Say Anything Blog

Seems rather presumptuous to me for Ms. Theron (gratuitous picture below) to talk for all the troops.  It also seems rather stupid to want a leader who doesn’t lead so much as cave to whatever the public opinion poll of the moment dictates.

Bush won his last election campaigning on Iraq, and that’s the only poll that matters.

But Charlize is pretty, so she’s got that going for her.  Which is nice.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

I followed the links, and still don’t know what the movie is about. What is the deal? I never heard of the movie and pay no attention whatsoever Stupid Saranwrap, so what is the punchline?

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem

Sorry, it is about a soldier that is murdered after his 2003 return from Iraq.  Loosely based on a “true” story.

From the WaPo:

“In the Valley of Elah” stars Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield, a retired military police officer who with his wife, Joan (Susan Sarandon), learns that their son, having survived a year of combat in Iraq and returned with his unit to Fort Rudd, N.M., has disappeared—this after a strange message on Hank’s cellphone. It doesn’t feel right to Hank, and so off he goes, by pickup, across the Southwest to the fort where his son was last seen.

Along the way he bonds with a young civilian police detective, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), and when he can’t convince the military authorities that something is seriously amiss, he goes to her to push the investigation forward.

In all of this, writer-director Paul Haggis, who also wrote and directed “Crash,” is straightforward and even heartbreaking, and the movie works best as what might be called a human-scale thriller. Haggis is an extremely talented man, and much of the film works brilliantly. But it misses the mark. Like many of the current antiwar films, “In the Valley of Elah” strives to lay the crime it uncovers at the feet of a government that would send 200,000 boys off to a certain place at a certain time to do violence in the name of certain principles. But the crime it uncovers is generic.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop. I hated the last sequence, in which Deerfield hangs a flag upside down to signal a country in distress. We may or may not be in distress, and we can argue about it forever, but it’s no Hollywood guy’s call, particularly as he’s extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

What is it about American celebrities, particularly Hollywood’s most notoriously self-indulgent, that they assume, stupidly, that their life-long facility for fantasy and make-believe somehow endows them with the authority to pontificate about issues in reality of which they know absolutely nothing?

Theron’s remarks only serve to reinforce our common, though occasionally mistaken, stereotypes about blonds.

“Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”

JB, I did not mean you had to supply it! The failure is in the hands of Ms Theron and her publicist. Had either of them, and the producer, done their jobs I would know what this movie is about. Until she began having chronic verbal diarrhea I actually thought she was an OK actress. Although, she(or someone)butchered Aeon Flux beyond any reasonable bounds of artistic license.

Una Salus Victus Nullam Sperare Salutem