Where's My Equal Protection?

Lindsay Lohan, the celebrity famous for being famous, is getting "an opportunity." On probation for ... oh, who knows what? ... she was brought before a California judge this past week for the fourth time in a year. This time it was for felony theft, following her walking out of a Los Angeles jewelry store with the goods around her neck. The necklace she took was priced at somewhere north of $2,000.

The judge in the case chose to assign the wholesale value to the necklace, making the matter a misdemeanor, with significant consequences to Lohan's probation. Now she can be put back on the street to do her important work in movies; word is, according to Associated Press, that the non-star is to portray the wife of mafia don John Gotti in some upcoming schlockbuster.

It's not like this judge has done Lohan any favours. All she gets now is a few hundred hours of community service, which will allow her to bring a camera crew into the county morgue and the women's shelter to document her ordeal. We will be treated to carefully scripted and rehearsed scenes of Lohan talking soulfully to the camera about how the dead bodies and abused women around her have affected her outlook on life, how their troubles have redounded to her own maturing understanding of herself. Kind of like those semi-celebrities on Dancing With The Stars when they talk about the obstacles they've surmounted to dance with Tony Dovolani or Chelsie Hightower.

See, if the judge had sent Lohan to prison for more than the few hours that her last three arrests have earned her, think of how that would drive up the box-office value of Lohan's name. What an imaginative advertising department could do with that!

But instead, she'll just have to limp along with her "opportunity" to be filmed doing meaningful work slopping out the autopsy tables.

Of course, we're all equal before the law; I know I read that somewhere. I suppose some would say it's just an aspirational statement, but suppose it actually is the law. That means that wholesale value, or some other lesser value, should be the scale by which such things are measured when thieves make off with your stereo and your iPad, not the exorbitant price you paid Best Buy and Apple for the goods.

 

I later learned that, while her arrest for stealing the necklace had been reduced to a misdemeanor, she was, at the same hearing, sent to county jail for four months for violating parole. She actually served about a month before she was released because of overcrowding at the county jail.

And Another Thing

Adding to my little rant about immigration a while back, another point about immigration:

We Americans ought to have the right to presume that government is doing its job. One of its jobs — in a fundamental sense, one of its primary jobs — is to keep our borders secure. That's part of "providing for the common defense." We ought to be able to presume that anyone walking around on the streets of our towns has the right to be there, and that anyone presenting themselves for work in our shops has the right to do so. Absent some reason to be suspicious of that person's status, we ought not to have to do government's job of ferreting out illegal foreigners. Absent some reason to overcome that presumption, we ought not to have to check their immigration or citizenship status, any more than we ought to be checking to make sure that drivers have licenses to operate a vehicle. 

That's just part of being a free society, even if other people don't like it.

Immature Fun: Hanna

Hanna
directed by 
Joe Wright;
starring 
Saoirse Ronan, 
Eric Bana, and
Cate Blanchett

The film starts with Hanna stalking an elk in the snow and shooting it with an arrow. While she guts it, we hear a man's voice say, "You're dead. I've killed you." The next hour and forty-five minutes are taken up with chase scenes, fight scenes, and flash-backs with the emphasis on the flash. We learn that the man, Erik, is by way of being Hanna's father, that he has brought her up in an arctic wasteland to be a sort of teen Terminator, with all the skills of a ninja and the empathy of, well, a Terminator. We follow her through the seamy underside of Morocco and western Europe, chased by cartoon cut-outs of evil American (naturally) government agents and their sleazy minions.

Some of those cartoon cut-outs might have been interesting, had they been given any chance to develop themselves on screen: Marissa, lightly played by Cate Blanchett slipping in and out of a Southern accent; Isaacs, intensely played by Tom Hollander channeling Elton John and Amon Göth; and Erik himself, played by Eric Bana, who gets just enough screen time to be The Good Guy, but not enough to make us care.  We also meet Sebastian (Jason Flemyng) and Rachel (Olivia Williams), ditzy post-modern hippies who go some way toward justifying forced sterilization; and their daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden), who is still young enough not to have yet proven her unworthiness to live. Not that it matters: she falls into Marissa's hands, and Marissa kills just everybody she meets.

As an action-adventure film, Hanna gets a top grade. It's all action, and stays far enough this side of science-fiction to keep our eyes from rolling. The adventure is sort of two-dimensional, largely because none of the characters get developed, not even Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) herself. The script doesn't get bogged down in explaining how a slight teenaged girl could have the strengths of Schwarzenegger and Mr Data combined. But it's put out on the screen artfully enough that the question is an idle, passing wonder instead of the obstacle it might have been in the hands of a less relentless director. It doesn't distract.

The sad thing is, I guess, that you just know that a lot of fascinating development of Marissa, Isaacs and Eric got cut, partly because it came down to a choice between characters and action, and partly (in the case of Isaacs) to preserve a PG-13 rating (which apparently stands for "Pretty Gruesome"). Isaacs could get an NC-17 on his own. As a result, we are left with a fully enjoyable movie and an immature, formulaic script, beautifully filmed from bookend-beginning to bookend-finish.