Seven Changeling Valkyries

 ** Spoiler Alert **

If you have any intention of seeing Changeling, Valkyrie, or Seven Pounds then read no further.

Is it me, or isn't the world depressing enough?  What with war, ever-present famine, presumed pending environmental calamity, epic economic collapse, geo-political uncertainty, and the winter blues kickin' hard just ahead of the dark solstice.  Now I can't even go to the movies to escape it all.

Five or six weeks ago I went to see Changeling, Clint Eastwood's too long visual masterpiece that, upon exit, imparts the viewer with a compelling desire to slit his own wrists.  You only wait that long because you're too busy retching in your seat in horror throughout the true (!) story.  If you have kids, or even like 'em a little bit, you can't just sit there and take it while:

• a working-class single mother comes home to find her only son missing.
  
• the police first dismiss her concern before excessively responding to the publicity of a child's kidnapping.
  
• the police return a child to the distraught mother who is not her boy, but browbeat her into taking him anyway.
• the mother is summarily thrown into the psych ward by a police captain who doesn't like the new publicity her protests are gleaning.
• a farm in the high desert is revealed to harbor a terrible & chilling history of child kidnap, torture, and murder - by ax, no less!
• trials take place to convict both the corrupt police and the serial killer from the farm.
• the serial killer is executed by hanging while the (STILL) lost boy's mother looks on.
• the mother gets on with her life after 4 or 5 years have transpired.
• the boy is never found -- dead or alive.

I think Clint's point in that final bullet is the mother never lost hope to find her son.  She might not have, but I certainly did.  By the way, any listener to the Jim Rome radio program oughta suggest replacing Mel Gibson's "Give me back my son!" bit with Angelina Jolie's "I want/Where is/This is not my son!"

Which brings us - at last! - to Seven Pounds and Valkyrie.  Just in time for Christmas.  Which has always been too syrupy sweet and just full of hope and light and life and all.  Forget all that bullshit in these troubled times!

Instead, how about another (allegedly) true story where Tom Cruise plays some kind of American-accented Nazi pirate who (like any good Tom Cruise character) after a period of self-doubt and thwarted success determines he needs to assassinate Adolf Hitler.  But then fails and is summarily executed in the end, along with several hundred co-conspirators and sympathizers.

Or Seven Pounds?  A movie marketed as some kind of feel-good man is on some quest to donate his organs to somehow worthy strangers before he dies.  Will Smith?  Hey, it's gotta be funny and heart-warming.  Sorry.

The reason for his death is not a terminal illness.  He's depressed over his responsibility in the deaths of seven people - including his wife/girlfriend/whatever - that occurred prior to the film's beginning.

So what does he do?  Seek treatment for depression?  Find family or friends at his door to intervene?  No, he decides to atone for this accident by committing suicide and donating his pieces-parts to the aforementioned worthy strangers.  And at the end of the film?  He kills himself.

Thank you, Hollywood!  You wonder why I'm not plunking down 10 clams on a regular basis?

Physician, heal thyself!  When you do, I'll be easy to find:  hunched in the fetal position with a stack of newpapers at the front door and reruns of Caddyshack or the ever-uplifting Scarface playing on the tube.

Not that I'll have ten bucks left to my name, mind you...