Hollywood and our dystopian future

So I really like watching apocalyptic (28 DAYS LATER; DAY AFTER TOMORROW; THE CORE), post-apocalyptic (THE POSTMAN; WATERWORLD), and Dystopian future (THE MATRIX; JOHNNY MNEMONIC; CHILDREN OF MEN) movies, even when they're bad.
I can watch them over and over and over... probably has something to do with my fascination with history and politics... there's always some fun little detail to pick out that reflects a fear or belief specific to the politics or history of the time in which the movie was made (note the detail in DAY AFTER TOMORROW where a female newsie gleefully points out that Americans are now illegally crossing the border into Mexico, rather than the other way around).

But in the end they rarely move me in a deep and meaningful way because they always seem overwrought. I mean if global warming turns out to be manmade and real, then the Earth is going to very VERY slowly warm up and winters will slowly disappear, farmable land will VERY slowly wither away, and populations will EXTREMELY gradually migrate elsewhere, they will not pack up all their things and become instant refugees, literally overnight. And we're not going to wake up one morning to an ice age that deposits 500 feet of glacial ice on New York City in a single afternoon.

Likewise, I don't see us becoming slaves to a race of machines, or spending the majority of our lives jacked into computer terminals interacting in a made-up world, or living in burned out cities where rich people inhabit gleaming apartments a thousand feet above the slums that have been left at ground level for "everyone else." I just don't think it's going to be as dramatic as the movies need their stories and visuals to be in order to get butts into theatre seats.

That said, I was shocked last night to find that a movie I have consistently made fun of over the years (even though it occupies a special place in my heart because of it's fun goofiness), showed me what I find to be the most plausible dystopian future you'll see in any modern movie.

I watched DEMOLITION MAN (DM) last night.

Most dystopian future worlds you see in the movies are immediately terrifying. If someone dropped you into the world of THE TERMINATOR or THE MATRIX or THE CORE, you would instantly shit your pants. Not so in San Angeles (the city where Sly finds himself in DM circa 2032).

If you woke up in San Angeles tomorrow, your first impression might be "hey, this is kinda nice." The streets are clean, the cars are electric and make almost no noise, the buildings are beautifully designed and built, there are plenty of trees and grass and there are no fast food joints, liquor stores, or billboards. Everyone is polite and nice, no one curses or fights, clothing is relaxed and attractive, as are the people. It looks like a utopian dream.

But San Angeles 2032 is ruled by a government made up of officials that I might call "benign fascists." At some point, it was decided by (presumably rich, well-educated progressives) that the behaviour of average Americans must be legally restricted "for their own good." Sandra Bullock explains the world pretty succintly when she points out to Sly that anything considered "bad" has been outlawed... everything from gas, smoking, guns, and salt, to cursing.

But I say these are "benign" Fascists because there is no secret police force that whisks "criminals" off to the gulag. This fascist government is much smarter than that. Physical threats, jails, and executions breed revolutionaries. If the only thing that happens when you curse or eat salt, is that a machine tells you that you've been "fined one credit for violation of the verbal morality statute"... well that's no so bad, is it? We can live with that... right?

Maybe, but the world in DM is not static, it's still evolving... and maybe today it's a fine of one credit, but governments that seek control MUST maintain that control at any cost. What happenes when one credit is not enough to dissaude cursing... it becomes two credits, then one hundred, and if people are still ignoring the statute, maybe THAT'S where the gulags and the executions come in... remember, when we join the story in DM, the leader of this utopian world has just re-awakened a dangerous criminal whom he hopes will assassinate the leader of an underground movement seeking to restore basic freedoms that have been given up or lost, and he doesn't seem to care how many people die as a result, as long as his goal is achieved. That's a pretty aggressive escalation.

And so, here in 2008 I look around me and I see helmet laws, cigarette laws, CAFE standards, and campus speech codes, and I hear politicians pushing laws to tell you what kind of lightbulbs you can buy (I buy Compact Flourescents but I don't think you should be forced to if you don't want them), or wether or not we should start taxing candy bars and soda... or I read an article like this one, where one side of a political debate on Affirmative Action points out that the only way to win is to keep the issue off of ballots because even though they'd lose in the court of public opinion, they're right and that's all that matters... or note how with each new election cycle, politicians manage to convince us of one more thing the government should have control over in our lives (now it's health care and mortgages... tomorrow it may be whether or not you can have a child and raise it on your own) and I start to wonder if, of all the dystopian future movies ever made, DEMOLITION MAN might be the most prescient, the most plausible, and ultimately, the scariest such movie ever made.

If Americans ever lose our freedoms, it will not be overnight, to force of arms... we will give them away, voluntarily and perhaps happily, over the course of many years, to people who consider themselves "our betters", and we will do so with the best of intentions... and while some things might seem nicer, or safer in the aftermath, we will have made ourselves slaves... make no mistake about that.

In response to which, I can do no better than to quote Denis Leary from DM...

"You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder - "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener". "

I had no idea HIGH NOON is commonly regarded as a brave liberal counter-attack on McCarthy-ism....

But according to Kyle Smith, apparently it is... at least among film enthusiasts on the Left, anyway. Oh the things you learn if you manage to live long enough.

You'll note that The Commander made almost exactly the opposite argument a year ago. Interesting fact, that. I guess it just goes to show that part of what's great about movies is that everyone can take something different away from them.

Ultimately Smith is making a similar argument to the Commander's, though from a slightly different perspective.

Still... interesting.

Where have you gone Indiana Jones? PART ONE

WARNING: These will be riddled with spoilers.

I'm not going to bother with the preamble... we all saw RAIDERS when we were young, we all loved it, we can all quote the movie chapter and verse, we all wore our Indy Costumes to work on the Thursday CRYSTAL SKULL finally opened (OK, that may have been just me), we all know where we're all coming from, so I'm just gonna pick up my Louisville Slugger and start swingin'.

ISSUE NUMBER ONE: C.G.I.

Think about the famous truck chase from RADIERS... Indy is riding a white horse along the cliffs above and behind the truck convoy. He comes to a stop at an impossibly steep ramp and pauses... Spielberg seems to be saying, hang on, cuz you're about to see some shit.

And we did... see some shit. A lot of it. And it was all happening in a real world, OUR world, and even as a 36 year-old Adult (Kid), I have no trouble believeing that someone (even if it wasn't Harrison Ford) did everything that happened on that screen.

Not so with THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Forget about the refrigerator tumbling end-over-end through a nuclear cloud for a second, hell at least that was interesting to look at... let's talk about the moment where my shoulders finally sagged in defeat and I said to myself "damn... I hate this."

Two boat-jeeps are careening through the jungle side by side and Shia LaBouf is straddling them, one foot on each, sword-fighting with Cate Blacnhett... except he wasn't. Not really. He was in a small bright green room standing on two bright green boxes, while, somewhere off camera, Steven Spielberg (or, hell, maybe even some random second unit flunkie) shouted things like "OK now she's over here" and "Now DUCK, here comes a tree branch."

EVERY SINGLE OTHER thing you saw on screen in that moment was created out of whole cloth, inside a computer, and digitally inserted into that shot long after Shia and company had gone home for the summer.

And that sucked. What's the point!? If I want to see a movie that only exists in a computer, I have Roland Emmerich and Tim Story and Stephen Sommers and Pixar making those movies and pumping them out one after the other each and every day. The market is positively LOUSY with them.

The beauty and charm of the Indiana Jones series is that it's based on Saturday afternoon serials that Spielberg and Lucas loved when they were kids... the kind of movies where you had to put a little extra thought into the how and the where and the when because you couldn't just run back to the studio and get another 10 million for computer generated F/X shots.

Even if they HAD had access to the kind of F/X budget they clearly had access to during the making of CRYSTAL SKULL, I firmly blieve they would not have used it because... well because that was the WHOLE GODDAMNED POINT of making the movie in the FIRST goddamned place!

Which brings me to the Alien...

Seriously... a goddamned Alien... right there on screen, smilling and blinking and pointing and eventually flying off in his goddamned space ship.

What the hell was THAT!?

And fer crissakes it didn't even LOOK very good.

And that's what's fascinating to me... there's really only about a half dozen F/X shots in RAIDERS altogether, and because they are practical effects, they fit much more seamlessly into the movie as a whole. OK sure, you can probably tell after a dozen or so viewings that they used a stop moion effect used to make the German version of Peter Lorre melt before the power of the Ark... but as far as special effects go, I'll take that sequence over what was, essentially, the exact same gag (except not done on a computer) that had Donovan ageing a thousand years in 5 seconds after drinking from the false Grail in THE LAST CRUSADE.

And let's talk about THE LAST CRUSADE for a minute, which despite the fact that I HATE HATE HATE what was done to some of the characters in that film (Sallah and Brody to name just two) has some fantastic action sequences built-in that are done almost exclusively through the use of practical effects and stunt work...

And when they do jump to CGI effects, which thankfully is rare, it's almost always immediately noticeable and off-putting... as it is when the CGI Messerschmidt, green and shiny as it attemps unsuccessfully to contrast with the background onto which it's been fused, crashes into the mountain tunnel.

There is almost no sequence in KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, including by the way, going over a waterfall in a boat (something that was done MUCH more spectacularly, AND with ACTUAL stuntmen in the shot, in ROMANCING THE STONE), which is not created primarily, or totally, within a CGI world...

And that's just a shame.

I'm not even going to get into the CGI Army of Monkeys, or the goofy CGI grins pasted on the prairie dogs in the opening sequence. Those crappy shots are not even deserving of our scorn.

More to come in future installments.

Perfect movies

Yeah I know... it's been a while. Not that this is any excuse since you don't get traffic without posting regularly... not to mention posting well, but it didn't look like too many people had been missing the ole Commander anyway, so I went on ahead and took me a little break.

I guess I was goosed to get back on the horse by Indy 4, which I've been grappling with for about the last 24 hours. The bottom line is I didn't like it... not at all... and that's been pretty hard for a man who came to Hollywood because of Indiana Jones to take... but there we are.

A buddy of mine and I used to play a game we called "Perfect Movies." The only criteria for making the list was that we both had to agree. In our game, "perfect" did not mean a "good" or even a "GREAT" movie. There's plenty of those in the world. A "perfect" movie is just that... nothing wasted, not a single bit of useless dialogue, no untied strings, no extraneous characters (a score on which Indy 4 fails miserable by the way), no dumb or meaningless tangents (again... Indy... my man... whattup wit dat!?!?)... in short, a flat-out, no bullshit, perfect movie.

You know them when you see them.

In all the years we've been playing... going on 15 now... we've only agreed on 3.

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark
2. Back to the Future
3. The Hunt For Red October.

Well luckily for my sanity, here I am, depressed, sitting on the couch wondering how Indy 4 could have gone so wrong, and here comes Red October on Universal HD.

If there is a better written and at the same time less well-known and certainly unappreciated scene than the one where Ryan briefs the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the situation surrounding the Red October, I can't think of what it could be.

"I'm a politician... which means when I'm not kissin' babies, I'm stealin' their lolipops" is just about as good a bit of dialogue as you're ever going to hear. No one will ever mention it in the same company as "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse" or "I asked for a mission, and for my sins they gave me one"... but damned if they shouldn't.