Category: Movie Reviews

What if a movie comes out and you want people to see it because it has some really good stuff in it, but the ending is criminally irrational…what would you do? Would you tell people to see it, knowing that they are going to guffaw at the ending, as my audience did? Or would you tell people not to see it, thereby causing a loyal reader to miss the gripping story that comprises at least three-fourths of the film?

That is, the greater part of The Call is a good thriller. Lots of edge-of-your-seat stuff. Lots of oh-no-don’t-do-that stuff. And then and then and then, the filmmaker throws reason to the wind and plunges into an abyss of nonsense a middle schooler could see through. I know, because the middle schoolers who sat in front of me were savvy enough to see how stupid the ending was. (What were their parents thinking to let them see a movie like this?)

Here’s the story.

Halle Berry is Jordan, a Los Angeles 911 operator. This is a very stressful and important job. Everything from “The nurse won’t give my wife medicine” to “There’s an intruder in my house” goes down. It’s the intruder in the house that gets our attention. Very bad things happen.

Worse things happen. Then some more.

Then a super mentally-ill man named Michael kidnaps a pretty blonde girl and stuffs her in the trunk of his car. It’s very tense and scary and yes, I cried. The victim calls 911. Jordan takes the call. Eventually (it’s very exciting) there is enough information to find out who the perp is, but not enough to find out where he and the kidnap victim are, darn those untraceable Tracphones!

Jordan figures it out, and this is where the movie goes all nutty on us. Don’t read any more if you are planning to see this film because I am about to tell you every squalid detail. (If you do see the movie, you might want to get a head start out to the parking lot when you see Jordan replaying the call over and over again, because the plot is about to go all to pieces.)

It’s nighttime now, and the 911 office is dark and deserted. Only Jordan is there listening to the call over and over again to try to find that little clue that will tell her where Casey is. Because of course at night they shut down the 911 call center and everyone goes home. What?

In any case, there she is playing and re-playing the call (like Jonesy does in Red October) and suddenly notices something (again, like Jonesy), she will (obviously!) choose to go investigate all by herself without (again, obviously!) telling anyone where she is going. Never mind she doesn’t carry. Never mind it’s two in the dark a.m. I don’t know about you, but I see no reason such a person should maybe tell someone (1) what she heard on the 911 call when she amped up the treble, and (2) where she is going.

What she heard was a clanking sound. How this translates into “Santa Clarita Hills” is unclear. When I hear a clanking noise, for instance, I think cow bells or perhaps “random clanking sound.” Jordan hears: “that metal piece that secures the rope to the flag pole, but now it’s not secured, so it’s just clanking in the wind.” Let’s try again: when I think “that metal piece that secures the rope to the flag pole, but now it’s not secured, so it’s just clanking in the wind,” I think “school” or perhaps “city hall,” or, scarier–since this is a scary movie–“abandoned sports stadium.” Jordan is smarter than I am and thinks, “Perp’s country house in the Santa Clarita Hills,” because of course all psychotic kidnappers with country homes fly Old Glory. They’re patriotic that way.

Whatever. Off she goes into the night, sans-a-pistol, to confront a known murderer who is about to kill a little girl. Is there a word for this level of dereliction of duty that doesn’t start with stupid and end with involuntary manslaughter?

She does this even though her boyfriend is an officer assigned to and working on this exact case, even though the entire LAPD, no doubt the Sheriff, no doubt the FBI are out in force, Amber Alert blaring, to find the poor little girl who is about to be scalped and buried.

You see, the Mike-o The Psycho wants a blonde wig he can make out with, because he misses his beautiful blonde sister who died of cancer in her teens, and he’s been looking for someone whose hair is just that shade and just that length to molest like he molested his sister. Let me clarify—it’s the hair he wants to molest, not the girl. He has no use for the girl.

He’s built an underground love nest for his hair fetish fiesta and he keeps killing girls trying to get the exact right hair. Shoot! This one has a little blue dye on it. Gotta kill someone else!

Is this level of psychosis really invisible to everyone in the mentally ill person’s regular life? His wife? His boss? (I’ll admit, in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stellan Skarsgård plays a guy who likes a little murder with his sex, but he lives alone. Here, the man has a wife and two little kids and Mrs. Mike is all, “Why are you bad policemen here? My husband is everything wonderful.” You know, seriously—and this is just a bit of advice—if the police are in your face saying, “Where is your husband?” the proper thing to do is to tell them where in the world the guy is.)

So, moving on. Michael hauls Casey down to this underground bunker, ties her up in a dentist sort of chair. He keeps putting a mask on her that looks like an ether-delivery mask, but she never loses consciousness.

Suddenly, there’s Jordan! And here’s a funny picture:

Look closely. Jordan sees something that might be metal. She bends down to take a closer look, and what do you know, if you brush away all kinds of leaves and dirt, there is a door into the earth! But hold the phone, Bad Mike took Casey kicking and screaming down through this very trap door just a little while ago, so it wouldn’t be covered with dirt and leaves.

But that’s just a silly glitch. Let’s get back to the real nonsense.

The entire law enforcement might of California’s greatest city is out in force and only an overworked emotionally-fragile 911 operator can find the perp. And, as in the inane Safe Haven, a very slight woman (Ms. Berry looks strikingly smaller than everyone else in the film.) is able to knock out a six-foot-one guy in his thirties who’s bent on very bloody murder. She conks him on the head three times with what appears to be a wig-head.* I have a wig-head, but mine is made of Styrofoam, so I’ve got to give it to this guy—he knows quality wig-heads, as does anyone who is searching for a home-made wig just like his sister’s hair, but she’s dead, so now he can’t just go buy a nice blonde wig to make out with, he has to take it off a living victim, because if the blood isn’t still flowing to the hair when you take it off, the hair dies, but if you take the entire scalp (not that lame Indian scalp—those guys only took enough to prove they’d killed someone, and I’ve always wondered whether this was more or less barbaric than the way David proved his value to Saul—but the whole thing, now there’s a man who loves his sistah!), you end up with a living wig you can really get into. Who knew?

Naturally, as in every movie of this genre, the bad guy may be down, but he is definitely not out. There are a tense few moments where we think Casey and Jordan will escape topside, but the raging lunatic is up and at ‘em! They get out of the bunker! Now he’s out too! But wait, Casey brought the scissors! She stabs him in the back! He pulls the scissors out of his back and goes to stab her! She stands there in her blue bra and doesn’t move! She doesn’t scream! Her bra is blue! He is about to stab Casey, when—luckily!—Jordan kicks him into the opening! He falls fifteen feet and lands on his back in the chalk-victim position!

They shut the trap door over him, pull over a giant boulder to secure it, call 911 and wait for the cops to come get the body.

If only they had! That would have rocked. They could have become pals and gone to see a movie on Friday night! They could have sat behind middle schoolers who had no business being at this movie, but their parents are so exhausted from working so many jobs to try to keep the house they shouldn’t have bought in 2005, they just say, “Go to the movies.”

No. That’s not what happened. They don’t shut the door and they don’t haul over a boulder, and, I’m sorry to be the one who tells you, but they don’t call 911. And, because Jordan failed to tell anyone she was going to go all Bernhard Goetz on us and Do The Vigilante, the cops don’t burst onto the property just in time to see that Da Girl Cop did it all by her skinny self.

Instead, they go down into the bunker (where Michael fell when they kicked him into the hole), haul the perp’s limp and bleeding body (remember the scissors?) back to the dentist’s chair, tape his wrists to the arm rests, and secure him with some giant chain they happened to find. He goes, “When will the cops be here?” and they reply, “What cops?” Then Casey says (remember, she’s 15), “I escaped. Jordan found me. You disappeared.”

They look at each other conspiratorially, because, after all, they are now conspirators. He shouts, “You can’t do that!” and Jordan goes, “We already have.” They slam and lock the door behind them. I was waiting for him to scream, “For the love of God, Montresor!” Alas, I was disappointed, he just screams. The credits rolled; the audience burst into laughter.

Now usually, I stay for all the credits, and I wish I had stayed for these to run through, because now I am left wondering if there was an extra scene, as appears in so many films these days. I didn’t stay (Mommy guilt—had to get home), so now I am home wondering if they put the correct extra scene in (if any).

The correct way to end this film is for the women to walk away from the duct-taped murderer, climb the ladder to the outside world, shut the trap door over him, pull a boulder over the door to secure it (because after all, perps are always able to escape even when they have been cracked on the head, then stabbed in the vitals with six-inch blades, then duct-taped to dental chairs and chained and locked in, because they are perps), and–just a hint for your future reference in case anyone ever tries to scalp you in an underground evil-dentist lab—call the police. It’s so easy to remember this number. It’s 9.1.1. Babies can learn it. (“Two year old saves Mother by calling Cops!” etc.) Then, they could hug each other and wait for the police.

Or, since cell service is apparently spotty in the Santa Clarita hills, they could drive down the hill, then call the cops and direct them where to go. Then, they would wait for the police to retrieve the gravely-injured Michael and watch as the ambulance comes and then goes with his extremely-damaged and highly-culpable self. Then, Casey in her blue bra, and Jordan in her shirt and jacket-that-she-never-offered-to-Casey would wave to the ambulance and exchange another conspiratorial glance followed by a heartfelt and certainly deserved girl hug.

Then Jordan would say, “Come on, Casey, let’s go home,” and we could see Casey being returned to her weeping mother. Seriously, that would have been a great ending. No one is going to have a problem with them having secured this guy to the dental chair to await his (heh heh) professional extraction.

We didn’t get that. We got a horrible ending that leaves us with a bad taste, because (listen up, Hollywood), We aren’t stupid. What Casey and Jordan have just done has a name: murder. It’s not self-defense, because they are not in danger anymore. It is not excusable, and there are a lot of reasons (other than the applicable criminal statutes) why it is not excusable: this level of mental illness needs to be analyzed. We need to interrogate this guy to find out who the biological owners were of the “living wigs” he keeps in his fridge. We need to get this guy on some psychotropic drugs to clear his mind so we can find out what happened and why. We need to know whether his parents are at all to blame for his relationship to his dying sister. Who photographs their son attempting to French kiss his chemo-bald dying sister? What sort of illness is that? If it’s hereditary (as it seems it might be), what intervention needs to be taken for those poor little babies back at Michael’s house? And so on.

Furthermore, a fifteen-year-old girl is not going to be able to withstand any sort of questioning that includes inquiries like this: “How did you escape from him when your hands were duct-taped to the arm rests and he was cutting into your scalp? However did you manage that, honey?” She will not be able to avoid this line of questioning–the cut on her scalp is long and surgically incised. She is going to need an entire seam of stitches. (It doesn’t bleed very much. This bothered me. You know, when you pick at something on your face–not that you do this–it just bleeds and bleeds and you’re sitting there with little bits of tissue and wondering, Can I go out now? So you’d think that if someone sliced a five-inch cut into your forehead with intent to scalp you, there’d be a little more blood.) Still ranting here: there is no Statute of Limitations on murder, so Jordan is trusting the rest of her life to a girl who is going to grow up and Realize One Day that what they did back there on that Bad Night was super-duper evil. She is going to want to Come Clean. (“Whatcha Gonna Do?”)

Nor are the police going to be far away. The underground Wig House of Horrors (blood everywhere, and a lab area that would have made Dr. Mengele proud) is on (or rather under) Michael’s country property. The cops are going to be all over the place up there looking for evidence. The LAPD is going to think, “Hey, he’s killed a bunch of people. Maybe he buried them out there.”

There will be cadaver dogs! I just Googled cadaver dogs and guess what—they find dead people. I read this: “Dogs found a single human vertebra, thirty years old, buried twelve inches deep.” This small bone was secreted on a plot of ground 300 feet by 150 feet and the dogs zeroed in, which tells us that death-smelling K9s are going to have no trouble whatever locating a freshly-decomposing human body not buried underground, but only sitting underground. In fact, since Jordan and Casey don’t take the trouble to tape his mouth (if they had, he couldn’t have asked them when the cops were coming, and if he hadn’t done that, Jordan wouldn’t have been able to utter her last damning line, which was supposed to be epic, but failed so very badly), Michael may still be screaming himself hoarse when the cops arrive in the morning. Super smeller dogs suddenly superfluous! Regular ears will do the trick, but at least then the charges against the women can be lowered to attempted murder.

In any case, Jordan, as she walks away with our blue-bra’d victim, is twenty-four hours at the most from being criminally charged. Solicitation, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, interfering with police work, lying to officers, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and murder or attempted murder spring instantly to mind.

A simple call to 911 would have made her a hero, got her interviewed by Piers. That would have been the right call, and the audience knows it, even though we hate that Brit sticking his nose into our business seven nights a week. Or Nancy Grace: “That poor sweet little girl all alone and taped–taped–to a chair with her scalp being sliced open. What do you think, Ms. Bloodthirsty Prosecutor?”

People are always telling me “You think too far,” but I reject that. If you are going to spend millions of dollars making and marketing a movie, please do your audience the kindness of thinking carefully about the ending. This scriptwriter and director wanted so badly to have Jordan’s gotcha-line, “We already have,” end the movie (you’ll see why if you see the movie), they failed to realize that their audiences need more than a catchy sendoff. The audience wants believability—wants the story to make sense. We want to go home feeling morally fulfilled, not dirty and complicit in the murder of a very ill, if multifelonious, human being.

My apologies to the filmmakers if there is an extra credit-scene. But really, even if there is, the audience cannot be expected to stay through the credits just so that you can go, “Wait, wait! Here’s the real ending.” Avengers got the extra scene right. In fact, let’s make it a rule that the last scene of every movie should have the cast gathered together eating shawarma, just so we know it’s really over.

If you go, let me know if there is a movie-fixing scene during the credits. Don’t take your middle schoolers.

* I’m not sure it’s a wig-head. I might need to see the movie again to clarify this point.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen.

Remarkably insulting to the viewer, this movie assumes you know nothing about anything. However, in case you want to know how not to behave in a crisis, here are some key points:

If your husband is abusing you, do not seek help or call 911. Instead, wait until he tries to strangle you, then plunge a knife into his back. When you see him bleeding on the floor, run for it. Continue not to call 911, but go to a neighbor’s house and ask her to assist you in flight. After all, he might get up, rinse off the blood and race after you to the bus station where you have stuffed a plastic bag full of everything you own under your shirt so that you look pregnant.

You’d better run, because he’s a cop and he is able, on his sole and own authority to put out a nationwide APB on you, accompanied by a Wanted Poster with your picture that says you have been charged with First Degree Murder. He can do this even though no one has died and you have not been charged with anything. No one in any of the thousands of police offices around the country will want to know details, and his own superiors will not discover this nonsense for months. When they do, nothing more will be said than, “Give me your gun and your badge,” as if he doesn’t have another weapon. No messages will be sent to any police agencies around the country to indicate that the poster is false. No one will worry that a creep of this caliber is likely to keep trying to find his runaway wife and that, if he does find her, he might not be super sweet about it.

When you arrive in a little North Carolina town with a plastic bag full of clothes and nowhere to stay, you will sleep under the pier at the beach. The next day, you will look fresh and happy and be able to get a job by asking at a diner. The owner will say, “I might could find you something,” which was the most believable moment in the film—not that there would be work available, but that, if there were, this is how a lady in a North Carolina diner would say so.

The owner of the diner will hire you even though you go by “Katie” with no last name, and have no identification and no social, so you can’t fill out a W-4. Does Mr. Sparks think we will let all this slide right on by? Would you hire someone who could give you no last name? Would you rent her a house?

The realtor in North Carolina did. She rented a house (apparently for cash) to a young woman with no last name, no car, no luggage, no credit check, no identification, and no bank account. It’s a dump deep in the woods, or so we are meant to think, but it’s not that far off the road, because Katie walks from there to town and back all the time. I’d comment about the state of the floor, but I’ve lived in Carolina in a house with a floor similarly unstable, so I’ll leave that alone. I will say, however, that if you step on the floor, it breaks, and you see a large rodent with a long tail underneath, do not leave it uncovered all night. Katie does. What? This is fanciful fiction at its most sappy–good thing–so the muskrat or whatever it is doesn’t come inside. (Remind me to tell you how Laura Szilasi and I once killed a gigantic rat in Varsity Village.)

Naturally, Alex, the owner of the store falls in love with her. Naturally his dead wife’s ghost appears to Katie all through the movie, even before we have met Alex. Naturally Alex lives adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean where his son plays on the pier every day, but has never learned to swim. Since they have nothing to do all day but mind a sparsely-shopped-in (unless the Greyhound is in town) store, you’d think they could have taken a little time out over the years to teach the kid to swim.

But back to the advice: if you are dating a man whose wife has died, definitely don’t ask what her name was, and definitely don’t ask to see a picture of her. That way you can be surprised when it turns out that the tall brown-haired woman who has befriended you turns out to be her ghost. Also, definitely don’t mention to anyone that you have a tall brown-haired friend named Jo who happens to live out in the woods with you. (When we first meet Jo, she comes on very personal and strong. I had been alerted that she was a ghost or I would have assumed she was a lonely Lesbian just out to make a new friend of the secretive and very cute new girl.)

When your new and twitterpated boyfriend sees your picture in the police station, he will be alarmed that you are wanted for murder. Don’t worry! Once you tell him that’s all a big mistake, he’ll drop the matter and leave his children with you. Don’t let it cross your mind that when you plunged a knife into your abusive husband’s back, he might actually have bled out. Also do not stop to wonder about the character of a man who will leave his children with someone who is wanted for murder.

When the knifed-husband who sends fake Wanted Posters around the country breaks into your neighbor’s home and listens to her answering machine, definitely run back up to Boston and kill her for (a) still using an answering machine, and (b) not erasing your old message. (That doesn’t happen, but a side trip to Boston would have made the movie a tad more exciting, if not more believable.)

By the way, we are alerted that Katie weighs 105 pounds. I don’t know about her (I have never weighed 105 pounds, except possibly for a brief instant on passing through 104 to 106), but most girls of this level of underweight are probably not able (with the lone exception of Demi Moore in her G.I. Jane days, if not today) to fight off police officers who are strangling them. Katie does it not once, but twice, and on the second time she manages to throw him into the ocean, but don’t worry, he recovers, if briefly.

I would have enjoyed the part about her reading The China Study and talking about veganism if the whole “we have free books that people leave” hadn’t been put into the script for the sole purpose of having her read The China Study and then comment about how gorillas eat kale. After talking about the glories of eating plants only, Katie kills a nonoffending fish for the joy of stabbing it, thereby softening the harsh self-righteousness of evangelizing vegans.

I might also (though this is less certain) have enjoyed the overly sentimental part about how Alex’s wife has a room over the store that no one is allowed to go in—it’s a shrine to Dead Mom–except that there’s a desk in the room in which are those now de rigueur letters that dying parents must write to their children, annual letters to be given them on this birthday and then that, plus letters to the daughter on her wedding day and to the son on his graduation day (as if the son won’t marry; as if the daughter won’t graduate; or worse, as if the son’s marriage doesn’t matter any more than the daughter’s graduation does, than which almost nothing is more sexist or cynical), all of which only exist so that at the end Alex can give Katie an envelope on which is written “To Her.” I’m definitely going to write a letter right now to the woman who is going to marry Brian after I die/run away/go loony.

Dear You,
Lottery win, you! He’s sweet, kind, and will do anything you ask and believe anything you say. He brings flowers at the appropriate moments. He will never call you fat. He snores and talks about global warming a little more than I’d like, but he makes $X,000 per year, and that should keep you in enough shopping (or movie attendance) to get over it. He doesn’t care if you cook or clean, but if you do, he’ll like that. Did I mention that he snores? Anyway, happiness to you. The kids are fine. Don’t worry about them. Make them pay their own way through college. Go to Hawaii as often as you can. Take earplugs, because at home you can just move to another room when the snoring gets to you, but in a hotel, you’re stuck.
Love,
Sharon

Back to the movie: what a stupid movie. At least, unlike other Nicholas Sparks movies, the main characters don’t die, although there are moments we’re sort of hoping. The abusive husband dies, but no one cares. The little girl almost dies in a fire. The son comes around, even though he previously hated Katie, which was amazing, because he didn’t even know she was a runaway married lady without identification fleeing the police.

Possibly worse than Nutcracker in 3D, (my previous standard for Worst Movie Ever) because that one could at least be blamed on an artiste funded by Europeans—so maybe I was missing some symbolism or profoundness of thought. There’s no excuse for this one.

It is possible this movie might be more believable, hence less stupid, had it been set in the 1930s, when young women might not have carried ID, would not have had social security numbers, would have assumed a police department so corrupt that a woman who showed up Boston General would be blamed for her own strangle marks, where someone might could get a job or rent a house without references, a last name, or a credit check.

The ghost-of-the-dead-wife thing we just have to let slide. There’s no excuse for it, and no reason for it other than to startle Katie at the end to find that the woman she’s been taking long walks in the woods with is actually the dead mother of her boyfriend’s children. It’s not like in Sixth Sense where there is some plot movement linked to the dead people. Nor is it like in A Beautiful Mind, where imaginary friends can be blamed on mental illness. I think Mr. Sparks was just wondering how far he could go and still have people make a movie of his nonsense, as if The Notebook wasn’t quite far enough.

There’s a sex scene (with sheeting).

This is a serviceable rom-com or rom-drom (if you like). Mr. Cooper and Ms. Lawrence are beautiful people, and their chemistry is nice. They dance together, which is lovely. De Niro is in it, as an OCD father whose purpose in life is to bet on the Philadelphia Eagles.

But. The. Problem. Is. . . You’ve Got Mail shows us what a rom-com is supposed to be, and what it’s supposed to have, which is a happy ending. If you’ve seen Silver Linings, you’re saying, “Hey! Wait a minute, that is a happy ending! They get together, don’t they?”

Well, sure. But look: in You’ve Got Mail, the main characters bring something to each other: Joe Fox (F-O-X) is a debonair gazillionaire who owns Giganto-Books, where Kathleen can live in peace, joy, books, and money for the rest of her life, and Kathleen brings a sweet joyful spirit that will fill all the sad empty places of Joe’s hitherto not-worth-living life. They will have beautiful babies who will be registered for fancy Manhattan preschools before they are born. The family will vacation in the South of France. He will buy her a crocodile Birkin.

Pat and Tiffany bond over their shared meds, and I can go there–I know Prozac makes you foggy, been there, made the co-pay. But it’s not something to build a life on, you know what I mean? Their poor kids are going to be trundled between grandparents, come-and-go babysitters, and Head Start, while Pat and Tiffany alternate in in-patient rehab. There will be knock-down drag-outs, TROs, and, eventually, shared custody. It’s not about the lower-middle-class thing. It’s about the mental illness thing, and it’s not a plan.

That said, I’m a massive Jennifer Lawrence fan. Her Hunger Games performance was dazzling, and this one is no small potatoes. (The script isn’t her fault.) Cooper’s now on my good list–in the last movie I saw him in, he didn’t actually speak, and here he both speaks and dances–bonus! He’s quite sparkly–he draws you in, and I’m not blaming Tiffany for falling for Pat, I’m just saying (since the script is trying to be all reality-based and Modern American), these people are way way far from being well enough to fall in love.

Plus there’s the little thing that he’s married. I know we’ve thrown away our devotedness to the Covenant of Marriage, now that Vera Bates showed us marriage doesn’t matter anymore if the wife is a Capital B-Word and there’s a sweet Little Anna in the wings, but maybe, if as Christians we are going to recommend a rom-com, it should be one where the characters are legally free to choose one another, mental illness or not.

Other than all that, the movie’s good if you don’t think past the ending to what is the inevitability of a mediocre-at-best life of two needy people going down the difficult path of second-marriage-after-divorce-and-widowhood while living in the garage add-on and taking a lot of Abilify.

Some skin (shower scene and later some skin-colored dancing outfits), some blasphemy. Racist content (against Indian-Americans, appropriately dealt with). Gambling.

I loved this movie. Apparently no one else did, but this is nothing new. I am all the time liking movies the critics hate and hating the movies everyone else loves. Pretty much I operate on the notion that if Ebert likes it, I won’t. He wins, of course. He gets paid to write reviews. I get popcorn.

Any movie about Los Angeles is going to interest me. I grew up in L.A. county, went to Dodger games, shopped the garment district, ate at the Original Pantry downtown, home of obscenely huge omelets and lines out the door and around the block.

Further back in our family history, though, there are dark rumors of the fearsome Goldberger brothers, fierce and possibly-criminal Jews who left Hungary in the very-late nineteenth century, settled down in Chicago, and then got tossed out of town for shenanigans, the details of which haven’t been disclosed to me. They settled in Los Angeles, and here I am.

Here they are:

The one called “unknown” in this picture is Arthur. They do look a bit gangstery, all of them, don’t they, especially Hugo in his pin-stripes. (I met Hugo at my grandfather’s funeral in 1982. He was decided non-gangstery in his yarmulke, at least to this untrained Protestant eye.) The one with the bizarrely-orange face is my grandpa. You don’t get a complexion like that without something fishy going on, so maybe there’s a little gangsta history in this birthday girl’s blood (did I mention today is my birthday?), who’s to say?

Back to the movie: it’s 1949 in Los Angeles, home of the Brown Derby restaurant, perfect weather, and young girls getting off buses at Union Station day and night, coming in search of an audition, certain they are the next Greta Garbo.

They aren’t. They’re the next victim of post-WWII, mid-century sex traffickers who run girls out of downtown hotels in between picking up heroin shipments. The leader of the crime scene—and wannabe mob boss—is Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), a Jew who’s been tossed out of Chicago for shenanigans, the details of which aren’t disclosed. Word is, Cohen’s taking over Los Angeles—it’s his destiny, he says—the cops are in his pocket, and frankly, sugar, it’s a done deal. Keep your head down and your nose clean. This here’s Mickey’s town.

More frankly, if someone’s going to tie one end of me to one car and the other end of me to another car and then command the two cars to pull hard and far in opposite directions, I’m basically going to do whatever he says, and down with my ethics class and everything I’ve ever learned about good decision-making, and Mickey can have the town, Garbo and all.

Enter the “Gangster Squad,” a group of off-the-record LAPD officers who are charged by Chief Parker (Nick Nolte) with busting up Mickey’s nascent syndicate. Led by Sergeant O’Mara (Josh Brolin), the picked group of not-Boy-Scout cops, rushes into Mickey’s establishments guns blazing. Lots of people die.

The script is smart, the characterizations savvy. I’m more than a little irritated by the negative reception I see that this film is getting. “Too much violence,” the “Top Critics” at Rotten Tomatoes say, these the people who gave Django a 95% fresh rating. Comparing the violence in Gangster Squad to the violence in Django is like comparing the fat content of bacon to the fat content of celery.

Speaking of Django, it took me a while to assimilate Django into my life—to understand that when there has been unthinkable injustice and horror, there is probably no level of violence that is too great that may be used to exact vengeance for that injustice. Not only is Gangster Squad not nearly as violent as Django, the violence that we see in Gangster Squad is undertaken by the Law. Django is pure vigilantism, while GS is a task-force operating under the auspices of the LAPD to put down a budding mob presence in Los Angeles. With this perspective, there is no way the violence is out of line.

Think about it: Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States. When I was growing up, I remember learning it was the third largest, after NYC and Chicago. Both those other larger cities were and maybe still are dens of corruption and mob activity. To keep such activity out of the next largest city in the country, how much violence is okay? Some might say, “just enough to keep it out,” but who’s to say how much that is? Maybe better if you shut it down definitively instead of being picky. How ‘bout instead of squishing ants one at a time, you put a blow-torch to the ant hill? Just sayin’.

Sean Penn is awesome. He’s been taking flack since Ridgemont High, but I think we need to put that behind us. Like Leonardo, who still suffers from post-Titanic jeers, Penn has been the object of pot shots for decades. However, I’m a great fan of his art. The last film I saw him (and loved him) in was Fair Game, a remarkable movie about courage and forthrightness under great pressure. Penn is a great artist, but the fact is, some people don’t like him, so they go, “Ewww, violence, bad movie!” Down with them.

The uber-cute Ryan Gosling is also in this movie, as is the ubiquitous Emma Stone. They both continue to be cute. Josh Brolin is perfect as the buttoned-down WWII vet who can’t wait to blast away at Cohen (“You go, Greatest Generation, you!”), but who is also under the command and thumb of his sweet and brilliant wife. I can’t help thinking of Brolin as Young Agent K in MIB3, but he kept it together and I never wondered if this movie was going to veer off into absurdity. It doesn’t. and it ends perfectly.

Speaking of the end, stay for the credits. The postcard images of Los Angeles are lovely.

A note on Palladio Theaters in Folsom in case the young man behind the concessions counter really does read this: We drive a long way to get there. It would be easier and closer to go to the theaters on Iron Point. But at Palladio, they don’t burst in at the end of the movie and start loudly cleaning up. They wait for the last patron (usually me; I always stay through all the credits) to leave before they start their chores, and they always say, “Thanks for coming. Have a nice day.” I go once or twice a week.

One time (Harry Potter 7b, midnight showing), I settled three kids in the theater, then came back out to the concessions to buy two large popcorns and two large sodas, what the heck was I thinking? A young man behind the counter asked if he could help me carry it all. Maybe he was dreading working that increasingly long line, but still. That’s service.

Just a few thoughts on this over-the-top violent anti-slavery movie, which for some reason Spike Lee thinks is (although he admits to not having seen it and promises not to see it) disrespectful to his ancestors.

It would be more accurate to say that this movie is disrespectful to the descendants of limited-gene-pool white trash, portrayed here as idiotic gun-toting thugs unfamiliar with the English language. Articulate slave owners are similarly disrespected (and blown apart into small pieces with lots of blood). Slavery is depicted as evil.

I imagine someone asked Mr. Lee to make such a statement, just to rile everyone up and get a lot of talking going about the movie. But to say that portraying blacks as slaves in America in 1858 is disrespectful is much like saying Schindler’s List is disrespectful to Jews or King of the Hill is disrespectful to guys who sell propane. America 1858 is the setting, that’s all, and there were (to our great national shame) slaves then.

With one exception, the African-American characters are portrayed as would be expected in a film about antebellum Mississippi. That is, as slaves. Steven, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is less of a house slave and more of a wannabe massa. He has his kneecaps shot up before he is blown up by a few dozen sticks of dynamite.

Did I mention this film is so violent no one should see it? Everyone is shot to pieces or torn apart by dogs or beat to death or whipped to death or blown to kingdom come. There’s tons of language, and, be warned, we see all of Mr. Foxx. There are also quite a few very funny moments.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Calvin Candie. He owns Candieland. Weird, Tarantino, just weird.

The moral of the story is that true love conquers all, and that true love will climb any mountain and fight off any devil to rescue the beloved. It’s the fighting off of the devil that is so violent, but considering the inducement to do so–a people enslaved , a horror we should not be able to speak of without trembling–and the complete lack of judicial means for accomplishing said rescue, one does root for Django in his quest to deliver his wife from her captivity.

Christoph Waltz is the best ever. He plays Dr. King Schultz, a dentist turned bounty hunter who carries the movie from beginning to end.

But really, if in this holiday season you have to choose only one movie to see, this isn’t the one.