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.

I Hollywood fighting a rear guard action against World War II ?

I saw this post pop up on a couple of blogs I read last week and I thought it worth talking about. The argument is that current Hollywood is being run by Liberals so incensed by the war in Iraq that, retroactively, they have begun to see ALL war as unnecessary, including previously agreed upon "good" wars like the war against Nazi and Japanese Fascism in World War II.

Driscoll quotes a Mark Steyn piece where Mark argues that this movement began with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN...

"Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa."

In a minute I'm going to give a couple of examples to show that Steyn and Driscoll may be on to something. But first I want to argue that their interpretation of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is not completely accurate. Here's the point. I don't think there's ever been a sane, rational, professional soldier who enjoyed war. I'm sure that in their quiet moments many of them reflect on the rightness or wrongness of the cause they are fighting for and they may experience pride or shame depending on how they come to feel about the value of their mission. But in the heat of battle, especially during World War II, which was brutal and often not fought by professional soldiers, my guess is that most GIs were concerned with doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, and not getting killed.

So, when you think about what a guy like the character played by Tom Sizemore might have gone through at the moment he's inspired to utter that fateful phrase that Steyn keys off on, most of it was, in fact, a "godawful mess." I would think a man like that might start to think less about the larger goals of winning the war, and start focusing more on what individual good he himself might have done. Up to that point, Sizemore's character had engaged in a long series of brutal and awful mortal combat. And I can certainly see why he might think... y'know, getting this kid home to his mom would be something I could do and remember and be proud of, rather than going to bed every night thinking about all the Germans I had to ram my bayonet into so that I could survive and get back home to my loved ones.

Isn't it possible THAT'S what he meant... that Saving Private Ryan is the one positive individual achievement that Miller and his men might be able to bring back with them to the real world?

I think so.

But that said, I think Driscoll is right that Hollywood is anxious to find stories set in World War II that they can use to fight the current ideological debate about Iraq. Let's face it, the movies they've made so far that were actually SET in Iraq are getting creamed at the box office, so you can understand why they might wish to continue this fight in a different setting, one to which audiences have historically been much more receptive.

... something like the "good war" in Europe in the Pacific.

I think the real war on World War II began with Clint Eastwood... and you have no idea how much it pains me to write that sentence.

I hated, hated, HATED FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. First of all it's the most boring war movie ever made. Second, I just don't understand the argument. With the vast majority of Americans in, y'know, America, and therefore removed from the fighting, the Government HAD to figure out ways to keep the American public engaged in the War effort. Let's not forget that this was not the big bad USA versus tiny little Iraq. There was a significant possibility that we would lose that war. We needed every American focused and engaged in the effort, not just fighting, but saving precious resources like oil and steel and food. And Americans get war weary, as do all right-thinking human beings... by the time of Iwo Jima, it's easy to understand why many Americans might have been tired of war, and why something like the picture of those men raising the flag above Mt. Siribachi might have been crucial to the war effort. Someone needs to explain to me what the hell could be so bad about using a heroic photo to give the folks on the home front a swell of pride so that they would stay engaged in the greatest battle against evil and totalitarianism that the world had ever seen!?

Stopping fascism by any means necessary is suddenly a bad thing? So they had to re-position the guys and shoot the picture twice... so a couple of the guys didn't react well to being called heroes because maybe in the heat of battle they did things that didn't feel very heroic in retrospect. Sorry, but boo-friggin'-hoo! There's a goddamned war on! It wasn't just that winning was important, it's that losing would have been a planetary catastrophe.

So that becomes, in my opinion, the first salvo in an assault on our collective memory of World War II. The template is, find a heroic World War II story and tell it in such a way that what should have been heroic becomes cynical and manipulative. The incredible assault on Iwo Jima suddenly goes from one of the most incredible acts of collective American bravery to a sham cynically abused by the powers that be to drum up support for a war to, what... seize European oil for Halliburton, I guess.

And there's more to come. Just off the top of my head I can think of two other movies in development that fit the same template. One film centers on the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, which resulted in the deaths of as many as 20,000 POWs, many of them American soldiers. Apparently, argues the movie, General Homma wasn't such a bad guy after all, and he got railroaded by the court that accused and convicted him of war crimes...

What's the point of making this movie? I mean really? Do we need to spend several million dollars to go back and resuscitate the reputation of a man who presided over the deaths from torture and starvation of thousands of human beings? Why!? What good could possibly come from doing that!?

Disgraceful. I wonder, if an American general forced a march that killed 20,000 Iraqis, would Hollywood treat him as kindly?

But getting back to the FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS template (Heroic effort becomes cynical sham)... Hollywood is also intent on making the true story of a particular operation behind enemy lines late in the war in Europe. In this story, a US General orders a small task force to assault and liberate a POW camp guarded by a much larger garrison of Nazi soldiers. It's an interesting story, no doubt, but the against-all-odds, for-our-boys heroic aspects of the movie are not what is motivating Hollywood in this case. I've heard this movie pitch a half-dozen times and it's always the same. They tell basically the same story I just pitched in the sentences above and everyone in the room kind of ho-hums... yeah yeah another mission movie about soldiers going behind enemy lines in World War II... been there, seen that.

But when the person telling the story gets to the punch-line and you can see everyone's eyes light up, as if to say ah-HA... you see it turns out this particular General's son-in-law was one of the prisoners being held in the camp! He sent 300 men on a suicide mission just to rescue his son-in-law!

And suddenly everyone gets why this is a movie that HAS to be made. Because there really is no heroism in war, no valiant struggle against the forces of evil... there are only victims (dullard US soldiers tricked into signing up) and cynical manipulative bad guys (US generals, Presidents, etc.) who send those victims off to die for their own enrichment, or amusement, or whatever.

And that's why Hollywood loves this story, because they can tell their own prevailing narrative of the war in Iraq, but couch it in the framework of WW2. Americans, Hollywood knows, like to see WW2 movies because it makes them proud of their nation. So they'll come in droves to see heroism, and get a dose of Hollywood "gotcha" instead.

Talk about cynical and manipulative.

Elah crashing and burning?

Don't take it from me... how's Variety work for ya?

UPDATE: Jesus! a week later and the movie doesn't even show up at all on world wide box-office.com!

Similarly, the IMDB has no business information on the movie at all. I don't know what it takes to register on these two sites, but not being there 10 days into release is a decidedly bad sign.

Time for some movie reviews

Gotta catch up on a ton of movies I've seen over the last few months... so here goes:

SHOOT 'EM UP:

AWESOME awesome movie. Simply put, if you miss this in the theatres you WILL be kicking yourself. Just a great example of what can happen when someone sits down to make fun kick-ass action movie with absolutely no loftier aspirations beyond making you feel like the money you paid was well worth the good time you got in return. It didn't do very well at the box office so it probably won't be around long, but do yourself a favor and run out to catch it before it slinks off to home video.


THE BRAVE ONE:

I kinda liked this one. It has a lot of problems... for one thing, Jodie Foster stumbles onto more violent crime in the course of one week than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes... but I'm willing to let that slide for the purposes of moving the plot forward. She has to become a vigilante, and if she's running all over the city for two hours unable to find criminals on whom to lay the smack-down, well then that's going to be one boring vigilante movie, isn't it? That said, the movie drags ass in the middle and I think maybe one less vigilante mission in the second act would have helped move things along a little better.

The performances save this one. Jodie is great as always. Terrence Howard is fantastic. I'm becoming a huge fan of his. I liked Nicky Katt a lot, as well. I think without his laugh-out-loud quality comic relief the movie would have been in constant danger of taking itself way too seriously. What with the maudlin Sarah McLaughlin songs running tediously underneath every scene, the movie is already in much more danger of that than it would otherwise be, in the frist place.

There's an interesting political point to make about this movie too. It doesn't seem to be arguing that vigilante violence is bad. Jodie never faces any serious consequences for her actions. And she never really seems to suffer any emotional effects from having murdered half a dozen people except for one very brief scene towards the end where she admits to a cleaning lady that she's killed a man and cries a little bit. Oh and by the way it's not like she's just killing people who are in the course of committing violent crimes, at one point she goes after a businessman who she's only been TOLD is a drug dealer, without EVER seeing any actual evidence of that fact. That's more than vigilantism. That's outright murder, plain and simple, and director Neil Jordan doesn't seem to have much of an opinion on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. He almost seems to be hoping we'll let it slide because of society's tendency to want to call violence committed by women against bad men in movies more like empowering acts, rather than actual crimes.

But whatever, you're never going to see me complain about assholes in movies getting what they deserve. I'm a gun owner and I have no problem with the concept of using guns to defend myself from criminals, up-to-and-including using deadly force. That's not to say I approve of vigilantes... I don't. But I find it interesting that this movie has nothing to say about whether what Jodie does is right or wrong. In fact towards the end of the film she is actually aided and abetted by the Police department in finishing off the bad guys... what exactly is Neil Jordan trying to say here?

Here's an interesting point of view from one of the guys over at Ain't I Cool...

quote:
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THE BRAVE ONE certainly does not condone Erica's actions. In fact, I think it's safe to assume filmmaker Neil Jordan (THE CRYING GAME; IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER) intended this to be an anti-violence, anti-gun film of the highest order.
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See, I think it DOES condone Erica's actions, certainly it doesn't work very hard to tsk-tsk them. But I love that he says "I think it's safe to assume this is an anti-violence, anti-gun film of the highest order." No it isn't. You may WANT to assume that because that's what you HOPE it is, but you you're going to have to show me some evidence before you can make a categorical claim like that. Cuz it ain't there. Certainly there's not enough evidence to make a "safe assumption" about anything.

But that's fine, people always try to shoe-horn ambiguous messages into the narrative they expect based on their own biased point-of-view. AICN is a Leftie site, and so they naturally assume that the filmmakers they admire share the same worldview. As for me, I'm sure Neil Jordan IS in favor of gun control and anti-vigilantism, but I'm also sure he doesn't effectively make that case in this film.

Also I found it odd to be watching this movie with a left-wing, Hollywood crowd (all agents, producers, and executives) and to hear them cheer Erica's every kill. This audience was more blood-thirsty than the one I saw SHOOT 'EM UP WITH. Moreover, this is the same crowd that calls me a right-wing kook when I suggest that 9/11 might have been prevented if the pilots had been armed, or that the Virginia Tech psycho might have killed fewer people if there'd been just one other person on that campus carrying a gun.

Ah well.. par for the course in this town... jam-packed with hypocrites and limousine liberals, it is.


IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (ITVOE):

Let's start with a quick two word review: JUST AWFUL

As for the rest of it... man, where to start? I guess with the movie itself, rather than the politics, which are so reprehensible that they should be enough to damn the movie all by itself. A friend of mine who was at the same screening, and who is NOT a conservative, said "I loved the performances, but HATED the message. Nothing good can come of that movie being made."

So what's good? Well, the performances. Tommy Lee Jones is fantastic. Doesn't matter what he does or how or when, he's just great. There are few better. End of story.

What's bad? Christ, I could go on forever.

But I want to start at the end. I remember when I was in film school it seemed like all my classmates were pretentious blowhards who wanted to make "important" films about poverty and AIDS. Fortunately I was always able to sniff out the action movie fans in my classes and hook up with them for assignments. I remember we were seniors making a short, heavy-on-the-action, chase film and just to thumb our noses at our high-minded classmates, we put a Jean-Paul Sartre quote over the final fade-to-black at the end, just as a joke. I'll never forget how hard we laughed when, after the screening, our professor told us he thought it was a very profound moment.

At the end of ITVOE, over the final fade to black, Paul Haggis superimposes the words "FOR THE CHILDREN." I shouldn't need to tell you I nearly threw up in my mouth. It's one thing to go for the "self-important" final scene quotation, but to decide on the most hackneyed, cliched tagline in the history of cheesy political taglines goes a long way towards showing how at its heart this is an amateurish film.

Yes, I said "amateurish." Everything is about "the message" in this movie, and it comes at the expense of good film making. Nothing seems to make any sense in this film, it's just a bunch of political dominoes set up to fall a certain way and storytelling be damned.

I made two predictions to the people I was with in the first ten minutes. The first came after Tommy Lee Jones pulled out of his driveway and drove past a school where he was shocked to discover the American flag flying upside down, the international symbol for distress. Now of course Haggis makes no effort to explain why the flag would be hanging upside-down in a neighborhood he has taken great pains to portray, through use of a long overhead tracking shot, as a neighborhood full of veterans and families of veterans. Yellow ribbons, American flags, and "support our troops" signs appear on every lawn. So who in this neighborhood flipped the flag over, and why? Doesn't matter. After TLJ got out to fix the flag I turned to my friend and said "before this movie is over, he's going to come back and re-hang that flag upside down."

I hardly need to tell you that at the end, he did just that. What was funny about that final scene though, was how Haggis kept the flag out of view the whole time, wanting to keep it a surprise so that he could slowly pan up and reveal the upside-down flag as the end music swelled. Like anyone in the theatre was like "Whoa man, you totally BLEW my miiiiind! I totally didn't expect that!"

Second prediction. When we first meet Charlize Theron she's talking to a pretty young woman who has come to ask for help because her Army husband killed the family dog and she's worried about him. I leaned over to my friend again and said "ten bucks the husband kills her before this movie is over." I hardly need to describe to you the scene in the third act where Charlize goes to the woman's home and cries over her dead body, drowned in the tub by her back-from-
Iraq soldier husband who just couldn't get the mental help he needed from the VA... oh boo-friggin' hoo.

Which brings me to the most offensive element of the film. The soldiers. There is not a single honorable, professional, moral soldier in this entire movie. Every soldier in the film is on drugs, drinks way too much, is psychotic, a liar or cover-up artists, a murderer, a rapist, or all of the above. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

Couple of laugh-out-loud moments. TLJ asks one of his son's buddies if his son was on drugs and his friend replies "no more than everyone else." EVERYONE else... OK so all the soldiers in Haggis' world are drug addicts.

Also early in the movie, suspicion falls on one particular soldier. The cops pull up his rap sheet which is FILLED with drug dealing arrests and convictions, so much so that when she sees it, Charlize actually gasps and says "oh my god." Charlize asks how he was able to get in the Army and her boss says "oh they've been lowering standards every year since this war started." ........

Yeah, they're letting in drug dealers now. Come on!

And then there's the line that is destined to become the most often quoted line in the film. If the movie gets nominated for an Oscar, this will be the scene they show. A soldiers tells TLJ that "they shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq."

What the hell does that even mean? Where should we send them, Paris!? We send our soldiers to shitty places to do shitty things because, news bulletin Haggis, you jerk, IT'S THEIR JOB!!!! It's been 6 years now since 9/11, everyone who got tricked into joining up because of 9/11 has had at least 3 chances to get out by now, can we please drop the fiction that the Army is full of dolts who got conned into joining by George Bush telling them that Saddam pulled of 9/11?

These are professional, VOLUNTEERS who have chosen to live this life. Isn't it time we started respecting their choice rather than treating them like victims of some giant conspiracy?

Ugh, I could go on and on, but this is getting way too long... one final word about amateurism, though. The whole movie rests on a few videos contained in the digital camera of TLJ's son. TLJ finds the camera early in the first act and at the very moment he finds it, you know, you just KNOW, that the answer to the mystery is contained in those videos. But you can;t just have TLJ wantch the clips and end the suspense in the opening act, So what does Haggis do to draw out the drama? Well of course the computer tech TLJ brings it to says "oh these files are corrupted, but I have a special program at home that I can use to fix them. Oh but I'm really busy at work so this is going to take a while, but what I'll do is e-mail them to you as I fix them."

So now we have to spend the whole movie waiting for TLJ to get the latest installment of his son's Iraq video, and of course the answer to the mystery is at the very end of the very last one. I'm sorry but that's just lazy.

To sum up, in Paul Haggis' world, all soldiers are drug-using psychopaths who could, at any moment, stab their best friend 42 times, chop his body to pieces, burn the pieces, then calmly lie to their friend's father without a single sleepless night. All cops are lazy mysoginists who assume that any female officer must have gotten her job by fucking her boss. And the only honorable people in small town America are the strippers.

Here's what I learned from watching In The Valley of Elah... Paul Haggis' America is a very depressing place to live.

Needless to say after CRASH and ITVOE, I'll be skipping Paul Haggis' third effort.


THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM:

I actually enjoyed this movie quite a bit. The settings bounce from Moscow to New York to Turin to Madrid to Paris to Tangier and back to New York again, which was great in that it made me want to get back on a plane and go traveling again. Action was great but I do have to say that I am more than ready for the hand-held camera era to end. Frankly I think it's lazy and directors use it to cover up an inability to effectively choreograph action. Yes I realize it was a reaction to directors like John Woo who relentlessly choreographed every single minute of every single scene. But frankly, I enjoyed Woo's action choreography, and I don't much appreciate being made to feel like I might puke at any moment.

I'll skip the politics of the movie since we're all more that used to the concept, by now, that every government official in a spy thriller like this must be, by definition, an evil bastard. David Strathairn plays the cliche in this one, and except for the hilarious affect of running around shouting things like "this is a level one priority!!!" and "this is a level four NSA priority!!!", he's mostly effective in a thankless role.

Although I do have to mention the one line that made me laugh out loud. During one of the scenes where Strathairn and his guys are tracking Bourne, Strathairn suddenly realizes they are in the wrong place and shouts "this is a Code 10 Abort!!!"

Doesn't Abort just mean stop what you're doing immediately? I mean how can there be ten different ways of telling your men to stop doing what they're doing!?

Hilarious. Sometimes too much of that goofy spy speak can ruin an otherwise fantastic action sequence. Just a quick note to all you would-be spy thriller writers out there, from Commander Shears to you.

Until next time! Cheers from Shears.