Hancock (2008) – written by Vincent Ngo, directed by Peter Berg, starring Will Smith

(It was raining all day and I watched this at home on my TV. My favourite kind of expensive movie involves science fiction fastened to contemporary reality. Though it only received 42 % approval rating on the Tomatometer, that's a number that often works well for me. I always figure that means politics were involved and split the vote. I figured I would like it and I did. After I finished watching it, I watched the good parts again.)

This 2008 movie is a lot like the 1942 movie Casablanca. It focuses on practical altruism and consists of a drunk hero, an angel hero and a good man hero. These characters are compelled towards each other and towards good works. In both centuries, the drunk is upset with the angel for letting him believe for so long that he was alone in the world.

Instead of being in opposition to the Nazis etc., the Hancock characters are in opposition to plain old criminals, to devastating loss in people's private lives, and to the banal evils of pharmaceutical companies. None of these heroes are very interested in public appreciation and all of them are generous in giving the criminals/ outsiders/ pharmaceutical companies a healthy benefit of the doubt before they let their pride or righteousness have a go. The forces of opposition are barely a threat to these super strong characters; so the characters themselves, satisfyingly, become the main force of action and their own worst enemies – struggles among the gods. They are also the primary joke tellers.

In Casablanca, the only way the drunk can become worthy of the angel's love again is to send her away on a plane with the good man while he, the drunk, remains on the ground in the fog. The angel’s love will help the good man make the world a better place. It is a resonating paradox conceived by the sobered drunk to the shock but silent admiration of the angel and to the oblivion but safety of the good man.

Luckily, Hancock is 21st century science fiction and is not so romantic. Here, actions are transparent and choices are made in consensus. The drunk doesn’t send the angel away, the drunk and the angel move away from each other because it turns out they are physically weaker together – less useful and more prone to injury. (We all sort of understand that an angel and a drunk are enormously more of a pain in the ass than an angel and a good man.) It is less of a sacrifice of one’s destiny for the greater good than a reasonable choice for one's own health and happiness. Here, destiny is something that goes on and on and is as predictable as gravity; the choices made against it become the small mysteries. In Hancock, the intimacy of friendship between three people is as compelling and as full of depth as Casablanca's private romantic love between two people.

In Hancock, the good man (who is a public relations man) helps the drunk (who is a superhero) improve his low-on-public-approval image to the city. This accomplishment is achieved early on in the movie. Though this change has useful benefits, for instance the drunk is less of an overt asshole to the people whose lives he is saving and he is also breaking less stuff, it becomes obvious that this is not the main point of the movie. It's pretty obvious from the beginning that he is generally a good person who is just having a hard time in his very long life . We see that the change in public perception doesn't change his heart at all.

That's the thing about being an altruistic asshole - you don't worry so much when your path doesn't correspond to public approval ratings and it doesn't move you so much when it does. We see a group of civilians around the drunk, applauding him for the first time in years after he saves several lives in a bank robbery (a typical act for him) while simultaneously not offending the victims, the police or the public (the new part). He tries to smile in gratitude to the applause, to be decent, but his looks like a smile of an alien trying to blend in on its second day on earth, the inevetiable and unintentional mockery of the human smile. Sometimes a disinterest in public approval is for the best and sometimes it's for the worst, it's always hard to know when to listen and when not to. But it is probably always for the best to try to not break so much stuff along the way.

It's pretty interesting to watch a character in a Hollywood movie undergo the most typical Hollywood character transition, only for us to then be shown how shallow that transition is for the character. But we are just at the halfway point here, we are just getting started. It turns out that it's very moving to see a character like that, this drunk, go after something deeper.

The Hurt Locker (2008) - directed by Kathryn Bigelow

(I watched this when it first came out on DVD. I watched it alone on a Saturday. The movie is entertaining and is kind of about a “cowboy”. Half way through, I had to go meet a friend for a drink. I walked down the street to the bar with my cowboy boots on still to the beat of this rock n’ roll war movie. The next day, I watched the second half.)

“The Hurt Locker” is framed by an opening quote, "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." This is the worst part of the movie - this quote. War is much worse than a drug and much more complicated. I'm sure that the book that this quote comes from is a wonderfully complicated book. But here, framing this entire movie, it is too simple.

This quote would have been great in front of “Apocalypse Now” because clearly there are a lot of different kinds of drugs going on there (including a great deal of confusion-inducing non-addictive ones) so there it would have been a wide open statement, or in front of “Tin Cup” because that movie stars Kevin Costner and is about a golf war. But apart from the pleasure-drug thumping soundtrack of “The Hurt Locker”, this movie shows a complexity of human action way beyond the movements of cocaine.

Apart from this, it is a really good movie. Instead of high realism, it is like a storybook story about a person who lives some of the time in an astronaut-like bomb suit in the Iraq and some of the time with a grocery cart in a suburban neighborhood somewhere in America.

The person in the bomb suit, James, is not like the other bomb-defusers. The other bomb-defusers are more like bomb-detonators. Instead of advancing themselves, they advance a robot that can detonate a bomb with a controlled explosion while they stay at a safe distance. These bomb-detonators approach the bomb only if all else fails. The bad side of detonation is that the buildings and streets get blow up.

But our man James is on the ground - with all the bad things that being on the ground entails. He walks up to ticking bombs with a peculiar comfort and manually defuses the bombs with his bare hands. We see the great pleasure and rewards of being a master at a difficult skill. All this to the horror of his team who think of James as having a death wish that will bring them all closer to death.

Some people seem to have bodies that automatically react to or are drawn towards explosive situations. Rather than the idea of a noble or heroic brain in action, I think sometimes it can be more like an involuntary movement of one’s body. They jump into pools when they see a kid struggling before they notice that they still have a cigarette in their mouth, they put their bodies between people in a fight before their mind questions if this is a useful idea for anyone, they sometimes walk instinctively towards a ticking bomb. I think it is fair to say that people like this would probably find it more painful to hear about bomb explosions from the safety of their homes, over the radio, than to be physically present where the trouble is and allow their bodies to walk forward and react.

The smartest part of this movie is that it is made very clear that James struggles to understand why he is the way he is, why his body moves so effortlessly towards these deadly bombs. It is too bad that that quote understands – everything else about the movie suggests something much more complicated. Mainly what James knows for sure is that he is really good at defusing bombs and that there are a lot of bombs around him.

The hope that one is "doing good" with their actions can sometimes make for deeper trouble than the trouble made by thrills and testosterone - the uncynical belief that one is making the world a better place, that one is saving children, stopping fights, defusing bombs. I think it is one of the great contemporary fantasies of war - soldiers as bomb-defusers. We know really well the horribly intentioned war villains, but we don’t as often see the good intentions gone horribly wrong. Here, we see James’ good intentioned initiatives, his masterful abilities and his dangerous mistakes and we get to focus on these things in a clear and strangely gentle way.

But my favourite part of the movie came when our man’s bomb squad almost crosses friendly fire in the desert with an ambiguously dressed group of soldiers. As the camera gets closer (and the situation defuses), we noticed that the head soldier of this group is the movie star Ralph Fiennes. As he says hello to our man in his British accent, I assume that he is playing himself as a British movie star among a crew shooting a war movie inside a war movie. And I was, like, Yeah! Let’s go war-movie-reality-tv-realism-reversal! But it turned out they were just playing British soldiers.