Crime

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.

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.

Matchpoint

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Erotic Thriller. A middle class Englishman falls in love and marries a woman from a wealthy family, but continues in a passionate adulterous affair with an American actress that results in dire consequences.

This is virtually a remake of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors from 16 years ago. The acting of all, especially Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as Chris) and Scarlett Johansson (as Nola), is superb. Allen’s capture of the spirit of adultery and obsession is profoundly revelatory, surely a result of his real life mirroring his movies, or shall we say, his movies are obviously expressions of his own experience.

In some ways, this movie explores redundant territory, but in some ways, it depicts the destructive nature of unfaithful obsession. It is the classic “boring kind wife versus passionate unstable mistress” story. But I gotta say, I was not enticed. Scarlett’s character was sufficiently realistic in her competing exclusivity to make this a lesson in consequences for those of us tempted to be unfaithful. Nola, unlike so many stupid women who actually think the adulterer is going to leave his wife, becomes jealous and demanding of more attention. This is more like the internal tension that most likely occurs in affairs, unless of course, both participants are pure hedonistic nihilists. But the point is that the temptation of adultery would be much easier to avoid if one would take the time to think through the kind of consequences and what one would lose if one did so. That is the power of these kind of movies, they play it through so we can receive an imprint in our minds of the consequences, which should come to mind whenever we might be tempted.

Unfortunately, this is a Woody Allen movie, and Allen is a Nietzschean nihilist, so the movie does not end well. Chris realizes that if Nola reveals the adultery to Chris’s family, he would lose his entire life of wealth and comfort and live in poverty with his passionate mistress. So he takes the only way out for a pragmatic nihilist: kill the mistress and return to normal life. Chris is shown early on, reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, which is about Raskolnikov, a student who kills someone as an expression of his belief in the Overman of Nietzsche, the man who is “above society’s petty constructed moralities.” So, back to the movie, after Chris kills Nola and successfully makes it look like a drug killing, he muses to himself that “you learn to push the guilt under the rug. The innocent are slain to make way for a grander scheme.” In the beginning of the movie, Chris says, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” And he ends up “luckily” avoiding being caught for his crime.

What is so important about this film is that it marks a deeper comittment to Nietzschean nihilism than his previous existential film, Crimes and Misdemeanors. Crimes is about a “good” Jewish doctor who hires a killer to kill his obsessive mistress to protect his comfort and image, just like Match Point. But there is a significant change here. In Crimes, the hero wrestles with his Jewish religious heritage and concludes that religious guilt is mere convention that can be overcome with time. In Matchpoint, there is but one reference in the movie to religion and that is scorned by the aristocratic class as the “despair of faith being the path of least resistance.” So, in this movie, God is truly dead in not even being part of the conversation, he is assumed to be dead, whereas in Crimes, Allen tried to prove he was dead. In Crimes, he has the “hero” hire a killer to do the dirty work, in Match Point, the “hero” does it himself. This is important because it marks a logical step in that if there is no morality that is truly binding on us, then we ourselves should not feel guilty in killing those who are in our way. In hiring a killer, you are still admitting a measure of guilt by having someone else do the dirty work. But here, Allen is saying we should be able to kill with our own hands and get over it.

A very interesting thematic exploration is going on in this movie between luck and purpose, chance and determination. Throughout the film, the characters argue over whether it is all luck and chance or purpose. The dominant view seems to be, as one character concludes, “All existence is blind chance, no purpose, no design.” As a Nietzschean, this is exactly what Woody Allen believes. And the character appeals to the indeterminism of Quantum physics to justify the worldview. Allen uses a very clever metaphor at the very beginning of the movie for his belief in chance. He uses the experience of tennis players, when the ball hits the net and there is a moment when you don’t know if it is going to fall on either side of the net. He freeze frames on an actual ball at that moment. Very ingenius. Anyway, this is a beautiful real world example of an actual Quantum Physics “slit” experiment of alleged indeterminism where light is shown through a slit and supposedly there is no way to know if a photon will go to one side or the other of the split. Allen has always had a brilliant ability to translate his philosophical concepts into real world dramatic experiences and metaphors.

I say, “alleged indeterminism” because not only do Quantum physicists say that what happens on a quantum microlevel does not necessarily apply to the macrolevel that we live in, but also that the philosophical conclusion of indeterminacy from this scientific experiment is indicative not of ontological reality but of man’s finite epistemic knowledge. To suggest that our inability to determine reality with our crude measuring tools or finite and impaired observations is somehow the nature of reality itself is pure prejudice and imperialism. Just because WE cannot determine reality does not necessarily mean reality is indeterminable. That is placing our pathetically inadequate finite capacity as observers at the center of the universe, the now-discredited superstitious ignorance of Enlightenment modernity.

Anyway, the hero/killer stole jewels to make it look like a drug robbery. So at the end, when the hero/killer throws the jewels into the Thames we see a ring fly through the air and hit the rail by the river, just like the tennis ball in the beginning, and fall on the ground instead. It is this ring that frees the killer because just when the detective figures out the crime, they find a drug criminal with the ring in his pocket proving it was a drug crime, but really the criminal found the ring on the ground.

So the hero/killer muses at the end that “it would be fitting if I were apprehended, it would give a sense of purpose,” but alas he is not apprehended, because according to this view, there is no purpose in life. This a clear monologue to the audience telling us that our desire to see the criminal pay for his crime affirms in us the mythology that there is purpose in the universe, and that evil will be punished. So because it is not, he is thumbing his nose in our face. This is a very dark evil worldview but in a way, it is also a very clear admission of the logical conclusion of such thinking. If you believe that morality is mere social convention, then “getting people out of our way” which amounts to killing them if we have to, is ultimately justified. And it is the superior men, the overmen, who live above society’s morality and are “brave” enough to defy it. They carry the future with them, according to this depraved worldview. Odd, this is exactly how the Nazis thought, and would have cremated Allen himself were he around Germany at the time. Also interesting that Allen had to determinedly craft a story with his purpose and predestination of his characters trying to prove there is no determination, purpose or predestiny. Kinda makes him a bit hypocritical don’tya think?

Boy, I would not want to be one of Allen’s friends. No telling what manner of action he might take would he consider you in the way of his career or conscience.

Munich

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International Espionage Thriller. “Based on true events,” this is a self-loathing Jewish “Godfather” interpretation by Spielberg of the Israeli assassination of terrorists in response to the Munich slaughter of Jewish Athletes in 1972. Movies do not happen in a vacuum. Period pieces are ultimately interpretations of the present by using the past as an analogy, and this movie is no exception. It is more than an anti-Israel polemic about Munich, it is an attack on the American policy of hunting down terrorists in the wake of 9/11. In the film, one of the characters says, “What happened in Munich changes everything.” This is an obvious reference to the oft-quoted notion that this is a different world since 9/11, that 9/11 changed the way we as a nation respond to terrorists because of their cowardly cruelty and evil in killing innocent people in the name of Allah.

This movie is a shocking piece of insanity that concludes that hunting terrorists breeds terrorist attacks and perpetuates a “cycle of violence” and creates monsters like Osama Bin Laden (In this story, the claim is made that Carlos the Jackal came into being in response to these hits on evil criminal terrorist cowards—yeah, right). It is an attempt to establish moral equivalency of the US and Israel with evil criminal terrorist cowards. There is a cut that shows the Israelis going over the list of evil criminal terrorist cowards that they are about to kill, just after we are shown the list of innocent Jewish athletes targeted by the evil criminal terrorist cowards, as if this is the same kind of hit list. Another Jew says they won’t win unless they “learn to act like them.” Golda Meir is quoted as saying something she would never have even thought, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” This is supposed to somehow indicate that the Israelis considered what they were doing was wrong, but did it anyway. The reality is that it is NOT a compromise to kill evil criminal terrorist cowards, but it is the incarnation of moral justice for a sovereign nation to do so.

Interestingly, “justice” is a concept that is never even addressed in the movie. The pursuit is pictured as revenge and bloodlust of people like the South African convert who says, “the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood,” thus making the Israelis out to be racist Nazis just like the evil Palestinian criminal terrorist cowards who hate Jewish blood. A key scene where the Hero has an argument with a PLO member who does not realize he is a Jew tries to redefine evil criminal terrorist cowards as merely wanting a place to call home, “home is everything.” Funny, how the storyteller leaves out an important bit of factual information that the real desire of Palestinian evil criminal terrorist cowards is to, and I quote from the Palestinian evil criminal terrorist cowards themselves, “Drive the Jews into the sea.” This is not some secret plan that nobody knows about, its documented all over the place, and reinforced every time in history that the Israelis would give in on negotiations and the Palestinian response would not be rejoicing but another murder bomber.

But there is an unwitting dialectical tension here, because Spielberg tries to show that killing evil criminal terrorist cowards breeds more killing by showing televised historical events that occurred in response to the assassinations. But what Spielberg does not seem to notice is that the evil criminal terrorist cowards respond by hijacking and killing innocent people. As if there is any comparison. Oh, so let’s not execute capital criminals because look at how criminals respond to law enforcement by engaging in more crime. It’s interesting that the movie portrays most all the evil criminal terrorist cowards as “normal” men being nice to people, teaching literature, being nice to his family, etc. so that it would be questionable as to who they are killing. What he should have done was that effect done in Run Lola Run, where you would show snapshots of each of these evil criminal terrorist cowards killing people, plotting their evil, making their bombs, killing Jews etc. But of course he doesn’t, that would show that it was justice and that these evil criminal terrorist cowards deserved it, and we can’t have that confusing concept enter into the discussion.

It is certainly bordering on lunacy to suggest that Israel should not respond to evil criminal terrorist cowards and that we should not fight crime because it might make criminals mad and they might do more crime in response. Since there is no nation where evil criminal terrorist cowards reside, and they parasitically and hypocritically live off the societies that they seek to destroy, then there is no other moral way to fight them than through international espionage. I think some of the truths that come through this otherwise politically correct drek is that justified killing does affect you negatively, regardless of its righteousness. The hero gets paranoid that others are trying to kill him, just like he is trying to kill others. He ends up distrusting Israel itself, believing that it will kill him because he knows so much and after all, Israel is just like the evil criminal terrorist cowards, right? Interestingly, Israel did not kill him. And they always sought to avoid killing innocents. What does that tell you? Maybe, just maybe, there is a difference between evil criminal terrorist cowards and imperfect nations seeking justice and righteousness. Another funny contradiction in the logic of the film is that the Jews are portrayed as stereotypical “moneygrubbers” who are worried about getting receipts and talking about the high cost of killing people, as if this is immoral reduction of people to objects of money. But then, the hero protects his information source and is loyal to them over his country, yet that source is the epitome of people who worship only money and no ideology. As if it is good to favor no government and betray anyone and everyone for money. This source betrays ALL sides to each other for money, as well as tipping off the hero’s whereabouts to his enemies. So this STUPID hero kills a whore who turned in his friend for money, but protects the worst of them all, the betrayers of everyone for money. You know, even though this story was an attempt to prove moral equivalency, I was unmoved by the attempt. Every time an evil criminal terrorist coward got assassinated, I cheered and felt justice was done. And I was affirmed that this is exactly how we need to respond to evil criminal terrorist cowards, the Winston Churchill way, not the Neville Chamberlain way of appeasement.

Fun with Dick and Jane

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Satire Comedy. A Jim Carrey vehicle about a married couple pressured to pursue the American Dream of keeping up with the Joneses, who turn to robbery when they both lose their jobs and face losing all they own. This is a “stick it to the Man” story about the corrupt greedy exploitation of the working man by Enron-like companies. Alec Baldwin does a great job playing himself as the heartless head of the greedy company who bails out of a collapsing hollow shell corporation with a golden parachute of millions, while all the company workers lose their pensions and lifelong savings. When Carrey and his wife, played by Tea Leoni, realize they should steal Baldwin’s money, not the innocent people around them, they plot a paper switch at a bank that would take his money and end up giving it back to the pensions of the jilted workers of the big company. So a Robin Hood movie. This is a complex issue in this story, because on the one hand, I do agree that the corporate exploitation of the little man is clearly a problem in our society, but on the other hand, I don’t think it is justifiable to break the law to “do good.” And that is exactly what the hero and heroine do in this story. Even though they turn from stealing from their neighbors, they do still end up stealing from another neighbor, he’s just a corrupt one. I do not like stories that try to get you to cheer on the hero if he is trying to accomplish a crime. They tend to reinforce vigilanteism even in non-violent forms. Trying to achieve justice while breaking the law is itself unjust. But one of the reasons why this did not bother me as much with this story as it did with others like Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve, is because it is a satire that seems more focused on the bad guy getting his comeuppance than on the hero’s own story. Of course, this doesn’t justify it as right, but it did make it less offensive. At the end the heros do not get the money, they give it to others, so it is less about them winning and more about the villain losing. Perhaps this is the powerful draw of Robin Hood mythology – it justifies crime by appealing to the pragmatic result of good. Evil is okay if it results in good. Pragmatic morality is the handmaiden of evil.

Capote

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Heavy psychological drama. This biopic of the infamous effeminate, lisping, out of the closet homosexual author of In Cold Blood focuses on his relationship with one of the killers of that heinous crime of the 60s. It rather insightfully captures how Capote’s simultaneous obsession and manipulative relationship with that killer created a moral crisis in his life so effective that he never wrote another novel afterwards. It is not a flattering portrait, but it is not an attack piece either. It is at once, both sensitive to the unfriendly suspicion of him by a morally upright society who nevertheless loves his writing, and unhesitatingly frank about Capote’s own aristocratic and hypocritical snobbery toward that same society. And in this movie, I found the morality of that American society refreshingly fair and without the harsh hateful judgment of it made by so many other movies. And yet, it reveals Capote’s self-delusion of being an honest man who “doesn’t lie.” He fancies himself honest and frank, but in reality, he lies from beginning to end to the killer in order to get his story. He masquerades with a pseudo-concern for the man’s rights against an unfair system of capital punishment, but between his lines we see that he is concerned about getting enough time to finish the story. And his concern for the humanity of the killer, is really a ploy to get inside the head of the killer to figure out what motives drive the evil that men do. Yet, in this course, he does connect with the humanity of the killer and finds himself in the killer. In the same way that the killer used his victims without concern for this humanity to achieve his ends, so Capote has used the killer as a thing to achieve his story without concern for his humanity. But so much of this is understated by showing Capote’s emotional reactions to specific events, like the killer’s death row last meeting, but not explaining his actual thoughts. Capote’s own ambiguities come through elsewhere when he reveals tidbits of his personal struggles. The theme of the movie is expressed when Capote says to his companion, Harper Lee, that he sees the killer and himself as being raised in the same family, but the only difference is that killer went out the back door and Capote went out the front door. Very powerful insight into the nature of crime and evil that I think is very needed in this world. It is a premise that I work from in my own writing, namely, that the interest in evil is not that it is something remote and fascinating for it’s own sake, or that it is an example of how environment or even chemicals makes “them” different from “us.” But rather that the evil that resides in such abominable beings, resides in us all. Depravity is an inheritance of the whole human race, me included. Well, I don’t want to scare anyone, but when I write evil characters, like killers, evil guards in POW camps, cowards, or whatnot, I simply look deep into myself and take what selfish or evil traits I struggle with and expand them to an extreme, as if I had fed them instead of feeding the pursuit of righteousness that I must continue to do. Capote is dialogue heavy, but I enjoyed it because Capote was a witty and Shaw-like man of words, and the movie captured that so well. Philip Seymour Hoffman embodies him so truthfully that I was captivated by listening to what he said at every moment.

A History of Violence

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Viggo Mortensen plays a diner owner, Tom Stall, in a small town whose act of heroism puts him in the news and reveals his whereabouts to the mob, who happen to know his true identity as a mob hitman on the run from Philly. The mobmen come after him and taunt his wife and kids until he fights back and returns to Philly to settle his score. This is Cronenberg, so it is graphic. It’s actually a rather redemptive tale of identity that contrarily wallows in gratuitous graphic physical pictures of violence and sexuality. I get the sense that this contrast of exploitation with strong moral underpinnings is more a reflection of Cronnenberg’s own struggle of two natures, one to the flesh and one to goodness, than it is a justifiable aesthetic of hard hitting morality. Anyway, Tom’s journey is one of rejecting his past of violence and embracing a normal life of mundane living – and enjoying it. This is the profoundly moral aspect of the tale. Unlike the sniveling regretful snitch in Goodfellas, who grudgingly lived a “normal” life under the witness protection plan, we see in Tom a hero who embraces goodness AS good, and kindness AS preferable. Quite a respectable irony in a movie like this. One is reminded of the haunted soul of William Munny in Unforgiven, who must become his old “evil” self in order to defeat evil. This is the same for Tom, who has an almost dual personality and turns it on and off, but with somewhat more control than Munny. The problem is that Tom did not CHOOSE his life of normality. He ran from the mob NOT out of a desire to change, but out of mere self-preservation because he screwed up a situation. He was hiding in normality, NOT desiring it. It wasn’t until he met his wife that he was redeemed in his character by love. So even though Tom has changed in some way, his current desire to be a different person is not equaled by a desire to right his wrongs or even pay for his sins, but rather by a desire to run from his past. (He blinded a guy with barb wire, which ruined his brother’s chances to move up as kingpin). So of course, his past comes looking for him in the form of the mob who wants payback (the blinded Ed Harris). So Tom must go back to face his mob past and ends up killing the men (in self defense) who want to kill him, thus atoning for his sins and returning to his small family life, begging his family to allow him back in. This very family that he betrayed with his secrets, but certainly without malice. Now, he proves he really does want to be a new man, because he comes back out of choice. So Tom’s redemption is in his seeking to be a new man of goodness, not evil, and he is tested by this and proves enduring in his intent. Perseverance of the Saints. But is Tom truly atoned for? What of all the men he killed in the past? Is it justice for their blood to cry out from the ground unavenged? Is this an example of grace? A man allowed to avoid payment for his sins? I think this is what unsettles me about the story. I see true grace as changing a man to accept responsibility for his past. I saw a news story about a man who was acquitted of a murder 25 years earlier, who after becoming a Christian went and confessed to the crime and did his time – 25 years later. Now, this is grace to me. This is true redemption, true change of natures. Forgiveness that makes a man courageous enough to face the legal consequences of his behavior in order to start anew, and out of love for the victim. Well, the movies don’t always work as well as real life I guess.

Flight Plan

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A great basic thriller about a woman, played by Jodie Foster, who accompanies her daughter and the casket of her dead husband home from Germany on a huge airplane. Jodie falls asleep and wakes up to discover her daughter is not only nowhere to be found, but no one remembers her being there. Is this all a delusion of Jodie’s or is there a conspiracy to sabotage the plane? Well, one very annoying element was the obvious red herring that they put in the film. A group of Arabs are made to look suspicious and then are accused by a Joe Average looking American to be terrorists plotting this whole thing, because Jodie remembered seeing them in a hotel looking at her earlier. Well, the trick here is to play off our prejudices and show that our biases blind us and that the real terrorist is yet again only after money. This is a cliché Hollywood gimmick that I remember even from the days of Die Hard. Hollywooders do not believe in true believers. They still actually believe (even after 9/11) that everything, even religion and ideology, is motivated by money. Now, the real sad fact is that all Arabs are not terrorists, but most all terrorists are Arabs. So what other movie or tv show other than 24 has portrayed this reality? None. Instead they make movies and tv shows that show how bigoted people react against Arabs unfairly accusing innocent people. While this is definitely a concern, it is clearly the LEAST concern in light of the actual thousands of innocent people being killed by ARAB TERRORISTS. Why do they suppress the truth? True to form, Hollyweird is more concerned about hurting criminals’ feelings than the innocent victims they murder. I reckon the real reason why they have no problems making evil criminals out of fundamentalist Christians while totally avoiding the reality of evil criminal Islamofascists is because they know that Christians won’t put fatwas on them and blow them up. Hmmmmm.

Lord of War

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Kind of Recommended with qualifications. A black comedy polemic about arms dealers. Nick Cage is an amoral arms dealer to whoever can provide money, regardless of cause. As he pursues his “American Dream” with the help of his brother, played by Jared Leto, his brother cannot take it and eventually dies trying to do the right thing. Now, I don’t entirely agree with the moral equivalency argument or worldview of the storyteller, Andrew Niccole, but I respect his storytelling and thought he did a great job of presenting his viewpoint, and made some great points with very witty words. Though I am not sure he realizes how contradictory he may have been about some of them. And the narration made it too heavy-handed and was a bit overdone. He has a great opening that follows the manufacturing, production and distribution of a single bullet from arms manufacturer all the way to the gun in some African rebel’s hands as he shoots it into the head of an innocent young boy. VERY CLEVER and very enticing of a creative point. The whole story takes the hero as an anti-hero really, who is only interested in money and contrasts him with others like a CIA operative who only sells arms to “take sides.” This CIA agent answers the charge that he armed both Iranians and Iraqiis with, “Did you ever think I wanted both sides to lose?” Some great dark comedy lines about the immorality of the heros’ alleged ammoralism: “You’re not a true internationalist until you sell guns to those who kill your own countrymen.” “I’m an equal opportunity merchant of death.” “The real weapon of mass destruction is the AK47, not the nukes,” because nukes sit in silos, but the body count of AK47s surpasses anything in the world. “Often the worst atrocities occur when both sides call themselves freedom fighters.” (Of course, calling yourself a freedom fighter is not the same as being a freedom fighter. Some really are and some really are liars.) Cage’s entire goal is to extricate himself from the responsibility of what he is doing by rationalizations galore. And part of that is his evolutionary worldview. He says to his brother who is outraged at how men can act cruelly like a pack of dogs, “You’re really just a two-legged dog. It’s part of being human.” But at the same time, he takes a toy gun away from his son and throws it in the trash, showing he doesn’t want for his own family what he foists on others. A particularly poignant moment occurs when Cage realizes that the CIA dealer had his uncle killed and is now in the position to kill the CIA dealer. The evil Baptiste, to whom Cage is selling arm, gives him the opportunity to shoot the CIA dealer dead, but he can’t. So Baptiste says, “So you want him dead. You just don’t want to do it yourself.” The ribald hypocrisy of Cage’s character is the point of the whole film. The fact is, money as a motive is NEVER without morality. This man who claims to divest himself from those whom he arms to kill others is responsible for his part in the evil. And he knows it. The fact that Cage does not learn his lesson but continues on at the end, even after losing his entire family and life, is not cynicism, but the challenge that this continues on in our world unless we put a stop to it and take responsibility. Now, it appears to me that Niccole has a specific anti-gun agenda that goes beyond the actual proven argument of the film. I say this because of his conclusion at the end of the film that the “Biggest arms dealers in the world” are the US, Germany, Britain and a few others, and these same big five are on the security council of the United Nations. As if this is some kind of irony or indictment against the US. But he wallows in a problem here because all his film has really proven if you look closely is that we should morally choose the right people to arm in wars. Niccole suffers a logical non-sequitur: he concludes that the gun is the cause of the evil, not the evil men who do the killing. The fact is, his story proves to me that the U.S. SHOULD arm the defenders of democracy or freedom or the United States, NOT that we should get rid of guns and somehow this will stop the bloodshed. Close to a million people were machetied to death in Rwanda in the 1990s. They didn’t need the guns for their atrocity and it didn’t stop them, not having them. In the story, Cage says, that some people say that evil prevails when good men do nothing, but “what they oughta say is, “Evil prevails.”” This is a cynicism from our deluded hero, but it unwittingly makes the point that his story simply proves NOT that we should not deal in arms but that we should support and arm those who ARE on the just side of a war or situation. Since our selling of arms is morally responsible, then, like the CIA agent, let’s only arm those who are on the right side against evil in a particular conflict. Of course, the relativist makes the moral equivalence argument that tries to halt all commitment to all causes. The fact is, a country may have some evil aspects to it, but if in a particular war, it is on the side of justice, then in THAT particular war, it is on the right side and should be supported. In a way, Niccole, wittingly or unwittingly makes this argument when he shows that Baptiste is an evil man who engages in atrocities and should not be armed, or should be armed against. Arming his enemies is therefore morally right if they fight to stop such evil. And yes, as the movie makes the point very cleverly that one revolution often overthrows the tyrants only to replace them with new tyrants. But the fact that one evil sometimes replaces another evil is not an argument against stopping the first evil. The point is whether or not one evil should be fought against or not. We cannot always determine what an ally will end up doing. I would contend though, that the issue is more complex than I would like. For instance, in arming the mujahdeen in Afghanistan to fight the Russian communists in the 1970s, we were arming enemies of the U.S., that would eventually end up using those arms against us. NOW THAT is cause for qualification and concern. The same goes for allying with the Soviets in WWII who turned around and used that advantage to fight the Cold War against us. But I understand that the argument is that we ally with non-allies only against a greater threat. But I am not entirely convinced of this argument. Especially since we are now eating the fruit of having armed Bin Laden’s kind during the Afghanistan conflict, and they then used those same arms against us. So, I recognize that the issues can be complex. But certainly cannot be reduced to the naïve simplistic formula that gun themselves are the problem (As Niccole evidently does by showing the homicidal maniac, Baptiste blame the lack of discipline in youth on MTV, rather than the gun he is swinging around and using to arm the youth of his country). This kind of faulty anthropology that blames the weapon for the evil denies man’s essential evil, ultimately leads to slavery. Because man will always be evil until the end, so if we don’t take that into account in our political or sociological theory of how to fix the problem, we will only lead to the slavery of the good by the evil who WILL NOT STOP doing evil. Therefore the provision of weapons defense is necessary. We must just make sure that they get into the hands of just causes. The fact that men use knives for evil does not negate the manufacture of knives because not only are they used for good, but for good self defense against evil men. The fact that evil men use guns for evil is NOT an argument against guns, it is an argument to arm good men or good causes against evil. I suspect that based upon the context of the movie, this is not what Niccole intends. It is, however what I think he ends up proving. Niccole unveils some insightful problems and issues, such as the fact that when the US leaves a field of operations, it is often cheaper to leave the munitions when it leaves than to take them with them and dispose of them. This is a problem with the dismantling of the USSR in the 80s, which ended up having Russian arms sold by black market operatives. Yes, these show the morality of fiscal choices, but they do not prove the immorality of weapons manufacturing or supplying. Also, Niccole conveniently avoided showing that it was REAGAN who stopped the Cold War, not Gorbachev as he shows it to be. But he does have a guy shoot a picture of Reagan, showing Niccole’s hostility against this greatest hero of the 20th century. Interestingly, a scene where the Interpol agent chasing Cage tells him he will do everything he can to delay Cage, even if it is by just one day, because that one day prolongs the life of the innocent who are killed with his guns. Well, I don’t suspect that Niccole realizes that this is the exact same argument of pro-lifers who block abortion clinics. Would he support those pro-lifers as well? Seeing the effect on kids is very strong here, whether it is seeing the innocent kids killed by the wars or those who are drafted into armies before they are mature enough to be a soldier is a strong and effective argument here. NOT against the sales of guns, as I suppose Niccole intends, but rather for arming those who fight against such evils. So, while I don’t buy Niccole’s complete worldview about the nature of evil residing in the existence of weapons, I still consider some of his points to be powerful reminders of the morality of all behaviors, including Capitalist ones. But I would qualify that with the moral necessity to fight evil and violence by arming the good against the evil.