Peter Dinklage should have been somewhere in Europe this week, shooting a Hunger Games prequel called The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Instead, though, he remained in New York to support his friend, director Sacha Gervasi, at a Tuesday screening of Gervasi's 2008 cult documentary, Anvil!, at a downtown arthouse called the Angelika (where the picture had run for four months straight upon its original release).
Because Anvil!—or, to give it its full, Spinal-Tappy title, Anvil! The Story of Anvil—is back. Or at least will be on September 27, for a nationwide, one-night-only rerun at some 200 theaters across the country. Not only that, but Anvil itself—the hapless, semi-tragic Canadian metal band at the heart of this rousing and unexpectedly heartwarming film—will be returning to the road soon in support of Impact Is Imminent, the group's nineteenth album in a 40-year career of nonstop non-hits.
The movie is about this long, soul-grinding slog, which has been sustained by the intensely supportive friendship of the group's founders, singer and guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner (note Spinal Tap echo). The dedication of these two men has never ebbed. They've never stopped shooting for the stars, and they're still convinced that a long-delayed career breakthrough is just around the corner.
"It kind of gets harder and harder to believe in that, the older you get," said Dinklage, seated before the Angelika screen in front of a packed house. The actor was 34 when his own big break came along in the form of the lead role in the 2003 film, The Station Agent. Clearly, any delay can be karmically repaid.
The movie begins in 1984, with Anvil at the height of their powers. They're playing a rock festival in Japan along with such stars as Scorpions, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi. Lips is up onstage, snarling and posing in front of a wall of Marshall amps and raking the strings of his guitar with a big pink dildo.
"Really amazing live performers," says Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, wheeled in for talking-head duty. "Sometimes life deals you a tough hand."
"I don't know if it was the Canadian thing or what," says Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, another early fan still puzzled by Anvil's failure to launch.
Director Gervasi, an Englishman who was once actually an Anvil roadie (he later moved on to become a heroin addict and to go to law school), had to mortgage his home to make the movie, and we can see where the money went—mainly into traveling all over Europe with Kudlow and Reiner and their current roster of Anvil bandmates, playing one low-paid (or unpaid) gig after another. (In Romania, at the Monsters of Transylvania rock festival, which the band is hoping will be a big deal, we get a quick look at some of the 174 people who showed up.)
Back in the States, the group's two mainstays carry on with their day jobs. (Kudlow drives a truck for a catering company; Reiner works in construction.) In the face of all setbacks, Lips is irrepressibly upbeat. "It could never get worse than it already is," he says. Robb, on the other hand, has occasional moments of melancholy. What went wrong? somebody wonders. "I can answer that in one word…three words. We don't have good management."
But things have gotten a little better since the release of the film 14 years ago. The two partners have both been able to quit their day jobs. And they've never stopped recording (on borrowed money, mainly). Even looking back on all the screwed-up tours and thieving concert promoters, Lips feels he's been living the dream—traveling the world, meeting the stars (Scorpions' Michael Schenker and the late Lemmy Kilmister also put in mini-appearances). Life has basically been good. "Things went wrong," he allows. "But at least there was things to go wrong on."
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]]>A Romanian court has told Constantin Reliu he is dead and there's nothing he can do about it. Reliu left the country to work in Turkey in 1992. After not hearing from him for years, his wife had him declared dead. Turkey deported him last year. When he got back to Romania, he found he was officially dead. The court said that decision can't be overturned.
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]]>At the beginning of this year, transitional controls on the migration of Bulgarians and Romanians within the European Union were lifted. At the time, I argued that free marketeers should welcome Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), whose members are not fans of the E.U.'s free movement policy, claimed that with transitional controls lifted, the crime rate would increase and between 350,000 and 400,000 Romanians will come to the U.K.
In fact, in the three months since the remaining transition controls were lifted there was a 3,000-person decrease in the number of Bulgarians and Romanians living in the U.K. While there has been an 18.5 percent increase in the number of Bulgarians and Romanians living in the U.K. compared to this time last year, Alan Travis points out that there will be 60,000 fewer Romanian and Bulgarian workers in the U.K. after the closure of an agricultural workers scheme.
One likely reason that there has not been a massive influx is that Bulgarians and Romanians have had the freedom to move to the U.K. since 2007; it is only the labour market that they did not have access to until earlier this year.
Scott Blinder, the director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said in January 2013 that "We just don't know" how many Bulgarians and Romanians would come to the U.K. in the wake of the change. Interestingly, UKIP leader Nigel Farage said something similar in a speech in September 2013:
And from the 1st of January next year, the risks increase massively.
The seven year period is up and nearly 30 million of the good people of Bulgaria and Romania have open access to our country, our welfare system our jobs market.
How many will take advantage of that no one knows.
The Home Office don't have any idea at all. The previous estimate was 13,000 in total. Migration Watch thinks 50,000 a year. It could be many times that.
Never mind that recent immigrants to the U.K. are net contributors to the British public finances. It is revealing that Farage accepts that he can't predict migration patterns.
Markets are much better than politicians at determining what the price and supply of labour should be. Policy makers should accept that they don't have nearly enough knowledge to manage immigration on that level, get out of the way, and let markets do their thing.
Watch Reason's recent debate on whether the U.S. should open its borders below:
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]]>Director Ilinka Calugareanu adds some thoughts here. Link via the Twitter feed of Kmele Foster.
I wrote about the integral role of movies and culture in Romanian politics (both before and after Ceausescu) in this 2005 Reason piece, which details how the show Dallas was miraculously smuggled into the dictator's shrinking TV schedule. For more on J.R.'s liberatory role, watch this Reason.tv vid:
The post How American Movies and a Brave Translator Gave Hope to Oppressed Romanians appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The High Court of Cassation and Justice found on Monday that Adrian Nastase illegally received 630,000 euros worth of imported goods between 2002 and 2004 and had work done on his house in Bucharest and a property outside the capital while he was in office.
The sentence comes less than a year after Nastase, the most senior politician to be jailed in Romania since communism collapsed in 1989, was let out after serving a third of a previous corruption sentence. He had hoped to make a political comeback in Romania's 2014 political elections, claiming the cases against him have been flawed and politically motivated.
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]]>Conservative Bavarian allies of Chancellor Angela Merkel say extra measures are needed to prevent "benefit tourism" in the EU.
But the foreign ministry, now run by the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), warned that questioning freedom of movement was "harmful to Europe".
Bulgarian and Romanian workers are now free to get jobs anywhere in the EU.
Bulgaria and Romania, the EU's poorest countries, were subject to temporary labour market restrictions when they joined the EU in 2007. Nine countries kept the barriers in place until 1 January.
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]]>The Rosia Montana project was due to become Europe's largest gold mining venture.
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]]>Alexandru Visinescu, 87, appeared before prosecutors to be presented with the charges. Between 1956 and 1963, he ran the Ramnicu Sarat prison where the pre-Communist elite and intellectuals were incarcerated.
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]]>Romania is among the European countries with the largest shadow economies as percentage of their GDPs, with Bulgaria ranking first however, with a 32.3 percent rate. Then comes Lithuania, with 29 percent, and Romania, third place. The smallest rates of shadow economy were posted by Austria – 8 percent, and Luxembourg, 8.2 percent. The Netherlands' shadow economy is also below the 10 percent threshold, with 9.8 percent.
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]]>The post Germany Threatening to Veto Passport-Free Travel For Bulgarians and Romanians appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Born in 1950 to Holocaust survivors, Kozinski grew up as a committed communist in Bucharest, Romania. On his first trip outside of the Iron Curtain, in Vienna, Austria, he experienced forbidden luxuries like bubble gum and bananas. It was his first taste of freedom, and it caused him to become, in his words, "an instant capitalist."
Today, Kozinski is responsible for some of the most influential—and controversial—legal decisions in the United States. Kozinski's rulings have challenged the Obama administration over the issue of same-sex marriage. In a case that tested the limits of parody and artistic expression, he has weighed in on whether a Barbie doll qualifies as a sex object. In one of the most influential dissents in recent memory, he caused federal prosecutors to drop all charges against a defendant who'd been convicted of smuggling of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexican border.
Kozinski sat down with Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch during Reason Weekend in Las Vegas for a wide-ranging discussion about freedom and the law. How do mobile phones and cloud computing affect our right to privacy? Why do judges interpret the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution so broadly? What's wrong with the practice of jury nullification?
Kozinski, a self-described libertarian, answers these questions, and many others, with the insight and wry humor that comes from decades of experience on the bench—and a childhood under communism.
About 50 minutes.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Alex Manning.
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]]>With 80 per cent of the polling stations reporting, the results confirmed exit polls that declared the Social-Liberal Union (USL) headed by Prime Minister Victor Ponta as winner in Sunday's poll.
Despite the fact that it (USL) has only held power since May, many voters saw it as the party of change because it has promised to roll back austerity cuts undertaken by prevous government.
Parties close to President Traian Basescu came in a distant second with nearly 17 per cent of the vote.
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]]>The death of actor Larry Hagman will no doubt bring many to write about his remarkable television career that included stints as Maj. Anthony Nelson on I Dream of Jeannie and J.R. Ewing on Dallas. But as Reason TV reported earlier this year, Romanians will remember him for helping overthrow communism.
Here is the original text from the June 15, 2012 video:
The oil-and-sex soaked TV show Dallas is back on the small screen. The unapologetically odious J.R., the unappealingly ethical Bobby and the uncontrollaby alcoholic Sue Ellen are all back, along with a new crew of young, hardbodied hotties to pull in viewers who have yet to start pulling in Social Security checks.
During its original run from 1978 to 1991, Dallas was an international cultural phenomenon with ratings higher than late-'70s interest rates. It was the most or second-most watched show in the United States for half a decade, showing up in ABBA songs and Ozzy Osbourne videos, and spinning off the megahit Knots Landing.
But Dallas' greatest impact ultimately wasn't in these United States but in communist Romania, where it helped topple the brutal Ceausescu regime.
Dallas was the last Western show allowed during the nightmarish 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu thought it showcased all that was wrong with capitalism. In fact, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap communist-produced cars."I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [communism]," Larry Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. "They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, 'Hey, we don't have all this stuff.'"
After the dictator and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve 1989, the pilot episode of Dallas—with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in—was one of the first foreign shows broadcast on liberated Romanian TV.
The impact of Dallas on global worldviews reminds us that "vulgar" popular culture is every bit as important as chin-stroking political discourse in fomenting real social change.
Throwaway cultural products influence far-flung societies in ways that are impossible for anyone, even dictators, to predict or control.
That lesson is more relevant than ever in a world where movies, TV shows, and music cross borders with impunity and the free West engages the semi-free East, whether in China or Iran. If the United States is interested in spreading American values and institutions, TV shows may go a lot further than armored personnel carriers.
Like Mikhail Gorbachev, poodle haircuts, and Members Only jackets, Dallas didn't long survive the post–Cold War world it helped create. But like an uncontainable gusher in a Texas oil field, the original series left us far richer than we ever dreamed possible.
About 2.30 minutes. Produced by Meredith Bragg. Written by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. For a fuller treatment of this topic, go here.
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]]>In the poll, 88 percent of those who cast
ballots voted to censure Basescu – but only 46 percent of registered voters took part, fewer than the required threshold of 50 percent of the electorate.
Parliament suspended Basescu in a decision backed by the leftist Social Liberal Union (USL) of Prime Minister Victor Ponta.
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]]>The hearing is to decide whether or not the referendum turnout on Sunday July 29th reached the 50 percent threshold to make it valid. The row has drawn criticism from the EU and from President Traian Basescu.
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]]>The post Romanian President Survives Recall Attempt; Turnout Too Low appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The two-month old government of Romanian Prime Minister Mihai Ungureanu failed a no confidence vote today, forcing the President to name a third Prime Minister in a span of six months. The last prime minister, Emil Boc, resigned after violent anti-austerity protests in February. The no-confidence vote, spurred by bitterness over austerity measures as well as claims of corruption, contrasts with the government's dissolution in the Netherlands, where the Prime Minister resigned for failing to bring the budget deficit down to the EU mandated levels it sometimes seems only the Dutch are trying to get to.
A new European budget pact, ratified so far only by Greece and Portugal, two EU bailout recipients, re-enforces the 3% of GDP limit on annual deficits and 60% of GDP for national debt that very few EU countries presently meet.
The Czech Republic's government is expected to survive its own no-confidence vote later today. Meanwhile, in France, Socialist Francois Hollande's is leading President Sarkozy by up to 10 points in opinion polls, running on a promise to re-open the EU's budget pact. Angela Merkel dismissed the idea as impossible, setting up a political clash with the potential next French President.
Reason's Tim Cavanaugh explains the myths of European austerity.
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