The DaVinci Code

Giving credit where it’s due, Dan Brown did resurrect the Holy Grail story.  Sure, we all know he ripped off Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum to do it, but who among you doesn’t get his blood stirred over a story of some valiant soul searching for the Holy Grail?

So here we have Tom Hanks searching for the cup of Christ.  Hanks is a professor of symbology at Harvard, who tells us that triangles and towers and church steeples are phallic objects that represent men, but that inverted triangles and upside-down steeples represent females.  Necessarily then, the cup of Christ is female, which means that Leonardo da Vinci painted his The Last Supper with an obscured Mary Magdalene next to Christ, who fathered lots of kids.  The Knights Templars guarded the Christ-Magdalene line of kiddies, while the Catholic Church, beginning at the Council of Nicaea, tried to destroy this secret bloodline of Jesus Christ.

It’s all supposed to be total nonsense turned into suspenseful fun, but the protestors do have a point.  The movie moves from one scene to the next very briskly, barely giving its viewers enough time to understand which character knows what piece of information.  But when it gets to the point where it explains the stuff about Mary Magdalene, the movie dwells and dwells on the long history of it, as if to say we really should consider its wacko theory.  There are even plenty of flashbacks to 300 AD to visually support the explanation that Jesus did in fact father children and the “fact” that Christians killed lots of women in order to preserve their cult of personality.

Really, Brown has absorbed multicultural nonsense and spit it back at his eager readers.  We hear an awful lot about how the Christian church has persecuted women and children and blacks and gays and cattle and Star Trek fans and all other oppressed minorities throughout history.  To The DaVinci Code, the Church is pretty much the big bully who is stomping the faces of everyone forever.    Presumably, if only Hanks could find Mary Magdalene’s grave, this persecution will end.

Well he does find Mary Magdalene’s grave and the Holy Grail — those being two seperate things — only you’ll have to wait until the sequel to find out if he ultimately takes down the Vatican.  But perhaps in that one Hanks will instead discover that the Prophet Muhammed sired a secret bloodline that all Muslims everywhere have oppressed for centuries.  This bloodline crossed with Christ’s bloodline to form a Super Prophet, only Hanks has to discover the City of Atlantis and find the Abominable Snowman first, before he learns that he himself is the Super Prophet.  This could be a great movie, except that all Muslims everywhere would have to promise not to order a fatwah on the heads of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.  Fat chance, since mocking Islam is not P.C. at present.

Entertainment:5

Intelligence: 0

Morality: 0

Prince Caspian (The Chronicles of Narnia)

Sometime after the release of Braveheart, movies took a horrible visual turn.  Since then, during any action or fantasy movie that features large armies, you get the standard stuff.  The good guy army faces the army of darkness at around the 110-minute mark, and for the next 30 minutes there’s an incredible amount of grunting and sword clashes.  All of the main characters are featured in the battle, one of which will probably die bravely, saving someone else’s life.  Usually there’s a group of archers who fire arrows high into the sky, which the camera tracks for us.  There may be slow motion at a key point.  These battle scenes are, when you think hard about the depth of them, extraordinarily boring.  There is rarely nothing meaningful at stake for the individual characters, and since neither the good guy army or the army of darkness is nuanced, it is a fairly bland ending once the obvious outcome is decided.

Prince Caspian celebrates this blandness.   It has nothing great to offer except an attempted 150-minute emotional high, driven by the musical score featuring blaring french horns.  It’s as if John Williams went berserk and decided to write a rousing theme for every second of this movie.  After awhile, you get worn out listening to and watching this.  Life isn’t this tensely pitched.  Usually when it is, it’s really annoying, like when you’re driving through rush hour traffic.

There are stretches of this movie that are reasonable, especially those that are quieter and that feature lines that were obviously C.S. Lewis’s.  This could’ve easily been a more contemplative, dialogue-driven movie, which would’ve allowed the movie to  attempt to approach the profundity of the book it was based on.  But that wasn’t to be.  Because the movie features cardboard cutouts for characters, the final battle (and the battle before that) offers us little reason to care about who wins.  Sure, Peter might learn a lesson in humility.  Except for hair color and accent, he is indistinguishable — personality-wise — from Edmund or Prince Caspian.

And where is Aslan?  The Disney DVD intro claimed that Disney movies were “magical.”  Certainly Aslan provides the magic here.  He makes one brief appearance early on, and then arrives right on time during the final battle.  He’s a deux ex machina, coming from nowhere to make a big “ta da!” and save the good guys.  In this movie he is entirely superfluous to the plot, which is more worried about how to get to the next battle scene than anything else.

After we were watching, a comment was made that this movie was less intense, and thus more watchable, than the Lord of the Rings series.  That’s like saying that the roller coaster with five vertical loops is much more pleasant than the one with twenty.  Mostly, we’d prefer to not ride the roller coaster at all.  But if were going to compare these two series, Lord of the Rings is far more preferable insofar as it is a much better spectacle.   Prince Caspian is for those who need a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings fix, but can’t get it because they aren’t making any more of those stories.  Lewis’ works deserve better treatment.  We are waiting on the Christian Orson Welles to give the Narnia series another try.   Heck, we will settle for the Christian Michael Curtiz.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 7

Captain Blood

They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Even though it doesn’t have the trillion dollar special effects or celebrity power, we liked Captain Blood a lot more than the recent Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. In Pirates, you get the macabre mixed with Johnny Depp’s rockstar bravado.  Captain Blood is manned by Errol Flynn, who always has a playboy aristocrat aura to him.  For people who like Depp for whatever reason, it is worth giving Flynn a try.

But we don’t care much about that celebrity gaga stuff, so on to the brief analysis.  Captain Blood is basically the Joseph story cloaked in a 17th century English colonial setting.  And boy, does King James II really get thwacked.  Captain Blood is actually Peter Blood, an English doctor who aids rebels who subvert James II.  Blood is caught in the act of giving medical attention to a rebel, and eventually sentenced to banishment from England and slavery in the Caribbean.  Blood is rightfully indignant about this, as we the audience are supposed to be.

Once in Jamaica, Blood conspires with his fellow slaves to escape.  The plot is all over the place from here.  You will run into Spanish marauders and French pirates, with escapes and swordfights and a titanic fight at sea to end the movie, complete with pirates swinging from ropes from one sinking ship to another. The movie implicitly praises Blood as a pirate for awhile — i.e., as a thief — but this is complicated by Blood’s final choice in the movie.  The moral stance is clear here: anti-slavery and pro-individualism, with a historical stance firmly in favor of the Glorious Revolution that put William of Orange on England’s throne.  But it is really swashbuckling with a smile.  If you have time to kill, this one is pretty fun.

Entertainment: 9

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 7

Iron Man

The myth of the self-made man is alive and well.  Iron Man is an extreme male fantasy, particularly an American male fantasy, in which the hero beds hot women, drives cool cars, plays with high-tech gadgets, owns a house in Malibu, and can invent the most amazing technological devices ever made all by himself.  Sheesh.  Is there no humility these days?

We found a likeness to the recent, duddy blockbuster Transformers throughout.  Our hero is a transformer himself.  He becomes Iron Man using a trillion-dollar robot suit, which lets him fly to the moon and fly to Afghanistan in order to save a remote village from a terrorist attack.  There are also plenty of one-liners, lots of destruction, and abundant rock music.

Our hero, Tony Stark, is an incredibly rich genius who owns a weapons manufacturing company.  He supplies deadly weapons to the U.S. military.  For some reason Stark goes to Afghanistan and rides in a convoy, which of course gets sabotaged by terrorists.  Does he not know that rich guys do not go anywhere near the front lines?  But questions of logic do not work for movies like this, so we will stop asking them.

Stark is captured by a terrorist group, which demands that he build them a billion-dollar rocket system out of a basketful of screws and car parts.  Instead of totally complying with these demands, Stark builds an invincible suit that lets him attack the terrorists and fly away.  While flying away, his suit fails and he crashes at free-fall speed, yet suffers no fatal injuries.  He is rescued and returns to the United States, where he renounces his weapons business.

You’d think a movie like this would have an obvious “liberal” (so-called) agenda.  Stark after all decides that it is morally wrong to manufacture weapons, converting from his hardcore, peace-through-strength position.  The film plays up the faux-conservative vs. faux-liberal arguments that we hear over and over again on Talking Head TV.  But it’s not exactly a liberal movie.  Consider that Stark, as capitalist and entrepreneur, re-enacts the myth of the lone inventor who comes up with something brilliant in his basement.  The government didn’t do that; American pluck and know-how did.  In that sense the movie appeals to free-marketeers too.

But wait, there’s more.  A government agent keeps showing up to debrief Stark on his capture in Afghanistan.  This agent is from a bureau called S.H.I.E.L.D., which is some kind of homeland security boondoogle.  Though the agent looks like he’s fresh from the set of The Matrix, the movie develops him into a good and useful guy, thus implicitly praising Homeland Security.

In short, there’s something in Iron Man to please everybody, unless you’re an Afghani terrorist or a bald, bearded white guy who heads a weapons manufacturing corporation.  We’re down to maybe three or four groups now who can be effective villains in movies, thanks to P.C.  Germans, Russians, rednecks, corporate CEOs, and tan-skinned terrorists.

Oh, but what about Iron Man?  We weren’t that amazed by it, even though it tries it’s darnedest to amaze with special effects.  Zathura is director Jon Favreau’s better movie.  If you need an entertainment fix, go rent that instead.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 2 (a brief, unnecessary sex scene)

Spiderman 3

Cheetos.  That’s what this movie reminds us of.  Cheese-flavored Styrofoam.

Sure, Spiderman 3 provides some commentary on pride, corruption, heroism, grace, yadda yadda yadda.  And it’s true, you bite into it and it crunches.  It’ll keep you from starving.   But it still tastes terrible, just like cheese-flavored Styrofoam.  We all know what a steady diet of Cheetos does.

Entertainment: 2

Intelligence: -5

Morality: who cares?

Star Trek: First Contact

This might be our one and only Star Trek review, so listen up.  Star Trek: First Contact is the second movie with the cast from the second Star Trek TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Got that?  It’s nearly impossible to keep track of these things, so let’s just call this the series with Captain Shakespeare and the android, the only two characters worth paying any attention to. (The marketers thought the same thing: see the movie poster.)

Essentially, in this movie, the Earth is being attacked by an alien race called the Borg.  To get a feel for who the Borg are, walk in to the nearest public school sometime.  It’s a race that forcibly “assimilates” all alien species into its collective.  It thereby evolves because it assimilates the knowledge of each species, and each person who gets captured and made into a borg becomes essentially half-organic, half-robot — a being indistinguishable from his fellow borg.  The key for Star Trek is that the Borg is a terrible kind of boogeyman for both the heroes and us the audience.  Captain Shakespeare and his merry band get freaked out by the thought of somebody, anybody, becoming a borg.  That person, they think, loses all individuality and freedom of thought.  It is so horrible to them that there’s no doubt about the ethical consequences: if your best friend becomes a borg, kill him.

Bizarrely, Captain Shakespeare and his merry band have never reflected on the structure of the United Federation of Planets, their own “peaceful” galactic organization.  Seriously, there’s little difference between the Borg and the Federation of Planets.  Both are highly militaristic, both seek to assimilate other species, and both are trying to dominate the galaxy.

The only difference between the Borg and the Federation is that the Federation appears diverse, whereas the Borg all look the same.  So yes, the only difference is appearance.  They are both multicultural collectives; they have “assimilated” many races into their cultural and political structures, but they have almost no diversity of opinion.   Can we just call the United Federation of Planets a communist enterprise and call it a day?

“Communist” doesn’t quite get it, but it’s close.   The crew of Star Trek band together, neither as a family nor as a religious body, but as a collective of individuals who operate a space warship.  You rarely see these people enjoying family.  There is no religion on the Enterprise, except for when they utter goofy mumbo-jumbo that would move only devotees of Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey.  All of the crew of this warship wear military uniforms, 24 hours a day.  They brag about how they’ve eliminated money from society and now all pursue the common good.  It’s a real utopia, this Star Trek.  The kind of utopia in space fantasies that, in reality, is hell on Earth.

In Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg travel back in time to the point where humans build a spaceship with warp-drive.  This is the key moment in human progress, when humans do something good enough to join the United Federation of Planets.  It’s the invention of warp drive that ushers in utopia, an era of everlasting peace and prosperity.  Yes, that’s right, NASA could save us all.

So the Borg want to stop this event from happening and assimilate humanity.  Somehow, Captain Shakespeare and his crew travel in time back with the Borg.  Yes, they have to stop the Borg and look heroic doing so.  Great.  The bizarre thing is they admit that human history turned on a dime.  You see, right after the Third World War, in which nukes were prominently involved, an alcoholic scientist built the ship with warp-drive.  So sixty years after nearly destroying itself in its third world war, humanity becomes entirely peaceable.  Of course, the crew of the Entreprise have no problem with killing the Borg, but never mind. Human nature has changed , and they are all near-pacifists now.  Their mantra: “Give peace a chance, or else.”

This is the kind of movie that Star Trek outsiders can grasp without having to know the character dynamics or the intricacies of the many Star Trek series.  (We say this because we don’t know them.)  In fact, the movie contains all you need to know about the politics and ethics of Star Trek, which are hilarious when not taken seriously.  They are entirely humanistic, which means that they are falsely optimistic and quite stupid. The god of Star Trek is scientific progress, backed by weapons of war.

Entertainment:6

Intelligence: 3

Morality: see above

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It’s a shame that Order of the Phoenix features good witches and benevolent sorcery.  Cut that part out and you’ve got an okay movie. In fact, Order of the Phoenix provides one of the most scathing critiques in recent memory of government-run schools.  Actually, it goes further than that: government-run anything, so the movie argues, is buffoonish and ineffective.  Incapable of combating external threats, it imposes tyranny on its own citizens in reaction to external threats.

The movie begins with an attack on Harry by a couple of soul-sucking skeletons.  Since these skeletons are government-workers — prison guards at the Azkaban penitentary — somebody on the inside has ordered them to attack Harry.  But Harry is blamed for this attack.  He is brought before an intimidating, secret government court and subjected to a rigged trial.  Only by a last minute intervention does he find himself vindicated.

And yet the government (called the Ministry of Magic) uses the media to attack Harry for claiming that the Dark Lord Voldemort has returned.  This government-media connection is featured throughout Order of the Phoenix, and it is not to be admired.

Meanwhile, Harry’s school is taken over by a Ministry of Magic bureaucrat named Deloris Umbridge.  Umbridge asserts that the students don’t need any practical training, and that the students will now learn solely in order to pass a government-mandated exam.  Umbridge makes Hogwarts its own little hell.  Curiously, she is the main villain in this movie, while the disturbing Voldemort plays second fiddle to Umbrage’s ultimate, government-sponsored evil.

So Harry starts his own, de facto homeschool.  Forced to teach themselves, Harry and his friends form an extracurricular group to learn the ways to defend against evil wizards.  And, of course, it pays off.

Yes, we like to look on the bright side.  This is the first Potter movie to have anything meaningful to say without resorting to some vague point about good overcoming evil.  Still, there are a few trite soundbytes uttered as profundities of wisdom.  Such as: we all have good and evil inside of us, and it’s up to us to choose.  And: friendship trumps evil.  Those came near the end, and it’s this kind of goofy, sentimental message we’ve come to expect from the visually imaginative Potter series.

This is the fifth movie in an eight-movie series.  It will be about six movies too long.  At about movie #3,  you need a map and a scorecard to keep track of the characters, and even at movie #5 it is still not clear how the invisible world of witches practically co-exists with the real world.  In fact, until movie #5, It was not even clear that there was much of an invisible world of witches beyond Hogwarts.  Of course there are always lots of spells, lots of curses, and a great witch fight as a climactic moments.  You, dear reader, know how much of this you can stomach.  If you are to view a Potter movie for style, go with Prisoner of Azkaban. If you are to view a Potter movie for content, Order of the Phoenix is probably the one to watch.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 3

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Here is where the Harry Potter series turns from fantasy to horror.  Yes, it’s a freak show, but it’s also genuinely horrible to see Harry and his friends begin to struggle with teenage hormones, to worry about who to take to the high school dance, to cry when Ron Weasley fails to ask you out.

Ah, the struggles of being a teenage witch!

In this movie you’ll experience a lot of teen angst, told from the perspective of a teenager.  You see, someone put Harry Potter’s name in the Goblet of Fire, which means he has to participate in the hazardous Triwizard Cup.  For some reason, none of the powerful wizards can keep Harry from participating, which makes no sense.  Harry is supposed to be special and has gotten in lots of serious trouble before. Shouldn’t this kid be surrounded by armored guards at all times?

Of course, all the adults act like fools and weaklings for the sake of plot development, so that Harry — that struggling teenage witch — can learn to be an adult who will one day act like a fool and weakling so that some other teenager can learn to be an adult who will one day act like a fool and weakling, etc.

So Harry faces three challenges in the Triwizard Cup.  This is a few challenges short of the number of Hercules’ trials, but it is the same amount as Jesus’ temptations in the desert, which puts Harry somewhere pretty high on the scale of the immortals (though Harry might be the highest-grossing immortal ever).  But even immortals have serious problems.  In Goblet of Fire we know that evil people are out to get Harry, as they always are, but the chief question for this and all the other Potter movies is: which high school teacher is it?  No, it couldn’t be the Defense against the Dark Arts teacher again, could it?  Not him, the rude guy with the glass eye?  If you can’t answer these questions immediately, and if you don’t have your intelligence insulted by Goblet of Fire, you haven’t watched many movies.

We wouldn’t understand the parent who allows any children to watch this movie.  You’ve got the ample stupidity mentioned above, witches struggling through high school, magic spells used to help the protagonists, people called Death Eaters walking around with skulls on their faces, bad guys amputating their own hands and drinking other people’s blood, and then in the end you’ve got to stare at Voldemort’s noseless face.  In one sense Voldemort is cheesy.  He looks like Sybok’s helper in Star Trek V , and it is sad that the big-budget Harry Potter series had to steal from such a crummy movie.  But, for most people, Voldemort is frightening.

Since this movie made 900 million dollars worldwide, we conclude that the world enjoys freakshows.  Expect more of the same from the next three Potter flicks.

Entertainment: 5

Morality: 0

Intelligence: 0

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Should we ever be banished to a desert island and be offered the choice of an Indiana Jones movie to take, we might take this one.  Granted, it’s a great conundrum. We could anguish over this choice for ages.  Much like we’d anguish over which toilet bowl cleaner to bring along.

When stories are based on forgotten pulp fiction, they’re likely to become pulp fiction.  This Indiana Jones has dance numbers, poison, tommy guns, plane crashes, falls off a cliff, whips, bugs, snakes, hidden passages, booby traps, evil cults, assassins, scimitars, blood-drinking rituals, mine cart chases, unstable bridges over deep chasms, alligators, and cackling villains.  This is a high-class B-movie — somewhere just below the cookie-cutter dime Westerns from the 1800s we’ve read.  But since pop culture is so elevated right now, it and the rest of this Jones series are “movie classics” from the 1980s.

Temple of Doom is credited with catalyzing the institution of the PG-13 rating.  Why?  A man’s heart gets ripped out of his chest.  People remember that.  They forget that the first half of the movie is deliberately, frenetically comical.  Then it shifts drastically.  Jones and his cohorts find the Thuggee cult, and here the movie goes on and on for twenty minutes on the ritual practices of this cult.  You won’t find what they do in many anthropology books, nor will you find a potion of blood that temporarily hypnotizes its victims, the hypnotic trance being broken only by jabbing the victim with a torch.  The Thuggees even use a voodoo doll, which they apparently picked up on a leisure trip to the Caribbean.  As we said, B-movie.

Even what little content this movie has is idiotic.  Jones does free the slaves and conquer evil in the end, but it is only to return the sacred stone back to an Indian village that worships the goddess Shiva.  The people get to keep their idols, at least the good ones.  From slavery to slavery.  Meanwhile, the reowned American professor of archaeology gets to bare his chiseled chest and wins the buxom blonde.  These are the kinds of fantasies everyone appreciates in a post-Christian age.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 0

Morality: 0

Return of the Jedi

In honor of the release of the spectacularly bad Clone Wars, let’s revisit the point at which George Lucas lost his creative powers, if he ever had any.  Return of the Jedi is a two-hour, thirty-minute denouement.  There is nothing in this movie that was not in the two previous installments, and it is missing much that was in those previous two.  The only new plot development is a soap-opera style moment in which Luke tells Leia that she is his sister.  Like the three prequels released after it, this movie believes that more stuff is better: more space shootouts, more monsters, more swordfights.  This is the narrative theory of the blockbuster: the audience is filled with morons with money to burn, so please them with as much spectacle as the budget allows.

This one tries to please using primitive teddy bears.  Lots of people have hated the Ewoks over the years, but they have their place.  The point is that even primitives can beat empires, hands down, with willpower and persistence.  It is complete nonsense — one use of a high-tech weapon could destroy everything the Ewoks have built for a thousand years — but it captures the general feeling these days that upscale political powers are too wimpy to go back to colonial-style rule. Return of the Jedi shows teddy bears throwing rocks at billion-dollar war machines, blowing them up, and winning independence.  We the audience are obviously supposed to cheer along.

A few Christians have gotten uptight about people believing in Lucas’ ripoff of Oriental mysticism. It’s true that you wouldn’t want your kids to believe in Star Wars‘ religious claptrap, but then, as good Americans, you probably do want them to hold dear its anti-tyranny political values, made clear by the victory of a ragtag band with American accents beating an empire of oppressors with English accents.  So, calmly discuss with little Johnny and Susie how stupid this business about the “Force” is.  Explain that “force” is a physics concept.  Tell them that telekinesis is not.  If necessary, demonstrate that you cannot lift rocks and green puppets named Yoda with your brain.  Finally, tell them that the balance of good and evil in the universe is very bad theology.  They should already know that long before they are capable of watching this movie.  It’s then up to you if they should watch it, but remember that everyone else in the world has, and so Johnny and Susie will be tempted to watch this and a lot of other things once they exit the house.  If you have properly equipped them for that moment, they will probably not convert to Buddhism or take up the ways of the Jedi.

Entertainment: 9 (but just a 7 for Lucas’ updated version)

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 5