Holding Out for a Motherf***ing Hero

Now come on, it's a movie called Kick Ass; how subtle do you expect it to be? We've had superhero/graphic novel movies played straight, played satirically, and played as morbid deconstructionist (last year's Watchmen). So what category does this fall into? All of them. Or none of them. When the opening Spider-Man-ish narration involves repeated references to the main character pleasuring himself, who the hell knows?

And that's either Kick Ass's saving grace for the more tolerant, or its curse for just about everyone else. It throws at us gobs of the stuff R-rated movies are typically built on: the F-bomb becomes the F-barrage and every moment of violence escalates out of a comic book "safe" zone into whatever bout of bloody carnage seems inventive for the moment. What's the purpose of this? Is there some subtext here that fighting evil is actually a rough and gritty business where people actually get hurt? Nah, it's too stylized to be that lofty. The simple verdict is that Kick Ass is plenty of madness, but the method apparently skipped town on a bus.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) wonders why no one really tries to be a super-hero (it's also a set-up for a jaw-dropper of an opening scene) and after he and his pals are mugged by corner hoods, decides to take the law, as it is, into his own hands. He buys a green wetsuit that makes him look like radioactive sperm, dubs himself Kick Ass, and heads out into the mean streets to halt crime in its tracks.

By which we mean, get his butt handed to him with a milkshake and an order of fries.

In a cute and ironic twist, his first beat-down puts him in an even better position to go out and play hero (how, I won't tell) and after he clumsily rescues a victim from a gang beating, becomes an internet and media phenom. Only, he's not the only costumed vigilante act in town. During one close encounter he's rescued by a man in Batman black, an ex-cop with an agenda (Nicholas Cage) and his precocious, and hard-hitting, daughter who calls herself "Hit Girl" (Chloe Moretz). If you've heard of this movie before reading this review you've seen the clips of Moretz, all of eleven, pouring round after round into mobs of bad guys, and if you've seen the red band trailer you've seen her drop the kind of language that would make David Mamet and Robert DeNiro blush. I mention this because, in a way, this is Kick Ass' mojo: it takes what it has and escalates it until it has to get a reaction out of even the most jaded viewer (don't think too hard about how Big Daddy Cage trains his daughter to use a bullet-proof vest). In many cases this would be a sign of desperation. It isn't here, but it's neither a sign of inspiration, either, if only because the movie is often like an ADHD kid without his Ritalin, too in-the-moment to consider the possibility of a "big picture."

The remains of the plot exhibit even more of this nervous woodpecker syndrome. A local crime boss (Mark Strong) mistakes the ill-health (i.e. death) befalling his subordinates to the doings of Kick Ass (in reality, the dynamic father/daughter duo are to blame) and hatches an elaborate scheme to put his heroics to a pulpy end. He even sends his son (Superbad's Chris Mintz-Plasse) out onto the streets as another superhero known as Red Mist (oh, don't tell me they really didn't want to call him McLovin') to lure the unsuspecting do-gooder in.

Kick Ass can be an entertaining ride while it lasts, if you can maintain the same kind of defenses normally reserved for horror movies, the kind that allows you to realize that it is only a movie and kids in it are not getting beaten to a pulp and talking like longshoremen. And there were touches I liked. I liked how Kick Ass becomes a celebrity for doing comparatively little, and I even liked the way Johnson undercuts the moments where he's supposed to be at his most courageous with a squeaky, unsure voice, like he's about to ask the villains if it's okay if he opens up a can of whuppass. I even liked the ending- I had to know what was in the crate, and I wasn't disappointed. B

Rules for Reboot

Now that (500)
Days of Summer director Marc Webb has been slated to do a new Spider-Man reboot, it occurred to me that perhaps a few rules are in order before this new buzz word gets ground into dust.

1. Give it a rest.
   

   Whatever the new Spidey flick ends up being called, it won't be the fastest turn-around ever seen between the time a franchise dies and is resurrected (that award goes to Hulk and its hybrid reboot/sequel five years later). But seriously, it took decades and rumors of countless other directors before Sam Raimi got the first one on the screen, and that one won't be ten years old before this superhero-in-high-school rethinking gets put upon us. There's a life cycle to these things: box office wonder, decline, obsolescence or kitch (or sometimes both), and then exile to oblivion where it should stay for a while. After all, how can we miss a franchise if it's always around?
   

2. 
   Stop it with the prodigy catapult. You're not fooling anybody.
   
   

   Someone made a really smart decision when they picked Christopher Nolan to reboot the dead-as-a-doornail Batman franchise. Nolan, at the time, had only two major features to his credit: the indie-smash Memento and the Pacino cop drama Insomnia. Both of these movies were deep-minder psychological set pieces and neither would lead one to think that Nolan was the perfect person to make a superhero blockbuster. So when he was picked, it all seemed so subversive. Young blood, uncorrupted by Hollywood success, and an actor's director to boot. Of course, this serious-mindedness is exactly what we got and is what turned Batman Begins and The Dark Knight into such great movies. So why is it that repeats of this model seemed doomed to fail? Look at poor Gavin Hood, the South African director who got noticed with his Iraq war drama Rendition, but ended up producing a stuttering (and stuttered) mess when asked to reboot the X-Men franchise (or at least the Wolverine part of it)? The difference is that Nolan was given the keys to his films and allowed to shape them with minimal interference. However, this trend of favoring inexperienced directors who are hungry for one big film is more often about picking a name who's eager to sign on and doesn't have the clout to push back when suits try running the show. If, let's say, that reboot of The Terminator happens, do you really think producers would look toward, say, Ridley Scott who has over thirty years of experience to ride on? At least the refurbished Bond movies have stuck a roster of qualified (if a bit odd) names for their films.
   

3. If you're not doing anything new, it's a remake, not a reboot.
   

   Stephen Norrington (Mr. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) may "reboot" The Crow. A Darren Aronofsky reboot of the Robocop series has become almost urban legend. And The Terminator is the latest name to be thrown into play. While an Aronofsky take on Mr. Tin Cop sounds cool, every single one of these sounds more like dredging up the originals with different names and a bit better effects in order to cash on the craze that everything that is old must be new again. What all of them lack is what Batman, Bond, and Star Trek all had- a new angle. Batman and Casino Royale both dumped the campy baggage their characters had built up over the decades and went for gritty realism. JJ Abrams took a franchise that had been strangled to death by its own over-wrought mythology and gave a gleeful FU to fans who insisted on strict adherence to cannon. If they make another The Crow, what's going to be different? Another dead guy beats the stuffing out of a different set of interchangeable bad guys while wearing slightly different face paint? Don't waste our time.
   

4. We know things are hard all around…
   

   ...but don't turn reboots into just a chance to squeeze blood from a stone. The scariest thing about the new Spider-Man is how high its sets the bar before people start scrambling towards the familiar. Ok, not very many people liked Spider Man 3, but it did follow two certified blockbusters. One hiccup and its not back to the drawing board, but back in time? Follow this reasoning to its (ill)logical conclusion and if Iron Man 2 underperforms, we may see a reboot of that by 2013. Think back to Star Trek. That original film series made a run of 23 years and ten films, and more than a couple of them were dogs (cough- Star Trek V). By the time Nemesis came around it had probably been long overdue to put it out of its misery, but scrapping one successful franchise due to a stumble caused by getting in the director's way (see rule #2) may mean we'll be on a never-ending carousel of refitted and failing old ideas.
   

 

Things That Go Aieeeeee in the Night

 

    I remember about ten years ago- two movies that came out around the same time. The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense were decidedly different films, but both were out-of-left-field smashes and both held the promise that, perhaps, the next decade of horror movies wouldn't be bloated FX whores like the remake of The Haunting, but would build on atmosphere and character the way The Sixth Sense did, or go Blair Witch's route of plugging into our most basic fears.

    How justified was this promise? Let's put it this way, it's ten years later and the term "torture porn" is now part of the everyday lexicon.

    A few weeks ago a local library held a screening of a documentary charting the evolution of the American horror movie, and far too charitable it was to the current state of affairs. I think of the best horror movies I've seen this decade, movies like The Descent and Let the Right One In and there's hardly a yankee entry in the bunch (Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell a lonely exception). With the exception of putting out a gargantuan string of Saw movies, the American horror set nowadays seems devoted to one of two things: remaking every title from the glory (and not-so-glorious) days, and taking the exceptional ideas from other countries (read Japanese ghost horror like The Ring and The Grudge or the Spanish mega-hit REC) and de-foreign-izing them for American audiences. It can be said that if there's one thing American horror finds scarier than pale faced ghosts and zombies, it's subtitles.

    This is why it's very surreptitious that ten years after Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense we get Paranormal Activity. This is a movie that's definitely reading from Blair Witch's playbook: made on the cheap (a rumored eleven grand), released small and carried into multiplexes on the shoulders of excited hype and word of mouth. Both are faux-video shot documentaries about people fooling with things they shouldn't, and both use their fear of the mundane to great effect.

    But if Paranormal Activity is a return to the lovely art form of insurgent filmmaking, it doesn't share the same detached-from-fantasy mojo that made Blair Witch so damned palatable. Paranormal is a sight to see- I would recommend anyone who wants to feel their pulse skip not to miss it- but it's also a bit on the rack. It wants to have its shriek cake and eat it, too, dressing itself up in the kind of reality-based cinema verite style that sucked us into Blair Witch's mythology, while also hanging on to the desire to indulge in age-old scary movie standards. None of this is done badly, but it undercut's Paranormal Activity's chance to really connect with the kind of subdued terror one feels when they hear that creak in the middle of the night and wonders if it's really the house settling.

    It features two characters: Micah and Katie, living in an expansive San Diego home (the setting is real-life director Oren Peli's pad, part of his gestalt-therapy reason for making the film) when bizarre things begin to happen at night. This doesn't come as a surprise to at least one of them- Katie has been occasionally plagued by supernatural "visitations" since she was a child. Thinking this is a cool way to break into Youtube famedom, Micah buys an expensive video camera to document what happens at night as the couple sleep. As the scene cards label Night #1 and Night #5, we listen, at first, to random noises coming from downstairs which then evolve into a door suddenly swinging closed, a picture getting smashed, etc… The pacing of the movie is strictly build-up. At night, the fast-forward slows before something happens, giving us a good period of time to twist in the wind wondering what tidbit of spookiness we're expected to witness next. During the day, tempers get frayed down to the live wire as Micah's overly cool exterior gets worn down by the proceedings and Katie's resentment that her boyfriend's cavalier attitude may actually be encouraging the spirit flares.

    As I said, from a technical standpoint, Paranormal Activity is near-flawless. There isn't a single moment, particularly a fright scene, that telegraphs what's going to happen next, and Peli's pace makes no single event enough of a release that we don't slide into the denouement like a tightly-wound wire. The acting by an almost-unheard of cast (actress Katie Featherston has a couple low-budget shock titles under her belt) is dutiful, although the characters they play don't always register. Micah comes off, at times, as particularly glib and superior and also suffers from the biggest reality-vexing quagmire of these kinds of movies: that when the fit hits the shan, wouldn't even the most self-absorbed person just put down the damned camera?

    Story-wise, the movie is a bit of a disappointment. Its liberties are not exactly out of bounds, but the core conceit of the film- that Micah and Katie's unwelcome guest is not some reality TV-show spectre but rather a malevolent entity who has the hots for Katie- feels like a script tool. This is especially true of the ending, a change suggested by DreamWorks chief Steven Spielberg which, yes, is scary, but also for good slices-and-dices the oh-my-God-this-is-really-happening mystique Paranormal Activity tries to set up for itself.

    Is it worth going to see? Definitely. Will it influence how horror movies are made in the future? I doubt it, although if it takes even one future filmmaker who was considering making the next Hostel and sets him or her down a different road, then it will be worth it. As it is, Paranormal Activity is a curiosity, a distraction, although one best enjoyed with the lights on.

    

I Don’t Believe in Government

I don't believe in government.

I don't believe the government should be getting into the health insurance business. But since free market companies have no interest in finding a solution for 15 million uninsured Americans, and countless more who are either under-insured or who will lose their insurance the moment they get sick, I guess they'll have to.

I don't believe the government should regulate an American's right to bear arms. But when, every day, over a thousand people use a gun to inflict violence on innocent people, I guess we need to make sure they don't fall into the wrong hands.

I don't believe government should use tax payer money to pay for free school lunches and breakfasts. But since every day more and more children are coming to school with nothing to eat, either because their parents couldn't afford food or were too irresponsible to provide it, I guess it's better than letting them go hungry.

I don't believe government should be the ones exploring the moon. But since I can't trust a private company to do it without defiling its surface with billboards and advertisements, I guess we'll have to trust NASA.

I don't believe government should be able to dictate what is and is not a "non-denominational prayer." But since majority faiths have shown themselves all too willing to use their beliefs to bully "minority" believers in the public forum, I guess it's the best they can do.

I don't believe in government. I agree with people when they say "government is not the answer." The problem is, nowadays, neither is anything else. At least it's trying to tackle the tough issues that we, the media, the free market, the average citizen, have washed our hands of. At least it's trying to do something where no one else is.

And the Winner (Still) Is…

    What do a bat-man and a robot have in common?

    Apparently both have enough champions some rules are about to be changed on their behalf. This week, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Masters of the Universe behind the whole Oscar hoo-ha, decided the model of nominating five movies for its Best Picture award is outdated and has upped the ante to, no, not six. Not seven. Ten. Ten movies this year will be graced as Best Picture nominees. This isn't completely unheard of- it was done a couple of times in the Thirties, however the five-film-formula has held steady ever since.

    Popularly, most people put the reasoning with the uproar from last year's contest when The Dark Knight and Wall-E were snubbed from top prize consideration. Now my own feelings about this are pretty complex. I liked The Dark Knight, but when I heard the Best Picture talk in late summer of last year I thought, "No. Good movie, not a great one." But by February when the lot of Best Picture nominees had been announced, I felt a palpable apathy. It was easier to admire Slumdog Millionaire than to like it. Frost/Nixon took a fiery topic and awkwardly tried to mold it into a Rocky clone. And I admired the workmanship of Benjamin Button, but from a director as fiercly creative as David Fincher, it was a let down. In short, The Dark Knight arguments suddenly made sense, because if it had been included it would have been the only one of the lot I could have gotten myself excited about.

    But would it have won? No, there's the reason why the Academy's decision is, at best, short-sighted and at worst reflects a fundamental lack of self-understanding. The more strident cynics have argued the only benefit sought and received from this change goes to the studios and independent film companies who can now label more titles in their catalog as Best Picture nominees. Defenders say this gives movies that would normally not thought to fit in the narrow presupposition of what a Best Picture should be a chance. This is a mistake, because widening the field doesn't do anything to change the biases or limited modes of thinking that go into selecting these films. I can't even remember a year in which I've felt there was such a glut of remarkable movies that the Academy's top 5 would be bursting at the seams, and there's also the fact that what constitutes my top favorites isn't necessarily, and in fact proves rarely, in line with what Academy voters think.

    The Oscars have always had to walk a tightrope- wanting to be a serious reward for cinematic artistic endeavor on one hand, and a commercially-accessible institution on the other. As a result, the "Best Picture" rarely is. Look at any year, then look at the top 10 lists of major critics and you'll often find that even if the Best Picture film is even on the list, it's often beat out by several other titles for the upper tier slots. So Best Picture really isn't the best movie of the year- it's the best of what's popular. Box office numbers don't really play a part in choosing a winner, but failure to reach a wide audience is anathema since it means that a winner may potentially face a lack of relevance to the mass movie-going population. This middle ground puts the Oscars in unusual straits. If it wanted pure artistic credibility its nominees would be a far more interesting lot and would more accurately reflect what is felt to be the "best" of the year among scholars, film professionals, and critics, but the institution as a whole would lose out in wide public appeal and the opportunity to demand four hours of network programming on a Sunday night. Go the other way, make it about public opinion and nothing else, like the People's Choice Awards, and you get a show that may attract viewers, but whose awards carry little weight in the industry.

    This dodging between artistic and popular has often boxed Oscar into patterns of behavior that, supposedly, this widening of the Best Picture category is supposed to remedy. The argument goes that The Dark Knight and Wall-E didn't make the cut because mass-market, escapist movies have strikes against them when they go before the Academy. Give me a moment to laugh while I ask, what then were Gladiator, Titanic, and Forrest Gump? If what was probably the best written, best directed, best acted popcorn movie in years, as well as an animated film that often rivaled Kubrick and Spielberg in its vision couldn't break into a top slot of mediocre movies, what does that mean? It means that in its pursuit to be all things to all people, the Oscars are more about finding the appearance of a great movie, than finding a great movie in and of itself. The five Best Picture nominees this year ran a gamut of an uplifting rags to riches story, a historical fantasy, and a political drama, themes seemingly chiseled into Oscar's mantra. If the category would have been widened, The Dark Knight might have found a slot, but more as a salve to more populist voters. Will ten movies to pick from radically change the outcome of future contests? Yes- if only because one cant' deny adding Ralph Nader to the mix in the 2000 presidential election impacted its outcome, just not in Nader's favor.

    It's a bit overly hopeful to think the additional five nominees are going to have much of an effect save for watering down the respect a nomination can bring. Deeper lines of misthinking dictate why certain movies aren't able to break into this rank. Just like The Dark Knight and Wall-E, if there had been ten rather than five nomination slots this year, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road might have found a place, but this, the only drama I saw this year that actually stuck in my gut, wouldn't have done much for its chances. Go back to last year. My favorite movie was David Fincher's true crime epic Zodiac, a movie that earned some of the best reviews of Fincher's career (even better than he would get from Benjamin Button) but flamed out hard in theaters. Zodiac was such a flop it would be hard to picture it making an Academy top 10 as opposed to a top 5 despite it landing on many critics end of the year favorites lists. In 2006 Paul Greengrass' searing chronicle of September 11^th, United 93, failed to make the Best Picture cut, but landed Greengrass a Best Director nomination, a sign the Academy wants to give an artistic nod to a movie not popular enough or too controversial to make a run for Best Picture.

    Maybe the cynics are right and this move is much like the "everyone gets a trophy!" attitude in little league, that we're going to reward movies, now ten of them, for just showing up. What it isn't going to do is reorientate the Academy in regards to who it decides to reward, its preconceived notions are too entrenched to be uprooted by something this superficial. Five slots narrows the field, which is what an award is supposed to do. There will always be many (me included) whose favorites end up on the killing floor, but this can be appreciated if the competition takes less visible qualities to heart. Besides, this is supposed to be a horse race, and you can't make a horse race out of a stampede.

If You Think I’m Going to Give Your ^$&*#! Movie a Good Review, Then *%#@! You!

    There's a reason why writers hate Amazon. Oh, trust me, overall we think it's fantastic with the selling of the books and the mathematically improbable sales ranking list that many a greenhorn scribe has lost their freaking mind trying to track their own work on. But if you want to find on topic to make your typical cozie matron shrill up and spit fire, talk about reader reviews. At times, Amazon resembles a shopping mall during Xmas- one in which the security guards have been given pink slips and where roving gangs of twelve-year-olds spray paint graffiti on the nearest Banana Republic before dropping their trousers in the Foto Friends kiosk.

    The problem specifically are people who live to give bad reviews to a product for imbecilic reasons such as:

1. I hate the author.
   
2. I only like genre X, so any work that is not genre X has made a major failing of not living to my expectations.
   
3. I really hate the author.
   
4. So-called "book" required me to "read." Not available in easy "osmosis" form.
   
5. I really liked the book; truly a literary feat that will stand the test of time. But the cover art sucked.
   
6. Did I mention I hate the author?
   

The curious thing is that many a writer, at least the ones who don't frolic in vaults full of money like Stephen King or Nicholas Sparks, actually spends time wondering why this is- why when people read a good book they often have to be prompted to saying anything positive on an online forum, while they'll stay in a burning building just a few moments longer to drop a few more metaphorical and superlative stink bombs ("Your book sucks only slightly less than Osama bin Laden. And that's on a good day."). This shouldn't be a mystery- particularly to people who write. We're writers- we like mixing up drama. We enjoy taking the hopes and dreams of people and loading them into a blender with a banana and ice and making an ennui smoothie. It's what we do.

For a period of a couple of years I regularly posted movie reviews on my website. Regular has now become few and far between, but there was one force of nature I was, and still am, aware of: it was a lot more fun to a bad review than a good one. Seriously. I look at some of the movies I lauded "A" or "A+" grades onto and I look at some of the most difficult reviews I ever had to spew out. I look at some of the movies I handed, decapitated, on an "F" silver platter and I see where I was in the zone. Trust me, like the Merchant of Venice we want our pound of flesh when we've been insulted, robbed, and bludgeoned on the head, which anyone who has seen it knows Catwoman is very effective at doing. We want to praise great work, but have trouble finding the words, but there's no limit to the words ascribed to the dog poo pile in the corner.

In that vein, when it comes to movies it feels like all of 2008 I've been walking behind a St. Bernard who was recently fed chili. I can think of, and probably count on one hand, the number of great movies I've seen this year. The smattering of good-to-OK ones gets lost in the fog.

But the bad ones? They've been hanging around like the Ghost of Christmas Past whose home just got foreclosed.

For example, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg, the bit-empty showman who finally grew up to make masterworks like Schindler's List and Munich reminded us that while there might be one great story in each and every one of us, the black hole from which we pull the stinkers is limitless. To be honest, I had to grow to like the Indiana Jones movies- Raiders of the Lost Ark is still on my list as one of the Most Overrated Movies of All Time (repeat this again with your voice in a cool echo). But Kingdom acted less like an Indiana Jones movie and more like one of its knock-offs, probably indistinguishable from any future Friedberg and Seltzer-inspired spoof named Adventure Movie. We know Mr. Get Off My Plane! Harrison Ford hasn't been into playing the lovable type lately, but the crotchety hum-drumness was only one step from having Indiana Jones shouting at kids to get off his lawn.

Then there were the strange bedfellows; this was the year that got me thinking about everything Nicholas Sparks and the Saw movies have in common. This year brought us Saw V, although it might make for less work for Lionsgate typesetters if they just called every sequel from now on Saw X (the X not standing for the Roman numeral ten, but the algebraic variable, since any number can be placed in it without changing the result). I was never into the series- the first two were curious but mediocre shock flicks, but I threw up my hands (along with my lunch) around the time of Saw III. It wasn't as much that I had a problem with the quality of the movie (although I did), but along with the unrepentant gore and really twisted morality message, it became obvious that you couldn't watch another movie in the franchise and expect anything but the same set-up and execution as in the others. It was the same kind of reaction I had watching Nights in Rodanthe, a movie that was originally on my list as one of the year's worst, but to be perfectly fair I couldn't talk about it in terms except the universal adjectives that attach themselves to Sparks' work (pat, saccharine, cloying, etc…). It just became obvious that, The Notebook aside, I couldn't expect anything more in a Sparks adaptation beyond what I got in Message in a Bottle… woman on the outs with love meets impossibly sensitive and caring man. They make love, pretend to hurt each other's feelings, then nature takes over because nothing says romance like someone buying the farm, right? Sparks seems to pull his characters out of a farm where they got all those red-shirted crewmembers in Star Trek, the nameless members of the landing party who you knew were never going to see the Enterprise again.

Proving that box office business is more about the marathon than the sprint was Twilight, based on tweeny novels by Stephanie Meyer. The predictions of monster business opening weekend came true, only for this Titanic for the iCarly set to get buried in following weeks by John Travolta and an animated dog. To be fair, Twilight wasn't "bad" in the same way a lot of the movies I'm mentioning are, but I can't think of a better example since Pirates of the Caribbean of a film that was concocted and guided by marketing analysts in suits who added scenes for no other reason than to bow to a demographic. The irony is that the movie's score, by Coen Brothers' favorite Carter Burwell, is one of the year's best and is unusual and clever in every way the movie safe and non-threatening. No wonder Burwell almost got fired from the picture.

A note to video game publishers: if you want to stop giving credibility to Roger Ebert's "games are not art" theory, then stop selling the rights to them to hacks- or at least sell them to people who actually get it. Comic book movies went through this period before actually grown-up fans got their hands on them to make Spider-Man and Iron Man. The only notable (or notorious) game example is Max Payne, Mark Wahlberg's hey-I-can-be-even-more-wooden-than-that follow-up to The Happening. Directed by Omen mangler John Moore, Payne committed so many sins holy water seemed more appropriate than a review. It looked great, but it didn't even try to emulate the game's own emulation and take on Dashell and Chandler detective noir, subsisting instead on a diet of bored looks, tired dialogue, and no soul.

If all of this is the turd pile, what would be its K2? Let's just say I've seen remakes that veered off from the original. But it's a rare moon when a remake veers off, then circles back around to spit in the original's face. There are a lot of things about The Day the Earth Stood Still that could be fuel for complaint- Keanu Reeves, the injection of an environmental message rather than one of world peace, Keanu Reeves again. I didn't worry too much about these things because this movie is the kind of disaster in which the smaller errors actually make everything seem relevant, like we might feel better if those were the worst things that could be seen.

I have no special knowledge or insight, but I could almost picture how this went down. A greenhorn director like Scott Derrickson gets approached by a studio to direct this year's I Am Legend. New directors aren't quite ready for this kind major release, but they're also easier to bully, too. Derrickson, who made the respectable if utterly confused The Exorcism of Emily Rose, takes and takes from the original and giving nothing back in return. Day alternates wildly between its half-hearted message (war bad, environment good) and its completely f&#*ed up moral compass. It isn't that the movie has none, but it freely, and with abandon, alternates between a self-serving "do no harm" banner to then killing of millions of people to justify an inflated FX budget to service a story that, at its heart, could be adapted to a stage production by a particularly shrewd director. Derrickson may or may not prove himself later, but he sold his soul on this one, resulting in the film's insulting evangelizing and almost criminal product placement. And by the time the mega robot Gort proved to be something other than a robot, I wondered if anyone connected to this had any emotional ties to the original beyond a Netflix rental.

And on and on (notice I didn't even get to Speed Racer). I could have written a blog fawning over Frost/Nixon and The Dark Knight, but as the Joker would have said, "What would be the fun of that?" I'll admit- I like writing bad reviews, and I don't think I'm the only one. Maybe, as writers, we're really that cruel at heart. Or maybe, as writers, we're our own worst critic 95% of the time, and we like talking about that other 5% that makes us feel just a little bit superior.

 

 

Freedomland

     Over the years, I’ve lost certain tenants of my faith in the fight to understand the world I live in, and the people I live with, more completely.  But when it comes down to it, whether a person is devout or has strayed, there are only a few key things they need to remember.  First is that all around us are entitled to love unconditionally.
     The second, and this comes right from the Catechism, is that the ends do not justify the means.
     Never.
     Ever.
     So I was surprised this morning to open up my paper to find Max Boot from the Council on Foreign Relations labeling me an “agitator” and an “absolutist.”
     Okay, fair enough, he wasn’t pointing me out specifically, but there was definitely a “and you know who you are” tone to his editorial.
     Boot’s Los Angeles Times piece is basically a super-sized advocate of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program that’s been in play since September of 2001.  The program has managed to stay under the radar for several years, until word came out the NSA, without legislative or judicial review, was eavesdropping on domestic phone calls either to or from suspected terrorists or those with ties to the same.  The episode raised not only uncomfortable questions about the primacy of the 4th amendment, particularly at wartime, but also, given the NSA’s choice to circumvent the FISA court’s domain on super-sensitive legal matters, whether the power of the executive branch could supersede the restrictions placed on it by the other two branches under the rationale of national security.
     The questions were never adequately answered, particularly when the President’s reasoning, when stripped of the legalese boiled down to “because I said so.”
     Now, like a Hudson River floater, the issue has surfaced again with the announcement in an article in USA Today that the NSA has collected trillions of phone records in a massive database in an effort to “filter” patterns that might point to possible terrorist chatter.  President Bush immediately came to the program’s defense (again), arguing that the NSA’s actions are not “data mining.”  Apparently he didn’t get the brief stating that scouring data for patterns is precisely the definition of data mining.
     It’s been hard lately to find defenders of these programs outside the circles who receive their paychecks from the federal government or Fox News, but Boot’s article claims that in a time of war, “the biggest advantage we have comes from our electronic wizardry.”
     Actually, this isn’t completely true- Boot claims more than this.  In fact, he gives a practical menu of reasons why the NSA program is a good idea.  If one doesn’t work, try the next one on for size.
     After he’s done lambasting people like me for actually caring about such a concept as civil rights, he goes for the benign approach.  The data is just numbers.  The data is just phone numbers and times and dates which, despite the enormity of the collective volume, reveal little personal information, particularly information that couldn’t already be secured from a credit bureau or credit card company by a dutiful private investigator.
     All well and good, except for this- if the data is this free of context, then what good is it as an intelligence gathering tool?  I don’t pretend to be educated in surveillance and cryptology, but even those who have are stumped at what masses of phone records, divorced from other intelligence, provides in the way of reliable information.
     Of course, that’s probably the point- the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” principle.  After two separate revelations about the NSA’s actions, is there anyone out there that thinks they haven’t just seen the tip of the iceberg?  Collecting random phone data seems nonsensical, unless you couple it to the question of what else the NSA is doing that hasn’t become a headline yet.
     The downside of all of these actions, Boot says, is dismissible “silliness.”  He paints groups like the Democratic Party and the ACLU who are up in arms over these revelations as Chicken Littles who are going around shouting not that the sky is falling, but that if there were a sky, it might hypothetically fall.
     Granted- much to the contrary of the bloggers of the ferocious ultra-left, the United States has not turned into an oligarchical police state.  The very fact that this controversy has stirred up passions in print and on the airwaves as opposed to sudden mass jailings and riots on the streets does speak to how well the American Character is holding under enormous strain.
     Boot’s defense is a facetious one, though, like defending a child who has been caught running with scissors because he didn’t hurt himself this time.  I live in a military town, never went to an Ivy League school (there was plenty of crab grass, though), and have never identified myself as part of what I consider the “fashionable left,” those in Hollywood and the entertainment biz who have taken up the left-wing saber more because it’s the “thing” now, rather than out of any deep-seated belief.  I do keep a close circle of friends and have yet to meet anyone who did not place a value on national safety and security.  However, all of us so-called “absolutists” have recognized that there are certain actions that can be culled into the basket of security and yet compromise it at the same time.  We could all be safe from muggers if there was a curfew prohibiting people from going out after dark.  We could have fewer car wrecks and save some gas if people were only allowed to drive every other day.  The reason why these are not sensible solutions is because smart people recognize them for what they are- substituting one form of shackles for another.
      The 4th amendment of the Constitution was designed by men who, much to the chagrin of people like Boot, saw the possible vindictive and overzealous nature of a government pursuing justice as more than a “hypothetical” possibility.  The neo-conservative line that Boot subscribes to, once the “it ain’t so bad” justification fails, move right on to expedience.  In a time when the country is at war with small groups of people who have the means to kill more than small groups have ever had in the past, notions of the 4th amendment and FISA are outdated and even disruptive to the pursuit of justice.  Which do you value more?  Your safety or your freedom?
     There’s a lapse of thought in believing that safeguards put in place by the Framers and those who would follow in their footsteps were ever meant to be conducive to government practices.  Of course they are difficult, of course they are frustrating- that’s the point.  A system of security and justice that voluntarily takes the high road creates a pure breed of justice unlike any seen in the history of the world.  I find it particularly distressing that I find myself in the same argument with people who want to limit my freedom so I can have more freedom (these are also the same people who tell me the government will have more money if I pay less taxes.  Go figure.).  Boot at least goes a step beyond, granting lip service to the possibility that such unfettered power exercised by the federal government can lead to abuse, but doesn’t seem any more inspired on how to solve that little glitch other than to say that anyone who does abuse their power will be thrown in jail and that will be that.  Yes, Mr. Boot, I’m sure Valerie Plame is very happy to hear that.
     I’ve never alluded to, or even pretended to be, a perfect Catholic, however there are some age-old ideals that I believe in.  First is that everyone deserves my respect, even when I fail in this regard miserably.  Second is that the reasons for doing things are never even half as important as how they are done.  Mr. Boot wants to keep America safe, and on that fact we see eye-to-eye.  What I refuse to believe, however, is that this requires a pull-out-the-stops approach.  In two-hundred years, we have fallen as a country.  We’ve fallen in our determination, our grit, and our morals.  We’ve also fallen in our belief in the system itself, to the point where legal cases are made that certain power restrictions can be ignored because they’re too much of a fuss.  In this new kill-the-patient-to-kill-the-disease world we’ve created, the time honored words of Thomas Jefferson, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” would have to be given the addendum, “as long as it’s convenient.”