Dear John

Seen at: Carmike 10, 4:20 pm today

Academy Awards over, back to catching up. Buying a ticket for Dear John this afternoon, I asked the college student behind the glass, "So this is the movie that won the Best Picture Oscar, right?" He didn't quite know if I was joking or not.

Why did The Hurt Locker win? Certainly it had wonderful cinematography, and a great score. But above any other movie it captured the lousy feeling that Americans have about the war in 2009, and by extension the lousy feeling they have about so many other things.

On the down side about it (if the reports are true), the soldiers seem to hate the movie because it fails basic verisimilitude tests about the actual experience of detonation squad soldiers in Iraq. That's an old Hollywood issue, of course. On a personal level, the descriptions of why the soldiers in Iraq didn't like it made me wince a little, because they reminded me of the kind of naive mistakes about the Iraq War that I made with Thor when we were writing a screenplay about Iraq five years ago. I expect more out of an Academy Award winning story than my own limited level of imagination. They actually went to the Middle East.

But I can forgive all that about The Hurt Locker because of the emotional power of the movie, and the fact that it is somewhat of an independent production (in a Hollywood kind of way).

More disturbing to me, however, were the thoughts that arose from seeing the Awards last night, where I could discern what it was about the movie that left me a little sideways about it, after first liking it so much.

When Bigelow spoke about dedicating the movie not only to the men and women in uniform in the military, but also to the hazmat teams teams, it occurred to me how much we now see the war as like a firefighting operation. It is a messy thing, but it is something that has to be done, and so we should honor the sacrifice of those that do the job for us.

The war has thus been completely depoliticized, seven years about Michael Moore got on stage and said, "We live in fictional times."

Bigelow then addressed the uniformed military, saying something along the lines (I'm paraphrasing) that "as long as you are out their doing what you are doing, "\we'll be back here..." whereupon she fumbled a little for words. I think she was about to say "making propaganda to support you." That's what she seemed to want to say, but she couldn't say that out loud right now, even though we all know it's true.

But this development, i.e. the complete acquiesence of Hollywood to the war, should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been going to movies in the U.S. on a regular basis over the last year or two. Lately, at many corporate multiplexes, if you arrived five to ten minutes before screening, you were very likely to be treated one of the short music videos created by the National Guard for recruiting purposes.

All of them are awesome---perhaps the best American music videos I've seen lately outside of Katie Perry (no shame in losing to her).

The one with Kid Rock, called "Warrior" has a rap mosh pit of soldiers in uniform jumping like the gorillas in Planet of the Apes. Can you beat that? It's hard not to wince, however, when he opens with the line "so don't tell me who's wrong or right when liberty starts slipping away."

The Three Doors Down video, called "Citizen Soldier" mixes footage of present-day U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the homefront with the militia of the Revolutionary War running through the woods firing muskets. I think Three Doors Down might have started the Tea Party Movement with this video (just kidding, of course).

I liked both videos, and looked forward to seeing them, even though they made me cringe a little each timey. They ran through most of 2008 and early 2009. More fun, however, was the late 2009 version of the ad campaign, which switched over to a chorus signing "Carmina Burana"-style Germanic chants with words like:

I will live by this credo
I will protect the U.S.
and I will fight to liberate all!

...I will always place the mission first!

The citizen soldiers go out to help a I.S. community in distress and wind up kicking in the door of a house. The boot heel comes to the rescue!

My favorite part of the video is virtual reality morph sequence, showing a pretty blonde high school student with her school books swirling into a placid-faced dutiful soldier with a beret.

My conclusion was that there is a de facto mild federal subsidy of the corporate movie chains through these advertisements. I think The Hurt Locker and movies like it as Hollywood's way of saying "thank you" back to the Feds.

As for Dear John, the movie I actually saw today, well of course it's a wet hankie movie in the old style. Written by the guy who wrote The Notebook, it plays a lot like Nights in Rodanthe Goes to Iraq.

But I'm dissing the movie too much. It was actually pretty good, for the kind of movie it is. Chandler Tatum is the perfect "dumb brute American" of the millennial generated "minted in the year 1980. He may have no intellectual thoughts about the war (because none of us do anymore) but who is nevertheless honorable, honest, loyal and kind. He's the best we think about our youth right now, the way we wish young men become when they serve the country.

Because he's a war hero, moreover, he doesn't have to be the stupid Postmodern boy when he courts the love interest, the pretty girl. She actually chases him, old school style.

In a way this was a very classical movie (all of the wet hankie movies by this author are), but that is part of its downfall. It tries to do too much with the novelty of being sound as a story. It builds up too much story momentum, almost as if showing off how elaborate the story can be, and still work.

This doesn't ruin the movie (the beauty of classicism is that it holds water even when overdone) but does create a long and somewhat fatiguing Act Three.

Amanda Seyfreid really impressed me, however, in a sentimental role that called for her to "grow up to womanhood" during the story. She certainly has a future as a serious actress. So does Tatum. I've quietly become of fan of his work. I predict one day he will get a truly significant role, probably in a war drama, i.e. "This Generation's Platoon," that will earn him some serious attention.

Maybe this will happen when we figure out what the war is actually about, and Hollywood comes out of its coma to make a statement about it. In the meantime, these videos I mentioned from the National Guard are worth checking out, especially the last one, which has been the one they've been showing since last fall. If you sign up, best not use my name as reference.

Kid Rock "Warrior" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHzSBEVbXtM

Three Doors Down "Citizen Soldier" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ww5-LDwUVQ

"At this Moment" Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbfPj00pTNY