the cabin in the woods and the banality of evil

This post contains minor spoilers about The Cabin in the Woods, but not anything that I think would ruin the viewing experience if you haven't seen it.
 
I saw Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods weeks ago. I thought it was one of the most brilliant movies I'd seen in a while. It gave me new respect for what you can do within the horror genre. It made me think about things in my own work, and weeks later, I'm still interested enough to write a blog post about it.

Many, many critics have written about how classic horror movies resonate with their audiences because they reflect bits of the real world. The films of George Romero and John Carpenter are some of the most frequently-talked-about in terms of social commentary, but I'm sure conclusions could be drawn about many other popular horror films. Horror has enormous potential for social and political commentary, because it's about the bad things in our world, and what you think about who, or what, those bad things are and where they come from says a lot about what you think about how our society is structured.

It's not very much of a spoiler to say that that real bad guys in The Cabin in the Woods are not the zombies (or, to be precise, torture-worshiping zombie hicks) who terrorize our group of seemingly-stereotypical-college-kid protagonists. The zombies are just tools in an environment entirely remote-controlled by cold-hearted technocrats in a secret facility for the purposes of...oh I can't tell you that. Watch the movie.

The people who control the monsters (who, in fact, are the first characters we meet) seem, for all the world, like normal office workers anywhere in corporate America. And yet, their job is to think up new and creative ways to kill innocent people, and then to do so, over and over and over again.

The staff at this secret facility do not, on the surface, seem bothered by what they are doing. In fact, they seem to be having fun. They crack jokes. They place bets. They drink--a lot. Like violence workers the world over, they create a self-supporting and self-justifying in-group of people who understand their work and believe in the value of their mission. When once--just once--one of the torturers-in-charge seems to have a moment of sympathy for his victim as she struggles for her life, he quickly covers it up, from his coworkers and himself, with booze. An astute observer might read all of these behaviors as defense mechanisms, ways of insulating themselves from the reality of what they are doing.

Perhaps most importantly, these horror apparatchiks rely on a carefully constructed ideology to justify their actions. They are doing all this, they tell us, for the greater good--to preserve the world we live in and make sure our children can sleep soundly at night. Their evil is a necessary evil, regrettable but unavoidable to preserve our way of life. The alternative is somewhat unknown, but, they assure us, it would be much, much worse. Stop me if this is starting to sound familiar.

When I first saw The Cabin in the Woods, I immediately thought of this: US soldiers in Iraq, laughing and joking as they mowed down Iraqi civilians from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter. It occurs to me now that a far better parallel is this, Obama's coldblooded executive murder squad, dispassionately selecting whom to kill via Powerpoint presentation and staff meetings dubbed "Terror Tuesdays."

You can pick your analogy, but what stuck with me about The Cabin in the Woods was its thoroughly modern version of evil. In this universe, the monster is not something aberrant and freakish that was never supposed to exist. It is institutional, bureaucratic, well-funded, and it sincerely believes it is doing this for the good of humanity. I kind of wondered if Whedon and Drew Goddard had read The Liberal Defence of Murder. Or maybe they have just been paying attention for the past twelve years.

I would not dream of revealing the plot twist that leads into the film's virtuoso third act. Let us just say that the helpless victims turn out to be less helpless than everyone thought, including themselves. If you take The Cabin in the Woods as a metaphor for US imperialism, or any system in which a small group of people dominate others by violence, fear and superior technology, then the third act of the film is not just a clever twist. Its message is downright revolutionary.

what's missing from miral

Is it possible that an American-born Jew could make a good movie about Palestine?  Theoretically, sure.  Unfortunately, Julian Schnabel's Miral is not that film.

Let us leave aside for a moment the numerous artistic problems of the film--the Interchangeable Brown Person Casting of Indian-Portuguese Freida Pinto in the title role; the atrocious script; the mediocre directing of even veteran actors; the numerous fudges of geography (I really do not think there is a checkpoint anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem); and the many painful incidents of characters pausing to explain things for the benefit of the audience that would be perfectly obvious to any Palestinian as part of their lived experience (my favorite: one Arabic-speaking character explaining to another Arabic-speaking character what intifada means...and getting the translation wrong.)  All these shortcomings are present, but Miral's deepest flaws are political.

The main story of the film takes place primarily in occupied East Jerusalem in the years between 1967 and the First Intifada.  Yet through the magic of Hollywood, we're presented with an occupied Jerusalem in which the occupation is almost completely invisible in people's daily lives.  In this fantasy Jerusalem, no hostile soldiers roam the streets of the Old City, outlandishly large guns slung over their shoulders, alternating between flirting with tourists and harassing the locals for sport.  No crowds of women linger outside police stations waiting for news of arrested husbands, sons and brothers.  No squat green police cars prowl the streets at night declaring curfew.  Miral and her religious father cheerfully plant flowers in the garden at the Haram al-Sharif without ever having to pass through a phalanx of riot cops to get there.

There is Israeli violence, yes: a home demolition in a refugee camp, a demonstration met with live ammunition, and a chilling sequence in which Miral is arrested, humiliated and beaten unconscious in an Israeli police station, which feels so vividly authentic because it is a true story from author Rula Jebreal's youth.  In these scenes the reality of occupied Palestine is momentarily visible through the Hollywood trappings.  But the Israeli violence is always a reaction to Palestinian resistance--with the unspoken implication being that if Palestinians would stop resisting, everything would be fine.

But that is not the reality in Palestine at all.  What Miral misses entirely is that Palestinian resistance is itself a reaction to the lived reality of Israeli colonization and ethnic cleansing.  It's the daily, lifelong parade of insults, humiliations, difficulties, pain and suffering imposed by the occupation that fuels Palestinian resistance again and again.  Palestinians don't have to do anything special to invite repression from the Israeli state.  They just have to exist.  Without showing the daily grind of misery and oppression that Palestinians face, Palestinian resistance becomes completely unmotivated, or motivated by abstract hatred of "the Jews"--which is exactly how Americans like their violence from Arabs.

Also missing from Miral is the mass popular character of the First Intifada, which was primarily a movement of strikes, boycotts and unarmed street protests--not unlike those sweeping the Middle East today.  It was a mass movement which touched all of Palestinian society.  Yet Miral manages to separate its main characters' daily lives from revolt, struggle and politics--something absolutely unheard of in Palestine.  Resistance is portrayed as a marginal, exotic, minority activity, alien and separate from ordinary people's lives.

The two characters who are unambiguously positive forces in Miral's life--her adoptive father (Alexander Siddig) and teacher Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass)--are openly hostile to resistance.  Not only is this politically reactionary; it's completely unbelievable.  If there is one defining characteristic of life in Palestine, it's the way in which politics forces its way into every aspect of people's lives, making the most ordinary tasks into de facto acts of resistance.  It's highly implausible that someone like Hind Husseini, who flies a Palestinian flag in her window (and somehow manages to get away with it in the pre-Oslo days when such an act was an arrestable offense) would berate her young students for attending demonstrations at a time when the whole of Palestinian society was in revolt.

While Miral herself frequently gives militant speeches, her forays into resistance seem naive and ineffectual and universally end in disaster.  A fellow student is killed at a demonstration and the anger is directed not at the soldier who saw fit to shoot an unarmed teenage girl, but at Miral herself for being so stupid as to drag her friend along to a protest.  Her fling with a vaguely-defined "PLO activist" results in arrest, torture, and alienation from her father.  Throughout it all, everyone's goals and politics are vague and muddy, and Miral comes off looking stupid and manipulated.  Even her wish for "one country where we can live together with equal rights" is dismissed as the silly dream of an idealistic child, as the film becomes an unabashed Oslo Accords love-fest in its closing moments.

We get a glimpse of Schnabel's politics earlier in the film, in a long, overly expositional rant against settlers as the driving force behind the occupation.  By placing the blame on settlers, Schnabel lets the rest of Israeli society off the hook for the original act of colonization.  This goes hand-in-hand with his strident defense of the two-state "solution," despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that it is both impossible and unjust.  The blame-the-settlers-for-hijacking-our-country-which-is-otherwise-perfectly-fine logic is essentially the J Street position, and Miral is J Street politics in a movie.  A component of this politics is the idea that the majority of Palestinians just want to live their lives but are being held hostage by a stubborn minority who insist on resisting and fucking everything up for everyone else who just wants to live in peace.  Completely missing, of course, is the idea that Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is itself the thing that is holding back genuine peace with justice.

The final element missing from Miral is more subjective and ephemeral.  Through a maudlin, directionless script and the overuse of tragic music, Schnabel manages to suck all the emotional intensity out of one of the most intense places on earth.  Schnabel's Palestine is a dreary tragedy, completely devoid of the warmth, wicked humor, communal strength and indomitable spirit that most visitors fall in love with when they travel there.  Completely lost is the idea that resistance (in whatever form one chooses) can be a source not just of suffering but of empowerment and joy, and that despite a seemingly endless supply of pain, Palestine is a place worth loving and fighting for.

elia suleiman puts the nakba on film

New developments continue apace in Egypt, and I'll write about them shortly.  But I have to take a break from current events to write about Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, which recently screened at Columbia as part of a film festival organized by the new, wonderful Center for Palestine Studies there.

I'm tempted to say The Time That Remains has eclipsed Annemarie Jacir's brilliant Salt of This Sea as my favorite Palestinian film, but that's really an unfair comparison.  Salt of This Sea is an extraordinary first feature by a filmmaker who surely has many great things ahead.  The Time That Remains is the masterpiece of a mature artist completely in control of his craft.  It's rare that you see a director's aesthetic and political vision so perfectly, flawlessly realized.

Suleiman is best known in the US for his 2002 film Divine Intervention, a series of loosely connected tragicomic vignettes (or tableaux, as Suleiman refers to them) about life under Israeli occupation.  Metaphorical, surreal, and often bitterly funny, they showed the banal absurdity of Israeli colonization, but many of the subtleties are probably lost on an American audience with little knowledge of Palestine's history.

In The Time That Remains Suleiman brings his trademark visual inventiveness and gallows humor to a far more linear narrative--the story of his own family from 1948 to the present day.  It is mostly the story of his father Fuad (Saleh Bakri), who was a young man in Nazareth in 1948, using his basement workshop to make guns for a Palestinian resistance that was hopelessly outmatched by the conquering Zionist militias that became the Israeli army.

Suleiman has an unparalleled eye for the individual moments of domination, humiliation and resistance that make up life under a repressive system.  He has a knack for creating scenes that are simultaneously blackly funny and deeply horrifying, as in the case of a madcap chase between doctors and soldiers over an unseen, wounded Palestinian who will end up either patient or prisoner in an Israeli jail.  When he turns his gaze to the original moment of conquest, the results are breathtaking.  The whole film is good, but the 1948 section is unforgettable.  Under the unflinching gaze of his breathlessly still camera, scenes of casual cruelty and brutality play out in long takes, businesslike and implacable, and we are unable to look away, because he won't let us. 

There is one scene in particular, a scene of stunning violence that takes place in a postcard-perfect olive grove, that may be one of the best scenes I've ever seen in a movie.  It is a perfect microcosm of the dynamics of occupation and resistance.  It should be studied by every film student ever as an example of how to film violence effectively.  There are no smash cuts or dramatic music here, and none are necessary.  At a key moment, the only sound is the wind in the olive trees.  The horror of the action speaks for itself.

As I watched the 1948 section of the movie, which is largely based on Suleiman's parents' letters and journals, it occurred to me that I had never seen some of these things on film before.  Is Suleiman really the first person to depict the Nakba in a non-documentary film?  I can't believe that's true, and yet I can't think of another example.

As we move closer to the present day, the narrative fragments into Suleiman's trademark vignettes, only tenuously connected and often dreamlike or abstract.  At the Q&A I attended, Suleiman said this was because the film becomes less his father's story and more his own as it progresses.  But I think there is a political message too.  The past is vivid, whole, and horrifying, while the present is suspended, fragmented and opaque, its meaning unclear.  The past is more real than the present, always there in the margins, as if it too is a present absentee.

Suleiman's family's story, like Palestine's, is a tragedy for now, its ending yet unwritten.  Out of it Suleiman has made a splendid film: beautiful, funny, breathtaking, and also heartbreaking.  More than anything, it made me want to make a movie, which is the highest praise I can think to give a film.

harry potter and the deathly hallows, part 1: initial reactions

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

I saw Deathly Hallows on Friday night in IMAX.  My initial reaction was along the lines of HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME.  Or possibly something like AGAIN, AGAIN!  I really wasn't surprised--Hallows is my favorite book of the series, Yates is my favorite director of the franchise, and the actors, production values and effects get better with each film.

These are some initial, loosely collected reactions from a first viewing.  I'm sure I'll see it at least once more in theaters, so I may write more as more thoughts occur to me.

LOVED IT
1. The Tale of the Three Brothers.  Beautiful, fluid and poignant, this unexpected delight of an animated sequence in the middle of two and a half hours of grim live action should win some sort of prize.

2. The Trio's acting skills.  It's sometimes easy to forget how far Dan, Rupert and Emma have come in ten years.  As late as Phoenix, they still felt like child actors with a stiff moment here and there.  Not so here.  All three deliver seamless performances without a false note among them.  They don't act; they inhabit their characters.  Most importantly, they finally capture the chemistry that's held these three friends together through what must be a very statistically unlikely number of near-death experiences even in the wizarding world.

Dan Radcliffe is the only 20-year-old I can think of who can look like a teenager one moment and an old man the next.  Some of his best moments are when he isn't doing anything at all, just sitting, feeling the weight of the wizarding world on his shoulders and knowing that is doesn't matter whether he thinks he is up to the mission he's been given, because there isn't any choice.

Emma Watson's Hermione blossoms into a quick-thinking, logical, hard-nosed survivor, proving her book learning can be put to practical use and demonstrating just as much Gryffindor courage (and considerably more emotional maturity) than the boys she heads into battle with.

Ron has been the most underwritten of the Trio in the films, and sometimes it's hard to see his appeal.  Yet here some combination of writer, director and actor magic gives his comic-relief moments enough genuine sweetness to feel like a vital asset in dark times.  In the post-Horcrux-destruction scenes, Rupert and Dan feel like real buddies in a way they haven't since Chamber of Secrets.

3. Everything in the Voldemortized Ministry of Magic.  This is when we see most clearly what a world run by Voldemort would look like, and it's a brutal, ruthless, terrifying place--a wizard police state that echoes all the worst dictatorships of the 20th century, yet somehow feels totally authentic to J.K. Rowling's world.  Add to that the fact that I wanted to pause the film every five seconds so I could look at everything--the propaganda pamphlets, the files in Umbridge's desk, the Magic Is Might statue, the emergency lockdown system you never knew the Floo Network had.  Just one of a million examples of the unbelievable production design that breezes by in an imagined world this rich.

4. Wizard combat.  I knew we were in for a treat when I saw how Yates handled the Department of Mysteries battle at the end of Phoenix.  Long gone are the ridiculously stagey duels of Chamber of Secrets days.  The filmmakers have figured out how to make wizard fights feel lightning-fast and deadly.

5. Rhys Ifans as Xenophilius Lovegood.  He's got two scenes in the whole movie and he fucking owns them.  His fear and desperation when Luna is kidnapped is heartbreaking and shows the price the whole wizarding world is paying under Voldemort.

6. Harry and Hermione's dance.  It was sweet and tender and a little silly.  It didn't seem out of character for two people who probably feel like the loneliest people in the world at that moment.  It worked.  I loved it.

NICE SAVE, DAVID YATES
1. "Hi, I'm Bill Weasley."  None of the other films bothered to introduce me, and I'm about to get married to someone you saw for five minutes in Goblet of Fire, but in my three seconds of screen time I still manage to sound like a werewolf-battling badass.

2. Dobby's reintroduction at Grimmauld Place.  I was pretty sure they were going to do something like this, since we hadn't seen Dobby at all since film #2.  They pulled it off smartly, Dobby was relatively un-annoying, and we got what we needed for an important moment later in the film.

REALLY HOPE THEY'RE SAVING THIS FOR PART 2
1. Wandlore.  Pretty sure the necessary exposition is going to be in there, but otherwise non-book-readers will sure be scratching their heads about why Harry's wand acted on its own back in that Seven Potter chase.

2. Dumbledore's backstory.  The thing is, I could see the plot working with most of Dumbledore's mysterious past omitted.  But we'd really be losing something thematically.  So I'm just going to tell myself that Harry didn't hear those tidbits about Dumbledore at the wedding and Hermione didn't pick up that copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore for no reason and hope, somehow, Yates & Co have something awesome up their sleeve on this one.

3. An explanation of Harry's magic mirror fragment.  Hey look, an important prop that was never introduced at all!  I am really curious to see how they solve this one, because I'm sure non-book-readers have no fucking clue what that business is about.

4. The Harry/Lupin parenting fight.  This could so easily be worked into the scene when Lupin drops by Shell Cottage to announce Teddy's birth...a scene I'm pretty sure they have to have...a scene I'll be really friggin' pissed if they don't have...no, what am I talking about, they have to show that.  Right?

5. Clues to what the other Horcruxes might be.  Cause right now we have none, nada, zero, zilch, and the one important clue about the Lestranges' vault didn't exactly make it into the Malfoy Manor sequence.  Which leads me to...

ABOUT THE MALFOY MANOR SEQUENCE
When I walked out of the theater last night, I really thought I had no complaints about this movie at all.  Overall it was an enormously enjoyable viewing experience.  But no complaints?  Come on, you knew that wasn't going to last.  And so we come to Malfoy Manor.

There are many, many frightening moments in Deathly Hallows, the book, but the sequence in which Harry, Ron and Hermione are held prisoner at Malfoy Manor just blows them all out of the water.  It is goddamn bloody terrifying.  Voldemort isn't even there.  It's just Bellatrix, running the show and being her batshit crazy torture-loving self.

There's a moment, when Harry and Ron are locked in the cellar, listening to Hermione being tortured in the room above them, that is one of the scariest in the whole series.  This is a moment that could have come straight out of any real-world torture survivor's testimony.  It's so horrific precisely because J.K. Rowling knows what the scariest position in this scene is: not the person who's being hurt, but the person who's trapped, helpless, while someone they love is screaming in pain.

In the film, the Malfoy Manor sequence is all right.  But it's not the drawn-out, bloodcurdling horror show that J.K. Rowling delivers for us in the book.  It goes by far too quickly and frankly, Helena Bonham Carter's ability to play a total psychopath is just not used to its full advantage.  I think one of two things happened.  Either the movie was running too long and this scene got sliced and diced for time.  Or the filmmakers put together something as spectacularly sadistic as what's in the book and decided it was too scary for the film's desired PG-13 rating.

The problem, of course, is that the Harry Potter stories left PG-13 territory some time ago.  By the time Hallows opens we are most decidedly in an adult world.  And, much as I love so many things David Yates has done with the series, there are moments when he backs away from some of the very darkest material of the series.  (Dumbledore drinking the potion in the cave at the end of Half-Blood Prince was another scene I thought could have been pushed further into creepytown.)  One thing that can't be denied about J.K. Rowling: she respects her audience enough to take us right up to the precipice of terror without backing away.  I only hope that when it comes to the final conflict coming in Part 2, the filmmakers have the guts and the wisdom to deliver.

Update, 11/23: Second viewing tonight.  Malfoy Manor seemed a bit scarier this time, perhaps because my brain wasn't completely overwhelmed by the visual onslaught coming from the giant giant IMAX screen.  And Bellatrix does mention the vault.  Once.

movie review: 127 hours

The best thing about writing a review of 127 Hours is that I don't have to include a spoiler warning.  If you're going to see the movie, based on the true-life survival story of climber Aron Ralston, you probably already know that it involves watching a dude amputate his own arm after five days pinned under a boulder at the bottom of a canyon.

The clever thing about the movie is that it uses this foreknowledge to its advantage.  In the film's opening montage, completely quotidian snippets of Ralston's pre-hiking routine--filling a water bottle, fumbling around for a Swiss Army knife--vibrate with tension, because we know what's coming.  In the first act, director Danny Boyle (who has hereby redeemed himself from the spectacularly improbable and wildly overrated Slumdog Millionaire) plays with this tension with an almost sadistic glee, faking us out with trips and spills until we reach the final, fateful slot canyon in which man and boulder meet.

A movie where the protagonist spends two-thirds of his screen time alone, immobilized, in a single location, is the kind of thing that tends to get described as "unfilmable."  And yet 127 Hours doesn't have a slow microsecond in it.  If the movie were a person, it would have 0% body fat.  The film zips through its hour-and-forty-minute running time with a frenetic energy that mirrors its protagonist, a happy-go-lucky daredevil so overconfident, or self-absorbed, that he thought nothing of going on a solo hike in a remote area without telling anyone where he was going to be.

Much of the credit for keeping the film moving goes to James Franco's exceptional performance, and the smart, deftly-written script he has to work with.  In the middle of a landscape of epic proportions, his character's journey is really all interior, and he takes us through it with a naturalistic performance that never feels overwrought in the most dramatic of circumstances.  But equally important is Boyle's willingness to slip effortlessly between reality and Aron's thoughts, dreams, memories, fantasies and hallucinations, creating a highly subjective landscape in which we're maybe as close to being inside someone's head as you can get in a movie.  Never again will you take things like water and sunlight for granted in quite the same way.

After hearing all the hype about the amputation scene, I was bracing for something stomach-churning.  While it's certainly very bloody, I didn't feel it was unnecessarily drawn-out.  It's true that I have a fairly high tolerance for gore, but honestly, there was never a moment I wanted to look away--because the filmmakers had successfully made me care enough about the character that I wanted to see if he could do it.  I think this is a very important point about showing any kind of violence or pain on screen: the more invested we are in the characters, the more likely it is to feel earned and not gratuitous.  I kept watching because I was rooting for him, and I wasn't the only one.  When the amputation is complete and Ralston finds himself suddenly, finally, separated from the boulder that's been his nemesis for the past five days, the audience in the screening I went to cheered.  It wasn't the reaction I was expecting, but it was pretty awesome.

In fact, the dominant feeling the film leaves you with is one of euphoria, the pure joy of seeing someone triumph in a seemingly impossible situation and get another chance at life.  Here we have a perpetual limit-pusher, an adrenaline junkie who is always flirting with the prospect of death until the day a real life-or-death scenario meets him smack in the face.  And, when push comes to shove, he finds himself not only equal to the challenge, but humbler and wiser for it.  Even if you're the kind of movie-goer who's not sure you can handle the arm-severing scene, this is one that's worth pushing your own limits for.

movie review: budrus

Sometimes I forget that the Palestine I know and love is so very different from the view of Palestine and Palestinians that gets presented in the mainstream media and is absorbed more or less uncontested by most Americans.  Anyone who wants to see my Palestine--the real Palestine--should watch Budrus.

Budrus is a good documentary by any standard, but as an education tool it is simply superb.  It shoots down so many myths about Palestine and Palestinians all at once--that Palestinians are unreasoning violent terrorists; that Israel is just defending itself; that there is too much ingrained hatred for Palestinians and Israelis to ever live and work together; that Palestinian women and girls are meek and submissive and play no role in the struggle.  All these stereotypes and more are soundly demolished in the film's slight one hour and eighteen minute running time.

When the residents of the West Bank town after which the film is named learn that Israel's apartheid wall will slice through their town's land, cutting through the cemetery and separating villagers from most of their agricultural land, they decide to resist, using classic tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience.  The Israeli army, predictably, responds with disproportionate, punitive violence.  The struggle unites local activists from Fatah and Hamas, men and women, young and old, Palestinians, internationals and Israelis.  Lead organizer Ayed Morrar's teenage daughter Iltezam is a force unto herself.

The scenes of Palestinian and Israeli activists defending each other against the army are some of the most inspiring moments in the film.  You can see two groups of people learning to trust and care about each other like family.  "They don't all hate us," realizes Iltezam Morrar, speaking about her new Israeli friends, which is striking because it's usually framed the other way around.  You can see the change in the Israeli activists too, how someone from an oppressor settler-colonial society can be transformed by switching sides and throwing their lot in with the oppressed.  In those moments, you can see how the whole apartheid system could collapse.

For those already familiar with the history of unarmed resistance in Palestine, Budrus won't present tons of new information.  Visitors to the Occupied Palestinian Territories now have the choice of attending one of a dozen or so protests of the type seen in Budrus on any given Friday.  What the film does do is tell the story of nonviolent resistance in one West Bank village incredibly well.  The filmmakers were there at the right time, and in the right places, and they reveal the transformation of the village through struggle in such an uncomplicated, straightforward way that the film's power doesn't really hit you until some time after you've left the theater.

Budrus is currently playing in film festivals and limited release around the world.  Look for a screening near you here.

movie review: lebanon

Spoiler alert.  Actually I'm pretty much going to destroy this movie, so...fair warning.

Samuel Maoz's highly praised film Lebanon is the perfect crystallization of the Israeli national tendency to want to be both victim and oppressor.  Set during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (in which Maoz was a participant), the film follows four young soldiers who drive a tank into a Lebanese town, then seem genuinely surprised to find themselves attacked while invading someone else's country.

Visually, the film is quite amazing.  Staged almost entirely inside the belly of the tank, our only glimpse of the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunner's sights.  The visual trick of being able to zoom in on a target leads to some breathtaking moments early in the film as victims of the war stare straight into the camera at us.  Unfortunately, this slender thread of human connection is broken the moment the tank is hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.  From then on in, the film becomes increasingly preoccupied with the fears and suffering of our protagonists embedded in their rolling fortress.

The film's visual style is an unintentional (I think) metaphor for Maoz's country.  Encased in iron, carrying weapons of mass destruction, the guys in the tank are virtually indestructible.  But they are still terrified.  Believing themselves to be surrounded by enemies, they react with hysterical, disproportionate violence, and in doing so make their worst fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Sealed into a permanent war machine, their only view of the outside world is through a gun sight.  And if you view the world through a gun sight, it's not too long before every human starts to look like a target.

The soldiers spend most of the film in various states of mortal terror.  Okay, I get it.  War is scary.  But in the back of my mind, there's a little voice that can't help saying, "Dude.  You're in a fucking TANK."  Imagine how scary that war would be if you didn't have an enormous white-phosphorus-shooting tin can to protect yourself with.

Many a glowing review has used words like "searing," "harrowing" and "sobering" to describe the violent things the characters see and do.  And yes, these soldiers kill civilians--but only under carefully pre-selected conditions.  There are two instances of fairly graphic carnage right in the beginning of the film.  In one incident, the tank opens fire on an old man driving a chicken truck.  This is the second car to come down the road that the tank is blocking--after a car carrying gun-wielding militants, who have the audacity to kill an invading Israeli soldier.  In the second incident, the tank crew blows away a family in a half-destroyed apartment--but only because gun-wielding militants (again) are using the mother as a human shield.  Said mother then has the temerity to ask the Israeli soldiers what happened to her daughter (who's dead) and freak out when a soldier rips off her nightgown, which has caught on fire (he was protecting her, see.)

In each incident, the violence of the Israelis is only a reaction--a hesitant, guilt-riddled reaction--to the true initiators of violence, who everyone knows are Arabs.  Keffiyah-swathed, nameless, Kalashnikov-wielding Arabs who use women and children as human shields.  (Sound familiar?)  So you see?  The tender young Israeli soldiers didn't want to kill civilians.  The terrorists made them do it.  Compared with this display of hand-wringing and self-pity, there seems to be something refreshingly honest about folks like the Wikileaks Apache helicopter crew, laughing as they mow down Iraqi civilians like targets in a first-person-shooter game.  At least those guys aren't pretending to have any conscience left.

Lebanon shares strategy and tactics with another highly-praised war movie to which it's been compared, The Hurt Locker.  Both films achieve the sleight-of-hand of making the invaders look morally superior while showing Arabs as victims of other Arabs.  Of course, no attempt is made to explain any of the complexities of a war that had already been going on for seven years before Israeli planes and tanks came smashing in.

The leering Phalange militiamen who show up halfway through the film are appropriately creepy, but they're also a foil--the Israelis look downright civilized compared to those gap-toothed, swaggering butchers.  The Israelis even protect their Syrian prisoner, the same guy who fucked up their tank.  Like the guys in The Hurt Locker who risk their lives to defuse a poor helpless sop of a suicide bomber, these soldiers are so noble they go out of their way to protect some Arabs from the other Arabs who want to kill them.

Of course, the war in Lebanon was a civil war, so Arabs did kill other Arabs, in large numbers.  As for the fact that the war's most notorious massacre, the slaughter in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, was carried out with Israel's knowledge, aid, and encouragement, by those Arabs who happened to be their allies...well, this isn't a movie about that, right?  Let's just focus on the guys in the tank.

And here we come to another element that Lebanon and The Hurt Locker have in common.  By insisting on such a narrow, intensely subjective perspective, the film scrubs away all context for the war.  Like in The Hurt Locker, the war is just a setting--devoid of cause, history, and power dynamics--a neutral backdrop for the characters' moral dilemmas.  Civilians and even The Enemy pop up like video game characters and disappear just as quickly, nameless extras in the Real Story, which is about how traumatic this all is--for the perpetrators.

This is the problem with this kind of intense soldier's-eye-view movies.  By stripping away all context, you also remove responsibility.  The fact that our heroes are invaders, occupiers, and would-be conquerors gets pushed out of the picture.  They're just guys doing their job.  We're supposed to feel for them and with them, and forget to ask whether their job is justified in the first place.

Lebanon has generally gotten rave reviews from US critics--it had an 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes when I last checked.  Perhaps this is because Americans have been making this very same type of war movie for at least fifty years, albeit with slightly less pathos.  (Americans proactively shoulder the burden of protecting the free world without complaint, while Israelis are only fighting because everyone's out to get them--a small but crucial difference in national mythology.)

Of course the vast majority of American war movies are from the invading perspective--we're usually the ones doing the invading, after all.  It has become so natural for us to privilege the perspective of occupier over that of defender or civilian that we don't even think about it--we just assume that's how war movies are supposed to work.

Perspective is powerful.  It tells us whom we are supposed to identify with, whose emotional experience we are supposed to be sharing.  What unconscious effect does it have to be constantly looking over the shoulder of an invading soldier in our war movies, to be looking through the rifle sights instead of into the barrel as it's pointed at us?  I think it just reinforces an already strongly-held American assumption, that war is something that happens in other places and to other people.  It's never our homes, our neighborhoods, our families under the bombs.  That fate is for other, unluckier people who have nothing in common with us.

review: green zone

As with most reviews...SPOILER ALERT!

I'll be honest. I was highly skeptical going into the theater to see Green Zone. The trailer and billboards made it look like Jason Bourne Does Iraq, and I was half prepared already to write it off as a piece of high-budget Iraqsploitation.

Boy was I wrong. Green Zone, shall we say, kicked ass. It's a sharp, fast-paced, uncompromising political action flick with a deceptively radical message and not one walking blue metaphor involved. There is plenty of action (and, fair warning, plenty of trademark Greengrass QueasyCam). But luckily the film is infinitely smarter and more subversive than its marketing would suggest.

I'm tempted to say that Green Zone was the movie I wish The Hurt Locker had been, but that may be unfair. They're completely different films: in scope, in style, and most importantly in intention. In fact they are almost the antithesis of each other. If you want to see guys defusing bombs in Iraq, watch The Hurt Locker. If you want to know why the bombs are being planted, watch Green Zone.

In an earlier post, I criticized The Hurt Locker for its lack of context. Green Zone is all about context--about the lies that brought us to war and the malignant neglect, neoliberal arrogance and open brutality that fueled the Iraqi resistance. And high time for such a movie, too, lest we forget exactly how we got into this war and what the cost has been. And while The Hurt Locker is relentless in its American perspective, Green Zone tells us we're in a different, multi-polar world from its opening scene, when we're with Iraqis during the terrifying Shock and Awe bombardment.

Green Zone follows Roy Miller (Matt Damon), a good soldier on a noble mission, who increasingly comes to realize there's nothing good or noble about the occupation machine grinding away all around him, and that if he wants something even as simple as the truth, he needs to take matters into his own hands. Standing in his way is Clark Poundstone, a neocon mouthpiece who manages to combine the worst aspects of Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld into one be-suited Greg Kinnear-shaped package.

Greengrass, who mastered the ensemble political drama with Bloody Sunday, takes us effortlessly from the swimming pools and beer-drinking-reporter-filled luxury hotels of Baghdad's neocolonial Green Zone to the detention centers and torture chambers that are their dark, inevitable corollary. As with Bloody Sunday, complex interests are crystallized into individual characters whose goals throughout the film roughly approximate different political positions. It's an effective way of telling a story with not just two sides, but many, although people not familiar with the ins and outs of the early days of the Iraq occupation might want to bring Cliff notes. I was certainly glad I watched the excellent PBS documentary Bush's War last semester, so I could match up who everyone was supposed to be in real life.

Green Zone had already defined itself as an excellent political film before it reached the third act, but here was where it really knocked it out of the park. Because by far the best thing about Green Zone is that it does not suffer from a case of White Man Saves the Universe. In fact, it does a whole lot to subvert that paradigm, which is an absolutely brilliant thing to do when you've got Matt Damon running through your movie with lots of military hardware.

There is a moment in the third act when we can see the traditional heroic resolution coming, the point when Roy Miller is supposed to triumph and get his man. And it doesn't happen. Instead we get a twist so awesome it made me cheer. Damon's crusading soldier is upstaged by an Iraqi--a secondary character who would be a passive helping hand in a less sophisticated film, but here turns out to have agency and his own agenda that our American hero hasn't spared a split second to consider. And this character gets to deliver the film's most radical line, directed at Miller, and thus, by extension, all Americans: "It is not for you to decide what happens here."

Central to the way the third act plays out is the fact that Roy Miller never gets the whole picture. In the end, he's a dupe: outmaneuvered by an Iraqi, and later by a neocon for good measure. He's not so much outplayed as he is not even in the right game. Politically, this is the exact inverse of The Hurt Locker, in which the soldiers and the horizon of their immediate mission are paramount. In Green Zone, the mission is not only pointless but hopelessly misguided. Those Americans with good intentions are naive and uninformed, and those with malicious intentions are clever, blind to the destruction they cause, and generally in charge. "We won," says Poundstone near the end of the film, and he's not just talking about the American army. But as Iraq proves, it's awfully easy to win the battle and lose the war.

in which i finally write something about the hurt locker

A few weeks ago I posted something about The Hurt Locker. Then I deleted it because after reading review after review, I still wasn't completely sure what I thought of the film. But now it's won Best Picture and Kathryn Bigelow has become the first woman in history to win Best Director, so I have to say something about it.

I saw the film when it first came out--twice, in fact. The first time, I got there late and had to sit in the very front row. I didn't realize you could actually feel the riveted attention of an entire audience behind you as a physical sensation, but you can.

Artistically, The Hurt Locker is just about perfect. The script (by a former embedded reporter), the casting, the acting, the physical production--flawless. The dialogue is minimal but at the end you realize you understand an extraordinary amount about these characters without them ever having said it. Bigelow spins off virtuoso sequences of suspense that just keep escalating to new levels of craziness like some insane circus act. And the brief monologue that Jeremy Renner's character delivers to a baby near the end of the film is one of the saddest, most existentially lonely moments I've seen in recent film.

My gut reaction to The Hurt Locker was to really like it. I like war movies. I like action, suspense and violence. Like Bigelow, I am fascinated with people who choose to put themselves in danger, who enjoy cheating death. If those kind of themes and stories don't interest you, The Hurt Locker is probably not your film. If they do, you'll probably walk out of the theater the way I did, which was thinking "Daaaaaaaaamn."

In fact, I liked the movie so much, it actually took me several months to admit to myself that its politics were crap.

This doesn't usually happen to me, you see. It's extremely rare for my gut emotional reaction to be at odds with my intellectual, political reaction to a film. If the latter is off, it usually short-circuits the former (see: Avatar). After two years of trying to teach myself how to create good political films, I've become extremely sensitive to things like perspective and representation and choice of protagonist and how they impact a story. But here, the sheer intensity of the sensory and emotional experience won out. This tells me that The Hurt Locker is a very, very good film. And for a long time, I defended it to filmmaking colleagues with whom I'm usually in agreement on political questions.

The review that finally broke me was this one. While I think Arabian is a bit harsh at times, he accuses The Hurt Locker of one sin I can't ignore: contextlessness. Here he is worth quoting at length:

The Hurt Locker completely forgoes any discussion of the many huge issues surrounding the Iraq invasion, choosing to treat it as simply a neutral fact. For this reason, some critics have called it an apolitical war movie. But that's not only an oxymoron (war is politics, and vice versa), it's also impossible in this age where buying a cup of coffee is a political act. In leaving out any consideration of the big picture of America's Iraq enterprise, and treating the war as just a setting, Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have made a decision that is indeed political, whether or not they and their admirers see it that way. They've presented an ongoing real-life conflict as something that appears to have no history, no subtext, no depth—it's simply there as an arena for the soldiers to do what they do.

This is related to another oft-raised criticism of the film, that of perspective. The Hurt Locker keeps us rigorously, relentlessly and totally in the perspective of the American soldiers on the ground. Artistically, this works brilliantly. And I actually don't think I would have a political criticism to make of that choice either, if, at any point in the film, even one character had raised some question about what it was the Americans were doing there in the first place. Do these guys, who defuse bombs all day, every day, for their entire tour of duty in Iraq, really never stop and think about why it is that Iraqis might be planting bombs all over their own city?

The Hurt Locker is not so much pro-war as it is unquestioning of the war. I do not think the film is a piece of blatant military propaganda as some have claimed. The main character is basically incapable of functioning in normal society, which isn't exactly something you put in a recruitment ad. It certainly does not make war look fun. But it does achieve a clever sleight-of-hand by focusing so narrowly on this particular bomb-disposal unit.

These guys are doing something that appears to be completely selfless--risking their lives to defuse bombs that would otherwise kill civilians. And because we never see the context that might lead people to plant these bombs in the first place--one of the most savage aerial bombardments in history, the daily humiliations of occupation, midnight house raids, torture, collective punishment of whole cities, looting disguised as reconstruction and a total contempt for Iraqi sovereignty--occupying US soldiers become heroes and Iraqis become that favorite Middle Eastern character, the Unmotivated Terrorist.

I'm certainly not suggesting that there is no value in a film told exclusively from US soldiers' perspective. Or that the absurdly dangerous job these men (and they are all men) volunteer for does not require courage. But there is nothing heroic about occupation. It is by definition inglorious, brutal, nasty, racist, and dehumanizing to all involved--not to mention insanely expensive at a time when funding for everything other than war is being slashed to the bone. Those who pay the highest price are the Iraqis. But the damage done to US soldiers asked to participate in the domination of another people is not slight, nor is that inflicted on all but the very richest Americans as our government spends a billion dollars a day on war.

I waited, as Kathryn Bigelow gave her acceptance speech, for her to say one word about the Iraqi people. I waited for her to say "Bring the troops home now." At at time when over 60% of Americans oppose the Iraq War, this would hardly have been a controversial statement. But she did neither, which to me says all you need to know about where the film's politics lie. The Hurt Locker may be a great film, but it is not an antiwar film. Does every film about the Iraq War need to be antiwar? Perhaps not, but I think we must seriously question what the role of a film like The Hurt Locker can be when our government shows no inclination of ending a war that nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose, and for which all stated justifications have been proven to be utterly specious. Given the straggering financial and human cost of said war, this is hardly an academic question.

what's wrong with percy jackson

It seems I have been posting a lot of movie reviews of late...maybe because I'm back to putting the political part of my brain into my writing (particularly my TV pilot about war reporters, which I'm really excited about) which is where it clearly belongs. I swear I do have several "serious" posts in the works, but for now, you are going to hear about Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and why it sucked.

The full title of the film is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Rarely are you in a good place when your movie title contains both an ampersand and a colon. Percy Jackson is Hollywood's latest effort to find the next pre-awareness*-loaded young adult fantasy franchise megahit, as the decade of Harry Potter ticks rapidly to an end. The film is based on a series of books about a young boy who discovers the ancient Greek gods are real (and live above the Empire State Building, natch) and his mysterious deadbeat dad is actually Poseidon.

If this is starting to sound a bit familiar to you, you're not alone. A quick Google search will reveal there are plenty of similarities between Percy (short for Perseus, get it?) and a certain boy wizard. Troubled pre-teen boy named Harry/Percy with an abusive aunt and uncle/stepfather discovers he is actually a wizard/demigod, is whisked off to a magical school/upstate New York summer camp, and with his two best friends (one girl, one boy), goes on lots of adventures involving magic/Greek mythology. (In the books Percy begins his quest at age twelve; in the film he's been updated to about sixteen, unfortunately without the trade-off of better acting.)

To qualify as anything better than a glorified fanfic, Percy Jackson would have to bring something genuinely fresh to the crowded YA fantasy arena. I confess I have not read any of the books. But if there was anything fresh to be found in them, it has certainly been sucked out of this toothless, Disneyfied, paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. The film could have been salvaged from condemnation as a vapid Harry Potter rip-off by at least one of the following: a decent script, decent acting or decent directing. Unfortunately, epic fail on all counts.

After watching the bonus features on the first two Harry Potter Ultimate Edition DVDs, I have a little more respect for Chris Columbus as a director who is actually competent, if not particularly imaginative. Hence I must conclude that here he was just being lazy. Veteran actors deliver terrible performances. It's impossible to tell whether any of the young actors are any good, since they're all weighed down with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a childless forty-year-old who watched a few episodes of Hannah Montana. And as if the film didn't need any more strikes against it, it suffers from several of the crassest cases of product placement (and politician placement--listen for a lame Obama shoutout early in the film) in recent history.

But there are also deeper structural problems at work here. Percy's mom bites the dust early in the film, to which Percy has...no reaction at all. Come on! He never knew his dad, and his mom just got killed by a minotaur! (One review I read mentioned that the film never uses the word "dead" to refer to what happened to her, just "gone.") When it's revealed soon after that Percy's mom is not, in fact, dead, but a prisoner of Hades in the Underworld, Percy goes on a quest to save her. This video-gamey adventure plot could work just fine if the film had spent even one scene establishing any kind of genuine, loving relationship between Percy and his mother, but it does not. This leaves us with zero emotional connection to our hero and his goal. That's Screenwriting 101, folks! Even watching a guy fight a CGI hydra is boring when you don't care about what he's fighting for.

(For contrast, watch how masterfully the Harry/Sirius relationship is set up, cemented and then destroyed in just three scenes in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Good writing, good directing, good acting.)

The filmmakers also have to contend with the unfortunate reality that Greek gods do not make very sympathetic characters. They were, after all, the ancient Greeks' way of explaining a world that often seemed capricious and cruel. They fight with each other over trivial things and leave humans in the middle of it. They send mortals on pointless, impossible, obstacle-course quests for their own amusement. They fuck humans when they feel like it (often under circumstances of, let's just say, questionable consent, but you can bet that's been excised from the story) and leave the world littered with their abandoned children. In a time when single-parent families aren't the unmentionable disgraces they were once perceived to be, one can't help thinking that the demigods aren't really missing out on that much not being part of a nuclear family with these jerks.

We might not care so much about this if Percy himself was a compelling character. But he's a cardboard cutout of a teenager with all the emotional depth and complexity of a bit part from High School Musical 3. As a protagonist, Percy is utterly lacking in any of the qualities that make Harry both a likable hero and a believable teenager. Harry's stubbornness, his rage, his impulsiveness, his perpetual resentment of unearned authority, the intensity of the emotional landscape he and his classmates inhabit--these are all the things that make Harry Potter feel engaging and real.

One of JK Rowling's greatest gifts is that she understands children and teens on their own terms and takes their heightened and volatile emotional world just as seriously as they do. Maybe some of you out there had peaceful, serene, Ministry-approved childhoods, but for many of us, childhood was an intense, scary, confusing and sometimes traumatic time. Rowling takes that teenage feeling that the whole world is out to get you and projects it onto a universe where the whole world really is out to get you, and it works gangbusters.

I keep coming back to something Mel Brooks said when he spoke on campus last semester. (Yes, he was hilarious.) He talked about how good comedy is like bouncing a ball--to make something funny, you need to have something hard, serious, to bounce it against. I think good fantasy is like that too--you need to have a solid foundation of real stakes and real emotions to build it on. The best fantasy franchises to come out in recent years, series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, have, at their heart, real struggles, real danger, real fear, and real, flawed, human characters we can identify with and root for. Anyone who wants to learn from Harry Potter's success should take this lesson to heart, instead of merely casting around for available fantasy elements that are still in the public domain.

*Pre-awareness: a Hollywood term for the opposite of original content. An already-existing brand that can be turned into a movie. This can be a remake, a book, a TV show, a video game, a comic book, a toy, even a board game. Seriously. Google "Monopoly movie."

war on film: avatar

Before going to see Avatar, I read Annalee Newitz's heavily circulated io9 article, "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?" in which she skewers the all-too-common scenario in which "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." I found the article pretty funny and insightful, but then I read responses from a few people whose judgment I trust saying that Newitz was being too harsh and Avatar was awesome and maybe the most politically radical blockbuster of all time. So I decided to approach the film with an open mind.

And I have to say, it was kickass. James Cameron has made an anti-colonial popcorn movie, and damn is it fun. If you are going to the movies to watch shit get blowed up real good, having it be some colonizer's shit for a change is really, really awesome. I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve, two days before flying to Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March, and I won't deny that it felt like a perfect sendoff.

Avatar is clearly a technicolor sci-fi re-imagining of the colonization of the Americas, complete with environmentally rapacious extraction of raw materials and displacement and massacre of the indigenous population. But Cameron mixes in plenty of neo-colonial imagery along the way. American audiences will instantly recognize visual echoes of Vietnam in Avatar's lush jungles and helicopter gunships. The phrase "Shock and Awe" is dropped into the dialogue at a key moment, and the squad of corporate-funded contract killers hired to conquer Pandora seems to be what a hybrid of the East India Company and Blackwater might look like if it were run by Colonel Kurtz.

Cameron has never been known for his subtle and delicate touch--but then, neither has colonialism. I never thought the colonizers, who are after a valuable metal called...wait for it...unobtainium, were too crude or violent or racist. Colonialism is crude and violent and racist. Aliens are often a metaphor for the other in science fiction, and these colonizers regard the other with an utter contempt that is thoroughly believable. They build schools and use anthropologists to manipulate the population into trusting them. When that doesn't work, they use spies like the film's protagonist, Jake Sully. And when Sully and his Scooby gang decide the natives aren't so bad and turn against the colonial masters, the colonizers are perfectly willing to switch tactics to full-scale genocide.

There are plenty of cliches in Avatar. Yes, the Na'vi dress like stereotypical Hollywood Native Americans for no apparent reason. (In one of my sci-fi pet peeves, lots of things also happen to have extra legs and grow to enormous size for no apparent reason. Why does a galloping animal need six legs? That makes no anatomical sense.) Yes, of course the white guy main character falls in love with the tribal chief's svelte blue cat-daughter Neytiri. Come on, did you really think there wasn't going to be a love story to write a ballad about for the closing credits? Might as well go ahead and just call her Pocah'ontas.

But none of these cliches were terribly unexpected, and I was having enough fun enjoying the ride that none of them would have been a fatal flaw and Avatar could have been an exceptionally well-made popcorn action flick with a solidly anti-colonial message.

Except.

Except for the part when the white guy flies in on a giant pterodactyl (I swear I'm not making this up) and saves the day. And magically sweeps away all the indigenous leadership and unites the Na'vi tribes in a way no Na'vi has ever been able to do and then leads them in battle (where, conveniently, both of his two male rivals for leadership, Neytiri's father and betrothed, are killed.)

And then I started to see the point of Newitz's article.

Here's the thing. I have absolutely no problem with a movie in which some of the oppressors switch sides and decide they're willing to fight and die on the side of oppressed. I think that's quite awesome. In theory, I would not have a problem with a scenario where these race traitors provided a crucial bit of information that led to victory. That's exactly why double agents and collaborators are so dangerous--they know the other side. But, because it's a Hollywood movie, the white guy (and ex-Marine!) who switches sides to stand in solidarity with the blue people can't just be part of the struggle--he has to lead the struggle. And he has to lead it way better than any of the blue people ever could. Because clearly they weren't capable of winning their own liberation; they needed some white dude to roll in and convince them he deserved to be their leader because he could ride some giant bird like one of their ancestors could. And because they're simple native people, they believed him. And because it's Hollywood, he was right.

All of this, in turn, begs the question: why is there a white guy as the protagonist at all? Why isn't badass fighter and hunter Neytiri the protagonist? Or, if a blue catwoman is too radical for Hollywood, what about her father? Or Tsu'tey, a gutsy warrior whose role in the two hours of the film before the final battle is mostly to cock-block Jake?

I don't buy that it's because audiences can't identify with a blue-cat-person protagonist. The creators of Wall-e made us identify with a toaster.

There's a white male protagonist in Avatar for the same reason there's a white male protagonist in Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or Blood Diamond, or Glory. (You can play this game with so many Ed Zwick movies!) Because the missing element that the oppressed need to win their liberation is clearly Kevin Costner. And because the presumed mainstream movie audience is white, and male for anything involving action, and the Hollywood studio presumption is that people can't identify with a protagonist who doesn't look like them.

Turns out, there are a few people who've had no trouble at all identifying with the Na'vi. A tribe in eastern India is appealing to James Cameron to help them stop mining company Vedanta from drilling into a mountain they consider sacred. (Think he will?) And last Friday's weekly protest against Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Bil'in featured an Avatar re-enactment by Palestinians and Israeli supporters. The Israeli soldiers standing by seemed not to get the joke, and fired tear gas and sound grenades per usual.

The Bil'in Na'vi pictures zipped around the interwebs and reached such diverse sources as the New York Times, AP, the Telegraph (UK) and AOL News. I don't know if I think this is a brilliant PR move, completely silly, or a bit sad that these demonstrators--who've been protesting nonviolently for nearly five years against the wall that's cutting their village lands in half--had to dress up as fictional characters to get the point across about their real-world struggle. But then, maybe when you've been protesting every week for the past five years, you just need to do something different every once in a while to spice things up.

review: harry potter and the half-blood prince

This sure ain't Chris Columbus's Hogwarts anymore.

As with all reviews, SPOILER ALERT. You have been warned.

I have just returned from a second viewing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. While I cannot say for sure yet that it is my favorite of the films (Prisoner of Azkaban will always have a special place in my heart based on plot alone) I can say with confidence that it is the best.

I can say this with confidence because I have read all seven books. And here is where I have a simple answer for those non-readers who kvetch about being confused about the various plot details: Go read the damn books, already. They're the twenty-first century's first great works of literature, for crap's sake. If eleventy zillion kids can do it, so can you.

I bring this up because Half-Blood Prince is a very fine movie on its own terms, but as an adaptation, it is simply magnificent.

It must be stated that a number of factors came together for this one. David Yates, the franchise's most well-suited director, who also did Order of the Phoenix, teamed up for the first time with veteran screenwriter Steve Kloves, who took the fifth film off and who probably knows more about the Potter universe than anyone save its creator. For the first time since Chris Columbus, a director gets the opportunity to take on more than one Potter film back to back, and the consistency in tone, visual style and the direction of actors shows.

The filmmakers also benefit from the increasing maturity and experience of their young cast, who grow more capable with each film. In Half-Blood Prince, one feels that for the first time some of the cast have learned how to act when they don't have a line to say, and it seems that Yates has paid special attention to getting naturalistic reactions and performances. If Daniel Radcliffe is still not quite up to the emotive challenges of certain scenes, we can take comfort in the fact that he had a whole Broadway run of Equus to practice on before filming Deathly Hallows.

Also, for the first time, cast, crew and audience have the enormous benefit of knowing how it all ends. This allows Kloves and Yates to achieve a level of sophistication in terms of foreshadowing, planting, and manipulation of storytelling elements that is miles ahead of any other Harry Potter film.

The result is that six films in, the franchise has finally hit a virtuoso note. The Kloves/Yates team has achieved a level of fluency with the magical world that allows them to go beyond putting the page on screen to actually creating something new out of Rowling's incredibly rich source material--combining, condensing, riffing, reading between the lines, creating new scenes and whole sequences that were never in any book but feel like they could have been, and in some cases--dare I blaspheme?--actually improving upon the source material by using film's unique ability to communicate incredibly concisely with images.

Yates and Kloves are substantially aided in their mission by absolutely stunning cinematography and lavish production design. I can say without seeing another movie this year that production designer Stuart Craig and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who shot Amelie and Across the Universe) should both receive Oscars for their work. Witness the insane detail of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes, Mr. Weasley's junk-filled garage at the Burrow, and the Room of Requirement (one million points if you can spot a diadem anywhere in there!) Each of these locations appear on film for mere minutes, but the amount of detail packed into them is astounding. Delbonnel's camerawork--from the jaw-dropping opening sequence in which Death Eaters zoom through the Muggle world into the magical one and back to destroy London's Millennium Bridge, to a number of still shots that are so exquisitely composed they look like fine art or an exceptional stage play--makes us forget for huge sections of the film that we're on a set in Leavesden Studios and not on location at Hogwarts, the Burrow, or Diagon Alley.

But beyond the technical and aesthetic aspects of the film, which are masterful (Did I mention the special effects? Seamless!) Half-Blood Prince is a tour de force of visual storytelling that should humble any student of film. Just as our young witches and wizards are learning non-verbal spells, it seems the filmmaking team is finally becoming confident in an adaptation approach that condenses some of Rowling's admittedly lengthy exposition into images of incredible conciseness and power.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the film's exquisite first shot, which is actually a flashback to the end of Phoenix--Harry, bloody and in shock, having just seen Sirius murdered and almost been killed himself, is accosted by a melee of reporters in the Ministry of Magic. Dumbledore simply puts his arm around him, to protect him--and in just a few seconds of film, we've set up the tone, the stakes, and the key relationship of the film--all before the Warner Brothers logo appears and without a single line of dialogue. This image is beautifully echoed much later in the film, when Harry and Dumbledore return from the cave. This time it's Dumbledore who's leaning on Harry, and the fact that a wrenching role reversal has occurred could not be more clear.

Amazingly, Yates and Kloves have been able to take what I always found to be the most disjointed of the books and create what is perhaps the most unified film. Out of a witch's brew of expositional flashbacks and vaguely-defined missions and budding teenage romance, they have distilled a potent thematic core, which can be summed up somewhat along the lines of "We were all children once"--with the implication, of course, that the time for childish things is rapidly coming to an end. Because, as we know, in the wizarding world, one comes of age at seventeen.

This is a story about two young men on the cusp of becoming adults, in extremely violent times and perhaps before they are ready. These young men are Harry and Draco, of course, and their twin missions drive the story forward like a well-crafted spy tale. Harry's mission is essentially intelligence-gathering, and requires qualities that are not particularly his strong suit, but that will be essential for the final part of the story. Draco's mission is the dark counterpoint to the main story, reinforcing the urgency of Harry's own task, and the filmmakers balance tension between the two storylines exquisitely.

Tom Felton, who plays Draco, has seemingly grown up overnight since the last film, and here he gets a chance to really shine. Watching the savage confidence--so like his father!--he displays at the beginning of the film crumble under the weight of what he has been ordered to do, seeing the scared little boy still there underneath the swagger and bravado, is truly tragic. The fact that so much of his storyline is handled without any dialogue at all (appropriate given Draco's utter aloneness on his mission) is a testament to the sophistication of the production.

Ironically (at least within the dramatic logic of the film), it is Harry's unthinking act of violence, the Sectumsempra curse, that ultimately pushes Draco into carrying out his plan. For Harry, growing up means supplementing his raw courage, which at its worst can turn to rage and rashness, with patience, tact, shrewdness and good judgment in circumstances where there will no longer be anyone older and wiser to rely on. For Draco it means being in over his head in a savage, violent and unforgiving world for which he is not prepared. It also means forsaking the teenage diversions and dalliances happening all around him. There is one beautifully composed shot where a crowd of older students linger in the shadows, talking, laughing and kissing, while Draco walks up a deserted corridor, completely alone. And if anything were still in doubt, Draco's pained reaction as he watches his new comrades smash up the Great Hall says it all.

There are, of course, two other young men of approximately the same age as Harry and Draco who haunt the edges of the film. One is Voldemort, seen in several concise flashbacks. Let me just say, both the actors who portray the young Tom Riddle (the younger of whom is Ralph Fiennes's nephew) have a promising career in evil-child horror films if they want it. The teenage Riddle, in particular, displays such an air of unspoken menace that I cared not a whit that he looked completely different from the diary Riddle in Chamber of Secrets, who presumably could not be more than one or two years older.

The other is the Half-Blood Prince himself, who I am very sad to say gets such short shrift in this film that it hardly deserves the title. In one of the few cuts of which I did not approve, the mystery of the Half-Blood Prince's identity is almost entirely excised from the film, to the point that when the final reveal comes (it's Snape) we hardly care.

I am of two minds about this choice. On the one hand, the knowledge of the Half-Blood Prince's identity contributes nothing dramatically to the film the way it has been set up. But on the other hand, it does contribute something thematically, by giving us a glimpse of Snape as a boy, which is kind of a strange idea to even think about. There is a lot we can deduce about the teenage Snape from this book, and from the other scraps of evidence we get about him in books five and seven. He is a half-blood, like two other significant characters. A poor kid from an unhappy family (the decrepit mill town from which Snape hails gets only the briefest visual reference in the film.) The kind of kid who would end up with a used book from the classroom cupboard. The kind of kid, we learn, who was mercilessly teased by cocky bastards like young Sirius and James for being "a greasy little oddball up to his eyes in the Dark Arts." The kind of kid who takes refuge in intellectual superiority and crowns himself a prince in his own private world. The kind of kid who becomes drawn to the Dark Arts out of a sense of powerlessness and a desire for revenge--who, at sixteen, invents a potentially lethal spell and labels it "for enemies." The kind of kid, who, in the Muggle world, might walk into school one day with an assault rifle. The kind of kid who grows up to be a cold-ass mofo who can walk up to one of the greatest wizards of the day and kill him without batting an eye.

What path Snape ultimately chose, and why, is one of the greatest reveals of the entire series, and I won't spoil it here. But it seems like the story of the Half-Blood Prince contributes something to Rowling's ongoing exploration of what attracts people to evil, and I was sorry to see so much of that plotline gone.

Against these heavy and mature themes, the comedy and budding romances sparkle all the more brightly, because they are constantly playing out right under the shadow of death. "Ugh! It was happy, then sad, then happy, then sad! I didn't know what to feel!" complained a teenage girl in line for the bathroom in front of me at the Wednesday night Grove showing I attended. "That's the point!" I wanted to yell. This is both the funniest of the Harry Potter movies and the most melancholy. The mix of comedy and tragedy, of laughing in the face of doom, is a strong component of Rowling's work, and seems to me to be...actually quite true to the way people behave in a world where sudden violence and death lurks around every corner.

There are numerous examples of this lightning-quick tone shift (Ron drinking the poisoned mead, Harry and Ginny's first almost-kiss in the Burrow, the moment just before the Katie Bell incident when Hermione really seems kinda tipsy) but my favorite is the story about Slughorn's pet fish. Here is a story that begins slightly randomly and is played for comic effect. It's even enough of a non sequitur that you might be tempted to dismiss it as clumsy screenwriting. But the funny little story about the fish that went "poof" turns on a dime to become something beautiful, then tragic, then vitally important to not only that scene but to that entire sequence of the film. In fact, holy crap, it's not only the culmination of the sequence (in Script Analysis terms) but of the whole second act of the film! Surprise! It's actually quite good screenwriting!

And--surprise again--this story about the fish is nowhere in Rowling's book. But it fits the world, the characters and the themes so well that it could have been, and in fact makes me almost wish it was.

There is another wonderful image that is not in the book, and this is what I will leave you with. Many people will be disappointed that Dumbledore's funeral is not in the film, leaving the ending feeling all Empire Strikes Back-y and inconclusive. (David Yates has promised we will see it, and many suspect it will be the opening sequence of the seventh film.) But there is a lovely and again wordless moment, in the scene where Dumbledore's death finally sinks in, where Professor McGonagall (the de facto second-in-command of Hogwarts after Dumbledore) raises her wand, lit with a single point of light, to banish the Dark Mark that stains the sky above the castle. One tiny point of light is not enough to do it. But one by one, the grief-stricken students, staff and teachers all around her follow suit, lifting their wands skyward in a silent gesture of unity and solidarity, an unspoken vow of collective resistance--a hundred points of light which together are strong enough to wipe away the clouds of death and terror that hover above them.

This image is so powerful, so beautiful, and so thoroughly Rowling-esque that I can only say one thing, which is that I am very, very excited for what these folks have in store for us in the final two films.

the final frontier? i sure hope not.

Star Trek: Am I qualified to captain this starship? Nope, but I sure look the part, don't I?

SPOILER ALERT!

Wait a minute. You've either already seen this movie, or you don't care about the plot.

Some day, someone will make a sci-fi movie in which there is no sound in space, in which the explosions from space blasts expand infinitely as they would in real space, creating incredible logistical difficulties for the battling spacecraft, and where one tiny crack in the giant front windshield (which all movie spacecraft are required to have) instantly depressurizes the bridge and sucks all the commanding officers out into the void, end of battle.

Of course, Star Trek isn't the only sci-fi movie guilty of these science faux pas (don't even get me started on the black holes...even if you could survive getting squeezed into a single point of infinite density long enough to be squirted out the other side, you wouldn't...oh, never mind.) But the fact that I had time to think about this while watching JJ Abrams's shiny franchise reboot should be cause for concern.

I spent the few days after I watched the movie reading all the glowing reviews (including some from friends whose film tastes I usually trust) and wondering if I had missed something. I'll be honest, I was never a Star Trek fan. I always found the series, in its various incarnations, rather boring. But I do like science fiction. And unlike, say, Wolverine (more on that later) there was nothing I could point to in this movie that was specifically bad. The film looked beautiful; stuff got blowed up real good; the acting was perfectly fine by the standards one would expect from such a film. But as I walked out of the theater, I couldn't help thinking, "Who are these people, what do they want, and why do I care?"

Then I read this review, by the wickedly intelligent Sady Doyle, who also writes the blog Tiger Beatdown. I must note that I and my moviegoing companion, another female screenwriter from USC, had noticed the highly impractical uniforms of the female Starfleet cadets and the general lack of female characters of any substance. (Let's think: pregnant lady, Spock's mom, chick Kirk hits on in bar who later dates another male lead, green sex object with one scene...I think I've got them all, right?)

In fact, the more I read her article, the more I started to think of young Kirk as an arrogant, entitled little snot who cheats and gets away with it, sneaks onto a starship and ends up its captain, and doesn't get the girl only because there's only one girl of appropriate age with any lines in the entire cast. Hell, he doesn't even wear his uniform half the time and he still winds up in charge! When you get right down to it, isn't he just a hotheaded country bumpkin who stumbles into power and manages to keep it because he is surrounded by people more competent and less self-important that he is?

And who is his chief rival? A bi-racial intergalactic expat who possesses formidable intelligence and preternatural calm under pressure. A guy who would actually be a pretty interesting character...except, oh yeah, he can't express emotion--leaving him both dramatically hamstrung and clearly an inferior leader, cause real captains take risks and think with their gut and don't negotiate with Eric Bana!

Okay. Maybe I am taking this political analogy a bit too far. I'm pretty sure JJ Abrams didn't intend Star Trek to serve as an exegesis of American cowboy politics.

But Sady Doyle's main point still remains. Star Trek has a progressive reputation because the original series was progressive. A Black woman on the bridge was a step forward--forty years ago. And Kirk and Uhura's 1968 screen kiss was a big deal--even thought it was not the first on-screen interracial kiss and was forced upon them by alien mind control.

But by not putting any effort into updating the franchise's gender and racial politics along with its special effects, Abrams has created something that is not progressive at all, but actually regressive. What may have been radical in 1968 is retrograde today.

As Doyle points out, all science fiction is social commentary, whether intended or not. By creating a new world, you are unconsciously reflecting your perspective on this one: what you value, what parts of humanity you view as constructed or unchanging, what you hope or fear will change in the future. If JJ Abrams's vision of the future is to be believed, the answer seems to be: not much.

Not to mention the fact that the laws of evolution will apparently be suspended, leading to scaly reptilian/arachnid hybrids that can somehow survive on ice planets.

new HP6 trailer

Mostly because I can't stand looking at that "Dan White Hero" fuckhead at the top of my blog...let's post something completely frivolous! The new Harry Potter trailer!



Half-Blood Prince is perhaps the most unconventionally-structured of the seven books, loaded with flashback and much lighter on major set-piece action sequences than many of the other books. (Although it makes up for it with what I think is one of the scariest, creepiest, skin-crawliest climaxes in the entire series.) It also has the challenge of existing in that dark, uneasy point in the story when the world of these characters teeters on the brink of all-out war.

I think the trailer does a great job of capturing this feeling of unease--not the easiest thing to deliver in a two-minute package, and something that was definitely missing from several earlier trailers. The trailer-makers do a great job of keeping us off guard by showing only very brief glimpses of some key moments (check out the Inferi at around 0:27, looking creepier than I could have imagined). Hero Fiennes-Tifflin (nephew of Ralph Fiennes) is delightfully ominous as the Omen-esque young Voldemort. And I love the continued motifs of water, fire, and darkness--very in keeping with the tone of this book/film.

If you go to see Watchmen in IMAX (an experience I highly recommend) you may get to see this trailer on the big screen, where the atmospheric green tinge cast over everything (not unlike the cover of the book) is even more apparent. Bottom line: hella cool. I can't wait for July 17.

woohoo!

Just noticed that my blog has been added to the "Leading Ladies" column on Scarlett Cinema :-). It is an honor I humbly accept.

lessons learned from the battle of algiers

SPOILER ALERT: If you're in Script Analysis at USC this semester, we will be watching this film in a few weeks. If you want a totally pure first viewing experience, stop reading now. If you want to get a jump on the analysis of a truly great political film that kind of hits you over the head the first time you see it, read on.

As I've indicated before, I'm writing a script for my feature class that takes place in the Gaza Strip. It's based on true events that happened in early 2008, when militants blew an enormous hole in the 20-ft-high wall separating Gaza from Egypt, temporarily breaking the siege that Gaza has been under for the past going-on-three years.

Last week, my feature professor told me to re-watch The Battle of Algiers. I think it was because he thought my Gaza script was not "even-handed" enough, which is a polite way of saying I am too sympathetic to the Palestinians. As it so happens, The Battle of Algiers is one of my favorite films, and one of about 12 movies I actually own. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest political films of all time, and there is a lot to be learned from it about the art of political storytelling. It's a film that packs a huge emotional punch the first time you see it, especially on the big screen. Re-watching it was a delight, since the second time around, I got to appreciate just how well-crafted it is.

As an added bonus, the Criterion Collection DVD has to be the best special edition DVD in the universe. It is absolutely packed with fascinating extras, not all of which I've been able to go through yet. In addition to a GREAT interview with screenwriter Franco Solinas, the super-fancy 56-page color booklet that comes with the DVD contains this fascinating little essay by film critic Peter Matthews, which is helpfully reprinted on Criterion's website.

As it turns out, Matthews's essay addresses a number of political questions and debates that have come up around my script, either in class or in my head as I'm figuring out how to tell the story.

One of the most interesting things to be learned from Matthews's essay is that the filmmakers originally envisioned the protagonist of the film as a Frenchman who would be played by Paul Newman. He would portray a French reporter and former paratrooper who comes to Algiers, sees the violence of the French troops in action, and comes to sympathize with the Algerians.

You can kind of see that this could have been an OK movie, probably something along the lines of The Quiet American, which is a film I like a lot. But it would most definitely have been the story of a white guy "set against the backdrop," as they say, of a revolution. And it would not be anything nearly as powerful or unique as The Battle of Algiers turned out to be.

Early in the discussion of my story idea, there was a suggestion made in class that I change my protagonist from her current incarnation (a half-white, half-Palestinian woman who grew up in the Occupied Territories, but has been away for many years) to an American who gets radicalized and ends up helping the Palestinian resistance.

This is not, inherently, a bad idea. In fact, it has the advantage (if you are making this movie for an American audience) of locating the protagonist in the same position as the viewer. I seriously considered taking this note for the better part of a weekend and tried valiantly to recraft the story with an American at its center before realizing that the whole thing just fell apart thematically and emotionally for me if I did that. And here's why.

My story, like The Battle of Algiers, is not a story about fighting for liberation. It is a story about fighting for self-liberation. One of the things that makes The Battle of Algiers such a decisively radical film is that it shows the successful struggle of an oppressed group of people for their own freedom. No one is fighting on their behalf, and no one needs to, because they are capable of organizing and liberating themselves. Keep in mind, this is a film that was most definitely made for a western (in this case, European) audience.

Peter Matthews's essay also takes issue with the idea that The Battle of Algiers is "even-handed," just because it shows both sides carrying out acts of terrorism against civilians, and because it shows the suffering inflicted on both the French and the Algerians as a consequence of this war.

Matthews argues that The Battle of Algiers is not even-handed at all, and re-watching it with an analytic eye, I understood exactly what he meant. In fact, it is a relentlessly, deliberately partisan film that consciously works to align our sympathies with the Algerians from the very first frame.

What is the first scene of The Battle of Algiers? It's the aftermath of an interrogation. The subject of this interrogation is an old man: toothless, thin, nearly naked, who has quite obviously been tortured. His torturers are French soldiers in uniform. At one point as many as half a dozen of them pack into the frame. The visual distinction between oppressor and oppressed could not be clearer. (Like I said, the replication of imperialism on the level of the individual.)

In the very next scene of the film, a seemingly ludicrous number of French soldiers pour into the Casbah, the Arab quarter of Algiers, and surround a house where revolutionary leader Ali La Pointe is hiding. Ali is one of the heads of the FLN, an Algerian resistance organization, and during the film we will see him do or organize some quite violent things. But when we first meet him, he is hiding in a crawlspace with another man, a woman and a young boy, surrounded by French soldiers who are threatening to blow up the house with everyone in it. (This is not, incidentally, the scene depicted in the screen shot at the top of this post. The first time we see Ali, he is unarmed.)

What is the point of these scenes? I would argue that they are essential in locking in our identification with the Algerian protagonists of the film. They invite us to feel the intense oppression of colonialism for ourselves. If you were treated like this, you would fight back too.

A similar dynamic is at work with the French civilians (although one could argue that settlers are not really, truly civilians) who, indeed, pay a high price for participating in their nation's colonial projects. Many people who watch this film remember the scenes depicting the bloody aftermaths of bombings in the French quarter, in which we are encouraged to feel quite sympathetic toward this terrorized population.

But the French of Algiers are not always shown to be totally innocent. The first time we see them, they appear as a suspicious, racist mob that gets Ali La Pointe thrown in jail. Here, again, we're invited to see the French settlers as the Algerians see them. It's another racist mob that leads to the mistaken arrest of an old man for the shooting of a police officer...an event that in turn prompts an enterprising police captain to take matters into his own hands, setting off a chain of escalating violence that will claim the lives of some of those very people who were so quick to finger an Algerian who we, the audience, know is innocent of any violent activity.

Although the film positions the French as victims of violence just as deserving of our empathy as the Algerians, there are really very few well-developed French characters. There is one notable exception: Colonel Mathieu (a fictionalized composite of several real French officers) who is in charge of the counterinsurgency operations in Algiers.

Mathieu, the only character in the film to be portrayed by an actor recognizable in Europe, really only has a handful of scenes, but they're so memorable I have found myself returning to him as a character model over and over again. If Ali La Pointe is the personification of the Algerian resistance, then Colonel Mathieu is the embodiment of the cold logic of occupation. He is not hateful. He's not even particularly racist. He is a rational, intelligent man who sees exactly what needs to be done to break the resistance in Algiers and is willing to do it. He's smart enough to know that in order to defeat an enemy, you must see him as your equal--a person like you, with fears, hopes and desires, and understandable, logical motives for his actions.

Like many good antagonists, Mathieu is the filmmakers' opportunity to tell it like it is. When confronted by a reporter about allegations of torture, he replies calmly. There is only one question to be answered, he explains. "Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, then you must accept all the necessary consequences." And, of course, he's right. One couldn't ask for a more succinct elucidation of the logic of imperialism.

The genius of The Battle of Algiers is that it's able to show both sides of the argument, while still be completely unequivocal about who is right. There is no doubt that the filmmakers believed the Algerians to be completely justified in resisting colonialism by any and all means necessary. If they hadn't, they would not have made the movie. I don't think anyone makes a political film without being on one side or the other--which doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't show the weaknesses, contradictions and flaws of the side you support, or the justifications and humanity of the people on the other side. It just means that it's not really possible to be "even-handed" when you're telling a political story--nor should you try.