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District 9

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This story is about a huge alien spaceship having to dock over Johannesburg, South Africa for some kind of energy problems. The aliens can’t get home to their planet. They stay there for 20 years and end up being treated like illegal aliens or refugees in a loud and obvious political metaphor for today. They are herded into “District 9,” a walled off internment camp for the 1.2 million aliens from the mothership. It all looks like the refugee camps we’ve seen around the world, and it is ministered by the obvious U.N. parallel, the M.N.U., Multi-National United. This metaphor also carries xenophobic and racist overtones as we see in the movie all the signs and rules “segregating” aliens and humans: “Humans Only,” signs for bathrooms, etc. The aliens look like shrimp to humans, so they develop the “dehumanizing” name of “prawns” to refer to the aliens, just like racist lingo all over the world does: “Caffer” in apartheid, “N-word” in America, “Cracker” for white people, and on and on.

The hero, Wikus, a nerdish South African, begins his journey as a heartless government bureaucrat, more concerned about following protocol than about the unequal treatment of the aliens, such as the suppression of their reproduction by extermination of all their eggs, as well as the brutal treatment of the aliens, who have turned scavengers and ghetto-like in their behaviors. It is shot like a reality news show documentary to heighten the sense of reality, so that it’s not so much a sci-fi picture but closer to home, much like Cloverfield did with the handheld camcorder subjective view. Although this movie does have 3rd person omniscient moments to progress the story interspersed with the reality show style.

Anyway, so Wickus begins his journey as a heartless bureaucrat, but when he stumbles upon some strange liquid that splashes in his face, and begins to turn him into an alien, we see the obvious theme that xenophobic or racist fear of the other dissolves when we see “the other” or our enemy in ourselves, or when we see the world through the eyes of “the other.” No better way to accomplish that point than to literally turn into one of the “other.” Then of course, the government captures Wickus in order to experiment on him and discover how this genetic transformation can benefit the military to be able to use the alien weaponry, which only works with alien DNA. So Wickus discovers an entire laboratory where humans are experimenting on the aliens and cutting them up into scientific pieces for analysis, another strong parallel to Nazi, Japanese, and even American experimentation done on unwilling participants deemed as lives unworthy to be lived or as less than human. This movie does not place a lot of faith or trust in big government bureaucracy as a means for addressing the issues of illegal aliens, refugees or racial segregation.

One can surely understand why Wickus transforms and seeks to help an alien father and his son get back to the mothership in order to escape and bring back alien help from their planet. Especially, since Wickus by the end of the film, turns completely into an alien, waiting for the return of the aliens who will supposedly be able to turn Wickus back into a human. Wickus even ends up taking up arms as a “freedom fighter” against the M.N.U. forces trying to capture him and stop the aliens from leaving. Wickus will not doubt ever call the aliens “prawns” again.

The Hangover

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The story of a group of four friends going to Vegas for a bachelor’s party. When they wake up the next day, they don’t remember what happened and they can’t find the groom, who is due to his wedding in 24 hours. It’s a male juvenile comedy about immature guys getting in trouble and out of it. It’s theme is an affirmation of the much repeated cliché in the movie, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” In comparison with movies like Wedding Crashers, or Knocked Up, (also gross our comedies) which mock male immature juvenility and affirm taking responsibility, The Hangover celebrates it. Because they were inadvertently slipped Ruffies (the date rape drug that causes memory loss), the guys are not portrayed as being entirely responsible for all the wild, criminal and immoral things they did during the evening. Mike Tyson, the famous boxer criminal, is portrayed as cool, even heroic, especially when he slaps a high five for the guys stealing a cop car. The three friends receive their share of beatings from criminal types, but it is all portrayed as undeserving, since they “didn’t know what they were doing” on the drug. There are jokes of endangering a baby they have to carry along with them. There are ultimately no consequences for their behavior as they get back in time for the wedding, and the groom tells his bride at the ceremony that “as long as we are married, I will never do anything like this to you again.” But the final moment shows the guys looking over pictures they took on a newly discovered camera of their night, all acting as if their orgy of debauchery was just good fun to be hidden in the memory. One of the guys, an uptight emasculated man, engaged to a controlling female monster hypocrite gets up the courage to take charge of his life and break his engagement because of his experience in unwittingly marrying a stripper/prostitute (while on the drug). He then decides to go back to take the prostitute out for dinner, because she is portrayed as more authentic and fun-loving. This movie is not a morality tale about growing up, it is an affirmation of male stereotypes and a celebration of juvenility, immorality and immaturity.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

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This is a Holocaust movie of a different approach. It tells the story of the loss of innocence through the eyes of a young German boy, the son of an SS officer. The family moves into the woods just barely out of sight of the concentration camp that the father is in charge of. But father avoids telling his family what he is really doing, presumably from shame. The little boy, Bruno spies the work camp from his bedroom window and assumes it is a farm where everyone wears striped pajamas. He sneaks his way over there and befriends a young Jewish boy in the camp and spends time with him talking and playing games through the electrified fence. Bruno never quite figures out what is going on, but his grandma knows, and his mother soon finds out, and summarily falls into depression and angry resentment of her husband. But the film does not fall into stereotypes of females being against the Nazi vision and males being warmongers, as the boy Bruno never comprehends the darkness – his innocence protecting him – yet his older sister embraces it and becomes a Hitler Youth in her affections. We see Bruno’s confusion over the treatment of Jewish servants as subhuman, and in that comparison lies the film’s critique of cultures of death that always need to redefine those they wish to dispose of as less than human in order to salve the conscience. The power of this story lies in its ending, because the little boy becomes so united in soul with his little Jewish friend, that he sneaks into the camp and dresses in the “striped pajamas” in order to help the Jewish boy find his “lost” father, who we know has been burned in the ovens that fill the skies with smoke from their stacks. This movie is the serious version of It’s a Beautiful Life. In the latter, innocence was maintained through a humorous deception of the father, but in this story, innocence is required to be a victim of evil in order to show the willingness of self-deception in a society that justifies atrocities. As Bruno is in the camp, the story ends with him being corralled with other prisoners and being gassed in the showers with his little friend as his father seeks him too late. What makes this deeply disturbing and sad ending so uniquely powerful is that Bruno’s innocent friendship becomes the ultimate unity in death with the innocent Jewish boy in a way that could not even be captured with a deliberately chosen sacrifice. At the moment when the father realizes his son has been killed, one is convinced that he will abandon the ideology completely because he can no longer avoid the inhumanity of what he is doing. It is a backdoor portrayal of the golden rule of do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is an embodiment of the classic informal argument “What if it was YOUR family member who received the consequences of your beliefs?”

Two Lovers

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Joaquin Phoenix plays Leonard, a Jewish guy who, on the verge of suicide by rejection of his fiancé, simultaneously falls for two women at once: One, a carefree existential live-for-the-moment Gentile girl upstairs and a nice plain jane no make-up good Jewish girl. This seems to be a blatant parable about the universal ubiquitous inner struggle in all men, that fantasy temptation that is ever present to “give it all up” or “throw it all away” for the exciting, the romantic, the dangerous, instead of choosing the safe, security of a woman of good character. The Gentile, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, is a drug addled mindless partying adulteress who, like most adulteresses foolishly pines for her adulterer to leave his family, believing that he will then be faithful to her. But none of this matters to Leonard, because she incites his passion with her existential living for the moment. There’s just something about the power of passion when you “follow your heart.” Meanwhile, the plain Sandra, played by Vinessa Shaw, is kind, gentle, devoted and stable and has the proper family connections for tradition. Leonard fornicates with both women, making it that much harder for him to see clearly. At the last moment, Leonard chooses to throw it all away and run away with the Gentile, but is stopped at the last moment when she throws it all away to return to her faithless adulterer after he leaves his wife. This is what you get when you choose a life of throwing it all away for a passionate feeling, you lose it all. The movie leaves one with a strong sense of disatisfaction as Leonard is able to return then to the “woman of character” without her even knowing his failed choice, as he then gives her the wedding ring he had bought for the adulterer. It’s like a consolation prize of passionless yet stable life. I think it would be a truer reality if Leonard had lost both of the women. Of course, one could argue, that he was entering into his own punishment of inauthenticity. When we make bad choices of character we reap the consequences of an inability to know real love. This story seems to indicate that when you follow your heart and seek for passion instead of character, you miss out on real life.

Public Enemies

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When I saw the title my first thought was, “Why is it plural? A movie about John Dillinger starring the illustrious talented Johnny Depp should clearly be called, ‘Public Enemy.’ Unless of course, Michael Mann is going to make a moral equivalency argument that the government that hunted down Dillinger was just as “criminal” or immoral as Dillinger. Therefore, the real public enemies are Hoover and his FBI gang.” And this is what I believe Mann has tried to do. Dillinger is depicted as a man without a country in that he is a Romantic, a “criminal with a heart of gold”: he doesn’t take individuals’ money at the bank, only bank money; He is a devoted and gentle lover of one woman in a world of sleaze; and he lives for the moment, being fiercely loyal to his friends. He doesn’t look beyond tomorrow, so eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. This existential worldview is depicted in the movie as being anachronistic in a modernizing era as crime syndicates learn to build a regular established illegal income through gambling rather than dangerous one-off bank robbing. Crime has lost its romance of the individual and become big business. Dillinger cannot continue to exist in this world with his fun loving devil may care Robin Hood romanticism. If you don’t change with the times, you will die, survival of the fittest. J. Edgar Hoover is depicted as a fool without any experience, therefore unworthy of his position. And the “good guy” tracking down Dillinger, Melvin Pervis, is depicted as cold and emotionless, a man of science who represents the future of the FBI, as he relies on new scientific techniques of forensics to track down bad guys, thus taking out all the glory of the human intuition. Pervis’ henchmen beat Dillinger’s woman, making them look more cruel than Dillinger. The Untouchables, this is NOT, as the good guys are portrayed as villainous and traitorous as the bad guys, in fact, quite often, simply stupid or neanderthal. So this is also a movie about the death of the romantic notion of Robin Hood redistributive justice in favor of the modern scientific method (forensics) and the big business of criminal syndicates. The real public enemies in this movie, as embodied in the FBI characters as well as crime syndicates are Enlightenment science and “corporatism” that has crushed the individual zest for life.

The Wicker Man

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Horror. A police officer investigates a missing child on an obscure island of Puget Sound, only to discover the island is controlled by a mysterious pagan cult. This is a story that shows Feminism/neo-paganism/Gaia Earth worship as evil. Hollywood always shows patriarchy as the oppressive subjugation of women by abusive men. But this movie is rather unique in that it communicates the opposite: that matriarchy is the oppressive subjugation of men by abusive women. In this story, little school girls are taught to recite that the purist form of the male is the phallic symbol. Men’s tongues appear to be cut out and they are reduced to breeders and physical laborers who are forcefully uneducated. These men-haters of this isolated isle disparage patriarchy and then attempt to replace one form of perceived oppression of women with their own oppression of men. The writer/director, Neil LaBute uses this commune to make his point that the “earth” religion that Wiccans, witches and radical feminists all point to as the glorious original pristine Garden of Eden is actually a Garden of Snakes that is rooted in the same human sacrifice that all paganism is ultimately rooted in. A sacrifice that is a twisted parody of the need for atonement that the living God has embedded into the universe. This is a unique and original voice. Put into Pomo lingo: This story is a subversive narrative that delegitmizes radical feminism and its neopagan counterpart as gynophilic male-hating imperialism.

The Path to 9/11

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Espionage Miniseries. The story of how 9-11 came about based on the 9-11 Commission report. Directed by David Cunningham, the director of my movie, “To End All Wars.” This is going to be on TV, but it is so astonishingly powerful, that I had to blog about it. It completes the incredible “trilogy” of 9-11 movies that I would say every American should see. The others being “United 93” and “World Trade Center.”

“The Path to 9-11” shows the political realities that the other two neglect. Shot like the series 24 in handheld very shakey style, this 6 hour extravaganza is a miracle any Hollywood Network would actually make it. Why? Because it shows George Tenet of the CIA, and Sandy Berger of National Security and Bill Clinton are all directly responsible for Osama Bin Laden being alive and carrying out 9-11. (It reveals Clinton’s sexual immorality being a distraction from his ability to lead, in missing the opportunity to actually catch or kill Bin Laden. It shows that Clinton and his administration had the opportunity to catch Bin Laden and he did not give the order to do so (This is a compilation of several events). This is why Clinton has sought to persuade ABC to re-edit the program. It shows that the US Embassy head in Yemen (played brilliantly by Patricia Heaton) was so concerned about “offending” Islam and following their social customs with sensitivity training that she quashed the investigations after the USS Cole bombing. It shows that “racial profiling” was responsible for missing the terrorists. It shows that the little people like a Canadian border guard and an airplane pilot educator were heros because they ignored the rules against racial profiling and caught Moussaui and another terrorist. It shows that the Clinton administration, including Madeline Albright, betrayed the “only true friend” we had, the head of the Northern Alliance, and failed to support him when he needed our help the most. It portrays Richard Clarke as a hero who kept telling everyone this was going to happen and we should attack the terrorists and take them out, and no one listened. And it is not one sided in it’s critique either, for it shows the capture of Ramze Youssef and Moussaui, so it shows the positive movements of the Clinton administration as well. But it also critiques the Bush administration in showing that embarrassing moment for Bush at the elementary school during the attacks, and how the military was confused and incompetent in scrambling their jets. And it also shows Condi Rice “demoting” Clarke into a lesser job, when he was the one guy who was pointing out the danger and what they should do. So it is not a politically biased movie.

There is a beautiful moment which highlights the difference between Islam and Christianity. As firefighters are carrying people out of the WTC towers, a priest, dressed in firefighting garb is heard to be praying for the men who are heroically rescuing others as well as for the victims to keep them safe. This God of mercy and grace and self sacrifice juxtaposed against the previous 5 hours of Muslims praying to their god of war and rationalizing hatred and murder. EVERY AMERICAN MUST SEE THIS FILM. Thank you, David Cunningham and the writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, for your courageous storytelling.

P.S. I just heard that ABC is re-editing the film in response to Clinton’s demand to make him look better. And that some US Senator has threatened to pull ABC’s license if they don’t pull the show. Wow, censorship. Where is the ACLU? That’s what I want to know. Now, let’s see, do you think ABC can be relied upon to tell the truth about anything when it capitulates to politicians like this? And then this lying Sandy Berger, who is a criminal who stole classified documents from National Security Archives and stuffed them in his pants to steal them — and this criminal scumbag is complaining about truthful portrayal? Jeesh. And by the way, the scene that Clinton is griping about, is a dramatization of the fact that the Administration failed to take several opportunities to catch Bin Laden (As documented in the 9/11 Commission Report, page 136-137).

The Descent

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Horror. A group of women go spelunking in an underground cave and fall victim to evolved human predators crawling around in the dark. This is the same exact story as The Cave, which I blogged on last year. But this one is better. The premise is just as ridiculous because it maintains that some humans evolved deep in caverns into blind grocking spiderlike creatures without any real humanity, and yet, they somehow had access to the surface in order to find prey to catch and eat. But alas, it’s only a horror movie and I don’t consider that all that bad of a contradiction for horror.

The point of the movie is much deeper. It is about what makes us human or not, and the answer is not hopeful. For in evolution, there is no ultimate difference. We are all reducible to our animal natures, our biology. And that is what this film suggests. There is a dilemma between the heroine and the “action woman” of the piece. Evidently, the “action woman” had an affair with the heroine’s husband before he got killed in a car accident. The action woman regrets it to some degree, though not totally, since she still carries around a token of the husband’s betrayed lust in the form of a piece of jewelry. Anyway, as the monsters start to attack, the action woman and the heroine turn into battling mommas, while the others fall apart. Only the heroine turns a bit more bloody in her rage.

So action momma refuses to leave when she finds the exit until she goes back for the heroine. This is her redemption or human conscience and guilt over her friend. Unfortunately, the heroine has discovered her friend’s betrayal and when she shows up at the escape exit, and have the last chance to leave, the heroine wounds the action woman and leaves her to be eaten by the monsters. This to me is a clear attempt to be consistent with an atheist evolutionary worldview that claims that morality is an arbitrary social convention, since these monsters, separated from the rest of society simply are reduced to survival of the fittest. The movie could have been a heroic affirmation of humanity if, at that moment of revelation between the women, the heroine would forgive “action woman,” and they escape. Because you see that would be what would make them different from the raw animal tooth and claw of their predators. The ability to forgive would be the sense of morality that humanizes us, that is, separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom as created in the image of God. That is what would give the characters their true “victory” to survive beyond the beasts. But instead, the storytellers chose to have the heroine capitulate to revenge and murder, to in fact become like the beasts that were chasing them.

This materialist mythology spoils the movie for me and shows just how unsatisfying atheist evolutionary storytelling is if one is consistent with one’s worldview. There is no heroism or hope or atonement, there is only survival of the fittest and revenge.

The Illusionist

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Romantic Mystery. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, a magician uses his skills to win the heart of a woman above his class status. Paul Giametti plays the police captain who tells the story and is torn between his loyalty to a corrupt prince and justice. I found this story engrossing. Although one could tell that all the illusions were simply camera tricks, not true magical skill, which sort of made it harder to believe. On the other hand, it was still a great story of love and the pressure of social standing.

World Trade Center

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Rescue Drama. Based on the true story of two cops who survived the collapse of the twin towers and their rescue from the rubble. I must admit, I was amazed that Oliver Stone made this film. This is a very human exploration of courage, hope, pain and heroism that touched my soul with the value of family, faith and country that is usually feverishly attacked by Stone. He should be applauded for the beauty which he has created in this film. Perhaps one of the reasons why his conspiracy theorizing is absent is because he chose to focus exclusively on individual New Yorker’s reactions to the events and almost completely avoided the bigger picture of what is happening, even to the extent of reducing the planes hitting to a mere shadow on a sky scraper passing by, and the sound and thunder of the hits from a distance. Of course, it is entirely possible that Stone may believe the insane theories that the American government or “the Jews” did it, and this is merely the ant’s eye view of the common man. Be that as it may, this was a truly great story and film.

What I love about stories like this is the existential factor that places the heros in such peril that you project yourself into them and wonder how you might face death, or wonder how much of your own life you have squandered in missing what’s really important.

It is important to note that the Marine who went alone into the rubble was positively portrayed as a man of Christian faith, courage and duty, who entered the rubble as a symbol of how the Marines are the first to arrive and often unspoken heroes in that sense. When he walked into those ruins alone and willing to die to help find survivors, it may have been the most moving part of the film for me. He says, “You are my mission,” to the trapped officers, which reminded me of the symbolic heroism of Saving Private Ryan, “The mission is a man.” So there is this entirely positive symbolic portrayal of the military in this film that is diametrically opposed to his other films. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he considers the military only good if it rescues people from the aftermath of evil, rather than being a positive force against evil on the battlefield. But then again, this good Marine says that there will be pay back and the story notes that he went on to two tours of duty in Iraq, so that softens that theory. Anyway, thank you, Mr. Stone, for portraying Christian faith and the Marines as positive in this picture. God knows, the negative stereotypes in movies are more typical.

Some may claim that the heroism is weakened because the cops that got buried in the rubble didn’t do anything, they just went in and got covered. But this misses the point, They DID act heroically. They went in to the building to help. Sure, it was their job in a way, but it was also a choice. Not everyone went. And they were there trying to help people, so they are clearly heroes.
As for those who say, “it’s too soon,” Balderdash! It’s not soon enough. We need to revisit September 11 intimately, because already too many people have forgotten and have reduced the war on terror to political grandstanding and party politics.