Brokeback Mountain

Crippen: Just returned from seeing (rather late in the game) Brokeback Mountain. I am deeply touched and moved by this film. I have always thought that humans are deeply hardwired for the passion of love, and not necessarily along traditional male-female lines although that subject has rarely been explored dispassionately in film. I am also coming to believe that there is such a thing as a “soul mate” that fully rounds out a person’s existence, and without that person you get what happens in Brokeback Mountain.

The photography is unbelievable, the sound track perfect, the characters come alive. Old couples in the back row were weeping unabashedly. This film will deservedly walk away with all the major film awards. It rates as in the top 5 films I have ever seen.

More review by Mike Darwin:

I saw the film in a virtually deserted theater so there was little audience reaction. I think it is a good film, a very good film, but not a great one, at least not in the iconic sense we associate with films like Casablanca or 2001.

This film is being billed as a love story, but it falls short of that in my estimation. Like all great stories (Annie Proux’s original) with an “obvious” message, Brokeback Mountain tells us an old story in a different context. When Jonathan Swift wanted to lob a volley about the politics of his time, he wrote about Gulliver, and his strange travels. Voltaire gave us the story of Candide. If you want people to take a common problem seriously you often have to tell them about it from an alien perspective. The other strong theme in the movie is the ancient Greek concept of high tragedy. In Greek tragedy the undoing is in the nature of the characters themselves. Their own character flaws doom them from the start. Brokeback Mountain owes much to the tradition of Greek tragedy.

To me, Brokeback Mountain deals with several big issues nowhere mentioned in the promotions or reviews for this film. Perhaps one of the biggest issues is that of adultery; deep, deceitful, intimate betrayal of those you love and who love you. Both cowboys, Jack Twist and Annis Del Ray, are homosexual, but they are very different from each other. I’ve know countless Annis Del Rays, straight or gay. These are men who feel profoundly, but are almost completely inarticulate. Something in their past, their character, or their genome, causes them to bottle up their feelings and their thoughts behind clipped, almost mumbled “conversation.” Something I’ve noticed about a lot of men like this is their habit of putting their hands up to their mouths when they speak — or when they seem to want to — and don’t. They are closed up inside.

When we meet Annis he is already on the trajectory to marriage and a very conventional life. It’s a fair bet he knows something is troublingly different about himself, but an equally fair bet that he hasn’t fully identified it, let alone admitted it to himself and started to deal with it. Jack Twist is a different matter. Jack “Nasty” has been around the block, and Jack knows who and what he is. He moves first on Annis because he knows a lot; he knows enough to trust his instincts that this emotional powder keg of a man will not kill him on this isolated mountain if he makes a sexual advance towards him. That’s more than Annis knows about himself. He knows not only the mechanics of gay sex in its roughest iterations, but also how to gauge a still, deep man like Annis, whose homosexuality seems seamlessly hidden and perhaps not consciously realized. That is knowing a great deal!

This creates two somewhat different moral planes. It is easier to understand why Annis marries and has a family; it is much harder to understand why Jack does this. Jack knows fully, and without reserve, who he is, and much more importantly, what he wants and how he might get it. And yet, he marries. This is a great betrayal not only of himself, but of his wife and eventually his son. Annis has had one earth shattering experience, and while he knows, as we see when he is pounding his fist into the building wall when Jack leaves that first time, he has no base of experience or wider world to look to gain understanding. It is easy, oh so easy, to deceive yourself in such a situation. Jack has no such excuse. We see him move on to other men, and do so with confidence, and at considerable risk.

The infidelity that rips these characters’ lives apart is ostensibly homosexual, but in reality it could be about any relationship, sexual or otherwise, that results in abandonment of emotional presence in a marriage. I’ve known both men and women, who left their marriages just as surely for a job, a golf course, a church, or an all consuming hobby. Infidelity comes in many forms and that is a recurring theme in this movie.

Is it a great love story? I don’t think we can know that. Love comes in two waves. The first is a fantastic surge of passion, bonding, and well-being. It is the acute stage of romance, but it is comparatively short lived: six months to two years at most. The second wave is, to me, the real thing. This is the time when trust, profound easiness with your partner, and mutual security built on real, hard life experience coalesce to form a bond that is so deep you would give your life for your partner — and do so even after long and careful reflection in the face of death. We can read into Jack’s and Annis’ affair whatever we like, but we can’t know how it would have worked out, because they never take that chance. There are plenty of people who are good at “being in love” but are lousy at loving. The acute is very different from the chronic.

So, that is the other great tragedy in this movie. These two men probably are soul mates (and I believe in such things too), but they will never really know and neither will we. Here the fates challenge character. As Jack Twist points out again and again, there *is* a possible future for them together as they were meant to be. But that future comes at a high price and at terrible risk. Ennis is haunted not only by the specter of social ostracism, but of violence and an unspeakable death imprinted onto him in his childhood. His almost autistic lack of social and emotional faculties makes it very hard to take the step off the cliff and leave every point of reference he has ever learned behind. Ang Lee makes us understand this — but he also lets us know that this a choice — a choice that will be paid for dearly — as is always the case in Greek tragedy.

In most films about homosexual men we are given the message that to whatever extent the identity is acted on, the characters are doomed to death or lifelong unhappiness. Here, Ang Lee tells us a great truth. If we deny the heart and soul of who we are, to the extent we are successful, we are just as surely doomed to death, or a life of sterile longing that is its equivalent.

Brokeback Mountain is a wretchedly sad and painful film at its core. It is a cautionary tale that has been told countless time before and will be told countless time again: Told at least as long humans are humans. A lot of gay men don’t like this film. I think one reason for that is that they do not experience the “remove” that heterosexuals do when watching it. Like Swift, Ang Lee has informed his audience of many great truths. but it has, perhaps, yet to dawn on them that Jack and Ennis are really just any two people with the same problems, straight, gay, or otherwise. We are all up there on the screen to the extent that we share these characters’ fates and flaws.

Mike Darwin

The human mind is said to have many computer-like qualities. The ability to reason inductively, to compare finite bits of data and draw objective conclusions from them. To store massive amounts of data and rapidly retrieve selections by Boolean logic.  But they operate entirely on instructions prepared by someone who has done the
pre-thinking and reduced  the problem to a point where
logical decisions can deliver the correct answer.

Computers fail quickly when human socialization muddies the water. Digital processing cannot quantitate what the science of psychiatry doesn’t understand all that well either. So as the human brain more closely approximates digital processing, it more excludes the rules of socialization that only the right side of the brain comprehends. Enter Harvard computer science student Mark Zuckerberg.

He’s fascinating to watch from the first scene of “The Social Network”. He instantly exhibits a “steel trap mind”. He processes concepts and formulates almost instantaneous responses that cut to the chase of the issue at hand. And in so doing, diverts the social consequences that then pile up as he goes along.

The prime directive is making his creation work, never mind that he built it on the ideas of others who eventually become irrelevant. The prime logic is to nurture the growth of the creation as an end in itself, discarding those without whom it would have never grown. They aren’t needed and so are discarded like booster rockets for a space vehicle, coldly and efficiently.

Zuckerberg is a new millennium monster that created a social network the nature of which he had no conception of other than as a picture on a laptop screen, reducing life to a database. A paradox that a man with pathologically bad people skills created the world’s most popular human networking location.  A terribly scary human information processor that functions with the efficiency of an IBM mainframe and wonders what the problem is when his discards start getting in the way of progress.

Impeccably acted, immaculately directed.  Newcomer Jesse Eisenberg chills to the bone.  Maybe a vision of a product of the ever-persuasive Internet, the full nature of which we really don’t understand yet.

A must see for Jesse Eisenberg, who will not win the Oscar but delivered a stellar performance.

I give it Four of five uncomprehending scowls.

It started out with an interesting premise. Evolution from temporal
to cosmic. What it took to be a “white swan” was technical
perfection. Practiced experience in playing the stereotype of
political or social perfection. Not so much as a feather out of
place. But the only way for a “white swan” to morph into the “black
swan” alter ego is to abandon all the commodities the “white swan”
and leap into the existential void while maintaining the same
habitus.

Is it possible to put enough pressure on the “white swan” to
accomplish the transition by simply an authority figure demanding
it? Was it possible for perpetually angst ridden Natalie Portman to
morph from virginal purity to otherworldly “no limits” expansionist.
Maybe somewhere in the universe, but not in this film.

Portman is an otherwise excellent actress and she tried hard to pull
the transition off. but was ultimately unsuccessful She started out
on the brink of sanity anyway digging at her skin under the thumb of
an overbearing mother having given up a ballet career to raise a
daughter. Interminable pressure from the ballet director pushing
her on both a performance and personal level. The stage was
set………

But ultimately, Portman’s transition only ends in cosmic psychosis
and she carries the unwilling audience with her. Neither perceives
what’s real and what’s Memorex, ultimately confusing everyone.
Gratuitous female-female sex scenes succeed only in making the
audience squirm uncomfortably. In the end, the question of how a
white-black swan meld might be answered remains mired in a
hallucination that goes nowhere.

On exiting the theater, a patron was overheard to say: “God, I’m
going to need therapy”.

One of five pink Tutus. Not recommended by me
—

It’s been said that time travel is impossible, otherwise people would be suddenly popping into the present and life scenarios would suddenly change as the future was previously altered. However, that’s only true if all the occupants of a time line are participants, not observers. If the future is abstract and begins only as the participant enters it, then there are an infinite number of universe possibilities and the participant literally makes it up as he goes along. The future could change an infinite number of times and the participant would not observe it in real time.

Our hero in “Source Code” has the ability to be both an observer and participant in eight minutes of a recurring future the rest of the participants cannot be aware of. The physics of this phenomenon involve programming neurotransmission. In the words of its creator Dr. Rutherford, “It’s not time travel, it’s time re-assignment”. He is sent back enabled with “overlapping consciousness” to find the key to a mystery time after time, just like Groundhog Day, each time arriving forearmed with more observations from pervious iterations that will lead him to solving the mystery.

However, once the mystery is solved, the resulting conclusion takes a very radical turn into physics that was previously not defined or predicted, which strains credibility somewhat. That said, it’s not out of the question that the entire concept was poorly understood from the outset, they were flying blind and had no idea what this experiment was capable of in it’s logical extreme. Alternate realities not only capable of self-sustaining but capable also of interacting.

At this point I will refrain from further spoilers.

Other than a few minor non-sequiturs and some pretty hokey biophysics (all of which work at least for the plot), this film is a worthy successor to two others working the same theme, “Inception” and “The Adjustment Bureau”. Jake Gyllenhaal was well cast. His chemistry with recurring and long suffering female acquaintance gorgeous Michelle Monaghan seemed genuine. Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) was also notable as was Frederick De Grandpre as the intense Dr. Rutherford. The dialogue was fresh, the plot was appropriately complex, interesting and intelligent. Appropriate for kids.

I give it four of five flash fires.

Ummmm, my understanding is that time travel FORWARD is a theoretical possibility as it wouldn’t create a paradox, but backwards is out.

I found your movie description very tough to follow, but gather from the end of your critique that you liked the movie.

Ummmm, my understanding is that time travel FORWARD is a theoretical possibility as it wouldn’t create a paradox, but backwards is out.

OK, lets try it again.

It has always been thought that if time travel was possible, then anyone going back to the past could alter something and the future would change. Like the old chestnut goes, if someone went back and killed my father, I would never be born and I would vanish in front of everyone I know. The butterfly effect; a butterfly flaps it’s wings in Peking and it rains in New York City.

We don’t perceive any of that happening. Therefore, reverse time travel, even though technically possible (wormholes) requires some stretch of the imagination to conceive of the practical reality. Just because we don’t perceive people that weren’t there before popping in and out and the landscape doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t happening. We simply might not be aware it’s happening.

The popping in and out phenomenon would only be observable if the future was preformed but alterable as I sailed through on a rail, and I could compare differences. One instant, the future was what I recognized and in the next instant it was something else because I can compare the differences. In my present, my wife is here, in the next frame she isn’t and never existed. I would be a participant in my history without the potential to observe alternate realities.

However, if the future is custom made specifically to accommodate my entry into it, then I would not necessarily notice any changes at all. The future is a void until the instant I enter it, then it accommodates to the thrust of my perception of reality. There are an infinite number of futures that could accommodate a change fomented by a past action and integrate that change into my current reality seamlessly. If my wife vanished, that future could be made compatible with my past in an infinite number of ways. My future could be an infinite variety that would appear seamless to me because I have no other frame of reference. I would be both a a participant and an observer with the potential to choose (or have chosen for me) alternate realities.

The protagonist in “The Source Code” has been given the ability to both participate in a progression from the past to the future, and also observe it/supervise it with foreknowledge. Each time he enters the eight minute clip of history, he does so with knowledge of what happened in each previous iteration, and his actions can change the progression of events……….at least within the eight minute clip. Whether the sum total of the eight minutes is capable of integrating into the stream of the rest of history is another matter.

And therein hangs a spoiler you don’t get. See the flick for the rest.
—

What makes a truly great film? Identification with the characters, believability of the plot? Insinuating yourself to be a part of the scenario? Perhaps becoming uncomfortable when it gets close. All these things apply to “Up in the air”, possibly the best film of the year if you don’t get too close to it.

Escape to The Road has been a theme since Hope and Crosby in the 40s, Jack Keroac in the 50s, Peter Fonda (Easy Rider) in the 60s, Jack Nicholson (Five Easy Pieces) in the 70s, The Road Warrior in the 80s, Thelma & Louise in the 90s, and now finally the saga of The Road sterilized to an air path and sanitized to a credit card swipe. An inverted world where airlines honor the loyalty of anonymous customers and employers jettison the contributions of long-term employees.

The emotional desolation of the prime character (George Clooney) fits the isolation of the road nicely since his job is to spread his own isolation to others as professional “Downsizer” (firing people for a living). The inverted life style of less is more and dipping his barren tentacles into the stark terror of those losing their jobs eventually drives his female associate (masterfully played by Anna Kendrick) to suicidal depression. Clooney thrives on it.

Clooney develops a literally “on the fly” relationship with fellow compulsive traveler Vera Farmiga, a female version of himself. Clooney reluctantly finds himself drawn to probably the first “meaningful” relationship in his life and is shocked to find his previous crutch of cynicism pulled out from under him. (no spoilers intended).

Those “let go” employees were actually filmed as they were told the bad news; their reactions are real (they signed waivers). Possibly some of the most uncomfortable scenes ever filmed. Writer / Director Jason Reitman, (Juno and Thank You For Smoking) masterfully weaves the characters together finding the lure, and then apart as they ultimately react to the reality of the road as panacea for the alone and lonely.

Read the reviews. The film really is that good.

It gets five of five carbon fiber loyalty award cards.

Father Benedetto: [speaking to Jack] “You cannot deny the existence of hell. You live in it. It is a place without love”. And so the viewer gets a front row view of this place for 106 minutes. The self-fulfilling prophesy of a soul-less slow burn, devoid of human emotion. What the scenario looks like at the end of the line.

Jack is approaching the end of his career in an unspecified malevolent endeavor and the sum total of his life experience is vociferous paranoia and survival as a full time endeavor. The ultimate terminus of his life is distilled into the skill of detection and avoidance of danger. George Clooney meticulously plays Jack as cold and aloof but between the sparse lines uses his talent to convey Jack’s complex emotions.

Jack is a creature of the environment he has created, and finds himself running through the maze with the same laconic expectations of doom he has lived. An existential crisis as he feels death closing but is unable to identify the threat. In the end Jack there arises an unexpected potential redemption, fleetingly brief, and both the viewer and the subject know under the façade it isn’t to be. There can be no redemption for those without a soul.

Beautifully filmed in Italy, the characters are magnificent, Clooney is always outstanding but ultimately this film doesn’t satisfy. Although interesting, Jack repels the viewer who wants nothing to do with him. The plot is predictable. The character is too distant and leaves the audience with too little pathos. Ultimately the audience refuses to be drawn into it, observing from a safe distance that obviates identification with the character.

Wait till it hits HBO and watch it for Clooney’s talent, only if there are no guns or knives in the house.

It gets only two of five stern frowns.

From the book “Gesundheit: Good Health Is a Laughing Matter” by Hunter Doherty Adams

At her request, I took my 10 y/o daughter to see the new movie Patch Adams for her birthday. The movie opens with an earlier iteration of Patch in a mental institution, finding that the doctors donÕt offer much treatment but the other patients do, a maxim most mental patients would subscribe to. He decides to become a doctor to help people and finds that medicine is an cold, self serving and impersonal business. Patch personifies the nonconformist, humanist, rebel who defies the impersonal system to bring the warm hearted message “Don’t worry….be happy” to patients starving for the personal touch.
i
Certainly nothing new there. The attitudes of the movie are certainly very politically correct for the HMO era. If only everyone would stop worrying and be happy, all disease would be eradicated or at least more effectively palliated. His ideology can be summed up, “You treat a disease, you win you lose…you treat a patient and I guarantee you’ll win.” But Patches answer to beating the establishment is bunny ears and bedpan flippers. My kid and the rest of the theater laughed right on que.

But the real thrust of the story went right over all their heads. As they followed the hard line……laughing
6at the best medicine, they didn’t notice is a very effective but hidden sub-plot that suggests that unrestrained acceptance of all the good in people is bad for your health and can kill people. Unlimited acceptance of the verity that laughter is therapeutic medicine quickly leads down the slippery slope to the next logical associated maxim, that if you just find out what people want and give it to them, they will respond better to any kind of therapy. Global acceptance of this dictum resulted in death and destruction right in the middle of the laugh lines.

Cynicism and skepticism are not born of good press but of of reality and experience. The bedside manner of both both the real Patch Adams and Robin Williams amount to nothing more than a buffoonish, scarily maniacal clown act, more likely to trigger relapses and lawsuits than augment a treatment plan. Making children in a cancer ward feel better by a clown act does not necessarily extrapolate to other populations of patients. The stark reality is that people sometimes do worse when given their desires rather than their needs. If simply finding out what patients want and giving it to them was the best medicine, Jerry Lewis could do more in a yearly telethon and all the medical centers in the country.

The film portrays a current and vapid vision of health care as might be dreamed up by a monster bearing the heads of Hillary Clinton and Edward Kennedy. Health care too expensive, impersonal and bureaucratic? Make it free! On a dude ranch in the Appalachians, with a clown act in every room. Although it plays well in the media, Patches real free clinic that treated 15,000 patients and a 40 bed hospital (In Pennsylvania) that will offer full services all for free is an illusion. The stark reality is that such services utilize scarce resources and they are not free and never will be. Someone, somewhere pays for them at market prices. St. Jude’s also provides effective free medical care, without the clown act.

Patch Adams should have been released in 1992 where it could have served as effective advertising for the Clinton medical plan. I give it one out of five red bulb noses. Had a great sound track.

I came, I saw bootlegged copy, I have observations.

Michael Moore makes very entertaining but one must never lose sight of some realities about him. Moore knows the end point of what he wants to say before he begins the film, and the film is constructed specifically to get there. He only interviews people that support his position. He insures that any alternative views are from shaky prospects. And Moore is very, very much a wild-eyed liberal. Michael always looks through a lens that makes his ideal look far different than objective reality. In “Roger and Me”, he would have General Motors spend billions to stay in Flint and risk insolvency just to support the hapless population of workers. In “Bowling for Columbine”, he pins the blame on poor befuddled Charlton Heston, already showing signs of dementia. In “Fahrenheit 441” he simplifies very complex issues by blaming one individual, GW Bush, (admittedly a doofus, but only a small part of the whole). Having said that, I think this film stands on very firm ground and should be seen by everyone. It effectively explores issues that will figure greatly into the 2008 presidential election.

Moore goes into it dismissing the egregious fact that over 46 million Americans are without health care indemnification. He then goes into great detail to show that many Americans who think they are insured get caught in the “disallowed” trap. Their insurance companies refuse to pay for needed services using one ruse or another. His recurring theme is that insurance companies cut costs be denying reimbursement, especially if it’s pricey and, of course, CEOs and executives pocket the savings. But this is old history. The date for one of his subjects was 1996, and most of this disallowment gambit is way over ten years old. Because of the efficiency of the Information Age, denying care has become much more unfashionable as the light of day shines on it and has been superceded by new evolutions of greed and gluttony. The thrust has changed from conserving wealth to building wealth. Instead of pocketing money diverted from health care provision, CEOs and executives now use entrepreneurial principles to build business empires from health care centers in which they profit by the “bonus” system. They use money to make more money and as the empire grows, their “bonuses” for creating wealth exceed their salaries many fold. They are isolated from actual health care delivery, but their decisions always involve money.

Moore’s thesis is that all that money that CEOs, executives and Big Pharma are taking out of the system should be used to help expand a true universal health care delivery system that’s overdue. As a country, we support obscene salaries of “non-profit” health CEOs and executives by taking money directly out of health care, a zero sum game. The pieces of the pie must always add up to 100% at the end of the slicing. When one piece of the pie gets bigger, the rest get smaller. This thesis simply isn’t contestable. It’s in all the resource management textbooks. So, we, the most affluent country in the world culls out almost 20% or our population from health care indemnification and under-supports the rest so that individuals prosper.

Having digested this film for a while, I truly think Michael Moore’s heart is in the right place. I don’t think he’s one of those Star Trek villains that glows when it’s around discord. I think he truly believes what he portrays in his films, especially this one. But he is a creature of his biases, and a big bias is populism. For example, he is very kind to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to revamp the health care system in 1993, insinuating she failed because “organized” medicine and especially Big Pharma ganged up on her. The reality is her plan failed because it was a conceptual disaster in every way, not even thought out by Hillary, who has never had an original thought in her head. It was her guru de jour Ira Magaziner, and he quickly faded into well-deserved obscurity. Even Moore admits that now Hillary is running second in receiving campaign money from health care corporations and Big Pharma.

Considering all the above, it’s obviously insufficient to open-endedly complain about a bad system. A better alternative has to eventually be put forth. Accordingly, Moore then goes on to extol the virtues of other countries’ health care provision systems. Ever the populist, Moore uses selective interviews to portray them as God’s gift to the citizenry, free, freely available and matchless in every respect. Idyllic Europeans describing getting paid to take three months off after surgery just to get back in a good frame of mind. “Ever get a bill?”. Smiles all around. “Only in America”. Very convincing, at least as far as the interviews go. But all are very vague as to how long they actually wait for services.

Of course there are such systems in the world, but there’s a Catch-22 that Moore doesn’t understand because he’s an interested bystander hung up by his populist biases. The stark reality is that getting access into the system is not the same as actually obtaining services. As access increases at a constant provision level, waiting time waiting for services goes up exponentially. That fact is incontrovertible. It’s in all the resource management textbooks. The National Health Care service in the UK does indeed offer 100% access for citizenry, as do most of the other European Union countries. But access does not necessarily equal efficiency and it isn’t cheap for those funding it. The income tax in most of these countries is considerably higher than ours, many over 50% of gross income, and most have a substantial “value added” tax for everything purchased that dwarfs our “sales tax”. 17.5 % in the UK in addition to income taxes. And the UK is a VERY expensive place to live. But they have unlimited free access to health care. Moore doesn’t seem to see the connection, but Americans soon will.

Better than what we have now? Michael Moore thinks so. Here’s are his final comments at the end of the film verbatim:

“You know, when we see a good idea from another country,
We grab it. If they build a better car, we drive it. If they make
A better wine, we drink it. So if they’ve come up with a better
way to treat the sick…………then what’s our problem. Why
can’t we do that? They live in a world of “we”, not “me”. We’ll
never fix anything until we get that one basic thing right. And
powerful forces hope we never do (Shows photo of Aetna Insurance building) and that we remain the only country in the Western world without free, universal health care”.

There is little doubt that America will have universal health care coverage probably as part of the next presidential term. They have all promised it, and although none show any convincing evidence of ability to deliver, they’ll all try. One thing is clear. We have gotten away with what we have far too long and it’s going to end because it can no longer be sustained. And universal health care will be a very bitter pill for every layer of Americans for a lot of reasons. As terrifying as it seems, Hillary Clinton has a shot at being the next president, and her plan is 1993 HillaryCare revisited. An updated version “managed care” for the new millennium. Few if any of the rest of them have much better plans. The only one of the batch that actually came out and stated that it will be tax based and taxes will rise to whatever level supports it is Edwards. Something the public doesn’t want to hear up front, but will find out after the fact.

Health care delivery will tread the path of the Great Golden Mean. Resource access will be managed by those with an incentive to maintain status quo. A stable normal distribution of care where the majority will eventually get what they need, and those on either end of the curve will get siphoned off……. and all will wait. The price of access and economy will be delay, and Americans aren’t used to waiting. Those wailing to Michael that they cannot obtain access will then be wailing that they have access but no service. Reports of deaths and disability while waiting for services will replace instances of death and disability from inability to pay. Instead of a portion of the population being very satisfied with their service and others unhappy, virtually all will be unhappy with the Great Golden Mean.

CEOs and executives’ bonus millions will dry up, as there will be no utility in building empires for government services. They’ll unfurl their golden parachutes and move on to other areas of more fruitful business endeavor leaving administration to those with an incentive to insure their job security. High priced surgeons delivering superspecialty care for a salary of millions will move onto something else. The same government employees that oversee social welfare programs will administer health care services, and complaining will similarly be met with stone faces. Angry malpractice lawsuits for malpractice will beat themselves to death against the pure essence of attrition. Big Pharma will move to other areas in the world, if they haven’t already.

I heartily recommend everyone see this film when it comes out 6/29. Here’s the URL for a pirated version maybe you can watch standing in line for your iPhone. (Don’t turn me into the Motion Picture of America Association Federales).

http://ccm-l.org/Sicko.htm

We live in interesting times.

“Vanilla Sky” meets The Matrix”. Computer Generated Interface meets imagination. And now in this amazing film, imagination strains the ability of the viewer to comprehend it. “The Matrix” is three standard deviations behind.

Briefly, dreams are subject to exploitation and information mining. Ultimately, the possibility of depositing information exists but the ramifications are unknown. The protagonist team plots to delve three layers into the subject’s subconscious (a dream within a dream within a dream) to plant the bare seed of an idea that would then bloom into fruition into his conscious world, producing a quantum change in a mega-billion dollar business deal. Along the way, the unpredictable random chaos of perception muddy the water.

The players and the audience immerse in the involutions and convolutions of the reality/dream interface, and dreams have scary rules. Drawing on memories to construct dreams can be dangerous. Intruding in the dreams of others can cause the dreamer’s “projections” (human representations created by the dreamer) to attack the intruders. Depending on the level accessed, dying in a dream possibly forces the dreamer into a very long limbo as ten minutes at level one can mean ten years when three layers into a dream. A unique keepsake called a “totem” is required in order to inform a character as to whether or not he or she is still dreaming, a situation reminiscent of Chris Reeves’ coin in “Somewhere in time” (with an unfortunate outcome for him).

These brief descriptions are only a fraction of the rules, exceptions, and details for creating the thorny world of “Inception”. The moviegoer will not have the luxury of simply enjoying the painless plot and tons of visual pyrotechnics as in “Avatar”. It’s highly unlikely the viewer will manage to keep up with the complexity but will continue to be swept along filling in the holes as best they can. This film will require multiple viewings, stopping to understand each layer before escalating to the next one.

This film intelligently mixes CGI with thoughtful text.
Chris Nolan is the new wave of outstanding Directors. Leo DiCaprio channels much of a previous character in “Shutter Island” but otherwise makes the role come alive. Ken Watanabe is always great. Newcomer Ellen Page (Juno) is surprisingly mature. The final scene leaves much to the viewer’s imagination.

It’s the best film of the year, a must see, probably several times.

It’s a little long and some of the action scenes don’t augment the plot so it gets 4.5 of 5 freight trains roaring down 5th avenue.

It had been ten years since Vietnam and I had very much forgotten much of it over time. I wandered into the theater in early 1979 not knowing any better. Just sounded interesting, the criteria most folks use to decide which films they choose to see on a Saturday night. In four hours it all came back in a vicious rush that left me stunned and silent in my seat for a very long time after the credits. I shuffled out of the theater in a daze and was non functional for a fairly long time. I could never bring myself to see it again.

At some point in the 80s, I actually purchased the video tape and it sat in a bookcase until the era of DVD, and I threw the tape away unwatched and got the DVD and never watched it. It just sat there collecting dust in mute testimony to things of the past left undisturbed. Tonight there was no one home but me and while channel surfing I happened upon it again on a cable channel. Uncut and no commercials. I guessed it was time to see it again after almost 30 years. I will probably regret it.

The purpose of film as an art form is to draw the viewer into the story as a virtual participant rather than an observer. Most stories allow some voluntary contact and easy emergence. The Deer Hunter draws you in and doesn’t let you go, and when it gets done with you you’re changed. For those that were steeped in Vietnam, it is an unwelcome change. It dredges up things best left alone. But once the process starts, it fixes you and you can’t escape. There is nowhere to hide.

The film itself has little to do with narrative war, but the horrendous atrocities and nightmare images are some of the most brutal and graphic depictions of war in film history. It is more about the impact of war on human relations. The Deer Hunter views Vietnam from a common-man perspective. The film relentlessly catapults the viewer straight into the lives of the people involved, and you become part of their complexity. The emotional weight is staggering

The Deer Hunter is arguably one of the most emotionally wrenching film ever made and should be avoided as entertainment fodder. This kind of intensity skirts the ability of rational man to survive it. In detailing how war destroys individuals, relationships and communities, the story is overwhelmingly moving, and frighteningly disturbing. The carnage to humanity is too much to bear. The ironic rendition of “God Bless America” at the film’s tragic end is perhaps as close to a verdict as will ever be found in film.

5 Academy awards including Best Picture

Robert De Niro
John Cazale
John Savage
Christopher Walken
Meryl Streep