Cultural Pilgrim » Vietnam Redux

Best films of 2009

Andres Kabel — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:00:45 +0000

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 I should be disappointed, but I’m not. We do the best we can, I tried hard throughout the year, and 201o will be better, won’t it?

And the films I was privileged to view! From a bumper year of film, here are the highlights:

The Hurt Locker (see my mini review), written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is simultaneously a pulsing thriller, an indictment of the occupation of Iraq, and a very human examination of risk taking
Surely claymation cannot evince tears? Adam Elliott’s Mary & Max (review), pairing a geeky Melbourne teen girl with a middle-aged, obese Asperger’s suffer in New York, is sad and funny and ultimately redeeming
In the Loop (review) presents a rapier-sharp satire of the British decision to invade Iraq, raising more belly laughs for me than any other film last year
Disgrace, directed with great control by Steve Jacobs, is better than the underlying J. M. Coetzee novel. An unsparing window into the harsh reality of modern South African life, it features John Malkovich in one of his best performances
Blessed (review), partly written by one of my favourite novelists, Christos Tsiolkas, highlights the huge talents of director Ana Kokkinos. A multi-character drama about street kids and their mothers, dovetailed with elegant precision, Blessed moved me enough to make it my favourite film of the year
Anvil! The Story of Anvil, is one of three terrific documentaries transformed into art via narrative mastery. Director Sacha Gervasi chronicles the career of a metal band that perennially almost succeeds but never does. Who would have thought heavy metal could show the trials and triumphs of creativity so luminously?
Standard Operating Procedure (review) by legendary documentary maker Errol Morris, a companion to the scorching same-name book by Philip Gourevich, is art and expose (once more of the Iraqi debacle, clearly a 2009 theme for me, isn’t it?) at its peak
The Cove (review) inserts the tension of a Robert Ludlum thriller into a documentary expose of the baseless, bestial slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town
Of the two Coen Brothers films, A Serious Man was displaced by the subversively funny and wonderfully tightly plotted Burn After Reading (review), which elicits out-of-the box performances from John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, George Clooney, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt
Maybe I didn’t see enough foreign films but only one, the fascinating, affirming Departures, made my highlights list. A brilliant look at Japanese funeral body preparation

A sad game in Afghanistan

Andres Kabel — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 06:56:55 +0000

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). Walt’s blast matches any sensible analysis of Afghanistan’s history:

To believe we can eke out something resembling “victory” in these circumstances is like believing one could drain the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon.

Riotous, saddening satire: Review of In the Loop

Andres Kabel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:00:06 +0000

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 a British public servant with the foulest language and most incendiary temper I’ve ever witnessed. Every time he opened his mouth, I brayed. Tom Hollander is also great as a hapless British politician, as is James Galdolfini as a US general. The film moves along at a cracking pace and not a moment of dialogue is wasted.

In the Loop is so out-loud hilarious that only afterwards does the brutality of its evisceration, and then its reflection in reality, strike home. This brilliant film has to be in line for best comedy of 2009.

Immersion in hell: Review of The Hurt Locker

Andres Kabel — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:25:01 +0000

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 life of a three-man bomb squad, from awful situation to awful situation, director Kathryn Bigelow (best known for thrillers such as the wonderful Point Blank and K-19: The Widowmaker) adopts a close-camera, frenetic style that frightened me. The plot is underpinned by focusing on the new head of the team, William James (played superbly by Jeremy Remmer), who turns out to be the ultimate daredevil, apparently with no fear. But one could be excused for reckoning the arc of the plot is dangerous bomb situation followed by dangerous bomb situation followed by another and then another, each one working well or ending badly, almost at random. Nothing is spared in portraying the bomb-wrecked, poverty-stricken streets, or the ghastly effects of bombs.

I did exit the cinema shaken, but there was something about The Hurt Locker that utterly captivated me, and subsequent musing suggests two reasons. Firstly, in a real sense the movie isn’t about defusing bombs, it’s about the nature of risk-taking in life. Bomb tyro maniac James seems unstoppable but begins to unravel with tension and horror, and the closing scenes sees him reflect on what he values in life (check out the ending). And, just as importantly, The Hurt Locker reinforces, to anyone willing to see beyond kinetic action, what a miserable hellhole Iraq, mostly a creation of our hated soldiers, engaged in a war of no point and no victory.

Go and see The Hurt Locker – you’ll come away stunned, I hope for the right reasons.

Epic and brilliant: Review of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke

Andres Kabel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 21:00:48 +0000

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 in 1983. The cast is huge and multifaceted: ‘Skip’ Sands, a naive, earnest anticommunist CIA operative ardently following his uncle, ‘the Colonel,’ a WWII hero and unstoppable Cold War warrior; Bill Houston, a sailor who loses his way, but not nearly as much as his younger brother James, who flees a religious Phoenix mother to plumb the depths of savagery in the middle of Vietnam; Hao, a South Vietnamese serving the Colonel, dreaming of safe passage away, and his Minh his nephew, and Trung Than their friend, now a Vietcong stalwart; Kathy Jones, the wife of a missionary; Jimmy Snow, a profane monomaniac assistant to the Colonel. The Colonel, a legend now perhaps operating outside the chain of command, lies at the heart of the novel, running operations as mysterious as they might be shady. Mostly the author tracks the fate of Skip Sands, the most bewildered of them all, but Johnson freely, and with delightful unpredictability, jumps into the skin of any of the other characters, all of them unmoored by the war America never needed to have, the unmitigated disaster for all sides.

Johnson is a brilliant, lyrical yet grounded stylist. Tree of Smoke crackles and pongs with the sights and smells of beautiful, ruined Vietnam. Every scene resounds with credibility, the horrors and the vitality equally portrayed. No clichés here, none whatsoever. The labyrinthine plot reminded me of Pynchon, the coruscating humour of no one else at all. Death, despair and madness expand their grips over the course of the 600-plus pages, yet somehow, as only the best writers can manage, Johnson construes the almighty mess of Vietnam as a triumph, of sorts, of the human spirit. Tree of Smoke is the most exciting, deep novel I have read since The Slap.

Ordinary Americans turn against the occupation of Afghanistan

Andres Kabel — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:00:07 +0000

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.

Film festival: Revenge comedy, Gaza psychologist, bomb squad in Iraq, Bulgarian noir

Andres Kabel — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:06:33 +0000

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 opener. Holmquist doesn’t have heaps of material but organizes it well. I now know that Gaza is one of the world’s hellholes. And the film confirmed my view that people are the same everywhere, regardless of ideology or religion – in particular, ignorance and repression in Gaza are so familiar to western eyes. 4 stars.
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a drama about an American bomb squad in Baghdad. I’ll review this in a little more depth but it’s beautifully done and asks questions as the best movies do. If Gaza is a hellhole we in the West are partly responsible for, Iraq is an even worse hellhole that we’re stage managing right now. 4 stars.
Zift, directed by Bulgarian Javor Gardev, is a harsh noir thriller set in 1960s Sofia. Delightfully filmed in black and white, it overlays Communist repression with a strange hardboiled perspective. An outlandishly different movie experience that I really enjoyed. 3 stars.

Film festival: British satire

Andres Kabel — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:33:50 +0000

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 on leaving the cinema: the film’s nonsense sequence that takes the United Kingdom into the invasion force isn’t much more ridiculous than actuality.)

Words of wisdom about the occupation of Iraq from Errol Morris interviewees

Andres Kabel — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:00:52 +0000

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 saviours.

A contractor interrogator:

If we leave, they’re killing each other and not killing us. If we stay, they’re killing each other and and they’re killing us. That’s the end result of this whole fucking debacle.

Illuminating truth: Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris

Andres Kabel — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:00:48 +0000

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?) that opens them up to close, close scrutiny, and he manages to probe deep motives. Then The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (which came out in 2003 but took a year to get to Australia) was a stunning exploration of a hugely influential man ambivalent about his own legacy. Now comes Standard Operating Procedure, Morris’s take on the Abu Ghraib ‘human pyramid photo’ scandal in Iraq.

Morris, as always, offers amazing access to his viewers. He interviews a number of the American prison guards (the worst offenders have been barred from him), some in or just out of prison. Using the many photos taken by these guards as the lynchpin of his movie, he slowly unpeels the ways in which unsadistic prison guards gradually turned inhuman, debasing and, yes, torturing the Iraqi inmates. Each piece of the sordid story is locked into place like pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. Interviewees include the sacked, female head of the American prison complexes in Iraq and the military investigator who prosecuted the guards. I felt ill as I watched, thinking thoughts such as ‘we’re the good guys of the world and this is what we did?’ Nonetheless I was compelled to watch on. And Morris, while addressing one set of criminal events, those underlying the photo scandals, sets up a number of even more important unspoken questions that he only answers via interviewees’ words and assembled photographs: was there even worse, terrible torture going on there (the answer is clearly yes)? Was all this sanctioned on high as ‘standard operating procedure’? Yes, methinks. Is this a sign of America adrift?

Grab the DVD and see it, that’s all I can say. View it for two reasons. Firstly, this is an invaluable lens focused on the Iraqi occupation, a debacle that will haunt our children. But more importantly, Standard Operating Procedure is superb documentary filmmaking by a maestro at the peak of his craft and art.