Breathin Red White and Blue

I made two very big mistakes yesterday. The first was going to see Clint Eastwood's new movie, Gran Torino, about which I had read a pretty glowing review by Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. This is not the first time ol' Manohla has led me astray, but I have vowed that it will be the last - she now joins the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris and former LA Times critic Kevin Thomas on my small but growing list of Movie Critics Not To Trust. Not that all the blame is hers: I confess to being a bit too easily swayed by reviews, not just of movies, but also of albums, restaurants, and any other item of consumption that I take the time to research before experiencing myself. And I confess to a very strong tendency to frontload many of my activities with lots and lots of research, often to the point of excess, as one or two ex-girlfriends and travel companions will tell you. It's not that I'm incapable of forming my own opinions of these things once I experience them - again, often to the point of excess - but rather that in making the initial decision to commit time and resources to undertaking an activity, I tend to rely on the advice of others, and too often these others are reviewers, either professional or amateur, whose judgment and/or taste is simply unsound. It's quite a problem.

I won't say much about the movie itself, except to note that there were several scenes that were so poorly acted, or so toe-curlingly cloying, or so larded with ham-fisted symbolism (if I may be permitted to mix two meat-based metaphors), that, had I not been hemmed in on both sides by my fellow moviegoers, I would have fled the theater. Do you know the story of the movie? Clint Eastwood is a Korean War vet and retired auto worker who's just lost his wife, is estranged from his sons, and is steeped in a racist rage at the steady infiltration of his Detroit neighborhood by Asian immigrants, specifically people of the Hmong culture. After a series of misunderstandings between Clint and his new neighbors, which usually involve Clint sticking a gun in somebody's face, or growling racist epithets, or both, the two cultures gradually come to understand one another, primarily through Clint's relationship with the teenage boy next door, for whom he becomes a sort of surrogate father. I won't give away the ending, the symbolism of which is not only lardy and ham-fisty but postively carcinogenic, but accept it as a measure of the movie's overall badness when I say that its highlights, comedic and otherwise, consist entirely of the scenes when Clint is pointing guns and growling racist epithets. Partly, I suppose, to compensate for my inability to escape, I found myself chuckling and enjoying these scenes immensely, presented, as they were, with a knowing wink to the hard-bitten vigilante characters that he inhabited in the Dirty Harry and Spaghetti Western flicks. At least I hope the wink was knowing.

My second mistake yesterday was arriving at the movie theater about five minutes early. I hadn't been to this theater before - it's the big multiplex in the area, in the mall out on Route 9 - and I'd forgotten that when going to movies at multiplexes one has to expect to have one's senses assaulted for about 5-10 minutes with loud, long, heavily-produced commercials that begin playing before the trailers, and sometimes well before the advertised showtime. This is how I encountered the new Kid Rock / Dale Earnhardt Jr. ad for the National Guard. Now don't get me wrong, I love militarism, and NASCAR, and cock-rock, any of which can enhance the moviegoing experience just as much as a big carton of Junior Mints and a bucket of popcorn. But I can't take all three of them together, particularly when they're deployed in the following manner:



Now, if you're wondering what driving fast cars around in circles has to do with the National Guard, then clearly you're not paying enough attention to what the US military has been up to over the last few years. Amidst all the talk about spreading democracy, destroying the enemies of freedom, and defending civilization from the barbarians, one aspect of our foreign policy that has received relatively little attention in the liberal media is our construction, in association with the Big Three automakers, of world-class NASCAR arenas all over the Middle East and central Asia. Hey, the British Empire introduced cricket to all sorts of places, from Trinidad to Malaysia - why shouldn't we use our imperial might to spread our own, much less faggoty sports around the globe? Especially if it helps out the troubled domestic auto industry? What?

My favorite part of the video, though, is when the little brown kid with the big Aryan eyes and feminine locks runs in front of the tank to retrieve an errant ball and, though initially trembling before the big, virile American soldier, smiles appreciatively when he gets his ball back. The message? Don't worry, world, we may look scary, but we're only here to give you back your balls.

The strange thing about all this is that it happened in the Valley, where I've grown accustomed to being insulated from the sort of nationalist propaganda embodied in the National Guard ad, if not from the sentimental multiculturalism of the Clint Eastwood film. Indeed, I'd be surprised if the multiplex isn't bombarded with angry letters from offended Valleyites as a consequence of this ad. Or maybe they're only showing it before mainstream films like Gran Torino, which are unlikely to draw the same sort of crowd as, say, Milk or W. In any case, nobody in my theater raised so much as a murmur after viewing the ad, and, what's more, everybody seemed to enjoy the movie as well (I assume all the crying I witnessed after the closing credits was induced by sorrow at the movie's downbeat ending, rather than at the horrifying travesty of filmmaking that we'd all just witnessed). Oh Valley, Valley, Valley... I'm very disappointed in you.