MOVIE 57

The Bourne Ultimatum (2x)
(Paul Greenglass, 2007, 115 m.)

Speed. Torture. Brainwashing. Being watched all the time from everywhere. Perfect fodder for psychiatric analysis. So, I watched last year’s movie again, this time in the Celluloid Couch series at Webster University in conjunction with the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. The commentator, M. Ann Simmons, compared Bourne to Frankenstein’s Monster. Not bad. Bad Bourne is coming unstitched and turns on his maker. The motherless monster just wants to go home but where is home? A torture tank in a Manhattan skyscraper? Oh-oh. Maybe something else is going on here, too.

Fear of our own government isn’t new in American movies; it’s nearly a cliché. From The Manchurian Candidate to Dr. Strangelove to Three Days of the Condor to Blade Runner to Bourne and more to come (Bourne Number 4 is scheduled for 2010). What does seem new to me in the Bourne series is the idea that the government itself has utterly lost its way after the future shock that hit us on 9/11.

We were attacked by one of our own movie nightmares. Nobody can fly airplanes into buildings. Impossible. Insane. Even if they tried, can’t Bruce Willis stop them for us?

In The Bourne Ultimatum, the smug bad man of the NSA argues with the sensitive good woman of the NSA. (Both well played by David Straithairn and Joan Allen.) He wants to kill American agents.

She objects: “Noah, she’s one of us. You start down this path where does it end?”

He answers: “It ends when we’ve won.”

Later he says, “All agents have shoot-on-sight authorization.”

Even later she says, “This isn’t what I signed up for … This isn’t us.”

When the NSA asked David Webb (Matt Damon) to become Jason Bourne, he volunteered for his transformation into a killing machine. They said he would be saving American lives. They sorta lied. He suspected all along, but he agreed. They really wanted him to kill anybody: test victims, foreign agents, politicians, wives, little girls, girlfriends, his own colleagues, reporters, anybody who got in their way. Why shouldn’t Bourne feel guilty? He should have just said no. If you want to hear Matt Damon give the smart “good” answer to the question, go back and look at Good Will Hunting and watch the scene where he answers rebelliously, “ ‘Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA?’ It’s a tough one, but I’ll take a shot.” The Bourne series is like an elaboration of parts of Will Hunting’s all-American boy response.

What’s the filthiest question under the movie’s questions? Is the NSA the USA? If so, we are in some deep evil. Wait. There’s more. Is the US just us? American politicians sometimes say, “We have nothing against their people, we only want to destroy their evil government.” Well, in the United States, aren’t we, the people, the government? Aren’t we the most famous democracy in existence and actively exporting that democracy around the world?

Have Americans been made into a Monster by a mad scientist or are Americans an insane doctor playing God and making a Monster?

MOVIE 56

Good Will Hunting
(Gus Van Sant, 1997, 126 m.)

I’ve been on a smart-script kick for a few weeks now, so I re-visited one of the smartest I’ve ever seen on film. How did those two twenty-ish actors write that story? Ben Affleck’s daddy was once a janitor at Harvard, and Matt Damon dropped out of Harvard about a semester short of graduating. Aside from that, who knows if one is the smart one or their genius is in the combining? Some of the lines can really make you smile and nod, for instance, when Will (Damon) steps in to save Chucky (Affleck) in a bragging contest with a Harvard snob and, even better, when shrink Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) dresses down Will Hunting for being a scared kid and breaks through his defenses. Robin Williams (for once kept on a short leash) is spectacularly sharp as a nobody teaching at Bunker Hill Community College. And Minnie Diver’s bawdy bar joke is so perfectly written, placed and delivered that I don’t know what to admire more: the script, the directing or the acting. And if you want to see how important editing can be, look on the DVD at the 11 scenes that were cut. Imagine them all in the movie and it’s definitely not the same story.

MOVIE 55

American Beauty
(Sam Mendes, 1999, 122 m.)

Maybe my favorite movie shot ever is the grainy video of a plastic bag swirling in a dust devil in American Beauty. It means nothing, and it means everything. It is about whether the minutiae of life are meaningful even if no one notices. It is the solution to the problem of the tree falling in the forest. The question is not “What’s meaningful about a bag in the wind?” The question is “Don’t you understand that recording a bag in the wind creates meaning?” Our conscious use of experience makes human meaning. All other meaning is, first, beyond our power and, second, beyond our ken.

When producer Steven Spielberg screened the movie prior to release, he immediately told first-time film director Sam Mendes that he had made a classic. How’s that for instant gratification? Besides nearly sweeping the Oscars, it won Best Picture awards around the world.

MOVIE 54

Harold and Maude
(Hal Ashby, 1971, 91 m.)

A reader on the “Silent Movies Aren’t” Forum challenged me to re-score this movie, so I watched it yet again. The sweet, strange favorite of many people. Who would think that a movie you have nearly memorized could make you laugh out loud for more than 30 years? Even the smallest details are hilarious: Tom Skerrit adjusting his pants as he gets off his police motorcycle, Harold’s mother (Vivian Pickles) rolling her eyes at Harold while she swims laps. Harold’s third date slipping and not-falling as she turns a corner. The running gags are even better: the computer dates are inspired and Harold teasing his shrink is unique. Good luck finding a weirder funny love story than this one.

MOVIE 53

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(Steven Spielberg, 2008, 124 m.)

Finally, the fourth installment is here. Hmm. Well, it isn’t bad. Actually, first things first, the audience was weird — as if they pre-loved it, although only one person was actually wearing an Indy fedora. Even after the movie began, whole sections would talk and laugh together, like a hometeam crowd at a baseball game. They already knew who they loved irrevocably.

Sad to say, I think Lucas’ script was a problem. It just would not let Henry Jones III take over from Dad. The LaBeouf kid had nothing important to do — one ball-busting jeep ride and a swordfight. Lucas wouldn’t even let the kid inherit the hat! That actually bugged me. Worse than Oedipal. Almost Lear-like. But really, who could expect four movies in a series to be killer-dillers?

As Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have the Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Last Crusade.”

Nick Otten is assistant director in the Theater Program at Clayton High School and adjunct professor in the graduate Communications MAT Program at Webster University. He consumes vast quantities of books and movies. In his description of Nick's List, he says,  "For every single work, I’ll quickly post a brief commentary — each week, at least 1 book and 2 movies, usually more. Maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. Sometimes, not often, I may go crazy and write some kind of extra, a page or so, on some movie or pair of movies or some genre, actor, or something else, or how one book relates to another or a movie or you or me or us. Such stuff will be just one click away, guaranteed."

To read the previous Nick's List posts click May 19 , May 12,   May 5 , April 28 , April 21 , March .