Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle writes, Lions for Lambs “is responsive, engaged filmmaking, the kind of movie they say Americans don’t make.”
On the contrary, Hollywood makes “responsive, engaged filmmaking” continuously. The problem is that it basically reinforces the unjust status quo about fundamental economic and military matters, especially.
Screener writes:
Lions for Lambs has an even lower Rotten Tomatoes rating than Fred Claus does, 30% compared to Fred’s 37%. “Never takes a genuine stand for or against anything Continue reading Hollywood’s Corporate View on War
by Ann Donahue:
On Friday, the megawatt-star-powered “Lions for Lambs” opens. Will it be the one to break the box office curse and give credence to early Oscar buzz? “If Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep can’t get it over $100 million, I don’t know what can,” Hartigan said. But reports that the film is too preachy could sink its chances. “Americans are extremely unhappy about this war…you’ve got to be awfully clever to get them to buy it as entertainment,” Thomson said.
And therein lies Hollywood’s debasement. Such “awful cleverness” doesn’t deserve to work. People don’t see the war as entertainment, of course, thus they don’t want to be clevered awfully into having it turned into entertainment. Most people’s view is partisan, and rightly so, thus it follows that they would respond to partisan movies, even polemic movies, not entertainments. But “entertainment” is about all that corporate dollars are willing to fund, advertise, allow. The corporate censorship of and over American culture continues.
Tuned into a nation’s slowly changing mood
Chris Stephen writes:
[Black Watch director John] Tiffany thinks directors are barking up the wrong tree if they think in terms of movies-with-a-message. “Don’t kid yourself that you can change the world through art,” he says. “You can’t tell an audience what to think – all you can give is a greater understanding.”
Right, and advertising has zero effect on audiences, doesn’t affect people’s thinking at all, which is why corporations spend a monstrous amount on it. No message there. Don’t buy our product! Continue reading A Slew of Iraq War Films
Go and see Rendition – it will make you angry…
…is Hollywood waking up – after Syriana and Munich – to the gross injustices of the Middle East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the region?”
Hmm – not exactly:
Bush’s thugs didn’t get fazed like Streep’s CIA boss. Continue reading Robert Fisk Reviews Rendition
And this may be the lesson that filmmakers need to absorb as they think about how to deal with the current war. It’s not a melodrama or a whodunit or even a lavish epic. It’s a franchise.
Frankly, he’s wrong. The war is a criminal melodrama, a criminal whodunit, a criminal lavish epic, and a criminal franchise. Continue reading A. O. Scott on Iraq War Films
Ask actor Mark Ruffalo why so many current movies focus on revenge and he answers quickly and with passion. The films are reactions to the war in Iraq, he says.
“They’re allegories about destruction, vengeance, taking the law into your own hands,” he says. “They’re dealing with what’s happening in the world today.”
Then he really gets on a tear.
…the more I’ve thought about it, the more I feel that my general apathy when reading a lot of fantasy short fiction today comes from finding in it a profoundly disturbing, if sturdy, middle class professionalism. The magazines and anthologies are dominated by what I’d call centrist fiction that simply drowns in competence. It’s good – it’s just not great. It’s clever – it’s just not trying to do more, or it does reach for more, but in familiar ways…. Words for what I was reading were more like twee, comfortable, recycled, reasonable, well-rounded, whimsical, unoriginal, well-behaved, and fuzzy.
With all due respect to Jeff VanderMeer, who I assume is a talented writer, the problem with VanderMeer’s thoughts on the matter is that his post is as weak as the fiction he decries: It’s essentially “twee, comfortable, recycled, reasonable, well-rounded, whimsical, unoriginal, well-behaved, and fuzzy” – quite far from what he would like to see, fiction that is “rough and wild and pushing and punk and visionary” – let alone even more culturally vital fictive art.
Continue reading Jeff VanderMeer lamenting the state of fantasy short fiction
We’ll see if the film industry does it any different this time in its slate of Iraq war films. The April 2002 views of British filmmaker and journalist John Pilger below seem accurate to me in “Hollywood Hurrah” –
“Ghost writer with the inside edge” – by Jay Rayner:
Robert Harris knows a thing or two about political intrigue. As a journalist, he has reported on it. As the author of novels such as Fatherland and Imperium, he has weaved compelling narratives from it. Now, with his new book, he is the cause of it. The Ghost, which is published this week, tells the story of Adam Lang, a recently retired British Prime Minister, brought low by an unpopular and possibly illegal Middle Eastern war, who is holed up in a media mogul’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, explaining himself to the ghost writer who is penning his memoirs. In the background is his Machiavellian wife Ruth and a load of thriller subplots involving possible assassinations, the workings of the CIA and the PM conniving with the practice of extraordinary rendition.
While Lang’s political allegiance is never named, it does not take a huge leap of imagination to see this as a fictionalised attempt by Harris to stab Tony and Cherie Blair firmly in the front. Sure, as a political journalist, he was quite the cheerleader for the Labour leader. He has long been credited with having spotted the MP for Sedgefield’s talents long before others realised his potential and during the 1997 election he was granted unprecedented access. He was even on the plane as the Prime Minister-to-be headed for victory.
But they fell out spectacularly, first over Blair’s treatment of Harris’s old friend, Peter Mandelson, when he was forced to resign for the second time in 2001, and later over the Iraq war, to which he was vehemently opposed.
Article by Trevor Butterworth from Huffington Post:
Recently, I had the pleasure to interview Louis Auchincloss, one of the great American novelists, and undoubtedly the greatest American novelist of power, money and politics. He was almost constitutionally incapable of talking about the war in Iraq but he did draw some interesting parallels with Vietnam, and specifically, the class of patrician who “pushed” that “disgusting” war. The following extract is from my profile of Auchincloss in the Sept 22nd Financial Times:
“I used to say to my father,” he says,”‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” He pauses before invoking a 20th-century American foreign policy who’s who: “There was Cy Vance, Bill Scranton, Ted Beale, both Bundys, Bill and McGeorge — they all got behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good, virtuous,” says Auchincloss, “the finest men you could find. It was the most disillusioning thing that happened in my life.”
Auchincloss has struggled to understand just how their shared patrician background could have produced this disconnect. And the answer would appear to be that wars are lost, if not always made, on the playing fields of New England. “Bill Bundy and I shared a study at Groton, and one day he came in from a football game, and I said: ‘Who won?’ and he said: ‘We lost,’ and then he burst into tears. You cannot lose. Groton cannot lose. That’s what they believed in, no matter what,” explains Auchincloss. “They all would have all been willing to die, if they hadn’t already been in high positions. They believed America cannot lose. We stand for every virtue and right that’s in the world.”
For more, including his excretory dismissal of the Bush family, read “The Irony of my life.” But if you are a political junkie, his 1980 novel, The House of the Prophet, whose protagonist is based on Walter Lippmann, is an indispensable meditation on the motivations and failings of the political pundit and public intellectual class.
Excerpt from “Mystery or Iraq war film” by Godfrey Cheshire:
As Crash did, though in a much different way, Haggis’ latest suggests a filmmaker whose sensibility is rooted in television. Indeed, the workmanlike earnestness of In the Valley of Elah would be right at home on TV. The one area where it excels, and I believe earns a place on the big screen, is the acting. Jones, who’s capable in most circumstances, here surpasses himself with a performance that shrewdly combines anger, dismay and steely resolve. Always commanding and ingeniously resourceful, his work receives very able support from Theron and the young actors who play the soldiers.
Ultimately, the film makes you wonder whether any salient tragic or political point can emerge from a movie so bound up with the mechanics of genre. When Robert Altman wanted to analyze America’s Vietnam morass in M*A*S*H, he did so by undermining rather than respecting the conventions of the war movie. When Hal Ashby set out to examine the war’s impact at home in Coming Home, he focused on an intimate, interpersonal drama and kept the genre gear-cranking to a minimum.
Strategies such as these, it seems, are virtually inevitable for anyone attempting to insert challenging insights into the formulas of entertainment. As you might expect, Haggis’ film hinges on how the psychological damage that soldiers experience in Iraq is brought home, sometimes with disastrous consequences. On the human level, that is worth considering, of course. But as dramatic analysis, it is hardly novel or profound, nor is it articulated in a way that connects it to deeper defects in American society.
Yet the real problem is that it is not essential to the drama of In the Valley of Elah. When the film is over, you realize you’ve been through a crime drama slash mystery that unfolds, builds and resolves according to convention—the implications regarding the Iraq war are interesting, perhaps, but incidental. You can easily ignore them because they are not central to the experience of watching the movie.
Haggis’ enterprise might also be faulted for focusing on the damage done to Americans, with only sidelong glimpses at the devastation visited upon Iraqis. But I would approach this bias by noting how clueless Haggis seems to be regarding the metaphorical implications of the film’s title.
The valley of Elah, we are told, is the place in the Bible (and Koran) where David did battle with Goliath. Haggis uses this tale to suggest that every American soldier going into battle is a David whose first enemies are his own fears. In other wars, this might have been a poignant little symbol, but in the current war it seems bizarrely out of place. While we may want to cling to the traditional symbolism, most of the rest of the world understands that, in Iraq, America is Goliath. We still await the artist who can make us confront that supremely discomfiting truth head-on.
As fake news announcers (three flat-screen televisions adorn the stage), they segue from enumerating the latest stats from Iraq to announcing the sales of Harry Potter books. In graver voices, they intone things like:
When our children
in service to slogans perish
Do we mourn them
Knowing they died well?
And are we comforted?
From “When the War Comes to the Home Front“:
…on Hollywood’s ability to sway public opinion and its right to ask provocative questions, he is resolute.
“Cinema has as much reason to deal with politics as literature does. Or theater. Or the editorial page of your local newspaper,” the gravelly voiced actor says on the phone from a Beverly Hills hotel.
Interview with Anthony Breznican:
In an unusually blunt conversation, Jones is at once defiant, passionate and eloquent, although his legendary status as one of Hollywood’s hardest interviews is deserved. He is not quick to open up.
Could In the Valley of Elah be set against the backdrop of any war?
“In part, but not entirely,” Jones says without elaboration.
What is it, then, about Iraq that makes it specific to this story?
Jones takes a breath. And then, it finally happens. He makes a long, slow series of statements that few politicians of either major party would speak so directly.
“There are many questions raised by the movie, but they all boil down to one big question, and that’s the big question in front of everybody in the country,” he says, his eyes hard. “It’s inescapable. It makes no sense to talk around it or avoid talking about it …
“That question is: To what extent are you engaged in a fraudulent war, you as an American citizen?”
The thought hangs there, daring for an attempted answer. Jones forges even further: “The other questions fall right behind it. To what extent was al-Qaeda embedded in Saddam Hussein’s government before we invaded? To what extent did the Hussein government’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction pose a threat to your freedoms? … How prepared was our army for that invasion? … Was there a good plan of what to do once we inevitably defeated them militarily? … Were our soldiers sufficiently equipped? …Was that a wise choice, to wage that war?”
His statements are punctuated with heavy pauses. He is tempting vilification by those still in lock-step with the White House, and he knows it. But he doesn’t stop.
“And coming around full circle, to the original question: To what extent was it a fraudulent enterprise?” he says.
There is no blame, no vitriol against President Bush or other politicians. He speaks of respect for the troops, who were sent on orders, and says we all have to evaluate our personal responsibility for why.
“You have to ask yourself that. There are good reasons to ask yourself that. And if you can’t ask yourself that, in the face of these children coming home in various states of disrepair — young women with one of her legs blown off, young men with their faces burned off — in the face of who-knows-how-many dead Iraqi schoolchildren and wives and old people … if you can’t ask yourself those questions, you’re not paying attention.”
Jones doesn’t offer his own answers. “In the political world, the only position I have is voter. I’m not a spokesman for anything,” he says. “If you want to know about my politics, the only way to do that is to look at my work.”
From his Oscar-winning role in The Fugitive to the military men he has played in Rolling Thunder and Rules of Engagement, and even the cowboys in Lonesome Dove and his own 2005 feature directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jones has explored men who are both devoted to authority but wrestling with doubts.
He continues that in Elah as well as the upcoming Coen brothers film of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men, playing a world-weary sheriff chasing a killer.
A movie such as Elah doesn’t pay anything close to a Men in Black salary, but shining a light on the unseen grief of military families is why Jones took the risk.
“I liked the movie for having a realistic outlook on matters of the heart,” he says.
Asked if patriotism is a matter of the heart, he narrows his eyes. “Yeah,” he growls.
“But often it would be better suited as a matter of the mind.”
From a couple years back at the National Review, but worth noting today:
In the novel Chain of Command, Caspar Weinberger and his co-author Peter Schweizer spin their message into the twisting tale of an attempted coup d’état executed by right-wing hardliners at the highest levels of the American government. The conspirators are motivated by the urge to wage what they see as an appropriately aggressive war on terrorism at home and abroad — a goal they believe they can achieve only by deploying military “security forces” into American cities and refashioning the government into a quasi-dictatorship.
Such a plot raises questions that, in today’s political climate, might seem surprising coming from a conservative author. But historically, conservatives have always been concerned with the power of the federal government and its potential for abuse. In an interview, Weinberger suggested that Americans would do well not to lose sight of this concern.
Also: On “conservative fiction” at the Literary Saloon.
A US film exposing the ugly reality of the Iraq War seared the big screen at the Venice film festival Friday, with director Brian De Palma saying he hoped it would help end America’s military occupation.
“The pictures are what will stop the war,” De Palma told a news conference after the showing of the movie, “Redacted”.
The feature, which is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers who also slaughtered her family, is a reaction to what he sees as sanitised media accounts of the war seen in the United States.
“All the images we (currently) have of our war are completely constructed — whitewashed, redacted,” said De Palma, who is best known for such violent fictions as “Carrie” and “Scarface”.
“One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war,” he added.
“Redacted” hits hard with its dramatic reenactment of the conditions, attitudes and stresses that led up to the real-life crime.
One of the soldiers involved, Private First Class Jesse Spielman, was in early August sentenced to 110 years in prison for his role in the rape and killings.
Shown through the imaginary video lens of one of the soldiers involved in the raid on the girl’s home, De Palma’s dramatisation is interlaced with actual news clips, documentary footage and stills from the war.
The decision to use the device of the videocam arose from De Palma’s research on the Internet. “The blogs, the use of language, it’s all there,” he said.
He explained that legal obstacles in dealing with real people and events meant he was “forced to fictionalise things” to get the movie made.
“Redacted” will initially be distributed nationwide by Magnolia Pictures as a “classic art film,” its producer Jason Kliot said. “If the response is strong one hopes the distribution will grow the film in a big way.”
The movie was something of a jolt when compared with the other fare on Venice’s programme.
…
There is no “natural” progression to any war. Too much depends on who makes what happen when, including what happens on the “homefront”. Certain crucial aspects of the US invasion and occupation are essentially as well understood as they will ever be. Of course one can’t predict the future, but one can document and dramatize the well known past, including the recent past. For example, nothing can ever make the US invasion and occupation less immoral and illegal that it was known to be before and upon launching it. Look at Israel in the occupied territories – they are still killing and dying there decades after invading. It is well known, to those who want to know, the nature of those decades then and now. Things could have progressed differently, as they might or might not in the future. The idea of waiting 50 years or 100 years or whatever it may be, or even two decades, or two years to write about something that is essentially knowable as it happens, and therefore able to be dramatized immediately, is pointless. German leaders after World War II were hanged for what the US leaders have done in invading and occupying Iraq. Nothing that happens in the future can change that reality. That is no small reality that ought to have been dramatized long since, and has been a bit.
Malcolm MacPherson writing about his Iraq War novel Hocus Potus:
When I returned from Iraq, I thought of nothing but the absurdity of that hubristic enterprise, run by people who acted superior to us mortals. The civilians in charge struck me as dishonest and incompetent, detached from the reality of what was happening over their guarded gates. Their highest calling was their ambition. They didn’t have a clue. So they bumbled. They stumbled. They lied and dissembled. In the process, they became cartoon characters.
In a Guardian books blog entry, The President of the National Book Critics Circle, John Freeman, writes –
“…when it comes to the arena in which novelists can have the most impact – their art – this generation (with the notable exception of Gary Shteyngart and his Absurdistan has been rather silent about the Bush years, so blisteringly described by Olbermann.
“Part of this – I think – has to do with the difficulty so many novelists, let alone Americans at large, had in absorbing 9/11. The trauma, the anger and the loss of that event have sucked up all the imaginative oxygen in the room.
“Six years after the attacks, the novel-based responses to that day – including Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man – continue to trickle in. But no one is writing about rendition or torture or trumped up fears.”
Actually a few – ignored – fiction authors are “writing about rendition or torture or trumped up fears” especially as tied-in to the subsequent far more devastating related Iraq War and the US corporate-state government in general. And while it’s easily accurate that enough authors are failing to write enough of this sort of fiction, it’s also easily accurate that the literary establishment is failing to solicit such work and that reviewers are failing to review quality novels that do get written in this regard. Thus, reviewers and publishers effectively discourage such work from being written in the first place. Who in the establishment will have much or anything to do with it? Here it is – waiting to be reviewed – the sort of thing that is also willing to be solicited: see Iraq War Fiction.
The movie industry, for the good or the bad, seems to be catching on. But publishing? And book reviewing?
A satire about the Bush adminisration and the Iraq war.
“Part savagely acute political satire, part living newspaper and all broad, tuneful and timely musical comedy, “Killing” is the Mime Troupe’s most direct grapple yet with the war in Iraq. It’s very funny and equally politically engaged…in the best tradition of agitprop theater.”
– San Francisco Chronicle
“Making a Killing” is one of the Troupe’s best… it’s a tightly plotted military ‘murder-most-foul’ mystery…”
– San Francisco Examiner
A Practical Policy 