Tag: Ron Howard

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CRITICS NIX NETFLIX HICKS! Hillbilly Elegy is a Depressing Mess

Hi, my name’s Chris, and I’m an authentic hillbilly. I grew up on a farm in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee. I watched Hillbilly Elegy on Netflix so you don’t have to.

The film is based on the book by J. D. Vance, which is subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book became a bestseller during the run-up to the 2016 election, and became a political touchstone for pundits trying to explain the appeal of He Who Must Not Be Named to the white, rural voters who put the Orange Menace in the White House and the country on what we now know was the road to ruin.

The story begins in Jackson, Kentucky, in 1997, with a tinny voice on the radio declaring: “In an age of prosperity, the American dream seems out of reach.” But here’s the thing: Vance is an Iraq War veteran and graduate of Yale Law School whose Wikipedia entry lists his occupation as “venture capitalist.” He was born into a working-class family, but he’s not exactly someone for whom the American dream was “out of reach.” He succeeded!

Haley Bennett, Gabriel Basso, and Amy Adams star in Hillbilly Elegy, based on the book by J.D. Vance

Maybe that’s why Hillbilly Elegy seems so vacant and shallow. It wants you to have sympathy for the hard lives of these characters, who are all based on Vance’s real family, but it cannot bear to turn its gaze on the deeper question begged by all the scenes of violence, drugs, and squalor — what has gone wrong here? Why are these people so screwed up?

From the start, the dialogue reveals a tin-eared writer. “Where you goin’?” asks the grizzled old redneck.

“Swimming hole,” says teenage J.D. (Owen Asztalos).

“Don’t get bit by a cottonmouth!”

The Grapes of Wrath this ain’t.

A few minutes later, J.D. is getting bullied by three local boys who hold him under the water until he almost drowns. Now this looks more like the hillbilly life I remember! Turns out, J.D. Vance isn’t even from the mountains of Kentucky — he’s from suburban Middletown, Ohio, and the actual hillbillies hate him. His grandparents moved from Kentucky to get jobs in the Ohio steel mills, which are closed now.

Glenn Close as Mamaw

There’s Mamaw (Glenn Close), J.D.’s mom Bev (Amy Adams), and sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett). A nostalgic sense of loss hangs over the family. Two generations ago, they were peasants pursuing opportunity in the big city. Now, they’re the suburban poor with nowhere else to go. Mom did well in school, but got pregnant young and found herself stuck in a cycle of failed relationships, struggling to keep food on the table for her two kids while she’s slowly being eaten away by the opioids she pops for stress. “We were all different in Middletown,” J.D.’s voiceover intones. “Something was missing. Maybe hope.”

And yet, there are no scenes in this two-hour film showing us the good things about rural life. It can be very beautiful, and the rhythms of the farm can be peaceful. Least authentically of all, not once does anyone step foot inside a church.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around grown-up J.D. (Gabriel Basso) trying to juggle career weekend at Yale with his mother’s latest addiction crisis back in Ohio. Much of the actual conflict involves Mom and Mamaw’s access to healthcare, which is the film’s most authentic and relatable aspect.

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck doesn’t shy away from the causes of his Okies’ miseries. It’s the banks that foreclose on the family farm during the Depression, the orchard owners who pay starvation wages for backbreaking work, and the thugs who beat the union organizers into submission. When Bev, fresh off an OD, is kicked out of the hospital because she doesn’t have health insurance, it’s treated as another example of her moral failure, and an inconvenience for J.D., who has to be back in New Haven, Connecticut, for a job interview at a corporate law firm the next day. The real bad guys — the pharmaceutical companies who knowingly marketed highly addictive opioids to a population who are being worked to death by rapacious capitalists — are nowhere to be seen.

Directed by Ron Howard, Hillbilly Elegy is a deeply unpleasant watch. Everyone professes that “family is the only thing that means a goddamn thing,” but they only seem to communicate by shouted insult. The cinematography is indifferent at best, except for the close-up of the heroin needle circling the toilet bowl. The pacing veers between leaden and excruciating.

But it’s the film’s attitude toward its characters that makes it truly odious. It’s always been hard to be poor, but other chroniclers of poverty, such as Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo, left you with an understanding of the systems and people who oppressed the peasants. Hillbilly Elegy‘s ideology prevents it from looking at America that deeply. J.D. saves his mom and gets the job because he’s just better than everyone else. For the people and the way of life he’s supposed to be elegizing, life sucks, and it’s all their fault.

Hillbilly Elegy is showing on Netflix.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story

In its century long history, Hollywood has produced a handful of characters that have become icons of American manhood. Nick Charles, The Thin Man, was a hard living, but elegant aristocrat. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid from Stagecoach was the archetypal cowboy: laconic, upright, uncomplicated. Rhett Butler was an irresistible scoundrel. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine was a heartbroken cynic finding his way back to virtue in Casablanca. James Dean’s teenage misfit Jim Stark was the Rebel Without A Cause. Peter Fonda rode a motorcycle named Captain America on an LSD fueled trip in search of his nation’s soul, while Chris Evan’s Captain America was thawed out of the arctic ice to remind us of the better angels of our nature. The 1990s brought us both Will Smith’s wisecracking fighter jock from Independence Day and Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s hallucinatory, revolutionary alter ego.

Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca

Then there’s Han Solo. When he first appeared in Star Wars, Harrison Ford was still a part time carpenter. Four years later, when he introduced Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford was the biggest movie star in the world, and would remain at or near the top of the heap well into the twenty first century. Befitting Lucas’ postmodern pastiche approach to space opera, Solo was a mixture of Rick Blaine’s fractured romanticism, a card playing smuggler like Rhett Butler, a quickdraw gunfighter like Wayne, and unrepentant ladies man like, well, all of them. His ostensible role was to provide a counterweight to Luke Skywalker’s boundless optimism, but he was the one all the boys wanted to be and, when he won the hand of Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, the one all the girls wanted to be with.

Han was the outsized focus of the franchise’s earliest spinoffs. In the 70s and 80s, Luke and Leia got one spinoff novel, Splinter of the Minds Eye. Han Solo and Chewbacca’s adventures filled three volumes, then, in the 2000s, three more. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and started cranking out Star Wars movies on the regular, it was inevitable that Han would take a starring role. It started out promising, when Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark put together a script, but Solo: A Star Wars Story turned into a textbook troubled production when the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired after four months of shooting. Lucasfilm honcho Kathleen Kennedy hired Ron Howard to clean up the mess, who was met with howls of derision from the fans. Lord and Miller are comedy directors who, it was hoped, would take Star Wars in a new direction. Howard was a safe choice, a Hollywood veteran with a reputation for unremarkable competence.

Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian

And that’s exactly what Howard brought to Solo. Kasdan, writing with his son Jonathan, constructed a solid series of heists gone wrong, shootouts, and chase scenes. We first meet Han (Alden Ehrenreich) as a street urchin boosting speeders on Corellia. His latest score, a batch of coaxium, a volatile spaceship fuel, is valuable enough to get him and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) off planet. But the plan goes quickly wrong, and the pair are separated. Desperate to escape his organized crime pursuers, Solo joins the Imperial Navy, hoping to become a pilot. Three years later, our hero’s washed out of flight school and is fighting with the stormtrooper grunts in the trenches of the swamp planet Mimban when he discovers a crew led by Tobias (Woody Harrelson) in mid-heist, and deserts the army to join the pirate life.

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra

The problem with Solo does not stem from its chaotic production history. It’s that the star never fills the role. Ehrenreich is upstaged by literally every member of the supporting cast. Clarke’s performance is assured and nuanced, better than most of her work on Game Of Thrones. Woody Harrelson steals every scene he’s in. Donald Glover’s turn as Lando Calrissian is absolute, caped perfection. Even Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo under the tutelage of Peter Mayhew, is more magnetic than Ehrenreich.

To be fair, filling the shoes of Harrison Ford is an impossible task that would have defeated the vast majority of actors. Take it from someone who has to sit through a lot of true crap: this is not a bad movie, and far from a return to the bad old days of Attack Of The Clones. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and primo spaceship action, but also a fair amount of box-checking fan service. The sight of the crystal skull from the tomb of Xim the Despot and Lando’s offhand mention of the Starcave of ThonBoka make my sad little geek heart grow three sizes, but will mean nothing to the casual moviegoer. Howard’s pedestrian direction gets the job done while underlining the greatness of Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi. The bottom line is, Solo is a fun two hours at the movies, while also being an all-too predictable disappointment.

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Inferno

An Open Letter to Tom Hanks

Dear Tom,

I am writing to inform you of a grave threat to our United States and ask that you step up to save our republic. I have chosen to write an open letter to you, not because I am looking for a cheap gimmick to spice up my review of the aggressively mediocre Inferno, but because I know that celebrities love receiving scolding correspondence from know-it-all peons as much as we love writing them.

I watched Inferno, the third adaptation of Dan Brown’s popular book series that began with The Da Vinci Code, and although I’m definitely in the minority, I thought it was OK. The plot may be almost laughably ridiculous, since this was Brown’s fourth go-round of trying to wedge a story into the basic formula of “bad people encode their nefarious plans into puzzles involving religious art and iconography that must be decoded in a race against time by Harvard symbolist Robert Langdon,” but, compared to the stuff I’ve been subjected to this year, it might as well be The Third Man. The problem with Langdon as a character is that he is like Aquaman — the problems he is equipped to solve are extremely specific. This time around, Brown borrows from fellow airport bookstore star Robert Ludlum and puts Langdon in a Jason Bourne memory-wipe situation. Ron Howard, as always, delivered a journeyman’s competence. Inferno functions most effectively as an IMAX-sized travelogue through the architectural and artistic treasures of Florence and Istanbul.

But Tom, if you see Ron any time soon, please tell him that if you’re going to shoot IMAX big, you’ve got to keep the handheld stuff to a minimum. Whenever there’s an action sequence, usually involving Ana Ularu as a mysterious assassin who may or may not be working for the nefarious World Health Organization (who knew they were so evil?), Ron defaults to shaky cam chaos, and when the image is like three stories tall, that’s some serious nausea-inducing stuff.

But without you, Tom, the whole thing would have collapsed. You were the best thing about Inferno, the way getting a morphine injection is the best thing about breaking your leg. Your comforting presence really took the edge off the meaning-free dialogue, like when WHO’s head asskicker Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen) tells her goons to “Work faster, work smarter, don’t trust anyone!”

Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones in Inferno.

You’re awesome, Tom, and everyone loves you. You hosted Saturday Night Live as part of the Inferno publicity push and almost single-handedly elevated the show back to the levels the Olds talk about in hushed tones. Your appearance as Doug on the “Black Jeopardy” skit was the smartest thing on TV this cursed election season. Doug’s “Make America Great Again” hat marked him as a rural Trump supporter, and you would expect the late-night lefties of SNL to tear into him. But instead, you played him with a subtlety and sympathy not commonly seen on the network of Celebrity Apprentice. It was hilarious, but, most importantly, you used your talents to bring Americans together. That’s why we need you to do comedy again.

Look, I get it. You started out in comedy, from Bosom Buddies on TV to Joe Versus the Volcano (which is a masterpiece of life-affirming humor, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise). But comedic actors aren’t recognized for their gifts, so you grew up, did Saving Private Ryan, and got recognized as a Serious Actor Man. You’ve got nothing left to prove. Meanwhile, we’ve spent the last 18 months getting divided into smaller and smaller polities, played by partisan propagandists into turning on each other. Some people think Hillary Clinton is a literal demon from hell while other people think Donald Trump is a raping raper who rapes, but the one thing that everyone can agree on is how much we love you, Tom. Maybe you and Irrfan Khan, the legendary Bollywood actor who is the only other person to come out of Inferno with their dignity intact, could do a buddy comedy. You know, like when you and Dan Aykroyd did that Dragnet parody back in 1987. Good times.

Soon, this election will be over, and hopefully the demon will beat the rapist. Your country needs you, Tom Hanks, to be silly on camera again, so we can heal. Just think about it, OK?

Your pal,

Chris

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Eight Days A Week

Here’s my big takeaway from Eight Days A Week: The Beatles were a great band.

The Beatles play Washington D.C during their 1964 tour of America in Eight Days A Week.

I mean, yeah, big whoop, right? The Beatles were a great band. Stop the presses. But I think The Beatles have been swallowed by their own legend. In the hip hop era, extolling the virtues of The Beatles will get the kids’ eyes rolling. They are the quintessential Baby Boomer phenomenon, and this documentary is directed by another Baby Boomer phenomenon: Ron Howard, a guy whose showbiz career started in 1959. Lately, the Apollo 13 director has devoted his time to low-impact adaptations of DaVinci Code books, and this movie is another softball. Nobody ever went broke selling The Beatles to Baby Boomers.

There are some parts of this production that seem phoned-in. The sound design, which you would expect to be perfect in a project like this, is occasionally haphazard. It’s not exactly briskly paced. There are a few colorized segments that look head-scratchingly tacky. As an obsessive fan of the band and of music in general, I didn’t really learn anything significant about The Beatles from this film.

But wow, they were a great band. And they’re still great. A couple of years ago, my wife and I paid a bunch of money to see Paul McCartney at the FedEx Forum. Our expectations were tempered by the fact that Sir Paul was 70 years old, but we figured if we just got to watch Paul Freakin’ McCartney’s muscle memory fire for an hour or so, it would be worth it. The man is living history. But the show wasn’t like that at all. Paul killed it. He played for more than two hours, alternating between bass, guitar, piano, and ukulele, never leaving the stage. The only clue that he exerted himself at all was that he took his jacket off after a few tunes. If nothing else, the man is a good argument for vegetarianism.

Before the show, we were talking about how it would be preferable to see Sir Paul in a small room instead of the Forum. But during the show, he casually dropped an anecdote about his last tour where he played to a crowd of 300,000 in Ukraine, and we realized that for him, the Forum was a small room.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1966

Eight Days A Week makes it clear that Paul and the lads pretty much invented the modern arena concert—or rather, it was invented because of them. Thanks to a ten-camera film setup, the first mega-show The Beatles played, Shea Stadium in New York, provides the documentary’s most compelling footage. They perform out on the baseball diamond, with the stage about where second base would be. The isolation from the 50,000-strong throng of their rabid fans provides a prefab visual metaphor for what it was like to be one of the Fab Four in 1965. There is no huge sound system visible, like there would be at a modern arena concert, because they simply hadn’t been invented yet. A good system for getting amplified music out to a crowd that big wouldn’t be assembled for years, when The Grateful Dead’s sound crew finally cracked the problem. At Shea, The Beatles played through the stadium’s built-in PA, a primitive system only designed for at-bat announcements and the organ player. Even more unfathomable from a modern musician’s perspective, they played without monitors. They couldn’t hear themselves. And yet, they played in tune, in rhythm, and sang harmonies more complex than just about anything you hear on the radio today. The show, which is appended in full to the version of Eight Days A Week now showing at Studio on the Square, is a dazzling display of virtuosity and stage smarts under difficult conditions that had no real precedent.
Like I said, The Beatles were a great band—not just a collection of genius songwriters and visionary artists, a great band. When Howard trots out 1963 footage of John leading the band through an Earth-shaking rendition of “Twist and Shout”, I thought, the young Beatles would kill at Gonerfest, the annual garage punk festival occurring in Memphis next weekend. Eight Days A Week confirms that every young group of miscreants who have picked up guitars and drums in the last fifty years have been playing in The Beatles sandbox.

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Time Warp Drive-In’s Hell on Wheels

Automotive and film technology came of age at roughly the same time, and cars have always been a particular source of fascination for filmmakers. When the first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey in 1933, it was the beginning of a potent and inevitable synergy between two of America’s favorite cultural forces. Movies sold the dream of freedom, and cars became the most prominent and expensive symbols of that freedom. People would pay to sit in their cars and watch movies about cars.

The theme of the next edition of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series (running the last Saturday of each month through October) is Hell On Wheels, which gave the organizers, filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matthew Martin, plenty of choices for programming.

The night will kick off with George Lucas’ American Graffiti. The film was Lucas’ first big hit, made after the studio-destroying dystopian sci-fi film THX 1138 had all but ended his career. Few films can claim the deep cultural impact of Lucas’ Star Wars, but American Graffiti comes close. Its meandering, multi-character story structure bears a resemblance to Robert Altman or Richard Linklater’s work but is utterly unlike the Hero’s Journey plots that would come to be associated with Lucas’ later work. Still, Lucas’ techno-fetishism is on full display with the loving beauty shots of classic autos designed in the days before wind tunnels and ubiquitous seat belts.

Even though the film was set in 1962, the chronicle of aimless youth cruising around a sleepy California town kicked off a wave of nostalgia for all things 1950s. The pre-British Invasion rock-and-roll and doo-wop soundtrack became one of the best selling film soundtracks in history, and Ron Howard — who, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, was himself a bit of TV nostalgia — and Cindy Williams would ride the popularity of American Graffiti into starring roles on Happy Days and its spinoff, Laverene & Shirley. It also marked the big break of a struggling actor and part-time carpenter named Harrison Ford.

The second Hell on Wheels film, Two-Lane Blacktop, is a classic hot rod movie from 1971 starring James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. If American Graffiti manifested America’s longing for a simpler time before the social upheaval of the 1960s, Two-Lane Blacktop was one of the counterculture’s dying gasps. It’s an Easy Rider-like plot with muscle cars: Two nameless street racers heading east from California challenge a square (Warren Oates) to a cross-country race to Washington, D.C. The dialog is sparse and the performances fairly flat, but the real point of Two-Lane Blacktop is the wide-open vistas of a now-vanished America.

The third film of the night, 1968’s Bullitt, is similarly light on dialog, but it is the opposite of counterculture. Steve McQueen at his sexiest plays a homicide cop trying to solve the murder of a mob informant. McQueen’s Frank Bullitt is the prototype of the “playing by his own rules” cop that would become so familiar in later films, but the movie’s real significance lies in the epic car chase that sees McQueen driving an iconic 1968 fastback Mustang through the streets of San Francisco set to Lalo Schifrin’s swinging jazz score. The oft-imitated but never equaled scene is worth the price of admission for the entire evening.

The program closes with Robert Mitchum playing a Tennessee bootlegger in1953’s legendary Thunder Road. Mitchum co-wrote the screenplay and produced the movie, which tells the story of a Korean War vet’s turbulent return to the violent world of moonshiners and flophouses. The noir-inflected film served as the template for dozens of hot rod exploitation stories, taught greasers to emulate Mitchum’s laconic cool, and even inspired Bruce Springsteen to write a song about it. It’s a fitting capper to a night of burning rubber and tail fins.

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American Made

The Bush years have given American swagger a bad name, but there was a time when this quality was rooted not in cowboy-style bluster but in competence and confidence. You can see this in In the Shadow of the Moon, a terrific new documentary about NASA’s Apollo space program, which put men on the moon in 1969 and returned for several subsequent voyages over the next few years.

Directed by British filmmaker David Sington and produced, in part, by Hollywood director Ron Howard, who celebrated the most difficult, tense Apollo voyage with his film Apollo 13, In the Shadow of the Moon might be as captivating a stew of imagery and words as has been seen on the big screen this year.

Sington posits this history of the Apollo program as something almost mystical, pointing out that the Apollo astronauts are “the only human beings to have visited another world.”

“I want to promise you I’m human,” says Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan early on. “I pinched myself to find out whether it was really happening. I called the moon my home for three days of my life, and I’m here to tell you about it. That’s the stuff of science fiction.”

All of the men interviewed — 10 of the 15 surviving Apollo astronauts who traveled to the moon — seem humbled by their experience. Charlie Duke, an Apollo 16 pilot who describes his father being in awe of his accomplishment and his 5-year-old son not the least bit impressed, recounts looking out the window of his ship at the shrinking planet he’d left and thinking how fragile Earth seemed, “hanging in the darkness like a jewel.”

Mike Collins, now in his 70s and still gifted with the guileless twinkle of the young boy who grew up flying model planes, was the Command Module pilot of Apollo 11, the first flight to actually land on the moon, and he was the man who stayed aboard the main ship, orbiting the moon, while the rest of his crew — Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — were making history on the surface. Collins is the most engaging of the subjects here, but it’s stiff competition.

Sington makes an astute decision to make his film basically an oral history. All narration and commentary, save a few written intertitles, come from the astronauts themselves, in tightly framed close-ups that often linger on the faces of these men for moments after they’re done speaking. These 10 men (Aldrin among them; the somewhat reclusive Armstrong did not participate) make for riveting, engaging subjects. Here is a bunch of old American white men, many of them with Southern accents, macho yet intelligent and gentle. They have accomplished great things via, in part, what Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell describes as an espirit de corps, a willingness to risk danger, and a pioneering spirit rooted in their generally shared history as test pilots. They are old-school American men, and they give that generally discredited class a fairly thorough redemption through In the Shadow of the Moon‘s two hours.

Sington pairs this terrific interview material with NASA archival footage, newly remastered and much of it unseen, synched up with original sound for the first time. This gripping footage is awesome in the most literal sense. Kubrick couldn’t touch it.

In revisiting the shiniest, happiest byproduct of the Cold War (the film acknowledges Soviet competition as a primary impetus to exploration), In the Shadow of the Moon restores the luster of the space program at a time when it seemingly lies dormant and barely dents the public consciousness. But, more than that, it speaks to a part of the American character itself.

“It was a bold move, and it had some risks,” says Jim Lovell of the Apollo 8 mission, which rushed to beat the Russians into moon orbit. “But it was a time when we made bold moves.”

We still make bold moves, of course. But the conception, follow-through, and outcome are not the stuff of the Apollo program. In the Shadow of the Moon acknowledges the dark side of this era in American history — a bad war in Vietnam, assassinations and unrest at home — but it also recaptures a moment when the world was united in admiration of American achievement. “I think it’s wonderful,” one European woman says in response to the moon landing. “I always trust an American. I knew they couldn’t fail.” Even the French loved us.

The image of American heroism captured here is built on role-playing, as always. But the laid-back machismo and professional swagger of these men is the stuff of Humphrey Bogart and John F. Kennedy, the president who set the mission in motion, not the more arrogant, less competent version that’s evolved in recent decades. It’s a movie that taps into feelings of patriotism and pride made latent by recent events. As such, it’s a moving, inspiring experience. But a bittersweet one.

Buzz Aldrin in a scene from In the Shadow of the Moon

The Kingdom, the latest film from actor-turned-director Peter Berg, also opens this week and is also somewhat of a testament to the American can-do spirit. The fictional story is about a terrorist attack at an American compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the four-person team of FBI agents who are sent to investigate.

The cast here — Jamie Foxx plays the primary investigator, leading a team played by Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman — is likable and relatively believable (in characterization, if not action). They create an engaging sense of competence and confidence, their quippy asides and gallows humor underscoring the ease of their professional camaraderie as they begin to piece together the clues in Riyadh. This feels like the inspiration of producer Michael Mann, who, himself, seems to get his feel for this dynamic from classic-age Hollywood films, primarily those of Howard Hawks. These outlaw-hero qualities — once pleasing embodiments of the American spirit — were corrupted in the age of Die Hard and Ronald Reagan and haven’t seemed like noble qualities for a while. But, in its quieter moments, The Kingdom hearkens back to an earlier notion of the American character embodied in In the Shadow of the Moon.

Unfortunately, The Kingdom doesn’t have the modesty or control to hold this tone. It wants to be a serious treatise on global politics, à la Syriana, and it also wants to be a noisy, exciting action movie. Berg isn’t content to make a mere quality film in the Hawks or Mann mold. He wants to win an Oscar and make a blockbuster. Can someone make a serious movie about the impact of violence and still craft combat/action scenes in a way that apes the would-be excitement of ’80s-era Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles? Maybe, but apparently Peter Berg can’t. And, in trying to make both kinds of movies, he accomplishes neither.

As Gladiator‘s Oscar win proved, a morally reckless disconnect between what a movie wants to be and what it actually is doesn’t have to be a hurdle to significance in this film culture. Gladiator was a movie that encouraged viewers to condemn the film’s bloodthirsty coliseum masses. Yet the film’s brutal fight scenes were presented in a way that encouraged filmgoers to become the modern equivalent of those ancient spectators.

The Kingdom has the same should-be fatal flaw. The film ends with speechifying against violence in favor of cultural understanding. But the film’s opening terrorist attack is presented in a way that encourages a demand for vengeance, something the film is all too happy to deliver with a noisy, unlikely shoot-out climax. The film audience, for example, is encouraged to cheer the sight of a knife plunged into a man’s groin. At a recent local preview screening, the audience eagerly and loudly complied.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Opens Friday, September 28th

Ridgeway Four

The Kingdom

Opens Friday, September 28th

Multiple locations