Staying On Message

Politician Martin Frost hates George Clooney's Ides Of March.  Why?  Because it makes politicians look immoral, which could lead to cynicism and lower voter turnout.  In the film (spoiler), Clooney is involved in a sex scandal and gets blackmailed by a staff member.  I somewhat agree with Frost--there are so many better reasons to be cynical about politicians than their sex lives.  Let's concentrate on what counts.

Frost hopes "the public will see this movie and not think any worse of the politicians who are actively trying to make this a better country." I don't know. It the politicians working hardest to make this country better who are usually the ones that frighten me most.

And maybe Democrat Frost didn't notice it because he's so used to thinking this way, but the film simply assumes Democrat ideas are better than Republican ideas, and that Democrats are more moral than Republicans.  Is that cynicism or idealism?

Elsewhere, Todd VanDerWerff reviews the latest Homeland. (He's impressed that the show jumped ahead three weeks to get to the interesting stuff, as if the action happens independently of the writing and the writers have to wisely choose what days to pick for each episode.) Anyway, he can't help but muse about how we treat our soldiers:

...as a society, we’re always far more eager to send kids off to war than welcome them home. When they come home, it’s impossible to relate to them, so we put them in the “hero” box and assume that’s good enough. But it rarely is.

I understand no one ever got in trouble for saying we need to treat our veterans better, but is this true?  We're "always far more eager" to send people off to war than welcome them home?  Seems to me there's a pretty good argument we see sending soldiers to war a sad duty at best.  And that's just for the war's supporters.  On the other hand, we all celebrate when they come home.

As for it being impossible to relate to them--really?  I know some veterans and they may have a past I don't fully understand, but that hardly mean it's impossible to relate to them.  There are lots of veterans and, statistically speaking, some will have problems, but I'd like to see evidence that they have a harder time adjusting to civilian life than any other group.  In fact, the one place I see them regularly have trouble adjusting is in popular entertainment, not real life.  The vet who goes nuts may make for good drama, but it's a tiresome cliche.

Politics, check.  War, check.  Let's talk about the economy.  Margin Call is a small film with a big cast that's all about the crash of 2008.  The film turns the actions of one firm in one day into a microcosm of the whole problem.  It (almost out of necessity) has to be simplistic, and a few times when the characters speechify it gets annoying since they treat capitalism as if it were some sort of scam. Still, I thought it was well done.

One thing I noticed is some characters smoked.  Fine with me.  People smoke, and this was a tense situation. But there was a line in the credits noting no consideration was accepted from any tobacco companies or their lobbyists.  I see.  So rather than making these companies poorer, they were helping them for free.

David Denby, a critic who's made clear in his reviews he understands exactly what caused the financial meltdown and probably could have stopped it if he were in charge, notes at the end of his review:

If Wall Street executives find themselves at a loss to understand what the protesters outside are getting at, they could do worse than watch this movie for a few clues.

If you've been following the Occupy Wall Street movement, you may have noticed their message is all over the place.  Denby--one in a long line of liberals who projects his policy prescriptions onto the protesters (excuse the excessive alliteration)--should have suggested they watch the movie so they can at least have a coherent argument.

Meanwhile, at the LA Weekly, where unlike Denby they see the film as too sympathetic to Wall Street, we get an odd thumbs down for political reasons from Melissa Anderson.

Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor's lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freak-out. [....I]ts thin origin story about how the economy went to hell released three years after the fact and against the roar of the real-life "99 percent" seems like an out-of-touch exercise in hand-wringing.

It's touching to see normally cynical critics with stars in their eyes about a political movement.  But it seems to me a decent drama about an issue still fresh in our minds can be relevant, whether or not people are out on the streets complaining about a related issue.

(She also notes there are "many time-lapse shots of the New York skyline." Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall a single one.)