Movie reviews

Now that awards season is in full swing (though I couldn't even watch the Globes), I'm catching up on my movie-viewing. I finally saw Children of Men and The Last King of Scotland. So it's been a bit of a downer.
Both were great in there own ways, fictionalizing the real and imagined terrors of the world in which we live, have lived and will live.
Children of Men is a warning of what life becomes when society gives up on it's future. In this case, that is represented by an inexplicable global infertility that threatens to wipe out the human race within a generation. The violent political strife between the English government and the droves of "fugees" from Eastern Europe and Africa (apparently), demonstrated in graphic scenes of terrorism and urban warfare, make a clear point that we don't need to be childless to be hopeless. The thesis of the film (if I may be so formal) seems to be that alienation and complacency result a moribund civilization: the scenes of characters going through the motions of a life without dreams or a future, without compassion for others (beyond celebrities they've never met) seems to invite the inevitable collapse of society around their ears. The lesson questions lifestyles that negate human interaction as well as politics that create us vs. Them. Ultimately the only ways we can survive as individuals, societies or a species is by embracing each other.
The Last King of Scotland, "based on real people and events," is a warning to anyone who thinks he can make a game of nation-building (ah-HEM). Though it's concerned with the aftermath of British colonialism in Africa, the lesson clearly has current applications. Fundamentally, there is a problem when any nation tries to impose their way of doing business on another, whether that's out of post-colonial guilt or a sincere desire to improve lives. There's an even bigger problem when you half-ass the job so you can spend the rest of your time screwing around in exotic locales. That may be too literal an interpretation, and obviously the film is entertaining and disturbing if the characters are taken at face value. I just can't help but think that (beyond providing an "access point" for white audiences) there's a reason to stick attractive white people in peril in Africa (The Constant Gardener and Blood Diamond are other examples of this), it can't help but make a political or social comment. Perhaps, in spite of our political correctness and under the guise of shining light on some issue or another, we (White, European, Western) can't help but see Africa without the spectre of the Heart of Darkness looming over it. It remains, in so many unfortunate ways, a place where it seems law has no rule and the most terrible things can happen. We perpetuate and revel in that notion. Our new manifest destiny becomes saving this damned place. Why else would Angelina and Brad and Madonna make a crusade out of their efforts there? I'm not saying the help isn't needed; it just seems the needs and the lacks of that place are fetishized in our culture as the ultimate Other, a place so opposite and broken that not even democracy works there. It would be interesting to see Africa through it's own eyes, on it's own terms.