Beyond Rangoon
With Patricia Arquette, U Aung Ko, Frances McDormand, Spalding Gray, Tiara Jacquelina, and Victor Slezak.
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If, once upon a time, audiences would throw money at artists who threw dead donkeys at them–a trend that, according to some opponents of the National Endowment for the Arts, has survived until fairly recent cutbacks–today we’re prone to praise and reward businesspeople for insulting us, often by throwing remakes at us. It’s arguably an insult to Robert Rodriguez as well as his public to hire him to do a big-budget remake of his own low-budget El mariachi, which ran in commercial theaters only two years ago and made a strong impression on audiences. But that’s what Columbia Pictures has done in the recent Desperado, and most mainstream critics don’t seem to mind a bit; they even go out of their way to excuse the film, explaining that it’s half remake and half sequel anyway, so what the hell? (Sequels too are just giving the idiot public more of what it wants.) After all, goes the implicit argument, if Columbia Pictures can make more money by treating us all like jerks, more power to them.
Insults of this kind are relatively mild, one might say, since they depend on how much we keep up with current movies and relate simply to movies’ generally shopworn materials. But what about the insulting assumption that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone in the world except themselves? We may be less likely to notice this kind of insult because it’s usually more indirect–part of the concept, built into scripts, ads, and marketing schemes (assuming one can distinguish among the three). But such assumptions are an important part of certain movies nevertheless, and to respond to these movies in the intended way is ultimately to agree to be insulted by them.
