Hollywood violence makes us yawn

By DONALD KAUL

Within the past 10 days I have seen two people stabbed repeatedly with fountain pens, then kicked to death.

I have watched others get shot through the head, the stomach and several extremities. I have seen still warm bodies dismembered and disposed of in vacant lots, like garbage.

I go to the movies a lot.

Not that I'm one of those people who is overly sensitive to screen violence, mind you. As a matter of fact, I worry that I'm not sensitive enough. I remember being surprised when a friend complained about the extreme violence in "Fargo," a film I had recommended.

"What extreme violence?" I said.

"Well, like when they fed the body into the wood chipper, for instance."

"Oh yeah, the wood chipper," I said. "I forgot." Actually, I simply hadn't considered it all that violent.

So don't take me for a Nervous Nellie. I grew up on Jimmy Cagney films and I was the first one on my block to do a credible imitation of Edward G. Robinson. I'm a tough guy. But it seems to me that things are getting out of hand.

For example, I recently saw the Al Pacino-Johnny Depp film, "Donnie Brasco." It's about a small-time Mafia hit man and his friendship with an undercover cop. It got pretty good reviews, although none of the reviewers seemed to notice that the film's idea of dramatic conflict didn't get much beyond shooting people with machine guns, then cutting them up for convenient disposal.

Then I rented "Casino," a Mafia-Las Vegas number starring Robert DeNiro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci. That's the one where Pesci takes his pen out and uses a guy in a bar for a punchboard, before kicking him into a bleeding mess. Another time he puts a guy's head in a vice and tightens it until the fellow reveals his secrets. The film was directed by Martin Scorsese, one of our finest filmmakers.

I also rented "Bound," a lesbian love story set against a Mafia background and featuring a scene in which a fellow is persuaded to talk by having his fingers cut off with a tree pruner; this in addition to the four or five or six murders (who can keep track?) that are carried out in living color before your very eyes. (The tree pruner scene echoes one in "Casino" where DeNiro, the manager of a casino, threatens to cut off a card cheat's hand with a power saw, but relents and merely destroys it with a ball peen hammer instead.)

These are entertainment films, remember. The creative talents of Hollywood apparently have decided that torture, mutilation and sadistic foreplay is the stuff American dreams are made of these days.

I don't think so. None of those films, all expertly made, was a box office smash. They don't connect. You watch a thug beat someone to jelly, then you're supposed to care whether he's got a happy home life?

The problem is epitomized in the new film, "Grosse Pointe Blank," a generally funny farce about a professional hit man (what else?) going back to his 10-year high school reunion. It features wonderfully witty dialogue, a cute love story and marvelous send-ups of psychiatry, upper middle class complacency and the CIA mentality. It derives much of its humor from the another-day-at-the-office attitude it takes toward the profession of hired killer.

But ultimately, it can't sustain the levity in the context of repeated killings. It begins by making fun of violent films, but it ends up being one. (Yes, it's another one where the hero kills a fellow with a pen. The only sop to the tender sensibilities of the audience is that when they dispose of the body by shoving it into a furnace, they don't cut it up first.)

The film dies when the blood becomes real. It ends in a shootout that is supposed to be hilarious but is merely tedious.

Here's what I think: I think the big reason there's been a run on Jane Austen films lately is that nowhere in any Austen book does anyone get killed with a pen. Not ever. You could look it up.

Hollywood might want to consider this thought: Violence, taken to extremes, is not merely repulsive, it is boring. Tribune Media Services, Inc.