For a stay-at-home reader like me, seeing two films each week, one hundred annually, represents a major challenge, one I’m only gradually tackling. Even a hundred movies a year is barely sufficient for one to aspire to be a film fan. Over 2009, I managed to view 54 current or near-current movies, so I guess [...]
Well worth checking out is Stephen M. Walt’s latest post (Does Obama watch “Frontline?”) on the futile games being played so that Obama can avoid being tarred and feathered for ‘losing’ Afghanistan. The Frontline documentary (Obama’s War, not out here yet) evidently damns the continuing effort, with even proponents clearly ‘in damage-limitation’ mode (Walt’s words). [...]
In the Loop is a glorious satire on the British decision to join America in invading Iraq. Director Armando Iannucci’ssavage take is that the big step was nothing more than the outcome of ferocious jockeying between politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The film’s standout performance is by Peter Capaldi, playing [...]
I dreaded seeing The Hurt Locker, a movie about an American bomb disposal squad in post-invasion Iraq, simply because the subject of Iraq stirs up in me tremendous anger and guilt. And my dread is mostly justified. This is a dark, dark film, offering little in the way of redemption. Following a month in the [...]
It takes a brave writer to tackle the Vietnam War and its legacy. Denis Johnson, a renowned, fierce, literary novelist, has done just that, fully head on, with his 2007 epic, Tree of Smoke. It revs into action in 1963, the day JFK is assassinated, and parses the years until 1970, with a longish coda [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
Yesterday, Salon reported that the latest opinion polls show American public support for staying in Afghanistan has fallen below 50% for the first time in two years. At last, maybe, at last.
Variety galore on my biggest festival day: Louise-Michel, a dark but comedic French satire directed by Gustave Kervern, is quirky fun that doesn’t always work (the ending is silly) but strikes a few ideological blows. 2½ stars. A doco about a psychologist in Gaza refugee camps, Pea Holmquist’s Young Freud in Gaza, is an eye [...]
In the Loop, directed by Armando Iannucci and starring James Galdafino of Sopranos fame, is billed as ‘The Office meets Yes Minister and Monty Python dosed up on speed.’ That description isn’t far wrong. A satire lampooning the British decision to invade Iraq, it is scathing, hilarious and brilliantly staged. 4 stars. (My first thought [...]
Standard Operating Procedure from Errol Morris (see my capsule review) contains two US quotes that seem to me to sum up why Iraq is Vietnam all over again. An army investigator: This was in Iraq, like Vietnam, will probably get remembered as the one time that we were not the heroes, we were not the [...]
I stumbled across Errol Morris a few years back at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which screened double features presenting pairs of his remarkable interviews with remarkable people. He has a way of zooming in on interviewees’ faces (is it true that he wears a camera on his head or is that an urban myth?) [...]
Also posted in Film, Genocide |