Sanctimony Murmur

I'm back from a break, and while I was gone...nothing happened.

Life's funny that way. One minute you're working hard on a ton of ultra-important jobs, reading reams of frightening news reports, answering life-or-death phone calls about family dinners and gig prospects. The next, you're sitting around for a week or two, drinking a few beers, watching baseball, listening to the grass grow, and it hits you. Life doesn't change much, and it doesn't need you, anyway.

I spent my 20's travelling around the world, and I'll bet that I watched the news maybe 3 times a month that whole decade. This was back when the internet was in its infancy, so the only news I got was from the TV hanging over a bar in Mexico or somewhere. If you've been in enough bars, then you know that the TV is always on super-low volume and drowned out by ABBA's greatest hits, so your chances of hearing anything important are pretty much nil. If you're a news junkie, you'd have to read the little scroller on the bottom of the screen to stay tuned to the big stories, like how the pandas came out of their cave and screwed for the first time in years.

So I spent a decade not really knowing what was going on. I don't mean I was a complete moron. I knew that Clinton got re-elected, and George Bush, and I saw 9/11 happen. Big stuff. But as for the little stuff in between, well, I just couldn't be bothered. When there's a beach bunny sitting under the TV set asking you to buy her another Bahama Mama, suddenly politics and Mississippi floods don't seem like that big a deal.

Not watching is more fun than watching, and certainly less stressful. I suppose I could hang on a politician's every word, or check on how many times an Israeli market's been blown up in a given week, or whether Katie Couric's numbers have gone up in the ratings. But taking a break from listening to those stories reminds you that life is pretty fleeting, and most things don't matter one way or the other.

Sure, I guess it matters to "life," whatever that is, but does it really matter to me?

That's a tough question. On the one hand, you could say that everything that happens in the world has a direct impact upon your life, no man is an island, so forth. When an Israeli market blows up, and someone mentions that Israel might nuke Iran, the gas prices spike. That bugs me, but it doesn't make me sit down and cry. So yes, that news story impacts my life, but not so much that it takes control of me.

So what do I care about? I worry about big stuff like Islamofacism, and what I see as a new wave of communism disguised as human rights (we are all one, up with the collective, everyone's a migrant, the Declaration of Human Rights is the gospel, Western society is the problem, the world belongs to all of us...and we need someone in charge to tell us exactly what to do with it). But I don't worry about it as much as I do the damn dresser drawer that won't work properly. Every time I watch the news I get pissed off, but whenever I open the dresser drawer and it almost amputates my foot, I get even more pissed off.

Caring is about proximity. Dresser drawer? Care. Weirdo terrorist in Baghdad? Care a little. Weirdo terrorist in my living room? Care a lot.

This is why I'm amused when I watch the news reports on TV. A month back, everyone and their mother seemed to be protesting about Myanmar. Remember that place? Former peaceniks were saying that war would be a good idea, to feed the people hit by the hurricane. No one liked Myanmar's regime, governments said they'd boycott them until doomsday, and feminists were going to send shipments of underwear to the junta in order to embarrass them or turn them on, I can't remember which. Anyway, Myanmar was a very big, bad problem, and the whole wide world was up in arms about it.

We all cared. Then a month goes by, and damned if I can find anything in the news about it. Oh, sure, there's lots of websites that still have a stake because they blew their money on the domain address, but when is the last time it led the evening news? It's been ages. I haven't heard the word "Myanmar" come out of a politician's mouth in a hell of a long time, and I doubt I will again until the place gets knocked over by another hurricane. The protests have dried up, and everyone's gone on to other protests, other problems, other picnics with potato salad.

So really: did we care?

If caring is about proximity, it's also about longevity. You can usually judge how bad a problem is for you by how much time you spend worrying about it. I'm sure you know that Myanmar is still a craphole and that people are suffering unbelievably. But you don't care anymore because you never really did. It was just the latest craze, the latest hep thing to be upset about. Then Obama got nominated, or your raise came in, or your boyfriend proposed marriage, or your dad died. And Myanmar? Poof.

Still, you can console yourself with the oldest line in the book: what can I do about it? Given a choice between a dresser drawer and Myanmar, you're probably going to reach for a screwdriver before you put your underwear in the mail.

Caring is about proximity and longevity, but for the really big news stories, you need one more thing: the news. The old "global village" adage is very true, but only when a megaphone is blasting the message into your rec room. For a few weeks, the news can have you thinking that Myanmar is the next city over. But when the megaphone changes to A-Rod screwing Madonna, Myanmar miraculously ends up on the other side of the earth. Proximity? Nada. Longevity? Forget it. Burmese people? Never heard of them.

The next time you're watching the news, be honest and ask yourself if you really care. If you do, let me swing by and ask you again in six months.

Burma and Stallone Revisited

I was putting a couple of movie reviews into the proper folder just now, and I stumbled upon my old review of Rambo.

With what's been going on in Burma the past week, I wonder if perhaps Stallone was on to something. Here's what I had to say then:

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2008 - RAMBO - REVIEW

Sly Stallone returns as John Rambo, in a movie that is bound to make movie reviewers puke and Far East movie fans cheer for more.

That's the way it goes with action pictures. I've worked with and befriended a lot of Filipinos and Indonesians, and they all adore two things: karaoke, and movies about men with guns. After America's pussification in the 1970's, action movies have had their biggest draw from international audiences. Since these audiences aren't American, they don't find it shameful to watch an American blow things up all in the name of fun.

I don't know why Stallone turned to another Rambo flick. Perhaps he's going through a mid-life crisis and saying good-bye to some old memories. First there was Rocky Balboa, to which even the critics gave grudging respect. But Stallone went a bridge too far this time, and they're slamming Rambo.

I'm not.

When are critics going to lighten up? They hand garbage movies Oscar nods (Atonement, No Country For Old Men), and talk about them in breathless whispers. Then they turn around and crucify a 90 minute action movie for being a 90 minute action movie.

Exactly what do people expect from a movie that has a poster showing Stallone wielding a homemade machete?

Here's what you get with Rambo: he's living in Burma as a snake wrangler. To the north, the Burmese army is killing civilians with impunity. A missionary group shows up, and they talk Rambo into taking them north. Rambo tells them several times to go home, but of course they don't listen. So guess what happens? That's right, the missionaries are captured and Stallone goes north to kill everyone he can get his hands (or bow, or machete, or machinegun) on.

But here's the kicker: I actually think Stallone put some thought into this one. Go ahead and laugh, maybe you're right. But tell me, is Rambo wrong when he says that the missionaries can't change anything? That this is the way some of the more horrible parts of the world operate?

Stallone wrote and directed the picture, and he had some guts making it. Though everyone thinks genocide and murderous regimes are evil (Rwanda, Darfur, for that matter Burma), not too many films are talking about it. Burmese monks are being shot and killed in the streets as I write this, and women are being hacked to death in Africa every other day. But Hollywood has nothing to say about it.

I may be crazy, but I think Stallone might have slipped one under the radar with this movie. Yes, it's a dumb action flick, but it has more to say about the violence and horrible evil going on in this world than any film has said since Hotel Rwanda.

Perhaps dumb action pictures are what it takes. "Important" films only talk about Western injustice (as was the main thrust of Hotel Rwanda, no matter who actually spilled the blood). To make a film about injustice in Africa or Asia you run a very great risk of being called a racist or a warmonger. Stallone walks this line with gusto, and I found myself admiring him for it.

In the end, Stallone avoids the racist/warmonger tags by being Stallone (no one takes him seriously, anyway), and hiding his views under a sequel. If Mel Gibson or Spielberg made a film with this subject matter, the fallout would be huge. When Stallone does it, it's "Ah, what do you expect?"

I think Stallone's vision of the world is very dark indeed. You do not write and direct a movie such as this without one. It is not by accident that one of the lead, peaceful missionaries in the film finds himself faced with an ancient dilemma (kill or be killed) and decides to bash someone's head in with a rock. And then is horrified that Rambo's early prophesy came true: this is what the world is, depending where on the planet you happen to find yourself.

Am I making too much of all this? Probably. But if the critics and the Academy are allowed to make a big deal out of a piece of crap like Atonement, then I'm allowed to wax eloquently about Rambo.

The reality of politics and war in the modern world is rendered very well here. The killing for killing's sake, and the absolutely brutal regime in Burma. Stallone is not far off the mark with his one-dimensional evil characters. As a rule, evil people in life are one-dimensional. They kill people, they plunder their land, and they kill more people. Until, in this case, Rambo shows up with lines like, "If you're pushed hard enough, killing's as easy as breathing."

The special effects in this movie are the best gunshot effects I have seen in any movie, ever. Pekinpah would have loved this flick. Sam started the whole "bullet going right through the guy" trick, and it hasn't changed much since. Stallone just did. It is probably the first and only movie that will show you what a large caliber weapon does to a person: it doesn't put a hole in them. It blows them to pieces.

That might draw your ire, but my hat is off to Stallone. He decided to go over old ground, but he did it with some new tricks, and he ended the movie after 93 minutes, before you had time to be over the whole thing.