The Monuments Men

The Monuments Men
Rated PG-13 (It's kind of a war movie, but not like Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down)
Written by: George Clooney and Grant Heslov (Screenplay) and Robert M. Edsel and Bret Wittier (Book)
Directed by: George Clooney
*** out of ****

A quotation attributed to Winston Churchill goes something like this: When asked if he planned to cut funding for the arts to help fund the war against Germany, Churchill replied, "Then what on earth are we fighting for?"  He didn't say it, apparently, but, the sentiment is accurate.

I'm not an artist.  But, I kind of am.  I can't draw, or sculpt, or compose.  I'm told I can sing well, I used to be able to play the violin passably well, and, while I'm not Twain or George Bernard Shaw or Roger Ebert, I do enjoy playing with words.  I like mashing them together, I like making sentences, I like the act of making things that exist in my head exist elsewhere.

I'm not a historian, or an anthropologist, but I do feel strongly that art is what we, as a culture and as a species, are.  We need food, and water, and air.  We need shelter and warmth and sleep.  Do we need art in the same way?  I'd wager that we do.  If it's not necessary, then why do we enshrine it and continue to make it?

I refuse to classify art as "high" or "low".  I've been to The Louvre and seen the "Mona Lisa".  My reaction was "Huh.  There it is."  I've read "Preacher" by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.  My reaction was "Ho... Holy shit.  Wow."  I think that Philip Glass is the greatest composer of the last 100 years, and I think that "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen is the greatest rocknroll song ever written.  Picasso's "Guernica" does nothing for me, but Zdzisław Beksiński draws my dreams.

I thought that we had finally stopped fighting WWII after Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.  Of course, that was more than 15 years ago, back before the History Channel became the Shit We Just Made Up Channel.  As I've gotten older, I've realized that there really are many, many stories to be told, and shouldn't be forgotten.  The Monuments Men is one of these stories, but, in a way, it's about every story.

Frank Stokes (George Clooney) is an art historian.  He learns that Hitler is stealing Europe's art (starting with private Jewish collections, of course) to populate his Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.  (Just a quick aside, the Nazis were unquestionably evil, but, man alive, did they ever have design figured out.  This museum would have been glorious.  Except, you know, for all the evil.)  With the permission of FDR, he assembles a team of, while not exactly Top Men, men of respect in their various fields.  There's James Granger (Matt Damon), another art historian, Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), an architect, Walter Garfield (John Goodman), another architect, Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), a French museum curator, and Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), a choreographer or director (it's not really made clear).  All men who know art, artists, and the importance of the mission: save art, and, thereby, save history.  They are assisted by Sam Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas), a Private from New Jersey by way of Germany and Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), a French secretary to a Nazi officer, Viktor Stahl (Justus von Dohnányi), who is one of the men "curating" the art for the Party.

The movie obviously takes some dramatic liberties with history, and, while it's packed to the gills with some terrific comic actors, there aren't really than many big laughs.  Which isn't to say that it's grim or dark.  It takes a while for the story to get rolling, but once it finds itself, it goes along just fine.

There are ideas worth fighting and dying for.  Can we say the same about art?  Should we be spending money to preserve art?  Absolutely.

Art is what we are.  It is our legacy.  Cinema is a little more than a century old, and, already, countless films have been lost due to simple chemistry and carelessness.  Television is even newer, and even more documents have been lost for the same reasons.  Paper documents -- poetry, novels, plays, compositions -- are decaying as we speak.  Even digital archival techniques are not completely reliable.  Years ago, the BBC decided to archive its library on laser discs.  When the readers broke down, they had to write computer programs to get the data back off of the discs.  Things like this are simply inevitable.  Cuneiform clay tablets have held up better than a healthy chunk of the history of the Industrial Era.  But, when you deliberately destroy art, you are destroying an entire culture.  The loss of the Library of Alexandria set our species back thousands of years.  Hitler (riding high on a wave of nationalism that started well before he came along) wanted to, if not re-write history to benefit Germany, destroy history.  It's a road that humanity has traveled down before.  Banning languages (German, Navajo, etc. in America), stealing or destroying "pagan" symbols in Latin America and elsewhere, by destroying the art and the language of a culture, you destroy the culture, and, thankfully, we seem to be waking up to that fact. 

And, speaking of art, man, Europe is just beautiful.  I wish that Clooney had taken a cue from Tarantino when filming France in springtime.  War is hell, yes, but, sometimes even destruction can be beautiful.

RoboCop

RoboCop
Rated PG-13 (Violence, brief language)
Directed by: José Padilha
Written by: Joshua Zetumer (Screenplay) and Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner (Original screenplay)
**1/2 out of ****

I'd like to tell you a story.  Now, now, don't get antsy, I'm not here to bore you.  Just hear me out.  It's a simple story, but it might just be the most important, nay, the Greatest Story Ever Told.

It's about a man.  Just like you or I.  Just an average man.  But, this man was something, had something, special.  See, he cared.  He cared about you and me.  He cared so much for us, in our little lives, that he laid down his life for us.  He died for us.  

Now, you hear stories like that quite often, don't you?  About people sacrificing themselves for others.  There was the track star who gave up Olympic glory to become a bone marrow donor.  There are the parents who sacrifice for the sake of their children.  So, one man, who loved the world so much, sacrificing his life for us, while it is a big deal, it really isn't terribly uncommon.

But, this man... Well, there's something that makes his sacrifice even neater.  

See, he came back from the dead.  He was resurrected.  And he continued to fight for each and every one of us.  Red and yellow, black and white, for all of us he continued to fight.

His name?

RoboCop.
 

Actually, his name was Officer Alex Murphy, and he was played by Peter Weller.   His deeds were originally chronicled in 1987 by Paul Verhoeven.  Oh, yeah.  And there was a dude named Jesus that you may have heard of, too.  But he wasn't a cyborg.

This new RoboCop... I didn't have a lot of high hopes for it, frankly.  The original was a pretty blatant re-telling of the death and resurrection of Christ (No, really.) in a sci-fi violence wrapper.  I didn't see the original until... last year, maybe?  A while after it came out.  But I liked it.

Is Hollywood out of ideas?  Maybe.  But, during the prologue, my hopes were raised considerably.

Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson, who doesn't turn on his Samuel L. Jackson until the end of the movie) is a (presumably) conservative talk show host.  In the future, robotics have advanced considerably.  ED-209s, smaller versions of the ED-209 and even human-sized robots are used to patrol streets, while AI-controlled drone jets patrol the skies.  In other countries. They are used for riot control, for threat assessment, for everything that would normally require the use of human troops.  Novak has a film crew on the streets in Tehran, watching a patrol happen.  The robots are owned and designed by Omnicorp, and (presumably) under the control of, if not the US Military, a private security firm (or, in the parlance of "Metal Gear", a PMC).  What are they doing in Tehran?  Installing "freedom", of course.  When suicide bombers take down a few robots ("We aren't going to kill anyone.  We just want to make sure we get on TV."), the feed is cut by the Pentagon, but Novak explains that this action would normally have killed American Troops, while now we are just out a few robots.  So, why can't we have this kind of security in America, the Greatest Nation in The World?

Mostly because of the actions of one Senator, Hubert Dreyfuss (Zach Grenier).  Dreyfuss asks the president of Omnicorp what a robot would feel if it killed a child.  "Nothing," replies Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton).  That's the problem.  Do we want a security force that has absolutely no emotion?  That carries out actions based solely on threat assessment in a binary language?  

Well, this is a bit of a pickle for Dreyfuss.  His company is missing out on billions of dollars in sales because America isn't on-board with the idea.  So, he goes to his head of prosthetics, Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), with a proposition: put a man in the suit, and your division (which isn't really a great money-maker for Omnicorp) will get all the funding it needs.  Forever.

The ideal candidate presents itself in Detective Alex Murphy, a family man with a wife and a kid, who is trying to stop a Bad Guy named Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow) and some possibly Corrupt Cops.  A bomb is placed on Murphy's car, which then explodes, which results in severe injuries.  The Only Hope for Survival is, of course, the robot body.

The movie started out really, really strongly.  This remake went away from the Christ story and updated it to reflect today.  The ethics of drone strikes, the meaning of humanity, the nature of free-will, all really, really juicy topics.  "You aren't your body," Norton tells a man who lost both of his arms.  "You are your mind, and your arms are simply tools."  An artificial arm that transmits sensation was just revealed this past week or so, so we are getting close to the future presented here.  "Now, play," Norton tells the man.  The man picks up a guitar, and begins playing a flamenco tune flawlessly.  Until he gets into it, and his emotions start making his new arms fail.  "Just relax.  Don't get so emotional," Norton tells the man.

"I can't play without emotion," is his reply.

So, we have one aspect of the nature of humanity: emotion.  And the filmmakers start to address this.  They also address the question of free-will in a manner similar to the way Kubrick did in "A Clockwork Orange", and just about as subtly, if not as skillfully.  If a man is compelled to act in a certain way, is he actually making a choice to act that way?  If you take away a person's "ability" to act, are they still a person?

The ethics of drone strikes is... kind of ignored.  Which is fine.  That might be even trickier than the notion of free-will.

RoboCop started out strong, but then... Somewhere along the line, it just... I don't know.  It's like the writer was like, "Well, that's some neat philosophy, isn't it?  Too bad we've got this whole plot to take care of.  So, let's just kind of take some shortcuts and shoot some stuff and end with the possibility for a sequel."  

I know I shouldn't look for too much depth in a movie like this, but, damnit, I hold sci-fi up to a higher standard.  I can appreciate a good ol' space opera, I think Pacific Rim was one of the best movies I saw last year, and the Resident Evil movies are good, stupid fun.  But, I know that the genre can be absolutely breathtaking.  It can get into philosophy and not be boring.  And to dangle some interesting concepts in front of me and not follow through?  Not cool, guys.

On the plus side, Michael Keaton is always entertaining.