CONFOUNDED I'm sure you've all had the experience of defeated expectations, well I got it in spades this weekend.

Saw Wallace and Gromit: Curse of The Were-Rabbit in Evanston on Friday. The Vivster was in attendance with me. We both expected to like this movie, as we're dog-lovers and had heard good things about it, but it wasn't meant to be. Not only did we not like the film, we actually found ourselves dozing off during it. It was just dull. The story wasn't interesting and the jokes weren't funny. My theory is that clay-mation is such a long, painstaking process that it's just too difficult to pack a lot of interesting material into a feature length film. It would take decades to complete. Were-Rabbit wasn't even bad, it was just boring.

So, on to Saturday. Viv and I met up with our friend Emily in Hyde Park for dinner at the Med. We then went over to Doc and took in a screening of War of the Worlds. Not even my four dollar ticket could get me excited about seeing this film. Well, imagine my surprise when I found it to be quite riveting.

I think you all know the story, so we'll skip to what I thought was interesting:

The Set Pieces. Partcicularly the first one, when the aliens attack Tom Cruise's New Jersey town. There's nice build-up to the catastrophe. We get to know Cruise's character and his family before the shit hits the fan. Then these extremely ominous clouds show up. Cruise's character notices that the wind is being sucked into them and all hell breaks loose. From the much talked-about 9/11-ish human ash, to the collapsing buildings and bridges, I thought this sequence was genuinely frightening. The other set-pieces - a crashed airplane, a capsized ferry, and a basement visit by the aliens - are also well-executed and disturbing. My particular favorite was a flame-engulfed train hurtling through a crossing. I liked that the film provided no explanation for it. You just have to assume that you would see bizarre, terrifying events like that in this situation.

On the other hand, I had some reservations about the set pieces, which led me to a more critical response to War of the Worlds overall. I thought it was more than a little preposterous that Cruise and Co. could live through so many catastrophes. I can see them living through one of these disasters, maybe even two, but not through five or six of them. Isn't the point of the film that most of the people involved in these events die? Shouldn't Cruise and his family be dead too? I know, I know, there wouldn't be much of a movie if the main characters either died immediately, or avoided all contact with the aliens. But I think the film could have still been interesting if Spielberg could have resisted the urge to keep piling on more bravura, knock-'em-dead spectacles. Perhaps instead of the ferry turning over, we could have had more of Cruise chasing after his wayward son. I mean, the film keeps hammering into our heads that Cruise is a flawed, selfish guy, who's not much of a father. What better way for his character to demonstrate his worth than risk life and limb tracking down one of his children?

The eventual overkill of the set pieces and the corresponding lack of development of the human story got me thinking about War of the Worlds. What is the purpose of this film? I suppose most people would say that it's just summer blockbuster entertainment. But since when has light entertainment been associated with depicting the shockingly gruesome deaths of thousands of people? Is this really how we want to enjoy ourselves? And what about Spielberg? I get the sense that he really enjoys the carnage and, looking back on his career, I think I'm right. From Jaws, to Schindler's List, to Saving Private Ryan, to War of the Worlds, Spielberg seems to delight in finding new and spectacular ways to mangle and destroy human bodies on film. If Spielberg's private fantasies involve mutilation and mayhem, that's fine, but what I object to is that he has nothing to say about the violence he depicts. He just wants to impress us with his film-making skill. Even someone like Brian DePalma is more sophisticated than this; DePalma tries too go too far with the violence in his films and, I think, implicate us in it, as silent accomplices. I find no similar sense of purpose in Spielberg. He needs to find his outlet for violence in socially acceptable frameworks, like his World War II films and this disaster flick. I think that Spielberg has it in him to make a very sick, perverse, violent film (his Peeping Tom, if you will), but he's much too concerned with taste, decorum, money, and awards to do that. It's a shame, because I think there could be a much more interesting film-maker lurking behind the virtuoso.  ¶ 9:01 AM