Roger Avary

Welp, I think we're done here. Trump himself is now saying he buckled under the pressure of Hormuz. It's as bad as it could possibly be. He's saying aloud that Iran can have anything it wants because America can't afford the staring contest. If this is his own explanation in his own words, then the fact that the sanctions relief is front-loaded...suddenly becomes important. The fact that the inspections regime that will verify compliance will be negotiated by an American side that has already admitted defeat, that needs this more than the opponent needs it...is now significant. And the fact that the proxy system is now recognized as legitimate by the United States -- is suddenly exactly the disaster you feared it might be. And the fact that America has declared aloud that it's not actually capable of imposing its will even in the world's most vital energy chokepoints, causing its allies in the Gulf to already begin to seek a new accommodation with Iran -- makes all of this worse than Obama and worse than the JCPOA. Remember: the great unfixable flaw of the JCPOA that none of its boosters ever had a good answer for was that it merely kicked the can down the road. It solved nothing. Trump's deal, as of this moment, is not even close to accomplishing so much. "Iran never won a war and never lost a negotiation," Trump famously said of Obama's deal (as a reporter reminded him at today's press conference). Ironic that the Iranians would win a negotiation most spectacularly against a man who styles himself the greatest negotiator to ever grace the White House. So what does it all mean? It means that in the coming years, nuclear programs will sprout like mushrooms after the rain throughout the Middle East. It means that many nations will now build out new and larger ballistic missile arsenals. It means that the state system will give way before the march of the region's transnational ideological axes. Minorities will again be trampled, new wars will be fought by stronger states to dominate the power vacuums within weaker ones. You're thinking of Israel in Lebanon -- but that's just a specific campaign against a specific enemy. Think Turkey, which right now occupies a region of Syria vastly larger than Israel's presence in Lebanon. Think heightened Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen and a new influx of money and guns to the different sides in Libya. It means, in other words, that we will have a few more wars to fight, a few more technologies to invent to deal with this new age of cheap missiles and drones -- and also of supersonic Chinese missiles bearing nuclear warheads that Iran will eventually, inevitably, be capable of deploying against us. And it didn't have to be this bad. (And maybe, when he's heard all the criticism, it won't be.) He could have left something, anything, to concede later. He could have kept the Iranians a little bit in the dark, just a smidgen, as to just how defeated America feels. Israel's position in all this is simple, and more or less unchanged from last week. America gave us more than we had a right to ask for. But we may be going it alone from here out. Dust off the nukes. Maybe test one somewhere far away from anywhere. Quadruple the interceptor production lines, double the size of the Mossad and the Air Force. And no, don't let Hezbollah breathe, not for a second. It's the 1960s again. And Israel will have to defeat a couple more enemies before it can once again eke out a few decades of peace.

My very first morning filming Detention in LA, which was supposed to be an $800k shoot, Iatse showed up with a ballot box and said the crew was going to "vote" to turn it union or I get shut down. I had no choice but to flip it and spent the rest of the shoot scrambling to find money every three days. After it was done, my own DGA union kept sending me bills to pay for fines on a movie I spent my own money on. Of course all this expanded my budget which then put me in another tier of SAG which then increased the budget again. It was an endless union squeeze that kept pushing the budget up, with me holding the bill. As they say in Goodfellas, Fuck You Pay Me.

"When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. This thing could park a couple hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it until it was all over." This film doesn't just hold up, it stands strong. Less an action movie (which the latter films increasingly became), and more a thriller, it remains the best adaptation of a Clancy novel. Don't get me wrong, the Harrison Ford films are good, but this one maintains the spirit of its source from start to finish, and Alec Baldwin is still the best onscreen iteration of Jack Ryan. The cast is absolutely stacked, with everyone turning in solid work. James Earl Jones, Courtney Vance, Stellan Skarsgard, Tim Curry, Joss Ackland, Fred Thompson... don't even get me started on Sam Neill's endearing, heart rending performance. Then you've got Scott Glenn (in his best role) going toe to toe with the titanic Sean Connery, who sells the deepest emotion and calmest control with only a twist of his mouth or the gleam in his eye. The script is a master class in tension, every scene tightening until the conclusion. John McTiernan (director of 'Die Hard') never loses his way with this film, never calls for more than a scene needs, despite the global crisscrossing and spiraling ensemble, and his editing team never wastes a frame. It's a film of massive scale mostly caught in camera, including submarine miniatures and real life warship and aerial maneuvers (CGI had yet to turn its sparkle on everything in sight). You feel the cold and the wind when Ryan has to jump from a helicopter into the ocean alongside a sub. Basil Poledouris delivers a fittingly grand, yet claustrophobic score, capturing the stakes of a war fought within these steel cans. The rousing Russian pride, the soaring American grit, the subtle loss, the tendentious peace... it all coalesces like something from another time, from a world built on nerves we were already forgetting. 36 years later, and you still want to believe this could have happened in the shadowed halls of power, in the dark depths of the sea... where some good men kept the whole powder keg from blowing. "Welcome to the New World, Sir." The Hunt For Ref October (1990)