Sublime (2007)

This film purports to explore the world of coma consciousness. I think it does this clumsily, unevenly, and long-windedly. It also claims to reveal some truths about medical fears and realities. I would say it's more like propaganda, and of the common variety. The film thinks it makes social commentary about "white people." In fact, it is base in its anger, almost a self-debasement. Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs even makes his famous Freddie "Boom Boom" Washingon tongue-wagging mug, as if to let us know this isn't real nor is it to be taken seriously. Therefore, the film becomes cantankerous, crotchety for being aware of its own pandering malaise. Yes, I am delving deep into pretentious criticism to criticize a pretentious film. The cast is affable and attractive, I'll say that. But this is a crashing bore. It teaches nothing, and those for whom it is supposed to feel vengeful will likely feel foolish.

Back around 1980, when cable TV started its proliferation, it still had that anything goes feel that happens with something new. HBO was one of the first premium channels and along with the usual movies that filled out its limited on-air hours (it was not on 24 hours back then) the network often programmed what could be described as filler content especially on the weekends when it was on the air for somewhat longer stretches. Most of these films were forgettable movies like Ashanti" (boring and lifeless) and "Voyage of Tanai" (truly a WTF movie if there ever was one). But into this mix would sometimes appear movies that did spark interest and sometimes became hits because of their airing on cable. Two films that come to mind are "Over the Edge" (which made a big impact on the girls in my 8th grade class due to Matt Dillon) and "Homebodies", a truly oddball movie about senior citizens becoming homicidal when confronted with the prospect of being evicted from their homes. Both of these films were true finds and could have found life playing commercial stations as well but their presence on cable made their impacts more pronounced because of the lack of commercials and no editing. "Sublime" falls into this category. Apparently a straight-to-video release, it stars what could only be described as second tier TV actors (Tom Cavanagh, George Newbern) and directed by Tony Krantz who had no directorial credits to his name. Surprisingly, the movie plays extraordinarily well. It's suitably eerie, confusing (intentionally so) and most importantly, it makes you care about the main characters especially Cavanagh's George and Kathleen York's as George's wife, Jenny. I will admit that I did not "get" a lot of what is allegedly the films symbolism and frankly the point of the movie really didn't hit me (I kept rewinding it right before the end to hear what Jenny and George were talking about because it seemed to be related to what he does) but to me, it didn't really matter. "Sublime" is not a film that someone just threw together. It has a great atmosphere, is intelligent and thoughtful and is certainly not your run-in-the-mill enterprise.

Well, this extremely ambitious and multi-layered film would either require just a short note or a very long one to put it all on the table. I think I'll just divide it into two parts -- one being what we witness on the screen and the other being the interpretation intended by the writer, the director, and the rest of the crew -- and leave it up to you to judge it.First, though, I give it credit for being very well executed on what I imagine to have been a relatively small budget. The photography is first rate, the images crisp, the events we witness are clear, and though the sometimes hallucinatory elements may drive us nuts, there is a merciful absence of directorial razzle dazzle. It's a slow movie, made for adults, not for kids whose aesthetic apparatus has been honed on cartoons and MTV.Okay. Here's some of what we see. George is an IT kind of guy with a wife and two kids, a nice enough fellow with the pale face of a straphanger, although perhaps not the most perceptive guy around. On the day after his fortieth birthday he enters the hospital for a routine colonoscopy.If you aren't sure what a colonoscopy is, you'll find out as you get older. It's a very pleasant experience if you're a masochist. A couple of strangers have you lie on your side in an alien environment, shoot you some juice to keep you from fiddling around, spread your cheeks, and insert a flexible tube of fiber optics about two feet up into your intestines. My doc was kind enough to let me view my own intestine through the lens. It occurred to me, doped up though I was, that at that moment I was probably the only person on the planet Earth who was looking a yard up his own Arschloch. It looked like the mountains of Mars.Where was I? I feel as if I'm still coming down from that Valium analog. This movie has got me all mixed up. Ma? Is that YOU, Ma? What have they done to you? You look just like my ex wife.Anyway, as the saying goes, if something can go wrong, it will. And, man, do things go wrong for George. During the procedure there is a dull flash of light, after which things begin to get really twisted. He wakes up and is cared for by his Iranian doc and a pretty young nurse in a recovery room. That nurse, by the way, looks like she just stepped out of a skin flick with a title like "Musical Hospital Beds". Her uniform is tight, her lipstick garish, she wears high heels, and her substantial bosoms are almost falling out. The kind of nurse any normal man would dream about, and that in fact is what George is doing. But let's not get ahead of the story.In brief, George is attended by a menacing black orderly who introduces himself as "Mandingo." He develops an infection of flesh-eating bacteria on his leg, which must then be amputated. And he was confused with some other patient with a similar name and instead of a colonoscopy was subjected to a sympathectomy, which to my knowledge had only been done on dogs in psychology experiments. Strange things get stranger. The pretty nurse finally takes off her spandex uniform and boffs him one night. The guy has just had his leg chopped off, found out his daughter is a lesbian, seen another patient murdered and his wife schtupped by a swarthy man, has been given the wrong operation, and is on a morphine drip -- and he's still able to get it on with the nurse. If you had any doubts before, at that point you will realize that we are now in Wonderland and have left reality far behind. In the end, George winds up in a "persistent vegetative state." In other words, he's a vegetable. (It's not a comedy.) Right. That's what we see happening on the screen. Then, trying to make more sense of it, I listened to the audio commentary by the film makers. I'm going to condense this so I don't run out of space. Let me put it this way. If you thought any of what you saw was accidental -- eg., the doc's being Iranian or the nurse's wearing a miniskirt or even the patient's name being George -- you're probably wrong. Everything in the film is a symbol or an allusion to something else. Complacency, white guilt, the "medical-industrial complex," the Iranian situation, the fear of betrayal, it's all there somewhere. "Finnegans Wake" is a child's illustrated pop-up book by comparison. That's about as far as I want to get into it without either being paid or handed a Master's degree in film appreciation.I appreciate the awesome effort put into this production but it's not my kind of movie. I'm old enough to have seen a can of tuna fish shrink without fanfare from 7 ounces to 5 ounces, so I appreciate the imminence of death and I find movies about protracted dissolution depressing. I had a similar problem with "All That Jazz." Further, I'm fine with allegories and allusions as long as they come as surprises or nudges in a story more rooted in reality than this one. Finally, George is fundamentally decent and he suffers too much. (At times, the movie begins to look like torture porn.) Who are we to think George deserves getting it in the thorax just because he thinks he can tell what his wife is feeling just by looking in her eyes. Dumb, yes, but let him who is without sin make the first incision.

I wish it had been a total and complete liberaloctomy. Who needs yet another preachy political thriller made by people who snort white powder every five minutes...Or perhaps the movie received an accidental sublimeioscopy and died only 110 minutes later, after having struggled through various phases of unconsciousness and coma. Nothing sublime here, except the supreme stupidity/clumsiness exhibited by all involved.Tom Cavanagh, who plays the dull main character George (as in "George Bush", get it??), is a cross between Colin Hanks (Tom's little baby boy) and Tony Blair - and is just as charismatic. His acting range stretches the gamut from "vague smile" to "relatively bored grin". Hence I don't see why he wasn't showered with awards, especially since this movie's laughable message happens to be fanatically/droolingly anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Capitalist. Even Michael Moore doesn't hate the white man this much...Yep, you heard that right, you're not hallucinating like poor, barely emotional George Grievez Hanks (he is white and middle/upper-class hence uptight, get it??)... Krantz, the creator of this mess, has a message for us all: "America is a place in which minorities and especially blacks are still practically slaves, the health care system doesn't work (except when it successfully butchers Latinos), Capitalism stinks because the U.S. is still a Third World nation, and Iran is a wonderful country from whose gentle democracy we could all learn a lot - if only we would bother to get our stupid white male heads out of our supremely egotistical derrières for just one lousy second".Yes, I know... Half the time "Subpar" gives the impression of standing for the OPPOSITE of all this, but that's only because Krantz is a schmuck, and schmucks tend to get confused when they give themselves any even half-way pseudo-intellectual assignment - in this case to make yet another (256,783rd) Leftist propaganda crap for the sleepy, brainwashed, comatose, easy-to-fool Western masses. Krantz has no idea how to handle his liberal/Marxist ideas in a symbolic and organized manner (yet he loves his shoddy Eurotrash "arteaux" 50s/60s cinema), hence ends up with a hodge-podge of scenes that can easily lead the average viewer to believe that Krantz is a racist Right-winger who wants to nuke Iran and enslave all black people. Krantz theorizes that George, the "typical" rich, white liberal, is in fact a flaming racist just like all the "others". The implication is that white men are racist no matter what political side they opt for. I.e. you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. Jesus Christ, Krantz, try making a simple action film next time! You were way over your head with this one. But if there is anything to learn from international cinema since its very inception, it's that it attracts society's worst and most neurotic/psychotic elements. Nothing new there... Misfits, misanthropes, and the mentally ill: unite to create garbage in order to change the world!However, being the experienced film-goer that I am, it's hardly the first time I cringed with deep embarrassment (Fremdenscham) while watching a silly little director stumble over his (bleedin'-heart) political dogma by managing to mix up all the symbols he'd so "meticulously" prepared. I quickly realized that what Krantz had intended was a Leftist mess(age). The problem is that we do not even know when Tom George Bush Blair Hanks Colin Cavanagh is hallucinating and when not. Krantz, who couldn't put together a 25-piece Mickey Mouse puzzle in under 100 hours, tries to mesh three types of sequences: George's recent memories, George's reality-based hospital experiences, and George's hospital-related hallucinations. Quite an ambitious goal for someone who might need a 150-page manual to press "PLAY" on a DVD player. Sure, the (hopefully intelligent) viewer should essentially always try to figure things out for himself instead of having everything served to him on a Chuck-Norris-like plate, but even the viewer needs a few knowns in the equation in order to deduce the unknowns. Figuring out the MESSage through the thickets of a pretentious, low-IQ filmmaker's piece of trash is one thing, but telepathy is still impossible... If indeed Krantz even possesses a mind one can hypothetically read anything from.Tom George Bush Blair Hanks plays a white middle-aged liberal, i.e. a very, very nice guy (but only on the surface! deep down he is racist trash) whose mild-mannered semi-apathy is meant to portray the stereotypical successful white guy: dull and bland. But Krantz, being far more Left than your average liberal, has a bone to pick even with white male Democrats! Wow. Why is Krantz so bitter? Because George Hanks Cavanagh voting for Obama and being guilt-ridden over America's past is simply NOT ENOUGH for foaming-at-the-mouth, hateful Krantz. George doesn't do enough to help minorities, to save the spotted owl, to ban all GM foods, and hasn't done anything to befriend noble Syria and Iran while alienating undemocratic Israel. So George has to suffer for this, get a taste of his own medicine: let him experience great mental/physical pain in a shoddy, cold hospital run by greedy white men. Ah, those white doctors... they're so Satanic in every way.The sad thing is, "Subpar" isn't even remotely original - and God knows it tried so hard to get there. The hospital as a substitute for an "ill society": "Britannia Hospital". George witnessing weird, weird, evil deeds in the depths of the building during his wheelchair bound tour: "Jacob's Ladder". The ending, with George Hanks Bush dying in a coma because he wanted to: ripped off from the last scenes in "Possible Worlds". Etc. Not to mention the pungent stench of "originality" in producing the 256,790th Left-wing propaganda film. (The figure has in the meantime risen by seven from the time I wrote 256,783, a few minutes ago). Bashing George Bush anno 2007 was so very creative, so unique, so new. How did Krantz come up with that?