Up

Is a trip to the movie theater even worth your consideration these days?  We went to Up, knowing nothing about it except that it is made by Pixar and follows two wonderful movies in Ratatouille and Wall-E.  We forked over $16 on a product we trusted.

Big mistake.

Up is a boring mess. It was so bad that it made both of us want to leave early, which is quite a difficult thing to do.  It’s chief problem is randomness piled on top of its two main topics, aging and grief.  Earth to Pixar: random cartoon action and grief over the death of a loved one don’t mix all that well.

The story is about an old man who, as a little boy, dreamed of romantic adventures in an undiscovered location known as Paradise Falls.  The boy meets a girl with the same dream, and soon we are whisked into a powerful montage three minutes into the movie wherein the boy and girl get married, grow old together, and then the girl (elderly in the end) dies.  This is the most profound and effective part of the movie.  You may stop watching after this point.

The old man is evicted from his longtime house, but instead of leaving he decides to rig thousands of helium-filled balloons to his house to make the house fly.  This is the part of the movie where we enter into fantasyland — the old man can fly wherever he wants, because this is a cartoon — but fantasyland in this movie is quite barren.  Of course he makes it to Paradise Falls, but what is there?  A few rocks, a waterfall, and little else.

Here is where the movie gets random.  A bird named Kevin, discovered eventually to be a female, follows the old man.  A dog with an electronic collar that allows it to talk enters the picture.  Everybody runs back and forth a lot.  There is a villain who is evil personified.  He has lots of talking dogs and an airship.  None of these things has anything to do with the death of the old man’s wife, nor with his own alienation from the world.  They do, in fact, distract us considerably from those concerns.

A cartoon world can take us anywhere, but Up’s fantasy world is never very interesting.  There is promise of a jungle labyrinth that never appears.  Instead, we get a boring wasteland.  The giant airship has promise, but we spend only a few minutes inside of it before the predictable chase scene comes. Ho hum.

Ultimately, the old man is supposed to realize that his goal in life is to save a bird, presumably an endangered species, from being hunted down and captured. He also must befriend his sidekick — an annoying Asian American boy scout — and become his surrogate grandfather.   This could be touching, except the characters are never developed. The old man is a grieving grump throughout and not much more.  (He is also the butt of inevitable hearing aid jokes.)

What’s more bizarre is that while the bird of unknown gender must be saved, the old man realizes that his childhood hero makes Darth Vader look like a nice guy.  This hero is Charles Muntz, a famed explorer who lives in Paradise Falls.  Muntz tries to kill everybody, including little boys and puppy dogs.  So why does the old man have to learn to hate the heroes of yesteryear, particularly a noble explorer?  Why is the bad guy an American adventurer, while the thing that must be saved is a stupid bird?

This appears to be the movie’s main moral: the old man must learn to reject and distrust the past, while embracing an environmentalist principle.

If you must see this movie because it is a Pixar movie, stick to renting it from Redbox for a buck. Better, just watch Wall-E again.

Entertainment: 3

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 8

Open Range

Open Range is Kevin Costner’s tone poem to “freegrazers,” or cowboys who once could graze cattle freely where they pleased.  If you’re a Western buff like us, you’ve already figured out without watching the movie that there will be trouble between the freegrazers and the cattle ranchers.  Definitely a gun fight at the end.  Probably a cowboy or two with a mysterious past.  Definitely an outlaw with a fast draw.

Yep, these are all here.  It’s as if Costner decided to do everything that’s standard Western fare, only he got Robert Duvall to spice up the cliches.

Costner’s added twist is the romance between his character and a middle-age nurse.  Everybody knows that cowboys — at least the stars of the show — don’t need romance.  Yet here is romance, one where the cowboy says he’s going to give his bride-to-be “a thousand kisses” not once but twice.  Bleeeeech.  The Western has long been the vehicle for extreme male independence.  Do you not know that, Kevin?

Yes, he does apparently, because the two cowboys go off in the end to rustle up their cattle.  The bride-to-be is left waiting for her beloved.  The cowboy remains hanging in a state of independence at the end of this movie.  So Open Range has it both ways — romance, but independence — yet, practically speaking, the romance aspect is totally unnecessary because females won’t be hanging around for the love relationships to develop after Duvall hits a few guys in the head with the butt of his gun.  The nurse could have been left out, and it still would’ve been the same movie.

What contemporary political issue do the freegrazers in this movie signify?  Free trade, perhaps?  Open immigration?  It’s never quite clear.  It is true that the cattle ranchers have bought and paid for “the law” — that is, the sheriff is working for the rancher.  Thus it’s up to the freegrazers to provide true, natural justice and return the world to its natural order.  This includes killing those who have murdered the innocent.  With lots of bullets.  There’s probably some theological analogy in here, but ultimately it doesn’t matter that much.  This is one of those movies — like 99.5% of all those you’ve ever seen — that you’ll forget about two hours later.

Entertainment: 5

Intelligence: 4

Morality:

Valkyrie

It is hard to believe that Valkyrie is a Hollywood movie.  This is the industry where half the Best Documentary Oscars go to Holocaust movies, and all of the major studio executives understandably have a tribal beef with Nazi Germany.  Valkyrie is fundamentally about Nazi officers — long-time Nazis — who at the end of WWII hatch a secret plan to assassinate Hitler and take over the German government.  The fact that these guys served the Nazi party for years is never explicitly mentioned and thus never questioned in the movie.  Never!  Quite unexpected.  A movie with this subject matter and with these lead characters has a 99.9% chance of containing at least one didactic, moral moment.

We’re not complaining, just amazed.  The major message of this movie — perhaps its only message — is that there was a German resistance, a supreme dislike of the Nazis by people in the Nazi party, and that this resistance cared deeply about its mother country.  The main character, Karl von Stauffenberg, repeats again and again how he is planning Hitler’s assassination for the sake of “sacred Germany.”  Think about that.  “Sacred Germany.”  We’ve all been taught to hate all Nazis, to distrust German history, to read into everything German that came before Hitler a deep wish for the Fuhrer’s “cleansing program.”  Yet Valkyrie wants to celebrate Germany, just without the Nazis.

That Valkyrie is slightly anti-PC doesn’t make it a good movie, and you’d think the fact that you know the ending of the movie before ever watching it would be sort of anti-climactic.  Suspense is what holds most $100 million-dollar-plus movies together.  This movie should have none, because you know that Stauffenberg fails and Hitler lives.  But no.  This movie is suspenseful, and it’s hard to imagine how it could’ve done a better job of keeping up the tension, even with a well-known ending.

One problem unaddressed here is what impact the assassination of Hitler would’ve had if Stauffenberg had succeeded.  This particular attempt — the last of 15 such attempts, we are told at the end of the movie — occurred in mid-1944.  Only nine months after that, Berlin fell and Hitler committed suicide.  So the impact of taking out Nazi high command might not have been as momentous as Valkyrie makes it out to be, though it’s a fun “What if …?” scenario to ponder for five minutes.

And it’s nice that a major motion picture dwells fondly on an old aristocrat.  Von Stauffenberg is an honorable guy, who in the movie is shown as deeply caring of his family and country.  There’s even a hint that he’s a Roman Catholic, and our guess is that he probably was.  Usually American movies diss aristocrats, even though American culture has its own faux-aristocracy made up of moronic celebrities and high-ranking politicians.  But von Stauffenberg is dignified and honored in Valkyrie, at least according to our redneck sensibilities.

During a pause late in the movie, C. turned to J. and asked, “Is this an all-time great?”  The answer is “no,” though it could crack a top-25 list of WWII movies.  But since C. is a female, who has a distinct taste for rom-coms but not one for war movies, this might be a good “guy” movie that you fellas can enjoy with your wives.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 8

This movie has nothing in it except one brief war scene and an F-bomb, which was carefully placed in the movie to keep it from getting a PG rating. Gotta love that idiotic ratings system! It’s otherwise a nice historical piece for the teenagers to see and learn from.

Lost: Season 5

Lost has nearly lost it.  We think that the unraveling has slowly been occuring, but sped up greatly when in this season the main characters traveled back in time.   Mind you, the show is still pretty good sci-fi — better than just about anything else on TV right now — but that’s a long way away from the world-class, timeless-tale aspirations the show had in the first two seasons.  Let’s figure out why.

First, the show has employed the old sci-fi time-travel paradox.  Say you traveled back from 1985 to 1955.  You accidentally run into your mother, who is attracted to you instead of the man she is supposed to marry, your father.  Then you cause the key moment in your mother and father’s relationship to not happen.  You then have inadvertently changed the future, which means  you shouldn’t exist, because your mother and father do not marry and thus you are not born, but nevertheless you have not disappeared after all.  You still exist, but solely for the sake of the plot.

In fact, by merely traveling to the past for a few days, you have already changed the future.  You have caused things to happen that didn’t happen already when 1955 occured the first time (without you).  There is no debate about this.  You cannot avoid changing the future when you travel back to the past.   The past occurs with or without you, but both possibilities cannot have the same future.

Also, if you travel back to 1955, what has happened is that the future causes the past to happen.  Normally, 1955 precedes 1956. Thus 1955 causes 1956 to happen, which causes 1985 to happen, the year you supposedly traveled back in time.  But, by having you travel back in time to 1955, what your contradictory but entertaining story is saying is that 1985 causes things to happen in 1955.  This is a logical impossibility, as an effect cannot be a cause of its own cause.

Of course this is pure speculation, as no one has ever traveled through time (yet).  Yet it has long been recognized as a convenient but silly sci-fi scenario to get us to ask: “Could I change the past?”  This is the eternal question the Lost characters wrestle with through half of this fifth season.   A major problem with this is that it is not, and has never been, a deep human concern.  As a speculative exercise it can be intriguing, perhaps entertaining, but it will never strike us as a very moving or powerful question because it’s not a question that affects any of us at all.  Perhaps it will be on the day time machines are invented.

Consider some of the questions posed in the early seasons of the show.  “How do I deal with this group of people (strangers)?  Who do I trust?  How do I really know what I know?  How do I deal with these other people who think they really know something that I think is a bunch of nonsense?”  Now these are questions that we all, everybody in the world really, deal with on an almost daily basis.  Done well, a powerful story can be based on these questions.

Season 5, however, is mostly concerned in its plot and character development with a speculative problem of the realm of science fiction.  This can be entertaining, but it is not particularly thoughtful.    One of the biggest problems that sci-fi has had over its one-hundred year lifespan as a genre is that it always tends to put aside real human problems in favor of problems that have never happened and may never happen.  This is why sci-fi tends to create one-dimensional characters, whose job is simply to wrestle with the speculative problem at hand.  The characters on Lost in this season, a few of them already well developed, devolve into one-dimensional characters because they are worried about whether they can change the future by changing the past.

The show’s other, major problem is that there are simply too many characters now, many of whom are paper-thin.  These characters are part of the show’s mythology, so they have been getting more and more screen time.  But the writers seem to have forgotten that the mythology, the mysteries of the Island and such, must be a mere backdrop to the real foreground,the character interactions of the several people who initially crash-landed on the Island.  In fact, much of this mythology doesn’t need to be explored at all; we would simply be better left speculating about it after the fact than having so much of it revealed to us.

In the process of exploring this mythology, the writers have dumped their two best characters, Jack Shepherd and John Locke, whose views of the island — resulting in crucial decisions in leadership — were the greatest source of conflict early in the show.  But Jack was almost totally ignored (in terms of screen time) once he traveled back in time, while Locke is not really Locke but some other person.  Surely the writers are not dumb enough to have killed off a character they spent four seasons deeply exploring, perhaps the best character on the show.  If the real John Locke, the man who crashed on the Island, is really dead for good, the show’s title will aptly describe the situation the show’s writers are in.

This season’s final episode had its sloppy moments.  It only takes two hours to dismantle a hydrogen bomb, which can be easily done if you follow the instructions in a notebook?  When did Jack hit the shooting range (for a doctor, he’s quite good with a gun in these pointless gun battles)?  You can get tortured but emerge from it with no cuts and bruises?  You can get in a long fistfight but still be energized enough for a gun battle?  The show is a sci-fi fantasy, but there still are limits to our willing suspension of disbelief.

Having dogged on the show enough, we’ll repeat that it’s still pretty good sci-fi.  “316″, the episode in which the six plane crash survivors returned to the island, was one of the best of the entire series.  “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” and “The Variable” were quite good too.

Pretty good sci-fi, sorry to say, is a disappointment for this show.  It is as if the show had (after its first two seasons) hit a homerun.  All it had to do was round the bases.  But after touching second, for some reason it stopped heading toward third and now is wandering around outside the ballpark.  For all practical purposes, lost.

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After Season 4 we made this observation:

The series is slowing peeling back layers of power, but we haven’t nearly reached the core yet.  First we thought the survivors could find their way off the island (Season 1).  Then we see that the survivors are naive, and that the Others possess the island’s secrets and the power to escape (Seasons 2 and 3).  Then, by Season 4, we see Ben Linus and Charles Widmore as the two major players gunning for control of the island, while everyone else, including the Oceanic crash survivors, seem to be mere pawns.  But then, clearly, something more powerful is controlling Linus and Widmore.  Is that Jacob, and is there something more powerful than him?

The answer is “yes, Jacob is the next layer of power.”  The final episode of Season 5 revealed that the island has yet another layer to its power structure.  Apparently Jacob and a rival, already nicknamed “Esau” on other sites, have been playing a long game on the Island, seemingly hundreds of years long.  Recall all of the black/white imagery — it comes up overtly every three episodes or s0 — and all of the instances in which people are playing board games.  This all apparently refers to Jacob and Esau, who wear white and black shirts respectively, and who appear to be playing games with people who come to the Island.  Somehow Jacob and Esau (perhaps just Jacob) control all events on the Island.  Esau wants to kill Jacob, apparently to take over Jacob’s position as Island ruler, or perhaps to “win” the game.

So what will happen?  With Jacob’s dying breath he sighed “They are coming.”  Probably this is a reference to our ragtag group of heroes, the survivors of the Oceanic planecrash.  If this show actually has a “good” guy and an “evil” guy — which is doubtful, because the writers love to reverse these roles and create ambiguities — Jacob is likely the good guy.  He visits all of our heroes, physically touches all of them, and gives some of them a choice but leaves that choice entirely up to them. Esau, meanwhile, seems to be tricking everyone by taking on apparitions and tempting them (especially Ben).  Perhaps all of the previous dead people who reappeared were just manifestations of Esau; perhaps our previous encounters with Jacob’s cabin was just Esau.  And the whispers in the forest too.  Remember when someone — Jacob, so we thought — whispered “Help Me” to John Locke. That may have been Esau.

We have no idea who the groups will be.  Somebody will back Esau, while others will back the apparently deceased Jacob.  And that will be the final contest, the coming “war” that Widmore told Locke about in Season 5.  Almost certainly Jack will see a manifestation of his father in the last season.  Also Jack will probably die, sacrificing himself while saving everyone.  The series started with Jack, so it will end with him.

There will be redemption for two characters who have been set up as irredeemably evil: Sayid and Ben.  The writers have leaned too heavily on their evil doings, while endearing them to viewers, to not allow them to do something redemptive in Season 6.

What does all this have to do with ancient Egypt (hieroglyphs, statues, etc.)?  We can’t imagine, but they better not try to explain it, because it will probably be something stupid.

What is the entire show about?  What might we say its worldview is?  There will probably no way to answer those questions definitively until the very end.

Fireproof

Although under high standards it deserves a trouncing, Fireproof is decent entertainment.  Realize that our bar is quite low here and that we laughed at the movie’s blunders.  Still, this is comparable to 95% of the fare you’ll find either on  the small or big screen.  It is certainly no worse, cinematically speaking, than the several dozen brainless romantic comedies released each year.

Fireproof is, above all else, a religious tract.  There is nothing wrong with making a tract movie — Hollywood is churning out several a day — though one must realize that a tract is not on par in terms of quality with a timeless theological treatise. That this tract is a full-length feature movie should point us to the obvious: that it’s ridiculously expensive for Christians to engage in making “Christian” movies.  The time and capital put into Fireproof boggles the mind. Dreams of a Christan movie industry or counterculture will continue to be dreams without billions of dollars invested.

This Fireproof tract is mostly about how to make your marriage work.  The formula for successful marriage is here: first convert to faith in Christ, listen to your parents, humble yourself, pursue your spouse. The characters fit into the formula perfectly; they are not played with subtleties, but then no one here is aiming for high praise.  The main character works through a 40-day, win-back-your-wife recipe book, which looks like it was inserted into the movie as a marketing tool to sell the Fireproof Your Marriage Devotional Guide.    Make no mistake, the suggestions in this recipe are quite good, although some require a decent income.

The pleasant surprise in this movie is that certain problems and moments are genuine.  Unlike its sister movie, Facing the Giants, Fireproof does not allow its main character to win life’s lottery immediately after conversion.  He still suffers internally, and he still faces a looming divorce.  He considers indulging in pornography.  Probably every modern American, bourgeois, Christian adult will find some problem or temptation to relate to in the movie.   Roughly 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce, so this movie should hit a nerve with the greater population.

Yet the movie is nearly ruined by its sideshows.  The main character is a firefighter, which calls for two unnecessary action scenes that have relatively little to do with the rest of the plot (yes, we get it: he saves total strangers but can’t love his wife; he needs to “fireproof” his marriage just as he does his job, etc.).

Those action scenes are acceptable given what Fireproof is, but the firefighter practical joke scenes are ridiculous.  This has to be the first serious movie about a dissolving marriage that’s interrupted by a hot sauce eating competition.  What exactly is it about mainstream evangelical culture that loves goofiness for goofiness’ sake?  Nothing else can explain the character of Wayne Floyd except that occasionally acting juvenile — e.g., imitating Adam Sandlar, performing silly dances, etc. — is a virtue for American Christians.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 10

Frankenstein (1931)

This is where we get our image of Frankenstein’s monster as a stiff brute with a funny walk. In Mary Shelley’s novel, the  monster has flowing locks of hair and he seems quite swift and nimble as he runs halfway around the world.   More importantly, though, this is where the association probably began between the name “Frankenstein” and the actual creature.  In the novel, of course, Frankenstein refers to the scientist and chief narrator, Victor Frankenstein, not to the monster.

Even though this version has shockingly bad acting, it is far better than you would expect overall.  The director, James Whale, knew how to frame a scene, so you’ll see plenty of fun angles with fine lighting and shadows.

As for the story, this Frankenstein plays up the social alienation the monster is supposed to feel, and Victor’s poor decision to unleash a deadly technology on the world without thinking about the consequences, while playing down Frankenstein and the monster’s father/son and God/Satan relationships.  The monster doesn’t talk in the movie, so he can’t tell us how angry he is at the world, nor can we sympathize with him via his great linguistic and oratorical skills, which is how Shelley’s monster is depicted.

Instead, the monster here is labelled as a predetermined criminal who could do nothing but evil.  Frankenstein’s assistant accidentally takes the wrong brain, one labelled “abnormal,”  so the monster gets a brain that should make him a cold-hearted killer.  The movie sides here with nurture in the nature v. nurture debate, since a maniac killer he does not turn out to be.  In a famous scene, he plays with a little girl, laughing and smiling until he does something he doesn’t seem to understand the moral consequences of.  As in Shelley’s book, the monster’s lack of moral understanding is Frankenstein the scientist’s fault, since he is the creator who abandons his creation — or the father who ditched his own son.

The various misunderstandings of the monster’s intentions lead to his hunt and eventual (so it seems) death.  He is hunted down by the Swiss bourgeois and exterminated via mob justice.  There is much that can be read into the movie’s final scene.  It seems anti-democratic, but perhaps only in the sense that the prejudiced middle-class dopes won’t tolerate or reason with our monster friend.   James Whale was a homosexual, so perhaps his revision of Shelley’s story implies that (then) oppressed, misunderstood taboo groups are mistreated.  Or the mob could be viewed as a bunch of angry Luddites who destroy not only a masterwork, but an invention that could actually benefit them, if only they accepted what it could do.  The ending, simply put, is something you look at and see what you want to in it.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 4

Morality: okay

Doubt

Though it features the Catholic church, Doubt is a fine morality play about modern Christian churches in general.  Here you have an authoritative nun, Sister Aloysius, who faces the wind of change blown in the early 1960s by the relatively new priest in her local parish, Father Flynn.  Flynn, in the first sermon we hear from him, channels Paul Tillich by claiming that doubt is the essence of faith.  Flynn says he wants to bring love, compassion, tenderness, and tolerance to the parish and Catholic school, while Sister Aloysius only seems to want to bring hard-headed authority.  Flynn thinks the secular “Frosty the Snowman” would be a fine song to sing at the school’s Christmas pagaent, while Sister Aloysius thinks that the song is purely pagan superstition.  So here’s the age-old fight between the revolutionary and the conservative.

Caught between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius is the young nun, Sister James.  James is innocent and trustworthy.  She’d like to be compassionate to her eighth grade students, who in Aloysius’ opinion would love to turn the wimpy compassion offered by James into rebellion.  James would like to side with Father Flynn, but one day she notices something odd about the behavior of the relatively new black student.  He is called to Flynn’s office in the middle of class, and he returns to class with alcohol on his breath.  She reports this to Sister Aloysius, and here’s where the ball gets rolling.

Sister Aloysius, without firm evidence, thinks something inappropriate has happened between this black male student and Father Flynn.  Aloysius pursues the truth, making firm accusations along the way, but how can she know? She may be completely wrong.  With this scenario Doubt plays with our contemporary knowledge of the recent sex scandals in the Catholic Church.  Father Flynn vehemently denies Aloysius’ charge, and Sister James, a possible witness to the scandal, would really like to believe Father Flynn is innocent.

SPOILER ALERT

So from here on I’ll discuss the movie looked at from the ending backward.  You’d think, in a typical Hollywood production, that Sister Aloysius would be typecast as a grim, cruel authoritarian.  To some extent she is, but then the movie makes room for the idea that such a person and position is necessary, especially in a school environment.  Further, Aloysius represents old time values — specifically, for Catholics, the glory days before Vatican II.  Father Flynn is obviously a Vatican II revolutionary, the kind of guy who thinks the church needs to modernize for the sake of … well, what exactly?  Either the church, or possibly himself.

Flynn makes his case for change based on several points that political and religious “progressives” would love to associate themselves with.  For example, absolute civil rights and social tolerance for nearly everyone and everything, including the idea that homosexuals are homosexuals by nature.  While the movie makes room for a viewer’s acceptance of many of Flynn’s beliefs, it associates them with Flynn’s probable pedophilia.  As we all know, being a pedophile today is the worst social sin one can commit, down there in a gutter with being labeled a racist.  So it’s funny that Flynn wants to blow the wind of tolerance through the church — which would elicit a loud Hurrah! from a whole lot of people these days — but he does it while seducing little boys in the rectory.

What is the movie’s point of view? Which character does it side with?  Obviously the writer-director, John Patrick Shanley (whose only other movie as a director is Joe Versus the Volcano, interestingly enough) has crafted a story built on the favorite aesthetic value of writers and artists since the mid-nineteenth century: ambiguity.  What is really true, and who is really right?  The movie does a fine job of leaving these questions open-ended, while humanizing all of the characters — the title of this movie says it all.  We have no doubt that even a few viewers might sympathize with Father Flynn’s pedophilia.  Still, it’s hard to say that — from the point of view of the mainstream in 2009 — Sister Aloysius isn’t ultimately the good guy (or nun).

It’s worth pointing out that there are a few theological howlers in the movie.  It concludes with Sister Aloysius’ doubts, but if she is talking about her faith in God, she has a deep problem. Contra Tillich, doubt is a sin; it is the opposite of faith.  Also, Sister Aloysius claims at least twice that she is “stepping away from God” in order to pursue Father Flynn.  Either she is joking or stupid, because bringing sin to the light — especially such wickedness as Flynn is accused of — could never be called “stepping away from God.”

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 9

Morality: see above, but it’s far tamer than Kids-in-Mind says.

Bringing Up Baby

This is probably the classic screwball comedy.  It is perfect for a bad day, a recession, or whatever else might dampen  your mood.  Admittedly you have to be able to enjoy 1930s-1940s acting, writing, humor, etc., but once you clear that hurdle this movie is, like we said, perfect.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 9-10

Flash of Genius

In this movie, Greg Kinnear plays the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers and wound up spending the rest of his life in legal imbroglios.  A subject this dull needs spicing up, so Hollywood adds an ‘f’ word and personal tension to every minute of every character relationship.  Voila, Entertainment!

To be fair, this movie isn’t as bad as you would think, assuming your expectations are rock bottom like ours were.  Kinnear’s character, an electrical engineering professor, invents his wipers only to have the Ford Motor Company “rip off” his design for windshield wipers.  Outside of a couple of family scenes, the movie is a watered-down ideological primer on the subject of intellectual property.  With Hollywood having recent billion-dollar issues related to “piracy” and such, the movie comes down firmly on the side of a man’s (i.e., gargantuan multinational corporation’s) right to have the government grant him monopoly rights to his own ideas, however terrible they are.

From a legal perspective, Kinnear’s character may have a case, though the movie is far from true to the actual history of the intermittent windshield wiper problem.  From a Biblical perspective, it seems difficult to us to justify such as thing as “intellectual property.”  An idea is not a tangible good.  And who is to say exactly when an idea has been “stolen”?  Ultimately, the government.  This privilege only further empowers the most massive government in world history (Pharoah and Caesar look upon it in awe).

But we digress.  The Ford Motor Company is the bad guy, the face of which is a mysterious character who keeps showing up and tempting Kinnear with loads of money.  Kinnear, an idealist, rejects this temptation every time by appealing to an abstract notion of Truth and Justice.  While he is supposed to be the hero, Kinnear (a Roman Catholic) alienates his wife and eventually divorces her in pursuit of Justice.  It would probably not be wrong to say an ideal became his mistress.  This is not the lesson the movie tries to teach, but it’s there anyway.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 3

Ideology Matters

From elsewhere on the web.  Both of these quotes are taken from the late ’80s/early ’90s, and judging by what we’ve seen lately, things haven’t really changed:

[...] The study contrasted “TV’s Dream Girls” in three different decades (those beginning in 1955, 1965, and 1975). It concluded that women in all three decades are depicted in ways suggesting they are not truly equal to men. The femmes come across as less important than men in TV dramas; they “are less likely to be mature adults, are less well educated, and hold lower status jobs.” Furthermore, women in the dramas tended to derive their identities from their marital status. “A majority of women are identified as either married or single, compared to about one in four men.”

We are edging up on the interesting part. Even though women in dramas are stuck in fairly traditional roles, the story line always takes the feminist side of any argument. (”Characters who deride women’s abilities are invariably put down by the script.”) This was not always true: Before 1965, say authors S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman, “22% of the episodes . .. rejected the feminist positions.” But not today — and here comes our fascinating fact. Of the thousands of dramas studied since 1965, “not a single episode derided notions of sexual equality.” Not one. Not even to break the monotony.

And then:

[C]rime is a far greater theme on TV than in the real world: The 263 programs reviewed by the Lichters showed 250 criminals committing 417 crimes. Second, murder is heavily overrepresented in TV crime: Homicides accounted for almost 25% of the crimes in the Lichters’ sample (vs. less than 1% in FBI crime reports). Third, business is wildly overrepresented among TV criminals: It was responsible for 26% of all the murders, for example. Also upping the unreality quotient was another finding of the study: that characters who are young, poor, unemployed, or nonwhite hardly ever commit violent crimes on the tube. For those seeking reality in prime time, we continue to recommend the ball game.

If we were to make TV shows and movies that reflected the federal government’s own crime statistics, we would be seeing a vastly different set of heroes and villains.

In the Leapfrog phonics videos that our children watch, there’s a character named Mr. Websley, basically a replica of Scrooge McDuck.  As a rich entrepreneur, Mr. Websley is always depicted as negative and gruff.  Each time we hear his name, the music plays an ominous DAHN-DAHN to indicate that this guy is somewhere between Captain Hook and Darth Vader on the evil scale.

Anyway, in one episode Mr. Websley puts an order into a factory that triples the factory workers’ workload.  This is seen as a slight negative, as it takes a father away from a child for a day and creates stress for everyone.  As if tripling business is a bad thing!  We need a few Mr. Websley to triple business today.  At least he is not depicted as a murderer, but we have probably seen a thousand businessmen who have murdered in Hollywood dramas — but we’ve never known one personally in real life.