Nothing personal, strictly business

The Girlfriend Experience
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Sasha Grey
78 minutes

Review by Scott Johnson

Steven Soderbergh can do more with a digital camera and a few months than most directors can do with tens of millions of dollars and years of development. This should not be entirely surprising--the paradox of making films in the corporate Hollywood environment is that seemingly unlimited resources are doled out with equally unlimited strings attached. Projects are given a green light based on their expected ability to return a profit and the only predictor for future success--in business terms--is past success. Stars, directors, and of course plot lines are regurgitated from previous box office hits, although box office bombs only doom the first two but do little to halt the latter.

Producing films like The Girlfriend Experience and Bubble gives Soderbergh a limberness that the Hollywood machine does not have. Not only are these films not necessarily submitted to the arbitrary rewriting process Hollywood executives demand--if for no other reason than to show that they put their stamp on a film--but his current film has a timeliness that is unlikely to be found in Hollywood any time soon.

If you know anything about The Girlfriend Experience, it is probably that it features porn star Sasha Grey as a high-priced prostitute in New York City. The film takes place shortly between the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September and the election in November--we know this because Grey's character Chelsea spends endless hours listening to her clients complain about the economy and the bailout while giving her advice on investing and how to vote.

The fundamental insight the film portrays is the way the free market distorts personal and sexual relationships. This is not entirely original--Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made this same insight over 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto, describing how the capitalist class turns women into commodities:

[I]t is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

More recently, this same point was made by a prostitute interviewed by Studs Terkel in his oral history Working, who describes how women "hustle" legally all the time:

A hustler is any woman in American society. I was the kind of hustler who received money for favors granted rather than the type of hustler who carefully reads a women's magazine and learns what it is proper to give for each date, depending on how much money her date or trick spends on her.

What makes the film uniquely clever, though, is the way that this insight shapes the story. There are a surprising number of scenes in which our expectations are turned on their head--we come to expect that every man she talks to is a client, but it turns out that one is her boyfriend, another a journalist interviewing her, and yet another is working for Chelsea, not vice-versa. One of the best scenes involves film critic Glenn Kenny, whose character we think we have pinned down several times before we actually find out his real purpose for meeting with her. The conclusion to their meeting provides a bitter satire on the self-important critic.

It has been suggested that Grey's experience in pornography makes her particularly apt for this role and there is certainly some truth in that. As a young woman who sells her sexuality, she certainly knows something about the world Chelsea inhabits. But Grey's recent interview with RottenTomatoes.com suggests that she is an intelligent, experienced actress who did not simply fall ass-backwards into serious acting.

She does not exhibit the sort of confident emotional range of other serious young actresses, but I could not possibly imagine an Ellen Page or Anne Hathaway in this role. Grey has the sort of restrained, near-confident shyness that a 21-year-old inhabiting a foreign and intimidating world typically shows. She does not create a thoroughly nuanced and vibrant character--rather, she acts like a young woman who is smart and confident but also somewhat in over her head and keeps the men in her life--her clients and her boyfriend--at arms length. This may be the result of a nervous young actress working with a world-class director, but it creates an authenticity that is perfect for Chelsea's character. With a few exceptions, we never feel like we quite understand her feelings--whether she is enjoying herself or just going through the motions. But I suppose the men in her life feel the same way as we do.

The "girlfriend experience" that Chelsea is selling is about more than just sexual intercourse, although that is always hanging in the background of every one of her relationships. Terkel's prostitute describes this in her own experiences:

The favors I granted were not always sexual. When I was a call girl, men were not paying for sex. They were paying for something else. They were either paying to act out a fantasy or they were paying for companionship or they were paying to be seen with a well-dressed young woman. Or they were paying for somebody to listen to them.

This reality underscores how the combination of economics and sexuality distorts a young woman's relationships with men, which is the question explored throughout the movie. Chelsea's interactions show that "prostitution" occurs not only at the intersection of sex and money but often in interactions when only one of the two is present. The final scene also humorously raises the question of what can actually be considered "sex"--Bill Clinton's definition notwithstanding--in a world of alienation and personal isolation.

This scene--and the film, appropriately--ends far too soon.

Bitter fruits of the occupation

Lemon Tree
Eran Riklis
Starring Hiam Abbass
106 minutes

Review by Scott Johnson

In Lemon Tree, Hiam Abbass plays a character much like the one she played in last year's The Visitor--a middle-aged woman whose life is upended by the personal effects of global politics. She only appeared in the last half of the earlier film, but she is the lead character of Lemon Tree, displaying the same sort of quiet nobility in the face of an inhumane system.

Abbass plays Salma Zidane, a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who makes her livelihood from a small orchard of lemon trees. She has inherited the orchard from her family who cared for it for 50 years until the (fictional) Israeli Defense Minister Israel Navon moves next door. Their homes are literally separated by a few yards and a barbed wired fence marking the Green Line--the border between the West Bank and Israel.

The minister's security team hastily erects a watchtower to look over Salma's land and then decides that the orchard is a security threat and the trees must be removed. This indignity forces Salma to sue the state of Israel and eventually take her case to the Israeli Supreme Court.

In the meantime, of course, she must deal with a security force that slowly encroaches on her land and deprives Salma of her livelihood and her dignity. Eventually, the orchard is fenced off pending review of the case, but while Salma cannot access the orchard, the security team has free reign. At one point, the soldiers even enter the orchard to retrieve lemons for Navon's pampered guests.

This leads to a very effective scene in which Salma reacts with justified outrage at this double standard while the guests look on. We can tell that the Israelis think they see a crazy Arab woman, but we have much more sympathy for Salma and cannot blame her for trying to protect her land.

Other indignities ensue as the legal process slowly unfolds and "the facts on the ground" are altered in the favor of the defense minister.

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The human story here has much potential and some of it is realized, but there are also some missteps in the film. For example, while Salma slowly comes to have more confidence in herself, a near romance develops with a man in her life. But rather than developing her character, it simply feels forced and awkward, unlike the tenderness of the relationship Abbass' character finds in The Visitor.

Even more problematic--and more central to the story--is the character of Mira Navon, the defense minister's wife. Mira seems to represent the viewpoint of the liberal Zionist who both wants to defend her homeland and reach a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians. She would prefer to replace the barbed wire with white pickets. The untenability of this position is shown well with her vacillations between supporting her husband--and succumbing to his pressure--while desiring to reach out to Salma.

She quietly objects to her husband and wishes that she "could just be a better neighbor" to Salma, as she tells an American reporter when the international media picks up the story. But it seems inconceivable that Mira--clearly an educated woman who is married to a major Israeli politician--would be shocked by the act of cutting down a few trees. Certainly, she must be aware of the policies for which Navon and his government are responsible, but many of her actions are based on this presumed ignorance.

There is also a sense in which both women have a common bond in that they are rebelling against the men in their lives--Mira against her husband and Salma against the ineffectual and male-dominated Palestinian Authority, among others. This bond is somewhat tenuous, as we can see with Mira's failure to take decisive action and her ultimate freedom to extract herself from the situation.

But this leads to a jarring moment in which Mira laments how the lemon trees have upended her life. Certainly, she deserves more respect from her husband, but considering what Salma is confronting, the comment feels incredibly out of touch and insensitive. A moment that appears to be designed to build sympathy for the character only achieves the opposite.

This is not at all to say that Mira should be portrayed as simply a racist land thief--there are many ways that she could be confronted by the reality of her husband's policies that are both honest and convincing. This is clearly the intent behind Mira's character, but I don't think it entirely succeeds.

A better example of this is seen in a brief moment involving the young, M16-wielding Israeli soldier stationed in the watchtower overlooking the orchard. He is prepared to blow away terrorists on sight, but he has no idea what to do with this pesky Palestinian woman who insists on tending to her trees. His situation is both funny and revealing.

Salma's quiet resistance is the central and most affective part of the story. The roadblocks she encounters are cause for much pessimism--nobody believes that she will really achieve justice, probably the audience least of all.

However, the point of Lemon Tree is not to point the way forward but to expose the indignities of life under occupation. Aside from the atrocities and bloody massacres in Gaza, there are bitter conflicts that ordinary Palestinians face even during times of "peace." Portraying these everyday outrages is where this film is most effective.

This review originally appeared at SocialistWorker.org

For whom the clock ticks

Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, and Patrick Wilson
162 minutes

Review by Scott Johnson

In spite of proclamations that the classic graphic novel Watchmen is unfilmable, I always thought that so long as the screenplay did not go too far astray from the source material the film ought to succeed. This is not the ravings of a purist fanboy--I did notice some differences, including an improvement in the final weapon of mass distruction--but just an observation that the material has more than enough to keep an audience engaged. Zack Snyder's new movie does remain fairly close to the original story and so it cannot help but maintain our interest.

In fact, the movie kept so close to the book that most of the lead characters look astonishingly close to their drawn versions. At the very least, the film is a good companion to the graphic novel, in many ways comparable to the filmed version of a play (although one with different actors in the roles). But Snyder does more than just copy Alan Moore's story--he has an effective sense of style that helps move the story along. This was the main thing--in fact, the only thing--that was interesting in Snyder's 300. With an interesting story to go along with the visuals, Snyder this time has found himself actually making a decent movie.

The film does well in introducing us to a series of troubled heroes, each of whom has a problematic relationship with the world. Most significantly is Dr. Manhattan, a god-like figure who is nearly all-powerful and is, of course, a tool of the US government. His long-ignored lover is Laurie, the second hero know as Silk Spectre, pushed by her mother (who should have known better) to take up the mantle she originated. Laurie eventually hooks up with Dan Dreiberg, another second generation superhero (Nite Owl) who spends his days reminiscing with the originator of his identity about the good old days--before masked vigilantes were outlawed. Except for Dr. Manhattan, the only heroes who refuse to give up are the Comedian, who becomes a mercenary for the US government, and Rorschach, a mysterious and extremely violent vigilante in the old fashioned sense. That is, Rorschach is less like Spider-Man and Batman than he is like the guy with a shotgun who lives down the street and nobody bothers anymore.

This is a rich tapestry of characters whose mere existence in the story--not to mention the mystery that develops--adds richness to the world they occupy and maintains our interest. In fact, it is surprising to consider that Watchmen is almost exactly the same length as the beautifully filmed but dramatically flat and uninspired The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But I could not help but notice some serious drawbacks to the film. None of these ruin the movie as an experience, but both find a way to keep it from being more than simply a decent entertainment.

The first problem is the stylization of the movie, which is not all bad and in fact adds something new. This occurs not only in the visuals but also in a series of extended songs by Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, among others. There is no way that I could possibly be bored listening to this music, and if the purpose is to keep the audience entertained through the nearly 3 hour duration of the movie, it succeeds. However, there is a serious drawback here, which is that the movie often feels like a series of disjointed dramatic scenes cut in between several music videos and fight scenes.

This is compounded by the fact that there simply is not much chemistry between the characters. We never really feel like Dan (Nite Owl) and Laurie (Silk Spectre II) really have a deep connection with each other, which is only compounded by the fact that Laurie still seems like she is 25 rather than the more world-weary and regretful 38-year-old she is in the book. A sex scene between the two characters is so stylized by Snyder that it seems more like a cool movie moment than a real passionate embrace between the two characters. The same goes with the troubled relationship between Laurie and Dr. Manhattan, whose detachment from the world seems much more real and sad in the book than simply a series of clever--if superficial--movie moments.

What is also lost is much of the nuance of the graphic novel. Dr. Manhattan, for example, was a game-changer for the Cold War in the original, not just helping the US win the Vietnam War but becoming a real scourge to the Soviet Union. There is an off-hand remark in the graphic novel where somebody comments that the USSR wants to talk about Dr. Manhattan as a part of an arms treaty--after all, he gives the US far more power than any hydrogen bomb. There is also more clarity about the Keane Act which outlawed masked vigilantes than we get in the movie.

It is quite clear in the film version of Watchmen that the heroes are flawed and not necessarily up to the task of heroism. What is not always so clear is that the world they are living in is even more flawed. For example, Dr. Manhattan's seemingly unlimited power and its cynical manipulation by the US exposes the myth of Superman, who fought for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But would that be such a good thing in our world? Author Alan Moore certainly didn't think so and that is made fairly clear in his graphic novel. And while there are hints of this view in the movie, much of the nuance that shaped this perspective are lost.

Even more, there are times when the literal adaptation of the source material seems strangely anachronistic. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for example, gives us little concern at a time when the US is in the midst of a disastrous occupation of the country. What perfectly captured the zeitgeist 20 years ago is reduced to merely an unusual plot point in the movie to bring our heroes together for a final battle--a deus ex machina with Dr. Manhattan almost literally in the role of the Greek God.

I am not sure that this is a whitewash--a sanitized version of the story made acceptable for corporate Hollywood. The screenplay relies so closely on the source material for nearly three hours that this level of nuance might not have been feasibly added without extending the running time even further. So it is difficult to say definitively that the movie is purposefully dumbed down with all of its sharp edges removed.

But it is not difficult to say that this lack of nuance is unfortunate. The movie makes a fine companion piece to a great book, but viewers will need to go to the original to get the full story with all of its iconoclastic insights into our world and its supposed heroes.

A tale of two political thrillers

Taken
Directed by Pierre Morel
Starring Liam Neeson
91 minutes

The International
Directed by Tom Tikwer
Starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts
118 minutes

Review by Scott Johnson


AFTER SEEING the Republican Party get decisively rejected at the polls, a group of conservatives launched a movie review Web site, Big Hollywood, to much right-wing fanfare, including announcements by Rush Limbaugh and the Washington Times.

Big Hollywood seeks legitimacy for conservative cultural criticism by printing not only movie reviews but articles by mainstream Republican politicians. Nonetheless, there is plenty of reactionary filth to go around, with this group's film criticism attempting to do what eight years of conservative ideology did for Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. economy.

The latest cause célèbre on the site is the action film Taken, starring Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA agent out to rescue his daughter from a sex slavery ring. Right-wing film critic Debbie Schlussel, lamenting what she sees as a lack of Muslim bad guys in today's movies, describes the film this way on the Big Hollywood site:

In Taken, retired CIA agent Liam Neeson's daughter is kidnapped by an Albanian Muslim sex slavery ring in Paris. And while the movie doesn't outright tell us they are Muslims, the filmmakers show us several quick close-up shots of tattoos on the hands of the men who head the ring--crescents and stars, the religious symbols of Islam.

Then, there are the people who "acquire" his daughter. They are obviously Arabs, who speak Arabic, and they are Muslims--their boss is "the Sheikh" on the yacht (Sheikhs are exclusively Muslim). And for once, they are the criminal thugs, the sex slavers, the murderers--without apology or excuse.

Just the way it was on 9/11.

It's partly for this reason that I liked Taken immensely.

In another review that Schlussel links to in this post, she explains further:

One of them is purchasing the women as concubines for his boss, a big, fat, ugly Arab Muslim Sheikh on a yacht...There is a great scene where all of these evil Arabic-speaking scumbags get sent to a permanent conference call with the 72 virgins. That is the kind of stuff people went to movies to see, and they don't get to see it much at all anymore.

Who needs Hollywood's vilification of Muslims when you have Debbie Schlussel?

Big Hollywood's editor-in-chief John Nolte agrees with Schlussel, and in a review of The International--a political thriller about an international bank and its criminal practices--he recommends that readers go see Taken instead.

I don't think that a film is simply made or broken as a piece of entertainment based on whether it chooses the right "bad guys," but unsurprisingly, in this case, Big Hollywood has it precisely backward.

Schlussel says that she liked Taken so much because, for her, it had the right bad guys. But this is actually part of the problem--Taken is all too simplistic and predictable. After some well-executed action scenes and some clever maneuvers by Neeson's character, it descends into a standard revenge flick, where no problem can't be overcome with a bit more senseless violence.

Whatever gratification Nolte and Schlussel get in seeing "their" bad guys portrayed, it's hard to deny that the movie relies on simplistic ethnic and cinematic stereotypes. The bad guys are at various times ugly, dirty, unshaven and fat, either living in immigrant slums or basking in gluttony. Even if making Albanians the bad guys is a trivially unique twist, the fear of dark-skinned people raping "our" virginal daughters is as old as American slavery.

This is simplistic crowd-pleasing fare that expects little from its audience other than hating what is all too easy for many viewers to hate. In spite of some decent suspense early on, Taken suffers from having little originality and few surprises.

After the Bourne series, Casino Royale, Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight, we have come to expect much more subtlety and complexity from an action movie.

The weaknesses of Taken do not rest solely in its selection of bad guys--although that aspect is certainly vile. Taken relies on the same sort of simplistic worldview that endorses smears and fear-mongering in American elections and sees any attempt to understand the Muslim world--or even attempt to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists--as a weak-kneed liberal appeasement that only makes America less safe from its enemies.

It should not be terribly surprising, then, that Taken finds no humanity in the Arabs and Muslims in the film, but plenty in the white CIA agents who brag about their exploits in the Middle East.

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THE INTERNATIONAL, on the other hand, doesn't rely on crude stereotypes and base fears but a complex plot--which even threatens to leave some viewers behind--that not only delivers suspenseful action but creates paranoia based on the inability of the lead character to challenge the entire economic and political system.

The film starts out as an investigation that opens up several levels of corruption in the fictional International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC), including the bank's funding of both sides of various rivalries because, we learn, the real spoils of war are not in who wins but who controls the debt.

The IBBC also has links with the Italian government and is involved in an assassination covered up by the Carabinieri--the Italian internal security force--who attempt to frame the left-wing Red Brigade.

The details of the investigation are meticulous but fascinating. The film doesn't worry about spelling out every twist and turn--most viewers will likely know nothing of the Carabinieri and Red Brigade, for example--but these provide a rich background to the story and there is plenty to engage most viewers.

The "bad guys" at the IBBC aren't ugly or dirty--rather, they are good-looking, well-educated and powerful. In another film, these same characters could have been heroes that we sympathized with. But this is what makes the story so much more insidious--they live happy lives as public figures with nice houses and attractive families, and yet find it within themselves to commit great crimes in order to protect their privilege.

The most wickedly evil moment in either film does not come out of the barrel of a gun but from a throwaway exchange of dialogue between the head of the IBBC and his pre-teen son. Two lines of dialogue between the two which are completely abstracted from crime and corruption chillingly suggest the criminality lingering beneath their ordinary lives and how the boy is being innocently trained to follow his father's path.

There are several moments like this that not only satisfied my left-wing sensibilities but created a rich texture for the world that the film occupies--which is, of course, a reflection of our own world.

While the action is choreographed with great suspense, Clive Owen as a burned-out Interpol agent finds that violence will only get him so far. Kill one banker and another will step in to take his place. The system is stacked in the bank's favor and in order to really challenge the bank you have to go outside of the system. This leads to an ending that is far more interesting than the all-too-neat package presented at the end of Taken.

In reality, many of the characters in The International would just as likely be complicit with government and corporate corruption as they would investigate it and the movie is no masterpiece by any means. Naomi Watts is fairly wooden as a Manhattan District Attorney and the films starts to run out of steam toward the end. But there is a great story in Owen's agent who can't stand to lose another case but slowly realizes that there may be no way he can win. This is so much more satisfying than Neeson's neocon-like self-assuredness that there is no way he can fail in his mission.

Originally published at SocialistWorker.org

Two, three, many hours too long

Che
Directed by Stephen Soderbergh
Starring Benicio Del Toro and Demián Bichir
257 minutes

Review by Scott Johnson

I recently watched William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives, a nearly three hour long 1946 drama about three soldiers returning from the war to the same small town. I am sure that Wyler could have made a much shorter film that was still quite good, but the length of the film is not wasted for a moment. Without any fancy cinematography or stunning plot twists, Wyler carries us along with these characters as we watch them attempt to adjust back to civilian life. Even as the film was coming to a close, I felt connected with and interested in the characters and their lives and would have been happy to watch another hour.

I cannot say as much about Stephen Soderberg's 4 hour epic Che. The first two hours are worthy enough with Fidel Castro's guerilla army in the Cuban jungle, along with flashbacks to Che's trip to the UN as a Cuban official giving a fiery speech to the assembly, as well as a few scenes in Mexico City with the revolutionarys gathered in an apartment wearing suits and ties, discussing their plans to overthrow the Cuban government. The highlight is the final successful battle of the Cuban revolution in a series of exciting scenes that gives a sense of how such a small group could have defeated a state army.

There are also a number of characters to give the material some life, including Benicio Del Toro's Che Guervara, who is entirely convincing. Even more of a surprise, though, is Demián Bichir's Fidel Castro, who possesses the self-assured enthusiasm that a young Fidel must have had. We can see why this group would look to him for leadership and inspiration in the pre-revolutionary years, before he became a powerful lifelong bureaucrat who gave 7 hours long speeches.

The second two hours--the last year or so of Che's life as he attempted to lead another revolution in Bolivia--falls utterly flat. Supposedly it was filmed in a different aspect ratio and with washed out colors in contrast to the richer visuals of the first part. Unfortunately, hardly anything interesting happens and the characters are drab and lifeless. This includes Che, whose quiet in the first section gives him an air of brooding and mystery, considering everything else that happens. In the second part, he is just as dull as everything else.

But what is the point of all this? To show that the the period leading up to the successful revolution was exciting while Che's Bolivian campaign was much more dreary? That is hardly the recipe for a good film, could surely have been communicated in a shorter period of time, and is not all that enlightening.

But the dull pointlessness of the second half only points to problems in the first half. There is not much said about Che as a man or the revolution he was participating in. Certainly, the structure points to ways that the mini-society the guerillas built in the countryside was a precursor--for better or worse--to the society they took control of. But was it better or worse, and why did it turn out that way? Soderbergh does not say. With the first half as a standalone film, this may have worked fine. But as a piece of a larger film it only begs the question of what it is doing there at all beyond convincing us to stick around for another two hours.

Somewhat infuriating is the transition to the second part. We are transported from the end of the successful battle leading to the seizure of power to Che in Bolivia. But what happened in between that led Che to disappear from Cuba? Could he have been disillusioned by Fidel's Cuba or perhaps working with him as part of a larger plan to transform Latin America? Both of these seem possible in Soderbergh's Che--at one point we are told that Fidel is sending money to help Che, at another one of Che's Bolivian prison guards asks what it feel like to be slogging it out in the jungle while Fidel is having fancy dinners in Cuba.

At one point, a Frenchman named Régis Debray arrives to support Che. Debray was the author of the classic Sixties text Revolution in the Revolution? Presumably, Debray and Che would have much to say about each others respective theories of guerilla warfare--what a fascinating discussion that would have been! Unfortunately, Soderbergh treats Debray as just some French guy who got caught, hardly more than a footnote in the history Che's Bolivian campaign and meaningless to anybody who does not already know who his identity.

The only mystery these issues create is why Soderbergh seems so ambivalent about these questions. By skipping over Che's life as a leader in the Cuban state, he avoids one of the most difficult questions of Che's life and the life of any revolutionary: how do you reconcile the battle to change society with the humdrum--and often compromising--reality of building a new bureaucracy while attempting to liberate ordinary people? Presumably Soderbergh is telling us that Che was really a fighter and not a bureaucrat, more comfortable organizing a guerrilla army than leading a bureaucracy.

But this adds little to the mainstream view of Che as the romantic revolutionary. There is some subtlety for those looking for some details, but little depth to explain his actions, what he was fighting for, whether Cuba became what Che hoped it would, and why the Bolivian campaign was such a disaster.

Haunted by what he forgot

Waltz with Bashir
Directed by Ari Folman
90 min
Rated R

Review by Scott Johnson

HISTORY IS written by the winners. The victors always turn out to have fought a just war--in the textbooks they will go on to write--and any doubts or contradictory evidence is flushed down the Orwellian memory hole.

That is how it is supposed to work, but individuals tend to remember things differently, regardless of how hard they might want to forget.

This is the problem dealt with in Waltz with Bashir, a film about Israeli soldiers who fought in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Told as an "animated documentary"--a series of interviews with animated visuals, memories and dream sequences--the story revolves around director Ari Folman's effort to remember his experiences in Lebanon, every memory of which has been repressed.

Folman interviews several people who served with him and might be able to fill in the blanks. Each provides a unique story that both fills in some of the details Folman is looking for and documents a uniquely incredible experience that most would prefer to forget. Describing one of the men, Folman comments that before the war everybody thought he would be a Nobel Prize-nominated physicist by the time he was 40. "By the time I turned 20," the man says, recounting his now lost youth, "that future was gone."

The innovative imagery is a product of several forms of animation, creating the look of an animated graphic novel. This makes the various tales of Folman's fellow soldiers much more believable than watching them played out in live action. It also helps to create a fantastical atmosphere that conveys the sense of a half-forgotten memory. The haunting and poetic scenes capture the fear, loneliness and misery that the soldiers faced.

But this is not Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, a movie in which the details of a rape and murder are described by multiple witnesses, with each story only contradicting the previous one. If only that were true, Folman might be able to avoid the painful truth. Rather, the deeper he digs, the closer Folman comes to an accurate account of the history he participated in.

For a moment, it seems like the worst things he will find are the challenges that the soldiers faced. But it turns out that Folman was at the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, where Israeli soldiers stood guard while the Lebanese Phalangist militia massacred 2,000 innocent Palestinian civilians. Folman slowly comes to realize that he and his fellow soldiers--who stood by as the massacre took place--are complicit.

A reporter he interviews recounts calling then-Defense Minister (and later Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon, who seemed blissfully unconcerned--but fully informed--of the massacre that was occurring. Folman's worst fear seems to be coming true--that he is complicit in a genocidal brutality on par with what his parent faced in Auschwitz.

In another interview, a psychologist tells him that people tend to remember things that did not actually happen to them, taking stories and images they discover after the fact and rewriting their own memory. This is essentially what has happened with the collective memory of many Israelis, who believe that the Phalangists and not the Israelis were responsible--which Folman shows to be a gross simplification.

Folman and his cohorts talk about how they erected an emotional wall between themselves and the events around them at the time of the war. One even describes looking on the battle scenes as if he was looking at them through a camera--but eventually the "camera breaks" as he finds himself in the middle of a scene too gruesome to either comprehend or ignore.

The animation in Bashir plays the role of this "camera", allowing us to view the war at arms length. Ultimately, as he comes to comprehend his own involvement in the massacre, the "camera" of both the character and director Ari Folman will break as well, as the long repressed images of brutality come flooding back.

Waltz with Bashir is not specifically pro-Palestinian, nor is it overtly critical of the Zionist political project. But its purpose is to lay the responsibility on Israel for the Sabra and Shatila massacre, attempting to challenge the whitewashed memory of Israeli innocence. Therefore, it is a very welcome development that this film has found some success inside of the country. Considering Israel's current invasion of Gaza, the hope is that this film will have some resonance with a wide audience there.

One scene in particular that seems incredibly relevant in Bashir is when Israeli soldiers look down on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as the massacre is carried out and do nothing to stop it. In a strikingly similar scene, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on Israeli citizens gathering on steep hillsides overlooking Gaza for a view of the battles, turning war into a spectator sport.

Perhaps they might learn from Waltz with Bashir that there is nothing innocent about this sort of gleeful spectatorship.

Originally published at SocialistWorker.org

If his city screams and nobody's paying attention, will it make a noise?

The Spirit
Starring Gabriel Macht, Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, and Scarlett Johansson
Directed by Frank Miller
Rated R

Frank Miller's The Spirit does not seem to be at all in the . . . er . . . "spirit" of Will Eisner's comic book. I found the more interesting of Eisner's stories to be those that were not really about the Spirit at all. The best stories from The Best of the Spirit are about unusual villains, ordinary guys who actually have secret desires and grudges that we would not expect by just looking at them. The Spirit himself is fairly uninteresting--it was Eisner's ability to spin a yarn and break the edges of the comic book panel, opening up the page to unique layouts that increased the medium's storytelling potential that made the comics fun to read.

Therefore, it is surprising that Miller is fairly uninterested in any of this. Granted, Miller is known for recreating old characters, including Batman in his classic The Dark Knight Returns as well as the awful All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder--where the lead character introduces himself to Robin as "the Goddamn Batman" and calls him "retarded". Frank Miller's The Spirit, unfortunately, falls more in the league of the latter comic than the former.

Miller tries to "sex up" the Spirit a bit with a superpower--Wolverine-like invulnerability--whereas the original had none. Again, it was the cleverness of the story and its telling that was the real draw to Eisner's work. But other than a unique visual style, there is little clever about the movie. I doubt there is a single thought or emotion that goes unspoken, often multiple times with cliched dialogue delivered by actors who have no investment in their one-dimensional characters.

One of the worst scenes of the movie--which was incredibly long, or at least felt that way--starts with the Spirit waking up tied to a dentist's chair. There are swastikas and pictures of Adolph Hitler on the wall, suggesting a brutal torture a la Laurence Oliver in The Marathon Man. Jackson walks out dressed in Nazi regalia--just in case you didn't realize he was evil--and delivers a dreary expositional speech about all of his evil plans, explaining to a disinterested audience the various MacGuffins that are at play in the movie. At the end of the scene, instead of an evil Nazi dental pick used to tear the Spirit's gums to pieces until he bleeds to death, we get Paz Vega in a slinky outfit with a big knife.

Of course, only one question remains afterward--what the fuck was that all about?

The rest of the movie is a mess. The dark and moody scenes we saw in the trailer with the Spirit jumping across roofs and delivering Dashiell Hammett-like lines about how his city screams and how he uses it as a weapon are few and random. These are juxtaposed against scenes with goofy comic book dialogue and bad action. I mean really bad. We're talking about Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner bad, without the intentional humor. At one point, the Octopus--Jackson's character--picks up a toilet and slams it down on the Spirit's head. "Toilet bowls are funny," he says, in case we didn't get the joke.

Near the end of the movie, Jackson pulls out two guns with four barrels each, declaring "I'm the Octopus! I have eight of everything!" That might have been more useful at the beginning, because at least we would have thought we knew why he had that name--of course, he doesn't have eight of anything else, so it doesn't really explain anything.

But what he should have said is "I have eight motherfucking barrels on these motherfucking guns!" Then the movie could at least have strived for so-bad-it's-good territory.

"My name's Benjamin Button. People call me Benjamin Button."

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
Rated PG-13
Review by Scott Johnson

Benjamin Button is, at different times, an old man without a past and a young man without a future. What a lonely and confusing way to go through life, so ripe with opportunities for exploring how time and age distort our view of ourselves and how the world views us. It is surprising, then, that the movie does not play up this fact more in the film itself. The young Benjamin in the old man's body seems a bit naive about sex, but the old Benjamin in a young man's body just seems like a young man. This is somebody who has lived an extraordinarily lonely life and I just don't think that we get enough of a sense of that.

In fact, I think a very similar movie, minus a few clever moments, could have easily been made without the the curse of backward aging at all. Perhaps the middle-aged looking man who has an affair with Tilda Swinton could have been a naive teenager--The Reader, anyone? That would have been creepy, you might say--although certainly less creepy than the seven-year-old octogenarian who has a crush on a 5 year old. Or it could have just taken place later in his life.

Button, unfortunately, plays it safe and avoids the creepy tension screaming to burst out of this material. Remember the movie Birth, where a young boy claims to be Nicole Kidman's dead husband--that was a movie that didn't avoid the creepiness and was much the better for it.

It cannot go without saying that the photography is incredible. Pulling off a scene of Brad Pitt as a shriveled up little old man not only makes you wonder how it was filmed but makes you realize that the entire film medium is past the stage of the impossible. If you have enough money, you can put anything on film and make it believable. Better yet, mind-boggling special effects do not have to result in blowing stuff up but can be used to create unique moments of drama. Technically speaking, Button excels in this area and I suspect there are many scenes where we do not even know that it is happening.

One of the problem the movie faces, though, is that it is far too long. The writers must have been trying to give us a sense of the full scope of the man's life, but that means there is far too much meandering and waiting for something to happen. There are quite a few good moments--Pitt's affair with Tilda Swinton, for example, when we first get a sense of Benjamin as a man. But we wait too long for those to occur. In the meantime, the bitter loneliness this character must have faced is not given nearly enough play, especially at the end.

The film was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump, a very similar film in many ways. This movie has less to say about history than Gump--which is fortunate--but Forrest lived through extraordinary events that he could not comprehend. It made sense that he was somewhat unaffected and just wanted to find Jenny, but it makes less sense here. Benjamin is a man of ordinary intellect and ought to learn great things out of life, but he floats through history just like Forrest.

Other elements of the earlier film seem to be echoed in in the current one--instead of Lieutenant Dan, we have Captain Mike. Instead of the feather floating through the wind (like Forrest), we get a hummingbird who appears after the death of a man with a hummingbird tattoo--and then again later. Huh? There is also something about a clock that goes backward, for no apparent reason, unless of course you did not realize that Benjamin was aging backward, which you did.

The movie itself is narrated by a character on her death bed in modern day New Orleans--just before Hurricane Katrina hits, of course. Why? "It's symbolic," the writer might say. But it is not really subtle and does not appear to shed any light on the story or the characters--other than to reinforce that a simplistic approach was taken instead of providing deeper insights into our lives and the passage of time.

These are some of the more annoying aspects and I don't want to dwell on them too much or make the film appear utterly worthless. Much of it is worthwhile--the performances are all well done and there are some fine moments. I think a very touching two hour movie could have been made out of this material--approaching Benjamin's life with broader brush strokes, showing how fleeting and momentary our lives are.

Some of that material finds its way here, but there is just not enough to justify the film's length.

Once upon a time in India

The scope of Slumdog Millionaire could be described as epic, with the characters' personal lives wrapped up in the ever changing historical and political landscape of modern India. The only problem with this description is that the decisions the characters make in their daily lives have no impact on the world around them. No, Jamaal and Salim, the two "slumdog" children who lose their mother to an anti-Muslim pogrom, are the people left behind by globalization. Their lives are the result of the economic changes of first Bombay, then Mumbai. At one point they are standing in a high-rise building in Mumbai looking over a sea of skyscrapers that was once the slums that they grew up in.

The crux of the story is that Jamaal grows up to be a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", a show whose mere existence is certainly the result of unfettered global capitalism. As a Muslim slumdog who makes it further than any previous contestant, he is, of course, questioned and tortured under the assumption that he cheated. We discover that, in spite of his lack of education, every question just happens to correspond with some horrific moment in his life. Many easier questions, he insists, would have probably been much harder for him. It's just dumb luck--or, quite possibly, fate.

This may sound like the plot to an incredibly contrived story, except that it is handled so well that we believe every moment of it. Key to all of this is the performances of the actors, particularly those of the children, who play characters that live through extraordinary events with both sensitivity and endurance. They don't lament their bad luck any more than a Western teenager who is sick of going to school and growing up in a boring town--probably less so, because their survival skills require them to focus on getting food and shelter today, not begrudge their misfortune. To Jamaal and Salim, it is probably not so much "luck" as it is life--there is no other alternative, no better town or better job. They feel pretty lucky just to have a job.

In many ways, this movie reminded me of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. In both films, we see young men growing up in adverse conditions and facing the challenges of survival the only way they know how. Their fates are bound up with the forces around them and their options are very limited. But while Leone's vision is much more pessimistic and regretful, director Danny Boyle is able to find hope amidst poverty.

You also can't help but describe Slumdog Millionaire as "Dickensian". Involving children orphaned in poverty, scheming money out of unsuspecting tourists, looking for their next meal out of the trash, and a beautiful young woman who will haunt the main character into manhood--that is a roundup of some of the best of Charles Dickens.

What Jamaal learns most of all is never to give up hope--no matter how bad his luck, or the luck of those around him, even though everything he learns about the world should teach him to be an arch-cynic. He may not have many prospects, but at least he might be able to save the girl he loved from a life of misery.

This isn't simply a fantastic fairy tale but rather the story of survival. And sometimes, if you survive long enough, good things can happen.