Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I went to see LOTR: TTT last night. I disliked it, but I’m not going to bitch about that one — mostly because I expect to get pilloried for doing so. No, my problem was with the previewed movies.

In particular, there was a preview for The Core, which looks like a throwback to The Great Summer Of Disaster Fetishism. The Core actually looks a lot like the two asteroid-hitting-the-earth movies, wherein there’s an impending disaster and only a ragtag team of Good Hearty Americans can stop it. No points at all for plausibility: the premise of The Core is that the earth’s molten core has stopped spinning, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Or is there? Yes.

Turns out that if we send a group of misfits deep into the earth with a nuclear weapon (?), that will get the core spinning again and we’ll be saved. From there, it looks just like one of the asteroid movies. In fact, if I remember correctly, one of those asteroid movies involved a wildcat driller (played by Bruce Willis) lending his digging experience to the task of boring into the asteroid. So maybe The Core starts to sound like an asteroid flick even earlier than previously suspected.

Why would I want to go see that movie? There are so many better things that I could be doing with two hours of my life than seeing a movie I’ve already seen — in some form — 500 times. I’m not being an effete art-movie snob here; I just find movies like The Core or Deep Impact boring. I fall asleep during them.

All right, I will go off about LOTR: TTT. I fell asleep twice during it. First, the action scenes are boring and long. When I heard that 10,000 soldiers would be storming the castle, I thought, “Fuck, I’m going to have to sit through 10,000 soldiers dying.” Fortunately they ran away before all of them had to die.

Then there’s the romantic subplot of LOTR: TTT which lacks all plausibility whatsoever. There’s the pretty blonde and Aragorn. They talk a bit. They talk about Liv Tyler, and the blonde asks where she is. A few minutes later the blonde gives Aragorn a long look, the soundtrack gets “stirring,” and we realize that they’re in love. Why? Not sure. Doesn’t he have Liv Tyler?

There’s the set of clichés that everyone has heard before. Indeed, the last five minutes of the movie is a sequence of clichés.

All of this even avoids the topic of whether the movie sticks to the sense of the book. I think that’s been debated enough that no new light will be shed on it here. I think it’s just important to say that I found the movie really boring, lifeless, badly acted, and uninventive. I’ll give it credit for really great cinematography, which led me to ask on more than one occasion how they got a helicopter to produce such smooth sweeps. Gandalf was well-acted. Gollum was wonderfully creepy and scary (and depressing – I couldn’t avoid thinking about child abuse). But other than those, it’s just banal.

Why can’t these people put out inventive, interesting movies? While watching Amélie, I never once wanted to be anywhere else. Last night, during LOTR: TTT, I wanted to be elsewhere from around 90 minutes in.

I saw The Trials Of Henry Kissinger with my friend Mike tonight. Great, great documentary. Even if you dispute the facts as presented in the film, you cannot dispute the skill with which those facts were presented. And we can convey ideas through any medium; when judging a film, the question is how well the artist used that medium to express his ideas.

The premise of the film is that Henry Kissinger should be tried for crimes against humanity for his role in the illegal bombing of Cambodia, and in the assassination of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. The film argues quite persuasively that he is a war criminal. Its skill in argument and presentation so impressed me that I immediately decided not to buy Bowling For Columbine when it comes out on DVD; in contrast, Michael Moore sounds like an unintelligent boob.

Not only do I recommend The Trials Of Henry Kissinger to anyone interested in American history, but I also recommend it to those who want to understand how good documentaries can be.

For reasons unknown to me, I can’t help collapsing in fits of laughter whenever I read Mike Nichols’s essay “Save My Seat.”

If I had made a list of The Ways In Which I Would Have Preferred My Day To End, I think “a spatula falls to tbe bottom of your dishwasher, filling your kitchen with acrid smoke and leaving the taste of burned plastic in your mouth” would have been somewhere near the bottom.

I’m in the middle of watching Birth of a Nation. What upsets most people about it, it seems to me, is the movie’s essential racism. That’s not what bugs me. What bugs me is that it drones on, and on, and on, as a rather banal love story and history of Reconstruction. I’m just bored by it. It’s also three-and-a-half hours long.

My mind has had time to wander throughout the film, so I started thinking about the general question: is it possible or desirable to separate a statement of belief from the way in which that belief is discussed? I was talking with a friend about this last night, on the subject of a very conservative person I know whose opinions I have a hard time respecting. I have no fundamental problem with conservatism; I do, however, have a problem with badly argued conservatism. That is, I tend to like George Will and dislike Rush Limbaugh. My friend asked me about this separation, saying quite sensibly, “Hitler arguing well is still Hitler.”

In the case of this conservative person, it’s a matter of my respect for him. I respect his opinions very little, because he doesn’t argue them well. Even if he did argue them well, I’d still object to his principles; but at least he’d be an opponent I could respect.

In the case of Birth Of A Nation, the question is somewhat different but still in the same ballpark: can you respect a director who is technically revolutionary (D.W. Griffith invented fade-ins, fade-outs, and zooms, among other things) but racist? More specifically, can you respect his films?

One might make the comparison to Clinton: one may respect the man’s policies, but object to his philandering. Or Woody Allen: one may feel distaste at his personal life, but love his films. I don’t think either of these are comparable to the problem of Griffith, because there his racism is inseparable from his works — the belief and the man are one and the same.

I’m far from having this figured out. I do think, however, that there is a large class of problems that fall under the same general category, so thinking about the problem is quite worthwhile.

It’s a cold, rainy day here, hence I’m inside watching movies. I just finished Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, and will soon be heading into D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation and Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. I bought the last one sight unseen, and I can’t even remember why. I think Amazon put it on my recommended list, and said that it would soon be coming out on DVD. So I bought it, and now I’m excited to watch it. It’s a Criterion DVD, which means it kicks ass.

I just finished with Amarcord, Fellini’s cinematic memory of his childhood. It’s going to take me a few viewings to understand Fellini’s 8 1/2 and his La Dolce Vita, but Amarcord is easy enough. It’s just a visually beautiful movie that happens to be really fun. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a couple hours of visually stunning escapism.

I can see echoes of Amarcord in at least a couple more recent movies. First, The Godfather borrows a lot from Fellini’s visual style, borrows a character that turns into Don Ciccio, and borrows the guy who scored a lot of Fellini’s movies, Nino Rota. Coppola didn’t just ape Fellini, of course — he’s much too talented for that — but the influence does shine through. Also, Y Tu Mama Tambien probably borrowed the scene in which all the boys masturbate as a group while yelling out the names of beautiful women.

As I see more movies, I see more connections like these. I hope that I’m not just constructing associations out of thin air.

I’d like to point out that today is my very own dad’s birthday. He’s very, very old, and I don’t think he really understands anything since the advent of “the talkies,” but nonetheless I’ll use “the Web” to convey a happy birthday to him. I love you, dad.

I’m in the middle of reading James Morrow’s book Towing Jehovah, whose ingenious idea is that the 2-mile-long body of God falls dead from the sky, landing in the ocean. Now religious people are bummed, because God is dead, and atheists are bummed because God was at one time alive. It then falls to a disgraced ship captain (patterned after the Exxon Valdez’s pilot) to tow the corpse to its final resting place – or perhaps to reanimate it.

It’s well-written, but I’m reading through it with a mounting sense of terror that Morrow’s going to avoid all the biggest questions with some (pardon) deus ex machina at the end — like, God comes back to life just in time, revealing His death to have been some kind of test to humanity (How do we all behave when we know He’s not around?) or something. It just seems like this might happen. Perhaps we should call this the Minority Report Syndrome: the big ethical question in that movie is: Even if the system pre-convicts only the guilty, and never falsely accuses anyone, is it then right for the state to pre-convict? Minority Report evades this with a classic Steven Spielberg twist. I’m concerned that Towing Jehovah may do the same. The big question in that book is (or should be, in my view): if God really, truly is dead, will humans be moral? I fear that the book will skirt this most important question.

It’s also the case that Morrow’s books (I’ve thus far read Towing Jehovah and Only Begotten Daughter) skirt a fine line between hardcore philosophy and theology on the one hand, and popular fiction on the other. I don’t think it’s always clear where they want to be. They’re not profound enough to raise any interesting questions of their own in the reader’s mind. Yet they place themselves solidly in the camp of books like The Brothers Karamazov which really do make the reader think. At times I feel as though Morrow is a low-grade 21st-century Dostoevsky.

I finished Maria Doria Russell’s The Sparrow while in Vermont over the weekend. Great, great book. It lies in at least the same conceptual hemisphere as Morrow’s books — maybe “theological science fiction.” I feel as though The Sparrow is just a much better novel than either of Morrow’s books that I’ve read, because it masters the novel form more than Morrow has. The Sparrow also has some theology to discuss (in essence, it’s a modern retelling of the story of Job), but its real brilliance comes in its mastery of the form; The Sparrow is one of the most suspenseful books I’ve ever read. Its theological questions are pretty basic — I have no religious training, yet I had already asked all the questions it asked — but its structure is just brilliant: after a failed Jesuit mission to another planet, the Vatican investigates why it failed. One thread moves forward, while they were on the other planet; the other thread moves backward, probing the protagonist’s mind after he’s returned to earth.

The theological sci-fi genre is interesting, if the three books I’ve read within it are any measure. If anyone has any other suggestions within this genre, please feel free to let me know.