In The Valley of Elah

I went to see In The Valley of Elah last week -it was quite good, except for a couple of things I'll get to later. First, the good...Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron are excellent. Jones is great at playing the tough guy who cares deeply but never shows his emotions. How much he feels may be shown in his actions (going to look for his son and digging and picking until he finds the truth) but he'll be damned if he comes out and says anything. As for Charlize Theron, while I thought her Oscar for Monster was well-deserved, she hasn't done much since to impress me-until now. Here's the story: Tommy Lee Jones' son is stationed in Iraq-he returns home with his until but almost immediately disappears. Jones goes to investigate the disappearance, as he was a MP when he was in the Army, but just a day after he gets to New Mexico from Tennessee, his son's remains are found out in the desert, cut into pieces and burned. What happened? He goes to the local police department, where Charlize Theron is a detective who wants to help, but is caught between her job, the local Army base and her fellow officers who believe she got the job by sleeping with the boss. Theron is great in this part-there's none of that "will they sleep together" stuff with Jones-he's very prim around her and there's no sexual tension, they are two people who want to find out the truth. And she so focused on her job that she's smart enough to learn from the old MP and use what he knows and what he can teach her-and that's what I liked about the movie. It's an investigation into what happened and is very much about people doing their jobs. Jones is a father, so it's his job to find out what happened. Theron is a detective, so it's her job to find out what happened. The son is a soldier...and this is where it's a bit murky. Is it his job to kill people? To torture people? What happens if by doing your job, you turn into someone you don't want to be? The son's nickname of Doc turns into a cruel joke, his friends and fellow soldiers turn out to be anything but and there is no happy ending for anyone, which actually worked out well for me-a movie about war (especially the one we are in now) can't and shouldn't have a happy and resolved ending-and the small scenes we see of the way (retrieved from his son's cell phone) are glimpses of hell-things that no one wants to beleive or see happen. What would it be like to see someone you love turn into a monster? Turn into someone capable of torture, of hate nad of heartlessness and then hated themselves for it? How bad would that be? I can't say I think this movies answers those questions-and I'm not sure it should-sometimes the asking is enough.
However, there were two things that bothered (and here's a warning that there are major spoilers ahead)...if his friends killed him by stabbing him at 42 times (and probably more) and then cut his body apart and burned it-wouldn't they have blood on them? If I have the timing right from the movie, they went to the strip club, had a fw drinks and got kicked out. Then they went driving around and went to see the whore-then they went out to the desert where they got into the fight and killed him and they the killers were hungry and took his credit cards to go eat, then went back to the base where they got rid of their clothes and went to sleep. Okay, so if they had on the same clothes they had on when they killed as when they went to the chicken place-no one noticed that they were covered in blood and maybe gasoline? And maybe looked a little scratched up from dragging a body into the desert? Come on, even in an Army base town, that had to stick out a little. And the other point is what happened at the end with the flag-Jones tells a handyman that to fly a nation's flag upside-down is to indicate that you are in deep shit and need help to get out-an extreme form of an SOS. I was really hoping at the end that I wouldn't have to see the flag upside-down, it's clear that this is war is a clusterfuck of monumental proportions, so we didn't need to see the flag to demonstrate that-it was a cliche in a movie that up until that point had been remarkably free of them.

I don't really want to talk about my netflix movie, which was House of D. There was a good movie in there, trying to get out, but didn't make it. Tea Leoni was great as a mother who recently lost her husband, Anton Yelchin was not great as the main character, a 13 year-old struggling to find his way and whose only friend is Pappass-a retarded Robin Williams, which should tell you all you need to know. Any movie where Robin Williams plays a character who is A) Retarded B) Quirky, C) A Rebel Who Is Trying To Change The System shoud be avoided at all costs and I should have known better. After seeing a great movie like The Lives of Others and then to watch this was such a letdown that felt mildly depressed afterwards. David Duchovny had pretty good to very good actors and he let most of them down. I will say that I liked Erykah Badu as the prisoner yelling at Anton Yelchin from her cell in the Women's House of Detention-that was probably the high point of the movie. From his directing and writing on The X-Files, I know he can do better, so I hope he improves because if it's worse than this...the mind boggles.