The cinema was half full, almost all were women.

The film is deeply depressing. I recently saw Precious, I had avoided it because I thought it would be predictable and depressing. It’s not, even with its subject matter.

However nothing in the cinema this decade has depressed me as much as Eat Pray Love’s hymn to vacuous selfishness. There are 16 year olds who have more profound insights. Talking of 16 year olds, the journey of enlightenment taken by Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) in the film is very reminiscent of 16 year old’s experiences; girl meets a boy, falls in love with him, gets bored, chants a bit and meets another boy, bliss.

Back to the story, Eat Pray Love is criminally dull.

In brief, a very rich 40 something woman who has EVERYTHING including the love of everyone she ever meets and a good husband and a home in the country as well as a place in Manhattan and a terrific writing career, feels sad, feels there is something missing. She sets off on a quest to find food (Italy), God (India) and Love (Indonesia) or more simply she goes off on a self indulgent holiday around the world for A YEAR.

SPOILER ALERT: She finds a new man, problem solved.

Everything about the film is superficial, from the emotional range of actress Julia Roberts’ Liz Gilbert, either a too toothful smile or tearful doe eyes, to the superficial travel brochure version of the places she visits. I worked in Italy for a wonderful year a long time ago, the Italians love food, they understand it and are very generous about it and their food is sensual. I had hoped to find some of that in EPL, it’s not there. Instead all the joys and pleasures of Italian food are reduced to heaped plates of Italian cliches, giant mounds spaghetti and pizza. The food photography is better in the Costco catalogue – unforgivable.

She journeys to India in search of God, apparently God can’t be contacted in America. That journey irritated me a lot too — it seemed so dated, so 60s, so Beatles. While she is there she be-friends a smart but terrified teenage Indian girl who is about to be married off in an arranged marriage and because this film is free from anything so mundane as a value, Ms. Gilbert offers no hope or escape for the poor girl. Cut to Ms. Gilbert resplendent in her sari attending the wedding and using the occasion to ruminate about her own wedding to someone she freely chose and who loved her dearly … I think they call that multiculturalism.

However, in Indonesia Ms. Gilbert befriends a single mother with financial issues. Bizarrely this case inspires Ms. Gilbert to intervene, she sends an email to her friends and instantly gets 18,000 dollars in the post, its so nice to be rich.

Amazing that neither the fate of the child in the arranged marriage nor the appalling poverty of India inspired any act of charity from Ms. Gilbert, but I forgot she was obsessing so much about herself she didn’t see anyone else.

One of the qualities of art and literature that make it miraculous is its ability to make us feel connected to lives lived in other times and other places. True art raises us up, inspires and ultimately makes us better people. Eat Pray Love offers none of this. Leaving the film on Saturday I felt just as disconnected from Liz Gilbert as I did from the teary-eyed Santa Monica women leaving the cinema with me.

I think I’m in trouble.

As President Obama says, let’s be clear: that comical Copenhagen conference wasn’t about science, it was about wealth transfer. The gist: because of America’s “hyper-industrialization,” we need to pay off poor countries for all the harm we’ve caused in the world. That’s the real green in the green movement: It’s cash, not grass.

What’s this have to do with Christmas? Well, I think the world has forgotten that the biggest gift to this planet is America’s industry – and it’s time to remind them where they would be without it.

1. Whenever a horrible disaster hits, they would be dead. Be it an earthquake, a tsunami or a Madonna tour – we’re usually the first and biggest responders – saving the injured, and helping to rebuild. It is because of our tremendous capability to mobilize quickly that makes us a nation of superheroes. It also takes planes, trucks and tractors to do that stuff. Imagine that carbon footprint.

2. If they ever get sick, they would be dead. It’s true. While critical cretins like Chavez and Mugabe actually harm their own people, we save millions of strangers’ lives. Even that bozo called Bono admits it was George Bush who helped prevent the death of millions of Africans from AIDS. Yeah – I know what our critics will say: it’s easy for America to do this stuff. Well, it’s even easier not to do it.

3. If their family is hungry, they would be dead. Let’s not forget Norman Borlaug, who invented disease resistant wheat, saving hundreds of millions of lives in India and Pakistan. You can only do that if you’re of an industrial mind – thinking about people, not polar bears.

4. If they’re under the thumb of fascism, they would be dead. We possess the greatest military technology in the world, and we’ve used it to end horrible wars. Our industry of annihilation gave new life to many countries.

In sum, the very people complaining about America would not be alive, if it weren’t for America. Which is why, I say to them: Merry Christmas.

It sure beats a pair of socks.

Tonight we have the lovely Remi Spencer, the delightful Mike Baker, the witty Steven Crowder, and the always awesome Dr. Michael Baden.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies.

After its national US release in January 2009, “Slumdog” received a positive critical reception in the West, with a 94% rating by Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics raised what would become ongoing issues, with “The Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw regarding it as “an outsider’s view” and “a product placement” for the very quiz show owned by Celador, the film’s producer. But on its release in India, including in a dubbed Hindi version of this mostly (2/3) English language film, “Slumdog” did only moderate box office, especially the English version, which one trade analyst found “not ideally suited for Indian sentiment.” Indian critics mostly bought the film’s energetic ride, while others puzzled over the mix of languages and the key issue of authenticity, questioning whether the film was “a white man’s imagined India,” a superficial “poverty porn.” Even novelist Salman Rushdie was unhappy, objecting to the film’s slick yet improbable pop version of “magical realism.”

Then the issue of pay for the child actors began to make news, with the Times of India claiming Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Salim as a child, was paid £700 and Rubina Ali, who played Latika, £500, with both still living in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. Distributor Fox Searchlight replied that for their month of work the kids were paid three times the average annual adult Bandran salary. Boyle and producer Christian Colson added that they had “paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina’s involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.” This attention included trust funds to cover education, transportation, and expenses for the next eight years. Boyle declined to reveal the amounts of these trust funds, as this could make them “vulnerable and a target,” but according to the India Times Azhar got £17,500 in trust until age 18. His father, Mohammed Ismail, responded, “My son has taken on the world and won. I am so proud of him, but I want more money now.” Both Azhar and Rubina attended the Oscar ceremony in February, Azhar accompanied by his mother and Latika by her uncle, and soon after the Maharashtra Housing Authority announced that both kids would be given “free houses.”

In April the filmmakers responded to further charges of exploitation by donating $747,500 to a charity for the welfare of Mumbai street children, a modest amount for a film brandishing the moral authority of these destitute kids, made for only $15 million while grossing $350 million.

In May Azhar was awakened by unannounced bulldozers demolishing his Mumbai slum home as part of a drive against illegal shanties, and the next week Rubina’s shanty home was razed to make way for an overpass. Rubina and her father were briefly hospitalized, and “Slumdog” director Boyle and producer Colson then announced that in addition to the education trust and grant to charity, they were raising the amount, revealed to have been $30,000, now to $50,000, for Azhar and Rubin to purchase new apartments, as well as giving each family a lump sum of $3,000 and $130 a month stipend.

Then in June it was announced Azhar finally got his new house, a tiny 250 square foot apartment, all that $50,000 would buy in Mumbai’s hot real estate market, casting a new light on the “post-imperialist” filmmakers’ claim of munificent reward according to local standards. Crystallizing the paternalism of this whole sideshow, the ownership of the home is to be transferred from a trust to Azhar when he turns 18, provided he completes school. As if to promise the sideshow would continue, it was announced that Rubina has signed on with Random House to publish her life story, Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. Boyle is reportedly reassembling his “Slumdog” team for a future project, adapting Maximun City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Back of all this noisy fallout, it’s still the film “Slumdog” Millionaire and the novel from which it is adapted, Q & A by Vikas Swarup, that raise the deeper issues. Like director Boyle wooing the Chinese, both film and novel adopt fundamentally anti-Western postures. The book’s hero, Ram Mohammad Thomas, suffers much at the hands of Catholic priests (some gay), malevolent Australian diplomats, English-speaking tourists, and Westernized figures like gangsters and movie stars (some also gay). In the film most of hero Jamal’s antagonists – police, beggar-chiefs, gangsters, the TV host (none gay), are visual figures out of Western media, a motif wickedly established when the child Jamal dunks in outhouse sewage for a photo autograph by a helicopter-borne Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. For novelist Swarup, a diplomat from a line of distinguished Indian lawyers, there is some irony here, as he is beneficiary of the two great Britannic legacies, the English language in which he writes and which most of the film speaks and the common law.

Moreover, the very narrative hook of the novel, the improbable quiz show leading to the fulfillment of dreams of wealth and love, constructs a state of mind: what you know that is most important is simply the inscription of the injustices you have suffered. It is the epistemology of victimhood, the right answers magically accessible to the wretched, or so “it is written.”

At the heart of any current look at India is the key issue of economic development, and both the film and book display related views. Globalization in India, while bringing slick modern media and flashy urban nightlife, is viewed as little different from the old imperialism, with slums and beggars replaced by ugly concrete construction and chai wallahs in phone call centers, an extremely discontented, leftist view of globalization as simply a worldwide extension of the old exploitative gangster/hooker relationships of capitalism, enforced by oppressive police. Such is “Slumdog’s” facile, distorted view of modern India.

This year 700 million Indians voted in month-long elections that returned the secular Congress party to power, an endorsement of religious toleration in a complex land with a Hindu majority plus a minority of the world’s second largest Muslim population. Since moving away from Soviet-style socialism and protectionism, India has been growing almost as fast as China, and now contains a middle class of about 200 million people. To suggest that this enduringly secular, agonizingly multicultural, authentically democratic, free market miracle is little more than a corrupted media show is delusional. As if to repudiate the film’s facile view, the entire subsequent saga of Azhar and Rubina’s pay and housing can stand as a case study of the vulnerability of those at the bottom in the third world, not without luck but without legally recorded and capitalized property as described by economist Hernando de Soto.

Regarding the film as an “outsider’s view” of India, the filmmakers have trumpeted their veneration of Bollywood films, especially the masala genre, and “Slumdog” is full of many of its elements and conventions, notably veteran actors, the score, and the final musical production number, as a kind of assertion of authenticity. This hardly proves a “post-imperialist” mindset. Hollywood films have been voracious appropriators of international trends, notably any avant-garde style, especially since WWII, when their audience increasingly became a youth audience and their business increasingly the sale of figures and tales of rebellion, like the “New Wave” Bonnie and Clyde, to the young. Director Boyle is an accomplished contemporary film stylist, comfortable with post-modern irony and pastiche, as in his successful “Trainspotting,” a breathless pixilation of charming young lowlife junkies.

Adaptation of a novel to film is usually a process of reduction and activation, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did a skillful job on “Slumdog,” eliminating characters, simplifying events, constructing the romance, and setting a ticking clock for the last act. There is, however, one change that involves more than streamlining. The novel’s protagonist is named Ram Mohammad Thomas because he is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest named Thomas in a religiously mixed community of Hindus (Ram) and Muslims (Mohammad), a personification of religious toleration appropriate to anyone with hope for India. The film changes this, with Ram, now Jamal, and his friend Salim now brothers in parallel lives, a trope of Indian gangster films, but both Muslim victims of Hindu mob violence, no less than the murder of their mother. As Jamal captains the triumphant main plot of the quiz show and romance, Salim works the parallel gangster/success subplot until its end in renunciation, when aspiring gangster Salim explodes against his false compatriots. Reminiscent of the classic film gangster’s moment of tragic recognition, the martyred Salim, now bathed in cash (millions?), goes out declaring “God is great.”

In Boyle’s flashy, fragmented, rhythmic style this renders an aspect of the film’s resolution a jihadi music video. Why would these “post-imperialist” Western filmmakers give this film such an Islamist twist? Perhaps it is just the same savvy recognition of their young audience that leads A-list Hollywood types to wear keffiyeh scarves as markers of hip transgressive style.

Perhaps it’s akin to what Michael J. Totten has called the “Orientalism of fools,” maybe even an expression of a suicidal self-loathing, an endgame for Western radicalism, which has been an attitude of the leftist cultural elite for some time.

No kidding, professor.

No, really, they are. I don’t mean in all the right places, of course, but somewhere else, with movies, in enjoying the things we see in the movies. 

I remember seeing Gunga Din (1939) for the first time and knowing from the opening shot that this was my kind of film. This was a guy film. Not a wishy-washy movie filled up with dance numbers and kissing scenes, but a guy flick. Great guy stuff was in this movie, and I was sold on it from the first pounding of that thunderous mighty gong. When Alfred Newman’s score turned from playful to ominous faster than you can say, ‘trouble in Tantrapur’, I knew I was in for a good one. This was the kind of movie you watched on a Saturday afternoon with your dad or with your pals. This was adventure! 

There’s no way, I had always thought, that a girl can appreciate this kind of film, that she can ‘get into’ Gunga Din and get out of it what I got out of it. There’s just no way. Would she be able to feel the same way I did, the way other guys do, when watching Victor McLaglen face quickly turn from stone to fraudulent smile as he tries to trick his buddy? Can she feel the same rush of pride when hearing the trumpet scream the battle cry, or when seeing the Sikh Cavalry charge against the 400 horsemen of Kali? Does she get choked up along with Mac, Cutter and Bal when Montagu Love reads Kipling’s reflective poem in that final scene? Is modern woman capable of this? Or will she be more concerned with the sole female character in the story, trying, naturally, to relate to her instead? These things I wondered. Yet, I was as certain of the answers to these questions as I was of Sergeant Ballantine’s destiny. No woman could do these things, bridge that crevasse away from the familiar into pure guy territory, where it’s always double drill and no canteen. It just isn’t done. 

But guess what? I was wrong. Completely wrong. In fact, I’ll go out on an already shaky rope bridge here and state I’ve never met a woman who didn’t like Gunga Din. That’s right, not one.  Sure, it’s got funny and handsome Cary Grant – what woman doesn’t love Cary? For that matter, what man doesn’t want to be him, including? And it’s got the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with that infectious smile and shock of hair that falls down great when he lunges with either saber, pistol or right hook into an opponent.  I mean, let’s face it, what female doesn’t like to watch these two guys at rest or in motion? But that’s not it, that’s not the reason they like Gunga Din, well not completely, anyway. 

I believe it’s actually closer to what happens in the scene in the temple when our three British soldiers plus one, are caught and imprisoned in the confines of that locked dungeon, complete with pit of snakes. Comically, with torture and certain death if they don’t figure a way out soon, all the ‘proud ox’ MacChesney can think of is retrieving Sergeant Ballantine’s signed reenlistment form, securing his buddy’s companionship and saving him from what he believes is a death far worse than any pit of snakes could ever inflict: married life.  The means he goes about trying to get his hands on that paper is a joy to behold. His phony fear of snakes and being lashed again is, like so many other Victor McLaglen moments, lovable and priceless.  It really is, I believe, this kind of friendly sparring and not so much the looks and charm of the other two leading men, that is the key. The loyalty, friendship and devotion to one’s chums, the camaraderie replete with fun-loving jabs and good natured mocking is what wins the day for the viewer and makes these kinds of films work so well and on so many personally appealing levels.   

An equally shocking discovery I made about Gunga Din is that not only do the women I know love this movie, but that they dislike the love interest, the fiance, Emmy with equal passion. No, not for the cliched reasons like ‘she’s not a strong character’ and all that baloney. No, that’s not it. And anyway, it’s not true since, under the circumstances, she’s pretty darn strong. So what don’t they like about her? The same thing George Stevens, Ben Hecht and I don’t like about her. They hate what she’s trying to do. The women I know hate the fact that Sergeant Ballantine’s lover wants to take him away from his pals, from the adventure, from life itself, to go into the tea business, of all things. They, like Cutter and Mac, want that siren to fail.

In real life there are not many women who would give up a life of luxury, lucrative profits in a very promising business in order to let a husband run off and reenlist in the thankless job of Her Majesty’s service. Nor are there many women who want their men to go up against elephants on rope bridges or Kali worshiping stranglers as a line of work. Not many at all. Probably not even one. And that makes a lot of sense. So, why do women when watching Gunga Din want Bal to join Cutter and Mac (and Din) and do precisely that in the movie? Is the answer simply to be explained away as yet another unfathomable layer of the complex nature of woman, the incomprehensibility of the fairer sex to the brutish mind of man? 

Beats me. 

So, I asked myself, why do women want a fellow woman’s plans stopped, granted not in the same feverish way Eduardo Ciannelli’s high priest wants to stop the British Empire with his much copied crescendo-building “Kill for the Love of Killing” speech, but definitely stopped. Why do women want Cutter and Mac to succeed in their scheme to reenlist their friend and take him away from the woman in the story?  This question puzzled me. It nagged at my inner man. Then, one day, quite unexpectedly,  I had an epiphany, a stroke of genius. It was one of those ‘eureka moments’, the kind you hear about, the kind that make you jump out of the bath, covered in soapy suds and run out into the street yelling at the top of your lungs, “I’VE GOT IT!! I’VE GOT IT!!” 

For the record, I’d suggest not expressing yourself in that way, exactly. Unless, of course you have a very good lawyer or a burning desire to see the inside of a psychiatric ward.  I have neither, so it’s fortunate that I came to my senses before I cleared the door jam and therefore was not forced to scribe this article onto a thick stone wall with a dull spoon. 

What I figured out amongst the bubbles was this: Women want men. Again, no kidding. No, hold on. That’s not it, exactly. Women want other men. Wait a minute, that’s not quite right, either. Let’s try again. Women want what other women want and that includes men. Yeah, that’s what I mean, sort of. 

Or to put it another way, in the form of a question, I came up with this: What woman, besides Joan Fontaine’s Emmy, would desire a domesticated Douglas Fairbanks who does very little else aside from selling tea and reading the paper? None. What woman would want a Douglas Fairbanks riding a horse, crossing swords with bad guys, getting trapped, imprisoned, escaping “by sheer strategy alone” and saving not only his chums, but the whole bloomin’ regiment, king and country, with a little help from his friends? 

Every woman, that’s who! At least I think so. 

Because, that’s the figure of a man. A man acts. He doesn’t necessarily think. For good or bad, he just does. And then another revelation occurred to me, not at the same time, thankfully, and not involving suds, but still noteworthy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a theory about men and women and it sort of ties in with all of this. I’ll restate part of it here briefly:

Men are simple. Women are complicated. 

Men live in the past. Women live in the future.  

(I have a sneaking suspicion children are the only ones who live in the present)

Here’s the big one: 

Women plan. Men dream.

When men become more like women – no not that way -  but when they stop dreaming as men dream, stop being reckless, stop living the adventure, stop thinking anything is possible (even if it clearly isn’t), stop acting, stop doing, when they cease to do these things, be these things, something has happened to them. 

They’ve grown old.

What I mean is, they’ve given up the ability to dream. They may not be old in years, but in spirit they are dusty cobwebs. They may not even know it happened to them until much later, well after the woman in their lives knows it. That’s something I’ll have to remind myself of from time to time, no doubt. 

When I think on other films that are called ‘guy flicks’ or ‘buddy movies’ there are so many that I love that I won’t even attempt to begin to list them. I will say, though, that along with Gunga Din (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Sahara (1943), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) are some of my favorite guy movies of all time, which honor things like honor, duty and the undying capacity to dream large, even when all around them is a nightmare. These are films I never get tired of watching, nor ever will. There are others, lots more, and even some that are more recent, that have similar appeal. Braveheart comes to mind. But for the most part, these newer films are missing something that their predecessors have.  Maybe it’s the technicolor, or the monochrome for that matter, or just maybe, it’s the writing, the way in which dialogue plays such a dominant role in shaping the characters. I tend to think that’s the reason. Then again, maybe it’s just because I saw most of them as a kid. Who knows? Not me, and frankly, I don’t think I really want to know.  Because I’d rather dream. 

But, yes, these are some of my favorites, and it’s interesting that all of them, yes, all of them, are some of my female friends’ favorites as well. What does that say? That I hang around a bunch of butch chicks? No, I hope it doesn’t say that. It says that there are films about men, that don’t get all mushy, that women truly love for the same reasons men do. It says that women can sit and watch a film about men with no female character they can associate with, or even like in the story and come away thoroughly thrilled at the outcome. 

So, are these guy flicks, or not? I guess not. They’re more than that. They’re great flicks. They speak to both men and women as loud and clear as Din’s trumpeting. But how are they able to do that? What do they have in common? They were all written by people who could write. Sure they are genre, but they aren’t hackneyed, formulaic. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to appeal to just men, or just women, or just kids, or just adults. They were meant to be enjoyed by everyone. Their message however politically incorrect some may find it, is universal.  And that’s why they are hard to find nowadays. Because today, it’s all about pitching to a niche. Everything has to have a target audience, a market to aim for, a demographic to appease, please and all to often, pander to. 

Great films don’t do that. Not guy flicks, not chick flicks, not any flicks. Great is great. And great films charge ahead into the breech not caring what this or that group thinks is proper or offensive. We’re missing that kind of courage today.  And our culture is suffering because of it.  These days, we hear a lot about so-called controversial films. Yet no filmmaker seems daring enough to take a chance at being great, at dreaming large. Why should they when it’s so much easier to pander? 

There’s a scene in another great, though entirely different film that captures and defines the essence of what a man is, what he wishes he was, and what he wants other men to see him as. 

At the end of The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager takes his Lockheed F-104 Starfighter up to where the sky ends and space itself begins. He’s so far up that there isn’t enough oxygen in the air to fully power the turbine anymore. His engine quits. He spins out of control amongst the vast stars and great heavens above, falling to earth like Icarus with melted wings. 

But unlike the Greek, there is no ocean to catch him. Only the brutally harsh and unforgiving desert of Edwards. 

With frantic eyes peering past hope at the funereal black smoke on the horizon, the ambulance driver suddenly spots a lone figure in the distance walking toward them, shimmering in the blurry heat like a mirage – or a god. We see he is burnt, bloody and limping. It’s Yeager, and he’s carrying his helmet and parachute. 

“Is that a man?”, the driver asks Ridley, fellow test pilot and Yeager’s best friend. 

Grinning ear to ear, Ridley replies, “You’re damn right it is!”

Something tells me Emmy would agree.