If you are looking for a peek into why George W. Bush was elected, watch this movie.

As usually happens with us, we get interested in a documentary topic and then watch too many documentaries on said topic which, in turn, relieves us of our interest.  This happened to us a few years ago with surfing films.  We first watched Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys followed in rapid succession by Riding Giants and Step into Liquid.  Then, we figured we were done with surf films for a while.  We did watch the fictional Lords of Dogtown which was based on the same events as Dogtown and Z-Boys and was disappointing given our newfound expertise on the topic of 1970s era surf culture in Southern California.
 

That brings me back to The Clash.  We rented The Essential Clash thinking incorrectly that it was a documentary.  In fact, it was a series of live performances with a little bit of interviews and such; however, not being a die-hard fan of the band, it left me wanting more information (this is coming from the guy who after seeing the Doors movie with Val Kilmer I bought The Best of the Doors CD and read No One Here Gets Out Alive…that was in the days before the World Wide Web).  I read the Wikipedia entry on The Clash which was interesting but we found out that there was a documentary called The Clash: Westway to the World.  Westway is a series of interviews with the members of the band and follows their history from the beginning to break-up but I felt that the movie was missing a narrator to fill in the blanks between the band interviews.  Title screens before each major topic helped but it would have been great to have more intermediary commentary.

What always amazes me about stories of popular bands, especially bands like The Clash which are later deemed to be “great”, is that their greatness seems to be so situational.  Not taking anything from their talent but I don’t think that The Clash is any more or less talented than any other band of their era.  They just happened to strike a chord (right time, right place and kind of, yes, random).  It always seems like they were successful in spite of themselves and that was definitely the case with The Clash. Fame, like everything else, is basically random.  You have to believe that any one of the hundreds of garage bands with bad lead singers from that, or any, time could have been the great band that The Clash became and that there was a large amount of luck that resulted in their success.   

That being said, their music is great.  I decided to listen to some Clash while writing this for inspiration and you can definitely tell how influential London Calling was.  You can hear in some of the reggae and funk material the beginning of the crossover bands that came later, like The Police.  It also strikes me as funny just how tame bands like The Clash, The Police and The Sex Pistols were in comparison to modern day punk and certainly the really hard core underground punk that I used to listen to in high school.  For its time, though, bands like The Clash were revolutionaries and saw themselves as such even though you can catch a few disco influenced beats in their songs here and there.  I added Train in Vain to my “Great Songs” playlist on my iPod and probably will spend more time listening to The Clash in the future.

When the new Miami Vice made it to the top of our NetFlix queue and I had a night to myself, I was looking forward to sitting back and enjoying my new entertainment system.  Since I got it in April, I have never really just tried to sit back and enjoy a movie in full surround sound.  And, Michael Mann movies are great uses for good home entertainment systems.  I love the camera angles, the sound, the music, the explosions, etc.  And, while usually longer than the average movies, Michael Mann movies are usually worth the wait.  Heat is a great example of that.  It’s long and builds up to a very dramatic ending.

The new Miami Vice movie definitely had a high budget, but that’s about it.  First of all, I don’t get the whole Colin Farrell (imdb, Wikipedia) thing.  I was actually shocked at his credit list because until he made headlines for the sex video, I had never heard of him and I probably don’t need to hear anything more about him.  Anyway, he was a totally lame Sonny Crockett.  Now, Don Johnson has proven himself in his later years (imdb, Wikipedia) to be kind of a freak show (I never needed to see Nash Bridges, and I can’t recall for sure whether I ever actually watched an episode of it or not, but how embarassing) but he was the original Sonny Crockett.  Colin Farrell was neither true to the original nor even close to a legitimate update.  Beyond the limitations of Farrell as Crockett, Jamie Foxx (imdb, Wikipedia) wasn’t a very good Tubbs either no matter how good of an actor he might be (understanding that Phillip Michael Thomas has become his own side show). 

In the TV show, the characters actually seemed somewhat tortured.  In this movie, they pretended to be tortured, but didn’t really seem to have any reason to be.  Maybe I am just getting old, but I have an increasingly difficult time suspending disbelief and in this movie, I just never could buy in to the attempted tension.  Even the big gun fight at the end (most Michael Mann movies have a big gun fight at some point) was kind of boring, even if the bullets flying around in sourround sound were kind of cool.  The film didn’t have much in the way of Michael Mann’s typical cool camera angles and such.  I think they just expected you to know all about the TV show story lines and character development and didn’t bother to spend any time bothering with that in the film.  Gong Li (imdb, Wikipedia) mumbles a lot and just doesn’t do it for me either.  Overall it was just a very weak effort by a very good director and it really kind of bummed me out.

Now, I’m not saying I didn’t like this movie.  Some friends of ours kind of half-heartedly recommended it and they were right in their opinion that it was not a great movie.  It was basically about the fairly common theme of disintigrating relationships; however, I think that movies like this can be judged by whether they make you at least a little bit uncomfortable and this movie definitely does that.  The performances were generally good and they avoided a sappy ending (thankfully, they resisted that urge) opting instead to leave you guessing a little bit.  I like it when I end up thinking about a movie after I watch it and this movie definitely makes you think…at least a little bit.

Now, Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby is the perfect example of a movie that was made for the Netflix list.  This movie was horrible.  We didn’t even make it past the first half-hour.  We did the same thing with Anchorman (and we have been told that we missed out on some funny stuff later in the movie, but it wasn’t worth waiting for to us).  Will Farrell is a very funny guy when he is contained by a decent script (e.g., Elf).  However, it seems to me that he and his cast of characters just moves from one movie to another trying to repeat the same formula, much like Christopher Guest does (except that Chrisopher Guest is successful at it).  The problem with this movie, much like Anchor Man, is that these scenes just go on forever and aren’t really that funny to begin with (a typical Saturday Night Live problem).  The scene with Will Farrell saying grace at dinner with his wife, kids, father-in-law and best friend is kinda funny for about 30 seconds but the scene just drags on and on and on.  It reminds me of a parody of SNL on The Simpsons where Krusty is the guest host and is involved in a skit where he has big ears and just keeps saying “look at my ears” while complaining under his breath that the skit is supposed to go on for 15 more minutes.  After about half an hour, we just looked at each other, decided the movie sucked, took it out and mailed it back to Netflix.

I am happy to report, however, that I do feel as though I learned something from the part of the movie that I did watch and I have compiled a list of the things that I think I learned:

• Al Gore, when preparing his slideshow and saving the earth, uses genuine Apple computer products available at finer electronics retailers near you.  I am certain that no promotional consideration was involved.
• Al Gore likes to gaze longingly into the distance out of the windows of cars and airplanes while traveling so as to make sure that those around him know that he is deep in thought on some very important matter.
• Al Gore actually totes around his own suitcase on wheels through airports and onto commercial airliners when he travels.  Imagine that!  (I think he does sit in the front of the plane though…let’s not get too carried away with this common man thing.)
• Al Gore was upset about the results of the 2000 presidential race but got over it and accepts it like a man even though he would have signed the Kyoto Protocol (for the record, 9/11 would still have happened and we all would be paying more taxes).
• Al Gore spent half of his childhood as a hick in Tennessee (yet couldn’t manage to win his home state in 2000) and the other half as a latchkey kid in Washington D.C.  Explains a lot.
• Al Gore is really proud of his environmentalist credentials even if his friends think he’s a little wacko; however, we all now know that Al Gore was an environmentalist before being an environmentalist was cool.  Early environmentalist, invented the Internet…blah, blah, blah.
• Al Gore showed me that PowerPoint presentations really can be interesting because none that I have ever been forced to endure have ever been nearly as boring, by orders of magnitude, as the one in this movie.
• Nobody, and I mean nobody, is more impressed with Al Gore than…Al Gore.
• As embarassed as I am to admit it and no matter how bad W is (and continues to get), I learned that I am still satisfied with my decision not to vote for this guy.
• Oh yeah, I almost forgot…some glaciers are melting but that’s OK because I don’t think glaciers had anything to do with the main point of the movie.  I think the only thing that this movie might accomplish is to put Al Gore back on the map for 2008 (God save us all).

This movie was about as boring and useless (to me) as I expected it to be.  I really do hope that we figure out what to do about this global warming problem (I, for one, plan to move to higher ground sometime in the next 10,000 years) but I just wish there was a way for Al Gore to invent something that can return to me the hour or of my life that I spent watching his political advertisement.  I would give him credit for an invention like that….but I still wouldn’t vote for him.