Fun

Movie: Crime 101

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Info

  • Released: February, 2026
  • Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry
  • Director: Bart Layton

Summary

A sad-sack detective (Mark Ruffalo) is getting divorced, moving to the beach, and obsessed tracking down a thief that is untraceable. Naturally, rest of dept thinks his theory is crazy.

The thief (Chris Hemsworth) is meticulous, calm, and socially inept. He has fancy clothes, fancy car, fancy watch, fancy apartment all with no character. Naturally,
he falls in love, awkwardly, and decides one last big score. His boss decides he’s lost his edge and replaces him with a psycho thief.

Hemsworth then tries to recruit an insurance agent (Halle Berry) for high end customers to help him identify his victims. Of course, she’s put down on the job and gets fed up. After agreeing to help with the theft, Berry instead betrays him to Ruffalo.

For the final score, everything goes crazy, all the bad guys lose, all our characters are compromised, and they all live happily ever after.

Opinion

Mark Ruffalo looks like Peter Falk in Columbo. The story is almost good. I thought the title, Crime 101 was about learning how to do crime but really it’s referring to Highway 101 in California — that’s probably the best twist of the movie.

Fun

Movie: Mercy

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Info

  • Released: January, 2026
  • Starring: Chris Pratt
  • Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Summary

In the near future an AI called Mercy acts as judge, jury, and executioner (effectively). Imagine
all personal media, location data, surveillance camera, transactions, etc is
placed in the cloud by law. When a murder occurs and the AI determines there’s a high probability of who did it then a trial starts immediately and the defendant has 90 minutes to convince reduce the AI’s probability to < 92% — otherwise execution happens.

There've been only 18 such trials, I assume they were all found guilty.

Naturally, a detective who's a big supporter of Mercy finds himself in the executioner's seat, accused of murdering his wife and the clock is ticking.

Opinion

Mercy is 75% an action movie, 15% about justice, and 10% a mystery. The idea of a rush to judgment by the AI is too obvious. That anyone could effectively defend themselves in the circumstances ludicrous. At least it's reasonable that Chris Pratt's character could be guilty though the twist at the end is too much.

Politics

Obituary for a Failed Presidency

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Obituary for a Failed Presidency | The New Yorker:

…the stalking menace of these past few years. As Trump became more powerful and less constrained by successive waves of White House advisers, he was correspondingly more and more outrageous, untruthful, and unmoored from reality. His sense of grievance and victimization escalated; so, too, did his threats, name-calling, and public provocations. He fired the F.B.I. director, a Secretary of State, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, three White House chiefs of staff, and two—or three, depending on whose account you believe—national-security advisers. He pardoned war criminals and boasted of complete and total vindication in the Mueller investigation, even though it offered no such thing. He forced the longest government shutdown in history when Congress would not fund his border wall—all while continuing to claim that Mexico would pay for it.