PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

We went up to Crossgates Mall in Albany yesterday, and my three older kids and I went to see a film called Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The price was $32.50. Children paid 7.50 and I paid 10.00. We snuck in oat bars, and apple juice, while my smallest child and wife went shopping.

The film wasn't too bad. There were lots of visceral action sequences in which a young rogue named Dastan (in French, it sounds like Destin, the word for Destiny) leaped from roof to roof as a boy, and then later becomes the charmed adopted son of the emperor. He leads armies, is disgraced after he is framed for murder, and ends up in love with the victimized queen of an empire that has been wrongly attacked for having (and yet not-having) weapons of mass destruction. A dagger with a glass handle is found in her city, and she is its protectress. It turns out that a wicked brother of the emperor wants this glass dagger because it controls time. The parallels to Cheney and Iraq have been apparent to all but the most meager reviewers. As usual, the most intellectually satisfying review is from Fox:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/05/28/james-p-pinkerton-prince-persia-conservative-islamic/

I rarely see movies on the big screen. This one was PG-13, and I worried that the six-year old would be scarred for life by the violence. He said the movie never scared him, but his eyes were big as silver dollars, and he would lean in close when the daggers and swords were flying.

Afterward, I asked my ten-year old daughter what she thought. She said, "It was a good movie to see, but not as good as Avatar. Avatar was like a dream, dad. You have to see it."

I asked my six-year old. He said, "It was good. It was all about a dagger, right?"

My nine-year old had fallen asleep in the car, so didn't participate in the follow-up discussion. We had been up the night before watching the Celtics' demolition of the Orlando Magic, with the lackluster performances of Dwight Howard and the others, as Paul Pierce again poured it on, making three-pointers, grabbing offensive rebounds, and forcing his team to the finals.

We are now looking forward to other action sequences between Kobe Bryant and Paul Pierce. Which one will want it more? I predict it will be Paul Pierce as long as his sidekick Kevin Garnett remains healthy.

The Soviet Cultural Commissar Andrei Gromyko once said that America lives for action sequences, and just wants physical thrills in its rock music and movies and in its love for sports. He contrasted this pejoratively with the deep thoughtfulness of the Soviet chess tradition, and their philosophical novels along the lines of Dostoevsky and the deep emotionality of Tolstoy. (But our lone wolf Bobby Fischer beat their finest players, and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy emerged before the Soviet system came into play and started murdering their writers. Their finest writers -- such as Solzhenitsyn, and Nabokov, were forced out of the USSR, and spent some of their best years in the US. One of the better chessmasters of the former USSR is Garry Kasparov, who is a critic of Russian corruption, and wants to put in place in Russia some of the checks and balances that distinguish the American system based on James Madison.)

The most American part of Prince of Persia was the sheik in the desert who wanted to keep his ostrich races free of the empire's criminally exorbitant taxation. In this way, the Fox Reviewer said, the movie, while pretending to be a critique of Bush & Cheney, was actually an endorsement of the American free enterprise system.