Cynical Cinema

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.

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 opening scene to For The Bible Tells Me So is great.  It’s a little scary at first.  I was watching, thinking “what have I got myself into?”  It appeared as though the film was going to be a bunch of anti-gay Christian propaganda.  It was an old news clip of a woman talking on television about how homosexuality was a terrible thing, and that she and her associates were not there to condemn the gay folk, but rather to help them by changing their lifestyle and “curing” them.  Then, out of nowhere, a guy shows up and slams her in the face with a pie.  Hilarious!  As it turns out, the film is not anti-gay propaganda, but rather anti-anti-gay propaganda.  It examines the way fundamentalist, right-wing Christians have distorted the meaning of the words in the Bible to further a bizarrely conceived anti-homosexual agenda.

People are quoted everywhere in this movie saying that the bible says homosexuality is “an abomination”.  And many of them can, indeed, quote chapter and verse.  However, the gay-bashers and anti-homosexual preachers and pastors and rabbis are using a very convenient interpretation of the bible.  Of course, we all know that the bible is interpreted very differently by many people.  Which is why some Christians are catholics and others knock on my door to give me pamphlets about doomsday that feature creepy pictures of children feeding goats.  But everyone who has chosen to engage in this crusade against homosexuality is doing more than interpreting the bible differently than sane people.  They are purposely ignoring large portions of the book.

You see, if you took the one passage from Leviticus that homophobes have used as their shining example of God’s hatred of homosexuality, and you took it at face value, you would be entirely missing the point.  This is the passage:  “You shall not lie with a male as those who lie with a female; it is an abomination.”  If that was the only passage you read, and you were a bible-thumping nutjob, you might think God was anti-gay.  But if you read the rest of Leviticus, you would realize that the word “abomination” is not nearly as harsh as it seems.  In fact, anything the least bit out of the ordinary is, in this chapter, an “abomination”.  Like eating shrimp.  Abomination.  Eating rabbit.  Abomination.  Eating bacon, oysters, ham, pork chops, lobster and crab.  Abominations.  But you are allowed to eat locusts.  Huzzah for the bible!  I don’t see Fred Phelps holding rallies outside seafood restaurants or pig farms.  Or eating locusts.  Although I would very much like to see Fred Phelps eat locusts.

Actually, Phelps is not in this movie, amazingly.  Which is kind of great, because he represents the extreme.  The really out-to-lunch lunatic fringe of the church and Christianity in general.  And that isn’t what the movie is about.  It’s about the opinions of regular, ordinary Christians, and how they are affected by those around them.  We meet many devoted religious believers who have had to deal with gay children.  Some are more tolerant than others, some actually became estranged from their children while others became activists for gay rights themselves.  The film also deals with the idea of ordaining gay ministers.  The backlash against those who have become ordained, and the support they received from other parts of the Christian community. 

And this is what makes this movie wonderful.  It is certainly a movie that takes sides - It has chosen to take the side of common sense over the side of rabid homphobic insanity.  But the fact that it stays right in the middle, with average Christians of all denominations - catholic, baptist, lutheran, you name it - and examine their beliefs and the origin of those beliefs.  And for the most part, these beliefs originate with the ignorance of others.  If your priest is constantly telling you that homosexuality is unnatural and evil, and you have built your life on following the bible and the teachings of your church, then it only stands to reason that you will have a difficult time reconciling those deeply-held beliefs with the truth when you are presented with the real facts.

After watching the film, I wanted to read more about the church and the crazy divide that has been caused by support for, and opposition to, the gay and lesbian community.  In fact, I have done considerable research just for this review.  Here is a great website that examines all six bible chapters that homophobes cite when condemning the gay lifestyle, and explanations for why it’s a little nuts.

http://www.otkenyer.hu/truluck/six_bible_passages.html

And that’s the last thing that makes this movie great.  It knows exactly where it’s going.  It doesn’t talk at all about non-religious people.  And I am most assuredly a non-religious person.  But I found it fascinating nonetheless.  It never makes the easy point that blindly following the bible is a poor way to make any decision.  It never takes the easy road that is constantly presented by fervent religious believers with their crazy behaviour and antics.  It takes on those beliefs at the very root, and presents the facts in such a way that almost any religious person, with the possible exception of the most rabid homophobic ones, would have to really think about their views in the context of this film.  A powerful statement on an important subject.

Alright Focus on the Family and like-minded Christians, I’m calling you out. You’re getting lazy. You spend so much time fighting against ambiguously gay television characters like Spongebob and Tinky-Winky, that you don’t have time for your own children. And why do you need to complain about these TV characters and movies like The Golden Compass? Because the only thing left to raise your children, what with all that time spent complaining, is the television. And you want to make sure that while being raised by that TV, your young impressionable boys don’t happen across the Teletubbies and all of a sudden start liking showtunes, lusting after Skeet Ulrich, and planning for a career as an interior decorator, or Kevin Fededline’s backup dancer. I know, I know, you COULD just spend time with them, making sure they watched only Christian-approved programming and maybe reading with them, but that seems like a lot of effort, doesn’t it? Better to write angry letters and volunteer at the latest Fred Phelps or anti-abortion rally, leaving your children in the care of (you hope) the VeggieTales.

So then what happens? Your kids are now addicted to cartoons and television. The only way to get through to them now is through other cartoons or possibly video games. And you want the to learn the bible, but they’re not going to be reading on their own or anything. So now, what, NOW what? Well, you hope that biblical stories get made into cartoons, so your kids can watch these cartoons and grow up to be just like you, and join you at the next Pat Robertson seminar. And lo and behold, here comes The Ten Commandments, the story of Moses, in cartoon form! And sure, you could always wait until Easter for the Charlton Heston movie to come on public access television, but then you would have to strap your children down with bungee cords and tape their eyelids open, because there’s no way they’re sitting through that one on their own.

Well, thank God for Christian Slater, Elliott Gould, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley, who have all provided their vocal talents to The Ten Commandments, (cartoon version), which came out May 13th courtesy of Alliance Films. This is one of those computer-generated “animated” movies where people kind of look like people, and kind of move like people, but they are mostly bald because animating hair would be that much more difficult. Again - lazy! Just because Yul Brynner was bald in 1956 doesn’t mean all ancient Egyptians were hairless, OK? Lazy, lazy, lazy. With The Ten Commandments, the story is already there. All you have to do is tell it in a cool, new way. But this movie hasn’t even done that. It’s just a cartoon remake, almost scene-for-scene, of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic! Down to the scene with the staffs and the snakes, and the slave labourers doing their thing, and the parting of the red sea while Moses stands facing it. That one is pretty much shot-for shot the same.

Which means that what we’re doing, in watching this film, is comparing it with Charlton Heston. And it comes up pretty darn short. Cheap, easy animation vs. a cast of thousands, with massive cinematography and epic storytelling? No contest. And Heston vs. Christian Slater? Come ON. Heston had the Moses voice. The deep, booming Moses voice. Christian Slater does not have that voice. In fact, he has a pretty sissy, weenie voice. Can you imagine, in a live action movie, Woody Allen playing Moses? That’s how this movie feels.

“Let my people go!”

“Umm…no.”

“OK, I’ll take my staff and I’ll leave.”

“Yeah, you’d best be going.”

And then there’s Alfred Molina, as Ramses, who calls for Moses like he’s William Shatner in The Wrath Of Khan. “Moooooosseeees!” “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!” And Elliott Gould as God may as well be…well…Woody Allen also.

So what it comes down to for me is this - why? Why make this movie at all? I wracked my brain long and hard before coming up with the laziness explanation. And I am fully aware, so don’t bother pointing it out, that the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments is more of a Jewish story than a Christian one. But I don’t see Jewish lobby groups complaining about Patrick Starfish. When I do, I will make fun of them as well. And this might not be the right forum for this, but…isn’t what Moses (and of course God) did to the Egyptian people…terrorism? The plagues - you can’t drink the water, it’s unsafe. The locusts have eaten your crops, so you can’t eat. Your civilians will die if you don’t…let God’s people go. We will kill all of the first born sons of Egypt. Yes. We will murder your innocent citizens if you don’t give us our independence. Umm…sound familiar? Perhaps in Palestine, the people might…OK. I was right, this is not the right forum for this. The Ten Commandments, stupid cartoon version, comes out tomorrow, May 13th, from Alliance Films.