I Return (For Now...)

My last blog post was… a while ago. Many moons. So many, in fact, that I don’t remember how many precisely. As I write these posts offline and I’m too lazy to go and check, I’ll have to settle for inaccuracy. But after all those months, I’m back. And I’m writing about something interesting. I have an original topic to write about. Something no one has ever written about on their blog before. Ever.

I’m writing about the movies I just watched (by which I really mean watched two days ago).

Scintillating, no? No? Aw, man… Eh, well, original or not, it’s what I’m writing about, since I found a logical flaw with my opinion on abortion and my arguments about homosexual marriage aren’t fully concise yet. And neither of those other two topics were really original anyway, were they?

All right, so, I saw The Day After Tomorrow. What a barrel of laughs! First-rate comedy. My little brother told me afterwards it was a disaster movie, but I maintain it’s definitely a comedy.

I mean, there’s these huge tornadoes, monstrous things, touching down in Los Angeles all over the place. And helicopters are still flying?! Between the funnels? Obviously they did it for laughs. It’s the same thing with the reporters calmly filming these giant whirlwinds that are stripping high-rises of their exteriors and killing people around them left and right. We’re supposed to laugh at the absurdity. They even put a little inside joke in there, just for L.A. residents; LAX international airport—without any planes touching down or taking off, and no traffic, even though the tornadoes literally arose out of the blue within minutes.

And there were the wolves. And the fact that one of the main characters was married to a woman trying to impersonate Michael Jackson. And the Little Cancer Patient, the impersonator’s shaven-headed surrogate son who survives the end of the world. (By the way, have we never heard of triage, people? You know, the practice of culling people in a desperate situation, giving aid to those that will actually live before wasting time on walking dead boys? Except, of course, he couldn’t walk. He could lie in his bed like a very endearing but useless lump.) And the fact that the northern hemisphere rather suddenly goes subzero while the southern hemisphere is… untouched? There was simply so much put in the movie that strained credulity that they must have done it on purpose, as some kind of weird humour.

There was also the blatant preaching about global warming… don’t get me wrong, I think that greenhouse gasses are bad and so on. I just think that no one has any idea what will happen from it, and I think that this sort of climate change has happened before (little Ice Age, anyone?), and—you know, I’m going to delay my thoughts on global warming for another blog post lest this one get too long. I’m already at 477 words and counting. But the preaching and the heavy-handed irony—I just had to laugh at it.

At the same time as this was a comedy, however, it was also a tragedy. They. Burned. Books. I have never been as traumatised by a movie before. Ever. It was worse than Hostel. It was worse than Dungeons & Dragons. It was worse than Pirates!

But that’s not what I really had to say on it. I was really going to talk about something I don’t think the writers thought about when they wrote their script. Near the end of the movie, only the southernmost parts of the southern states are not covered in ice. The surviving Americans have crossed the Rio Grande and are refugees in Mexico. They would be illegal immigrants except that Mexico allowed them access after the President agreed to forgive all Latin American debt. I thought that was quite generous of the Mexican President to bargain like that on behalf of all of Latin America but at the same time I think he was quite stupid—he should have held out for more, what with the annihilation of all Americans as his bargaining chip and all.

But at any rate, there is a huge refugee camp in Mexico. It’s gigantic; it makes Hartisheik and Dadaab look like a family camping trip. And the president has set up shop there. Yes, that’s right, President not-Cheney (formerly Vice President not-Cheney, but he became president after President not-Bush died) is also a refugee. He, however, still commands the military, which saved some helicopters, and at the end of the story he sends them to New York to get the man who tried to warn him about everything. Oh, and anybody else who might have survived. Never minding how the devil they got there all the way from Mexico without refuelling (in Chinooks or similar models, too, which are supposed to have a range of about 500 miles…) or how they plan to get back, the President, in a televised broadcast that goes out exactly as the surviving people are being rescued, says that he’s done this. Specifically, he says, “I’ve ordered an immediate search and rescue mission to bring them home.”

Home. It sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it? They survived, they’re alive, they’re going to go home. Everyone can be happy.

Except “home” is in freaking Mexico. What gives President not-Cheney the right to welcome them “home” to Mexico? Home implies ownership. It implies a sense of belonging, and so on and so forth. If he were simply welcoming them to the refugee camp, welcoming them back to the remnants of American society, that would be one thing. Or if he were anyone else but the leader of the aforementioned remnants, perhaps he could get away with welcoming them “home” to Mexico. But when it’s the President of the US, it seems a bit presumptuous to welcome anyone home to Mexico.

I wonder if the writers thought about that before they wrote it? Was it a feel-good line, or did they purposefully stick a statement with such shades of Manifest Destiny into the movie?

This all goes along with my pet theory about what happened the day after The Day After Tomorrow, by the way. I think that after America is frozen, the remnants of the US take over, or at least attempt to take over, northern Mexico. Yep, I think we just invade them and try to take the territory. Because President not-Cheney’s gratitude for Mexican hospitality aside, I don’t think Americans are equipped to become second-class citizens the way we make immigrants second-class in our society. I think we’d definitely have an armed uprising in that sort of situation.

Something that also occurred to me is that Catholicism and Islam would be the shapers of the future in the days after the end of the movie. White westerners being all dead (Europe was frozen too, see), China, India, Japan, &c. &c. being wiped out… We’ve got the Middle East left, and Latin America and Africa. I would love to see how that goes down, and what country fills the vacancy left by America.

But enough about The Day After Tomorrow. On to the second movie, Léon, The Professional. It’s about a hitman who takes in this girl whose entire family was shot to death right next door to him. She survived and is now going to be trained by him. And stuff. It’s really quite implausible.

The main thing I got from that movie is “never, under any circumstances, be poor in New York.” I mean, damn. People shoot off guns and everyone looks the other way? The cops try to kill people with RPGs? Holy cow. That leaves off obviously psychotic people in high positions in law enforcement with equally obvious thugs popping in and out of his office and… hmm. Well, that sounds kind of like Bow Street in the beginning but then again, this is America in the age of lawsuits and ass-covering. I really don’t think that someone quite so blatantly crazy would be high up in the D.E.A.

So there were some major flaws. But with a willing suspension of disbelief, everything works out. And it was quite a pretty movie; all the explosions were refreshingly noisy and destructive and the guns were awesome. Also Jean Reno and Natalie Portman did a fantastic job. Absolutely stunning; you could really believe that they were who they were purporting to be. Gary Oldman, however, managed to do something that I never really expected he would be able to do: he gave me to know the reason he was picked to play Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. I always thought he was exceptionally ugly for someone chosen to play a man described as being devilishly handsome, and I never understood that particular casting. Until now. He’s actually handsome in Léon! If quite insane…

I think I would have liked the movie, though, except for two things. I think the first is fairly obvious. The main character’s a hitman. Who can root for a hitman? Sure, he’s nice to the girl and he saves her and whatnot, but… he’s a hitman. His entire life revolves around killing people he doesn’t know so that he can be paid. And not even very well: one person is worth $5000. That’s the price of a life. Cheap, isn’t it? And you know he’s killed many, many people because he’s got massive credit stocked up with the mob boss (theoretically; I’d like to see him try to actually extract his money…). And he teaches the girl how to heartlessly kill people, too. Sins of the surrogate fathers or something, I suppose.

So really, how can I seriously connect with him and root for him?

I can’t. Which brings up the second problem. I can’t really connect with the little girl either. She’s twelve years old, bloodthirsty in the extreme, and can’t wait to lose her virginity. She had to walk right past her slaughtered family without batting an eye and has been beaten and stuff, but… twelve years old and she wants to kill people she doesn’t even know just for practice and she wants to have sex with a man a minimum of four times her age?

Sorry, I can’t connect with that.

No matter how tragic the back-story, there are just some things I can’t excuse. Killing with no motive but money is one of them.

So there you have it. My thoughts on these two movies, both watched and written about when I should have been studying for Algebra… oh well. Can’t study all the time, no?

I wouldn’t see either of them if you haven’t already.