The Tiger Mother, Amy Chua, along with her husband Jed Rubenfeld, is back with her latest controversial book.

Let’s not pretend that we all haven’t noticed that certain groups of people in North American society consistently outperform the general population in conventional measures of success: financial, academic, and prestige occupations.  The authors dare to point this out and to offer an explanation that successful groups all share a set of traits they call the Triple Package: a superiority complex, group insecurity, and impulse control.

What’s ironic about their theory is that, if correct, no group can enjoy long-term, multi-generational success.  The more successful a group is, the less insecure it becomes, thus eroding a key component of the Triple Package.  There is great pressure put on group superiority complex by North America’s culture of equality where all people are nominally considered to be equal to each other.  Finally, the modern culture of immediate gratification undermines the discipline of impulse control.  I guess you can call conventional success, the culture of equality, and the pressure of immediate gratification the anti-Triple Package.

In this re-boot of the Paul Verhoeven cop-turned-robot dystopian classic, the producers have tapped a number of actors from hit TV series: Joel Kinnaman (The Killing), Michael K. Williams (Boardwalk Empire), Aimee Garcia (Dexter), and sprinkled in a number of big-name veterans to give the film greater weight: Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, and Gary Oldman.

As usual, the villains steal the show, with Jackson playing the media stooge for the global colossus OmniCorp, Keaton its slimy, sociopathic CEO, and Oldman, the doctor who sells his soul to fulfill his scientific vision, a la Dr. Frankenstein.

This movie is technically excellent, with its fast-paced computer-game graphics and imaginative CGI effects.  But it lacks the humanity of the original, and has sacrificed much of the first movie’s grittiness and wickedly dark humor for the sake of a PG-13 rating.

In 2009 filmmaker Alex Gibney was making a documentary about Lance Armstrong’s return to the Tour de France after a four-year absence.  That project transformed in the wake of the events of 2012 and 2013 with Armstrong being stripped of all of his seven titles and being banned for life from competitive cycling, and his confession on the Oprah Winfrey show that all his claims of competing clean were a massive fraud.

The subsequent documentary became Armstrong’s explanation, not excuse, for why he did what he did.  His great sin was not just his deception regarding doping, but the lengths he went to to perpetuate that deception, damaging the lives of former friends, colleagues,  teammates, and anyone who dared to speak out publicly against him.

Credit to Armstrong for finally being totally candid about what he did, but he’s a long way from redemption.  He didn’t live a lot of lies, but he lived one big one.