Friday I'm In Love, Bush and Putin Swept Away In War

Last night a warm rain stumbled across Palindrome (Arizona) and it seemed a good moment to venture out in the elements and get away from the reality in my head. We found ourselves over at the AMC multiplex downtown, catching the Will Smith flick Hancock. My friend always has a ready supply of free passes from his job at a place I call Candyland; between the free movie passes, the three hour lunches and the morale building team jaunts to visit the museum of non-productivity, it amazes me that he ever goes home to his family at all at the end of the day. The theatre was mighty empty, a plus, and as we entered a twenty-something was exiting with his girlfriend, her huge chest falling out of a plunging tight black blouse.

I realized I don't get out enough, suddenly faint and dizzy with the concession stand blurry in front of me. The hobbit sized man with just a finger and thumb took half our tickets and directed us to the far screen.  We picked up some not very hot popcorn and not extremely cold soda and joined the only other three people in theatre: two plump ladies and what appeared to be a four year old.

Once out of the film, the real world was there to greet, and of course you know what I mean. Look to the left this morning and we have Wal-Mart telling of slowing markets, and glancing to the right we see the newspaper industry continuing to take hits, this time with Gannett losing 1,000 staffers; they are the publishers of the hometown Arizona Republic. (Notice, "the" hometown, not MY hometown, which is still in my mind, Queens, NY where I grew up).

Meanwhile, President Bush has called on Russia to stop their bullying of Georgia,  while simultaneously announcing the extension of U.S. military influence, via a  missile shield this time, ever closer to Russian borders.  While the United States has argued in the past that Russia has nothing to fear from Nato, and that Nato is not about Russia (with Nato tanks presumably intended to be lobbed via catapult into the Middle East instead), the details speak otherwise:

A senior Pentagon official described an unusual part of this quid pro quo: an American Patriot battery would be moved from Germany to Poland, where it would be operated by a crew of about 100 American military personnel members. The expenses would be shared by both nations. American troops would join the Polish military, at least temporarily, at the front lines — facing east toward Russia.

The West (ever benevolent) assumes that Russia should have no fear, presumably the way we would all sit casual if Russia built bases on Cuba, and dropped missile shields in Mexico; or would that not be permitted to happen in a million years?  All these many years since the fall of the Soviet empire, we have asked them to trust us, while simultaneously not trusting.  Russia is lead now by Prime Minister Putin precisely because we set up a series of policies of distrust and military expansion, while speaking peace.

As presented in this expansive article in The Age:

Under Russia's hardline president-turned-prime minister, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Bear is reasserting itself after almost two decades of chaos and what it sees as humiliation by the West. A major energy producer and one of the world's most populous and militarily powerful nations, Russia wants respect.

And Moscow — greatly angered over Western-imposed independence for Kosovo against its own strong protests — has chosen to move now at a time when the United States and other major Western powers, mired in Iraq, Afghanistan and a global economic slump, cannot fight back — economically or militarily.

"I think this is a war that is much less about objective objectives as it is about emotional objectives," says Lawrence Sheets, a 20-year veteran of the region and its post-Soviet civil wars. He is in a cramped office in Tbilisi with the International Crisis Group, located above a US-backed collection centre for supplies for war victims.

The above are all problems and policies that my night at the movies will hardly obscure, but it's Friday and I am in momentary love with actress Charlize Theron.  In a film filled with incoherent backstory about its superheroes, CGI that could have been created by trade school graphics class, and one uneccessarily vulgar moment that was instantaneously humorous but retrospectively disgusting, Theron's appearance was subdued and perfectly calibrated to soothe your soul, calm the bear, and make you want her. She was the angelic opposite of the boobliska exiting the movies as we arrived.

I won't do a total breakdown of the film since it was very slight and hardly worthy even as a confection, but I did manage to dig out a problem.  Lately we have been pointing out how blacks are used in many films; they have appeared particularly "pontificatory" yet unable to fight well or stay alive in such films as 300 and even TheDark Knight.

Here we have Will Smith, America's leading black actor, so we can hardly imagine him getting his derriere kicked, or not having the last laugh.  Box office assures him a level of power that most other actors, regardless of race or sex, will never have.  But it occurred to me during that massive sex scene two thirds of the way through the movie between Smith and Theron that even here the black actor loses, despite winning (in paycheck).  How so, and what sex scene and what movie was I looking at?

You have a lone male superhero, the last of his kind. Nobody can stop him. Yet in the end, he must remain a servant, a slave to mankind, stopping their petty fights and saving them from danger. Yes he has a hot wife, but science and scripting and incoherent thinking have structured a world where if he gets the woman-- in this case the white woman-- he grows weak.  Not to mention the fact that she can, if she wishes, beat the daylights out of him. It's odd actually, given the fact that he was the one who rescued  her during several lifetimes.  Our jolly Mr. Smith is reduced to immortal stalker, showing up in her life and at times seemingly unwanted.

When they finally get together to have a talk and explain themselves to each other, she shows up at his place in her sexiest-of-the-film outfit, and they proceed to tumble across L.A. much like in a scene from the original "Swept Away," although she never gets to the point where she says, you know... oh go Netlix THAT film.

The screenwriters pushed all the sexuality out the back door, giving us a fight scene as substitute, and stuffing the film with cute kids and PG-13 ridiculousness when in fact a tighter, better, more poignant film could have been created with the comedy still intact.

Bottom line lesson though: Even if you are a superhero, if black, you still won't get the girl, and certainly not the white girl, and certainly, certainly not the white blond girl. You will end up alone, playing with your bird, sitting atop a tall pointy building, slave to the world which drags you down.