2001-03-04 - Evening
Had another terrifying brush with �80s nostalgia last night. One of the performers at the comedy club I went to was wearing nylon cargo pants--shiny black, with neon blue piping and about 1,000 zippers all over, just what the well-dressed Miami coke dealer is wearing--which I haven�t seen on anyone for 13 years at least. I frankly couldn�t tell if the guy (who was very funny, by the way) intended them as a serious fashion statement, or if he was wearing them because he�s a hip young comedian and the pants are, like, ironic.
Dubya hasn�t said anything Reaganesquely stupid this week--or if he has, I haven�t heard about it and thus my self-imposed news blackout on anything Shrub-related is holding fast--so I�m guessing those pants were just the Zeitgeist�s way of keeping me reminded that It�s Morning in America, again. Gee, thanks.
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Saw Traffic this afternoon. If you haven�t seen it yet and don�t want me to spoil it, this is your cue to stop reading.
I was going to write a full review of it here, but every attempt to do so spiraled immediately into yet another barely coherent rant about the stupidity of the War on Drugs. I think you�ll agree that there are plenty of those on the Web already. So, I�ll keep it short.
The one thing this movie makes clearer than any other drug movie I�ve seen (pro or con) is that the "War" on Drugs is a war only in the Orwellian sense. No one directly involved in it believes it can be won, or even that it should be won--all that matters is that a state of war continue to exist. That way the U.S. government can keep on gutting the Constitution--because, by golly, this is a WAR we�re fighting!--and the drug lords can keep on getting rich, since restricting supply without reducing demand just drives profit margins up, up, up. The movie�s various plotlines all have that "Oceania is at war with Eurasia ... Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia" tone to them, with the bad guys constantly shifting allegiances and the good guys either going bad or burning out. You leave the theater feeling that the whole thing is a sham. Which it is--a big, blood-soaked sham.
Benicio Del Toro is awesome. Michael Douglas is too, although I didn�t really buy him as a conservative judge--probably because he is, after all, Michael Douglas, who should just go and have EARNEST HOLLYWOOD LIBERAL tattooed on his forehead already. In the end it doesn�t matter, though, since the sort of "Daddy, what�s Vietnam?" naivete his character has coming in can be found all over the political spectrum. (In that same vein, the cameos by politicos like Orrin Hatch and Barbara Boxer are a wonderfully wicked touch--I�d have given my left ball to see the looks on their faces in the theater when they realized how the director had made them look like fools.)
Worst part of the movie: the teenage girl�s honor-student-to-crackwhore-to-12-stepper storyline--particularly the part at the end where Michael Douglas and Amy Irving (as her parents) are at the AA meeting with her, but only to "support her, and to listen," as they so smugly proclaim. Huh? The movie doesn�t say it outright, but it strongly implies that the Douglas character is himself an alcoholic (anyone who "needs" his three scotches in the evening is an alkie in my book). Addiction is addiction is addiction, Mikey. As for the Irving character, the fact that she was a drug-using hippie in the �60s and thus couldn�t cope with her own daughter�s rebelliousness rates an 11-out-of-10 on the Miguelito Slap-o-meter. It would have been nice to see these two (Boomer) characters admitting their mistakes at the same time their child is facing up to hers, but I guess showing Boomers behaving responsibly is too much to expect from Hollywood.
Best part of the movie: the scene on the plane where Michael Douglas, as the newly appointed federal drug czar, demands new ideas and "thinking outside the box" from his aides and is greeted with dead silence. No one charged with fighting the drug war dares think outside the box--that might lead to something rational, and we can�t have that, can we?
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