Once (2007)

I remember "absent-mindedly" watching the Academy Awards last February and noticing one of the nominees for best song was just a man on the guitar and a woman on the piano singing a song called "Falling Slowly." It was so unpretentious that it really stood out among the other songs--and absolutely everything else in Hollywood--and to my surprise it became one of the few pieces of art to win that actually deserves to win. Glen Hansard gave an acceptance speech and ended it saying, "Make art. Make art. Thanks." But the orchestra started playing before Marketa Irglova could talk. So after the commercial break, Jon Stewart asked her to come back up and give her speech. I think he new a good thing when he saw it. Both of their speeches are posted here and are pretty inspiring. 

So it took me a while to see the movie but it was well worth seeing. Hansard plays a vacuum cleaner repair man--or as he calls himself, "a broken-hearted hoover fixer sucker guy"--who writes songs and plays on the streets of Dublin, Ireland. He plays covers of Van Morrison and the like during the day because he figures most people want to hear songs that they know. (As a sometime musician, I know that's true). But at night, when the streets are empty, he plays his original work. The song that he plays during the title sequence is intense and draws the attention of Irglova, a Czech immigrant who lives with her mother and her young daughter, and works variously selling roses on the street and as a house cleaner. 

Irglova recognizes the beauty of his original work and presses him about it. She finds that many of his songs are written about his ex who has since left him and moved to London. She correctly deduces that he isn't over her despite his denial and that deep down he wants to move to London to win her back. However, he's stuck in a rut, living in his dad's house and his life not moving anywhere. 

But their friendship grows, and Irglova, who is a classically-trained piano player, finds that she complements his music perfectly. And so the movie is a musical where the musical interludes actually make sense because the characters are musicians who are writing, rehearsing and recording their songs. Though it is a little bit of a stretch how perfectly they play their songs on the first try, but, of course, it's a movie. 

There's not much story, but the characters draw you in. Irglova is so cute and talented and Hansard is also very talented but a little awkward and lonely and wants to make the relationship work out. Implicitly in this movie, you can see how a man and a woman can look at the same situation very differently. But the end of the movie is correct. It's fair play.

But the movie is excellent and like Hansard said at the Academy Awards, they've made art. 

Together (2003)

Directed by Kaige Chen
Written by Kaige Chen and Xiao Lu Xue
Starring Yun Tang, Peiqi Li, Hong Chen, Zhiwen Wang, Kaige Chen and Qing Zhang

I first saw the trailer for Together in June of 2003 (before Bend It Like Beckham) and I knew I had to see it. Unfortunately, I moved to Spain that same month and it was no use trying to see it in the theater there because it would have been in Chinese with Spanish subtitles. And that would have been useless.

After all this time I finally got around to seeing it. I wanted to see it with someone but I ended up watching Together alone.

Anyway, Liu Cheng (Peiqi Liu) is the personal chef for a wealthy man in a small town in China. His 13-year-old son, Liu Xiaochun (Yun Tang) is a violin prodigy who has won competitions every year. When he gets a chance to compete in Beijing, his father stuffs their life's savings in his orange beanie and they head for Beijing, hoping that they can find a good teacher for Xiaochun.

It's touching to see how hard Cheng will work to get his son positioned with a good teacher. He follows teachers to their homes, offers them gifts, flatters and begs. He would come off as a sleazy agent type if he wasn't so self-effacing and sincerely humble. He's definitely the type of father who would work in a grocery store for twenty years so that his son can go to Harvard. He has so much invested in his son that he says he can't watch him playing in a competition because he (the father) gets stage fright.

Xiaochun is a complex character. He has the same peasant work ethic as his father -- he works hard without being told and he has high standard of cleanliness that his first teacher doesn't live up to. But you can tell he wants more from his life than his father has gotten. You can see that he is ashamed of his peasant background. He has pictures of models hidden in his sheet music and has an exceptional eye for fashion.

The strength of China's capitalist market economy are displayed as two rice merchants literally fight for Cheng's business. In the scuffle, Cheng loses his hat and their life savings. He is able to find work at a restaurant -- but not as a chef, which is his training (and you suspect that he is a better chef than the restaurant's chef), but as a delivery boy. Xiaochun earns extra money playing and doing odd jobs for a call girl named Lili (played by Hong Chen, who is director Kaige Chen's wife) who lives down the street and is just as pretty and fashionable as any of the girls hidden in Xiaochun's sheet music.

Lili becomes Xiaochun's connection to the more sophisticated urban life while his first teacher Prof. Jiang (Zhiwen Wang), a perennially tousle-haired professor who lives with stray cats that he has taken in and has given up a domestic life for his music gives him the training to move on. He doesn't have the connections to make Xiaochun a star and so their professional relationship must end -- but his contact with Xiaochun has made him a better person.

Director Kaige Chen, who also directed Farewell My Concubine, plays Prof. Yu Shifeng who takes Xiaochun in and prepares him for a career as an international musician.

One of the beauties of the film are the good characters mentioned above that Xiaochun and his father meet in Beijing (though for a city as large as Beijing, people seem to bump into each other very often). It was also touching to see Lili and Professor Jiang walking Cheng to the train station. It signified that they recognized him as an extraordinary man.

What had first attracted me to this film was the ambition of two villagers living in the city with nothing but their talent and their will to survive keeping them going. However, there is a revelation toward the end of the film that makes this a film about grace and the gratitude as a response to a tremendous act of self-sacrifice that motivates good works. Cheng is like a Christ figure and Xiaochun offers an apt example of the Christian response to the Gospel.

In the end there is an imaginative twist on the clichéd dad-doesn't-love-me-because-he-didn't-come-to-my-performance/game ending (that a Spanish ad campaign ridiculed American films for having).

I highly recommend this film in a room with a good system. The soundtrack is amazing with original music by Ling Zhao and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. And Chen along with his cinematographers Jiongqiu Jin and Hyung-ku Kim match the sound with the images with incredible beauty.

A tremendous film.

By the way, Emily Litella would have loved this film.

Topkapi (1964)

Directed by Jules Dassin
Written by Eric Ambler (novel) and Monja Danischewsky (screenplay)
Starring Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell

Don' t you hate it when you watch a movie and it is nothing like the book?

That's how I felt when I first started watching Topkapi, which was based on a novel by Eric Ambler, the father of modern spy novels. I guess I got into an espionage kick and read his book A Coffin for Dimitrios while I've been preparing to go to school. I don't know. Maybe with what I'll be learning I need to prepare myself for the posibility of writing spy fiction.

After Dimitrios I read Light of Day because I had read that they had already made a film out of it and that Pierce Brosnan was going to remake it as The Topkapi Affair.

Unfortunately, Jules Dassin, the director of the critically acclaimed 1955 heist movie Rififi--which I haven't seen yet--took a lot of liberty with the plot about a small-time English con-man in Athens named Arthur Simon Simpson who gets mixed up with upscale jewelry thieves who are planning a daring heist of the royal jewels in Istanbul. Along the way, Turkish security catches on to him and he is forced to spy on the thieves or else he'll get thrown into a Turkish prison.

While Ambler tells the story from Simpson's point-of-view, focusing on the espionage involved in taking down the gang of criminals, Dassin, who is American-born and was forced into exile in France after he was named as a communist before Congress, plays up the heist telling it from the thieve's point-of-view, with Simpson being just a part of the ensemble.

Peter Ustinov does an excellent job of portraying Simpson as the loser that Ambler portrayed him as. His mannerisms provide the heft of the subtle comedy in the film. During the heist someone tells him, I was afraid you lost you nerve. To which he replies, "It's not a question of losing my nerve; I never had nerve!"

The Austrian Maximilian Schell, who happens to be Angelina Jolie's godfater [I'll let the gentle reader decide what kind of a job he is doing], plays the Walter Harper, the Swiss leader of the gang, with a suaveness and surprises me that I haven't seen him in anything else. Melina Mercouri plays the femme fatale whose idea it is to steal the jewelry and tempts Simpson to join the gang. The Greek actress would marry Dassin and their marriage would last until her death in 1994. She was also became Greece's first female minister of culture in 1971.

I guess I might have reacted to the film differently if I hadn't read the book. Besides the change in the plot, even though there were comedic elements in the book it seemed like the film, as often seems to happen with films of that era, tried a lot harder to be funner and bordered on the slapstick. I don't know, maybe I just don't notice the comedy in books as much. It also didn't help that it began with the typical colorful 1960s imaginary that provided so much fodder for Mike Myers in the original Austin Powers.

Though Topkapi is apparently an acclaimed heist movie, I'm hoping that Pierce Brosnan--who was brilliant as a distraught hitman in The Matador--will stick closer to the Hitchcockian aspects of the book in his sequel to the The Thomas Crown Affair.

Ikiru (1952)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni
Starring Takashi Shimura

I don't think you get any more ambitious in a movie. Japan's greatest director, working with his most reliable actor in a film about the meaning of life. In fact, the title of the film Ikiru means "to live."

Kanji Watanabe, played by Takashi Shimura, is a the section chief in city hall's public affairs office. He's been doing mindless work for thirty years without missing a day, when he finds out that he has stomach cancer and has less than six months to live. It is then that the bureaucrat -- and the viewer -- are faced with the question of how one should live his life.

The film takes the form of an argument. First, Watanabe tries living hedonistically. He goes to what appears to be Japan's version of Vegas and blows 50 yen in one night (his son and his daughter-in-law talked about buying a modern house for 200 yen).

After returning from his binge, he runs into the young female employee from his office who is bored out of her mind at work and needs his authorization to resign -- apparently the office comes to a standstill when Watanabe isn't there to approve everything that happens. He decides that the meaning of life is in meaningful relationships. But although he appears content with a platonic relationship, she gets creeped out.

So finally, he looks for his purpose in the place that he feels that sucked it out of him: his work. It's an affirmation of the Protestant Work Ethic that would make even John Calvin smile. After his death, his coworkers throughout city hall wonder what a could have caused a loyal worker to decide to actually get something accomplished. Its an indictment of bureacracy that every government worker should be forced to watch.

Shimura plays Watanabe with a mix of brokenness and horror at his fate. Two years later, he would play the leader of a band of samurais hired to protect a village in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, which for my money is the best samurai film ever made. His range was extraordinary, which is why the descendant of the warrior samurai class was so closely associated with Kurosawa.

It is also one of those films where you get the idea that every image has a deeper meaning and that Kurosawa instilled so many layers into the film that you could watch it five or six times and still notice new things. For example, it is no coincidence that as Watanabe has his epiphany, he he stumbles out of a restaurant where a girl's birthday party is happening. As he stumbles out, the girls begin singing "Happy Birthday," signifying his new life that is about to begin.

Ikiru deserves its standing as one of Japan's, and specifically Kurosawa's, most important films.

Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2002)

Since the last film I reviewed was by Fernando Meirelles, I thought I would include my review of his earlier film, City of God. It was actually the first film review I ever had published on a now-defunct, I think, web site called, Biggerboat.net. I don't think it's too bad but I also hope I've shown some improvement.

City of God is a collection of interwoven stories based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Paolo Lins that is set in a favela (slum) of Rio de Janeiro, known as the “City of God.” The biggest box office hit in Brazil’s history (and the country’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in this year’s Academy Awards), City of God portrays the gang life in a poverty-stricken favela so well, the Brazilian police actually arrested a notorious drug lord in the lobby of a theater waiting to see the film’s sneak preview.

The story begins in the 1960s, when the government relocated the city’s poor and homeless to what an area that resembled a refugee camp, in order not to spoil the city’s “postcard image.” The police rarely ventured into its streets and as a result, the so-called City of God became a breeding ground for drugs and crime, ruled by gangs of children wielding guns that are all too readily available.

Through the sprawl of its many storylines, the film centers on two main characters who each follow vastly divergent paths. The first is a boy named Li’l Dice, who hangs out with a gang of older boys called the Tender Trio. “We have to find a way out of here,” the eleven year old tells them, and he devises a plan to rob a local motel (which also functions as a brothel for rich men from other parts of the city). Because he is the youngest, the Tender Trio make him wait outside the door to look out for the police while they rob the motel’s patrons. Unhappy with his role in the heist, Li’l Dice sounds a false alarm, clearing the Tender Trio out of the motel so that he can perform a brutal act that marks the beginning of a bloody career that will make him the most powerful gang lord in the City of God.

The second character, Rocket, who also serves as the film’s narrator, is too afraid of dying to get involved in the gang culture. His older brother, a member of the Tender Trio, tells him that he has the brains of the family and, making him swear never to touch his gun, encourages him to find his legitimate way out of the favela. Rocket finds a way out when he sees a photojournalist taking pictures of the body of the Tender Trio’s leader, who had been shot to death by the police as he tried to escape the City of God. Fascinated by the camera, Rocket aspires to become a professional photographer — though it will take him another decade before his newfound ambition can provide an escape.

The anarchy and untamed violence portrayed on the streets of the favela are reminiscent of the chaos that drove last year’s Blackhawk Down. But, unlike that pro-America war microcosm, City of God gives faces to the members of the angry mobs with guns—and it manages to do so without sentimentalizing them with trite explanations for their actions. Though the film condemns society for allowing places like the City of God to exist, it never excuses the characters’ behavior.

Director Fernando Meirelles has received some criticism for employing nearly 200 nonprofessional actors from the streets of Brazil and for glorifying violence with highly stylized action sequences. These criticisms fail to look at the big picture; though Meirelles portrays life as cheap to many of the hoods, he also highlights the anguish their actions cause to innocent bystanders. Meirelles shows both Li’l Ze’s brutal murder of a man trying to protect his brother and his mother’s grief stricken reaction.

Unfortunately, the Academy snubbed City of God from this year’s Oscars. Y Tu Mama Tambien, which earned more in the box office than any other foreign film, also got snubbed from the Best Foreign Film category, but made it for Best Original Screenplay.

Though praised by Brazil’s newly elected Leftist president, Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, as necessary viewing for anyone who truly wants to understand Brazil, its portrayal of Li’l Ze’s unrestrained ambition to dominate his business can just as easily be interpreted as a critique of corporate America. Exhibiting an extraordinary talent for storytelling, Meirelles succeeds in revealing a side of Brazil (and by extension, the world itself) that many would have preferred to sweep under the rug. In a society that idealizes brutality without remorse, violence only breeds more violence and Meirelles’s city streets mete out their own brand of justice for those who take up the gun.

Nacho Libre (2006)

Directed by: Jared Hess
Written By: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess and Mike White
Starring: Jack Black, Ana de la Reguera and Héctor Jiménez

Ignacio is a cook in a Mexican monastery who believes he can do more with his life. The monks don't even give him enough money to make fresh food for the orphans in his charge. While in town he gets the idea to raise money for the kids by working as a professional wrestler by night. The problem is that the monks see the lives of the popular wrestlers as a sinful. So the question is whether it is moral to pursue a lifestyle that the church does not approve for the sake of ultimately supporting the church.

To suggest that Nacho Libre, a film by the writers of Napoleon Dynamite and the writer of The School of Rock, answers any ethical or philosophical questions would be a vast misrepresentation. Besides its premise, the plot is weak and the characters are one-dimensional but the film is pretty damned funny.

Jack Black, who has a comedic presence the size of the central character of his previous movie King Kong, carries this film. I haven't seen School of Rock but I would venture to say that this was his best performance since his break out in High Fidelity ("Oh, I'm sorry, is your daughter in a coma?") .

I have to admit, that I did like Napoleon Dynamite better. I think Jared and Jerusha Hess loved their characters more. Even though he was the antagonist of the story, you could still feel sorry for Uncle Rico in a pathetic sort of way. There were so many good characters in that story.

In Nacho Libre there are really only three characters that get any air time Nacho (Ignacio), the beautiful nun who Nacho has a crush on, Sister Encarnación, played by Ana de la Reguera, and Nacho's malnourished tag-team partner Esqueleto, played by Héctor Jiménez.

The first few scenes set up single gags that aren't that funny. But the real comedy comes when Hess just sets the camera on Black and lets him do his thing. Whether it's his heroic affectations -- he does a lot of posing -- or his catch phrases that only work with his Mexican accent ("take it easy") or his unconvincing arguments for the advantages of a monk's life -- which are complicated by his crush on Sister Encarnación -- to the young orphans.

In the end, Nacho Libre is an earnest tale about a sincere and naïve underdog. But there really isn't much of a moral, implicit or explicit. It's just a really funny story. And isn't that enough?

The Constant Gardener (2005)

Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Written by John le Carré (novel), Jeffrey Caine (screenplay), Bráulio Mantovani (contributing writer)
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé, Danny Huston, and Archie Panjabi

A thriller directed by the Brazilian filmmaker of City of God based on a novel by the writer of the The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

When Tessa Quayle (Rachel Weisz) is murdered on an expedition in Kenya, her husband Justin (Ralph Fiennes), a loyal member of the British High Commission in Kenya, investigates the circumstances that led to her death, which involves much more than a romantic affair with her research partner Arnold Bluhm (Hubert Koundé) as is first suspected.

In the scenes that flash back to their marriage, it is amazing that they were even married. He is a civil servant that does his work without questions and she is a bleeding heart activist. In fact, they met when she heckled him during a speech and criticized British foreign policy during the run up to the Iraq War. (But of course, in the world according to Hollywood no one has to question what keeps Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In the looks department, Fiennes and Weisz give Brad and Angelina a run for their money, at least in my book.)

But while they are stationed in Kenya, she begins investigating pharmaceutical experiments that are being conducted on the Africans. It is then that she makes dangerous enemies.

Fernando Meirelles was a wise choice to direct this project because his perspective as a Brazilian brings joy and vibrancy to scenes that a director from a developed country would perhaps only see poverty and misery.

On the DVD, John le Carré, the author of the novel of the same name on which the film was based, says that he originally planned to write a novel about the oil industry before writing about the pharmaceutical industry, which leads me to think that he set out with the intention to write a novel about how Africa is being exploited and then found a plot to justify his assumption.

But what does ring true, to me at least, is when a character explains how the pharmaceutical companies send outdated medicine to as "aid" for Africa -- while earning tax credits -- without caring much about the consequences of their actions the real reason behind is guilt.

It just reminds me of Bob Geldof, Jeffrey Sachs and the G8 that try to raise more and more aid for Africa but never consider what happens to the money after it gets there, whether it is actually accomplishing anything. But it really doesn't matter because they are clearing they guilty consciences by getting the money out of the hands of the rich. Whether or not it actually helps the poor in Africa is irrelevant.

The Constant Gardener is a love story wrapped in an effective thriller. However, I will hold my judgment on the political accusations.

Come te nessuno mai [But Forever in My Mind] (1999)

Directed by Gabriele Muccino
Written by Gabriele Muccino, Silvio Muccino, and Adele Tulli
Starring Silvio Muccino, Giuseppe Sanfelice, Giulia Steigerwalt and Giulia Carmignani

When his classmates conspire to occupy their high school, an act of social rebellion in the tradition of Europe’s generation of 1968, Silvio Ristuccia must be a part of it. Though he’s not nearly as politically active as the rest of his classmates, he’s going to the protest because there’s a distinct chance that he can score with his friend’s girlfriend.

It’s not that Silvio, who is played by Silvio Muccino is a bad guy, it’s just that he and his best friend Ponzi, played by Giuseppe Sanfelice, are eager to lose their virginity in this coming of age comedy set in Rome during the late 1990s.

If But Forever in My Mind were a drama, I would have said that the director Gabriele Muccino (Silvio’s older brother) and the film’s composer Paolo Buonvino, had no sense of irony, portraying the petty dramas of adolescence that take on momentous significance for those who experience them with earnestness and a straight face. I would have thought that Muccino underestimated his audience. But I’ve just seen that the film is listed as a comedy in IMDB, and I’ve decided that he may have overestimated his audience—or at least me.

But Forever in My Mind is really directed from a 16 year old’s perspective. Indeed, the first shot of the film is actually from a scene that happens at the end of the story, as Silvio lies on Ponzi’s doorstep wondering what he will think of himself at age 16 when he is 45. It’s funny, because I think I would have looked at this film much differently when I was 16 (although I am only 28 now).

Like he showed in his 2003 film, Ricordati di me (whose title "Remember Me My Love," seems unnecessary if his previous film really were "But Forever in My Mind") featuring, as every Italian movie should, Monica Belucci, But Forever in My Mind, Muccino has a very slick, polished directing style. I tried watching his 2001 film L'Ultimo bacio but all of the characters seemed equally immature without any redeeming characteristics, and I just couldn't get into it. I turned it off after 45 minutes and I uncharacteristically sent it back without watching the whole thing.

Besides the main element of drama in But Forever in My Mind's first act being the gossip going around about who is sleeping with whom the irony is evident in each of the students whose reasons for demonstrating are identical: “to protest privatization and standardization.” Since I would bet few of the students really understand what privatization is or realize how standard their answers are, I would suspect that Silvio’s reason for joining the protest is not that uncommon.

What these kids really want, as Silvio’s question in the first shot suggests, is to know that their lives are meaningful. Their parents protested Vietnam. They have nothing to protest but abstract ideas. But where Silvio and Ponzi are really looking for meaning is in sex. They are anxious about their first time and they want to get it right. In the last scene one character tells another (I don’t want to give which one away), “Today it was you, tomorrow will be me.” The sincerity of the statement, and the emotions the friends put in each other’s confidence, are in fact touching.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)

A Documentary Directed by Errol Morris

Last night before putting a DVD into the player, I happened to flip onto "The Daily Show" when John Stewart was showing clips of Donald Rumsfeld's confrontation with Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned White House critic. One could be tempted to think that Rumsfeld is the most controversial Secretary of Defense in American history. What would I give to find out, say twenty years from now after all the dust has settled from the political battlefield, what he really thought during his tenure in the Bush Administration and what conclusion he will have drawn from the decision he made then.

It just so happened that the next film in my Netflix queue was The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Robert McNamara was Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, under whose watch the US entered the Vietnam War, and overseeing the Pentagon into Johnson's Administration, some in the contemporary press apparently called Vietnam, "McNamara's War."

Besides his unique perspective as the architect of the Vietnam war, McNamara's work as an analyst during World War II, his position as the president of Ford Motor Company, his presence in the Oval Office with John and Bobby Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and his term as president of the World Bank make him an intriguing subject of Errol Morris's documentary and offers a window into the major events of the mid-twentieth century.

"In my seven years as Secretary," he says in the film, "We came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! "

In a sense, McNamara was almost a real-life Forrest Gump. Of course, it wasn't dumb luck that got him involved in some of the most crucial events of the 20th Century. He was a highly intelligent, Berkeley- and Harvard-educated Forrest Gump, who earned his way into every position that he had. Despite his qualifications, it is staggering how one person can influence so much of the world's history. For crying out loud, he is responsible for putting seat belts in cars! Seat belts! How much more integral can you be. And for his contributions to the Ford Motor Company, he became the first president of the company whose last name wasn't Ford. But that was a short-lived position, coming only a few months before he got a call from John F. Kennedy.

During the film's interviews, describes his experiences as an analyst for General Curtis LeMay, who designed and implemented the bombing strategy of Japan during WWII, his time at Ford and his return to government service as the secretary of defense during the Vietnam era.

The archival clips of him during Kennedy's Administration reveals a person at least as arrogant as Donald Rumsfeld (to his credit, though, I think Rumsfeld has mellowed out in the last few years).

Although McNamara raises many moral issues regarding war and government included with his "11 lessons," his conclusions -- if you can call them that -- are intriguing but don't seem very substantial.

For example, in regard to the firebombing of Tokyo that killed over 100,000 civilians in one hight, he offers one of his 11 lessons is "Proportionality should be a guideline for war." But he never really addresses in proportion to what. The Japanese had raped and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians throughout Asia. That he doesn't mention this doesn't give us context to the moral question which he brings up but just leaves us hanging. What would have proportionality looked like?

He says, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He . . . and I'd say I . . . were behaving as war criminals. " The truth is they would have been killed just as many American, British and Australian POWs were. Many Japanese leaders were in fact tried and convicted as war criminals. In a sense, LeMay and McNamara were waging war proportionally.

He continues to grieve the injustice of the Vietnam War as if he were criticizing someone else's judgment leading Morris has to ask him, quite a few times, if he takes responsibility for those decisions. He passed some of them on, perhaps fairly, to Lyndon Johnson but we are left wondering what his responsibility was as secretary of defense.

What is frustrating is that McNamara never really defends his decisions. Nor does offer alternatives. He only offers vague platitudes like "Proportionality should be a guideline for war" that no one can really disagree with but really don't mean anything either. He can't seem to make a firm stand on anything and seems to mistake his wishy-washy answers for wisdom. The result is that his confessions seem to be nothing more than self-flagellation.

I know the questions he is dealing with are difficult. In response to certain questions about Vietnam, he responds that they are so complex and difficult to answer that he's damned if he answers them and damned if he doesn't and he'd rather be damned for not answering them. Fair enough. But questions like these do not go away, and future policy makers need the wisdom of people who have faced them before. In other words, people like McNamara.

I don't know if Morris views his film as a serious work of policy or as a portrait of a man who is haunted by the difficult decisions he has made in his early life. If it is the latter, he was quite successful. If it's the former, I don't think he's a very deep thinker.

In terms of the technical aspects of the film itself, I think the visuals were beautiful. The pieces of the film that were shot by Morris himself -- as opposed to the archival footage -- to fill the screen during the voice overs were very creatively done, almost to the point of distraction. Combined with Philip Glass's original score make this film a work of art. (Interestingly, I had pretty much only known Philip Glass for South Park minimalist "Holiday" musical).

Gunner Palace (2004)

A documentary directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein

Since I haven't posted anything for a long time, I am going to put up an article that was published in an abridged form in the San Francisco Observer.

Here it is in it's entirety:

A Filmmaker on the Frontline
By Alex Selim

When Michael Tucker arrived in Baghdad with a camera in May of 2003, he wanted capture the chaos and danger that American soldiers faced in the months after “major combat operations” had ceased in Iraq.

After spending two months in-country with the 2/3 Field Artillery, a.k.a. “The Gunners,” who were stationed in a bombed-out palace, he produced “Gunner Palace,” a documentary that will be released nationwide on March 3 [2005].

“I wanted to see how [the troops] were coping,” he said in a question and answer session at a screening in the Embarcadero Theater on January 27.

“Gunner Palace” portrays the war from the soldier’s perspective, following them through the banalities of war as they police the streets, teach their translator how to flirt and have a pool party in their home, a former pleasure palace built for Uday Hussein after the first Gulf War.

It also depicts the war’s intensity as they raid the houses of suspected insurgents and patrol the streets of Adhamiya, a hostile neighborhood of Baghdad where every plastic bag left on the street could contain an improvised explosive device.

Tucker, who was born in Hawaii but is now based in Germany, wanted an accurate representation of the war without the filter of the evening news or the inevitable Hollywood makeover but didn’t want to make an overt political statement.

“I’m suspicious about films influencing elections,” he said in response to a question about why he didn’t release the film before the American elections. “Since when are films made to change people’s minds? It’s for people to see what the war was like for them now.”

Like the World War II journalists Ernie Pyle or Bill Mauldin, Tucker, a former Army reservist, has an affinity for the enlisted men, letting them express their own complex feelings about the war, many through free-style raps and one through his guitar playing—both of which provide the film’s soundtrack.

The film also displays soldier’s dark humor—a coping mechanism in stressful situations—as they joke about the quality of their vehicle’s armor, months before Rumsfeld made excuses for it in Kuwait.

Though not an imbedded reporter, Tucker had total access to all operations and did not have to submit any of the 400 hours of footage that he filmed to a military censor because its release wouldn’t put soldiers’ lives in any immediate danger.

However, despite the surprising amount of cooperation that the U.S. military gave him, Tucker has found it difficult to find a distributor in Germany, where he now lives. Europeans feel that the film is too sympathetic to the soldiers, he says, citing a change in European attitude toward Americans after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Though viewers coming to the film to see either a condemnation or a justification for the war in Iraq will both be disappointed, “Gunner Palace” offers a valuable record of what the men and women serving our country are experiencing right now.

“It’s not about for or against,” he explains, “It’s about talking about it and finding solutions.”


Capsule Review:

Director Michael Tucker offers a gritty, slice-of-life documentary about the American soldiers stationed in one of Uday Hussein’s pleasure palaces as they patrol a hostile neighborhood of Baghdad. With little voice over, Tucker allows the soldiers—who provide the film’s heavy metal and freestyle rap soundtrack—to express their own complex feelings about the war. The drawback of Tucker’s verité style, however, is that it lacks the necessary context to judge their actions. Nevertheless, it gives a much-needed human face to the war in Iraq.