Cynical Cinema

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is one of the most unfortunately-named movies in recent memory.  It conveys some sort of sweeping romantic epic that will likely involve intricate costumes and poems read to a lady from over a hedge of some kind.  And, in a way, it actually is.  But it’s an epic love affair between Irishmen and their country.  It’s actually the story of the beginnings of the IRA, as the British government holds Ireland in a grip of terror.  The British soldiers are beating Irish citizens, enforcing apartheid-type laws against the citizens of the country.  And the Irish have had enough.  They form a group to fight back against the British military. 

Cillian Murphy is terrific as Damien O’Donovan, a doctor who gets caught up in the resistance along with his brother Teddy, the de-facto leader of the resistance movement.  Orla Fitzgerald is wonderful as Damien’s love interest, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.  The movie is long - more than two hours - but it has a lot of story to tell.  The Irish resistance finds guns and weapons to drive out the British, but once they start becoming successful, they begin fighting amongst themselves, over political and territorial issues.  The IRA is split into two basic factions, the one that is willing to accept a compromise with the British and become a free state of the British Empire, and the one that will accept nothing less than total freedom from Great Britain.

The tension between the brothers, the warring factions, the passion of the resistance fighters and the palpable love of their country are all themes and moments that are expertly handled by the director, Ken Loach.  As the movie draws to an end, we see the issues that not only divided the IRA at the beginning, but also divided the country itself.  A fascinating and powerful look at the nascent years of one of the most famous (and infamous) fighting forces in the world, as well as the politics that divided Ireland, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an epic, beautifully filmed tale of struggle, triumph and tragedy.

After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff.  And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching.  Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery.  It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life.  The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter.  The Deer Hunter this is not.  Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences.  And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert.  But the rest of the cast is weak at best.

Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall.  Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell.  Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man.  Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.

There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people.  But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure.  Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers.  And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept.  What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power.  It’s too bad.

An intensive, in-depth, and sometimes exhaustive look at the issue of abortion in America, Lake Of Fire is a more than two-and-a-half-hour documentary.  Which is awfully long, but then, it has an awful lot of people to interview and a lot of information to disseminate.  While the film makers clearly make an effort to stay directly in the middle of the issue, and not take one side or another, in the end, it appears as though they favour the pro-choice side a little more.  Which is fine, it seems like  it would be impossible to make a movie like this without having a little bit of your personal opinion come through. 

This is perhaps the most difficult ethical issue of our time in terms of definition.  When does a fertilized egg become human?  No one has an answer.  But this movie fleshes out the arguments on both sides.  One of the most convincing pro-life advocates is an intellectual colleague of Alan Derschowitz named Nat Hentoff.  His argument, however, is fairly contradictory to the rest of the Pro-Life movement.  His suggestion is that if you are against abortion, then that means you must be against the taking of life in all forms.  Which means you must be against war.  And against capital punishment.  The one follows from the other.  And yet, most of the Pro-Life lobby has historically been hypocritical in this respect.  Noam Chomsky appears in the film as well, taking this train of logic one step further.  If there are 15 million actual, live, real children who die in the world every year from preventable diseases, and all it would take is a change in American foreign policy to provide aid to the countries where this is taking place, if you are anti-abortion then you must be pro-increased foreign aid for Africa, Eastern Asia and South America.  But, in this case, the Pro-Lifers have once again been hypocritical.

Most hypocritical of all are the right-wing Christian zealot nutjobs who actually went so far as to kill doctors and staff at abortion clinics in the 1990s.  Driven to furious, frothing outrage by a few preachers who vehemently advocate the defending of life at all costs, these impressionable men were fashioned into basically suicide bombers of intolerance, bomibing clinics and shooting doctors with the expectation that they were giving up their own lives in the service of saving what they believed to be unborn lives.  Classic Christian zealot martyrdom, not too different from today’s jihadists.  And because 99.9% of the pro-life lobby is hardcore Christian, it becomes difficult to separate the issue from the religion.  Although there are a few who set themselves apart from the religious fanatics, like Hentoff, for the most part the zealots become crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier as we know more and more about them.

And there is another problem with lobbying to change public perception about something.  Here is a group of people who believe passionately in the idea that abortion is murder.  An idea that can be reasoned out in a logical, clear and sensible way by people who are not religious.  Like Hentoff, and Derschowitz, and Chomsky.  (Of the three, only Hentoff is pro-life, but all three make very reasonable arguments on both sides.)  But once you start labeling yourself - and the label “pro-life” certainly carries with it the connotation that if you are against them, then you are “pro-death” - and calling on God’s word to back you up, you are leaving yourself open to the possibility that people will ignore you.  After all, the most angry and passionate anti-abortion people are also the same who believe homosexuals should be executed.  And that Harry Potter is immoral.  And how can anyone, anywhere, really take these people seriously?

So, once again, we get religious bigotry clouding a real issue.  And this movie does what it can to get to the heart of the real issue.  Dozens of interviews, with all kinds of interesting (and sometimes scary) people.  Professors, intellectuals, religious leaders (some pro, some con), women having abortions, abortion clinic doctors and nurses.  Victims of the violence and insanity of the evangelical lunatics.  Those lunatics themselves.  Paul Hill, the Fred Phelps of the abortion issue, who preached the “execution [murder]” of abortion clinic doctors, under the pretext that if you killed them, you were doing God’s work.  Which is the really dangerous thing about these people - they believe they speak FOR God.  That only they know what he’s really saying in his little book there.  And they are insane.  Hill among them, who eventually put his ideas into action and murdered two people, while seriously injuring a third.  He was killed by lethal injection in 2003 - a fate that really underscores the sensible philosophies of Chomsky, Derschowitz and Hentoff in this film.

Throughout Lake of Fire, there are graphic and disturbing images of actual abortion procedures.  And their emotional and physical side-effects.  This is not, I repeat, NOT for the squeamish.  We see women being pried open, in full detail.  We see the actual stuff that comes out of the uterus.  We see more than I’m sure any of us ever wanted to see, ever, in our lives.  For any reason.  But this stuff is essential for the essentially neutral tone of the movie.  When the anti-abortion activists claim that the doctors who perform the abortions used to crush the skulls of the babies, but now they sell the heads because it’s more profitable, we need to know that this is an insane thing to say.  We need to know what’s true and what isn’t.  And Lake Of Fire attempts, over a very long running time, to do just that. 

And it does a good job.  Tony Kaye, the director, worked on this film for more than 15 years.  And there has been ample material to film over those fifteen years.  Which means that this is as complete a film document as you will find on the issue, as well-researched as anything you might find, and will stand for years as the definitive movie about abortion.  Whether you’re pro-choice or anti-abortion, this movie will teach you something you didn’t already know, and is worth watching.  If you have a strong constitution.

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.

Sometimes, it takes star power to get people to watch a movie.  And in this case, the star power comes from George Clooney, the man with about the most star power alive.  Also, of course, Don Cheadle, who actually factors far more into Darfur Now.  Cheadle knows just how powerful a movie can be, having of course starred in Hotel Rwanda.  However, Hotel Rwanda, Shake Hands With The Devil, and dozens of other similar movies share something in common.  They all came to the theatres, to DVD, and to the consciousness of the world AFTER the genocide was over.  In Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Germany and Poland and Yugoslavia and Iraq and elsewhere around the world, the world’s attention was drawn to the horrific events after the fact.  Much of the media tried, in certain circumstances, to tell the story.  But people avoid that until they get it in the more-palatable movie form.

Here is yet another time where we, the people of the world, can actually make a difference before it’s all over and a race of people are wiped out.  In Darfur, a small part of Sudan, there is a genocide taking place.  Right now.  It was the subject of a documentary last year called The Devil Came on Horseback, which was a fine look at the problems actually happening in the region.  Darfur Now focusses more on what real people are doing to prevent the extermination of these innocent people.  Cheadle and Clooney do what they can, using their star power, to convince China to stop trading with Sudan, or at least to acknowledge the genocide taking place.  The fact that they are the highest-level delegation to approach Chinese officials on the subject is, as they say themselves in the film, deeply sad.

There is another young man, a college student at UCLA, who with no political experience whatsoever, who manages to pass a state bill in California to prevent any money going to Sudan.  A Darfurian woman who has joined the rebel forces fighting the Janjaweed, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a United Nations humanitarian who actually takes the film makers through his attempts to deliver aid and food to the refugees, and a community leader in a Darfur refugee camp.  These six people are all trying to do what they can in a cause that is lost unless they can make the people at the top of the governments of the world respond in some way. 

And therein lies the problem.  Not only are governments notoriously slow to respond to things like “genocide” - after all, how long did it take the U.S. to go after Saddam Hussein for gassing the Kurds after it happened?  Fifteen years?  And even then, how much did they really care about the genocide?   Darfur Now, in addition to being compelling viewing, is an attempt to mobilize people, create awareness and call attention to one of these situations that is taking place right now.

During the first 15 minutes of The Onion Movie, I laughed about as hard as I have ever laughed at a movie.  I don’t think I’ve had this many laughs since Borat.  Here is one of the biggest and best reasons why:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sQQcrM7A8Q

Steven Seagal, it seems, has learned to laugh at himself.  And the world is a better place.  I, however, am not really happy about it, because it means that my love for Seagal and his movies has to be re-evaluated.  I have always enjoyed the man because he seemed so incapable of laughing at himself.  Now my entire impression of him is shot.  Perhaps - he’s NOT the deadly serious, mystical wisdome spewing jackass he appears to be on screen?  Maybe he…actually understands the ridiculousness of his movies and the cheesiness of the tough-guy lines he spits out?  That’s it.  I’m giving away my copy of Belly Of The Beast.  But boy, did that ever make me laugh.

Anyway, the first fifteen minutes are hilarious.  But after that, the movie begins to lose steam.  The Onion is the best fake-news source on the web (www.theonion.com), and it has always been a very sharp, biting satire of mainstream news.  And the movie itself is just that.  Sharp, and biting.  But it’s also hit-and-miss.  The best bits, like that Seagal trailer, are spread throughout the movie.  There is another great Dungeons and Dragons skit, the Melissa Cherry music videos are as funny as they are hot, and Michael Bolton’s infomercial for “What About The Children” is priceless.  But the entire movie is just a series of sketches and vignettes and fake news stories.  Which has about a fifteen minute shelf-life.  And so the last hour of the movie becomes fairly tedious, and hard to sit through.

But there is enough really good, witty, incisive and politically incorrect stuff in there to keep us going.  The rape party game, “Little Known Racial Stereotypes”, and the story about the Pope condemning three more glands are fantastic.  “This brings the total number of sinful human body parts to eleven”.  The landmine salesman, and the basketball player who blames God for a loss - all priceless.  But it’s like watching an hour and a half of a really great sketch comedy show that was intended to be watched in fifteen minute episodes.  The ending, although there IS an ending, and it DOES wrap things up in a final-episode-of-Seinfeld sort of way, is fairly lame.

 There are also several sketches that don’t really work.  The penis-removal team, the Gil Bates thing - get it?  Gil Bates?  He runs a software company?  But the constant references to Seagal’s upcoming blockbuster movie make the poorly done stuff easier to swallow.  Watch the Onion movie.  Well, watch that trailer (posted above).  Then decide if you want to watch the rest.  Then watch it 15 minutes at a time.

As I wait, with breathless anticipation, for a chance to go see Son of Rambow, I have been forced to make do with regular Rambo in the meantime.  The fourth installment in this moribund franchise came out yesterday, and I begrudgingly rented it, feeling as though it were something of a duty, rather than a pleasure, to watch this re-hashing of the aging Stallone’s one-time moment of glory.  But then, I felt the same about Rocky Balboa, and it was the second-best of the moribund Rocky series.  So pleasant surprises are possible just about anywhere.  Although I hate to call Rambo a pleasant surprise.  In point of fact, Rambo did not surprise me in any way.  Rather, I surprised myself in watching it.  I’ll explain that in a moment.  First, a bit of Rambo history.

When I was a kid, Rambo was more of a punchline than an icon.  You would see someone cutting their sandwich with an unnecessarily large knife, and say “look out, Rambo’s in the kitchen”.  Or some other such clever childish thing.  By the time Rambo III rolled around, even eight-year-olds were making fun of the over-the-top idiocy of the film.  Rambo was in Afghansitan, fighting with the Afghani “freedom fighters” against the Russians.  I put freedom fighters in quotation marks not because these people were not really “freedom fighters” because it is a Rambo buzzword that separates the good guys from the insidiously evil ones.  And he mowed down half the Russian army, muscles bulging, as fifty of them stood on a hill vs. the one guy with the massive machine gun.  This was even more ridiculous than Rambo:  First Blood Part II, where he shot the communist bad guy with the arrow, and the guy exploded.  And even as children, we all understood this.

What gets lost in all this mess is that the first Rambo movie, First Blood, was actually good.  It was actually very good.  Stallone was the vietnam vet, unable to shake the nightmares and the violence that had become a part of his life, and he just wanted to eat a sandwich.  But some small-town backward hick sherrif decided to exert his questionable authority, and the next thing we all knew, everyone was dead.  A very cool, very dark, very gritty film.  But we don’t remember that, for the most part.  We remember the sheer insanity and bonkers mayhem that resulted in those last two abysmal efforts at “movie making”.  Which is why most of the world expected total nonsense and horrible acting and ludicrous pacing and unimaginable explosions with the fourth movie, 20 years after the third became the most expensive movie ever made.  (At the time.)

So I was cringing as I pressed play on the DVD player.  I was cringing through the opening credits.  I was dreading the Rambo cliches and the lousy dialogue and the ridiculous, unnecessary violence and explosions.  But all of a sudden, as the movie began, my opinion started to change.  Rambo is living in the jungles of Thailand - still a damaged man, he catches snakes and sells them for a living.  Yet somehow he can still afford a boat.  Anyway, I know what you’re saying - Vietnam was a long time ago, how can he still be damaged?  Shouldn’t he be over that by now?  But you see, this is Rambo.  He also saw (and caused) horrendous violence in Afghanistan and small-town U.S.A.  He just can’t escape it, and so he becomes a hermit at the beginning of every movie.  But then, of course, something happens to draw him back into the killing game.

In this case, that something is a group of missionaries who are trying to go up-river (it’s always up-river) into Burma (how timely) to deliver medical supplies and medical attention to that impoverished and war-torn country.  They want to rent Rambo and his boat, but he is a wise old soldier, and he knows that they should really not be going up-river.  They will be killed, he knows.  But a sweet, innocent missionary lady named Sarah (Julie Miller from Dexter) convinces him that they have to try, so off they go.  But these missionaries think that he’s John Rambo.  They don’t know that he’s RAMBO.  After he delivers them to their destination, they are of course captured by the crazy-evil Burmese.  And now Rambo is hired, once again, to take a boat up-river.  This time filled with mercenaries, who also don’t know that he’s RAMBO.

But we know he’s RAMBO.  WE have seen the three previous films, or are familiar with this cultural icon.  And it is that knowledge that fills me with anticipation as the crew goes up-river…wait - anticpation?  I find all of a sudden that I am actually anticipating the shunting aside of John Rambo in favour of the emergence of RAMBO!  Not only am I anticipating it eagerly, I am irritated it hasn’t come sooner!  I find myself thinking “when is he going to become RAMBO?” in a very whiny voice inside my head.  All of a sudden, I want ridiculous bloodshed.  I want over-the-top explosions and gigantic machine guns.  Where IS the violence?  Well, I know these mercenaries are loose-cannon and maniac enough to cause some mayhem.  Here we go!  And the violence beings, and the RAMBO emerges, and I am able to revel in the idiocy.

Bodies blasted completely into pieces are de rigeur in this film.  Whether it be by explosions, mines, sniper rifles, or the you-knew-it-had-to-be-there gigantic super-power machine gun, body parts are all over the screen and flying through the air for about half an hour straight.  Explosions which could just as easily have been small ones turn into staggering spectacles of fire and dirt and booming, as the body parts are scattered over many many miles.  It is not enough for Rambo to break a guy’s neck, he must rip his entire throat out with his bare hands.  Yes!  It’s THIS kind of excess that made Rambo II and Rambo III so terrible and so laughable, and as I realized here, so very nostalgic for me!  I found myself cheering for every single Rambo cliche in the book - the shadow that flits past the bad guy just before he dies.  The slow rise of Rambo into view behind the bad guy at the opportune moment, with murder in his eyes, so you KNOW that guy’s gonna buy it next.  And of course, the machine gun that I would assume no single human being could operate alone.

And then there are the nightmares, and the flashbacks.  Just so we don’t forget who John Rambo really is, we get flashbacks - to the previous movies!  Now it is these movies that are giving Rambo himself nightmares, as I am certain they did for many a movie critic in the late 80s.  Scenes from First Blood - “Nothin’ is ovah!”, scenes from the other two, all tormenting this man.  And it is important to know that he is still tormented.  Rambo has never voluntarily, in any of his movies, taken up arms.  He has been forced into a position where he had no choice but to kill everyone he met.  And this movie must fit that mold.  Also, there must be a cause, a noble one, that could be taken up somewhere in the world.  In this case, Burma (or, Myanmar), a horribly violent country with a civil war that has been ongoing for many, many years.  (In fact, bootlegs of this movie were the hottest selling items on the streets in Myanmar until the devastating hurricane that killed thousands.  Now, the hottest selling items are bootlegs of video footage of the hurricane devastation, so people can see what is actually going on, and not the sunny everything’s-OK picture painted by the government.) 

And all of these things add to the greatness of Rambo.  The fun one has when watching.  This is a real country, with a real fight, that really needs help in a big way.  And yet, the people who made Rambo are willing to, on a certain level, trivialize the conflict itself by showing an aging Sylvester Stallone get behind the biggest machine gun in the world and blow the arms and legs and necks off thousands of people.  But they don’t care.  They have a budget, and explosives, and damn it all, they are going to use every single ounce of both!  I am still cheering for the dream sequence, which was absolutely hilarious.  And there are some seriously wicked Rambo-style lines - my personal favourite being “you either live for nothing, or you die for something”.  I think we could all picture Mel Gibson delivering this line in Braveheart, for example, but Stallone?  As Rambo?  LMAO.

Stallone still has what it takes to play John Rambo.  The ability to flex and the inability to articulate.  In the year leading up to the film, he was caught with steroids.  I guess he had to stop taking them, which is why Rambo, for the first time, does not appear shirtless at all in this film.  His arms are still gigantic, and he does flex them a lot, but one would assume that at the age of eighty-four, Stallone’s abs are not what they once were.  So he wisely keeps his shirt on, and we are all the better for it.  And in the end, we are all the better for having seen this movie, knowing that Rambo is still out there, unable to speak his mind but still tortured inside it, unable to persuade people not to fight but still the ultimate fighter.  And the final scene in the movie, which makes it almost inevitable there will be a sequel, is sublimely foolish, powerfully obvious and the cherry on top of this movie.  A movie which is not brilliant by any means, and it probably isn’t even good, but it is Rambo.  John Rambo always finds himself in a situation where he has to do bad to do good.  RAMBO, on the other hand, just has to be bad to be awesome!

“Recount” is an HBO movie that premiered on May 25th on HBO in the states and The Movie Network here in Canada.  Originally, Sydney Pollack was slated to direct the film, but pulled out at the last moment due to an undisclosed illness, which of course was cancer, the same cancer that caught up to him yesterday.  A sad coincidence as this fantastic movie premieres.  This is one of those major TV drama events where a made-for-TV movie actually gets hype and buzz and deserves it.  Well worth checking out.

HBO has just put the movie on TV, a dramatized version of the real events that led up to George Bush being fictitiously elected over Al Gore in 2000.  I recently saw Antonin Scalia, one of the American Supreme Court justices directly responsible for the handing of the election to Bush, saying in an interview “it was eight years ago.  Get over it.”  But America can’t get over it.  They still have that falsely-elected president, who is still screwing things up on a daily basis.  And not in a fun, keystone-cops kind of way.  Screwing things up in a malicious, Mr. Burns sort of way.  Scalia, by the way, is also the Supreme Court justice who believes torture is not an act in violation of the Eighth Amendment, the one dealing with “cruel and unusual punishment”.  His reasoning - although torture, such as waterboarding, IS cruel and unusual, it does not qualify as “punishment”.  You see, people who get tortured are not being punished for anything, since they have not been convicted of anything.  They may well be innocent.  And if they are innocent, then they are not being punished.  A prince of a man, Mr. Scalia.  But I digress.

Anyway, although the politics and questionable behaviour of Antonin Scalia are something about which I could rant for aeons, the man does not figure prominently in Recount.  Rather, the movie is about several other people.  Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Al Gore’s fired-then-rehired campaign advisor.  Warren Christopher (John Hurt), the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who was sent by Gore to supervise the recount.  (Sidebar - Christopher, so far, is the only person portrayed in this film that has objected to his protrayal.  He has not seen it, but he read the transcripts and felt they made him sound way too naive.)  Katherine Harris (Laura Dern), the Florida Republican Secretary of State who exhibited terribly partisan and unethical behaviour during the 2000 election, doing everything she could to hand victory to Bush.  And James Baker (Tom Wilkinson), the Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., who was the chief legal advisor to Bush Jr. in 2000.

Each of those actors gives an examplary performance, especially Spacey, as an idealist who will fight to the end, and Dern as a woman in way over her head with a self-esteem problem and a taste for the spotlight.  Also terrific are Dennis Leary as Michael Whouley, and Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies.  Although we already know the end result of this film, (and for many of us politically interested folk, the entire process), this film still plays like a thriller.  Each moment is more and more tense, as you really get a sense of the machinations behind the scenes.  You get righteously indignant at the Republican troublemakers who tried to delay the re-counting of the votes.  You get furious at the groups who intentionally excluded more than 20,000 voters, most of them African-American, under the false pretext that they had been convicted of a felony.  You pull for the supreme court to render the right decision, and you can get right into it when something goes the right way for a change.  Even though you know for a fact that at the end of the movie the bad guys win and we get eight years of Chaney and Rumsfeld and Rove and Rice and that president guy.

 The only really irritating thing about the movie is the appearance of Bush and Gore themselves.  The two of them appear courtesy of archival footage, which is fine, but then they are shown, always from behind, and played by some stand-in actor.  That gives Recount, if only for those few brief moments, the feel of one of those lame, cheap, re-enactment scenes from a When Animals Attack show, or Unsolved Mysteries.  Aside from that, however, Recount is incredibly brisk, moves along very quickly, and is an absolutely thrilling political true story.  Tour-de-force performances all the way through, and a script that I’m sure just wrote itself.  Catch this one while you can, playing on The Movie Network right now.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

Michael Moore had a short-lived TV show called The Awful Truth a while back, that presented a series of left-leaning half-hour episodes where he used humour and publicity stunts to educate people about some of the world’s ugly truths. Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Is pretty well the antithesis of The Awful Truth. Basically the same thing, only with a heavier focus on humour, more mean-spiritedness, a LOT more profanity, WAY more naked boobs, and it’s slightly right-leaning. The basic premise of the show is that famed magicians Penn Jillette (who has two names) and Teller (who has one) try to uncover the myths and well, the BS behind some of society’s most treasured beliefs. God, I’m trying to type this while re-watching the episode about women’s breasts. It’s called Breast Hysteria and it’s really distracting.

Anyway, Michael Moore’s show was hit-and-miss, because it’s fairly difficult to really hit the mark on social causes in a half hour. And this is similar. It is very hit-and-miss. Like the episode on Wal-Mart. Penn and Teller take on the people who made the movie Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and others who protest against Wal-Mart. Their position on Wal-Mart is that it’s good, not evil, and that people who protest against it are stupid jackasses. But that’s about all they have. They take on some of the ideas people have about Wal-Mart, but they don’t really provide much information to tell them they’re wrong, or to present the other side. They just say they don’t care. Like, Wal-Mart drives small stores out of business in little towns. The movie made the point that if Wal-Mart is prevented from opening in that town, they will open just outside that town, taking the business anyway and denying the town the business, and thereby forcing towns to either accept Wal-Mart or suffer the consequences. Penn and Teller ignore the second part, and just say “who cares? It’s capitalism - just let Wal-Mart into your town!” OK, it’s a good reason to yell and be angry, but it isn’t exactly informative.

Which is about all they do. They take issues or beliefs that people have, hear from both sides, pick a side, and rage against the other side. Which sometimes works. There are quite a few good episodes. The one about the conspiracy behind the weight-loss industry, and how it’s such a massive multi-billion dollar industry that it becomes in their best interests to keep people fat so they can buy into weight-loss programs and diets. And the one about anger management is great too. The BS behind court-ordered anger management, and some particularly hilarious “treatments” for peoples’ anger. And, of course, the breast episode, which I am still watching. So please forgive any spelling mistakes.

Of course, as in many episodes, there are many, many naked boobs. But it’s also very well done, as the guys take on societal stereotypes about breasts and the women who have them. Idiotic ideas about the blasphemy of public breast-feeding, the stupid double standard that says it’s OK for men to go topless and not OK for women, and lots of other stuff. Really - how come men’s nipples are a body part that just happen to be on their chests, whereas women’s are strictly sexual organs that shouldn’t be seen by anybody? It is a pretty silly double standard, when one really thinks about it. And Penn and Teller don’t stop there - they take on the breast cancer lobby in a bit that makes a lot of sense. If lung cancer kills more than twice as many women every year as does breast cancer, how come there are way more movements to reduce breast cancer? In the end, it is because breasts, even in the world of charity and disease fighting, are sexualized. Which means that fighting breast cancer is sexier than fighting lung cancer. And despite the gigantic amount of effort that is made to raise money to fight breast cancer, more of it goes into raising more awareness of the problem than goes into fighting it or finding a cure. In fact, there is no organized effort in the States to find a cause or a cure for breast cancer.

I keep calling them Penn and Teller. But, of course, it’s really just Penn. Teller is the one who doesn’t talk. So Penn narrates and stars in every episode, and Teller just shows up to stand next to the naked models. I wonder what his paycheque is for this? The breast episode is over, so I am able to concentrate better, and this is what I’m thinking. Now it’s a gross episode about colon cleansing, detoxing, and the parasites that supposedly live in your body. There’s a vole necropsy going on, and it’s gross. I want to watch something else now. OK, I’m going back to the breast episode. Penn and Teller: Bullshit! The Complete Fifth Season comes out on DVD today, May 20th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment.