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" JERRY BRUCKHEIMER HAS always specialized in turning us on with frivolous destruction, so his new interest in turning us on with the important kind of destruction must mean he&amp;#039;s aspiring to dignity. Under Bruckheimer&amp;#039;s aegis, Michael Bay, the sensitive soul who directed Armageddon, is readying Pearl Harbor, due to blow up real good come Memorial Day 2001. Though he takes unofficial second billing to a budget sporting more lowercase zeros than Japan launched uppercase ones, Ben Affleck stars--when you can&amp;#039;t get Damon, you hire Pythias--as one of a pair of hotshot flier brothers in love with the same woman, and I&amp;#039;m guessing that Admiral Yamamoto will solve that quandary the way Dr. Laura only wishes she could. You don&amp;#039;t need the presence of Tom Hanks&amp;#039;s D-day sidekick Tom Sizemore in the cast to figure out Bruckheimer&amp;#039;s thinking: How can we get Private Ryan on board the Titanic?  As if the millennium&amp;#039;s end were the cue, the movies have rediscovered history--rediscovered it as fertilizer for lollapaloozas, after a couple of decades when imaginary futures ruled the box office and costume pictures were mostly good for peddling elegant diction and general nostalgia to Merchant Ivory junkies. This past summer, Hollywood refought the American Revolution--Brits lost again, if you&amp;#039;re wondering--in The Patriot, directed by Independence Day kaboom- meister Roland Emmerich. That followed hard on the sandy heels of Ridley Scott&amp;#039;s Gladiator, Hollywood&amp;#039;s first trip back to ancient Rome in more than thirty years. By then, submariner Woody Harrelson (sorry, Matthew McConaughey--it keeps happening) had already outwitted the finky Nazis in U-571--so far as I can remember, the first straightforward adventure flick to use World War II as a backdrop in at least twenty. Credit Braveheart for figuring out that macho now looks less objectionable in period togs. It&amp;#039;s true that Mel Gibson is kind of a lunkhead; in fact, he&amp;#039;s just shrewd enough to be proud of it. But that didn&amp;#039;t stop him from being ahead of his time. Five years ago, his mangy-maned ode to Scotland the brave (but easily bamboozled) was so out of whack with prevailing blockbuster recipes as to seem freakish even to the Academy voters who rewarded Mel for Lethal Weapon&amp;#039;s profits by naming it Best Picture. It also earned writer Randall Wallace (now Pearl Harbor&amp;#039;s wordsmith) his own Oscar nom for a script whose most memorable lines--the climactic howl of &amp;quot;Free-dumb!&amp;quot; aside--were grunts of pain, in the humdingingest confusion of masochism with virility since Kirk Douglas last tensed for a beating. Because The Patriot relocated Mel&amp;#039;s fight for free-dumb to eighteenth-century America from thirteenth-century Scotland--and, to quote Rambo, let him win this time--reviewers were quick to dub it Braveheart II. But the reprise made me miss the prototype&amp;#039;s lack of calculation. Even though U-571 bungled the action-movie formulas of yesteryear like a drunk happily pushing every button on an elevator at once, I had a good time at it, because the most genuinely old-fashioned thing about the movie was its silliness. By contrast, the overweening tone The Patriot shares with Gladiator--the way they glare back at you as you watch--insists that something too important to merely enjoy is going on. They&amp;#039;d both be miles more pleasurable if they just admitted they were crap. In fact, if either movie was set in outer space instead--as each easily could be, with no changes except in weaponry--its basic vulgarity would be harder to miss. Invoking history lets both projects masquerade as class acts instead--however laughable that is in Gladiator&amp;#039;s case, with the ghosts of Steve Reeves and Victor Mature hovering in the arena&amp;#039;s wings. Yet the only vivid thing we learn about the epochs in question is that they were amazingly gory. For male moviegoers trapped in our own tame, unduly civilized, all-too-enlightened times, the special thrill of these primitive fantasies is the implication that, once upon a time, they weren&amp;#039;t fantasies. Watching the valiant carnage of an age in which grisly deeds could have heroic justifications, we&amp;#039;re left lamenting that we were born too late--or maybe just regretting that we&amp;#039;re saddled with wives, kids, and/or mortgages, since both The Patriot and Gladiator feature protagonists driven to brutality after their placid home lives are destroyed. Do we feel sad about that? Sure we do, honey. Pass the popcorn. Just as L. P. Hartley so famously said, the past is a foreign country--one we now maraud through at the multiplex like debauched tourists, hungry for excitement and indifferent to all other values. The advent of computer-generated imagery has let filmmakers re-create historical events on a scale humongous enough to make D. W. Griffith&amp;#039;s Babylon set for Intolerance look dinky, but at some cost in wonder; nobody ever asks &amp;quot;How&amp;#039;d they do that?&amp;quot; anymore, depriving us of one of our keenest dopey pleasures at the movies. The biggest loss, however, is in empathy. Ridley Scott is famous for his visual hoo-ha, but there&amp;#039;s no magic of time recaptured in his digitalized ancient Rome--just an endless bustle of tiny cutouts in a Lego kit gone mad, in a movie whose tag line should have been, &amp;quot;Let the video games begin.&amp;quot; The CGI cannonball that takes off an anonymous soldier&amp;#039;s head in The Patriot gets rid of what may be the only functioning brain in sight; wistfully, I watched it whiz away. The effect is dazzling but unreal, and I think that, far from objecting, the audience kind of digs the alienation. If we felt remotely implicated in these bloody goings-on, we wouldn&amp;#039;t be able to relish them as much. Instead, history gets hawked to us as past-tense sci-fi, resurrected for our pleasure like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. It&amp;#039;s telling that the directors now making historical spectacles aren&amp;#039;t obsessed sentimentalists like Sam Peckinpah--the Max Ophuls of shoot-&amp;#039;em-ups--or even stuffy ones like David Lean and his all-thumbs epigone Richard Attenborough but high-tech sensation mongers with no discernible commitment to their material. (In the Stanley Kubrick vein, Ridley Scott&amp;#039;s mystique comes from how imposingly unconcerned he is with what used to be called human interest.) The fabulistic way the past is used now in movies, without resonance except as civilization&amp;#039;s equivalent of presold brand names, testifies to how cut off from it today&amp;#039;s audience actually feels. The Patriot is supposed to stir us by recounting our own country&amp;#039;s beginnings, but a movie like Total Recall seemed more plausibly connected to our world--maybe because the hero&amp;#039;s memory getting wiped out was something moviegoers could identify with. Scott&amp;#039;s visual sophistication just makes the solemnity with which Gladiator uncorks more than two hours of stupid gladiator tricks more incongruous. Maybe I&amp;#039;m showing my age, but shouldn&amp;#039;t a movie this inherently puerile be more fun? It&amp;#039;s The Dirty Dozen in a toga, and it comes on like Shakespeare for the tongue-tied. Yet people get off on the humorless, baleful impressiveness of it all. Proving just what a boys&amp;#039; movie we&amp;#039;re watching, the tests of mettle don&amp;#039;t even leave room for a token orgy, although such displays of Roman decadence used to be half this genre&amp;#039;s meal ticket. All we get is head baddie Commodus&amp;#039;s incest fixation--a foible less likely to attract angry picketing by real-life practitioners than the implied or overt homosexuality that would have signaled Commodus&amp;#039;s depravity a movie generation or two ago. Perhaps in deference to tradition, though, Joaquin Phoenix plays him swishy anyway. It used to be easy to distinguish Hollywood&amp;#039;s mindless action movies from its prestige epics, but now the numbskull values of the one have acquired the self-importance of the other. Considering its subject, the funniest thing about Gladiator--not that anyone onscreen cracks a smile--is that it really is a sports movie, the ultimate tribute to playing hurt; we might as well be staring at a gigantic, live-action Successories poster. It&amp;#039;s enough to make you nostalgic for Spartacus&amp;#039;s sententious humanism, when fighting to the death for other people&amp;#039;s jollies was kind of, you know, degrading. For Russell Crowe&amp;#039;s Maximus, it&amp;#039;s an apotheosis; the movie treats the mob&amp;#039;s acclaim as an unironic triumph and his self-sacrifice as inspiring--even though all he&amp;#039;s accomplished, so far as I can tell, is to give we-who-are-about-to-die someone less icky to salute. Even if the violence has now all but crowded out the sex, using the nasty old Roman Empire to hawk the delights of barbarism to the audience isn&amp;#039;t exactly unprecedented in Hollywood. It&amp;#039;s more startling to see the American Revolution put to the same purpose. Movie re-creations of our national past used to generate a kind of folkloric authenticity by drawing on a shared reservoir of hokey idealism about what our history meant--which was appealing even if you knew it meant other things, too. Here, all that&amp;#039;s gone by the boards; the hero&amp;#039;s only motive for joining the rebellion is revenge, and the only argument in favor of independence in Robert (Saving Private Ryan) Rodat&amp;#039;s script is that fighting for it lets you kill people. A lot of effort clearly went into The Patriot&amp;#039;s elaborately authentic production design, and the cinematography mimics the arresting combinations of delicate colors and burnished light in the era&amp;#039;s martial paintings. But all the painstaking detail just sits on the screen, because Emmerich doesn&amp;#039;t use it evocatively. He&amp;#039;d rather get on to the next bloodbath; whenever poor Chris Cooper turns up in his natty Continental duds to mutter about strategy, the wary resignation in this capable actor&amp;#039;s eyes tells us he knows he&amp;#039;s the boring part. In another movie era, the Gibson character&amp;#039;s haunted memories of his own sadism during the French and Indian War could have had only one resolution: At the climax, the hero would have had to show mercy, implicitly justifying the American cause by proving that he really is what Jason Isaacs&amp;#039;s sneering Colonel Tavington calls &amp;quot;the better man.&amp;quot; Instead, Gibson&amp;#039;s efficient butchery of his nemesis just proves he&amp;#039;s the better psychopath, and a movie designed to indict Americans as bloodthirsty killers would be hard pressed to make us look worse. Appalled by Tavington&amp;#039;s over-the-top cruelty, British commentators complained that The Patriot slandered their national character. But where were the stateside right-wingers protesting the insult to ours? If this is how we celebrate ourselves these days, Michael Bay&amp;#039;s revisit to a day now moribund in infamy has its work cut out for it--he&amp;#039;ll have to turn Pearl Harbor into a massacre of the Japanese. It&amp;#039;s not that I think history is so sacrosanct, honest; I know that those who don&amp;#039;t learn from it aren&amp;#039;t even doomed to repeat sixth grade. But I do think that the past must have better uses than flattering our own time&amp;#039;s appetite for brutality by giving it an impressive- looking pedigree.  The Index Five Things You Should Know 1. A New Show to Watch James Cameron, Titanic man, comes to TV with Dark Angel. It is certainly dark and there is definitely an angel here--Max, who could save the world if she would just lighten up. See, the world Max lives in has been de-electrified by some sort of radio pulse, plunging the nation into a deep depression. Okay, it doesn&amp;#039;t sound that great. But you can tell that a movie guy put this show together. The sets are impressive, and in the first episode there are not one but two long shots of Max sitting on the slanted roof of some skyscraper overlooking a desolate Pacific Northwest--you just don&amp;#039;t get to see that on TV very much. There are a fair number of head smackers (&amp;quot;They say we&amp;#039;re in a depression, but no one looks depressed to me. . . .&amp;quot;), but you somehow come away genuinely charmed. Premieres October 3 at 8:00 P.M. ET on Fox. 2. An Indie You Should See Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky&amp;#039;s astonishing follow-up to 1998&amp;#039;s Pi, is a full-body experience. The film so precisely captures the sensory effects of falling into addiction that you&amp;#039;re bound to leave the theater unbalanced if not somewhat ill. If there&amp;#039;s any justice left in Hollywood, Ellen Burstyn will take the Best Actress Oscar for her tortured portrayal of an aging woman struggling with loneliness, isolation, and a subsequent diet-pill dependence. Surprisingly, the rest of the young cast--including Jennifer Connelly, Jared Leto, and Marlon Wayans as starry-eyed heroin addicts--keeps pace with her, turning in some of the most poignant and devastating performances in recent memory. Requiem for a Dream is far too bleak to be a crowd pleaser, but Aronofsky has turned this gut-wrenching journey into one of the great films of the year. In theaters October 20. 3. Horror to Love Though released more than thirty years ago, Roman Polanski&amp;#039;s landmark film Rosemary&amp;#039;s Baby still holds the power to thrill and unnerve, even in these times of graphic overkill. Now you can relive the chilling experience, not to mention the sixties--the clothes! the hairstyles! the camp!--with a bonus, as one of the greatest horror films of all time is reborn on VHS and DVD. Both formats have been remastered and include new background material as well as retrospective interviews with Polanski and producer Robert Evans. The extras put the film in perspective, but the main allure is still the stunning performance of waif/wraith extraordinaire Mia Farrow, who effortlessly evokes a profound paranoia that winds up being all too well-founded. Available October 3. 4. Live Nude Girls. Really. At once racy and earnest, Live Nude Girls, Unite! is as provocative as its title. Silver-tongued stripper/comedian Julia Query takes the audience on a unique video journey, beginning with her decision to leave grad school and start dancing, through the organization of a group of San Francisco strippers who create the first union of exotic dancers in the United States, pausing briefly along the way to tell her mother, an acclaimed activist and M.D., about her new profession. Her strident humor and commitment to the cause make Live Nude Girls, Unite! one of those rare subversive documentaries that manage to be comical, political, enlightening, and entertaining all at the same time. In theaters this month. 5. A Rare Game to Try If you&amp;#039;re a tennis fan for whom the gap between Grand Slams yawns wide, Sega Sports has your solution: Virtua Tennis 2000. Sega&amp;#039;s first tennis title and one of few video games dedicated to the sport, Virtua Tennis has everything a TV-bound fan could ask for: name players, elaborately authentic action, and graphics so sophisticated you can recognize stars by the way they play, the way they walk, and even by the expressions on their faces. With simple controls, Virtua Tennis is an addictive experience you&amp;#039;ll be playing nonstop--at least until the real tennis season starts again. Available now. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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