Timothy Treadwell loved bears. In the name of loving them, with a stalwart sense of the innate sanctity of his mission, he continuously abused them for thirteen years. Time and again from 1989 until 2003 he invaded their territory — startling them, scaring them, angering them. Interrupting their hunting, their mating, their sleep, their play, he would coo sweet nothings at them in a flamboyant, high-pitched whine. He gave the savage beasts silly names like Lulu, Cupcake, Daisy, Ginger, Booble, and Mr. Chocolate, robbing them of their natural dignity. He firmly believed he was their protector, and unleashed torrents of self-righteous hatred upon anyone who dared question his treating of one-thousand-pound predators as if they were cute cuddly teddy bears. Handsome and charismatic, yet narcissistic and naïve, filled with honest caring, yet a smooth liar thoroughly at home in delusion, he became a constant danger both to himself and to everything he loved, ever on the verge of instigating a sudden volcanic eruption of nightmarish unintended consequences.

In short, Timothy Treadwell was a perfect liberal. He loved bears, with all his heart.

And then one ate him.

The story of Treadwell (1957-2003) is told in Grizzly Man (2005), a film destined to be remembered long after the likes of Crash, Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Capote, and the rest of that cinematic annus horribilis are blessedly forgotten. Directed by the fearless and unflinching German filmmaker Werner Herzog, it’s also an intensely conservative film, in its conclusions if not in its subject. (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)