Hollywood Award Season

So the various Movie and TV awards shows are right around the corner, which means... it's time to talk about the WORST movie's of the year... of course.

I'm going to nominate IN THE VALLEY OF ELLAH. I don't really remember much of the movie, I tried to flush it from my memory banks as soon as I walked out of the theater, but here's what I wrote the day after I saw it:

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IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (ITVOE):

Let's start with a quick two word review: JUST AWFUL

As for the rest of it... man, where to start? I guess with the movie itself, rather than the politics, which are so reprehensible that they should be enough to damn the movie all by itself. A friend of mine who was at the same screening, and who is NOT a conservative, said "I loved the performances, but HATED the message. Nothing good can come of that movie being made."

So what's good? Well, the performances. Tommy Lee Jones is fantastic. Doesn't matter what he does or how or when, he's just great. There are few better. End of story.

What's bad? Christ, I could go on forever.

But I want to start at the end. I remember when I was in film school it seemed like all my classmates were pretentious blowhards who wanted to make "important" films about poverty and AIDS. Fortunately I was always able to sniff out the action movie fans in my classes and hook up with them for assignments. I remember we were seniors making a short, heavy-on-the-action, chase film and just to thumb our noses at our high-minded classmates, we put a Jean-Paul Sartre quote over the final fade-to-black at the end, just as a joke. I'll never forget how hard we laughed when, after the screening, our professor told us he thought it was a very profound moment.

At the end of ITVOE, over the final fade to black, Paul Haggis superimposes the words "FOR THE CHILDREN." I shouldn't need to tell you I nearly threw up in my mouth. It's one thing to go for the "self-important" final scene quotation, but to decide on the most hackneyed, cliched tagline in the history of cheesy political taglines goes a long way towards showing how at its heart this is an amateurish film.

Yes, I said "amateurish." Everything is about "the message" in this movie, and it comes at the expense of good film making. Nothing seems to make any sense in this film, it's just a bunch of political dominoes set up to fall a certain way and storytelling be damned.

I made two predictions to the people I was with in the first ten minutes. The first came after Tommy Lee Jones pulled out of his driveway and drove past a school where he was shocked to discover the American flag flying upside down, the international symbol for distress. Now of course Haggis makes no effort to explain why the flag would be hanging upside-down in a neighborhood he has taken great pains to portray, through use of a long overhead tracking shot, as a neighborhood full of veterans and families of veterans. Yellow ribbons, American flags, and "support our troops" signs appear on every lawn. So who in this neighborhood flipped the flag over, and why? Doesn't matter. After TLJ got out to fix the flag I turned to my friend and said "before this movie is over, he's going to come back and re-hang that flag upside down."

I hardly need to tell you that at the end, he did just that. What was funny about that final scene though, was how Haggis kept the flag out of view the whole time, wanting to keep it a surprise so that he could slowly pan up and reveal the upside-down flag as the end music swelled. Like anyone in the theatre was like "Whoa man, you totally BLEW my miiiiind! I totally didn't expect that!"

Second prediction. When we first meet Charlize Theron she's talking to a pretty young woman who has come to ask for help because her Army husband killed the family dog and she's worried about him. I leaned over to my friend again and said "ten bucks the husband kills her before this movie is over." I hardly need to describe to you the scene in the third act where Charlize goes to the woman's home and cries over her dead body, drowned in the tub by her back-from-
Iraq soldier husband who just couldn't get the mental help he needed from the VA... oh boo-friggin' hoo.

Which brings me to the most offensive element of the film. The soldiers. There is not a single honorable, professional, moral soldier in this entire movie. Every soldier in the film is on drugs, drinks way too much, is psychotic, a liar or cover-up artists, a murderer, a rapist, or all of the above. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

Couple of laugh-out-loud moments. TLJ asks one of his son's buddies if his son was on drugs and his friend replies "no more than everyone else." EVERYONE else... OK so all the soldiers in Haggis' world are drug addicts.

Also early in the movie, suspicion falls on one particular soldier. The cops pull up his rap sheet which is FILLED with drug dealing arrests and convictions, so much so that when she sees it, Charlize actually gasps and says "oh my god." Charlize asks how he was able to get in the Army and her boss says "oh they've been lowering standards every year since this war started." ........

Yeah, they're letting in drug dealers now. Come on!

And then there's the line that is destined to become the most often quoted line in the film. If the movie gets nominated for an Oscar, this will be the scene they show. A soldiers tells TLJ that "they shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq."

What the hell does that even mean? Where should we send them, Paris!? We send our soldiers to shitty places to do shitty things because, news bulletin Haggis, you jerk, IT'S THEIR JOB!!!! It's been 6 years now since 9/11, everyone who got tricked into joining up because of 9/11 has had at least 3 chances to get out by now, can we please drop the fiction that the Army is full of dolts who got conned into joining by George Bush telling them that Saddam pulled of 9/11?

These are professional, VOLUNTEERS who have chosen to live this life. Isn't it time we started respecting their choice rather than treating them like victims of some giant conspiracy?

Ugh, I could go on and on, but this is getting way too long... one final word about amateurism, though. The whole movie rests on a few videos contained in the digital camera of TLJ's son. TLJ finds the camera early in the first act and at the very moment he finds it, you know, you just KNOW, that the answer to the mystery is contained in those videos. But you can;t just have TLJ wantch the clips and end the suspense in the opening act, So what does Haggis do to draw out the drama? Well of course the computer tech TLJ brings it to says "oh these files are corrupted, but I have a special program at home that I can use to fix them. Oh but I'm really busy at work so this is going to take a while, but what I'll do is e-mail them to you as I fix them."

So now we have to spend the whole movie waiting for TLJ to get the latest installment of his son's Iraq video, and of course the answer to the mystery is at the very end of the very last one. I'm sorry but that's just lazy.

To sum up, in Paul Haggis' world, all soldiers are drug-using psychopaths who could, at any moment, stab their best friend 42 times, chop his body to pieces, burn the pieces, then calmly lie to their friend's father without a single sleepless night. All cops are lazy mysoginists who assume that any female officer must have gotten her job by fucking her boss. And the only honorable people in small town America are the strippers.

Here's what I learned from watching In The Valley of Elah... Paul Haggis' America is a very depressing place to live.

Needless to say after CRASH and ITVOE, I'll be skipping Paul Haggis' third effort.