R, 1 hr. 28 min.
Directed By: Kevin Smith. DVD Release Date: Oct 18, 2011.
It’s finally happened. There’s finally been a Kevin Smith film that
I liked more than just the grudging approval I feel for Dogma. Generally, I think
his movies are iconic for the folks in this country who don’t think that there
should be any kind of responsibility or accountability… and I know I sound a
bit too much like my dad when I write this, but I think a person's character (or lack thereof) is built upon their ability to accept those two things in their life. Color me old fashioned that way.
Mallrats and Clerks kind of symbolized the latter
portion of Generation X… and they basically said that it’s cool to be so
counterculture that you can’t keep a job, don’t go to school, have no ambition,
have no dreams. Don’t get me wrong. I
occasionally found Jay, and Silent Bob to be funny, but I don’t want to have anything
in common with them.
Red State is more than a little timely in its arrival on
the scene, and I’m wondering why Smith chose to release this movie like he
did. It could have actually made him
some income… but I guess obscurity is going to be its own reward. I say it’s timely because around the time this was released, I was listening to a radio show and the hosts discussed three young men
who were posing as a woman interested in finding one-time sexual partners that
murdered anyone who made a date with them.
I’m not sure how many they racked up before one potential victim managed to escape and they were caught, but the
internet is a scary place… and I was reminded that I need to be a little more
cautious when I use it.
Now, I have a few criticisms about the movie. I think Smith (like many others before him)
have painted conservative Christians with an unfair brush, although it's pretty much the same brush I've seen Christian film apply to those they disapprove of, so I'm not going to get terribly worked up about it. There’s a very… god, I’m going to say it,
liberal agenda at work here. If you
listen to the dialogue that happens in the Church services, you know these
people have to be stupid, well, brainless is probably better. They get suckered in to an arrangement like what we see here, and don't have the thought processes to figure out they're being fed a total line of crap. We listen to the preacher talk about how
homosexuals are threatening mankind with extinction because they (1) don’t
reproduce themselves and (2) recruit. The rational thinker realizes that we're in the grip of a population explosion on the global level, and it's a problem that will have to be dealt with, probably in my life time. So... it's kind of okay that these folks aren't reproducing, and while I know they're not recruiting because it doesn't work that way, it would be okay if they convinced others to join them in a zero-sum growth plan. But these guys don't know enough about anything to call BS when it's fed to them.
I also had a problem with the ATF business. It was like... babytown frolic and I suspect there was an effort at half-truth and subversion of context a la Michael Moore that just wasn't done well enough to hide behind a veil. If you aren’t going to negotiate in a hostage
situation, and you don’t have to worry about the hostages, you don’t sit there
shooting back at the whack jobs with automatic weapons. You either gas them or you blow them up and
claim it was a gas leak that was ignited by the fire fight. You also don’t have a field agent who is
about 150 pounds over his healthy weight range. Seriously. They have standards, even at the ATF. Basically, as much as I didn’t like what Smith had to say about
religion, I liked what he had to say about the government even less. The silence of Michael Moore did not leave a
vacuum that needed to be filled. And,
frankly, Smith isn’t up the sheer level of bullshit that Moore’s capable of.
However, the man put on some decent entertainment,
and pulled together a remarkable cast. I
didn’t like his message, but once I was able to ignore that, I liked the movie
well enough.
