Cynical Cinema

Brian DePalma seems to be slipping. His last movie before Redacted was The Black Dahlia, which starred Scarlett Johanssen and Hilary Swank, two of the greatest actresses ever, and it still blew. Redacted is different. There are no stars in this movie. I would go so far as to say that there are not even any great actors. There are a few decent ones, but the pictures tell this story far more than any actors would or could. And the pictures in Redacted are interesting, if not always good. It’s a pretty cool way to tell a story, as though there was no film at all, but rather a documentary pieced together from footage found all over the world. The main footage is taken by a soldier in Iraq, who is filming everything that happens for a documentary that he believes will be his ticket into film school when he returns to America. There is also online video blog footage, news camera footage, and webcam shots between husbands in Iraq and wives in America. Together, the bits and pieces add up to the story of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl by American soldiers in Iraq. Another device DePalma uses very effectively, both in the opening credits and the closing scenes, is little black lines obscuring faces, facts, and transcripts from the event. The real story is not so much the rape and murder as it is the cover-up of the incident by the government and the media and of course, more than anything, the military.

There are some good moments near the beginning, like the scene where one of the soldiers is reading from Somerset Maugham’s “Death Speaks”. Then the movie gets going, but it’s hard to care about it. It’s so heavy on the anti-Iraqi sentiment by the U.S. soldiers, two in particular, and you end up hating them. Which is fine, because they are the ones we are supposed to hate by the end of the movie, but it feels like the horrific events that are to come are being telegraphed. The movie seems to be saying that it isn’t war that turns these men into rapists and murderers, but rather that it is these type of men who want to go to the war. The movie moves extremely slowly, which makes some sense because Iraq must be, for the most part, extremely boring for the soldiers stationed there. And in that context the brutal scenes should seem that much more brutal. But somehow they don’t.

And there are some seriously heinous scenes in this movie. The rape scene is almost graphic, and is certainly brutal. The murders we don’t see, but we know they took place. And there is a beheading scene later on, like the ones that the insurgents have shown on their internet tapes, that is nothing short of sickening. The movie leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The cover-ups, the sadistic nature of the military culture, the sickening things people do to other people. And yet, it still doesn’t work. It’s such a high-minded film. It wants to shock and to assault people with the reality of Iraq, but it never makes it there. The closing sequence in the film is the most powerful, with actual, horrific pictures from the Iraq war, pictures that close with the shot of the girl that was really raped and killed by American soldiers, the true story upon which this film was based. Here is the main problem with these message-movies about Iraq. The only people that will watch a film like Redacted are those who are plugged into the world, and are already outraged at the actions of the United States. And so the movie maybe will make them feel more outrage, but so what? People who would actually be affected by this movie, who might have their opinions changed, would never watch it. 10/10 for concept. 2/10 for execution.

A Global Warning is about so much more than Global Warming. But of course, it comes down to that. No, this is more a film about the history of weather and the environment, about the great heating and cooling periods in the history of the Earth, and how that affected the life on the planet. Mass extinctions, the temperature of the world over the past 200 million years, and the causes and effects. This is fascinating from a historical perspective, and also in terms of how it affects us today. It’s a History Channel documentary, and interviews dozens of scientists and paleontologists and climatologists about the events of the past and the impending global catastrophe. There are certain things that are giving cause for alarm. For example, just a little bit of globalb warming raises the temperature of the oceans just a little, which could end up releasing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which would then accelerate the heating process an amazing amount, and put us past the point of no return almost overnight. There are other ideas, but I’ll leave it to you to watch this film. I think enough has been said about climate change so far, and the facts are out there, and it is now up to each of us to decide whether we heed the warnings or give up. This film is merely a good place to start heeding the warnings.

Manda Bala is about corruption and kidnapping and gangs in Brazil.  It’s almost an hour and a half of twenty minutes worth of story.  In point of fact, there is more than enough information out there for a full movie, but not enough people to talk about it.  It begins on a frog farm in Brazil, which is kinf of odd.  There is a lot of talk about frogs, and the farming of said frogs.  Then it moves on to the meat of the movie.  Apparently, there was some scandal involving a frog farm.  We learn about it later.  Apparently, a very high-ranking politician, named Jader Barbalho, installed himself as the overseer of something called “Sudam”, which was a project funded by the government using taxpayer money that was designed to create business and boost the economic situation of the poor parts of Northern Brazil.  Instead of creating business and enterprise, however, Barbalho created fake businesses, over 400 of them, and stole the money.  Over two billion dollars.  And one of the fronts he used to launder the money was a frog farm.  So, there is the loose tie-in to frog farming.

The movie then moves on to kidnapping, which is the major criminal enterprise in Sao Paolo.  At least one person is kidnapped every day in Sao Paolo, because it is easier and more lucrative than robbing banks.  We meet a woman who was kidnapped and had her ear cut off, to be sent along with the ransom note.  This is the persuasion method of choice for kidnappers in Brazil.  We also meet a plastic surgeon, whose business is almost exclusively re-attaching or re-creating ears for kidnapping victims.  And we see a kidnapper cutting off an ear on a tape that he sends along with the ransom.  At least Reservoir Dogs cut away for that scene.  It really is awfully tough to watch, even though it’s grainy and of poor quality.

But what’s really tough to watch is the movie itself.  You have to turn on the subtitles, because a large portion of the film is in Spanish.  But then there are interpreters at various points in the film, which means you get the subtitles, and then you get the English translation which is the same, and the movie drags on for twice as long as is necessary.  The main problem with the film, however, is that no one wants to talk about this stuff.  Understandably, they’re scared, but what it means is that the only people with anything constructive to add are a kidnapper with a hood on his face, a couple of members of the Sao Paolo SWAT team, a kidnap victim and a frog farmer.  So there is very little information actually disseminated in the movie.

What we do learn is that kidnapping and killing are very easy for the people who live in the slums and who would never be able to live with a real job, because their neighbourhoods are so poor.  And corruption is very easy for the people in charge of the government.  This Barbalho was charged with embezzeling two billion dollars, and ended up walking.  And then getting re-elected to congress.  But that’s about all we learn, and it takes way too long.  There are certainly some impressive scenes - the scene where the leader of the SWAT team shows his bullet wounds and scars, a scene where people who have purchased bulletproof cars take a course in defensive driving - how to get away when another car is shooting at you, and a scene where a microchip inventor describes his newest invention - microchips that can be implanted under peoples’ skin so if they are kidnapped their family will know immediately. 

But in the end, this is three different stories, which are tied together clumsily, and have a sort of connection at the end of the film, when the point is made that it is just as easy to steal with a pen as it is with a gun.  And all we really get is a picture of Brazil as a really messed up place to live.  And with interview subjects who refuse to say much, or won’t be identified, there isn’t much story beyond that.  Brazil is certainly not perfect.  Neither is this documentary.

Jonathan Demme will always be known for one thing above all others.  He is the man who directed Silence of the Lambs.  Which, in the world of film, is much like being the guy who wrote The DaVinci Code.  It doesn’t really matter what else you’ve done, or if it’s any good, you’re still that guy.  And Demme has done some other excellent work, like Adaptation and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.  He has also done some great documentaries, mostly music ones, like Stop Making Sense, about the Talking Heads, and Heart of Gold, the recent excellent film about Neil Young.  And now, he comes out with this terrific documentary about former president Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains.  The movie often makes reference to the fact that Carter is the 39th president.  Why are Americans so crazy about the numbers of their presidents?  We don’t do that here - it took me a long time to figure out what number Prime Minister Stephen Harper was…then I forgot before I came back to writing this review.  All that counting for nothing.

Carter was on The Daily Show last night, promoting his new book about his mom Lillian, “A Remarkable Mother”.  And I was so taken with Carter that I immediately watched Man From Plains the next morning.  And the first person to appear - is Carter’s mom!  On the Johnny Carson show in the late 70s, while her son was president.  Her appearance is awesome - such a funny, engaging elderly woman, and it sets the tone for the entire movie.  Because Carter is a lot like his mom.  He can be funny, he can be entertaining in an elderly, my-grandpa-makes-jokes kind of way, and he is always interesting and very well-informed.  The movie moves on right away to a barbecue near his birthplace where he blesses the meal.  This is one of the few Christian speakers who actually gets his voice heard while not being a total wing-nut.  His blessing is so very American, but good-American.  He prays for the soldiers overseas, and prays for the environment, calling the American people “custodians of the land”, and expressing the hope that they all remember this and work together to save it.

Then the film moves on to the meat of the story.  Carter’s new book (at the time) was called “Palestine:  Peace not Apartheid”.  It was a reference to Israel’s policies in Palestine, which are, in many cases, the same as apartheid, and in some cases worse.  (Apartheid, by the way, has been defined by the UN in the wake of the human rights battle in South Africa, and Palestine certainly qualifies, but people hate using the word to describe anything other than South Africa itself.  It’s would be kind of like people getting angry about the genocide in Rwanda being called a “holocaust”.  No, there was only ONE holocaust, and I’m offended!)  And the controversy over the title and content of the book is the main theme in the documentary.  Carter suggests, early on, that there is absolutely NO degree of objectivity left in the American news media, and watching the film, it seems like a pretty accurate statement.

The basic premise of the book is that in order to broker peace in Israel and Palestine and the Gaza Strip, Israel has to withdraw.  They are keeping the Palestinians behind a wall and enacting very apartheid-sounding laws to keep them opressed.  So his solution seems, on the surface, to be very simple.  Back off.  Let the Palestinians have their land.  Everyone wins.  The controversy arises when the Israelis and their supporters start pointing out the Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel.  If the people in Gaza are walled in, the Hamas supporters can’t walk into Israel and detonate a suicide bomb.  So, we keep them in their cage so that innocent Israelis are not killed.  Which is an argument that also makes sense.  And while Carter decries the terrorism and suicide bombings in his book, he also says that they are not going to stop as long as their people are being, for all intents and purposes, kept in a cage.  The attacks on Carter become more and more venomous, accusing him of everything to plagiarism to outright lying, to actual anti-semitism.

Carter makes appearances on lots of shows, being interviewed by Jay Leno, Al Franken, Larry King, and the always-irritating Wolf Blitzer.  Callers ask him questions on radio programs, questions that boggle my mind - why were you such a sissy over the Iran hostage affair?  Why didn’t you bomb the s*** out of Iran then?  Wouldn’t we have a better relationship with Iran today if you had done that?  And Carter’s response is remarkably controlled, given the question.  Who still thinks this way?  Does this caller really think that thirty years from now, the U.S. will have an excellent relationship with Iraq?  Because they have destroyed it now?  Bonkers.  And what’s more bonkers is that you get the sense from peoples’ reactions, that had he come out totally one-sided on the Israel-Palestine issue, and it had been against Palestine, there would have been almost no controversy at all.  The U.S. has chosen a side already.  It is Israel.  And nothing more can be said on the subject.  Except, of course, when you are Jimmy Carter.

 Jimmy Carter is a wonderful man, a man who may well be doing more for America and the world after his presidency than he did while he was still commander-in-chief.  He’s 84 years old, he just celebrated his sixtieth wedding anniversary, and he is still making the rounds of talk shows, doing countless interviews, and working harder than maybe anyone else in the world toward peace in the middle east.  And I am going to assume that everyone knows what he has done to help Africa with disease prevention, and what he has done with Habitat For Humanity, building houses for people all over the world.  (Although my mom volunteers at Habitat For Humanity, and I’m not sure she knows the exact involvement of Jimmy Carter.)  Does anyone remember what Reagan did after he left office?  George Bush the first?  Gerald Ford?  They kind of disappear, rest on their laurels, and barely lift a finger again.  Bill Clinton has been working his tail off since he left office, doing dozens of speaking engagements at half a million bucks a pop.  Jimmy Carter doesn’t charge for his speaking engagements, and offers to give lectures at universities and hundreds of places across the U.S.  And, after this book came out, sometimes he was actually turned down.

In Carter’s administration, he aimed for less dependance on foreign oil.  From the time he took office until the time he left, U.S. imports went from 9 million barrels a year to 5 million barrels.  The States is now back up to 13 million barrels a year.  He suggests in this movie that the Bush government’s policy - which is not to speak to anyone in the world who doesn’t agree completely with the Bush government, is insane.  How can you ever see both sides of an issue when you won’t listen to anyone but yourself?  And Carter has the credentials to talk.  He is the one who did what many thought couldn’t be done in the 70s - brokered actual peace between Israel and Egypt.  A peace that lasts to this day.  Those peace talks are shown in this film, and Carter’s wife reminisces about that time in some pretty amazing scenes.  And the movie closes with Carter, as president, being both right and incredibly forward-thinking about global warming.

The one complaint I have about the movie is the soundtrack.  I like it - the songs are good, and interesting, like Djamel Ben Yelles, Alejandro Escovedo, and Neil Young.  They certainly fit the tone of the film, but the editing of the soundtrack is intrusive.  Rap songs, like one by Brother Ali, play while Carter is on the phone, so it becomes difficult to listen to both at the same time.  But it’s a small quibble.  Man From Plains is a wonderful film about a wonderful man.

My Kid Could Paint That is the most dangerous movie of the year.  Why?  Because your kid COULD paint that.  This is a movie about a 4-year-old girl who becomes a shining beacon in the art world, selling canvasses for up to twenty grand.  And this movie could inspire stage parents who think it’s a good idea to get their kids to do the same thing.  They could entrap their children into a painting-as-slavery proposition where the joy and the youthful exuberance gets sucked out of their child’s life forever.  Which is exactly what the parents in this movie are accused of doing.  When four-year-old Marla Olmstead had one of her paintings displayed in a local restaurant, and someone bought it for a few hundred bucks, the art world all of a sudden took notice and started banging down the Olmstead’s door.  They wanted more and more works from this four-year-old “genius”, and the price of her paintings went up accordingly.  Pretty soon, she was having gallery shows, and had earned more than $300,000.00 by painting, which was just something she loved to do in her own home.

The art world is something of an enigma to most of us.  And many of us have suspected that it is in fact an enigma to the people who are the arbiters of taste in that world, as well.  That merely being able to sound important when discussing a painting is enough of a reason to make that painting worthwhile.  As the art gallery director in this movie says, this was a way for him to “stick it” to the world of modern art, which he sees as a bunch of phonies talking crap anyway.  His point is that this is a four-year-old, who is not a child prodigy, who is not some kind of genius, but rather just a kid who likes to paint.  And it’s merely the unusual nature of the story that makes the work worth what it is worth, and not the actual work itself.  Like, why does a Jackson Pollack sell for millions, and an Eric The Intern ass-painting sell for $120.00?  Because there is a certain cachet attached to the Pollack name, more than for any other reason.  There have been other movies made about the self-important idiocy of the world of modern art.  Most notably Who The *&#$ is Jackson Pollack, which was a great documentary about a woman who purchased what appeared to be a Pollack original at a yard sale for like eight bucks, and the art community went out of their way to discredit the painting, because they couldn’t conceive of a Pollack existing outside their realm, and costing so little.  A hilarious movie, that one.

This one is not so hilarious.  After establishing, for the first half-hour, that the art world is indeed pretentious and full of s***, the movie takes a dramatic turn.  Marla has been featured on dozens of news programs and talk shows, or at least her parents have, since they want to keep her out of the spotlight.  Which is what it seems good parents would do.  Then, during a Charlie Rose feature on 60 Minutes, the bubble is burst.  A child psychologist examining the paintings suggests that there is no way they are the work of a four-year-old.  That they are either done by her daddy, or that he has finished them for her.  And the Marla enterprise comes crashing down!  All of a sudden there is no interest in her art.  It becomes worthless.  All this overnight, because of an investigative journalism piece.  I think it is key to note here that Marla’s parents were “outed” by a child psychologist, and not an art crititc.

So…then what?  If it’s a 4-year-old who painted these abstract canvasses, they are amazing and worth 20,000 dollars.  But if daddy helped her - well then, they are worthless?  It’s abstract art, for God’s sake.  It looks the way it looks, people like it for the way it looks, and nothing more, right?  Nope - just like a painting done with an ass is more interesting than a painting done with an elbow, a painting done by a small child is far more interesting and therefore valuable than the same painting done by an adult.  So…if Jackson Pollack had been a five-year-old, his paintings would now sell for billions, instead of millions?  What?  Or Voice of Fire - would have been worth ten TIMES as much had it been painted by a monkey.  Right…here’s the thing.  Pollacks, and monkey paintings, and elephant paintings and ass art - CAN be done by children.  There is nothing intrinsically difficult about these things.  Or about most modern art in general. 

So the parents start fighting back against the allegations and the venemous hate-mail they begin to receive.  This is “investigative journalism” gone awry, they contend.  And just having one child psychologist decide this having never met Marla, seems like a pretty cheap way to ruin a life this way.  So the parents fight back, and videotape Marla doing a painting start-to-finish.  It takes a long time, five hours over a period of about a month, but she finishes “Ocean”, which looks just like her others to me.  And the art world is back on board!  The parents and Marla are vindicated, and the shows begin again.  But somehow the documentary film maker doesn’t fully believe it yet.  He is not convinced.  “Ocean”, he feels, does not look as good as Marla’s other work, and therefore is inconclusive!

So he leaves us with a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.  And no real answers, other than those we feel on our own.  As for me, I don’t care whether the parents DID do this or not.  Who cares?  Art is art simply because someone likes it, and it shouldn’t be about WHO painted it or HOW.  Had the Rolling Stones done Seasons In The Sun instead of Terry Jacks, would it still suck?  Or would it be a classic?  No, it would still suck.  The Beach Boys did Kokomo.  People still know it sucks.  In the end, this movie is a glorious screw-you to the art world, and a commentary on the piling-on nature of major media.  As soon as this 60 Minutes story ran, no one else did their own investigation, they just jumped on the pile.  And you can imagine the art pundits and self-important art community scuttling back and forth like rats, away from 4-year-old Marla, and then back to her, and then away again, and then back, depending on the way the prevailing winds are blowing.  Screw the modern art world indeed!

There has been a civil war going on in Northern Uganda for more than twenty years.  A rebel force called the Lord’s Resistance Army is killing men, women and children, and abducting kids to conscript them into becoming rebel child soldiers.  A camp has been set up in Uganda, one that at first was meant to house five families under government protection.  There are now 50,000 displaced people in this camp, many of them children.  Many of those children have been abducted by the rebels, and have been recaptured or escaped and made their way back to this camp for government protection.  In similar camps around northern Uganda, there are an estimated 2 million displaced members of the Acholi tribe.  It’s amazing that under these circumstances there could BE 20,000 schools in Uganda, but most of them are further south where the war doesn’t touch.  The kids in these schools compete every year in the National Music Competition, where they are graded based on their performance in music, drama and dance.

War Dance is a documentary shot in the most remote, and therefore most vulnerable camp in this war zone.  A camp where the kids can’t go outside, because the danger of abduction is too great.  There are thousands of child abductions in this region every year.   30,000 kids have been kidnapped and conscripted into these rebel armies.  Kids, some of them eight years old, tell heartbreaking stories about watching their fathers hacked apart by machetes, their mothers raped, their brothers abducted, or sometimes themselves.  One of the most powerful and devastating scenes I have seen in a movie in a long time is one where a rebel commander has been captured by the government troops in this camp, and a young boy asks to see him.  He sits with this rebel commander, perhaps the very man who hacked apart his father, and shows him a picture of his older brother, asking if he has seen him at the rebel camp.  He just wants to know if he is alive or not, after he was abducted.  The rebel tells him that he has not seen him there, and so he is probably dead.  And the kid asks him why the rebel forces abduct kids.  Why did they abduct me?  He says.  And the soldier replies, it’s because the bigger you are as an army, the more power you have.  We know it devastates families.  We know what the mothers go through.  But without the kids our army isn’t strong enough.  It’s just heart wrenching and touching and incredibly moving.  You can’t create moments like this in Hollywood.

Somehow, music is the salvation.  Music gives these scarred children something to focus on.  The competition gives them a goal.  And they love their music.  Their instruments are makeshift at best, wooden xylophones and harps held together with string.  It’s music as therapy, music as a purpose, and yes, a form of escapism as well.  In one of the war zones of the world that doesn’t make the news, there are 200,000 orphaned children, and they need some escapism.  These kids work, and they work hard, to be ready for this competition, and it is really cool to watch the competition itself - the African music and dance are sensational, and the triumphant finish is wonderful.  Triumph, of course, being measured by degrees in this part of the world.  War Dance is a powerful, devastating, but amazingly uplifting film, given the subject matter.

An Inconvenient Truth was effective, because first of all, it was the first massive, promoted, well-distributed movie about Global Warming and peoples’ effect on the environment.  It worked because Al Gore had some cachet, and because the movie was not only eye-opening, but also genuinely entertaining.  This is also why Michael Moore documentaries are so effective.  They are entertaining.  There are moments that make us cry, moments that make us laugh, and moments that educate us.  All of which makes for a good movie.  This is where The Eleventh Hour misses the boat.  It isn’t terribly entertaining.  It’s exremely informative, it very well-researched and well-documented, and it has considerable star power.  But it’s more preachy and tedious than An Inconvenient Truth, or even A Global Warning, the Discovery channel documentary that came out recently.

 It’s narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, and features appearances by such environmental luminaries as David Suzuki (I like David Suzuki - screw these people and their anti-Suzuki backlash) and such intellectual heavyweights as Stephen Hawking.  And seriously, if you’re not going to listen to Stephen Hawking, who are you going to believe?  But whereas in some situations the movie is heavy-handed with it’s preachy, doom-and-gloom message, it understates other things.  The environment COULD be the greatest challenge of our time?  No, it IS.  There are very few people left alive who would believe otherwise.  But I will say this for The Eleventh Hour - it has an awful lot of information that is important for us all to know and understand.

 There are some great ideas here.  The idea that sunlight has provided all the energy the world needs throughout most of our recorded history.  And that when we are taking fossil fuels out of the ground, we are actually using up “ancient sunlight” energy, which is of course a non-renewable resource.  We are now using thousands of times the energy that the sun provides, which means that at some point soon, we will no longer be self-sustaining.  When there were one billion people on Earth, we were a self-sustaining species, but now that the population of the planet has exploded over the past one hundred years (and, especially, over the last fifty) we are no longer able to reconcile the supply with the demand.  There is less food, what food there is is becoming increasingly poisoned with toxins, and factors such as deforestation, global warming, overdishing and chemical dumping are causing dead zones, flash floods, hurricanes and droughts.

David Suzuki says something interesting.  He points out that if we, the human race, were to create the kind of energy each year that nature does for free, it would cost us 36 trillion dollars.  A year.  The total gross national products of the world this past year total 18 million dollars.  Therefore, it would cost us twice what we make to do what nature does, and we are busily destroying that nature for our own ends.  And the U.S. is the biggest consumer, the biggest waster of resources, and the richest country, thereby becoming the biggest problem.  Americans (population 300 million) spend more money maintaining their lawns each year than all of India (population 1.1 billion) collects in taxes.  It all comes down to the Economy vs. the Environment, which any intellectual, (in this case Stephen Hawking) will tell you does not have to be a battle at all.  Why is it one or the other?  And who would ever suggest that they are of equal importance?  It’s rubbish.

 And one more good thing The Eleventh Hour does is this - it gives us hope.  A slim, glimmer of hope that we can save ourselves now, at the eleventh hour.  Sustainable cities, systems and industries are attainable.  (And, in all the models they show, seem to look like every futuristic sci-fi city we see in the movies.)  There CAN be a waste-free sustainable system - after all, nature does it, and has done so for millions of years.  We could reduce the human footprint on the environment by 90 percent fairly quickly if we act now.  But it will take a giant uprising, a huge movement of people, companies, businesses and of course governments all over the world to get it done.  The idea here is to impart the notion of “frugality” to people.  Not poverty, but the sensible appropriation of resources. 

A former CIA chief in the movie quotes Winston Churchill, when he said “Americans always do the right thing, but only after the have exhausted all other possibilities”.  The hope here is that at this point the Americans, and the rest of the world, HAVE exhausted all other possibilities of doing the right thing, and it is now time to take action.  The best thing we get from this movie though, is that the Earth will be fine.  Nature will make a comeback, with us or without us.  And that is what we’re looking at - an extinction, just like the others that have happened in history.  Onlyn this one will be caused by mankind, and will wipe out mankind.  As one interview subject in the films says:  “the Earth has all the time in the world.  We don’t”.

Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman take on the Russia-Afghanistan war in Charlie Wilson’s War, a movie about a real-life American congressman named Charlie Wilson (Hanks), who virtually single-handedly provided the Afghan fighters with the weapons to destroy the Russians and drive them out of the country.  It’s a comedy-drama, where Hanks and Hoffman are hilarious together.  (Hoffman plays a senior CIA official who is about the most politically incorrect guy you would ever find in a political movie.  Charlie Wilson is a womanizing, drug-using, completely corrupt politician who all of a sudden finds a cause worth fighting for.  His office is great - his staff is just a bevy of hot young women (Amy Adams among them), he calls them, collectively, “jailbait”, and he sleeps with every hot woman who crosses his path.  One of these women is Julia Roberts, whose role in the film is pretty pointless, except to steer Wilson in the right direction.  After visiting a refugee camp populated by displaced Afghanis in Pakistan, Wilson steps up his efforts to help them out.  That help involves getting the freedom fighters weapons and training to be able to shoot down Russian planes and helicopters.

 One of the best things about Charlie Wilson’s War is that at the end of the movie, his crusade to help Afghanistan has not changed him as a person.  He is still a shallow playboy who sleeps with all kinds of hot women.  That is nice to see.  In fact, at one point a scandal involving a Playboy model and some cocaine threatens to derail him, and the point is made - if the press hears “strippers and Playboy models and cocaine”, then they will be so focussed on that, that they will completely ignore anything that is being done elsewhere in the House of Representatives.  As long as that scandal is at the forefront, Wilson can do anything he wants, policy-wise, and no one will pay any attention.  Which is how he plans to get the money to help Afghanistan.  This is actually a great idea for a movie in itself - a politician creates his own sex-and-drugs scandal in order to push forward policies that are controversial!  It could be a pretty cool movie, on the level of a Bulworth or some such thing.  Think about it, Hollywood!

And that is one of the biggest criticisms I have of Charlie Wilson’s War.  It is very Hollywood.  So many details are glossed over.  Julia Roberts exists only because she is a hot chick with a marquee name.  This issue is a complex one - the Russians can’t know (for sure) that it is the Americans who are arming the mujahadeen, because this could tip off a real American-Russian war.  So Hanks has to get Russian-made weapons from Israel, ship them to Pakistan, at which point they can be handed over to the Afghanis such that they can fight.  In the meantime, tensions between Israel and both Pakistan and Afghanistan are escalating, and the CIA is training the mujahadeen.  (We don’t see Osama Bin Laden here - thank God, it would have been just too heavy-handed.)  When the movie is over, it all seems so simple.  Perhaps that’s the idea.  For the US to do the right thing, all it would really take is one congressman with an agenda and the tenacity to see it through.  So we are then to assume that there is not one congressman in Washington today who has the fortitude or the balls to do something about Rwanda, or Darfur, or what have you?  That may well be the point of this movie.  But it’s pretty devoid of substance.

The end of the movie is a celebration of American ingenuity and the capacity of one man to change the world.  However, it is also a cautionary tale of what happens when you change the world and then just up and leave.  I think we all know what happened with the freedom fighters in Afghanistan.  They became the Taliban, they became Al Quaeda, and they used their CIA training to attack the United States.  The movie assumes we know this, and I guess we do.  And this is the only moment in the movie that has the ring of relevance today.  I would have loved to delve more into the slow germination of the anti-US sentiment that was going on with these people at the same time that they were being armed and trained by the US.  The collision between high-minded, idealistic US foreign policy, and the inept implementation of that policy that results in the hatred spewed toward America throughout the world.  But Charlie Wilson’s War is more content to show Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman bantering.  Which is funny, and entertaining, but it really isn’t enough to make this movie great.  (Although I will say this - as far as movies about Afghanistan go, this one is miles above Rambo III.)

Robert Redford is an excellent film director.  Although he doesn’t get enough credit for it.  Quiz Show was one of the most under-rated films of the past fifteen years, as was The Milagro Beanfield War before that.  Just about the only Redford-directed film to get the credit it deserved was Ordinary People.  And likely, Lions For Lambs will fall into the same category, and be compeletely overlooked in the coming years.  The main problem with the movie is that despite the star power, (Tom Cruise, Redford, Meryl Streep), nobody saw this film, and it is likely that now it’s out on DVD, not that many more people will see it.  You see, it is a message movie, and this is the year with more message movies, and less people watching them, than ever before.  Thirty years from now, people will still likely know In The Valley of Elah, as I am convinced it will be considered classic down the line.  But other films, like Redacted and Lions For Lambs will fall into the also-ran category when message films are remembered years from now.

 Which is not to say Lions Foir Lambs is bad, it just doesn’t compare to In The Valley of Elah.  There are some great performances in the movie, and some great dialogue, but that’s about all there is.  There are three different stories being told, all of which are connected in some way.  Tom Cruise is playing a part for which he would appear to be typecast - a smarmy, sleazy Republican senator who has come up with a new military strategy to “win” the war in Afghanistan for the U.S.  He is detailing his plan to a skeptical reporter (Streep), who feels as though she has heard all this “hearts and minds” rhetoric before, and has a hard time believing anything the man says.  Streep is great, as always, as this woman who is both captivated by the senator’s personal charizma yet repulsed by his politics.  The problem in these scens is Cruise, however, as his dialogue doesn’t give him much to work with, and he comes off as an almost cartoonish political figure of questionable ethics.  It doesn’t take a genius reporter to see through him or his Vietnam-type rhetoric, we can all see it, since it is so obvious on the screen.

 The second scenario is the direct result of Cruise’s military strategy, which basically uses American soldiers as bait to flush out the Taliban.  Two soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in the mountains of Afghanistan, with the enemy closing in.  And the third scenario is Robert Redford, as a university professor, reminiscing about two of his most promising, brilliant students.  The same two who are now trapped in Afghanistan.  This is a short movie, and it gives equal time to each of the three set pieces, which are, for the most part, well written.  Especially Redford’s exchange with a student who is not living up to his potential, which is poignant and intelligent.  However, there is nothing else happening in the movie.  Once the military has mobilized their helicopters to take the soldiers where they are going, there is no more movement.  Just three scenes in three locations, cutting in and out of each other.

 Doc watched this on the plane on the way back from his vacation, and he felt it was a left-wing propaganda piece.  It isn’t.  The intention of this film is not to be anti-republican, or anti-neocon, although it certainly comes off that way at times.  The intention of this film is to provoke thought, and that’s it.  The left-wingers will identify with Redford, who tries to convince his two students not to sign up for the army.  The right-wingers will identify with the two soldiers, whose reasons for enlisting are well thought out and make sense.  It has become the fashion to accuse a movie of being propaganda when it has a left-wing slant.  But how can a movie about Iraq or Afghanistan NOT have a left-wing slant when it deals with facts?  What would people call a film about Iraq where the “surge was working”, and the Iraqi people loved the American soldiers, and none of those civilians died, and everything was roses and kittens and victory?  Now THAT would be propaganda.