Fumarama

The movie is basically about how a Texas congressman, a Houston socialite, and a CIA agent get together to supply the Afghan mujahedeen with weapons to defeat the Soviets in the 1980s. The three protagonists succeed in doing just that, and then we get a scene in which we see two Russian helicopters pilots talking crudely (first about how they are hunting Afghans and then about women and commitment) while the Afghans with their new American weapon nervously get ready to shoot the helicopter down. The Russians are laughing and having a good time when the Afghans shoot and kill them. The Afghans, excited, run off. This scene is followed by a montage of Afgans shooting down Soviet helicopters, Charlie getting more money for the covert operation, and green script on the screen telling us how many helicopters were shot by the Afghans in a given year. It was like something out of Hot Shots or something. It was not just a throwback to an 80s war movie, it was so over the top it was like a spoof of one. In this day and age, our war movies are like the Clint Eastwood's Flag of our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima, portraits of how both sides have an equally devastating story. Who still kills Russians in their movies?

I was so uncomfortable during those scenes. I mean covered my eyes, couldn't watch unconfortable. To have the uplifting climax with the music and cheering for something that we know will ultimately be so destructive was upsetting. But I swear someone next to me in the theater clapped. My friend afterward stated that clearly these scenes were meant to be ironic. He even argued that they looked Dr. Strangelove-esque. It has been a very long time since I have seen Dr. Strangelove, but my memory of the movie is that every moment in the film is very clearly satire. Charlie Wilson's War is breezy and light but it is not all satire. The filmmakers are telling a story with jokes thrown in but the movie is not mocking anyone. And yes, the story itself has an underlying irony but that irony is pointed out pretty explicitly at the end of the film. Which brings me back to the montage in question. If it is meant to be ironic, it is tonally different than the rest of the movie. CWW would be a 97 minute movie with 10 minutes of satire stuck in towards the end. But at the same time, the majority of the audience knows where this weapon and training from the United States is ultimately headed and would suffer from the same cognitive dissonance that I did. So maybe Sorkin and Nichols could have predicted this audience reaction.

Basically, I can't decide if this series of scenes are brilliant because they point out our expectations about tone in movies and by doing that our expectations about narrative. What I mean is that once we got to know and like the characters, we expect their actions and the results of their actions to be good. By playing the scene without indicating any irony while the audience feels like it should be played for irony reenforces the tension underlying the movie beween the pure intentions of the players and the consequences. In a purely fictional movie, we would cheer with the actors in the film, but instead here we feel strange even there is no indication that the characters feel strange. It is a very powerful show of how our best intentions can get very screwed up. Or whether these scenes are just some leftover 80s nostalgic jingoism?

1. They did not tell us the superpower of Hiro's dad, or Nathan and Peter's parents, or the woman who invented the virus. I am a big proponent (the only proponent I know) of the theory that if a piece of fiction/entertainment is not going to give all the answers, it has to surpass a certain threshold of quality. So for example, I have never seen the Sopranos but theoretically, a show like the Sopranos that bent all the rules on what a tv show could be could get away with an ambiguous ending, but Heroes is no Sopranos. It is kind of a clumsy show, part of its charm is that it can be kind of over the top and campy. Why is the show not embracing this standard? give me answers!

2. They killed Nathan Petrelli. He was my favorite character. The first couple of times that shows killed major characters in tv shows it was pretty cool because suddenly shows became less predictable, you could never be sure that everything would be ok. (Everwood, of-course, did this first and best.) But now that there are these shows with a million characters, you basically know that they will kill someone every sweeps season and it has become another predictable plot point.

3 The repeating superpowers. When I first read in Entertainment Weekly that they were planning to allow multiple characters to have the same power it seemed like a good idea, a way to get around the problem of giving people lamer and lamer powers because they ran out of ideas. But once I saw it in practice, I did not like it. One of the pleasures of the show was when they introduced new characters because the question was what new power they would come up with. Now with the repeat powers, one of the fun things about the show is gone.

4. How many heroes are there? So does this mutation happen to a select handful of people or is it like X-men when there are a whole subset of people who have a mutation. Last season, they made Heroes seem like X-men when they had the story line 5 years later with rounding up all the heroes. It made it seem like Heroes were a group in the population like a race or ethnicity. But then this season they made it seem like there had only been 13 heroes in the previous generation and also it was a mutation that seemed to be passed through families. So what is it, are there like 30 Heroes or like hundreds of Heroes?

5. What was the overarching plot? The Ashanti virus? Were you compelled? I was not.

I loved it.

Update 12/25: I still love it but I want to ask: why would a couple as rich and super as Jeniffer Garner and Jason Bateman advertise for a child in the pennysavers? I mean I know this method proved effective but wouldn't they have some super rich people way of going about it?

I loved like the first 10 minutes. It was a very funny send up of the whole Disney movie thing. There is this pretty maiden who lives in a tree. She has lovely dreams about true love's kiss and then wakes up and sings about it to her cartoon animal friends. There is a cartoon chipmunk as well as birds and deer who all help her. Giselle is this innocent maiden who lived with her cartoon animal friends and she sings about true love's kiss while her animal friends help her do things. And it is all very lovely and happy. (This is actually very similar to how I picture attending Yale law school, except the woman does not necessarily need to be a mainden and instead of singing about true love she sings about constitutional moments or something.) The prince hears her and immediately knows he must marry this woman. They meet, continue the song, and decide to have their ceremony the next day. Perfect.

Of-course there is an evil step mother who ruins the plan by sending Giselle to a place where are no happily ever afters, New York City. (Now that I have left I have reromanticized New York as the town of endless hope and possibility, and so my first thought was you are wrong evil stepmother, New York is totally the land of happily ever after.) Anyway, she meets Patrick Dempsey, a cynical divorce lawyer, and begins the process of warming his heart. And this is where I ran into trouble with the movie.

I also watched two episodes of the Girls Next Door today. This is the show about Hugh Hefner's girlfriends on E. And what has struck me about this show is that Hef will have these dinner parties and he will bring other old men with thier respective twenty-something blonde girlfriends. And so you will have this interesting dynamic of older, all fairly accomplished, probably very intelligent old men, with these very young women. And because the show is about the young women not Hef, you will just kind of see these men indulge the women. But I always imagine them later off to the side engaging in serious conversations. And it is like the girls are children or something.

And that is my problem with Giselle, she is a red-headed girl next door. She is a child, all sweet, and pure, and innocent. And Dempsy is playing a middle aged lawyer more or less. And basically he just falls in love with innocence. It is a little creepy. And I watch Girls Next Door, I am not saying that young and innocent isn't a male fantasy, but this movie was made for little girls. And the over the top Disney version of cartoon princes falling at first glance for pretty women is ok, because the princes are usually pretty innocent too. But to send a message to little girls that innocence wins over flesh and blood men, that was different. It was strange and kind of upsetting.

American Gangster is not a good enough movie for Russell Crowe to look all shlubby.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie. And I know that theoretically it is supposed to be oscar bait, but it reminded me of a movie like the Inside Man, an well-executed, entertaining movie about cops and robbers but ultimately not much more. Which gets me back to my original point. I am all for actors gaining and losing weight so that they can fully inhabit their characters but I just don't think the boy scout cop played by Crowe needed to have that bit of a gut. I mean I think the role would have been just as believable and the acting just as good if Crowe had maintained his perfect pectoral muscles and perhaps gratutiously taken off his shirt a couple of times.