Fanatics, Mountebanks and Drillers
February 26, 2008
A Bloody Oil Film. Saul Landau and Farah Hassan on There Will Be Blood.
“There Will Be Blood” implicitly warns against fanatics in an era when one form of that breed occupies the White House and other major mountebanks consume countless daily hours of TV and radio time.
“I see the worst in people,” confesses self-made oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s gritty California epic, “There Will Be Blood.” This statement alone should warn audiences that they should proceed cautiously before identifying with this protagonist. The opening of the film shows a minutes-long, no-dialogue sequence of Plainview mining for silver under harsh conditions and breaking a leg without uttering a complaint. So intensely does he feel the need to find mineral wealth that extreme physical suffering offers no obstacle. The abrasive sounds of mining and the sight of men working invoke John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” “Blood” should remind studios that audiences don’t need flashy cuts or intricately choreographed violence and special effects to get lured into the drama of a movie.
Letters from Beirut: War of 33
February 25, 2008
A new documentary by the excellent Big Noise Films company: makers of, among other things, The Forth World War.
‘The War of 33′ – An intimate, personal and powerful telling of the story of the 2006 war in Lebanon. A series of letters written by Hanady Salman – a mother living through the war in Beirut – carve a narrative arc through the intense and haunting images of conflict. She tells the stories of her family and the people she lives the war with the refugees, the wounded, and the everyday Lebanese, struggling to maintain their sanity and their humanity during a time of war. The War of 33 is more than a document of a particular historical experience. What emerges is a universal story – a complex picture of love, pain, resistance and survival in the face of uncertainty and violence.
Battle for Haditha
February 15, 2008
I am looking forward to Nick Broomfield’s film on the Haditha massacre. Here he is in the inaugural issue of RealFits describing the story behind the film.
Abu Ghraib and the Haditha massacre of 2005 will be remembered as the most haunting, symbolic events of the Iraq War, just as My Lai is for Vietnam. In reality there were countless Hadithas; this kind of thing happens and will always happen in any serious conflict. It is an inherent part of the language of war, and the Tony Blair’s and George Bush’s know when they embark on such misadventures that countless numbers of innocent people will inevitably be killed. A million Iraqis have died in the last five years and the responsibility can only be taken by the self-same politicians who actively choose to create a war.
In the Valley of Elah
January 26, 2008
Several documentaries have come out since the illegal invasion of Iraq which at most times have chronicled the unfolding tragedy far more ably than the mainstream media. It was Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 that put the war on the agenda in a big way (though there were several notable independent releases). As for Hollywood, until recently, references to the war have remained mostly oblique or symbolic (as for instance in the case of The Assassination of Richard Nixon). This may not surprise those who would recall that in the case of Vietnam it was well after the war had ended that Hollywood first attempted a critical portrayal. Perhaps it is a testament to the rise of the independent film maker that some in Hollywood feel confident enough to tackle the issue of the war even when most of US population would rather they weren’t reminded of it. In this respect, while Robert Redford’s well intentioned Lions for Lambs suffered from its attempt to balance criticism of the cynical politics of the ‘war on terror’ with support for ‘our boys’, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah is a real triumph. The film may be stating the obvious, but the dark build up to the denouement leaves one constantly on the edge. It is an intelligent and nuanced take on the Iraq war and the culture that sustains such horror. The subtlety of the film’s narrative is contrasted by the powerful symbolism of the last scene. First rate performance from Tommy Lee Jones, and kudos to Paul Haggis for an intelligent and courageous statement. Even Charlize Theron — who often gets cast merely as a splendid invitation to make babies — gets a decent role, which she performs admirably. I couldn’t recommend this highly enough.
“Sicko” Gets the Oscar High-Five
January 26, 2008
…a note from Michael Moore
January 25, 2008
Friends,
I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know (if you didn’t already) the good news that “Sicko” has been nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary. It was a pleasant surprise when we got the news on Tuesday.
Of course, every reporter who’s called me in the past few days wanted to know if I plan on giving an “anti-war” or “anti-Bush” speech, should “Sicko” win, as I did when we won the Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine” in 2003. (As you may recall, it was the 5th day of the war when those Oscars were held, and I said from the stage that, while I enjoy making nonfiction films, we live in fictitious times with a man of fiction in the White House. A ruckus ensued with a loud roar of cheers and boos, then someone cued the band to get me off the stage. As host Steve Martin said a few moments later, Teamsters were out back loading me into the trunk of a car.)
Standby Monks, Here Comes Rambo
November 18, 2007
Via TruthDig: ‘If the combined power of thousands of Buddhist monks staging a nonviolent protest isn’t enough to oust Burma’s oppressive junta, one American hero (cue movie trailer voice-over) is coming to fight for democracy in a faraway land—or at least stick his nose in another nation’s business. Yes, Rambo is ready to exact vigilante justice in Burma in the fourth installment of the Stallone series called, well, “Rambo.”’
(The first commenter on the USA Today article writes: “…while you’re there buddy, could you free the Wal-Mart factory employees too….??”)
The movie’s story, which borrows from tales of real-life atrocities but is otherwise fictional, involves Rambo reluctantly helping missionaries traverse the wilderness of the Salween River on their way to deliver supplies to camps of war-ravaged refugees.
Rambo has spent the past two decades living in the region as a hermit, one who has shed patriotism, lost his faith and given up on humanity.
Lions for Lambs
November 10, 2007
Generally a good measure of how good a film really is is how bad are the reviews it garners. The only exceptions are where the hype is overwhelming. Lions for Lambs was unfortunately released before sufficient hype was generated. The film starts promisingly, and the performances from the main three protagonists are pretty solid. It is also bold in so far as it is making a statement on present events, rather than offering a safe retrospective. The commentary on the so-called ‘war on terror’ is informed and perceptive. The incestuous relationship between Washington politicians and the mainstream media is also well highlighted. The discussion between Robert Redford, playing the professor, and his promising student touches on causes bearing on the progressive decline of idealism and activism on campuses. Apathy and careerism reign supreme in educational institutions today (highlighted most starkly for me by a publication called YES that I found at the university reception the other day; it encourages ‘entrepreneurship’ among kids of school age [!] and sells the appeal through glossy images of kids in early teens dressed formally and toasting champagne). So far so good.
Rendition
November 5, 2007
Robert Fisk on the image and reality of ‘extraordinary renditions’. Recall that this is the same film which was recently panned by some ass in the Guardian.
At university, we male students used to say that it was impossible to take a beautiful young woman to the cinema and concentrate on the film. But in Canada, I’ve at last proved this to be untrue. Familiar with the Middle East and its abuses – and with the vicious policies of George Bush – we both sat absorbed by Rendition, Gavin Hood’s powerful, appalling testimony of the torture of a “terrorist suspect” in an unidentified Arab capital after he was shipped there by CIA thugs in Washington.
Why did an Arab “terrorist” telephone an Egyptian chemical engineer – holder of a green card and living in Chicago with a pregnant American wife while he was attending an international conference in Johannesburg? Did he have knowledge of how to make bombs? (Unfortunately, yes – he was a chemical engineer – but the phone calls were mistakenly made to his number.)
Who’s Afraid of Michael Moore?
October 22, 2007
John Pilger reviews Michael Moore’s excellent Sicko.
In Sicko, Michael Moore’s new film, a young Ronald Reagan is shown appealing to working-class Americans to reject “socialised medicine” as commie subversion. In the 1940s and 1950s, Reagan was employed by the American Medical Association and big business as the amiable mouthpiece of a neo-fascism bent on persuading ordinary Americans that their true interests, such as universal health care, were “anti-American”.
Watching this, I found myself recalling the effusive fare wells to Reagan when he died three years ago. “Many people believe,” said Gavin Esler on the BBC’s Newsnight, “that he restored faith in American military action [and] was loved even by his political opponents.” In the Daily Mail, Esler wrote that Reagan “embodied the best of the American spirit – the optimistic belief that problems can be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are”.
Guardian’s Rendition
October 19, 2007
So Hollywood finally gets around to addressing an issue of grave contemporary relevance, and Guardian assigns the review to a half-wit wanker. The outcome is predictable: there is much obsessing with a single alleged weak link in the plot, and complete lack of comprehension regarding the larger issue. But what caught my eye is this passage:
It’s a structural device that implicitly carries the rational lesson that the US is not an island entire of itself, to paraphrase John Donne, that its actions have consequences for other people’s lives, and are themselves determined by factors outside its borders. It also asks the audience to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too. There’s a decency in this, but also a naivety and a moral equivalence…
Imagine that? Someone actually naive enough to ‘to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too’!
