The Yin Blog

More on action actresses

Steve Bainbridge throws down the gauntlet on my assessment of action actresses:

Don't watch Chuck? It's the best scripted show on TV. And you really don't want to mess with Strahovski's Sarah Walker.

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And then Tung really went off the rails:

Uma Thurman was quite good in "Kill Bill" but . . . I dunno. I mean, Scarlett Johannsen beat up a bunch of guys in "Iron Man 2" but I'm not rushing to put her on my list of best action actresses.

I'm, sorry. The Bride doesn't just beat up a lot of people. She destroys them. Exhibit A: The NC-17 version of the fight with Gogo and the Crazy 88s. "Any more subordinates for me to kill?"

To some extent, I think Steve and I are maybe focusing on different things, which is understandable since I didn't define clearly the criteria that I was using in my assessment.  Since I was criticizing Maggie Q's acting in "Nikita," I was not looking at how lethal the female characters are depicted, but rather, how convincingly the actresses pull off depicting the characters.

I mean, in the comments to my original post, Steve says:

The Bride could kick Xena or either Nikita's ass with one hand tied behind her back. Sidney Bristow would last about 10 seconds against Sarah Walker and about a nanosecond against The Bride. I'll concede that Mrs. Smith could probably take Sarah Walker, but not The Bride.

Now, if we're talking about the characters, this is clearly wrong with regard to the Bride (Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill") versus Xena.  I mean, the Bride has an impressive kill count in the movies, but Xena has probably killed multiple thousands of people in the TV series.  And while the Bride has mastered that 5 step heart death strike, Xena can paralyze with finger strikes to the next.  But more importantly, Xena can kill Greek gods and goddesses!  So, no, I do not think the Bride could kill Xena.

Continuing on the characters, I'll grant that the Bride probably beats either Nikita, Mrs. Smith, or Evelyn Salt.  From the clip of Sarah Walker on Steve's blog post, I do not think that Walker beats Sydney Bristow.

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Switching to what I had in mind originally, which is how convincingly do the actresses in question pull off the physical fight scenes, I will potentially stir up a hornet's nest here, but I was not that impressed by Yvonne Strahovski's fight scenes.  They weren't bad, but there were too many quick cutaways, and she didn't look like she could really beat up the guys in those scenes.  That's the problem that I have with Maggie Q; it's not that Nikita, as written, can't beat people up; she does.  She just doesn't look convincing.

Uma Thurman as the Bride?  I'll concede that she looks convincing.

Not the best place to "boot" a car. . . .

Okay, we have a small parking lot for faculty & staff here at the law school, so I understand why the parking enforcement people are constantly checking permits and giving tickets.  Tickets deter unauthorized parking and generate revenue.  But when you have someone who doesn't respond to the tickets, something else has to be done.

But really, the boot?  That doesn't seem like the best idea in a small parking lot, since that's one fewer space available until the bootee shows up to pay accumulated tickets, etc.  It seems to me that towing would be a better step of escalation.

Best action actresses

Tonight marks the return of new episodes of the CW's "Nikita," which I've been dutifully watching mostly out of loyalty to the USA Network's "La Femme Nikita" (1997-2001).  I've blogged before about "Nikita's" flaws, but I've come to believe that the lead actress, Maggie Q, is part of the problem.  She's just not that believable as a kick-ass action star.  She's so skinny that it's painful to watch the all too common scenes where she strolls around in a bikini.  And her acting isn't bad in general, but it doesn't convey toughness.

This got me thinking about various actresses who've played tough heroines or villains in action movies or TV shows, and why some were good and others not so good.

Lucy Lawless: In real life, Lawless is kind of slender, but as Xena, she really looked like she was inflicting massive damage on the bad guys.  Even better, when Xena was evil, Lawless was even better at depicting the mayhem and carnage in her wake.  I'm not sure there's an actress who does a better job of snarling.

Angelina Jolie: I used to think that whole "carrying a vial of Billy Bob Thornton's blood on a necklace" thing was pretty weird, but that was a while ago.  I haven't seen the Lara Croft movies, but seeing her in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and especially "Salt" has turned me into a believer in her fight scenes.

Summer Glau: Glau is petite, but in the movie "Serenity," she has a couple of amazing fight scenes -- basically her against dozens of much bigger opponents.  She used to train ballet, and the fight choreographers tailored the fighting very effectively to her ballet skills.

Michelle Yeoh: I think she was the only Bond Woman who could plausibly have beaten up James Bond.  Well, maybe Halle Berry too.  Yeoh's been in a ton of Hong Kong movies, but this fight scene in the otherwise vastly overrated "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" explains her standing.  The other actress, Ziyi Zhang probably belongs on the list too.

 

UPDATE (1/29): Steve Bainbridge weighs in, both in the comments here and at his own blog, with a video clip of his own.

Hey, didn't I see something like this on "24"?

The title of the news story says it all: Would-Be Suicide Bomber Killed by Unexpected SMS From Mobile Carrier

It kind of reminds me of season 4 of "24," when Jack Bauer manages to blow up a suicide bomber by remotely triggering the suicide bomb vest . . . .

Innumeracy strikes Above the Law

Elie Mystal lauds Canada for having a better legal education system than we do here in the United States:

Canada’s key to success seems to be actually regulating its law schools and assuring a basic level of high quality across the board. There are only 20 law schools in Canada, which means that (gasp) not everybody who wants to go can go. Yet despite demand, Canadian law schools also cost less than their American counterparts.

I can't speak to the cost factor, especially since one never knows what law students are actually paying; certainly, not everyone is paying "rack rates."

But as to how Canada has only 20 law schools and is therefore not providing an oversupply of lawyers, Mystal -- and a Canadian career services director -- seem to be overlooking a very important fact: the United States has about 9 times the population of our northern neighbor!  Therefore, we would expect to have approximately 9 times as many law schools.

We have 199 ABA-accredited JD programs, so about 10 times as many law schools.  I guess you could argue from that that we're slightly over-supplied in law schools, but it looks a lot different than saying, gosh, Canada only has 20 schools and we have 200, wow, we should have so few too.

Leaving Portland for Chicago because of . . . air travel?

A local steel company, Evraz Inc., is moving its headquarters from Portland to Chicago because of the lack of adequate air travel from here to Canadian cities where many of its mills are located.

Yes, Portland's air travel options are less than you would expect given the size of the metropolitan area, which also means that prices are higher than you might expect.

But moving to Chicago?!?  That would mean using O'Hare International Airport all the time!

During my seven years in Iowa, I came to loathe O'Hare.  I can understand that air travel gets totally messed up if there's a foot of snow on the ground.  But I had problems with delayed or even cancelled flights even in reasonably good weather.  It's ridiculous to sit on the tarmac for two hours when the sky is blue and the outside temperature mild, but that's happened to me.  I've had flights from Chicago to Iowa City cancelled with the next available flight being so much later (like a day or even two) that it was much preferable to rent a car and drive the 220 miles.

I'm sure in the long run, the move makes sense for these steel execs.  Still, I can't help but laugh at the idea of moving to Chicago because of air travel.

Ghailani's life sentence

Embassy bombing conspirator Ahmed Ghailani got a life sentence today on his one count of conviction.  The judge rejected defense pleas for leniency, notwithstanding Ghailani's mistreatment during earlier U.S. captivity:

The judge said his sentencing decision shouldn't be taken as condoning any mistreatment Mr. Ghailani may have suffered. He said Mr. Ghailani may have remedies for any "any illegal and improper actions by our government." The judge said: "Today is about justice not only for Mr. Ghailani, but for the victims of his crimes."

I suppose Ghailani may be able to file some kind of Bivens claim and hope that the state secrets doctrine doesn't get the lawsuit kicked.  And then if he establishes that he was mistreated, he can hope that the jury will award him damages of more than $1.  But even then, he has this to contend with:

As part of the sentence, the judge also ordered Mr. Ghailani to pay $33 million in restitution.

I'm guessing that it's just going to be "even Steven" between the U.S. and Ghailani on the damages/restitution issue -- in the sense of neither side getting anything.

An obnoxious feature of the Affordable Care Act(?)

I went to my hospital today to have my eyes dilated as part of the vision checkup.  After looking at my health insurance card and driver's license, the receptionist said, "As part of the health care reform, we have to ask you for your race."

"Why do you need to know that?" I asked in the most mild, polite tone that I could, since it was not the poor woman's fault.

"You're free to decline to answer," she said, and added that it used to be really hard for her to ask this question.

I said that I was, quite obviously Asian, but apparently that was not precise enough for the requirements of the new health reform act.  It was necessary for some reason to classify me as not just "Asian" but "Chinese."

I have little reason to doubt the receptionist's statement that she had been instructed to collect this information.  I am curious as to what reason the government would have to make health insurers ask such a question . . . .

A Reinhardtian victory

In Premo v. Moore (2011), the Supreme Court, as it often does, reversed a Ninth Circuit grant of habeas petition from a state prisoner.  Moore had pleaded no contest to felony-murder under Oregon law after he and co-conspirators had kidnapped the victim, during the course of which Moore claimed that his gun went off accidentally and fatally shot the victim in the head.  In his habeas petition, Moore argued that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel because his lawyer had failed to move to suppress his confession to the police and that he had therefore been induced to plead guilty erroneously.

The primary precedent in this area is Hill v. Lockhart (1985), in which the Court explained that this burden means:

[T]he defendant must show that there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's errors, he would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted on going to trial.

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For example, where the alleged error of counsel is a failure to investigate or discover potentially exculpatory evidence, the determination whether the error "prejudiced" the defendant by causing him to plead guilty rather than go to trial will depend on the likelihood that discovery of the evidence would have led counsel to change his recommendation as to the plea. This assessment, in turn, will depend in large part on a prediction whether the evidence likely would have changed the outcome of a trial. Similarly, where the alleged error of counsel is a failure to advise the defendant of a potential affirmative defense to the crime charged, the resolution of the "prejudice" inquiry will depend largely on whether the affirmative defense likely would have succeeded at trial.

In Moore's case, the problem with demonstrating that the predicted trial result would have changed had his confession been suppressed is that he had confessed about the killing to two other people -- a fact that every court until the Ninth Circuit found critical.

In an opinion by Judge Reinhardt, the Ninth Circuit reversed and ordered relief granted to Moore.  That's not necessarily an absurd result.  The suppression motion probably should have been granted, and a confession reported by the police might be accorded more weight than confessions to other people who might have some shady histories.  However, Judge Reinhardt went far beyond such a restrained analysis and invoked a "harmless error" case that was decided on direct appeal following a trial (and hence a much different posture than a habeas case with a guilty plea) to create a seeming new rule in evaluating the effectiveness of counsel.

The extreme distortion of law wrought by the Ninth Circuit's opinion is best demonstrated by the fact that it was reversed by an 8-0 vote (with Justice Kagan recusing herself).  There were 7 votes for Justice Kennedy's majority opinion, which was a judicial smackdown of the Ninth Circuit, with such descriptions of Judge Reinhardt's opinion as "wrong," "doubly wrong," "improper [transplantation of legal doctrine]," "no sense in which the state court's finding could be contrary to [precedent]," and "[h]indsight and second guesses are also inappropriate."

Did it have to be such a bad smackdown?  Justice Ginsburg's concurrence was much more mild:

To prevail  under the  prejudice requirement of  Strickland v. Washington, 466 U. S. 668, 694 (1984), a petitioner for federal habeas corpus relief must demonstrate “areasonable  probability that, but  for counsel’s errors, he would not have pleaded guilty and would have insisted ongoing to trial,” Hill  v.  Lockhart, 474 U. S. 52, 59 (1985). As Moore’s counsel confirmed at oral argument, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 32, Moore never declared that, better informed,he would have resisted the plea bargain and opted fortrial.  For that reason, I concur in the Court’s judgment.

One has to wonder how much the extra admonishment resulted from Judge Reinhardt's excesses.  True, this was going to be a difficult case for Moore to prevail in, given the Hill requirement of showing that he would have gone to trial and been likely to win there.  Still, a more moderate opinion in his favor might not have triggered the Supreme Court's response, which forecloses a number of issues from being favorably decided in future cases with "better" facts.

Who did Judge Reinhardt help?  Not Moore, who now goes back to his 25 year sentence.  Not future criminal defendants who plead guilty, who, even if they have better arguments, can't raise the same ones here, since those have been decided in favor of the state.

Another quick thought about Asian mothers

It occurred to me that the biggest beneficiaries of Amy Chua's parenting memoir, apart from Chua herself, may well be the moms of numerous Asian Generation Xers, who may well be thinking, "Wow, I thought I had a strict childhood, but at least it wasn't anything like that!"  I basically said that in my earlier blog post, but it's a recurring observation in conversations I've had with a number of Asian-Americans.  It reinforces my concern about the labeling of this parenting style as "Chinese," as opposed to "Chua's."