Month: November 2008

Following Mark’s lead, obliquely, I recalled a film celebrated in Z Channel that I’d always meant to see. I dutifully stuck Stuart Cooper’s Overlord onto my queue, and with equal diligence forgot entirely about it, ’til Mark’s recent post … and dug it out, moved it up–and here we are.

It’s worth seeing. In brief, Cooper tells the story of one soldier off to boot camp in preparation for the D-Day invasion, but he tells it in and out of time, with dreamlike flashforwards and -backs, sequences that seem half-dream or disconnected memory, interwoven with archival footage–particularly many stunning sequences of planes strafing, bombing, or just ominously dragging a shadow over bucolic landscapes. It’s a compact Thin Red Line, as dreamily philosophical as Malick with half the gas, at a third the length; its impact on Spielberg seems evident, as well, as at a fraction of the cost Cooper captures the terrifying moments before and at landfall in Normandy. Maybe that’s unfair, but since aside from Z I’d never heard of the film, and it only recently got the Criterion treatment, it seems crucial to trace its impact on those later acclaimed films.

And like those films, Cooper’s war is gorgeous. Here’s the thing that got me posting– Continue reading Art (of) War

Although the events depicted occurred thirty years ago, Gus Van Sant’s Milk feels culturally fresh and politically relevant—a new film for a new American order about a community organizer preaching for hope and change. Milk is a bio-pic but it avoids many if not all of the genre’s pitfalls by focusing on an eight-year period in Harvey Milk’s life, specifically narrowing in on the anxieties and community tensions surrounding the controversial 1978 vote for the Briggs Initiative, otherwise known as Proposition 6, a law that, if passed, would ban gays and lesbians and anyone who openly supported GLBT rights from teaching in the California public schools. This, if you are old enough to remember, was one of orange juice fascist Anita Bryant’s (the Ur-Sarah Palin but also one of the first celebrity voices of the nascent American culture wars) efforts to rid America of degenerates in order to “Save Our Children” from the “homosexual agenda.” Now there’s a bio-pic worth making, but I’ll leave that to John Waters. Continue reading MILK

James goes rogue like Sarah Palin
I sat through 100 minutes and man I am a ailin’

But seriously . . . noisy and incomprehensible, the new Bond film can’t be recommended. It seems to have something to do with South American water futures and a clandestine shadow organization–a nefarious agency of evil hitherto unknown to MI6, the CIA, and, for good measure, the KGB. It’s a cold, impersonal film without a jot of wit or humor or even, god forbid, joy (Bond is in full-tilt revenge mode and the Bond “girl” is surly not sexy). Still, it moves at a fever pitch, and most (Chris) won’t mind suffering through the swift ninety-nine minutes. There was a cool sequence that took place during a mammoth, postmodern production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I did appreciate Forster’s eye for catchy architecture, but that’s about all I got.

Jose Padilha’s 2007 crime film pivots from the ground traversed in the excellent Bus 174 (see comments 3, 4, & 5), turning away from the criminal trapped and interpellated within a rigid, pervasive system of inequality toward cops, just as trapped. The film got a lot of love in Brazil, and certain international festivals, but my plot summary seems more cogent–and a lot more thrilling–than I found the film. I liked its thesis, and disagree entirely with Manohla Dargis’ critique of its politics, even as I fully accept her critique of its aesthetics. It perfectly defines “lugubrious,” trudging through the mechanics of a crime & corruption thriller, without any of the dynamics. And this makes me bring up, for the 100th time?, Fernando Meirelles’ superior (and I think superlative) City of God.

My apologies if someone has already posted on this movie.  War, Inc. is a blast, the most fun I’ve had watching a movie all year. It is an absurdist take (clearly indebted to Dr. Strangelove) on the corporatization of war and nation-building. A fictional Halliburton (the Tamerlane Corporation) has an exclusive contract to rebuild, privatize and generally rape the central asian country of Turaqistan, and every aspect that we have seen in recent years in Iraq is ramped up to 11 to comic effect. The politics of the movie are crude and brutally funny, with moments of real power and poingancy. In particular, a scene in a bombed out town at night, as assorted military contractors and local militias fire blindly at each other, explosions rake the landscape and refugees flee, bring to mind the bridge-building scene in Apocalypse Now.

John Cusak is the corporation’s hit man with a heart of gold, and the movie elicits hysterical performances from Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei and a host of minor characters. The story of redemption for John Cusack is hardly original, but the movie still pulls very few punches, and occasionally hits you right in the gut. The choice of eschewing ernest characters offering their critiques of American imperial power and instead relying upon images and humor makes this even stronger. I suspect that there will be less of this kind of movie in the next couple of years as the afterglow of Obama’s victory lingers. This one is well worth watching, if only as a reminder of the world Obama has inherited.

Continue reading Five Films