Cynical Cinema

The Walker is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.  It knows exactly where it’s going, exactly how to get there, and exactly how long it’s going to take.  But that’s kind of like saying the same of a Michael Bolton album.  Sure, he made the exact album he wanted to make, but why in God’s name would anyone want to listen?  And in the same way, I can’t understand why people would want to watch The Walker.  Well, the cast in impressive.  Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Bacall and Kristen Scott Thomas.  Which might get some people to rent this film.  But I can’t see it getting them to like it once they have done so.

Harrelson plays a gay man in Washington who doesn’t seem to do much except hang out with the society ladies and play canasta, gossiping about everything tawdry that goes on around him.  He is referred to as a “walker”, a man who walks around with rich women.  I don’t know if these people actually exist, or are referred to as such, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Harrelson has this fake southern accent which is disconcerting at best, obnoxious at worst.  He comes off as a gossipy cross between Truman Capote and Scarlett O’Hara, which is not a character I thought we ever needed to see.  His friendship with these women is a shallow one, based almost entirely on surface appearances.  His life outside his gossip-sewing circle is also shallow and surface-deep.  This is what we learn in the first half hour.

And that first half hour, as with the rest of the film, is meticulously planned out and executed.  Soon, Harrelson is driving Kristen Scott Thomas to visit the man with whom she is having an extra-marital affair.  When she finds that man murdered, a vague plot is exposed.  A vague plot, involving vague motives, featuring vague power players in Washington with a vague denouement and a vague resolution.  Shadowy figures pass through the scene, old friends turn out not to really be friends, and Harrelson takes a vague stand based on some vague morals and some vague motivations, which seems to basically involve him being vaguely questioned by vaguely politically motivated cops.

You get the sense that this film is vague?  Well, it is.  Nothing concrete ever really happens, certainly nothing exciting happens, and although the narrative is pretty straightforward, the movie barely scratches the surface of what surely is meant to be a very complex political murder plot.  There is just not enough here to interest people, and on top of that, you have Woody Harrelson playing the central role, one which is just plain irritating.  Skip The Walker.

CSI used to be an awesome show. Bad guys and DNA and blood spatter and all kinds of cool stuff. And it’s still all about that. But it isn’t that good any more. The Seventh Season of CSI shows they have run out of ideas. Two-part episodes where nothing really worthy of two parts takes place, gimmick episodes like the one where the murder victims sit up and talk to each other in the morgue, sensational episodes like the one where the Clockwork Orange kids terrorize Las Vegas. It just isn’t the same any more. But at least it isn’t boring, like CSI New York. And, best of all, it doesn’t involve David Caruso, like CSI Miami. It does, however, involve cool actors like Sean Patrick Flannery, washed-up former “stars” like Danny Bonaduce, washed-up current “stars”, like Kevin Federline, and the always-smokin’-hot Marg Helgenberger.

There are several reasons to watch CSI, the main reason being that if you watch enough of it, you will know how to get away with murders. Now, CSI Season Seven comes with a special feature that will help you learn how to do so without all that pesky episode-watching. Las Vegas: The Real Crime Solvers takes us behind the scene with real-life CSIs, who of course have a much smaller budget and far fewer resources than the TV show. Well, less than the CSIs on the TV show. Come to think of it, the TV show probably has a budget, like, two thousand times that of the actual CSI departments in police stations around the country. Think about how many crimes could be solved if those resources actually went to the police!

Well, the original, (and still best), CSI seems to have maybe run it’s course. So perhaps those resources can be appropriated for a greater cause. Like CSI: Reality, or some such thing. But for now, those resources are being used to distribute DVDs like this one, CSI Season 7, which is worth renting or buying for these three reasons: First, the episodes have deliciously clever names. Like “Fannysmackin’”, and “Loco Motives”. Secondly, Marg Helgenberger is still smokin’ hot. (Although for that, you can always rent the made-for-TV Tommyknockers or the Steven Seagal classic Fire Down Below.) And thirdly, you get to see Kevin Federline punched in the junk. CSI: Complete Seventh Season comes out today, courtesy of Alliance Films.

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.)