BEFORE THE FALL-- WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO BE AS BRAVE AS FRIEDRICH AND ALBRECHT? OR WILL YOU JUST GO ALONG UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE TO SAVE YOUR SOUL?

You know how sometimes on weekends I run a non-Bush-bashing-article or two? Sabbath and all... So I sit down to purge the Bush scourge from my mind and do a nice innocent movie review and... well, look what happened (ma). I took some time off from Blogostan duty Friday to go see a movie. A few friends whose tastes in movies I totally trust had been suggesting that THE SQUID AND THE WHALE would be one I'd love and how I couldn't miss it. And the reviews were good. Years ago, whenever I'd go see a film with Roland he'd always go buy the tickets and say "One regular and one for gramps" and nod in my direction. I was always happy to save the money on a senior citizen ticket but I always marveled at how a 20-something airhead can't tell the difference between someone in their 40s and someone in their 70s. I guess it was all the same to me at one time too. Anyway, now I just routinely ask for a senior citizen ticket; no one has ever asked me for ID. So it's pretty cheap to see movies for me.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE was excruciating. I found myself leaving the theater several times and nosing around the other theaters in the cineplex to see if anything looked good. Finally I stumbled onto the opening of BEFORE THE FALL. Oh, now that was a really good film. Alas, though, as easy as it would be to talk about THE SQUID AND THE WHALE without alluding to Bush, Bush is hard to avoid for anyone thinking about BEFORE THE FALL.

It's not the kind of film any right-winger is going to be able to enjoy or, in all likelihood, understand. I bet I can sum the plot up in one sentence: an ideal, albeit maybe a little less than intellectually-oriented son of an anti-Nazi working class family in 1942 Germany gets the opportunity to enroll in an elite Nazi school where he comes face to face with the visceral reasons why his (now) discarded father hates fascists. There; not even run on! So what does this have to do with Bush, you're wondering?

Well, the movie has a little subplot. See it's not just about the coming of age of a hunky Aryan boxer, It's also about how a tiny but dedicated band of fanatics and extremists can manipulate, over time, a whole nation of basically decent folks and turn them into murderous fiends capable of... well you know what the Germans did in the 40s. Do you know what the Americans are doing now? I mean, the whole world reviled the Nazis for torture, right? Do you think the whole world doesn't revile us for torture now?

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of disdain and contempt for Germans who let Hitler put one over on them. But let me tell you, the Germans had a lot more historical reasons to fall in behind Hitler-- as unforgiveable and repulsive as that was-- than we had for allowing Bush to steal two national elections and then lead our nation down the catastrophic path we're now on, a path we hear other political "leaders" (from Republican John McCain to Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Wes Clark, Joe Biden, and Evan Bayh) and almost the entire punditocracy (and mass media) telling us we have to keep going down.

BEFORE THE FALL is about one brave 17 year old-- well 2 actually-- awakening in the belly of the beast and saying "no more. It's wrong. We have become monsters." He gets the shit kicked out of him in every way for it too-- literally and figurately. I know Bush's approval ratings in the polls-- now in the hitherto unheard of high 20s-- are sinking like a stone, but are these people coming to grips, however slowly with how we have been made into a pariah nation of monsters? Are they ready to punish the criminals-- or even recognize that there are criminals? Or are they only angry cause gas prices are too high? I only saw one or two polls that even mention impeachment, let alone war crime tribunals.