Friday, October 20, 2006
World Trade Center
I've never much cared for the libertarian religion. I know my libertarian friends will probably balk at the use of the word "religion", but the disciples of Ayn Rand do indeed make a great number of spiritual assumptions whether they admit it or not. Watching Oliver Stone's World Trade Center made me think about how very false so many of those assumptions are.In case you have just returned from a lengthy vacation on the moon, the plot involves the true story of two New York cops trapped under the World Trade Center after 9/11.
It's hard to think of anything to say about this movie that hasn't already been said. Stone's decision to tell the 9/11 story from the micro, on-the-ground viewpoint was inspired. The performances are great. The special effects, wow. This is a solid movie. It will get an Oscar nomination and deserve it. Go see it.
With that out of the way, I'm going to do what drives my wife crazy about these reviews and focus on the negative, just for the hell of it.
Although this is a powerful movie, it deserves to be said that it derives a lot of its emotional power from fairly rudimentary cinematic manipulation. Ya got your 'band of brothers' quasi-military loyalty to comrades unto death. Ya got your guys doing the old "tell my wife I love her" dying message bit. And you've got lots of parental situations. That last one is the simplest trick to pull in a movie. We parents are sucker. Stick a scene in a movie with a guy and his kids and even the toughest he-man on earth will start tearing up. It doesn't take a lot of story-telling sophistocation to pull that off.
But despite the sometimes superficiality of the story-telling, the fact that it is a true story delivers a powerful message, and that's what got me thinking about libertarianism. Libertarian thought revolves around the notion of the "sovereign individual" whose connection to other humans is not intrinsic but only a function of explicit or implicit contract. I've heard libertarians argue that even motivations like parental love are merely matters of "choice".
Among the many problems with the "sovereign individual" assumption is the observed behaviour of people in disaster situations. In an emergency, most people will try to help each other. Even in the face of imminent physical danger and with no benefit to themselves, ordinary people will typically make superhuman efforts to save the lives of other members of their species.
This movie shows this phenomenon over and over again. At the end of the movie, a narration observes that these ordinary people who performed heroic acts did so instinctively, compelled by the simple feeling that what they did "just seemed like the right thing to do."
So, with all respect to my many libertarian friends, the whole notion of the disconnected "sovereign individual" is full of shit in my opinion. We all participate in a life that supersedes our individual lives. Human experience demonstrates this in a million ways.
Moving from one impolite topic to another, this movie also got me thinking about the political and tactical implications of terrorism. In the landmark third seasoner opener of Battlestar Galactica, a suicide bomber successfully slaughters hundreds of evil Cylons and traitorous human collaborators. When a Cylon official asks a human leader Laura Roslyn to condemn suicide bombing as a tactic, Roslyn just sneers. "It looks like we've finally found something that scares Cylons," she says.
I couldn't get that line out of my head as I watched the scenes in this movie where they flash around to terrified crowds of people all over the United States watching the events on TV. I couldn't help but think that there was an otherwise moderate Islamic leader somewhere in the world thinking "It looks like we've finally found something that scares Americans."
This doesn't bode well for the pursuit of the War on Terror. The fact is our enemies will never give up terror tactics. Why should they give up tactics that work, and that work so economically? On September 11, 2001, for the price of a few airline tickets, a small group of radicals brought the most powerful country in the world to its knees. If you sincerely believe that your enemy is fundamentally evil, why would you ever give up such tactics?
Further, as the history of Israel has proven, it is effectively impossible to eliminate terrorism. No matter how many security systems you impose, there will always be loopholes as long as there is any traffic of people or goods.
Therein lies the conumdrum of our times. What can we possibly do to prevent terrorism?
The answers are still very unclear and, I'm sure, will remain so for a long time. This movie, in its own sometimes-subtle, sometimes-blunt way, deserves kudos for making us think about those questions again.
posted by Mentok @ 3:29 PM,
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
The Devil Wears Prada
Here at Mentok the Mindtaker, we're all about saving you money. For example, I once managed to jerry-rig a big screen projection system using electronic spare parts that cost a fraction of the store-bought versions. Of course, my projector contraption looks like it was built in the former Soviet Union and it emits an odd odour if you leave it running for more than an hour, but it works.
In that jerry-rigging, do-it-yourself spirit, I offer you this simple plan for viewing the Devil Wears Prada without the expense and hassle of going to a theatre or renting it on video.
1. Using a four-way splitter, attach 3 DVD players to your TV and begin playing the movies Working Girl, Swimming With the Sharks and the Princess Diaries simultaneously.
2. On the fourth input feed, tune your TV to the Fashion Network.
3. Consume enough alcohol so that things begin to blur together, but not enough that the room starts to spin. If you choose Mentok's signature drink, the Hurricane Katrina, two of those babies should do the trick.
4. Use your universal remote to quickly switch among the four input feeds. Keep this up for about two hours.
Voila! You have just watched the Devil Wears Prada.
Seriously, although the movie draws on some well-worn themes, it is on the whole a good movie well worth renting on video.
The story, in brief: struggling young fish-out-of-water (Anne Hathaway) who knows nothing about fashion lands a job as an assistant to monster-boss Meryl Streep, the editor of a prestigious fashion magazine. Yada, yada, yada, Hathaway discovers wealth and glamour are shallow and instead finds the secrets of true love and real happiness.
The movie on the whole does a very good job of depicting the "royal court" environment of an industry that is fixated on itself and therefore totally alienated from real life. This is symbolically depicted in a scene in which Hathaway's is supposed to drop something off at the editor's house with strict instructions not to go beyond the foyer. When Hathaway is lured into the private areas of the house, she sees that her all-powerful boss is, in her "real" life, completely powerless to stop her husband from falling out of love with her.
In this and other scenes, Streep does a particularly subtle job of adding dimension to a boss-from-hell character that could have been played even more cartoonishly than it was written.
I question the casting choice of Anne Hathaway. More to the point, I question Hathaway's career choice in making this movie. There really is far too much Princess Diaries in this story. I have faith that Hathaway has talent but she's in danger of getting typecast, if she isn't already. (By the way, guys, this is definitely a chick-flick, so regrettably there is no Anne Hathaway nudity in this movie.)
I fully expect this movie to pop up at the Golden Globes and possibly the Oscars. It doesn't deserve it, but it will get there anyway on the basis of its Working Girl vibe, I predict.
On the whole, I liked the movie, wasn't knocked out by it, but it's a perfectly suitable choice for a video night.
posted by Mentok @ 2:51 PM,
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