Hazing

• Winston & Strawn LLP announced today that a Winston team led by litigation partners Dan K. Webb and Matthew R. Carter filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of Pat Fitzgerald, Northwestern University’s former head football coach.
• Northwestern and university president Michael Schill are the named defendants.
• The suit seeks in excess of $130 million in compensatory damages and as-yet unspecified damages for emotional distress and punitive damages.
• None of the players interviewed was able to point to a specific instance of misconduct by a Northwestern football player or coach.

Winter on Market Street, and it’s time to switch off one’s phone and retreat to the cinema cave for the 12 days of hibernation known as the Sydney Film Festival. From the 50 or so films I caught this year, my top five (in no particular order) are below.

Afire

• Afire is the latest from writer-director Christian Petzold.
• When they arrive at the house, they find out they will be sharing it with Nadja (Paula Beer).
• Afire is a wicked comedy about everything going wrong and the capacity of “the quake of love” to transcend this, to pull us out of ourselves into a genuine engagement with the world.

A Storm Foretold

• Trump’s former mover and confidant Roger Stone may be an easy target for this documentary from Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen.
• Guldbrandsen’s footage from camera and phone is intercut with archival material, some involving nasty explosions of street violence.
• Guldbrandsen’s documentary is an intimate and effective image of a political operator, remarkable for what Stone allows him to capture on camera.
• Read more:
  Why Congress can't curb Trump's power to commute Stone's sentence and pardon others

Rheingold

• Rheingold is an irreverent, riotous, rags-to-riches, macho gangster yarn from German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin.
• While other biopics often painfully try to recreate the sense of reality of the subject, Rheingold joyfully dispenses with any sense of reality from the beginning, delighting in its own absurdity and exploiting the fabulous nature of its premise for all its cinematic worth.
• Rheingold is an amoral, violent and kinetic cinematic romp.

Sisu

• Sisu, from Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander, is set in 1944.
• The Nazis, led by equally stoical psychopath Bruno (Aksel Hennie), seize the opportunity and attempt to rob Aatami of his gold.
• The premise of Sisu is patently absurd, but it works so well because it is played seriously for all its worth.
• Every aspect of Sisu is well done.

May December

• Twenty or so years earlier Gracie and Joe were all over the tabloid headlines.
• Gracie, in her mid-30s, had a sexual relationship with 13-year-old Joe in the pet shop where they worked.
• Berry is playing Gracie in a new Hollywood movie and wants to understand her character.
• Read more:
  Hollywood has got method acting all wrong, here's what the process is really about

Other great ones

• The problem with top five lists is that great films are invariably omitted.
• This year this seems to be more the case than usual, with at least ten other films that could make the list.
• It is an exceptional film and will probably be one of the best of 2023.

Only two terrible films

• There were only two films I regretted seeing.
• Because the acting is so bad and the dialogue even worse, the whole thing becomes very irritating to watch.
• Alas, 50 films, around a third brilliant and only two duds?

• In April he passed new legislation introducing electronic military draft papers, which will make it much harder to avoid conscription.
• The last wave of conscription in September 2022 prompted an exodus of hundreds of thousands of young men to neighbouring countries.
• So to encourage men to enlist, the Kremlin has launched a massive media campaign appealing to the notion of “warrior masculinity”.
• Two paradoxes, which are legacies of the fall of the Soviet Union, can help explain the lukewarm response to the call to arms.

Unwilling to serve

• I conducted these interviews in 2012-2014 and found the majority of men I spoke with expressed personal unwillingness to serve in the Russian army and were strictly against their own sons serving.
• Conversations about the military were one of the main grounds where Russian men negotiated and established their masculinity, as well as that of other men.
• Despite Putin’s military reforms, my interviewees regarded Soviet and post-Soviet Russian armies as two completely different social institutions.
• The former was seen as a social lift, a place where masculinity is forged and where ordinary men become heroes.

Demilitarising masculinities

• The Russian army in Ukraine is overwhelmingly made up of soldiers from the poorest regions of the country.
• I found this in my research, where it became clear that the Soviet-era citizen-soldier has turned into a citizen-spectator.
• Individuals may vocally support militarism while refusing to personally engage in any military practices.

• Only half of U.S. high school students (51%) say they feel a sense of belonging at their school, according to new research from Qualtrics (Nasdaq: XM).
• In contrast, in college where students exercise greater choice in whether to attend school and where 81% of students feel like they belong at their school and 86% of students are glad they attend their school.
• Bullying is prevalent in high schools and can lead to a lack of a sense of belonging.
• According to the Qualtrics study, 51% of high school students say they have witnessed bullying at their school.