unclefestering Blog

Under discussion:

Shoot 'Em Up  (2007)

So I'm cruising through Netflix and see Shoot 'Em Up. Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci and Clive Owen, well how bad can it be?

Bad.

Clive Owen plays a man with no name who happens to be the world's greatest tactician, marksman and gymnist, happens to see thugs trying to gun down a pregnant lady and spings into action, buying bullets with food stamps, taking the baby to the the hooker who specializes in nursing grown men that he just happens to know and taking on the entire military industrial complex single handedly to save American democracy.

And then the story gets silly.

Under discussion:

August  (2008)

Directed by Austin Chick.

Starring Robin Tunney, Rip Torn, Josh Hartnett, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Adam Scott, Andre Royo, Naomie Harris.

August is like an inverted Langston Hughes poem in movie form. Instead of struggling for the deferred dream, Tom Sterling (Josh Hartnett) is fighting to keep alive a dream that was brought into the world too soon. Unfortunately, his own hubris may get in the way of his goal.

Sterling is the CEO of Landshark, an e-commerce company that does… well…  OK, I’m not sure what the company does. But neither do several of the characters in the movie. Sterling launched the company with his brother Josh (Adam Scott) just as the warning signs of the dot.com bubble's impending burst are becoming clear. He’s hailed as a genius and the company’s stock rises as several competitors are crashing. A quick jump to the end of the summer of 2001 and Landshark is foundering due to Tom’s wasteful spending habits, which have blown through the company’s initial capitalization and a lack of customers.On top of all this, is the external problem that by now the dot com bubble has popped and the stock is tanking.

To make matters worse, Tom’s own arrogance prevents him from closing deals. In a meeting with a potential client, Tom refuses to give them a presentation. Instead, he spouts a bunch of babble about how his company is pure “e” and anybody would be a fool to turn him away.

The pressures of the business also flow directly into his personal life. His brother no longer trusts him and is just as desperate to keep the company afloat since he has to pay for a new mortgage and protect his wife and newborn son. Tom's relationship with his parents is also rocky, as he wildly reacts to any negative comments about the business and attacks them for giving up on their own ideals. His one bright spot is his attempt to rekindle a relationship with his ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) who has just returned to New York.

This movie really made me think that Josh Hartnett could act, something I've doubted for a long time. The movie rides and falls on Hartnett’s shoulders, since he is almost every scene. You can feel the jittery energy coming off him as his persona of business whiz is cracking and he becomes more and more desperate to keep the business running and, more importantly to him, to be perceived as a success.

Two small roles highlight the fracturing of that self perception. Rip Torn, playing the father of the Landshark brothers, quickly dismisses the entire venture with questions about what the company actually does and his stentorian disapproval of a staff sitting around eating Oreos. Rarely has a cookie stood in for all the disappointment a father could have for his son.

The other is a brief cameo by David Bowie as the venture capitalist who could be the last hope to save the company, but at a ruinous cost. Bowie’s character is so dismissive of Tom Sterling that he barely bothers to look at him when they are finally in the same room.

The one thing that overshadows all of the action in the movie is that the viewer knows that one month after this takes place; all the actions in this movie will be seen as petty and small when compared to the tragedy looming in September 2001.

Under discussion:

An Inconvenient Truth  (2006)

Out of Balance  (2007)

Out of Balance is a documentary of the worst type: pick an easy target, show what they do is wrong and claim a moral victory. It doesn’t attempt to portray any kind of balance to the story it is telling. While there are plenty of talking heads, I expected them to quote from more than three documents to prove ExxonMobil is the greatest threat to the environment.

According to this movie, ExxonMobile is the single, greatest source of evil on the face of the planet. The company single handedly is going to destroy every aspect of life on Earth. Am I exagerating the claims made by the documentary? Yes. However, my exaggerations are not as much as you would expect.

This movie spends slightly more than an hour featuring one talking head after another from extremely radical environmental groups claiming that ExxonMobile has stifled the debate on global climate change. They claim the company has exerted undue influence on the government. And that they have created massive amounts of doubt in the mind of the public on how serious the problem of global warming is.

Of these claims made by the movie, really the middle one is the one I believe most strongly. It is also the one that they have the most documented evidence. It appears to be clear that Exxon and the other oil companies were able to use their personal relationships with the president and the vice president of the United States, to craft an energy policy that favors the current energy producers and prevent any real reform in researching and producing alternative energy sources. This part of the movie comes very late and in a way is the most compelling because, finally, people other than environmental lobbyists are on camera and they have some actual proof the match the claims.

During the rest of the movie, when the speakers are not onscreen, the viewers get treated to stock footage of the ecological devastation caused by the Exxon Valdez spill. This footage is shown again and again over the discussion that ExxonMobile funds researchers and organizations which take the position that global warming is a myth or that the effects are greatly exaggerated by the people who believe in it. This is the bulk of the movie and this is what I had the hardest time with.

Very little time in the movie is devoted to the idea of what can be done to stop the juggernaut that is ExxonMobile. Other then a couple of the speakers saying they don’t buy gas from Exxon, only about 10 minutes at the end is devoted on what people can do to make a change. And really the conclusion they draw is that the government has to tell the company it has been bad and make them change.

I know one person who thinks that global warming is a hoax. I know one other person who tends to doubt the validity of scientific studies and even he believes the global climate change is a real crisis. I think the people who are trying to move the global warming discussion back to the “Is it Real” phase have really long lost the argument. The movie tries to make the claim that this is where the energy debate is.

In reality the debate has moved on to the “What can be done to address the problem” stage. This is a fact that the movie doesn’t want to address because it would make Exxon seem like less of a looming threat.

The problem with polemics like Out of Balance is that they are all arguments with very little in the way of facts to support those arguments. What made An Inconvenient Truth so compelling was that Al Gore compiled fact after fact to show how serious the issue was and how incontrovertible his conclusions were. Here the facts are just replaced with anger and even if you agree with the idea they present, the undocumented single-mindedness of their attack undermines their position.