|
|
|
A correction: In my last entry in this space I wrote that the Federal
National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) was in trouble over alleged misposting
$200,000 in expenses to improve the bottom line at a time when executive
bonuses were at stake. The actual figure was $200,000,000 of course. Makes a
difference.
Enough correcting. Confession is good for the soul, but bad for the
reputation, as Mark Twain said, so I won’t overdo it.
Instead I’ll correct other people. I’ve been feeling the need for a while
now, particularly with regard to the movies I’ve encountered while surfing the
tube. Most of them have been hailed as masterpieces, almost divinely inspired
in fact, but I’ve been unable to accept that estimate. They rely too much on
premises which just won’t stand up under examination. Consider, for
instance, the one called “Reservoir Dogs”. Never mind the name. I’m not complaining
about that. It must mean something to somebody. The story is what I find
preposterous. Five strangers are brought together by a mob leader to commit a
jewel robbery. They’re not allowed to identify themselves to each other.
Trying to coordinate a bunch like that would be more of a problem than a gangster
with real insight into his profession would care to take on, you would think,
but let that go. After all, he couldn’t be expected to realize that one of
them is an undercover cop.
The undercover cop is the stumbling block for me. Knowing what’s going down,
he doesn’t step out of his gangster role, but participates fully in the
robbery, which turns into a bloody shambles with robbers, cops, and civilians going
down in a blaze of gunfire. The surviving robbers who escape eventually get
into a second gunfight over who’s to blame for the fiasco and the movie comes
to a dead end, that is, one with everyone dead.
The gaping hole in this story is the way in which the robbery is allowed to
happen even though the police have advance knowledge of it from their “plant”
inside of the gang. Any police commissioner letting this happen would find
himself in handcuffs the next day. What, allow armed gangsters to hold up
unwarned civilians and put their lives at risk so the police could make an arrest
for a completed robbery instead of just an attempted one? I missed some of the
story, so maybe the gang didn’t know their target location until the last
minute, so it couldn’t be evacuated, but even so their man could have been
followed to the staging area and the gang arrested there. The charges would have
been conspiracy to commit robbery and possession of weapons, which might have
been unsatisfying to the commissioner, but would have been more than satisfying
to the civilians saved from a violent death. Whatever else this was, it was
not cinema verite´.
So Hollywood barges ahead, not letting common sense get in the way of a good
story. One of the most egregious instances came in “Saving Private Ryan”,
another towering masterpiece of cinematic art that took an unblinking look at
the reality of modern war and dared to show it in all its brutality and horror,
etc., etc. Sure, sure. Let’s see, the Chief of Staff of the Army doesn’t
want the whole Ryan family to be wiped out in battle, so he sends out an order
to find the surviving Private Ryan and take him off the front line before he
too becomes a casualty. The order reaches Normandy and a unit is “tasked” with
the job of finding Private Ryan and removing him to Headquarters.
Now comes the incredible part. The group picked to carry out the
top-priority mission ordered by the supreme commander of the American Army is not what it
would have been in real life, a first-class combat team commanded by a
ranking officer, completely equipped with vehicles capable of transporting them at
high speed to search locations and radios able to send out news of their
results to a waiting headquarters, but simply a raggedy-ass squad of foot soldiers
commanded by a lieutenant, and not equipped with so much as a bicycle to get
them around. Considering that when General Patton wanted to rescue a relative
of his from a prison camp, he sent a division to do the job, and he was only an
Army commander, not the Chief of Staff, does anyone really believe an order
from that quarter would have been handled in such an offhand manner? Of course
not, and it wouldn’t have been done in a corporation with one from the
Chairman of the Board either. It’s ironic to think that this fantasy movie was
saluted for its “realism”. No way.
Hollywood keeps messing up on service movies, probably because almost none of
the movie people have ever been in the service. There was one called “A Few
Good Men” that I was told I would like. In an early scene Tom Cruise, as a
Navy lawyer, sits down to confer with his superior, a woman officer, in her
office. He casually puts his feet up on her desk. That was enough for me. I
quit immediately. Later I asked a couple of neighbors, one a former navy flier,
the other a former Air Force medic with a commission, what they thought of
this outrage against Naval Regulations. Both of them said it made them seasick.
And so it goes. Another Hollywood sin is stealing from old pictures. I saw
one example in yet another so-called superb masterpiece called “The English
Patient” where early on I began to notice a resemblance between it and a 1943
movie called “Five Graves to Cairo”. The plot point around which everything
revolved in “Graves” was the action of some German archaeologists in the 1930’s
who used an Egyptian expedition as a cover to enable them to smuggle military
supplies into the desert where they were concealed for the use of the German
army in a later invasion. When hidden arms caches in the desert started
bobbing up in “Patient” I got the feeling that, hey, I’ve seen this before. Later
on I explored the connection a little more.
I got the impression from searching that the “Patient” creators would be
unlikely to acknowledge that they lifted their plot from “Graves”, but at the
same time didn’t mind leaving a clue that would make people think about the
connection. Otherwise why give their hero a Hungarian name, Count Lazlo de Almá
sy, when the author of the original picture was named Lajos Biro, and the music
was composed by Miklos Rózsa? It’s all a mystery, but we’ll pass on from
it to another example of the use of memory to, well, supplement the action of
one’s creative imagination in devising a new original work of art for the
stupefaction of the public.
The movie “The Firm” was the cause of the offense here, because once again I
got the feeling of déjà vu as the plot unwound. Tom Cruise and his wife
thought he was simply a new associate in a Memphis law firm, but slowly began to
realize that he had actually been enrolled in a secret unsavory organization
for which the law firm was only a front. It was clever enough, but the trouble
with it was that I had seen it before. The same thing had happened to the
protagonists in Ira Levin ‘s “The Stepford Wives”. They didn’t know until it
was too late either. What a coincidence. You can’t trust anyone, can you?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
