Drama

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.

Little Miss Sunshine

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Quirky Comedy. A family of dysfunctional misfits takes a road trip to bring their little daughter to a beauty pageant for children. This was a fascinating story to me with fascinating characters, and a touching theme about the value of family love and acceptance in the midst of imperfection. Alan Arkin as the 60s hippie grandfather who cusses too much, Greg Kinnear as the Success motivational teacher who is a loser, the brother who reads Nietzsche and hates everyone and takes a vow of silence. Steve Carrell as the gay professor of Proust who tried to commit suicide because of unrequited lust. Toni Collette as the mother and a newcomer as Olive, the little girl who appears to be the only sane one in the family.

What I liked about this film was it’s sense of reality, that none of us are perfect and that love and human connection can occur even within messed up families. More importantly, that perhaps the “functionality” of the “normal world” is maybe not so right or even desirable after all. When they all get to the pageant, it’s a circus of Jon Bene Ramses, strutting their little 6-9 year olds around like Miss America, looking way too adult for their age, and being coaxed to be a commodity of commercial success rather than just being little girls and enjoying life and family. If this is normal life, you can keep it. One of the themes is about how each of us is special and important, even with our quirky dysfunction or problems. At the pageant, Olive is about to be totally humiliated when she does her little dance because the family realizes that all the other girls have professional routines and they know Olive just doesn’t match up to them. So, when Olive starts to be rejected at her dance, the whole family joins her on stage dancing like fools to diffuse and even absorb her rejection. It’s really quite a moving moment of unity within this motley crew called family, and shows their concern for her more than the other parents who have culled their little girls to be things of entertainment.

What I did not like about it is that the dance that Olive had learned was from her grandfather, who was a dirty old man. So Olive does a strip dance. Okay, she has a sequined little outfit underneath, so it is not a pedophile thing, but the point is that it is a truly immoral thing and NOT a worthy thing to support in the little girl. This element sullied the moral of family support. We simply should not support such impropriety in little girls, it will destroy them if we do. Also, another scene tries to create a moment of family unity, when the father, who is obsessed with being a winner and not a loser, challenges Olive not to eat her ice cream because it makes people fat and fat people are losers, or more precisely, the Miss Americas that she idolizes do not eat ice cream, so if she wants to become a winner like them, then she shouldn’t. The other family members mock and deride the dad as insensitive and they all take a spoonful of ice cream to get her to take some as well. Later, the little girl asks a Miss America if she likes ice cream and she says, yes! The point here is that I think the filmmakers intended this to be a moral statement about the obsessive preoccupation with health as destructive on children’s psyches. But I have a completely different moral compass that says that the epidemic of obesity in children today – and it is an epidemic – is caused precisely by this politically correct rejection of guilt and elevation of the impulses. After all, it’s what all addicts do to each other, comfort each other in their problem. The father was actually right and was in the better interest of the child. She was already chubby, which indicated that she was already eating TOO MUCH CRAP (read: SUGAR). So, yes, commodification of women is wrong, but so is psychobabble about making children feel good and giving them whatever they want instead of teaching them discipline and giving them what they need.

The DaVinci Code

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Thriller. A cryptologist and a symbologist stumble upon a conspiracy by nefarious Catholics to cover up an alleged secret that God is a woman and Christians are cold blooded murderers who want to keep people from having fun, especially women.

All right, here’s the scoop. I did some research and found out that the director of the movie, Ron Howard, the writer, Akiva Goldsman, and the producer, Brian Grazer are all part of a vast conspiracy called “I IN GAME,” which just happens to be an anagram of “Imagine” Entertainment. Check it out for yourself. Really. Religious scholars say that this secret order is an atheist bloodline of soldiers who have a long line of connections and aberrations through history going back to the Ku Klux Klan, White Supremacists, the Nazis, slave holders in the antebellum South, Hezbollah and Al Queda, as well as all the way back to the Baal worshippers of ancient Canaan, who sacrificed their children in the fire. And it’s all right there in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels. Somewhere in the Tripartate Tractate or the Trimorphic Protenoia, and other serious sounding scroll titles.

There are some who believe that at the same time as he was playing 6 year old Opie Taylor on TV, Ron Howard may have had a part in the assassination of JFK—most likely as a messenger boy for the mafia, CIA and Cubans Against Castro, though some believe he may have actually been the unseen trigger man in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. There is a “Hanks” family tree that goes back to some slaveholders before the Civil War who beat their slaves and raped them.

“I In Game” is a phrase that means, “I am in the game of world conquest.” It seeks to achieve this by spreading hatred for Christians so that people will rise up and imprison them and create a new Colloseum to throw religious believers to the lions, jut like Nero did in the First Century. Which is not the least bit ironic since Goldman’s Jewish ancestors did that very thing to Christians, by betraying them to the Romans. It’s all true and I found it out from scholarly respected books like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Some documents recently discovered show that Howard, Goldsman, and Grazer, and even Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen have been members of this organization for many years, and the fact that there is no documentation to prove it only shows how secret they are. Even though both Howard and Hanks appear to have good marriages, it is entirely possible that they actually beat their wives regularly and their entire family covers it up. If you doubt this, just ask them, “have you stopped beating your wife?” and see what answer they give. Besides, he has worked very closely with Russell Crowe on A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, who has been arrested for his violent behavior.

But the oldest secret Academy that may be connected to Dan Brown himself (the original author of The Da Vinci Code) is one uncovered by journalist Bill Federer (He writes about it on WorldNetDaily.com under the article “Dan Brown and the “Voltaire Code.”). He reveals that the famous God-hater Voltaire started this secret academy around 1728. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795-1817 gave an address in New Haven on July 4, 1798 wherein he uncovered this conspiracy of “Voltaire’s Code.” His address is available in Encyclopedia Britannica’s Annals of American, Vol. 4. In it he exposes Voltaire’s plans to “fabricate books of all kinds against Christianity, especially such as excite doubt and generate contempt and derision.” Dwight reveals the astonishing fact that these false books that Voltaire proposed “were formed, altered, forged, imputed as posthumous to deceased writers of reputation and sent abroad with the weight of their names.” The Gospel of Mary Magdalene? The Gospel of Judas? Obviously counterfeits imputed with false authority in order to attack Christianity. Now, The Da Vinci Code, another in a long line of such conspiracy propaganda.

Ron Howard, as most Enquiring minds already know (reported trustworthily on the internet, Dec. 6, 2001) left his kid behind at a donut shop. What they didn’t tell you was the rumors that he may have been wanting to get rid of this child so he can divorce his wife and marry a mistress. This may be just legend, but it fits the picture perfectly, doesn’t it? Grazer of course, most likely has a string of venereal diseased “girlfriends,” but some reporters disagree. According to some sources who remain unnamed and therefore unverifiable, Ian McKellen once met a guy at a Hollywood event that was an alleged member of a militant gay group that has burned down churches and may have been the financing source of the Roman Catholic circle of predatory homosexual priests. The goal: to topple the Roman Catholic Church by infiltrating it with its secret members.

Now wait, you tell me. This is hate-filled racist propaganda, lies, legends and rumors. Oh, you mean like saying that the essence of Christianity is oppression, misogyny, lies, murder, rape and power? You mean like saying as Langdon does that wherever the “one true God” has been preached, “There has been killing in his name,” as if the heart of monotheism is murder? So, all of a sudden now, history needs to be verified beyond conspiracy theorizing and bigotry? What’s sauce for the goose of Da Vinci Code is sauce for the gander of I IN GAME. I’ll just say what Dan Brown says—my story here is only fiction. But every detail is based on facts. Try to nail me down on that one. But isn’t it slander to attack someone’s character like that when it is not true? Answer: Slander is only acceptable when it is against Christianity. Hate is only allowed against Catholics, Evangelicals and Republicans. Intolerance is only acceptable against the politically incorrect. I’ll just answer with the wise words of Hanks’ character, Langdon, “The only thing that matters is what you believe.” So if I believe it, who cares if it isn’t true. It’s true for me.
So, now you know how it feels.

G.K. Chesterton once allegedly said, “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.”
And those same conspiracy theorists gripe that Christians believe in fairy tales? Sheesh.
p.s. the best line in the film, uttered by Teabing: “You can’t trust the French.”

The Lost City

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Period Romantic Epic. A wealthy family in the midst of the Castro Communist revolution of 1958 Cuba. And Andy Garcia, the filmmaker, shows the truth of Communism. Different sons of the family go different ways when Revolution foments in the Batista regime. Andy and his father and uncle believe in democracy, peaceful justice. Another brother joins the revolution and we see the cruelty and evil of it as the “government” takes over private property in the name of “the people” and shuts down Andy’s night club and free expression. It’s a powerful juxtaposition of two worldviews one free and the other cruelty in the name of the people. Che Guevera is portrayed accurately as a murderous slimeball henchman of Castro, spouting the true Communist ideal, “the ends justifies the means.”

Anyway, a wonderfully tragic and heart ripping love story occurs between Andy and his brother’s widow, who fall in love with each other. But unfortunately, the widow falls for the revolution and chooses it over fleeing to America with Andy because it makes her feel good to be a part of something bigger than herself, a cause. But there is nothing bigger than us and our love, Andy tells her. Well, this was not quite accurate because Andy does in fact believe in freedom more than love because he moves to America without her, even though they both love each other deeply. This was a very powerful powerful truth that there is something higher than human love, but it ain’t the collective alone, it’s FREEDOM. I would have liked to hear more of this, but Andy’s actions show it clear enough. Freedom is more valuable than even love. In fact, without freedom you cannot have true love. To see this was very unusual because most movies place the love of two people to be the highest value that trivializes beliefs and worldviews. But the fact is that freedom and control, democracy and communism, democracy and revolution cannot coexist. One must die for the other to live. And that is expressed brilliantly in the story. Thank you Mr. Garcia for a story of truth, beauty, freedom, love and higher causes that rings deeply true to the core.

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?

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.

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.

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.