Speaking of disconcerting subtext, despite an absurd reason for joining up and the thoughtless image of a star-spangled soldier barging into some foreign building and shooting people, CAPTAIN AMERICA is hardly the gung ho propaganda for the rewards of jingoism that even some of its supporters claim with an untroubled chuckle, as if the getting away with something is more significant than what they got away with. Okay, so America is a land of innovation and volunteers and opportunity, and Italy is a rugged jungle needing to be saved from itself, but STEVE AND THE MULTICOLOR DREAMSQUAD has no discernable politics beyond supporting Tommy Lee Jones for any office he wants—even his phone-ins are worth admission. Instead it has a disquieting ethical system that supercedes geographic boundaries and only crops up explicitly once, when wise father Stanley Tucci has a calm-before-the-storm chat with Steve about his superhero serum: “Good becomes great, bad becomes worse,” he says, and the film backs him up. Maybe you could chalk this up to pulp simplification, more fantasy for the land of magical Norse artifacts and laser guns—now with extra lens flares!—but the concept of human beings as divisible into good parts and bad parts is so shallow as to coarse through the rest like poison. It’s an excuse to send a children’s hero into violent combat—the picture is teeming with punches so loud all you can see is a splash panel BANG!—and the film’s multiple cop-outs (suicide, accidental suicide, literally demonizing the bad guy) are even worse. It’s okay to fight bad guys because they’re bad, and what’s more, they all die on their own, bloodlessly. Logic!

Still worse than another kids’ movie championing violence as right and good and noble is yet another film deflated by franchising. A cliffhanger would have been perfect—“Captain America will return in . . . OCTOPUSSY!”—but this isn’t that. After our first melancholy act of heroism, necessitated by poorly explained plot developments that Evans and Hayley Atwell power through like Olympic swimmers, we get another ending that waters down the melancholy into bittersweet, a striking (and strikingly inappropriate) tone for a film of clean-cut, tighty-whitey ooh-ra, all so we know Cap’s on the path to Avenging with Joss Whedon next year. That said, Johnston’s imaginative candyland pastiche is too packed with exciting toys to let his blunt wielding of them detract: the KISS ME DEADLY non-MacGuffin, a Bondian mountainside palace, an Alpine train job, an Endor speeder bike chase, a Norwegian temple not far removed from Frankenstein Castle, Hugo Weaving doing his best Christoph Waltz, and just enough loving shots of the male physique to hit the quota but keep Zack Snyder from suing for intellectual property theft (though Cap’s magical pants are kept on during his steroid session for being the lesser of two distractions). Johnston even acknowledges the silliness of his very sincere adventure with in-universe Captain America comics and a Bob Ford-style USO show where our hero knocks out Hitler. In the end, Johnston made an okay film about the power of entertainment where the morale boost is infinitely more effective than the propaganda.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

You could blame the monumental waste of Kevin Macdonald’s THE EAGLE on CENTURION‘s release last year, which preemptively renders its successor both outclassed and unnecessary, if the bulk of its ineptitude didn’t reside in the script. Yes, Jamie Bell heroically tries to balance an ensemble led by a statue and filled out with Donald Sutherland’s paycheck and a Roman frat boy, and yes, Macdonald does the film no favors submitting to the visual conventions of the genre right down to shoddy nocturnal action scenes and golden, sub-History Channel flashbacks, and yes, someone apparently instructed the cast to throw away what few jokes there are, except for the moment where we’re meant to laugh at the mistreatment of a slave because that’s hilarious, not to mention the wealth of accidental comedy up to and including the far-off screech of Stephen Colbert’s eagle, yes, the entire crew save Jamie Bell seem hellbent on sinking this vessel, but nothing is more suggestive of social promotion than the lazily structured, utterly undeveloped, and ultimately meaningless screenplay.

We start with SuperChanning, who has been endowed for this role with super-hearing, super-compassion, and super-pecs, not that we get to behold our hero’s greatest attribute for more than a few seconds, and in the darkness at that. I’m being unfair; SuperChanning does have one flaw, his stupid father, who infamously lost the titular artifact along with the Ninth Legion in the wild north, so now, like a disgraced Klingon, he secretly seeks to restore honor to his house. Our glittering untouchable superhero is the only character the film develops though the life-at-Hadrian’s-wall opening and the first couple of battles, except it doesn’t develop him so much as sing about him in ode, which is a problem if we’re meant to interpret the fighting as anything other than one actor struggling mightily against a greenscreen of Peter Jackson’s computerized minions, but, not that we can discern any of the action anyway, it’s all just a way to bolster our understanding of SuperChanning’s superdom, so mission accomplished.

Eventually he winds up in R&R at Rivendell under Elrond Sutherland’s care, where, through the magical force of his persuasive oratory—“Live! Everyone, live!”—he singlehandedly changes the thumbs-down vote of the mob at the arena to spare the life of the gladiator, who thanks him by invoking a Chewbacca-like life debt to his new master. While Bell is costumed as the lead of FLASHDANCE right down to what I assume are period appropriate leg-warmers, SuperChanning’s too caught up in the dreamy eyes of his chosen to notice. Needless to say, sparks fly.

With unfunny jokes and plot lunacies galore, THE EAGLE plays out like its trailer, a sequence of episodes not because, as in true picaresques like HUCK FINN, they all revolve around the same ideas, but because it’s the easiest form of plotting: This happens, then this happens, and so on. We stumble over a handful of complicated ideas—not the neon signs that shout freedom and loyalty but genuine thorns about occupation, veterans affairs, violence in everyday society—but the film takes the easy way out, expectedly validating Rome (and the eagle—KRAAAAWWW!) because its indefensible savagery, a topical imperialism noted by Marshall and ignored by Macdonald, occurred offscreen whereas the nasty native Britons kill a child right before our eyes, and thus the film unwittingly reveals its only moral: stupidity breeds evil.

THE EAGLE ends with a PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN-style sequel setup with our two walking six-packs smirking away into the next adventure, and the not-actually-forthcoming THE EAGLE 2: EAGLER can’t help but be a better film for three reasons: 1) probability, 2) more Jamie Bell, and 3) the continued exploration of the central romance, the bastard offspring of Shakespeare and Tolkien made well-muscled, dirty-sexy flesh. You thought it couldn’t get hotter than the life debt, which begins with Bell physically pressing his entire weight onto SuperChanning in bed, but soon enough they’re risking their lives for each other, planning the B&B they want to open in Vermont, and spooning on a horse. They build to a declaration of love, which, this being THE EAGLE, isn’t the most timeless eloquence, but “I thought I’d lost you” ain’t that far off from “I wish I knew how to quit you.” All of which is to say, THE EAGLE is the worst made film I’ve seen this year and sets a nigh impossible standard for non-quality, but still I can’t wait for the sequel.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and just joined Twitter @bnowalk.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Is there a better symbol for our historical moment than a tabloid terrorist? I don’t mean trash-mag doodler Perez Hilton; I mean a bona fide violent terrorist whose persona is more celebrity than revolutionary, whose exploits and impact are approached with bemused spectatorship in place of active engagement. Pop history has had years to streamline a narrative for the Cold War, but the new world order—talk about a term for the history books, coined, truly, for the self-conscious era—resisted easy alignment until the dawn of the Age of Terror, or whatever we’re calling the bigger-than-Bush struggle between Islamic terrorism and the imperialist West. What Olivier Assayas’ rise-and-fall rock star/geopolitical epic CARLOS illustrates, in words and images that call back to World War II and reach ahead to our brave new world of war criminal punditry, is the obvious. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

CARLOS opens in 1973 with a character—the European honcho for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—whose assassination produces a vacuum that sucks our charismatic young rebel into power positions that vastly exceed his intellect if not rhetoric. Over the next five and a half hours, Edgar Ramirez as Carlos transforms from active young militant to bloated narcissist in a story—indeed, the story—that takes us from European capitals to the empty deserts of Yemen to the shores, or at least air strips, of Tripoli, and back again. Ramirez’ evolution is incredible, and casting Carlos as a rock star—indeed, he signs autographs and enjoys a paparazzi moment after his most ostentatious performance—subtly belies his incoherence. The New Wave soundtrack, centered on Carlos’ self-mythologizing New Order anthem “Dreams Never End,” isn’t just there for period; it lends grandiosity to the punk rebels.

It will be no surprise to Assayas acolytes that CARLOS is an authentic, obsessive portrait of globalization. It’s a struggle between an interconnected network of global terrorist cells and an interconnected network of “legitimate” governmental bureaucracies, and Assayas speaks to the game’s complexity by limiting exposition to chirons (which, granted, come fast and loose in this constantly traveling film). Between the rich sequences of exciting, funny, or cool action come even more invigorating battles of ideology, including a running thread connecting modern police methods with terrorism practiced on individuals. The film covers more territory than James Bond (and speaks more languages, besides), but the talk expands the net to include Pinochet’s US-backed Chilean coup and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam and Ceausescu’s Romania and Hitler’s Germany. Because this Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous episode is really a trenchant look at the relationship between states and terrorism.

What it boils down to is the chilling reminder that terrorism is only illegal when performed by individuals. Carlos gets away with his many and thrilling acts of violence—which he justifies as “the minimum military requirement of any political struggle”—because he’s working for state governments. States, even ostensibly democratic ones, can do whatever they want, as anyone paying attention to President Bush’s celebrity book tour (specifically his assertions that waterboarding need no justification but here’s one anyway) can attest. Assayas peppers CARLOS with shots of airplanes for obvious reasons, and some of the most powerful moments are the cuts from the inside of a DC-9 holding the kidnapped ministers of OPEC (the world’s most agreeable cartel) and Carlos’ terrorist gang to a silent exterior of the plane.

Just before the where-are-they-now montage, CARLOS lands the terrorism/plane motif in a confrontational closing argument. It’s 1994, the world now in the hegemonic shadow of a single state, and terrorism is still an active, if off-the-grid recourse for the world’s anti-imperialists. We’re on an airplane in the midst of a crime, only this time, the perpetrators are the Sudanese government embarking on an under-the-table extradition deal with the French. It’s vengeance dressed as justice executed by the state.  The low angle of the state official looking down at us says it all.  As one of the governed (as in the mythical catchphrase “consent of the governed”), I don’t feel any safer knowing Carlos is behind bars and the state has usurped his methods.  Do you?

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

The first scene of Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man.  The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier the night before his execution, beaming a greeting of filial affection to a former enemy.  We’re in a POW camp run under the auspices of the Japanese military, where Allied soldiers are half-subjected to, and half-ignored by an honor code that proposes self-disembowelment as the response, it appears, to just about any infraction.  In between the attempted seppuku and the smiling greeting, the adorable Tom Conti reflects poetically on the mutually assured idiocy of war, Ryuichi Sakamoto gets angry, and then gets healed while his fascinating and eventually ubiquitous score overplays but not so much that it bothers, and gorgeous burnt light provides a mystical hue to what is ultimately a nightmare that becomes a dream and then finally a reality the audience always wanted: reconciliation between people who were otherwise ready to kill each other.

But not before David Bowie saves the world.

This is probably the least actorly of Bowie’s screen appearances; his portrayal of callow/shallow and ultimately penitent youth is all the more resonant because he seems out of place in the movie: we know him to be something other than either the rigid Japanese or the sentimental English colonel; his off-screen status as chameleon works because he’s more like us than anyone else in the movie.  He wanders through a context in which violence is sexualised, men are murdered for loving each other, and everyone is fantasising about being somewhere else.  It’s probably the most erotic war movie ever made; it’s a perfect companion piece to the thematically similar ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’, whose British Colonel is the antecedent for Sakamoto’s character here: both men obsessed with honor over humanity, both undone at the last possible moment, both the points of deepest frustration for the audience.  The formal beauty of the compositions could overwhelm the point of the film: a kind of insider’s apology for, or at least critique of, his nation’s particular brand of nationalistic idiocy, which here is probably best summed up by the institutional nonsense of lying about killing.  Not far off my homeland’s own nonsense, nor that of the day I’m posting this, when a holiday is observed in the US, marking the arrival of a genocidal maniac who no doubt believed God and his queen had told him to love the natives by burning some of them alive.  Oshima and co-screenwriter Paul Mayersberg evoke Columbus and any number of other pioneers of the sacralising of violence, by having Conti’s character exclaim, ‘Damn your gods.  It’s your gods who have made you who you are,’ at the point where he realises that he is to be killed to preserve a sense of order that was psychotic to begin with.  And it’s in the confrontation of the madness of the scapegoat mechanism where ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ takes on the deepest core of the human tendency to spiral downward into mutually assured destruction.  Regret for the past is why men war with themselves today; an unthinking assumption that someone must be punished is why we kill each other; and the film locates such regret and assumptions in nothing more complex than the cruelty of boys who become men without changing.

But it neither labors nor over-philosophises its point; Oshima trusts us to get it – the first scene is so memorable precisely because it starts half way through where you’d expect.  We’re right there – in an attempted imposed ritual suicide; there’s no introduction, no preparation, no consolation for those of us who want our war films to pretend that war isn’t murder.

At the end, I’m left reflecting on three things (beyond the easy admiration for the remarkable career of producer Jeremy Thomas, who in the splendid interview series on the Criterion disc seems to prove that he hasn’t lost any thirst for making films that are both aesthetically compelling and politically humane): How childhood trauma can both cause us to dysfunction within adult relationships, but might also provoke us to live differently; to avoid the suffering we caused others, or was caused to us when we thought we didn’t know any better.  On the role of sexual repression as a foundation for violence; and how a well-placed kiss could end conflict between people.  And finally, as Thomas says, how certainty is often the enemy of peace, for in war, ‘we are victims of men who think they are right’.  ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ sounds, at first glance, like a humorous title; but it’s not, and it could not just as easily have been ‘Happy 4th of July’.  It’s a film that begins with a man being forced to torture himself to death, and ends with the anunciation of what, for Rene Girard, perhaps the thinker most capable of explaining why scapegoating kills us all, would consider nothing less than the axis of history.  Along the way there’s blue light, Bowie’s blond locks, Conti’s smile, Takeshi’s ambivalence, Sakamoto’s rage.  And a war film that sometimes feels like science fiction, sometimes like romance, sometimes like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

I’m not going to add anything to the scholarship on Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy, but holy moly are these films breathtaking.  I’d seen Rome, Open City previously, but, no, I really hadn’t.  A good print, as characterizes the new Criterion transfers, is indescribably immersive.  Post-war Europe comes alive.  First up is Rome, Open City, shot in Rome (also known as the seat of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime) in 1945, I repeat, 1945! Apparently Rossellini and Federico Fellini (you may have heard of him) and Sergio Amidei started the script about two months after the allies tore through Italy ousting the Germans from Rome. While the war was still raging throughout most of the continent and beyond. Which events would be depicted in spiritual sequels Paisan and Germany, Year Zero.

I cannot overstate how fascinating I find this. But had this film come out of the late ‘60s or something, it would still be one of the great works on World War II, like Melville’s Army of Shadows, not least as a document of the real city of Rome in 1945. It’s not even two hours long, but it’s divided into two segments that break cleanly along the point of no return, a grisly surprise for this viewer who was too caught up in the resistance to expect the event that closes out Act 1. No wonder the first half keeps returning to that spiral staircase, all skewed in Rossellini’s vision, up or down, either way, we eventually lose our bearings.  In a telling visual, a bunch of kids return home after curfew, and as the gaggle make their way inexorably up the spiral, kids peel off at the doorsteps of their worried parents to meet their respective, furious ends.

The story of the resistance naturally lends itself to the film’s web structure, a reflection of the Schroeder Plan that divides the city into sectors, boundaries protruding like spokes from the center. The first twenty minutes are a knotty sprawl, as we sneak from scene to scene meeting about twenty agents of varying significance until finally we get a sense of the ultimate shape. Religious filmmakers can be alienating (see below), but at least in Rome, Open City, our hero is speaking my language: “I am a Catholic priest. I believe that anyone fighting for justice and liberty walks in the ways of the Lord, and the ways of the Lord are infinite.”

The priest sequence in Paisan, on the other hand, nearly takes down the film for me. Okay, not really, but can we just pretend that sequence never happened and move on? At first, it appears Rossellini would validate not only multiculturalism but American multiculturalism. But, no, in the end, our right-thinking priest sees the error of his tolerance for spiritual diversity through the passive aggressions of the Italian monks. Forgive me if I don’t venerate before Rossellini’s persuasive genius.

But it really is easy to forget (and some of that sequence remains insightful) as one of the six episodes of Paisan, a short story cycle/rumination on communication and major influence on Inglourious Basterds/tour through Italy as the allies storm Sicily, liberate Naples and Rome, fight insurgents in Florence, and go behind enemy lines on the Po. And, again, Rossellini must be reading my diary: “You’re all alike. You, the Germans, the Fascists. You people with guns are all the same.” Not that I completely agree, but to the nonviolent, what’s the difference?

Germany, Year Zero supports my theory of (slightly) diminishing returns in the trilogy in direct proportion to blatancy of manipulation (all films manipulate us; subtlety is the sticky factor). Paisan’s smash cut to “Fine” is here replaced by the obvious ploy of making a child the protagonist. I won’t go into the narrative, but boy is this an elegant marriage of intellectual argument and emotional involvement. Similar to the others, it’s a real, ‘live portrait of the streets of my reigning favorite city Berlin in 1948. And where Rome, Open City is defiant and Paisan is ambivalent, Germany, Year Zero is necessarily mournful and rightly set in the Nazi capital. The defining moment of the 20th century was an epic tragedy that we’re still mourning.

Which reminds me of a moment of Rossellini’s generosity, a trait that seems only to grow as his work matures. I can’t remember in which film, but probably in Germany, Year Zero, there’s a scene where two Germans are talking about their life after the war. At the end, one of them laments, “Before the war we were national socialists. Now we’re just Nazis.” Rossellini doesn’t linger or let them off the hook, but he humanizes them in a fleeting moment of connection.  Talk about grace.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Covering the war in Afghanistan from the frontlines, Restrepo (2010) is an eye-opening piece of journalism that makes CNN’s Persian Gulf coverage look like a puff piece.  Directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger deliver verite naturalism as they embed with the US Army for fifteen months in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan, the Korengal valley. The film’s intimate perspective compensates for a lack of omniscience with an observant eyes-on-the-ground approach similar to that of Generation Kill. The major divergence, though, is in the acknowledgment, or glaring lack thereof in the case of Restrepo, of the reporters. They ask questions on a couple occasions, and the entire campaign is interspersed with later confessional sequences in typical doc style, but you wonder why nobody’s rushing to cover the directors during any of the combat they wind up in.

Still, it’s hard to focus on the crew when you’re in the midst of a real-life battle between US Army soldiers and invisible Taliban insurgents. The power of the film’s battlefield access cannot be overstated. No news report or fiction film comes as close to conveying what fighting in Afghanistan is really like, and the talking heads (“felt like fish in a barrel,” “ my mindset was like ‘I’m gonna die here’”) only augment the horror. You’re on edge hiking through the forests. You feel betrayed when you hear reports that the recurring valley elders have called for jihad. You’re dumbstruck at the chaos of the two major skirmishes, the dig-shoot-dig fortification of a new base (the titular O.P. Restrepo) and the so-bad-they-warn-us Operation Rock Avalanche. You’re exhausted when you read that ending title card, the filmmakers’ final, ironic killshot.

Restrepo isn’t nearly as depressing as it sounds, though, precisely because it doesn’t have much perspective beyond that of its creative, energetic, young soldiers. The greatest scene in the film is a humorous walkie-talkie conversation so absurdly detailed and expertly timed that no screenwriter could have concocted it. Through their talking heads and spontaneous dance parties and artistic outlets we come to know the individual soldiers, especially platoon leader Capt. Kearney, who desperately clings to the notion that OP Restrepo is a success. It’s more than a strategic victory and more than a memorial for the soldier, glimpsed in poetic low-angle flashback, it’s named after. It’s a symbol that their campaign, however costly, produced some concrete result.

Restrepo the film is more opaque, but the film’s multivalent attack crystallizes in the weekly meetings with the valley elders. These sequences hearten the less gung ho among us, they provide an interesting if limited anthropological insight, especially the meeting about the aptly named Cow Incident, and they demonstrate the documentary’s limitations as the weekly impasse is resolved without explanation. But more than any other scene, these episodes reveal both the film’s worldview and its cunning. As the appearance of diplomacy occurs on hardly neutral ground, the camera silently, selectively clarifies that each side talks past the other and walks away feeling accomplished. It’s the illusion of progress, but next week you’re back where you started. Welcome to Afghanistan.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

TFT 126 – KICK-ASS / VINCERE

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DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE: KICK-ASS / VINCERE / VINCERE AT THE BELCOURT, NASHVILLE

OVERTURES

Three opening sequences have embedded themselves in my mind this year:

Youssou N’Dour’s anthemic call, at the beginning of Elizabeth Chai Versalihis’ ‘I Bring What I Love’ to the young people of Africa, tears streaming down his face, asking his people to be guided by their own vision to unshackle themselves from the dependency fostered by sentimentalized Western views of the continent.

The first section of ‘Up’, which I saw a few weeks before my own wedding in May, the most glorious animation and design fused with a powerfully resonant story: the arc of a love affair, beginning in childhood, and reaching a crisis with the death of one party; whole films have dedicated to this arc, of course; ‘Up’ manages to make you believe it in five minutes; the whole rest of the movie is about what happens next, and how love always outlasts its object.

And the first half hour of ‘Inglourious Basterds’, which manages to invoke the memory of Lee van Cleef, the ‘Hills are Alive’ sequence in ‘The Sound of Music’; and even the face of Stanley Kubrick.  Beyond that, it provides the most credible reason in cinema history for a French and German character to speak English to each other; announces the arrival of a fantastic actor – Christoph Waltz – on international screens; and declares Tarantino’s intention to make Nazi violence look even worse than it has ever done by the very absurdity of its portrayal in his film.

More suggestions?

In this week’s episode: In association with our friends at the Film Society of Lincoln Center we delve into the 2009 New York Film Festival – Lebanon / Inferno / Room and a Half

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This Episode: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds / Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock / A preview of Those Crank Guys’ Gamer / Click Here to mail us your entry in our Taking Woodstock Competition

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