Movies

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.

Casanova

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Period Romantic comedy. Infamous promiscuous adulterer falls in true love with a proto-feminist in 18th century Venice.

This is a well crafted farcical comedy of errors almost on the level of Shakespeare, at least certainly on the level of Shakespeare in Love. I found this tale actually quite satisfying both from a story as well as a moral standpoint. Not perfect, but satisfying, because the story is about how this sleazebag womanizer meets his match in a strong woman named Francesca and learns to love her alone for the rest of his life. Of course, the Roman Church is mocked for being prudish (The Inquisitor uses all the language that makes moderns like us scoff, like “vile fornicating destroyer of women’s virtues,” stuff like that), as well as intellectually foolish (as when the Inquisitor rants about heresy being “whatever I say it is.”). But it’s not so extreme as to be hateful in my opinion, and quite frankly, there have been Catholics who have been like that in history, so it ain’t entirely false either. But of course, the assumption that drives the mockery is the modern one of fulfilling natural sexual urges as completely natural.

But back to the good stuff, the heart of true love in this movie is expressed by Francesca, who says, “Give me a man willing to give himself only to me and I would love him forever.” This becomes the redemption then for Casanova to eventually learn and learn it he does. But even more so, Francesca also speaks of Casanova’s conception of love, and by extension, all the stupid women who allow themselves to be exploited by him, this way, “What he imagines as love is self-love.” Wow, what a great insight into promiscuity, indeed, extramarital sexuality, the lifestyle of most Americans. Francesca then says, “My true love must sacrifice himself for me.” And so Casanova eventually does sacrifice his very life to save Francesca and in so doing, wins her love and his redemption. The redemption of a self-centered human is of course, self-sacrifice, it’s opposite. It’s a beautiful portrait of true love and maturity.

This is all very powerfully Christian in it’s outlook, except for an annoying little humanistic addition to the story. Even though they elevated marriage for Casanova, they also celebrated his promiscuous lifestyle by raising up a newly deflowered virginal young man as the new Casanova to continue the legend with a nod and a wink. In a way, this is the viewpoint that boys will be boys, and young men are horny, so it is normal for them to be promiscuous and get that experience before they meet the one they TRULY love for a lifetime. Thus, this movie was a mixture of good and bad, but in my opinion the good outweighed the bad.

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.

The New World

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Historical Romance Epic. The story of Pocohantas and her relationship with John Smith, the Western explorer.

This is a very beautiful looking film. Terrence Malick is a cinematic painter of scenes and visions and few words. He has a signature now I guess of existential poetic internal monologue that repeats itself from The Thin Red Line, his previous film. I have a mixed reaction to this film. On the one hand, he handles abstraction and symbol pretty well, such as the final scene of Pocohantas’ death. We see her sick in bed, then the bed is empty, an Indian from her tribe runs out of the house in slow mo, and then we see her playing with the sun in the garden. Very beautiful and evocative. Some powerful images of the forest and nature.

But I have to say, all this abstraction and symbolism becomes too dominant for me and overshadows the story, which made it rather boring to sit through. Could have been 20 minutes shorter. Too may scenes of contemplation and brooding and pondering makes this just too boring. Also, his non-linear, non-contiguous editing did not work for me. As a technique, it was overused. I know fans will say that is its creativity and that I am being just too stuck in my linear narrative approach. I don’t know, I’m pretty open to variety and even non-linearity, if it is done well or appropriately. I just don’t think it worked here.

I have to say that Malick propagates the lie of the “noble savage” in this story. The Indians are portrayed and perceived by Smith as in tune with nature. He calls them “loving and kind. No sense of guile, no jealousy, envy or sense of possession or treachery.” And of course, all the Englishmen are ugly, spitting, treacherous betrayers of one another. Smith justifies fornication with Pocohantas (implied) by saying, “Love, shall we not deny it when it visits us? Shall we not take it when we are given it?” Okay, so what about the “love urges” of child molesters, adulterers and practicers of incest? Shall they not deny those urges when they visit us? While I would not deny the positive elements of all cultures, anyone with any cross cultural experience with third world or uncivilized tribes will tell you, that despite the good elements of their cultures, they are all very acquainted with jealousy, envy, pride and greed. It is pure lunacy to deny the inherited sinful nature of mankind. The Indians were not all evil in their culture, but they were certainly NOT all utopian either. They killed each other from warring tribes over territorial and other pursuits. They had petty jealousies and rivalries within their tribes.

It’s all just too utopian and too boring to ingest. And yet, once again, the transforming experience of Christianity on Pocohantas is virtually ignored by relegating it to a 3 second Baptism shot, which is unexplained and out of context. So, once again, Christianity is written out of history by those who wish to retell the story of history as secular.

Underworld: Evolution

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Supernatural Horror. A sequel about Vampires versus werewolves that quite frankly, I could not describe because it was too complex too follow.

I don’t have much to say here. It was okay as far as sequels go, but it was excessively violent, as sequels often go, and too complex to follow, as I said. The first one was clearly about racism and I thought was very intriguing, but this one, ah, whatever.

End of the Spear

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Jungle Thriller. A son explores returning to the stone age tribe that killed his missionary father in the 1950s.

This movie is a step in the right direction for Christian stories being told in Hollywood. I think it still has a long way to go. But we are getting there. We are getting better. I believe we need to support these kind of movies by paying to see them so the studios will distribute more of them and then we’ll get better at making them. And so I recommend seeing this, but I still think Christian filmmaking has a lot to learn. So let’s support it with our money so it can get better. This movie is miles ahead of those End Times obsessions that keep being made, and for that, I applaud it and support it.

I liked how they tried to avoid the Christianese of many Christian stories by downplaying the god talk of the missionaries. HOWEVER, this is a story about missionaries, and I never got to know the hearts of these people and what would drive them to risk their lives trying to get to these savages? And also, what would drive the women of the martyred men to go back into the village of the people who killed their husbands and bring their children? These are the most important moments of the story and they are never dealt with. It’s almost like they were so paranoid of sounding like a typical evangelical movie that the result was a lack of clarity of purpose behind characters as well as internal issues and struggles.

I thought it was an interesting idea to show the native’s perspective, but unfortunately, the actual result was a bit boring. I found the missionary stories to be more interesting, but less developed.
The final scene where the son of the matryed pilot confronts his father’s killer was a powerful opportunity, but I have to admit that it didn’t work for me the way it was done. I didn’t believe the kid’s acting or the way the whole thing was set up.

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.

Hostel

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Horror. A couple of American tourists happen upon a hostel in Europe that captures unsuspecting tourists and uses them as torture subjects for high paying mafia customers. Nihilistic survival of the fittest worldview. I walked out. These are the kind of movies that truly scare me, knowing that there are people out there, mostly kids, who are entertained by this, as it breeds heartless violence against people as entertainment rather than moral lesson. And I might add that this movie highly profiled Quentin Tarantino as its producer, which does not surprise me in the least, given his postmodern-nihilistic-B-Movie-video-store-clerk worldview.

The Hurt Locker

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This docudrama type movie is about life in an American bomb squad in Iraq. As men diffuse IEDs they face the hardships of war. Its premise is listed in a quote at the beginning of the film saying “war is a drug.” The movie then follows a team of soldiers led by a wild man individualist Texan who lives on the edge of danger in defusing bombs. Half of the fighting is justified and half of it is confused delusion, as the lead wild man gets them into trouble with his “cowboy” antics. I think it is ultimately an anti-war film because at the end, the lead character cannot go back and live with his family. He tells his little daughter that as you get older you love fewer and fewer things, until you only love one thing. And we see that he doesn’t fit into the “insane” consumerist America of a thousand cereal choices in the supermarket (Is this what we fight for?). And we see he cannot connect with his wife or daughter anymore, and after saying that statement that you only love one thing, we see him back on another tour willingly. So according to this movie, being a soldier destroys your ability to connect with the humanity of family and turns you into a machine that can only relate to one thing: war.

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.