SPOILER ALERT! I’m about to tell you the entire movie, but you should watch it anyway.

CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT!  Everyone has seen this warning on their coffee cup.  Ridiculous, right?  Frivolous, right?  Everyone knows that coffee is hot.  Do you think you know about the lawsuit that triggered this warning?  Think again.

Stella Liebeck of New Mexico bought coffee from McDonald’s.  She was sitting in a car, holding the coffee between her legs (no cup-holders in the car), when she spilled it in her lap.  She suffered third degree burns on her legs that required skin grafts.  During her lawsuit it was discovered that McDonald’s policy required franchise owners to keep their coffee temperature at 82-88 degrees C or 180-190 degrees F.  Water boils at 100C or 212F.  It was also discovered that McDonald’s had over 700 reports of similar incidents and had done nothing about it.  Mrs. Liebeck was awarded $2.9 million in compensatory and punitive damages.  This amount was later reduced in a private settlement.    Soon after the verdict was announced, a concerted media campaign started, making Mrs. Liebeck and her lawsuit a national joke.  The terms ‘lawsuit lottery’ and ‘jackpot justice’ were kicked around.  So began the battle for so-called ‘tort reform’ that would cap the damages that juries could award.  BTW, McDonald’s now keeps their coffee at 77C or 170F.

Nebraska couple Lisa and Mike Gourley were pregnant with twins.  Without going into the medical details, through the malpractice of Lisa’s OB/GYN, one of the twins was deprived of oxygen in the womb and suffered severe brain damage.  In the subsequent lawsuit the jury awarded the Gourleys $5.6 million for lifetime care without knowing that the Nebraska State Legislature had capped damages for all civil cases at $1.25 million, which the trial judge imposed.  Appeals to the state’s Supreme Court confirmed the cap amount as constitutional, shifting the financial cost of caring for the boy from the doctor’s insurance company to US taxpayers through Medicaid.

Seeking to ensure that state supreme courts continued to provide pro-business decisions, the US Chamber of Commerce (USCC), launched a campaign to elect pro-business judges to courts throughout the country.  They started with the state of Mississippi and Justice Oliver Diaz, considered to be pro-plaintiff, who was up for re-election in 2000.  The USCC spent a great deal of money in a negative campaign against Diaz and in favor of his opponent.  Diaz had to get a co-signed loan to finance his own campaign.  Amazingly, he won.  Almost immediately however, he was investigated and charged with accepting bribes (the loan), and tax evasion by federal prosecutors from the Bush administration.  He was eventually acquitted on all charges but it took 3 years to clear his name.  Under the taint of past indictments, he lost a re-election bid in 2008.

Many corporations seek to avoid lawsuits altogether and so have written into the fine print of employee and customer contracts, a mandatory arbitration clause which prohibits public lawsuits, and imposes secret arbitration by a judge hired by the company.

Nineteen-year-old Jamie Leigh Jones signed just such a contract with KBR/Halliburton before she went to Iraq.  When she arrived she found that she was not housed in the promised female barracks, but was instead housed with men.  In less than a week she had been gang-raped and then after reporting it, locked in a shipping container for her ‘protection’.  As of 2011 she had been fighting for 4 years to have her case heard in open court.

But that’s the US, right?  That couldn’t happen in Canada, right?  It’s true that judges aren’t elected in Canada, but you should probably still investigate before you have to go to court.

I like this book because I like to follow politics; real politics.  While I did not read his first book, The Best Laid Plans, the author did well enough to fill me in on what had happened.  In many ways this book borders on fantasy: a scrupulously honest politician? Crises of conscience? Ministers resigning honorably?  When have we ever seen that in Ottawa in the last 30 years?  And did we fall into a time warp? The Progressive Conservatives still exist and there’s no Bloc Quebecois?

I know this is intended as a humorous book, but I felt the author leaned far too heavily on stereotypes.  The stereotypical crazy Scot, Angus McLintock; the backroom operator, Bradley Stanton; the feisty senior, Muriel Parkinson; the negative campaigner, Emerson “Flamethrower” Fox; the punk rockers Pete 1 and Pete 2; and the religious fundamentalist, Alden Stonehouse.  The only two characters that were half-way ordinary were McLintock’s campaign manager Daniel Addison, and his girlfriend Lindsay.  Even so, Daniel comes across, rather annoyingly, as some kind of lovesick puppy when it comes to Lindsay.

Speaking of Alden Stonehouse, I think the author missed the boat with this character.  Fallis merely used him as a vehicle for splitting the conservative vote with Angus McLintock’s opponent, Flamethrower Fox.  But, being a religious fundamentalist, he ought to have been all over Daniel Addison for his unmarried living arrangement with Lindsay.  It was a plot twist begging to be exploited, yet the author passed it by.

Still, despite it’s shortcomings, this was a pretty satisfying book, depicting political leaders doing the right thing, something we as voters all hope for.

Robert Redford heads and directs an all-star cast telling a story that brings the audience back to a time in American history that many would rather not talk or even think about.  It is the early 1970s.  The war in Vietnam is dragging on with no apparent end in sight.  Student protesters are becoming dissatisfied with their ineffective peaceful tactics for ending American involvement.  A radical and violent movement forms to bring the war to domestic soil.  They are dubbed The Weather Underground, and they become notorious for a series of bombings of domestic government targets throughout the country.

In this story, a cell of this movement has committed a bank robbery in Michigan in which a security guard was shot and killed.  Three of the members of the cell believed to be involved were never caught and remained at large; that is until one of them, Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), decides to turn herself in after 30 years, and is arrested on the way to doing just that in Albany, NY.  A local reporter, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), begins poking around the story and soon discovers that a local lawyer, living under the alias Jim Grant (Redford), is actually another wanted member of that cell and exposes him in print.  This sends Grant on the run, not to escape, but to seek a third member of the cell, Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), who he believes can clear him in the robbery and murder.

Reporter Shepard pursues him to Michigan, followed closely by the FBI.  While there he meets the policeman that headed the investigation at the time, Henry Osborne (Brendan Gleeson).  He also meets Rebecca Osborne (Brit Marling), Osborne’s adopted daughter, who turns out to be a key figure in the story, and not just a source of information.

While we’re on the subject, I have a real problem with the casting choice for the character of Rebecca Osborne.  At the time of production and release of this movie, Brit Marling was no more than 30 years old, while the facts of the story put her character much closer to 40 than 30.  The producers made no attempt to depict her as the age she realistically ought to have been.  They made a weak attempt to rationalize this by giving Shia LaBeouf the line, “You’re older than you look.”

Call this a political opinion if you want, but the whole tone of this movie really bothers me.  It presents this group with great sympathy when they were really little more than domestic terrorists, using the violence of the government as a justification for their own violent behavior.  Call yourselves a political movement and you can rationalize almost anything.

As I said at the start, this was an all-star cast, with appearances by Sam Elliot, Terrence Howard, Stanley Tucci, Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Jackie Evancho, and others.  BTW, Harry Potter movie fans will recognize Brendan Gleeson as none other than Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody.