Reviews

Morris and his writing team may suffer the irony of being accused of trivializing either the struggles of Muslims or the suffering of the victims of terrorism. This is akin to asking: can we ever laugh at modern life? Let alone when the joke is almost less outrageous at times than the banal hilarity of real "holy warriors" and the people who pursue them? Can we really never look at the people and situations that arise so crucially in modern politics with the eye of an artist, rather than the agenda of a politician or the moralizing of a demagogue?

Well, luckily, we all can.

Art, this film shows, may be more healthy than a pat ending. Laughing may be the proper follow-up medicine for crying. Listening to all the characters in this world until they can be appropriately and truly made fun of may be what brings us together - and oddly enough, Morris may have actually managed to make audiences in West and East, from outlaw to intelligence agent, laugh at the same film.

You have to see this movie to judge it. There is no substitute for your own thinking process.

Some people, though, don't want you to do that. They want to tell you what to think, instead of letting you think for yourself.

To give you an idea of what I mean, conservative commentators from the "fair and balanced" Fox News channel have been likening Michael Moore to Nazi propaganda chief Goebbles. This, coming from Fox's Roger Ailes - Goebbles' greatest successor in the modern world. The irony of a Goebbles protege like Ailes invoking his master against his enemy is rich, and it isn't lost on anybody.

That some Republicans will play the Nazi card with this movie is one kind of indicator about how much this movie scares them – and how good it is. You can practically feel their knees jerk as they involuntarily vomit out the lowest insults they can muster. So far, the Party's best defense against it has been to threaten the lives of theater owners who show it. That's right, Republicans are practicing bloody censorship just like Soviet Communists, or, come to think of it, Nazis.

And why? What Moore does is to calmly and effectively tell the story of the last 4 years under Bush. To do that, unlike Fox News, you have to strip away the carefully staged gloss from the politicians, and show a more fair, more balanced version of them – instead of what they want you to see. And, more importantly, you have to stop hiding the ugly realities of war. You have to actually force yourself to look at the coffins, meet the amputees, watch the crying, tortured families of dead soldiers (and how ordinary Republicans will turn on them in such ugly ways if they dare to question why their children died). You get to see, a little bit, how futile our attempt to occupy Iraq really is. And when you do this, what you are likely to feel, finally is the gravity of what our country has done, and then, a terrible, burning anger at Bush Republicans, and at the people who still believe their improbable lies.

Our biggest challenge as a country may be to realize – whatever party we're from - how badly we've been duped. It's about seeing our politicians for what they are, and realizing that they are capable of nearly anything: outrageous lying, plundering the national treasury, gravely endangering the lives and integrity of our soldiers, and most of all, giving great aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden and his (now rapidly growing) brotherhood of Muslim fascists, by starting `an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat...' but who sure has lots of oil.

You see, it turns out that the images we see on television don't just bounce off our eyes harmlessly, without any consequences. In fact, the content of our mass media, often filled with lewdness, violence and depravity, affects our lives in a profound way. And I can think of no better way to illustrate that than what this film does, which is of course to show you about as much lewdness, violence, and depravity as can possibly be squeezed into a 90-minute movie, starting with having James Woods and Debbie Harry get naked and do some ear piercing with a long dirty needle. While watching snuff films. Oh man, David Cronenberg is definitely the man for this job.

We're virtually forced to accept the movie's central thesis in its first few minutes, as Woods' cable executive character smarmily delivers his lines about `giving his viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and frustrations,' a claim no one in the audience is really prepared to believe, let alone when the point is underscored by totally creeping us out. Woods is like that little kid in the anti-drug propaganda film who goes right from trying pot to shooting skag in the alley – he falls in with the wrong girl, a few minutes of torture porn and he's ready to start really expanding his leather collection.

`You know in Brazil, Central America, those kinds of places, making underground video is considered a subversive act. They execute people for it. In Pittsburgh, who knows?'

Of course, the only thing worse than senseless violence and depravity on TV is intentional propaganda and manipulation on TV. If we really believe that what we broadcast matters, we also have to acknowledge that the broadcaster is the new king. Or the new God. And the combat of would-be emperors in the Videodrome actually ends up making cable's soft-core porn and violent action look wholesome by comparison. That conflict is what makes this movie not just an interesting cult flick, but something more, perhaps a kind of spiritual successor to Huxley and Orwell's work. The old establishment line about needing to censor the media to protect us from harmful images has been turned on the establishment.

Speaking of Reefer Madness films, Videodrome is ultimately of the same school – a flamboyant cautionary tale about the dangers of media use, humorously compromised by what it pretends to protect us from. Whether drugs or mass media will turn out to be more dangerous remains an open question. Speaking of drugs, have fun trying to guess how much LSD went into the making of this movie. Or take some yourself. If there are late fees involved, it might be cheaper than renting the video, not to mention safer and more relaxing.

Top billing for Minority Report will go to the infamous Steven Spielberg. But as the creator of the intense but crushingly sentimental Saving Private Ryan, and the promising but cruelly lobotomized AI, it's clear he's only part of this puzzle. The credit for what is probably one of the most vital, important, and timely science fiction movies of the 21st century so far ultimately goes to two dead men; the also-infamous Philip K. Dick (the criminal mastermind behind such diverse works as Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Screamers), and Spielberg's eccentric British alter-ego, Stanley Kubrick, whose influence (along with a series of touching allusions) haunt this film like a frightening but ultimately benevolent ghost. With uncharacteristic restraint, Spielberg admits as much, as his `precognitive' tells the distraught Tom Cruise, `the dead watch, and help the living.'

In fact, uncharacteristic restraint is the surprising hallmark of this movie, making one think that perhaps in Dick, Spielberg has finally met his match. A dividend of his material's prolific genius, the moviemakers seem at last capable of letting facts settle in to place quietly and the difficult moral and philosophical dimensions of the story hang true, an almost unknown level of class from a moviemaking culture in general and a filmmaker in particular so accustomed to black-and-white morality tales and audience-bludgeoning simplicity.

The story of psychics who are forced to dream an endless string of murders so the police can prevent them is more than just unsettling in its alienness; it represents a comforting and powerful weapon against violence, depicted in all of its terrifying spectacle so that we understand what is at stake; it's allowed to enter the ancient struggle to defend the myth of choice - to feel that, despite all the growing evidence, we determine our own fate through the mystical agency of free will. It shows us, and quietly tells us, that no human system can ever be perfect. Finally, we are led back to the foundations of our democracy - wordlessly reminded that the architects of our country knowingly intended that `a hundred criminals go free rather than one innocent be deprived of their freedom' - and that they had very good reasons for their beliefs.

Minority Report knowingly makes a beautiful example of how a society's weaknesses are often its strengths: the more powerful and technocratic a state, the more awful it is when bent towards abuse. Yet the movie never preaches, and it never pretends to give answers it doesn't have. Dick, and I think even Kubrick, would be proud.

For better or worse, Spielberg's most often used talent these days is his ability to preside over a state-of-the-art technical production with verve and style, to truly use the CG rather than be used by it, and he does so masterfully; just as in AI, the sets and the effects are stunning, yet equally as restrained and refined as the story. His cadre of production designers, editors and choreographers has created pacing and rendered action sequences so breathtaking that they risk belying the humble and earnest genius of the script.

Attention should be paid to the always-neglected screenwriters, who in this case are Scott Frank, author of the surprisingly watchable Out of Sight as well as the excellent Dead Again, and the unknown Jon Cohen, who has apparently started very big. Their science fiction summer blockbuster has more social conscience than most of its mainstream, independent and art house contemporaries, and it is not uncommon to see tears in the theater, lit by the closing credits. It will be very interesting to see how they top this effort.

This is one of the most disgusting movies I have ever seen. Like the scene where Ricky knocks this guy on the back of the head and one of his eyeballs flies out and birds fly over immediately and eat it. But it gets better. Because this guy turns around and cuts himself open and then tries to strangle Ricky with his own intestines.

This inspires the assistant warden to call out jovially, "aw, you've got a lot of guts, Oscar!"

But this is really the most heartwarming scene in the movie. Other than that it's really disgusting. Great date movie, if you're in prison.

I will not attempt to describe this movie. It would be fruitless. You may at first be frustrated by the seemingly inept invocation of all the tried and true cliches of the "genre" - from Mad Max to its weirder post-apocalyptic cousins. But this is not Circuitry Man in reverse - it is much, much stranger. By the time the polka-dotted bikini-wearing ex-girlfriend of the hero is playing hostess at the disney-esque bubble-dome camp of the desert-dwelling homicidal outlaw gang... oh, never mind. By the way, Melanie Griffith was much better looking before lip surgery. Almost hot, in fact. But rest assured, this is a work of genius, exposing a deep understanding of the rift between genders during the height of the supposedly post-sexual-liberation 1980's, an almost sublime sense of humor about sexual alienation and most of all, the erotic link between women and cars in American culture is finally completely laid bare.

In fact, this movie is so profoundly subversive that it could only be made under cover of shlock. Do not be fooled by what seems like coke-addled acting and tourette-syndrome editing. This film is high art. Especially the part where the robot says "is that your hand?" Stay up late and watch it on TBS tonight! And take notes!

Perhaps the best praise in a review is brevity. This is the single best science fiction film ever made.

Cameron is an obsessive genius, with a fixation on detail and obsessive consistency that makes Lucas and Spielberg look like a couple of Troma interns. The "hard" special effects, executed by some of the best in the business on carte blanche budgets, are what make the current digital state of the art look fake. The acting is on target and the story is dark, cerebral, inventive, and as utterly believable as it is fantastic. A standard is set here which has never been matched since - this movie makes the Matrix look like a bad Barney episode. I must warn you, seriously, that once you see this, you will be ruined for other science fiction forever.

Disney has a way of co-opting things so completely and forcefully that we can feel betrayed by the source material itself. Interestingly, this actually rather brave and experimental movie wove together a lot of the tricks of the original (actors double convincingly between the real and fantasy worlds) while stripping the Disney gloss off what was actually a really captivatingly weird set of stories. Grim, frightening, conceptually interesting, at times visually stunning, people will probably never forgive this movie because it makes the yellow brick road look like a rotting abandoned farmhouse's driveway. But it works.

The movie is really smart in esoteric, stagey, dramatic ways. The electricity crazy doctors are an excellent trope. The wind-up soldier is a convincing tactician. Too bad the bad guys are definitely going to cost your kids a lot of money in therapy in a few years. See it for yourself. And wonder who was crazy enough to greenlight it, despite being perversely fond of the whole, oddly beautiful thing.