Conjuring Magnum Force

The reports of beheadings and other atrocities on the part of ISIS bring out the Dirty Harry in all of us. The outrageousness of the crime is directly proportional to the level of revenge— that was the formula for the immensely popular Clint Eastwood movies. Remember Harry Callahan’s famous lines, “But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?” You may find yourself intoning them when you see one of those videos that you’ve had to go to the Fox News site to see (since CNN refuses to show them). Increased feelings of helplessness fueled by the Charlie Hebdo affair and the shootings in Denmark fuel further fantasies. How about releasing the most violent and unrepentant prisoners in maximum security prisons (providing they aren’t Jihadists) and setting them down on the border between Syria and Turkey with full license to wreak havoc. Or better yet, if we need boots on the ground, which is what we are constantly told is the only real way to defeat ISIS, how about a million man strong robot army, which is impervious to suicide bombers? Every robot would have it’s minder, safe and secure behind a control consul at say Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. Let the enemy fire all they want, these bullet and bomb proof robots won't be stopped. Only what happens when it turns out the robots have minds of their own and their artificial intelligences turned out to be real?

Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys

Kumba is what you think about when you see Clint Eastwood’s movie version of Jersey Boys. Everyone but Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) who talks about T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” is from the neighborhood and that’s the problem. The disquisition rendered in intentionally old style Technicolor (which is to say intentionally lacking in the kind of production values audiences are used to today) renders a series of plastic stereotypes, a kind of working class commedia dell'arte. Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young) is clueless, Tom DeVito (Vincent Piazza), is the not too street wise criminal who mortgages the group’s future and Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) the winteriest of the Four Seasons just wants to go home. Frankie’s wife Mary Delgado (Renee Marino) couldn’t have been too happy with her portrait as a demanding alcoholic who forces her husband to pack his bags just as he’s about to make it. Apparently it’s all true, but it also plays as the stuff of a lousy afternoon soap or  reality show like The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Speaking of neighborhoods, the aging demographic of the cranky crowds attending Jersey Boys might remind you of another Italian neighborhood, Dante's Inferno. Marshall Brickman’s script sacrifices believability for verisimilitude. At one point Frankie and his pals try to steal a safe which is so heavy that their car rides on two wheels. It’s a scene that wouldn’t be worthy of a Little Rascals outtake. Sometimes the things that people actually say to each other are neither informative nor entertaining and furthermore Jersey Boys is not cinema verite. It’s a musical, but once the dreary backstory with its god forsaken lounges and hokey songs comes to an end, you get the pay off. “December, l963 (Oh, What a Night),” “Let’s Hang On,” “Candy Girl,” “Walk Like a Man,” “Dawn,” “Sherry,”"Who Loves You," “I’m Working My Way Back to You.” Who cares if the lives of The Four Seasons were embarrassing and deeply sad (one of FrankieValli’s daughters, Francine, a talented singer in her own right died of a drug overdose and his stepdaughter, Celia died the same year from a fall). “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind...” Rod Serling says in his introduction to The Twilight Zone.  That's where those hits exist.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

In the Dirty Harry films Clint Eastwood established a dynamic by which retribution is justified by the degree of the crime being avenged. Harry Callahan was the best argument there is for terrorism as a response to oppression and his .44 Magnum is curiously prescient of escalating cycles of vengeance and reprisal not only on an individual level but in troubled parts of our present world. In David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a similar dynamic is working. The over the top vengeance that Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) engineers is directly proportionate the traumas she’s experienced both in the present, as a victim of a brutal rape, and in the past by virtue of her abusive upbringing. She's the spokes person for all the mutilated women in the movie, the equivalent of a walking class action suit against a world of serial murders and sexual abusers. The novel and the movie on which it’s based, whatever one may think of them, are, however, beyond good and evil, since they are cultural phenomenae and significant as products of their times. And what makes them unique? Firstly, on the broadest level, to quote George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The film is mired in repetitions, beginning and ending on an accident, perpetrating a family line of sexual predators and propagating the notion of a never ending cycle of revenge. Beyond this, every era produces its own private eyes and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a social misfit, threatened with institutionalization, who is a master of bisexuality, hacking and self-mutilation (to the extent that she is pierced and tattooed). As private eyes go, Lisbeth is about as far from the cool elegance of  The Thin Man as they come, yet she’s an acute observer and up there with the best shamuses.  Archaic forms of  Christianity permeate the plot and also recall the kind of nightmarish form of Christianity that raised its head in, in The Exorcist  and more recently in The Da Vinci Code. Most of the movie takes place on an island and one can’t help thinking about another island in contemporary Swedish folklore and that’s Bergman’s Faro where sadism, familial agony and a God that was both haunting and silent were also portrayed, albeit with eons greater profundity and a total lack of the kind of emotional manipulation that both Larsson and Fincher excel at.