Reviews

For people who were not alive, or not of age, during the early 1980's this documentary offers a fascinating glimpse into the mechanization of one of the B-list media stories of that era: the development of the commune of Rajneeshpuram near the city of Antelope Oregon. Rajneeshpuram was the brainchild of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian mystic and guru who had attracted a small but very devoted global following. What emerges is an extremely watchable and fascinating case study regarding power, tribalism and tyranny told through the narratives of many of the players in the drama.

On the Bhagwan's side, there are four main characters: a still-believing attorney who was at the center of all the legal wrangling, the power-hungry sociopath who ran the commune, another true believer who feels that the vision was right but the execution was left wanting, and a key instigator who now rejects the teachings of her former master.

On the other side, there are the townspeople who resented the intrusions of these hippie-dippees into their quiet red state existence, the lawnakers of that era, and the various law-enforcement officials who were monitoring developments and preparing evidence.

What happened? Treachery, back-stabbing, gun-running, immigration fraud, election fixing, attempted murder and various other audacious acts committed in pursuit of "nirvana."

It exposes the disconnect that often occurs between philosophy and its implementation. Things that seem true in theory become much more salient when backed by the threat of force.

But then force has its downside as well.

In the post-postmodern era being fashioned by millennials, there are two ways to get rich: (1) connect large amounts of people together under a common communication platform via the Internet; or (2) hire a lawyer and become a parasite of someone who has connected large amounts of people together. While I enjoyed this film a great deal, I found it lacking in noble purpose as it castigates the inventor and glorifies the parasite.

The false premise of our "feelings matter" pop culture is that humans should be judged by the quality of their relationships rather than the degree of their contributions. This movie advances that meme by condemning Zuckerberg for being an anti-social schmuck whose single focus on the success of his fledgling enterprise kept him from the really important stuff like learning the appropriate way to interact with the people who clung to his fame because they lacked the capability or confidence to do anything remotely as great as Zuckerberg was doing.

What was Zuckerberg doing? He was making it possible for 500 million people around the world to connect with each other in a richer, more humanly way. He was making life better for hundreds of millions of people who desired to see a few more pictures of their grandchildren, or learn a bit more about their kids off at college, or ease into a relationship with a potential mate. That's a pretty big thing, and if he was paid a mere $15 billion for what he did, I'd say he was underpaid.

His reward? His best friend and financial angel stabs him in the back by closing out all the accounts he depended on to keep afloat in the early stages, then sues him. The best friend settles for an undisclosed sum, reported to be better than $1 billion, signing a non-disclosure statement in the bargain. Then the same "friend" goes to a writer and collaborates on a tell-all, tabloid-type piece of trash that violates the hell out of the non-disclosure statement, if not in fact then in spirit. And now the book has become a movie.

Yes, it's a good movie, very well made with snappy dialog and a few great performances.

But if the viewer comes away thinking that Zuckerberg is a schmuck who doesn't deserve his wealth, I'd ask him to think again.

One of the things I like to think about when I review a movie is what other movie might be matched with it to make a great double feature. In the case of Toy Story 3, the obvious choice would be to make it a triple feature with the first two episodes; and I can think of few better ways to entertain myself than to spend 5 hours or so revisiting this trilogy. But here is another suggestion. Watch it as a double feature with Seabiscuit (2003) and see how both movies deal with the idea that when a thing gets beat up a little, you don't just throw it away.

Rejuvenation is the essential idea behind Toy Story 3, and that makes it as much a movie for aging baby boomers seeking new significance in the late maturity phase of their lives as it is for young ones seeking new thrills and adventure. For this aging boomer, Toy Story 3 massaged all of the critical emotions that go along with aging: the sense of uselessness, the boredom that goes along with being stashed away in the attic by my grown children, the realization that maybe my best days are behind me. The big payoff came at the movie's conclusion as it delivered hope and an avenue to rediscovering the joy of living.

Yes, it's that good.

For my money, Toy Story 3 is the best movie of the series, and that is saying a lot given that the first two installments were masterpieces. The plot takes off a bit later from where Toy Story 2 concludes. Young Andy is a bit older and getting ready to go off to college. His ragtag assemblage of toys is less important to him now. Most days, the playthings just collect dust on the shelf or wait endlessly in a dark corner of the toy chest for that rare moment when Andy might get the urge to play. The story's conflict concerns whether the toys should be stored up in the attic or given away to a day care center before Andy leaves home.

All of the characters from the previous episodes return for the finale, and some new interesting and colorful characters are introduced. There is plenty of fun and frolicking, as well as some scary close calls that might be upsetting to very young children. In the end, it's how the movie deals with its subject of renewal that makes it such a worthwhile investment of your time.

Fair warning. It packs an emotional wallop, and all but the most stone- hearted of viewers will be wiping away happy tears at the end.

The thing about making a movie is that it presents to the filmmaker the delicious opportunity to plant an idea in the viewer's subconscious, bypassing cognition and appealing directly to the subconscious through emotion-evoking symbolism. The idea of a subconscious was first proposed by Freud, who argued that it acted as a sort of "referee" or super ego between those things the reptile brain tells us to do and those things society tells us to do.

Perhaps no man came to understand the implications of Freud and how his notions of the subconscious might be exploited for the purposes of creating propaganda better than Ernest Dichter, a Vienna-trained psychologist who became very famous for applying persuasive symbolism into television commercials. Among Dichter's more notable achievements was suggesting to the Betty Crocker Company that when a woman bakes a cake, she is subconsciously procreating, and that the act of pulling a cake from the oven was equivalent, on a subconscious level, to taking a baby from the womb. Dichter suggested to the executives at Betty Crocker that they should require that an egg be personally added to their cake mixes so that, when baking a cake, a woman would be offering her man a symbol of her fertility.

Are you laughing? So did the executives at Betty Crocker. All the way to the bank. As did the executives at Ford, who agreed with Dichter that men treat sedans as wives and convertibles as mistresses.

While much of what Freud thought about personality and motivation turned out to be bogus, the one thing that continues to stand up to the test of time is Freud's notion of dreaming and the meaning of symbols in dreams. Symbolic imagery is used so frequently today in films, television and commercials that we process the meanings routinely. We know, for example, that the fireworks exploding behind that scantily-clad Victoria's Secret Model are not really fireworks. We process their true meaning emotionally and intuitively through a process the psychologists call the "peripheral route to persuasion."

Filmmakers are very aware of the peripheral route to persuasion and use it to feed us propaganda on a regular basis. Most of the time we don't mind because it is propaganda we agree with, such as we should treat our families better or be more concerned about the disadvantaged and poor. But what about the more controversial filmmakers? Isn't Michael Moore, for example, attempting to plant in the minds of his audience the notion that capitalism is inherently flawed because it is based on greed and heartlessness?

What if the filmmaker could bypass the whole process of making a movie and just hook up some keen electronic gadget to himself and another person, crawl into his or her subconscious and plant the idea in the deepest, darkest part? That is the premise of Inception. While on the surface the movie is about crawling into dreams and planting ideas, it could easily be about movie making itself, because in the end the character Cobb and the director Christopher Nolan are in the same business. In that respect, this may well be Nolan's most personal film.

While some have compared this movie to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I think Inception would make a great complement to a double feature together with The Stunt Man (1980). Inception borrows the "film within the film" concept, puts it on steroids and applies it to dreams. In the end, it could easily be a movie about making movies that are themselves about movies.

For those of you insisting on explanations, yes, I think the whole damned thing was a dream. But, like Mulholland Drive and Lost it's a death dream in which Cobb is working out the regrets and sins of his life. What I saw was Cobb's purgatory, and by the end of the movie Cobb's subconscious was able to work out a lot of issues, and he got closer to heaven.

Or maybe it was just another movie with an intentionally-ambiguous ending designed to provoke us. What worries me is what Nolan might have planted in my head while I was watching it.

Let's face it. Some people are just plain too dim-witted and irresponsible to be parents. There. I just gave you the whole point of this movie, so you can save yourself the $8 On Demand fee and the time investment required to see it. Beyond that simple message, there is nothing else here. Nothing. No one is transformed, there is no hope that the protagonist will ever redeem himself, and if you react to the movie the way I did, you'll want to throw a brick through the screen in the hope that it will find the directors who wasted your time.

Some may regard this as an interesting character study, but I found very little to like about this character, so I cannot recommend it. I will say the movie may haunt you a little; but, for me, even that was unsatisfying as on reflection I found very little of substance to hang onto.

I just kept seeing everything from the point of view of the ex-wife, and I concluded that if this man had truly loved his children he would have left them alone. It is his own loneliness and need for affiliation that causes him to pursue them as he does, not any genuine love for the kids.

And that is what is so heart-breaking. It left me disgusted, and little else.

He wanders the harsh West Texas landscape like the angel of death, dispensing a justice only he understands. He is accountable to no known human constraint; not logic, not the law, and certainly not compassion. He is the embodiment of the escalating senseless death we see in our society, from Columbine to Virginia Tech, and for us to try to understand him is as futile as a steer attempting to understand the slaughter, which makes his weapon of choice all the more poignant.

No Country For Old Men rubs our noses in the fecal matter of being human. Namely, that we are constantly being stalked by the angel of death, we have no idea when he will overtake us, but every day we live we are certain he is closer at hand than the day before. We stand by as others are taken, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. The good often die long before they deserve; the bad often die long after they deserve. The young die as well as the old. It's as senseless as a Fellini (or Coen Brothers) movie and as random as a coin toss.

The movie had to end the way it did because when it comes to random, unexplained violence, we never know who will be next, anymore than we could predict what numbers will come up in the lottery by looking at the ones that came before. We can only take comfort in the fact that our fathers faced the same realities, and their fathers before them, and we can hope that somehow our ancestors are preparing the way for us when our time is at hand.

Timothy Treadwell moved to LA transfixed on the hope of becoming a star, but got "eaten alive" by the decision makers in the entertainment industry. He then went to Alaska to make what happened to him figuratively in LA a horrible reality by taunting grizzlies until one finally took his bait and killed him. The only surprises were that it took 3 years to accomplish his dance, and that he tragically took someone (an innocent woman) with him. Ironically, in his death, director Herzog came along and made him a posthumous star in what is a most compelling movie about man's relationship to nature.

Treadwell emerges not as a sympathetic environmentalist, but as a narcissistic, compulsive, and mentally imbalanced wacko hell-bent on self-destruction. Not that he isn't sympathetic; he is. But he is so obviously wrong that one cannot leave the theater thinking he got what he deserved.

Imagine a common housefly with a microscopic video camera flying around someone's house, pretending to be at one with the humans, filming its exploits for the other flies. The fly buzzes all around the humans, showing how the humans won't hurt it so long as it doesn't give its ground. When one of the humans tries to shoo the fly away, it tells the human it loves it. Sooner or later the hairy little pest is going to get swatted, and rightly so. Well, If I were a grizzly bear I'd feel about as sorry for Treadwell as a human would about that fly. Treadwell had to know this, and yet he deludes himself into thinking that he was somehow immune to the irrefutable laws of nature in which there are predators and prey and never the twain shall meet.

In the end, the bears probably hurt him less than the Hollywood producers who years earlier led him on with false hopes; the producers being far more dangerous than grizzlies, especially in their native habitat.

I've read all of the user comments so far, and while I agree with most of them, I wonder if anyone had the same feeling I did when the movie was over. I wondered whether the answers to the riddles were contained in the movie, but the viewer must decipher the clues to discover them. Or maybe I am so desperate for closure, I just cannot accept the idea that it doesn't really matter, that the journey is the thing.

SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS

The key questions are: (1) Who wrote the original letter? (2) Is there a son, and who is he? After all is said and done, the most likely answers to the first question are Winston, Sherry or Penny. If the answer to the first question is Winston or Sherry, then the answer to the second question is NO, and if the answer to the first question is Penny, then the answer to the second question is YES and perhaps the son was the kid Don Johnston encountered at the end, or perhaps not.

The fact that the letter had no readable postmark, plus the fact that Winston was a writer who fashioned mysteries, leads me to conclude that he must have been the writer of the first letter. That is the scenario that best fits everything that happens subsequently. I also think it is possible that one or more of the encounters with the women may have been dreamed, but I can't quite fit it all in. I'll need to take another look at the movie, but something about the state of the flowers in the vase at Don's house seemed awry as far as time passage.

Why did Winston write the letter? Because he saw that his good friend Don Johnston needed a wakeup call, and only through the quest to find a long lost son would Don come to realize that he did want a family after all. Sherry may have been in on it, but Winston had to have been the main instigator.

I'd be very interested to read others' opinions on this. It could be that the answers just weren't given. But then why does the screenwriter sell us on the fun of deconstructing a mystery only to disappoint us in the end? Unless the mystery was solved, but we've all been too lazy to discover it.

Is Broken Flowers like Mulholland Drive, or is it just another existential, postmodern celebration of relativistic ambiguity? I need to know.