Recommended with Caution. I was moved by this story of a fifty-year old being demoted in his ad sales job, and getting a new boss who is 26 years old, knows nothing about ads or sales and is falling in love with the fifty-year old’s daughter. I guess because it rings close to home, as I get older, I see how age is not respected in this culture and youth and ambition is worshipped to the detriment of humanity. That’s what this great movie is all about. Some will no doubt see this as TV type storytelling. But I say, if so, it is the best dang TV I have ever seen. So much heart and humanity and love in this film. Dennis Quaid, one of the best underappreciated actors ever. He is so “everyman” it’s amazing. And that’s why I relate to his character. So, the 26 year old is named Carter and he represents the typical ambitious young shark learning what it takes to climb the corporate ladder. Unfortunately, because of his workaholism and worship of career, he loses his new wife (not without her own sin of adultery and immaturity). Quaid, playing Dan Foreman, learns his Sports magazine has just been acquired by a media mogul played like a Ted Turner by Malcom McDowell. Meanwhile, Carter takes his cues from his young shark boss, a heartless soulless snake, who ultimately turns against Carter. So the whole thing is a comparison of family values of community and people and loyalty versus corporate greed and using and heartlessness. The movie has a realistic share of the heartless layoffs of loyal workers, the stress of wondering if you are going to be next, etc. Scarlett Johanson, plays Dan’s daughter, Alex, with poise and elegance. The comparison of young Carter without a life and nothing but career versus Dan, who has family and is actually happy with an uneventful life. That’s what makes this movie so emotionally powerful, because it actually portrays a normal family life, not as boring or dreadful, but as a satisfying good life, and even as more desireable than a “successful” career. Boy, ain’t that rare in movies. Carter starts the movie as the guy who is cutting employees and ruthlessly pursuing his success. But by the end, he has seen in Dan’s family that very meaning he craves and cannot have. “I want my life to mean something the way this all means something to you.” He can’t believe that Dan actually believes in his company’s product so that he makes a big sale saying, “The best thing about it is, it really is the best thing for the client to come on board.” Carter asks him, “you really believe in this stuff.” “Why else would I do it?” replies Dan. Yes, the dinosaur ways of the old school meant that you sold products to people cause you believed in the product and wanted to help the person. And it shows this “dinosaur” old school as superior to the new school that conceives of people in terms of marketing demographics and consumers without souls. I loved it. So the kid learns that if he wants to find the meaning that Dan has, he has to act with Dan’s character. So when it comes time to fire Dan, Carter makes the choice to go down with him, but they save the day because they work together cooperatively rather than competitively. What’s cool about this story is that at the end of it, the guy doesn’t get the girl. Carter doesn’t get Dan’s daughter. Carter makes the right choice at the end, but is only a beginning. Changes can occur, but lives take a while to process and fully change. Character takes time, step by step of making the right choices. The value of family in this story was amazing. Almost to the point of unbelievablitity. When Dan discovers his daughter is seeing Carter, he wants to know if she is sleeping with him and feels betrayed by her dishonesty in hiding it from him. He even slugs Carter, in what I consider a rather unfair reaction. After all, their attraction was without any connection to Dan. And so what if they fall in love with each other. What does that really have to do with Dan, other than his pride that the kid is his boss? But so what? But I think it had more to do with Carter’s lack of character. One likeable aspect of Carter was the fact that he was completely honest around the daughter. She says, “Wow, you are incredibly honest” to his openness about his faults. He says, “No, actually, I’m not usually. Just around you.” Great romantic line of truth. Anyway, by now, the daughter is going to NYU, but she breaks up with Carter and tells her dad it wasn’t because of him, it was because of her. She just needed to focus on her education. But somehow underneath it, we can’t help but know that her father’s disappointment was what helped her realize her own choices were immature. She realizes Dan took out a second mortgage to pay for her education and she was not respecting that sacrifice by making mature choices like focusing on that education that was worked hard for. Amazing that this kind of stuff comes from a Hollywood movie. Parents are right? Romantic “Love” is not god? Yeah!! But I must say one major disappointment is the fornication that is very “naturally” a part of the daughter’s relationship with Carter. Of course, Hollywood assumes true love must be consummated with fornication and this is so assumed by our culture, that to even bring it up as an objection marks me as a fundamentalist religious fanatic from the Dark Ages. But the truth is, you will never understand the depth of true love if you do not love truly. And true love waits. Simple as that. True love respects the act of sex as a holy union with special status between a man and woman committed for life, not an act engaged in with people you have good feelings about. That is a devaluation of love and dilutes its specialness. But of course people who engage in premarital or extramarital relations do not understand this because they have never lived it. Those who do not delay their gratification do not understand that delayed gratification is EVEN more pleasurable. Now, those who delay sexuality until they are “in love” with someone may be a step close than the promiscuous, but they’re still missing it. They’re missing the component of sexuality that can only be achieved through life long commitment, the component of intimacy. And yet, ironically, intimacy is the one thing they are all trying to find! Ah well… Another thing about the depiction of modern corporate culture as heartless, soulless, backstabbing and concerned only about the bottom line. As in the movie, megamergers become absurd giants of soulless marketing enterprises devoid of concern for people, defining them as consumers etc. Now, the reason I didn’t get the feeling that this was the typical Hollywood socialist or Communist attack on capitalism is because it contrasted the worst of corporate megalomania not with a Marxist or Michael Moore type view of so-called “social justice,” but a moral view. It was caring for people, human beings, family and loyalty, versus the dehumanization of people into objects of conquest and consumers to manipulate. The problem with the Marxist /socialistå screeching about social justice is that they conceive of the individual in the same exact terms as does the greedy multinational corporate conglomerate. People are not humans, they are “groups” of objects defined by their communities, to be manipulated for their own good. They have no will or even responsibility to leftists. They are VICTIMS. And Victims must be engineered to be saved. And of course, who has the goodness and freedom to control them? Why the leftists of course. Back to the dehumanization of megacorporations. Let’s face it, our culture is becoming more and more heartless and less family driven. The Ted Turner guy in the movie tries to paint the picture of their company becoming a new democracy, with a new electorate, a new country. I think that this kind of culture is in fact resulting from the creation of multinational companies. Nationalism is being replaced by multinational marketing. Corporations are defining people in terms of money and are repatriating loyalties away from family and nation into the dollar. The attempt to abolish countries and nations is not driven by egalitarianism, but by a dictatorship of the soul. You don’t abolish nations, you replace them with a new authority. Multinationalism is not a “sensitivity” to other cultures and worldwide harmony without “the bigotry of nationalism.” Multinationalism is ultimately a betrayal of the “masses” into slavery under a new oligarchy of the super-rich. It’s great that the movie had an appropriate critique of such consumer culture and multinational corporate heartlessness without being Marxist. Of course, the ultimate irony is that it is a multinational megamedia corporate conglomerate that funded the movie critiquing such multinational megamedia corporate mindset. Ah, the ironies of life.

Partially Recommended. This Indie movie about four generations of fathers and sons seeking redemption was pretty good. Good performances by the eldest Grandpappy, Michael Caine, Father Christopher Walken, (yes, he CAN act well as a protagonist), Josh Lucas as a great son, and some little kid as the great grandchild (son of Lucas). It’s a road trip movie where Grandpappy dies, but not before leaving a will that directs all the family members above, one big miserable family, to follow directions on a sort of scavenger hunt around the United States in order to receive the inheritance. He has them doing little rituals and scattering Grandpappy’s ashes at various locations important to him. Of course, it’s really just a ruse to force the alienated Walken and Lucas to try to reconnect before it’s too late. And the ultimate location is the home where Walken hurt his baby son many years before. He is in deep need of forgiveness and that is what this tale is about. Walken finding his redemption in the forgiveness of his son, whom he hurt. Well, on the surface, this is a powerful theme for a movie. But unfortunately, the characters were all so alienated from each other that I could never really enjoy them or like them as people. So I did not care too much for them as I watched their story. This lack of sympathy weakened my appreciation for the story. Interesting quirky characters are not enough. There must be something I like about them or I will not care for them. So the big forgiveness scene was not really all it could be. In fact, it really didn’t happen. The actual act of forgiveness is so underplayed and indirect as to be missed. And the worst part about this redemption was that the son suffered a physical injury all his life from this abuse of his father, BUT HE NEVER KNEW IT. He had been told, since he was a baby, that he fell down the stairs. So, the problem here is that the story starts with Lucas as the main character, but then ends up being Walken’s redemption because Lucas had nothing he had to deal with. How could he? He didn’t know. If he had only known somehow then his character would have a reason for his own angst. That was an unfortunate lack in the character arc of the story. But I did love the symbolic ending where Walken is dying and Lucas, his son, drives him to a rock in New Mexico where Walken had “made love to a woman” in his dark criminal past. It was his personal nostalgia. But when they get there, we discover that it was the place where the son Lucas was conceived, so it was his mother that dad was talking about. A very touching redemptive conclusion, better than the forgiveness scene, that also ends with the father dying of kidney failure before he could make it there. So Lucas and his son go to the location in his stead to continue on the father’s desire, as a powerful symbol of the next generation moving on and overcoming its past. Although I heard this writer/director was a Christian, there was no spiritual side to the story, which was rather disappointing.

Partially recommended with caution. I call this a philosophical farce. And that’s the only reason why I have any recommendation for it, because of its total original take (it’s about time too) on addressing philosophy in a movie – and with Tom Stoppard-like humor. Unfortunately, the story itself is rather uninteresting. Albert Markovski (played by Jason Schwartzman, all grown up since Rushmore) is a tree hugging lefty protesting against huge corporation Huckabees to keep it from plowing over a small marshland and putting up another one of its chain malls. But he’s losing control of his enviro-wacko coalition to his friend, Brad (played by Jude Law). He’s facing his own personal angst. A series of coincidences guide him to hire a husband wife team of Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, “existential detectives” who seek out meaning and purpose in people’s lives who can’t find any in the universe. They have a coincidence file on each subject. What I love about this story is how the philosophy is “in your face,” and an explicit part of the plot. Hoffman and Tomlin are “Monists” who specialize in “crisis investigation and resolution” as their business cards say. They seek to convince our hero Albert that his alienation is an illusion and that “There is not an atom in our bodies not forged in the furnace of the sun” and therefore, “There’s no such thing as you and me,” “everything is the same, even if it’s different,” because “the whole truth is, everything is connected.” Ultimately, Albert’s redemption will be his discovery that “everything you could want or be is everything you already are.” This is Eastern style self-enlightenment to our supposed deity within. But the problem is that the villain, in the form of French Nihilist writer Catarine Vauban and her disciple, played by Mark Wahlberg, is also after our hero, to try to free him from the Monists to realize that “It’s all random and cruel,” “nothing is connected, there is no meaning,” to life, “the world is temporary, identity is an illusion, and everything is meaningless.” What a riot! Two diametrically opposite philosophies battling for Albert’s soul – quite literally. Who will win? In a great metaphor for the power of death to get us thinking about life, Hoffman has Albert engage in therapy that consists of zipping up into a body bag to achieve an altered state of consciousness of sorts (sensory deprivation and all that) where he can give up “your identity that you think separates you from everything.” The Nihilist, (who should have been a German, not a Frenchwoman), lures Albert under her wing for a while and he faces his parents who “made him feel bad for feeling bad,” in other words, Sartre’s “bad faith” of not accepting one’s complete freedom from others. Well, okay, maybe the French gave us the existentialists Sartre and Camus, but The Germans gave us Nietzsche, but then again the French gave us Foucault and Derrida, the pomo stepchildren of nihilism, so I guess it’s okay for the villain to be French. In a funny scene that captures the nihilist notion of meaning through masochistic pain, Albert and Wahl hit each other with a big blow-up hippity-hop ball for kids. In the experience of pain, they receive their enlightenment that “it’s like I’m a rock or a piece of mold. I’m here, but not here.” A much tamer version of the same darker expression in Fight Club. And when Albert has sex with his French philosophical seductress (her real agenda, how revealing), it begins with an erotic forceful splashing of each other’s heads in a puddle of mud. Ah, the “absurd drama of human existence.” The witty repartee and philosophical bantering back and forth about ontology, metaphysics, “desire, suffering and pure being” is all rather clever and enjoyable for those interested in philosophy. There is a great creative scene where Hoffman debates with Wahl about their opposing ideas of monism versus atomism. As they talk, little pieces of their faces break apart and float around. Hoffman explains that all the molecules are connected and we see them flowing around, then Wahlberg says, yes, but there are spaces in between the molecules or cracks in between the floating pieces, thus reinforcing his atomism of alienation. And they go on like this down to the smallest particles that still have cracks between them. Do we accept the cracks and pain of total alienation or do we believe this is illusion and embrace our oneness with all things? There’s a great subplot where Jude Law’s Brad is enlightened to his need for redemption by realizing that he tells a funny story over and over to many people that elevates himself at the expense of famous singer Shania Twain. His redundant telling is an obvious attempt to make himself feel good so he “doesn’t have to face his depression.” Some real truth in some of this existential and monist gobbledygook. At the end, Albert, in a Forrest Gump-like climax asks if these two philosophies are working together, because it’s like they’re both “fractured philosophies that are born out of one pain,” one is too light (monism) and one is too dark (nihilism), and we are reminded of Forrest at Jenny’s grave saying, “Is life all random like, floating around like a feather or do we have a destiny? Maybe it’s both. Maybe it’s both at the same time.” As Albert concludes, “We’re interconnected, but it’s nothing special.” And there we have the absurdity of existential and monist philosophy, wanting to have the cake of illusion or meaninglessness and eat meaning and value too. Uh uh, sorry, guys, if monism is right, then love and cruelty are ultimately ONE, as I’ve said before, Hitler is ONE with Mother Theresea. Love and hate are ONE, and you cannot make a “distinction between good and evil” because you’ve already said that “distinction” between things is the problem and we must deny such identity of being. So when the Monist tries to tell you that there is a distinction between your “distinctive” thinking and the reality of oneness, he is outright negating his own philosophy in expressing it. He is using distinction and identity while denying it. Metaphysical hypocrisy – and moral hypocrisy I might add. And if nihilism is right, then all attempts at creating meaning for ourselves is pure delusion. The fact that even nihilists are not consistent and do not commit suicide is because they are created by God with his image and know God, but suppress that knowledge in unrighteousness, trying to escape their responsibility to their Creator while maintaining the sanity of his benefits. (Romans 1:17-23) When a nihilist uses reason, he negates his own philosophy because reason assumes a universe of law-like order – Logos. The Nihilist assumes meaning while denying it. Well, I won’t go on. Unfortunately a couple things degrade the movie. First, the hero begins the opening moments of the film cussing his head off like something out of a Quentin Tarantino film, F-words galore. In a way, this is entirely consistent with the heart of his despair, but some may find it offensive. Another thing ticked me off. Of course, when dealing with metaphysical issues, what about religion? Ah yes, there is a completely gratuitous Christian-bashing scene full of the standard clichés and bigoted prejudices against Christians and Christianity. Albert and his Nihilist friend who is a fireman obsessed with petroleum conspiracy theories, visit a house that happens to be the home of a Christian family. As they eat lunch, they end up fighting because of course, the Christians are portrayed as ignorant fools who, “don’t ask those kind of questions” that are disturbing, because “curiosity killed the cat.” In other words, fear driven self-imposed ignorance about the real questions of life. When they leave the house, Albert and Wahl tell each other, “They’re crazy.” “Yeah, there’s nothing good in there.” Okay, Christianity has nothing good to say to these philosophical bigots. Ironically, Christianity is the only worldview that provides the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of anything beyond mute silence – and even silence itself! The Nihilist and Monist could not even argue that the Christian is wrong or “crazy” unless there is an absolute objective external order that defines truth beyond our personal subjective creations. Like the child sitting on the father’s lap trying to slap the father. This is the biblical definition of a fool: “The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1)