Screenhead

So Michael Moore’s looking to drum up a little advance attention ahead of his upcoming “documentary”, Capitalism: A Love Story by announcing that it just might be his last.

Quoth Moore: “I have been working on two screenplays over the last couple of years.  One’s a comedy, one’s a mystery, and I really want to do this.”

It’s not such a stretch to believe that Moore wants to become a filmmaker; his “documentaries”, meanwhile, have been at least partially fiction for years, so why not lose that “true-story” veneer completely?  Even better, a movie merely written by Moore would mean that he’d be out of the shot, and we could actually see background for once.

Would the audience follow?  Possibly but not necessarily–Moore could probably do a very interesting political satire, assuming he actually took a run at it.  There’s no word as to what the content of his comedy or his mystery entails, so we’ll have a good long while to wait before we get to see just how Moore’s filmography turns out.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I was really looking forward to this one, I’ll tell you that much going in.  I saw Borat back in 2006, and I really liked it.  I loved the way Sacha Baron Cohen playfully jabbed at our weaknesses and failings, as a way for us to maybe take a little better look at how we treat other people.  Was it frequently wrong, how we treated others?  Yes, of course it was.  Look at those poor dumb fratboys who got in the trailer with him.  They’ll NEVER live that down.  See?  We’re even still talking about it three years later!  Right here!

But Bruno…this is somewhat different.

Bruno, opening today,  is the story of Bruno, a nineteen year old fashionista played ably by Sacha Baron Cohen and the former host of Funky Tag, a show dedicated to fashion and similarly pointless topics such as a “What’s in / what’s out” segment. One such segment declared chlamydia out and autism in because “autism is funnier”.

That is a QUOTE, please save your flames.

Indeed, Bruno was on top of the world, with Germany-wide fame, at least minor celebrity and power, and even a flight attendant boyfriend, plus several bicycle-powered sex toys.  No, seriously.  But following a disaster of epic proportions involving a suit made entirely of velcro at the Prada show, Bruno was out.  And thus, taking with him only his assistant’s assistant Lutz, Bruno went to Los Angeles in search of global celebrity.  But what he would find would be much more and much different than he would ever expect.

Like I said above, Bruno was a much different animal from Borat.  Sure, both started out about the same, making me laugh with the power of sheer over-the-top antics.  Borat had The Running Of The Jews, Bruno had a three minute sequence involving things he did with his flight attendant boyfriend.  Sheer ludicrousity fuels the comedy in both Borat AND Bruno.

But Bruno…Bruno overdid the ludicrousity.  I know, how can it be possible?  The very definition of ludicrous requires it to be laughably unrealistic!  How can you overdo the unrealistic when it’s REQUIRED for ludicrous!  Oh, they did.  Believe me, they did.

Most of the movie is, as I’ve mentioned, that gentle poking of fun with the standard overblown Sacha Baron Cohen style,  with one-note jokes over and over again:  gay guy learns self-defense, gay guy baits ministers, gay guy tries to join the Army, gay guy baits more ministers, gay guy goes down South and tries to bait EVERYBODY and so on and so forth.  But not a whole lot of people are rising to that bait.

Until the night of the cage match, and this is where it really gets low.

See, Cohen, in a new persona as “Straight Dave”, sets up a cage match.  Lots of people there, plenty of them clearly crocked, several actually holding beers.  And “Straight Dave” ramps up the rhetoric, describing how great it is to be around straight people, how he’s glad no “fags” are around (again, QUOTE, no flames, thank you) and it goes on like this until Lutz shows up.

You can probably figure out what happened from there, but I’ll say this much, the phrase “descent into barbarism” is at least somewhat appropriate.  Bruno stacks the deck by trying literally everything it can think of to bait a response.  Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t.  Thus, we’re left with a series of gay jokes that fall terribly flat and a skewed reflection of the very worst of America.  It’s the Borat that didn’t work.

I had wondered how Cohen could ever manage to pull off another Borat–wouldn’t everyone see him coming?  And the answer, for the most part, is yes.  No matter what outlandishness he tries–and man, does he ever try–he just can’t replicate what he did the first time.

Bruno is a profound waste of time and money.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Given that Ford is now pretty much the only major automotive manufacturer left on the face of the earth, it’s not surprising to see that movies are made about their earlier days.  Flash of Genius is one such movie, a dramatic pseudo-documentary about the earliest days of the intermittent windshield wiper and their original inventor, Dr. Robert Kearns.

In Flash of Genius, Dr. Kearns and his family create the Kearns Corporation, a firm designed to develop and eventually produce the Blinking Eye Wiper, a windshield wiper designed to move at various speeds to improve reaction to falling rain.  It could adjust its speed according to the rate at which the rain fell, and it’s essentially the same as the design is today.  But back then, when Kearns first developed the wiper, Ford was amazed to see it.  So amazed, in fact, they made a push to keep it for their own.  Thus began a long and arduous legal battle for Robert Kearns and his family, filled with hardship and peril and loss and everything else, but hopefully reaching the climax they all long for.

This is, when you get right down to it, the story of just one man–more specifically, just one family–against one of the largest corporations the world has ever known.  It could never be regarded as simple, nor could it ever be called easy.  But what it could be called is an amazing movie.

Not only an amazing movie, but an amazing journey down the road of one man’s life with a corporate carjacker in the passenger’s seat.  Interestingly, this movie was released only about four years after the death of the actual Robert Kearns, and if it hadn’t been for that, you might well have never had the chance to see this incredible story of one man’s struggle against corporate hubris so massive it earnestly believed it could steal the very ideas from a man and use them for its own purposes.  It’s shameful.  And yet, at the same time, it’s hopeful.

Robert Kearns, you see, fought back.  Robert Kearns took on a company with only one thing in mind–not the money.  Not the public accolades.  But rather, the sheer RIGHT of the matter.  He would not back down until it was acknowledged, publicly, that HE was the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, despite the fact that he had to destroy his job and his family and his sanity to do it.

He did not. Back. DOWN.

Okay, granted, by most reasonable standards this is insanity, but still.  He was right.  Why shouldn’t he fight?  This story should give us all hope.  It’s a uniquely American–a uniquely Michigan, even–story.  We’re looking to corporations to stand up and reduce carbon emissions and go green, we’re looking at our governments to police the corporations.  Why aren’t we looking to guys like Kearns and his ilk, guys in their basements, gals in their garages, families in their spare rooms?  Corporations are great in their way, sure.  They give economies of scale and access to bigger markets.  But they’re just a means to an end.  They’re not city-states.  They’re not powers and forces.  They’re just TOOLS.  Like the windshield wiper.

In a time when everyone the world over is losing their jobs, and when the little guy seems at his most powerless, it’s good to look at stories like Kearns’ and remember that sometimes the little guy can win one.

And so can we.

Popularity: 1% [?]