Before readers write this off as more complaining, I’d like to wedge in my commendation for Good Night And Good Luck, a minimal, easy, near-perfect film.

With that out of the way, here are two unfair and accurate movie reviews:

Walk The Line

Long, boring and less eventful than any VH-1 shot at the same genre. Factually questionable in some places, meaning, I question the validity of Waylon Jenning’s (played by son and King of Leon-come-lately Shooter) long hippie hair in 1966. The outlaws were outlaws in ’66, but they had yet to dirty themselves up. I question the drug usage throughout the movie. Johnny Cash was addicted to painkillers, yet many of the scenes depict the effects of speed, and speed is what he is offered early in the movie. Was he into speed before the painkillers? The shaking hands, frantic dialing of the phone, etc. Now, painkillers can have a speedy talky-talk impact on the system, but your hands don’t tremble, nor does one fly into fits of rage. Then, the withdrawal sequence is clearly one induced by painkiller addiction. Be straight with the audience. When a the script uses nothing more descriptive than the word “pills”, it serves to smooth over the product, turning it into what the filmmakers were obviously aiming for: Lifetime Channel vanilla for the big screen. Lastly, were we not led to believe, over the years, that Johnny Cash was of the reliably copy-worthy type? Specifically the mysterious, troubled, doomed, genius, ilk? According to this movie, he was a dirt stupid, bumbling oaf with infrequent flashes of determination and creativity.

“JUUUUUUUUUNNNNEEEEE, OPEN THE DOOR JUUUUUUUUUUNNNNEEE!!!!”

“JUUUUUUUUUNNNNEEEEE, ANSWER THE PHONE, JUUUUUUUUNNNNEEEE!!!!!”

(repeat ad infinitum)

And dragging along that nag-the-paint-from-the-walls frumpasaurous wife for ten plus years of total hell….it’s a wonder she didn’t stab him in his sleep.

SYRIANA

Oil is bad? For everyone? For everything? Hey thanks. Oil companies are corrupt? Our government is corrupt??? My mind is blown. I’m all “woke the fuck up” now!!! Like Traffic, which was written/adapted by this guy, Syriana is an infuriating mixture of the obvious being stated (a service to stupid people, I suppose…in this case, REAL stupid), preachy heavy-handedness, fantasy situations (more on that later), and clumsy ensemble maximization.

What it amounts to is clevered-up Jerry Bruckheimer, or we can reverse this and lump it into the growing, and longstanding, genre of Smart Films for Dumb People.

Sure, it’s entertainment. Entertainment that’s not very entertaining, sadly, and please believe all of the other bad reviews in one regard: It is a fucking mess. It feels like watching the first 15 minutes of 20 different movies. But aside from entertainment, it’s no leap to assume that this guy is shooting for some form of realism. Instead, he comes up with fantasy. For instance, I believe that the U.S. government is capable of nefarious activity. I believe that we’ve sanctioned or carried out assassinations. I do not believe that we would assassinate the “prince of Iran” with a missile from the skies. It’s almost as if I was watching a poorly-made conspiratorial thriller from the early-70’s, thinking to myself, “Ha, that would never happen or be spoken in that manner, especially these days,” but I was watching a movie set in 2005. Points for most hilariously misleading tagline of the year (“Everything Is Connected”).