Ask Mick LaSalle: Did violence in “Guardians” bother LaSalle?
Dear Mick: I saw “Scarface” when I was 9, and it didn’t ruin me. Yet something about the casual mass murder in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” really bothered me, and I think it might be a bad message for kids. Did that bother you at all?
Wesley Joost, San Francisco Dear Wesley: Bother me? No, because if things like that continued to bother me, I’d be living inside a basket by now with a lid over it. But do I like it? No, and I don’t think such spectacles should be seen by kids. But hey, who cares about kids? Not the Motion Picture Association of America. They care about money. Under their authority, PG-13 has become a license to depict mass murder. Each year, the annual big-budget PG-13 festival of carnage begins before Memorial Day and lasts until Labor Day. I believe this causes damage, and I’m not alone. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano wrote the book on this, “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill” (1999). Hello Mr. LaSalle: You recently mentioned your avoidance of television, in general. Does that also extend to “made for TV” films? Some memorable TV films that I can still recall include “And the Band Played On,” “Sybil,” and “Brian’s Song.”
Julian Grant, Pacifica, CA Hello Mr. Grant: I saw “And the Band Played On,” because it was written by a colleague, Randy Shilts, and because Nathalie Baye was in it. And I saw the other two, because I was a little kid and forced to watch whatever my parents had on. When I was 13, “Go Ask Alice” (1973) — about a girl who dies of a drug overdose — had a profound effect on me. And I continue to love the 1976 “Dark Victory” with Elizabeth Montgomery and Anthony Hopkins. More recently, Steven Soderbergh’s “Behind the Candelabra” (2013), about Liberace, was a terrific TV movie that I ended up seeing several times, because my wife insisted on showing it to everybody. I don’t see many TV movies, but I see a few here and there. Dear Mick: What are your thoughts about the power of film to spark social change? “An Inconvenient Truth” is one example, as are various films by Michael Moore.
Allen Brown, Montara Dear Allen: Al Gore’s movie introduced the topic of climate change to the general public, and in that way “An Inconvenient Truth” made and continues to make a difference. But such examples are rare. Do you know a single person who goes to see a Michael Moore movie who doesn’t already agree with Michael Moore? There are right-wing movies that pop up every year, that barely advertise in the Bay Area and don’t even screen for critics. They just depend on word-ofmouth and conservative media, but they do get audiences. So basically you can’t even lead horses to water with documentaries — forget about making them drink. I think the movies that do spark social change are narrative features. For example, I suspect that Heath Ledger’s two big emotional moments in “Brokeback Mountain” did more for bringing about gay marriage than 100 documentaries combined. I also believe Sidney Poitier’s films in the 1960s had a profound effect on racial attitudes. A white person could not watch Sidney Poitier on screen and be a racist — at least not in the actual moment of seeing Sidney Poitier and identifying with him as the protagonist. This is how movies work. We emotionally identify with screen protagonists because we are the protagonist of our own lives, so we automatically have something in common with them. George Washington once wrote, “It is among the evils, and perhaps is not the smallest, of democratical governments, that the people must feel, before they will see.” Along that line, the only movies that actually change things are the ones that make people feel something, not think something. We might not like that — George Washington saw this challenge to the republic in early 1787, months before the Constitution was written — but that’s just how it is.
Have a question? Ask Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com. Include your name and city for publication, and a phone number for verification.