Sporadic Ramblings

Interesting movie. Not a great movie, or even really a good one, but interesting. It was part supernatural ghost-story thriller, part study of a driven guy suffering through bereavement. The first part was kind of cheap and dumb, while the second would have made for a much more interesting movie if it hadn't been trampled over by the ghost story part. It's not common you'll find me saying, If only there could have been less magic spookiness and more realistic grieving. It's odd, though - in much the same way Kevin Costner was seeing his wife trying to contact him from the afterlife, I saw a good movie trying to contact me through the confused mess of this one.

The ghost story part was cheesy, but somewhat effectively done. The startles were there, and they were cheap, but they were often surprisingly low-key, which made them somehow more scary. The doctor's response to these unrealistic things seemed pretty realistic, at least at first - skeptical, then hopeful, then worried about his sanity, in a believable way. It's when he headed to Venezuela that the movie tossed believability out the window and wandered into some kind of stunt-laden National Geographic special, which seemed a bit exploitative of the individuals depicted. It's one thing for National Geographic to go to a remote tribe and investigate their culture; it's another entirely for these guys to go to the tribe, hand them prop spears, and make them boogeymen in a ghost-story movie.

I figured out what was going on early enough to make the ending not any kind of surprise at all, but not early enough that I can scornfully mock the plotting. I'm sure some poindexters had it all sussed within minutes, but that's not usually me. I watched some of the deleted scenes, and they would certainly have made it a lot more obvious what was coming, so deletion was a good choice. The deleted scenes also showed most of the doctor's hallucinations as dream sequences where he woke up at the end, which would have made for a completely different movie.

The problem I have with these kinds of things, where a rational guy discovers that there ARE supernatural forces, that the dead CAN contact you, and that everybody's linked by some kind of ethereal cheesecloth binding us all together, is that they're just cheap wish-fulfilment. These are things that people want to believe but have no proof of. In a movie like this, there is proof of the supernatural, so there's no reality to it at all, and no ambiguity to the rational protagonist's eventual conversion to spiritualism.

I'm telling you, a much more interesting movie would be one where the doctor could even have had some of these flashbacks, but it remained ambiguous in our minds and his whether he was actually having supernatural contact or just stress-related hallucinations. An even better movie would be one where the ghostly stuff fades, and he actually does have to do what neighbor Kathy Bates tells him to - sell the house, give the clothes to Goodwill, go on with his life, wondering whether he's damaged goods because he went a little nuts when she died.

That's not to say I don't like ghost movies; I thought The Ring was great and scary. Damned scary. Cringe-away-from-the-screen, wonder-why-I-paid-eight-bucks-for-this scary. But that movie establishes early on that regular rules don't apply, that there is a vicious malevolent dead person/demon that wants to hurt us. The movie isn't about whether, it's about how, and how bad. I tell ya, all I need to see is that black-and-white well on a TV and I get chills.

In this movie, the message is that near-death experiences are real. They even present "evidence" for them several times. To their credit, the counterbalancing arguments are also presented, albeit by annoying minor characters. But the main character starts as a non-believer and comes to believe, which isn't fair, because his dead wife is actually rearranging his laundry and giving big-eyed kids secret messages. If that happened to me as unambiguously as it's presented here, I'd believe it too - anybody would. But it's a movie - they can make anything happen.

The problem is, I think the writers and director are true believers themselves. They want us to believe that if you just want to hard enough, you can converse with the dead. In reality, you can talk to the dead all you want, but they don't answer back, no matter how much you want them to. The more time you spend trying, the less time you have to spend living.

So, today Brianna asked me if anybody ever fell asleep the exact same second as anybody else. Awesome kid question, I thought. "Sure," I answered, and then did the math. It turned out to be a lot more sure than my gut told me. Assume:

• 6 billion humans
• All fall asleep once a day (except college students pulling all-nighters, I guess, but we'll give the college students some back because I've seen some of them fall asleep multiple times in a single one of my sedimentary geology lectures)
• 24x60x60 = 86,400 seconds a day

That means roughly 70,000 people fall asleep in the same second as you every day. Of course, more than half of those people live in the opposite hemisphere from Brianna, so her chances aren't quite that good.

On the other hand, if you live in a city of 300,000 (she does), and most of the folks in that city go to sleep between 7 pm and 12 midnight, then you've probably got at least 15 people in your city drifting off at the exact same second as you every single night.

Sweet dreams...

So, that's another thing that drives me nuts. When people say "I believe in evolution" or "I don't believe in evolution." It's not a matter of faith. It's a matter of truth, actual scientific truth. When people "believe in evolution," what they actually mean is, evolution is a compelling theory that explains all sorts of observations consistently. When people "don't believe in evolution," what they mean is that they choose to ignore the explanatory power of evolutionary theory, and in most cases, to ignore the observations themselves. There is no belief or disbelief; there is science, and there is willful ignorance.

Imagine if someone didn't "believe" the theory of gravity. That wouldn't change the fact that he or she falls down, or that it is an objective truth that gravity exists. If that someone went around saying that there was no gravity, and that everybody was actually floating around the world, reasonable people would look at the evidence surrounding them and call the gravity denier a fool.

The only difference between a gravity-denier and an evolution-denier is that the evidence for evolution isn't as personally obvious as falling out of bed. You have to read books and look at bones to get a handle on some of it. But it's still objectively true. Believe it or not.

I've been thinking about (and depressed by) polls showing that some large portion of Americans are receptive to creationism. When I see these polls, I feel like they come with the implied suggestion that we should accede to the desires of the creationists and teach creationism in schools. This may well be my defensiveness rather than their intent, although I can't see much purpose in asking the question other than to gauge support for such a thing.

See, polls are really only good for showing what people think. The only cases where public-opinion polls should determine results is in the few areas where it matters what the general public thinks. In practical terms, this is elections and ballot initiatives, where there's a constitutional or statutory mandatory response to polls.

With the case of science education, the general public is clueless, so the polls don't demonstrate anything other than that cluelessness. Suppose you had cancer. Would you rather have a local TV station take a poll as to what treatment you should undergo, or ask a doctor? Obviously, you'd ask a doctor. Now, you might want to know what the consensus among informed people (i.e., doctors) was, in which case a poll of that group would be useful.

Now, suppose you want to teach kids about science (creationists don't actually want to do this, but I bet polls would show - hah - that the general public wants their children to know about science). Would you take a poll of the general public to determine what valid science is, or would you, say, ask scientists? And if you ask scientists, you hear with resounding unanimity that biological evolution is real, and that Earth history makes no sense without it.

You can't take a poll to find out what is true. You can only take a poll to find out what people think is true. So, quit taking the polls. Or act on the real problem they reveal, which is that the average American is ignorant about science. We need more, not less, evolution in classes, even if people don't "believe" in it. Especially because they don't.

I've gotten more than a few movies from the 1970's and early 1980's from Netflix recently, and many of them, despite receiving critical acclaim when they were released, don't seem to have aged well. For example, I was fairly disappointed with The Deer Hunter, mostly hated Apocalypse Now, completely hated A Clockwork Orange, and thought that The Delta Force, which I remember being intrigued by as a kid, was horrible (it was also difficult to watch post 9-11, but obviously I can't blame Chuck for that). On the other hand, I recently watched Star Wars (the original one) again with my kids, and I loved it.

So, it was with some trepidation that I got The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Clint Eastwood western. I was actually pleasantly surprised. The acting was solid, the story engaging. The bloody conflict between Missouri and Kansas, seemingly far removed from slavery, is a sad but interesting part of the whole Civil War. It was also addressed in more detail by Ang Lee in Ride With the Devil. This isn't as serious a movie, but it's exciting to watch the course of Wales' life through the war and his attempts to deal with what came after. It also has all of that great western stuff I love - tough guys, horses, wise Indians, beautiful scenery, dusty towns.

My one issue with the movie was that Wales is depicted as a superman, almost always impossible to hurt. Sometimes this was because he was clever in the way he approached conflict, which was neat; other times, it was because the guys fighting him just missed him, over and over, which is kind of unsatisfying. It's always a little disappointing when the bad guys lose just because they're bad shots - you want the hero to win because he or she is smart, not lucky.

I enjoyed the movie a lot, though, and would recommend it.

What a mess. An expensive mess. The good parts:

• The re-envisioning of the ancient world. I have no idea how historically accurate the portrayals of people and buildings were; I suspect the palaces were far less sumptuous, the people far less clean, the teeth far less straight and white, but darn it, this is a movie, and the vision of Babylon's roof-top gardens, busy streets, and elaborate palace was breathtaking. If I'm watching a dramatic movie about the ancient world, I'm OK with it being grander than life, in much the same way that I'm OK with Shakespeare's re-envisioning of Julius Caesar, where everyone speaks with deep meaning in wry verse.
• The battle scenes, particularly the first sequence; in that one, you could get a sense of numbers and layouts and even follow the strategy to some extent, although it wasn't clear exactly how Alexander could get back through all those guys to the opposing leader. Also, the use of elephants in battles was strikingly portrayed; I admit to often having wondered how effective an elephant could be. I've been snowed by elephants in the wild, in zoos, and in circuses, and neglected to imagine how elephants trained and bred for war might act. The scene toward the end where a charging horse is multiply skewered was amazing; I'm sure it was all computers, but it was visceral, dramatic, and unlike anything I've seen.
• The credits - visually neat-o, especially with the Greek renderings of the actors' names.
  

The rest of it was pretty much a failure. It often wasn't clear what was happening or why, or how much time was passing, or what the importance of the various battles was, or even what the characters wanted, although they sure yelled at each other a lot. The acting was very overwrought; lots of eyebrow-based emoting as in Camelot or JAG. The accents were horrible - I'm not sure where Angelina Jolie was supposed to be from, but it must be somewhere between Moscow and Transylvania, and I'm pretty sure the real Alexander wasn't from Ireland, but you wouldn't know it from this. The accents of the other folks were all over the map, too, and it wasn't the Mediterranean map. I don't need them all to speak in accents, but if they do, they shouldn't be different nationalities from the characters. Sometimes it seemed like Alexander was channeling the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

Speaking of language, another thing bugged me, which was the use of English in maps and written materials shown in the movie. Obviously the characters have to speak English, or the movie becomes a stupid subtitled exercise. But having the wall mosaics and tax documents in English was jarring and lame. Putting them in an Greeky-looking font doesn't cut it.

The portrayal of homosexuality was a puzzle for me. I'm a passionate supporter of gay rights, including marriage. I like seeing shows that portray realistic-seeming gay people in realistic-seeming relationships (e.g. Six Feet Under, not Will and Grace or The Birdcage). I wasn't sure really what they were after in this movie - showing a culture where homosexuality was accepted, or trying to be risque and titillating about gay sex. I have to think that in a culture where male homosexuality was common and approved, the gay folks you'd see most often wouldn't be wearing eyeliner or mascara or be drag queens or do exotic dancing.

This could have been a really neat movie; it had great costumes, great visuals, and a great life as subject matter. I think you could even take the movie that currently exists, cut out all the interpersonal stuff, and turn it into a cool documentary. But what we got was a muddled, often incomprehensible story with enough jangling wrong notes to ruin the rest of it.