Three movies and a birthday

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.


The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.


But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.