I wrote a couple of reviews of politics-related movies recently, so I thought I'd post them here:
Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats is an outlandish hippie paean to outlandish hippie-ism, using true facts about some of the weirdest ideas ever embraced by the military from Jon Ronson's non-fiction book of the same name to create characters who can spout and explicate them.
(continued below the fold)
It's not exactly a true story, but it is a very funny and well executed showcase for Heslov's directing talents, and especially the acting talents of Ewan MacGregor as Bob Wilton, the fictional Ronson/journalist stand-in, George Clooney as Jedi master Lyn Cassady, Jeff Bridges as Bill Django, the Jedi masters' master--a sort of military "Dude" redux from the Coen Brothers' classic, The Big Lebowski--and Kevin Spacey as Larry Hooper, the actually rather amiable, if still evil, villain.
The film imagines a psychic/druggie military corps of the real-life proposal for a "First Earth Batallion," a peace force using music, peaceful thoughts and environmentalism instead of more familiar war-like tactics to prevent war and end hostilities. While the film implies that some form of this may actually have existed, without having read the book, but only some reviews and background information, I gather that it probably did not, or at least not, perhaps, in the form portrayed in the film, though one might almost wish it had.
I am aware of some crazier things the government has done, though, so it's not too much of a stretch to play this out the way it is done here, and it seems necessary and useful to the comic story, as well as to trace how the ideas from the proposal, as well as other New Age, psychic and psychological tactics infiltrated the U.S. military from the Reagan administration up through the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars of today.
MacGregor is very good portraying a small-town journalist whose strange encounter with a psychic who has used his mind to trouble some hamsters sticks with him as his need to impress a woman prompts him to head to Iraq near the start of the current conflict. He can't seem to really get in the swing of the combat coverage, however, until a fortuitous meeting with Clooney's Cassady helps him open up his mind to a different kind of war story.
The story of the "New Earth Army" is told through flashbacks introduced by narration from MacGregor, and it's mostly fun and fact-filled, though the facts are not exactly as told here. The film strikes a nice balance between an ongoing quest and the roots of the adventure, until they come together again at the end. It's pretty cool to see Bridges, Clooney and Spacey age backwards and forwards twenty-five years pretty credibly.
Though most (all?) of the Jedi tricks, tactics and beliefs presented are risible and, basically, hogwash, the film does a good job of graphically showing ways in which a belief system put into practice--almost any belief system--can change and direct lives, and mark people forever. Not everything about the psychic/New Age/druggie cultures, after all, is ridiculous or useless, by any stretch. Peace, situational and wider global awareness, projected confidence and the power of thoughtfulness, meditation and surprise attacks all get their due in a gently humorous but semi-profound way. (Telling someone without irony that one believes one is a Jedi warrior is a sort of surprise attack of its own.)
The film is its own, and holds its own, while also including many sorts of not-exactly-referential movie references, including the casting of Ewan MacGregor, the recent Obi-Wan, in a movie full of Star Wars references, which makes for some amusing and ironic side moments, and the aforementioned similarities of Bridges's New Age stoner/investigator with Jeff Lebowski. Clooney's Lyn Cassady is some sort of cousin of his previous Coen Brothers character from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, pugnacious, odd and with a similar look and comic whipping head movements. Joseph Campbell's concept of "The Hero's Journey," a major George Lucas influence, is dialogue-checked, and the film is as much of a magical/mythical quest as anything. The sand dunes of Iraq also recall Star Wars aesthetics (and Clooney's previous humorous foray there in Three Kings), and one character even has a Darth Vader-y prosthetic arm.
I would say it's a bit thin, and wants a bit less of a lazy ending, but it's such a hugely enjoyable tour-de-force of humor and ideas that this does not matter much. And the ending does have its own resonance, for a completely made-up sequence of events, so maybe I'm just a little sore that the movie had to end.
Review: 2012 (2009)
3 out of 4 stars
2012 displays all of the trademarks of disaster director Roland Emmerich's films: a huge scale, impressive effects, cardboard characters whose only hope of redemption is very good acting from the beleaguered cast, and terrible, terrible dialogue.
That said, it's one of the most visually impressive, cinematically worthy and credible (within its own bounds) apocalypse pictures ever. It's grand, gorgeous, completely cheesy, and oddly, stupidly moving despite its girth and outsized moments of total empty-headedness. It drags for a few moments at the beginning and the end, but for the rest of the two and a half hours of its remaining length, it's a great, at times jaw-dropping ride.
John Cusack plays Jackson Curtis (not to hit you over the head with too many J.C.'s, but he seems to be a minor prophet, as well), a divorced worst-selling novelist with two kids and a job driving a limo for a rich Russian magnate of some sort. I suppose making him a novelist makes the many coincidences of his realization of imminent disaster and quest for survival ironic or something, anyway a bit better than just pure crap, which they also are. This is, as usual, forgiven by the disaster movie rule, also true in real life, that he who has the most and happiest coincidences in a major catastrophe shall survive the longest, and also be the character whose story we see the most of.
Curtis happens to take his kids camping in Yellowstone National Park, straight to the spot by the lake where they were apparently conceived, which is now blocked off by the military as they research the rapid superheating of the earth's core, caused by sunstorms, which is the raison d'être of the film's disaster. (Note: Never walk up to an elk corpse by a dried-up lake in an area of a national park blocked off by the military, especially with young children, yo.)
This area is also the temporary home of a crazy (but correct) radio broadcaster (Woody Harrelson, weird) forecasting the coming disaster, who happens to have a secret map given to him by a murdered friend of Curtis's, which marks the spot for potential salvation for whoever might get saved as massive flooding, tsunamis and the shifting of the earth's crust start killing off most of the population. Also while there, Curtis meets the main White House science adviser working on predicting the timing of the apocalypse, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, pretty good), who happens to be reading a rare copy of Curtis's unsuccessful prophetic novel. Oh, and the place is just a few steps away from an airstrip with crucially full fuel tanks, for later.
Ah, bushwah. Anyway, the plot's about as unimportant as the superfluous humans in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It's sciency enough to fit in with a reasonable suspension of disbelief which gives us the excuse for the surface of the earth to crumble and the oceans to rise up biblically and spectacularly, which is what we're paying for, after all.
Still, there's a real immediacy to many of the film's events. It doesn't get too cute politically (as, I assume, Emmerich's previous global warming epic, The Day After Tomorrow, probably did, which assumption is why I didn't see it and have to assume), while still packing all the punch of those creepy flooding pre-creations from Al Gore's film, with more interesting camera angles. The last-minute--literally--soppy clash between Helmsley and his boss, the crass but eminently practical Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt, not bad), is pretty stupid, and probably a direct political hit (you say "Anheuser," I think "Busch...Bush...Cheney"). (I tried to construct some significance out of the last president of the United States of America in its current form [both geologically and politically] being African-American, the first president apparently not related to his namesake with the same name as a previous president, and that namesake being probably the worst, most openly racist [and eugenicist] president [post-slavery], but I found it used too many parentheticals and brackets even to mention. But maybe now you know Woodrow's actual first name was "Thomas.")
There are a few too many absolute last-second escapes to be believable or satisfying, but then again this is leavened by a few last-second non-escapes which keep some tension going. If you've seen the trailer, which you probably have, you've seen some of these images already, and they're better in the movie, even if slightly spoiled, as big moments are wont to be by trailers these days. Still, Santa Monica falling into the sea is beautiful and kinetic and the airplane ride under the faultline-adjacent subway spewing out into space is pricelessly wrong and chillingly hilarious. A mushroom cloud in a national park is truly scary. A molten Hawaii is haunting. And many of the flooding sequences are handled quite well, notably the one with the Tibetan monk ringing the bell--probably too late to warn the valley below, but a lot of warnings are too late in this movie, to its credit.
You're most likely going to see 2012 already, I know, and you probably should see it, and you probably will like it. It's a guaranteed-hit popcorn movie, and for that, it's a slice above many guaranteed-hit popcorn movies. It's undeniably great to watch, and maybe even a very nice surprise, even if your expectations, like mine were, could be understandably low. F! X!
Alex
Choose Our President 2012