Lost in the Movies: iraq

Showing posts with label iraq. Show all posts

Southland Tales w/ guest Andrew Cook (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #54) + appearance by Vera Drew & capsules on Donnie Darko/The Box

For the finale of the Lost in the Movies podcast (at least for now, I don't plan to return from the scheduled summer/fall hiatus), I'm offering up a doozy. This second guest conversation with Andrew Cook - who covered Eyes Wide Shut with me years ago - is the longest episode on this feed, an hour-plus discussion of the wild, sprawling Richard Kelly opus Southland Tales, which I've supplemented with numerous bonus sections including a couple feedback readings, an exchange with previous Twin Peaks Conversations guest (and The People's Joker director) Vera Drew about this film, and a couple capsule reviews of Kelly's other movies: Donnie Darko and The Box. At the center of this coverage, Andrew and I dig into the complicated place of Southland in the decade it was made which also features as its half-imagined subject. As I said when cross-posting the Patreon episode which originally contained this material (a sprawling survey of zeroes cinema and culture), "Set in an alternate version of 2008 but shot in 2006, it imagines an America whose War of Terror tremors have caught up with a culture that just wanted to go shopping - transforming the country into a manic police state with an active resistance and wild sci-fi developments emerging virtually overnight." Both of us are fascinated with how Kelly holds a funhouse mirror up to the film's own time as well as, inadvertently, the Trump era which followed a decade later (and may be ongoing today). Meanwhile, there are currently plans for me to make a guest appearance on the Southland Tales-focused Have a Nice Apodcalypse podcast for further discussion dwelling on the connections between Richard Kelly and David Lynch, so stay tuned...

While this concludes my public release of "film in focus" podcasts, there are still many movies I covered only on Patreon. In coming months, I'll share previews of these on the Lost in the Movies feed but if you want to jump into this backlog right now, check out this directory (scroll down for Patreon exclusives) and become a patron.

Subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts

You can also listen on Pinecast and Spotify

(and most places podcasts are found)

The Patreon episode intended for last month will be released in four parts.

These links will be updated as the episodes are published in mid-December...

Listen to Episode 97A: 60s bonus / Concluding the 90s & 70s...

Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (capsules on Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, The Swimmer, Dr. Strangelove, Dog Day Afternoon, The Muppet Movie, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Witches, Heat, The Blair Witch Project, Edward Scissorhands, Election, Groundhog Day, Total Recall, Dick Tracy, archive reading of To Kill a Mockingbird + feedback/media/work updates & more)

Listen to PUBLIC Episode 97B: Everybody Look What's Going Down - The 60s Archive
(readings of Breathless, The Wild Bunch, Cleo From 5 to 7, Before the Revolution, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Loves of a Blonde, Primary, 4 Days in November, Dear Brigitte, The Trip, Greetings & the Olympics + 60s/00s crossover w/ The Life & Death of Peter Sellers)

Listen to Episode 97C: The 00s in November (& beyond)...

Southland Tales w/ guest Andrew Cook (w/ his feedback & my capsule on 300 + capsules on No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, A History of Violence, Brokeback Mountain, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Darjeeling Limited, The Dark Knight, Gangs of New York, 500 Days of Summer, The Ring, Donnie Darko, The Box & archive reading of my reflections on the decade)

Listen to PUBLIC Episode 97D: Hall of Mirrors - The 00s Archive

(readings of 25th Hour, Inland Empire, earlier reviews of The Dark Knight & 500 Days of Summer, You Can Count on Me, Funny Ha Ha, Thirteen, The World, Iraq in Fragments, The Story of Marie and Julien, The Girlfriend Experience & the Olympics)

Introducing the episodes

As we spread out from August's focus on the eighties, moving into earlier and later decades in each direction, we reach two eras forty years apart. Yet they make the perfect pairing in my mind, in part because I was obsessed with the sixties during the zeroes, a time I experienced firsthand and which shaped my perceptions of the world for better or worse. In a way, these decades are a natural fit at least from the American perspective: both haunted by national traumas (Kennedy's assassination and 9/11), both dogged by quagmire wars of choice (Vietnam and Iraq in particular), both racked by technological transformations which troubled as well as enticed (inward for the age of the iPhone, outward for the epoch of the moonshot). But while the sixties gave birth to a vibrant youth counterculture and political resistance, the zeroes often felt like a dead zone to those of us living through it. This was part of my hunger for sixties media; I sought work which excavated and explored the turbulence that I could feel under the surface in the cold, sterile, repressed Bush era but which somehow always remained locked off. These were periods of deep societal alienation which expressed that alienation in very different ways.

With all that in mind what better film to focus on than Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, the sprawling, notorious follow-up to his cult classic Donnie Darko (which I discuss more briefly in this podcast, along with its own deep if different zeroes zeitgeist connections)? Set in an alternate version of 2008 but shot in 2006, it imagines an America whose War of Terror tremors have caught up with a culture that just wanted to go shopping - transforming the country into a manic police state with an active resistance and wild sci-fi developments emerging virtually overnight. Ambivalent after my first viewing years ago, I invited Andrew Cook as a return guest (after our Eyes Wide Shut episode); he's a big Kelly fan who knows the film inside and out which made for an interesting dynamic as I tried to wrap my head around it. This is one of the longest film in focus podcast segments I've ever recorded, running over an hour as we dig into both the film and the era it depicts...and re-invents as something else (perhaps the Trump era to come). This also makes for an offbeat but appropriate pairing with my sixties film in focus, the very different avant-garde apocalypse of Weekend. Here Jean-Luc Godard reaches the apotheosis and negation of his radical sprint through the decade, anticipating the chaos of May '68 months ahead of time. The selection, in which I wrestle with a film that converted me to Godard when I first saw it but which I had more trouble with this time, is one more tribute to the legendary director who passed away in September (I also focused on his eighties film Hail Mary in a previous episode).

Elsewhere, Andrew's contributions continue when I read his in-depth feedback (alongside my own short reflection) on Zack Snyder's 300, an iconic, and much more popular, film by another of his favorite directors. In capsule form, I run through a number of memorable zeroes films alongside a smaller selection of sixties classics, wrap up my viewings of the nineties (alongside a pair of quite different seventies classics), and offer updates on my recent intake and output in several mediums. Most notably, in addition to a couple archive pieces that I wanted to center and share on their own - a meditation on the power and limitation of To Kill a Mockingbird and a broad polemic expressing my frustration with the state of American culture in the Bush era - I'm also gathering a number of pieces focused on each decade into two public archive episodes, offering a survey not just of zeroes and sixties cinema, but my own perception of them at various points.

As noted in the introduction to this podcast, I am planning to wrap up this podcast approach - combining updates with film reviews and other topics in a main montly episode - after reaching #100 in February. Though there's still much content to come in those months, I can't think of a better way to begin my ending than with this particular episode(s).

Meanwhile, I've continued chugging along with my advance character studies every month - although I need to pick up the pace if I want to have the necessary backlog ready at year's end for a 2023 public debut. November's trio includes one of the third season's scummiest characters alongside one of its most heroic. Unlock these pieces for $1/month to learn more...

EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #66, 65 & 63 (#64 already published)

(become a patron to discover their identities)

And Patreon also housed my $5/month tier reward, the second part of my discussion with the director of The People's Joker (as discussed in last week's cross-post). Southland Tales comes up again too!

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Vera Drew

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Listen to Episode 93: Coffee and Cigarettes (+ feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Russian Revolution, failures of the decadent right, history of malls, archive reading: Lady and the Tramp & more)

Once again, a fairly random viewing - one of just two movies I watched in July - provides the film in focus to anchor this month's podcast. I happened to see Jim Jarmusch's quirky Coffee and Cigarettes because I was visiting someone who had an old DVD of it onhand and was intrigued by the title. Reflecting on both its seventeen-year production (assembled into an anthology from disparately shot but aesthetically similar short films) and the nineteen years since its release, I'm able to explore themes that always interest me regarding the passage of time - alongside other threads working their way through these blackout sketches of (usually) two actors playing themselves in a fictional, often contentious, conversation.

There were a lot of political topics dredged up by this month's podcast recommendations, including the legacy of revolutions, what Boris Johnson's resignation tells us about the state of the right and its appeal, and how shopping malls have evolved as cultural touchstones. There's a bit more feedback this time than last time (all from YouTube), another Marvel movie to discuss in brief capsule form, and for the second month in a row I have an essay on a fifties classic to share from my archive.

Meanwhile, having finally caught up to June's Twin Peaks character studies in late July, I caught up to July's just a few days into August. That's an improvement at least, and now I'm on pace to provide three advance entries to patrons every month going forward. This trio was particularly striking despite the low ranking, not only for the characters' onscreen antics but also the performers' offscreen lives...

EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #80 - 78

(#83 - 81 already published)

(become a patron to discover their identities)

I introduced and cross-posted the full conversation on the site last week but actually the one post to make it up on schedule in July was Part 2 of this exchange with the hosts of the weird fiction podcast Counter Esperanto for the $5/month tier's reward...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Jubel Brosseau & Karl Eckler

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Listen to Episode 92: The Power of Nightmares (+ feedback/media/work updates: King Kong vs. Godzilla, In the Line of Fire, political shifts, the Iraq War, archive reading: An American in Paris & more)

Just a few weeks after my last (belated) monthly podcast, there wasn't much to update in terms of viewing, listening, or behind-the-scenes work, but I did have one film/series I wanted to zoom in on. Adam Curtis' eccentric 2004 BBC program The Power of Nightmares offers a cutting, hypnotic audiovisual analysis of the dance between American neoconservatives and Middle Eastern Islamists which eventually led to the War on Terror. I'd seen, and never forgotten, the first chapter not long after it was first released. This time I watched the whole thing and reflected on it from a different standpoint than I had at the time, further to the left and more deeply skeptical of the government line on Al Qaeda (even so, some of the wild discrepancies and overreaches that the film highlights remain astounding). Hopefully I can watch more Curtis films in the near future; I've been fascinated by his style for a long time but never really explored his work. A year ago, my all too ambitious plans included a chapter-by-chapter reaction to the director's recent analysis of the left's ambitions and failures, Can't Get You Out of My Head. Perhaps that will be next in my exploration - when I finally find some time in my schedule.

Elsewhere, I offer some capsules on a handful of films I watched in June, riff on similar Bush era themes based on some podcasts I listened to (touching on my own political evolution - or evolutions), and end the podcast on a lighter note with a reading from my past work on a Gene Kelly musical, albeit one that also toys with issues of war, loss, and wistful regrets.

As I struggled to keep up with various projects, particularly Lost in Twin Peaks, I fell behind on the latest patron reward: the presentation of three character studies each month. Only several weeks after the month ended could I finally share the first one (the other two followed the next week, and I'm already moving ahead on July's advances so they won't suffer the same fate). Despite the delay, this represents a major breakthrough. Remarkably, I never wrote a single character study in all the years since The Return - despite my oft-stated goals. That half-decade was spent, when I focused on this work at all, slowly putting together the posts on minor characters and the like. Hopefully from now on I can move forward at a much quicker pace (on a positive note, when I finally got down to writing it, the first piece didn't take very long at all). (This cross-post accidentally went up last week with most of what you see here, and the reason I removed it and re-publushed today was because two these character studies were not yet ready.)

I won't discuss who these entries cover - the public gets to find that out if/when the series begins official publication in early 2023. But here's where you can find out, and read them ahead of time...

TWIN PEAKS Character Series advance entries for June: #86 / #85 & #84

(become a patron to discover their identities)

following the announcement of

Update: June character entries delayed, should be coming soon

I've already cross-posted both parts of my conversation with Cameron Cloutier in a separate entry, but just to be thorough, here's the $5/month exclusive that went up in June...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Cameron Cloutier

Podcast Line-Ups for...

The how & why of my adventure in filmmaking, followed by the end result.
Click here to watch the film first.

Commencement: Discovering a Premise

My long journey began in, of all places, Hollywood.

Not behind the closed doors of a cushy studio office, or in a limousine winding between the (literally) star-studded sidewalks, nor even on a sweaty camaraderie-boosting soundstage but at a wings joint on Sunset Boulevard. It had been nearly two months since my quixotic arrival in Los Angeles, but this was the first time I had actually gone out in the city itself, after weeks of scrambling to find a place to live and work. Now, as the clock rolled past midnight, and April gave way to May, I was unwinding with co-workers after a stressful week.

Having finally secured a position at a fundraising organization, I set to work immediately pursuing my real goal, making movies, only to discover, like the characters in Godard's tragicomic La Chinoise, that what I thought had been a great leap was only the beginning of a long march. Additionally, the week had seen my blog disappear into thin air (later resolved, although at the moment my prospects appeared bleak) and offered reminders that, even once hired "permanently" this high-turnover job was hardly a sure thing (indeed, within a few days, I'd be the only one at this table left at the office).

Tonight, the talk quickly shifted from work to movies - street fundraisers, like all impermanent employees in this city, tend to be supplementing work, or dreams of work, in the entertainment industry. I turned to a younger co-worker, who had earlier claimed many story concepts he didn't know what to do with (in other words, the exact opposite of my problem), and asked him if he had any short film ideas he'd be willing to share.

He responded, "Yeah...I haven't written much on it, but I'd love to see a movie about a bunch of characters waiting at a train station for the afterlife. It wouldn't be about where they were going or what happened when the train arrived, but what they were thinking, and who they were."

With that, the wheels began to turn...

Evening update: If you were having trouble viewing on Vimeo, please note that the embed has been changed to You Tube

Class of 2002 is subtitled "a photo-memoir" because it takes the form of a documentary fusing snapshots, home movies, found footage and voiceover to recall the tragic lives of five young people the narrator knew in high school. This is, of course, a work of fiction and through its anecdotes, illustrations, and asides I hope to tell an overarching story. The narrator focuses on his five classmates, whom we discover through his descriptions and recollections, but eventually we learn more about his own life, and how it connects to the people and places we've encountered.

You can view the short film, uninterrupted and in its entirety here:

(It's also on Vimeo; however, I had trouble viewing it on that platform, and switched to You Tube.)

I will return later with further details about the how & why of this film. For now, please watch it. I made it for you guys, as well as for me. Enjoy.

Class of 2002 (Part 2), directed by Joel Bocko

___________________

The second half of the film was longer than expected, so I split it into two further parts (hence the slightly abrupt ending of this segment). The conclusion, Part 3, will premiere on Sunday followed by a posting of the entire film, probably with some minor technical and aesthetic modifications, on Monday morning.

Watch Part 1.

Now Playing: Green Zone

I was in a shopping mall when the first bombs dropped on Baghdad. It was spring break, 2003, and I was vacationing with my family in Florida, taking a breather from an unsatisfying freshman year of college and the incessant march to war that had accompanied it. Always a history buff, I was both fascinated and repelled by what was happening - the notion of invasion never made sense to me and Bush's justifications appeared half-baked at best, yet it was with a sense of relief that the inevitable drumbeat reached its crescendo (if it's going to happen, happen already!). And of course it was a bit overwhelming to experience such a historic moment, and to feel so frustratingly sidelined. That evening, in fact, sitting down for dinner at a plastic restaurant in the middle of touristy mega-plaza, I quizzed my parents about their own brushes with history: where had they been when JFK was killed? When a man walked on the moon?

I think we were onto the fall of the Berlin Wall when our waitress approached and let us know that they had just started bombing Iraq - earlier than expected, since Bush's 48-hour warning to Saddam had only passed a few hours ago, and the bombing had not been expected till tomorrow morning. The young woman also mentioned her twin sister, stationed in Kuwait at that very moment, awaiting the ground invasion. She kept her cool, but looked shaken. That night we huddled around the TV set in the hotel room and watched the eerie orange glow over the ancient city, and I remember feeling irked that, when we flipped the channels, normal programming was on some of the cable networks. The next morning, vacationers splashed and swam in the swimming pool but an uneasy sense of irreality hung in the air. In the lobby of the resort, families - I particularly remember the old men in Hawaiin shirts - gathered around the TV as a Rumsfeld press conference unfolded.

There we were, surrounded by palm trees and the heat, half a world away from the action. It was an unforgettable sensation. Why do I mention all of this, particularly when I try to avoid these autobiographical, anecdotal asides in my pieces? Because Green Zone re-awakened the feelings of that moment: the odd mixture of pride, frustration, confusion, and helplessness that accompanied the most ambitious and dramatic start of an American war since World War II. I saw the film the other night in a crowded multiplex (though the lines forming through the lobby were for the 3-D Alice in Wonderland) and before the movie we were deluged by Avatar advertisements for Coca-Cola and embarrassing promos for Kirstie Alley's self-humiliating new reality show (during which I put my head down and tried to read a book I'd brought along). The audience chatted and chuckled ironically at the self-aggrandizing trash flaunted across the screen, but they fell silent when the screen went to black. The mood was quiet, intent - suddenly we all seemed to be in the same boat again, riding stormy seas, this time headed into the maelstrom instead of huddling on the horizon, trying to squint and glimpse at what was going on inside.

This is the first entry in my renewed Best of the 21st Century series. It is cross-posted at Wonders in the Dark; the rest of the series will unfold exclusively on that site.

Two pictures to sum up a decade. One, a man encased in defensive armour, surrounded by explosive canisters. He's a stranger in a foreign land, an embattled American, homemade bombs weaving a spiderweb in the desert sands beneath his feet. The devices are all aimed in his direction like gigantic bullets, together forming a silent threat simmering just underneath the surface. Two, a man in a cavernous, overwhelming, colorful yet utterly sterile supermarket, faced down by hundreds upon hundreds of cardboard boxes, each containing processed and mass-produced snacks. More significant than the contents is the packaging - this is nutrition second, consumption first, and an empty, dissatisfying consumption at that. The bombs are existential threats; the boxes are not, and yet somehow their spiritual threat seems deeper. As Jason Bellamy astutely notes (in an observation which inspired the pictures and paragraph which open this piece), "In staring at all the cereal boxes on the shelf, he is presented with a multitude of choices, just as when he's disarming a bomb, but his choices don't mean anything. There's no 'wrong' choice. It's a reminder of how he misses the rush of duty, when every decision has a potentially life-altering consequence."

Pick your poison. Sgt. William James has certainly picked his.

"A cloying cliché presented as profundity" - so Peter Plagens, Newsweek art critic, describes Jeff Koons' Hanging Heart and, by turn, the Bush era in Newsweek's recent article, "The Way We Were: Art and Culture In the Bush Era." One could add that it's also a particularly apt description of what passes for socio-cultural criticism these days, with the contents of Newsweek's run-down providing the latest example. The article's opening reads, "If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing." The implication is that somehow the Zeros have been a bonanza of cultural expression, angry fist-waving at our social conditions, a constant artistic outcry at the folly of our times. This is, of course, absurd, and to be fair, many of Newsweek's critics take a different tack, highlighting - as Plagens does with Koons' Heart - the ways in which glib, narcissistic, or tacky art has inadvertently reflected the ethos of the epoch. Yet even here their critique is problematic, for if the arts are thrown in the lion's den with our much-maligned president, the castigators largely refrain from applying the same vitriol towards themselves, the cultural (and mostly liberal) establishment, or us, the American people. Reading this article stirred up a variety of thoughts and feelings, criticisms which both reflected the writing and responded to it. The rest of my reaction follows after the jump.

Mid-decade, filmmaker James Longley took his small camera to Iraq, where he shot, directed, and sound-recorded, and later composed music for and co-edited, a truly fascinating movie. Insinuating himself into various Iraqi populations, he formulated a graceful, poetic film which feels as different from other Iraq docs as a verse feels from a newspaper article. Iraq in Fragments presents the documentary as art film, in an unusual but captivating approach. Much of the film has the feel of narrative fiction, but by sidestepping continuity - the cutting is impressionistic, the sound design musical, the photography close-quartered and graceful - the movie avoids most of the compromises inherent in documentary form. This is a good movie with which to draw my election series to a close, because it's a reminder of the humanistic and individualistic elements underpinning politics and world affairs...the soul in the body politic.

Iraq in Fragments exists in three fragments of its own. The first fragment follows a little Sunni boy in Baghdad - he has difficulty in school and works for a machinist who is alternatively tough-loving and physically rough. The second fragment does not focus on one individual but rather the collective passion of the Shiites in Iraq's South as they coalesce around Moqtada al-Sadr to discover their post-Saddam identity.The third and final fragment travels to the north, visiting with Kurdish peasants who bake bricks, herd goats, and rush to polling places when they get the chance to vote, hoping to stake a claim on their own land. Each fragment is poetic in texture, ranging from the distracted sadness of the little boy to the fierce, frenetic violence of the militias to the cozy pastoral lives of the Kurds. Form scrupulously echoes content and the free flow of impressions and experiences and images and sounds is liberating and indeed startling after experiencing so many informationally-focused documentaries.

No End in Sight is one of the best Iraq documentaries because it is isn't powered by justifiable rage but rather sheer disbelief and frustration. Its director, Charles Ferguson, ostensibly pro-war in 2003, does not focus too extensively on the reasons for going to war or even on the subterfuge involved in the preparations. This it leaves to other documentaries (whatever the motives, this plays as effectively as Michael Moore introducing the uninsured in Sicko and then announcing that the movie would not be about them). Instead, No End in Sight chronicles the unbelievably incompetent and damaging way that the arrogant Bush administration, and especially the Department of Defense, conducted the postwar reconstruction. Or lack thereof. Complete lack thereof. In World War II, the plans for postwar Japan and Germany were drawn up two years in advance. For Iraq, a war of choice in which we had all the time in the world to think ahead, postwar planning did not begin in earnest until two months before the invasion began. This boggles the mind, but it's only the beginning.

On December 5, 2002, an Afghan taxi driver picked up several passengers in the small city of Khost. The driver's name was Dilawar and he was a slight man (though 5'9," he supposedly weighed only 122 lbs). He was young, only 22 years old, and had a family in Yakubi, a small village, where he agreed to take the three men. Passing an American base which had earlier been rocketed, Dilawar's car was stopped by Afghan guerrillas guarding the base. Finding an electric stabilizer in the trunk of his car - which Dilawar claimed not to know about - he was turned over to the Americans and held in Bagram Collection Point, where he was interrogated as a suspected terrorist. On December 10, 2002, he was declared dead. He was the second prisoner to die at Bagram within a few weeks.

Fahrenheit 9/11 achieves a more total immersion than any other documentary I've seen. Which is to say, it erases the distance between the audience and the material, the emotional remove that remains when we watch the news on TV. Fahrenheit 9/11 plays as a narrative film, a story unwinding before our eyes in the way all Hollywood stories unwind, complete with the appropriate formal tricks (cutting footage to echo the mise-en scene of a screen drama) and subtle manipulations (streamlining facts to fit a conventional narrative). In erasing this distancing effect, in adopting the tools of narrative fiction rather than exploratory documentary, Moore crafts a powerful work, as personal as any auteurist art film, as immersive as any escapist entertainment. He also disables our ability to think and critically analyze what we are seeing, fashions a work of sublime propaganda, and crafts an intensely manipulative, misleading, and demagogic pseudo-doc.

(W.) -Click here for the full review.

In the last scene of W., our hero imagines himself in a baseball park at night. He's on the field, alone, the stands empty. Yet he hears the roar of the crowd and the crack of the bat and runs back to catch the fly ball. He grins, puts his glove in the air and waits...and waits...and waits. He furrows his brow and peers up into the inky black sky. Nothing. No ball. He keeps waiting, and the movie ends. Like "Bushie," "Geo," or "W" as he's variously called throughout Oliver Stone's election-eve biopic, we in the audience keep waiting for that revelation, that home run or final out that clears everything up. We never get it.

By the end of the movie, we still don't quite understand what's going on in that head, why things came to this point - but the man at the center doesn't really seem to understand either, and we're brothers in confusion. In JFK and many of his other breathless, frenetic opuses, Oliver Stone tried to shine a bright light on all the chaos, illuminating some sort of Truth (perhaps a "counter-myth" as he calls it in reference to JFK). In W., Stone takes his time, doesn't rush, avoids stylistic fireworks, and delivers the movie with a great deal of clarity. Yet he doesn't illuminate any transcendent Truth, any "ah ha! so that's what it's all about!" comeuppance to the past 8 years of obfuscation. Instead he seems to suggest that even our president didn't understand what was going on, and has passed his perplexity on to us.

"I'll take out some pictures and I'll start to show them, they'll yeah yeah yeah yeah...You asked me to look at them, give me the goddamn respect of looking at my pictures. You have any idea what I've done? If I gave them ten minutes to feel that fear, that loneliness, and that sacrifice they might pay a little bit more attention." - Mike Moriarty

There has not yet been a definitive Iraq documentary, at least not one that I've seen. Why We Fight (which I reviewed here) tries and fails, but most other docs (perhaps wisely) focus on one aspect of the conflict. So you get No End in Sight, a masterful if dispiriting look at how horribly the occupation was run, full of talking heads, detailed and illustrative anecdotes, and an extreme focus on a specific period, described in precise chronology. Or Gunner Palace, the self-consciously stylish work of an embedded filmmaker, attempting to show daily life for the grunt. Or Iraq in Fragments, whose extraordinarily impressionistic vision of Iraqi life leaves American soldiers and tanks as foreboding spectres in the background, focusing on the lives of a Sunni orphan, a Shiite religious fanatic, and a Kurdish farmer. Iraq in Fragments may be a masterpiece of sorts, but it certainly does not offer a totalistic vision, nor does it attempt to illuminate life for an American in that country.

The War Tapes shares Gunner Palace's grunt-eye view, but with a notable difference: here we don't have a filmmaker trying to understand and portray the soldier's perspective - the soldiers themselves share and often dominate filmmaking duties.

Why did we fight after 9/11? Why did we fight in Iraq? Why have we fought since World War II? Why do we fight at all? What does Gore Vidal have to say about all this? Perhaps if Why We Fight had tackled any of these questions individually (well, maybe not the last one), it would be a more focused and satisfying documentary. Then again, given the paucity of answers Eugene Jaracki's award-winning 2005 documentary provides despite all the questions, we might still have come up empty-handed. Anyway, great documentaries like Hearts and Minds can juggle numerous topics and questions, so Why We Fight's big muddle is ultimately the result of a formal failure and not over-ambition.

If any war required a documentary explaining its motives, it's this one. But like the Iraq invasion itself, Why We Fight is constantly employing sleight-of-hand, moving us from one topic to another without settling down, until we feel like we're in a restaurant examining an endless array of appetizers but no entrees. No explanation is compelling enough in and of itself, nor are enough connections drawn between the various threads to give us a composite answer. It's as if Jaracki was handed a Rubik's cube, furrowed his brow, set to work, and triumphantly returned it to our hands two hours later in a new and even more confusing jumble.

Southland Tales w/ guest Andrew Cook (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #54) + appearance by Vera Drew & capsules on Donnie Darko/The Box

2002 in 2012: The Making of My Movie, Class of 2002

I've made a movie

Class of 2002 (Part 2), directed by Joel Bocko

Now Playing: Green Zone

The Hurt Locker

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush

Iraq in Fragments

No End in Sight

Taxi to the Dark Side

Fahrenheit 9/11

W.

The War Tapes

Why We Fight

Search This Blog