A few days ago, the Significant Other and myself saw the new movie Lord of War, a thought-provoking drama about the world of illicit arms trading (that’s gunrunning, for you folks who favor more direct language). Through the experience of seeing this movie, we learned two very important things, neither of which has much to do with gunrunning.
The first is that Sean Means, the Salt Lake Tribune film critic who called this well-made, intelligent movie “morally bankrupt” before giving it a rating of “no stars” — a worse rating than he gave The Dukes of Hazzard, by the way — is an idiot.
And the second thing we learned is that most of the other people sharing the theater with us were idiots, too.
Take, for example, the parents of the eight-year-old girl who was seated directly behind me. Yes, that’s right, a couple of supposed grown-ups apparently thought that a R-rated film about an amoral, coke-snorting arms dealer and the genuinely reprehensible people who buy his wares — a film that includes, among other things, a close-up of a man’s liquified brains dripping off a broken window — was appropriate viewing for their third-grader. Now, I’m not one of those prudish, “think of the children” types who believes that kids should be shielded from any entertainment stronger than an episode of ALF. My own parents took me to my first R-rated movie when I was about ten or eleven (the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, as I recall), and I turned out just fine. However, I do believe that there are (and should continue to be) movies that are clearly not intended for a young audience. Partly, it’s because these movies often include imagery that young ones might find hard to take (like, say, a man’s brains dripping off a window), but even more important is the fact that grown-up movies often deal with subject matter that is of no interest to children, or that is simply beyond their experience and ability to process. That eight-year-old behind me was bored out of her skull by Lord of War, as evidenced by the way she kept kicking the back of my seat until I was forced to go all gruff and ogre-y on her. Her two older sisters, who looked to be in their early teens, weren’t grooving on it, either, judging from the heavy sighs that kept issuing from their direction. The only things in the movie they seemed to approve of were small children and a pair of hyenas that menace Nicholas Cage at one point, all of which earned an approving, “Oh, cuuu-ute.”
I will give their parents a degree of credit for thinking to go ask the theater manager if they could swap movies — I heard them debating over whether this was possible before they went to ask — but when the answer presumably came back in the negative, they made the worst possible decision and continued to watch Lord of War anyway, white-knuckling it all the way to the miserable end. Me, I would’ve asked for my money back, taken the kids to something they actually wanted to see, and then, if I wanted to finish Lord of War, come back later sans children. Or, if no refund was possible, I would’ve simply eaten the cost of the tickets and gone home, rather than continuing to subject my kids to an inappropriate movie and my fellow audience members to their boredom. But then, I like to think that I am not an idiot.
If the irresponsible parents behind me weren’t bad enough, I had a teenage boy in front of me who earned his idiot’s badge by text-messaging throughout the last hour of the film without bothering to cover his cell phone’s brightly glowing screen. Plenty of others have documented the havoc wreaked upon our society by the ubiquitous cell phone, so I won’t go on about this too much, other than to note that whatever these phones use to back-light their screens is amazing stuff. This kid’s tiny little flip-phone was generating enough glare to wash out the image thrown by the movie projector, an impressive — if incredibly annoying — feat of micro-engineering. If it was up to me, I’d deal with this sort of nonsense by installing jamming devices in all cinemas, live theaters, and concert halls. I hear this is already happening in some countries.
Finally, I never will understand some people’s senses of humor. Lord of War is being advertised as somewhat of a comedy, and it certainly contains plenty of intentional humor — I myself was greatly amused by a timelapse sequence of African villagers dismantling an abandoned airplane — but there was a lot more laughing going on in the theater than I thought this film warranted. And it wasn’t the “Oh my God, this movie is bad” style of laughter, either. It was, “Gee, that’s really funny how a man behaves when he’s hit rock-bottom in his moral and spiritual crisis.” It was also, “Gee, that’s really funny how that man’s body jerks and twists as he’s being machine-gunned.” It can only be explained as more idiocy.
Anne thinks I misread the situation, that this inappropriate laughter was actually the nervous chuckle you sometimes hear when people are confronted with something that’s a little too harsh to immediately process, but I’m not so sure. It reminded me too much of the debate I used to have with fans of the movie Pulp Fiction, who seemed utterly baffled that I didn’t think the scene where a guy gets his head blown off by accident in the back seat of Sam Jackson’s car was the funniest thing ever put on film. I thought then and I think now that we have a big problem in this country when it comes to the portrayal of violence in our popular entertainments. I’m not at all opposed to it, and I don’t even think it always needs to be shown in a Serious-with-a-capital-S manner. But it is troubling to me that so many people find it laughable when someone’s head explodes on-screen. It’s not funny. I can’t conceive of any set-up, circumstance or plot development in a live-action film when this might be funny. (Cartoons are another matter, given their general disregard of the laws of nature.) And every time I’m in a room full of people who apparently find such things funny, well, it makes me uncomfortable. Because I don’t know what it says about those people that they find carnage funny, or about myself that I don’t. But that’s perhaps something to ponder another time.
