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Monday, November 01, 2004

Culture beat

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 Michael on 11/01 at 08:23 AM
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