I felt like that in 1989 when I saw Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

My friends and I had been weaned on Monty Python, we could recite long passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we worshiped both Time Bandits and Brazil. So we had some idea of what to expect from a new Terry Gilliam film: visual surrealism, distrust of authority, antipathy to soulless reason, and a skewed sense of humor, among (many) other things. Pure chocolate-covered chaos covered in shiny tinfoil and encased in a neat plastic wrapper.

But Baron Munchausen was something else altogether. Imagine if someone tried to film Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King – without the benefit of CGI. It’s that grand of a scale. Gilliam gives us real armored elephants, ornately carved cannons, and hundreds upon hundreds of fully costumed soldiers engaging in mock battle. He gives us baroque, lovingly crafted setpieces and clockwork monsters that look like Muppets. He gives us cameos from Sting and Robin Williams, not to mention a stark naked Uma Thurman. There’s a story within a story within a story, with allusions to everything from Greek mythology to 1001 Nights.

My friends and I watched Munchausen with jaws dropped. Some Hollywood assholes had paid tens and tens of millions of dollars to make this movie. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. And here we sat, on a Saturday afternoon, the day after opening — in Southern California, no less, the movie capital of the world — and there were less than 20 people in the audience.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Someone had screwed up, and screwed up big time. I mean, of course if you’re running a Hollywood movie studio, you don’t give a mad genius like Terry Gilliam a blank check and virtually no adult supervision. Of course you don’t bet that an 126-minute postmodern retelling of an obscure 18th century German novel starring some British Shakespearean actor nobody’s ever heard of is going to do boffo box office.

Yet someone did. And we, a bunch of 16- and 17-year-old kids, got to reap the benefits. We left the theater giddy, feeling like we had come away from the vending machine with two candy bars for the price of one.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen became one of those Hollywood object lessons in bad producing. The Wikipedia article for the movie tells me that the film cost $46.63 million to make (twice the original budget) and only brought in around $8 million in return. If I’m reading this box office chart from the week of May 12, 1989 correctly, the movie actually debuted at #21 in the weekend’s box office. It debuted on 117 screens nationwide. Contrast that to The Return of Swamp Thing, a B-movie from Miramax with a budget of probably a few hundred thousand, which debuted the same weekend on 123 screens.

So Baron Munchausen pretty much stank up the box office. And it hasn’t really even become a huge cult hit on video either, despite what Wikipedia says. It’s not one of those films like The Princess Bride or Blade Runner that went on from modest beginnings to become an enormous word-of-mouth success. This film isn’t widely discussed and admired the way that Gilliam films like Time Bandits and Brazil still are. I seriously doubt the movie made back any significant fraction of its original budget on VHS or DVD, even when factoring in inflation.

Yet given all that, Sony decided to suddenly give Munchausen the royal 20th anniversary treatment. I bought the film on Blu-Ray last night and loved the heck out of it once again (despite the fact that the Blu-Ray player crashed halfway through and took about 10 minutes to reboot). It’s just as chaotic, just as funny, and just as barbed as I had remembered. It’s much more postmodern than I had remembered too. Like the work of John Barth, the film spends most of its 126 minutes smashing through the fourth wall, even if you don’t always realize the film’s doing it. By giving us a tale within a tale within a tale, Gilliam refuses to stick within the bounds of story — in fact, he boldly and gleefully tells us that no such bounds exist.

The real treat of the new Munchausen disc isn’t the 1080p transfer or the Dolby TrueHD sound — because, let’s face it, few movies from 1989 are really going to benefit all that much from a high-tech makeover. No, the real treat is the documentary, “The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen,” which details for the first time all of the studio infighting and bickering and financial malfeasance that went on behind the scenes.

These making-of DVD documentaries have become Hollywood’s version of reality TV. I find them fascinating to watch, because they basically show Hollywood cannibalizing itself. In 1989, Terry Gilliam was simply a wizard and who knew how the hell he did it. But today, Hollywood no longer just sells you the spectacle — now you watch the spectacle and you watch the spectacle-makers dissecting their own spectacle-making.

What makes the Munchausen documentary so fascinating is how all the players involved let loose on one another in a big circle jerk of blame. Gilliam relates production disaster after production disaster; Eric Idle goes off on how Hollywood is full of evil shits (his words) and that’s why he doesn’t work there anymore; Robin Williams talks about how he took over the role of King of the Moon from Sean Connery (!) as a favor, and how his managers insisted he not be credited lest the sleazy producers behind Munchausen plaster Williams’ image all over everything and sully his reputation.

Everyone involved points the finger at the producer, this German guy named Thomas Schuhly, in the kind of vicious language you generally don’t see in your standard DVD documentary puff piece. Schuhly, for his part, disclaims all responsibility and blames Gilliam’s people for unprofessionalism and anti-German bias. (The documentary filmmakers give Schuhly his say, but it’s clear where their bias lies. At one point in the Schuhly interview, you can hear what sounds like someone letting out a rather loud fart in the background. Nobody bothered to edit it out in post-production, which speaks volumes.)

But only Gilliam seems to be keenly aware of the irony of the whole thing. A bunch of stodgy Hollywood accountant types arguing over who’s at fault for letting this delusional (albeit brilliant) filmmaker go off and make such a movie… when the movie itself is about a delusional (albeit brilliant) adventurer who goes off to fight the Turks over the protests of a bunch of stodgy bureaucratic accountant types.

Life really has become a Philip K. Dick novel, hasn’t it?

You’ve seen that film a thousand times before, and it’s essentially the plot of Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant new film, No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name). It’s one of the standard thriller plots that crawls out of Hollywood every five years dressed up in a slick suit of violence with a little flower of moral conundrum stuck to its lapel. The Coens have entertained a few variations on the suitcase-of-money scenario themselves (see Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Ladykillers).

Here’s the thing. No Country for Old Men took that dandy little thriller behind the woodshed and beat its ass bloody.

That No Country for Old Men is fiercely entertaining is not really the point. Some audiences can’t see past the offbeat humor and treat the Coen Brothers’ films like hip Quentin Tarantino trifles. Critics often fail to see the point too. They’ve labeled the work of the Coens nihilistic, or misanthropic, or just plain vicious. They call the Coens’ films empty exercises in technical virtuosity without soul or subject.

These critics couldn’t be more wrong. Joel and Ethan Coen have an ongoing subject, and it’s a subject that they discuss intelligently and with compassion. Their subject? The American Dream.

You know, the American Dream: the idea that any penniless schlub born in a broken-down shack can, through grit and hard work, one day become Andrew Carnegie, or Sam Walton, or Bill Gates. It’s a free country! Opportunities unlimited! There’s supposed to be a proper moral framework propping up the whole thing, but somehow in the latter half of the twentieth century it became all about the money. Americans are obsessed with the stuff, whether in the affirmative sense (money enables you to follow your hopes and dreams) or in the negative sense (money can’t buy you happiness). Either way, material wealth always seems to be the fulcrum around which the whole American moral universe teeters. Rather appropriate when you think about it, considering that the United States was largely founded by a bunch of rich white landowners who were pissed off at the King of England because their taxes were too high.

Regardless, the American Dream is what it is, and for whatever reason Joel and Ethan Coen seem to have chosen it as their topic. In film after film, ever since 1984’s Blood Simple, the Coens have been steadily dissecting this Dream. Analyzing it, tearing it up, and stitching it back together. Charting out the ways it can corrupt us and demean us.

Witness Fargo, the story of a dumbass car salesman whose shame about his inability to provide a better life for his family leads him to fraud, extortion, and ultimately murder. Witness The Hudsucker Proxy, a cartoony take on Frank Capra in which a naive dimwit strives to reach the top of a major corporation only to find himself the puppet of his corporate masters. Or The Big Lebowski, featuring a ’60s reject with no ambition higher than getting his rug back, who is nonetheless sucked into the scheme of a corrupt self-styled philanthropist to steal a million dollars. Or The Man Who Wasn’t There, starring yet another dim bulb who’s thrust unprepared into a world of ambition by his wife’s philandering and is ultimately undone by it.

What do all the Coen protagonists have in common? They’re all ambitious schemers dissatisfied with the status quo, looking for unorthodox ways to achieve that American Dream.

And why not? You think the Carnegies, the Kennedys, and the Rockefellers got to their lofty positions by diligently punching the clock in a middle management job? You often hear the phrase these days that “well-behaved women rarely make the history books,” and it is, by and large, true. It’s certainly possible to earn a comfortable living on a middle-class salary with annual scheduled 5 percent raises. But to have Rockefeller money, or Perot money, or Gates money? The big American fortunes don’t come from middle-class salaries with 5 percent raises that are wisely invested. Some of them come from slave trading, bootlegging, war profiteering, and drug smuggling. Successful businessmen in this country often bribe law officials, extort politicians, oppress workers, and bully the competition.

The Coen Brothers protagonist sees a world that’s stacked against him. He’s stuck in a lower-middle-class rut with no upward mobility in sight. He’s not a venture capitalist or a bond trader or a software mogul. He’s (in chronological order by film) a bar manager, an ex-con factory worker, a middling Irish hood, a struggling screenwriter, a graduate of the Muncie College School of Business, a failing car salesman, an unemployed slacker, a convict sent up for practicing law without a license, a small-town barber, a high-powered attorney (okay, let’s just skip Intolerable Cruelty), and an itinerant con man.

With No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen give us another one of these would-be Andrew Carnegies in the form of Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Vietnam veteran (in an astonishingly understated performance by Josh Brolin). Llewelyn stumbles on the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, finds a suitcase filled with two million dollars of drug money, and naturally assumes, in that uniquely American way, that he can “take on all comers” to keep it. He knows full well that there’s no pot of gold waiting for him after retirement from the welding trade; if he’s going to make a move up the ladder, if he’s going to follow the American Dream, Llewelyn has to jump into this with both feet.

Unfortunately, this opportunity leads him into the path of some unidentified cartel that’s willing to go to the mat to get back their cash. Towards that end, the cartel hires a lone assassin named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh isn’t your typical hit man. He’s kind of like the Terminator, if the Terminator wasn’t such a sentimental, weak-kneed pussy. He’s like Hannibal Lecter’s evil twin. This dude is bad, and he walks around West Texas indiscriminately killing just about everyone he crosses with a big cattle gun.

You couldn’t think up a more classic American conflict than this. A laconic cowboy taking on an assassin hired by corrupt businessmen, in Texas no less. A fight against incredible odds. A good ol’ Southern boy raised with good manners against a Godless, thoughtless Mexican killing machine. Blue-collar worker up against the men with the big money.

Now, big spoiler here. So stop reading now if you don’t want to know how this ends.

Ready?

Llewelyn Moss loses. He loses badly, in fact — gunned down in a cheap El Paso motel, possibly without even getting a shot off himself. In this he follows in the tradition of Coen Brothers Protagonists like Fargo’s Jerry Lundegard, who whines and thrashes like a baby as the police collar him; The Ladykillers’ G.H. Dorr, who persists in his elaborate heist to the death of him and all of his co-conspirators; Raising Arizona’s H.I. McDonnough, who sheepishly owns up to his ineptitude and returns the baby of the furniture magnate he previously stole; and The Big Lebowski’s Jeff Lebowski, who winds up sans rug, sans one of his best friends, and sans the million dollars he was promised (but with johnson thankfully intact).

The shocking thing about the climactic ending of No Country for Old Men is that the Coen Brothers don’t even bother to show it onscreen. Why?

Well, partially they’re just being faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. But certainly this ending appealed to Joel and Ethan for a good reason: it’s the real ending. Of course Llewelyn Moss is going to get his ass handed to him. You and I — the ones who sit in traffic on the way to work every day wishing there was a way to leave the rat race behind — we read stories about idiots like Llewelyn Moss all the time. They’re the ones who you see doing the perp walk on the evening news, the ones who thought they could beat the odds, the ones who thought they could get away with it. You and I know that there’s only one place where a stubborn Texas welder with a shotgun can outsmart, outmaneuver, and outgun a Mexican drug cartel: Hollywood.

And most Hollywood directors are there specifically to indulge these fantasies for us. That’s why we fork over ten dollars every few weeks, so we can see the story of the guy who beat the odds. To see the promise of the American Dream fulfilled. Hollywood obliges by giving us that one-man-against-an-army scenario time after time on the big screen. After the lights come on, you’re going to go back to your middle-class job with your scheduled annual 5 percent raise, but you can be comforted that somewhere out there, some underdog beat the odds.

One of the reasons I love the Coen Brothers is because they refuse to play this game. They refuse to peddle the same bullshit. They know how the world works, and with No Country for Old Men, they give us a much-needed splash of cold reality. It’s very simple. You play with fire, and you’re going to get your head blown off by a cattle gun.

Why is it a shame that nobody’s marking the occasion? Because Full Metal Jacket is one of the most meticulously crafted films of the past 20 years. I think it’s damn near perfect.

(Interesting side note: Believe it or not, this will be Full Metal Jacket’s first home video release in widescreen. The film was originally shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, what you and I call “widescreen.” But if you’re an eccentric genius like Stanley Kubrick, you get to make unconventional decisions. Before his death Kubrick decided that, since 98% of the world’s TV sets back then had a 4:3 aspect ratio — i.e. “fullscreen” — henceforth and forevermore his films would be released in a 4:3 aspect ratio. None of that devil letterboxing for Stanley! It’s only now that Warner Home Video, with the collaboration of the Kubrick estate, is restoring the films to their original specs.)

Audiences have had a peculiar relationship with Full Metal Jacket since its debut on July 26, 1987. It’s much loved in some quarters, but it’s equally despised in others. Everyone seems to appreciate the taut first act set in a Parris Island Marine boot camp, yet many never get over the film’s sudden shift to Vietnam in its second half. Even so perceptive a critic as Roger Ebert famously called the latter half of Full Metal Jacket “a series of self-contained set pieces, none of them quite satisfying.”

But Full Metal Jacket is designed to be a two-part story; just about everything you see in the first half of the film has a parallel in the second. It’s a structure Kubrick has used before (cf. the apes/the astronauts in 2001, and Alex’s life before/after his treatment in A Clockwork Orange).

More than that, the film is full of dualities: Joker’s helmet with the peace symbol and “Born to Kill” inscribed on the side (“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man… The Jungian thing, sir”). The two dramatic deaths at the end of each section. The two-mindedness of the American public about the war. Joker’s own conflicting desires to “get into the shit” and to get out of there as quickly as possible. His dual nature as Leonard’s teacher and as the one who beats Leonard the hardest. And so on.

Of course, most of the moviegoing public doesn’t want to see films about Jungian dualities, and so people often go into Full Metal Jacket with false expectations. Hollywood generally only gives us three categories of war films: (1) the anti-war film (Platoon, Kubrick’s own Paths of Glory) (2) the war-is-sordid-but-necessary-and-sometimes-ennobling film (Saving Private Ryan), and (3) the out-and-out propaganda film (John Wayne’s The Green Berets, 300). But what do you do with a Vietnam movie that not only refuses to take a stand on the Vietnam War, but actually embraces its contradictions? “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” Crazy Earl says in response to a question from the television interviewers in FMJ. He looks totally perplexed, like he’s never even considered the question before. “I don’t know. I belong in Vietnam, I’ll tell you that.”

So if you’re going to get the most out of Full Metal Jacket, be prepared to take the long view. The way long view, the view of an alien civilization dispassionately studying humanity under a microscope. Like those hypothetical aliens, Kubrick rarely makes moral judgments; he simply observes. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Joker, Animal Mother, the Vietnamese sniper, even the crazy gunner gleefully shooting down fleeing Vietnamese civilians from a moving helicopter — the film doesn’t really take anybody’s side. It doesn’t give you convenient moral labels to tell you who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Take Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played with vicious brio by R. Lee Ermey (you know, the guy who’s played the military drill sergeant in every fucking movie since 1987). At first blush, he seems like as good a candidate as any for a villain in this movie. A manipulative brainwasher, a callous tool of the U.S. government. But on repeated viewings, you realize that he’s not the villain at all — quite the opposite. He’s doing his best to prepare these soldiers to survive out in the field. He’s a father figure. He’s a protector and teacher. He’s Obi-wan Kenobi, if Obi-wan Kenobi called his Padawan learners “unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit.”

“Because I am hard you will not like me,” says Hartman. “But the more you hate me, the more you will learn.” Didn’t Mr. Miyagi say something similar to the Karate Kid when making him paint the fence?

Put in that light, Hartman’s abuse of Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’onofrio) becomes not just understandable; it’s necessary. Look at the scene where the platoon goes tearing through the mud in slow motion, only to have Leonard trip and pull the whole team down into the mud with him. We fat and happy civilians look at that scene and think, why doesn’t someone give that poor kid a hand? Hartman looks at that scene, and he thinks: that kid’s not just going to die in Vietnam, he’s going to get a whole shitload of other Marines killed too.

So Hartman is playing the role of the Teacher. But you know what happens to the Teacher in all these stories: he dies. In fact, he must die, because our Hero must learn to prove himself, alone.

Who’s our hero in Full Metal Jacket? He’s called the Joker (Matthew Modine). His name is never given, but if you look closely, you can see that the nametag on his shirt says “J.T. Davis.” And Full Metal Jacket is the story of his coming of age, the story of his transformation from protected child to self-actualized soldier.

At the film’s outset, he’s a gentle soul who’s trying his best to maintain an ironic detachment from the reality of the Vietnam War. He responds to Hartman’s diatribes with a mock John Wayne swagger; his “war face” is the pathetic imitation scream of a man who’s only seen death on TV; he tells the television crews that he wants to be “the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” For the Joker, war is something remote. Death is something that happens to other people at a distance.

But over the course of the next 120 minutes, Joker will see the barriers between him and death slowly stripped away. Notice how the authority figures protecting Joker from the big, bad world become less and less authoritative as the film goes on. At first, we have the stern and menacing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman; then there’s the sour-faced colonel who tells Joker to “get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you”; next there’s Lieutenant Touchdown, who seems competent if not particularly fearsome; then there’s Crazy Earl, who’s hardly much of an authority figure at all. By the time Cowboy takes command of the squad, you can see that he’s too green to have any sway over the anarchic Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin, now known to many as Jayne Cobb from Firefly). In the last scenes, even Cowboy is gone, leaving the Marines bereft of any real authority figure.

When we reach the last minutes of Full Metal Jacket, Joker comes face to face with death for the first time. As he faces down the Vietnamese sniper, we realize that Joker’s never really been under fire before. Nor has he ever killed another human being. Oh, he’s hunkered down in a bunker during the Tet Offensive and fired wildly at darkened figures in the distance. But to look the enemy directly in the eye and pull the trigger? No.

So Joker has reached his moment of truth, the moment that Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was trying to prepare him for. Can Joker set aside the irony, the sarcasm, the phoniness, and perform the job he signed up to perform as a Marine?

No. Joker fails, as Hartman foreshadowed way back in Parris Island. “Your rifle is only a tool,” he said. “It is the hard heart that kills. If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill.” Joker hesitates, his rifle jams, and he withers under fire. He reaches for his pistol, drops it. Only by dumb luck — by the quick thinking of his buddy Rafterman, who Joker tried to leave behind — does he survive.

Earlier in the film, Joker asked the helicopter door gunner incredulously “How can you shoot women and children?” Now the question comes back to haunt him as Joker stands over an enemy sniper who is both a woman and a child (about 16, by the looks of her). The camera lingers over his face as he finally accepts the duality of man, the Jungian thing. Human beings are savage and civilized, kind and cruel, noble and deranged. Joker shoots.

Full Metal Jacket ends with Joker marching confidently alongside his brothers singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short,” Joker narrates in the end. “I’m in a world of shit… yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

• The world is a vile and dangerous place.
• America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
• If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
• Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
• Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

At least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

These assumptions are also the ones that underline 2002’s The Bourne Identity. It’s a nice little popcorn flick with a plot so familiar you can slip into it like an old bathrobe. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon, playing a CIA-funded black ops assassin who has a change of heart because the agency has Gone Too Far. Now after a bout of amnesia, he finds himself on the run from the very organization that funded him. Car chases and dead bodies ensue. Spoiler alert: the heroic Matt Damon gets the girl, and the villainous Chris Cooper gets shot in the head. (Oh, and FYI, there are more spoilers below.)

And then someone had the inspired idea of hiring Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) to take over the franchise. To call The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum better films than their predecessor is kind of like calling a fine aged pinot grigio better than a Zima. They’re among the most intelligent, well-crafted, thoughtful thrillers about American paranoia that I’ve ever seen. (And holy crap, did you realize Matt Damon could act?)

Suddenly our protagonist is no longer just a youthful maverick spy fleeing across Europe with a spunky German chick in tow. Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious. He’s an unstoppable force who never tires, who never gives up, who can never be killed. Imagine a cross between Batman and Patrick Henry who knows how to kill people with a plastic pen.

Richard Corliss clearly noticed the transformation in his Time magazine review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

That’s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs. They are a projection of American power — or a memory of it, and the poignant wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That’s a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order.

Corliss is on to something here, but I think he’s got it exactly backwards. Jason Bourne isn’t just an action stud in the James Bond mold; Bourne is, in fact, a calculated response to James Bond, or more than that, he’s the anti-James Bond. James Bond on the Bizarro planet. Is it an accident that Jason Bourne and James Bond have the same initials? (Well, actually it probably is. But you’d have to ask Robert Ludlum, who created the character, and he’s dead. But apparently Greengrass didn’t read the Ludlum novels anyway.)

James Bond uses an assortment of high-tech gadgets helpfully provided to him by the British government. Sleek guns, high-tech cars, gizmos that are notable mainly for the way they’re camouflaged inside ordinary objects. Over the years, Bond has used:

• A remote-controlled BMW with rocket launcher
• A tricked-out surfboard with a hidden compartment for guns and explosives
• A ballpoint pen grenade
• A wristwatch with a built-in laser cutter
• An escape pod concealed in a ski jacket

Jason Bourne, by contrast, uses such glamorous weapons as:

• A cheap rotating fan
• A rolled-up newspaper
• Laundry pulled from a clothesline
• A beat-up Cooper Mini
• A plastic pen
• A hardback book

But even more interesting than the contrast of weapons is the contrast of attitudes towards government. James Bond is, in many ways, a manifestation of how the British would like to see themselves: debonair and worldly; as technologically adept as the Americans, without sacrificing class and gentility; dangerous when crossed. In the world of James Bond, the British government might be stodgy, but its heart is in the right place.

Jason Bourne, on the other hand, is a maverick who was once broken by his own government and is now on the run from it. In the world of Jason Bourne, the United States government is composed of equal parts corrupt slimeball and impotent douchebag, with a small contingent of do-gooders skulking around the fringes.

We can discuss Great Britain and James Bond another day. As for America: how did we get to this point? When did we get to the point that the assumptions outlined at the top of this article became commonplace?

I imagine it began in the aftermath of World War II as we ramped up to fight the Communists in their quest for world domination. It was fertilized by the suspicious assassination of John F. Kennedy, watered by Nixon’s dirty tricks in Watergate, nurtured by Reagan’s Iran/Contra hijinks, and ripened by George W. Bush’s global war on terror. And no, it wasn’t just the province of Republican administrations; Johnson was as manipulative a son-of-a-bitch as they come, Clinton did very little to stop or reverse the trend, and Carter played right into the paranoids’ hands by letting a bunch of religious maniacs hold Americans hostage in Iran without consequence.

The end result is that we the people don’t believe in the United States anymore.

Oh, sure, we believe in the people of the United States. We believe that our neighbors here in this country are largely honest, decent, hard-working citizens. But all the things the United States is supposed to stand for — the idea that free and open societies work better than closed ones, the idea that we can work out our differences through courts and legislation, the idea that we should live by principles of law and reason rather than mere tribalism — we don’t have faith in those things anymore. The courts are rigged against us, the government is laced with corruption and undue lobbying influence, the police are either too hampered by bureaucracy or too brutal and bloodthirsty to trust.

No, we need maverick heroes like Jason Bourne (and John McClane, and James Bond, and Indiana Jones, and Batman, and Jack Bauer, and every character that Arnold Schwarzeneggar ever played) who can skirt the law, who can actually break the law when they deem fit and not be held accountable for their actions because we know they’re really good, just, honorable people acting in our best interests. And every situation we face is a 24 situation. Al Qaeda has agents infiltrating your living room, they’re going to blow up the Sears Tower at any minute, there’s a ticking bomb about to go off! What, you want to trust the police at a time like this? You want to follow stupid laws hammered out by some ignorant yahoos in Washington who spend all their time in bed with lobbyists? Are you crazy? We’ve got to do anything we can to prevent this! Law and order be damned, we’ve got to act now now now!

It would be one thing if this was just the exaggerated attitude of the movies. But it’s not.

When a handful of jihadist fanatics murdered three thousand people in 2001, we didn’t trust that we could resolve this through the international cooperation of law enforcement agencies. No, we needed to lash out, we needed to send a disproportionate response, we needed to punish those states who were sympathetic to our enemies. Osama bin Laden isn’t just some robed lunatic with a gun in a cave; he’s evil incarnate. He’s Adolf Hitler! And when you’re facing Adolf Hitler, you can’t resort to ordinary tactics. Extremism in the defense of liberty tain’t no vice.

When Barack Obama recently suggested that even bin Laden should be given due process and his day in court, the nation scoffed. Due process? Man, due process doesn’t work! If we capture that son-of-a-bitch, we need to string him up but good. If you put him in a courtroom with F. Lee Bailey as his attorney, he’ll argue his way out of a conviction and be walking by sundown! Nope, only a secret military trial and execution will do.

(It’s the same mentality that’s at work with the Bush Administration’s runaround of the FISA limits on wiretapping. This just astounds me. FISA allows secret, anonymous, unaccountable intelligence agents to stretch the bounds of the Constitution by conducting wiretaps on U.S. citizens simply by getting rubber-stamp permission from a secret, anonymous, unaccountable judge — and the Bush Administration doesn’t think that’s enough?)

I just don’t believe this paranoid worldview is sustainable. And director Paul Greengrass doesn’t either. Like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart or Irving’s Headless Horseman, these things come back to haunt us. And for Greengrass, in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, that Headless Horseman is Jason Bourne.

Notice the look of fear in the eyes of the various intelligence impresarios that Bourne runs across (played ably by Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Joan Allen, and David Straitharn). Bourne isn’t just a renegade spy; he’s the twitch of conscience that you feel in the middle of the night, he’s the thing that haunts you after you’ve just violated international law in the name of the United States of America. Soil the Constitution, and Jason Bourne will get you.

Interestingly enough, the manifestation of the American subconscious isn’t a bloodthirsty killer. Time and again in these films, we’re subjected to the image of Bourne approaching a target with gun in hand, only to turn away at the last moment and not shoot. Bruce Willis’s John McClane gives a cheerful “Yippeekayay, motherfucker” before he kills; James Bond’s whole signature move is to turn towards the camera, strike a pose, and fire a gun until cartoony blood flows over the lens. I haven’t seen all of the Bond films, but from what I remember every single villain meets some kind of nasty demise in the end. I can think of at least six distinct scenes in the Bourne films where the hero has the villain in his sights, unarmed, gun in hand, and he fails to pull the trigger.

But if Damon’s character isn’t a killer at heart, he isn’t a do-gooder either. He’s not on a righteous crusade to bring America back to lily-white purity. In fact, he’s almost completely self-absorbed; he doesn’t particularly seem to care about America or the government or international law. Sure, he cares for the various mousy white women who get into trouble because of him, but only insomuch as they intersect his path and get in trouble on his behalf.

All of this culminates in what is, to me, one of the most stunning, jaw-dropping, unforgettable scenes in the past decade of film. At the end of Supremacy, Jason Bourne drops in on the teenaged daughter of two of his early assassination targets. And he apologizes.

There’s something incredibly primal about the scene. Bourne is exhausted, gruff, half in shadow; he seems immense alongside the poor girl, who mistakes him at first for a burglar. But Bourne quickly calms her down. He tells her that, contrary to what she’s been told, her parents didn’t die in a murder/suicide. They were gunned down by him, on assignment from the CIA. “It changes things, that knowledge, doesn’t it?” says Bourne. The terrified girl nods. And then Bourne gets up, mumbles “I’m sorry,” and walks out of the room.

It reminded me of that grass-roots campaign that went around the web in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 presidential elections. Remember that? It featured thousands of Americans taking pictures of themselves holding up signs for the world to read expressing how sorry we are that we couldn’t stop George W. Bush from taking office for another four years. (Update 10/4/07: The name of the campaign was “Sorry Everybody,” and you can see the photos at www.sorryeverybody.com.)

When does the American paranoia end? And who will stand up and apologize once it’s over?

This speaks less to my amazing prophetic powers than the rote predictability of the Oscars themselves. They’re growing less and less relevant, and it’s only a matter of time before they become so irrelevant that people stop paying attention. I give the Oscars fifteen more years.

In fact, in case you’ve missed this decade altogether, it’s no secret that the entire Hollywood movie industry is dying. Why? Actually, the reasons are well-documented in any number of places, but I’ll repeat them here because I’m just that way.

1. High definition television and DVDs. The obvious scapegoats. The movie theater chains made a huge tactical mistake in the ’80s and ’90s by putting an emphasis on building lots of multiplexes with smaller screens. The end result is that I’ve got a high-def TV and Surround Sound setup in my basement that rivals many of these lower end venues. It’s certainly good enough for your garden variety comedy/drama, and does a damn fine job on the mega-blockbusters too.
2. Actors’ and directors’ exorbitant salaries. It’s an interesting phenomenon that now Hollywood’s profits are teetering, the A-list stars are commanding higher prices than ever. Why? Well, the less certain you are of making back your investment on a film, the more you’re willing to spend to make sure you can get that return. Ben Stiller might not bring in nearly as large a crowd as, say, Robin Williams did back in the day, but at least he’s still bringing in a crowd.
3. Hollywood regulation. Robert Rodriguez wanted to give artist Frank Miller co-directing credit for his (brilliant, bloody) Sin City. The Director’s Guild of America wouldn’t let him. So, figured Rodriguez, who the fuck needs to be part of the Director’s Guild of America? He quit. It’s this kind of rigid bullshit that causes A-listers like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron to snub the system and work outside it. Look for more defectors from the Hollywood unions as their relevance plummets.
4. A globalized workforce. Similarly, who wants to deal with expensive union workers in Hollywood when you can hire some non-union worker in Fargo, or Tallahassee, or Mexico City for that matter? The spotlight creative jobs in Hollywood will stay local (for a while, at least), but filmmakers will discover that you can outsource almost everything else. Why pay x for postproduction in Hollywood when you can get the same quality for 10% of x in Bollywood?
5. Lack of edge. More multiplexes + higher salaries + union costs = more expensive films. What happens to movie studios when they need to get more and more butts in the seats to make back their investment? The same thing that happens to U.S. Presidential candidates once they make it through the primary season — they go scurrying for the middle. The studios and the movie chains start falling back on “sure bets” — sequels, popular franchises, formulaic comedies with bankable stars. Quality (which was never all that high to begin with) dips precipitously.
6. Moore’s Law (i.e. more powerful computers). Films that once required a film lab, a team of special effects gurus, and a roomful of dedicated Silicon Graphics workstations are becoming the province of some dude with a $500 camcorder and a Mac. There’s only so much gee-whiz spectacle and panache you can fit into a 90-minute film, and Moore’s Law says that desktop computers will be hitting that threshold in a few years.
7. New methods of distribution. In the old world, the only way to get your movie seen was to worm your way into the slippery network of nationwide movie chains, most of which won’t screen small, independently produced films. Festivals like Sundance made some headway in the ’90s opening film up to the smaller fish, but again it’s computer technology that’s made the difference in distribution. Why put up with the hassle of going through the traditional channels to distribute your movie when you can distribute it on the Internet via BitTorrent or YouTube, or just sell the DVD on your website?
8. New methods of marketing. Just like you couldn’t get your film seen in the olden days without studio distribution, you couldn’t get your film heard about without studio marketing money and big media tie-ins too. That’s going away. Good-bye, massive Burger King promotions — hello MySpace guerrilla marketing.
9. An unreasonable obsession with piracy that keeps the studios from trying new technologies. The MPAA has been gearing up its anti-piracy machinery in preparation for a similar onslaught that the music industry experienced. And like with the RIAA and the music biz, the studios will never win by threatening to sue the pants off their audience.

So what does a dying Hollywood movie studio industry mean for the movies themselves? Well, just because the movie industry we’ve grown up with for the past hundred years is dying doesn’t mean the movies are going away. You might be watching less of them at a cramped, overpriced, greasy theater next to the mall and watching more at home. You’ll see increasing market segmentation, more international faces, and the death of the Big, Loud, Summer Blockbuster That Pleases Everybody. You’ll see talents outside Southern California given a chance to bloom. You’ll see Hollywood itself change from the film industry’s Mecca to its mausoleum, kind of like Detroit and the auto industry.

How can Hollywood possibly reverse these trends? A few ideas:

• Interactivity. Exactly how this would work I’m not certain. Perhaps a system where you can vote for the outcome of the film in progress, a la “American Idol.” The crowd wants our protagonist to get the girl in the end? He gets the girl. They’d rather kill off the miserable fucker? He dies. (The big hurdle here is that such interactivity is likely to be expensive and much easier accomplished at home anyway.)
• Elimination of the theater release window. Hollywood is clinging desperately to the idea that major films should be given an exclusive window of opportunity to lure viewers into the theaters. Here’s a better idea — give away copies of the DVD with a ticket to the film. I guarantee if you don’t have to make that choice between paying $12 a ticket for a film you only see once, and waiting six months to pay $15 for a film you can view over and over again, you’ll spend more time in the theaters.
• Serials. We’ve gotten used to the idea that every film should be an “event.” Why not take the long-term view and build an audience gradually over time with serials that release new episodes, say, three or four times a year? Keep the production costs low and give discounts for those who buy tickets to the whole run of the series.
• One word: IMAX. You’re unlikely to be able to achieve the experience of watching an IMAX film at home until we’ve got the whole immersive virtual environment thing down, and who knows when that will be. So start putting some serious money into building IMAX theaters and financing IMAX films. I’m unclear exactly how the business model for an IMAX theater works or who owns IMAX in the first place, but Hollywood needs more IMAX theaters next to the mall and fewer multiplexes.

And if the movies do crash and burn, you could always stay home and read a book. Just a suggestion.

Doesn’t sound like much of a premise, but that’s the basic plot of Diner (1982), Barry Levinson’s first movie and one of the greatest coming-of-age stories ever put to film. It also happens to be one of my favorite films of all time, and (with the exception of The Empire Strikes Back) possibly the closest to my heart. (Read IMDB’s profile of Diner.)

Diner isn’t just a coming-of-age story for college-age boys; in many ways, it’s a coming-of-age story for America as well. The story takes place in the last days of 1959, a very symbolic time for the U.S. Fidel Castro has just recently taken power in Cuba and will soon align himself with the Kremlin — a fact that Levinson subtly reminds us of by having Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) and Elyse decide to honeymoon there. (Although whether a Cuban honeymoon would have still been possible in January of 1960 I don’t know.) In fact, all kinds of tumultuous events are right around the corner for these young men: the social revolution of the ’60s, racial integration, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Luther King’s Dream, Vietnam, the assassination of the Kennedys. Not to mention the more prosaic crises of marriage, career, child rearing, adulthood, and responsibility.

So Diner represents a last hurrah for these young men. The last flush of innocence. Some of these boys might very well be lying dead in the jungles of Vietnam within a few years.

How do the Baltimore boys choose to fill their last days of innocence? By reliving their glory days of high school, of course. They shoot the shit at the Fells Point Diner until all hours of the morning; they pull pranks on one another; they shoot pool, go to the movies, watch TV, hang out at strip clubs. They cheer on friend Earl as he valiantly attempts to conquer the “whole left side of the menu” in one feat of gustatory bravado. They settle old scores and rehash old arguments. Eddie leaves the door open for bachelorhood by requiring his fiancee to pass a football quiz before he’ll marry her.

But despite their best attempts, they can’t stave off the coming of adulthood forever. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) already has a wife (Ellen Barkin) and a budding career as a television salesman. Billy (Timothy Daly) has gotten his childhood sweetheart (Kathryn Dowling) pregnant. Fenwick (Kevin Bacon)’s trust fund will be running out when he turns 23, forcing him to find some kind of path for himself. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) has gambled his way so far into debt that he’s forced to sign on with his father’s old friend Bagel (Michael Tucker) in the home improvement business. (A nice segue for Levinson’s next Baltimore film, Tin Men [1987], which centers on a pair of aluminum siding salesmen in the ’60s.)

(It’s worth noting that although Paul Reiser’s character Modell has a good amount of screen time and has been added onto the DVD box cover for marketing purposes, he’s not a significant player in the film. Modell has no real story arc to speak of, and his role in Diner is mainly that of comic relief. A role that he performs admirably, I might add.)

In some cases you can practically mark these boys’ transition to manhood on a scorecard. Witness the scene where Boogie tries to get Carol Heathrow (Colette Blonigan) to “go for his pecker” in a darkened movie theater. To the rest of the guys egging Boogie on, this is just a lark, something to laugh about later at the diner; but for Boogie, his future (and possibly his life) rests on pulling off enough crazy bets like this to pay off his massive gambling debt. As far as Boogie’s concerned, adolescence is over.

Likewise Fenwick’s Nativity scene desecration that lands him in jail overnight. When you’re a kid, getting hauled in by the cops for a bit of mischief is almost a badge of honor; but when you’re an adult, things change. How long until Dad shows up with the bail money? What kind of permanent black mark is going on Fenwick’s record for this little stunt? Can you imagine appearing at a job interview as a college drop-out with no appreciable skills, an alcohol problem, no money, and a big fat misdemeanor on your record?

Throughout the whole film, Levinson gives us pitch-perfect dialog, largely improvised by the then-neophyte cast members; understated camera work that stays out of the way, for the most part; and a loving (and seemingly accurate) recreation of Baltimore in the 1950s. There are also a number of fine brush strokes that go by almost unnoticed on the first viewing: the fact that you never see Elyse’s face; the jackhammer acting as soundtrack for the scene where Tank (John Aquino) roughs up Boogie on the street; the way the camera lingers on Eddie’s family’s black maid for a brief moment and the almost forced neutrality on her face.

The final scene, where Elyse tosses the bride’s bouquet into the audience, provides a nice tidy bit of symbolism. The bouquet lands on the table in front of the Diner guys, signaling that responsibility has finally arrived. It’s been staring them in the face for years; but now, suddenly, adulthood is here.

But is this a happy ending? It’s hard to say. Billy’s relationship with Barbara and the fate of their unborn child remain unresolved. Eddie’s headed for a one-sided marriage with a woman who will probably resent his pigheadedness. Shrevie and Beth have come to a nice temporary truce, but only time will tell if it’s merely a plateau. Fenwick is jobless, careerless, addicted to drink, and soon to face the loss of his trust fund. Boogie’s earned a reprieve from his gambling problem, but whether he can conquer his personal wanderlust and make a career under Bagel’s tutelage is unknown.

“We’ll always have the diner,” Shrevie assures Eddie during his hilariously bad pep talk about marriage. But those of us on the other side of thirty know that this statement simply isn’t true. Friends move on. Careers intervene. Life kicks you in strange and unexpected directions.

Diners close down.

To say the LOTR fan community has gone ape shit over this turn of events is to drastically understate things. They’ve gone orc shit. No, Uruk-Hai shit.

Searching for the truth of a Hollywood monetary dispute is kind of like searching for WMDs in an imaginary country on the Bizarro planet. It can’t be done. Based on the evidence at hand — which is scarce — I’m sympathetic to both sides in the Jackson/New Line dispute.

On the one hand, Jackson, an unknown C-list director prior to the Rings film franchise, has made a gazillion billion dollars, earned a fistful of Oscars, and become the George Lucas of his generation because of these movies. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for him getting the raw end of a couple of rounding errors on the spreadsheet. New Line put up a hell of a lot of money for these movies, and I’m sure their berserker troll lawyers tilted the contractual playing field as far as they could before PJ signed on the dotted line (in the blood of his firstborn).

On the other hand, New Line has become a kingpin studio specifically because of Jackson’s films. This wouldn’t be the first time a Hollywood studio used sneaky accounting tricks to wipe out their profits in order to hide them from financing partners/directors/mafia dons. (See the little-known Eddie Murphy flop Coming to America.) They owe it to PJ to resolve this whole thing amicably. There’s a reason many of the biggest directors in the business bail out of the studio system as soon as they can: it’s crooked.

On the other other hand, it’s not like there aren’t any directors that could step into Jackson’s shoes on The Hobbit. Sam Raimi, Terry Gilliam, Stephen Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Alphonso Cuaron — there are plenty of folks around that could put together a great Hobbit film. The only people you’d need from Jackson’s cast and crew to do the prequel would be Ian McKellan, Hugo Weaving, Andy Serkis, and Howard Shore. It would be nice to see cameos from Christopher Lee, Orlando Bloom, and Cate Blanchett too — and there’s some justification in the book for them — but please spare us from the cavalcade of mugging walk-ons and in-jokes we all know this movie could turn into.

On the other other other hand — and this is the last word — why should Peter Jackson bother? His filmic legacy is set, he’s probably sick to death of Middle Earth by now, and he’s sitting on a pile of lucre ten times the size of the one Smaug sat on in the Lonely Mountain. Let New Line do whatever the hell they want with The Hobbit.

If you’ve read The Hobbit, or at least seen the Rankin-Bass TV adaptation, you should be able to see the irony here. The climax of the story, The Battle of Five Armies, takes place after Smaug the dragon has been slain and all of the rival factions get into a ruinous fight over who gets what share of the treasure.

So as far as fandom goes, I’d say it’s time to sit back and let the Five Armies of Ravenous Slobbering Lawyers duke things out. Don’t think for a minute that anything the studios do with The Hobbit will change J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy in the slightest. He almost certainly would have disliked the Peter Jackson adaptations of The Lord of the Rings — his son and literary executor Christopher certainly doesn’t have a very high opinion of them — and his works will survive another generation or two in the public imagination just fine without them.

—

(One quick side note: I have a huge sentimental attachment to the Rankin-Bass cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit. Why? Because that cartoon alone turned me on to the entire fantasy genre when I was 6 or 7. We owned the 3-disc LP version, and I used to sit in my room for hours listening to that record over and over again on my little orange plastic record player. John Huston’s Gandalf is absolutely magnificent, and you don’t get much more menacing than Richard Boone’s gravelly Smaug. I still get goosebumps when I think of the haunting melody to the dwarves’ song: “Far o’er the Misty Mountains cold/Through dungeons deep and caverns old…” Shut up, I do, I swear.)

(Another quick side note: Has anyone else figured out yet that the best way to get The Silmarillion to the big screen is through an animated musical a la Disney’s Fantasia? You divide it into three acts. Act 1: the story of Feanor and the Silmarils. Act 2: the story of Beren and Luthien. Act 3: the story of the fall of Numenor. You intertwine the story lines like Robert Rodriguez did for Sin City, and there you have it. New Line, call me.)

So what are we to make of Christopher Nolan? Three of the four big-budget Hollywood films he’s made portray haunted men obsessed by the murder of their loved ones who devote (and thereby ruin) their lives attempting to exact vengeance. I’m talking about Memento, Batman Begins, and now, The Prestige. (As for his other big-budget thriller, Insomnia, and his two smaller debut films, I haven’t seen them.)

If Nolan continues to mine this vein with such rich results as he does in The Prestige, he just might become our foremost cinematic chronicler of obsession. But then again… wasn’t everyone saying something very similar about another filmmaker who recycles tricks like a skipping record, M. Night Shyamalan?

The Prestige, based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Priest, details the rivalry between two turn-of-the-century stage magicians, Robert Angier (an appropriately theatric Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (the magnificent Christian Bale). The rivalry turns deadly when an onstage accident leads to the drowning death of Angier’s wife Julia. From then on, the double-dealing and the backstabbing grows increasingly frantic as each seeks to one-up the other. There are twists within tricks within mysteries — some that you might not figure out until after you’ve left the theater entirely.

Central to the competition is an act of Borden’s that he calls simply The Teleported Man, wherein Borden appears to zap himself instantaneously across the stage. Angier devotes his energy, his fortune, and his time to discovering the secret of the Teleported Man. The quest leads him across the ocean to track down eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla (a nearly unrecognizable David Bowie). Tesla just might have invented the device that makes Borden’s trick possible — or perhaps it’s just another level of the game.

Christopher Nolan and co-screenwriter brother Jonathan Nolan have a love for Gothic, puzzle-box narrative structures. Memento cleverly simulated the mental state of a man with no short-term memory by narrating the events of the film backwards. Batman Begins, though relatively straightforward in structure, gave us a maze of villains and counter-villains for the Dark Knight to sort through. True to form, The Prestige gives us a flashback within a flashback — and then shows no hesitancy to yank us back to one of the two frame stories with no warning.

But without the tortured souls at his films’ centers, Nolan’s works would be nothing more than clever contraptions (cf. Shyamalan). And it’s the tormented protagonists at the heart of these three films that drive them. It’s the tortured soul that keeps you coming back for second, third, and fourth viewings.

The condition of Memento’s (anti?-)hero is divine retribution for his callous disregard of an insurance claimant. His continuing quest to revenge his wife’s murder has become a farce, a tool which others can use for their own dastardly ends. Batman’s Bruce Wayne is similarly doomed to scour the earth for a satisfaction he will never get — and the girl who should be his by cinematic fiat is one who, in the end, he must reject. As for The Prestige’s Angier, he’s given a career, a fortune, and even a new love in the form of luscious Scarlett Johansson. But he’s constitutionally unable to just take these blessings and run. Instead he remains obsessed with turning back the clock, a sleight of hand that not even the greatest illusionist can pull off.

Do yourself a favor: see The Prestige. Watch it carefully and take notes. You’re going to want to refer back to them after you buy the DVD for the second, third, and fourth viewings.

As for Christopher Nolan, let’s hope he’s got more up his sleeve in the future. The man’s simply too talented to let waste a career.

1. Freeboating at a fancy-schmancy LexisNexis conference in Boston with my wife
2. Diligently avoiding sharp objects in an attempt to avoid despair at the still-unfinished state of MultiReal, the sequel to Infoquake
3. Falling increasingly behind on a number of web projects
4. Starting half a dozen rants about this or that topic and coming to the realization that none of them are blogworthy

So in an effort to break my dry spell, I’m going to just spill a few random things that have been on my mind the past few weeks.

• X-Men: The Last Stand was actually really, really good. I had heard so many horrible things about this film pre-release that I decided not to spend the money to see it in the theater. But I was pleasantly surprised after buying the DVD to discover that, not only was X-Men 3 a great film, it might actually be my favorite of the three. That’s not to say it’s flawless — there are too many damn subplots, the pacing is erratic, and a few of the characters just disappear without a trace (i.e. Cyclops) — but overall it’s a richly imagined, three-dimensional film wherein much ass is kicked. And as for those who complain that the movie eviscerated the Dark Phoenix saga from the comic books… so?
• I will be at CapClave in Silver Spring, Maryland this weekend. Schedule TBD, but I think there will probably be a reading and/or a coupla panel appearances in there. Which means that I will be busy this week making more Infoquake promotional CDs to give away.
• Am I the only Democrat on the face of the Earth who’s underwhelmed by Rep. Mark Foley’s crimes? I’m not saying I approve of Foley’s actions, or that the guy should be nominated for Congressman of the Year. I’m simply wondering what happened to our sense of perspective, and whether this scandal would have been such a big deal if Foley were not a) homosexual, and b) a Republican four weeks away from the mid-term elections. The nation seems to believe that Foleygate is some kind of Morality 9/11. Right now, as we speak, 11-year-olds are being frogmarched into debaucherous orgies with drunken, leering senators behind closed doors while lobbyists shower them with wads of cash! Mark Foley has admitted his wrongdoing. He has resigned his seat in Congress and left his spokespeople to mouth some weaselly words about alcoholism and abuse. There are government investigations underway. Move on.
• Why do all PDA phones suck? I recently moved from a lousy, kludge-y Palm-based Treo 600 to a lousy, kludge-y Windows Mobile-based Treo 700. The thing crashes every single frickin’ day, and I’ve gotten more “critical ActiveSync errors” these past few weeks than I can count. (And I can count at least to 20.) Steve Jobs had better get on the case and produce an Apple Phone quickly. Although come to think of it, my iPod is pretty creaky, kludge-y, and crash-prone as well.
• Paul Cornell raves about Infoquake. The inimitable novelist and screenwriter Paul Cornell (recently nominated for a Hugo for his work on Doctor Who), has published a very nice review of Infoquake on his blog. Sez Paul: “It’s conceptually exciting, the current expressed as the future and the future as a refreshing crash through the ranks of those who say there is none…. I have faith in this Mundane masterpiece.” Thanks, Mr. Cornell!
• Futurismic also raves about Infoquake. Another Paul, Paul Raven (who blogs under the name Armchair Anarchist), has had some great things to say about Infoquake as well in his review on Futurismic. “The hyperbole surrounding this novel seems justified — drawing on cyberpunk and singularitarian themes, it boldly places a banner for what is arguably a new sub-genre of science fiction.” Proof positive that you can have a nosering, an earring, and a lip ring, and still enjoy business-oriented science fiction. (FYI, if you’re looking for a great place to follow science fiction and technology in the blogosphere, you can’t do much better than Paul’s Velcro City Tourist Board blog.)
• I have a knack for coming up with great band names. To wit: Carpal Chunnel Syndrome, The Hanukkahs, The Eat Shit ‘n Dies, Fartknocker, Broiled Flounder, The Dog Ate My Homework, The Simchat Torahs, Floating Face Down. Now if only I still had a piano, I could actually use one of those band names.

I hadn’t remembered that Alien is really a film about the exploitation of blue-collar workers. (Warning: there will be spoilers in this article.)

On the surface, Alien is your prototypical high concept film: a monster movie in outer space. I’m willing to bet that’s how it was pitched to 20th Century Fox. And with H.R. Giger’s gloriously macabre production design, that concept might have worked in any setting.

But screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett chose a gritty commercial towing cruiser named the Nostromo. And they chose as their heroes a crew of ordinary blue-collar joes and janes whose situation in life can be summed up by the fact that they’re getting paid to waste months of time in a rickety ship under cryogenic suspension.

The fascinating moments of Alien don’t necessarily lie in the suspense of who’s-gonna-git-it-next (although the suspense is very nicely done). The fascinating part of Alien is watching the day-to-day interactions of the Nostromo’s crew. Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Parker (the great Yaphet Kotto) lamenting the fact that none of the others ever dirty their hands by coming down into the guts of the ship. Dallas (Tom Skerritt) making brash (and as it turns out, totally wrong) managerial decisions on the spur of the moment. Ripley (Weaver) and Ash (Ian Holm) arguing over quarantine procedure and what the proper chain of command is when senior officers aren’t aboard the ship. Parker making crude come-ons to the female members of the crew even though he knows they won’t take the bait. Unlike the fake blue-collar camaraderie of so many Hollywood films — The Abyss comes to mind — the interplay between the characters in Alien is spot on.

These are miners, people who work with their hands, people who smoke cigarettes on the job and don’t bother to pack anything more than the grubby company jumpsuit as clothing. Parker wears a ratty bandana, while Brett smokes something that looks hand-rolled and might very well be something other than nicotine. We can see in one scene that someone has chosen to decorate the walls of a supply room with nudie pictures.

How much are they getting paid? A single Company share each. The movie doesn’t say how much a Company share is worth, but I’m willing to bet that you and I would be making at least three or four of them. Two of the crewmembers aren’t even making that much; Brett and Parker spend most of their screen time in the first half of the film bemoaning the fact that they’re only earning half a share.

So when the crew of the Nostromo lands on the nameless moon to track down the source of the intercepted transmission, they’re not searching for riches or glory or the mythical lost Sceptre of Mizlpaxtrzh. No, these are tired miners heading home from a long job. They’re diverted to the moon by direct order of their employer, as a clause in the fine print of their contracts. They’ve been commanded to investigate; no investigation, no pay.

Your typical horror movie shows us bratty, spoiled rich kids getting disemboweled as punishment for their innate greed. Alien shows us low-rung, end-of-the-road schlubs getting mercilessly slaughtered by a monstrous stand-in for their corporate employers.

Oh yes, the subtext here is perfectly clear. The alien is the Company. The alien sees the human crew as just a nest to implant eggs in. According to the ship’s computer, the Company regards the crew as “expendable”; Dallas and Company’s sole purpose here is to transport the Company’s new prototype weapon back to Earth. By the film’s end, the alien’s tentacles are indistinguishable from the wires and tubes of the ship’s architecture itself, signifying that this alien is just a manifestation of the forces already devouring these blue-collar workers.

Who runs this insidious Company? What is their primary line of business? What kinds of outside pressures are bearing down on them to cause their engaging in such a ruthless research project? The later Alien films shed some light on these questions, but within the scope of the original, we just don’t know.

Remember, in the end this is a Ridley Scott film. And while Ridley Scott is a master craftsman, he is simply an entertainer a heart, just another tentacle of the ruthless corporate alien that is Hollywood filmmaking.