Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment is coming out with a movie called Chicago 10 on August 26th. It’s a very strange take on the famous Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at that convention that led to riots, arrests, and a really bizarre trial. Chicago 10 is basically a documentary about that trial, featuring archival footage of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Bobby Seale, and the rest of the people involved with the trial. Interviews with them at the time, footage of Hoffman and David Dellinger at speaking engagements, and of course footage of the demonstrations, the police response, and the riots that took place. What happened after the disturbance in 1968 was that eight people were put on trial for “crossing state lines for the purposes of inciting a riot”. The trial really was a farce, and film maker Brett Morgen wants to accentuate this by creating a cartoon representation of the trial itself.

Which means that between the archival footage and the documentary pieces, we get a re-enactment of the Chicago trial by cartoon characters. They look like the people they represent, they talk like the people they represent, and Morgen has recruited some big names to help voice these characters. Jeffrey Wright, Amy Adams, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber and many others participated in this film. Which is impressive, and really adds punch to the courtroom scenes, which are taken directly from the transcripts of the trial itself. A trial which saw the judge order Bobby Seale, the national leader of the Black Panther Party, to be bound and gagged right in the courtroom because of his frequent outbursts. This was an absolutely crazy time in North American history, and this trial really encapsulates what was craziest about it. And this movie provides a really interesting look into that trial.

Interesting, but not as interesting as it should be. This trial and these events in Chicago in the late sixties fascinate me, and I wanted to learn everything I could. And in watching this movie, I learned an awful lot. But the style of the movie and the “artsy” nature of the animated segments don’t really help. It’s better than one of those cheesy “courtroom re-enactment” scenes from other, worse documentaries, and I frankly don’t know what I would have preferred to see in it’s place. But the style of the movie becomes overpowering, and I found myself getting distracted from the actual story by the animation. It isn’t a major fault, because this movie is still impressive and thorough, but it prevents the film from being a great one.

Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden comes out August 26th from Alliance Films, and it’s a terrific premise for a movie. After watching The Hunting Party, and witnessing the amazingly easy capture of Radovan Karadzic a month ago in Belgrade, it isn’t actually a giant stretch to think that one guy with a camera crew could conceivably find the man. Or at the very least come pretty close. And certainly one guy with a camera crew who interviews the people closest to Bin Laden would bring out some information as to his whereabouts that would come as a shock to the general public. After all, it has been SEVEN years since September 11th. SEVEN. And has anyone, anywhere, come within sniffing distance of this guy? At the very least, a movie like this one will remind us that Public Enemy Number One is still at large. Like, hey! You remember that guy, who did the thing with the planes? Yeah, we still don’t have him. And perhaps we’ve stopped trying.

And, at the very least, that’s what this movie does. And that’s ALL it’s good for. Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought us the fantastic film Super-Size Me in 2003, has taken his second stab at directing, producing and starring in a documentary. And he has, for the most part, failed. While there is nothing overtly wrong with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden, there is also nothing particularly right. He talks to people all over the world, in places where Osama Bin Laden may be hiding, and other places where he is obviously not hiding, getting their opinions on American foreign policy, and he talks to soldiers in Afghanistan and he makes a little bit of commentary on the situation. But here’s the thing - this is a documentary. And I learned nothing. Documentaries are supposed to teach you something. Either give you a window into a world you have never heard about, or give you a new insight into something with which you are already familiar. This movie does neither.

In the end, it feels just like one of those TV news pieces where they go out on the street and ask people’s opinions about something. Like high gas prices or Dion’s green shift. It’s just done in other parts of the world rather than in the United States. And Morgan Spurlock, while he has the ability to be funny, attempts to inject humour into this film where it doesn’t really belong, and it ends up being less funny and more irritating. Interspersed in between his interviews with the regular people of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we get treated to phone calls between Spurlock and his pregnant wife who is waiting at home for him to return. I don’t know if these conversations are thrown in there as a way of justifying the fact that the film maker never really puts himself in harm’s way, or if they are just another way of making the movie more about Spurlock himself. Either way, it’s just distracting.

And I don’t think he needed to put himself in harm’s way. He seems to be doing so, at certain points in the movie, but you get the sense that at no time is he really in any danger at all. And if you’re going to make a movie like this, you have to do one of two things. Either go all the way - search through the mountains, dodge bullets, and talk to potentially dangerous terrorist targets. Or, make a movie that is so insightful and compelling that no one will care about the fact that you aren’t really trying to catch Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock has done neither, and therefore the movie doesn’t work. To find a really good movie about this conflict and this sort of subject matter, check out Blood Of My Brother. And ignore Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden.

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

In every movie about soldiers returning from war, there has to be some kind of traumatic war event before they go home. That way, the fact that they’re all messed up makes more sense to us. There have been many amazing movies about soldiers returning from war, the best of which was The Deer Hunter. Of late, the war in Iraq has provided some great films about this, the best one being In The Valley of Elah. And now we get Stop-Loss, another film about soldiers being messed up and freaking out when they get home, and it’s almost as good. And it does start off with that traumatic event, one which we see in more and more flashbacks as the movie continues.

The practice of Stop-Loss is one that has affected almost 100,000 American soldiers since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. Basically, it’s (as Ryan Philippe says in the film) a back-door draft. Soldiers who have completed their tours of duty get stop-lossed, which means that just as they are about to get discharged from the military, they get yanked back in and sent back to the war, whether they want to go or not. In the film, Brandon (Ryan Philippe) is one of those soldiers. A fine sergeant, loved by his friends and his soldiers, respected in the military, he returns from Iraq to his home, a small town in middle-America. The soldiers that fought with him are all, apparently, from the same small town. These include his life-long best friend Steve (Channing Tatum), and their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Instantly, upon their return from the war, they show how messed up they are in ways we’ve all seen before. Tommy starts fights with everybody. Steve gets really drunk and believes he’s still in the war, and digs a big hole in his front yard. And Brandon still has a useful role, as the guy who keeps all his friends together and makes sure they stay alive and reasonably sane. (Think DeNiro in Deer Hunter.) Within days of the guys being back in the States, Tommy’s wife has left him and he’s drinking himself to death. Steve has beaten his girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish), and only Brandon’s intervention has saved any of them. And then Brandon gets stop-lossed.

Faced with the prospect of going back to Iraq, now he starts to lose it too. His resistance at first seems to be based entirely on principle. The practice of stop-lossing soldiers is cruel. Once their tour of duty is complete, they have done exactly what they’ve signed on to do. They’re done. To force them back into action really is nothing but a draft, and his decision to run is basically, at first, a protest against the draft. What they’re doing isn’t right, so he basically refuses to comply. We discover, as the movie goes on, that he has other reasons, of course. Like that Big Traumatic Event that we saw at the beginning of the film. He can’t go back because he can’t shoot people any more. He can’t stay home, because the army will simply arrest him and send him back anyway. So his only option is to go on the run, with some vague idea about how to get out of this.

And his idea, as he goes AWOL, really is vague. Steve’s girlfriend Michele accompanies him on his trip, because she believes in what he’s doing. Basically, however, the stop-loss laws mean that his flight can take him only one place - either Canada or Mexico. And once he goes, he’s basically in witness protection, because he can’t contact his family at all. He can’t ever return home. He will have to get a new identity and new papers, and start his life all over. Which is, of course, a tough decision to make. While he and Michele are on the run though, things at home are starting to turn bad. Steve has re-enlisted for another tour of duty. Like so many characters in these movies, he no longer feels comfortable anywhere but in Iraq, fighting.

Tommy has also tried to re-enlist for the same reason. Everyone hates him at home now, so he has nowhere else to turn. However, the reason they hate him is that he’s a jerk, he’s messed up, he beats people up all the time, and he gets drunk out of his mind before plowing his car into buildings and stores around town. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is developing into one of the great character actors in movies. He is the most magnetic and believable character in Stop-Loss, especially next to Channing Tatum, whose character feels re-hashed and obvious. Tommy could be as cliched as Steve, but Gordon-Levitt rises above. The main problem with the movie is that he isn’t given enough to do. As the most compelling character in the film, it would have been nice to see a lot more of his story, rather than jumping from one mess to another.

The big problem with Steve and Tommy, of course, is that Brandon is no longer around. Brandon’s gone AWOL, and without his calming influence to guide them, they begin to come apart at the seams. This is fairly indicative of their mindsets anyway. They are also two guys who can’t really function without taking orders any more. They have no real minds of their own, and unless their lives are structured for them and planned out, they can’t manage. Which is why Steve re-enlists and Tommy falls to pieces. When Tommy gets dishonourably discharged, and therefore is unable to go back to the war, he really loses it. (Which sort of begs the question - why doesn’t Phillippe do this too? Instead of going on the run, just get really drunk and do stupid stuff and get kicked out of the army!)

In the end, Stop-Loss asks a very tough question. If people are depending on you, and you take off on them for the right reasons, are you really doing the right thing? A political movie with a specific ambition, it resonates with some great performances, mostly from Ryan Philippe, Abbie Cornish, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s not on the level of In The Valley of Elah, but it’s very, very good. Stop-Loss will not end up being a classic, but it’s well worth a rental. It comes out July 8th, Tuesday, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a fascinating, totally new look at the war in Iraq, focused on a heavy metal band named Acrassicauda. The DVD comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and is well worth watching. Not just for heavy metal fans, or political watchers, or documentary afficionados. This movie is great for everyone. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the music of Acrassicauda (whose name, in Arabic, is a type of venomous black scorpion). I just don’t dig that crazy super-heavy, unintelligible, screaming death metal. At the same time, I recognize the skills of their guitar player, and I think that musically these guys are terrific, given their circumstances.

And those circumstances are crazy. They began playing in Iraq, pouring their love of American heavy metal into their music, wearing shirts that, on the right day at the right time, could get them killed. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer. These are not bands that are tolerated by the repressive Islamic fundamentalists over in those parts. In 2005, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, VICE magazine teamed up with Acrassicauda to put on a rock concert. The show was a huge success, a sell out, and a year later Suroosh Alvi, the founder of VICE magazine, teamed up with the head of VICE films, Eddy Moretti, to travel back to Baghdad and see what had happened to the band in the intervening year.

What they find is disturbing and sad. The band doesn’t practice. They didn’t mind practicing under the threat of sniper fire, bombs and murder. But onec their rehearsal space was actually bombed, how much practice were they going to get in anyway? The film becomes more a tale of survival than a tale of heavy metal headbanging awesomeness. One of the only films out there that focuses on the youth culture in Iraq, and how the war is affecting those people. This film started out, really, as a magazine article for VICE, which you get in the booklet that comes along with the DVD. And the film makers are clearly not hugely experienced with this kind of filming. Their love for the band and the guys in it is constantly apparent, and their zeal for their “crazy mission” keeps coming through again and again. It’s a little intrusive, frankly, when we want to hear about Iraq and the band and their story more than anything else.

And in this sense, Heavy Metal In Baghdad succeeds despite itself. The story is so amazing, and the window into this world in Iraq has rarely been seen. Not the heavy metal world as such, but rather the world of teenagers and young adults who love many parts of Western culture, who hated Saddam Hussein, who buy bootlegged Metallica records, and who are unable to stand alone on the streets at night for fear of being killed. This is the world these guys inhabit, and this is the world we get to see through their eyes. The film follows them as they are forced to flee as refugees to Damascus, and the more laid-back interviews with the band members there reveal some seriously thoughtful, intelligent people who just want to make their music. They understand the situation they are in, they don’t want to make political statements with their music (although sometimes they are forced to do so), they just want to bang their heads and rock hard.

The personable, charming nature of these guys is the driving force of the movie, and they prove to be very engaging, interesting documentary subjects. They are not the low-brow, dumb-ass metalheads many of us have come to believe are par for the course. And they are not the West-hating, prayer five times a day, war crying Iraqis that so many of us have seen in the media. Heavy Metal In Baghdad is not about the war, or about heavy metal, or about Iraqis or Americans or religion. It’s about people. And it’s amazing.

Blood of My Brother is in many ways an incredibly impressive achievement.  It is a documentary on the Iraqi war that is incredible in terms of the access these film makers were given to shoot in Iraq.  They get behind the scenes at fundamentalist, jihad-fueled rallies.  The manage to come along with an attack on American forces.  They ride along on a tank with American forces.  And no judgements are passed one way or another.  There is no narrator in the film.  The only dialogue is from the interview subjects themselves.  It’s therefore almost all in Arabic, with English subtitles.  It follows one particular family so closely that you feel like not only are you there, but you’re almost a family member.

And it’s this Iraqi family that defines both the film and the plight in the country itself.  One of their sons and brothers has been killed by American forces while guarding a religious building.  His younger brother, Ibrahim, has become the family’s provider.  In his heart, he’s torn between a desire for revenge toward the Americans and the need to provide for his family, which would be destitute if he died.  This is a real insider’s look at the Iraqi insurgency, as the film takes us inside the Mehdi Army, one of the insurgent groups in Iraq.

 All of which makes for some powerful imagery and moving scenes, especially the scenes of mothers weeping over the death and the gravesites of their sons.  And yet, somehow, without a narrator to move the story along, and without any defineable position or purpose, it feels more like we’re eavesdropping on tragedy and militant anger, rather than understanding any of it at all.  Sure, we understand how the rallies and the speeches and the fury toward the Americans creates an insurgency, and makes suicide bombers out of people who would ordinarily abhor such violence.  All of which is an amazing thing to see, in terms of eavesdropping.  But as a movie, there just isn’t enough continuity to make it exciting or to make it very watchable.  An amazing achievement, a movie that ought to be seen, but one that’s an effort to watch.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is one of the most unfortunately-named movies in recent memory.  It conveys some sort of sweeping romantic epic that will likely involve intricate costumes and poems read to a lady from over a hedge of some kind.  And, in a way, it actually is.  But it’s an epic love affair between Irishmen and their country.  It’s actually the story of the beginnings of the IRA, as the British government holds Ireland in a grip of terror.  The British soldiers are beating Irish citizens, enforcing apartheid-type laws against the citizens of the country.  And the Irish have had enough.  They form a group to fight back against the British military. 

Cillian Murphy is terrific as Damien O’Donovan, a doctor who gets caught up in the resistance along with his brother Teddy, the de-facto leader of the resistance movement.  Orla Fitzgerald is wonderful as Damien’s love interest, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.  The movie is long - more than two hours - but it has a lot of story to tell.  The Irish resistance finds guns and weapons to drive out the British, but once they start becoming successful, they begin fighting amongst themselves, over political and territorial issues.  The IRA is split into two basic factions, the one that is willing to accept a compromise with the British and become a free state of the British Empire, and the one that will accept nothing less than total freedom from Great Britain.

The tension between the brothers, the warring factions, the passion of the resistance fighters and the palpable love of their country are all themes and moments that are expertly handled by the director, Ken Loach.  As the movie draws to an end, we see the issues that not only divided the IRA at the beginning, but also divided the country itself.  A fascinating and powerful look at the nascent years of one of the most famous (and infamous) fighting forces in the world, as well as the politics that divided Ireland, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an epic, beautifully filmed tale of struggle, triumph and tragedy.

After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff.  And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching.  Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery.  It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life.  The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter.  The Deer Hunter this is not.  Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences.  And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert.  But the rest of the cast is weak at best.

Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall.  Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell.  Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man.  Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.

There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people.  But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure.  Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers.  And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept.  What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power.  It’s too bad.

An intensive, in-depth, and sometimes exhaustive look at the issue of abortion in America, Lake Of Fire is a more than two-and-a-half-hour documentary.  Which is awfully long, but then, it has an awful lot of people to interview and a lot of information to disseminate.  While the film makers clearly make an effort to stay directly in the middle of the issue, and not take one side or another, in the end, it appears as though they favour the pro-choice side a little more.  Which is fine, it seems like  it would be impossible to make a movie like this without having a little bit of your personal opinion come through. 

This is perhaps the most difficult ethical issue of our time in terms of definition.  When does a fertilized egg become human?  No one has an answer.  But this movie fleshes out the arguments on both sides.  One of the most convincing pro-life advocates is an intellectual colleague of Alan Derschowitz named Nat Hentoff.  His argument, however, is fairly contradictory to the rest of the Pro-Life movement.  His suggestion is that if you are against abortion, then that means you must be against the taking of life in all forms.  Which means you must be against war.  And against capital punishment.  The one follows from the other.  And yet, most of the Pro-Life lobby has historically been hypocritical in this respect.  Noam Chomsky appears in the film as well, taking this train of logic one step further.  If there are 15 million actual, live, real children who die in the world every year from preventable diseases, and all it would take is a change in American foreign policy to provide aid to the countries where this is taking place, if you are anti-abortion then you must be pro-increased foreign aid for Africa, Eastern Asia and South America.  But, in this case, the Pro-Lifers have once again been hypocritical.

Most hypocritical of all are the right-wing Christian zealot nutjobs who actually went so far as to kill doctors and staff at abortion clinics in the 1990s.  Driven to furious, frothing outrage by a few preachers who vehemently advocate the defending of life at all costs, these impressionable men were fashioned into basically suicide bombers of intolerance, bomibing clinics and shooting doctors with the expectation that they were giving up their own lives in the service of saving what they believed to be unborn lives.  Classic Christian zealot martyrdom, not too different from today’s jihadists.  And because 99.9% of the pro-life lobby is hardcore Christian, it becomes difficult to separate the issue from the religion.  Although there are a few who set themselves apart from the religious fanatics, like Hentoff, for the most part the zealots become crazier and crazier and creepier and creepier as we know more and more about them.

And there is another problem with lobbying to change public perception about something.  Here is a group of people who believe passionately in the idea that abortion is murder.  An idea that can be reasoned out in a logical, clear and sensible way by people who are not religious.  Like Hentoff, and Derschowitz, and Chomsky.  (Of the three, only Hentoff is pro-life, but all three make very reasonable arguments on both sides.)  But once you start labeling yourself - and the label “pro-life” certainly carries with it the connotation that if you are against them, then you are “pro-death” - and calling on God’s word to back you up, you are leaving yourself open to the possibility that people will ignore you.  After all, the most angry and passionate anti-abortion people are also the same who believe homosexuals should be executed.  And that Harry Potter is immoral.  And how can anyone, anywhere, really take these people seriously?

So, once again, we get religious bigotry clouding a real issue.  And this movie does what it can to get to the heart of the real issue.  Dozens of interviews, with all kinds of interesting (and sometimes scary) people.  Professors, intellectuals, religious leaders (some pro, some con), women having abortions, abortion clinic doctors and nurses.  Victims of the violence and insanity of the evangelical lunatics.  Those lunatics themselves.  Paul Hill, the Fred Phelps of the abortion issue, who preached the “execution [murder]” of abortion clinic doctors, under the pretext that if you killed them, you were doing God’s work.  Which is the really dangerous thing about these people - they believe they speak FOR God.  That only they know what he’s really saying in his little book there.  And they are insane.  Hill among them, who eventually put his ideas into action and murdered two people, while seriously injuring a third.  He was killed by lethal injection in 2003 - a fate that really underscores the sensible philosophies of Chomsky, Derschowitz and Hentoff in this film.

Throughout Lake of Fire, there are graphic and disturbing images of actual abortion procedures.  And their emotional and physical side-effects.  This is not, I repeat, NOT for the squeamish.  We see women being pried open, in full detail.  We see the actual stuff that comes out of the uterus.  We see more than I’m sure any of us ever wanted to see, ever, in our lives.  For any reason.  But this stuff is essential for the essentially neutral tone of the movie.  When the anti-abortion activists claim that the doctors who perform the abortions used to crush the skulls of the babies, but now they sell the heads because it’s more profitable, we need to know that this is an insane thing to say.  We need to know what’s true and what isn’t.  And Lake Of Fire attempts, over a very long running time, to do just that. 

And it does a good job.  Tony Kaye, the director, worked on this film for more than 15 years.  And there has been ample material to film over those fifteen years.  Which means that this is as complete a film document as you will find on the issue, as well-researched as anything you might find, and will stand for years as the definitive movie about abortion.  Whether you’re pro-choice or anti-abortion, this movie will teach you something you didn’t already know, and is worth watching.  If you have a strong constitution.

The Walker is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.  It knows exactly where it’s going, exactly how to get there, and exactly how long it’s going to take.  But that’s kind of like saying the same of a Michael Bolton album.  Sure, he made the exact album he wanted to make, but why in God’s name would anyone want to listen?  And in the same way, I can’t understand why people would want to watch The Walker.  Well, the cast in impressive.  Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Bacall and Kristen Scott Thomas.  Which might get some people to rent this film.  But I can’t see it getting them to like it once they have done so.

Harrelson plays a gay man in Washington who doesn’t seem to do much except hang out with the society ladies and play canasta, gossiping about everything tawdry that goes on around him.  He is referred to as a “walker”, a man who walks around with rich women.  I don’t know if these people actually exist, or are referred to as such, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Harrelson has this fake southern accent which is disconcerting at best, obnoxious at worst.  He comes off as a gossipy cross between Truman Capote and Scarlett O’Hara, which is not a character I thought we ever needed to see.  His friendship with these women is a shallow one, based almost entirely on surface appearances.  His life outside his gossip-sewing circle is also shallow and surface-deep.  This is what we learn in the first half hour.

And that first half hour, as with the rest of the film, is meticulously planned out and executed.  Soon, Harrelson is driving Kristen Scott Thomas to visit the man with whom she is having an extra-marital affair.  When she finds that man murdered, a vague plot is exposed.  A vague plot, involving vague motives, featuring vague power players in Washington with a vague denouement and a vague resolution.  Shadowy figures pass through the scene, old friends turn out not to really be friends, and Harrelson takes a vague stand based on some vague morals and some vague motivations, which seems to basically involve him being vaguely questioned by vaguely politically motivated cops.

You get the sense that this film is vague?  Well, it is.  Nothing concrete ever really happens, certainly nothing exciting happens, and although the narrative is pretty straightforward, the movie barely scratches the surface of what surely is meant to be a very complex political murder plot.  There is just not enough here to interest people, and on top of that, you have Woody Harrelson playing the central role, one which is just plain irritating.  Skip The Walker.