Invisible Allegories

East India Trading Company Shrub
Two recent movies are blatantly allegorical, but most reviewers blinked. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN opens by hanging a ten-year-old boy in a cruel Gitmo scenario that poses a radical question: with brutes like Cheney in charge, wouldn't you want to sing the other guy's song? Based on Disney's global marketing strategy, how many Americans sense the director is playing to the gallery? The movie doesn't follow these metaphors through, but the Cheney figure does get skull-rape by Bill Nighy, and Kiera Knightley makes a Hillary Clinton presidency plausible (minus the sex appeal). And when the imperialist stooge of a captain, Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), is struck dumb as his crew begs him to change strategies while sinking, it's like a red light flashing "Iraq Iraq Iraq."

Similarly, EVAN ALMIGHTY struck me as a thinly veiled fantasy about holding Washington accountable for hurricane Katrina, complete with aerial shots of houses swept under by flood. The plot's culprit wasn't so much real estate greed as it was CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT. The picture is a dud, but it's weird how so much flies under the radar these days. When I was a kid, George Allen made a more plausible God; it's the kind of movie that starts you meme-ing to yourself: who's more exposed than John Goodman and Morgan Freeman? Fresher talent might have rescued at least some of the tired dialogue.

Somebody let Wanda Sykes host the Oscars.