Eagle Eye

 

In 2008, D.J. Caruso directed an AI-gone-rogue thriller that starred real-world PITA Shia LaBeouf and the always welcome Michelle Monaghan. 

The film featured supporting performances by Billy Bob Thornton as an FBI agent and Rosario Dawson as an Air Force investigator chasing LaBeouf and Monaghan's hapless puppets who they believe might be domestic terrorists. (They're not; they're being manipulated by artificial intelligence embedded in government hardware.) 

It's an outlandish but entertaining trifle that did fairly well in worldwide box offices.

The movie's last reel takes place at the Kennedy Center, where a children's orchestra is scheduled to play. A bomb has been rigged to go off when a certain note is hit -- leveling the arts center and killing everyone inside.

It's a diabolical scheme but not nearly as chilling as the one the real-world PITA in the White House is planning for the illustrious arts complex. He can't commandeer it so he'll make sure no  one else in the world will be able to enjoy it -- ever again.

Seems like the biggest domestic terrorist we have lives in the White House.

Buddy

 

Writer/director Casper Kelly's wildly demented creepfest, Buddy, takes a bloody stab at satirizing gooey children's television programming like Barney and Teletubbies by crossing those genres with the psycho-horror of slasher movies like Chucky or M3GAN.

Kelly's colorfully trippy movie is set in the world of the eponymous character, an orange unicorn (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) who leads a small group of children, led by the gritty Freddy (Delaney Quinn), through a variety of inane activities, accompanied by cloyingly trite kiddie tunes, most of which in praise of Buddy. 

Young Josh (Luke Speakman) refusing to take part one day sets Buddy off on a murderous spree of vengeance and control. He must be loved and obeyed!

Act II in this freewheeling nightmare features Cristin MIlioti and Topher Grace as parents Grace and Ben, who are challenged by Grace's feelings of dreadful menace, eventually revealed to be connected to Buddy. 

Kelly brings the two worlds together in a manner that audience members will either go with or not -- and I believe that is by design. In fact, the entire surreal experiment in storytelling is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

The film's outlandishly loopy story will undoubtedly reveal more about the folks who embrace its lunacy than about the world and characters it has created. 

On that point, it struck me more than once that the rebellion against Buddy's carrot-colored control is a welcome metaphor for these times of social/cultural/political manipulation and fabrication.

The Sound of Music

 

One of the songs that didn't make it into the film version of The Sound of Music (1965) is a trio in which the Baroness Schraeder, the impresario Max and Captain Von Trapp bemoan the inevitability of the rise of the Reich.

The baroness and Max are tunefully fatalistic, intoning that political domination and social disruption are as routine and predictable as a sunrise. The only thing one can do is keep your head down and go with it.

(Baroness)
A crazy planet full of crazy people,
Is somersaulting all around the sky.
And everytime it turns another somersault,
Another day goes by.
And there's no way to stop it,
No, there's no way to stop it.
No, you can't stop it even if you tried.
So, I'm not going to worry,
No, I'm not going to worry,
Everytime I see another day go by.
...
(Baroness and Max)
And there's no way to stop it
No, there's no way to stop it
If the earth wants to roll around the sun
You're a fool if you worry
You're a fool if you worry
Over anything but little number one

The captain humors them, but is determined to resist.

The Broadway production debuted in '59, and no doubt WWII was still fresh in the minds of many, so maybe the sting of the song's cynical egoism was viewed differently then. Neither the baroness nor Max were particularly lovable characters, redeemed by their less oily depictions in the film.
Still, for me, Rodgers and Hammerstein were onto something truly resonant with this bubbly number of selfish expediency -- something relevant for today's world.

Who would have thought the United States, historically a defender of freedom and justice, would be feared and despised by other nations as a marauding behemoth, threatening its neighbors; persecuting its citizens; rounding up, deporting or imprisoning undesirables; stifling speech, truth and information; erecting vain totems, destroying art and literature and rewriting history?

All while too many folks within its borders shrug their shoulders, crouch low and whistle away their days until the chaos passes.

Shameful.

 

By Any Means

 

Elegance Bratton's cinematic telling of an actual FBI pairing of a mob enforcer who is also a government asset (Mark Wahlberg) and a Black special agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) in Mississippi in the '60s is a brutally visceral presentation of a wide gray line walked by law enforcement in pursuit of justice in a hostile and unjust region.

The film opens with Wahlberg's Greg Scarpa putting a baseball bat to the body of a known Klansman to extract information on the location of the bodies of missing Civil Rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Scarpa is clearly a sadist who derives great joy from the bashing. That he is able to pull the needed information is almost an incidental by-product.

When Abdul-Mateen's Wayne Strider is pulled into the case of the firebombing and murder of a local NAACP organizer (Giancarlo Esposito), he has been sitting idle in the field office for a while, stifled by administrative indifference and the Klan's terrorism.

As one would expect, Strider doesn't trust Scarpa or his methods at first, but eventually comes around to seeing that the hit man's ways, while criminal in themselves, are effective.

An early conversation between the two revolves around the film's title statement, attributed to Malcolm X, whom Scarpa sees as a more serious threat to embedded racism than Martin Luther King Jr.'s peaceful resistance. When Strider's own home is fired upon by Klansman, he is given more reason to adopt more forceful methods.

"By Any Means" is not a film about a questionable ethical code. It's more a rationalization for fighting fire with fire, one which many members of the audience will embrace ... possibly seeing contemporary applications, as well.