This week I missed a couple of teaching days due to illness. Feeling the body aches, headaches, chills, and hacking drawing nigh (and realizing I was way too tardy on the Airborne Immunity Booster) I rented four films from our locally closing chapter of Hollywood Video (this recession is brutal).

Doubt

Watchmen

The Fifth Element

Battlefield Earth

Now, you know I’m going to review them for you. But a little background first.

The former two seem pretty innocuous, right? “But what in the name of human decency did you rent the latter two for?” you must be asking.

Doubt and Watchmen I rented because my friend, Chris, kept pestering me that they were both must-see movies. The Fifth Element and Battlefield Earth, well … like Pandora, I was only curious about what was inside the box. Sure, I’d heard many horrible tales, but they couldn’t all be true, could they? You understand, I was feeling kinda melancholy over the closure of our town’s Hollywood Video, and I was running a temperature.

First, to the Blue Ray’s.

Doubt
Meryl Streep is the best female actress alive, and she’s still under-appreciated. In fact, it should be a court-ordered mandate that all sprightly young Hollywood actresses must reverently bow their head any time they’re within a city block of Meryl. “Mommy, is that lady an actress like me?” asks Vanessa Hudgens, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, Hilary Duff, etc. “No, sweetheart. She’s … you wouldn’t understand.”

Streep intones a full Baltimore accent that made Maryland natives feel phony. And when her Sister Aloysius finally cracks for the first time, on the very last frame of the film, it’s a crescendo note as clear as a thousand falling icicles piercing her frozen soul.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is quietly tossing his hat into the fray as today’s leading actor, by the way. Unfortunately for PSH, there’s a dragon guarding that gateway by the name of “Double D” Lewis, and he’ll drink your milkshake. Daniel Day’s untouchable.

I also liked that I went into this film expecting full-on catholic bashing, and came out wowed (that’s what I get for prejudging). Like all masterful works, Doubt never tells you what to think or feel, it just allows you to draw whatever conclusions you will draw all on your own. The characters are fully fleshed in three dimensions far beyond any measure the CG enthusiasts will ever appreciate.

Watchmen
Didn’t like it. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I think I’m smart enough to identify when something is trying to be smart but only achieves pretension. “Yeah, but, this is about questioning our paradigms. Our values. What’s happened to us? Where’s Superman gone?”

Spare me. Alan Moore’s an adult now (beard and all), and he understands what his writing was then and what it is now. All young men, even writers Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, experience the “angry young man” syndrome. It’s when a young man’s eyes are first opened to a world that includes evil, injustice, intolerance, etc. And he’s mortified. It is a time of simplistic solutions mixed with limited experience. It blames everyone older for having failed to fix everything. I also call this period of a boy’s life the “I can do it better than You, God” phase.

So what changes when you get older? With perspective comes humility. You’re not powerful enough to change anything, save for yourself. You’re the one that’s meant to change all along.

Costumed superheroes are a childish voice for this type of diagesis, anyway. Most adults understand that superheroes are metaphors that have nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. It’s like coffee and salt. Both might be on the breakfast table, but they exist independently of each other and fulfill separate uses.

Now, to the DVD’s.

Battlefield Earth
To say I began this movie without any outside bias would be like saying Rush Limbaugh approaches his golden microphone with an open mind each day. This film has had more scorn and bad press dumped on it than any I can ever remember.

Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s unfounded. While by no means a breakthrough in cinema, BE isn’t anymore hokey and plodding than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sorry. There have been a lot better films in the genre, and a lot worse, too.

Removed from the stigma of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, BE stands on it’s own as another sci-fi adventure, and certainly not the worst film of all time. Please. That’s so hyperbolic.

The art direction’s totally acceptable, Roger Christian’s narrative is cogent and steady (BE flows a lot like Planet of the Apes), and the effects feel a lot more rooted to me because they aren’t so CG reliant. But it’s the score that’s surely the biggest detractor from the film (talk about your musically tin ear).

It’s not John Travolta.

Travolta’s actually the best thing in the movie, channeling righteously entitled alien indignation. The Psychlos were an entertaining bunch of movie villains all the way around. Yes, I know, they’re a Ferengi/Klingon hybrid. Fine. Whatever.

The Fifth Element
Do you remember that classmate you went to school with? He or she wasn’t popular or unpopular. This person would just float into your circle of friends for a while, but never really seem to be on the same page with whatever it was that made your group cohesive. In short, he or she just didn’t quite have a fully formed sense of who they were, and thus, didn’t quite get it.

Yeah, that’s Luc Besson you went to school with.

See, good ol’ Luc is French. And he really likes Hollywood movies (or at least some fictionalized fantasy of what Hollywood movies are). But he doesn’t quite get it. You know what I mean? He’s not wholly untalented. He’s even got a few cool filmic ideas. But, a master storyteller, Luc is not.

By throwing together several cool-looking comic book images atop a fairly borrowed plot, we get The Fifth Element. Luc likes Blade Runner. Check. Luc likes Starwars. Check. Luc likes Lord of the Rings. Check. Yeah, I know the LOTR movies came out after TFE. But believe me, sci-fi Tolkien is all up in there.

Besson also didn’t have a second act. Great hook. Acceptable first act. Missing. Blank. Vacuous. Ridiculous third act.

Lastly, Luc. Musical selection is not your forte. Very few guys can crosspollinate their genre pieces with other genre music. Actually, I can only think of one. Quentin Tarantino.

Well, there we are. On the whole, not a bad way to spend a couple of days lying sickly on the floor.

ps – Happy Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and New Year, everybody