding factor in how Congress votes.
MoveOn and allies have hosted rallies outside of the Capitol to show their opposition to Kavanaugh—even as hundreds of Americans have bravely shown up to protest inside the halls of Congress.
MoveOn's Video Lab team has been working overtime to create powerful videos showing the consequences of Kavanaugh's confirmation, which have already racked up millions of views and have helped spread the word about this dangerous nominee. I was honored to be featured in one of these videos!
And mobilizations in key states are taking place as we speak, while constituents share their personal stories—often deeply personal ones—that will be crucial as on-the-fence senators make up their minds about Kavanaugh.
It is critical that these efforts continue full steam and that energy remain high in these final days before the vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination. That's why I am now asking for your help:
Republicans insisted on rushing these hearings—two months before the National Archives could finish reviewing Kavanaugh's paper trail from his time as "the nerve center" of George W. Bush's White House. This kind of rushed, secretive process is unprecedented.
Republicans dumped 42,000 pages of documents regarding Kavanaugh’s judicial record on us, the hearing committee, the night before the hearing began, with no time to read them. My colleagues and I urged the Republicans to postpone the hearing, but they refused.
The Trump White House is hiding another 100,000 pages of documents, invoking an unspecified constitutional privilege.
And this week, Republicans openly encouraged Kavanaugh to refuse to answer even the most basic questions—and he happily obliged, because when I asked him about last year's deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, about his support for the Voting Rights Act, about protecting marriage equality, about women's access to abortion … he wouldn’t give an answer.
What’s being hidden about Brett Kavanaugh and his record? We know what it is: He is a dangerous partisan, and under no circumstances does he belong on the highest court in the land, a position from which he could negatively impact the lives of tens of millions of Americans for decades to come.
We are in the final rounds of this fight, and what happens in the next few days will impact us soon and for generations to come. But there is hope. I see it from my colleagues in the Senate. I see it in the faces of the women and men who are protesting and rallying and sharing their stories. I see it in you, Alfred.
Thanks for all you do.
–Senator Kamala Harris
P.S. On Thursday, during his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh referred to birth control as "abortion-inducing drugs." He knows full well that there are laws that impact women and their bodies, but when I asked him during his confirmation hearings,: "Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?" he couldn’t think of any.
Want to support our MoveOn's work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump's agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation's pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it MoveOn needs your support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
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From Veterans For Peace- A Message from Executive Director, Michael McPhearson Veterans For Peace

Veterans For Peace<vfp@veteransforpeace.org>
T  


Veterans For Peace is part of a growing international peace movement. Our work is more important than ever, and we are stronger because of you.  And your support is vital.  Can we count on you to join us by supporting our work with a donation?

We all know the horrendous impacts of recent U.S. wars on the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine and throughout the Middle East. As well as U.S. military operations around the globe. Recently the President signed the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act - NDAA which sets spending and policy priorities for the Department of Defense. The appropriations process provides $717 billion to fund programs outlined in the NDAA including $24.1 billion for 13 new battle force ships and more submarines, $2.3 billion to purchase 20 F-35B jets, low yield nuclear weapons and much more. Even more concerning to me is an observation by Breaking Defense, an online Defense Magazine, “These are only the beginning of budgetary changes that reflect the shift in strategy from regional conflicts and counterinsurgency to great power conflicts.” Sounds like shades of WWI.

And to be clear, this is not about Trump, Republicans or Democrats. This NDAA reflects both parties’ addiction to War.

And while we work to build peace abroad, we also face huge challenges to build peace at home. Rising hate in all its forms, inadequate healthcare including privatization of veterans healthcare, low wage jobs, separation of families and the impact of climate change as seen by unprecedented fires sending smoke across the country. Social and economic pressures and the circus in Washington make it very difficult for people to pay attention to foreign policy. We must keep uncovering those connections as we build a full spectrum movement for peace and justice.  

These moments can feel overwhelming and hopeless.  However, I see what does not make the headlines.  The hundreds of thousands of people who are speaking out and against the status quo.  New people join those of us who’ve been in the streets for decades and it continues to be a moment that contains great opportunity towards building a new and better world, free from war-making and disastrous economic policy.

Your individual action and our organizational activity is how we create the change we need. Your financial support keeps the doors open and the engine running.

I’m honored to be a part of an organization that brings together so many awesome people--veterans, military families, peace and anti-war activists, justice seekers, peacemakers and at times former battlefield enemies.  When we continue to create spaces of commonality, rather than focus on what divides us, nothing but the warm fire and energy of inspiration can happen. Here we are, former servants of war, now prophets of peace, working together to share and think about how to resist war.

We are stronger because of you. Will you join us by donating today?  Your contribution of $75, $100, $200, or $500 allows us to continue our efforts in this pivotal moment.
Michael McPhearson
Executive Director, Veterans For Peace

Veterans For Peace apologizes if your donation and this email crossed paths!
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When At First You Practice To Deceive- Once Again, He’s Been A Bad Boy-John Heard And Goldie Hawn’s “Deceived” (1991)-A Film Review





When At First You Practice To Deceive- Once Again, He’s Been A Bad Boy-John Heard And Goldie Hawn’s “Deceived” (1991)-A Film Review





DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Deceived, starring Goldie Hawn, John Heard, 1991

I believe every woman when she gets married, or these days becomes part of a “significant other” relationship, wonders deep in her mind whether the man she is marrying is who he says he is. Has not been if it came right down to it a psycho murderer like the hubby in the film under review Deceived. (Men can make their own judgments going the other way, but I am talking specifically about women here.) This is not normally how I would start a film review but the subject matter in this one strikes close to home so I felt compelled to open up with this line of inquiry. When Greg Green assigned this film to me, a film I did not see when it was first released in 1991 and so did not know what it was about, who or what was being deceived, and I mentioned how I wanted to start the review he balked, although finally he let it pass through under some kind of catharsis theory, mine. Even my long-time companion Sam Lowell balked at my strong statement against the whole male half of the human race perversely interested in marriage or its facsimile. But I prevailed.

The reason for my strong reaction to the plotline of this film was that long before Sam and I got together I had been married, mercifully for a short time, to an American pyscho type like Jack Saunders, Frank Sullivan, Daniel Sherman or whoever he was, played by seemingly rationale John Heard, although he didn’t have a predilection for murder if he didn’t get his way in the world. (That was my first marriage my subsequent one although not successful was more a matter of a parting of the ways, of two ships passing in the night too long.) I had met a man through a close friend, who in the end would be almost as shattered at I by the experience as I was, back in the 1960s during the Vietnam War when many weird things were happening not all of them fitting into the “newer world” we were seeking. We fell in love, he, Francis, his real name, and me, at least I did, and we were married shortly after we met and subsequently moved to Washington, D.C where he claimed he had a job offer from a high ranking governmental official. (I won’t give specific details and names since this is not about them and they were totally unaware of what was happening.). This after Francis allegedly had been honorably discharged from the military through these connections since he had otherwise been scheduled in that hated year 1969 to go to Vietnam as an infantryman (as I would later learn through Vietnam veteran Sam really “cannon-fodder).

We went to Washington where I had assumed he was working for that governmental agency and while times were tough as they can be for newly marrieds I thought things were going okay. Then we had a burglary in our small apartment and almost all our items of value were “stolen.” We filed a police report but nothing ever came of it, burglary then, maybe now too, a fact of life in big cities and small, mostly unsolved. Then a few weeks later the other shoe dropped when I got a call from a collection agency in Silver Springs up on the border in Maryland telling me that Francis had forged a company check while he was working for them and that they were going to prosecute if they were not made whole in the matter (their legally-based expression). Which we did pay back after Francis came home and told me that the government job had fallen through and he was afraid to tell me. Had gotten the collection agency job on the fly in order to have money coming since we were just scraping by since I was only working in a department store at the time. Having no particular reason to be in Washington where neither of us had roots we headed back to Albany and stayed with my parents for a while.

That was when the final straw broke. During all those several months down in D.C. Francis’ mother was getting calls from the FBI looking for Francis who they claimed was AWOL (as part of his lies he had told me that he had to go to Fort Dix to be discharged after his connections pulled their “strings”). Francis said nothing to me about it until one day his mother called up and told him that she had given them our address so he could straighten things out with them. That is when he told me that he indeed was AWOL, had been all along since he did not want to go to Vietnam (and weirdly had worried that he would die if he went over there and had never been married). Francis in a moment of candor also told me that he had staged the Washington burglary to get money for us to live on since he was broke and the collection agency job didn’t pay much. He also admitted to many other lies about his life and achievements. On the advice, solid advice, of my pious parents I filed quickly for divorce on mental cruelty grounds and started a long and expensive process to have the marriage annulled by the Catholic Church so I could marry again without flak from the Church (in those days I was a serious practicing Catholic). After the FBI came to my family’s house and took Francis away I never saw him again although he called several times trying to get back together. Jesus. I would go a number of years without male companionship due to that horrible series of deceptions so don’t tell me I don’t know about such men. That I am being crazy for stating that every woman also harbors such deep concerns when she starts a serious relationship.

As dear sweet Sam says in his reviews here’s the story-line. Young artsy Adrianne, played by Goldie Hawn, meets and marries Jack Saunders in New York City (as already telegraphed he had other aliases but let’s stick with this name), an art curator played by John Heard and they have a child. They go along for several years until the wheels begin to fall off for reasons never made clear except greed and avarice on Jack’s part when forgeries and missing items start happening in his department with him as a prime suspect after a curator had been murdered for no known reason. To get out from under he tells Adrianne he needs to go to Boston for an auction. That is a turning point since a fellow worker of Adrianne’s on hearing from her that Jack was in Boston mentioned that she thought she had seen him entering a hotel bar. He talks his way out of that even when Adrianne finds out things that place him in the city during that period. Shortly after this Jack “dies” in a car accident.

That is a tripping point for when Adrianne goes to try to collect on Jack’s Social Security contribution she is shocked to find he was not really Jack Saunders who had died a number of years before but his closest friend Frank Sullivan. Then Adrianne becomes a snoop, a detective tracking down the real deal including finding Frank’s mother who tells her that Frank was a bad son (an understatement under the circumstances). Presto Jack/Frank pops up at his mother’s New York apartment after luring Adrianne there. Tells her some cock and bull story about being blackmailed by a guy named Daniel Sherman and he needed to “die” to get out from under but this Sherman was looking for a very valuable ancient necklace to make things go away.

This is all bullshit since Jack/Frank is also Daniel with another family out in the suburbs to boot. He wants that damn necklace for whatever reason and he will kill if he has to even though allegedly he doesn’t want to hurt Adrianne or their daughter. Given his murderous track record, the curator, the hitchhiker who took his place in that car accident, his mother, and who knows maybe even beloved Jack Saunders Frank is a sure bet to kill Adrianne for that freaking amulet. And he almost does except by an interesting and inevitable sleight of hand Adrianne does him in by her own deception. This film has too many moving and unresolved moving parts to be a highly recommended thriller but is first-rate evidence for my contention that every woman worries about what kind of hell she might be getting into when she goes down the aisle. Remember my story if not this one.
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As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Otto Dix

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Day 11/11/1918 at 11 AM Commences-Some Creative Artists Who Fought/Died/Lived Through The Nightmare That Destroyed The Flower Of European And American Youth –Otto Dix 




By Seth Garth


A few years ago, starting in August 2014 the 100th anniversary of what would become World War I, I started a series about the cultural effects, some of them anyway, of the slaughter which mowed down the flower of the European youth including an amazing number of artists, poets, writers and other cultural figures. Those culturati left behind, those who survived the shellings, the trenches, the diseases, and what was then called “shell shock,” now more commonly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is duly recognized, and compensated for at least in the United States by the Veterans Administration in proven cases reacted in many different ways. Mainly, the best of them, like the ordinary dog soldiers could not go back to the same old, same old, could not revive the certitudes of the pre-war Western world with it distorted sense of decorum and went to what even today seem quirky with moderns like Dada, Minimalism, the literary sparseness of Hemingway, and so on. I had my say there in a general sense but now as we are only a few months away from the 100th anniversary of, mercifully, the armistice which effectively ended that bloodbath I want to do a retrospective of creative artistic works by those who survived the war and how those war visions got translated into their works with some commentary if the spirit moves me but this is their show-no question they earned a retrospective.

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On The Cultural Front of The 1960s Uprising-The 50th Anniversary Of The Musical “Hair”-A Few Thoughts

On The Cultural Front of The 1960s Uprising-The 50th Anniversary Of The Musical “Hair”-A Few Thoughts 



A link to an National Public Radio On Point program featuring the 50th anniversary of the musical and it meaning then, and now:

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/05/04/fifty-years-of-hair  



By Si Lannon


The first time I heard that Seth Garth was going to preempt political aficionado Frank Jackman and do the 200th anniversary of the birth of Communist Manifesto writer Karl Marx was upon publication under the former’s name. Which pisses me off since I have been squeezed out apparently of getting any assignments around the incredible number of 1968 events which are having their 50th anniversary commemorations. (The Marx 200th anniversary thing intersects 1968 via a then growing interest in his theories among students and young radicals once the old tactics and strategy around Democratic Party takeover politics went asunder.) Upon privately complaining to site manager Greg Green he gave me this assignment to make a few comments of the 50th anniversary of the musical Hair, on Broadway at least although it had been off-Broadway the year before, one of the few musicals that could have possibly captured some of the pathos, bathos and essence of what was going on in all its messy splendor in that year.

Hair represented that trend away from goodie two shoes formula entertainment like song and dance musicals and thinly pitched family dramatic productions. That represented what the audiences of the 1950s were interested in and still had, have a place in the Great White Way scheme of things. But the unacknowledged (at the time not so now once the cultural critics took their long look at the subject) effect of the vanguard work that was being done in little theaters for little money for little audiences finally took root. Artaud’s Theater of the Absurd, Brecht’s didactic efforts and the like finally found a more receptive general audience. So Hair in 1967-68 did not raise as many hairs among the theater going public as it might have earlier in the decade when it would have been treated as an end of run “beat” saga. That is no to say the subject of intense profanity, vivid sexual reference, an interracial cast and endless paeans to drugs of all sorts didn’t raise hackles, didn’t have members of the audience walking out shaking their heads but as word got out that this was a generational sage for the agents of Aquarius the thing couldn’t be stopped. And as one voice in the above mentioned link noted she was still playing in, albeit in Vermont, one of the last real refuses of the survivors of the Generation of ’68 is still being produced someplace in this wild wicked old land.         




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The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise”

The Battle Of The Titians-Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” Vs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “This Side Of Paradise” 








By Zack James


No question as Josh Breslin has seemingly gracelessly aged he has become more perverse in his greedy little mind. That trait has exploded more recently as he has finally hung up his pen and paper if one can do such a feat and stopped writing free-lance articles for half the small press, small publishing house, small artsy journal nation. All this hubbub boiled over recently when he told his old friend from his growing up in Riverdale days, Sam Lowell, about his “coup,” his term, in upsetting the applecart of the American literary pantheon by claiming on very flimsy evidence that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s early work, the one that gave him his first fame, This Side Of Paradise, could be compared with his masterwork The Great Gatsby. The perverse part came when he told Sam that he had only  written the article as a send-up of all the literary set’s fretting about who and what works belong in, or don’t belong in, the pantheon also based on as very little evidence.       

The whole faux dust-up came up because now that he was retired he could write a little more freely since he had neither the pressure of some midnight deadline from some nervous nelly editor waiting impatiently for him to dot that last i before rushing off to the printer nor the imperative of reining in his horns to insure that he could keep up with the gathering payments for alimony, child support and college educations for a three ex-wives and a slew of well-behaved kids. The latter being a close thing that almost broke his spirit. He had accepted a free-lance at-your-leisure assignment from Ben Gold, the editor of the Literary Gazette, who told him he could write a monthly column on some topic that interested him. As long as it was about three thousand words and not the usual five or six thousand that had to be edited with scalpel in hand and arguments every other line about its worthiness as part of the article.         

Josh admitted to Sam that he was intrigued by the idea and after thinking about the matter for a while decided that he would concentrate on reviewing for a 21st century audience some of the American masterworks of the 20th century. The beauty of this idea was that he would no longer have to face the dagger-eyed living authors, their hangers-on and acolytes every time he noted that said authors couldn’t write themselves a proper thank you note never mind such a huge task as writing a well-thought out novel that they had forced him mercilessly to review the relatively few times he entered the literary fray. He had made his mark in the cultural field by reviewing music and film mostly but would when hard up for dollars for those aforementioned three wives and slew of hungry kids take on anything including writing bogus reviews of various products like dish detergent and mouthwash although more recently a spade of reviews on technical gadgets like things for computers which he frankly didn’t know or give a fuck about. Couldn’t even figure out how to attach the damn things to the computer. Now he could leisurely delve back into the past and cherry-pick a few bright objects, write a few thousand words and move onto the next selection.

Or so he thought. Josh had made Sam laugh, had made himself laugh as well, one night when they were at Sam’s favorite watering hole, Teddy Green’s Grille over Lyons Street in their old hometown after he had finished and Ben had published his first “thought” article in the Gazette. He had admitted that his take on the issue was perverse, was a low-intensity tweaking of all those in the literary racket who labored long, hard, and winded to specialize in “deconstructing” some famous author in order to make hay in their own bailiwicks, making their own cramped careers out of the literary mass of real writers. He had stirred up the hornet’s nest by his “innocent” comparison of the two Fitzgerald works.                 

Josh told Sam that he had been rather naïve to think that the literary gurus would take his little heresy as mere grumbling of an old man and pass it off as so much blather. He had reasoned that one could get passionate about who would win the World Series or the Super Bowl, one political candidate over another, some worthy cause but that the almost one hundred year old vintage of a couple of books set in the Jazz Age 1920s by a now unfashionable “dead white man” author long since, very long    since, dead should be passed in silence. Not so. No sooner had the Gazette come out than some silly undergraduate English major had e-mailed Josh about how wrong he was to compare the “juvenile antics,” her term, of privileged white college boy Amory Blaine over up from nowhere strivings after fame and fortune of one Jay Gatsby when all the old-time money and position was against him. Of course he had had to defend his position and sent her a return e-mail summarily dismissing her championship as so much sophomoric half-thinking “politically correct” classist claptrap that has overrun the college campuses over the past decades, mostly not for the better.  

End of debate. No way since thereafter a couple of academic heavyweights, known Fitzgerald scholars, had to put their two cents worth in since an intruder was invading their turf, an odd-ball free-lance music and film critic well past his prime according to one of their kind as if he himself had not been pan-handling the same half dozen admitted good ideas for the previous forty years since he had gotten tenure. In any case no sooner had that undergraduate student dust-up settled down than Professor Lord, the big-time retired English teacher from Harvard whose books of literary criticism set many a wannabe writers’ hearts a-flutter took up the cudgels in defense of Gatsby.

Pointed out to ignorant Josh that  the novel was an authentic slice of life about the American scene in the scattershot post-World War I scene and that Paradise was nothing but the well-written but almost non-literary effort of an aspiring young author telling, retailing was the word the good professor used, his rather pedestrian and totally conventional youth-based comments. Those sentiments in turn got Professor Jamison, the well-known Fitzgerald scholar from Princeton, Scott’s old school, in a huff about how the novel represented the Jazz Age from a younger more innocent perspective as well as Gatsby had done for the older free-falling set who had graduated from proms and social dances to country club and New York Plaza Hotel intrigues. So the battle raged.   

Josh laughed loudest as the heavy-weights from the academy went slamming into the night and into each other’s bailiwicks and stepped right to the sidelines once he had started his little fireball rolling. Laughed harder when he, having had a few too many scotches at his own  favorite watering hole, Jack’s outside Harvard Square, thought about the uproar he would create when he tweaked a few noses declaring Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the definite Jazz Age novel and put Gatsby in the bereft dime store novel category by comparison.


It was that idea that Josh wanted to use Sam as a sounding board for, a guy to tussle out the pieces with. After Josh had received the response that he did from well-paid hucksters in the academy to the first article in his monthly column he decided to change tack and actually act as a provocateur, a flame-thrower, and rather than placid kind of educational pieces he would go slightly off-the-wall dragging some of those in the literary pantheon through the mud. So that throwaway idea of pitting two titans like Hemingway and Fitzgerald together to fight mano a mano for kingpin of the Jazz Age literary set began to geminate as the fodder for the next article for his column. Hence, Sam, Sam as devils’ advocate, since Josh and he had had many go arounds over literary subjects ever since they were in high school English classes together. Watch for the bloodless blather from the literati on that one when he gets done.     
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The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds

The Gang That Couldn’t Rob Straight-Owen Wilson’s “Masterminds



DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

[Sometimes even a well-oiled, hard-bitten film critic or heck even somebody just into the cinema will get caught out by a big name star in a production or some actor that you really like for some personal reason. The “forget” part is that not everything these favorites do on screen is pure gold (except maybe in their pockets if they are bankable and the film really needs their name to float, or not go under). A whole separate branch of the criticism business could be devoted to some of the reasons why established stars wind up as in the film under review below playing in “turkeys.” Maybe it is just money, maybe the lure of their names always on the marquee, maybe after reading the script they really believe the thing can work. I am too close to retirement to figure the motivations out but some younger mind could make a nice career out of working that racket. S.L.]         

Masterminds, starring Owen Wilson, 2016

Sometimes when a friend recommends a film it turns out to be a dud, turns out to be less than expected and in the case of the film under review, Masterminds, make that much less than expected considering the cast. Makes one wonder why a great comedic actor like Owen Wilson took the job, took the chance to work on a funky film that had a chance to go in one of two directions, a straight line comic look at a true story or a farce that bombed. It took the latter. The direction toward the farcical led the vehicle astray when all is said and done.  

Here is the skinny, here is why the title of this piece can be called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight taking a page from an old Jimmy Breslin book. The story line based on a true incident about the doings around one of the great cash robberies in banking history, the Loomis heist in North Carolina in 1997 for seventeen big ones-17 mil, okay not chicken feed then nor now. David Scott Ghantt, a security guard on a Lommis armored truck was hook-winked, no make that bewitched and bewildered by his sexy armored truck partner, Kelly, who had walked  out on the job over some harassment. A while later she wound up working hand and hand with a low-life short end of the stick criminal Steve, played by Wilson, who wants her to con, I am being kind here since this is a family sensitive outlet, David into being the inside man on a big heist of the company’s loot. David balked at first but Kelly lured him with her charms despite the fact he was two minutes to midnight away from getting married to another woman.       

The heist was a piece of cake for an inside job and David was told to lay low in Mexico until the coast was clear. The false lure to get him to go minus the dough was Kelly joining him soon, yeah, soon. The idea Steve thought though was that David was to get the short end of the straw, was the odd man out as he, Steve, was not going to share the dough with anybody but his loving wife and two unlovable kids.


Meanwhile David was still forlornly expecting Kelly to join him in Mexico. Sucker. Double sucker because Steve threw the Feds onto him and he led them a merry chase before he got wise to what Steve, and Kelly, were up to. Steve in a panic, putting greed before good sense ordered a hit on David by a screwball hit man who couldn’t hit right-as was to be expected. They wind up switching their identities (it’s a long unfunny story so just go along with me) so that David wound up at Steve’s over-the-top mansion ready to get even. And he does in a way after the Feds got definitive proof that low-life greedy Steve and not pure-heart David was the evil mastermind behind the caper. Steve did 11 years, David pure-heart drew seven and Kelly a bunch too. With that enticing story-line it was a shame that the film was marred with so many unfunny slapstick jokes, some much low-rent bathroom humor and such a waste of an obviously talented cast. Yeah, what was Owen Wilson thinking. Some day when they do a retrospective of his work this one will not be included, I hope.      
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