Amusing mayhem

While poring over the movie equivalent of horseracing forms to play pick-the-Oscar-winners, I was struck by the monotony of the themes of the supposedly best films of the year: psychopathic slaughter.

I’m no prude when it comes to blood-and-guts on the screen, which anyway has a long tradition. Watching Javier Bardem tweeze a bullet out of his leg in No Country for Old Men reminded me of a John Wayne movie where he does a similar tough-guy act and has whiskey poured over his wound to cauterize it. A lot of the mayhem is cartoonish, and one can be perversely amused by the Grand Guignol aspects of people getting bashed with bowling pins or shot in the forehead with a pressurized tube. You half expect them to get up afterward like Daffy Duck and say, Ow! That thmarth!

Nonetheless, you start to wonder what’s going on in a culture that can’t get enough of entertainment of that sort at the same time as huge numbers of entirely real people are getting killed half a world away. A few films about some other kind of topic or protagonists who were not ALL anti-hero sociopaths would be reassuring.

Two favorites of mine are the stunning Away from Her with Julie Christie as a woman slipping into Alzheimer’s, once favored for a statuette, which probably will lose to a lurid portrayal of drug- and booze-addled Edith Piaf; and Persepolis, which turns the Iranian clerical revolution and Iran-Iraq war into stand-up comedy without sacrificing its seriousness. Apparently, these movies are too adult in subject and treatment to please American audiences.