Dopey Popey.

Another fine mess the Catholic Church has gotten us into!

Tom Hanks returns in ANGELS & DEMONS as Robert Langdon, atheist symbologist from THE DA VINCI CODE (2006), a little trimmer, a little wiser, a little more action man and a little less Vitruvian Man.

The Pope has just died and the archbishops next in line to be God’s Bottom Bitch have been kidnapped by the Illuminati, who threaten Rome with implosion by anti-matter if they don’t stop being irrational religious fanatics – “science obliterating religion.”

Burn Bitch Burn

Well, Rome can’t stop being irrational religious fanatics, so the Vatican shamelessly calls on Robert Langdon again despite that business with The Da Vinci Code where it covered up the truth about Jesus’s ancestors after he unearthed it. Undermining his authority wasn’t enough, now the Vatican wants him to save its unholy ass, enlisting his aid to decipher the location of the anti-matter bomb, for which the Illuminati have left clues that only a cunning atheist symbologist could follow and there’s none of them aroun– oh, dash it all! What are the odds?!!

Through his staggering knowledge of religious symbology, arcane scripture, medieval history and a fair share of gobbledegook that writer Dan Brown has made up off the top of his head, Langdon crisscrosses Rome following the trail of murdered archbishops, before locating the bomb and letting Obiwan Kenobi dispose of it.

And just like it did when Langdon uncovered the Da Vinci Code, the Church then issues another press release undermining Langdon’s participation (and bribing him with a precious Galileo text to keep his mouth shut), lying that it was The Victim in an unwarranted attack by extremists – not one of the news reports mentioning The Illuminati, or the fact that the Illuminati’s vendetta with the Catholic Church is blowback for the Church unrepentantly torturing and killing Illuminati in medieval times. Langdon outlines quite clearly how the Church resisted the Illuminati “illuminating” the Church’s superstitions with rationality.

And then Christians have the temerity to question how “God” can allow bad things to happen. Keep in mind these people use a CRUCIFIXION as their symbol of peace and love.

You can be persuaded to belief but you can’t be persuaded to knowledge.
— Anonymous.

Armin Mueller-Stahl is an archbishop with designs on popehood; Stellan Skarsgård is head of Vatican security, with such a big puss on his face he might as well have “Red Herring” tattooed on his forehead; Pierfrancesco Favino is a cool Euro detective who just screams Nice Guy; composer Hans Zimmer evokes the right level of religious scariness with his dark, cloudy, ominous score; and Ayelet Zurer is the hot chick scientist responsible for creating the anti-matter (or should that be “un-creating” it?), a plot point which brings in “science” only as a whipping boy.

I’ve grown incensed at the way “science” is spoken of in movies that advocate ignorance (i.e. “religious” movies). Though the film’s producers pat themselves on the behind for inserting a scientific theorem as a plot point, the Illuminati – the scientific contingent – are portrayed as one-dimensional villains and everyone in the film is allowed to refer to “science” as if it’s just another religion. Langdon loves beating down people’s misconceptions on Christmas and Easter and other superstitions, yet he is mum when it comes to people regarding science as if it is competing with Christianity for “believers.”

Ewan McGregor is the Pope’s consiglieri, a post called the “camerlengo” (which comes down to us from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, meaning “murderous religious zealot” or “Jedi”). He gives an impassioned speech demeaning “their new god, Science,” like it is an alternative religion trying to replace Christianity’s myth-based religion with its own myths. MacGregor’s priest is meant to be a misguided ignorant character – trouble is, in their own ignorance, Christians in the audience AGREE WITH HIM.

Science is not a religion, science is not a deity, Science is a METHODOLOGY based on EVIDENCE; it is an EVER-MORPHING PROCESS, constantly replacing outmoded theories or facts with newer ones based on EXPERIMENT and RESEARCH.

I’m not sure Dan Brown and the people who made this film and the people who watch this film are discerning exactly who the villain is here…

Langdon clearly explains: “The Church forced the scientists out because they were trying to bring intelligence to the Church… 1668, the Church kidnapped four Illuminati scientists and branded each of them on the chest with the symbol of the cross, to purge them of their sins, and executed them; threw their bodies out onto the street as a warning to stop questioning the Church on scientific matters. They radicalized them; the purga created a darker, more violent Illuminati bent on retribution.”

Not only does the Church definitively prove it is against the methodology of science, it terrorizes those who bring that intelligent methodology to it. The Church is not just the villain in this movie, but the villain to civilization itself.

Be careful – these are men of god.
— Assassin, to Langdon.

Langdon dodges the question of “belief in God” – because he’s Tom Hanks, America’s sweetheart. When Obiwan asks Langdon point blank, “Do you believe in the Dark Side of The Force (i.e. God),” Langdon suddenly gets unnecessarily eloquent, “My mind tells me I will never understand God… and my heart tells me that I’m not meant to. Faith is a gift that I have yet to receive.” A simple no would do, Forrest.

I appreciate the fact that Robert Langdon is smart, but someone call 1-800-EMOTION and get this guy a charisma transplant. Or at least buy him a few vodkas. Hanks gets this close to toppling Nicolas Cage for the Mourning Face of the Year Award. And he is such a wealth of knowledge, we just want to slap him. Usually I welcome powerful minds (as in V FOR VENDETTA), but Dan Brown’s writing under Ron Howard‘s direction has a knack for annoying even the scrappiest Crossword fanatic. Things lead to other things that have so little to do with the former things that we just throw up our hands on the convoluted plot and simply hope the hot chick will get her knockers out. As much chance of that as an angel dancing on the head of a lightsaber.

END

Resistance is Futile.

When one of the world’s largest international banks is discovered brokering covert arms deals with China and the Middle East… well, who’s really surprised these days?

In THE INTERNATIONAL, it seems everyone is. Louis Salinger (perpetually unshaven Clive Owen) and Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts, sporting the most atrocious American accent since Gerard Depardieu) are international police who must have just arrived from Bizarro World not to realize that corruption at the highest levels is the jugular upon which the honest world suckles. The movie SYRIANA conveyed terrifyingly and succinctly how Corruption makes the world turn: “Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.”

So in the grand scheme of bringing justice to those who operate above the law, THE INTERNATIONAL is a no-win. Clive Owen is the nominal Good Guy (an obsessive, disheveled, loose cannon working for Interpol) and Ulrich Thomsen is the nominal Bad Guy, a slick, Euro CEO for the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), whose amorality is tempered by his being a family man.

To eradicate the cancer that is Big Corp would take a lot more than one man taking down one other man.

As flying camera pans languidly caress the modern architecture of Berlin, Italy, France and New York, Salinger and Whitman run around a lot looking for people to blame.

It’s all very covert and one big fat coverup, but there is a major breakthrough when Salinger and Whitman discover the IBBC has a hired hitman on the payroll – whom they call The Consultant – who has just assassinated an Italian dignitary. Again with the incredulity: Imagine that?! A bank using an assassin for their hits! Well, who else would they use – a baker?

And when the four IBBC owners/conspirators meet online and decide, “We must cancel our contract with the Consultant,” we know they’re not talking paper trails.

Upon cornering The Consultant (Brian F. O’Byrne) in the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, there is a great fun shootout in the Guggenheim’s rotunda, with Salinger and the Consultant having to go Marvel Team-Up to escape the IBBC’s hitmen for the hitman.

Armin Mueller-Stahl is one of the four IBBC “conspirators” who tells Salinger he cannot stop the bank within his idealized scheme of justice, he must go outside the law – but if Salinger does that, the very justice he fights for will be moot. “Everyone is involved.” The govts of China, France, Russia, all so interconnected to world trade that the corrupt IBBC is – as they say in 2009 America – “too big to fail.”

The Italian dignitary (Luca Barbareschi) gives the most profound speech in this movie, much like the “corruption” speech from SYRIANA:”It’s about control… the IBBC is a bank, their objective is not to control the conflict, it’s to control the debt that the conflict produces. The real value of a conflict is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything. This is the very essence of the banking industry – to make us all… slaves to debt.”

Perfectly encapsulating the W. administration and how they sold the United States to China. China controls America’s debt. Ergo, China controls America.

(I found it amusing that the DVD cover shows a big bloody gash across Owen’s face, with the rest of it airbrushed. I mean, why not leave his face as rugged as it usually is; it would lend more cred to the gash, rather than looking like a cheap stain on a Teen Model With No Pores.)

Directed by Tom Twyker, written by Eric Singer (Hey! Isn’t he the drummer with KISS?), THE INTERNATIONAL has no resolution. It is unsatisfying because the criminal in this case – the IBBC and its CEOs – are too arterially networked into the world markets to be affected. When one of the conspirators is killed, the IBBC simply grows another Hydra head and goes on to post record profits…

In the real world, we know that nothing like this story ever happens… it’s much worse.

END

Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your mascara on…

Mission To Farce.

MISSION TO MARS stands every bit as tall as CAPRICORN ONE in the Ignorant Space Movie category, exhibiting so many misdemeanors, misrepresentations, misapplied physics laws, mistaken facts, missteps, mysterious logic, and misapprehension of spacefaring dialect that one wonders which second-grader took three months off school to helm it.

Brian de Palma – the dark force behind 1983’s SCARFACE – appends his name as director. But I think he’s lying.

Starring Don Cheadle as the Crazy Black Guy, Gary Sinise (wearing more makeup than David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour), Tim Robbins as The Tragic Apple-Pie Hero, Connie Nielsen as The Chick and Jerry O’Connell as The Fat Kid from STAND BY ME.

Poffy roving redundantly.

From its first space scenes, the film trumpets its ignorance, showing a remote rover aiding a manned mission on Mars. Audiences are so conditioned to robot helpers in space cinema (since Will Robinson and Dr. Smith leaned so heavily on theirs for comedic side-kickery in LOST IN SPACE of the 60s) that they do not realize this particular rover’s superfluity. Rovers are reconnoiter craft for unmanned missions – consequently, this 26-million-dollar redundancy would not exist in a space agency whose motto became “faster, cheaper, better” to appease the ignorant, impatient public and the even more ignorant, penny-pinching government. (That only two of these three aspects can exist simultaneously is another issue altogether. That is, you can have faster and cheaper, but it won’t be better; cheaper and better, but it won’t be delivered faster, etc.)

And from there, it’s downhill fast.

MISSION TO MARS is so machine-gun riddled with one discrepancy and fallacy after the next, that absolutely zero enjoyment can be gleaned from the storyline, performances or the space or planet backdrop effects.

Crazy Black Guy gets stranded on Mars. Blatantly throwing logic, budget, orbital mechanics and NASA protocol to the pigs, Apple-Pie, The Chick, Fat Kid and Ziggy are sent to rescue him. Another “launch window” to Mars is years hence, yet these American Pie Heroes – working on the fact that everyone in the film and the audience regard the launch window as a McGuffin – go anyway. Launching outside a “launch window” is not a “dramatic element that illustrates dedication and Team Spirit” – it is an impossibility. Without gravity assists (by flybys of Venus and Earth), a spacecraft already constructed for such a journey would have to be retrofitted to house inordinate amounts of additional propellant, construction exigencies alone putting the mission outside budget and payload constraints… No one can just declare their heroic intentions and have everything ready to go by Sunday – which is basically how Ziggy achieves his launch; to save someone openly considered dispensable by the space agency (who train scores of astronauts for the same missions, for just such eventualities), who may be a corpse anyway, considering all radio contact with him was lost.

You lost me at Houston, We Have a Problem.

NASA would more likely launch a mission to retrieve its ROVER, which has more intelligence in its antenna than all the astronauts combined.

Our rescuers discover a giant Face on Mars – that old 70’s superstition from the Viking 1 probe photo. In a space age where we have already disproved its existence, the film-makers opt to pander to conspiracy theorists, pseudo-scientists, astrologers and imbeciles who shun scientific evidence like the mystical “evil” they have been inculcated to believe is tangible. In a technological era that possesses extraterrestrial soft-landing spacecraft (Mars Pathfinder, launched 1996) and high-altitude surveillance (Mars Global Surveyor, launched 1996), given the fictional year of this movie (supposedly 2020), even if we need to regard The Face as “real” for the movie’s dramatic purposes, it should have been discovered decades before these astro-nots landed.

Instead, the movie ramps further into idiocy.

Near Mars orbit, the rescuers abandon their exploding ship (more obscene fallacies accompany the ship explosion than can be catalogued here); though, leaving in a dead fall, they still achieve enough orbital velocity to capture a supply module already in orbit. (Again, absolutely no respect is afforded physics laws, as Apple Pie fires up his jets and points directly at the module to catch it – but with the module in a lower orbit, he needs to fire his jets against the direction of his higher orbit to attain that lower orbit.)

Upon impossibly reaching the module, Pie goes flying past it as if he was in an atmosphere, setting up the most heinous crime this movie could commit on the unquestioning minds of its ape-like audience:

With Pie’s MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) out of fuel, Chick, supposedly a trained astronaut, uses the same incorrect directional jet burns and massive overacting to try to save him. Pie tells her, “You can’t catch me with your MMU, honey. Their jets are designed for attitude control, not travel.” Information which probably should have been learned at the Astronaut Academy, dontcha think? After the mathematical impossibility of saving Pie is explained to her like an idiot-child, she stops and – shoots a tether cable at him! Remember that silly thing we learned in grade school called Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”? Taking for granted that Chick has miraculously attained orbital velocity of 28,000 kph, after shooting the tether, she retains her relative position, steady as a rock, in the vacuum of space – breaking one of the most fundamental physics laws, while everything else around her continues to adhere to those same laws! No one told Newton that enough overacting piled on the Third Law would negate its physics.

Speciously landing on Mars, Crazy Black Guy is found (spearing fish and talking to a volleyball named Wilson), whereupon ensue conversations about DNA that only a screenwriter with absolutely no biology knowledge could appreciate. Their super-redundant rover leads them into the Face on Mars, where they encounter a tall alien being wearing a flowing number that would look fabulous on Barbra Streisand.

Of course, helmets – as in all space movies – are completely arbitrary. Who knows why NASA spends so much useless time engineering environment suits when every planet in the universe – as LOST IN SPACE taught us – already has a breathable atmosphere? Before we can even ingest the next twenty stupidities that the movie flings at us like ape-poo, helmets on Mars are eschewed for the purpose of contractually appeasing the pretty movie stars and their agents who insist on verifiable screen time. (How else to prove it if there’s that unfashionable helmet obscuring the star’s $500 hairstyle?)

Barbra shows them a solar system hologram – with all the planets orbiting in the wrong direction (proving that there are idiot screenwriters even on Mars) – and a nifty morphing computer program which she bought from Michael Jackson, showing that Life on Earth was seeded from Life on Mars. Well, that accounts for all those Jerry Springer guests.

Every aspect of the DNA scenes, zero-gee scenes and orbital mechanics scenes is completely blundered from the dialogue to the action to the fallacious physics laws which go in and out of play as the plot requires; spacecraft do not emit vapor trails; sound does not propagate in a vacuum; galaxies don’t look that way in visible light; the atmosphere analyzer on Ziggy’s forearm shows “Nitrogen 56% Oxygen 20% Trace Gasses 1%” – the film-makers are so lazy that they do not even bother to make the numbers add up to 100 percent!

Movie writers always hide behind the pretext that movies are “only entertainment” and should be taken less seriously. Yet what kind of entertainment can be gleaned from a movie with this much blatant disregard for the most basic tenets of reality (such as: Humans Can’t Breath On Mars)? Why should society extol education and learning when this demeaning and insidious disrespect for learning is lauded with heathen funding and absolutely criminal promulgation? If they say they are appealing to “the masses,” how much of an insult is it to regard The Masses as this imbecilic? Unfortunately, there will be many who, being too young or underprivileged to have afforded an opportunity for education in basic physics, will enjoy this film – and thus the dumbing down of a generation acquires its target long before that generation even knows what hit it.

Every scientific fact that mankind has strove so hard to identify is treated like so much dross by the ignoramuses who forged this worthless and useless, deformed, retarded thing they call a movie, that their greatest punishment will be having to see their names attached to it for millennia to come.

END

The Cheesemaker.

Infuriatingly predictable and wholly uninvolving, THE PEACEMAKER finds George Clooney in classic head-waggling mode (as Army Intelligence Officer Devoe – hey! I bought his record, Whip It!) and Nicole Kidman in severe-skirted secretary mode (as White House Liaison, Julia Kelly), saving White America from nuke-thieving Russkies who intend to blow up Manhattan.

A Flowerpot Man and his tight-skirted secretary were unharmed today in an explosion which wiped out two city blocks.

In movies of this ilk, the American Military is omniscient, portrayed as so technologically advanced they can pinpoint license plate numbers half a world away; relishing showing off their spy-satellite capabilities and infiltration devices – yet never putting that technology to use in deterring the theft of nuclear weapons in the first place. They seemingly only use these gadgets to sell your confidential details to lowlife corporate bidders; to conveniently lose your records when you report an identity fraud and to send you garbage-loads of junk mail whenever you purchase a new electronic appliance with your credit card – instead of doing something important like capturing Osama bin Laden. As Devoe says, “Toil Is Stupid.”

Kidman is the token “sexy woman in power,” incessantly battling to be taken seriously in a Man’s World – until man-toy Clooney turns up and cows her with his head-waggling and tacit indications that she might soon be allowed to touch People’s Sexiest Man Alive 1997.

Poffy Devo:
Are We Not Cucumbers?

But they get too busy to get busy, barking orders at everyone within modeling distance, as is the manner of Nuclear Threat movies: walking through office hallways hastily (glass doors and staircases, add extra points), handing off reports, getting reports handed to them, hectoring underlings to get “the President” or “the head of [insert Department]” on the phone, reeling off statistics and information to each other, extras with one line updating them on the crisis situation (oh joy! – one step closer to a SAG card!) – doesn’t anyone in the star’s walking trajectory ever have something that they should actually be doing at the time they’re lining the star’s route being barked at?

Meanwhile, something of world-shaking and head-waggling import is happening – but in Nuclear Threat movies I can never quite scare up the interest to find out what. Ultimately, the Russian plot to blow up the United States grinds to a standstill through the efforts of the poreless Kelly (whose bra is always tantalizingly translucently apparent through her secretariat blouse) and the head-waggling of Devoe (who is air-lifted onto a truck which hangs off a bridge in classic Vehicle-Hanging-Off-Bridge position, leaving him just the right amount of time to Get The Hell Outa There before it falls).

Flowerpot hats off to Devoe, as all the stolen nukes are accounted for – but one! So begins the final idiot act of the movie – congruent with the final idiot act of a desperate terrorist (played by a non-threatening, apathetic Marcel Iures), who has the opportunity to detonate the nuclear device in his backpack at any time – keeping in mind that a bomb that powerful would do the same amount of damage no matter where it blows – yet opts to mill aimlessly through New York streets, presenting himself as a target for military rooftop snipers. Despite Devoe’s imprecations of “Are We Not Men?!” the snipers refuse to take out the Russian, due to curly-haired American kids getting in the way (strange, that’s never stopped them in real life…).

When the movie degenerates to the final chase sequence, Devoe gets to perform the action hero staple of Running Over Car Roofs and Sliding Over Car Hoods like a TV cop – he even gets to knock over a homeless guy with a shopping cart! This movie has everything!

Finally we meet the star of our show – The Bomb – replete with easy-to-read big red digital numbers ticking down (Sesame Street was so proud they dedicated a sock puppet to Devoe), which Julia must defuse. And the big red numbers only give us two minutes to think about how predictable this whole scenario is – as if the film-makers would risk mussing Nicole Kidman’s makeup by having a bomb explode in her face. But wait! – there’s more malarkey: we are told – via Julia’s harried and wholly specious dialogue – that this contraption is a “bomb within a bomb”; that there is a small “normal” bomb that they can detonate which will actually negate the detonation of the “nuclear” bomb, so we can still have our climactic ending (the Pretty Orange Explosion) and yet save civilization! (Can I slap someone now, please? Preferably the writer.)

Diving through a stained-glass window with an explosion at your heels apparently only sustains a few minor scratches to the forehead, no worse than falling off your bike on some soft grass. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful world!”

Let us not forget the pat Hollywood epilogue: Julia does laps in a pool while Devoe appears to make energy-dome innuendo about “whipping it good!” after she emerges. Not that she has any choice in her future bed-partner. As Devoe once sang, “Freedom of choice is what you want / Freedom from choice is what you got.” He is, after all, a New Traditionalist, and one of the Ten Commandments states, “Thou shalt not end a Major American Studio Movie without the heterosexual couple spanking it, to please the slack-jawed masses.”

Fade to hack.

END