Boots on the Ground--The Movie

     

    Boots On the Ground is a feature length action film. American air strikes have not been able to contain ISIS which has also launched several successful attacks at targets in major European capitals, during one of which over a l00 hostages are captured and air lifted to a brutal ISIS prison near Qatar. The United States will be next.   

    Moses Thomas is a high ranking member of U.S Military Intelligence. In his role he oversees covert missions by both Special Forces and Navy Seals. Moses grew up in Chicago where his brother Ike took a different tact becoming a widely feared leader of the Bloods. Ike is now serving a life sentence at Menard, a maximum security prison. During a long period in solitary confinement Ike has developed a deep faith in God and has also earned a PhD in sociology. He is a leader in the prison where he is routinely consulted by inmates and authorities alike.

    Moses has unsuccessfully been trying to get Ike a reprieve for years, but due to his brutal past, all attempts to get pardons, even by Moses interceding at the highest levels, have failed.

   As the crisis escalates Moses develops a plan which will re-establish American hegemony and empty the prisons. Ike and an army of criminals will raid the ISIS stronghold on the Iraq Syria border where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is reputed to oversee operations. The stronghold is deemed practically impregnable and bombproof as it lies at the bottom of a famed archeological dig, a holy Mesopotamian city that lies over a half a mile below the surface of the earth.

    Cut to ISIS teams perfecting work on a tactical nuclear devices which will be used for an attack on Washington along with chemical and biological weapons designed to paralyze populations throughout the country.  In the meanwhile the training of Ike and a task force comprised of thousands of criminals has not gone without glitches. Given the opportunity to be good at being good rather than exceling at being bad, some of the hardened mobsters Ike has recruited still remain loyal to the underworld. At first he's forced to use strongarm techniques to discipline his own men. He’s got to demonstrate who’s boss. This part of the film will resemble the kind of MMA you see in the televised Ultimate Fighting challenges. But once Isaiah has prevailed and weeded out the incorrigible, he’s ready to move.

    There will be a scene right out of Preston Sturges when the gates of all the prisons open and the prisons are emptied with a flip to lines of former bikers, pickpockets, murderers, rapists and mobsters all decked out in the uniform of the the United States Correctional Military! Naturally you will have a WAC unit which will live up to its acronym, but will also be an in house source of intelligence while providing the film’s romantic interests). Remember it was a woman CIA officer who was instrumental in tracking bin Laden.

    Moses introduces Ike and his men into the next level of preparedness which involves having access to the most classified levels of weapons technology. They are training not to strike from the air, but by way of an underground drilling operation. This part of the movie will in some ways resemble Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, with underground drones performing high tech feats. There will be sections which also mirror the Chilean mining disaster when Ike and his crew become trapped in explosions and cave-ins that go undetected by their minders who have neither radar nor sonar connections to the army of criminals.  

   Finally our heroes are prevail against the elements and find themselves on a collision course with their ISIS counterparts. They’re willing and ready to use a mixture of street smarts and advanced weaponry to defeat their foe.

    The tone of the movie will be tongue and cheek and filmed like a 30’s romantic comedy with irises and other old-fashioned visual effects and while ISIS may be defeated, our army of criminals is going end up in jail on V-ME (Victory Middle East Day).
    At the end of the film the disconsolate prison guards who had been put out of work by Isaiah and Moses will be happily restored to their jobs. The prisons will be full and American hedge fund honchos and Silicon Valley billionaires, our latter day Robber Barons, will again be free to reek financial havoc with world markets and bring about the same conditions that helped to create terrorist organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda in the first place. No one has learned anything.

Christmas in Connecticut

Peter Godfrey ‘s Christmas in Connecticut (l945) is a winter’s version of Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the movie which played as part of the Stanwyck festival at Film Forum, Christmas Eve, Stanwyck is Elizabeth Lane, a single journalist who lives a hand-to-mouth existence, but whose doppleganger is a doting wife and mother who cooks delectable meals for her patrician husband in a Connecticut farmhouse. Stanwyck had previously demonstrated an aptitude for playing double-faced characters. In Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (l941), which  was the second part of the double header, she’s a grifter who disguises herself as an aristocrat. But fantasy is the lingua franca of  Christmas in Connecticut, which begins when the survivor of a torpedoed American vessel, floating in the middle of the ocean, dreams he’s being served an elegant French meal. The conceit is carried forward in the hospital where a nurse reads Lane’s column in Smart Housekeeping and dreams up the scheme of luring one of her charges into marriage by having him transported to the fantasy Connecticut manse for the holidays. It’s interesting to note that the kind of journalistic chicanery that Stanwyck’s character practices, which usually has rather severe consequences, is here the substance of romantic comedy. One wonders if the props for the movie are stored somewhere on the Warner Brothers lot, since the setting is an iconic never never land and the ultimate house with the white picket fence. Sleighs are pulled by horses and sleigh bells announce the guests. But when all is said it functions a kind of magic retreat, like Shakespeare’s forest in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), the recovering seaman, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet), the magazine publisher, John Sloane, the ill-fated suitor and Felix Bassenak (S.Z. Sakall),a restaurateur, who is the resident Puck, all converge.The bucolic setting is belied by the potent and even revolutionary effects produced by the imaginative goings on within. This minor masterpiece is not like any Christmas you will ever spend in Connecticut. 

Nebraska

The Descendants was a complex movie, but the word for Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s latest outing, is good intentioned. Not since Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels has a director been able to insinuate  the presence of so much goodness in such a stark American Gothic setting. The fact that the film is shot in black and white is almost confusing. It adds a nourish quality that at first belies the emotions at hand. It’s like the macguffin that never amounts to much. Nebraska starts with Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his son David (Will Forte) leaving Billings, Montana for Lincoln, Nebraska and the beaten town of Hawthorne where much of the action takes place is filled with the kind of freaks and criminals that populate Coen Brothers movies like Fargo (one of these, a garage owner named Ed Pegram played by Stacey Keach, allows Payne to place two veteran actors in a showdown). “See Us Fo Your House Loan,”reads the highway ad for one of Hawthorne's banks. But then the plot takes over and Payne demonstrates the ability to turn caricature into something more universal. Woody, who is suffering from a mixture of wet brain and senile dementia, has received a sweepstakes notice sent out by a magazine subscription service and is convinced he’s won a million dollars. It’s apparent to David that it’s all a merchandising scheme, but he goes along with his father’s delusion, realizing that “the guys just needs something to live for."The role of Woody is a brilliant creation since it cuts a large enough swathe to encompass the delusion, the life-lie, the pipe dreams that are the essence of the human condition. David humors his dad, but also uses the journey they set out on to get to know the man who continues to be an enigma. At one point David asks, “Did you ever want a farm like your dad.” “I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter” is the only response. Woody and David exhibit the mixture of estrangement and intimacy that characterizes many father/son relationships, even though this pair are particularly lacking in communication skills. The coup de grace lies in the discovery of Woody’s simple, but touching motive. Suffice it to say that while he doesn’t end up getting what he’s come for, he gets everything he wants. 

Identity Thief

Anyone who has ever been the victim of credit card fraud or had their identity stolen entirely will “identify" with the character Jason Bateman plays in Identity Thief. The helplessness of such fraud is exacerbated by the monolith of modern technology. A series of erroneous transactions may be instigated by a criminal, but once they’ve occurred, they take on a life of their own. Bateman who plays a mid-level financial services executive named Sandy Bigelow Patterson is lucky or unlucky enough to have discovered the face of evil, a woman criminal played by Melissa McCarthy, of Bridesmaids fame, who has used his androgynous name to her own benefit. Identity Thief is what Hollywood calls a high concept movie. but it’s a mess that lulls its audience into a stupor as it struggles to set up an unwieldy plot. The script is lead. However, what’s interesting about it is that it’s classic Americana in the style of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. In Sullivan’s Travels a film director dresses up as a hobo to see how the other half lives and ends up finding himself thrown into prison on a trumped up murder charge. In Identify Thief, Bateman sets out to restore his good name and ends up becoming an accomplice to fraud, taking the cue from a sociopath who convinces him the ends justify the means and that certain people deserve what’s coming to them. So it’s not thievery, but the more profound question of identity itself that’s the lingua franca of the movie. The Melissa McCarthy character is significantly an orphan who has never known her real name. Would that these interesting concepts had been handled in a less cumbersome manner. One after another the conceits unfold, along with an overabundance of plot threads. Sandy is not the only one in hot pursuit of his double, who turns out to be a fraudster with a heart of gold. A collection agent and two hired killers are part of the pile up that sidetracks this tepid addition to the road movie genre.

Sullivan's Travels

There is a wonderful scene in Preston Sturges’s comedy classic Sullivan’s Travels in which a group of inmates in a draconian prison are freed of their shackles, literally and metaphorically, and allowed to watch some Disney cartoons. Sullivan’s Travels is about a big-time Hollywood director who dresses up as a hobo in order to gather material for a script based on a depression-era novel called O Brother Where Art Thou by one Sinclair Beckstein. (The Coen brothers would recycle this title for a film based loosely on Homer’s The Odyssey.) In his hobo garb, Sullivan is mistakenly arrested and convicted of assault, and no one believes him when he claims he’s a famous Hollywood director and naturally innocent. When he’s finally freed through a series of tiny miracles (really directorial sleights of hand on Sturges’s part, the improbability of which only highlights the intractability of real despair), Sullivan is chastened. Having known true misery, he realizes that neither prisoners nor the public at large want to see it portrayed on the big screen. It’s sobering to recognize that despite the great achievements of history’s Caravaggios and Genets, who found beauty in squalor, it’s neither surprising nor even reprehensible that the mass of men, personified by Sturges’s inmates, consume art for escape and release. But Sturges has his cake and eats it too. Yes, The Great McGinty and The Palm Beach Story are delightful treats, but the director is wily. There is a message and a dark side to his classics, which gives us pause for thought as we serve our time.

A Chicken in Every Pot

Freegans rummage through garbage for food. Such scavenging might be expected in a scene from Preston Sturges’s Depression era masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels, in which a film director intent on making a movie about real life descends a little farther into the great melting pot than he had meant to and almost succeeds in getting his goose cooked.

Freeganism—a neologism created from the words “free” and “vegan”—emerged in the prosperous, go-go years of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when food was so plentiful that stock market profiteers and hedge fund managers regularly tossed it over their hedges. The desire to save, recycle and prevent waste came amidst the kind of prosperity in which waste was looked on as a form of social elevation, and the pragmatic values upon which America’s particular brand of capitalism was based were openly flaunted in favor of a more magical notion of entitlement.

There may have been a thousand years of Rome, but the American Empire now looks like a wobbling giant, a Gulliver pierced with arrows by hordes of Lilliputians, ready to be tied up like a roast. Now, Freeganism has turned from philosophy to survival tactic. Indeed, prosperity seems far away in these times of recessive inflation. The paralysis of our banking system calls up memories of the Weimar Republic. The shadow of death haunting the urban population in Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterpiece, M, mirrors the dread of an anemic culture.