HillBuzz

We love Danny Glover.  When he is acting in movies, not going to Venezuela to act upon his Tiger Beat infatuations with Hugo Chavez. (“But he’s just SO DREAMY!  I can’t help myself, though I am getting to old for this s***. Heh, heh, heh, that’s a Lethal Weapon joke I did right there, ’cause I was in that movie. Heh, heh, heh”)

Once, years ago, when one of us was still in the fashion biz, we met Glover in the hallway of a hotel as he was en route to the coveted “Gifting Room” (where celebrities Trick or Treat for freebies in clothes, jewelry, electronics, you name it).  Glover was as nice as nice could be, and even seemed to enjoy the inane Lethal Weapon references we made and humored us with a few line deliveries of the same.  A class act and a good man in our book.

But, man alive is he terrible in the new movie 2012, released yesterday.

His acting is as good as ever, so it’s mainly the character he plays, a dithering, naive, incompetent black POTUS who takes as long as possible to make command decisions and ultimately becomes the very last POTUS the world will ever see…by his own choosing, actually.

We’re going to cut this post here for those of you who don’t want any spoilers….read below if you don’t mind knowing what happens in the movie:

The theme of 2012 is multinational global cooperation, where the US is very much one nation at the table, with no more say or influence than anyone else.  Glover’s character, President Wilson, is the first to realize the world will end in 2012 when solar flares shoot a massive wave of neutrons our way, cooking the Earth’s mantle, and causing the tectonic plates to float and twist around on top, like the skin of a rotten orange.

Wilson sets out to find an internationalist solution to preserving humanity, and from the outset has no plan for ensuring the continuation of the United States, the nation he swore to protect during his inauguration.

It’s assumed from the onset that after the disaster, the world would start over, with no more nations, and instead would be a Star Trek-like “global community”, with America ceasing to exist.

For obvious reasons, this irked us for the almost three hours we sat in the theater last night and watched this film.

Wilson’s daughter, Laura, played by Thandie Newton, is tasked with replacing all the world’s great pieces of art with fakes and evacuating them to what she believes is a secret preservation vault in the Alps.  She does not know about the end of the world, but instead believes she is protecting art from terrorists…who in recent years have tried to destroy various treasures, including the Muslims in Afghanistan who decimated ancient Buddha collossi that once stood along the old Spice Road.

This is actually the most interesting part of the movie, and lasts about five minutes before the main title sequence — and it reminds us of one of our favorite stories about WWII where the French government was in Marginot Line mode, believing its mountain fortresses would stop Hitler’s advances…but private citizens mobilized to save the art of the Louvre from Hitler’s plunderings by removing all the artwork and hiding it in caves, tombs, catacombs, barns, and mine shafts for the duration of the war.  When Hitler took Paris, one of his advance teams went straight to the Louvre, kicked open the doors, and had film cameras ready to record the taking of all those treasures for Hitler…only to find room after room empty.

THAT was a great victory of average citizens banding together to correct the mistakes of a naive and ignorant government

2012 doesn’t explore this very much, which is sad, because it would have been a much better movie for it.

Instead of being the strong leader that’s needed, President Wilson makes the decision to keep Americans in the dark about the coming disaster for as long as possible, never allowing the private market to figure out their own solutions for survival.  The government has roughly three years of prep time to build a few giant arks in the Himalayas, all internationally built and seemingly shoddily made. Private citizens aren’t told of the disaster until Pasadena, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and most of Texas are already destroyed by the Yellowstone super volcanoe’s eruption.

If Hell is real, there should be a special place in it reserved for President Wilson, and the nanny state government that thought it knew best.

No matter how half-baked or hair-brained a plan we could come up with, if the world was really going to end in three years, we’d want three years to come up with SOME plan to survive it.  At the very least, we’d have used those three years to make peace with people we’re estranged from, go places we’ve always wanted to go, or just go run wild and live naked on an island in the Pacific if we wanted to.  Maybe we would have spent three years eating all the things we never let ourselves have because we have to maintain under 15% body fat in Boystown or become pariahs.  Maybe we would have spent three years doing a Forrest Gump run across the country, or even the world.  Perhaps we would have finally written that book we know is in us.

But, President Wilson decided people shouldn’t have the private option to decide their own fates…but also didn’t adequately prepare to save everyone’s lives either.  Those arks weren’t designed to save the 300 million Americans.  They were built to save several hundred thousand “global citizens”, of which Americans would be a small fraction.

That’s criminal.

And it makes us think about how much of a failure the government always is when it steps in front of private entrepreneurialism and personal decisions, thinking it knows best, but in the end it’s a disaster for everyone but the urban liberal elite who make sure they protect themselves while signing everyone else up for their doom.

And when the world finally does come to an end, President Wilson has a breakdown and stops functioning.  He gets on TV and makes a live, clumsy statement that basically tells everyone to run and panic.  This message should have been prepared in advance, striking the perfect time, and should have been ready to roll automatically so the POTUS could be doing what he needs to do elsewhere…and that is ensuring the smooth continuation of the American government through whatever disaster would come.

Instead, Wilson thinks only of himself, and goes off by himself to ponder his importance as “the last President of the United States”, reveling in the fact that he’d be that bleak bookend to Washington.

That part of the film made us almost want to get up and walk out, it was so sickening.

Weak, broken, dithering, he just abandons all of his responsibilities and decides not to leave on Air Force One as it heads to the Himalayas for rendezvous with the Ark.  The unnamed Vice President’s helicopter has crashed outside Pittsburgh, and he’s killed.  The Speaker of the House is missing.  There’s no mention of the Secretary of State or other Cabinet members.  And the President of the United States decides to stay at the White House to die in Washington instead of continuing to lead his people.  Mass confusion ensues because the Presidential Line of Succession is obliterated.

We kept thinking:  “The Secret Service needs to pick this idiot up off the ground and throw his ass on Air Force One.  Sedate him if you have to, boys”.

When you run for the presidency, you need to realize that if you get that job it is no longer about you for the next four years.  The current First Family needs to learn this lesson too.  It is no longer about what you want…but what the nation needs.  If you don’t like that, resign so that someone who understands the job description can take the helm.

The President of the United States should not dither.  He or she should not be wandering the halls of the White House, covering in filth, as President Wilson did after deciding not to board Air Force One and lead his people after the disaster.  He just shambled about, lost and confused, as he opened up the White House to refugees and then walked the lawn to see the triage area for himself.  That’s where Wilson dies, when a giant tidal wave pushed the USS John F. Kennedy towards the White House to smash it to bits.

And after that, there are numerous occasions when command decisions needed to be made on the arks, but the President of the United States was not alive to make them….so chaos ensued that very nearly drowned a ship full of survivors.

Clearly, 95% of people watching a CGI disaster epic are not going to be debating the behvior of a fictional president played by Danny Glover — and considering Hollywood’s infatuation with Dr. Utopia, none of this is meant as any sort of commentary on the current president.

But there are certainly parallels between the two if you care to look for them.