I have to admit that even as a pretty avid football watcher (college and pro) I had never heard of Pat Tillman until he was killed in action in Afghanistan in April 2004. (In my defense, I don't really care about Arizona State football and the Arizona Cardinals were going into their 70th or so year of cellar dwelling around the time he started playing for them.) For me the original story I heard about him made total sense: As a meat-headed jock he decided to enlist in the Army the day after September 11, 2001; he was tragically killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan. He immediately became a national hero, in part because he played our national sport and in part because he gave up lots of money to serve in the Army.
Of course, almost none of that story is actually true. What came out over the next months and years was that Tillman was a wild individualist who did join after September 11, though his motives for doing so were always a bit murky. He was a very smart guy and by the time he was killed, he was basically totally against the war in Iraq and much of what was happening on the ground in Afghanistan. He hated George W. Bush and was a proud atheist. He was killed by friendly - not enemy - fire, although the Pentagon hid this fact for at least a month after his death.
The Tillman Story is a very interesting and heartbreaking documentary about how Pat Tillman's death was used by the Bush Administration and the Pentagon as a political cudgel, burying the truth and never owning up to the disgusting lengths they went to create a fantasy universe of heroes and American Exceptionalism. Director Amir Bar-Lev does a very nice job of weaving in the facts of the story with the emotional experience of his family and friends and the greater political meaning of these strands.
The film walks us through the main points of the narrative, from his background as a foul-mouthed wildboy jock (he and his brothers never met a use for the word "fuck" they didn't love), to his college career (with a 3.8 GPA... not bad!), to his days busting his ass to make an NFL team despite his rather average height, to his enlistment and service in two tours of duty. We see how his family was informed about his death and how immediately facts of the case were being kept from them.
For his family, there was the Pat they knew and the Pat they saw on the TV news. Senator John McCain made a sickening speech at his memorial service about how he was being "reunited with his God" or some such nonsense - of course Pat didn't have a God... but that was not something a politician or a 24-hour news outlet could admit to. The heroic prop he was turned into was disheartening to his family, and his mother, Dannie, began doing the job no journalist was willing to do: looking into the friendly-fire killing and finding out why it was covered up and never owned up to.
We should not forget that by April 2004, the war in Iraq was not going brilliantly. The administration had been embarrassed by the fraudulent Jessica Lynch rescue story and the damning torture photos from Abu Ghraib had just been released. The tragic death of a professional athlete (even an obscure one) became a life raft for military support. It could re-position the war as a battle of good against evil and lift it up out of the mud it was in.
The film is as much as condemnation of the press (especially cable news) as it is a condemnation of Rumsfeld and Bush (who are shown to be the dark, evil men that they are). We see how brazen the news companies were to tell a binary story of an uncomplicated man who died in action. Once it came out that he was killed by a fellow American soldier, it became a double tragedy, and he became a symbol for the confusion of battle.
Bar-Lev shows how television news programs used the term "fog of war" dozens of times to hold nobody accountable for the tragedy (lest the troops who actually fired on their fellow soldier be disciplined). And with nobody accountable, Bush and his cronies got away with turning Pat Tillman into something he never was. Even after all the facts of the cover-up were on the table, we see Wolf Blitzer still talking about how some general at the Pentagon "bungled" the story. There was no mistake made by the Pentagon. That general was following orders to lie and cover-up the friendly fire - orders he got from higher up the chain of command. Of course we never get that view of the story.
This is a very well crafted, well structured film. It presents the story in a way that shows the Pentagon, the news media, Bush and his posse as well as main street America all complicit in the cover-up of a truly terrible story. It is not preachy, but it is very powerful.
Stars: 3 of 4
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Soul Kitchen (Saturday, August 21, 2010) (106)
I strongly believe that Fatih Akin is one of the greatest active filmmakers working today. Both Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are brilliant and they suggest to me that the young German writer/director will have a long and interesting career ahead of him.
His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.
Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)
I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.
I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).
There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.
I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."
Stars: 2 of 4
His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.
Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)
I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.
I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).
There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.
I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."
Stars: 2 of 4
Monday, August 16, 2010
Centurion (Monday, August 16, 2010) (105)
For my entire life I have always wanted to be able to use the word "pictish" in a sentence. Thank goodness for the movie Centurion that I am finally able to do that!
This film is in the second century A.D. as the Romans are beginning to lose their control of Britain. They are fighting the Pict people, native to the middle-to-upper part of that island, and are losing badly. The 9th Legion is the last effort by Rome to push north, but they are severely routed by the Picts who are more familiar with the environment.
Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is one of the last officers left from the regiment (the singular eponymous centurion) and he has to hightail it out of the Pictish land and back to the newly constructed Hadrian's Wall. On the way he is joined by a handful of Roman soldiers as well as an outcast Pict lady (who is totally hot!).
The film is sorta high-level popcorn fun. There is nothing particularly brilliant about it, but also nothing really terrible either. It's incredibly violent and bloody (writer/director Neil Marshall comes from the world of slasher thrillers) and it's not uncommon here to see heads chopped off or smashed in, or eyeballs gouged out with sticks.
I have become a big fan of Michael Fassbender, from his work last year in Hungar (one of the best films of 2009) as well as his very troubling, interesting role in this year's Fish Tank. He is quietly confident and immediately likable. I think his character is written a bit light (with a focus more on his brawn than on his brains), but this is clearly Marshall's fault and not his own.
This is a fun, gory twist on a more typical "sandals and swords" flick. It is a modestly sized film (even the battle scenes seem to have fewer extras than many movies from this genre), which I appreciate. Again, there is nothing amazing here - and it's certainly not something that one needs to rush out to see - but what it does, it does well enough.
Pictish. (I just wanted to be able to write that again.)
Stars: 2.5 of 4
This film is in the second century A.D. as the Romans are beginning to lose their control of Britain. They are fighting the Pict people, native to the middle-to-upper part of that island, and are losing badly. The 9th Legion is the last effort by Rome to push north, but they are severely routed by the Picts who are more familiar with the environment.
Quintus Dias (Michael Fassbender) is one of the last officers left from the regiment (the singular eponymous centurion) and he has to hightail it out of the Pictish land and back to the newly constructed Hadrian's Wall. On the way he is joined by a handful of Roman soldiers as well as an outcast Pict lady (who is totally hot!).
The film is sorta high-level popcorn fun. There is nothing particularly brilliant about it, but also nothing really terrible either. It's incredibly violent and bloody (writer/director Neil Marshall comes from the world of slasher thrillers) and it's not uncommon here to see heads chopped off or smashed in, or eyeballs gouged out with sticks.
I have become a big fan of Michael Fassbender, from his work last year in Hungar (one of the best films of 2009) as well as his very troubling, interesting role in this year's Fish Tank. He is quietly confident and immediately likable. I think his character is written a bit light (with a focus more on his brawn than on his brains), but this is clearly Marshall's fault and not his own.
This is a fun, gory twist on a more typical "sandals and swords" flick. It is a modestly sized film (even the battle scenes seem to have fewer extras than many movies from this genre), which I appreciate. Again, there is nothing amazing here - and it's certainly not something that one needs to rush out to see - but what it does, it does well enough.
Pictish. (I just wanted to be able to write that again.)
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Making Plans for Lena (Sunday, August 15, 2010) (104)
The French title for this film, Non Ma Fille, Tu N'ira Pas Danser, means "No, my daughter, you will not go dancing." This wonderful phrase refers to a sequence in the film when the main character Lena is talking to her son about a story he's reading. In it, a young Breton woman who loves to dance has a competition where she will marry the man who can dance with her all night. Every man she picks to dance with her dies because she's is so talented. After burning through several men, she finally begins to dance with my mysterious guy, who turns out to be the devil. He ends up killing her because he is so much more talented at dancing than she is.
Much of this poetry is lost in the English title for the film, Making Plans for Lena (a reference to the XTC New Wave song from the early '80s Making Plans for Nigel), but the gist is still there. Lena is a middle-aged woman who has two kids and leaves her husband after she discovers him cheating on her. She quits her job and her life begins to fall apart from the pressure of the children and her family who try to tell her what to do at all times. Her family is very close and to them, she is a grown child who needs pushing and prodding at all times. They try to get her a new job, they try to set her up with new boyfriends, they try to get her to reunite with her husband, they try to give her advice about how to raise her kids.
Clearly the subtext here is that she is dancing around in circles to such a degree that she is risking her life (and the lives of her dependent kids). Lena is a flake, to be sure, but she's also a good person who is really trying to do the right thing all the time. She's not abusive to her kids, but she does put them in bad situations. Her family is probably too overbearing for her, and possibly if she was to get more space she would figure things out herself - it's just the pressure of her life that throws her off tilt.
Throughout the film, the acting is wonderful, but particularly Chiara Mastroianni (daughter or Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) as Lena. She does a beautiful job with the rather difficult role. She has clearly been a more put-together person in the past, but is fraying at the edges right now. She's capricious and youthful, but also serious when it comes to mothering.
Director and co-writer Christophe Honore does a nice job of creating a very naturalistic world, even inside the few fantasy or story sequences. The colors are rich and vibrant and the apartments and houses have a nice internal geography and are filled with real crap that you'd find anywhere.
One thing I did not like was that the story frequently jumped around from one place to another without much explanation, leaving us a bit confused for the first moments of the next scene. This seemingly arbitrary continuity got rather frustrating as the story moved along and I had some trouble following it at times.
I really wanted more from this film. I really liked what I got in general, but it felt rather whimsical and not all that well formed. Not a heck of a lot happens in it. Basically we spend a few months with a woman while her life is falling apart. I'm not sure it really ends anywhere in particular - it just ends. I really love the symbolism and presentation of the fable of the woman dancing to death, but that doesn't really tie in to Lena's story on a deeper level. It's just a beautiful moment in a bigger, rambling tale.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Much of this poetry is lost in the English title for the film, Making Plans for Lena (a reference to the XTC New Wave song from the early '80s Making Plans for Nigel), but the gist is still there. Lena is a middle-aged woman who has two kids and leaves her husband after she discovers him cheating on her. She quits her job and her life begins to fall apart from the pressure of the children and her family who try to tell her what to do at all times. Her family is very close and to them, she is a grown child who needs pushing and prodding at all times. They try to get her a new job, they try to set her up with new boyfriends, they try to get her to reunite with her husband, they try to give her advice about how to raise her kids.
Clearly the subtext here is that she is dancing around in circles to such a degree that she is risking her life (and the lives of her dependent kids). Lena is a flake, to be sure, but she's also a good person who is really trying to do the right thing all the time. She's not abusive to her kids, but she does put them in bad situations. Her family is probably too overbearing for her, and possibly if she was to get more space she would figure things out herself - it's just the pressure of her life that throws her off tilt.
Throughout the film, the acting is wonderful, but particularly Chiara Mastroianni (daughter or Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) as Lena. She does a beautiful job with the rather difficult role. She has clearly been a more put-together person in the past, but is fraying at the edges right now. She's capricious and youthful, but also serious when it comes to mothering.
Director and co-writer Christophe Honore does a nice job of creating a very naturalistic world, even inside the few fantasy or story sequences. The colors are rich and vibrant and the apartments and houses have a nice internal geography and are filled with real crap that you'd find anywhere.
One thing I did not like was that the story frequently jumped around from one place to another without much explanation, leaving us a bit confused for the first moments of the next scene. This seemingly arbitrary continuity got rather frustrating as the story moved along and I had some trouble following it at times.
I really wanted more from this film. I really liked what I got in general, but it felt rather whimsical and not all that well formed. Not a heck of a lot happens in it. Basically we spend a few months with a woman while her life is falling apart. I'm not sure it really ends anywhere in particular - it just ends. I really love the symbolism and presentation of the fable of the woman dancing to death, but that doesn't really tie in to Lena's story on a deeper level. It's just a beautiful moment in a bigger, rambling tale.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Animal Kingdom (Saturday, August 14) (103)
Animal Kingdom tells the story of Josh who moves in with his grandmother and four uncles after his mother ODs on heroin. His extended family, who he does not know very well, are all drug pushers and gangsters. His grandmother, Janine, is a weird lady who seems to not be upset if her kids die from their life of violence and substances. Her oldest son, Pope, is wanted by the cops for any number of things and comes and goes when he things the coast is clear from them. Three other sons work as deputies to Janine and Pope in their world of crime.
Josh is taught how to survive and work inside this family. He has a girlfriend who seems oblivious to what is going on - and he likes it that way. He pretends that he has a normal life as a way to guard against the chaos he actually lives in. When a murder by his uncles goes wrong, he is interrogated by and becomes friends with detective Leckie, Guy Pierce, who wants to break his family's crime ring for good.
The film has a good-looking style and visual look, with lots of interesting, quiet set-ups, but the script by writer-director David Michod is mostly trite and uninspiring. The movie plays much to slow and way too long. By the end it seems like there are about four false endings, one more dull than the next.
Perhaps the worst part of the film is that it's hard to identify with any of the characters. Clearly we are supposed to align with Josh, but he's so quiet and internal with his thoughts and actions that it's hard to feel much sympathy for him. His uncles and grandmother are all bat-shit nuts so it becomes hard to understand why he sticks with them at all. By the end it seems like we're watching this family through a dirty window, rather than being inside the family, which I think would have been a much more effective view.
There isn't really that much crime in this crime movie. By the time we're up and running in the family house, most of the uncles are already done with their violent lives and looking to get out of the game. We see about three illegal acts, but we don't see all that much that would lead them to become such a serious target of the police. That we don't see how totally bad these guys are from the outset really hurts our conclusions about them.
This is just a very slow, boring and banal crime movie. There is nothing very special about it. The acting is good enough, but most of the characters are under-developed and weird (especially Pope and Janine) and that gets in the way of any real positive or negative feelings about them. At then end of the film I was mostly happy that it was over at all rather than happy or upset with the way the story ended (which felt rather random and unnecessary, by the way).
Stars: 1 of 4
Lebanon (Saturday, August 14, 2010) (102)
The first shot of the film Lebanon is the prettiest and most colorful and open. We see a horizon in the distance behind a beautiful field of sunflowers in the foreground with a clear blue sky above. From this moment on, everything else onscreen is dark, tight and dirty. This film is a super-intense, super-intimate look at the early days of the 1982 Labanon War from inside an Israeli tank. Other than this early shot, everything is seen from inside the tank and the only views we see outside are through the scope and cross-hairs of the tank's gun.
This is very different from other films in the spate of Lebanon War movies that have come recently (Waltz with Bashir and Beaufort, to name two). Those movies are more about an intellectual level to the fight - what the men felt at the time and how they see their actions 25 years later. This movie is really about the exact moment these things are happening. The men in the tank are not able to sit and dream about marrying their sweetheart - they're getting shot at and they're worried about not crapping in their pants or getting killed.
There are four solders inside the tank with us: Assi, the commander; Herzl, the rocket loader; Schmulik, the gunner; and Yigal, the driver. Each one is new to war (this is the first day of the conflict) and deals with his fears in different ways. Yigal constantly asks for his mother and asks that the commanders let her know he's safe. Schmulik is easily unnerved and misses several shots because he has trouble pulling the trigger (which leads to the deaths of several friends). Assi is new at leading and doesn't yet know how hard to push these weak men serving under him.
More than anything this film is about the textures, sounds and smells of war. From very early on, we hear the hatch on top of the tank clanking as it opens loudly. We see the water dripping from above into the hold. We see a box that the men piss in so as not to get out and risk getting shot - this of course, however, makes the place smell like piss.
Every surface is covered in grime, oil, blood and soot. Each rocket they launch is a huge explosion inside the pod. When the machine begins to smoke and break down, there's a visceral sense of a human death. This tank is an old man and is falling apart. It groans and aches from its years in service (maybe it was used in the 1967 Six-Day War).
Writer-Director Samuel Maoz doesn't really comment on value or ethics of the war at all - this is much more intimate than that. He merely presents us with a bunch of soldiers in a particular position and shows us how stressful and difficult that spot is. This is much more a comment on the act of war itself, rather than whether or not this is a good or bad fight.
What we see through the rocket scope is very interesting. It is a very small view and it puts us directly in a seat inside the tank. Our view is very limited so we quickly realize that there could be people (enemies) directly outside of our field of vision and we wouldn't know it. We soon learn the blind faith these guys have in trusting the radio orders they're getting and the allies on the ground (the Lebanese Christians). Without these connections, they would be totally lost in a tin can in the middle of a hellscape.
I should say that at times, I did find the frame of the scope and the cross-hairs rather heavy-handed - that everything becomes a possible target and that we become so incredibly vulnerable. I think the use of it is important for the emotional experience of the film as well and is more good than bad - but it was a bit manipulative. Perhaps Maoz overused this view a bit and could have shown it less.
One amazing thing about the film is the use of the quiet spaces between the fire-fights. We get two or three minutes of loud shooting, smoke and explosions and then we get 10-15 minutes of nothing. In these spaces the soldiers reflect on what they're doing and become paranoid at what's coming next or what they've just done. There is a ton of unnerving hurry-up-and-wait in this film and it's these "wait" moments that are sometimes the most dramatic. It's in these spaces your left with your thoughts and worries, not to mention the drips of the decrepit tank and the growing stench of shit, sweat, dead bodies and grease.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
This is very different from other films in the spate of Lebanon War movies that have come recently (Waltz with Bashir and Beaufort, to name two). Those movies are more about an intellectual level to the fight - what the men felt at the time and how they see their actions 25 years later. This movie is really about the exact moment these things are happening. The men in the tank are not able to sit and dream about marrying their sweetheart - they're getting shot at and they're worried about not crapping in their pants or getting killed.
There are four solders inside the tank with us: Assi, the commander; Herzl, the rocket loader; Schmulik, the gunner; and Yigal, the driver. Each one is new to war (this is the first day of the conflict) and deals with his fears in different ways. Yigal constantly asks for his mother and asks that the commanders let her know he's safe. Schmulik is easily unnerved and misses several shots because he has trouble pulling the trigger (which leads to the deaths of several friends). Assi is new at leading and doesn't yet know how hard to push these weak men serving under him.
More than anything this film is about the textures, sounds and smells of war. From very early on, we hear the hatch on top of the tank clanking as it opens loudly. We see the water dripping from above into the hold. We see a box that the men piss in so as not to get out and risk getting shot - this of course, however, makes the place smell like piss.
Every surface is covered in grime, oil, blood and soot. Each rocket they launch is a huge explosion inside the pod. When the machine begins to smoke and break down, there's a visceral sense of a human death. This tank is an old man and is falling apart. It groans and aches from its years in service (maybe it was used in the 1967 Six-Day War).
Writer-Director Samuel Maoz doesn't really comment on value or ethics of the war at all - this is much more intimate than that. He merely presents us with a bunch of soldiers in a particular position and shows us how stressful and difficult that spot is. This is much more a comment on the act of war itself, rather than whether or not this is a good or bad fight.
What we see through the rocket scope is very interesting. It is a very small view and it puts us directly in a seat inside the tank. Our view is very limited so we quickly realize that there could be people (enemies) directly outside of our field of vision and we wouldn't know it. We soon learn the blind faith these guys have in trusting the radio orders they're getting and the allies on the ground (the Lebanese Christians). Without these connections, they would be totally lost in a tin can in the middle of a hellscape.
I should say that at times, I did find the frame of the scope and the cross-hairs rather heavy-handed - that everything becomes a possible target and that we become so incredibly vulnerable. I think the use of it is important for the emotional experience of the film as well and is more good than bad - but it was a bit manipulative. Perhaps Maoz overused this view a bit and could have shown it less.
One amazing thing about the film is the use of the quiet spaces between the fire-fights. We get two or three minutes of loud shooting, smoke and explosions and then we get 10-15 minutes of nothing. In these spaces the soldiers reflect on what they're doing and become paranoid at what's coming next or what they've just done. There is a ton of unnerving hurry-up-and-wait in this film and it's these "wait" moments that are sometimes the most dramatic. It's in these spaces your left with your thoughts and worries, not to mention the drips of the decrepit tank and the growing stench of shit, sweat, dead bodies and grease.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
Friday, August 13, 2010
Eat Pray Love (Friday, August 13, 2010) (101)
Eat Pray Love is based on a book by Elizabeth Gilbert that was gigantically popular a few years ago with women (in particular). The story falls somewhere between "nth-wave" feminism and treacly white urban cosmopolitanism. I fucking hated this stupid film - and hate everything it represents and says about dumb American culture. It is the story about how in an effort to come to terms with female self-dom, women are somehow only able to take cues from men, that women's self-worth is entirely dependent on men and that white people in general use the developing world as their toilet in an effort to sell goddamn herbal soaps and moisturizers.
Liz (Julia Roberts) is a travel writer (that's a real serious fucking job!) who is married to a nice loser of a man, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She grows tired of him, possibly because he's a loser with no direction and possibly because she's a fickle bitch, and gets a divorce. She then moves in with another loser - an actor and yoga, new-age freak, David (James Franco). She complains to her black best friend Delia (Viola Davis) (Ooooh! Look! How cool that she has a black best friend) about her dumb life and decides to travel for a year to find herself because she has never spent time examining who she is inside - rather, she has spent her life bouncing from one guy to another.
She goes to Rome for a few months where she eats and learns to give up counting calories (which we never see her doing before); then she goes to India to meditate with a guru and comes to terms with the pain she feels from losing her two men (which is weird because she was the one who left them - so now she regrets it?); and then to Bali, where she talks to a healer-guru guy who helps her recharge and learn to love again - I guess this time not as a fucking self-centered witch.
In each place she meets white people who are rich enough to not work and fuck around all day. In Rome she falls in with a group of people who love to eat and travel and talk about the rest of the world. In India, despite the fact that the guru is apparently a woman who we never see, she mostly talks to an American guy, Richard (Richard Jenkins) who has some pain in his life that he's working through. (In all fairness, Richard has the most interesting view of things where he says that she fills her head with bullshit and if she were to clear her head, she would experience stuff much better.) In Bali she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who is also recovering from a hard divorce, but is a Brazilian fuck-machine and fucks her brains into submission (and love).
All of the white people seem to be totally unaware of the ethnic specialness of their surroundings or the deep socioeconomic differences between their own lives and those of the native peoples they live among. Yes - in Bali, Liz does try to raise money for a woman who has lost all her money in a divorce, but this is presented so lightly that it seems that she doesn't understand that there are probably twelve women down the road who are in similar situations or the amazingness of the ability of woman to get divorces in Indonesia - which most woman cannot get throughout most of the developing world. This moment is pure tokenism and rather upsetting for what it exposes about her aloofness.
The direction of the film by Ryan Murphy (and the adapted script by Murphy and Jennifer Salt) is almost entirely terrible. We barely see Liz in her day-to-day New York life to get a good picture of her. When she suggests that she married a guy when she was "young" and is now "older," it is confusing because the flash-backs to her wedding have her and her husband as the same age they are now - suggesting she got married in her 30s or 40s rather than her teens or 20s. We never really she where she starts to know well enough how much she has grown at the end.
Murphy uses a ton of moving camera shots to make scenes fancier-looking. Some of these shots are clever and actually nice and poignant, but mostly they are overdone and unnecessary. By the end, I was nearly screaming for him to stop moving the camera and give us a simple, straightforward shot with a level horizon. Just because it looks fancy doesn't make it interesting; if what you give us is dog shit in the first place, when you twist it around you just get pretty dog shit.
Ever since Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has re-made herself into a bitter woman with an acid tongue ("They're called tits, Ed!"). This role is no different. She's very hard to like because she seems like such an antagonistic person, that it ultimately gets in the way of the story. In the end I just don't like Liz - because she's just another version of the same Julia Roberts character I've seen before and disliked before. I understand that as an actress she has some power over people - but I will never figure out why that power exists or where it comes from. To me Julia Roberts is just Julia Roberts. She's bigger than any character she's ever played and doesn't relate to me as a sympathetic person.
(One more totally unfair thing that I'll say is that this film has a shit-ton of marketing tie-ins from jewelry to food to soaps and skin-care products. Meanwhile the film is not really about this stuff. It's not about consumerism at all - though buying shit is really in the background of everything that happens in the story, even if it's never really examined. Is the idea here that if I liked the movie I can go to the Fresh beauty supply store and buy Eat Pray Love soap and become like Liz? I recognize that the marketing effort has nothing to do with what I see onscreen, but this tone-deafness in licensing is exactly and amusingly the same as the tone-deafness that you find in the film.)
What am I supposed to take from this movie? That we should all get in touch with our inner selves because white men who have tons of money and can afford to not work tell us we should? That if you're lucky enough to lead a life of pure pleasure you will be happy? That brown people are more in touch with the earth and can teach us things about it - but that their poverty makes us sad so we should ignore that?
What I particularly hate about this film is that on the surface it's about how a woman gets in touch with herself by stopping to smell the roses, but it never examines how she has roses at all to smell. I never get the sense that she comes to terms with her inner (or outer) bitch, so I don't know why I should care about her self-proclaimed growth.
Stars: .5 of 4
Liz (Julia Roberts) is a travel writer (that's a real serious fucking job!) who is married to a nice loser of a man, Stephen (Billy Crudup). She grows tired of him, possibly because he's a loser with no direction and possibly because she's a fickle bitch, and gets a divorce. She then moves in with another loser - an actor and yoga, new-age freak, David (James Franco). She complains to her black best friend Delia (Viola Davis) (Ooooh! Look! How cool that she has a black best friend) about her dumb life and decides to travel for a year to find herself because she has never spent time examining who she is inside - rather, she has spent her life bouncing from one guy to another.
She goes to Rome for a few months where she eats and learns to give up counting calories (which we never see her doing before); then she goes to India to meditate with a guru and comes to terms with the pain she feels from losing her two men (which is weird because she was the one who left them - so now she regrets it?); and then to Bali, where she talks to a healer-guru guy who helps her recharge and learn to love again - I guess this time not as a fucking self-centered witch.
In each place she meets white people who are rich enough to not work and fuck around all day. In Rome she falls in with a group of people who love to eat and travel and talk about the rest of the world. In India, despite the fact that the guru is apparently a woman who we never see, she mostly talks to an American guy, Richard (Richard Jenkins) who has some pain in his life that he's working through. (In all fairness, Richard has the most interesting view of things where he says that she fills her head with bullshit and if she were to clear her head, she would experience stuff much better.) In Bali she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) who is also recovering from a hard divorce, but is a Brazilian fuck-machine and fucks her brains into submission (and love).
All of the white people seem to be totally unaware of the ethnic specialness of their surroundings or the deep socioeconomic differences between their own lives and those of the native peoples they live among. Yes - in Bali, Liz does try to raise money for a woman who has lost all her money in a divorce, but this is presented so lightly that it seems that she doesn't understand that there are probably twelve women down the road who are in similar situations or the amazingness of the ability of woman to get divorces in Indonesia - which most woman cannot get throughout most of the developing world. This moment is pure tokenism and rather upsetting for what it exposes about her aloofness.
The direction of the film by Ryan Murphy (and the adapted script by Murphy and Jennifer Salt) is almost entirely terrible. We barely see Liz in her day-to-day New York life to get a good picture of her. When she suggests that she married a guy when she was "young" and is now "older," it is confusing because the flash-backs to her wedding have her and her husband as the same age they are now - suggesting she got married in her 30s or 40s rather than her teens or 20s. We never really she where she starts to know well enough how much she has grown at the end.
Murphy uses a ton of moving camera shots to make scenes fancier-looking. Some of these shots are clever and actually nice and poignant, but mostly they are overdone and unnecessary. By the end, I was nearly screaming for him to stop moving the camera and give us a simple, straightforward shot with a level horizon. Just because it looks fancy doesn't make it interesting; if what you give us is dog shit in the first place, when you twist it around you just get pretty dog shit.
Ever since Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts has re-made herself into a bitter woman with an acid tongue ("They're called tits, Ed!"). This role is no different. She's very hard to like because she seems like such an antagonistic person, that it ultimately gets in the way of the story. In the end I just don't like Liz - because she's just another version of the same Julia Roberts character I've seen before and disliked before. I understand that as an actress she has some power over people - but I will never figure out why that power exists or where it comes from. To me Julia Roberts is just Julia Roberts. She's bigger than any character she's ever played and doesn't relate to me as a sympathetic person.
(One more totally unfair thing that I'll say is that this film has a shit-ton of marketing tie-ins from jewelry to food to soaps and skin-care products. Meanwhile the film is not really about this stuff. It's not about consumerism at all - though buying shit is really in the background of everything that happens in the story, even if it's never really examined. Is the idea here that if I liked the movie I can go to the Fresh beauty supply store and buy Eat Pray Love soap and become like Liz? I recognize that the marketing effort has nothing to do with what I see onscreen, but this tone-deafness in licensing is exactly and amusingly the same as the tone-deafness that you find in the film.)
What am I supposed to take from this movie? That we should all get in touch with our inner selves because white men who have tons of money and can afford to not work tell us we should? That if you're lucky enough to lead a life of pure pleasure you will be happy? That brown people are more in touch with the earth and can teach us things about it - but that their poverty makes us sad so we should ignore that?
What I particularly hate about this film is that on the surface it's about how a woman gets in touch with herself by stopping to smell the roses, but it never examines how she has roses at all to smell. I never get the sense that she comes to terms with her inner (or outer) bitch, so I don't know why I should care about her self-proclaimed growth.
Stars: .5 of 4
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