2001 April 15, reviewed 2001 April 16

Erin Brockovich, video

Is it another Diablo Canyon or did they have to exaggerate medical statistics in the plume to make a show worth watching? Is hexavalent chromium really causal in all those ways? Everything synthetic? At least this is one case where a beauty queen is accurately played by a movie star. So, whether chemically realistic or not, we watch Julia Roberts run around on a shoestring (and not always wearing a whole lot more) activistically sympathizing with the victims, blatantly using sex appeal to get where and what she wants, and being California-rude and swearing at everybody else while the biker next door raises her three small children. If that's not a true story made for environmentally sensitive Hollywood, what is?

I found it disturbing to watch. Sure there are big, faceless corporations who are big jerks in their neighborhoods. We now have another in a long line of entries from pristine and sinless Tinsel Town that brands them all that way, broad brush. Here I am myself trying to be less of the job, trying to give my family not stuff but attention. This flick doesn't extol any of that, except in a bit of sermonizing from the biker himself and in miscues from everyone else who thinks Erin is out partying all the time because she's pretty. I guess in a true story we're not really at liberty to create an ideal heroine.

The acting is good, the drama is good, the story is good, that's why it won all those Oscars; I just can't decide what to take away from this. Part of me wants the supposed satisfaction of accomplishment that the single purposed, well-matched task yields, but I've come to resist that part and to consider it unhealthy. Part of me wants appropriate accountability and justice for all, large and small, but I want more than that. I want big arrogance to be a big evil as well as big pollution. If we were on trial for arrogance and social violence, nobody depicted in the show would be blameless. I want an end to stereotyping in making judgments. Stereotyping of big corporations, stereotyping of beautiful women, stereotyping of hardworking, well-educated lawyers. And, I want people to understand the distinction between causality, correlation, and fantasy.

It's a lot to ask. Is it worth making my own crusade?

2001 ...

reviewed 2001 April 16

Miss Congeniality, theater.

This was a hoot to see once. I went twice, once with the rest of the family and once with Viannah who missed the first time. It wasn't worth going twice.

Laura Bullock portrays an FBI agent who has trouble being one of the guys and following orders. She needs to infiltrate a beauty contest run by queen bee Candace Bergen with William “my ancestors were Quakers” Shatner. Of course, Laura Bullock, movie star, is a beauty queen and she's more or less unconvincing dressed down to the "I'm just a slob on the job" status with her punching bag. A messy apartment helps the image but, except for the snorting laughs, she is never really so unattractive that it would be a surprise that she could do this, as it would be for, for example, for me.

There are funny jokes and some subtle twists at the culture of Texas and the culture of pageants. Behind the scenes at the TV shoot and the "girl's" studies are where we find some of the best subtle humor. She makes friends with some or all of the girls and saves their lives, all while extolling "world peace." There are some pretty good quotable quips. Michael Caine probably has the best role, as a trainer who happens to be gay who gets the job of working with Agent Hunt because he's been blackballed from the pageant community. The behind-the-scenes stuff at the FBI seems pretty stereotypical.

It's a comedy. That's fine.

2001 ...

reviewed 2001 April 16

Thirteen Days, theater

So take Jack and Bobby Kennedy in the White House and stick an insightful Yankee advisor in the middle who looks an awful lot like Kevin Costner and then replay the history of one of our nation's greatest crises for a couple of weeks and you have "Thirteen Days." I was a first grader in Henrietta, Texas when this really happened and I didn't know anything about it until ... well, until I was grown up. Our lives nearly ended there that month in one form or another.

It's a well-played show. As historical fiction, it provides just the kind of overview of the crises and what went on to resolve it for which I had hoped. Of course, you have to suspend disbelief, but all the major elements are there, the stresses with Adlai Stevenson, representative to the U.N., the press, the Navy and, in fact, the Joint

Chiefs. We see the non-hawkish Presidential style of Jack Kennedy and the intelligence of not just allowing oneself to be drawn into inevitable conflict because of pride or honor or other mismatched notions of propriety, it was all there.

Did somebody like the Costner character really make all those behind-the-scenes, around-the-chain-of-command calls to the field commanders? Did they really co-opt those pilots into under-reporting to their brass so as to hold down the problems of escalation? Was LBJ really the jerk he looked like in that last scene where he seemed only concerned with the political gains that were made as a byproduct of saving the world?

No, truth probably is stranger than this fiction.