Hodak Value

For those of you who have been concerned about the sissification of America promoted by our politically correct schools, this adrenaline-charged, ultra-violent movie should calm you.

I saw 300 with my two boys. Like all kids, mine have been inundated since pre-school with the virtues of sharing and niceness, or at least the appearance of such, and the vices of ownership and competition. It���s not overstating things to suggest that the liberated, educated mothers and teachers in the lives of these boys have sought to tame their innate, male thirst for conquest and transform it into a kind of sensitivity that holds a regard for other���s feelings higher than the desire to win. The hearty audience reaction to 300, even more than the popularity of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars series, reveals the utter failure of this indoctrination.

Every now and then I get to do something really "New York," like attending a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival hosted by the producer. Yesterday, I saw The Hammer, a movie co-written by and starring Adam Corolla. It's a humorous take on the boxing underdog story.

Here Corolla, as aging slacker Jerry Ferro, is the underdog by virtue of being a hapless 40 year-old who suddenly finds himself an aspirant to a spot on the Olympic boxing team. Snicker if you will, but it's no more far-fetched than a 60-year old guy straining to credibly portray a middle-aged boxer fighting a champion in the prime of his career. Except The Hammer is much funnier--intentionally so.

In fact, this is a perfect vehicle for Corolla. His acting skills are lightly taxed as he portrays a construction worker and boxing teacher, roles he had in real life before his career as an entertainer. He even gets to show off his native jump-roping and unicycling skills in a semi-parody of the training montage.

While this film tracks a fairly staple plot line, like the break-up with the girl who loses faith in him so he can transition to the one who believes in him, it plods along this path with just enough footwork to keep one's interest. This otherwise predictable line connects the discrete points in the movie where Corolla gets to let loose. His verbal flurries prove to be just as potent as his physical ones.

This film lacks the quirky unexpectedness one, well, expects in an independent film. Corolla is exactly as you've always seen him--wry and funny. Heather Juergensen plays the cute, but appropriately wary foil to Corolla's relentless charm, though she eventually dissolves into the role of slushy love interest. Many of the scenes get stolen by Ferro's side-kick, "Oz," played with gusto by Oswaldo Castillo. In fact, when the film seems like it's getting too tired to continue, Corolla somehow manages to kick up enough dust with the other characters to keep it going, including his erstwhile rival, played by newcomer Harold House Moore.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. I expected something artsy, i.e., risky in a way that sometimes works, but often doesn't. What this movie delivered instead was a conventional story, not extraordinary, but with some good punches thrown in.

OK, I accidentally took my wife to a Holocaust film. She would have been perfectly happy never to have seen one; she can't stomach the violence. So, to prevent any similar misunderstandings out there, let's be clear this is not a heist flick.

Instead, it's a very well done film about a master counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, whose particular genius was put to use by the Nazis in a massive, desperate scheme to undermine the Allied economy. The film was "based on a true story" which, of course, means everything in it was made up except for the basic premise. The German's Operation Bernhard, for real, created a lot of fake money--over 130 million British pounds in small denominations. But, like all good stories, this is mainly about relationships, which are revealed through the emotional and verbal content of the script. This script relied on the recollections of one of the survivors, Adolph Burger.

In the end, the interactions are stylized and organized in a sensible and powerful manner. That's probably the best one can do for an event that evokes as much senselessness and powerlessness as the Holocaust. That Burger's character is neither central nor particularly sympathetic, lends authenticity to the author's recollections. Burger was willing to sacrifice himself and his fellow prisoners to deny the Germans the fruits of their talent, while Sorowitsch stood against him to preserve their lives for as long as possible. Both goals in a sense represented a blow to their enemy. In the end, via a delicate, somewhat accidental balance of sabotage and achievement, the counterfeiters sufficiently delayed their work so as to preserve their lives, while limiting the amount of cash that the Nazis could use.

The era was beautifully evoked with a photochrom feel and vintage tango music done slow. Sorowitsch was well-acted by Karl Markovics, whose face would do justice to a broken boxer. That the other prisoners and the Nazis were portrayed as two-dimensional characters is not a criticism of the film so much as a commentary of the extreme constraints under which all of these characters existed in that place and time. The film certainly deserved its Oscar. If you and your date can deal with the intensity of institutionalized violence, then you won't be disappointed.

Too late for the epidural.

Like most romantic comedies, Knocked Up is basically about placing mismatched elements A and B in a crucible, throwing in a catalyst, and watching the crazy reaction as they become a bonded pair. In this case element A, Allison Scott, played by the stunning Katherine Heigl, is a girl that pretty much has it all together; she's a junior producer on E! network who just got a promotion. Element B, Ben Stone, played by the lumpy Seth Rogan, is as his last name implies someone who would rather wake up to some good weed, and without much of a planning horizon beyond that.

I've never seen Heigl before on TV or in film. Now, I could watch her all day long. I hear she plays a doctor on TV. In this film she plays a patient looking for a decent Ob-Gyn. But this film is really about what she's looking for in the man who impregnated her. Decency is a given. Ben is immediately taken with Allison--who wouldn't be--and quickly owns up to his responsibility. Allison is a decent person, too, so it's not like he has to take the good with the bad on that count.

The "baby on the way" is, of course, the catalyst in this crucible. The pregnancy establishes the timetable for this relationship as well as the pace of this movie. The birth itself happens at such a pace that the doctor must tell Allison that there is no time for the epidural. That's how comedy works--we laugh at the pain of the characters. The acting and writing was uniformly good--a perfect Apatow blend of goofy and grounded.

I think that romantic comedy endings are scarce in real life because people are too impatient to let a relationship grow, or tend to succumb to the destructive fantasy of "the one for me." I've always believed that two strangers stranded on an island would figure out how to make it work happily ever after...or there would soon enough be only one left. But no two people are on an island. We're inundated with choices and friends and relatives and all the rest of civilization telling us "you can do better." And lots of unhappy relationships.

I read that Heigl got banged up a little about comments about this films "sexism." I'm sure the public reaction was overly politicized and highly unfair. She clearly liked making this film, and did a fabulous job. One of the things I have liked about Apatow films have been their apolitical nature, which is often misinterpreted as "politically incorrect." Politically incorrect is what a Mel Brooks did. Everyone else is just a pretender.

The movie was pretty good, despite having the most illogical premise ever.

I'm not talking about the robot love story, where machines go against their programming to acquire free will and human emotion. I grew up with Hanna-Barbera. I'm cool with smart-ass robot maids and rambunctious robot pets, so I have no qualms about robot romance. What bothered me is the inexplicable strategy of the humans in this film.

B'n'L, a rapacious corporation-cum-government, has taken consumerist pandering to such obscenely wasteful levels that the earth is no longer fit for habitation. (OK, Hollywood blames the Earth's environmental destruction on a monolithic corporation; nothing surprising there.) Then, as they deploy robots to clean up the planet, this same company has chosen to build a mammoth, luxury space liner, called Axiom, to transport the people away, with robot servants catering to their every whim. Think Starship Enterprise meets Royal Caribbean. Then, as B'n'L would, super-size it. And Axiom provides this luxury indefinitely, for centuries at a time, even though it was only designed for a five-year cruise.

Maybe I'm just a victim of my aerospace engineering training, here, but it seems obvious to me that a spaceship is a self-contained environment. It has to provide everything needed to sustain the basics of life, let alone its luxuries. It must have a permanently renewable source of energy. It has to be able to recycle everything--water, air, waste of every kind--otherwise this ark would eventually be depleted. (There is a moment where we see that the ship regularly ejects waste from a trash hold into space, but let's ignore that.)

So, if B'n'L could, and would, create this sustainable, self-contained haven as a space-borne habitat, why couldn't it have built it as a earth-bound biosphere? I mean, it could be as sealed off on Earth as it would have to be in space, except that it wouldn't need all that extra propulsion and navigation equipment. Ask Hilton; a land-based hotel is much less complicated and costly than a sea-borne one. At least some people would presumably prefer a hotel to a high-end prison, even if that hotel were on a spoiled Earth. (That was, in fact, a conclusion quickly reached by the humans in this film.)

I can abide retro notions of robots that don't (quite) take over the world, and Brave New World monopolies that do. I can laugh at human stupidity in a dystopian future, and at human kinkiness in a post-apocalyptic paradise. But I can't help but notice when people make totally uneconomic choices about technology right there in hand. That does not compute.

Awesome.

Christopher Nolan has convinced me that Batman is the only comic that has grown up into a mature movie, albeit by tapping into its original, dark roots. It has an arguably fuller story than Hulk or Spiderman, a mix of story characters with that perfect mixture of predictability and depth driving the action, gripping scenery that evokes a self-contained otherworld, and--the necessary element of every great film--a score that meshes perfectly with the rich imagery.

Spoilers from here:

Heath Ledger screws the other Gyllenhaal

I also liked that the Joker was an experimental economist. In the initial heist, he convinced each accomplice to kill the next in a well-timed string of murders that would leave him alone with the loot. Survivor is for wusses.

One of his next tests was telling three thugs that he was hiring only one of them, cracking a pool cue in half to create a spear, and tossing it into the middle of the three--a kind of gladiatorial job interview. Cold, man. Very effective sorting mechanism. Worth keeping in mind when I need to get rid of a surplus analyst.

Later, when the Joker forced the caped crusader to pick Dent or Dawes, he meant it. No Hollycrap saving of both. The willingness to sacrifice a key character is the sign of a great story.

Then, at the end of the film, those two groups, each with the power to blow up the other, and the promise that both would be blown up if neither acted by a certain time--what an awesome example of applied game theory.

A stickler might ask how the Joker could afford his obviously elaborate set-ups if he burned all his money just for yucks, or why he was madly touting chaos while executing diabolically intricate schemes that clearly required more planning than could fit in an architect's portfolio. But mad people do that, sometimes, don't they?

Everyone is gaga over Heath Ledger's acting. The hype reflect reality, for a change. It drove home how we will all be missing a lifetime of great performances. Some people were less enthusiastic about Christian Bale's Batman. I found him a bit wooden, but still captivating. I didn't think a non-smoker could rasp his voice like that, but I guess it's an effective part of his disguise. No one can blame him of being transparent, like Clark Kent, of whom my then-eight year old son once mentioned, "Uh, he's just wearing glasses." For my money, the only weak spot in the acting was Maggie Gyllenhaal. It might be me, but I just didn't find her compelling as Rachel Dawes. Or maybe it was Dawes that was not compelling? Anyway, they needed a girl that I would be a little sorrier to see blown up. Sorry Maggie.