White Line Fever

This is one of those movies that should have been on the original Movie A Day Project. I had more than a hundred films listed and I simply started with the ones that were on my shelf at the time. As the summer went along that year and the project progressed, I started looking for copies of the movies on my list and ordered them or found them in local retail outlets. There were several movies that were not available anywhere that I looked and so they got bumped from the project. A couple of things could be rented on i-tunes and a couple had been uploaded to YouTube, but White Line Fever was one that escaped me. About a year back I saw that it was available as a disc on demand on the Warner Brothers site. These discs are bare bone films in the best available format the studio has. Sometimes the prints have flaws or the sound and color are not as sharp as they might be, but the movies don't have enough cache to demand re-mastering and a major release. With internet streaming they may end up being made available without any packaging or modification at all. I still like physical media, and collecting a library that someone can see when they come to the house is fun. I finally sprang for the DVD on demand and it came yesterday so I could not wait.

 The 1970's were an interesting time to live through. International conflicts, political upheaval, changing social mores, they had them all. Fads have come and gone for centuries and I can't say that the 70s invented them, but when it came to social trends and movies, the 1970s may have had the greatest number of inexplicable cultural fads of any decade. Buried in the middle of the decade was an obsession with the "Trucking" lifestyle. The CB radio became ubiquitous, and there were TV shows, movies and hit songs that all featured truckers. "White Line Fever" is a relic of that time period, Truckers were the modern day cowboy, riding the ranges in their eighteen wheelers and living the truly free lifestyle that so many of us envied. With the oil shortages and government regulations at the time, there were regular protests by truckers of injustices that they saw. "White Line Fever" played out many of the themes of those times, abuse by public officials, manipulation by power crazed distributors and financial hardships created by the cost of buying gas. For the most part, it is a very traditional story of one man fighting against the system. It's not quite "On the Waterfront" but the general objective is the same, the difference is the means by which it is achieved.

This is the old Alhambra Theater. I saw many of the seventies based movies I write about at this theater. The Facade in the picture shows it as the Twin Theaters but in the decade before, it was divided as the Alhambra and the Gold theaters. The main house had a huge auditorium that could accommodate maybe 800 audience members. This is where I first saw the film with my friend Mark Witt. It may have been one of the last movies we went to together because soon after graduation, he and his family moved to a farm community in Central California. Mark and his brother Dick, were in my Scout troop and they were farm boys trapped in suburbia. The trucker aspect of the movie would have appealed to Mark, because if he wasn't going to be a farmer, he'd have been a trucker. I know I saw this movie several times and at least one of those times was in the smaller Gold Theater at this complex, if had seats for maybe 200. The ceiling in that theater was very low and the feeling was cramped compared to the spacious cavern of the main house. I had two or three circles of friends, and it is interesting to me that although my best friend Art, worked at the Alhambra Theater, he and Mark never socialized with me at the same time.

The movie stars Jan Michael Vincent, who spent most of the 1970s on the cusp of big stardom but for some reason never seemed to make it to the next level. His later life was a mixture of personal problems and professional dead ends. In this movie he plays a headstrong, independent young man who wants to make his way in life as a long haul trucker. He is supported by his hard working wife but she worries that the job will keep them apart. For much of the film, that is not an issue because he can't get a job hauling anything. He once worked for his father in the trucking business and they shared some basic values, including knowing what is legal and right. His unwillingness to move contraband along with the legitimate products is the reason he is blackballed by the local trucking collective. It is hard to imagine that a guy could get away at one point with hijacking a job at gunpoint, but that is a plot point in this film and it kind of makes sense. There are several other actors of note in the film. Kay Lenz plays his wife and she was on TV and small movies all the time in the 1970s and 80s. Her biggest role was in the mini series Rich Man, Poor Man and she also appeared in another of the Movie A Day Projects "The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday". She is still working and appears in television programs on a regular basis. Her character here is nearly as head strong as Vincent's is. They made a very believable on screen couple. The great Slim Pickins is in this movie, but it is one of the few performances I've seen him in where he does not seem to be putting much energy into it. He will be better remembered for his work in 1975 in Blazing Saddles than this. He does however get a pretty effective death scene and it was disturbing enough to me to be able to recall it vividly before I watched this again for the first time in thirty plus years. L.Q. Jones is in the movie as well. L.Q. was a buddy of Strother Martin, the actor who was my Mother's cousin. I always keep an eye out for him in movies because he is a connection to those days. I was told recently that he had died but that turned out to be premature and the woman I know who is writing about Strother, has had some contact with him. He is especially slimey in this film, they gave him a pair of black leather pants to wear and he looks like some nasty peckerwood who is trying to be something bigger than he really is.

An exploitation film like this really thrives on a couple of things, either gratuitous nudity (none here) or spurts of violence (several set pieces here). There is an nice action scene where our hero climbs on top of his big rig and has a shotgun shootout with the bad guys. Most of the violence was basic fisticuffs rather than gunplay or martial arts. The fights are well staged but often feel like there is not much resolution because the antagonists will be dukking it out again in a later scene. The climax of the picture is a well lit night time truck stunt that looks pretty spectacular but it is not clear in the story how it would resolve anything. The idea that the truckers can come together to fight against the corruption they are faced with is a solid one, but the cartel that controls their business seems to be more cartoon like than is needed. In the long run, the story is only moderately satisfying, but the theme and road images made the picture memorable. There is some casual use of racial epithets, and I know I heard people speak that way and not think twice about it in those days. Today such language would be an anathema for most of us. I'm glad to check this one off of the list and it was great to revisit it, even if it was not a great film.

Bait 3D

Sometimes I have to question my sanity, or at least my common sense. This movie is out on DVD/Blu Ray on Tuesday, and it is playing in very limited release this week only. So why can't I wait a couple of days and just buy it and watch it as often as I want? The answer is simple, as much as I love the whole concept of watching movies at home, there is no substitute for seeing a film in a theater, on a big screen, with an audience. Unfortunately for the producers of this film, my audience consisted of only five people. I know that the screenings are not really designed to bring in the cash, because they are basically just advertising for the Video, but this would be a lot more fun with a crowd of screaming teen girls, their hipper than thou dates, and a bunch of other thrill seekers looking for an opportunity to jump up and yell, "Hell Yeah". My daughter and I love the cheesy horror elements and a shark in the water will bring her to the most awful movie because Jaws is her favorite film. So, on a Sunday morning, we drove almost fifty miles across the county, to the harbor area in L.A., and took in a screening of "Bait" in 3D.

I'd seen this promoted on a Facebook page and I liked it months ago. The site directs you to another site Called Tugg, where apparently, if you get enough requests in an area, the company arranges a screening.  I'm not sure if this was a Tugg event, after all, the film is playing all week and not just for one night. It is an interesting concept, and I saw that another blogger I follow, attended a Tugg event for "The Princess Bride".  I'll have to keep my eyes open on this because I am really interested in seeing older films that I have missed, or genre crap that will not get a general release, up on the big screen. So, enough background, the real question is, "How was the movie?"

The concept is an interesting mash up of a disaster picture, with a shark thriller/horror film layered on top.  A group of people with mixed motives and relationships, gets stranded after a natural disaster in a grocery store/parking garage, and they are being stalked by great white sharks. It sound pretty silly, and it is, but when you see how it all set up it makes more sense. Sometimes people are separated and they have to get from one spot to another before the sharks can get to them, other times there is a deliberate attempt to move from one spot to another to achieve a short term goal. Let's face it, watching eight or nine people sit on a shelf for two hours is not going to make a very good movie. The sharks have reason to be antsy and the people are given reasons to test their ability to outwit and out swim the sharks.

There are plenty of odd inconsistencies in the storytelling. At one point the survivors are struggling to come up with a rag or towel to create a bandage or tourniquet. Five minutes later, they have assembled a portable shark cage, complete with underwater breathing tools. Of course it doesn't make any sense but it does give them something to do and the audience some reason to hope for both success and failure. A movie like this, requires that there be some failures so we can get the gruesome, violent payoff we have been promised by the scenario. From the beginning of the movie, the audience knows that blood is going to be spilled, the only question is whether it will be in a style that is visually arresting, shocking, and emotionally or morally satisfying. For the most part the film lives up to it's promises. While it is nearly an exploitation picture, it turns out that it has dramatic pretensions as well. Unlike the two "Piranha" films in the last couple of years, there is no gratuitous nudity. Unlike "Shark Night" of last year, there is no stupid horror film style subplot. What we got was a pretty standard disaster drama, with some bloody special effects scenes built in.

The actors here are all competent and deliver their lines with some sense of reality. I did not recognize most of them, but Amanda said that one of the girls is in "Vampire Diaries", so they are not an inexperienced cast. The one guy I did recognize is Julian McMahon. He was Dr. Doom in the "Fantastic Four" films, and he played the psychotic candidate in the movie "Red" last year. He has an interesting face and demeanor, and was cast as a conflicted heavy in this film. The two young sets of actors, playing the star crossed lovers and bickering romantic partners all seemed to be the right age and were as convincing as the set up would allow anyone to be. There is no surprise in who ultimately gets killed and who makes it out into the light of day. The only elements of surprise  concerned how the shark deaths would look on film. There are two really effective and grisly deaths, two other deaths that have a little bit of payback satisfaction, and hundreds of deaths that occur within a short sequence.

I did feel a bit of moral guilt watching a group of survivors, and rooting for some and not others, shortly after thousands of mostly faceless others were killed. It is the nature of a disaster picture however to present us with that type of scenario.  Most of the deaths occur in a quick and non-exploitative manner. There were however a couple that seemed to feed the feel of the picture as a cheap action picture. If the movie had been more outright nuts, then maybe those sequences could be laughed off, I just thought they were a little too "cinematic" for a film that is trying to be a real drama. That said, the guy dangling from a rope who gets bitten in half by a leaping shark was pretty gruesome cool. The movie is not over the top crap like Piranha 3DD, but it did have a feel for exploitative action entertainment. It was a satisfying morning, and if you are looking for a low budget drama with some horrifying action, this is your ticket. If you want cheap ass thrills, wait for all the crappy horror films that are about to hit, or best of all, dip into the "Piranha" films. Bait has it's moments, but it is actually too solid a movie for it's own good.

Arclight Poster Wall

Last night we went to a screening of Logan's Run at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood. The film was in the Cinerama Dome, which is a stand alone structure right next to the main Arclight facility. The lobby of the theater complex is spacious, and there is a coffee bar, gift store, and a restaurant. There are two levels of theaters that you can purchase your tickets for at the  box office. Immediately behind the box office is my dream room come to life, take a look at this:









































These are full sized movie posters, each in a light box, attached to the wall, stretching upwards of fifty feet into the highest part of the lobby.There are at least ninety posters here, although I can plainly see that there is one two part poster advertising "Ishtar" so maybe there are only eighty-nine movies.  By my count, I'd seen about fifty eight of of the films that appear here. Unfortunately, I only own four or five of the posters on display. I want them all but even more than that, I want a ceiling at least fifty feet high and thirty feet wide so that I can do this at home. I'm so jealous.




















Update: In celebration of the Upcoming Clint Eastwood Baseball Movie, the Arclight updated their film poster wall with Sports Themed Posters. Take a look:

Here is an update based on the comment below. This is the La Jolla location not Hollywood but it is still awesome.

Logan's Run

Two years ago, this film was on my original "Movie A Day" project. It fit the criteria to a tee; a 1970s Summer film. So it is a little odd that I am writing about it for the first time today. The reason is that, "Logan's Run" was one of the films my guest blogger wrote about while I was in Alaska. My daughter Amanda did a nice write up but is actually somewhat critical of the film and it's 1970s trappings. My perspective is informed by two substantial differences; first of all, I actually saw the film the first time in theaters in 1976 and second, my current post is based on a viewing last night on a full sized screen rather than a video of the film. I really like the vast majority of the film. The story is a wonderful example of the Science Fiction concept films I was drawn to, and frankly, the cheesy costumes and set designs are like a ticket to my past (even though they are supposed to represent the future). Last night Amanda and I took in a screening of "The Sexist Movie Ever" , it was playing on the original big screen that I had seen it on thirty-six years ago.

If you have not been to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, you do not really understand why this is such a great experience. The building itself is a geodesic dome based on the work of Buckminster Fuller. From the interior, you can see how the pieces are fitted together as you look up at the ceiling. When the Arclight Theater Chain proposed a new film complex at the location, there was a huge hue and cry from preservationists because the iconic structure was threatened. Most historical theaters were built in the 1920s and 30s. The Cinerama Dome is a relic of the 1960s, which is not usually seen as an architectural watershed period. Anyway, the preservationists won out and "The Dome" has remained as a single , separate screen at the Arclight complex. To me, the greatest element of this preservation is inside the dome. Originally designed to show true "Cinerama" films using a three projector process, the screen in the dome is extremely large (much bigger than the FauxMAX screen I saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark" on Friday). The screen is also slightly curved, so it has the effect of enveloping the audience in the movie experience. This has a very dramatic effect in a couple of scenes in "Logan's Run", and there are many films that I remember seeing here that were probably better simply because of the theater.


 The audience at last night's screening was amused at several pieces of dialogue and acting that are admittedly a little clunky. Some of the laughter was derisive but it seemed to me that at times it was also a bit warm for the more innocent film making period. "Logan's Run" was a big budget, Hollywood Science Fiction film that came out a year before the movie that would change the way Science Fiction would be visualized forever. All of the money was spent on set design rather than on special effects. The sets are garish renditions of the future that largely use shopping mall architecture to suggest a world of youthful hedonism. The characters frequently end up chasing each other in "the Arcade", which looks like a mall from the 1970s with some funky specialized stores. Neon lights and mirrors are the mainstays of the designers for this movie. Futurist travel between locations consists of sitting in a capsule that then moves thru a tube to a well lit station with some chrome fittings. The most well developed visuals in the film are the miniatures used to show the domed cities of the future and the layout of the structures in each of the domes. The serendipity of watching a movie based in a domed city, while in a domed movie theater, was not lost on me. Unfortunately, the static manner in which the miniatures are shot, emphasizes too often that they are just models. There is something about water that makes the model work in most pre-Star Wars movies look artificial. A second element that really dates the movie is the costuming. When the film is once referred to in a popular TV show as "The sexiest movie ever...", they must have been thinking of the way the characters barely dressed. Jenny Agutter, was a beautiful young actress, and basically she wore a sheer piece of fabric tied around her waist.

Most of the other women's costumes are also fairly revealing. Michael York is lounging in his apartment in a black and silver caftan which looks like it could have come straight out of a fashion magazine layout from 1973. Everyone has layered 1970s hair style, Farrah Fawcett Majors appears in the movie, and she has the hair style that would basically define the late seventies. The one thing about the costuming that works is the color scheme which is designed to identify the characters "life" status.



 So, far I have been talking about the things in the film that don't work all that well. It is time to get to the stuff that makes this worthy of your attention. Set in a future where wars have ravaged the planet, the ecological balance of the world is kept by strictly regulating the size of the population. Breeding is done in incubators and death comes a a predetermined moment. This allows the society to use the resources it has to maintain a hedonistic lifestyle for only the thirty years that are allowed. All of this seems to be largely a mechanical function, there is no political structure or power elite. The only aspect of a "government" that is detectable, are the "Sandmen" who isolate violent behavior and track down and destroy anyone who tries to avoid their deadline. Philosophical issues are answered by the ritual of "Carousel", the promise that by accepting death, the people have a chance at renewal, to come back for another life.

Inside the trappings of a splashy, comic book looking film, is a nice nugget of an idea. Would a tradeoff of unlimited pleasure and indulgence, justify a limitation on your life. We are supposed to empathize with the "runners", but aren't they really seeking to have their cake and eat it too? What would it do to the society if everybody was not required to play by the rules? Is the ritual of "renewal" through "Carousel" just a false promise, a metaphor for all religion? What is the purpose of life if it is to end so quickly? The futurist citizens in this world are not too removed from the "Eloi" of H.G. Wells Time Machine. They are provided for but what is their purpose?. Sometimes I look at the world we actually live in and I see some of the same kinds of questions. It might be a little hypocritical to write on a movie blog that we may be amusing ourselves to death, but many of today's indulgences are not too far away from the creepy Brave New World visions of the future found in movies like this. "Logan" and "Jessica" first contact each other on "the circuit", a device that transports you to a willing sex partner for a brief period of pleasure. There are a whole bunch of dating web sites out there that pretty much do the same thing. Why would our view of this behavior condemn it as vacuous when we see it in 1976, but be acceptable to us in 2012?


 OK, enough with the philosophizing, back to the movie. The opening set piece of "Carousel" is one of the most successful components of the film. The visual of a crowd cheering on the deaths of their fellow citizens bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Coliseum. The masks, turn their fellow citizens into faceless bodies that they can cheer for without the remorse of knowing which exploding body was their friend. The unitards and robes add to the sense of ritual as does the dramatic music, provided again by the great Jerry Goldsmith. The bodies rising off the ground, spinning uncontrollably and then exploding is a great visual for this ominous story. Sitting in the Cinerama Dome, with the screen looming over and nearly surrounding you, it almost feels like you are in the stands for ritual. There are some clever visuals to suggest the future which were not all that cheap looking and don't feel dated. Logan's apartment is pure 70's modern, that is true, but when his fellow Sandman, Francis 7, comes in the door with two giggling women ready for sex, and he throws a bulb filled with some sensuous enhancing gas against the ceiling, that feel futuristic. The laser surgery sequence is not far off from the way many modern surgeries are performed except the equipment is not as intimidating as the device used here in the film. The sequence in Prometheus earlier this summer is a grandchild of this sequence. (I also saw it in the James Bond film, "Die Another Day"). This movie was rated PG in 1976, it has themes of sexual perversity, there is an orgy shop with writhing naked bodies, and then the refrigerator is full of nude extras as well. We get two gratuitous nude sequences with our leading lady, and a lot of people also die. This movie came eight years before the PG-13 rating was created. At my wife's school, the general guideline is that they can show the kids a PG rated film without having a parent's permission. I think this movie might be an exception.

"The Sexiest Movie Ever", is probably not safe for the sixth grade. Just as an aside on the event, while waiting for Amanda after the film was over, I saw Ted Rami standing in the lobby. Maybe not a celebrity sighting that the rest of you would enjoy, but I liked that "cowardly Warrior" from Army of Darkness, just went to the same movie I did. Only in Hollywood.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - IMAX

There is not really any point in reviewing a film like this. Everyone knows how special it is and everyone has already seen it. So what is the point of posting on this, simple, I get to share my joy with others. (Oh, and I get to lord it over all of you who did not get a chance to experience this in the IMAX format). In the interests of full disclosure, I actually saw this today in one of AMC FauxMAX theaters. The sound and projection are amazing, and the screen is oversized, but it is not the seven to ten stories that I think a true IMAX theater should be. The problem was that our window was limited. The promotional posters go to the first five hundred at each theater, and Amanda, my daughter and frequent movie companion could only go to an A.M. screening today. So we swallowed our reservations and went to see a fantastic piece of cinema that remains for many, the high point of Steven Spielberg's career.

All of this is of course a week long commercial for the release of the Blu ray DVD next week. Last month there was a single screening of Jaws in Orange County in celebration of it's release on Blu Ray, and it irritates the hell out of me that I missed it. "Raiders" on the other hand will be on the IMAX screens all week, and next Saturday, they are playing all four Indiana Jones movies in a one day marathon. I don't think I will be able to make that, but believe me the Box set will be coming home that next week.

The movie looks terrific. I can't say what all the technical issues were that the studio addressed, but I don't think the movie ever looked as good as it did today. For those of you who may not realize it, I actually saw "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in it's original theatrical run, so although my memory is not perfect, at least I have a basis for making a comparison. The images were sharp and the colors clean and consistent. There was only one minor glitch that I noticed, that was some out of focus work on Satipo, the character played by Alfred Molina. When the spiders are discovered crawling all over him, there was a bit of blurring and loss of focus for just a few seconds. This might have been a technical issue in our screening, but I will be looking for it on the disc when it comes out.

Harrison Ford looked so incredibly young and rugged in the film today. Tom Selleck might have been fine, but the movie really thrives because of Ford's charisma. Karen Allen was so perfect in the tough girl, with glamorous potential role, it is great to remember that she was in many other terrific films as well. We re-watched "Animal House" the other day and she is so cute and sweet in that. John Rhys-Davies is actually very svelte in this film, it wasn't until "The Last Crusade" that he started playing "bigger"roles. The music from "Raiders" is among the many masterpieces of John Williams. Listening to it today, I was reminded how it was so powerfully evocative that it was used everywhere in the next few years. That sound was a touchstone for many and it set a template for action adventure films to follow. There are some truly beautiful passages as well as the swelling march that everyone recalls so clearly.

With the picture as sharp as it was, there were several places where my eye was drawn to set decoration that had whizzed past me before. At Indiana's house, as he and Marcus are discussing the upcoming endeavor, you can see at least three fantastic art deco style lamps in the living room. I was a Lawry's in Las Vegas on August 2, and I took this picture of the lamp on the mantle in the lobby:

This looks like they took it from the Indy set and set it down in the waiting area. It is the same lamp.

In the cabin on the boat that Marion and Indy are taking to get the Ark out of Egypt, there are several other beautiful pieces as well. Every detail of the movie was very vivid. Even during action scenes, the clarity of the picture enhanced the experience. I actually see the bullet wound and explosion in the forehead of one of Toht's Nepalese henchmen. There were times I saw the movie before this, where I had only imagined what it must look like, here it was in goriuous red.

I will probably be traveling back again this weekend to visit all of these characters on the big screen one more time. When the girls were maybe nine and eleven, we took them down to the New Beverly in the Fairfax area of L.A., to see a double feature of Raiders and The Last Crusade. It was one of the experiences they both recall vividly from their childhoods. I can't imagine that anyone out there would want to deny their child a seminal moment like this. So get yourselves out there and enjoy. Marion says it best for me, "Indiana Jones, I always knew someday you'd come walking back through my door."

ParaNorman

Here is a nice summer kids movie that swings right up my street, knocks on the door and says "Hey can I come in?" My answer will be of course "yes". This little guy features stop motion animation, a kid obsessed with horror films, and an off center point of view. Oh, add on top of that it uses the great Donovan hit from the 1960s, "Season of the Witch". I'm in with my heart if not always my head. The wordplay in the title is just the kind of joke I need to put me in one more spot up on the must see list. Unfortunately, I've been so busy the last couple of weeks, I'm only just now getting around to it and some of you may already be on to something else. That's OK, I'm going to give you my fix still.

To begin with, this is not really a film for little kids. There is some pretty gruesome stuff going on here. I heard a lot of comments around me today from 5, 6, and 7 year olds, that seemed strange. One little guy said, "Zombies don't really kill you, they just eat your brains." Another tyke was asking her mother if you were a ghost, could you hurt someone or did you have to be a zombie. I know kids grow up faster these days but this is not really a film for anyone under eight or nine. I have not checked but it should at least be rated PG. There is a plot point that involves a group adults actually killing a little girl, we don't see it on screen but it is a key element of the plot. How are you going to explain that kind of stuff to the little guys? Give em a couple of years and it will be fine.

The look of the stop motion figures is classically odd. Let's face it, stop motion looks different from traditional animation for a clear reason. There is a look and feel to these characters that is very different from a classically drawn image. I liked the way that the adults were shown, warts and all and the kids have there negative aspects as well. Giving Mom a little pot belly is not the usual way these things go in animation. The colors of the film are dark and luminous at the same time. There is a sense that the images are glowing green, even in those spots where they are not. The plotline features ghouls and ghosts, many of which do not look like they are Scooby Doo friendly, they look more "Night of the Living Dead" gross. I found that the story spun out of control a couple of times. Just as it is established that our hero can see the dead, that plot thread disappears except for motivation of the story. We don't really encounter any dead people after the goal of the hero has been set up. Once the curse that Norman is supposed to be fighting against begins, everyone can see all of the zombies and ghosts. There was clearly a family connection to this gift but it was barely developed. Norman is charged with his quest by a crazy Uncle, but that element of the story goes away and we don't get much of a fix on how the Uncle fit into the earlier generations family dynamic. If it is going to be mentioned, it should be part of the story, but it just is, without reason for being there. We meet the dead grandma and the live father, and neither of them talks about the Uncle much, especially after he expires. I did like some other characters that get brought into the story. Norman's unwanted friend Neil and his brother, tag along with Norman and his sister on a journey to discover the burial spot of the "Witch". The hysteria with all the towns people gets a little overwrought as does the parallel to earlier times.

The plot pulls it all together eventually, but it felt a little ragged to me. There are a couple of weird sex related references, and that's another issue for the little kids. None of it was explicit, but it was a little out of place. The resolution of the story was fine and there is a nice moral to the story. We did not see it in 3D but it looked as if there were some good visual gags that would make it 3D friendly. It was much like "Coraline" from a couple of years ago, well planned visuals, a good idea for a story but a little weak on putting the narrative together. A solid film, but not quite the complete treasure that many parts of it are.

2016 Obama's America

Eight years ago, a piece of hysterical, conspiracy mongering propaganda, posing as entertainment, was released in American movie theaters before the presidential election. I suspect that many who would dismiss this film from Conservative thinker Dinesh DSouza, will simply view it as attempted turnabout for Fahrenheit 911. Both have political objectives, both were produced, written and directed by film makers with strong political opinions, and both of them can be criticized for problems with the data they use or selective editing of interviews or events. The final complaint is true of every documentary, because it represents the views of it's creator. One major difference here is that D'Souza frankly admits that the film is his explanatory theory of Barack Obama's decision making philosophy. He is looking for a holistic explanation for why the President acts and believes the things that he does, and also why Americans have largely not seen the real philosophy that D'Souza sees.

I have a hard time imagining anyone who shares the President's views on international relations or economic issues, would ever find themselves an audience member for this film. They are likely to be antagonistic from the very beginning. There is in fact a brief segment in the movie that shows some pretty strong reactions from a variety of public figures to the articles D'Souza first published on this subject, prior to writing his two books that the film is based on. One of the most difficult things to do for any true believer, is to get them to suspend judgement long enough to hear the other side. That is true of both ends of the political spectrum. I'm not writing about this because of a political agenda, there are other places for me to express my opinions on those kinds of issues. I know that people reading this blog do so because they are interested in film. I will try to focus on the film and not the politics of the movie in sharing my opinion here.

For example, everyone on both sides of the political aisle, will accept a couple of premises. President Obama believes that American foreign policy has been over expansive and it has neglected the need of other nations of the world. He opposed the war in Iraq, and has clearly reduced American military power in parts of the world where he feels our interests are not threatened. This is not a controversial statement. Neither is the second premise, the President believes the role of the government is to protect those who are treated unjustly and to make sure that economic activity benefits are distributed in a manner that he sees as being fair. So the expansion of government to achieve those objectives is appropriate. I don't think there are any supporters of the President who would deny that those are core principles that he holds. The thing that makes this film controversial is the theory D'Souza advances that these views reflect an anti-colonialist point of view that has morphed into an anti-capitalist perspective which is antithetical to the American tradition. In addition the point he is making is that these views are reflective of Obama's personal history and upbringing. He also takes the position that Americans have largely not seen these things about the President for some very calculated reasons. Those are the meat of the movie.

The manner that he presents this case involves some contrasting parallels between himself and the President. Race issues are mentioned, and D'Souza has an interesting theory.He and the President, despite being the same skin color and having some similar outsider characteristics,see the race issues in different terms. As an immigrant, D'Souza believes he measures the status of race issues against the rest of the world and in practical terms. The President on the other hand is seen as defining the status of race against our history and our ideals. The film makes an effective case, using the Presidents own words and voice, that to overcome the barriers that race might present to a candidate seeking widespread support, the tone of discussion must be different if not downright diversionary. Some comparisons to African American political figures is used to make the point. It is D'Souza'a contention that Barack Obama turned the race issue into a net benefit for himself in a way that diverted attention away from the more damaging political philosophies that really define him. This was the strongest section of the film, but it was not the one that the greatest amount of time was spent on. His point here would make a good subject for a dissertation in political communication.

The sections of the movie that take up the greatest amount of time, deal with the roots of Obama's political ideals. It is the title of Obama's own autobiography that suggests the theme here, "Dreams from My Father". I am suspicious of any psychology based biographies, regardless of their point of view, because the analyst basically selects the events and incidents that they want to focus on to confirm their own thesis. The insights are usually so speculative that they are tantamount to reading tea leaves as a way of interpreting history. There are two or three talking head segments in the film, that seem to conform to my worst views of these kind of analysis. There are however stronger indicators to make the same argument. Once again, the President's own words, many of them spoken in his voice from the audiobook, and from news video, do a better job at making the case than the "living up to my father" projection that is basically the same thing Oliver Stone did with his biographical film "W". The use of current events and political decisions that the President has made is also more convincing than those psychological profiles.

This movie could have been a hatchet job on the President, based on political differences. Dinesh D'Souza is clearly a conservative writer with a dramatically different philosophy than the Presidents'. The film is structured in a very loose, narrative fashion. It develops theories, and offers data as proof that are sometimes convincing and sometimes not. A skilled propagandist would have turned this into a much more focused, hard hitting piece that attacks continuously. It might have been a more effective political product then, but I doubt that it would have the ability to change anyone's beliefs any more than political ads do. By structuring this as an investigation of a theory, it is more palatable to a wider audience, and it is more believable at times as well. I have read some articles on the marketing of the movie. We saw it with a crowd of thirty five people in a theater designed to hold a hundred and twenty. We saw a Saturday afternoon matinee, and I've seen Hollywood blockbusters with smaller crowds on an opening weekend. I think we might be surprised at the box office returns, but to me the bigger surprise is how the film presents it's point of view, to allow any viewer the ability to accept or reject it's conclusions. It is a one sided argument, but it is clearly presented as an argument.