I hate to celebrate misery (other than in my work), and while it’s terrible for their children, things might be looking up for film fans. Guy Ritchie and Madonna have split. Maybe now Guy can get back to making quality pictures like Lock Stock and Snatch. From what I’ve seen so far, Revolver…
Updated: I think I’ve confused that film with another one that involves a musician.
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I watched Anton Corbijn’s Control last night and was mesmerized by it. Truth be told, I had forgotten the impact that Joy Division had on me in me in my youth - the simplicity of their music and yet its mesmerizing power. The only downside to the film was the fact that during the closing credits a cover of Shadowplay by The Killers was included. I mention that only because, to me, The Killers are a poor man’s version of Joy Division and have built a career on resurrecting something that others did far better, and with far greater risk, thirty years ago.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Joy Division I urge you to head directly to iTunes and purchase The Best Of Joy Division as a place to start. Once you do that, listen to Transmission, which was released as a single in 1979, at a volume that will piss off everyone within a 1 mile radius. Either that or watch them perform it live below…
Joy Division’s catalogue is small, consisting of only two LP’s and a handful of singles, though what they began would ultimately produce a group that would go on to sell millions of records and influence an entire generation - New Order, which consisted of Joy Division’s remaining original members following Ian Curtis’ suicide with the addition of Gillian Gilbert. Truth be told, had Curtis lived, Joy Division may have very well outdone New Order’s global success.
All of that said, the film was very well done. One aspect of it that I truly appreciated was that Curtis’s widow, Deborah, who helped produce the film, and whose book it was based on, was extremely open with regards to the extra marital relationship that Curtis had with Annik Honoré, what she meant to him, and how the strife caused by it truly affected him.
One thing about Ian Curtis that I have always admired was his dislike of fame and for admitting that Joy Division’s growing popularity was something that he felt suffocating. At the time of his suicide the band had gained notoriety but did not enjoy the sort of sales that are usually equated with a band of significant popularity. Even at that level, Curtis found it difficult to cope. Coupled with his battle against epilepsy and the stresses of his personal relationships, his death seemed an inevitability in many ways. Unfortunately, as is the case throughout modern music history, his suicide cemented Joy Division’s place in history instead of providing a wakeup call to the realities of what can happen to artists when their personal difficulties are given less attention than the pressures placed upon them to placate audiences.
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The Los Angeles Times ran an interesting article yesterday entitled The Iraq war movie: Military hopes to shape genre. Here’s a short excerpt…
“With military assistance, moviemakers get access to bases, ships, planes, tanks and Humvees. Military leaders also offer script advice.
And unless a filmmaker agrees to address any problems, the Pentagon generally opts out.
Most movies involving the military have been summer action films, like this year’s “Iron Man,” which was made with Air Force help.
But Army officials are eager to work with filmmakers making serious movies about Iraq — the kind of pictures that have the power to shape the public’s view of the war and its warriors.
“In the past, have there been instances of disagreements with scripts? Yes,” said Maj. Gen. Anthony A. Cucolo III, chief of Army public affairs. “The message I would send is: Give us a try.”
The problem for military officials is that some in Hollywood see their script advice as a subtle form of censorship or an attempt to spin the war.
Paul Haggis, writer and director of the Iraq war movie “In the Valley of Elah,” said he concluded that the Army was not interested in telling honest stories about the war or soldiers.
“They are trying to put the best spin on what they are doing,” Haggis said. “Of course they want to publicize what is good. But it doesn’t mean that it is true.”
Few directors focused on Iraq or Afghanistan have approached the military for help. Haggis did.
Haggis said that after he submitted his script, the producers received 21 pages of objections to parts of the film. Haggis, who did not review the notes, said his producers told him they amounted to a refusal to participate.”
In the article, Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale claims that Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a film about the true story of the rape and murder of a teenage Iraqi girl and her family by US soldiers, was “wildly offensive”. The reason? Because he felt that it painted all members of the US military as potential rapists and murderers. Ironically, murderers are what most of Muslims has been painted by many in the West over the last seven years and you don’t see anyone making films to correct that misconception.
I own Redacted and I think De Palma did a superb job documenting a very important event - a war crime. I did not walk away from the film convinced that all American soldiers were rapists and murderers – but here’s the thing - some are, whether Breasseale likes it or not. The film that De Palma made was based on an actual event, one that received a nanosecond’s worth of attention stateside. It was an important film to make, as was Haggis’ In The Valley Of Elah and Kimberly Peirce’s recent film Stop-Loss. Added to that list are notable documentaries which should be quintessential viewing as far as I’m concerned, such as No End In Sight, Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib, Why We Fight, and The Road To Guantanamo.
How should the war in Iraq be depicted? The fact of the matter is that the same people that are willing to dole out finances to those willing to put less of a negative spin on the war are the very same that have never bothered to even keep an official count of Iraqi civilian casualties.
And they want to talk about ‘reality’.
Bad news. According to ‘reality’ the mission was ‘accomplished’ in 2003. Remember?
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The new backend admin features for Wordpress are pretty cool. Even cooler is the fact that Dale customized our layout. One of its downsides, unfortunately, is the fact that audio upload sizes are pretty restricted, making it basically impossible for me to throw up teasers on a whim.
Another cool development is the addition of video to Flickr. I know that a lot of Flickr purists are against it, but like anything, you just don’t have to use it. The clips are limited to 90 seconds, but can be embedded, so I’m probably going to use it primarily for quickly answering fan questions. If you’d like to ask a question, you can email me at matt@matthewgood.org or by using the Flickr mail service. If you chose to, please include your real name and where you’re from, because I won’t answer anonymous questions. Obviously, I won’t be able to get to everyone’s questions, so forgive me in advance if yours isn’t chosen.
Anyway, a few film reviews…
I wasn’t sure what to make of this HBO series, but bought it anyway given that the creators of Deadwood are behind it. I must admit that I was refreshingly surprised – so much so that I watched the entire first season in one sitting.
To say that this film wasn’t the best film made last year would be a profound understatement. While I have always been a massive fan of the work of the Cohen Brothers, there is simply no way that No Country For Old Men is even in the same league as this film. The acting, the dimension, the cinematography and depth – they are all representative of the sort of superlative filmmaking that is becoming increasingly rare.
The film opens with almost fifteen captivating, dialogue-free minutes; a powerful achievement and one that certainly speaks to not only the ability of Daniel Day-Lewis, but also the vision of Paul Thomas Anderson.
How this film did not win Best Picture is entirely beyond me.
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First up this morning, two quick film reviews…
Based on the rape and murder of a teenaged Iraqi girl in Mahmoudiya (and the execution of other members of her family) by US Marines manning a nearby checkpoint, the film is a wake up call that received little to no attention in the United States. While the crime is one of the major focuses of the film, another important aspect is the pressures faced by the individual that finally came forward and revealed that it happened.
Great cinematography, great performances. Didn’t like the story.
An op-ed by Seumas Milne published by The Guardian today is one that should be read if you have the time. An excerpt…
“The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week’s carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence - or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides - has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a “holocaust” if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.
So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the “numerous civilian casualties” on the week’s “significant rise” in Palestinian rocket attacks “and the Israeli response”, condemn the firing of rockets as “terrorist acts” and defend Israel’s right to self-defence “in accordance with international law”. But of course it has been nothing of the kind - any more than has been Israel’s 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees.
Nor is the past week’s one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel - backed by the US and the European Union - imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January’s mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn’t work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians.
But the US and Europe’s response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the “starting point” of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years.
Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation - or to self-defence - whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel’s disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world’s largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.
The truth is that Hamas’s control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians’ democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair - and also passed to the Guardian - George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: “What happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”
Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran’s support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt’s unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president’s face.”
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I forgot to post reviews of a few new films out on DVD the last time I did it, so here are the ones that I missed. As always, they’re brief and to the point.
First, George Clooney is outstanding. Second, the story itself is amazing – especially the film’s conclusion.
This isn’t out on DVD yet, but you can download it on iTunes. Being that it’s my favourite animated show, I’m completely bias. But it has to be said that Guitar Queer-o is truly outstanding (not to mention accurate beyond belief, ahem).
This film proves that Ben Affleck should stay behind the camera and that his brother is far superior in front of it.
Complete nonsense. Utterly and completely historically inaccurate. Looked great though.
Good for that warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s about all.
I have to admit, much better than I expected it to be.
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As you can all see, we have a new site design. The truth is that it’s not actually new; it was a design that we used over a year ago. After re-designing the site after its use, Dale made it a Wordpress theme available for download, so if you want to use this theme, and have a Wordpress blog, please do. We’ve obviously made some changes to it for our use here, but it’s basically the same.
One of the alterations is the addition of the little ship logo, which, as is usually the case, I designed to look like a football crest. The little ahoy! is a guilty pleasure that we included because, well, we have a soft spot for base nautical humour.
The favicon was also my idea, though we might change that in the days to come because most people will automatically assume that it’s the Cross of St. Andrew, the Scottish flag, which it isn’t. I, myself, have some Scottish heritage, so it’s nothing against Scotland. It was just meant to be, once again, a little inside nautical humour.
I have always had a thing for ships, primarily 17th and 18th century vessels, so it’s really no surprise that I would use a ship’s silhouette in the design. That said, it will stick around until we get bored of it and, ultimately, find something else to replace it. We are, after all, design freaks, though this latest change was made primarily to trim some fat from the site.
No matter how many changes we make, the content, and the archives, remain the same, so there’s no worries on that account. I personally like single column designs when it comes to blogs if they include a clean top menu, which this one does, so.
If you read the site via the RSS feed, make sure to take note that the author of each entry is now listed below the post itself. I have to take the blame for that, as I didn’t think putting that information above the entry text looked clean.
The ‘Featured’ Icon
You’ll notice that a few entries at the top of the main page of the website have this arrow icon next to them. These are entries that are ‘featured’, or been pinned at the top of the site because of their popularity or because they contain important announcements. New, regular posts, will appear below them. So make sure to scroll down to see if anything new has been posted.
I purchase and watch a lot of films, so providing in-depth reviews of all of them isn’t something I have the time for. So when I do, I’ll be short and sweet. Anyway, here are three that I picked up this week…
Beowulf
The classic Anglo-Saxon tale Hollywoodized. That’s to be expected. The use of Rotoscoping was an excellent decision, and makes the film.
The Darjeeling Limited
Like his films or not, Wes Anderson has a natural gift for making films that focus on the nuances of dialogue, something that is sorely lacking these days. Both Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman were excellent.
Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale
Would I go so far as to say that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have redefined comedy through works such as The Office and Extras? Yes, I would. This series finale is so good, in fact, that it overshadows the brilliance of the entire first two seasons.
The lynch pin, though, is the acting of Ashley Jensen, whose performance is, in my opinion, outstanding.
Jump online…
“Karla-Rae Morris is getting an $8,000 boob job for free – and she owes it all to bosom buddies she befriended on a controversial website.
Since the fall of 2005, the petite 26-year-old Fort McMurray mother has been racking up donations on www.MyFreeImplants.com – a California-based site that allows men to invest in breast augmentation surgery for flat-chested women who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it. In exchange for donations, the women chat online with the charitable men and send them photos and videos of themselves.
Morris, a married stay-at-home mom with two young children, reached her goal of $8,000 last month. She joins Strathmore mom Candace Leadley, also 26, as the only known Canadians to reach “Hall-of-Fame” status on the site.
The five-foot-six, 98-pound Morris, who initially took some grief from her husband and two of her sisters for her quest for a treasured chest, plans to undergo surgery this spring to expand from a 32AA to 34C cup.
“I’m going to be really super happy,” she told Sun Media. “I always felt like less of a woman and more like a little girl. It’s going to make me more confident wearing a swimsuit. And I won’t have to buy padded bras anymore.”
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Tuesdays mean the release of new DVD’s. That being the case, I usually find myself up until almost five in the morning watching those films that have been released that I’ve been waiting for. In some cases, I randomly choose films, which can lead to both disappointment and pleasant surprises.
Last night I watched two films, Rendition and In The Valley Of Elah, and I though them both worth mentioning in a post.
As one can assume from the title of the film, it’s basically about the US practice of Extraordinary Rendition. In a way, it leans on the story of Maher Arar; in others it demonstrates the futility of torture.
When the film was release it received mixed reviews, some claiming that Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance was a detriment to it. But, as far as I’m concerned, not only is his performance quintessential, but also that his character is the crux of the entire film.
While Rendition can be viewed on the surface as a film simply about both the entirely illegal practice itself and the methods employed to illicit information, the metaphor provided by the struggle and consequent actions of Gyllenhall’s character represents something far more important – conscience. Embodied in his character is the conscience of an entire nation, one that would no doubt be sickened by the realities of those practices that the United States government has covertly instituted or augmented since 9/11. To me, that is the real message of the film, and Gyllenhaal’s performance, given that he is not a case officer but forced into the role of having to act as one, is one that is, in my opinion, near perfect. It is one that reflects not a brash inward struggle, but a silent and confused one, one torn between loyalty and truth that does not produce the sort of immediate moral conclusions that one might expect.
In many ways the film is flawed, but as a metaphor for the struggle of a nation’s conscience embodied in the experience of one man, it profoundly succeeds.
Based on actual events, this film delves into the realities of the affects of the war in Iraq on US combat soldiers and how their moral compass is altered both while at war and after returning home. It is, I believe, a must see film.
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“Similarly, we are told by another insider reviewer, James Rocchi, that the scenario, as originally written by Aaron Sorkin of “West Wing” fame, included the following line for Avrakotos: “Remember I said this: There’s going to be a day when we’re gonna look back and say ‘I’d give anything if [Afghanistan] were overrun with Godless communists’.” This line is nowhere to be found in the final film.”
The above is taken from a recent piece written by Chalmers Johnson regarding the film “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Johnson opens the piece with the following…
“I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (D-2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for close to twenty years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors. Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives — the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee — from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents.
Both men flagrantly abused their positions — but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system — retire and become a lobbyist — whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency Clandestine Service’s first “honored colleague” award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a $360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan.
In a secret ceremony at CIA headquarters on June 9, 1993, James Woolsey, Bill Clinton’s first Director of Central Intelligence and one of the agency’s least competent chiefs in its checkered history, said: “The defeat and breakup of the Soviet empire is one of the great events of world history. There were many heroes in this battle, but to Charlie Wilson must go a special recognition.” One important part of that recognition, studiously avoided by the CIA and most subsequent American writers on the subject, is that Wilson’s activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and led to the United States’ current status as the most hated nation on Earth.”
Johnson, who worked as a consulting annalist for the CIA in the 60’s, and is the authour of three paramount works regarding American Imperialism, The Sorrows Of Empire, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, and 2000’s now prophetic Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, commented on the book that the film was adapted from, writing…
“The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every ‘secret’ armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the rape of Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the ‘secret war’ in Laos, aid to the Greek Colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of President Allende in Chile, and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the Agency’s activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States and devastating to the people being ‘liberated.’ The CIA continues to get away with this bungling primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its Constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.
“According to the author of Charlie Wilson’s War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan mujahideen (”freedom fighters”). The Agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and ‘unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].’
“The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show ‘60 Minutes’ and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S.’s clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was ‘the largest and most successful CIA operation in history,’ ‘the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time,’ and that ‘there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire.’ Crile’s sole measure of success is killed Soviet soldiers (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991. That’s the successful part.
“However, he never once mentions that the ‘tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists’ the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
It’s in times such as these when the voice of someone so vastly knowledgeable is direly needed. To foolishly categorize someone like Johnson as just ‘another liberal nut’ is not only ignorant, but also extremely revealing with regards to ones own self-censorship based solely on political bias. I urge anyone interested to read Johnson’s works. For more information about him, click here.
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