Just because I don’t attend church doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate religions.  I like religions.  I like spirituality, and for most people the best place to find that is in church.  (or equivalent).  What I don’t like is the “one true” mentality.  The Bible clearly says that God wants everyone to make it.  (see parable of the shepherd, among others).  If this is true, why would God act like a bad D & D dungeon master, creating one safe door and a bunch of doors that lead to certain doom?  With no way for an average person to decide which one is correct?

Face it, most people choose the religion they get from their parents.  And some people, naturally, try to find the exact opposite.  A few go adrift, then wander into some church led by friends or potential romance.  Nobody actually sits down and does comparison shopping, using analytic tools to ascertain the one true religion.  People who claim to have done so inevitably either decided on the church they were raised in, or the one with the prettiest girls.   Presumably God knows this is what would happen, so judging people on their failure to do this makes no sense.  Therefore, every religion that makes this claim is wrong, at least to that extent.

I also used to believe that religions had really fundamental differences.  Christianity was the “only” religion that allowed for salvation through mercy.  Islam had five pillars, including total service to God.  Buddhaism is the only religion that really understands the denial of the self.  Etc.  But now I think that any story about the relationship between God and man can be told within any religion.  The differences have more to do with temperment and culture.

Movie genres behave the same way.  You can tell a story about guilt and redemption as a romantic comedy (Wedding Crashers), an action movie (The Untouchables), a horror movie (The Exorcist), or as a Western (The Searchers).  Each genre has its own symbols, conventions, and appeals to a far different crowd, but central human themes are available in each.  And, naturally, there are some people who feel that one genre is the one, true means of expression.  Having said this, I reserve the right to bash the idea of Romantic Comedy at any point in the future.

If literature tells us anything, it’s that as soon as Google achieves sentience, it will destroy us.  The theme has been pretty well explored, from 2001, A Space Odyssy, to Battlestart Galactica.  We create something intelligent, and it rises up and destroys us.  This summer, Skynet will take another shot.  Maybe Mary Shelley thought of this first.  If you can adjust to the writing style, it’s still one of the best tellings of the story — second only to Battlestar Galactica.

One version of the story was the movie, Colossus, that came out in 1970.  Steeped in both cold war paranoia and 50s-style scientist-hero myth, this could have been done as a Twilight Zone episode.  A really good episode.  This is not an action movie, or an atmospheric horror piece.  It’s more of a deconstruction of the confident, proud scientist soldier, holding up under the pressure of a creation gone bad.

Colossus is a giant computer, designed to take over control of all the country’s strategic missiles.  Thus, there would be a precise, objective response to any attack.  Viewers may instantly think this is a bad idea, but the confidence of the scientists seems very reassuring.  Even though we know things will go wrong, we sort of believe they did the right thing.  They figured it out, and they have excellent vision.  But Colossus finds a buddy, the Soviets have built one also.

The progress of bad things is done without the usual pyrotechnics, but feels real and inexorable.  After nuking one town in Russia, the computers can order humans to do pretty much anything.  How the good looking, super-smart scientist tries to fight this takeover is a fairly well-grounded game between humans and computers.  No “24″ style plot-magic here, almost every move and counter-move sounds like what people would really do.

The direction this movie takes at the end raises it to a higher level.  This is a movie that pulls no punches, and may reflect our relationship with many of the great technologies we’ve created, then become dependent upon.  Twilight Zone had some pretty damn good stories, stories that didn’t just scare us, but looked a bit closer at our relationship to the world around us.  This movie, though not a big-budget masterpiece like 2001, really gets to the relationship between creator and created, much like Mary Shelley did.

During the movie Taken, one of my friends had a strong negative reaction to the torture sequence. Not because it was graphic, or even disturbing. He had a political reaction. Afterwards he said he nearly walked out because “torture never works”. My other friends thought it odd that he picked out that element. After all, hiding behind a couch to avoid bullets never works, either. Other things that never work:

• Driving through a hail of bullets hoping the thin metal of your car will protect you.
• Finding conveniently placed explosive barrels to help cover your escape.
• Taking on a guy with a handgun using your super-duper fire extinguisher.
• Recognizing a voice you heard over an international line, based on two words.
• Shooting a middle-aged woman in the arm and saying “it’s just a flesh wound”.  Could be, could hit an artery.

But none of these things upset my friend.  He’s against the torture.  I went back and forth.  I’m also against torture, and also believe that it rarely gives reliable intelligence.  In fact, I don’t like the show, 24, in part because they constantly use torture to advance the plot in a way that seems to validate it as an intelligence gathering tool.

On the other hand, it’s just a movie.  We allow ourselves to enjoy movie protagonists who commit every kind of heinous act.  Torture doesn’t stand out over, say, murder, genocide, drug-dealing, or vampirism.  I thought people who got upset about the “torture quests” in WOTLK were idiots.  Still do.  So why shouldn’t this be the same?  I think that, had they really established the character they were shooting for, the father so blinded by rage and love for his daughter that he considers nothing else, it might have worked.  But in this case, Liam Neeson’s character never rises above a sort of everyman with talents.  So we don’t really separate his morals from our own.  So his choices are those of someone who we consider “moral”.

I do think my friend was being ridiculous, but I get just as ridiculous over other things, especially the off-screen hiding spot.  The hero walks into a room, looks around, and is suddenly jumped by a bad buy who was hiding off-camera.  It’s a good hiding place, because WE CAN’T SEE THEM.  The hero, though, shouldn’t be limited by the camera frame.  Liam Neeson does this once, walking out into a hall, apparently without noticing the bad guys, who then knock him out.  So they can hang him from a pipe.  This trope drives me crazy.  I haven’t walked out, yet, but then I’d have to explain and people would probably say “it’s just a movie.”

Like Donnie Darko, Boondock Saints seems to receive affection, adoration, even passion far in excess of any value in the movie itself. I’d heard about Boondock Saints from many sources, compelling me to not only put in my Netflix list, but move it up near the top. It’s based on a graphic novel, and there have been some pretty good movies come out of that genre. But this movie kind of hints at why that shouldn’t work.

Many parts of the movie are fun to watch. William Dafoe turns in another “Walken -1″ performance as a gay FBI agent who channels at crime scenes. He is oddly disconnected from the FBI, instead running a group of local policemen, one of whom also tries to channel but with far less success. He’s quirky. Possibly homophobic.  Then he gets quirkier, dresses in drag, and tries to exude tenderness.

The McManus brothers are two good-looking Irish kids who work in a meat-packing plant, yet speak about ten languages.  This is never explained.  At some point, with little motivation except some apparently private religion, they go all Travis Bickle on bad guys, except with much more smoothness, coolness, and moral clarity.

Then there’s this guy, who is supposed to be the baddest assassin ever.  The beast.  Except that he’s also played as a cartoonish yokel.  With long beard, six guns, long-coat and hat.

The only character who isn’t some flat cartoon is poor ‘Funny Man’ Rocco.  He’s a stupid guy, but at least he suffers and changes through the movie.

The story-telling style would be interesting if you’re in film school, but probably only in a basic course.  The story advances to a point, stops, then skips to the consequences.  William Dafoe does his channeling explanation of the scene, then we go back and see how it really happened.  It’s just arty enough to keep the Donnie Darko crowd happy.

In the end, I don’t know what people really like about this movie.  The coolness is destroyed by the beast character, the moral undercurrents were better explored in any of a dozen revenge movies.  The action is passable, and motivation is hokey.  I’d offer a theory, but I really don’t get it.

Why am I writing this blog?  It’s not as if there aren’t enough reviews our there, or that Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t do a pretty good job of aggregating all those opinions into something you can use.  But people often ask my opinion about movies, and I find myself explaining.  And sometimes, with movies like Leaving Lost Vegas, my view is a bit different.

I saw this years after it came out.  I had long heard that it was a gripping, but tragic performance by Nicholas Cage.  I was never quite in the mood to watch a drunk slowly die, though, so I kept skipping it.  Netflix is where I put movies that I know I should watch, but not right now.  Sometimes, because I don’t alway check to see what’s coming next, a movie like Leaving Los Vegas gets through.  So, instead of letting is sit, I decided to watch it.

First, I can’t say anything bad about the acting.  It’s all good, spot on, gripping.  But the story, I just didn’t buy.  I know a lot about alcoholism, a little about despair, and something about being a frustrated creative.  The story here seems to romanticize those elements, seeing something slightly noble about falling down the hole, knowing full well there’s only death at the bottom.  Waving away all offers of help.  Maybe, but I got bored after a while.  In fact, I started playing World of Warcraft while watching the movie.   I was doing this quest where you have to take some kind of magic cloak to some guy in a cave.  The only way to find the cave is to attract the attention of his pet bear, and it will point the way.  But the mechanics of getting the bear’s attention eluded me.  Stand in front, type wave, stand to the side, right click the bear, left click the bear, I kept trying different things.  It occured to me that I was playing a game that had me waving at a bear.  Over and over.  This is the game that somehow has me addicted.

I finally figured out the bear when the movie went off the rails.  Instead of sticking to the dying drunk, it went off to trail the somewhat random life of Elizabeth Shue’s hooker.  Dead pimp, frat rape, being thrown out of a casino, flashbacks to an abusive father, the cliches piled up quickly.  All bad men in her life, somehow contrasted with the drunken guy lying on her couch.  It didn’t make sense to me, either, but then she ripped off her top and he poured booze all over her at the pool.  That was pretty good.

In the end, I did feel guilty about the World of Warcraft distraction.  There was some sort of meaning going on, and it was passing me by.  But I think the movie could have done more to hold my attention, and I really think that the central premise never gave me anything to by into.  It’s always possible I would have enjoyed this in a theater.  Trapped in the darkness, alone in a sit, but anonymously part of a much larger crowd, I may have been open to the depths of the movie.  You never know.

Plato (and/or Socrates) was the first person to describe a movie theater, yet he couldn’t wrap his mind around fictional stories.  Not only do they lie, they don’t hold up high standards for people to live up to.  Fortunately Aristotle came along and pointed out that we don’t just need role models, we need catharsis.  Stories take us through experiences that might be we’d rather not have in reality, but whose lessons and emotions help us grow into stronger, more complex creatures.

These thoughts run through my mind when I think about the debate over whether people should smoke in movies.  Or drink.  Few characters are presented as absolute icons of goodness anymore, and real people smoke and drink.  I do get tired when drinks are used as shorthand for relaxation, celebration, or moral decay, but there are so many other elements that are used as shorthand for this and that.  If you want to do real stories about real people, or even really fake stagey caricatures with real characteristics, you can’t rule out smoking.  Besides, even as an ex-smoker, I was pretty excited by the scene described by Rob Lowe in Thank You for Smoking.  You know the one.

But there are other things that are bad, things we shouldn’t do, but everyone absolutely does anyway.  Should we show people doing these things on film?  Would that be an acknowledgment that these things are done?  Possibly even an approval of sorts?  The top five things we shouldn’t do, but do, include:

• Eating off the floor (5 seconds or not)
• Sticking Q-tips in our ears
• Spraying sunblock and bugspray out our faces, while holding our eyes closed
• Picking or scratching at sunburns and bug-bites
• Eating raw hotdogs