War Movies

If you haven't read this post at The Belmont Club on war movies, do. There's been a lot written on the failure of recent (anti-) war movies, and this piece goes well beyond that premise to what makes a war movie truly great. (And it's not necessarily great battle scenes.)

hat-tip: Dr. Sanity

Oppressing The Spark Of Hope

Where there is tyranny, the spark of hope can be all but extinguished by the oppressive darkness of the state, and while the spark never dies, it stays faintly kindled only by the lives of others.

In The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2007 (along with its 41 other international awards), once hopeful lives are indeed crushed under the heavy, corrupt hand of the East German police state in the last years of the Soviet Empire. But the power of the spark does stay alive in the film, tyranny ultimately fails, and new lives begin.

I waited a long time to see the film, which has been on my "must view' list since the first review I read of it. The review detailed a scene in which the central character, a Stasi (secret police) agent, is asked by a young boy in an elevator if he is indeed Stasi.

"Do you even know what Stasi is?" asks the agent, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, played in haunting sterility by Ulrich Muhe.

"Yes, they're the people who send innocent people to prison."

"And who told you that?"

The boy answers "My father," and in the moment before he can ask the obvious next Stasi question, all the slowly building complexities of the plot come together and a spark of hope ignites in the empty soul of Wiesler.

East Germany in the late 1980s, North Korea, Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, Venezuela today. Throughout the world, countries are full of people with sparks, and others who are watching their lives, trying to put out the sparks, trying to keep the oppressing blandness and overwhelming control in place.

Find a night when the house is quiet, watch the film and marvel at how relevant its 20-year-old story remains. Here's the Netflix page for your convenience.

Rendition: The "Loud Voice/Small Mind" View

Disclosure: I am not going to see the film Rendition, but I have plenty to say about it nonetheless. This is a legitimate position because I'm not setting out to be a movie critic, but for the last three years and three days (I seem to have just missed noting C-SM's third anniversary) I've become a noted (by a few hundred folks, at least) social critic.

The story line of rendition, as told us by that trusty source, Reuters, is pretty straightforward:

Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon, "Rendition" tells the fictional story of an Egyptian-American engineer abducted by U.S. customs at Washington airport, deported to a North African jail and tortured under the eyes of a CIA agent.

Witherspoon plays the man's pregnant wife desperately trying to track him down, while Gyllenhaal is the reluctant CIA agent asked to supervise his brutal interrogation.

The more you read about this film, the more you see how South African director Gavin Hood has gone out of his way to create a sympathetic victim. The renditionee, Anwar El-Ibrahimi (played by Omar Metwally) is described by LA Times reviewer Carina Chocano as "He lives in a Craftsman house in the Chicago suburbs and makes $200,000 a year. He's handsome, athletic and expensively educated," and to top it off, he has a cute blond American (pregnant yet!) wife. The CIA agent, Gyllenhaal, is "reluctant" because he's not clear what the rules are, and he thinks they're being over-stepped.

Any other approach and Hood would risk losing what little audience the movie will attract. If Metwally's character had a level of suspicion around him significant enough to trigger rendition, if his wife were a Muslim equally suspicious in her nature, if the CIA agent knew the rules and made sure they were applied (which is, after all, his job), Hood would be left with a limp story. Instead, he's got himself a pulpit-flick, and he admits it:

"(It's) not just the people to whom it happens but the people who are involved in having to do this and they don't quite know what the rules are ... We don't have the answers but I think we ask people to ask the questions and I hope the film contributes to the debate."

"Debate" being the key word. Anyone who has ever been on a debate team knows the ploy of deliberate overstatement in order to emphasize a point. That's a fine and well-worked strategy, but I'm not going to pay $8 to watch it done if there's no rebuttal offered.

I feel the liberal media breathing down my neck even as I write this simple request for a balanced movie on the issue. I turn around with a start. Sure enough, it's A.O. Scott of the NY Times:

Given the tenor of political discussion these days, it is inevitable that someone with a loud voice and a small mind will label “Rendition” anti-American. (But look! A quick Internet search reveals that some people already have, many of them without even bothering to see the movie.) It is, after all, much easier to rant and rave about treacherous Hollywood liberals than to think through the moral and strategic questions raised by some of the policies of the American government. But it is just these questions that “Rendition” tries to address, in a manner that, while hardly neutral — it may not shock you to learn that the filmmakers come out against torture, kidnapping and other abuses — nonetheless tries to be evenhanded and thoughtful. “Rendition” may be earnest, but it is hardly naïve. Rather, it tries to be thoughtful and respectful of complexity while at the same time honoring the imperatives of commercial entertainment.

So I have a small mind and a loud voice because I want to hear the issue from someone who hasn't come out against "(undefined and surely ill-defined) torture, kidnapping (but hardly of innocent kids) and other (unnamed, but let your imagination wander) abuses."

"The imperatives of commercial entertainment" Scott mentions are what I kicked around at the outset: Sympathetic heroes who are not terrorists, a nasty enemy willing to shred not just lives but the American Way, and an agent caught in the middle. Would that it were true, but if the records of rendition were suddenly opened, we would find unsympathetic targets, interrogators doing their best to protect people like Hood, Gyllenhaal and Witherspoon from terror attacks -- and a lot of internal pushing and pushing back regarding how far we should go with this particular tactic, then a scrupulous following of the defined rules.

Instead, Hood has created a predictable plot upon which to set his pulpit. His hapless victim has done nothing at all wrong in the world except have a name that's one letter off from a terrorism suspect who's been implicated in a bombing that just occurred, killing an American operative. I'll let the LAT reviewer pick it up from there:

The man's death leaves a young and inexperienced Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) in charge and sends CIA honcho Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) into a retaliatory frenzy. Local officials in North Africa, led by an intimidating Abasi Fawal (Igal Naor), are happy to oblige with Whitman's request that the prisoner be squeezed until he talks, to the free-thinking Freeman's growing discomfort. Meanwhile, the hugely pregnant Isabella (Witherspoon) starts knocking on doors, starting with that of an ex-boyfriend named Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard) who works for a powerful senator (Alan Arkin).

Does it sound like every anti-American, anti-war film you've ever seen, including the fun but nasty Bourne Ultimatum? Streep's character, the CIA agent who refuses to follow the rules, is a fine Hollywood construct because it allows Hood and his ilk to quickly do away with the fact that there are rules. And of course the Senator is played by Alan Arkin, the most glitterati of the Hollywood libs, who is so excellent at playing slithery politicians.

But in the end, it's all a plot sham designed to preach, not entertain, and the American people have stayed away in droves. It limped into ninth place in the weekend box office, behind even a re-issue of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas and a Disney re-issue I've never even heard of.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's irrelevant. Hood will make his producers rich when the film opens in Europe and the Middle East, where it will do further harm to the world opinion of America. Hood and Hollywood attackers of America will be the winner, and America, which is only trying to defend the world from Islamist terrorism, will be the loser.

Stardust Is A Must-See

Fallen stars, aging witches, lightening pirates, a girl discovering love and a boy becoming a man ... the makings of a couple hours of magical movie-going.

The movie is Stardust, and if you've seen the trailers, you may have thought it a fantasy film that might be worth seeing. The trailers don't tell it be half -- this is one of the best movies, if not the best movie, I've seen so far this year. Only 300 was in the same league, although they're in very different leagues.

The story is of a country boy's great adventure from boyhood to manhood in a land just over the wall, just over the dimensions, from his home. It's a story of greed and deception, of magic and might, of loyalty and honor.

Near the end of the movie, the object all desire is moving toward oblivion and two good forces and two evil forces (including Michelle Pfeiffer in a delightfully witchy roll) are moving towards her, two to kill, two to save. I think at that moment you would not have found a back against a seat anywhere in the theater; everyone was leaning forward to get just three inches closer to finding out what happens next.

Light will reach your eyes a tiny bit quicker if you're leaning forward, you know.

And when Robert de Niro got into his groove, the laughter just rolled. I think I heard this sound ... best supporting actor ... behind the peels. (Incredible Daughter #3, a ridiculously devoted Johnny Depp/Jack Sparrow fan, declares him the best pirate ever, to the amazement of her friends on IMDB's Pirates board.)

Unless, of course, that award goes to the scenery. IMDB says it was filmed in locations in Hertfordshire, just out of London, and that may be true for some scenes near the villages, but the vast landscapes made me think of Patagonia or summertime Alaska, so there was some trickery involved. These backdrops were massive, empty, powerful, and very much a part of the movie, as New Zealand was in the Ring movies.

I am not a movie reviewer and can't pretend to be; everything I've written here has been strained and difficult. It's just this: If you liked The Princess Bride, Pirates of the Caribbean or the Lord of the Rings films, you will love this movie, and will particularly admire the skill of the screenwriters. You'll laugh, be on the edge of your seat, feel like a child again.

A Troubling September Dawn For Mitt?

September 11 doesn't mark just one anniversary of the slaughter of Americans by religious fanatics; it marks two, and in 2007, the earlier event will have its 150th anniversary.

In that case, the Mountain Meadows massacre, about 120 American men, women and children were brutally executed by ... Americans. The executed were members of a wagon train going west, Christians from Arkansas. The executers were Mormons and a few of their Paiute comrades.

There are differences between the two 9/11's, of course. For one, the U.S. had declared a war of sorts against the Mormons, dispatching 2,500 troops to Utah to deal with Mormon polygamy and refusal to bow the federal law. The hapless Baker-Francher wagon train happened into Utah just as Mormon apocalyptic thinking about the approaching Army troops was reaching its peak.

Here's the Wikipedia entry, that appears to be pretty bloody turf itself, as Mormon minimizers and anti-Mormon maximizers seem to be at war within the entry. Read it with open eyes and you'll come away with a pretty good accounting all in all through the push and pull.

Mitt Romney would probably rather we not talk about this. Mormons ruthlessly killing pioneer families is not an image that will do his campaign good ... but it's going to be a bit hard to avoid the matter as the movie September Dawn opens August 24.

It won't be a subtle event. In the trialer, the narrator, in a deep, conspiratorial voice, talks over white-on-black type screens and quick-cuts of pioneer images:

On September 11, 1857 in an unspoiled valley of the Utah Territory and in the name of God, 130 men, women and children were savagely murdered. Who ordered the massacre and why in a cloak of secrecy and conspiracy and the reputation of one of this nation's mightiest religious figures has been preserved and protected ... until now.

As the type fades on "until now," a man on horseback draws and cocks his six-shooter and shouts,

Mormons, do your duty!

... and the massacre begins. (View trailer here)

There's good reason for the movie to be coming out now ... it is the 150th anniversary and all ... but how unfortunate for Romney that the timing is such that the movie is coming out now.

Will it have an impact? I doubt it, really. Slavery didn't keep Jimmy Carter from being president and the Inquisition didn't get in Kennedy's way; besides movies like this don't tend to attract big crowds.

Sure, there are those who will use it to turn voters against the Romney campaign -- gullible voters who will let themselves be swayed by something that happened 150 years ago in a very different time, a very different country.

Sunsets, Simpsons And A Longer Vacation

This is how the mountains looked last night as we left La Quinta for Rancho Mirage and dinner and a movie. It was about 109 as the sun set, and 101 as we drove home about 10 p.m., but today's got some clouds and is cooler.

We saw The Simpson's Movie. Incredible Daughter #3 didn't want to see it because our household has had a good taste ban on the show, but a scrub of the reviews indicated there would be nothing too offensive, so off we went ... to find a movie that delighted us all.

From beginning to end, laughter broke out spontaneously throughout the theater; sometimes we were in synch, sometimes there was something that tickled just a few, who could be heard here and there throughout the theater. As I considered the amount and type of laughter, I realized that it's quite rare to have that much good humor in movies today.

I particularly liked that environmental misanthropes and environmental zealots were the two villains of the movie. The first, of course, is Homer; the second is the EPA and its dark and dreadful director, Russ Cargill, voiced by Albert Brooks. (I wonder what Cargill, the food chemicals conglomerate, thinks of that name selection.)

In an early scene, Lisa Simpson is going door to door, trying to get someone in town to recognize that the townspeople have to stop polluting Lake Springfield. Door after door slams shut in her face. One lady sees Lisa and says, "Oh, it's the little girl that saved my puppy," but slams the door as soon as the first Greenie word leaves Lisa's lips.

A few scenes later, Green Day is playing a concert from a raft anchored just offshore at the lake. At the end of a song (catchy lyrics: Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,), lead singer Billy Joe Armstrong (voiced by himself) says something like, "We've been playing for 3 1/2 hours now and we'd like to say something about the environment." They're booed and hissed and "shut up and sing"-ed into oblivion.

Are Matt Groening and James Brooks lampooning the silliness of Greenies, or expressing concern about society's failure to hear their warnings of imminent doom? I think the former, but who cares? We're having too much fun, far too much fun, to bother.

It's the same with Christianity. Groening's and Brooks' portrayal of the Christian neighbor Flanders has rubbed me the wrong way more than once, which is part of the reason for the good taste ban of the show in our home. But is the movie's scene of Grandpa's bout of tongues in church a lampoon of faith ... or a more subtle poke at the faithful for not recognizing religion when they see it?

(There's a hugely funny bit late in the film, when all is going to H-E-double toothpicks in a handbasket. The church and Moe's bar are next door to each other, and when some particularly bad news comes in, the doors to both establishments fling open and all the barflies race to the church for salvation and all the churchgoers race to the bar for a strong one ... make that a double.)

We left laughing, having enjoyed a good yarn well told, lots of laughs and the kind of bad taste that's not that bad at all. So, highly recommended.

Now, on to a longer vacation. We'll now be vacationing through Wednesday morning so I can pick up a client meeting here in the desert Wednesday afternoon. No one complained when I suggested the option of staying two more days.