On DVD now: Zero Dark Thirty

 We’d been eagerly awaiting this movie, so much hype and controversy, who wouldn’t want to see it?

But here’s the problem.

It purports to be based on actual firsthand accounts of actual events. That’s quite a burden. Rarely do actual firsthand accounts of actual events make a good movie. ‘Based on a true story’ is much, much easier.  

For those three or four of you that haven’t heard about this film, it’s about the CIA's hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Spoiler alert, they find him and kill him.

And that’s part of the difficulty, we already know most of the story, and we certainly know how it ends, now, entertain us.

I swim often in the pool called ‘creative non-fiction’. I write essays, some that have been published in actual books, that are based on true stories but have been enhanced, embellished, to make the stories more entertaining.  Some of the stories I’ve written have been almost entirely true, some contain only a tiny shard of a real story.

Hint: If my story contains witty banter or engaging dialogue, then that part is almost certainly manufactured, real people in real life don’t talk like they do in print. Well, maybe I do, but nobody else does.

We in the business call this ‘creative non-fiction’ which is code for ‘tall tale based thinly on fact.’

Life, real life, is rarely interesting on its own merits, conversations and interactions. Even intense, important, historical events are laced with great big heaps of nothing especially interesting happening.

Take D-Day. Most of the soldiers, sailors and Marines that were involved in the monumental, unprecedented and enormous invasion of Nazi occupied Europe spent months, months, doing virtually nothing but waiting. Whenever we see a movie with that much waiting around involved, the producers tend to skip over the enormous part, or enhance it with a little comic relief, usually guys playing poker in the bowels of a ship until a fight breaks out. Not that the card game and the fight didn’t happen, it’s just not likely that that particular set of guys played cards and started a fight, if those guys really existed in the first place.

But if you are going to make a movie that says it is based on true, firsthand accounts, then your embellishment options are limited by your stated fact-based, eye witnessed  story.

In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, this is exactly where the controversy came from.

We saw the ‘good guys’, the CIA, physically torturing detainees. Water torture, sleep deprivation, culture-based humiliation. In one scene a man is stripped naked in front of a woman, had a dog collar and leash attached to his neck and was forced to crawl around in front of her. In certain cultures this is about as bad as it can get. Not necessarily for Americans and Europeans as I’ve seen lots of movies and been to a few parties that included men being stripped naked in front of, and often by, women and led around on a leash. You know what I’m talking about. But for some cultures this sort of behavior is perceived as a bad thing.

There is nothing, nothing, in this movie we haven’t seen depicted thousands of times before in fiction movies and TV shows. So it’s not the actions themselves that caused the uproar, it’s the fact that these things are now being presented as things that we, the good guys, actually did to other humans.

Some of the same people that cheered on the fictional Jack Bauer in ‘24’ as he opened up some horrendous whoop-ass on alleged terrorists, or who absolutely delighted when Rambo or some other fictional character meted out violent, absolute vengeance, single-handedly as judge, jury and executioner, now find themselves protesting that sort of behavior.

It’s pure duplicity. We want our fictional heroes to do horrific things, but not our real heroes. Torture is apparently okay as long as there’s nothing actually at stake. However, in the real world, when real lives have been lost and more real horror is threatened, it’s inhumane.

I’m not saying torture is okay. I admit mixed/flawed/inconsistent emotions on the issue.

But this movie was dealing with first-hand accounts of things that many now perceive as atrocities.

So there’s vicious torture early on, though filtered through the lens of hindsight and good intentions.

Ten years post-9/11 it is easy to Monday-morning quarterback the actions of our government. The film makes certain tacit apologies through facial expressions and muted conversations about mixed/evolving feelings of the apparently repentant/regretful  torturers after a few years have passed and politics back home have evolved.

The film spans seven or eight years. There are huge gaps where apparently very little actually happened. You know, like in real life.

So the movie skips ahead several years, several times. The characters though, never age. I’m not even sure they even changed clothes during these long blank periods.

The story follows a female CIA agent, Maya, who for reasons we are never quite made aware of, is considered an expert in the hunt for Bin Laden. According to her own words, Bin Laden is all she has worked on for entire career, nothing else, since her recruitment out of high school. (This is mentioned, but never really explained either.)

Maya pushes, begs, pleads, humiliates and strong-arms her less-enthusiastic bosses, a career strategy that could only ever work in government employment circles, and finally gets her way. A raid is ordered up, the imperfect, wobbly, top-secret stealth helicopter prototypes are loaded up and SEAL Team Six does the dirty needful.

There is no real ‘rest-of-the-story’ aspect to this film. We don’t really learn anything new. There are no great reveals in this flick, it is simply a story that we’ve all heard before, played out on the big screen.

Even the raid itself is not very revealing as it takes place mostly in the dark. Shadows move from room to room, violent noises erupt around every dark corner. The entire raid takes place on screen in either disorienting stroboscopic bright flashes in otherwise pitch-black surroundings, or through that nauseating dim green we have come to equate with the world as seen through night-vision goggles. If this segment were security tape footage of a crime, no one would ever be convicted of anything given the poor angles and low resolution. But it is done as a shaky, fast-paced and erratic ‘as-if-you-were-there’ event which gives you the feeling of very high tension.

The casting was excellent, as it didn’t overshadow the film or the story. The story itself was rather shaky and skippy though. If this were a work of fiction, it probably would not have received nearly a fraction of the fanfare and acclaim that it did. There are too many plot holes, too many assumptions required, and believe it or not, very little actual tension and conflict.

Don’t get me wrong, I stayed engaged watching the story play out, even though I knew exactly what would happen next. The very fact that it was in fact, factual, was at the same time its greatest selling point and also its biggest handicap.

Yeah, go ahead and watch it, it’s not as bad as you might think, though it’s not as good as a little fictionalization could have made it.

On DVD Now: Life of Pi

We snapped this one up the weekend of its release on DVD. For us, that’s unusual. Sure it won a bunch of awards, sure it was critically acclaimed, but was it actually any good?

We gave it a shot.

First and foremost the opening several minutes could easily be a presentation by the India tourist bureau. The scenery, the architecture, the wildlife, the rich, vivid colors were tremendously inviting.

I know a little about India and the cultures there. You can tell that by the way I used the plural form of 'culture'. India is a big-ass land mass. It boasts around a BILLION souls. That’s BILLION with a ‘B’. Three of them for every single American resident, legal and illegal. India is a land of wide diversity, rare is the stereotype that accurately spans the entire nation.

In the most recent iteration of my IT career, the last twelve or so years, I’ve had the good fortune to have known and worked with scores of fine people from India. Not a random scattering, admittedly, but scores of technically sharp, college educated and mostly articulate-English-speaking people from India. I’ve come to know a little about their cultures and their lives and have always been fascinated and impressed.

Theirs is a rich and ancient story mix of adversity and fortune, wealth and poverty. Their society is dotted with a wide variety of gods and demons, stories that predate Christianity by thousands of years. Bizarre tales that seem to us fantastic tall tales of magic and enchantment, betrayal and power-lust that make the Greek and Roman gods seem tame and boring in comparison.

My good friend and co-worker Ramesh once told me about the elephant-headed god that the little statue on his dashboard represented. “He clears obstacles.” He said to simplify the epic stories.

I admire Ramesh, he seems to personify  many of the ideals that I wish I could claim. He is a devoted husband, a doting father of a beautiful little girl, a dutiful son himself, and a cautious, meticulous worker. He is proud and patient. Whenever he is asked about his culture by any of us simple Americans he smiles and explains it in a simple and thorough narrative. He doesn’t take offense at our mistaken understandings, and does not correct us boastfully or arrogantly. He is a humble and polite man, and quick with a joke. Not unlike the movie’s main character, Pi.

In the movie, Pi, the adult version telling his life story, explains to the inquisitive Canadian writer, how he and others can easily be both Catholic and Hindu. “We get to feel guilt towards hundreds of gods, not just one.” He says with a winking smile.

I loved the way Hinduism was interlaced into the movie’s storyline, not proselytizing, rather explaining how the ancient religions that are Hinduism are a very prominent part of the people, and how understanding a little about the religion helps one better understand the people.

In evidence, the reluctance and conflict when Pi, stranded aboard a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and early on by an orangutan, a wounded zebra and a hyena, cannot justify killing any of the animals, even when faced with starvation or the teeth and claws of the hungry tiger itself. Upon clubbing a large fish to feed to the emaciated giant cat he weeps with pain and screams apologies to the fish, at the same time praising Vishnu for sending the fish to feed the tiger to keep the tiger from eating him. By this point in the film you get it, you really do.

That’s how good a job the writers and screen adapters did their job. You actually feel Pi’s pain for having to kill a fish to save his own life.

By now you know the crux of the story, Pi is raised by a family that runs a zoo. They decide to move to North America, so they load up all the animals into a Japanese freighter and they all set sail across the pacific.

Then there’s a terrible storm. So for most of the rest of the movie we have Pi and the Tiger in a battle of wits in a thirty-person lifeboat.

What about the other animals I mentioned? Did you not read the part about there being a hungry Bengal tiger aboard? Sheesh, this ain’t no Disney cartoon where the lions and lambs sleep and play together.

I was glad to see that the animals, even though they were almost entirely computer generated, were allowed to portray what they were, wild animals, not cute, talking, fluffy toys. Pi is made to understand this very thing by his father earlier in the story.

Without giving away the real twists and ending, I’ll just say this, the tiger and Pi never, ever kiss and make up or become bosom buddies. I was glad to see this; take that Gentle Ben, Tarzan, Daktari, Jungle Jim, and Elsa the cuddly lioness in “Born Free”.

I’ve mentioned that the animals were mostly CGI’d. Which leads me to the most stunning and pleasing aspects of the movie. The cinematography.

There were many places in the film that were obviously CGI. The animals tended to be a bit jerky at some points, their movements not fully perfected. But what really stood out were the fantasy scenes. As delirium and reality become harder for Pi to discriminate, we too, through absolutely vivid and bright, rich, compelling graphics and detail, are often mesmerized by the unearthly images before us. The brightly glowing jelly fish, the leaping great whale, the tens of thousands of meerkats on the lush, lime-green floating island, and more, much, much more. We don’t care whether it is real or imagined, we just want it to be real, it is real, at least for a moment.

The imagery is not just interwoven into the overall story, it is integral to the story. For the story itself is epic, fantasy-like and surreal, not unlike the many small Hindu stories laid out earlier in the film.

The movie is bright, spectacular and in several places quite funny. Though very dark, almost horrific at the core, Pi smiles, laughs and jokes often about the agonizing turns of fate. Even devout Christians can enjoy this movie, and would note the many similar story lines, not only of the boat full of animals, but also by the Job-like spiraling suffering and the steadfastness and resolve of Pi’s complex beliefs.

By the end of the film, the word I came up with was ‘Wow!’

I was entertained, thoroughly. I was not preached to, hit over the head, or tricked into liking the movie. There were no A-list celebrities at all, no one’s ruggedly handsome mug nor quaffed Hollywood perfection to steal scenes and attention from the story itself.

The movie makes many points, mostly subtle, but the one I came away with that stands out above the others is that it is not so important what the characters in a story are, often they are merely symbols. What is important are the life lessons learned form the stories, whether the story character be a tiger, a talking snake, a human living in a fish, an elephant headed god, these elements merely make the lesson more memorable, something even old Aesop recognized. You certainly remember those talking, magical animal morality tales don’t you?

What is important is making the story and the lessons memorable, and “Life of Pi” certainly masters this.

Highly recommended!

On DVD Now: Flight

“Flight”

2012

From the previews and trailers, this movie looked to be an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Unfortunately I had done no research, read no reviews, so I was duped.

We rented this on our satellite provider’s on-demand service.

It started out interestingly enough, with gratuitous but appreciated full frontal nudity, quite a bit of it, by a very fetching woman, Nadine Velazquez, who you might remember as the voluptuous, booby-bouncing illegal alien, Catalina, from the TV series “My Name is Earl”
 Denzel Washington’s character, ‘Whip’ Whitaker, and the extremely naked woman had just finished up what appeared to be a wild alcohol and cocaine fueled tryst. Whip’s phone rings, he says that he’s flying out in a couple of hours. Okay, scary.
All this further aroused my interest.

The next fifteen or twenty minutes was indeed a buildup of drama, tension, and then finally, abject terror as Whit fiercely battles an uncooperative and rapidly decomposing airliner into a low altitude inverted flight, in a tense race to get to the crash site as slowly as possible.

Whip keeps his cool, advises, bravely instructs and calms the crew, even as they are upside down a couple of thousand feet off the ground. Just before they inevitably collide with the planet Earth, Whip coolly rights the plane and manages to get it to glide, both engines afire, somewhat safely, into a field near a Pentecostal church. The Church is apparently symbolic of something here and makes a few more appearances.

 We expect the accolades and ‘Sully’ Sullenberger comparisons that obviously was this film’s initial motivation and maybe this film will explore the perils and tribulations of unexpected, but well-deserved fame. But no.

The action all happens in the first fifteen or so minutes, less time than may be spent watching a single excruciating episode of Sponge Bob.

Instead of what I expected, a procedural of the highly complex and political process of airline investigation and litigation, yeah, I could enjoy that, or a plot involving intrigue or savage crime or terrorism, it is a movie about a pathetic individual’s alcoholism and redemption, a-la VH1’s formulaic ‘Behind the Music’

The rest of the movie is about Whip’s ‘condition’. He does not believe he has a problem with alcohol, in fact he outright loves to overindulge in vicious binges and chemically infused physiological roller coaster rides.

Of course it is immediately discovered that at the time of the heroic, miraculous crash, that he was blowing nearly three times the legal limit of alcohol and that it was being counter-balanced by cocaine.

And of course the airline, the pilot’s union, etc. are trying to bury that evidence and a slick Chicago lawyer, played one-dimensionally by a criminally underutilized Don Cheadle, manages to find some procedural gaffes and indeed the blood test is excluded from future investigations. Only a confession from the skilled liar-alcoholic Whip could possibly get him convicted of anything other than abject heroism. You see it coming too, don’t you.

But that’s all the investigating we see. That’s all the courtroom intrigue we get. The rest of the movie actually follows Whip as he self-destructs with booze and lines of white powder, repeatedly, with the help of his pusher friend Harlan, played by John ‘why the hell are you in this lame movie’ Goodman.
Along the way Whip falls for and rescues a drug whore… excuse me, a lovely heroin addict, and they fall in and out of love and ravenous sex-capades until inevitably and completely unsurprisingly, that relationship implodes.

This goes on for over an hour. No action, no intrigue, no cat and mouse. It is entirely about an individual’s spiraling alcoholism and eventual and fully predictable redemption. He may as well have been a rock star or a coal miner. The heroic and skilled airline pilot aspect is actually meaningless to the tired plot.
Without the airliner angle, this movie could be any of a thousand or so addiction/redemption flicks on Lifetime.

How lame was it? By the second half Angel was browsing on her laptop and I was battling bricks, ice cubes and pigs with her Angry Birds machine.

The equivalent of walking out, not in anger or indignation, but in boredom.
 The initial premise, spills and thrills, is completely abandoned early on. It’s simply a lazy, lousy story form best left to amateur writers.

“What about ‘Gilligan’s Island’, seven diverse and eccentric characters, except instead of an island they’re trapped in an isolated and abandoned land fill?”  Would be a similar pitch.

We were duped, this movie sucked us in promising action, intrigue and adventure, then bludgeons us with drawn-out preachy, weepy sermons.

Unless you like the sappy pabulum dished out by Lifetime, this movie will disappoint you. Not worth the $4.99, nor even the $1 Red Box trip.