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United 93

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Terrorist Thriller. This docudrama recounting of the true story of United Flight 93 on that fateful day of 9/11, is the most important movie for America in years. Every American should see this film. These people are the heros of this generation. I am not exaggerating. These people are the heartland of America and they are what makes America great. When they discovered that these cowardly Muslim terrorists were going to kill them, these normal everyday people like you and me, stood up and fought back. They did it with knives and forks and extinguishers. They rose up together as one and fought evil. And they saved America. These people died for our country, folks, and that is no exaggeration.

This is a training film for every American. It is the only way to stop this evil. Just like Hitler. Hitler had to be killed or he would have killed millions more and enslaved the rest (just like radical islam). Appeasement would not work.

And to think that it was ordinary Americans who saved the Capitol, the most important of all the symbols that were attacked that day. That is why it is so mythic. And they did by fighting evildoers, not by appeasing them. Very excellent point in the film when the German passenger was telling everyone to appease the terrorists and do what they say and everything would be all right. Yes, this is Europe.

My one problem with it was that it focused too much on the technical and distant side of the air traffic controllers and the NORAD people. I wanted more of the personal. I wanted to see a bit of Todd Beamer’s life and the other guys who stormed those cowards. I wanted to know their humanness before they did this heroic act. I would have loved to see what Todd’s and some of the other’s goals were that day on their way to the airport, or whatever. It would have even been better to replace some of the documentary type tedious technical details in the air traffic controller’s room with more of the character’s development in the plane. But it was still phenomenal, AND MUST BE SEEN BY EVERY AMERICAN.

Thank You For Smoking

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Black comedy. This was a very clever cutting piece about the nature of manipulation of truth on behalf of agenda. And you know, I didn’t take it as being just about the politically correct cause of anti-smoking. I think it extends far beyond that. The main character, played brilliantly by Aaron Eckhart is a lobbyist for big tobacco, and he goes around unashamedly defending smoking, based on freedom of conscience. He gets the idea to help big tobacco by placement in Hollywood movies and there is a wonderful sequence about the insanity of Hollywood types as they do anything for money.

Unfortunately, I saw this movie very late and I was very tired, so I fell asleep during the most important part, the congressional hearings, so I’ll have to see it on video and complete this blog sometime later. But suffice it to say that there was some brilliant stuff in there about spinning. He tells his son, “that’s the great thing about logic. If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.” Well, this is profoundly true and why so many people can be so irrational while upholding rationality. It’s all in the premises. If you start with the right premises, you can win any argument. This is why “framing the argument” is so important in winning debates, and why the media is so manipulative, because they in fact do this very thing, which is symbolically portrayed in Aaron falling in lust with a news reporter who uses him to get a good story, and then when he questions her, she responds, what do you think I would do? I’m a reporter.

You know, as much as I agree with the idea in this film that smoking is bad for you and people who support it are just rationalizing, I could not help but think of the hypocrisy that comes with this moralizing. You see, the point of this film is that marketing smoking as cool in movies and media is morally responsible for the smoking that results because people, especially kids, imitate. AND YET, these very same people DENY that marketing irresponsible sexuality and violence as cool in movies and media IS NOT morally responsible for the sexuality and violence that results because people, especially kids, imitate. So kids are destroying one another’s innocence and murdering each other, and these people are concerned with how evil smoking is?

Take the Lead

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Social issue dramedy. Antonio Banderas plays a Ballroom Dance instructor who tries to help inner city delinquent students to learn self-respect by teaching them ballroom dancing. This was a very rich story, full of hope and redemption for wayward youth. On one level, it is refreshing to see the discipline, hard work and beauty of Ball Room Dancing invade the undisciplined ugly environment of modern high school culture. It has the predictable lead student struggling between choosing a criminal life on the streets and the good life of accomplishing something through the dance competition. But so what. It still worked.

I enjoyed seeing the clash of cultures with Antonio’s polite manners being quaint anachronisms in the “modern liberated” egalitarian tyranny of public schools. Yet his politeness is shown to be superior to the lack thereof and even desired. A young kid picks up from him the lost art of opening doors for women. This of course is sexist patriarchal condescension to a feminist or egalitarian. But in this story, it’s goodness. And the burnt out woman principle played by the always lovely Alfre Woodard, jumps at the chance to do a dance with Antonio, even though every one else is questioning his program of dance for the kids. Even the teachers think it’s all just play and fun and the kids, who are in this class for detention, should be learning their math and doing homework.

Yet, Antonio explains to them how dancing teaches respect and dignity between people. Although it’s interesting that never once does he use the word discipline. It was almost like the filmmakers were trying to make a movie about discipline, but were still carrying residue from a politically correct worldview that just won’t admit to certain concepts like discipline and punishment. So, rather than being the hard strong Coach Carter, Antonio woos his students and persuades them. Well, this works well in fiction, but I question its efficacy in real life, and wonder what the real Pierre Dulaine (That Antonio plays) really was like. The filmmakers personal agendas most likely revised that history. But just the same, Antonio does tell the parents who are blameshifting their troubles, “Assigning blame is easy. Parent, environment, but it doesn’t make a problem go away.” True enough, indeed.

There is also a moment when a girl complains about the man taking the lead as making him “the boss,” and Antonio tells her “no,” she is the one who chooses to accept, to follow and is therefore not really being “led.” Well, okay, there’s definitely some truth to that, but you can’t help but think they are yet again trying to avoid the obvious patriarchal essence of male leadership that the very name of the movie, TAKE THE LEAD, implies. But of course, actions speak louder than words.

One thing bothered me though and that is the sexuality of the Tango that was used to inspire the kids. We see that their street dancing is sensual and erotic and they think that ball room is for old foggies. But then Antonio shows them a Tango with a dance queen and they see that it can be just as erotic in a classy way. The problem is that teens should not be sexualized so young and yet youth culture is so heavily sexualized that teens are being spiritually and psychologically raped and they don’t even realize it until they grow up and their screwed up relationships illustrate that they “grew up” too fast. Of course, like Antonio’s character, this very thought of mine is so anachronistic and old fashioned as to be laughable by the deluded modern mind. But it nonetheless remains the answer to the problem, just as his dancing was the unlikely catalyst of redemption.

Also, some of the humanistic worldview of individualism kept trying to creep in and recast the meaning. For instance, Antonio explains to the parents about his leading of the principle in a dance, “If she allows me to lead, she’s more than trusting me, she’s trusting herself.” Boy does that make any sense? He tells another kid, “You need to dance for yourself, not anybody else.” And to another, “Having courage to follow your heart is what makes you human.” All very beautiful half-truths. Of course on one level, kids do need to learn that following their peers or living to please peer pressures etc. is not cool. But I would recommend “doing the right thing” is freedom, believing the truth is freedom, and both those things often do not reside in our “selfs” or our hearts, which tend toward selfishness.

June Bug

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Quirky family dramedy. This was a very interesting film that left me thinking for a few days. A New Yorker guy, George, visits his Southern home town family when his girlfriend, Madeline, discovers a rural artist out in that area. What we discover very quickly is that George’s family is an uneducated dysfunctional band of hicks, and George has been avoiding them for a long time because he has citified and become “civilized.”

Okay, so what I found so interesting about this movie is that it had a certain ambiguity to it that defied clichés. Oh sure, the southerners are uneducated, parochial, and simple-minded, as well as a tad bit of religious bigotry. Stereotypes on one hand. But what I found intriguing was that they also had a very strange sense of warmness, community and appreciation of life that lacked in George, his city girlfriend and the other city people. It seemed very clear that they were more authentic humans than George and Madeline.

Madeline, it turns out is the curator of an art gallery that discovers “outsider art,” that is, primitivist works of people in cultural ghettos who have no clue of the “real world.” In fact, what she really is is an exploiter of crazy people. Displaying their works and making money off them as freak show acts. The artist she discovers in George’s old home town is a whacky Ex-Confederate who is an anti-semite and paints crazy little Heironymous Bosch like pictures of the Civil War. Well, it seemed clear to me that Madeline was not much better in that she lacked humanity in turning people into objects of exploitation without their awareness of it. A condescending bigot who subverts people without them knowing it, rather than display her sin on her sleeve, like they did. And she had no qualms about it. Whereas, these bickering, dysfunctional illiterate southerners would actually treat her with compassion and genuine affection, as well as have moments of true human connection, standing around a church banquet hall singing, an old Christian hymn. Their imperfect connected humanity versus her alienated modernity.

And it’s interesting that the hymn George sings in the banquet hall surprises Madeline, illustrating his effective suppression of his religious heritage in his world of modernity. But the song is “Calling, oh, sinner come home.” So there is a real tension here within a man who struggle with his past, a past that is both dark in places, but also very light and warm, thus defying easy answers or cliché damnings. Who is worse, the uneducated sister-in-law, Ashley, who doesn’t have a clue about the “real world” outside her home town, but patiently naively tells her explosive tempered husband that Jesus loves him as he is, but wants him to change, the simple-minded Ashley who is genuinely loving toward Madeline who she considers superior to herself – or the cold and calculated Madeline, who condescends to Ashley, and can do nothing of genuine human connection. Even her sex with George seems to be just sex without ultimate connection. And George seeks to leave as soon as possible, so when he does at the end, he declares he’s glad to finally get out of there. Yet he does this right after an incident where Madeline chooses her career opportunity of visiting the artist over visiting the sick Ashley in the hospital who loses her newborn child. This heartless humanless choice of Madeline’s disappoints George for the moment when says that he’d rather stay with Ashley, with family, cause family is important, but then he gets in the car afterward and drives away with Madeline, grateful to get out of there, satisfied to be with her instead. It’s as if he did not learn his lesson at all. As I say, no simple black and white easy answers, but very thoughtful and rich in humanity was this story. If only grace had invaded it with redemption.

North Country

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Civil rights drama. Story of a single mother trying to work in the mines of Minnesota and how she overcame widespread sexual harassment on the job. This is the first class action lawsuit for sexual harassment that occurred in 1989. Charlize Theron is just brilliant in this gut wrenching social justice story. It is superbly told and should have received an Oscar nomination for best picture. The most moving movie of the year. It captures the experience of the heroine, Josie, as she joins the male-dominated workforce of the mines, where a few women have been allowed in, but are so frequently sexually harassed by the men that it went way beyond bad taste. And to top it all off, she has a false reputation as a whore (she was actually raped), which causes everyone to shift the blame onto her and no one will stand by her, not even her own father or the other women at the plant because they feel their jobs would be in jeopardy.

This movie is mostly fair in its portrayal of the kind of reasons why people do nothing about harassment. They all ring true, and quite frankly, as a man, I have to say that the sexual harassment rang true to male nature as well. The moment where her father turns and stands up for her at a union meeting, which is entirely against her, is a beautiful moment of grace and redemption. But so is the moment when she is in the court room all alone as the sole complaintant, trying to get someone, anyone to join her in order to get the class action lawsuit. And no one will do it. Until they all find out that she was raped and she is not a whore and then her best friend, who happens to have Lou Gehrig’s disease stands for her first, and then one by one a dozen people stand to join her. It’s all very formulaic and I CRIED MY EYES OUT because it was beautiful and virtuous and true.

Francis McDormand and Sean Bean bring it in with excellent performances as the childless couple who actually have a loving marriage, and Woody Harrelson is the New York lawyer who defends her, and is too shy to actually date her. So, the movie actually avoids feminist stereotyping by portraying a few good men, and good marriages.

On the down side, they try to cast the slanderous political attack on a black man, Clarence Thomas, as a similar case of sexual harassment, when in reality, Anita Hill was proven to be lying with a political agenda that could not be substantiated. And that points up the kind of story that really needs to be told now: The story of how victimization as a political agenda has created a culture of fear that can destroy innocent men’s lives with the mere accusation of political incorrectness. But despite this one major fallacy, the movie is a profound and beautiful story of redemption in the midst of a harsh environment of prejudice.

Ultraviolet

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Sci-fi female action. The human race has been compromised by biological viruses that turned some into vampires. Now, the state has almost completely eradicated the vampires, but one of them fights against the huge police state machine to bring freedom for her persecuted minority. Well, this is all just a little too goofy to be able to suspend one’s disbelief. Poor persecuted vampires? Come on. And the plot is very convoluted so that I could not really tell you what it was about anyway. This is part of a series of movies, probably playing off the intelligence of the Matrix series, that have these labyrinthine plots of mythology and detail that become too confusing to follow. Aeon Flux was exactly like this. So the fight scenes are okay, but you really don’t know any of the characters and so you don’t really care about any of them, let alone, Ultraviolet. Therefore, it results in a very expensive feast of BORING special effects action sequences. I was literally yawning and talking to my movie buddy through the film about other stuff.

And the other problem is that Ultraviolet is an invincible heroine, which means that her fight scenes are boring because she never appears to be able to lose, so you don’t really root for her because there is no risk, no humanness to her. As every increasing numbers of soldiers array against her and she says, “You’re all going to die,” I said to myself, “whatever.” And it just gets ludicrous that they pile up in the hundreds against her. When will these action filmmakers realize that its good story that ultimately makes a good film, and lots of box office bucks?

Thumbsucker

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Quirky comedy. A teen kid struggles to overcome his insecurities around his family, friends and schoolmates that is exemplified in his leftover habit from childhood of thumbsucking. This movie breaks the traditional story structure rules and focuses a bit more on character than story, but is ultimately a very interesting tale that left me thinking about it for days. The main point of the story is incarnate in the “mentor” character of the kid’s dental surgeon, played ironically by Keanu Reeves. The kid tries all these different ways to stop his habit, from hypnotism, to taking drugs for ADD, which is one of the funniest and profound elements of the story. The kid realizes that the drugs are just another fake solution to our human condition, which is really an indictment against the medical model of psychiatry that dominates our culture.

But the story goes farther than this. After the kid has tried all these means of stopping his habit, and has not been able to do so, the dentist meets with him again and tells him his previous theory was all wrong and apologizes for it. He then concludes with a monologue expressing the theme of the film that we really don’t have the answers to the human condition and each of our theories and attempts are just our confused way of wandering through life trying to find our way. Although this is ultimately existentialism in its cynical view of truth and rejection of solutions to the human condition, there is a big grain of truth in it that connects with me. While I believe that there is absolute truth, I don’t think that as humans, we have absolute or certain knowledge of it outside of faith. And even having a connection to God doesn’t guarantee absolute or certain experience of victory over our problems. Our understanding of God is often wrong in so many different ways as well. This doesn’t mean truth is undiscoverable or that we should not seek to find answers, but merely that we need to be more cautious in our pursuits of claiming certainty and have a willingness to consider the remote possibility that, yes, we might actually not have it all right.

Night Watch

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Russian Supernatural Horror. Okay, this is a vampire movie that has some cool moments in it, and was done for an amazingly small amount of money 4.2 million. It looks almost as big as Underworld 2. I was amazed. It is a very convoluted and detailed story about the forces of lightness and forces of darkness held in balance through the ages, based on some ancient truce made by the two warring kings of each side. The emphasis is on choice, and how everyone must choose for themselves which side to be on, and these forces cannot violate that free will. It is a Manichean Dualistic worldview that understands spiritual reality as two equally opposing forces in a perpetual struggle for the souls of mankind.

And there is a prophecy of a Gnostic redeemer who will come one day and choose one of the sides, who will it be? So, very Gnostic. And quite frankly, it was a bit too esoteric and detailed for me to follow. But there are some very cool things that happen in it. For instance, the very beginning starts out with a young man going to an old woman in present day to put a curse on his unfaithful girlfriend pregnant with another man’s child. This lady turns out to be a modern day witch, and it’s all very Jean-Pierre Jeunet style in its gothic quirkiness. Very interesting characters who are not all beautiful, as in Underworld. I like that about foreign films.
So anyway, this old lady starts to curse the woman and her unborn child after telling him it is a “sin” to kill the unborn. So, then the guy yells stop because he can’t bring himself to do it, and these spirit beings stop her from clapping her hands to finish the curse and the baby is safe.

So, this guy goes on to join the forces of light. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness are depicted as vampires. So by the time the hero has to help this kid twelve years later who is an “Other,” that is, he is sensitive to the spirit realm, the hero comes to realize that the kid is his own child. The girlfriend was not pregnant with another man’s child, but with his own! But for some convoluted reason the hero is deceived into thinking he must kill the kid for the good, and is stopped in mid stride by the bad guy. Then the child asks him why was he trying to kill him, and the hero replies that he would never try to kill him. To which, the child replies that he did try to kill him, TWELVE YEARS AGO when he used the witch to curse his unborn child. This desire to kill his own child is what causes the child to go to the forces of darkness instead of light. And that, my friends, is a VERY powerful life affirming story. Three cheers for the Russians!

Firewall

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Suspense Thriller. Harrison Ford as a computer security executive for a major bank whose family is kidnapped by a bank robber who wants Ford to break through the bank security for him or his family gets killed. This is a formula thriller, but I loved it. And particularly the very strong value that the story incarnates on a personal as well as societal level: FIGHT TERRORISTS/CRIMINALS TO THE DEATH, DON’T SUBMIT TO THEM. Let’s Roll!!

The Matador

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Buddy Black Comedy. An aging assassin who is losing his touch befriends an everyman nice guy and both their lives are changed for the better.
This is a rather funny comedy that uses a Matador’s eloquent noble killing of a bull as a metaphor for facing death and murdering people with style. There are some great and funny moments of Greg Kinnear as the consummate everyman good guy and his shock at getting to befriend this cold hearted killer. As well as humorous moments of the Assassin, played brilliantly by Pierce Brosnan, as he tries to rediscover normal human life through this everyman.
However, I would have to say that the story fails in a couple ways. First, it doesn’t really explore the themes that are most embedded in such a premise. It doesn’t show the effect in Kinnear’s life of facing death and becoming more of a man of action and decision in light of the brevity of life. The story focuses on the encounters with these men, but not really the life effects on Kinnear. Also, the movie merely shows the hitman losing his nerves and being unable to kill anymore, but it does not explore the interior reasons for this in the killer. It does not show or tell us what could have been a wonderfully profound depiction of the effect of being a person who takes innocent life. At best it shows him as lonely on his birthday, because after all, who wants to be the friend of a killer? But he never tells Kinnear anything about this. A beautiful opportunity to transform Kinnear into a confessor is totally missed.

The morality of the movie is also deeply flawed. Basically, you have a hero, Kinnear, who befriends a man who should be turned in to the Feds, but he doesn’t. And there is no pressing reason that forces him NOT to. There is a wonderful moral moment, when we begin to realize that Greg may have hired the hitman to kill his business competition, and we become repulsed by him, but then we realize that he asked for it, but the hitman wouldn’t do it because he knew it would rack him with guilt for the rest of his life and he would regret it. So Kinnear learns his lesson without going all the way. Very cool. And by the way, this may be the scene where the storytellers were trying to show us the negative effect on the killer of his killing, but I don’t think it was clear enough. This could have been the confessor scene where we see the killer’s explanation of why he won’t do it more as a confession of his own misery in doing so. But instead it seemed to me to be portrayed more like the killer was more mature and able to handle it, but Kinnear was not, so the killer is like an older brother protecting the everyman, but not with his own regret.

Anyway, after that moral triumph, Kinnear then ruins his entire integrity by helping the assassin to kill his last target in order to get out of the business safely. This makes him a very unsympathetic hero to me. We find out that the target was actually the guy who was trying to kill the assassin, but it is too late, because the hero did not know that, so he did it, thinking he was killing an innocent man, which makes his character unredeemed and stained with evil. And I believe the storytellers knew this to be the case because they did not show a crucial dramatic moment of Kinnear helping him to actually kill the target. So, alas, the moral structure of this film was rather repulsive, though the ironic humor of the moments was brilliant.