Poor Owen Wilson

It is by now old news that blond, crooked nosed, cutie Owen Wilson tried to take his own life yesterday. The only reason I mention it is to see if I get a million hits.

ps: I hope he feels better. We like him.

Superbad

With very high expectations, given the glowing reviews and the box office success, I went to see Superbad, the new Judd Apatow production. I'm a huge fan of the 40 Year Old Virgin, less so of Knocked Up, but still I consider Apatow a phenomenon in recent film comedy history.
For a teenage buddy comedy, I noticed that around me was the most diverse film audience I have ever seen in a theater. There were plenty of women, young and older, plenty of young males, but also older males, black and white, and plenty of diverse people. Alarmingly, there were a couple of children. This movie should be x-rated. You don't see it, but boy do you hear it, and it is unbelievably filthy.
Superbad is an unlikely love story between two mega nerds, Evan and Seth, played by the fantastic Michael Cera, who is a young master of the excruciatingly gentle deadpan, and by Jonah Hill; physically, the only true heir to the great Zero Mostel, and in this movie an unbridled monster of male teenage need. The filth that comes from this young man's mind, let alone his lips, is heart-stopping. I'm all for freedom of expression and particularly freedom of sexual expression, and freedom in comedy, where nothing is sacred, and long live Lenny Bruce and all that, but the obscenity in this movie becomes a bit tiresome after a while. There are the seeds of subversion in this extremely explicit, and sometimes funny, talk of sex, but how effective can subversion be if it becomes monotonous? I wonder whether Superbad does in fact reflect the culture or is it just that the writers have dirty minds? Are kids today so truly influenced by porn and so obsessed with sex? Or is Superbad setting the pace?
Still, even though I confess that I found the relentless barrage of vulgarity a bit off-putting, I welcome that a mainstream hit movie will make all those Bible thumpers call for the apocalypse. Now they will have even more reason to blame the Jews in Hollywood for the evils in this world. The obscenity is a slap in the face to the hypocritical virtuousness of an immoral God-fearing president, and as such, bring it on!
What Superbad makes clear is that the culture in America is permissive in everything but in deed. For a teenager, it is faux liberty. Porn is abundant, but real sex is not. Booze is abundant, but it can't be had if you are a teen, (and still they do get sloshed); adulthood is thrown right in front of your face, and it is a scary thing. Superbad explores the dark side of the nerd's angst, and by God, this is the angsiest trip since Gregor Samsa turned into a roach.
I read somewhere that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote this script when they were teenagers, and it shows, even though it has been massaged into something more substantial. The movie is great and most funny at exploring the tribulations of the teen mind. In the surprisingly tender coupling of Seth and Evan you have the division between civilization and barbarity. Evan, the one with the moral conscience, is a sweet bumbling loser with genuine decency. There is quite a disturbing scene of a sloshed young girl being extremely sexually aggresive with him. The moment of truth has arrived, and Evan is mortified and terrified, not only because of the act itself but because of the moral implications of taking advantage.
The lust and fear verging on panic of women is a constant in Apatow's male buddy comedy as is his insistence that real sex and intimacy make men very afraid.
Seth, on the other hand, is a monster of selfishness and his hysteria is palpable, as is his hurt at being abandoned by his friend. The best parts of the movie are when you see these two in action, whether they are parsing the mysteries of sex as if they were Talmudic scholars and particularly when they have a spat. They have a true relationship, a dependency that staves off loneliness and fear, and Hill is wonderful when he is wounded. Most reviews I read talked about the sweetness of the movie, so I was rather taken aback by its depiction of bully behavior, which is a constant in teenage life, and in this movie, practiced by adults as well, since in the Apatow universe (and therefore possibly in America) no man is ever really a mature adult.
The more puerile parts, like a too long subplot involving two irresponsible, childish cops and Fogel (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the biggest nerd ever to hit a movie screen, are intermittently funny but they distract from the meatier conceit of male bonding in the time of hysteria.
I love that this motley bunch of Jews, white nerds in a totally white universe, sway and jive, or try their best, like superbad black guys. That's another subtle dig at a culture that is desperately in need of macho cred. Apparently, nowadays only ghetto talk provides that and the actors and writers know there is nothing funnier than a white nerd trying to pass off for a badass motherfucker. The funky music score, by the way, is excellent.
The movie redeems itself by ending like a love story, with a tender (platonic) love scene between the two friends, who go on to face their respective rites of passage on their own, lost in a mall, as befits the new romantic comedy in America.

French Class

Now that I'm back from France, I'm forgetting the French I learned. So I'm watching lots of movies in French, both at theatres and at home, to see if somehow something sticks.
So far, I've seen Blame it on Fidel, by the daughter of Costa Gavras, which is a diverting but kinda lukewarm coming of age story about a snotty little rich girl who grows up with very lefty, albeit bourgeois, parents. I wasn't as taken with the film as I expected, although the little girl is appropriately snotty and it is interesting to see an unsympathetic little girl for whom you do muster some sympathy. The politics of the parents may be virtuous, but in the highly hierarchical, unforgiving world of childhood, they may wreak havoc while you are growing up and finding out who you are. It's a wonderful subject for a film yet one watches this movie thinking that there is a better movie buried in there somewhere.
Dans Paris is a terribly obnoxious film starring my darling Romain Duris. The film tries to be now like the films of the nouvelle vague were in the sixties, except that what was fresh and new and bracingly disorienting then seems painfully embarrassing done today, even if it's an homage. The only reason I sat through it was because it was French Class. Otherwise, I'd have seriously considered leaving after five minutes. Which was good, because it gets slightly better as it progresses. Dans Paris is a melange of French directorial styles (early Truffaut and Godard), including an actually lovely musical number over the phone, a la Jacques Demy. It starts out in a completely maddening, pretentious way, but somehow it grabs you. Some of it is relatively charming, most of it is just very proud of itself. It's interesting to watch French people trying too hard to lay on the charm. Ces't ne marche pas, like they say.
At home I saw the very scary horror movie by the Fréres Dardenne, L'Enfant, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2005. As a French lesson it wasn't very helpful, because the characters are barely literate themselves. But it is a tense, chilling film, in which the horror (no blood spilled, minimal violence) is that of total human detachment and a lack of moral consciousness. It is a fantastic movie, with an amazing story that keeps you at the edge of your seat, (including even a scooter chase) but it is intelligent and chilling and ultimately heartbreaking and the kind of movie you will never see done in America, land of the formula.

Coopted by Hollywood

I see the talented German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who gave us the excellent Hitler tearjerker Downfall (actually one of the scariest movies I've ever seen), was sadly coopted by Hollywood to do a completely unnecessary remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that has already had one remake by Philip Kaufman (I liked it). I have yet to see the original, by Don Siegel, which is probably the best. Apparently, this being Hollywood, and even though Mr. Hirschbiegel retains director credit (and to judge from the reviews, rather unwisely) three other directors were brought in "to amp up the action", including the monstrously overrated Wachowski Bros, from the Matrix, and one of their collaborators, from V is for Vendetta.
I feel sorry and angry at the poor German film director for following the money, thinking that he could retain in Hollywood the illustrious success and the independence of mind of his first film. Perhaps he thought that he could turn the great parable of the body snatchers into another tour de force of claustrophobia and mass deception. Sounds like a very interesting premise, provided you let him do it his way.
Why hire the guy if you are going to turn whatever he does into crap? It's like you hire Ozu, but what you actually want is Johnnie To. Why waste so much money, time and effort? Why pretend you want something artistic? Why waste everybody's time jerking off to pretension when all you want is farts, because the audiences, according to you, love farts and nothing but? It would save everybody involved a lot of misery just to fart it out as planned.
3. And if it turns out that it is not the big fart you imagined, have the decency to own it. It may not make you so much money, but it may actually be good.

On DVD: Shortbus

Since I meant to stay up to watch the Perseids, I finally got around to see what was collecting dust in my Netflix for months. I had two choices. Edmond, by David Mamet and Shortbus, by John Cameron Mitchell. We chose the second one, thinking a little explicit sex would be highly diverting. Boy oh boy, were we wrong.
There are two things that are routinely confused with art:
1. Good intentions. (In which the auteur wishes to inform the audience that his soul is pure, wise, tolerant, and ecumenical and he has the benefit of mankind at heart). This is the most pernicious of the two. When confronted with this one, run for your life.
2. Shock value. (In which the auteur has not outgrown his/her childish need to get attention by any means necessary, except he/she now thinks that by doing something deliberately outrageous he/she are in fact doing something original and brave).
Both together are a recipe not for art, but for kitsch, which is the opposite of art.
Shortbus is one such example.
It is a capital, unforgivable sin for a movie to promise to be erotic and then not deliver. Shortbus is awash in explicit sex, but it is absolutely, resolutely not sexy. Why? Either because the sex is joyless and selfish (as in the gay couple who struggles with monogamy and one of them is really depressed because he was abused, or as in the sex therapist, that, surprise, surprise, can't have an orgasm and spends an entire movie humorlessly trying to force one out); or sex is too joyful, as in an orgy room full of loving-caring people who look like a million bucks and who seem to be having a moderately nice time in fantasyland, and I mean the Disney one.
The sex in Shortbus wants to be both well intentioned and shocking and thus it is reduced to absolute corn. It's like watching a visual version of sex therapy (like that Canadian woman, Sue Something, and what could be less sexy?). Then Mitchell thinks he is brave for using very explicit real sex scenes, one homosexual one involving the blowing of the Star Spangled Banner into someone's rear orifice, for instance. This, because of its transparent need to shock, has quite the opposite effect. It is puerile and completely devoid of real shock value. Borat's rendition of the national anthem in that rodeo in Hicksville -- now, that was truly transgressive and much braver.
To cap it all off, there is a garishly hideous animated travelling shot over Manhattan I guess meant to connect the stories of the sex crazed New Yorkers that inhabit this particularly unrealistic universe, that makes this town look like a toy you buy at K-Mart. The movie feels long, the humor forced, the bathos unbearable. Unwitting kitsch may be fun once in a while, but kitsch that thinks it has something important to say is a fake and a waste of time.

Classics: Danton

At the moment we are undergoing a bit of an obsession with the French Revolution. Perhaps it is because we spent one month where every two blocks you see the three immortal words that look great carved in stone but that we haven't quite figured out how to achieve yet: liberte, egalite, fraternite. To know that these and other thoroughly enlightened concepts which gave rise to the modern state, to what we now consider democracy, came hand in hand with an unbelievable bloodbath, well, it is all very sexy and important and we wish to learn more about it.
So off to see Danton, showing at the Lincoln Center film retrospective dedicated to mon amour, Gerard Depardieu. Danton was directed by Andrej Wajda, the Polish film director, and was made in 1983 as a French-Polish coproduction to commemorate the anniversary of the French Revolution. At the time, it also famously resonated as a thinly veiled metaphor for what was happening with Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland. Today, it is worth seeing because what it says about the perversion of ideas by power unfortunately still holds (cf, the Bush Admin.); but also to watch two monster actors face to face: mon amour who plays Danton, and the great Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, who plays Robespierre.
The movie is very stagy and theatrical, but it is a visceral and cogent illumination of how power corrupts and how idealistic and idealized heroes are all too human. The tour de force is the great scene between Danton, an unfettered sybarite with some sort of a conscience that the ideals he fought for and the institutions he helped invent are being perverted by the Terror, and Robespierre whose cold rationality has led him to guillotine pretty much everybody with a functioning head on their shoulders in the name of keeping those ideals alive (and with a shudder you notice that Robespierre's coldness reminds you of Dick Cheney, except the latter doesn't even have the good intentions, or a heart). It is not only a magnificent acting duel, with mon amour trying to charm and seduce Robespierre through food and wine and humor, and the other one cold as ice trying to guard himself from those advances. It is as precise and strategic as a chess game.
Students of acting: this scene is a master class in acting technique (beats, low and high status, listening, what the other wants, conflict, tension, you name it), but you never notice it because you are too taken by the intense drama that is unfolding across a table.
In any case, to cut to the chase, many heads rolled.
Later at night, as we walked home from a very satisfying chocolate malt and French Toast (like Danton, we are unfettered sybarites) we saw a woman rummaging in the garbage. On closer inspection, someone had thrown away a bunch of very respectable books, a veritable cache of culture. So what would be our joy and surprise, to find, sitting dejected near the gutter, Citizens, Simon's Schama massive book about the French Revolution! We may not have seen the meteors, but we believe that the universe is trying to tell us something.
The plan is to start reading Bertrand Russell's a History of Philosophy, and then do the massive Schama book. By the time we re finished with the two, if we are still breathing, we will be able to solve all the world's problems. Stay tuned.

Gods of Cinema: Bergman and Antonioni

In today's New York Times there are two tributes about Bergman and Antonioni, written respectively by Woody Allen and by Martin Scorsese. It is a lovely idea. But of the two, the Scorsese one is the real jewel. If Martin Scorsese were to give a Master Class in cinema, and he should, I would start lining up now. Not only are his enthusiasm and absolute love of film contagious, but he is a genius at articulating what a film does to the viewer emotionally, what it achieves artistically, why it is important. He is incredibly generous with his knowledge, he is eloquent and utterly illuminating. As with the best teachers, the ones who truly inspire, one learns something. Even as he says how the movie shocked him and changed the way he looked at cinema, he writes self-effacingly. It is not about himself. He gives all his thought and passion to the work of Antonioni, and to exhorting us, inviting us and seducing us to watch, learn and partake.
As for the Woody Allen piece on Bergman, it is an amusing personal recollection, but it is very different from Scorsese's tribute. It has more to do with Allen than with Bergman. And even though he enumerates in a list the reasons why Bergman is important (with all due respect, like a college student would in a term paper, just a string of clichés), he doesn't really explain what makes Bergman's films unique. He doesn't make you want to run out to watch the entire oeuvre, like Scorsese does. Woody is proud to have been friends with Ingmar. Fine. But the piece is very revealing in quite a different direction, and I'm sure quite unconsciously:

I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Precisely. Don't. Scorsese learned from Antonioni that cinema could be freeing, and that the camera could invent true, devastating emotional landscapes. Perhaps compulsive Scandinavian workaholism is not the best lesson to learn from Bergman, who had the advantage of being a truly gifted, creative being. Instead, it would behoove Allen's immense talent to churn out less half-baked films and try to recapture with less discipline but more artistic rigor the great comic genius he once was.

Master Class

In today's New York Times there are two tributes about Bergman and Antonioni, written respectively by Woody Allen and by Martin Scorsese. It is a lovely idea. But of the two, the Scorsese one is the real jewel. If Martin Scorsese were to give a Master Class in cinema, and he should, I would start lining up now. Not only are his enthusiasm and absolute love of film contagious, but he is a genius at articulating what a film does to the viewer emotionally, what it achieves artistically, why it is important. He is incredibly generous with his knowledge, he is eloquent and utterly illuminating. As with the best teachers, the ones who truly inspire, one learns something. Even as he says how the movie shocked him and changed the way he looked at cinema, he writes self-effacingly. It is not about himself. He gives all his thought and passion to the work of Antonioni, and to exhorting us, inviting us and seducing us to watch, learn and partake.
As for the Woody Allen piece on Bergman, it is an amusing personal recollection, but it is very different from Scorsese's tribute. It has more to do with Allen than with Bergman. And even though he enumerates in a list the reasons why Bergman is important (with all due respect, like a college student would in a term paper, just a string of clichés), he doesn't really explain what makes Bergman's films unique. He doesn't make you want to run out to watch the entire oeuvre, like Scorsese does. Woody is proud to have been friends with Ingmar. Fine. But the piece is very revealing in quite a different direction, and I'm sure quite unconsciously:

I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Precisely. Don't. Scorsese learned from Antonioni that cinema could be freeing, and that the camera could invent true, devastating emotional landscapes. Perhaps compulsive Scandinavian workaholism is not the best lesson to learn from Bergman, who had the advantage of being a truly gifted, creative being. Instead, it would behoove Allen's immense talent to churn out less half-baked films and try to recapture with less discipline but more artistic rigor the great comic genius he once was.

Editing DIY

Dear dears: I'm editing my short movie myself. At the beginning I was totally panicked because me and technology are in shaky terms, like two clumsy dance partners who keep stepping in each other's toes. But after three days pushing cursors and cutting footage, I am loving it, even though I get into major problems that then I don't really know how to extricate myself from. Yesterday a wonderful solution was found for my floundering. Set the program at 99 undo commands. It's the only way.
Editing is fun. It is also somehow beautiful. It is playful and exciting, requires mechanical skill but also much more than that. The intangibles of knowing when to start and end a scene; what makes something funnier or more dramatic; what makes the story move at a good clip. You can change the tone and meaning of a scene just by cutting off some frames. You can make an actor's reaction more powerful by choosing just to show the meat of it. I know this may be obvious, but it is a wonderful discovery to do it yourself with your own little fingerinos.

Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn is the first foray into Hollywood of the great German director Werner Herzog, yet it still manages to be a Werner Herzog film. That is, a lyrical foray into extremity and madness. It tells the story of Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped a Laotian prison camp and survived in the jungle before being rescued by the US Army. Herzog had already made a documentary about him called Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which according to many sources is even better than this movie. I have not seen it, but I have seen Rescue Dawn and I strongly recommend it.
There is a wonderful profile of Herzog and the making of this film in this recent article in the New Yorker. Basically, the story of "Rescue Dawn: The Movie" is the story of the struggle between the desires of an artist filmmaker and those of the moneymen. Because this is the formidably crazy Werner Herzog, it turns out that the artist won the battle with enormous wile, stubborness and chutzpah (read the article, it is a hoot). Rescue Dawn is not an action movie, it is not a war movie. It is a movie about man in extremis, which is one of Herzog's favorite themes. What distinguishes this film from any other Rambo-like jungle adventure (which is probably what the producers were hoping for) is precisely the sensibility of the director. Nothing feels staged. Actually, that is not true. The first minutes of the film, which happen in a US Navy carrier, safely indoors, feel clunky and mechanical. The dialogue sounds stiff, the lighting looks cheap, one braces for the worst. But once Dengler's plane crashes in the jungle, Herzog feels right at home. He is in his element. The thicker the foliage, the more forbidding the jungle landscape; the more glorious, fluid, powerful and lyrical the images.
There is enormous emotional power in this film and it comes not only from Herzog's subtle, un-Hollywood conception of the hero, but also mainly from Christian Bale's towering performance. For Dieter Dengler is not your typical gung-ho, cocky American hero. He is some sort of eccentric, German-born kid who is good humored and good natured and has, besides a luminous smile and a winning, cocky charm, endless reserves of inventiveness and willpower. He is not a machine. I have never seen a hero like this in a Hollywood movie. About Dengler, Herzog has said: “All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.” And this is exactly what Bale conveys with incredible force and total abandon. It is a fresh and original performance that never falls back on clichés. I fear that its magnificence may be attributed to or confused with the fact that he lost 55 pounds for this film. But it is his characterization and the authenticity of feeling that merit him the awards. If he is not nominated for an Oscar, it will be a travesty.
In the middle of the jungle, and under apparently quite insane production circumstances, Herzog somehow elicits fantastic performances of the entire cast. Steve Zahn is excellent as Dengler's friend and fellow escapee. It's the first time I see him in a non-goofy role and he is tender and haunting to the core. Jeremy Davies, (in my book, the male version of Jennifer Jason Leigh, and this is never a good thing) turns out his usual unhinged, mannered shtick as a crazed prisoner. He wins the weight contest by a mile, looking worse than an Auschwitz survivor, but somehow, even though he's good, he is shticky. It's not about that.
The movie is slightly bizarre for American standards. The rhythm is off, there are no predictable turning points and formulas, and only a few torture thrills, but the story is gripping and it has deep expanses of pure feeling. The cinematography, by Herzog's longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who must be a professional masochist, is stunning, with gorgeous, floating camera swoops and fantastic handheld shots that never distract. Some scenes in the prison camp seem right out of Goya's war paintings. Herzog shoots the amazing Thai jungle locations as landscapes of the mind. He also puts the actors through a grinder. They eat worms and snakes and pull leeches off their bare skins.
There is by now a famous scene between Zahn and Bale where the prisoners fantasize the contents of their fridges at home. It reminded me of Chaplin's food hallucinations in The Gold Rush, very funny and moving at the same time. There is true tenderness between the two escapees. In the end it is clear that the film is much more about the edge of madness, good and bad, about human folly, and like all survival stories, about existence, than it is about a hero's exploits.
I will not spoil anything for you if I tell you there is a happy ending after the rescue that seems pegged on to humor somebody in a focus group. Thanks to the utter integrity of Bale's acting and to Herzog's discreet subversiveness, the scene works at a different level. It is worth the price of admission just to watch the reaction in Dengler's face as he is given a hero's return. The overwhelming confusion, the pain, the joy, the dizziness is all there; for a moment he seems like he is looking for himself. Then as he salutes, composing himself, his eyes fill up with tears and he strains to contain his emotion. Not one to fall for easy patriotic and religious bromides, all he says is he wants a steak. And when he is asked to explain how he survived, he replies simply, like a Buddhist sage: You empty what is full and you fill what is empty.
And this is why I love Werner Herzog.

There Is A Rough Cut!

You must have thought I had forgotten all about the little short I shot. Pas du tout, as we say in French.
I just went to Paris for a month and left it in the hands of an editor, who worked on it while I was away.
As you can imagine, the suspense was killing me, but I finally saw the first rough cut yesterday. It still needs a lot of work, and it is extremely rough and it has lots of problems, but I think it works. It is a very strange feeling to see the bits and pieces one shot in the course of three days, strung together into a story. Some stuff that I thought wasn't going to work, amazingly does. Other parts are going to need major tinkering, but with some sleight of hand we may make it work. It's the first time I feel something distantly related to exhilaration.

Required Viewing: No End In Sight

We're back to reality, with a major itch for the movies. First thing out of the bat is let's get totally outraged, homicidal and depressed. No, it's not the Transformers we chose for this task (though we know they'd have done the trick). It's a documentary called No End In Sight, written and directed by Charles Ferguson, now showing at Film Forum. This film should be shown on TV every night. I already told my senator Hillary Clinton to watch it. Every Congressman should.
It is a lucid recap of the absolute disaster of the Iraq War that continues raging four years after our unspeakably moronic fratboy of a President declared that the mission was accomplished.
Remember that scene in Clockwork Orange where to deprogram Malcolm McDowell they make him watch hours and hours of horrible scenes of violence to the accompaniment of Beethoven's 9th Symphony? Well, this is what should happen to Bushie, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie and Condi with this film. None of them would deign be interviewed for the film, but to start with their collective punishment, they should be made to watch this film till the end of eternity. They should watch it in the company, not of Beethoven's music, but of the soldiers and the families of the soldiers who didn't come back or who were maimed and injured because their Humvees were not armored, for instance. A bridge falls in Minnesota and yes it is a terrible tragedy. But I don't hear anyone raising the same kind of outrage for the destruction we've unleashed in the Middle East, and by corollary here at home. We have created millions of savage enemies, who will gloat at the spilling of American blood, if they don't actually take it upon themselves to orchestrate it personally. We have ravaged and destroyed an entire country. To be able to say that Iraq was better off with Saddam, who was as evil as they come, is proof of the debacle we have provoked for no good reason. Words like arrogance, debacle, quagmire, cynicism, corruption, incompetence, disaster, IMPUNITY, don't begin to encompass the enormity of the damage. And yet, those responsible are still in office, our congress is not forceful enough in its condemnation or its actions, and life goes on.
This film will make you physically ill. It will make you gasp in disbelief. And it's not saying anything we don't know already and that hasn't been documented in countless books and journalistic articles. It just makes sense of it. With the benefit of hindsight, it clearly spells out the list of disastrous decisions and lack of preparedness that resulted in the murderous chaos we see today. It starts badly and just keeps piling on the mistakes, the cynicism, the ignorance and the arrogance until you want to cry uncle. It is devastating. What is tragic is that there were scores of intelligent, capable people in the military, and other government agencies who worked and planned and researched and thought, to the best of their ability, a plan to make this folly happen in a less destructive way. They spoke out their concerns. Nobody listened to them.
You see in this film the two fascinating polarities of the American enterprising spirit: the thorough, conscientious people who solve problems with great heart, ingenuity and alacrity, and the spineless, lazy vermin who are just out to profit: ignorant, cynical macho bullies who cannot face or accept criticism, deeply corrupt power freaks on a bender. To this last group belongs the entire Bush administration. To the first group belong heroic individuals in the Army and other organizations. These people have a conscience and a core of human decency. They break your heart in the film. Their righteous indignation is quiet and contained, and they even feel guilty that they didn't do enough. They feel personally responsible. They can face the camera unwaveringly. The fury is contained in their eyes. You know they are telling the truth because their gaze does not shift nor their voice wavers. Why don't we have people like that in office?

I will quote from a fascinating book called Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, by Irving L. Janis of Yale University. It is chilling in its accuracy to describe how decisions go wrong in groups. He cites as case studies The Bay of Pigs, The Korean War, Pearl Harbor and Vietnam. The book was written in 1982. (Thanks to brainy Bea for the reference):

In a concurrence-seeking group, there is relatively little healthy skepticism of the glib ideological formulas on which rational policy makers... generally rely... One of the symptoms of groupthink is the members' persistence in conveying to each other the cliché and oversimplified images of political enemies embodied in long-standing stereotypes. Overoptimistic expectations about the power of their side and the weakness of the opponents probably enable members of a group to enjoy a sense of low vulnerability to the effects of any decision that entails risky action against an enemy. In order to maintain this complacent outlook, each member must think that everyone else in the group agrees that the risks can be safely ignored.

...The most prominent symptoms were excessive risk-taking based on a shared illusion of invulnerability, stereotypes of the enemy, collective reliance on ideological rationalizations that supported the belligerent escalation to which the group became committed, and mindguarding to exclude the dissident views of experts who questioned the group's unwarranted assumptions.

In the first paragraph he is talking about Bay of Pigs; in the second about the Korean War.

Dropping Like Flies

Isn't it weird that Antonioni and Bergman died one after the other? It's like when Shakespeare and Cervantes died the same day (of the same year!) I hope all our geniuses don't start dying en masse all of a sudden. 'Cause we are not replacing the caliber of these people with new ones, that much is clear.
Of Antonioni I can't say much because I have seen exactly 2 movies: La Notte, which I loved, and The Passenger, which I hated. I have homework to do on him.