Stupid Is As Stupid Does

I suppose that the moment when Die Another Day lost me was in the scene with the diamonds. James Bond and one of his flunkies are examining some diamonds taken off an enemy agent, when the flunky mentions that the diamonds are chemically identical to “African Conflict Diamonds.” Now, this is true. It is also true that these diamonds are chemically identical to every other diamonds in the world, whether they are “African Conflict Diamonds” or not. The American Museum of Natural History reminds us that all diamonds are made of crystallized carbon, with trace elements of boron and nitrogen. Now, maybe, the crack team from “CSI” could tell us whether the trace elements in these diamonds are similar to the “African Conflict Diamonds” or not, but they’d need a huge lab and a mass spectrometer and God knows what all. It is not something that, for the love of God, one could tell just by looking at the damned things.

Die Another Day has actually done its homework here. “African Conflict Diamonds” are not some invention; they are sold by unscrupulous rebels in places like Sierra Leone to support their rebellion and the assorted mayhem they engage in. (The United Nations has an excellent website, complete with pictures of a mutilated child and boy soldiers impressed into the rebellion; it does a good job of explaining the issue and what the United Nations is doing about it, which is bugspit.) But the diamonds are just a McGuffin, naturally, Die Another Day doesn’t care about them any more than the audience does. The only people who would care about the diamonds would be the people of Sierra Leone, and the CIA Factbook reports that the per capita annual GDP of Sierra Leone is $500, which makes it dodgy to buy tickets, and there isn’t any electricity to run the projector, so that’s that.

I can hear you now, I really can. “Who the hell cares?” “It’s a James Bond movie for the love of God!” “It’s supposed to be mindless entertainment! Nobody cares about the chemical composition of diamonds, or the per capita annual GDP of Sierra Leone.” “It’s a popcorn movie, a roller coaster ride, a chance for escapism.” “All we want to see in a movie are explosions and Halle Berry’s breasts, so go to hell, you stupid movie critic, you.”

You know something? Fine. I don’t care. If you’re going to see Die Another Day anyway, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. Nobody, seriously, is going to take anything I say seriously on this movie. The kind of people who like this sort of movie are going to accept it no matter what. The kind of people who don’t care for James Bond movies aren’t ever going to see Die Another Day anyway. And the kind of usually intelligent, discerning, aware moviegoers who might listen to what I have to say on the subject already know what this movie is going to be like, and where it is going, and more or less how it is going to get there.

I would, however, at this time like to address the “popcorn movie” audience. Let me tell you something. I love you people. Really, I do. I am proud that I live in a country that is the home of the popcorn movie. I am glad every day that I wake up in the morning that I don’t live in France, where they couldn’t make a popcorn movie if it was the difference between getting invaded or not. I am glad every time I go to a movie that I don’t live in Iran, which apparently has a thriving movie culture but whose cinematic culture would disapprove of Halle Berry’s breasts. I am glad every time that I sit down and write a review that I don’t live in Scandinavia or Turkey or India or anyplace else where they make horrible movies. America makes the best, most entertaining movies in the world, and I am glad of that, and would put the worst of our popcorn movies against the best of anything else out there.

But you people are killing me.

This is my point. It is OK to like popcorn movies; I am not saying anything different. It is OK to ignore, or even to scorn, the critical community. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s your First Amendment right. If you go and see only those movies that the critics have universally panned, and tell your friends how much you enjoyed it, that’s OK, too. I am not telling you how to live your lives here.

But you have to realize one thing. What you do matters, what you see matters, and what you think about it matters. If you go to movies that are basically stupid, and embrace them wholeheartedly largely because of their stupidity, if you loudly state that you don’t care whether the movies you see are stupid, well, guess what happens? You’re going to get a lot of stupid movies shoved down your throat, that’s what’s going to happen. This much is true; the people who run the movie studios aren’t stupid, at least not all of the time, and they know a trend when they see one. If the demand for stupid movies keeps increasing, the supply of stupid movies is going to increase, and then all you’re ever going to get are stupid movies, and you had just better like them. (You don’t think that Hollywood wasn’t noticing the other weekend when Jackass was the #1 movie in the country?)

So I urge you, implore you, and beseech you to turn on a little tiny bit of your mind when you’re watching Die Another Day. Just a little bit. Pay attention to the things that you see. Realize that there is no such thing as an armored hovercraft, and that hovercraft exert air pressure against the ground, which would be enough to set off landmines. Realize that one cannot spend 14 months in a North Korean prison camp and then stroll into the Hong Kong Yacht Club as though nothing had happened. Realize that one can’t actually have one’s facial appearence changed by DNA transplantation. Realize that one can’t wander around outside in the Arctic without a parka for any length of time and then jump into bed with even the perky Rosamund Pike without experiencing some, er, shrinkage.

This is not much of a review, but there is not much else to say. There’s no point in recapitulating the plot; nobody really cares, and anyway, the whole thing is just a shaggy-dog story dressed up with seemingly random elements out of the headlines. (Although it is interesting to see the North Koreans, of all people, grasping the strategic significance of missile defense.) There’s no point in talking about the acting. Pierce Brosnan is an adequate James Bond and that’s about all. The main villain is somebody named Toby Stephens, who is basically the poor man’s Jeremy Northam. (I am still steamed that nobody has thought to cast David Bowie as a Bond villain.) Halle Berry is apparently taking a vacation from acting here; she is not required to do anything but look good, and she does.

If you’re not asking for much, Die Another Day is a lot of fun. It has the double entendres and extreme action and gadgety cars and explosions and preposterous plots that can be interesting if you’re in the right mood. But it is essentially an empty film, without passion or purpose or principles or any of the other good words that start with “P”. Like Bond’s Aston Martin, Die Another Day is shiny and glittery, has a lot of horsepower and high-tech gadgets, but there’s nothing inside. It doesn’t insult the intelligence of its audience so much as it ignores it, takes it for granted, pretends that it doesn’t exist.

If that’s something you don’t mind, well, then, Die Another Day is perfect for you. Just be warned. The less you ask of your movies, the stupider they will be.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.