I love Hollywood movies. To me, movies are a country’s modern-day parables. A good movie teaches me as much as about myself as the Sunday School lessons that I learned growing up. When a movie touches you, it’s because it reflects a larger truth or a more universal yearning that a talented director and group of actors have captured. And it seems that the current focus of modern Hollywood is on helping its audience — particularly, the white American male — understand his place in a modern world in which life is tough, and sexuality, gender, race and religion are not quite as simple as they once were.

Being American, I guess it was inevitable that I’d love Hollywood. When I was younger, I always thought I’d end up working there. Not as an actor, but as an entertainment lawyer. That was until I went to Los Angeles for a summer to work in Sullivan & Cromwell’s (a major Wall Street law firm) LA office and realised that even though Hollywood movies can move the spirit, LA itself is spiritually dead. Your value is determined by your proximity to A-list stars, many of whom are the products of plastic surgery and a loss of perspective. Not at all like the heroes that they play in the movies.

But I still love Hollywood movies, even though my European friends make fun of me for it. Many of them refuse to go to the movies with me.

So this past week — the middle of August is one of the deadest periods in Spain’s calendar — I’ve been watching a lot of them, sometimes by myself. Here’s a partial list of what I’ve been watching.

Blood Diamond (on DVD): Great movie. Leonardo DiCaprio is the modern-day prodigal son, an amoral, self-centred diamond smuggler who learns how to love from an African fisherman who will do anything to reunite his family, which has been torn apart by the Civil War in Sierra Leone. The rebels are atrocious, cutting off people’s hands to keep them from voting, brainwashing children to convert them into a brutal child-army and enslaving able-bodied men to work in diamond fields. It’s the sale of diamonds as wedding rings to European and American women that funds the rebels’ efforts, but the rest of the world ignores the issue until DiCaprio, initially lured by the desire to sell a priceless pink diamond, helps a beautiful journalist to get the information that she needs to write the story that will embarrass world leaders into initiating reform.

Take-home messages:

• even if you’ve been a total shit all of your life, it’s never to late to reform and do the right thing; and
• Africa (thanks to Angelina Jolie, Madonna, DiCaprio, Forrest Whitaker, Bono and a few other stars) is the new focus of left-leaning actors who want to use their star power to make the world a better place.

The Last King of Scotland (on DVD): Forrest Whitaker won the Oscar for this one, beating out Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated for Blood Diamond. He humanizes Idi Amin, the strange and brutal Ugandan dictator. But this isn’t his story. It’s really about Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a fictional, young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda to help the poor but ends up becoming Amin’s personal physician. Garrigan has just graduated from medical school, but he feels that he’s too much in his father’s shadow. (His father is also a doctor.) So he takes out the globe, spins it around and decides to go to wherever his finger stops it. He ends up going to the second place, because (if I remember correctly) the first place was Canada, and he vetoed fate’s first decision. Although the lead character here isn’t American, the issue is the same — a young man trying to find his place in the world, getting attracted by the glitz and glamour associated with an African dictator (a seemingly counter-intuitive proposition), and then eventually realizing that he needs to do the right thing — which is getting out the story of African atrocities to his primarily white European and American colleagues.

It’s interesting to note that in both “African” movies, the central contribution of the white protagonists is to give up personal gain and spread the message about the atrocities taking place in Africa. This is the principal message that Hollywood wants to send to its main audience, and I think that it’s a good one.

That being said, the more politically incorrect and ultimately more important question of why black Africans seem to have a penchant for savagely mutilating and enslaving each other is neatly avoided. After all, the take-home message is meant for the movie’s target audience, which is white (i.e., not black African), and no Hollywood exec wants to be accused of racism by highlighting delicate racial issues.

The Bourne Ultimatum (in theatres): Loved it. It was the best of the three Bourne movies so far. I loved the first one, liked the second one, and was blown away by the third one. We’re interested in Bourne, because he is the best. He looks like a normal guy (it’s Matt Damon), but he has supernatural physical abilities and he never gives up on his mission. In search of his identity and his humanity, it’s a metaphor for the lost sense of self suffered by the modern male in a metro-sexual, pop-psychology world. Men are taught to be strong and unemotional, but there’s a more recent trend to become more emotionally in touch with who we are and who we love. The interest in spies reflects our continuing concern with fighting terrorism, except that in America right now there’s a general distrust of the government (Hello GWB), and so the evil that Bourne fights against is less about foreign terrorists and more about the bad guys within the Department of Defense.

Take-home message: Life is a bitch and will throw you lots of obstacles, but if you kick ass in everything you do and never give up, you’ll survive. And by the way, try not to forget who you really are, and remember to love.

Regardless of the genre, American movies tend to be idealistic and moralistic, like Americans themselves. European movies tend to be more “realistic” and less morally judgmental. Life is tough for its protagonists as well, but there usually isn’t the stereotypically happy Hollywood ending, and the characters tend to be more emotionally complex.

I can see why some of my friends make fun of Hollywood movies.

But at the end of the day, it’s kind of like religion. It might not always make sense, and some of the stories might seem laughable, but it’s better to believe in something than to be cynical and not believe in anything at all.

Life really is tough. That much, everyone seems to agree on.

But hope and cheesy ideals sometimes help to make it a little more bearable.