Munich: Hollywood Hates Itself, Too

Munich is Steven Spielberg's apology for Schindler's List, I suppose. It is a story about the retributive killing of the Arab terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.

The story unfolds in atypical revenge-plot fashion. Typically, we are shown the atrocity in its bloody, brutal entirety, and thus the retribution that follows is deemed righteous. Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson films are good examples of this. But Spielberg isn't interested in righteous retribution -- he's interested in moral ambiguity, though I cannot see how punishing murderers can be morally ambiguous. Using cinematic sleight of hand, to prevent us from "taking sides," we are not shown the totality of the Munich massacre until near the end of the film, by which time the violence of the avengers is made to seem comparable.

Any child in elementary school knows that if you punch a bully in the nose, he will likely stop tormenting you. But our enlightened artists live lives of arrested adolescence where these simple, time-honored rules of civilization somehow do not apply.

The leader of the Israeli team, Avner (Eric Bana), is tortured by their actions. His reticence to carry out their mission forms the backbone of the film (or lack thereof) and turns what should have been a "bad guys get their just desserts" story into another pathetic exercise in moral equivalence, which is what people lacking morals use to equivocate truth. There is a famous quote: "If the Arabs were to quit fighting tomorrow, there would be no war; if Israel were to stop fighting tomorrow, there would be no Israel." This is undeniably true.

After the end of the Six Day War in 1976, Israel told the conquered Arabs that they had the option of renouncing terrorism and accepting Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of the Arabs rejected this generous offer. I was once told by a Jerusalem city councilman that if the Arabs had accepted the offer and had become citizens, their higher birthrate would have eventually made them the majority -- the effective masters of the country.

Spielberg tries (quite ineffectively, I think) to create moral equivalence between people who murder and those who punish murder. It's a contortionist's stretch. But Spielberg makes it because he is a self-hating Jew. Self-hating Jews are generally found outside Israel, living in the lap of luxury in the U.S., doing little to aid their brothers and sisters in Israel, and who secretly loathe themselves for their inaction. Thus, they must find something fatally flawed about Israel, or else their own consciences would demand that they do something -- perhaps moving to Israel -- to help their own flesh and blood.

Finally, though others would eschew revenge as a reason for retaliation for murder, I will not. Revenge is a good enough reason, I believe, if it achieves at least one of two purposes: it prevents the murderers from murdering again, and stands as an object lesson for others considering following in their bloody footsteps. The facile argument that "violence begets violence" has so many exceptions that I need not respond to it here.

And, as any ten year old boy will tell you, if you pop the bully in the nose, he'll think twice about hitting you again. Like Spielberg, I wish the world were different, but unlike Spielberg, I do not believe in fairy tales. There is evil in the world that must be dealt with. Failure to do so not only dishonors the victim, it invites violence against new victims.

Tron: Legacy: These Bytes Really Bite

Tron: Legacy is a case study of Hollywood's plummeting values over the last generation. Its prequel Tron (1982) was the first true CGI movie and its story is pertinent here, as the values expressed in the first movie are literally stood on their heads in the sequel.

Jeff Bridges plays Kevin Flynn, a wunderkind programmer whose gaming software is stolen by corporate baddie David Warner and hidden in the ENCOM computer. While attempting to hack into the mainframe to obtain proof of the theft, Flynn is digitally transported inside the computer and finds himself trapped in the "grid," which is basically a videogame world. There, he connects with the digital analogs of his real-world friends and enemies. In the end Flynn obtains the proof he seeks and destroys the thieves, both inside and outside the computer world.

And yet this entire scenario is reversed in Tron: Legacy, where the protagonist, Flynn's neer-do-well son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) apparently has nothing more to do with ENCOM (his father took it over at the end of the first film) than to make its proprietary software free to the entire world in contravention of the board's (and conceivably the shareholders') wishes.

In short, Sam Flynn is a thief. But this never comes up when Sam finds himself in cyberspace; he never admits to his father (whom he respects greatly) that he has essentially destroyed everything Kevin Flynn ever worked for: private property rights.

It's astonishing that a film could go so awry from its template. The first Tron was about punishing theft; this one is about theft perpetrated by the protagonist that is never punished, much less admitted.

But I'm not surprised. Hollywood has been hypocritically attacking the "man" for years now, forgetting that it is the ultimate "man," making films in right-to-work states to avoid paying union wages in L.A., brutally destroying all competitors, refusing to make or distribute films based on #1 best-selling books (see my review of Atlas Shrugged herein) -- quite literally acting like the teenagers they are as they sneer at Mom and Dad for their reasonable request that junior mow the lawn in exchange for room and board.

I have a nephew who, back in his teenage years, righteously defended the music-theivery site Napster by saying, "Hey, man, music should be free!" Now, a decade later, he's a struggling musician in England. I'm certain everytime he hears about someone bootlegging his intellectual property, he's outraged. Thus are Republicans born: when we are not fairly compensated for our labor, we become absolutely reactionary.

But not Hollywood. Since it's intended audience is teenagers, it wouldn't do to have all this jive bringdown about mowing lawns. Even though these "adults" take every opportunity to lecture me about smoking, evil corporations, renegade soldiers, and not recycling, they will not face their own hypocrisy. They truly are the MAN, sticking it to the audience and waltzing away without a thought about their own perfidy.

Tron: Legacy is an okay movie if you like chases, but a terrible movie if you want an actual story. Jeff Bridges doesn't reprise Kevin Flynn here as much as Jeff Lebowski, a kind of stoner dude whose laid-back answer to most questions is to "wait." That way, "The forces, man, will combine on their own, man, like the way those Isos came out of nowhere, man, you know? Man?"

He's sleepwalking through this. But one thing he's true to: he sacrifices himself (by reintegrating both yin and yang portions of his psyche) to save his son, the same son who never tells his dad he's ruining his company out there in the analog world.

The kid does show a glimmer of hope upon returning, however: He tells Bruce Boxleitner (Tron) that he's now ready to run ENCOM. I wonder if he'll reverse his "freeing of the bytes" and start looking after ENCOM stockholders' interests. If he's had a true epiphany, he will.

Unlike his Users, the filmmakers.

Avatar: The King is Dead

Oh my goodness, there is so much wrong with this movie, it would be easier to list the things that are right, so I will:



It's gorgeous! No world suits the CGI color palette better than sci-fi, and the filmmakers were obviously aware of this fact. Indeed, I would say they got carried away; the CGI masked (or, my preferred phrase: cemented over with intent to erase) the astonishingly lame Dances with Smurfs storyline. Nevertheless: it's amazing.

Anytime I can see Sigourney Weaver, I'm good to go. She is uniformly convincing and compelling; the first sci-fi heroine. I love seeing her here, even though it's in a script far less human than the title character of her first film. Oh well.

Sam Worthington can't act. (Sorry, I know that belongs below, but he was such a good robot in whatever that new Terminator film was called that I thought he could actually portray a human. My mistake.)

The connection the Blue Watusis have with their animal mounts is intriguing (though it's also cringe-inducing when you realize it's a kind of bestiality, so let's not go there).

Okay, I'm out of positive comments; on to the glaringly obvious negatives:

Except for the CGI artists, it's apparent that no one in a creative position in this film has any creativity. Whatsoever. The story is as old as Kurtz going native in Heart of Darkness or, if you haven't read the classics, the more recent Ferngully will suffice. In between, of course, Kevin Costner cavorted with canines in Dances with Wolves, which is the most obvious source for this film. Amazing, considering James Cameron is famous for his inventiveness. Not this time. (Maybe that inventiveness is limited to cool guns and spaceships; sure seems so.)

And the story, as old as it is, is equally shallow and unbelievable. It's a hoary cliche to say that the aboriginals of early America were civilizationally advanced beyond the depraved European invaders. In what way? Let's see: they made murdering each other an art, turned the American midsection into the Great Plains by firing the forests to chase bison off cliffs, leaving heaps of carcasses (I'm not making this up) hundreds of feet deep. So enough with the noble savage nonsense. Oh, and they also gave Europeans syphilis in return for smallpox. Fair trade, I think. But still this childish daydream prevails, even among the Hollywood intelligentsia (sic: oxymoron).

In addition to this, Cameron finally shows us what he really thinks about Marines. In his earlier films (shot before 9/11 and the engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq), he respected their fighting brio and made them heroes (Aliens). Not now; now they're blood-thirsty, mindless morons intent upon destruction and the bigger the bone pile the better. Of course, this is nothing like our real-world Marines, Abu Graib notwithstanding. (I don't consider a few humiliating photos torture and if you do, go away. Beheading is torture; just ask Daniel Pearl. Oh, that's right, you can't because they beheaded him.) But since he needs antagonists and the Blue Goodies are oh-so-nice and corporate types are just too skinny and bloodless to shout "Hoo-yah!" and unleash hell, Cameron chose the only other humans available as his evil avatars: American soldiers. Weak, weak, weak, and also insulting and outrageous. I hope the U.S. military never lends him another chopper for a film.

As for what all the fuss is about, my review of that (nonexistent) plot point can be summed up with one word: Unobtainium. Never has a filmmaker's disdain for the public been so transparent as here, where Cameron couldn't even be bothered to come up with an actual real-sounding ore. Unobtainium, as in, "Fortunately, we missed Avatar, as we were all out of Unobtainium, and couldn't afford tickets."

I really wanted to like this film, but it was so ham-handed, and frankly amateurish in its story, direction, and conclusion, that I was required by law to hate it. James Cameron, once the self-anointed King of the World, is now the crowned King of Schlock, and only someone under age ten could really like this film, because no one over the age of ten will fail to see the utter contempt Cameron has for America and for American ideals, as well as for time-honored cinematic conventions.

Oh, and the most astonishing faux pas of all: Here's this very important metal (I never saw any evidence that it does more than float between magnets) that is found in just one location, under the giant tree sacred to the Blue Man Group. But instead of negotiating with them for the metal (maybe there was a way to get it without hurting the tree, we don't know), or, if negotiations fail, simply dusting the area with magic pixie sleeping dust (hey, is that less likely than Unobtainium?) and physically removing all of the Blues to the other side of the planet before they awake, or, maybe there's more than one giant sacred tree on a planet the size of earth where they could move to, OR, finally, the humans realize that, holy cow, this stuff really is unobtainable (sic, that's unattainable, by the way, genius) and maybe we should just pack up and go home and let these toilet-dye folks have tail-sex with their flying ponies.

But no, we need a climactic battle in Act 3, where it looks for awhile like the humans will prevail, but in the end, Benedict Blue betrays humanity (presumably because his walking is more important than every human on the planet) and manages to defeat the Soviet Union. (Oops, I mean America -- same thing.)

Not a single moment of nuance or adult-level thinking finds its way into this cardboard cut-out of humanity as seen from the Olympian perspective of James Cameron, who, by the way, hypocritically uses the most advanced technology available in this world, technology which, by the way, involves strip-mining hilltops to reach precious metals that are required to manufacture his cameras, computers, stainless steel Evian bottles, and his Lear jet(s).

Aside from that, he's a total Luddite, living in peace with the Greenies, or "Greenbacks" as they're called by those who find them Unobtainable. But there's a revolution a-brewing here on the Blue Planet, and one day the nut-tree-dwelling James Cameron may find itself being shaken to the earth by we Swamp People who are sick and tired of being treated like fools and having our money stolen from us in the name of Movies That Are Good For You.

Until then, ride, Captain, ride upon your ego-trip.

The Sum of All Fears: Cowardice and Greed

To begin with, I don't understand what the big deal is with Ben Affleck. He's been involved in some high-profile projects and he's been sold as a wunderkind writer/director/actor, but I find him wooden and empty; when he scowls it's just that: a scowl -- I never see any evidence of gears turning under the surface.

Another strike this film has against it is that two other much better actors (Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford) have played Jack Ryan in the previous films and Affleck simply doesn't have the chops these guys have.

All that being said, The Sum of All Fears is based on a moderately successful Tom Clancy book of the same name and thus has the same built-in loyalty and fan base. So why did it fail at the box office?

Two reasons, probably, and only one overtly political. The first is the most obvious: the story posits a terrorist attack against a pro football game in Baltimore. Coming out less than a year after September 11th, this film was probably too intense a reminder of what terrorists have in mind for America. The fact that the terrorists are successful in the film is another problem (thousands of American citizens are killed); no one wants to see the bad guys win.

The second, deeper reason draws upon the first. In the novel, the terrorists are what 99% of terrorists are in the world today: fundamentalist Islamic fascists, intent upon creating a worldwide caliphate and forcefully converting, subjugating, or killing everyone else on earth. In terms of storytelling motivation for an antagonist, this one is unequaled (except for the movies where aliens want to eat us; you can't convert to alienism and avoid death, so it's worse).

So why change the terrorists to neo-Nazis? Because the filmmakers decided that Islamic terrorism was "cliched," and that it would be "incendiary" to depict Muslims as terrorists. Yet they would say their film was "timely" and "cutting-edge" (they always do). But they're cowards first and businessmen second. After all, the market for American films is now worldwide; it wouldn't do to offend the many movie goers living in 7th century Afghanistan, would it?

But Americans, seeing the truth, stayed away from The Sum of All Fears, and, adjusting for inflation, it places a distant third among the Tom Clancy adaptations.

If a book had a neo-Nazi terrorist and they wanted to make it into a movie, fine. But why not only destroy a franchise, but also be untrue to the book?

If you have a better reason than the ones I've given -- sheer cowardice and greed -- I'd like to hear it.

Unknown: A Rose by Any Other Name...

Unknown, starring Liam Neeson, is like The Sixth Sense in that it hangs entirely upon a surprise revelation. If the twist is convincing to you, you'll probably like the movie. It wasn't for me. I'm always bothered by amnesia stories where people forget their name and just everything else about themselves, except how to hack computers, jimmy locked doors, and perform maiming roundhouse kicks.

The story is a whodunnit involving lost identity, and for most of the film we're wondering what the bad guys have on Neeson's wife so that she goes along with the apparent charade of not knowing Neeson and being married instead to Aiden Quinn, who goes by Neeson's same name. (Of course we're never informed why the masterminds behind the whole deal went to the effort of creating two identical actors, but leave that aside.)

My political gripe with the film is a sequence which is, I believe, the first use of the now preferred liberal moniker: progressive. An assassination attempt against a scientist who has developed a revolutionary corn strain, is of course, the result of nefarious corporate espionage. (Why they don't just steal the corn recipe rather than kill the inventor is beyond me.) The movie describes the scientist as a progressive who just wants to give the new strain to the world at no cost, which will, of course, wipe out world hunger.

This simple assertion--that people starve because there is inadequate food--is utterly unsupportable. People starve because their governments are corrupt. Period. And U.S. foreign aid in the billions hasn't eradicated hunger in sub-Saharan Africa because these cultures are frankly toxic. In other, harsh words: people get the government they allow to rule over them.

But the arrested adolescent progressives still believe that the simple act of inventing a new food will actually solve this perennial problem. And when it doesn't, do they reexamine their premises? No, because it's not results that matter to liberals/progressives, it's intent.

But my favorite part is the Saudi prince who is the financier of the new corn strain. He's willing to give the corn away because he, too, is a progressive. Show me one Saudi who ever gave anything away and I might believe this.

To sum up: Unknown is a mildly clever identity actioner with two frankly unbelievable characters (and, surprisingly, neither of them is Neeson): a scientist and a Saudi prince who both labor at great cost of time and money to develop a new corn strain and then decide to give it away for free. And Neeson et al. are the corporate assassins who want to interfere with this nobility. Of course, Neeson, who finally recovers his memory in the last act (though not his former values as a paid assassin), now struggles to expose the evildoers and prevent the assassination. Which, of course, he does.

This movie should have been billed as science fiction.

Angels and Demons: Falling from Grace

Somewhat better than The DaVinci Code, the filmmakers managed to take another Dan Brown anti-Catholic screed and actually ratchet back from the howling bigotry of the first entry in the series.

In addition, the ending is far superior to the book, refusing to deny the physics of falling objects (a guy falling earthward from a helicopter hits 32 feet/second pretty quickly and cannot be saved by using his suitcoat as a parachute, even in a Hollywood movie),

All in all, though, Hanks sleepwalks through this movie as he walks through scenes spitting out exposition. Lots of running around Rome does not make an exciting movie.

Of course, this is a murder mystery, but why, in the name of all that is holy, must the antagonist be the Pope's right-hand man? Isn't that the most supremely obvious choice of evildoers? I'm surprised he wasn't carrying a baby around the whole time, planning to kill it and make cookies from the blood. Dan Brown really has a chip on his shoulder about believers in general and Catholics in particular, and one has to wonder when and if that well will ever run dry for this hack--his toolkit is indeed shallow and hackneyed.

As I've said elsewhere, if the movies really wanted to make the reveal of the antagonist a surprise, they'd pick the guy our guts tell us did it but our politically-correct brains resist.

Maybe Ron Howard will redeem his anti-western religion bias in his next film and make The Mohammed Murderers.

Frost/Nixon: Cold Reception

It is a testament to how well-behaved Republicans have been, that for the last three decades, the Left hasn't found a better receptacle for their hatred than Richard M. Nixon.

I'm sure Ron Howard and Co. believe their film goes overboard in being fair to him (that's what swell, morally-superior guys they are), even though the only "gotcha" moments in the film belong to David Frost and his minions, who, if they were Republicans, would have been charged with Hate Crimes, so vitriolic was their animus toward RN.

As in all biopics, the best lines and scenes are completely fictional: private off-the-record conversations and late night drunk dialing by, who else, but the sodden and disgraced ex-President. Nevertheless, the film is worth seeing -- no matter how you come down on whether a petty burglary was sufficient to overshadow Nixon's many and notable accomplishments -- because Frank Langella's portrayal of the fading and failing politician is, to put it mildly, astonishing. He captures the gravitas and graveness of Nixon in a way that is nothing short of amazing. Wearing little apparent makeup, but not succumbing to jowl-shaking, Langella so completely inhabits RN's junkyard dog scrapper personna that I believe even Nixon himself would admit he was well served by his actor avatar.

Having seen Howard's other films, and witnessed his clunky direction, I'm inclined to give most of the credit for this performance to Langella himself. Why he didn't get the Academy Award can only be explained by Hollywood's fist-clenching, howling hatred, not only for Richard Nixon, but for anyone who doesn't portray the man as an ax-murdering psychopath.

In the Valley of Elah: An Upside Down World

In the Valley of Elah is a well-wrtten, well-acted, well-made, and completely wrong-headed film that speaks volumes about the actors, filmmakers, and Hollywood executives' left-wing and anti-American world view. Out of their own mouths, so to speak.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank, a retired military investigator working with small town detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) to first find, then uncover, the reason for the death of Hank's son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), a recent returnee from the Iraq war.

They ultimately discover that Mike was murdered during a night on the town which included visiting a strip club, fighting in the parking lot, illegal drug use, and having sex with a hooker . . . you know, just a typical Saturday night for our enlisted men. The climactic reveal is that Mike was senselessly killed by one of his buddies, a combat comrade in Iraq, for no apparent reason. Indeed, said the perpetrator: "It could have easily been Mike killing me."

No wonder the $23 million film made less than $7 million in the U.S. I have no problem with the film strictly as film. It is perfectly acceptable fare: a murder mystery. And I have no trouble with the military setting. People do terrible things everywhere. But why In the Valley of Elah was one of the first (and few) Hollywood films to be made about the Iraq war is inexplicable. Surely, no one on the Left is asserting that more than a minscule proportion of our soldiers are murderous sociopaths.

No, what they're really saying is that war, especially war the way America fights it, turns decent young men like Mike into sociopaths; in other words, we're creating a whole generation of brutal murderers. This is the "Gitmo creates terrorists" argument, for which, statistically, there is absolutely no evidence. But lack of evidence never deters a true believer. In fact, lack of evidence gives rise to a leap of faith, which is the staple of under-informed, emotionally-oriented people. "I care! Isn't that enough?" they seem to shout when contrary facts arise. No, it isn't enough. Accuracy would also be nice.

And lest anyone reject my assertion that this film is anti-American, how else do you explain the final shot, where Hank raises a weathered American flag upside down, a universal sign of distress. With this image, the filmmakers are saying America is in trouble because of the way we fight wars; we are destroying the young men and women in our military.

This is also an age-old Leftist canard: soldiers are victims. (Ignore the fact that our military is 100% voluntary.) In one scene (I love how filmmakers reveal their own motivation as well as their characters'), Hank's wife Joan (uber-Leftie Susan Sarandon), chides him for his military background, saying their son Mike joined up because he was raised in Hank's home; he literally had no choice. So not only are soldiers victims, they were brainwashed into being such.

To recap, this is Hollywood's view of the military and America's foreign policy: Evil engagements abroad (always for ultimately nefarious reasons, e.g., "blood for oil!"); CYA coverups by the military (the liaison, Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric) is an unlikeable, insensitive company man); immoral behavior by our troops (the inciting incident in the film, which drove Mike "crazy" was his hitting a child on an Iraqi street with his Hummer, because there were standing "orders" to never stop a convoy for a pedestrian because that usually set them up for an ambush (sounds like a good policy to me), yet Mike never swerved or hit the horn; he just roared straight ahead, killing the child); illegal drug use, drunken fighting, consorting with hookers and murder being de rigeur behavior of soldiers on leave; yet these same soldiers are credulous children, victims of over-zealous, gung-ho parents and the corrupt militaristic American culture, which put them in the position where they have no choice: they simply must become sociopaths.

If this is the sort of film Hollywood makes to mark the Iraqi war (a war which, by the way, has been, for all intents and purposes, soundly won), then the upside-down flag is indeed apropos. But instead of the local VFW post, it should be flown over the Kodak Theater where they hold the Academy Awards.

The Path to 9/11: Walt Would Die

In 2006, ABC/Disney surpised the world by announcing a miniseries called The Path to 9/11 to be broadcast on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, based on several books, including, prominently, the 9/11 Commission Report. Opposition began immediately.

The project was maligned by the mainstream media and pressure was brought to bear because the miniseries took a hard look at the lack of response between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks. Remember, those years included the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the African embassy bombings—and that’s just the attacks on American interests. During that time, all over the world, the jihadists were blowing things up, and Bill Clinton was asleep at the switch.

The miniseries, condensing the voluminous matter coming out of the 9/11 Commission and other authoritative sources, promised to be a bombshell in itself. But the series almost didn’t broadcast. Bill Clinton himself demanded changes to the completed film and a number of politicians—none of whom had seen the film, mind you—attacked it. And ABC caved, deleting entire scenes, truncating others, and running a disclaimer. The series, designed to run every year on September 11th, ran just once. It never aired again and was never released on DVD.

Blocking the Path to 9/11: An Anatomy of a Smear details what happened in the aftermath of this debacle. The miniseries itself was billed as a docudrama, indicating that certain liberties were taken with presentation. In Blocking, it is clear from interviews with the participants that they were just trying to tell the truth about the lead-up to 9/11, to “connect the dots” as so many accused the Bush administration of failing to do. Unfortunately for the Left, there were only a few new dots to connect during Bush’s few months in office, but a whole mess of them were ignored during Bill Clinton’s tenure.

A growing sense of horror builds as you watch Blocking. The main writer, Iranian-born American Cyrus Nowrasteh, has a formidable pedigree in the film business, as does director David Cunningham. But nevertheless, they soon became marked men for their temerity in trying to tell us what happened prior to the attacks.

Blocking the Path details how craven Disney was in bowing to pressure from the politicians they helped elect. Several scenes are shown with the excised material intact. The one that stands out most is a moment when the Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan have Osama bin Laden in their sights, the target painted with lasers, and American fighters above, their thumbs poised to fire missiles, awaiting a kill order that never comes. The national security team, including heads of the FBI and CIA and the president’s own national security advisor, all agree that bin Laden must go, but no one has the courage to give the order.

And Bill Clinton? He’s upstairs in the White House residence and won’t come down to take the phone call and make a decision. For two hours they wait and he never arrives. Finally, the operation is cancelled. As the leader of the rebels leaves, he says to the CIA operative, “Are there any men left in America?”

The gainsayers of this episode say things didn’t happen exactly that way. Nowrasteh responds that maybe that is true, but they had thirteen such opportunities to kill bin Laden, and for the purposes of the film, they collapsed them into one. All the elements in the edited scene were factual.

That’s thirteen chances to avoid 9/11, folks. Thirteen. Talk about an unlucky number.

And that’s really the crux of the so far successful attempts to derail The Path to 9/11. Though millions of people saw the two-night series broadcast, they didn’t see the version that was approved by the phalanx of ABC/Disney lawyers and researchers prior to the filming. But when pressure against the film began to be felt, ABC/Disney caved for no other reason than to spare the person most responsible for 9/11—William Jefferson Clinton.

Blocking the Path leaves the viewer stunned. Every fact need not be unassailable for you to realize that those charged with protecting us failed miserably and are still trying to cover up their malfeasance with help from the very people who are supposed to defend free speech.

As stated, The Path to 9/11 is still unavailable on DVD. Imagine spending $40 million and not wanting to recoup your investment. When a group of investors at a Disney shareholder meeting challenged the company to either release the film or sell it to someone who would, the CEO responded that he knew of no one interested in buying it. The investors immediately made an offer, which Disney refused.

Mickey Mouse is indeed a rat.

Note: You can sign a petition to encourage ABC/Disney to make The Path to 9/11 available at
http://www.petitiononline.com/eds1/petition.html

He who controls the media controls history.

Atlas Shrugged: Hollywood Self-Haters

Here's what you'll hear: critics hate Atlas Shrugged, Part 1; that it’s amateur hour, with wooden acting, unknown, weak actors unable to handle the stilted dialogue, an incomprehensible story, made on a thread of a shoestring budget.

Here are the facts: the novel Atlas Shrugged is one of the most successful books of all time. More than fifty years after its initial release, it is always in the top ten on Amazon. The executive producer tried for almost twenty years to make the film in Hollywood, but no one would finance it. After he made it with his own money, no one would distribute it. So, instead of the 3800 screens the animation film Rio fills, Atlas Shrugged had to settle for just 300. Yet on its first weekend, it equaled the per-seat income of the other hit films. And though just 5% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes like the film, a whopping 85% of the audience does.

So what gives? I thought Hollywood was all about profit, not politics. If there was money to be made in bringing this book to film, why didn’t they jump at it? There may be several reasons, not all of which are damning to the L.A. Lefties.

Atlas Shrugged is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to screen. It’s over 1200 pages of long speeches on economics and government, not exactly the Bourne Identity. Many people have tried to adapt the book and have gotten waylaid by reverence for the source material. Instead of mining a good story out of it, they stayed true to the unwieldy plot. (This may have been a requirement by Rand’s estate.) But the movie is so true to the book that even the bad dialogue remains.

The most obvious change should have been to update a key plot point—Rearden Metal, a new alloy that can support trains moving at 200 miles an hour—into mag-lev technology that doesn’t require rails at all. Or use it in aircraft or automotive construction. Whatever. But trains? Obama thinks high-speed rail is the future. Isn’t that reason enough to abandon it as the basis for a key point in the movie?

Another reason: Hollywood has a long history of hating corporate execs, and all the protagonists in the film are corporate execs. According to Hollywood, only union organizers, beleaguered government workers, and renegade journalists are heroic, and each of those types is relegated to the antagonist class in Atlas Shrugged. Even though Hollywood is such a corporate, union busting town that most films are shot in right-to-work locales now (try to find a depiction of New York that wasn’t shot in Toronto in the last twenty years), Hollywood still has this fictionalized account of itself that Atlas Shrugged exposes.

Another reason: Hollywood has reason to think audiences are brain-dead morons. Adam Sandler has been the most consistent money-maker in Hollywood for twenty years—which really only proves that we like movies and though we’d rather see a great movie, we’ll watch trash if that’s all there is. (Take that, American movie-goers; you go to these movies, after all, don’t you?)

Atlas Shrugged is a serious movie about serious (and timely) issues: the government picking winners and losers, bureaucrats making it impossible to build or run a business, hate-the-wealthy class warfare, a plummeting economy. No pratfalls, penis jokes, or bare breasts—how could the producers imagine that this movie would excite audiences? And yet it is, because we’re starving for films—no matter their production values—that say something important. The programmers at Turner Classic Movies know this: fifty, sixty, and seventy year old movies are still popular because they were made in an era when Hollywood still shared the values of the audience. But those times are long gone, destroyed with the anti-heroes of the 70s, the nihilism of the 80s, and the stupidity of the 90s until the present. (Hangover 2 is coming soon!)

No, Atlas Shrugged is not a great movie; it may not even be a very good one. The critics’ carping about production values, acting, and the screenplay are all valid. But while not being a great movie, Atlas Shrugged is a good movie about great ideas. Great as in important. I think you will be surprised at how many young people will absolutely love the movie and then tackle the book. I’ve no doubt that John Galt’s seventy page diatribe in the book will be severely truncated in the final film installment, perhaps losing most of its power, but if the movie serves to encourage people to read the book, and they have the discipline to wade through it, by the time they reach Galt’s radio rant, they will be, as I was, spellbound by his passion and irrefutable logic. And it very well may change their lives, as it did mine when I first read it thirty years ago.

Not a bad accomplishment for a movie.

Seven Pounds: Pound Foolish

A film cannot be judged by its intentions; it must be judged by what it actually accomplishes, and Seven Pounds creates a monster divide between the two.

The trouble begins with the title, a reference to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock, a vengeful money lender, attempts to exact a "pound of flesh" from a defaulting borrower. Shylock is foiled when the judge points out that while he may, indeed, have a contract right to the borrower's flesh, that right does not extend to the blood in that flesh.

The moral is clear: the consequences of our actions should be commensurate with them. In Seven Pounds, however, Ben Thomas (Will Smith) is no money borrower. He is merely a careless young man, happily in love, who momentarily loses concentration on the highway, and seven people -- including his beloved wife -- die.

What in the play is racially-motivated revenge by Shylock is mere carelessness in the movie, yet Smith, understandably tormented, must literally take his own life to "repay" the lives he accidentally took on that highway.

This confusion about the difference between accident and purposeful acts is the core problem with the film, and no amount of mute, tortured staring into the dark future on Smith's part can approximate the evil intent of Shakespeare's preeminent villain, Shylock.

Yet Smith trudges from scene to scene, racked with guilt, attempting to atone for his "sin," and it's a too-clever script (only in places, sadly) that unfolds the details of the accident at a snail's pace, so we are left wondering what exactly happened right up until the final scene.

This sort of manipulative storytelling is a minor sin compared to the false moral equivalence between fecklessness and wicked intention, but no less aggravating. "A" for effort, "F" for achievement, results in a "C" grade, acceptable for a Redbox rental but little more.

Contact: Sadly Out of Touch

I really wanted to like this one. I have great respect and affection for director Robert Zemeckis's movies, and this one works pretty well until it fails completely in the penultimate scene.

Contact could have been great, if only Zemeckis had listened to Matthew McConaughey's character, who told Ellie (Jody Foster) that he couldn't support her entering the "Machine" as a representative of mankind because she believed that the 95% of the planet who believe in God were delusional.

The screenplay does a fair job of presenting both sides of the God argument and there are sympthetic (and unsympathetic) characters on both sides, but the key antagonist (a bleached-blonde whackjob from rural Utah--Jake Busey) is a religious fundamentalist, so we know on what side of the argument the filmmakers fall.

That didn't surprise me, but what did is that Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Castaway, Forrest Gump), normally a director with a pretty good handle on making a crowd-pleasing (and thus profitable) film, flatly avoids giving his audience (remember that 95%?) what they really want: a film about the infinite yet benign universe and our tiny but important place in it. He simply cannot bring himself to do so. Why? Zemeckis strays a long way from Carl Sagan's book anyway, so why not craft an ending that will please the 95% who are buying tickets to the movies?

It would have been easy: When Ellie arrives on the bright nighttime island shore a billion miles from earth, she encounters a being that she at first believes is her father (David Morse), deceased since Ellie was ten. But it's only seconds before she realizes that this cannot possibly be her father; there is no such thing as life after death, according to her religion, Science.

"We thought it would be easier for you," says Morse, "if I looked like your father." Oh, really. Isn't this just the same old condescending crap we've seen in a dozen sci-fi movies (The Day the Earth Stood Still, to name just one)?

The lesson is that we humans are just too stupid and superstitious to be able to grasp infinity, etc. So these benign aliens, in their infinite condescension, pull our most sacred and tender memories out of our subconscious and prop them up in front of us, torturing us with fake fantasms. All-knowing? While they were in there rooting around, didn't they encounter the pain of loss? And these are the good guys? So, aside from this being a hackneyed, tired plot device, Zemeckis blew it when he made Morse an alien at all.

Contact has grossed near $200 million, but one small change would have doubled that amount: When Ellie asks the apparition if he is her father, he should have said, "Yes, Ellie, it's me! Isn't it wonderful? Life goes on, and there is an entire universe awaiting us on the other side of death's door! Your mother and I love you and we're waiting for you when your time on earth is done."

There wouldn't have been a dry eye in the house, for this is the secret wish of everyone who has ever lost a loved one. (Even the other 5% -- come on, admit it.)

And how is such an ending contrary to Science anyway? Isn't it less fantastic to believe in life after death than to believe that some unknown alien race (unknown even to the alien who greets Ellie on that distant, sandy shore) created a transit system a billion years ago and then disappeared? How is that any different than believing in God? He isn't exactly around to sign autographs, either.

The only answer is that the space ship we momentarily glimpse between wormhole jumps on Ellie's trip to Bali somehow makes it more palatable to the athiests in Hollywood. After all, if these god-like aliens use space ships, then we can't be too far behind them, right? No humility required, no prostrating ourselves before Diety. All we have to do is acquire a few more scientific facts and we too can fold space and time and be all-powerful. How needs God and all that moralizing hoohah?

And that's the real reason Hollywood eschews the crowd-pleasing and Occam's Razor-attuned ending I've suggested: the core fact is that most Hollywood denizen's spiritual growth was arrested during their teen years. They deeply fear the notion of God, a being that has expectations and demands upon us.

Science, on the other hand, makes no such demands, no such expectations, no such -- dare I say it? -- judgments. And that is why Science is the preferred Hollywood god, because they, like any rebellious teenager, don't want to hear about responsibility; all they want is power, avoidance of consequences, and an endless summer. (Hence the cool surfing spot out past Vega.)

So, to spite his own face, Zemeckis refused to give the 95% of us who actually believe in a God that is bigger than our own selfishness, what we go to movies for: hope that there is something bigger than us out there -- and not just bigger brains, but bigger souls.

Don't tell me Hollywood always follows the money. When it comes to core issues, like the teenager who doesn't know where money comes from, they cannot face the facts: 95% of the planet is probably onto something.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004): Global Idiocy

Denzel is usually brilliant in his selection of scripts. Not this time.

The film is nicely done except for its politcally correct tilt: instead of the Chinese doing the kidnapping and brainwashing of the U.S. soldiers (as in the original 1962 film), the remake now has an American corporation, inexplicably named "Manchurian Global" (contradiction in terms?), that does the evil deed. And instead of an assassination attempt, the plot has been "updated" with an attempt to hijack the presidency itself.

Hollywood has no guts whatsoever. If it weren't for Nazis, every antagonist in every film would be a Wall street financier or a crazy right-wing gun-toting, Bible-quoting hillbilly inbred.

Stick with the original.

The Last Castle: Checkers Logic

Another oldie, but in a long line of Hate America flicks.

It stands to reason that Robert Redford -- renowned Leftist -- would only don the Uniform if it was to smear the American military. This ridiculous movie, full of liberal and movie cliches, preceded 9/11, so I guess I should cut it some slack, but Redford's pedigree has never been in doubt. He is a perfect example of the NIMBY limo liberal and I'll bet this script was like catnip to his ignorant and reflexive world view.

Moreover, this film partakes in the most egregious cliche of all: that every man in prison is anything but guilty. In this case, a military prison full of innocents who, in Redford's purple prose, are "still soldiers!" No, they're not. They're convicted felons: drug dealers, rapists, and murderers.

And yet the very restrictions of the command system they found too onerous to obey when they were soldiers are now no problem whatsoever, now that they are privileged to serve under hizzonor General Redford.

The only cliche more obvious is the one about the sadistic warden (James Gandolfini), who delights in oppressing these "innocents," but finally meets his match in Redford, who disobeyed an order from the President of the United States, of course to rescue men in an impossible situation in wartime. (It's always so: the hero cannot have anyone around him who is more intelligent or prescient that he is, so his disobedience is nothing more than misunderstood wisdom.)

The truth might not make as great a movie: that soldiers, for the most part, are honorable men. And when they become dishonorable (usually in very predictable ways), they must be punished. They are guilty and usually incorrigible, and the military's rank system means nothing to them. In addition, no officer would ever be placed in the general stockade population, as these "model" soldiers would rather frag an officer than get extra pudding at lunch.

To believe that Redford's character could somehow inspire them to duty and even the misplaced sense of honor this film espouses is juvenile, childish claptrap. Come to think of it, that's how I'd describe most of Redford's movies, apres Butch Cassidy. Instead of wasting your time on this loser, if you want to see a good military flick, I recommend We Were Soldiers Once, an outstanding example of honor, courage, and the American soldier.

Quest for Fire: Burned By the Question

Okay, this is an old one, but stands as evidence of the length of time Hollywood has had it in for us believers.

A laughably poor premise in which a species (us) that has learned to survive in a hostile world still inexplicably cannot make fire. Must be those heavy brows. They already know how to communicate, hunt, nurture children, bind themselves into a cohesive group, fight, use tools, strategize battles and engage in deception against the enemy, make clothing and weapons . . . and yet they cannot make fire?

Think about the level of intelligence required just to survive and then try to convince yourself that making fire is not the most basic skill any human ever learned (if only to survive a dinner of raw meat.) It inarguably came long before speech, tools, clothing, and culture.

This is what happens whenever we consider first causes. Modern unbelievers say the universe began with the Big Bang, but have no answer whatsoever to the question of what caused the explosion. The same holds true in every case where they try to excise a Prime Mover from the equation: utter, laughable failure. Truly, what is more unbelievable: the Big Bang itself or the Big Bang Coming From Nowhere?

Surely, the creatures in this film are not my forebears but rather those of the filmmakers. Gotta give them credit, though: without films like these, Ron Perlman would never have had a career.

Disney's Earth: Lost at Sea

Beautifully photographed (including some fantastic months-long time exposures as the camera pans across a forest vista and we see the full blossoming of both trees and flowers) but ultimately disappointing global-warming proselytizing tract.

Especially egregious was the clearly fabricated storyline of a starving "dad" polar bear, separated from his "family" and in danger of drowning and starvation. The filmmakers attempt to place this particular bear (you can't be sure it's the same one throughout, of course, they all look so much alike) in jeopardy, due to, of course, man-made global warming that is causing the ice flows to break up sooner every year.

They also fail to point out that polar bears are capable of swimming for hundreds of miles in the open sea without trouble and routinely do so on their hunting expeditions, as they shadow seal herds.

Finally, they also neglect to reveal that the population of polar bears has increased five fold over the last few decades, due to a ban on hunting them. So the bears are doing just fine, with or without CO2 emissions adjustment.

Gone are the days of my youth, when in grade school we watched the Disney "Living Desert" films that dramatized the natural life cycle of animals without injecting politics and/or religion. Now, every single natural history show has the "sky is falling" overlay.

The saddest part is I doubt even the filmmakers believe this nonsense; they're just using it to amp up the drama. After all, they had the stirring lion-elephant confrontation, as well as the compelling slo-mo cheetah-gazelle chase . . . what kind of interest can we get from a few polar bears who hunt undersea and just amble around on land? Oh, yes! Let's pretend they're in trouble because of the melting ice-pack and a bit of video we shot of a bear's unsuccessful attempt to nab a walrus cub! Yes!

At this point, I always thank the missionaries for stopping by and say, "I've already got a religion, thank you. Good day," and shut the door.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia: The End is Nigh

"The family that tatoos together, does time together."

Though some find this stomach-churning doc sadly hysterical, I found it profoundly disturbing; a perfect example of the entitlement culture that has allowed these jobless miscreants enough money to afford new vehicles and money for all the drugs they can consume.

Apparently, no one in the White family has a job (except for Poney, who fled to Minnesota, no doubt saving his life), but they still have plenty of cash for the necessities: blow, booze, and babies (sickening: mother Kirk snorting coke in the hospital with her newborn baby in the crib next to her).

I can't help but feel that if we as a society were less generous with benefits (clan doyenne Mamie brags that she's "disabled" though it's not clear how), these losers would have to do what the rest of us do: get a job and reserve their partying for the weekend.

If these people are outlaws, as they claim, then we're the stagecoach that handed over the strong box without a fight.

No, it's not funny at all, it's just plain sad that the Boone county officials who shake their heads in dismay at these lowlives cannot figure out a way to bust the whole lot of them and give them a chance at rehab, or at least split them up before they completely ruin the children of the next generation, who are (for now) educable witnesses to every form of human misbehavior imaginable.

By the way, the Grandma Bertie Mae White was seen in one scene wearing a Kerry/Edwards tee shirt.

What a surprise.

Fail-Safe: Aiming at Ourselves

This is what happens when a bunch of really smart Lefties (screenwriter Walter Bernstein was black-listed) decide they're more qualified to make policy than elected officials.

Fail-Safe is based on a false premise, even though the movie (directed by Sidney Lumet) is remarkably well-made. But it is equally wrong-headed. The problem is its moral equivalency: equating the world's worst regime (which killed 20 million of its own citizens) and the world's best (that's us, folks).

The plot: due to a mechanical failure, U.S. bombers get a false attack order because of purposeful Soviet electronic interferece, yet the entire film makes the U.S. out to be the sole offender even though no intent to bomb the U.S.S.R. is ever shown. So biased are the filmmakers that not even hawk Walter Matthau is allowed to say, "Hey! It was the Ruskies that interfered with our communications with the planes!"

And in the end, president Henry Fonda, in what has to be the most absurd example equivalency in history, orders nuclear bombs dropped on NewYork by American pilots.

Thankfully, we have almost fifty years of history since this film was made and we know the truth: MAD (mutual assured destruction) kept both sides honest through the first fifty years of the nuclear age. Ronald Reagan, understanding what Lumet et al. did not, decided that the Soviet regime could not compete with freedom, so he proposed we destroy the U.S.S.R., not by nuking it, but by spending it into the ground. He did that by rebuilding our military, placing Patriot missles in eastern Europe, and instigating research on a missile defense shield unfairly dubbed "Star Wars." Oh, and challenging Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

The fruits of his vision were these: just months after Reagan left office, the U.S.S.R. was indeed dumped into the ashcan of history. His confidence in freedom allowed Reagan to see the world in much clearer terms than these leftist filmmakers who, undoubtedly, subscribed to the stupider-than-dirt notion that we could and should live peacably with the Evil Empire.

It's also amusing that Fail-Safe was beaten to the punch by the release of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove just months before and so by the time Lumet's movie came out, parody and guffaws were the only response to a nuclear stand-off and Fail-Safe thus died at the box-office.

Yet the Left has a seemingly endless supply of fools, and George Clooney, enamored of the original film, set out to repeat Lumet's mistake, and did so in 2000. The movie was so bad it got relegated to TV and nobody saw it. Fitting.

Finally, the distributor of the original film tacked a scroll on the end of the film stating that a mechanical failure such as the one depicted in the movie is impossible. In the DVD extras, Lumet and his co-conspirators mockingly dismiss the disclaimer, but history once again proves them wrong: we never had a system failure and we beat the Soviets without firing a shot.

So much for the geniuses in Hollywood, except for the one who made it to the White House. Ronald Reagan really was a genius in the only way that matters--the genius of knowing the difference between right and wrong--and now the 300 million people of the former Soviet Union are free to make the same kind of stupid films Lumet made. Fortunately, a free market also decides if a movie is worth seeing, as it did with Fail-Safe (both versions).

The verdict? Fail-Safe fails.

The Town: A Dead-End Street

Forget the anti-hero, now we have full-on antagonist as protagonist. Historically, the anti-hero has had some form of redeeming humanity: he has a dog, is kind to old ladies, etc. But from what I saw in this Ben Affleck written-directed-and starring film, his character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He and his crew rob a bank, beat the manager unconscious, kidnap the comely assistant manager and leave her blindfolded on a Boston area beach.

Then Affleck realizes he has the horn for the girl, stalks her with intent to kill her if she recognizes him, pretends to bump into her at a Laundromat, continuing a series of lies that stretches the entire length of the film. "I'll never lie to you . . . again!" he finally wails in agony once she discovers his perfidy.

And when she asks him if he's ever killed anybody (as if that's the only true measure of evil in the desiccated Charleston neighborhood of Boston), he says no. But the truth is, in the final shootout, he squeezes off a couple hundred rounds at the FBI, local cops, and the SWAT team, though the film editor never shows him hitting anyone. But I'm sure no one was hurt, and besides, if anyone was, he never intended to hurt them. "What, this? It's just a machine gun. I just fire it to scare 'em. I don't wanna hurt nobody. Really!"

And the sickest part? The bank manager falls for it. There's already one addled loser chick in the film, the sister of Affleck's psychotic crewmate, with whom Affleck has good time sex because, hey, she wanted it, didn't she? He might be the father of her child; we don't know for sure. But he's going to be faithful to the bank manager after they reunite in Tangerine, Florida. And she buys it! So every woman in this film is not only a slut, she's a moronic slut.

If this is what passes for civilization in Hollywood now, it's over.

Knowing: What Know-nothings Believe

This movie falls prey to the typical difficulties when dealing with end of world scenarios: Is salvation to be found spiritually or through science? Director Alex Proyas designs beautiful scenes, but he's not a natural storyteller in the big picture sense, so this film is muddled and cannot decide what it wants to be.

Nicolas Cage is a scientist at MIT and is, of course, an athiest because his wife died in a hotel fire. Why tragedy must always result in atheism is childish hogwash, but that's Hollywood for ya. You'd think they never heard of the "life is a test" argument; that we're judged on how we meet our challenges--but that's too deep for those who never enter a church except for a funeral.

So when Cage is faced with the fact that a prescient young girl recorded the date and location of hundreds of fatal incidents fifty years ago, he naturally looks for a natural explanation. And he finally finds it, when everything ends due to a solar flare that threatens to burn away the earth's protective ozone layer, thus killing everyone.

At this point, the film has a chance to become interesting. But the filmmakers are conflicted; they seem to know that audiences would prefer a spiritual answer, but their all-encompassing athiesm requires either a deux ex alien or a tragic total destruction scenario. (Remember, they are enlightened and educated, not irrational snake-handlers like we moviegoers.)

So the ending, while minutely hopeful, is not spiritual, and like the also almost, almost great Contact, the filmmakers hedge their bets and try to have the best of both worlds. Yeah, Cage and almost everyone else dies, but some few survive, "called" by protective aliens to leave earth and populate a new planet of endless golden fields and immense, glowing trees. You know, a new Adam and Eve and all that hooey that rational people just cannot stomach. (Why aliens should care about us is never explained.)

So, instead of a crowd pleaser that recognizes that God is in control and would deal with global natural disasters either by avoiding/minimizing them or transporting select people elsewhere and gathering up all those who die into His loving bosom, we have Cage and everyone else incinerated at the end of the film. But, hey, at least they resolved their differences and had a big group hug, so we don't feel so bad.

And the execs at the studio wondered why this film didn't make more money. Hmm. Now, who's smarter: the athiests with the camera or the audience that stayed away because who wants to pay good money for hopelessness?

Limitless: Morally Stunted

The protagonist (Brad Cooper) starts out as a lazy, feckless loser with ratty hair and winds up a U.S. senator with a $200 haircut.

In between he lies, steals, cheats on his girlfriend with a woman he probably killed, and knifes his mentors in the back. But it can all be blamed/credited to a drug he's taken called NZT that miraculously allows him to use 100% of his brain, and thus he bests all adversaries, including corporate monster Robert DeNiro. Others who have taken the drug are addled, have bad hair, and are dying, but Cooper figures out a way in the end to avoid any of those downsides, instead rising higher and higher, and keeping his coifs glossy.

And the ultimate, noble goal, according to this film? Being a politician. Bill Cosby once said that when a friend offered him cocaine, he asked what its effects were. "It intensifies your personality," the friend said. Cosby retorted,"What if you're an asshole?" Exactly.

This movie is wrong on so many levels, I can only list them:

1) It says that, instead of hard work and effort, there is a magic pill that will make you successful;
2) You will be the only one with this advantage, and everyone else will be playing catch-up;
3) It doesn't matter what you do on the way up, so long as your motives are pure (selfish self-advancement is sufficient);
4) The highest calling is not making money, giving others around you a chance to work hard and succeed, but is politics, in which you, by virtue of your virtue, will decree goodness in everyone's life, and do it without personal risk or spending a penny of your own;
5) Romantic relationships will survive even murder, so long as you have a great haircut, look fantastic, and have lots of money (c.f., Charlie Sheen);
6) Brain power, not morals, is the key to success; and
7) Hollywood hates you and your pathetic, lower-middle-class work ethic.

But surely, you're already taking the real NZT, which is living with the consequences of your acts, and you already knew all this.

Source Code: Resourceful Stupidity

The premise is acceptable sci-fi: terminal soldier Gyllenhaal is sent on one last (short: 8 min) mission: re-live the final minutes of the life of a victim of a railroad terrorist attack. What makes this a feature film and not a short film is that he can re-live those eight minutes an apparently unlimited number of times, kind of like a tragic Groundhog Day, with the protagonist progressively uncovering more and more information about the attack and finally sussing out who the terrorist is and stopping him.

So far so good, but it wasn't fun because Hollywood is apparently incapable anymore of giving us a realistic (that means fact-based, folks) terror scenario. Of course, I knew the minute Gyllenhaal started ogling the Arab businessman that he was a red-herring. And of course, I knew the second he zeroed in on the doughy-faced white kid with the kitchy "Illinois"-embroidered wallet that that guy was a crazy, right-wing reactionary Timothy McVeigh and we had our man.

Now think about this: it takes hundreds of people to make a film and nobody in that crowd pulled the screenwriter or director aside and said, "You're trying to make a thriller here, right? Why don't you throw in a twist or two, so it's not so predictable?" No one? I mean, politics aside, it would just be good storytelling to have the terrorist actually be the Arab guy because we're all programmed to be so politically correct now. The Arab could be found, initially, to seem innocent, but the hero eventually discovers his perfidy and stops him. But no. The cracker has a van (of course it's white) filled with high explosive and a dirty bomb in a shipping cube covered with, what else, the stars and stripes. Could there be a more cliched antagonist? Methinks not.

So, what might have been a fairly interesting exploration about "walking a mile in someone else's shoes" or a chance for rebirth resolves itself into a politically-correct melange of outright stupidity and cowardice. Hollywood is one day going to run out of Nazis, Neo-Nazis, and American Nazis and have to use actual real-world terrorists, of which there are apparently thousands: Fundamentalist Islamic Fascists (I've already copyrighted the acronym: FIF.)

Some day. Probably not in my lifetime.