THE FASCINATING PROPAGANDA OF OLIVER STONE

I was in the tenth grade when the World Trade Center fell. I remember being in Mr. Kuhrt’s World History class. Someone rushed in and told him to turn on the television. The first tower had been hit, but no one knew what was going on, the gravity of the situation that would forever change things for us. We knew that the building was on fire, on one of the higher stories. We didn’t know that someone had flown an airplane into it, or that a second airplane was minutes away from colliding into the other tower.

Every September 11^th I dig up the footage from Youtube and show it to my students. For them, the event is on its way to being as distant as the Kennedy assassination is from me. Not quite yet, but soon, it will be long enough ago in history that children will cease to be emotionally affected by it in the same way that we who saw it unfold were so affected. Most of my middle school students weren’t even born yet. Students who graduated from high school in 2015 were about four or five when it happened. Being aware of it was terrifying, not knowing what was going to happen was terrifying. That day is a reminder that history was once real time, the present, unfolding before us, and the “we” of that former present did not, in the moment, have the benefit of recollection. Staring down at historical events, relegated to the page, gives us a false sense of superiority over them, as though we somehow authored them. We know the ending. In a sense, we don’t experience them as real events. It seems so simple, yet it’s so easy to forget that an historical event was once a real moment in time, all possibilities, pulsating and vibrant and brutal yet somehow naïve, each one graduated second being converted into the past.

The assassination of President Kennedy was the 9/11 of its generation. Or rather, the reverse of that. My generation’s experience of 9/11 happening in real time is comparable to what it must have been like to be alive on November 22, 1963, watching the motorcade make its way through downtown Dallas. When I see the President slump over after being hit, and I see Jackie Kennedy, frantically climbing onto the back of the open car in absolute terror, I’m brought to a stony silence. What must it have been like?

Oliver Stone’s JFK reminds us that movies are a vital, urgent, necessary art form. Those of us who are too young to remember the assassination of President Kennedy are met with the tragic reality of it only through such compelling re-enactments as this film, which puts the actual footage to effective use. Movies can awaken history to us even though most of them are historically inaccurate, and whether or not Oliver Stone’s depiction of the conspiracy theories behind the assassination of JFK are totally bonkers or totally onto something, this film captures the absolute chaos into which we were thrown on that horrible day in Dallas. Stone’s film pulsates with the blood and the synapses of real time, turning “dead historical fact” into an urgent, provocative, spine-tingling, terrifying mystery. At the very least, JFK reminds us that the government’s reaction to Kennedy’s death was wholly inadequate, allowing for the perpetual development of numerous conspiracy theories.

Once you get past Kevin Costner’s bad Louisiana accent (he plays New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison), it’s hard not to be affected by the sincerity of his performance, especially during the compelling courtroom speech he makes at the end. Atticus Finch has become some kind of Messiah in the pop culture for his conscientious liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird. But the Garrison character as depicted in JFK reaches further, challenging our complacency about government, awakening a deeper obligation to pay attention, to question, to use our own minds rather than accept with docile, childish ignorance, the happy lie that government is always honest, always seeking justice, always promoting truth. That’s our job just as much as it is theirs, and when we turn away from our own duties, we do so at our own peril.

I suppose this is less a movie review than a preachy treatise on the effects of a Hollywood movie. Or maybe, to put it in a better light, it’s an honest outpouring of the impression Stone’s film left on me. JFK is a magnificently entertaining, incredibly well-put-together piece of film. Stone’s ability to weave together archive footage with re-enactments makes him probably one of our greatest propagandists, and even if Stone’s theories about the assassination are false, his style is something to study. He knows how to make an arresting, spine-tingling, deliciously paranoid political thriller. And moreover, his quest for truth doesn’t ring false. The speech made by Garrison in the film’s denouement is as much a direct line of communication from Oliver Stone as anything.

The movie met with considerable criticism upon its release in 1991, and yet it was at least partly responsible for a new policy of transparency regarding official government documents about the Kennedy assassination. Stone’s film gives credence to the dubiousness of certain elements of the esteemed Warren Commission, namely the so-called “magic bullet,” which traveled with more finesse and effect than one of those talking cartoon bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The only bad scene occurs after Garrison learns of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. When he wakes up his wife (played by Sissy Spacek) to tell her the news, she’s confronted with the reality that her husband, plagued for years with public skepticism that has affected her own feelings about his work, was right after all. Their feels of validation turn into passionate kissing, and it is more than a little off-putting to think that an assassination serves them as an aphrodisiac. (Spacek, I should note, offers a stunning performance in an ultimately thankless role as the classic worrying wife, one of Hollywood’s favorite stock roles.)

Stone has gathered an impressive array of actors to fill his cast of strange, fascinating characters: Tommy Lee Jones, Laurie Metcalf, Joe Pesci, Michael Rooker, Wayne Knight, Kevin Bacon, Gary Oldman, Jay O. Sanders, Ed Asner, Jack Lemon, Donald Sutherland, Sally Kirkland, John Candy, Vincent D’Onofrio, Walter Matthau, and Brian Doyle Murray.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1

In this review, I’m assuming you’re somewhat familiar with the overall plot of The Hunger Games series, so while I do discuss plot points, I’m not going to bother explaining all the rules of the franchise’s milieu.

The trouble with movies like Mockingjay Part I is that they demand so little of the film medium. They’re not interested in being good movies, merely filmed readings of the novels, visual valentines to the devoted readers of the book series who want to expand their excitement and their experience of the fantasy. Harry Potter wasn’t content to be a well-told book series or even a film series. It eventually became a whole world unto itself at Islands of Adventure. And Hunger Games may one day have to follow in HP’s footsteps to give the fans what they truly want. Perhaps a Hunger Games-themed paintball park? No one is interested in adapting the series in a way that feels truly cinematic, although director Francis Lawrence does make some efforts with Mockingjay. But the movie is ultimately tethered to the book series in a way that ensures it will be a boring set-up for the finale. And viewers may likely find themselves restless with disinterest, but unwilling to criticize the movie since it’s part of a larger whole. How can we really even rate a movie like this, when it’s incomplete?

Even the great Jennifer Lawrence isn’t enough to save this movie. It’s partly her very quick rise as a respected actress—an ascendance that actually started before The Hunger Games—that has made her performance as Katniss Everdeen seem labored and gradually too familiar, too repetitive. Jennifer Lawrence already had an Academy Award nomination under her belt by the time she made the first Hunger Games (for the unsettling, murky meth-noir Winter’s Bone). Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other actors who were Oscar nominees before they were stars of hugely popular young adult movie franchises. Now that Lawrence has won an Oscar (for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook) and a third nomination (for last year’s American Hustle), her presence in Mockingjay Part I—the first half of the conclusion to The Hunger Games—is a little bit like a 22-year-old being stuck at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. The other grown-ups have legally recognized her adulthood, but they’re still treating her like a child. Of course, Lawrence has obligations to fulfill, and this series is her bread and butter. But Mockingjay Part I is a real yawn of a movie, and for people who look forward to what Lawrence can do on the screen, it represents a dull speed bump for an actress who has shown such promise.

It’s especially hard to watch an actress as good as Jennifer Lawrence be so inactive. Katniss Everdeen never felt more passive than in this movie. She sits, she waits, she reacts. She’s occasionally enlisted to shoot propaganda videos to rally the districts, which are fighting a losing battle against the Capital. She waits for news of her beloved Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who’s a prisoner of the Capital being used as a puppet to denounce the civil war between the districts and the Capital as radical and self-destructive. The alleged love triangle between Katniss and Peeta and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) has no momentum, especially since Peeta is seen through a glass screen for most of the film. (And how crummy is it to be Gale at this point? Always doing things for the woman he knows will never love him back the way he wants her to.) She chats with the leaders of her district—Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman—about strategy. She chats with Woody Harrelson (her alcoholic mentor). She chats with Elizabeth Banks. But none of the conversation, none of the characterization, adds up or amounts to much.

There’s also not much of a strong villain presence. The only really tangible bad guy is the face of the cold, ominous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) who’s mostly seen on big TV screens and thus needs desperately to be petting a white cat on his lap. He’s too larger-than-life to feel very threatening, and the movie drones on vaguely about the Capital in a way that never make the threats of the Capital seem real or genuinely tense. Even the big scenes—such as an air raid by Capital bombers—fails to show us the weight or the impact of the struggle. We see lots of terrified district folks running for shelter as the building around them shakes. But we don’t see the bombers and the scene is rendered ineffectual. It’s stagey in the worst way, like when the actors in a play look out the window and report on what they see since we the audience cannot actually see it. Moore and Hoffman are stern and unfeeling and dull as the leaders, always vaguely unaffected by the many setbacks and tragedies going on around them, and too noble to be capable of any real feeling.

I haven’t read any of the Hunger Games books. I saw the first film, but skipped Catching Fire. About fifteen minutes into Mockingjay, I was wishing I had skipped it too and waited for the finale, which is sure to be more entertaining (one hopes). This silly trend of expanding the final entry of series into two movies is peculiar and, I think, antithetical to movies and what they are. (Studios, of course, cannot pass up an opportunity to squeeze as much money as they can out of their pet franchises.) Even fans of the series seemed largely underwhelmed by this installment. The theater wasn’t even crowded. (Granted, it was the middle of the afternoon.) And nobody seemed excited. When I went to the final Twilight movie on opening night, half the fun was observing the audience. Those fans were having the time of their lives. The movie was a bummer—although entertaining for what it was—but the fans’ energy made it worth seeing. This latest Hunger Games entry felt lifeless.

The film is technically well-made. The director, Francis Lawrence, makes an effort to give the movie some visual feeling. In an early scene, we see Katniss emerging from a circular hallway into a large bunker, and the shot is kind of elegant. Many of the scenes in Mockingjay are visually tied together in a way you don’t expect from this kind of series. And the movie doesn’t pound you over the head with ending after ending. (I suspect that will come with Part 2). No, this film’s problem is that it’s a place-holder, and there’s so much being withheld that it’s hard to care. Even the one big advancement in the film’s plot (involving Peeta’s eventual release from the Capital) feels too little too late.

The Hunger Games

In The Hunger Games, there are 12 districts of a larger country which must endure a yearly punishment where their rebellious deeds are "remembered" (so they will never rebel again) in a contest called "The Hunger Games." A boy and a girl from each district (that's 24 adolescents) must fight to the death in the wilderness. That means one winner, and 23 dead. Enter our heroine, Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence (not so far from the character she played in Winter's Bone).

I haven't read the books. Not planning to read the books. In fact, I felt predisposed to dislike The Hunger Games, because it's the latest book-to-movie series obsession. But, to my surprise, I enjoyed it.  It's an engrossing adventure, with a good adult supporting cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Banks (barely recognizable under piles of make-up and gaudy-looking attire), and Donald Sutherland.

People will likely be scratching their heads about a story in which children are pitted against one another and turned into beasts, but the movie shies away, perhaps a little too much, from the dehumanizing effects of the Hunger Games. They were trying desperately to ensure a PG-13 rating, I'm sure, but in the process I think the point of the story is rendered more than a bit murky. We, the audience, are supposed to be indicted for our role as spectators getting our kicks out of violence. This is merely an amped-up version of those Gladiator fights from the Roman days, you see. The Hunger Games are telecast for all to watch (there are cameras everywhere, hidden even within the trees), and each player receives a tracking implant that lets the government monitor his or her every move.

It's much more rewarding to think of this movie as mindless entertainment than to try and tease out a moral message or some kind of Orwellian warning about the future. All of its ideas are rehashes of other people's ideas, simply put into the world of juvenile fiction, a world which is highly profitable, as even adults are getting into these books. The movies themselves will serve as a nice summing up for those of us who aren't planning to read them.

The Hunger Games's futuristic leanings may be designed to elicit deep contemplation, but they don't. The movie's too tame for that. While I wasn't exactly drooling for more violence (there was certainly a lot implied, so they could have turned this into a real bloodbath had they wanted to), the tameness has a way of luring you back into the complacency which the movie is, I think, trying to rail against. The future is for the spectators. They don't care about kids turning into monsters, killing each other. They want only to be entertained. Oh, but it comes at a price, a high, high price! This is the inner-monologue we're supposed to be having as we watch The Hunger Games, and then I suppose we're supposed to walk out of the theater with the realization that the future is now.

It was interesting to see how the movie (and presumably the book as well) recycled the decadent fashions of years past. You see spectators sporting colorful hair, done up in elaborate and unique fashions, and the clothes are equally loud and garish looking. Apparently everyone in the future (at least, in the big cities), is going to be a metrosexual. The poor folks still look like good old-fashioned working class, adorned in drab-looking, practical clothes. The Proletariat never get the fashion forward. They feel all too real and of the moment, which was probably the intention.

Also, the technology is fun to think about--lots of fancy computer screens flashing everywhere, and some impressive developments in the genetic manipulation of the natural world (often used to give the government a more active role in the creepy fight-to-the-death game that ensues for most of the movie).

The world of futuristic fiction is a strange one. There are so many ways an idea can go wrong when one is trying to depict the future. You look at 2001: A Space Odyssey and you see how inaccurate were their imaginings of what technology would be like in 2001. In fact, the set-up to this kind of movie can really kill it. You might start to giggle or possibly frown if you think too much into the futuristic world carved out for the drama of The Hunger Games. But it delivers enough suspense to be a fun movie, and there are enough moments of drama to make the main characters real and sympathetic, despite the situation that continues to dehumanize them.


Also starring Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, and Lenny Kravitz. Written by Suzanne Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross.

Pride and Prejudice

First, The Sociopolitical Rant Part of My Review:

I have never really tried to understand people's obsession with Jane Austen. Most of the Austen-philes have probably seen the myriad television and film adaptations of her six novels and the occasional few have actually read some of them. I remember reading Northanger Abbey in college because it was a spoof of Gothic novels. Reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time opened up my eyes to why Jane Austen is so popular. Of course, I should have seen this coming: it's the same reason any contemporary romantic comedy is popular. Pride and Prejudice affirms the marriage cult.

And now the review of Pride and Prejudice (2005 version):

Fluttery piano music wafts in and out of the movie. It's layered over the soundtrack whenever director Joe Wright doesn't know how to develop the emotions of the moment (be they happy, sad, confused, angry, indifferent, or anything in between). So the piano music is there to tell us how to feel.

And there's a smattering of overtly cinematic camera angles and dissolves that are placed to try and elevate this comedy of marital bliss into something else. I think it would have been fine as social satire had they stuck with the source material, but overall, the 2005 movie is banality come to life. Keira Knightley is very pretty indeed, but who could believe her performance as Elizabeth? She's too pretty. Rosamund Pike is an actress I enjoyed very much in An Education. She plays Jane fairly well, but then, Jane's a bit of a bore. She never has much time to stand out. Matthew Macfadyen scowls appropriately as Mr. Darcy.

Pride and Prejudice is for people who need to keep alive the mythology that marriage is the only way to be happy or fulfilled, and moreover that marriage is the supreme business of women. When you read Jane Austen it's rather interesting partly because it's not so anachronistic as it appears to today's audiences, but also because Austen was fairly good with the words and all. The movie flattens everything out so that satire and irony have been omitted. The only remaining levity is built in for the mass audience in the most insulting fashion. And everyone is too pretty, not just Elizabeth, to be believable (except Donald Sutherland).

With Tom Hollander and, because it may be British law to cast her in any British-themed movie, Judi Dench.

Horrible Bosses

What's most fun about this movie is seeing Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell playing audaciously horrible human beings who drive their subordinates (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, respectively) to want to murder them. Aniston hasn't been this much fun in years, and you probably already knew Spacey was made for this kind of live-wire psychotic CEO part. Farrell is the least recognizable (physically), and yet you get the feeling he's had some experience playing the "tool" before.

Horrible Bosses may not score any points for originality (it acknowledges its plot similarities to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and ignores its similarities to the Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin-Dolly Parton workplace comedy Nine to Five), but at least it treats us to some moderately dark humor delivered with nothing but fervent zeal from its cast. Most of them seem delighted to be playing such over-the-top characters for once. Bateman and Sudeikis pretty much do their usual schtick. Charlie Day scores highly as an easily agitated dental assistant whose boss (Aniston) has been sexually harassing him with impunity.

Midway through, the movie takes an unexpected turn that changes it from a darker version of Office Space to a darker version of the afore-mentioned Nine to Five, which was about three women kidnapping their sexist boss so that they could make some worker-friendly changes in the office. It's the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy employees will cheer for, and yet there's always a bitter feeling in the back of your mind that you're rooting for three would-be killers.

Horrible Bosses ties things up too conveniently at the end, but it's a diverting enough hour and a half. Directed by Seth Gordon. With Jamie Foxx and, in a bit performance, Donald Sutherland.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) is a re-imagining of the 1956 cult classic directed by Don Seigel. In the 1950's version, people read into it a social commentary on the communist scare that seemed to be gripping the nation. Ultimately, it was a fear of becoming un-American. Identity was so wrapped up in nationalism that to lose your Americanism might have felt like the ultimate displacement. It was set within the banal landscape of suburban America, where everyone was already a conformist anyway. The aliens, unseen except in the form of seemingly harmless pods with little flowers on them, are making duplicates of the townspeople so that they can take over their world.

Twenty years later, Philip Kaufman retells this weird story (originally conceived by Jack Finney in his novel, The Body Snatchers) in San Francisco, hardly a foe to the non-conformist. The movie uses its racially and ethnically diverse, politically liberal and liberated city as a wonderfully ironic backdrop: besides the fact that it's a crowded city, it's a modern, hip city, and so how can you really tell that people are suddenly acting out of the ordinary? There is no ordinary there.

Brooke Adams plays Elizabeth, a lab analyst for the public health department. Her boyfriend Geoffrey (Art Hindle) wakes up acting rather different from his usual demeanor, and it starts to freak her out. When she tells her colleague and confidant Matthew (Donald Sutherland), he suggests a consultation with his shrink-friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy). The movie mocks our increasing reliance on therapy as a panacea for unhappiness and discontentment, and in Body Snatchers, Dr. Kibner is proffered up as some kind of 20th century Messiah. We meet him at a book signing, where he's being inundated with fans/readers in need of counseling. His calm, emotionless persona (which probably served him well as Dr. Spock in the Star Trek movies) is already so much like one of those pod people that you're immediately suspicious of him. He seems to care about finding solutions, and yet he doesn't seem to listen to people. He's condescending, as though he's aware of some supreme joke that his needy patients couldn't possibly get.

Matthew's friends, Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright), have their own pod person encounter when something that looks like a duplicate of Jack begins growing in their massage parlor. Jack notes how the features resemble his, but that the thing is unformed, lacking such recognizably human features as fingerprints or respiration. As the pods progress throughout the city, Elizabeth, Matthew, Jack, and Nancy become increasingly alienated in their conviction that something is terribly awry in their world.

There has yet to be a better version of this story. Kaufman injects into it a really kooky atmosphere. The cinematography, by Michael Chapman, is first-rate. He uses lots of off-kilter angles to give the movie a distorted look (this, coupled with the setting of hilly, already distorted looking San Francisco, makes you feel like nothing is very grounded or "sane" to begin with). The music by Denny Zeitlin is at times like something from John Williams, but then he infuses it with pulsating synthesizers that zing at just the right moments, reminding you of the corny period of movie-making from which this movie hails, the 1950s. It was an era obsessed with half-human monsters and apocalyptic alien invasions. The 1970s, up until the tail-end of the decade, was much more interested in lighter space fare. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was about the beauty and mystery and mutual admiration of an alien encounter. And then there was Star Wars, which wasn't really about alien encounters, but certainly took away the anxiety about them that people have so often worked out in movies.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 joins the ranks of the paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the decade, from Klute to The Conversation to All the President's Men. It channels the vibe going through a country that was freaked out and frustrated by the government, politicians, public leaders in general, institutions, crime. I kept thinking about David Fincher's 2007 movie Zodiac, which is about the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the early 70s. Invasion of the Body Snatchers puts the city into an altogether different state of panic, but the fear of losing one's identity is a fear that can be transmuted to serve the needs of any genre, be it science fiction, horror, drama, or documentary. The pod people are soulless drones like George Romero's zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1979), or the brain-dead Barbie doll women in The Stepford Wives (1975). The only difference is that in Body Snatchers, the pod people are masterful survivalists. They're adapting to our world and our human forms. The drones in Dawn of the Dead are just reanimated corpses, and the drones in The Stepford Wives are robots. They're not surviving.

As for the performances, Brooke Adams gives probably her best, most believable one. She has a natural likeability that is so often hampered by the material of the movies she's in, or maybe the directors haven't had the ability to draw it out of her. She shines in this, as does Veronica Cartwright, who's sizzling with energy. Ridley Scott apparently wanted her to put a lid on that in Alien, but in Body Snatchers Kaufman lets her run wild. She's the ultimate eccentric in the land of eccentrics. Almost all of the actors in this movie have done notable work in the genre before or after Body Snatchers, with the possible exception of Donald Sutherland, who carries the film rather well. It was scripted by W.D. Richter.