Everybody Wants Some!! – 2

This movie’s view of college life makes Animal House seem realistic. Unfortunately, where Animal House is hilarious, Everybody is just obnoxious. In the 40 minutes we watched before walking out, there wasn’t a single enjoyable, let alone amusing, moment, no one I cared about, or anything resembling a plot. The characters’ personality traits were among my least favorite. I spent my college years avoiding people like this. That all the actors appeared to be closer to 30 than college age and wore cliched outfits didn’t help. Maybe Richard Linklater was setting these baseball players (and when did baseball players become BMOCs?) up for a deserved fall as the movie wore on; or maybe he just had a bad day.

Vegas Baby – 8

Despite having no knowledge of, experience with or particular interest in the subject of in-vitro fertilization, I was hooked from the start of this documentary, and it never let go. Director Amanda Micheli skillfully mixed science, human interest, joy, sadness, ethics and economics, with just the right touches of humor for leavening to tell a story that is provocative and enlightening. I saw the movie twice and cried both times. My only disappointment was not the filmmakers’ fault but the result of the dice that a documentary has to throw: the couple that won the IVF contest and thus became one of the three personal stories the film tracked was neither attractive nor inspiring. That’s the difference between life and Hollywood.

Eye in the Sky – 8

Kudos to director Gavin Hood, producer Colin Firth, et al., for making a commercial film that presents and provokes debate on a controversial public policy issue: America’s drone war on terrorists in the Third World. Both sides are vividly presented. Pro: a drone strike will eliminate three identified terrorist leaders and two jihadi mules armed with suicide vests that could kill hundreds of innocent civilians in Nairobi if allowed to proceed. Con: the strike has minimal, if any, legal justification and will cause collateral damage including the probable death of a sweet 11-year-old Kenyan girl. Then there is the “political” issue: if the suicide bombers succeed, the terrorist group Al-Shabab will be blamed; if the drone strike succeeds, the West will be blamed and Al-Shabab will benefit.

While the debating points may be balanced – depending, perhaps, on your view of the subject going in (more on this later) – the filmmakers’ sympathies clearly lean in one direction. The principal proponents for the strike are an obsessed field commander (Helen Mirren) and a buffoonish superior officer (the late great Alan Rickman in an unfortunate final role), while the legal go-ahead comes from a weasely Attorney General. Meanwhile, the girl who epitomizes the collateral damage is presented as angelic, if not saintly; and the American and British underlings who have to follow orders – the on-site legal adviser, the sergeant assessing CDE, and the American pilots who have to pull the trigger – are shown as caring, empathetic and principled. Similarly, the only “conscience” in the administrative war room in London is a lone woman in some unspecified position, who seems to have no authority except morality. She expresses one conclusion the audience is free to reach when she tells the general that his whole performance has been “disgraceful.” The film, however, lets neither her nor us off easy by giving Rickman the more powerful rebuttal: “Never presume to tell a soldier the costs of war.”

From a dramatic standpoint, the movie is sensational. Somehow we always know how it will end, yet the route there keeps getting more complicated. We are involved emotionally as well as intellectually, but one never clouds the other. My quibble, and it is not small, is with the ways the deck is unnecessarily stacked. There was no reason the Mirren character had to be made so obsessed. Her view becomes more reasonable once the weapons and suicide bombers show up, but they were not part of the equation when she ordered her Somali operatives into the rebels’ armed compound, apparently unconcerned about their survival; nor was she unduly concerned that the limit of her mandate was “capture” when she started twisting facts to achieve a “kill.” Moreover, without more background information her targets, British citizens including a woman, didn’t appear to pose an imminent threat to anyone. As for the Rickman character, the film introduces us by showing him struggling to buy the right model of an expensive doll for his daughter, perhaps to let us know that these people all have real lives outside their jobs, perhaps to draw a third world/first world contrast with the Kenyan father who has just taped together a primitive hula hoop for his child. The problem, though, is that we don’t feel the general is quite focused on his job. He is brusque, in a “let’s-get-this-over-with” manner that translates as, let’s not think too much here. And then there is his goofy haircut, not the kind you’d expect to find on a senior military officer. For me, the pro-strike arguments could have been made just as well by serious, thoughtful soldiers (and politicians) who recognized and acknowledged the risks they were advocating, and that would have made their arguments, and the film, more compelling.

But would that have changed my view as to the rightness, or wrongness, of the ultimate decision to strike? Or what if the wonderful Barkhad Abdi had succeeded in removing the bread-selling girl from the danger zone? We are still left with the situation where British and American troops are killing people – never mind their citizenship – in a foreign country without that country’s knowledge or authorization. Even when we know there are suicide bombers intent on killing innocent civilians, what right have we to intervene? Is there a threat to America or Britain? No. The only justification is the belief that America is “the world’s policeman,” and anywhere we see wrongdoing we are entitled to intervene. Many people, including most of our current Presidential candidates, hew to this belief. I stubbornly cling to a Golden Rule of foreign policy: how would we feel if Russia sent missiles into downtown Miami to kill some Chechen terrorists? If they shouldn’t be allowed to do it, why should we? Then there is the practical matter that, so far as I understand, the drone strikes aren’t helping us. Yes, they help American and British politicians who can say they are doing something about terrorists, and they trumpet each successful strike as a battlefield victory. But the strikes are doing nothing to win the war. There is plenty of evidence that our drone warfare creates a multiple of terrorists for every one it takes out, and the situation in every country where we have struck with drones is just as fraught as it was before. In short, they are the product of a bad policy, and nothing in Eye in the Sky suggests otherwise. After making its arguments pro and con, the movie leaves us with two final images: the young American pilots, emotionally shaken if not shattered from their experience of pulling the trigger in Las Vegas and watching people in Nairobi die; and the young Kenyan girl with her hula hoop, resurrected from death to grace the final credits.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot – 7.5

It’s rather gutsy to make a romantic comedy about the war in Afghanistan – what with all those people dying, not to mention the overlying issue of what our army is doing there in the first place – but Tina Fey handled that challenge admirably. What she didn’t do was convince anyone she was a war correspondent; she was Tina Fey, which was fun to watch, as usual, but made it hard to take anything seriously. Arguably, that was the point – no Zero Dark Thirty here – but you got the sense that this was supposed to be more than a series of skits. Billy Bob Thornton was excellent: he made me proud of the Marines and, while not justifying our presence in Afghanistan, made it seem relatively innocuous. One last note: there was no particular justification for the movie’s title, which was recently used, similarly without justification, on one of the better books I’ve read.

10 Cloverfield Lane – 6

John Goodman is never uninteresting, and his turn as a survivalist looney was suitably convincing – and well matched against Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s hostage.  Maybe there was nothing terribly important or riveting at stake, but the players kept me engaged. When actual stakes were revealed at the end, a new light was cast on all that had gone before – but not much illumination.

Embrace of the Serpent – 3

Long, boring and if there was a point, I missed it. Heart of Darkness meets Ramar of the Jungle is not a winning recipe, especially when the white-man leads are unattractive and delusional. The natives were more noble but not noticeably attached to any universe I recognized. At least I learned that the Amazon, or at least a tributary thereof, runs through Colombia.