|
When I have to
drive more than
two hours one way to see a movie, I relish the experience. Not when I
saw
“Sweeny Todd”. Helene Bonham Carter is prettier to look at than Johnny
Depp in
“Sweeny Todd” but watching Depp repeatedly cut throats, then blood
flow,
looking like mini-waterfalls, is a bit much. (For the blood-spurting
throats, I
covered my eyes.) The London set seemed
reminiscent of Paris’s
‘Moulin Rouge’. I wasn’t sure that Depp and Carter had taken singing
lessons
and were singing ala Vanilla/Manila, and didn’t bother to see the
credits, so
sickened was I by wasting my time and money on this ‘award nominated
film’.
Since
I drove
more than two
hours, I thought I would try my luck with another Academy award
nominated film:
“No Country for Old Men”. I kept waiting for someone to say that line
amid the
murder and mayhem and planning of murder. The only great scene in this
film was
when the bad drug guy in the big, clean, city skyscraper got blown away
in his
office. Both films had good acting and
slick productions. Other than that, both films were violent Americana without
much plot saving graces to
justify the on-screen murders.
Back
in 1980,
I interviewed a BBC
representative who was importing ‘Dallas’
for UK
television. He had said, in his typical British
Empire
way, ‘We give the people what we think they need’. The American way? ‘We give the masses the lowest level of
entertainment they will buy.’ As usual too, men account for most of the
acting
roles and production people in ‘Sweeny” and ‘No Country’. Not much has
changed
in the USA for
women in L.A.
Around
the
world, America
sells violence and people buy it. Who
are the Americans to condemn South America for its cocaine sales or Afghanistan
for its poppies? Not only does the USA
enter undeclared wars in Korea,
South Vietnam
and Iraq, it also
breaks banana workers backs with
police actions in Central America
that
eventually ignite civil wars. ‘Democracy comes
at a price,” Bush would probably say, and that price
is violent
mass entertainment and real mass murder. Yeah, right, as he removes
privacy
rights of all Americans.
If a
violent thought is the
domino for even 10% of resulting violent actions, and the human mind
has
serious problems distinguishing between a real image and a TV/movie
image, who
has more responsibility for bringing violence into the world: Hollywood and the
Pentagon? Or South American
and Afghan drug trade?
|