85 - The Last Supper review

Caught this on FX at 2 in the morning, wrote the review afterwards. Not my best, but decent considering I threw it together around 4 am.





The Last Supper almost works. It’s a bitter ‘almost’, as buried deep within the film’s flaws lies a valuable message. At least, I think it does; the execution comes off as so haphazard that I’d be reluctant to bet money on one message, just to hear the writer had another in mind.

Speaking of execution, the plot: Five Iowa grad students, Jude (Cameron Diaz), Paulie (Annabeth Gish), Luke (Courtney B. Vance), Marc (Jonathan Penner), and Pete (Ron Eldard), share the same house and often invite people over for dinner and politics. These are seriously pompous left-wingers, the sort who can’t get off the topic because reminding themselves how brilliant and compassionate they are functions as twenty-four hours worth of masturbation.

One evening, a truck driver (Bill Paxton) gives Pete a lift, and receives a dinner invitation. Even though the driver obviously has a few screws loose, that doesn’t stop them from ridiculing his service in the Gulf War, nor do they drop the subject when he expresses admiration for Adolf Hiter. The driver pulls a knife, and the ensuing struggle winds up dead with a blade in his side.
At first the group freaks out, but when calm returns, they feel strangely good about themselves. After all, he was a rotten man, it was sort of self-defense, and he fits right in the garden in the back yard. For once, they feel like they’ve actually accomplished something, which may be similar to the feeling I got recently when an acquaintance said "Fuck the NRA," and I seriously responded "No, fuck you!" Unlike me, who will probably won’t do that again for a couple of weeks, they decide to invite people whose politics they disagree with over for dinner (read: conservative Republicans), and if they can’t change their mind, they serve them some wine poisoned with arsenic.

Of course, any very political person can tell you that changing one’s entire political beliefs through the course of one conversation is virtually impossible. The grad students may feel like they are giving these people a chance, but in reality they have selected them for execution. Never do they consider that their views would be odious to many others, nor do they realize the irony in their favorite question, "If you could kill Adolf Hilter before he had done any damage, would you?" Their behavior echoes Hitler more than that of any Neo-Nazi they invite to dinner, with their fascist monopoly on the truth and distribution of death sentences. I mean, when you think about it, Hitler only murdered the extreme elements that were destroying German society, right?

While The Last Supper may take an unusually negative look towards the type of liberal that Hollywood normally fawns over, it does bear that leftward slant that is a prerequisite for any studio produced political film. While having dinner guests over who argue for a fair tax plan or an aggressive defense policy would be effective, most visitors have malevolent streaks a mile wide. Thinking seriously, when was the last time a conservative you know argued in favor of Hitler, said that the homeless deserve to be beaten to death, and that AIDS was the perfect cure for homosexuality? The blithe portrayal of every conservative as a venomous moron who knows no discourse other than the invective kind is preposterous, and seriously weakens the film’s moral core. It may criticize those on the left who would play God with human life, but it deeply sympathizes with that way of thinking, advocating tolerance of evil conservatives instead of their murder.

Observe the ending, where a Rush Limbaugh like figure (Ron Perlman) misses his flight and comes to dinner. Though well known for his right-wing rants, he cheerily dismisses this image to his hosts, matter-of-factly declaring that both the extreme right and left are bad, and that in reality, we should all be aiming for the center. First off, if you’ve ever met any serious right-wing types, you’d know they think less of moderates than they do liberals. Second, this constitutes a very cowardly cop-out on the part of the filmmakers. Why not have a seriously smart conservative that puts them in their place not through describing the need for moderation, in reality the bastion of the dimwitted and the weak, but by knocking them off their high horses and illustrating how they’ve become worse than those they murder? The Last Supper is on to something, but like its characters, allows itself to get way out of hand.

2 out of 5

84

Mel Gibson's fortune as of late just went from bad to worse: Rob Schneider announces his refusal to ever work with Gibson. I'm sure Mel is seriously broken up over that one.

Is it just me, or do all these people demanding that Gibson be boycotted forever simply reinforce a lot of those bad stereotypes? What a fascist thing to do; we don't like him, so fuck him, his career is over.

Though he obviously doesn't think highly of Jews, he apologize and offered to work with Jewish leaders to promote understanding (whatever that means, it sounds nice). Encouraging tolerance should be about educating people and changing their minds, not bullying them into keeping their thoughts to themselves. Need I even mention how notoriously anti-Christian the mainstream film industry has been over the past 20 years?

On top of this, does anybody actually care that he was going more than 40 miles over the speed limit, loaded on tequilla? What do his wife and seven children think of dad's less than enviable behavior?

83 - The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada review

Whatever way you cut it, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is embarrassingly rigorous attempt to imitate a Sam Peckinpah film. The imitation of any auteur is a task best not attempted, and Peckinpah may be amongst the most difficult. His films were drenched in dirt, sweat, and blood, populated by desperate, raw characters that were trapped in battles they knew were hopeless. To watch one of Peckinpah’s truer efforts such as The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia takes you through the hellish mind and soul of a director whose personal demons were too intense to bear. The surprise comes not with the fact that first time feature director Tommy Lee Jones fails, but that he fails so badly.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada begins as two Border Patrol guards stumble upon a murdered man’s body. Local rancher Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones, speaking few English words) identifies the body as Melquiades Estrada (Julio Cedillo), an illegal immigrant who was both Pete’s ranch hand and best friend. Enraged, he launches an investigation, at first only discovering how little the local rednecks care about Melquiades’ death. Through no skill of his own, Pete learns that his comrade was accidentally gunned down by Mike Norton (Barry Pepper, looking especially gaunt), a newly arrived Border Patrol guard from Cincinnati.

Jones foregoes any and all tact while illustrating his message. Just so we understand how we are supposed to feel about Norton, included are sequences where he mounts his totally disinterested wife, punches a migrant woman in the face, and masturbates in the desert, not to mention the accidental shooting. Other Border Patrol agents fare little better. Meanwhile, all of the illegal immigrants are good, kindhearted people looking for a break, none of the drug runners or violent felons that populate real life batches of border jumpers. At a time when a number of illegal immigrants greater than the German army that invaded the Soviet Union are crossing the U.S. border every year, the thinking of this films exists so far outside the realm of reason that I won’t even attempt to decipher the logic behind it.

Pete promptly kidnaps Norton and digs up Melquiades’ corpse. See, Pete swore to Melquiades that if he were to die in America, Pete would return the body to his hometown for burial. Since Norton fired the fatal shots, he gets to bury the body, presumably so Pete can teach him a lesson, though the film is too pretentious to get bogged down with little details such as objective, reasonable plotting, or useful exposition. Along the way they encounter the usual assortment of movie weirdoes, and even manage to work a couple of awkward pieces of poetic justice into the mix.

The chronology jumps awkwardly from one piece of time to another, for no discernable reason other than to increase indie street-cred. Sprinkled throughout the first half are scenes of a few local yokels, such as Norton’s bored wife (January Jones), the racist sheriff (Dwight Yoakam), and the village bicycle waitress (Melissa Leo). They primarily serve to pad the running time, and in the second half are nearly forgotten altogether, another wasted opportunity for the relevance and power the film so desperately desires.

About halfway through, I realized something else was wrong, as if they weren’t already enough. While the photography is good, the colors and angles are far too vivid for this type of film. Peckinpah’s westerns were filmed in dull Technicolor, giving the picture a rugged, filthy look that did wonders for the glum atmosphere. By comparison, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada looks clean and sterile, everything simply in the need of a good scrubbing instead the nuclear explosion which would put the sorry Peckinpah world out of its misery.

What Jones really needed to know about Peckinpah’s world was that the impact came not from the violence or macho characters, but from tragedy and horrific desperation, not to mention some wild gunfights (totally absent here). Jones substitutes grossness for brutality and dead silence for meaningful dialogue, decisions that result in an empty click instead of a bang. Instead of visceral heartbreak, we get an egregious political message and a frustratingly ambiguous ending. Jones may have studied Peckinpah, and he may somewhat understands the aesthetic, but he completely misses the humanity, and thus, the whole reason we give a damn.

1.5 out of 5