Vantage Point

Pete Travis, USA, 2008
2 out of 4 stars

After some perfunctory exposition, the president is assassinated, while introducing an anti-terror conference in Spain! Then a building is blow up! And yet, soon, we are asking, why should we care?

More precisely, we're asking what exactly we're supposed to care about, or even how. In fact, I think the spectacular terribleness of the incident was one of the only things that kept my interest in the first place.

Having shown us this tragedy, the film rewinds back to show it (and some preliminary goings-on) from another perspective, and does so again two or three more times until finally reaching a conclusion. Of course there is some repetition, although this is kept to a minimum, it still wore on my patience to see much of any material repeated in what is only a 90 minute film.

So we soon come to the problem of what character to focus on, and the answer seems to be none of them (although this answer seems to change again in the ending scene). Although many have commendable qualities (in one case, to an improbable and annoying degree), the film mostly seems to be about displaying a certain imagined cleverness as far as the "how'd it happen?" question goes. If anything, this just served to alienate me from the film. As usual, it didn't help that the most potentially interesting "twist" was spoiled in the trailers, which I saw a few months ago.

Politically, Vantage Point is all over the place, and not even in a particularly interesting manner. On the one hand, the president, when we finally meet him, seems to be some kind of liberal fantasy, showing an restraint in military matters that only the deluded could truly expect from, say, a President Obama. On the other hand, the filmmakers seem to enjoy showing the degradation of a reporter who intentionally bucks the corporate line on air and rails against censorship to her boss; what's strange is they seem to be agreeing with her at that point, so did they just fail to realize that it would seem as if they were delivering her her comeuppance afterward? It's quite hard to say.

As usual, the ending is also quite objectionable, as you don't realize until the film has concluded that the goalposts, so to speak, have been shifted in a way that raises uncomfortable questions about our nation's priorities (in contrast, once again, to the more internationalist ideology that the film sporadically promotes).

Source: United uncut pan-and-scan airplane video
30 Jun, 1:20 PM

Thank You for Smoking

Jason Reitman, USA, 2005
2.5 out of 4 stars

To no one's surprise, I wasn't able to get this one written until quite a while after having actually watched it, so it will be slight, to say the least. This is the first movie in a while that I can remember watching from start to finish on an airplane. It was certainly an effort, as I had to hold the headphones to my ears to understand what was being said. Luckily, since this was British Airways, no censorship was employed, meaning that there was both sex and bad language. What was the most curious was the way in which they chose to deal with screen ratio. Some scenes were in widescreen, but then others were cut off at the sides. The weirdest thing was when this transition occurred in the middle of a given scene!

Okay, as for the movie itself, I'm not even sure if it could be classified as satire. It features a rather engaging antihero, the tobacco lobbyist, who faces enemies that are largely bufoonish. As our sympathy is continually placed with the lobbyist, we start to wonder who is being lambasted, exactly. There does actually seem to be a larger point that the filmmakers want to make about the system, but I'm not entirely sure if pays off. The humor is wry, although not as dark as it could be. Most of the enjoyment comes just from watching the man work and not caring if it's "right."

Source: Jaguar airplane video
17 August, 4:45 PM