Familiar Affairs

The only film genre more formulaic than romantic comedies is Hong Kong action. Every time out it's the honorable cops versus the craven triads [or honorable triads and craven cops]. At some point we are introduced to one or more soulless, doting, ineffectual female characters who exist only as testaments to the hero's startling animal magnetism. There are always double and triple crosses ending in bloody showdowns. In Hong Kong action, bullets are drawn to foreheads like East Asian Mafiosi to the heroin trade.

There's often a mystery to unravel or a game of cat and mouse. Those films lacking in mystery generally compensate with a revenge plot and absurd amounts of blood--gushing out of foreheads split in two with precise gunplay.

For better and for worse, Infernal Affairs [Hong Kong action titles also generally sound like soft core porn] finds a way to incorporate each and every on of these things into a single film.

You've got your cops, who hunt your gangs who push your drugs. You have no less than two dumb female love interests, a testament to the stunning virility of both our hero and his nemesis [differently heroic in his own right]. You have your dumb former love interest, a testament to our hero's devotion to his work. I counted one double, one quadruple and one quintuple-cross, leaving everybody any of the main characters ever cared about dead. Lots of bullets find their way through lots of foreheads.

Infernal Affairs' central conceit, further, has been done countless times, but is developed well enough to be exciting. See, instead of having a triad mole in the Police Department or a cop deep undercover within the triad, Infernal Affairs does both.

Since Hong Kong action conventions have no qualms with presenting honorable criminals, Infernal Affairs allows itself to offer dueling heros. Both are so incredibly good at what they do that each man quickly realizes the existence of the other. Both are so dependable and honorable that their respective bosses [who they are deceiving remember] quickly puts each man in charge of sniffing out the other. So each man is aiding the establishment he has infiltrated while simultaneously seeking to undermine it. Sound tough to follow? It is. Probably about as hard to follow as this review.

The plot is so convoluted that I'm sure I missed the significance of half the stuff that flashed onscreen. The nods, the tapping fingers, the obsessive use of morse code. But rather than alienate the viewer, Infernal Affairs becomes incredibly compelling, because this confusion seems to mimic the confusion the characters themselves--who have had to essentially kill their real identities--must feel, constantly serving two masters.

All of this makes Infernal Affairs one of the best and most faithfully executed Hong Kong thrillers I've seen, taking convention to such a dizzying extreme that it somehow becomes fresh again.

Then finally, when one man emerges triumphant over the other, the ending is bittersweet. Both of these individuals had been treading the path of redemption, only to find those paths intersecting in the deadliest possible way. Also bittersweet is the denouement, in which those moronic female characters are trotted back out to weep and gnash their teeth lest we forget that this fallen hero was also some kind of super-virile God-man.

The last note strikes sour, but that's the fundamental tension of a story that borrows this heavily from the genre that inspired it. A step in either direction is the difference between being a masterpiece or a complete failure.

Infernal Affairs is rated R but has very little actual violence and no profanity or sex. On several occasions, though, Szechwan noodles are flung disrespectfully.

Read the full thing here.

Another blog on science and morality

Last week I was challenged by [or I challenged, I can't remember] the Sandpoint Reader's conservative op/ed columnist to a duel over intelligent design. A battle for hearts and minds. He's no slouch. His father aparently having invented televangelism, he's no doubt accustomed to reconciling irreconcilable things [the Christian call to charity and the millions of dollars swindled annually from TV audiences to continue God's ministry--in Bentleys, wearing fur coats]. I haven't read his half yet, but here's mine. Once the new issue is online, which might be months, I'll pass the link along. If you visit this blog with any consistency, you've read modified versions of this countless times. This time, though, I come strapped with quotes! Without further ado . . .

Evolutionists have refused to take part in the intelligent design hearings in Kansas. It's beneath them, they say. ID is just creationism in a more inclusive blanket. Current Intelligent Design proponents, though, say it's unfair to lump them in with the quaint ideas of creation science. Their conclusions are based in observation, not dogma. Indeed their conception of life's origin is so pure that they are able to even see through the near religious zealotry of the Darwinists. They are the hip new kid on Science Street. They've come to shake things up. Except Intelligent Design isn't new, and their underlying goals probably aren't even science.

The Discovery Institute is a major ID think tank based out of Seattle. They have published a five year plan called the "Wedge Strategy" aimed at igniting their "natural constituency . . . Christians" against what they called the morally destructive power of scientific materialism [a broad term under which evolution sits].

But is it good science to question a theory's moral implications?

Science is, by nature, descriptive, not proscriptive. Science attempts to explain what is, not what ought to be. The question of how we ought to live is the business of philosophers and theologians. Put differently, the moment a scientist turns away from a theory because he worries the ideas will lead to immorality or worries that the ideas are somehow dangerous, he ceases to be a scientist.

Which is fine, the world needs people to discuss ethics and morality, to contemplate the way people ought to act toward each other and toward their world.

But we don't call these people scientists.

And if their primary interest is "[t]o defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies," Intelligent Design theorists are most certainly not doing science.

Those, like William Dembski, who seem to truly want to prove ID is science [and who rightly see the wedge strategy as a hindrance] nevertheless fail to realize that their work is meaningless. It may ultimately be considered science, but only in the way students dropping different sized fruits off buildings to gauge gravity is science.

ID breaks no new ground, it offers no new insights. They take existing data, draw a contrary conclusion, and stop because that's all the farther their conclusion can possibly lead. God did it, end of story.

"Kansas wants your child to get a crappy job."

That was the title of my first draft. I wrote it to be funny, but it's essentially true. These Kansans, they want your child to go to heaven, but down the path they propose, a crappy job is likely to be the best earthly reward available. Intelligent design teaches children who have been brought up believing in something greater than themselves that the God they trust rewards and encourages ignorance.

Intelligent Design suggests that, whenever there is a puzzle that's too tough to crack, we should assert that God made it so, and all the pieces fall into place. Do that and we'll go to heaven. Whenever the words of an ancient people, translated hundreds of times over thousands of years, do not match up with what we see before us, right now, today, Intelligent Design teaches us to shut our eyes and follow blindly. Do that and we'll go to heaven. If something seems unlikely, it is a miracle. Inquire no further, we'll leave this wretched, over-populated, disease-infested earth behind. We'll go to heaven.

But I don't believe that blind obedience is the same as faith. Neither Abraham nor Job nor even Jesus carried their burdens lightly. They questioned their God. They sought answers. Why, then, should we think God now wants us to bury our heads in the sand? The most absurd thing about Intelligent Design is that it broadly asserts life was created perfectly, yet asks us to ignore our most perfect and valuable possession, our big human brains. ID posits that God gave us a glorious intellect, but doesn't want us to use it. That is more than paradoxical, it's moronic.

The debate fundamentally boils down to chance, a roll of the dice in a history so remote that we cannot even fathom it. Yes, the chance of certain organic compounds lining up to form certain replicating amino acids is a tough bet, but billions of years is a long time to get lucky. Neither Evolutionary biologists nor Intelligent Design theorists know what happened that day, but they draw their conclusions from the same set of data. Given long odds, creationists and intelligent design theorists like to point to the glorious unknowable omnipotent force of God and say that's all the answer you need. Look no further children. They then hang up their quill and inks and go back to comparing Genesis to Aristotle's Physics while starvation and disease create untold agony in billions of people. They say God made us perfectly and that disease is just decay. But if it's just decay, how do we stop it? What medicines exist to stop decay? None yet. Will there ever be such a drug? With a research program built on the principles of ID, I can't imagine how. Unless God hands it from on high.

Evolutionists, though, take God at his word.

Believing Him when He said He was unknowable, they focus on what can be known. Over the last two hundred years, as what we know has increased, the facts suggest more and more that evolution is the most correct theory we have. As we learn more, the theory expands and contracts to become more correct still. Along the way, we come to better understand ourselves, we cure diseases, solve problems and even, you know, get good jobs.

Aristotle lived 400 years before Christ. If we trace the legacy of Intelligent Design back through creationism, back through Saint Thomas Aquinas' cosmological argument we end up eventually at Aristotle. Design theories have been around for almost 2500 years, Evolution has been around for less than 200. In a tenth of the time, evolutionary theorists have told us more about our organic world and its composition and inner workings than design arguments have ever been able to. That is why the vast majority of scientists who also have deep and abiding faiths [Christians, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, whatever] are Evolutionists, not Intelligent Design theorists. Evolution explains things better, it solves more problems, it helps more people, it makes the world a better place. It eases pain. What could be more moral?

Read the full thing here.