BURN BEFORE VIEWING: Your job, should you choose to accept it -- Suck up to this week's platter of the bloated and obvious from Hollywood


The OBJECTIVE, Leonardo DiCaprio told the LA Times stenographer: "To make a highly intelligent film with today's politics." DD thought a more modest objective could be to keep Ridley Scott away from the studio's lavish party spreads.

Sometimes it's difficult to feel sorry for the plight of newspapers. Losing circulation to the Internet, they've been unfairly shelled into giving away their work for free to a demographic in cyberspace least likely to pay for anything.

And then one reads the Sunday features section, one in which a bunch of staffers are sent to unblinkingly copy down whatever trash is spoonfed them by Hollywood swells no matter how obvious and intelligence-insulting.

At a time when the heaping of ridicule upon the scripted and empty-headed bragging of Hollywood celebrities might be seen as a slight civic service, the Los Angeles Times -- so frightened that it might lose readers by being supercilious -- often seems to go in the opposite direction.

Moving along, DD wrote about the Hollywood fantasy of striking pay dirt with movies about the war on terror a couple months ago.

The formula's beyond moldy: Option a book that wasn't quite a bestseller, one by some pundit or first-string reporter from the country's top five newspapers. Hire a couple stars for marquee value, make the same movie fifty or sixty times, and don't forget to line up the newspaper features reporters and magazine writers to say how good it will be before the critics check in and spoil it all after theatrical release.

There were two gobblers rolled out for your scorn in today's newspaper: Ridley Scott's "Body of Lies" and D. J. Caruso's "Eagle Eye."

To read Scott's comments in the Times was to laugh. A normal person, instead of obediently writing everything down, might have been moved to say: "C'mon, today you're just another famous blowhard. You need a sound thrashing for trying to pass off this rubbish as something fresh."

"My gut tells me [this is] a commercial movie," Scott told the Times.

"The film ... offers plenty of other visceral stimulations as well," writes the Times. "[Tautly] paced shootouts, car chases and lushly photographed explosions ... Big ideas, too."

"[Leonardo DiCaprio] says he checked his political agenda at the door ... But researching his character with a former head of the CIA (whom the actor declined to name) and coming to understand something of how agency operations are run in the Middle East gave him a new perspective on the peace process."

DiCaprio, adds the Times, really was tortured during the making of the movie. In the sidebar, "Acting can be a torturous process," readers are told one eye-rolling whopper after another: "For an excruciating sequence in 'Body of Lies' in which his cover operative is tortured by terrorists, [DiCaprio] had to psyche himself up for months prior to shooting. But even with all his mental preparation, the experience of shooting in an old prison in Rabat, Morocco, left him sickened and spent ... [The] combination of the intense physical mental stress of the scene, coupled with ... dust particles lodging in his lungs, left DiCaprio worse for wear."

No word on torturing audiences, after at least fifty movies and television dramas, all including the same thing.

Ridley Scott tells the Times he needs to make movies that are "about something." Perish forbid they be about nothing.

It is intended that "Body of Lies" "voice certain hard truths about the United States -- even if that means ruffling some feathers ..."

How fiery and forward!

The other piece of hagiography was furnished by Geoff Boucher, who usually writes about comic books or that Metallica's new album will be really great.

"Early in the upcoming tech-thriller 'Eagle Eye,' a suspected terrorist is in the back seat of an SUV bouncing along a rugged road in Afghanistan as a US spy drone follows it from the sky overhead," writes Boucher.

Haven't seen that before, have ya?

"Even with this eye-popping technology, the world is still complicated," it is said.

Starring Shia LaBeouf, the producer tells the reporter, who fails to let on whether he laughed or not, that "the film is very much of the moment with its web of political intrigue and sleek high-tech sensibility."

D. J. Caruso adds: "What I didn't want to happen is that it get so big with the hardware and action and the stunts that the people get lost, that it turned into something like a video game."

Presumably, this is why the man hired Shia LaBeouf, an actor who is most well known for starring in movies that are video games.

"Eagle Eye producers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman -- who were part of the writing team on 'Transformers' -- said that they found inspiration in the news coverage of the war on terrorism and that exploring the topics left them a little bit rattled," informs Boucher.

Rattled, they tell ya. They were rattled by news of the war on terror while making a big movie!

Ah, asses are made to bear and so is anyone who has to listen to this stuff sans the option of leaving the room or hanging up the phone.

Sucking up to the swells at the Times. And here.