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.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
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:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
Indulge me in a little board topic abuse if you will...
Strictly speaking this doesn't have anything to do with the movies, but it IS a media related topic, and it's about guns, and I love action movies above all things, so if you absolutely MUST have a Hollywood connection in all of your KILL HIM! posts, hopefully those will tide you over.
I think the big wire services ought to start hiring crime reporters who know something about guns, because this article is a bit of a disaster... full of scary words like "spraying bullets" and "AK-47", but nearly empty of actual helpful information.
First of all, the article goes back to the old assault weapns ban canard...
quote:
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Another issue potentially at play is the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, 10 years after its passage. The legislation outlawed 19 types of guns, including the semiautomatic AK-47.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That last sentence is absolutely false. It did not outlaw the semi-automatic AK-47... the fully automatic AK-47 was illegal before the ban, and remains illegal now that the ban has been lifted. I must have typed these words a million times on this board but the assault weapons ban made illegal certain types of attachments that could be ADDED to weapons like the CIVILIAN version of the AK-47, which were always LEGAL to purchase, even DURING the ban. Again those are bayonet lugs, fire supressors, folding stocks, xtra large magazines, and grenade launchers.
But again, the author SHOULD know that, and if he's going to accuse the lifting of the Assault Weapons ban, then he HAS to provide evidence that one or more of those previously banned attachments are THE thing that is increasing the lethality of these weapons. Has he done that? No. In fact, he doesn't even seem to be aware of the reality of what the ban actually DID.
Also, There is a very important piece of information that he is leaving out of this piece that could tell us almost definitively whether or not the lifting of the AWB is to blame here.
I'll give you a second to try and figure out what that might be...
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
That's right, we need to know if the Assault Weapons they are seeing on the streets are AUTOMATIC or not. Again, fully automatic weapons have ALWAYS BEEN ILLEGAL, both before, during, and after the ban, and they continue to be illegal now. Are we seeing these AUTOMATIC weapons on the streets now more than ever, or not? This is a crucial point. But not only does the article not answer the question but in several cases they use wording that further obscures the issue.
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The spray of bullets that killed a police officer and hurt three others this week came from something increasingly common on this city's streets: a high-powered assault weapon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if you just spray the general vicinity you're going to get innocent bystanders
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These quotes suggest that what we are seeing on the streets of Miami are Automatic Weapons that can put out a spray of gunfire with one pull of the trigger. A reporter writing a story about guns ought to know this but I'll say it again... if I shoot a semi-automatic "assault rifle" as fast as I can, meaning I have to pull the trigger once every time I want the gun to fire, and you fire a semi-automatic handgun as fast as you can, the rate of fire will be NO DIFFERENT. So are we REALLY seeing bullets being "sprayed" or is this a euphemism being used for political effect?
If these criminals who are "spraying bullets" are firing automatic weapons, then that sentence makes sense. If not, then they are not "spraying bullets" any more, or more dangerously, than similar criminal firing a handgun, and therefore it doesn't really matter WHAT kind of gun they are using to commit these crimes... in which case you'd want to know why they wrote the piece in the first place.
If, on the other hand, they are firing automatic weapons, then we have a different problem altogether... but more importantly, it's a problem that CANNOT be solved simply by re-instating the Assault Weapons Ban (which did not need to address automatic weapons because they were already illegal), and mentioning the AWB in the article has been done for shock/political effect in a callously calculated way.
Or, put another way, is this just honest bad reporting, or does this guy have an agenda/bias?
The really sad thing is that it occurs to me that what's most unfortunate about this mediocre reporting effort is that at the heart of this issue is a really interesting story. We know that two big reasons why gangs and criminals tend not to use assault style weapons is that 1) they tend to be very expensive, while a decent handgun can often be had for 1/4 of the price. And 2) because gangs in parrticular want something they can carry and assault-style weapons are very difficult to conceal.
So if Miami has suddenly been flooded by Semi-automatic assault-style weapons, then I'd want to know what has changed. The reporter might want to look into the possibility that someone, perhaps Mexican drug gangs running them across our porous border, has been flooding the market with cheap models... or maybe the local police departments are so outnumbered and overwhelmed that they have decided to abandon gang interdiction altogether and the criminals no longer are worried about being seen on the street with a rifle.
Either question might have resulted in a useful and interesting story... but I guess that's too much to expect fromt he modern-day investigative journalist.
I think the big wire services ought to start hiring crime reporters who know something about guns, because this article is a bit of a disaster... full of scary words like "spraying bullets" and "AK-47", but nearly empty of actual helpful information.
First of all, the article goes back to the old assault weapns ban canard...
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another issue potentially at play is the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, 10 years after its passage. The legislation outlawed 19 types of guns, including the semiautomatic AK-47.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That last sentence is absolutely false. It did not outlaw the semi-automatic AK-47... the fully automatic AK-47 was illegal before the ban, and remains illegal now that the ban has been lifted. I must have typed these words a million times on this board but the assault weapons ban made illegal certain types of attachments that could be ADDED to weapons like the CIVILIAN version of the AK-47, which were always LEGAL to purchase, even DURING the ban. Again those are bayonet lugs, fire supressors, folding stocks, xtra large magazines, and grenade launchers.
But again, the author SHOULD know that, and if he's going to accuse the lifting of the Assault Weapons ban, then he HAS to provide evidence that one or more of those previously banned attachments are THE thing that is increasing the lethality of these weapons. Has he done that? No. In fact, he doesn't even seem to be aware of the reality of what the ban actually DID.
Also, There is a very important piece of information that he is leaving out of this piece that could tell us almost definitively whether or not the lifting of the AWB is to blame here.
I'll give you a second to try and figure out what that might be...
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
That's right, we need to know if the Assault Weapons they are seeing on the streets are AUTOMATIC or not. Again, fully automatic weapons have ALWAYS BEEN ILLEGAL, both before, during, and after the ban, and they continue to be illegal now. Are we seeing these AUTOMATIC weapons on the streets now more than ever, or not? This is a crucial point. But not only does the article not answer the question but in several cases they use wording that further obscures the issue.
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The spray of bullets that killed a police officer and hurt three others this week came from something increasingly common on this city's streets: a high-powered assault weapon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if you just spray the general vicinity you're going to get innocent bystanders
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These quotes suggest that what we are seeing on the streets of Miami are Automatic Weapons that can put out a spray of gunfire with one pull of the trigger. A reporter writing a story about guns ought to know this but I'll say it again... if I shoot a semi-automatic "assault rifle" as fast as I can, meaning I have to pull the trigger once every time I want the gun to fire, and you fire a semi-automatic handgun as fast as you can, the rate of fire will be NO DIFFERENT. So are we REALLY seeing bullets being "sprayed" or is this a euphemism being used for political effect?
If these criminals who are "spraying bullets" are firing automatic weapons, then that sentence makes sense. If not, then they are not "spraying bullets" any more, or more dangerously, than similar criminal firing a handgun, and therefore it doesn't really matter WHAT kind of gun they are using to commit these crimes... in which case you'd want to know why they wrote the piece in the first place.
If, on the other hand, they are firing automatic weapons, then we have a different problem altogether... but more importantly, it's a problem that CANNOT be solved simply by re-instating the Assault Weapons Ban (which did not need to address automatic weapons because they were already illegal), and mentioning the AWB in the article has been done for shock/political effect in a callously calculated way.
Or, put another way, is this just honest bad reporting, or does this guy have an agenda/bias?
The really sad thing is that it occurs to me that what's most unfortunate about this mediocre reporting effort is that at the heart of this issue is a really interesting story. We know that two big reasons why gangs and criminals tend not to use assault style weapons is that 1) they tend to be very expensive, while a decent handgun can often be had for 1/4 of the price. And 2) because gangs in parrticular want something they can carry and assault-style weapons are very difficult to conceal.
So if Miami has suddenly been flooded by Semi-automatic assault-style weapons, then I'd want to know what has changed. The reporter might want to look into the possibility that someone, perhaps Mexican drug gangs running them across our porous border, has been flooding the market with cheap models... or maybe the local police departments are so outnumbered and overwhelmed that they have decided to abandon gang interdiction altogether and the criminals no longer are worried about being seen on the street with a rifle.
Either question might have resulted in a useful and interesting story... but I guess that's too much to expect fromt he modern-day investigative journalist.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Favorite summer movies?
I've been asked by a few people to talk about my favorite films of the summer thus far. I think I'm going to have to say that coming in at Number One is LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD. Yes a lot of it was cheesy, some of the action was over-the-top, and the crime was lame, I REALLY enjoyed spending 2 hours with John McClane. He's one of the best action heroes of our generation and it's been too long since we've seen him on screen.
We had fun watching TRANSFORMERS, but the second we walked out of the theatre, we looked at each other and said "Jesus, that was dumb!"
There's a lot of holes in my summer movie schedule though and it's quite possible that any of the following could overtake DIE HARD, but I've been really busy this summer and my movie-going hasn't been as stellar as I'd like.
I haven't seen THE SIMPSONS, RATATOUILLE, RUSH HOUR 3, BOURNE, HAIRSPRAY, or STARDUST. So take that.
Oh wait, one more. I didn't mention it because it hasn't been released yet, but if you're an action fan, SHOOT 'EM UP is one of the best movies you'll see this year.
We had fun watching TRANSFORMERS, but the second we walked out of the theatre, we looked at each other and said "Jesus, that was dumb!"
There's a lot of holes in my summer movie schedule though and it's quite possible that any of the following could overtake DIE HARD, but I've been really busy this summer and my movie-going hasn't been as stellar as I'd like.
I haven't seen THE SIMPSONS, RATATOUILLE, RUSH HOUR 3, BOURNE, HAIRSPRAY, or STARDUST. So take that.
Oh wait, one more. I didn't mention it because it hasn't been released yet, but if you're an action fan, SHOOT 'EM UP is one of the best movies you'll see this year.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Martin Scorsese's "favorite films" Doc.
Just watched the two-part four-hour documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, which I gather was made in 1995... I think this is being re-broadcast now because they've since produced a Part 3.
Really interesting stuff, although the interviews with Martin get a little visually tedious, done as they are in extreme close-up on Martin's not-very-expressive face. But the insight he imparts is invaluable to anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of the American film director and the Uniquely American art form to which they aspire. At least as valuable as any four hours I spent in a film class during college.
It's particularly interesting to watch as Martin points out tricks and techniques that were truly revolutionary at the time, for without someone specifically pointing that out, it's often difficult to look back and know that something had never been done before. I was particularly struck by his analysis of a DW Griffith film that pioneered the art of cutting back-and-forth between action happening simultaneously in two different locations... Martin tells us that Griffith had to fight tooth and nail with the studio who were convinced that audiences would have no idea what the hell was going on. Think about how crucial that device has become in modern films... I kept thinking about that great sequence near the end of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which plays with our expectations about intercut scenes to make us think the FBI is about to kick in the bad guy's door when in actuality, it's Clarice who has found the killer and the FBI are barking up the wrong tree. When Jame Gumb opened that door and Starling was standing there instead of the FBI agent with the flowers I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for a second.
Also note Martin's analysis of the final scene in THE PUBLIC ENEMY which, despite being a climax that the audience has been waiting for, for quite some time, happens entirely off-stage such that we don't know what's happening until Cagney walks back into the view of the camera, which is situated outside in a static master shot. All we have to go on are gunshots and screams... brilliant way to build tension.
Really interesting stuff, although the interviews with Martin get a little visually tedious, done as they are in extreme close-up on Martin's not-very-expressive face. But the insight he imparts is invaluable to anyone who wants to better understand the evolution of the American film director and the Uniquely American art form to which they aspire. At least as valuable as any four hours I spent in a film class during college.
It's particularly interesting to watch as Martin points out tricks and techniques that were truly revolutionary at the time, for without someone specifically pointing that out, it's often difficult to look back and know that something had never been done before. I was particularly struck by his analysis of a DW Griffith film that pioneered the art of cutting back-and-forth between action happening simultaneously in two different locations... Martin tells us that Griffith had to fight tooth and nail with the studio who were convinced that audiences would have no idea what the hell was going on. Think about how crucial that device has become in modern films... I kept thinking about that great sequence near the end of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS which plays with our expectations about intercut scenes to make us think the FBI is about to kick in the bad guy's door when in actuality, it's Clarice who has found the killer and the FBI are barking up the wrong tree. When Jame Gumb opened that door and Starling was standing there instead of the FBI agent with the flowers I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for a second.
Also note Martin's analysis of the final scene in THE PUBLIC ENEMY which, despite being a climax that the audience has been waiting for, for quite some time, happens entirely off-stage such that we don't know what's happening until Cagney walks back into the view of the camera, which is situated outside in a static master shot. All we have to go on are gunshots and screams... brilliant way to build tension.
Friday, July 13, 2007
DVD review: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
Goddamned brilliant!!!
Best opening twenty minutes in comedic film since KISS KISS BANG BANG... before that? Hell I don't know... FIGHT CLUB? I can't remember when I've laughed so hard.
You must see this movie. Seriously... I'm going to find a way to get Jason Reitman on the phone Monday and tell him he's a genius. Not kidding!
And the most amazing thing is the film is politcally neutral. Most highly charged politcal film I've seen in years and I'll be damned if I can figure out what side it comes down on. In the same way they used to say Don Rickles was great because he was an equal opportunity insultor, this one takes jabs at literally everyone.
If you really hate government, and with Bush at 29% and Congress at 24%, realistically, who doesn't? Then this is the movie for you!
Best opening twenty minutes in comedic film since KISS KISS BANG BANG... before that? Hell I don't know... FIGHT CLUB? I can't remember when I've laughed so hard.
You must see this movie. Seriously... I'm going to find a way to get Jason Reitman on the phone Monday and tell him he's a genius. Not kidding!
And the most amazing thing is the film is politcally neutral. Most highly charged politcal film I've seen in years and I'll be damned if I can figure out what side it comes down on. In the same way they used to say Don Rickles was great because he was an equal opportunity insultor, this one takes jabs at literally everyone.
If you really hate government, and with Bush at 29% and Congress at 24%, realistically, who doesn't? Then this is the movie for you!
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