Cynical Cinema

My Kid Could Paint That is the most dangerous movie of the year.  Why?  Because your kid COULD paint that.  This is a movie about a 4-year-old girl who becomes a shining beacon in the art world, selling canvasses for up to twenty grand.  And this movie could inspire stage parents who think it’s a good idea to get their kids to do the same thing.  They could entrap their children into a painting-as-slavery proposition where the joy and the youthful exuberance gets sucked out of their child’s life forever.  Which is exactly what the parents in this movie are accused of doing.  When four-year-old Marla Olmstead had one of her paintings displayed in a local restaurant, and someone bought it for a few hundred bucks, the art world all of a sudden took notice and started banging down the Olmstead’s door.  They wanted more and more works from this four-year-old “genius”, and the price of her paintings went up accordingly.  Pretty soon, she was having gallery shows, and had earned more than $300,000.00 by painting, which was just something she loved to do in her own home.

The art world is something of an enigma to most of us.  And many of us have suspected that it is in fact an enigma to the people who are the arbiters of taste in that world, as well.  That merely being able to sound important when discussing a painting is enough of a reason to make that painting worthwhile.  As the art gallery director in this movie says, this was a way for him to “stick it” to the world of modern art, which he sees as a bunch of phonies talking crap anyway.  His point is that this is a four-year-old, who is not a child prodigy, who is not some kind of genius, but rather just a kid who likes to paint.  And it’s merely the unusual nature of the story that makes the work worth what it is worth, and not the actual work itself.  Like, why does a Jackson Pollack sell for millions, and an Eric The Intern ass-painting sell for $120.00?  Because there is a certain cachet attached to the Pollack name, more than for any other reason.  There have been other movies made about the self-important idiocy of the world of modern art.  Most notably Who The *&#$ is Jackson Pollack, which was a great documentary about a woman who purchased what appeared to be a Pollack original at a yard sale for like eight bucks, and the art community went out of their way to discredit the painting, because they couldn’t conceive of a Pollack existing outside their realm, and costing so little.  A hilarious movie, that one.

This one is not so hilarious.  After establishing, for the first half-hour, that the art world is indeed pretentious and full of s***, the movie takes a dramatic turn.  Marla has been featured on dozens of news programs and talk shows, or at least her parents have, since they want to keep her out of the spotlight.  Which is what it seems good parents would do.  Then, during a Charlie Rose feature on 60 Minutes, the bubble is burst.  A child psychologist examining the paintings suggests that there is no way they are the work of a four-year-old.  That they are either done by her daddy, or that he has finished them for her.  And the Marla enterprise comes crashing down!  All of a sudden there is no interest in her art.  It becomes worthless.  All this overnight, because of an investigative journalism piece.  I think it is key to note here that Marla’s parents were “outed” by a child psychologist, and not an art crititc.

So…then what?  If it’s a 4-year-old who painted these abstract canvasses, they are amazing and worth 20,000 dollars.  But if daddy helped her - well then, they are worthless?  It’s abstract art, for God’s sake.  It looks the way it looks, people like it for the way it looks, and nothing more, right?  Nope - just like a painting done with an ass is more interesting than a painting done with an elbow, a painting done by a small child is far more interesting and therefore valuable than the same painting done by an adult.  So…if Jackson Pollack had been a five-year-old, his paintings would now sell for billions, instead of millions?  What?  Or Voice of Fire - would have been worth ten TIMES as much had it been painted by a monkey.  Right…here’s the thing.  Pollacks, and monkey paintings, and elephant paintings and ass art - CAN be done by children.  There is nothing intrinsically difficult about these things.  Or about most modern art in general. 

So the parents start fighting back against the allegations and the venemous hate-mail they begin to receive.  This is “investigative journalism” gone awry, they contend.  And just having one child psychologist decide this having never met Marla, seems like a pretty cheap way to ruin a life this way.  So the parents fight back, and videotape Marla doing a painting start-to-finish.  It takes a long time, five hours over a period of about a month, but she finishes “Ocean”, which looks just like her others to me.  And the art world is back on board!  The parents and Marla are vindicated, and the shows begin again.  But somehow the documentary film maker doesn’t fully believe it yet.  He is not convinced.  “Ocean”, he feels, does not look as good as Marla’s other work, and therefore is inconclusive!

So he leaves us with a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.  And no real answers, other than those we feel on our own.  As for me, I don’t care whether the parents DID do this or not.  Who cares?  Art is art simply because someone likes it, and it shouldn’t be about WHO painted it or HOW.  Had the Rolling Stones done Seasons In The Sun instead of Terry Jacks, would it still suck?  Or would it be a classic?  No, it would still suck.  The Beach Boys did Kokomo.  People still know it sucks.  In the end, this movie is a glorious screw-you to the art world, and a commentary on the piling-on nature of major media.  As soon as this 60 Minutes story ran, no one else did their own investigation, they just jumped on the pile.  And you can imagine the art pundits and self-important art community scuttling back and forth like rats, away from 4-year-old Marla, and then back to her, and then away again, and then back, depending on the way the prevailing winds are blowing.  Screw the modern art world indeed!

You know how Maury Povich, every now and then, brings a bunch of “out-of-control teens” on his show, and they freak out on stage, and their mothers cry?  And the kids say “yeah, I’m fifteen, and I smoke weeeeeeed, and I drink tequiiiiiiiila, and I have seeeeeex with men!”  And the mothers cry.  And the kid comes out and she gives the finger to the audience, and the audience boos the girl because they see what her mother is going through, and I sit at home thinking “ummm…it’s just weed and booze and sex.  What’s the big deal?”  I guess it’s the fact that they’re so proud of it.  The really bad ones are prostituting themselves, or sleeping with much older guys, or they have moved on to crystal meth.  And Maury Povich acts all righteously indignant, and says “can’t you see what this is doing to your poor mother?”  and the kid doesn’t care, and yells “y’all don’t know me!” and then drops the “I’m pregnant” bombshell, and six months later she’s back on Maury with eleven different guys and they test the DNA…God I love that Maury Povich show!

Anyway, at the end of the My Teenager is Out Of Control Show, they always send them to Boot Camp.  And we see some drill sargeant yelling at these girls from one inch away, and then we see the girls do some pushups, and then they cry, and everything is better and they hug their moms and say sorry, and the show ends.  Well, these boot camps actually exist.  And Boot Camp is a documentary about what really goes on in one…OK.  I made that up.  Boot Camp is actually a live-action movie about Life After Povich.  Where a bunch of out-of-control teens are rounded up and sent to an island in the South Pacific to turn their lives around.  But wait - it turns out that Boot Camp isn’t so fun after all!  And it’s also nothing like on the Maury show, because SOME of them are actually boys as well!

So it’s a boot camp, where Peter Stormare and his cadre of creepy militia-types torture and rape these kids until they are completely broken, then…what?  Ship them back to their families, broken and destroyed?  But at least they won’t act up and cause problems and make their parents do work any more…Mila Kunis is the star of this movie (you know, Jackie from That 70s Show), and this is not her star turn.  (That may have come with the new film Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)  She gets sent to this boot camp by her Wicked Step Father who exerts Mind Control over her Real Mother.  Once she is there, she is basically a prisoner-of-war in Nazi Germany, with horrible abuse and crazed group thinking and a cultish mentality to Stormare’s followers.

Her boyfriend, fearing for her safety, arranges to be sent to the same island for some re-programming of his own.  I guess  his idea is to break her out.  And it’s a testament to the cartoonish idiocy of this movie that he actually manages to do so.  The dialogue is incredibly lame, the premise gets old after six minutes, and the acting is bonkers at best.  The conclusion is so trite and lame it belongs in some ridiculous Lord of the Flies type after-school special.  At least you get to see Mila Kunis boobs.  I imagine that will put Boot Camp on Mr. Skin’s must-see DVDs of the year, but simply seeing naked flesh from a former star of That 70s Show is a piss-poor reason to watch a movie this lousy.  Skip Boot Camp altogether.

There has been a civil war going on in Northern Uganda for more than twenty years.  A rebel force called the Lord’s Resistance Army is killing men, women and children, and abducting kids to conscript them into becoming rebel child soldiers.  A camp has been set up in Uganda, one that at first was meant to house five families under government protection.  There are now 50,000 displaced people in this camp, many of them children.  Many of those children have been abducted by the rebels, and have been recaptured or escaped and made their way back to this camp for government protection.  In similar camps around northern Uganda, there are an estimated 2 million displaced members of the Acholi tribe.  It’s amazing that under these circumstances there could BE 20,000 schools in Uganda, but most of them are further south where the war doesn’t touch.  The kids in these schools compete every year in the National Music Competition, where they are graded based on their performance in music, drama and dance.

War Dance is a documentary shot in the most remote, and therefore most vulnerable camp in this war zone.  A camp where the kids can’t go outside, because the danger of abduction is too great.  There are thousands of child abductions in this region every year.   30,000 kids have been kidnapped and conscripted into these rebel armies.  Kids, some of them eight years old, tell heartbreaking stories about watching their fathers hacked apart by machetes, their mothers raped, their brothers abducted, or sometimes themselves.  One of the most powerful and devastating scenes I have seen in a movie in a long time is one where a rebel commander has been captured by the government troops in this camp, and a young boy asks to see him.  He sits with this rebel commander, perhaps the very man who hacked apart his father, and shows him a picture of his older brother, asking if he has seen him at the rebel camp.  He just wants to know if he is alive or not, after he was abducted.  The rebel tells him that he has not seen him there, and so he is probably dead.  And the kid asks him why the rebel forces abduct kids.  Why did they abduct me?  He says.  And the soldier replies, it’s because the bigger you are as an army, the more power you have.  We know it devastates families.  We know what the mothers go through.  But without the kids our army isn’t strong enough.  It’s just heart wrenching and touching and incredibly moving.  You can’t create moments like this in Hollywood.

Somehow, music is the salvation.  Music gives these scarred children something to focus on.  The competition gives them a goal.  And they love their music.  Their instruments are makeshift at best, wooden xylophones and harps held together with string.  It’s music as therapy, music as a purpose, and yes, a form of escapism as well.  In one of the war zones of the world that doesn’t make the news, there are 200,000 orphaned children, and they need some escapism.  These kids work, and they work hard, to be ready for this competition, and it is really cool to watch the competition itself - the African music and dance are sensational, and the triumphant finish is wonderful.  Triumph, of course, being measured by degrees in this part of the world.  War Dance is a powerful, devastating, but amazingly uplifting film, given the subject matter.

Sidney Lumet has created some of the greatest movies in the history of cinema.  Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, and Serpico, among others.  And although he is nowhere near as prolific now as he was in his mid-70s heyday, he has shown, with The Devil Knows You’re Dead, that he’s still got it.  “It” being the ability to cast great actors and then coax them into terrific performances in tightly told stories on the big screen.  Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke have been better in other movies (Capote, Training Day), but they are definitely at the top of their game here.  They play brothers who are both sleeping with the same woman (Hoffman’s wife), played by Marisa Tomei.  And that means there is a lot of Marisa Tomei nudity, which can’t hurt a movie.  It also means that the movie opens with Philip Seymour Hoffman nudity, which is not an auspicious way to begin a film.

This is Hoffman’s third major movie released on DVD in two weeks (the others being The Savages and Charlie Wilson’s War), and he looks to be in the same kind of zone Gene Hackman once occupied.  That ability to appear in twelve movies a year and be fantastic in eleven of them.  Very few actors have ever pulled this off on the level of Hackman in the mid-seventies and Hoffman now.  The premise of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is that Hawke and Hoffman have planned a robbery of their parents’ jewelry store in the suburbs.  They know the store inside and out, the alarm system, the schedule, the safe combination.  It should be fairly easy, just go in with masks, take what you need at gunpoint, and leave.  Insurance covers the parents, and the brothers have 600 thousand bucks worth of jewels they can fence, and fix all their money troubles.

 The money troubles for Hawke involve child support payments he has to make.  And while he is a devoted father and loves his little girl, his ex-wife (Amy Ryan of Gone Baby Gone) is a horrible shrew who is attempting to take him for every penny she can.  Hoffman’s money troubles stem from a little bit of a darker reason - he has a drug problem, and there are some fairly creepy scenes of him shooting up in the apartment of a she-male drug dealer.  He is clearly stealing money from the company where he works to support his drug habit, and the IRS is about to do an audit which will flush him out any moment.  He needs the money to replace what he has stolen, and of course to continue taking drugs.  You know the end result of their armed robbery endeavour right away, as the robbery itself is the second scene in the movie.  The rest of the film spends it’s time telling the story of the days leading up to the robbery and the days and weeks following it.  As one would safely assume, nothing really goes as planned in this hold-up, because if it did, this movie would end fairly fast. 

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead was marketed as something of a “black comedy”, but there is very little funny about it.  There are some amusing parts when people react predictably to unpredictable situations, but overall there is very little humour.  Hoffman is terrific as the older brother, bullying and convincing and manipulating and wheedling until Hawke agrees to go through with the plan.  And Hawke is tremendous as the younger brother, who gets in over his head almost right away, and spends the rest of the movie trying to subdue his rising panic.  Eventually, there is a watershed moment, where all the tensions in this family come out.  Somehow, we get the sense that if this discussion had taken place twenty years earlier, none of the events of this film would have taken place.  However, this watershed moment affects everyone differently. 

 Albert Finney, who is great as the patriarch of the family, becomes obsessive to the point of insanity, seeking revenge.  Hoffman becomes obsessive to the point of insanity, hoping to cover up his involvement in the crime.  And Hawke seems to just shatter, losing whatever independance he ever had and blindly following Hoffman’s lead (which, given his state of mind, may not have been such a great idea).  This movie ends well.  Extremely well, I would say.  The final scenes give a sense of closure of one of the main threads of the story, while other threads are left hanging completely.  But somehow these loose ends feel better than a nice, neat package would have.  Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is very good, beginning to end.  It’s not a Lumet classic, it’s no Dog Day Afternoon or Network.  But it certainly shows that he is still a master at his craft.

You can tell the kind of thinking that went into P2.  Or, at least, the casting of the movie.  Let’s find a girl with big hooters, and put her in something skimpy.  Then we’ll make a movie.  That girl is Rachel Nichols, and the movie is about a maniac parking attendant in a parking garage (Wes Bentley).  It follows every maniac captor-buxom abductee cliche in the movie book, the same story arc.  When the girl gets to a phone, 911 is…busy.  An operator will take your call soon.  Whenever the maniac has the girl trapped, she manages to escape, but just seconds too late to get to the cops who are passing by.  Eventually she decides she needs to be Rambo and go AFTER the guy…you know.  All that horror movie gobbledygook.  But it is fairly effective gobbledygook, and that at least counts for something.

Angela (Rachel Nichols) is some kind of executive at a major firm…apparently a 19-year-old executive?  At a major firm?  OK.  Whatever.  So she has these big jugs, see.  And she’s the last one out of the building on Christmas Eve, and her car won’t start.  So the parking attendant (Bentley) zaps her with a taser and takes her clothes off.  Which of course he would do.  He chains her to a table and tries to force her to enjoy a Christmas dinner with him.  Then he kills a guy to prove his love for her.  And she escapes, and the chase is on through the parking garage.  Action does take place on P1 and P3, but P2 is the scene of the big denoument, and as such is the title of the film.  Despite the predictability and the cliches, there are some effective scenes and some genuine scares.  But really the entire movie is a device to get the girl with big boobs in a skimpy negligee to get sweaty, soaked and eventually covered in blood.

 There are some things I expected and didn’t get.  The thing about the parking garage idea is that it is a genuine fear for some women.  Being alone in the big underground parking garage in the dark, going to your car by yourself - for many women this is a real and understandable fear.  And real fears are the basis for most good horror movies.  If people are afraid of the dark, spiders, snakes, what have you, then these are the most effective tools to terrify those people.  But at no point is the actual parking garage fear used.  It’s only after she gets terrorized by the killer that Angela ends up alone in the parking garage.  And by that point there is no mystery of who might be lurking around the corner, or who might attack you on your way to the car.  So it could have been a lot better.  Oh, and this is a Christmas movie.  Which makes it’s April 8th release so very timely.

An Inconvenient Truth was effective, because first of all, it was the first massive, promoted, well-distributed movie about Global Warming and peoples’ effect on the environment.  It worked because Al Gore had some cachet, and because the movie was not only eye-opening, but also genuinely entertaining.  This is also why Michael Moore documentaries are so effective.  They are entertaining.  There are moments that make us cry, moments that make us laugh, and moments that educate us.  All of which makes for a good movie.  This is where The Eleventh Hour misses the boat.  It isn’t terribly entertaining.  It’s exremely informative, it very well-researched and well-documented, and it has considerable star power.  But it’s more preachy and tedious than An Inconvenient Truth, or even A Global Warning, the Discovery channel documentary that came out recently.

 It’s narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, and features appearances by such environmental luminaries as David Suzuki (I like David Suzuki - screw these people and their anti-Suzuki backlash) and such intellectual heavyweights as Stephen Hawking.  And seriously, if you’re not going to listen to Stephen Hawking, who are you going to believe?  But whereas in some situations the movie is heavy-handed with it’s preachy, doom-and-gloom message, it understates other things.  The environment COULD be the greatest challenge of our time?  No, it IS.  There are very few people left alive who would believe otherwise.  But I will say this for The Eleventh Hour - it has an awful lot of information that is important for us all to know and understand.

 There are some great ideas here.  The idea that sunlight has provided all the energy the world needs throughout most of our recorded history.  And that when we are taking fossil fuels out of the ground, we are actually using up “ancient sunlight” energy, which is of course a non-renewable resource.  We are now using thousands of times the energy that the sun provides, which means that at some point soon, we will no longer be self-sustaining.  When there were one billion people on Earth, we were a self-sustaining species, but now that the population of the planet has exploded over the past one hundred years (and, especially, over the last fifty) we are no longer able to reconcile the supply with the demand.  There is less food, what food there is is becoming increasingly poisoned with toxins, and factors such as deforestation, global warming, overdishing and chemical dumping are causing dead zones, flash floods, hurricanes and droughts.

David Suzuki says something interesting.  He points out that if we, the human race, were to create the kind of energy each year that nature does for free, it would cost us 36 trillion dollars.  A year.  The total gross national products of the world this past year total 18 million dollars.  Therefore, it would cost us twice what we make to do what nature does, and we are busily destroying that nature for our own ends.  And the U.S. is the biggest consumer, the biggest waster of resources, and the richest country, thereby becoming the biggest problem.  Americans (population 300 million) spend more money maintaining their lawns each year than all of India (population 1.1 billion) collects in taxes.  It all comes down to the Economy vs. the Environment, which any intellectual, (in this case Stephen Hawking) will tell you does not have to be a battle at all.  Why is it one or the other?  And who would ever suggest that they are of equal importance?  It’s rubbish.

 And one more good thing The Eleventh Hour does is this - it gives us hope.  A slim, glimmer of hope that we can save ourselves now, at the eleventh hour.  Sustainable cities, systems and industries are attainable.  (And, in all the models they show, seem to look like every futuristic sci-fi city we see in the movies.)  There CAN be a waste-free sustainable system - after all, nature does it, and has done so for millions of years.  We could reduce the human footprint on the environment by 90 percent fairly quickly if we act now.  But it will take a giant uprising, a huge movement of people, companies, businesses and of course governments all over the world to get it done.  The idea here is to impart the notion of “frugality” to people.  Not poverty, but the sensible appropriation of resources. 

A former CIA chief in the movie quotes Winston Churchill, when he said “Americans always do the right thing, but only after the have exhausted all other possibilities”.  The hope here is that at this point the Americans, and the rest of the world, HAVE exhausted all other possibilities of doing the right thing, and it is now time to take action.  The best thing we get from this movie though, is that the Earth will be fine.  Nature will make a comeback, with us or without us.  And that is what we’re looking at - an extinction, just like the others that have happened in history.  Onlyn this one will be caused by mankind, and will wipe out mankind.  As one interview subject in the films says:  “the Earth has all the time in the world.  We don’t”.

Thanks to Lars and the Real Girl, I have spent an hour on realdoll.com doing research.  These are basically blow-up dolls, just really high-end.  So you order them for sex, and they get delivered to your house (delivery is at least 500 bucks itself), at the cost of $7,500.00 or more.  The website proclaims that they are perfectly realistic in every way (except that they are unable to speak, react, or do…anything).  And I think I found Lars’ girl.  She’s face #6, with the red lipstick and hairstyle #0731, and…OK.  I have spent WAY too much time on this site.  Anyway, it all seems bizarre to me.  My dad always said that a car may cost $15,000.00, but fifteen grand buys a LOT of taxi rides.  This was his way of making me really think about buying a car.  I apply the same logic here.  If you really need sex that badly, ten grand can buy a LOT of hookers.  And you can get a new one every day.  (Try to skip Vanier though.)  I have discovered, in the past, that I can get bored with the same girl day in and day out, after about two weeks.  Now, imagine that she doesn’t talk to you or move around at all.  How fast would you get bored of that?  And there goes ten grand…

Anyway, Lars and the Real Girl is about Lars (Ryan Gosling), who is an eccentric weirdo in a small town who can’t form regular relationships with other people.  He lives in the garage of his brother’s house, and barely talks to anyone on his way to and from work.  His brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and Gus’ wife (Emily Mortimer) are constantly trying to break Lars out of his shell, but it isn’t working.  Lars ignores the one girl at his office who has a crush on him, because he is incapable of touching people.  Then, all of a sudden, he shows up with this “real girl”.  Who is hilariously dressed in the skankiest outfit imaginable.  He calls her Bianca and introduces her to his brother and sister-in-law as his new girlfriend.  He has constructed an elaborate back story for Bianca.  She is a missionary, and is arriving from Spain, and her luggage and wheelchair got stolen at the airport, so can she borrow some of your clothes?  His family plays along, even when he asks if Bianca can sleep in their guest bedroom (she is a Christian, and believes strongly that they should not sleep together before marriage).  And this is what makes the whole thing work.  This is obviously a sex doll, and if he bought it for sex, that would just be creepy.  But he does not want it for sex at all, and it ends up being kind of sweet.  He wants people to see him as a normal human being, with a girlfriend in a wheelchair, but he is also deluded enough to believe that she IS real.  And that others will believe this as well.

He talks to her as though she is answering him.  Like Casey used to do to Finnegan on Mr. Dressup.  And then he tells people what she says.  She is painfully shy, you see, and she will only talk to him.  Before long, the entire town is buying into this fantasy, and they keep taking Bianca away for sewing circles and PTA meetings and they get her to read to kids at the local elementary school.  He certainly seems happier when Bianca is around, like Jimmy Stewart with his giant rabbit in Harvey, and like Harvey, Bianca is a harmless delusion for an otherwise charming and likeable guy.  There are some elements of the plot that are odd - like the girl at Lars’ office with a crush on him.  Sure, she’s kind of weird, but is she weird enough to be into THIS guy?  And how healthy is it, really, that everyone goes along with his bizarre delusion, all the way to it’s conclusion, which I won’t reveal here.

 This movie is too long.  Gosling is terrific, but he undergoes character development only toward the end, and the middle of the movie is an extended set-piece of people giving strange looks to him and Bianca.  Some of this is funny, in fact a lot of it is, but it drags.  This movie could have been done in a little over an hour, and there is an extra half hour that could have been left on the cutting room floor.  But it is a sweet, charming little movie about a sweet, charming little man.  It’s genuinely funny and has a big heart.  It’s worth the extra half hour.

Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman take on the Russia-Afghanistan war in Charlie Wilson’s War, a movie about a real-life American congressman named Charlie Wilson (Hanks), who virtually single-handedly provided the Afghan fighters with the weapons to destroy the Russians and drive them out of the country.  It’s a comedy-drama, where Hanks and Hoffman are hilarious together.  (Hoffman plays a senior CIA official who is about the most politically incorrect guy you would ever find in a political movie.  Charlie Wilson is a womanizing, drug-using, completely corrupt politician who all of a sudden finds a cause worth fighting for.  His office is great - his staff is just a bevy of hot young women (Amy Adams among them), he calls them, collectively, “jailbait”, and he sleeps with every hot woman who crosses his path.  One of these women is Julia Roberts, whose role in the film is pretty pointless, except to steer Wilson in the right direction.  After visiting a refugee camp populated by displaced Afghanis in Pakistan, Wilson steps up his efforts to help them out.  That help involves getting the freedom fighters weapons and training to be able to shoot down Russian planes and helicopters.

 One of the best things about Charlie Wilson’s War is that at the end of the movie, his crusade to help Afghanistan has not changed him as a person.  He is still a shallow playboy who sleeps with all kinds of hot women.  That is nice to see.  In fact, at one point a scandal involving a Playboy model and some cocaine threatens to derail him, and the point is made - if the press hears “strippers and Playboy models and cocaine”, then they will be so focussed on that, that they will completely ignore anything that is being done elsewhere in the House of Representatives.  As long as that scandal is at the forefront, Wilson can do anything he wants, policy-wise, and no one will pay any attention.  Which is how he plans to get the money to help Afghanistan.  This is actually a great idea for a movie in itself - a politician creates his own sex-and-drugs scandal in order to push forward policies that are controversial!  It could be a pretty cool movie, on the level of a Bulworth or some such thing.  Think about it, Hollywood!

And that is one of the biggest criticisms I have of Charlie Wilson’s War.  It is very Hollywood.  So many details are glossed over.  Julia Roberts exists only because she is a hot chick with a marquee name.  This issue is a complex one - the Russians can’t know (for sure) that it is the Americans who are arming the mujahadeen, because this could tip off a real American-Russian war.  So Hanks has to get Russian-made weapons from Israel, ship them to Pakistan, at which point they can be handed over to the Afghanis such that they can fight.  In the meantime, tensions between Israel and both Pakistan and Afghanistan are escalating, and the CIA is training the mujahadeen.  (We don’t see Osama Bin Laden here - thank God, it would have been just too heavy-handed.)  When the movie is over, it all seems so simple.  Perhaps that’s the idea.  For the US to do the right thing, all it would really take is one congressman with an agenda and the tenacity to see it through.  So we are then to assume that there is not one congressman in Washington today who has the fortitude or the balls to do something about Rwanda, or Darfur, or what have you?  That may well be the point of this movie.  But it’s pretty devoid of substance.

The end of the movie is a celebration of American ingenuity and the capacity of one man to change the world.  However, it is also a cautionary tale of what happens when you change the world and then just up and leave.  I think we all know what happened with the freedom fighters in Afghanistan.  They became the Taliban, they became Al Quaeda, and they used their CIA training to attack the United States.  The movie assumes we know this, and I guess we do.  And this is the only moment in the movie that has the ring of relevance today.  I would have loved to delve more into the slow germination of the anti-US sentiment that was going on with these people at the same time that they were being armed and trained by the US.  The collision between high-minded, idealistic US foreign policy, and the inept implementation of that policy that results in the hatred spewed toward America throughout the world.  But Charlie Wilson’s War is more content to show Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman bantering.  Which is funny, and entertaining, but it really isn’t enough to make this movie great.  (Although I will say this - as far as movies about Afghanistan go, this one is miles above Rambo III.)

When Arnold Schwarzennegger ran for governor of California, it was a complete media circus.  Stuff that would ordinarily have been completely ignored was blown up to an international level by the media.  Mary Carey, a porn star, was also running for governor.  How many of us would have known that if not for Arnold.  And the sound bites!  Oh, God, the sound bites!  The idea that a guy can get elected based on closing every speech with lines from his movies?  “I’ll be back”.  OK…back to where?  From what?  What does that have to do with this election?  What’s happening?  “Hasta La Vista, Gray Davis”.  OK, at least that makes a little sense.  Poor Gray Davis though.  Here was a guy who got tossed in this special recall election, blamed for a lot of things that were his fault, and still others that were most assuredly not.  This is the tone of the Arnold movie.  And it’s true - Davis took more than his fair share of criticism, and lost to a guy who spouted catch-phrases and platitudes.  It’d be like losing an election to a corporate logo.  Can you imagine losing your job to Tony The Tiger, or Chester the Cheetah, or the Pillsbury doughboy?  This is actually what happened in California.

 Running With Arnold traces Schwarzennegger’s origins, from a young buy growing up in Australia and becoming obsessed with body-building, all the way to his landslide victory in the California gubernatorial election.  Most of the stuff in the middle we already know.  Remember Hercules in New York?  And Conan the Barbarian, and True Lies, and of course The Terminator?  Even if you don’t, there is a lot of film footage that has virtually nothing to do with the film.  The main point of the movie, it seems, is to paint Arnold as an incredibly power-hungry individual, driven to the point of obsession to be the absolute best and biggest he can be.  (Biggest, both literally and figuratively.)  Even as a young boy in Austria, he wanted to be president of the United States, because it was the Most Powerful Man In The World position.  He was never satisfied, always wanted more, even after winning five straight Mr. Olympia titles.  Even after conquering Hollywood and becoming the most bankable star in the world.  And now, even after becoming governor of the fifth-largest economy in the world.  Now, he is trying to get the constitution amended so that he can run for president!

The movie seems to be fairly anti-Arnold.  It’s narrated by Alec Baldwin, and constantly makes “is this man really qualified for the job?” statements.  They seem to suggest that this limitless ambition on his part is a sign of egomania and that it should somehow preclude him from doing things like changing the constitution of the United States!  But I say, more power to him!  Who ever becomes president, prime minister, governor, an elected official in any capacity, without having a larger-than average ego?  And although I thought Arnold’s victory was the end of the world when it took place - he was installed into the position by the same Republican crap-machine that managed to get Bush elected, with an eye toward helping get Bush re-elected.  He had some very shady ties with Ken Lay and the top guys at Enron.  And he ran on nothing but slogans!  It must have been the apocalypse!  But then something happened.

 Somehow, somewhere along the way, Schwarzennegger took a sharp turn to the left.  And distanced himself from the Bush Republicans as much as anyone ever has - stem cells!  The idea that stem cell research should be outlawed while abortions remain legal is asinine, and Arnold understood that.  He had some good advice on this one.  And he decided to forge ahead with stem cell research in California.  Then, he takes a hard-line stance on the environment.  HARD-line.  Cutting California’s air pollution by 50%.  Taking serious measures to copmletely cut California’s dependence on foreign oil.  All of a sudden, this guy is doing the right thing.  Time and again.  So…what happened?  Did he use that Republican BS machine to get elected, wait an appropriate two years and then start doing whatever the hell he wanted to do?  God, I sure hope so.  And was Gray Davis really that put-upon, come to think of it?  I somehow get the feeling that had Arnold been governor in those days of the rolling blackouts and power shortages in California, that he would have done something.  He wouldn’t have cared at all that he was in bed with Ken Lay.  You’re screwing with my state, we’re done.  Cut all ties.  Which is, sadly, the only way these days in the U.S. to be a good politician.  Stroke the right folks until you get where you want to be, then break away, completely.  I hope he gets the amendments he wants.  I hope this man has a chance to run for president once Barack Obama has served his eight years.  Because although he isn’t perfect, and he’s kind of sleazy and slippery, once he gets in there, he will actually listen to good advice and act on it.  Which is more than you can say for most politicians.

John C. Reilly is a serious comedic talent.  Normally relegated to the Will Ferrell backburner in movies like Talladega Nights, he has been given a chance to star and to shine in Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story.  And shine he does.  Reilly is easily the best part of this movie, with his understated performance meshing perfectly with the surprisingly understated movie.  As far as parodies go, the people who make all those Epic Movies and Date Movies and Meet The Spartans could take notes from flicks like this one.  Understatement is often far funnier than garish, over-the-top gross-out parody.  There are some terrific lines in Walk Hard, lines like “I’m chopped in half pretty bad here”, which would probably NOT be considered understated were we not inundated with the likes of Scary Movie Eleven and Epic Movie.

 The thing about Walk Hard is that it works on only one real level.  And that is, if you have already seen Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash biopic with Joaquin Phoenix.  If you missed that one, you will miss a lot of the hunour in Walk Hard.  The father’s constant refrain of “the wrong kid died”, the numerous occasions where sinks get destroyed, and the tumultuous relationships Dewey Cox has with various women.  And there are other references the movie makes which only the hardcore music-history and music-DVD fan would understand.  A Brian Wilson moment where Dewey is clearly losing his mind after too much acid, and asks for a twelve-thousand voice choir of Benedictine monks, or some such thing.  A Bob Dylan moment, which is a direct parody of a press conference Dylan gave in 1965 after going electric at Newport.  (That entire press conference, by the way, is available on a DVD called “Dylan Speaks”, and is a must for any Bob Dylan fanatic.)  But these are references the regular public wouldn’t get. 

The stuff they would understand is stuff about Elvis and Buddy Holly and the Beatles.  I think it is safe to assume that the general public, if they are even in passing familiar with this music, know that Elvis was the King, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and the Beatles went to India for spiritual guidance from the Maharishi.   But that’s about all there is for the casual observer, which might help to explain why this movie didn’t find a larger audience upon it’s release.  Oh, it did OK, but it is superior in many ways to those Will Ferrell movies that do gigantic bank every time they are released.  Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Elf…Walk Hard is better than all of these, but just sadly inaccessible to many people.  The one thing though, I think, that everyone would be able to agree on is that the songs are terrific.  Every song sounding exactly like the era which it is meant to parody, every one hilarious and smart.  That might be the best way to determine if you will like this movie.  Listen to the soundtrack, and if it amuses you, so too will the film.