i'm alive

Just really busy. And fairly creatively exhausted at the moment, as I struggle to drag all my projects simultaneously across the graduation/First Pitch finish line. Between trying to finish three scripts, prepare my pitch, read a criminally long book for Entertainment Industry class, and go to a reasonable amount of the valuable-but-unhelpfully-tightly-scheduled end-of-year events, I just don't have the brain space for a blog at the moment. You'll hear from me on the flip side, which, dear god, I sure hope is coming some time around May 8.

every american should watch this video

On April 5, the whistleblower site Wikileaks released this video showing US soldiers in an Apache helicopter opening fire unprovoked on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. While the initial report on the incident claimed US troops were responding to small arms fire from resistance fighters, the video shows a very different story. Among the twelve dead were a Reuters photographer and driver, which is perhaps the only reason the story did not slip into obscurity in the anonymous mass grave that is the US occupation of Iraq.

Every American should watch this video. Because this is not an isolated incident, but an everyday occurrence in Iraq under US occupation. Because we are so frequently shielded from the reality of war and occupation. Because we're paying for this. Because these soldiers, who have learned to kill so easily, have already come home, along with tens of thousands of others.

You know, I was going to write some commentary about the many ways in which this video is profoundly disturbing, and I still might in a separate post. But I think Glenn Greenwald, Dahr Jamail, and Democracy Now! have already said it better than I ever could.

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.

thesis

I finished my thesis script and turned it in on Monday, once again proving that if you give a writer a deadline, she will work as close up to it as humanly possible.

There were times when I hated this script and just wanted it to go away. But toward the end, I kind of started to like it. At the 11th hour, I cracked a couple of scenes that had been giving me trouble all the way through, and suddenly I not only understood the script structurally but actually started to enjoy writing it.

Funny enough, my attempt to write something "not political" ended up being about many of the same things as my "political" scripts: resistance, and standing up to someone much stronger than you, and making the choice to fight instead of flee, despite the greater risk involved. Those themes were there from the beginning, but the more explicitly I dealt with them, the more I liked the script and the easier it was to write. Thanks are owed to James Cameron (for Terminator) and--you guessed it--J.K. Rowling for helping me work that out.

I keep waiting for the little knot of anxiety that lives in my stomach to untie. It hasn't so far. Perhaps this is because I have about 45 pages of a pilot and a rewrite of another script still to accomplish in the next 5 weeks, and a pitch to prepare by Saturday morning, in time for the first rehearsal for our end-of-year pitching event.

45 pages...there was a time, not so long ago, when that would have seemed incredibly daunting. Now I shrug that off as three solid days' writing.

In other news, Jess finished Harry Potter! I was able to hold off my desire to sleep after turning in aforementioned thesis just long enough to watch her liveblog the final chapters on Monday night.

just a brief note to say...

...that for most of the past two days, when I'm supposed to be working on finishing my thesis, I have been reading this blog, by Jess, a 20-something English and theater nerd who is reading all seven Harry Potter books for the first time.

Jess's commentary is fresh, funny, irreverent and loving all at the same time, and is providing a vicarious thrill to many a Harry Potter aficionado as we relive a little bit the twists, turns, thrills, chills, reveals and payoffs of this immensely complex series. I'm going to have to parcel out reading this one carefully instead of rushing through it like an actual Harry Potter book, because it's a treasure trove of exactly the kind of smart-but-not-too-stuffy commentary I have been looking for.

This is why I love the internets. I can't quite remember the chain of events that led me to stumble across this blog, but I think it was by link-hopping from the comments on this--which, may I say, looks hilarious and awesome. In the process I also found Back to Hogwarts, by a dedicated fan who is re-reading and writing commentary on all the books in time for the final movie release. This is such a great idea I might start doing it myself, after graduation when I have proper amounts of time to read books. Although I've gone back and read my favorite bits of the series now and then, I've never re-read completely all the way through from start to finish, knowing what I know now about the end. Starting on July 31 seems like a pretty sweet idea, but that will depend on what May and June hold; I may not be able to wait.

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.

march 4 day of action to save public education

Today is a national day of action to defend public education across the country, with actions planned in 32 states and dozens of protests across California alone.

Students in the University of California system are facing a staggering 32% tuition hike along with cuts to department budgets, faculty, libraries, graduate student funding, even janitorial services. The Cal State and community college systems--which, together, serve nearly 3.5 million Californians--are facing a similar attack. While the CSU and community college system don't have the prestige of Berkeley and UCLA, they may be the only shot at a college degree for millions of working class Californians, disproportionately people of color and immigrants. California has probably the best public higher education system in the country, and it's being dismantled before our eyes.

At the same time, Los Angeles K-12 public schools are facing an unprecedented wave of pay cuts, layoffs, furlough days, increases in class size, and the potential privatization of a significant chunk of the LA Unified School District through an invasion of charter school corporations.

Privatization, union-busting, slashing social programs and gutting the public sector: when the IMF comes into a Third World country to do this, it's called structural adjustment. Here, we have our own government to do it for us.

The good news is that Californians are putting up a fight. You can check here to see the extensive list of actions planned across the state. A great live blog of the day's actions can also be found here, including a live video feed of the main Bay Area rally beginning at 5pm PST.

And California's fightback has inspired struggles in other states, including protests at Hunter College in New York, and this one in my home town, Baltimore, calling on the state of Maryland to divert some of the $280 million it has allocated for more prisons for juveniles and women into funding for education and youth jobs instead.