Not Recommended. Not as good as the original. And you know, this one was only “inspired” by a true story, whereas the original was “based on” the true story. There’s something extra special about a story that really happened over a story that didn’t. But this one, about a soldier who returns to his small town and finds it taken over by evil drug peddling, stripper exploiting, casino operators, who just happen to be the soldier’s old friends. Well, when the hero stands up to corruption at the casino, he almost gets killed and then he responds and the violence escalates, tit for tat. But when the hero becomes sheriff of the town and tries to clean it up, there is all out war. What I like so much about this film is it’s value of standing up to and fighting evil men. If we do not, we will be overrun by them and our children will be destroyed by them. This is great. One tragic irony, if I may deconstruct the film for a moment is that there is this great aspect of connecting corruption, casinos, adult entertainment and drugs all together as a negative influence on society. That’s saying a lot in today’s morally relativistic world that sanctions such things as mere personal preference that we should not judge. And the hero is supposed to be above it. He scorns to see kids with pot, and the local adult bookstore. But for some reason, he has no problem watching a stripper himself. So adult bookstores are bad, but personal stripping is okay? Also, what I do not like about the movie is its vigilanteism: taking the law into our own hands. Though good in intentions, vigilanteism is ultimately immoral. (See me article: “A Time To Revenge?: Vigilanteism and Movie Justice in A Time to Kill. ) The law in the movie is set up as being corrupt and in on the casino dirt and drugs. And those drugs are destroying the kids, even the hero’s little cousin. So, emotionally, we feel justified when the hero fights back by vandalizing the casino. As much as I want to believe this is okay, I can’t. God commands us to obey the law, even when it is corrupt (Romans 13, Daniel 1-3). So when the hero gets let off by a jury of his crime of beating up the bad guy’s casino and thugs because of their giving drugs to the hero’s little young cousin, well, we sure feel emotionally justified, but hardly morally so. The jury acquits the hero in vandalizing the casino because they understand it was in reaction to the bad guy’s own crime against the hero. Well, it seems to me that this whole jury disregarding the law and voting from the heart for personal revenge outside the law, is the whole problem with American jurisprudence these days. It may feel good to stick it to the evil guys who hide behind the law, but due process has been subverted, and with it, a just society, when juries ignore the law and make subjective judgments that violate established law. As much as I hate many laws, and consider them unjust, the responsibility of jurors is to judge in accordance with the laws not with their personal sentiments. If the laws are unjust, then they must be changed through due process, not through arbitrary will. Jurors do not make the law, they apply it in judgments. It is certainly the result of our postmodern relativistic culture that every man is a law unto himself and that moral and legal judgments are reduced to subjective individual preferences and sentiments. If there is no absolute standard of law (as in the Bible) to which all individuals and society is accountable then it will follow that men will use their legal positions to arbitrarily impose their personal wills upon the majority. Without objective external moral and legal theory, ALL law is oppressive imposition on society, so the Will to Power wins. Nietzsche wins. This is what we have in our modern Supreme Court and indeed our judicial system, which attempts to subvert the Constitution and legislate from the bench, rather than interpret law beholden to the objective standard of law passed by Congress. The Supreme Court has become a tyrannical manipulator of law. They have subverted the balance of powers. But the juror system is quickly becoming this as well. Encouraging people to decide from the heart rather than from truth or rational application of established law is descent into anarchy and the foundation of an unjust society. Back to the movie: When the hero runs for sheriff and wins in order to clean up the town, it could also be argued that he is simply using the law for his own purposes, rather than upholding and respecting the rule of law. He is really only a reflection of the villain, who is himself manipulating law to his advantage. So, morally, what you have is two villains, not a hero and a villain. Now, if the movie explored this moral struggle, fine. But it does not. It encourages vigilanteism. (And keep in mind, I believe self-defense IS morally justifiable and IS NOT the same as vigilanteism.) So in the movie, technically, the hero is justified in clamping down on the bad guys because after all, he is the law. But in truth, he is really only using the law as a cover for revenge. He bashes the bad guy’s car lights, which is a moment of audience glee, but is actually legally and morally unjustifiable, no matter how bad the villain is. The hero cuts up a villain’s truck with a chain saw while “looking for drugs” in the vehicle. Okay, that one is technically okay because of probable cause, but as you can see this is also a pretense for fighting crime with criminal behavior. It may feel emotionally satisfying to our vengeful nature, but I have to say it is not right.
Thriller
The Ladykillers
Recommended. I believe the Coen brothers are the modern day Woody Allen with a moral twist. Unlike the Nietzschean nihilistic lack of moral clarity that informed all of Allen’s stories, these guys sometimes place their quirky bizarre parables within a moral context. And a Judeo-Christian one at that. At least the latest stories, O Brother, Where Art Thou? And The Ladykillers express this profound spirituality. In my book, Hollywood Worldviews, I write about the moral superiority of uneducated spirituality over the educated humanistic arrogance that they addressed in O Brother and it appears they are capitalizing on that theme again in this story. They’re even exploiting the old time scratchy record, country, bluegrass, folk, and gospel music that they did so well in O Brother, that it became a bestselling soundtrack. Hey, these guys are getting what Hollywood does not. Give the people what they want and you’ll make tons of money. And the people like positive religious themes. That’s fine by me. Michael Crichton’s stories are all about the arrogance of humanistic science without morality. These guys seem to tell stories about the arrogance of humanistic education without morality. The story is about a group of criminal misfits led by a verbosely obscure professor G.H. Dorr, played by Tom Hanks, who rent a room in an old black woman’s house in order to tunnel their way into a casino cash vault nearby. The humor lies in the fact that the house is owned by an uneducated Gospel singing, church going black matron, Marva Munson. She is intellectually clueless, but morally full of heart and soul with her small town country church mentality. Sure, the writers have fun with this lack of smarts, but it’s not mockery, it’s loving affection, like that for a grandmother, on the level of The Apostle. When she hears a black dude swearing, she slaps him over and over again, cause she won’t have any of that “hippity hop music” language in her house, a Christian house. We laugh, but we ALL know she’s really right underneath the humor. Her naivete is like Forrest Gump, funny, but really the truth that we have all discarded out of our modernist arrogant disdain for the past. Are we really educated? Have we really progressed? Or is our pride in man’s wisdom led to a stupidity far more foolish than the simplicity of the primitive? I think these guys are clearly proving it’s the latter. The Ladykillers is a morality tale about how your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:33), how you reap what you sow (Galatians 6:7-9), and if you sow to the whirlwind you will reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7). The fear of the Lord is the beginning of true knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction (Proverbs 1:7)When Marva’s spiritual sensitivity kicks in and she suspects the men of criminal activity, she gives them a chance to repent and come to church. So they decide to kill her. Unfortunately for them, God is protecting her and each one faces his own demise as they try to take her out one by one, until they are all gone, including Dorr. They employ an interesting thematic image that I found very satisfying. The story begins with this shot of a garbage dump island in the middle of a river. And the men dump their bags of tunneled dirt onto the garbage barge every night. Then, when each man dies trying to expire the old lady, their bodies are dumped on the barge as well. I think this is a powerful metaphor that illustrates that we try to get rid of our “garbage” (read, “sin”) but we really can’t. It all piles up somewhere, stinking and infested, but it never goes away. We can’t hide it. Our garbage will find us out. We cannot divorce morality from knowledge. At the end, by way of a funny twist of events, the money falls into Marva’s hands. Because the local sheriff thinks she is making up the story, he tells her to keep the money and do whatever she wants with it. SO, she, following her perceived authority, takes it and gives it all to her favorite charity, Bob Jones University (an ironically racist school in its dating policy up until lately). So, even the money, “ill-gotten” from vice, ends up given to God’s school of choice. Very strong theme that God uses evil for His good, and His will can’t be thwarted (Job 42:2). Ya gotta love it. Of course, Bob Jones U is not a paragon of theological accuracy in my eyes, but compared to the godless idiocy of man’s best, like Harvard and Yale, etc. BJU is a beacon of light and truth. And that’s the point of this film anyway. GO SEE IT. SUPPORT TRUTH IN CINEMA WITH YOUR DOLLARS.
Taking Lives
Not Recommended. Not terrible or anything, just another by the numbers thriller, without any real substance or value to it. Oh, for another Seven or Silence of the Lambs. You can’t have it all. Angelina Jolie plays an FBI profiler who helps to track down a…. Oh, it’s a boring and uninteresting story.
Secret Window
Not recommended. Although it was well done for a Stephen King adaptation, and well-acted by Johnny Depp, this thriller about a writer haunted by a violent hick whose story he claims the writer stole is a real downer. It turns out that the hick is killing people, and he is a figment of the writer’s imagination, which means the hero is the villain, and he gets away with murdering people in the end. Not morally or story satisfying.
Twisted
Not recommended. Ashley Judd. I love watching her act. But in this movie, ah, it ain’t even worth saying anything about. It’s just a dumb thriller about a beautiful chick as a cop that is totally unbelievable, because feminine beautiful women like Ashley just can’t take down strong testosterone criminals, no matter how much Hollywood wants us to believe that women can be just like men, and still be women. I’m sorry, it ain’t so.
The Butterfly Effect
Not Really Recommended. An interesting take on the Chaos theory notion that the smallest change in a sequence can result in major ramifications down the road. The example often quoted by Chaos theoreticians: A butterfly flapping its wings can result in a hurricane on the other side of the world. This movie is a strong embodiment of that idea with a corresponding caution about man’s inability to control his destiny. Ashton Kutcher plays Evan, a young man who discovers an ability to travel back in time through reading his journals written throughout his troubled early life. He starts to go back in time in order to right some wrongs and save people he loves, only to result in either worse lives for them or for others around them. A problem I had with it is that the storytellers gave him such a harsh and dysfunctional family and neighborhood that it was hard to believe. A local pedophile child-abuser with a son who becomes a killer and a daughter who is ruined psychologically is technically feasible, but it just all seemed too extreme to relate to, it caused a disconnect in my suspension of disbelief. I liked the multidimensional display of how child abuse destroys people in different ways, no matter what single thing you may try to change. As Evan goes back to change specific events in his friend’s lives, he realizes that there are so many other events that he could not anticipate, and we see those results with each new “universe” he embarks down. It’s a great idea but not a great movie. Secondly, the story was very casual about sexual promiscuity in the lead characters. It is interesting to note that the storytellers had no clue about the fact that the fornication they celebrate in the “good versions” of the characters’ lives, is just as linked, in reality, to dysfunctional values, experiences, and poor choices as every other dysfunction in the movie. In some ways, the most destructive dysfunctions of all are those which are not even considered problematic, the ones that are assumed as good by society, and then cause the turmoil in people’s hearts when they can’t understand why their lives are so broken or empty. As C.S. Lewis said, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” One strong moral component that I thought was a missed opportunity was that in one of the “many worlds” that Evan “creates,” all his friends are happy and well-adjusted, but HE is a quadrapalegic. He decides to kill himself because he is afraid of going back and messing it all up again. But this is an act of self-pity, not heroism. Okay, that would be a first reaction, but why couldn’t he have come to the conclusion that he must suffer for the sake of other’s happiness, and bear up under life’s trials? That would have been profound. Instead the filmmakers chose to have Evan discover that his mother turns out to be the one who is suffering, which justifies going back one more time to try to save her as well. The Butterfly Effect is a great idea, but not a great movie.
Monster
Recommended with Extreme Caution. This movie is on par with Se7en, one of the most powerful movies about the nature of depravity. Charlize Theron WILL win the Oscar this year for her acting in this film. There is nothing else even close in any other movie. She is absolutely brilliant in her portrayal of white trash Lesbian prostitute serial killer Aileen Wournos. Every move, every word, every gesture and look is superbly acted by Charlize. This is based on the true story of her killing spree back in the 80s, and her relationship with fellow traveler/”lover” Tyria Moore (In the movie, Selby Wall, played by Christina Ricci). It is a brilliantly written script that captures Aileen’s decline into murder from her abuse as a child and from the destructive world of prostitution where women are not merely dehumanized through objectification but through violent treatment. And writer/director Patty Jenkins carries us through the process with incredibly written voice-over narration by Aileen throughout the film. I do not buy the modernist argument that environment creates us, but I do acknowledge that it certainly influences us, has a major hand in shaping us, depending on our personal response, which is the ultimate category of responsibility. And this film certainly has a pretty good balance in showing the effect of our abusive society on women without negating Aileen’s personal responsibility. It theorizes that Aileen had a fairy tale fantasy of being loved by everyone and becoming a star some day that drove her to do what she did, even from her early days where she would pull up her dress for the boys to see in order to get a few dollars. The film then chronicles her real world experience that crumbles that fantasy, while she holds onto it in utter denial. It paints her picture as a human being turned into a monster, which is only fair because this is basically true, even considering the fact that we are born with depraved natures. She is portrayed as a heterosexual who is driven into lesbianism because of the male abuse of her as a prostitute, which again, is fair enough, though not universal, and I don’t doubt it’s what really happened. But even though there is a female sympathetic understanding of Aileen, they do not seem to fall into the all-too-typical Hollywood agenda of denying Aileen’s personal evil or responsibility. They don’t capitulate to propoganda, and because of this, present a pretty even-handed drama. And that is the power of drama. If done well, it can be one of the most powerful forms of argumentation for a viewpoint. There is no such thing as a neutral drama. All drama is crafted by the storyteller to prove a particular worldview or viewpoint and this film is no exception. The filmmaker no doubt used quite a bit of artistic license to make changes to fit her deliberate theme. But to tell the story in such a way as to ring true to the human condition and to the spirit of the persons involved is the goal. Jenkins’s interpretation of Wournos is clearly an interpretation but it is done very persuasively. The scenes of prostitution with the “johns” is so poignantly portrayed as pathetic that one can only be repulsed by it all. This is not titillating stuff, it is depiction of depravity the way it ought to be, as despicable, not desirable. Very much the way the Bible depicts evil. It shows Aileen’s “first kill” as an abusive killer himself who was going to kill Aileen and cut her up into pieces with a hacksaw. This is an obvious appeal to justification and sympathy and I doubt was the fact of the case, but it is certainly within the parameters of that world. But Aileen is not merely depicted as defending herself in every case. She becomes addicted to the killing and ends up even killing innocent men who are trying to help her as well. And she is also portrayed as sometimes NOT killing a man because of his innocence. By the end of the film, Aileen is caught and her companion confesses and is used by the FBI to trap Aileen into confessing to some of the killings over the phone. Aileen recognizes this with her street smarts, and in an act of sacrificial love, accepts complete and total blame for all the killings, in order to save her “lover.” Of course, the film portrayed Selby as completely innocent of any killings, but certainly a knowing accomplice. I think the title then is intended to be ironic. The film shows Aileen as a human being driven by love, albeit a confused love, who is made into a “monster” by a loveless cruel world. But I think it also fairly displays Aileen’s own rebellious inability to face reality in favor of her fantasy. So I think there is sympathy without negating responsibility. Excellent, powerful, persuasive drama. By the time Aileen is carried away to her execution, she has given up all her fantasy and has embraced the nihilistic conclusion that what they tell you in life, “All you need is love. Faith will move mountains, everything happens for a reason. [Laughs] Well, they gotta tell you something.” The transformation is complete. A true warning for our postmodern generation that ignoring the real evil in this world will crush you in its grasp.
Paycheck
Not Recommended. Pretty formulaic conspiracy story about seeing the future. Compared to Phillip Dick’s other stories that became Blade Runner and Minority Report, this is just terribly uninspiring. I never thought I would see Uma Thurman act so poorly. Ben Affleck is a reverse engineer who does illegal work for a corporate marauder played by Aaron Eckhart. After he does his work, his memories are erased with a special machine so he doesn’t know what he did. This latest job turns out to be a machine that can see into the future and of course, the bad guy wants to use it to get rich and control. There are some clever sayings throughout about the nature of fortune telling. Knowledge of the future controls people. If a futurist tells people that there will be war, then a country goes to war preemptively to get a jump on it (an obvious and inadequate reference to the recent preemptive strike on Iraq by the U.S.). If the futurist says there will be a stock market crash, everyone rushes to sell their stocks before it happens, thus creating the crash. Ben says, “If you show someone the future, they have no future. Take away the future, you take away their hope.” Knowledge of the future is a form of control over others. A Romantic materialist worldview is expressed by Uma when she says to Ben, “All we are is the sum of our experiences.” An interesting approach to this ability to see the future is used by the storytellers. They use the Eastern notion of palm reading. The big future-seeing machine is simply a technological palm reader. This is set up earlier by showing a palm reading diagram in Ben’s apartment as he plays with hand balls with the Tao symbols of yin and yang on them. This Eastern notion of fortune telling is a clever idea for explaining the basis of foreknowledge and is very chic now in movies, but it is pagan and fraudulent in truth.
The Missing
Not Recommended. This is a very well done Ron Howard remake movie of the John Wayne movie, The Searchers. It’s about a woman in the western frontier, played brilliantly by Cate Blanchette (Isn’t she always brilliant?), whose daughter is kidnapped by some rogue Indians in order to sell as a slave in Mexico. She teams up with her father, (played by Tommy Lee Jones) an Indian convert himself, who she hates for abandoning her as a young child, to track them down and rescue her daughter. Its got it all. Excitement, suspense, pathos, great acting, good storytelling, etc. But it also has anti-Christ bigotry. The woman is clearly set up as a Christian and modernist because she is a nurse of sorts who helps people over their superstitions. The father comes around after abandoning her many years ago as a child and she cannot forgive him. Even though he is shown as in need of her forgiveness, in our politically correct culture, the judgmental exclusivist (read: Christian) is always the bad guy against the “open –minded” pluralist (read: Indian). SO casting the Christian as judgmental and contemptuous of other religions places her in an inferior position and her faith as undesirable. Her name is Magdalena, like the disciple of Jesus. Anyway, the Indian father may have a past that he is trying to reconcile, but he is shown as more sincere about his Indian religion than Cate is. She has nothing but contempt for his “savage” religion as she calls it. She is shown as prejudiced and arrogant and unforgiving. Okay, fine. Everyone has something wrong with them that they need to change. But her faith is clearly shown as without power compared to the Indian religion in the context of the movie. When the father gives her daughter, his granddaughter, who is with them, some moccasins to wear, Cate rejects them, until the little girl loses them and Cate is obliged to give in and let him give the moccasins to her. Then when he offers magic beads to protect them from the spirits, Cate rejects them also with condescension. When he scares her with a story about evil spirits, she lets him put the beads on the kid just in case. This is an obvious surrender, showing the weakness of her own religion to really truly protect. And when the Indian sorcerer who they are tracking gets a hold of a personal item of Cate’s he performs a voodoo ceremony that makes Cate sick with evil spirits. Her father and another good Indian set about to counter the black magic with good magic and they fight to heal Cate. Meanwhile, the little girl recites the Bible as well, so when Cate is finally released from the evil spirits, it is a bit ambiguous as to which religion made the difference. But it isn’t really. It’s really favored to the Indian side. It’s clear that the Indian voodoo has power over Cate, her relationship to Christ having no power to protect her (unlike the Bible and real Christian experience that indicate just the opposite). The little girl reads an irrelevant passage of “begats” in the Bible, making it words that are meaningless to the situation and ultimately irrelevent, and the girl’s words quickly blend in to sound not too different from the babbling tongues of the Indians, making her really subordinate to their magic. Also, Cate, after being healed, gladly puts on the protection beads, showing once again that her religion needs to keep submitting and changing it’s view because it has no real power. Cate’s faith is also without much conviction worthy of following when she is shown as being a fornicator, sleeping with a man who is not her husband. Meanwhile, the father is shown as happily and satisfyingly married to several woman, some at the same time, another pagan antichristian jab. Also the father’s religion is made out to make him “one with nature” as he talks to a hawk who leads him magically on to safety at one point in the film. The little granddaughter learns about dreams from the Indian father and she has a dream about their rescue, just like granddad suggested. So the little girl is helped and grows because of her attachment to Indian beliefs, not Christian ones. The Indian beliefs are shown as magical and with real power, while the Christian ones are not, and just lead to arrogance or condescension. At the end, Cate gives a cross back to her rescued daughter and says, “I thought I’d die wearing it,” another subtle negative reference to all things Christian. And you know, its funny, but you would think having Indians be the villains would be politically incorrect. But not here. You see, the bad Indians are only bad because they are US Cavalry scouts led astray by some caucasian army deserters. The Indians are only bad cause they’re hanging with white boys! So it is the white man who is really responsible for their corruption. Also, the sorcerer bad guy is portrayed as so ugly and mutated in his size and looks that he ends up being a freak oddity never to be confused with “normal” Indians. The rampant anti-Christ propaganda made this movie hard to appreciate and harder to recommend.
Timeline
Recommended. This one is about some archeologists who go back in a time machine to the Middle Ages to rescue a fellow professor who is stuck there from an earlier visit. They get more than they bargain for when they discover that the company in control of the time machine has plans and secrets of its own. I am a sucker for time travel movies. I think it is because it is a way of creatively imagining what it would be like to be in a different world. Or as a character in the movie telegraphs, “the past helps us understand where we come from and where we’re going, so we don’t make the mistakes of the past. We understand now by understanding the past.” So really, all period pieces as well as time travel movies are merely metaphors or doorways to understanding ourselves now. This is why there is often a lot of historical revisionism going on in period pieces. People like to cast the past so much in terms of the present that they end up rewriting history to suit their own prejudices. Oh well. This movie wrestles with the romantic notion of chivalry and the medieval virtues of courage and honor in contrast with the warring brutality of the very same time culture and period. Much like our own that has great accomplishments in technology only to be abused by the greed and power-mongering of men. Crichton’s one note trumpet, a very good one at that, is precisely the scientific hubris of man. From The Terminal Man to Jurassic Park to Prey to Timeline, he writes of the dangers of scientific pursuit without moral restraint. As the lawyer in Jurassic Park says, “We’re so busy exploring if it can be done, we forgot to ask whether it should be done.” I love this motif and think it is apropos for our modernist world. The hero is a dumb California surfer type blond boy who has no real empathetic qualities, while the secondary character, Merrick, who decides to stay in the middle ages cause he studied it so well and fell in love with a woman back then, is the far more interesting part of the story, and a more likable candidate for hero.