Margarita Movies

Remember last week I said a waitress at BluJam knew my name? She called me Chris today. My name is Nick. So close.

I was woken up at 9:30 today by Dan telling me it was time for zombies. We played international 4-a-side Left 4 Dead with one team from the USA and one team from various Commonwealth countries. Even though my loyalty is now to the USA I had to go with the n00bs on the Commonwealth team and get fucked by Team Evil Sneaky Fucking Bastard for two hours.

Right after that, lunch at BluJam with Dan. After that, wandering Century City with Dan. Han asked us if we had run out of things to talk about by the time he showed up to the Pink Taco at 3, I said, we ran out of things to talk about in 2005. Dan and I are like an old married couple who have discussed everything we ever needed to and now all we have left is arguments about inane subjects. Dan still occasionally drops surprises on me though, like when he casually mentioned “oh yeah, this is while I was Michael Jackson’s personal assistant.”

The quality of bartender at the Pink Taco has dropped significantly in recent times. One in particular pours a drink that is basically a sugar headache in liquid form with little to no alcohol. Luckily some decent ones showed up at shift changeover, and the alcohol content increased scarily fast. Usually the drinks are a solid reddish pink, but these margaritas had so much tequila in them that they were the colour of a rosé. Anyway, the three of us thoroughly inebriated, we were ready to get our minds blown.

As it turns out, in 2003 there was a war in Iraq. Matt Damon was there, and he was in charge of going into buildings and finding out that there were no chemical weapons in them.

Incidentally. I have always said “WMDs”. On the news, I’ve always heard it said “WMDs”. In this film, they say “WMD” as the plural of WMD, which actually makes sense if you think about it. However, it sounds weird, especially when Iraqis who barely speak English are getting it right.

So anyway it turns out there are no WMD, which we all know because we saw it on the news at the time. Matt Damon isn’t happy about this and he does a bit of investigative work on the ground in Iraq with the assistance of CIA agent Brendan Gleeson (failing to hide his Irish accent) and Beadie from The Wire, who is a journalist of some sort.

The film is chock full of characters that require very little explanation. You’ve got your Carter Burke-type US intel guys who are hoodwinking people, you’ve got heroic marines who are just doing their job, you’ve got outraged Iraqis getting irate with the marines for bombing the shit out of them, and so forth. Every character is one-note.

The film is basically a liberal wank fantasy. If you have ever encountered someone who is not particularly clever but thinks they are, who, when Iraq is being discussed, tells you in very serious and slightly angry terms that “Iraq is just about oil” like they’d just uncovered a grand fucking conspiracy that nobody was aware of, this film is a bit like that.

This film actually made me less liberal. I am screamingly liberal by most peoples’ standards and this film made me think “we really are a bunch of tediously self-righteous cunts”. I might switch sides, at least conservatives know how to party down when they’ve oppressed someone’s culture or stolen their shit. I know we see films drunk and everything, but fuck this film. At one point, Matt Damon shouts “THE REASONS FOR GOING TO WAR ALWAYS MATTER” at some faceless suit-wearing type. I nearly shouted “FUCK OFF” at the screen.

Everything in the film is SEVERELY on-the-nose. There’s a pool party in the middle of the Green Zone HQ - you’re meant to shed a noble tear and wonder how people could party down while Iraqis are being blown up outside. Frankly I don’t think they were partying hard enough. They should send Team MM into Iraq and we’ll show them how to have a good time. To replicate the Pink Taco experience, several Muslim women will need to be equipped with large fake boobs and Pink Taco-branded burqas.

At one point a one-legged Iraqi shoots this guy Matt Damon is trying to bring in and tells Matt Damon “IT IS NOT FOR YOU TO DECIDE WHAT HAPPENS TO IRAQ”. I think I have finally suffered enough white liberal guilt and can now be at peace with all races and creeds.

People applauded when the film was over - I guess they are super glad that some totally liberal filmmakers told a totally liberal audience that the war in Iraq was BULLSHIT. I don’t know if it counts as a spoiler warning but we kind of already knew the war in Iraq was bullshit while it was happening. I confidently predict people who think they are clever for saying “Iraq was all about oil” will see Green Zone and tell their friends that it is AWESOME and they definitely should see it if they want to see THE TRUTH about Iraq. More accurately, the film is tedious and boring, and people should see it if they want to see a hand-wringingly earnest, completely fantastical idea of what happened in Iraq that caters to what they already believe.

The one saving grace is that about every fifteen minutes, Matt Damon and his marine squaddies head in and shoot some Iraqis for reasons I didn’t follow most of the time. At one point someone RPGs a helicopter, which is far and away the best bit in the film. There’s a lot of bits where people are talking about why they have to go and shoot some dudes, and then they go and shoot the dudes and I realise I wasn’t paying attention and don’t really know why they’re doing it.

Milk is chilling, Giz is chilling, what more can I say, THE SCALE SCALE.

S - Story: 1. FUCK OFF.

C - Comedy: 1. NONE WHATSOEVER.

A - Awesomeness: 7. The shooting stuff is cool. The helicopter crashing is cool.

L - Ladies: Everyone who watched The Wire fancied Beadie a little bit, but I think that might have been because the next hottest character in The Wire is probably a junkie. 4.

E - Et Cetera: 1. This film did not please me.

-Nick

Next week: REPO MEN!