Seeking the Truth and Other Cock and Bull Stories

With Ron Howard’s movie version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code coming out in a month, I want to offer some thoughts on the book.

First, everyone should read Mark Bertrand on The Da Vinci Code. I agree with most of what Mark, as well as most of what the Salon article he references, say about Dan Brown’s novel. Basically, Mark dismisses Brown as a terrible writer, while the Salon article assumes that he’s a terrible writer and then dismisses him based on the bogus history purported as truth within The Da Vinci Code. All of this stuff is great. Me, I enjoyed the first half of the book and then simply finished it because I felt like I had to. I admit that I felt some tinges of guilt as I was reading it. Even though I reacted with anger that such typical and trite stuff could be so popular, I still kind of liked it. But don’t tell anyone.

The problem is that people tend to dismiss Brown very quickly, in a huff of deserved intellectual highbrowness. Yes, he’s a hack author who basically passed off some very suspect “history” as fictionalized truth. But The Da Vinci Code is also one of the bestselling books of all time. I have gotten emails from Christian groups describing how people have "lost their faiths" over this book, and that we, as Christians, need to know how to combat it or how to minister to people who have had their faiths shaken. My own mother-in-law, who was visiting while I was reading it, wondered why I would read such a blasphemous book. I guess she thought I should have better things to do with my time. While it's easy to dismiss these kinds of responses very quickly, as well, I'm not sure that we should dismiss either of them.

Yes, it's true that Brown is not a great writer. The book is engaging in the way that a silly action movie is engaging (and full of the same number of holes, too). One page chapters are a sure sign that an author is trying to create a false sense of suspense, after all. All of that contributes to its popularity, surely. But what do we do with a book that is so popular because of its false religious/historical suppositions? How do we engage a novel and a culture that is enthralled with the novel? We can’t just dismiss it, because this means that we dismiss the public as a bunch of gullible idiots who are “going to hell” by virtue of their own gullibility. The argument would be something like, “if someone is going to lose their faith over The Da Vinci Code, that person didn’t have real faith in the first place.” There’s something to that argument, sure, but we can’t let it rest there, either. All of these religious refutations aren’t quite the right track either, because why bother reading “history” from either side, when the people involved clearly have such agendas?

Will I go see the movie? You bet. I can’t wait, in fact. I think it will be good, and that’s enough for me to go see a movie no matter how blasphemous it is. Am I a “good Christian” for doing so? Maybe not. But at least I’m “seeking the truth,” as the tag line to the film claims I should do. Hah! That gets me every time I see it. Seek the truth by, well, not believing this movie is truth.

I haven’t rated a book here before, but why not, just so I can compare the book with the movie?

Grade for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: 4 (silly but engaging)

Transcribing Mamet's Oleanna

I like David Mamet. If there is one director/screenwriter who is best at the snappy dialogue, it’s Mamet. House of Games (1987) and Heist (2001) are two of my favorite examples of my favorite genre—the confidence game or the heist. I consider the two kind of interchangeable, after all, even though one is the other but the other isn’t necessarily the one. Yeah, it’s confusing. Think rectangle and square…

I taught an Introduction to Drama class for sophomore university students a few years ago, and Mamet’s Oleanna was included in our text book. Since my reasoning that semester was to only teach things I had never read, I included it on the syllabus, and my students had a hard time with it. Everything the professor did that was “wrong” was so subtle that my students couldn’t see it.

The movie version loses that subtlely. Because we generally watch movies in a single sitting, we watch the three acts of Mamet’s Oleanna (1992) one right after the other, and the professor’s “badness” really shines through. Even though we may not pay attention to what he does in the first act, when the student brings it up in the second, it’s blatant that, yes, he committed those wrong actions.

Most of you are lost, I know. This film is not well-known, and for good reason, I think. Mamet was attempting something different here: to film a play as a movie. A movie with only two speaking characters. And no music. And have the actors act like they were acting in a play.

But a play is not the same medium as a movie, and simply changing a few camera angles doesn’t make for a good movie. It’s tedious and, well, boring. The dialogue is typical Mamet fare, but we’re forced to listen to a professor who speaks like your boring college English professor; you know, the one who used all of those big words without explaining them, the one whose convoluted sentences required diagramming to understand them, the one who could never get to a point because he said he wasn’t trying to preach but to make you think. Damn that guy, right?

Damn straight. And here he is again. In the play, I respond to it because I can slow down and read it. In his movie incarnation, the professor becomes sometimes incomprehensible, and his incomprehensibility is purposeful, I think, to demonstrate the student’s perceptions of him.

But wait, did you say there were only two speaking characters? Yep, a teacher and a student. It’s weird. Let’s just say that the teacher tries to “help” the student and the student then vies for power. The three acts are basically the three versions of who holds power in the student/teacher relationship. That part is really compelling, too.

The bad part is that the girl is left holding the cards at the end. Sure, the teacher can overpower her, but she wins in the end. She claims she just wants understanding, but that’s what he wanted, too, right? It’s all a vie for power between groups who have it and groups who do not.

Wow. This blog entry has failed, I know. It failed because I’m rambling, but also because I’m rambling about a provocative movie that most of you have not seen. Where I want to go off discussing the film, I’m forced to step back and try to explain what happens in it, and that just ruins it.

Grade for Oleanna: 5

Naturally Bad Santa Kills Thirty in the Bad Lands

Terrence Malick doesn’t make movies very often, and until 1998’s The Thin Red Line, he had not made one since the 1970s. No wonder that I didn’t really know who was until then. He now has four movies to his credit: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005).

The Thin Red Line was impressive: its scale was remarkable, the characters were interesting and engaging, and the photography was vivid and teeming with life. The only problem was that those things don’t necessarily make for a good movie. I have to actually enjoy movies to call them good, and The Thin Red Line wasn’t enjoyable. Sure, its technical work was some of the best I had ever seen, but the movie was just a bit too sprawling—it needed a lot of editing to make it into a good, coherent film.

So I had never really sought out Malick’s other films until I noticed Badlands in the library. Knowing that my wife was going out with her cousins on Friday night, I grabbed it. For those of you who know my wife, you know that it’s better to keep these movies from her. Trust me.

Now I am a Malick fan. This one had all of the beautiful technical details of The Thin Red Line without the lack of editing. It included all of the beautiful scenery and photography, but it wasn’t overdone like in his newer film. Here, it’s all set to serve the story of these two lovers, played wonderfully by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Those two actors are so good that they made me believe that these characters would actually do the terrible and crazy things that they do in the film. Few actors could have done that.

Badlands made me reassess Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), too. Notice that in my review of Stone’s films above, I didn’t mention Natural Born Killers as one of his masterpieces, and that fact is that Killers suffers from its overdone style. While it attempts something interesting, the style of the film eventually overpowers its own story and leaves the movie and its viewers a bit, well, empty. I’m sure its defenders would say that this is the point, but all stone achieves is a satire on our fascination with criminals, and I don’t see the point of that when Malick had already done it in Badlands.

These two films—Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994)—share a similar plot but with different ends. Natural Born Killers is there to glorify and make us love the characters while undermining their glory at every turn. In other words, its purpose is to make us question our own love of violence. And it does it in a sick and playful way that I think works against its own theory. Badlands, however, isn’t content to make fun of its characters. Where Natural Born Killers’s psychology within the film remains on the level of “violence is cool, so it’s cool to be a killer,” Badlands takes us inside its characters and explains how they could actually do the things they do. Some things are left up to mystery, but Martin Sheen does what he has to, not what he wants to. Woody Harrelson is humorous as a killer, while Sheen is tortured.

It's a big difference, one that makes Badlands a remarkable movie.

Grade for Badlands: 9

Bad Santa, Good Movie

Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is hilarious. I don’t think I have laughed so hard at a film since the third time I watched Raising Arizona, and it’s no coincidence that the Coen brothers produced this movie.

I want to stop right there, but I can’t. Let me tell you two things: first, I used to teach at Prairie View A&M University, and my students there loved this movie and couldn’t believe that I had never heard of it. Second, my wife tells me that I make inappropriate jokes and laugh at inappropriate things.

Those two facts probably tell you why I found Bad Santa so funny. First, I didn’t know anything about the film, and second, I share the inappropriate humor of eighteen-year-old freshmen.

Billy Bob Thornton is the bad Santa, and he is such an amazing actor that his comedy appears completely believable. Whereas another actor may have hammed this film up, Thornton plays it like he is a character from Monster’s Ball. So I watch him curse at eight-year-olds and stumble around drunk staring at women's behinds, and I crack up. It’s so preposterous, yet so believable coming from Thornton. I must have laughed a million times just hearing Thornton say “What the f*** do you want?” or some variation to a five-year-old. It’s just hilarious. I laugh just thinking about it.

But that’s where this movie’s goodness ends and its badness begins. The other actors are terrible: Bernie Mac, who I generally like, has a bit part, and he serves no purpose in the film. I think he's only there becuase he's cool. John Ritter’s role is more important and funnier, but he only appears in half of the film (I think he died during the filming, God rest his soul). The actor who played the elf is actually pretty good, but his character’s actions are completely unbelievable, which brings me to the plot of Bad Santa.

The plot is, well, stupid. Every part of it makes no sense: a drunk bum who can crack uncrackable safes? A Santa and elf who have robbed stores for seven years in a row? Has no one caught on to their scheme? The ending is completely preposterous, as well. Such things wouldn’t happen.

The bottom line, I guess, is that Bad Santa is not a good movie. It’s funny, sure. Man, is it funny. (“What the f*** happened to you?” Hah!) But it’s only funny if you like inappropriate humor incorporating vulgarity, sex, and little kids, not particularly in that order, thank goodness. And I guess I enjoy those things…

Grade for Bad Santa: 6

From Nixon to the Fourth of July

 
From Nixon to the Fourth of July

If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I have been trying to go through the back-catalogue of important contemporary filmmakers, and today I will briefly discuss Oliver Stone. His oeuvre is impressive: Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Talk Radio, JFK, The Doors, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, Comandante, Alexander, and the much anticipated first non-documentary film about 9/11, World Trade Center.

He has made some great films—Platoon, JFK, and Wall Street—but he has also made some real shite—U-Turn, Alexander. This weekend I watched two of his films that I had never seen before: Born on the Fourth of July and Nixon. And they’re both good. It may be strange to compare these two films or to review them together, but they share a common theme that runs through most of Stone’s movies: communism is good and government conspiracies abound. Yes, they really are the same theme, for most of the government conspiracies involve communism in some form, especially Cuba. JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Nixon all involve Cuban/American conspiracies, although the idea is just hinted at in Born on the Fourth of July.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Stone’s documentary Comandante is actually a glowing portrait of Fidel Castro. Part of Stone’s film-making mission is to make American government look bad (especially Republicans) and to make Cuba look good. Nevermind that he never actually takes us to Cuba: the point is that we know its there and our government has used it in a myriad of ways, from patsys to excuses for war.

I’m not criticizing Stone for making movies with disagreeable politics. I’m no neo-con myself, and I sympathize with nearly all of Stone’s sentiments (stopping way short of praising Castro, of course). But political statements and movies don’t always mesh. That’s the problem with Born on the Fourth of July, which was a big deal when it came out. The simple fact is that it’s not that great of a movie (I hope you're getting used to me stating my opinions as facts). It’s well-done, but it’s too heavy-handed. The first half is really good, but then the movie descends into a simple argument against the Vietnam War. If it had remained a movie about a vet’s ability to cope with the war, I would have been much more receptive. Making the main character into a hero makes it much too simple.

Even though Nixon is the lesser-known film, it’s the better of the two. Stone isn’t content to bash Nixon. He gives him his due, I think, and he uses the Nixon tapes as a way to flesh out what happened with Watergate. Some of it is conjecture, sure, but conjecture can make a good movie—just see JFK. Nixon is a complicated figure whose childhood and family relationships all play a role in his descent. Stone doesn’t merely argue that Nixon got a bad rap, either. The film indicates that Presidents or all people in positions of power get embroiled in intriguing situations that we, the public, would probably be better off not knowing about. And that kind of message makes for a decent movie. The editing gets confusing and annoying at times, and we can see the style of Natural Born Killers coming through, which brings the film down. Overall, though, this is the better movie.

Grade for Born on the Fourth of July: 7
Grade for Nixon: 7.5
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