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Spielberg...what?

     I woke up this morning, fully intending to write about Steven Spielberg's newest movie, Disclosure Day. Then I checked the news, and found out that Lindsey Graham died overnight. So we're going to take a quick current events detour, and then we'll get to the Spielberg of it all.

    Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina became a congressman in 1993, when I was 14 years old. When Strom Thurmond died in 2003, Graham took his seat in the senate. For those of you who are too young to know who Strom Thurmond was, you can learn more about him here. Those were some pretty huge, hateful shoes to fill. And, looking back, I think we can safely say that Graham tried his best.  

    A man with essentially no moral compass, in December 2015, he said "you know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for..." By 2017, however, he was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, "I have never heard him make a single racist statement. Not even close."

    Just last month, when he won his primary after a Trump endorsement, he called Trump out in his victory speech: "I want to start with a bunch of thank yous. I want to thank the big guy, God. Trump comes later...Mr. President, you're not far behind God, but we're gonna start with him." Make of that what you will. 

    I could spend the rest of the day writing about Graham and the harms he caused his constituents and the world in general. In the next few days, I'm sure we'll all be inundated with a thousand think pieces about his life and legacy. In the end, all I can think about is the line from the Hamilton musical: "If you stand for nothing...what'll you fall for?" Graham's life seems like the embodiment of that thought.

    Now, for something completely different...

    Disclosure Day. Woof. That was $26 and two and a half hours of my life I'll never get back. B and I decided on a whim yesterday that we'd go to the movies, since we haven't been to the theater since I moved over here last March. It was supposed to storm all afternoon, so why not? And a Steven Spielberg movie about aliens? Count us in. So off we went to the movie theater.

    Y'all. If you go in thinking you're going to get a movie like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this is going to be a kick in the teeth. If you think it's going to have tinges of E.T. the Extra-terrestrial, you are in for a rough ride. There is nothing of the wonder of Close Encounters here. There's nothing of the emotional high stakes of E.T. here. By the end, I didn't care about anything but getting out of the theater as quickly as possible, because really, what did I just watch? About an hour in, I was ready to get up and leave, but I really had to know if it was going to get any better. I should have made us go at that point, because it didn't get any better.

    I'm not a movie snob. Particularly in the summer, I am willing to sit through any amount of nonsense, if only to enjoy the frigid movie theater AC and some super buttery popcorn. Some of my favorite movies aren't particularly heavy on plot or reason. The problem I have with Disclosure Day is that there wasn't even a nod to plot. Rather, it felt like there were five different movies in there, and instead of picking one and making a solid film, they figured it would be okay to just move forward with this hodgepodge of ideas, and we'd all work it out for ourselves. There were no stakes. I never knew why I was supposed to care about any of the characters, and so I couldn't really root for them to change or grow. And when they did change, it was for seemingly no reason? For example, Colin Firth plays the villain of the piece, and we never get any idea why he's so evil, or why he decides not to be in the end. Did he just get tired? We'll never know.

    Also, there's a whole potential nuclear war happening in the background, and we get approximately no explanation as to what's going on with that. There's a scene in a convenience store where everyone's acting like it's one day before a hurricane's landfall, and it took me so by surprise because I'd forgotten all about the potential nuclear war plot line. All of a sudden, everyone's panicking and it took me a full minute to realize that this had to do with the war, not the aliens of it all.

    We can't expect anyone to hit it out of the park every time they're up to bat. Steven Spielberg has made some of the best movies I've ever seen. He's also made some questionable choices. I wasn't a huge fan of A.I., for example, and I've always wondered what that movie would have been if Stanley Kubrick would have made it. Disclosure Day is different, because it feels like what happens when the force field around a successful artist is so strong, no one dares let them know that this isn't good work. There were a hundred times in the process of making this movie when someone could have said, "this doesn't make sense. We need to tighten it up." All the way through the editing process, different choices could have been made. I would love to see what the cards said after the test screenings. 

    I can't recommend this movie, but if you need some good background noise while you're doing chores in a couple of months, feel free to find it on whichever streaming platform it lands on. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a fun, perfect alien movie? I cannot recommend Project Hail Mary enough. 

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