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| I watched In the Valley of Elah last night. :( by Creexuls, a monster >:3 05/26/2008, 3:36pm PDT | ||||
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| For a large portion of the movie it's really more of a detective story type mystery, with Tommy Lee Jones as an ex military police dude who had two sons in the military, one died 10 years ago, and he just got word that the other went AWOL after having returned from Iraq. At first they figure he ran off with some girl, but a half hour into the movie they find his charred and dismembered body nearby, close to the military base.
Overall this movie is the exact same as Redacted, but a little more subtle, until the very end. Until that point, Tommy Lee Jones actually has a pretty good performance as a military type dad who isn't really a major hardass, but on his trip out to the army base (a couple days of driving according to his nagging ass bitch wife), he stops at a nearby school(?) to rehang the flag, because apparently it had been hung upside down. He shows the dude (a mexican guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!) how to do it right, and then informs him that an upside down flag is the international sign of distress. Now, we should have the point by then, but he goes on, saying "it means something is very very wrong here." I'm sure this is just character development really. Jones' performance is good as the military dad who is shocked to discover these things about his son getting into drugs and being abusive to strippers at the titty bar, but he tries to keep his cool so he can keep up with the investigation. Meanwhile, his wife is played by Susan Sarandon, whose skills are fading with age. He calls home to her every once in a while just to have her bitch at him, like when she finds out their son is dead she sobs directly into the phone and says YOU COULDN'T LEAVE ME AT LEAST ONE SON. She comes to the base to see the body, which is shown in a few one second cuts that let you see the face is pretty much burned off completely so it's just a faceless red mass, and the arms and legs are torn off, and there is exposed bone and animals were eating the body. So Sarandon sees him and she is all sad of course and "is that all that's left?" Then a military says "I'm deeply sorry for your loss," and she just turns to him and is like YOU DON'T HAVE A SON DO YOU? Tommy Lee Jones leads her away immediately, almost as if he improvising the scene, just trying to end it before she got more bitchy and unbearable. So he gets to the base and Charlize Theron is averaged up so that she looks somewhat plain at a distance, but when the camera gets close your cock instinctively gets harrrrrrrrrrrrrrd. But anyway, she's a small town cop who has to deal with sexism in the wurrrrrrrkplace and cops don't appreciate her as you can see by the unimportant cases they give her. Tommy Lee Jones eventually teams up with her to investigate who could have killed him, and they go over credit card records bloo bloo. Tommy Lee (.................JONES) also gets his son's cell phone from his room at the base and has a tech guy pull convenient videos from it, the techie saying that he knows a process that takes a long time but will get the videos off so they can be watched, and he will mail them to Jones. Gee I hope these videos don't show increasingly escalating dehumanizing of the son and troops. In the videos, there's a point somewhere between seeing burned corpses and torturing wounded prisoners for fun where they become completely insane and traumatized by seeing dead people in Iraq, and having to run over people lest they stop and be attacked by RPGs. Charlize Theron plays a hardass trying to get RESULTS while the uncaring mean cops try to hold her back and trying to make this investigation look like a personal vendetta (they may have assassinated a GANG LEADER o_o etc), all while being a single mother to her son, who Jones visits in a scene where he tells the son about the story of David and Goliath fighting in the valley of Elah, and so the kid learns to be less afraid of the dark. Most of this works pretty well for the most part just as a mystery movie. There are signs that since Jones' son was into drugs that a mexican drug gang killed him. At the end they reveal (of course?) that it was one of his own army friends, in true hollywood fashion stabs the guy seemingly out of nowhere just because a couple of them were fighting while drunk and stoned. He confesses in a way as if he just doesn't know what happened, showing that hollywood writers actually believe the temporary insanity defense. The killer guy says he is sorry about it, and also tells a story about how Jones' son would stick his fingers into the bullet wound of a prisoner while laughing and all the troops got good yuks out of it, because the troops are dehumanized by their war traumas (I'm sure the writer of this movie knows about it), and some of the troops say YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT WE WENT THROUGH OVER THERE (war?). So I don't know, is war bad? Halfway through the movie, when they're investigating the son's drugs and doing meth, a package arrives at home sent from the son, it looks like a big puffy package and apparently addressed to himself. Jones tells nagging harpy not to open it, probably thinking that it's some drug package or something he probably doesn't want to see. At the end when he returns home he finds it opened, and inside is a folded flag all dirted with sand so it's from Iraq. Jones goes back to the flagpole at the school or whatever it is, as seen earlier in the movie, and raises it with the mexican guy there, then he duct tapes the rope to the pole. Mexican guy says, "shouldn't we take it down later?" and Jones says "no, we'll just leave it like that." I'm thinking that it being upside down would be really too obvious and stupid, it's just going to be the old American flag. Zoom out pan up and sure enough IT'S FUCKING UPSIDE DOWN. Cut to black, with the words "directed by Paul Haggis." It's almost like an apology, as if to say "yeah that happened, but what do you expect from the guy who made Crash?" So clearly, this is just oscar bait. The movie is oscarbating all over the faces of the audience. This movie will end the war just as much as Crash ended racism. |
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