It’s hard to say which is more absurd: the 1985 animated television series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, or the new mega-movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. We’ll decide after a quick primer.

Hasbro is a big American toy company—only rival Mattel is larger. Hasbro sells Monopoly, Scrabble, Pictionary, Clue, Trivial Pursuit and dozens of other household brands—Tonka, Tinkertoys, Nerf, Mr. Potato Head, Play-Doh, Transformers and so on. The people who run Hasbro are very, very rich.

In 1963, jealous of Mattel’s success with Barbie, Hasbro launched a line of 12-inch soldier dolls for boys—Action Soldier, Action Sailor, Action Pilot and Action Marine (hence action figure). The original G.I. Joes flew off the shelves until America flew into Laos and Cambodia—preventing both Hasbro and the White House from selling war for the next decade-and-a-half.

G.I. Joe redeployed in 1985 with smaller molds and smarter marketing (to be copied by George W. Bush after 9/11)—now they were an elite international force defending “human freedom against a ruthless terrorist organization.”  There were comic books and a TV show, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, which ran weekdays on the networks. (Washington prefers to demonize al-Qaida in prime-time.) Once again, Hasbro couldn’t stamp the plastic figurines fast enough.

A Real American Hero was everything the rest of the world (that’s us!) dislikes about Americans—loud, simplistic, disingenuous and culturally tone-deaf. For instance, the ethnic-cleansing names for some of the white characters—Cutter, Torch and Sgt. Slaughter—juxtaposed with the Native American Joe, code-named Spirit (what else?), who sported braids, epigrammatic English and a pet eagle, Freedom. The Joes were not scared high-school dropouts of all races from low-income towns (like the real American “heroes”), but fearless, steroid-pumped Aryan musclemen.

Of course, racist war propaganda will only entertain children for so long. The American Hero line was retired in 1994. Which brings us to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Hasbro’s Hollywood honcho, the man responsible for the two Transformers movies just past, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra right now, and millions of toy sales in the future.

The Rise of Cobra can best be described as a wall of noise and sound for people who like to bang their heads into walls, transporting a team of Joes from a green-screen Sahara Desert to a green-screen underwater base to a green-screen North Pole to, well, it doesn’t even matter. Channing Tatum, who plays Duke, defends the movie’s awfulness this way: “It’s a huge, 170-million-dollar movie. It’s just a big, kid sort-of driven film.” Oh. Okay, then. Paramount, who made and promoted the movie, refused to even screen the film for American critics. It’s as if your husband said you didn’t look fat, and then traded the car for a forklift.

To answer the absurdity question, the movie is worse, even though in one episode of the TV show, a dog saves the Joes by using his paws to pump a handcar out of a mineshaft.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra centers around a swarm of nano-bug-things that can eat a city. Yes, you read that right. It doesn’t spoil anything to tell you they try to eat Paris. There are costumed freaks trying to spill the bugs—the Baroness, Storm Shadow, the Doctor—and costumed freaks trying to kill the bugs—Duke, Ripcord, Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Heavy Duty. They fight—in the air, on the ground, under the water. Nobody really wins, except Hasbro. Nobody really loses, except us.

All that’s left to say is: Go, Joe. Please go.

Living in a country with beggars at the traffic light, prostitutes on the corner, and gunmen in the streets drives home certain truisms. We, as a people, are dissatisfied. We, as a people, want more. We, as a people, are tired, frustrated and disillusioned with our jobs, our schools, our spouses and coworkers, our politicians and parties and government, our roads and buses and taxis and tolls, our bills and fees and taxes and payments and loans. That’s how you feel, right? Right.

This peculiar mix of apathy and anger builds inside you until you quit your job or start smoking, get drunk or get high, beat your wife or leave your husband, find God or try to kill yourself. Here’s a better idea. Go see Diana at Centerstage. You’ll feel better, and you’ll get to watch characters who do most of the above, anyway.

Patrick Brown populates his remounted playscript, Diana, with some long-suffering (and thus highly frustrated) Jamaicans, starting with its title character, a struggling nightclub dancer brought to life by Camille Davis (not to be confused with Cameal Davis, ascendant star of Dreamgirls). Davis provides a subject lesson in stage acting—the art of living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. The simplest yet most powerful pleasure of watching theatre is its immediacy, and Davis lets us witness her joys and heartbreak, her pain and relief, minute by minute, beat by beat. Lovely stuff.

The Jambiz stable, along with one inductee, fills out the other roles—Glen Campbell, with a paunch, as Diana’s employer, Pops; Courtney Wilson, with a bigger paunch, as her beloved; Chris Hutchinson, with a six-pack, as her wicked and wild suitor; and Sakina, with a washboard stomach, as her deaf-and-dumb best friend and exotic dance partner.

Glen Campbell and Sakina are instantly convincing, as expected for such talents. In recent years, Campbell has eased gracefully into more supporting roles without sacrificing either dignity or vivacity (which puts him in the fine company of actors like Edward G Robinson and Lewis Stone). His style has similarly concentrated—he conveys more by doing less.

Sakina’s onstage energy, by contrast, is ceaseless but infectious (if at times excessive). She has that elusive and intangible quality—presence—which insists, like a lover, on your gaze.

Wilson, though not as seamless, warms up by the middle of the first act, and he and Davis display the familiar body language of a couple. Hutchinson fails to nuance his muscled thug, Babyface, spending his time swaggering around the stage.

Diana reflects the comfort of a director who feels at home. Trevor Nairne’s production is perfectly scaled to the confines of Centerstage—tucking a kitchen entrance upstage left, packing the walls with tchotchkes, and sending his actors to the downstage corners every so often. And there is one magical how-the-heck-did-they-do-that moment the first time Diana’s battered, broken house changes into Pops’ luminescent nightclub.

Such directorial competence is rare enough in local playhouses, but with Diana, Nairne has done much more than block actors on a well-built set. Through the judicious and precise use of the tools of theatre, Diana throws us, without reserve or apology, into the aspirations of ordinary Jamaicans—the kind of working-class citizens who don’t have the time, the diplomas or the resources to read theatre reviews in the newspaper. Life is too short, and too hard, and too unforgiving.

One scene opens with Wilson alone on the stage. His character is waiting up, late at night, for Diana to return. Nairne kills the lights except for amber rays peeking through the louvres. We must wait for Diana as well. All of us, sitting in the dark, phones at the ready, waiting for a loved one to reach home safely.

Diana captures, and by its existence preserves, and therefore elevates, such elementary truths of living in Jamaica—the life of the construction worker, the dancer, the barman and the badman. No well-turned phrase or cheap industry award can repay Brown and Nairne (although they certainly help). The only appropriate tribute is your laughter, and your tears, and your applause.

Diana runs Wednesdays to Sundays at 8pm, with additional matinees on the weekend.

Ever since the 1950s, the American movie industry has faced an existential question: how to distinguish itself from television.  Gone are the days when the local movie palace—torn-down theatres with costume-jewelry names like Regal, Rialto, Ritz and Majestic—held a monopoly on cheap thrills, public voyeurism and smoking seduction.  (Imagine having to stand in line for a fleeting, flickering glimpse of Lynn Bari’s long, well-lit legs.)

Now you can watch I Love Lucy reruns, or episodes of Laguna Beach, or a Lynn Bari movie marathon until your eyes burn, until your retina complains about the constant stimulation.  Such is the dubious bounty of American cable television.  Each new release at the cineplex must thus prove it is worth a 15-minute drive and $600 of your time and money.

The Ugly Truth, which casts Katherine Heigl in a well-worn sitcom mold of cloistered, buttoned-up executives—see TV title characters Julia Baker, Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal et alia—fails that litmus test.

Every aspect of the film—the loathe-at-first-sight plot; the workplace/apartment sets; the overuse of the close-up; the flappable boss, homely best friend and sniping supporting characters; even the title—plays like a Very Special Episode of a weekly light entertainment vehicle.  It doesn’t help that Katherine Heigl currently stars in a weekly light entertainment vehicle on ABC called Grey’s Anatomy, or that her character in The Ugly Truth, along with that of her costar, Gerard Butler, works—where else?—in television.

Even when a film justifies its inconvenience (such as last week’s enjoyable Harry Potter), it doesn’t really matter.  The differences between any two American mediums—e.g., film and television—are superficial.  With rare exception, they all propagate a consistent and specific set of lies about life in general, and American life in particular—lies designed to pacify and attract the largest possible (read: Anglo-Saxon) audience.

The Ugly Truth exists in the same fictional universe—the kind of fantasyland where people of colour are banished to the outer fringes of the screen (Ooh! There’s a black guy holding the car door for Katherine Heigl!) and eleven months is a long time to have not had sex.

A cursory moment of introspection will confirm that most of the black people you know—your family, your friends, your family friends, and your friends’ families—do not exist only in your peripheral vision.  And most of them are too old, too young, too scared, too scarred, too single or too married to have slept with someone last week.

Life in Jamaica, therefore, is nothing like The Ugly Truth, in which buxom blondes and square-jawed musclemen joyride in luxury convertibles.  That’s obvious, but not obviously harmful.

The damage is in the dose.  One cigarette makes your lungs laugh, but a pack a day will kill you (as 1950s audiences found out the hard way).  As with nicotine, so it is with celluloid.  The Ugly Truth, by itself, is a harmless diversion.  But relentless depictions of health, wealth and happiness that marginalize people who look like us, depictions blasted from a thousand screens—in our homes, our offices, our banks and bars, at the movies—well, you get the pictures.

The last time our cinnamon nation was so blanketed with psychologically damaging imagery, we had a better name for it—slavery.  There’s no surgeon-general for the cinema, so this warning will have to suffice: REPEATED EXPOSURE TO HOLLYWOOD MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.  And that’s the ugly truth.

You’re here to read a review of the new Harry Potter movie. And you’ll get one.

But first, Palace Amusement wants you to know they have a card that can save you time. Also, the tabloid Chat! says hi; Burger King wants you to buy Whoppers; Guardian Life asks for your money; Digicel reminds you it is bigger and better (than what?); KingAlarm hawks their security systems; Claro sings about their 3G network (whatever that is); KIG claims to sell cars, although it’s not clear which ones; and Palace Amusement says they have more cards—gift cards this time. They will also host your child’s birthday party.

If you found that annoying, don’t go to the cineplex.

And now, the review. Here’s the truth. You’ve read all seven of J. K. Rowling’s books. You’ve watched at least one of the previous five movies in the franchise. You, or your child, or your spouse, threw both hands triumphantly in the air when you saw the TV promotional spots. And, regardless of what is printed here, you’re going to go and see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Fortunately, the movie is highly watchable. Sturdy, even. As far as these spectacles go, it’s positively masterful. Tightly plotted, appropriately macabre, surprisingly witty. The trouble with adapting the Potter stories is that everyone already knows what happens. Titanic (1997) navigated that obstacle by putting Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio at the prow, The Passion of the Christ (2004) by obsessing over visceral detail. Director David Yates and series scribe Steve Kloves, handling a truly sacred text, instead tweak Half-Blood Prince to create unexpected, fresh moments.

One comes early, when Harry flirts with a waitress in a Muggle diner, only to be interrupted by his Hogwarts headmaster, Dumbledore. Magic was Harry’s escape from reality; now the real world reveals its own charms. Hormones run high throughout Half-Blood Prince—Hermione, Ron and Harry all have uncomfortable moments with each other (not least when Ron, having imbibed a love potion, jumps into Harry’s bed).

The romantic comedy bits provide welcome relief from the dark thrills and black magic of Half-Blood Prince. More than the earlier installments, though less than the novel, the film lingers on ugly instincts—fear and revenge, pride and prejudice, power and greed.

Around 1940, with war close at hand, many German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. Their expressionistic aesthetic fused with American paranoia to create film noir—cheap crime thrillers with high-contrast lighting, oblique camera angles and a persistent sense of pessimism, suspicion and gloom.

A similar sensibility pervades Half-Blood Prince, with its Dark Arts, dementors and Death Eaters, so Yates and his cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel borrow the film noir look. Hogwarts has never been so menacing—cathedral windows cast prison-bar shafts of light onto cold stone passages. Many scenes are staged at night. Even the posters for the film betray the heritage, its text askew, its heroes half-hidden.

Warner Bros. spent more than US$150 million just to market and distribute Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, trying to get people excited enough to line up and buy tickets. This time, the excitement is warranted. But try to be late. With a little luck (drink some Felix Felicis), you’ll skip the ads.

The Soloist is mainstream American filmmaking at its ambitious best—where oversized budgets meet oversized imaginations—and if it attempts to take on too many sweeping issues or employ too many cinematic tropes, it still manages to entertain, elucidate and edify. It is the story of four isolated men, each with grander delusions than the last, but only two of whom appear onscreen.

First, there is the white Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez (a real journalist, but here played by Robert Downey Jr), author of a human interest column called ‘Points West’. Lopez traffics in stories of seedy streets, of the disenfranchised but not dispirited denizens of the city. In the film, he lives alone but works alongside his amicable, attractive ex-wife (Catherine Keener)—in other words, he’s frustrated. And in both fiction and reality, he meets a homeless black cellist who changes his life.

The cellist is Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, portrayed without reserve (or eyebrows) by Jamie Foxx. His Ayers stumbles along both sides of the divide between genius and insanity, talking in a soft, rambling patter as his mouth tries to catch up with his mind. In both art and life, Ayers dropped out of New York’s Julliard School because of his schizophrenia. When Lopez spots him, he has a violin with two strings and a running commentary about his favourite Romantic composer.

Ludwig van Beethoven, although not seen except in marble or plastic, provides the aural topology for The Soloist. One scene revels in the concrete majesty of the city, with sky-high shots of its snaking highways and Spanish-architecture suburbs—majesty courtesy of a Beethoven symphony. There are implicit parallels drawn between Ayers and his idol—both suffering from tragic conditions (Beethoven slowly went deaf) that obstructed the pure expression of their immense talents.

Ayers is only at peace when consuming music, brilliantly conveyed halfway through The Soloist when he sits in on a rehearsal for the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra. As a hundred musicians dive into the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the screen explodes into a synesthetic sequence of light and colour.

The uninitiated might wonder how an iTunes visualization found its way into the film, but the bravura sequence distills cinema to its essence—the spatial arrangement of light through time. Moreover, it proudly appends itself to a long history of visual sound films—from Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel, Opus I (1921) and Oskar Fischinger’s Allegretto (1936) to the mid-century experimentations of Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and John Whitney’s Catalog (1961). Like all maestros, these cine-magicians knew the exhilarating potential of their medium—its ability to stimulate the eyes and soothe the heart.

The man behind The Soloist is director Joe Wright, the most ambitious of all. Within the scripted confines of one film, he provides a loving tribute to a city, a scathing exposé of societal apathy and bourgeois pretensions, a filmic concerto for a two-hundred-year-old musician, and a bond between two men who are able to save each other from the ravages of life. Such an outsized endeavour, in any art form—be it the words of Steve Lopez, the notes of Nathaniel Ayers, or the images of Joe Wright—demands your admiration, your attention and the price of admission.

Go to Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and you will be handed a pair of glasses that looks like it fell out of Back to the Future—large, square and quirky.  The weird spectacles are for the spectacle of watching the film in three dimensions—so when the sabertooth Diego gets going, he literally leaps off the screen.  As the first film screened in Jamaica using digital 3D projection, any discussion of Ice Age 3 has to start with technology.

Digital 3D is the latest attempt by American film distributors (like Ice Age’s 20th Century Fox) and global film exhibitors (in Jamaica, that means Palace Amusement) to lure people to the cineplex.  In geological time, it comes hot on the heels of other gimmicks like sound (1927), color (1929), old-fashioned 3D images (1952) and widescreen (1953).

Those changes were panicked responses to falling attendance (the Great Depression in the 1930s) and disruptive technologies (television in the 1950s).  Times change.  Now movie execs are worried about falling attendance (the global recession) and disruptive technologies (broadband Internet access and Blu-Ray discs).  Guess it’s time to trot out widescreen 3D movies again.

The first anaglyphic 3D film, 1952’s Bwana Devil, promised viewers ‘a lion in your lap.’  That same year, theatres showing Cinerama widescreen gushed that ‘you won’t be gazing at a movie screen—you’ll find yourself swept right into the picture.’  Half a century later, Ice Age 3 gives us a tiger, while the press release from Palace Amusement wants us to ‘get ready for the movie experience that puts you smack dab in the picture.’  Sound familiar?

To be fair, Ice Age 3 is a more immersive experience than, say, Ice Age 2.  Depth perception makes the desolate icescapes more sepulchral and the chase sequences more immediate—when Diego hunts an antelope early in the film, the camera hurtles along for the naked adrenaline rush.  And the limited viewing angle and ghosted images that plagued analog 3D have been banished—every seat gets a sharp image.

But immersion is not investment (although Palace’s accountants might beg to differ).  No amount of whiz-bang gadgetry can fake a good story.  Diego’s chase pales in comparison to the wildebeest stampede in the hand-drawn, two-dimensional The Lion King (what is it with jungle cats, anyway?)—three minutes of absolute terror as a young child, facing death, is saved by his father only to see him murdered, as in Hamlet, by his uncle.  It would have been riveting with sock puppets.

The plot in Ice Age 3 skates on thin ice.  Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) is taken away by a Tyrannosaurus, forcing the rest of the herd—woolly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah), opposums Crash and Eddie, and Diego (Denis Leary)—on a rescue mission.  Which would have been fine, except Ellie is massively pregnant.  And there’s a tropical jungle under the ice that nobody noticed until now.

So what?  It’s harmless fun for kids.  That’s why, of the two female characters, one is knocked up and the other is a shrew, prompting both Diego and rock rat Scrat to flee the supposed confines of domesticity.  Harmlessly teaching our young men that monogamy and marriage are to be endured, not enjoyed.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs—three-dimensional image, one-dimensional story.

The new comedy from playwright Andrew Roach bills itself as ‘mystical’, ‘hilarious’ and ‘funny’ (doesn’t the second imply the third?), but perhaps all three could be replaced by another adjective—earnest. Ras Genie, which opened June 12th at the Pantry Playhouse, is an earnest comedy—built from drywall and dedication, the actors, sweating under hot floodlights, do their best to make the show work. The tragedy is that it doesn’t.

Ras Genie has its laughs, including a clergyman (Rowan Byfield, treading worn ground) whose liturgical literature draws from scriptures old and new—i.e., the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and Beenie Man. It has a deliciously absurd idea at its core, swirling two Abrahamic faiths together for its title character, a Rastafarian jinni. And the cast tackles the material with gusto—Carlene Taylor, as exotic dancer Wingie, and Peter Heslop, as the eponymous Ras Genie, both deliver spirited performances.

But comic absurdity and attitude cannot paper over structural flaws. Ras Genie is unsure of its protagonist. More time is spent with Wingie and her desire to find love, financial security, or a way out of the ghetto. The title, curtain call and expositional passages, however, favour her protector, the Genie, who swings improbably between wanting to return to his bottle and itching to be free.

Traditional Greek theatre sometimes climaxed with a deus ex machina—a god who appeared, a little too conveniently, to solve unsolvable problems and untangle tangled plots. Modern audiences, paying for their entertainment, frown on such arbitrary endings. Ras Genie’s second act contains what we could call a jinni ex machina, who appears without explanation and whisks Ras Genie away. It makes you want to supply the stage with an extra bottle or two.

It’s a shame, because Andrew Roach sprinkles Ras Genie with the kind of cultural commentary emblematic of ‘roots’ plays and essential to keeping society healthy and its leaders honest. Believing he can’t return to his glass house, the Genie laments on his bad luck—he’s stuck in Jamaica, of all places, with “Bruce (Golding) and Portia (Simpson-Miller) and the sliding dollar.”  Some of the characters aspire to the perceived acme of Cherry Gardens and Norbrook. And there’s the aforementioned Reverend, quoting Colossians and Capleton.

Roach also has a keen ear for the vernacular of his countrymen, and an affinity for the plight of the common man (and woman), traits shared with luminaries like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Wilde and Shaw, however, never left their characters without arcs and their plots without through-lines.

Given its flaws, Ras Genie feeds the idea, popular amongst the cocktail crowd (you know, the ones who live in Cherry Gardens and Norbrook), that ‘roots’ plays are a low form of entertainment. It’s hard to disagree that our marketplace is stuffed with the genre—turn to today’s Entertainment pages—or that many are mediocre. But what this country needs is more ‘roots’ plays, not less. To hell with Oscar Wilde. We need to be drowning in indigenous drama, our lives relived for us with imagination and intermission. William Shakespeare was little more than a talented hack banging out commissioned plays for the English masses, and he turned out alright.

Ras Genie lacks the makings of great art, but not because of its roots or its aspirations. Director Dahlia Harris, playwright Andrew Roach and their cohort of thespians just need to try again, keeping in mind always the importance of being earnest.

We’ve all seen movies that lied and told us they were special, only to reveal themselves as empty and disposable—see The Proposal. (Actually, don’t.) But what about a movie that pretends to be summer schlock, only to surprise as one of the strongest and sturdiest of the season?

Such is the perverted delight of seeing Fighting, the underdog story of an underground street fighter in the underbelly of New York City. In a movie climate that panders to the lowest common denominator, the television ads and trailer showed hyperkinetic knockdowns set to rap music and baritone narration (“Now.” Pause. “Every fight.” Pause. “Brings him closer.” And so on.) The laws of box office returns also dictated the admittedly direct but misleading title. (If the film does well in America, copycat monikers like Chasing or Exploding may follow.)

Fighting isn’t really about fighting, at least not the kind with knuckles and bloody noses. It is about the way a big city makes you feel small, and a crowded nightclub reminds you that you’re alone. It’s about finding a reason to get up in the morning, and the strength to make it through the day, and someone to spend the night with. They should have called it Surviving.

The people trying to survive in Fighting are wrestling reject Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum), broken hustler Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard, using his higher registers) and burdened waitress Zulay Valez (newcomer Zulay Henao). For different reasons, they all live in New York, dreams deferred until they can make the rent. Shawn doesn’t have to worry about that—he sleeps on a park bench, his clothes in a duffel bag.

Writer-director Dito Montiel creates a strong sense of place for his troika—no easy task with a city as photographed as the Big Apple. His New York feels familiar but foreign, modern but worn, built by men but inhabited by animals. He captures the untamed energy of a Brooklyn night and the ironic quiet of a midnight subway car, roaring along rusted rails past abandoned buildings. This is not the sunny yuppie-paradise version of New York in The Proposal or the middle-class traffic hub of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The people in Montiel’s Gotham have pretty faces that hide ugly pasts, and neat clothes that hide messy identities.

Channing Tatum, with his thick nose and small ears, has the appearance and the emotional range of a brick wall—to get angry, he just gets loud. Fighting gives him top billing over Terrence Howard, a consistently brilliant and underemployed actor. Here, Howard’s performance is too mannered, but still enjoyable. The real gem is Zulay Henao, whose onscreen beauty is irresistible. Never mind that she can act—she reminds you why the cinematic close-up was invented: to create sculpture from a cheekbone, and a masterpiece from a smile.

So don’t let the ads fool you. Fighting has everything going for it—compelling characters, a unique vision of New York, and Zulay Henao. And, of course, some knuckles and bloody noses.

At some point, fatigue sets in.

Ever since we figured out that we could all do more if we each did less, most of us have been delegated (or is it relegated?) to perform specialized tasks over and over again—most of us, in other words, have jobs.  We spend nearly all our waking hours preparing for, plodding through and recovering from our jobs.  And at some point, some indeterminate but inevitable point, fatigue sets in.

For a teacher, it could hit near the end of the term, while regurgitating arcane scientific trivia to a roomful of children.  For a nurse, it could be during the graveyard shift, pacing sterile and empty hallways.  For a film critic, it is now, halfway through the summer season, sitting through ordinary yet over-budgeted orchestrations like The Proposal.

Ten weeks ago, the mislabeled romantic comedy New in Town featured a successful but frigid East Coast female executive in her forties (Renee Zellweger) who was displaced to a frigid but charming rural outpost (Minnesota), where she gradually warmed to the handy, handsome local (Harry Connick, Jr).

The Proposal, by contrast, is the story of a successful but frigid East Coast female executive in her forties (Sandra Bullock) who is displaced to a frigid but charming rural outpost (Alaska), where she gradually warms to the handy, handsome local (Ryan Reynolds).

Bullock plays Margaret Tate, whose specialized task is making executive decisions in tight clothes at a major New York publishing company.  Reynolds is her assistant, Andrew Baxter—his job is to fetch cinnamon soy lattes for Margaret.  In danger of being deported to her native Canada, Margaret proposes a quickie marriage to Andrew, followed by a quickie divorce.  A great plan, except (Spoiler alert!) they fall in love instead.

If nothing else, The Proposal is entertainment conducive to cuddling.  Of course, so is the programming on Music 99 FM, which is free.  The Proposal is also two hours of situational hijinks and light laughs, but so are four syndicated episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, which is funnier and, with some creative channel-surfing, also free (since you’re already paying for cable).  You don’t like your job, so don’t spend the money you made there on this movie.

The reason so many bad films get made is that everyone involved—the director (Anne Fletcher), the stars, the movie executives—can bank on our fatigue.  They know that, as soon as we punch out, we tune out.  We don’t really care if the movie is any good or not—at least it’s not work.

At the risk of inducing a midlife crisis, consider this question.  Why are we so desperate for distractions like The Proposal?  Are we so mortified about the consequences of quiet contemplation that we must fill all our available leisure time with liquor and libido, tickets and television?  So what if our jobs force us to compromise childhood dreams—we can’t all be astronaut rock stars.  Skip The Proposal, and live with it.

The Hollywood studio system, humming along with surprising resilience since the Great Depression, spat out 610 movies in 2008, the vast majority feature-length fictional narratives with the same actors, writers, directors, electricians, plotlines, special effects and special effects supervisors as the year before and the year before that. That’s why it’s a system—because the same movies are systematically being made over and over again.

Another six hundred American films will be released this year, and despite their tragic similarities to last year’s crop, almost every single one is being marketed, at great expense, as the newest, biggest, loudest, most exciting, explosive, expletive-filled, multiply orgasmic experience of your life.

Surprise. They’re not. Here’s three reasons why The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, on the surface a fresh action adventure, is just something old made new again:

1. It is a literal remake. Actually, it’s a remake of a remake of an adaptation of a novel. Morton Freedgood wrote a 1973 paperback thriller, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, in which four criminals hijack a New York City subway car for a million dollars. It was made into a movie the following year with Robert Shaw as the British lead hijacker, Ryder, and Walter Matthau as a crusty Transit Authority policeman who tries to catch him. Twenty-five years later, it was remade as a television movie. And finally, here it is again, with John Travolta as a more brutish, brutal Ryder, and Denzel Washington as the embattled subway dispatcher on the other side of the radio.

2. It retreads one of the most consistent, tiresome and propagandistic themes of American movies—that the U.S of A. is the greatest country on earth. The head office of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is two blocks from the White House, with good reason—friends stay close. Washington has always lent Hollywood its weight abroad, because it understands that Denzel is a far more insidious and effective colonizer than an Army division.

During World War II, the government actually commissioned films from top Hollywood directors, like John Ford and Frank Capra. Pelham’s director, Tony Scott, might as well be on the payroll, with films that routinely rhapsodize about America’s strength and spirit. He directed Top Gun (1986)—enough said. An early scene in Crimson Tide (1994) shows a Navy crew—handsome, spruced and patriotic—standing in formation in the rain. It’s great—if it doesn’t make you gag. Deja Vu (2006) was explicitly dedicated to the supposedly heroic people of New Orleans. If surviving a major hurricane constitutes heroism, we need about 2.8 million medals in a hurry.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 features sunset panoramas of the Manhattan skyline and characters who spout post-9/11 drivel like, “Makes you realize what you’re fighting for, doesn’t it?”  We get it. You love your country.

3. In addition to being directed by Tony Scott, it stars Denzel Washington. This has happened three times before—in Crimson Tide, Man on Fire (2004) and Deja Vu—although Denzel’s alter ego seems to shrink in stature each time. In Crimson Tide, he was the strapping, brilliant second-in-command of a US Navy nuclear submarine, with the power to annihilate half of Russia. Man on Fire made him an ex-CIA bodyguard who singlehandedly took down a Mexican kidnapping ring. He was a troubled and lonely ATF agent in Deja Vu—at least he still had a gun. His subway dispatcher in Pelham is never in control—under investigation by superiors, under demands by Ryder, he looks to others before making a move.

It’s big, it’s loud and it’s explosive, but you might want to let Pelham 1 2 3 pass you by. There’ll be a new movie next week, right?