Under The Skin (2/5 Stars)

‘Under The Skin’ the new movie by Jonathan Glazer and starring Scarlett Johannson does not suffer from any error in style but rather a lack of substance. This would be a good half hour movie but has been expanded beyond all reason to feature length.

Scarlett Johannson is an alien from a place we are not told. She is assisted on this Earth by another alien that is never introduced. He rides a motorcycle. That is the extent of his character depth. Scarlett whose character remains nameless as far as I could tell spends her time seducing Scottish men into her lair where they walk hypnotized into a vast blackness of goo (see trailer). Once there, something horrifying happens to the tune of a creepy score. What exactly happens or why the aliens want to do it remains a mystery. That would take us the midpoint of the movie and it would take as many sentences as before to explain all that happens for the rest.

The fault seems to be the writer/director Jonathan Glazer who IMDB suggests is not all that much of a writer. He is more of a director of music videos. Such a revelation makes sense given that there is almost no dialogue in the picture and the best thing happens to be the creepy score. At this point one would take pleasure in the little things. For instance, Scarlett Johannson is a beautiful woman and she is naked for many minutes here. Most of this is less of a sexual nature and more of ‘Alien curious of one’s new body’ sort of thing but that hardly matters right. The role is reminiscent of Jeff Bridges in ‘Starman.’ Of course Jeff Bridges had far more to do, whereas Johansson’s role is somewhat limited. She is better looking though.

What else can I say here? Do you like Scotland? Because that’s where the movie is set.

The title comes from the end scene and is appropriate and rightly strange and creepy. However so little goes before and for such a long time that it is not exactly a big enough payoff to make the movie worth seeing. If the movie was supposed to be about anything more than what I've written about, I must confess I did not pick up on it. 

The Unknown Known (4/5 Stars)

Any military commander who is honest with himself or with those he’s speaking to will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people! unnecessarily, his own troops or other troops through mistakes or errors of judgment…and the conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes.”

- Robert MacNamara, The Fog of War

Certainty. That is the subject of the new Errol Morris documentary, “The Unknown Known,” in which he interviews at length Donald Rumsfeld, the United States Secretary of Defense from 2000 to 2006. Many a comparison has been made to Errol’s previous Oscar winning documentary, “The Fog of War, “ in which he interviewed Donald MacNamara the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. That interview started with the exceedingly wise statement above. As it so happens Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War as well. He served under President Gerald Ford at the very end of the Vietnam War. Errol Morris asks Rumsfeld if there was a lesson any lesson to be learned from that war. “Some things work. Some things don’t.” states Rumsfeld matter-of-factly apparently feeling no need to elaborate.

This is not your usual documentary. The subject is Donald Rumsfeld and the research is limited to Rumsfeld. Morris excavated more than 20,000 memos nicknamed ‘Snowflakes’ because of their frequency that Rumsfeld had dictated to his staff during his periods of public service. There are no other people talking or giving opinions about Rumsfeld in this movie. It is just Rumsfeld reading aloud his memos and elaborating on them into the Interrotron. By doing this Morris intends to tell the story of this man inside out, to hopefully help get a sense of how he thinks. And what he finds or more specifically what he does not find are parts charming, chilling, and downright stunning at times.

What is going on here? Rumsfeld speaks with such certainty. He uses words so expertly. His style of combative debate is almost flawless. The only problem is that his arguments lack substance. He speaks at one point about choosing specific words to describe the Iraq war in order to further the cause of the USA and hinder the terrorists. He looks up several words in the pentagon dictionary: ‘guerilla warfare,’ ‘insurgency,’ and ‘unconventional warfare’ and finds them all lacking with his political mission. But let us take a step back and consider that beyond what words someone chooses to use to describe a situation, there is still that situation that exists in objective truth in the world. That is to say no matter how you describe something, that something cannot be changed by how you choose to describe it. There is a concept in George Orwell’s 1984 called doublethink, that is the ability to hold the objective truth of a matter in your head and speak the politically expedient truth with certainty at the same time. The scary thing about Donald Rumsfeld is that he does not seem to be guided by doublethink. It seems that the politically expedient truth is the only thing in his head, that there really is no separate objective reality. How scary that is! You would hope your leaders would at the very least lie while knowing the truth. That is not the best of worlds but that is surely better than them not knowing truth and being guided by wishful thinking!

In several video clips from several news conferences Rumsfeld defends with absolute certainty the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq with the phrase “The Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence.” That is to say even though UN inspectors did not find any WMDs in Iraq that did not prove that Saddam had not stashed them somewhere the UN inspectors did not look. This technique of logic is called trying to prove a negative. An example: A man sees an Unidentified Flying Object in the sky and claims that it is an alien spacecraft. He insists on believing it is aliens until you prove him wrong. How easy would it be to actually prove that the UFO was not an alien? Well almost impossible. For instance it might have been a weather balloon or something else or just his imagination, but none of that can be proven. You weren’t there and even if you were, the thing is unidentified, that is to say it literally can’t be described as anything and in essence it really could be anything, possibily even the highly improbable nearly impossible alien aircraft aforementioned.

There is an old joke (told to me by Neil DeGrasse Tyson). A man tells a famous astronomer with absolute certainty: ‘There is a teapot revolving around the sun.’ The famous astronomer scoffs and says ‘no way.’ “Prove me wrong,” the man says. So the famous astronomer spends sleepless nights scouring the night sky mapping out the entirety of expanse surrounding the Sun. An expanse so vast the astromer would die at least a thousand deaths before he would be able to map every square inch of it and that is supposing he did it perfectly on the first try. Where is the man during all this? Well as the astronomer works himself to death he is on some Caribbean Beach drinking a margarita and getting a suntan. The moral: Don’t let someone ask you to prove a negative. If they have some claim about the objective reality of the world, it is on them to prove it exists, not for you to prove that it does not exist. Yet this type of reasoning is everywhere and it feeds on the desire of human beings for certainty, our fantastic imaginations that can readily supply that certainty, and the uncertainty inherent in the human experience given the limited senses of our anatomy. (On this last point, the next time a creationist uses the human eye has an example of intelligent design, please point out that our eyes see very little of the electromagnetic spectrum. If it were intelligently designed would we not be able to see far more than we are able.) This is an uphill battle for anyone who would wish to explain why beliefs based in faith are not to be taken seriously, but such battles are some of the noblest battles to fight for anyone with a token interest in objective reality.

Most people don’t have that interest and surely lead happier lives and sleep better at night. After all, to take that interest is to acknowledge the presence of uncertainty, a very worrisome peristant fact. The problem of course is that the former fall prey to confidence men like Donald Rumsfeld who could imagine WMDs in Iraq and so advocated invading a sovereign nation and wasting thousands of lives and billions of dollars in the process. Errol Morris claims that he knows less about why we invaded Iraq now that he has spent 36 hours talking to Donald Rumsfeld than when he started. It is an exceedingly depressing truth to acknowledge that he may be right. When asked if the Iraq War was worth it, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged and said, “Time will tell.”

That asshole didn’t learn a goddamn thing. We couldn’t even achieve that.

p.s. Some person would say that there was some evidence of WMDs in Iraq. For instance, that guy named Curveball who was lying. I ask you this: was that evidence enough to justify standing in front of the world and stating with 100% certaintly over and over again that WMDs did exist. Because that happened. I was there. There were no qualms about it. It wasn’t ‘maybe’ or ‘possibly’ or ‘likely.’ It was certainty. I would posit that there was not enough evidence to induce 100% certainty. And I point to the lack of evidence before and the non-existence of WMDs after to support that assertion.

NOAH (4/5 Stars)

The time for mercy has past. The time of punishment has begun.

You want faith? How about the faith of the producers behind writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s new film, “Noah.” They have reportedly spent $125 million dollars to make and market it. Sure, Aronofsky is a great filmmaker. But he is not a proven blockbuster filmmaker. His hits have always been these low budget character studies (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan). The one time he did command a large budget for the time travelling obscufated odyssey The Fountain it became a critical and box office failure, a sure poster child for ambitious folly. “Noah,” on paper at least, seem adept at capturing the audiences that filled the theaters for Darren Aronofsky’s previous films but also the people that showed up for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and other money making religious films. But “Noah” was not made by a religious filmmaker at least not one recognized by any church groups as being especially religious and “Noah” is a demonstrably different type of movie than Aronofsky’s earlier work. The producers are hoping to capture both audiences but there is also an outside chance it might not get either. And what will be left is the artwork itself, another ambitious folly or at least the most unique blockbuster (i.e. a movie with an over $100 million dollar budget) I’ve ever seen.

The strangness of “Noah” is born from its dark and primitive source material and the baffling sincerity of its modern makers in telling it exactly as it should be told. The original story can be found in the book of “Genesis” in the Old Testament of the Bible. It is a short story and can be summed up like this. God became dismayed at the wickedness of his creation and wished to eliminate all of it via a huge flood. He ordered Noah to build an ark and save two of each animal to survive. Noah builds the ark and God does exactly what he said he would do. He covers the world in a huge flood and kills every single human and every single animal on earth except the Noah and his family and the animals they have collected on the ark.

Now a modern audience would perhaps object to God’s malevolence in this story. Surely not every person on earth is wicked and even if they were, how is it okay to kill them all without warning or due process? Where is the justice in that? And by the way how is collecting two of each animal saving the species? Won’t they all become degenerate and hopelessly inbred in a few generations after the flood? Really the only way this story would make moral sense is if you were living in prehistoric times and continually witnessed the wrath of Mother Nature without knowing the science behind it. Surely, if you do not understand how the storms work, you may imagine that a deity was creating the weather in response to the behavior of humans. Or if you did not know the world was round and had not the slightest idea how big it was and thought the rain came from holes in the ceiling of the sky like the Bible describes (and not say the evaporation of existing water) you may have no trouble believing a flood could raise the ocean level for 40 days above all the existing land in the world and then sink to its original level after the rain stopped falling. These concerns are generally so prevalent in modern society that any Old Testament tales are generally eviscerated beyond all recognition from the original worldview of the author. Take for example the movie, “Evan Almighty” that starred Steve Carell as a U.S. Congressman who is told by God (Morgan Freeman) to build an ARK. Turns out in that movie, ARK, represents ‘Acts of Random Kindness.’ Oh the original Noah was rolling in his grave.

But Darren Aronofsky is telling this tale as it should be told: that is dark and weird and catastrophic. And he is using computer generated visual effects for all the animals. And he is creating incredible storms bashing up entire landscapes, and he went and built a huge ark out of gopher pitch and wood. In essence he poured the money only possible in modern society with a completely developed economy into a tale that only people in a primitive society with no scientific knowledge could take seriously. Who is the primary audience for this movie? Nobody? That is why I think the producers committed a great act of faith in this movie. I would not have done it. And I liked it.

The casting for this movie is pitch perfect. Russell Crowe plays Noah. Anthony Hopkins plays Methusala, Noah’s grandfather. Jennifer Connelly plays Naameh, Noah’s wife, and Emma Watson plays Ila, an adopted daughter. Finally Ray Winstone plays Tubal Cain, descendant of the original Cain and self-proclaimed king of this prediluvain Earth. Biblical acting is not your normal kind of acting. It is reminiscent of Shakespearean acting but with less humor. I think there is but one and only one joke in this movie. (But of course who could joke when the apocalypse is at hand.)  They all pull it off very well. Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins both seem more at home in movies that take place a long time ago than they are in modern settings. We are reminded of their roman gladiator movies for good reason. I could praise the acting of Jennifer Connelly but I would prefer merely to dwell for some time on how beautiful she is in this movie. She is of that group of few women like Jodie Foster and Sandra Bullock that seem to have hit their peak of physical perfection in their mid-forties, not an easy thing to do. Emma Watson is cute too but we all already know that. Stealing the show though is Ray Winstone as Tubal Cain. The character is completed invented and a definite improvement from the original tale. Tubal Cain questions his Creator. Did you not cast my ancestors out of the Garden of Eden to live in hardship in the desolate wilderness? And is it so wicked for me to survive as best I can with what you have given me? Why does you not speak to me? Am I not made in your own image? I think he has a good point.

Other interesting things to dwell on: The production design of Noah’s Earth suggests a world that has been untouched. That is the landscape is flat and spare. It does not look like Earth as we know it but an Earth just formed. Creationists are of this view and that the great flood is what formed everything like the Grand Canyon. However when Noah tells the story of creation to his children, when he speaks of the seven days, we instead see several billions of years starting with the Big Bang in very fast forward. That’s not quite right I thought. Also the wickedness of man is linked to environmental degradation. This too is not quite right. I would bet anything that the original author’s did not give a hoot about the squandering of Earth’s resources and was far more concerned with sodomy and other like things. I know it is sort of better this way, but if you are going to go so far to be faithful with the source material, might as well go whole hog huh.