Sweet, sweet Oliver Stone hate

I didn't realize that Oliver Stone was doing a movie about George W. Bush. He's true to form, if nothing else. And that form largely consists of...the directorial equivalent of shouting at the audience for three hours (and three hours is a floor in terms of his movies' length). He doesn't respect his audiences at all to get his point (witness Nixon where Tricky Dick orders the Cambodia bombing while eating a rare steak, so that he has BLOOD ON HIS HANDS!). This is what passes for clever in Stoneland, and it doesn't look like the Dubya movie is going to be any different.

But Stone really has lost his mind looking at this cast list:

W stars Josh Brolin as George W. Bush, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, James Cromwell as George Herbert Walker Bush, Academy Award® winner Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, and Ioan Gruffud [sic] as Tony Blair.

Not one of those choices seems right. None of them look anything like the people they're portraying (Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell?! The Jeffrey Wright from Casino Royale who played Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter? The one who helped him stay in the game after he lost to Le Chiffre? Seriously?). Sure, I don't suppose they don't all have to look like the real people (though I think a 6'10 President George H. W. Bush is going to be interesting to see) but it's hard to see exactly why Ollie Stone thought, say, that Ellen Burstyn would make a good Babs. The personae of the Bush White House are ripe for fictionalization, but this is like a crazy, crazy joke, right? Like casting pretty boy Colin Farrell as Alexander the Great? Oh, wait...

I suppose I'm tired of Hollywood trying its hand at Bush agitprop. I'm tired of it largely because Hollywood sucks at it. Every time they try it, every time, they only succeed in reinforcing Bush's support among Bush lovers (although these days they would probably all fit into one theater) and they tell Bush critics nothing new. I sure hope that this movie does more than sneer at how dumb Bush is, because of all his crimes his infelicity with the English language is surely at the bottom.

As for Oliver Stone--why do studios still do business with this madman? He hasn't made a good movie since The Doors (JFK, if one wants to be extremely charitable). And Platoon, despite unquestionably being Stone's masterpiece and a Best Picture winner, really isn't that special overall. I mean, it's anchored by a Charlie Sheen performance. It seems authentic in its depiction of Vietnam, but it comes to no original or interesting conclusions about the conflict. Meanwhile, Stone's become a Hollywood fixture who still secures funding for big blockbusters that have uniformly been shitty money-losers for ages. He couldn't film a six year old's birthday party without turning it into a hamfisted political message, and a boring one to boot. Hollywood does seem to have basic reflexes to stop it from hurting itself--I haven't seen Jessica Simpson in a major motion picture for a while now, for example. And yet Oliver Stone, a man with no discernable talent who is, to put it charitably, a has-been that hasn't done anything worth seeing in two decades still makes a movie every other year? Words fail...

The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects was a film released in 1995 to some acclaim and has since become a cult movie. I was obsessed with the movie in high school, but upon rewatching it, my opinion has, shall we say, been lowered. Here's my revisionist review.

The Usual Suspects is a movie that has exciting action sequences, dialogue that recalls David Mamet's hard-boiled staccato verbiage, acting that is almost uniformly excellent--heck, even Steven fucking Baldwin delivers a solid performance--and, of course, a famous twist that is, as a matter of fact, as surprising and jarring and just flat-out brilliant as has been advertised. It also has no soul. The movie is an exercise in cynicism of the highest order. None of the relationships between the characters are particularly compelling, none of the characters has too much in terms of subtlety or nuance, and while these decisions can be justified by the film's denouement, the rationalizations actually solidify the point that the movie is hollow. Kevin Spacey's character quotes Baudelaire during the course of the movie, to the effect that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. The greatest trick that Chris McQuarrie and Bryan Singer ever pulled, on the other hand, was convincing the audience that The Usual Suspects is a movie.

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but it is true. These, ladies and gentlemen, are the facts of life (as pertain to movies):

1. Movies are fictitious accounts of events, usually from the point of view of one of the characters or from the "eye of God."
2. Movies contain characters who typically undergo struggles and have complex interactions with one another.

Okay, so there are probably more, but these two are the one's that interest me. For the record, to people who have not seen Suspects (and, hey, it's worth seeing once), this post is going to have a number of spoilers. Consider this a blanket SPOILER ALERT. Now, to continue...

The finale of Suspects involves the audience learning that the entire events of the film, as narrated by Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) are almost certainly invalidated. Kint is an unreliable narrator who dissembles enough to fool a Customs agent (Chazz Palmintieri) into letting him go, right before he realizes (along with the audience) that it's Kint who is the notorious Keyser Soze, a supercriminal whose identity had heretofore been unknown. It is a brilliant twist, largely thanks to the use of techniques like false foreshadowing and juxtaposition that makes the culprit seem to be another character, Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). In fact, virtually the entire film builds up to what appears to be the unveiling of Keaton as Soze, when it's actually Kint, the supposedly trustworthy narrator. The film also provides the brilliant touch of making Kint a cripple, and thus naturally virtuous and trustworthy in the eyes of the audience, since disabled people are always slow and stupid, right? Everyone underestimates Kint, and that age-old assumption--that handicapped people must naturally be virtuous and good--is deployed to great effect. It's actually a fairly progressive message in terms of knocking down stereotypes, though the filmmakers RUIN EVERYTHING at the end when we learn that Kint was faking being a cripple the whole time. They couldn't commit to a crippled supercriminal because there was another commitment in play--the commitment to removing any doubt as to the identity of Keyser Soze, which is hammered home here with all the subtlety of an Oliver Stone film.

This is why we are here. The filmmakers can't follow through on such a promising idea because making Kint turn out not to be a cripple is essential in unveiling him as Soze. But it's not the only problem associated with the twist. The central relationships of the film are those between Kint and Keaton, and between Keaton and his lover, Edie, who has supposedly reformed Keaton. Neither relationship is especially convincing on its face. Kint and Keaton were supposedly friends, but there's hardly a moment of warmth between them. Keaton and Edie appear together in about two scenes, and there is never a moment when that relationship becomes real to the viewers. And this is not by incompetence, but rather because of the twist ending that necessitates the poverty of these relationships. Keaton has to be a dick to Verbal so that people will better swallow the idea that he's Soze, a man without friends who just used people for his own purposes. And the Keaton/Edie relationship is weak because it must be--the notion that Edie had really reformed Keaton undermines the false twist before the real end, because people will be more reluctant to think that he's all bad.

So, the relationships Keaton experiences are deliberately stripped down and unconvincing so that people will more readily buy it when the final shoe drops, but what does this tell us about the movie? The characters and their relationships are deliberately shallow, and there's just nothing much to recommend if you're a fan of characters, plus there's the little thing about most of this stuff probably never having happened, and almost certainly never having happened the way Verbal is telling it. There's nothing to latch onto in this film--there's no anchor. Everything is a lie. Which might be fine if there was some emotional import of all this sturm und drang, but there really isn't. The movie provides little feeling and has no heart, and repeat viewings, while perhaps providing more clues to the finale that had earlier been missed, only serve to underline the emptiness at the core of the film. People don't really matter in Suspects, relationships don't matter, what really happened doesn't matter. All that matters is setting up that big twist, which is so uninvested in the characters' motives and feelings that the impact is entirely cerebral. It certainly blows the mind, so much so that people will probably watch it and think it's a good movie because they were so entirely fooled by the twist. They don't know how right they are.

I suppose that one could dissent from this logic to say that I'm not being charitable to the movie. After all, entertainment is entertainment, right? The movie provides a little bit of a mindfuck to people without making them feel stupid for not having guessed it in the first place. It's a watchable enough movie, no?

Buying into this sentiment, though, requires that one concede that a movie that is little but a glorified con job, a masturbatory picture that exists merely for that mindfuck and that eschews the messiness that comes from accurately and honestly depicting human beings--that a movie that so readily brushes aside those things that constitute art can still have value. And I'm not saying that it doesn't have some value, because it is a movie that contains a number of interesting ideas. Technically speaking, it's virtuosic at every level. But the larger problem is not that the movie doesn't care about telling a story about people. The problem isn't so much that it's not art, but rather that it claims to be artistic. It's full of literary references, it takes itself completely seriously, and it's simply too well thought-out and meticulously planned to be anything else than a cynical con on anyone who watches it. The joke is on us, the audience. It's a "serious" film that has no interest in artfully showing humanity at it's best (or worst). It's the worst kind of con, too: we thank the filmmakers at the end for pulling the wool over our eyes. The rush that the ending provides feels similar to the sort of emotional resonance that one might get from watching a heartfelt film like, I don't know, The Elephant Man. Only The Elephant Man isn't trying to fool us into thinking that the reaction that a film provides is anything other than at face value. There's something deeply insidious going on in Suspects, and the con is executed so perfectly that one doesn't even realize it until much later, if ever.

I generally consider myself a cynical person, but this movie is a few steps too far for me: the film is hollow and manipulative in the extreme, with nothing at the core. The twist is well-executed, although the necessary precursors to make it work weaken the film to such an extent that it barely works as a genre piece. If one were to take The Usual Suspects, cut out the last five minutes, and show it to an audience of people, it is hard to see more than a few people enjoying the film. Despite some intriguing ideas, I must condemn Suspects as perhaps the most cynical enterprise upon which Hollywood has ever embarked. And that is saying something.

Back-lestar

So, Battlestar Galactica is back, and it's actually been pretty good so far. Certainly, it's a vast improvement from the middling third season, whose failure I think I've figured out: there were no cylons. Well, that's not entirely true. There were cylons, but they weren't doing very cylon-y things, like, you know, trying to exterminate the human race, for example. (I exclude, of course, the totally awesome opening quartet of 3rd season episodes, as well as episodes in which the cylons did appear as antagonists). What were the cylons doing all season? Well, they were examining their theology, searching for the final five cylon models (four of which we know at this point), and generally engaging in the kinds of things that I didn't find that interesting about the cylon race, rather than the stuff that was interesting (like the aforementioned attempts to annhilate mankind). From day one, the series's premise was simple: humanity is destroyed. A small group is trying to find the rest of the humans on Earth. The cylons are never more than a step behind. Simple, as most good premises are, but with a lot of potential to explore different things. But the show (pre-season 3) was at its strongest when it kept to this formula, and it was at best mediocre when it departed from it. See Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down; Black Market; or that dopey hostage episode for verification of this rule.

Season 3, though, seemed to hint at several things, but one in particular: the crew behind the show forgot what made the show successful to begin with--i.e. the premise described before. That humanity was nearly extinct went unmentioned during the season; the quest for Earth was on the slow burner. And, most unforgivably, the cylons were hardly the fear-inducing toasters of yesteryear--after all that "kill the humans" stuff for two years it seemed that the cylons just couldn't be bothered to try to find Galactica during the past season, and the mystique surrounding the cylons vanished as the writers moved aggressively to explore every nuance of cylon society. The results were not entirely uninteresting but they had a side effect of taking all the tension out of the show. And I suppose that all the praise for the show's characters finally went to the writers' heads as they crafted so many episodes that turned interesting, tortured relationships that simmered under the surface to long, boring melodramas to which the only proper response was, "just frak already." Just remember this: with the exception of the mid-season cliffhanger and its resolution, from episode four until the final episode of the season (20) the crew was not in any danger from the cylons, and rarely were they in danger from anything else. Season three of BSG often felt like a first season, but then again, BSG had an awesome first season that managed to introduce the universe and its characters effectively and poignantly. Season one induced wonder. Season three induced weariness.

So, let's just say I wasn't terribly excited as season four arrived. I was worried that nothing would have been learned, that we'd keep seeing the same melodramatic bullshit, the same focus on the mystical aspects (which are acceptable and interesting until a point), and more cylon emoting. To some extent my worries were well-founded: cylon-human conflicts have not been plentiful so far this season, and the religious stuff is as prevalent as ever. I suppose the genie isn't going back in the bottle on those two, and I've accepted it. I can only hope that Ron Moore is going to find some way to wrap up these threads into a neat package. But when one tries to take the show on its own turns--well, actually, it's been really good so far. I have not been bored even once with the stories this season, which is an improvement. And rather than just having heated theological and eschatological arguments en vacuo, in this season the cylons have moved straight into a full-scale civil war, and the most recent episode has floated the possibility of the humans perhaps forming an alliance with one of the sides in the cylon war. Could Adama eventually wind up becoming like a cylon-equivalent Nixon? I still think the decision to show us the innards of cylon society (starting with "Downloaded") was a huge mistake, and was responsible for making the show significantly less exciting--fear is often the result of a lack of knowledge, after all, and Dean Stockwell's character has become, well, not scary. Learning about cylon society second hand, from Athena (for example) was more compelling, in my opinion. But what's done is done. At the very least the creative team is trying to make it work, and so far I can't really complain.

Still, the show still suffers in comparison to what it was. In my opinion, Season 2.0 (I hate the name, as does everyone else) is by far the best run the show ever had. Every single episode is brilliant, addictive, and emotionally fierce television. The first four episodes of the season in particular represent a sort of zenith for this generally high-achieving series--an apex that the show never again quite reached. Helo and Kara on Caprica. Baltar, Tyrol, and the rest on Kobol. Adama shot, Tigh in command, Roslin in jail. That season managed to juggle so many different characters and plot threads with a virtuosity almost equivalent to The Wire, while simultaneously building up and paying off long-standing story arcs. Now, those episodes aren't necessarily the best of the series (the three Pegasus episodes, and perhaps the Free New Caprica storyline at the beginning of season 3 are superior), but they transcended the show and provided for a more consistent, fluid and well-paced chunk of storytelling than has ever graced the show, and they didn't skimp on the action. Season 2.0 represented the high watermark for Galactica's run, a daunting television achievement that no doubt helped get those "Best Show on Television" endorsements rolling. And then the show indescribably fell down, and only now is it starting to show some signs of life. I can only hope that it ends strongly, as did another late-season slumper, The Sopranos. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see, though we won't have the final chapter of the saga for six months while BSG perilously pushes the envelope of what constitutes a "season" of TV.

Insufficiently Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

So, it would appear that Jimmy Fallon has Conan O'Brien's old (current?) job when Conan moves to be Jay Leno's replacement in 2009. I suppose there is a conservation of low-wattage comedians law in effect over at NBC's Late Night division.

I'm waiting for Dick Cavett to weigh in on this on his blog, which is excellent, by the way. The logic here doesn't really make much sense to me. My guess was that J-Fal (you know his asshole buddies call him that) got this based largely on his tenure on Weekend Update, as opposed to his film career or his famous poker face. To be fair, Jon Stewart had a pretty terrible film career and he's doing alright in his current job. Then again, Jon Stewart is, well, funny. And professional. For all his virtues, Stewart really isn't much of an actor--I recall watching a NewsRadio episode in which he was a guest star and his performance there contained so much discomfort that it might have been better suited to playing a teenager losing his virginity. I did like his self-portrayal on The Larry Sanders Show, and that's about it. But--and here's the difference--Stewart can talk to people. The Daily Show isn't really a chat show, but the chat segments are usually solid, if light. Now, if Fallon were being considered for Stewart's job, I'd say that makes sense, although I always thought his version of Weekend Update was a bit overrated--to think that someone's fake news could actually make me miss Craig Kilborn!--but he was alright.

Fallon, though, got Conan O'Brien's job. I've long believed that Conan was at his best during interviews and at his worst during the monologues, and his sketches have always been entertaining. I'm not exactly sure what Fallon would do for a whole hour--I'm guessing a lot of sub-Sandler singing and giggly, passable impersonations, perhaps with Horatio Sanz as a sidekick (as if!)--but I've never thought him interesting enough to look at for more than a few minutes, and this whole thing reeks of bean counters trying to tap the "youth" demographic. Hey, guys, newsflash: we young people don't really like Jimmy Fallon too much. If we did, we would have seen his movies. He was occasionally amusing on Saturday Night Live. That's it.

Who knows, maybe Fallon will prove quite adept at the host's chair, but the chatting part of the equation is unknown at this point, unless you count The Barry Gibb Talk Show, and I doubt Timberlake is going to want to co-host. And isn't that, like, the most important part of the show?

The New Atheism

This excerpt from John Haight's book (via Andrew Sullivan) made sense to me:

And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So the new atheists just know there is something sick and delusional about theology. There is no need to look at it up close.

I find this mentality to be true on both sides of the faith divide. There were plenty of Christians I knew when I was growing up that might perfectly fit this description with the words altered: they felt no real need to learn about the Bible, or to ponder the great mysteries, or to really put any work into their faith at all: they just believed in Jesus's awesomeness, and that was enough for them. I also ran across a number of atheists just like the ones Haight described, and I always found it hilarious when the ignorant atheists got into arguments with the ignorant Christians: the ignorant atheists would make claims about Christianity that weren't true, and the ignorant Christians would be unable to rebut them. And vice versa.

To call this atheist mentality fundamentalist is an insult to the intelligence of actual fundamentalists. They do know what they believe, in general. Let's just call it what it is: unseriousness. And there are plenty of people of different faiths who are fundamentally (pardon the pun) unserious, to be sure. I have observed that many of what Haight calls the new atheists seem to disregard the big questions altogether, since they have no answer since there is no god. But while this mentality might very well be par for the course for the new atheists, it wasn't for the old atheists. Rarely will you find a mind as curious, as spiritual, as relentless in confronting the questions of mankind's existence as that of Albert Camus, my favorite philosopher, and he was a confirmed atheist. I have somewhat less affection for Sartre, but his work is well-known, to be sure. So many of the philosophers associated with the enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinking were quite secular, and putting aside the whole decline and fall of religion element it is a point worth making that these philosophers thought the big questions worth pondering, even if their belief system didn't include a deity.

So, what has changed? My impression is that a lot of these atheists are attracted to this system of beliefs because it provides them with absolute, comfortable answers. So it's not unlike the draw of fundamentalism, deep down, and it's not unlike the draw of the shall we say unrigorous Christianity. Usually, the pull of this sort of atheism is based liberally on points of dorm room philosophy, along the lines of "how many wars have been started by religion?" A compelling point unless one lacks even a fundamental knowledge of history--sure, there were lots of bloody chapters in Christian history, but more often than not, talk about conquering lands "for Christ" was just a rationalization for colonization. It certainly was in the case of the "White man's burden" that the English made infamous. It takes a certain kind of willful ignorance to see a sincere Christian heart at the bottom of these escapades, but it seems to me that if you're going to allow manifestly dishonest exponents of Christianity to represent the whole then atheism itself would have to qualify as far more bloody as Christianity: just look at the 20th century atheist states of the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China, all of which have been responsible for incomparable murder and chaos. I'm not saying that these states are representative of where atheism is these days, but neither are the Crusades. My opinion is that the seeds of violence, conquest, etc., are something intrinsic to humanity since they crop up in every culture everywhere, rather than just an emergent quality that crops up when religion rears its ugly head. The latter view, which I do believe is what belies the religion=wars argument, is just too pat, and it doesn't explain all the pertinent phenomena, like those three states I mentioned. Those of us in science know that a theory that doesn't explain all the outliers is really not a theory at all, and is just waiting to be supplanted by a better one. I don't really have one, but it is typically easier to disprove a theory than to prove one.

Of course, many of these atheists really aren't interested in what Christianity really is. They've decided what it is. But for the collective bristle that occurs among atheists when atheism is noted as being another religion--well, it seems merited in many cases. To be certain, not all atheists are "new atheists," but I suspect the attraction occurs on at least two levels. I suspect that nihilism is becoming a more attractive philosophy for many people in this country, and it's not incomprehensible--after all, if you can't easily figure out the answers, there must not be any--and the idea that there's no meaning to life does answer that question succinctly. We humans like certainty, of course, and atheism does offer that. So does fundamentalism. Those of us who reject those extremes and try to understand the world and the infinite as it really is are in for a perhaps less satisfying but, in my opinion, a far more rewarding spiritual journey. I suppose just don't understand the appeal of nihilism. I will say that arguments along the lines of "which world would you rather live in, one with a God who loves you or one that doesn't?" never held much water for me (what, is human existence multiple choice?) but to say to one's self, to honestly believe that one's life has no meaning seems bleak. One could, perhaps, be an atheist and believe that life still has meaning, even if we make it ourselves? Believing one's self to be a worthless tool cannot be very healthy, one thinks.

I wonder if another big factor here isn't just an antipathy for organized religion, to which I am not entirely unsympathetic. I hate the megachurches probably more than most atheists do. Between the 30-plus minutes of terrible music played with medium competence to the earnest solicitations of money for the building fund (and believe me, there's always a building fund) to the infomercials about how much good the church is doing to the usually fluff-packed message that tends to owe more to self-help books than to the Bible, it's usually the worst hour and a half of my week when I choose to go, and it's usually full of the same kind of duckspeaking Christians that couldn't talk about Christianity for any length of time without it eventually descending into a catalog of bromides. Perhaps they're not all like this, but my experience is that the experience does not vary between one megachurch and another. And Lord knows that contemporary Christianity is palsied by any number of bigotries masquerading as good old-fashioned moral values. I do not blame people from being put off by what they see coming from Christianity these days--I am as well. But that isn't the entire story. Jihad isn't the only form of Islam, for that matter. There is a psychological concept at play here called the availability heuristic which tells us that we tend to believe that the things we see a lot are the truth. It's the theory behind propaganda, and it's why so many parents spend so much time obsessed with keeping their children from being abducted, even to the point of developing "safe words" so that kids don't leave with strangers. After all, there's one of those kiddie abductions on the news all the time! Never mind that there's about 100 of them a year, and that most of them are abducted by people they know. We see stories in the news, we remember them. It seems like a terrible scenario, so we get freaked out about it. In reality, though, the phenomenon is less common than one thinks, and there is little to fear in the end.

I have, of course, met many atheists who do not conform to these stereotypes. I have met many more who do. I do not think less of people who disagree with me, but I do think less of people who do not take life seriously. I do not profess to be a biblical scholar or a wise man, but it is my belief that we are not meant to get complacent about these issues, and too many people of so many persuasions are.

Spartan

"Time to go home."
"Lucky man."
--Spartan

These are the final two lines of the film Spartan, a little-seen film from 2004 that happens to be one of the most underrated films of the past decade. Val Kilmer plays the film's protagonist, a government agent who prides himself on following orders, protecting his country, and fighting the bad guys. He trusts the chain of command, and they trust him. The events of the film, though, propel him to give it all up, and that final line has a double meaning that becomes more apparent if one watches the film. Not only does Kilmer's character (any name he goes by in the movie appears to be suspect) wind up exiled, but he comes to realize the country he served simply doesn't exist anymore. He ends the movie in an unnamed European city, bearded, walking down a street. Why did he give it all up? The film doesn't really give any pat answers, though Kilmer's initially amoral-seeming character turns out to have a few more scruples than one might have suspected of a cold-blooded G-man. Spartan is replete with surprises and pleasures for people who invest themselves in the movie, and it has several things going for it. For one, the lead performance by Kilmer is amazing: he is a force of nature, he commands attention the whole time he's on the screen and one senses in the performance (and the script) a desire to create a truly new character. I certainly can't think of another portrayal of a government agent that is remotely similar to what Kilmer does here. And Mamet's directorial hand is sure: much of the movie has more visual and atmospheric flair than many of Mamet's other films, and instead of trying to engage us on multiple levels of mindfuckery Mamet chooses to tell a simple, easy-to-follow story where the characters seem real, the dialogue is impressive without being too showy, and the central con of the film (there's always a con in Mamet films) just barely stays on this side of plausible. Rarely have Mamet films come together in so many ways, and rarely have "war on terror" movies been this engaging, gritty, and exciting. Spartan is an imperfect film, to be certain, and it has a number of third act problems. It is, however, a masterpiece because of what it gets right. I place it second among Mamet's films, right behind the amazing House of Games, not counting Glengarry Glen Ross which he did not direct. It is a movie with which it is worthwhile to acquaint one's self.

There's little denying that David Mamet's stock has been on the decline in the past decade: the post-Spanish Prisoner period has been replete with lesser films like State and Main, Heist, as well as his television show The Unit that might as well have been entitled JAG II. He did have a genuine (if flawed) masterpiece in Wag The Dog, whose central thesis about modern-day politics is pretty much right on the money and whose humor was generally pretty great, although it also had third-act problems. Perhaps Mamet ought to stick with two-acts, like Glengarry. It is probably not coincidental that Mamet's decline has coincided with his embrace of conservative politics, though not for the obvious reasons--Mamet is simply not a political director, and his films are more interested in empirical observation of the human soul than in making political points. He's much better at the former than the latter, and just catch an episode of The Unit if you doubt me. I liked Mamet much better as an unthinking liberal than as a dogmatic conservative who preaches his opinions with a convert's zeal. (Full disclosure: I'm a liberal myself, though I consider myself a thoughtful one. I'm not wild about being preached at by liberals or conservatives.)

Nevertheless, Spartan is not a right-leaning movie. Well, sorta. It's suspicious and cynical about the government and power structure, which has (until recently) been a conservative trait, but the central thesis of the movie is that the war on terror inevitably erodes the character of the people fighting it. The movie concerns an abduction of the president's daughter, played by Kristen Bell. Kilmer has to try to get her back. That covers most of the movie. There's a bit more to it than that, especially in the denouement, when we learn that the abduction might not have just been an accidental kidnapping by White slavers. The end impression that one gets of the government types in the film are people who have become so focused on fighting "the enemy" that their respect for the law, for the lives of Americans and even their own basic humanity has long since atrophied, leaving behind only a monomaniacal focus on "protecting the man" and getting the job done. This is mainly shown by William H. Macy's character, who becomes the personification of the Newest World Order. Machiavellian does not do this philosophy justice. In sum, it's a film whose implications civil libertarian-type liberals could wholeheartedly endorse, and that unlike other "war on terror"-type films actually has something important to say about the conflict and, critically, actually does a good job of saying it, vividly. It is a shame that the movie wasn't a hit, because it might have kickstarted the sort of conversation we need to be having right now. Then again, it might just have been dismissed as anti-American.

Is the movie unAmerican? I do not think so. In fact, I believe it comes from a place of true patriotism. The "grunts" in the film are generally not contaminated by the bug that the government elites are, and Kilmer's performance sort of splits the balance between the two. He starts off as cold and efficient as Macy's character, nonchalantly instructing subordinates to cut out a suspect's eye in one scene. But the contagion proves reversible in Kilmer's case--despite initially heavy resistance, Kilmer does the right thing in the end: he goes after the girl in Dubai, thanks largely to the intervention of a greenhorn Army Ranger (Derek Luke) who is relentless in getting Kilmer on board. What is most interesting about the scene where Luke persuades Kilmer is that Kilmer only half-heartedly tries to convince Luke that his evidence is wrong. His arguments against trying to find the girl (and she is always referred to as "the girl" in the movie) generally fall along the lines that he's a soldier, he does what he's told but nothing more. Kilmer's character, like so many other actors in the War on Terror, is more than willing to subordinate his moral judgment to a higher power. He doesn't have to take responsibility, he is just a tool, so to speak, in the hands of the elites, and he's confident that his superiors are doing what is necessary to protect America. It is when he starts to believe that those elites might not be doing that--that there might be a cover-up--that he acts. And his character arc is really not all that expansive--he does change, but not much. At the end of the movie, he's still a cold-blooded killing machine. It's just that we learn more about him, and he learns more about the nature of things, and it all leads to a series of events that can't help but shatter Kilmer's worldview and sense of purpose. He can't go home again in the obvious way: he'll be killed. But the home doesn't exist anymore because its values have been eroded by power-hungry elites. So what does he do?

So much for the positive aspects. Most of the movie's criticism comes from the finale, which has some problematic elements to it, but is generally not that bad. Many reviews complain that the idea of the president's daughter becoming a semi-willing sex slave is ridiculous. Such reviews are based on a fundamentally inaccurate reading of the film. Just listen to Macy's final speech, and it becomes clear that Bell's kidnapping took place in order to spare her father from political embarrassment. She was not a sex slave of any sort, this was only a cover. This only goes toward the film's central thesis, which has already been discussed in detail. Now, one can debate whether such a turn of events is plausible, but it is what it is. The shootout in the hangar is also a bit anticlimactic as a finale, and one wonders whether the movie could have been tied up more artfully. It's certainly expected, and it's how a typical genre film would wrap things up, but Spartan tries to be a bit more than that and so the expectations are higher. Ultimately, though, one's appreciation for the film depends on one's willingness to just go with it, to just follow the twists and turns to see where it goes. As it turns out, it's one hell of a trip.

All in all, I think it's safe to say that Spartan is a movie that warrants a reappraisal.

It's good to know I'm far from alone in my unadulterated hatred of the Epic Movie ilk. The Hater over at The A.V. Club has this idea for those dudes' next film (which looks to parody Superbad):

Fake McLovin and his date (maybe Fake Jessica Simpson) would be looking for a room in the house to have sex in, and the entirety of the movie (all 70 terrible minutes of it) would be the pair opening door after door to reveal pop culture reference coupling, after pop culture reference coupling. And, of course, for the big finale, Fake McLovin and Fake Jessica Simpson would open the attic door to reveal Fake Juno giving birth on the back of Fake Christian Siriano (while he shouts, "So not fierce!") to Fake Flava Flav, who would then be promptly adopted by Fake Angelina Jolie. The End.

So, it's like a highly abstract version of their earlier oeuvre? It's sorta like my idea for fast food psychotherapy: the shrink just gives you a list of things to say with the assumption that just being able to say some specific phrase will suddenly make a person "fixed." The laziness that one finds in such things is enormous: more than anything else, these movies resemble conversations between longtime friends that are filled with inside jokes, only the jokes are "outside" jokes, and they're not even jokes. I suppose I'm a snob for mocking what the Great And Good American People^TM enjoy watching (as though there were any doubt of my snobbishness anyway) but this is what I think of when those right-wing politicians talk about how hordes of Mexican immigrants are destroying our culture, or whatever they say. I think of Epic Movie. And I shudder. This is the mainstream culture, folks. Now, theres still great stuff going on around the margins, but that's all they are: margins. I don't mind being marginal. How about you?