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As a gesture of thanks to the 119,797 people who stopped by this once-humble-but-now-overbearing blog in October-- and especially to those of you whose comments have reduced me to helpless teary laughter time and again (this truculent blog prides itself on having some of the wittiest readers in the English-speaking world)-- I’m offering a new pre-election feature today: ridiculously belated movie reviews in capsule form! 

Here are the first three:

Fahrenheit 9/11

Janet and I were the very last American progressives to see this film.  I was holding out all summer, along with anarcho-syndicalist and Murray Bookchin fan Melvin J. Furd of Brattleboro, Vermont, but when Mr. Furd finally caved in late September, I grabbed Janet and promptly drove over to the Second-Run Theater in downtown State College, where I was entertained by roughly two-thirds of the Movie that Drove Conservatives into Sheer Barking Lunacy.

The opening twenty minutes or so on the 2000 election are galvanizing.  In fact, we should put them on a tape loop for the next 28 hours, just so we can remind ourselves of the hideous, sickening spectacle of Al Gore presiding over the Congressional Black Caucus’s failure to get a single Senator to support their challenge to the installation of George Bush.  The 40-50 minutes on the Carlyle Group, the Bush-bin Laden connection, Afghanistan and Unocal, etc. are maddeningly incoherent.  Yep, the global financial elite all know each other.  Surprise!  And then the final 45 minutes or so on Iraq-- plus the Moorean street theater of renting a truck to read the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker, asking members of Congress to volunteer their children for service in the armed forces, following around the Marine recruiters in Flint-- are pretty damn good. 

The Day After Tomorrow

I can’t believe Moveon.org actually tried to promote this film as some kind of political statement, but what the hell.  The important thing filmmakers need to understand is that in movies like this, nobody cares about the damn plot.  We just want to see those cool tornadoes in Los Angeles and that tsunami in the streets of New York.  Trust me on this.  Especially if you’re going to try to suggest that Dennis Quaid’s character needs to atone for neglecting his son . . . because he did all that nasty doctoral research far away from home in extreme climates!  Well, yeah, he did become one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, but he didn’t see his kid grow up!  One expected the film’s climactic rescue scene to feature a shivering Jake Gyllenhaal being embraced by Quaid to the stirring tune of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” And don’t get me started on the gratuitous-kid-with-cancer bit.  Wasn’t that kid also in The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, and Airport ‘77?

Beyond that, the movie suffers structurally from what I call the Searching for Bobby Fischer problem.  Namely, how do you make chess look dramatic on screen?  Why, by filming people playing lightning-chess in public parks in the driving rain!  Now that’s dramatic!  Likewise, global climate change would be really cool if it happened in seven to ten days instead of five to ten thousand years.  Now that would rock!  It would be like Weather Channel porn, only even better!

Every SF film ever made

Janet and I were watching the great opening minutes of Blade Runner for no good reason the other day, when suddenly she said, “this is Los Angeles in 2019?  What bullshit!” And I said, “is this about the flying cars?  it better not be about the flying cars, because I really do not want to hear any complaining about the goddamn flying cars.” To which she replied, “no, it’s not about the flying cars.  It’s about the fact that this is supposed to be the year 2019, but nowhere in the film are there hordes of crazed Islamist and Christian jihadists killing each other.”

“Good point,” I admitted.  “But what about the Nexus-6 androids and that cool ceiling fan in the first interrogation scene?  Won’t we have Nexus-6 androids and ceiling fans, in some weird kind of postmodern pastiche where cybernetic simulacra meet Sidney Greenstreet?” “No,” Janet said.  “It’s just going to be hordes of crazed Islamist and Christian jihadists killing each other.”

She’s right, you know.  And just imagine what would happen if those people got a hold of the flying cars!

OK, that’s today’s Culture Beat.  Next:  election day special!

Posted by on 11/01 at 08:23 AM

  1. 1. What about Mr Bookchin? When do we get to see his review?

    2. It was all about the wolves. It was a prescient look at the 2004 election. That Bush ad was literal.

    3. Maybe the Islamofascists and Christian Crusaders were the ones doing all the fighting off the shoulder of Orion. They’d graduated from flying cars to spaceships already.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  11/01  at  10:11 AM

  2. Michael, would you and your readers take the advice of an unrepentant (fill in your blank here, but conservative fits well) and go see the juvenile glory of “Team America.” American jingoism, leftist pomposity, and very hoky action films are satirized fully.  Honest to God, haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time.

    Posted by  on  11/01  at  10:46 AM

  3. Maybe the war between the fundamentalists will be fought as a series of fly by shootings. Are flyin’ cars with gun turrets out of the realm of possibility? Who says religious wars can’t include great techno effects?

    An aside: I was with my tribe of political theorists in an undisclosed western location this past week and The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies received some nice, unsolicited praise.

    Posted by  on  11/01  at  10:48 AM

  4. 1.  Point well taken.  The number of embarassingly excessively rich people is small enough that they probably all date each other in all possible ways, and are well inbred, sort of like the McCoys.

    2. The Day After Tomorrow:  really, global climate change in 5-10 K years?  Try reading the Scientific American. As a nice aside, try reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “40 Signs of Rain”. 

    3.  The Blade Runner?  That hack movie?  And why Islamic jihadists vs Christian crusaders?  Why not Christian crusaders?  More likely Crusdaers vs godless everyone else.  Did P. K. Dick do a religious SF novel?  I can’t remember.

    Time to watch Arsenic and Old Lace.

    Posted by  on  11/01  at  11:59 AM

  5. Jorge, I do plan to see “Team America"-- but of course, I won’t get around to reviewing it until March 2005.  And PZ, you’re so right-- it’s all about the wolves!  Do you think BC04 got the idea for their ad from those scenes on the Russian vessel?  Like we need to <i>slam the door</i> on terrorism so that it merely leaves a bloody stain on the window?  But then again, if BC04 is reading this blog, now they’ve gotten the idea that flying cars can have gun turrets.  Thanks a whole lot, Chris.  As for the timeline of climate change, Carol, I’m down with both Scientific American and National Geographic (which recently devoted an issue to the subject, prefaced by the editorial admission that it would lead to any number of cancelled subscriptions-- just the price you have to pay, I guess, for living in the reality-based community).  But <i>the film itself</i> opens by citing a 10,000-year time frame (when Quaid presents his stuff at that Indian conference) before shuttling it down to 6-8 weeks and then 7-10 days.  Hence, lightning chess in the driving rain.

    Posted by Michael  on  11/01  at  12:08 PM

  6. Michael, I’d intended to post this rumination on every science fiction film ever made on Monday to your recently bedeviled site, but the comments section wouldn’t cooperate. Here’s hoping your man Laocoön soon emerges victorious from his battles with the dread server serpents. Anyhow—

    The wonderful android’s elegy of Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner, in which the defeated android tries to transmit to the detective who has killed him the wonder of all the vasty unimaginables he has witnessed in his time, is the sad elegy for all the many made-worlds of science fiction in the end. Soon enough the made-world dates itself and dies, no longer ever to be achieved at the going rate of humans, melting as the made-world of Blade Runner melts into the bad plan of its construction.

    An overlordiship of Japanese corporate control of nearly just about everything was the common inclination of the near future plot of nearly just about every one of the edgiest of science fiction makers at the time Blade Runner was filmed.

    They could not get enough of the idea that Japan would soon enough subsume all of capitalism in its expansive business practices. Crichton had at the trope prosaically enough and Gibson of course and all the many rest of them with their fine talented way with imagining how it would be, wrongly in the event.

    The world has not nearly turned out that way at all, and as the forseeable unlikeliness of the world of 2019 ever turning out that way increased over time the toilers in that genre increasingly moved on to all the more modern modes of profitably imagining the future absent the ascendent Japanese of before.

    It will be a hard thing to give up on the flying cars, admittedly, if it comes to that.

    The Fifth Element, by post-dating the flying cars farther and farther along the human timeline while avoiding as much as possible the touchy subject of what’s under the hood, takes flying cars for a nice spin, but in the made-worlds of classic science fiction we were supposed to have at the very minimum by now at the dawn of the 21st century through the good offices of triumphal technology helicopters to get around in, our own personal helicopters if not some compact other flying thing transporting us to and from our Mies van de Rohe towers, and what do we have instead? Not nearly that commonly offered world of science fiction at all. All the moon-colonies of the made-worlds of our described time in the science fiction of the past have come to nothing, as it turns out. There are no moon colonies just now, nor any of the flying cars at hand either. Those made-worlds die off in the actual world’s approach, suffering the extinguishment of their wonders just as thoroughly as the wonders known to Rutger Hauer’s android, killed with his last breathe.

    There is something to be said for the work of science fiction whose unlikeliness is unvarying. Perhaps a preposterous film like Attack of the Mushroom People will never stale (although you never know with fungus) because it was so comprehensively unlikely from the first that it remains equidistant down the years from any approaching actuality. It may or may not have its other charms, that film, but it does have that.

    Posted by  on  11/05  at  06:50 AM

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