Marty and Martha’s

Summer blockbuster review

by Marty and Martha Roth

Blockbuster action films dominated our entertainment activities this month: those loud, fast, over-earnest cartoons that presume to show us life at the edge where politics as usual meets human annihilation. The best of these, Phil Alden Robinson’s “The Sum of All Fears” and Doug Limon’s “The Bourne Identity,” like the genre as a whole, seem to have been, ironically, rejuvenated by 9/11. Whatever the actual circumstances of their making and the intentions of individual filmmaker, that violent denunciation of America’s imperial role and the denial and guilt that have convulsed the nation ever since has become the prism through which the fantasy of international politics comes to be seen. 


 Freeman and Affleck in “The Sum of All Fears.”

In some way nuclear annihilation is an old-fashioned subject that should have gone out with the Cold War and yet the fraught bookkeeping that attends the dispersal of the old nuclear arsenals and the entry of new members into the nuclear club (especially India and Pakistan) keep this topic simmering and perhaps crying out for new attention. “Sum of all Fears” oversees final confrontation between the United States and Russia, both helpless to avert nuclear disaster. Ironically, in the backstory that just doesn’t matter at all; a neo-Nazi cult has used an Israeli bomb to precipitate the dreaded event. Any film that reduces an American city to nuclear rubble is post 9/11 by definition (and doing it via a soft-drink dispenser unlea shes mushroom clouds of memory of “Dr. Strangelove”).
 “Sum” has a good cast for the kind of hearty but rigid acting this genre demands. James Cromwell is the best American president under duress ever, and his opposite number Ciaran Hinds is a most convincingly beleaguered Russian premier. Morgan Freeman appears to the mantle of power born and Ben Affleck continues to be superlatively adequate. The film’s great virtue is a threatening mood and an inexorable and suspenseful pace combined with a kind of lightness that one might have expected from the director of “Sneakers.”
“The Bourne Identity” is harder to turn into a contemporary thriller: secret agent suffers from total amnesia and must discover who he is and stay alive, while his one-time bosses, the CIA, direct the world’s technology and every expert hitman in Europe at him. Nevertheless, its core is the preservation of American innocence in a world dominated by a corrupt American empire. More than most thrillers, “Bourne” poses the amazing irony of an American superpower dissected with a fervor that would satisfy its most radical critics (the CIA is sheerly evil, the government sublimely stupid) and yet it doesn’t matter at all: we watch in amusement or boredom and not one tittle of moral resolve is added to our political registers. As for the innocence, by having Bourne be insomniac (like Geena Davis in “A Time to Die”), he can be a new Huckleberry Finn (whom Damon deeply resembles): both innocent and guilty, clean and dirty, a morally integral, humane subject whose nerves and body remember every dirty trick they have ever been taught. The film thus becomes a way of acknowledging America’s guilt in the contemporary world and yet finding a way to opt out of it, to preserve its old idealism if only in one poor shell-shocked, dispossessed individual.
Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” is based on a sci-fi story by Philip Dick, which explains its family resemblance to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” At his best (“Empire of the Sun” and AI”), Spielberg is good at bringing out the freakiness and kinkiness of fantasy and science fiction, and this plateau is often reached in this film about a future society freed of homicidal violence by the institution of a Pre -Crime department which tracks murders before they happen and still incarcerate the criminals. Unfortunately, the film is just too cluttered with Spielberg’s rococo technology. It’s also a film in which product placement is nothing to be ashamed of. However, the real downside of all of this is that you have to look at a grim, silently fuming Tom Cruise for over two hours, probably meditating on his film career.
After “Insomnia,” we no longer have to wonder about the profundity of Christopher Nolan’s first big budget film, “Memento.” The dislocated narrative logic of that film loses some of its artistic prestige when it becomes clear that Nolan just can’t do straightforward narrative at all. “Insomnia” is an even more embarrassing performance when you realize that all he had to do was direct by the numbers, since his film is a point for point remake of a Norwegian movie of some years back (it uses the same script, for godsake!). Alaska stands in for Norway as a place of constant daylight and Al Pacino for Stellan Skarsgard as a corrupt Los Angeles cop who is on loan to a hick town police force while, at home, his stellar career crumbles in disgrace. The image of Pacino, gaunt from sleeplessness, pressing every fabric in his hotel room against the windows to keep out the glaring light, has integrity, but that’s about all in the film that does. The star of the film is Pacino’s leather jacket. Robin Williams acts as if he’s doing standup at the villain’s convention, and Hillary Swank—well the less said the better.
Those were the big films we saw this month. There were also a number of small ones, all in various shades and degrees of good. Although it may be a bit of a mess in some respects, Peter Care’s “The Dangerous Life of Altar Boys” is one of the freshest films we have seen in a long time: authentic, earnest, and charming—not impressed with itself, not movie-like at all. The premise is familiar: a small group of rebellious boys wage a dirty trick campaign against the narrow-minded, pietistic nun who dominates their lives at parochial school. Played by Jodie Foster, the nun deserves every ounce of resentment they feel for her. The most attractive element of development is a parallel run of action-comic animation. All of the boys are comic book fans; they all spend time dreaming and drawing themselves; they all have developed super-hero identities; and the film regularly shifts into animation, telling us a high-powered story about four heroes and a venomous band of motorcycle riding demon-hag nuns. The film is also to be commended for the dark places that it allows small-town life and remembered childhood to take us.
Good or not, we laughed heartily and long at “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” which tells the perennially American story of the son or daughter who chooses to marry out of the tightly-knit, culturally dense ethnic community, much to the consternation of her patriarchal father and her myriad aunts and uncles. The film felt like it developed out of stand-up or improv material that the writer and star Nia Vardalos had been developing for some time. “Saturday Night Live’s” Andrea Martin has taken on a comic firmness and sharpness; Lainie Kazin barely alters her Jewish mother from “My Favorite Year”; and Michael Constantine is almost too much as the Greek father who proves that almost any word you can think of comes from Greek language roots.
The last entry in the small movie department is the “American Pie” people, Chris and Paul Weitz’s latest film, “About a Boy,” which is a careful and rather funny film about the intrusion of an intense young boy, the son of an hysterical, suicidal mother, into the life of a charming but selfish wastrel in London. The story is predictable—love wins out and love redeems. Toni Collette does a remarkable turn as Brenda Blethyn as the mother. Finally, however, the charm of the piece had most to do with the way in which the film used Hugh Grant as a relatively worthless human being, but one who knows it, is more or less easy with it, but wouldn’t mind changing if it didn’t cause him too much pain. 

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