Odyssey Three: When Surfer Dudes Boldly Go…

In his 2014 Oscar speech, Matthew McConaughey told us his hero was “himself, in ten years’ time.” Everyone thought he was a narcissistic jackass. Until INTERSTELLAR, when he travels to the future through a wrinkle in time and meets – himself!

Standing lofty on the shoulders of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and CONTACT, INTERSTELLAR is writer-director Christopher Nolan‘s modern masterpiece. A journey as much into the mind as into the farthest reaches of spacetime; a pondering of purpose, a savaging of the senses, an epic odyssey, urgent, terrifying, thrilling and intense; soundless space, boundless ideas, binary code in gravitational beams, a tesseract in a bookshelf, and the glittering organ from 2001…

As Earth dies, astronauts follow three beacons through a wormhole, seeking new habitable worlds, seeking the pioneers who went before them, and, led by the World’s Greatest Surfer Dude, seeking the Ultimate Swell, brah.

Written by Nolan and brother Jonathan, INTERSTELLAR is ultimately about salvation, but like all Nolan films, it is not salvation in the prosaic Hollywood sense, endorsed by the Gutless MPAA. For Nolan’s idea of salvation, we must journey through a glass darkly…

The most intelligent entity in the Universe,
and a Supercomputer named TARS.

McConaughey (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) is Cooper, engineer, ex-Shuttle pilot, loving father and begrudging farmer. In a lightspeed first act we meet his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), named after Murphy’s Law (who claims there is a “poltergeist” in her room communicating via Morse and gravity beams), his grounded son (Timothée Chalamet) and sad father-in-law (John Lithgow). We learn of Earth’s planetwide crop blight and Professor Brand’s (Michael Caine) theory:

“We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.”

We follow Cooper and his astronaut team (Wes Bentley, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi) into a wormhole near Saturn, created by entities known simply as “They,” following beacons sending back pings from 10 years prior. Habitable worlds? Signals from dead astronauts? All Cooper knows is, the time dilation of this journey will rend from him the life he knows and all those he loves; in essence, all that he is trying to save will be lost anyway…

McConaughey in a role that – ahem – rockets him to another stratosphere of acting, exemplified in one of the most searing scenes of his career, as he drives away from home for the final time, his face a mask of desolation, tears edging his eyes; his daughter having cursed him for leaving her, his heart lost, his world broken. On top of all that, he forgot his surfboard.

A bravura jump cut to the launch of Endurance. We are not cavemen anymore (you know, like people from the 1950s) – we don’t need to see Cooper arriving, suiting up, entering the craft, flicking switches… Nolan’s ingenious filmmaking efficiency shines through in every frame of this epic adventure quest. When we see exteriors of the craft, it is mainly from one truncated angle, sluicing through space or atmosphere; when we see docking maneuvers, we see only the clamps that latch onto the main ship. These funny little props could have been constructed in some corner of a studio set for $13.75 – we never see any other angles, but they convey what needs to be conveyed – either they lock or they don’t, creating the impetus for the next scene.

And I love that the spacecraft is called – Endurance! Tough gig, tough name. We have come to accept ridiculously platitudinous spacecraft names (Discovery, Explorer, Endeavor, Challenger, Intrepid, et al), yet none describe what a space journey of this magnitude truly is.

On Cooper’s team, Doyle (Bentley), last seen in THE HUNGER GAMES sporting a beard that cried, “Take me roughly from behind”; now with fully grown bush that cries, “Bearcub seeking daddy.”

Brand (Hathaway, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES), with lips too big for her eyes and eyes too big for her face, and a pageboy hairdo funnier than Wes Bentley’s beard in THE HUNGER GAMES; orating a scientific soliloquy on “love” and how it compels her to follow the beacon that belonged to her lover… Wait, the fate of the Earth depends on this chick’s itchy loins? Luckily, Cooper throws a bucket of water over her.

Romilly (Gyasi, CLOUD ATLAS), the team physicist, who utters the film’s most devastating line. When Cooper and Brand descend to a planet near a black hole to find a beacon, Romilly warns them that each minute spent on the surface is seven years of Earth time, due to time dilation. (It reminds us of Nolan’s own INCEPTION, where the deeper the dream level, the longer each minute drags to eternity.) Tragedy strikes on the planet (because they encounter mountain-sized tidal waves – perfectly feasible on a planet so close to a gravitational monster – and, as mentioned earlier, here’s Cooper without his longboard), and when they claw their way back to the Endurance, they ask a slightly gray Romilly how long they were gone:

“Twenty-three years.”

The world spun, my heart fell into my shoes. Endurance. Now we had a movie!…

Laughing/weeping inconsolably, Cooper watches 23 years of backlogged messages from his growing kids, as they slowly lose the will to communicate with him. Many critics call Nolan cold-hearted. It may be because he can pull plot stunts like this and then sit back impassively and watch his characters suffer their agonies, but I look at it the other way – if you can watch these characters impassively, you are ice, not Nolan. His powerful human relationships are all the more poignant because we feel every bladed nanometer of their losses.

This time dilation plot point is the grim difference between INTERSTELLAR and every science fiction movie ever made. It gives weight to relativity – the crushing obstacle to Mankind’s travel plans. Our lifespans are not long enough. We cannot travel to even our closest star (Proxima Centauri, merely four light years away, with no known habitable planets), let alone even communicate with our closest galaxy (Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away). The round trip for a light-speed message to Andromeda is five million years… Cities, civilizations, planets will birth and die in the interim. That is the rationale in the plot for the wormhole, and probably what many may consider the wormhole in the plot – if it weren’t for this wormhole, there would be zero hope of attaining another planet in one surfer dude’s lifetime, yet this wormhole throbs as a blatant deus ex machina…

It’s all about relativity. (Yup, that’s why McConaughey meets his relative – himself.) INTERSTELLAR is where Einstein’s relativity, Sagan’s terraforming and Hawking’s event horizon converge. What I like about Nolan’s films is that, like master filmmaker Woody Allen, he doesn’t take us for idiots, and no one in his movie is an idiot either. All the principals are scientists! Let me say that again: all the principals are scientists. And they’re not B-characters, played off as dweeby comic relief (although McConaughey always has a notebook and a pen protruding from his breast pocket, because, uh, that’s how dweeby scientists dress, right?), rather they are the drivers of civilization’s forward momentum. There are no military drogues to argue with over examine-or-kill, no politicians to red-tape progress, no civilians giving the army orders to shoot at Godzilla, no Annoying Kids. These scientists are fully formed, empathetic characters. INTERSTELLAR comes at the same time Stephen Hawking is being honored with the biopic, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING. (Think about it: even Tony Stark is an engineer, Bruce Banner is a geneticist, Barry Allen is a forensic expert…) Synergy for a new movie trope: scientist as hero.

Cooper’s daughter understands Morse code and physics, without having to explain why; one whole wall of her bedroom is stacked with books. I love it! No astronaut gives dopey exposition dialogue to other astronauts that should already know that information. Matter of fact, the first act is a little off-putting, as we are not accustomed to such smart characters in a tentpole movie.

Everyone speaks “universally” – of Mankind as a species, of the world’s fate, of generation-spanning solutions for humanity. People just don’t talk that way. (Let’s hope they start.) We humans are not wired to think past our own eyeblink lifetimes; the frailty of our minds reflects our bodies trapped in finite mass and function. As one character observes, “Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier” meaning thinking beyond your individual comfort, to the longterm welfare of the species.

Nolan presumes our general knowledge of spacefaring dialect in 2014, and doesn’t insult us with baby explanations of time dilation (a black hole’s mass creating extreme gravitation which affects even time itself, slowing it down), or terraforming. [See POFFY SEZ: Leggo my Eggo.] And there is minimal didactic talk about wormholes and event horizons. That doesn’t mean INTERSTELLAR is carved from ignorant fluff: CalTech physicist Kip Thorne (friend to Sagan and Hawking) is employed as consultant and exec producer to keep the physics honest.

And lo, INTERSTELLAR produces the most authentic black hole ever committed to screen, a startling void surrounded by a luminous accretion disk. It’s ALL theoretical speculation, even with the mathematics to support it, so the striking visuals for this and the spherical wormhole refracting star fields are anyone’s guess, yet Nolan and his effects team render visually what is hardly comprehensible even intellectually.

All we need to know is that Einstein was right all along when he said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Oh, and he was also right about all that physics gobbledegook as well…

“Open the pod bay doors, TARS.”

Cooper’s team have another member, a homage to 2001 in myriad ways – an artificial intelligence computer named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin), an oblong monolith that speaks like HAL and walks like Gumby. Programmable for variable levels of Honesty (90%), Humor (75%), Sarcasm, etc., he can also assume various shapes to fulfill deus ex machina plot points. Even his demise is played like HAL’s sacrifice in 2010: ODYSSEY TWO (presumably with his Equanimity setting on 100%, as he goes without any complaints or metaphysical rap like “Will I dream?”). We imbue him with the same inexplicable screen-love we grant all anthropomorphized inanimate objects. He is Wilson, he is Hobbes, he is Number 5, and yes, he is even HAL. And Gumby.

“Now we’re just here to be memories for our kids.”

Cooper’s kids as adults are Casey Affleck (with a DUCK DYNASTY beard) and Jessica Chastain (ZERO DARK THIRTY) with enough angular thinness to slice bread. I know the future is short on food, but eat something, honey! She returns to her bookcases to crack the code for the film’s magnificent time-loop/poltergeist payoffs. With the aid of Topher Grace (desperately miscast as a fellow scientist), she tries to convince her brother to abandon the dying family farm. And to get her a sandwich.

Nolan makes two excellent counter-intuitive casting choices, specifically to throw the audience. Michael Caine is one of those choices (as old Dr. Brand), who cajoles Cooper and his team into the wild black yonder. We’ve grown accustomed to Caine playing the lovable lump comic relief, but watch carefully how he cloaks his agenda in the palliating Dylan Thomas verses, “Do not go gently into that good night…” The other surprise casting appearance is for the same purpose.

Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer bashes us over the head, then kicks us in the liver when we’re down.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is like THE GODFATHER of its genre. Untouchable. Undoubtedly, it is a movie for the ages, but no one dares unseat it as the cosmic yardstick by which all other space movies are measured. INTERSTELLAR unseats 2001. I said it. Deal with it. It’s not “better” or “more eternal” but unlike recent contenders (CONTACT, MOON, GRAVITY), it can be held up as a new yardstick. It entertains, terrifies, saddens, inspires, educates, intrigues; its production values are cosmic, its design celestial, its performances stellar; it moves us to ponder, to grieve, to examine our humanity in the farscape of eternity; and it makes a helluva lot more sense than that art film with the Monolith that nobody understood unless they were half-baked… McConaughey looks up from his new introspective ethos, “Did someone say ‘half-baked’?” He’s always been about the time dilation. Was anyone paying attention? “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man: I get older, they stay the same age…”

Glittering organ crescendo. Cut. Hall reverb out.

END

To Live and Die in Hicksville.

Sex in a small town. And more sex. And more sex…

In 1951 Anarene, Texas, there’s not much to do except be an angst-ridden teen and feel up chicks in the dark of the old movie theater. But small town life is crawling to a close, and the teens in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, like the town of Anarene itself, are thrown into the world with their naïveté on stun and their hormones on kill.

The bad economy (isn’t it always?) has forced the local movie theater to close. Soon there will be a last picture show. And the dull meaningless void beckons. The teens are antsy, drunk, irresponsible; the adults, worn out, cynical, devoid of dreams.

From a novel by Larry McMurtry, Peter Bogdanovich co-writes and directs this frank, forward tale of a small community fragmenting as the old guard is replaced with teen beat. With the death of the town’s tacit head, Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), the townsfolk and teens who regarded him a stabilizing force are suddenly rudderless.

Duane (volatile Jeff Bridges) and Sonny (soulful Timothy Bottoms) are best friends, high school graduates gawping at the threshold of life without a clue. Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) is the teen tease every boy lusts after – she’s Duane’s girl, but has no qualms in cozying up to a rich college boy to further her prospects.

Shepherd plays Jacy with a callousness that prompted the invention of the c-word; using sex academically, as a weapon. She accepts an invitation by Randy Quaid (so young he looks like little brother Dennis) to a pool party only to get closer to the rich boy; on this same night, Duane gives her a watch bought with six months savings, which she callously takes off – along with her clothes – and dives naked into the pool for the rich boy. Rich boy tells her “Come see me when you’re not a virgin,” so she deflowers herself dutifully with Duane (who adopts the studly strut – until he realizes she was only prepping herself for the richie).

Meanwhile, MILF Ruth (Cloris Leachman) cozies up to teen Sonny while her husband Coach Popper is at school coaching Sonny’s basketball team. Back when Cloris Leachman was only in her 40s, she was surprisingly svelte and sexy, yet it wasn’t from her cardboard emotionlessness or pointy bra – it was her sexual forthrightness, openly seducing Sonny with a frankness that we don’t see in modern American cinema.

When Jacy eventually elopes with Sonny she doesn’t allow him to touch her in the car on the way to their honeymoon; as with all her relations it is purely academic, simply so she wouldn’t be an old maid in a small town. When they are caught and she is forced away from him, it is not the usual tearful rending of two lovers; she gives him an ambivalent look, gets into another car and doesn’t look back as it drives off.

Then – Clu Gulager! Renowned C-actor and bane of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, boyfriend to Jacy’s mother (Ellen Burstyn, also looking young and MILF-y), seducing Jacy on a pool table, who acquiesces with nary a movement.

No such thing as foreplay in this town, which is a refreshing change from all those mid-Americana teen movies where kids spend endless hours necking necking necking. Yet there is also dearth of emotion. Bogdanovich is intent on showing us how clinical, uncomfortable and embarrassing sex is, almost an unnatural act with its participants autonomously going through motions without knowing why.

And on the opposite side of the life-creating act, there is death. Tragedy must necessarily dog a town on the threshold of change. Or that does this much shtupping. And Bogdanovich pours out the tragedy in equal amounts.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is the reality that happens after the cameras stop rolling on any given episode of HAPPY DAYS.

END

Heroes for a Loser Class.

If you’ve never done hard drugs before, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM will make sure you don’t. If you’ve puked your guts out over your bed, stayed unwashed for a month straight, and sold your mother’s TV for a fix, well, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is like last Wednesday.

To say Darren Aronofsky‘s unflinching mind-bender is an intense cinematic experience is to sell it short – it is a scooping out of your intestines and playing with them before trying to squeeze them back into your torso, all while you’re conscious.

Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly are two young lovers (Harry and Marion) hooked on heroin and dreaming big, nebulous dreams of saving their drug-dealing money to buy a business. Marlon Wayans is their junkie friend, Tyrone, along for the pipe dream.

Ellen Burstyn is Harry’s pill-popping mother, Sara, enamored with an afternoon television game show enough to hallucinate herself into it.

Aronofsky shines his glaring light not just on the emptiness and false hope of heroin addiction, but on the seemingly innocuous addictions of prescription drugs. While Harry, Marion and Tyrone run the gamut of heroin’s follies (street killings, their “savings” dwindling to nothing while promising themselves they’ll make it back with One Big Score, being driven to prostitution, gangrene from needle overuse), Sara becomes obsessed with losing weight via pills to fit into a red dress for an imagined TV appearance – by the time the dress fits her skeletal frame, nothing really matters anymore.

Burstyn’s bravura performance admitting truths about the emptiness of old peoples’ lives is scary. It is astounding how deep she goes.

When Harry discovers his mum is popping weight pills, he lectures her, “You don’t wanna turn into a dope fiend.” Of course, this hypocrisy falls on deaf ears.

Aronofsky is an emotive film-maker. Everything that comes at us from the screen is geared towards stirring our innards, presented in the most jarring manner possible. Yet Aronofsky does not try to shock with the actual taking of the drugs, like TRAINSPOTTING; instead, whenever his characters fix, it is purveyed in a few crash cuts of iconic visuals. Makes it all the more effective, focusing on the consequences.

With composer Clint Mansell and the Kronos Quartet evoking darkness and disturbia, REQUIEM touches nerves we thought we’d wiped from our memory in young rock bands and college parties and street denizens spouting all the same inanities, like listening to people in jail holding cells, all saying the same things so many times (“What are you in for?” “It wasn’t my fault”) that it becomes physically nauseous.

In most movies when down-and-out characters proclaim they’re going to Buy That Store or Make That Score, it serves the story arc to achieve their goals – in REQUIEM, the characters are doomed to fail. That’s the way junkies are built – all the platitudes in the world cannot change their nature. As a reformed alcoholic once told me: “Every alcoholic is between drinks.” Which doesn’t bode well for the inherent nature of humanity. Two years after telling me this, she proved it.

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is about the incorrigible ones, those who self-fulfill the prophesy of their weakness. It is a noxious paean to losers the world over. And a horrifying warning to the rest of us who used to get sucked in to driving these losers around to “a friend’s place” and waiting for one hour in the car while they just went in “for two minutes to pick up something.”

Mr Garrison from SOUTH PARK put it best: “Drugs are baiyd. M-kay.”

END

Hi. We’re the Ku Bush Klan. And we’re gonna FUCK EVERYONE!

Putting the W in WMD.

First came RAIN MAN. Then FORREST GUMP. Now, in a long line of congenital idiots, comes W.

But wait, Bushies! Do not dismiss this movie as leftie revisionist conspiracy. Director Oliver Stone‘s W. is a fair and balanced representation of America’s 43rd president, George Walker Bush. Insert joke: “which means it shows him as the imbecile he is.”

No, W. is too fair. Not because the movie portrays George W Bush (affectionately known as “W,” redneckingly pronounced, “Dubya”) as intelligent, lucid or principled – on the contrary, he’s portrayed as the enabled, amoral, irreconcilably ignorant rich brat he’s always been; it is “too fair” because it clobbers us with one small aspect of W’s psyche – his relationship with “Poppy” (father, George Herbert Walker Bush), the 41st president – instead of examining the adverse affects that W’s obsessing over his father’s approbation brought down on planet Earth.

Oliver Stone (writer/director of 1991’s JFK and 1995’s NIXON) seems to miss all potential target audiences: Bushies will hate W. for the irrational reason that anything remotely disparaging toward their sheltered idiot-child “should” be hated, and the other 75% of America will find no red meat to indict the doofus C-student they so stupidly elected twice.

Movie opens after 9/11, in the Oval Egg, with the Bush cabinet creating a vivid catchphrase for the group of countries ideologically opposed to America, settling on Axis of Evil, the president flippantly throwing Iran, Iraq and North Korea into the pot – even though none of those countries acted in concert against the U.S., unlike the WWII Axis countries.

This should reveal something to America: there IS no Axis of Evil; merely a concoction of a few dappled minds (including, but not limited to, the fear-swillers: David Frum, Michael Gerson, Dick Cheney, W) who portrayed merely religious contingents as whole countries.

Hate those dangerous Arab WMD’s…

The primary players in this Greek tragedy are introduced, with varying success: Josh Brolin is the eponymous W, channeling the spirit of doofus admirably (with the light at the right angle, the resemblance is scary); Bruce McGill makes a reasonable George Tenet (CIA); Toby Jones is a slimmer version of walking rectum, Karl Rove; Jeffrey Wright leans hard on his General Colin Powell; Richard Dreyfuss cannot possibly plumb the depths of the slime-pit Dick Cheney crawled from, but tries hard (it is common knowledge Cheney runs the Ku Bush Klan, but movie marginalizes his involvement); Dennis Boutsikaris is not frog-faced enough to play Wolfowitz; I always thought Barbara Bush was a 1920 storeroom mannequin in disrepair – apparently not, as Ellen Burstyn gives her voice here; Scott Glenn is way too noble to be the ludicrous Donald Rumsfeld; Ioan Gruffudd brings the British accent (and a sensible sweater) for his Prime Minister Tony Blair; and Thandie Newton does Condoleeza Rice like a caricature audition for Saturday Night Live.

Movie follows three segments of W.’s life (a pre-pol in college in 1966, pre-pres, and post-9/11), skipping back and forth as often as W skipped out of day jobs; at one point, W simply walks off an oil-rig mid-shift – a directionless, privileged quitter, with not a shred of responsibility. Bush Snr (James Cromwell as Poppy) pulls strings to get W out of jail, land him summer jobs, slide him into Harvard, yet W keeps disappointing with his vacuous and impulsive irresponsibility. It would be the same traits he would bring to the stolen presidency in the dark winter of 2000, along with his “gut” decision-making (rather than informed leadership), to earn him the lowest favorability rating of any president in America’s history. Imagine how disappointed his father is NOW…

The performances are uneven – Brolin, Wright, Cromwell, Dreyfuss pulling the weight of all the others who seem miscast – but Stone’s direction is stellar. Written by Stanley Weiser, these characters exist in a vacuum; a disconnect between backstage and the world stage.

Richard Dreyfuss remarked on THE VIEW: “It leaves out how terrified people were of their own president.”

The film won’t have historical legs because the issues that defined the W presidency are given short shrift or glaringly omitted. Authorizing torture is mentioned once, over breakfast – there is no Abu Ghraib, no Guantanamo, no John Yoo; that scene (like other allusions and brief intimations), is more an inside wink to audiences well-versed in that travesty of justice, who will nod their heads and say to themselves: “Ah! Look at the mess he got into with that one!” There is no contention over the 2000 or 2004 elections, no dirty Swift Boating campaign, no massage gaffes at the G8 Summit – we just don’t see these events.

As for the lie of WMD in Iraq (this is not contention any more – it’s in all the literature), Frank Rich, Vincent Bugliosi, Bob Woodward and countless others have researched and concluded that W knew he was lying when selling the “mushroom cloud” to America as justification to invade. Whereas this lie should be a defining moment in any George W. Bush character study (What kind of a man would do this?), we get the barest rationalization that W is going after Saddam to finish what his father started. “My dream is to see peace break out in the Middle East! …UN resolution or not – we’re going to war!” Again, the real reasons are not slammed up against the real outcomes of this ignoble, ignorant, unlawful decision.

W’s life seems free of consequences, when we all know that isn’t true, and – worse – the consequences affecting planet Earth are ignored.

Bush had asked the two men [Rumsfeld and Bremer] point-blank who was in charge of finding the WMD… Bremer indicated it was Rumsfeld’s responsibility. Rumsfeld said Bremer was in charge. [Bush] wanted someone in charge… Since the CIA had insisted Iraq had WMD, the agency could go find the weapons. So finally, two and a half months into the war, the administration was going to give some focus to the hunt.
— “State Of Denial,” Bob Woodward.

Powell protests over America’s ideology going astray over a few terrorists, “We blew it before 9/11, because people weren’t doing their jobs right,” attacking Iraq is “not New World Order – that’s World Gone Mad.” (Powell’s character is prescient screenwriting from Weiser, as this movie was completed before the actual Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama in 2008). Cheney clarifies the admin’s position: It’s about energy resources. And – “there is NO exit strategy.”

As sinister as Cheney’s “no exit strategy” sounds, there is no mention of the chilling callousness of having no “infrastructure” strategy. Forget “empire-building” – what these meatheads called their grandiose intrusive blunder – even running water and electricity in war zones was out of the Bushies’ purview. Further, no mention is made of W running on the ticket of “no empire-building” then immediately using the excuse of 9/11 to go empire-building (which was in reality a euphemism for “energy-controlling”).

A movie about the world’s biggest meathead – with so little meat.

Not even an accurate biopic, W. is an insular, one-dimensional fairytale of a cowboy moron’s rise to power, from an alcoholic tail-chaser to the bumbling, born-again dumbest president of the United States. Like W, the movie talks a lot but says nothing.

Key events in W’s life are condensed, making the movie one big montage: W’s alcoholism, subsequent conversion to born again soberness, early political life; his wife (Elizabeth Banks – way too sexy to play W’s man-boy Laura); his decision not to be out-christianed or out-Texaned on the campaign trail; coached by Karl Rove…

And here we shake our heads in outrage again: when Rove coaches W, a picture is presented of a Rain Man cramming for an exam, not someone educating himself, studying documents and assessing intelligent solutions to national issues; we never see W reading – a salient point. Rove would coach W to counter attacks from the hostile press or public, not through knowledge, but memorization. Exactly like the 2008 Repub VP nominee, Sarah Palin. Sure, Dems and Repubs all work this way, but with this particular pol, his duplicity and ignorance became so transparently obvious through his public actions and responses. Still, Brolin never quite grasps W’s condescension. (The real W explains political strategy to the press as if speaking to five-year-olds because that’s how political processes are explained to HIM.)

Rove coins the public catchcry of W “being someone they’d like to have a beer with” – but didn’t W stop drinking long before he ran? Which made even that phrase just another lie…

W’s embarrassing and laughable malapropisms and dysfunctional grammar are slotted in offhandedly – not disparagingly – almost as comic relief. Movie shies away from WHY he is such an abysmal communicator – his low intelligence, hence, zero credentials to run a “nookuler” superpower. Grandest irony is that he married a librarian! (Holding stark, opposing political views to W, we can only presume Laura is a weak, unprincipled gold-digger for marrying him.)

Stone emulates Marty Scorcese in juxtaposing disturbing visuals over jovial soundtrack (Adventures of Robin Hood under W’s cavalier decision to run for politics, Yellow Rose of Texas under war scenes, The Battle Hymn of the Republic scoring the Mission Accomplished moment), yet this ain’t no laughing matter. When Rumsfeld says of Afghanistan “It’s not a war – it’s an exercise”; when W quotes St. Augustine to rationalize “Just” War; when W as Texas governor never pardoned anyone on Death Row, presiding over 152 executions (the highest number in modern history); when the Real World consequences of the Middle East conflict have displaced/ destroyed/ debilitated over 2 million people, it becomes too serious to satire, only proving what a soulless, murderous hypocrite this supposed “christian” is.

In the movie, W gives up pie as “sacrifice for the war” (we don’t see the 2004 public dinner where he tastelessly jokes about his inability to find WMD – bet the dead soldiers’ families were laffing their asses off); film doesn’t show him “giving up golf” because he “shouldn’t be enjoying himself while young men and women are dying” (then filmed on a golf course after making this statement); film doesn’t show W’s statement about bin Laden “dead or alive” (six months later: “I don’t know where he is… I just don’t spend that much time on him”)…

W is half a movie, like PASSION OF THE CHRIST or STAR WARS EPISODE III, where the film-makers took it for granted the world knew the story, so did not bother to develop it cogently. The movie poses questions and pretends no answers – when even a precocious cucumber like me, only mildly interested in politics, KNOWS the real-world answers. Mention is made of Carter installing solar panels on the Shite House roof (before “green” was an admirable fad), yet no talk of Reagan immediately ripping down the panels when he took office (That’s Our Republican Hypocrite!); W’s cabinet issues a media blackout on soldier caskets returning from war – but we don’t see press secretary Tony Snow lying “There is no media blackout”; W is told Saddam didn’t have WMD but pretended to – but the movie posits wrong reasons for Saddam’s pretense. (The real reason is simple: with a dangerous neighbor like Iran, Iraq didn’t want to publicly announce it was defenseless, so Saddam had to cooperate with the U.S., letting inspectors swarm his military facilities, while snickering over his shoulder to Iran as if he was duping the U.S. The U.S., as usual, too blunt-headed to discern this subtlety.)

The last question posed to W at a press conference, “What were your mistakes?” culls the Obligatory Hollywood Introspective Moment from Brolin, rather than the weak-chested, blank-eyed, weasel-sniveling backpedaling and stuttering that the real life W met that question with. Maybe Stone is trying to be ironic or subtle, because his film is LOADED with W’s mistakes, but because they are mentioned so fleetingly with no follow-through, the audience can’t see them as mistakes.

But that “mistake” scene highlights the film’s overall “mistake”: casting Josh Brolin. Y’see, Brolin is cool. Always will be. And he’s playing a guy who is just an intrinsic fuckin’ douchebag. And Brolin just can’t quite make it to that deep a level of douchebaggery… No one is that good an actor.

Movie ends abruptly during a dream sequence where W is waiting for a fly ball that is not coming down, and we see in Brolin’s eyes the most prominent unanswered question of the W era: “Where do we go from here?” Either that, or “What the hell am I doing here?” Or “How the hell did I get here?” Most likely, “I wonder if I’ll have time for a bike ride before breakfast tomorrow?”

With W’s lame duckidency limping to a shameful, disgraced end, we can only be thankful that the real Axis of Evil – George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove – will soon be disbanded.

END

Doubtin’ The Fountain.

Raving beauty, rabid camera angling and startlingly somber performances almost save this movie from its own convoluted and ambitious storyline spiraling down the artsy-fartsy toilet.

The trailers for THE FOUNTAIN were extremely well done and conveyed the hero (Hugh Jackman) as traveling through time, pursuing his true love across the ages (Rachel Weisz) – then I watched the movie… and I lost track of which flash-forward was which time-backward in the first flash-sideways… so I read Roger Ebert’s review for a smidgen of probable comprehension and apparently, the movie is about one time-frame with two other “fantasies” piggybacking off the reality of the main story….

Er… then, uh…. Sigh.

If my description confuses you – wait till you see the movie.

Written by Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel, and directed by Aronofsky, the “realistic” thread is the story of a scientist (Jackman) trying desperately to discover a cure for the necrotic effects of a brain tumor on his wife (Weisz). While she dies daily before his eyes, he loses his own health and sleep experimenting on apes.

Weisz keeps a diary concerning some mythical Fountain of Youth, which Jackman’s other characters pursue in other realities. I’m sure that the metaphors of the “imaginary” realities are profound, but it will require more than one viewing and about ten viewings of the “Making Of” reel to untangle those metaphors. The three “realities” are linked by the two main protagonists appearing as various characters in those realities; Jackman as a conquistador, Weisz as a Spanish queen, Jackman as a shaved-headed recluse in a space-bubble – wha-? I’m telling ya, this thing is WEIRD with a capital D.

It would be easy to dismiss THE FOUNTAIN as a failure, but then we are haunted by the fact that in misunderstanding Aronofsky’s vision or depth, we’ll be called ersatz reviewers and never be invited to another SPIDER-MAN screening.

Reviewer James Berardinelli hits the perfect note in describing the film thusly: “There’s little doubt this is an ambitious effort, but one can argue that Aronofsky’s vision has exceeded his ability to bring it to the screen within the allotted running time.”

This cucumber concurs, Mr. Berardinelli.

END