By Patricia Ducey. War Horse opens with a rapturous aerial shot of the rolling Devon hills, dotted with neat farms and hedgerows and so achingly verdant that it takes one’s breath away. Soon that transcendent vision of the land as another Eden or demi-paradise gives way to the more intimate image of a mare giving birth in a meadow below, while young Albert Narricott (Jeremy Irvine) watches spellbound from just outside the fence. As the satin-coated foal finds his legs and gambols about, we realize that in one short minute we, like Albert, have fallen totally in love with the spirited youngster. And we know, sadly, something Albert doesn’t: that this idyll will soon be smashed to smithereens.
War Horse’s story is set in England at the moment before World War I breaks out. In one prideful moment, lovable ne’er-do- well tenant farmer Ted Narricott bids against his hated landlord for the now mature horse at auction. His son Albert is thrilled that his father has brought home the object of his years’ affection and names the horse Joey, but mother Rose (Emily Watson) insists that the horse be sold; a horse as fine as this one must be worthless as a working animal. Albert insists he can train the noble half-thoroughbred to pull a plow; in those desperate economic times, they must plow and plant a rocky field to pay the rent on the farm. The horse soon learns his trade and earns his keep, but a storm later destroys the hard won crop. Thus, finally, Albert’s father Ted (Pete Mullan) is forced to sell the horse. War has broken out, and the British Army snaps up the beautiful animal for its officer corps. Albert bids farewell to his beloved horse – and, for the next hour, we see through Joey’s almond-colored eyes his wartime ordeal on the march to the front lines, all the way to the gut wrenching trench warfare and the terrible climax in No Man’s Land.
War Horse was adapted by British writers Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) and Richard Curtis from a young adult novel, and then Tony-winning play, by British author Michael Morpurgo, which told the story of the Great War through the eyes of a horse and the family that owns him and seemingly loses him. Reportedly, Spielberg saw the play and sewed up the movie deal the next day, even though the schedule interfered with his Tin Tin project.
Jeremy Irvine as Albert, with Joey.
This being a Spielberg film, and a Young Adult offering, sometimes it claws at your heartstrings when a tug would do, and at 146 minutes, is far too long—a few subplots and scenes could be trimmed, to perhaps leave time to explore Albert’s emotional journey as well. The look and sound of the film experience, though, is flawless, thanks in part to Spielberg’s long-time collaborators, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and production designer Rick Carter, who breathe fire into the director’s storyboards. Their War Horse must be seen as his team’s masterpiece–if 35 mm film is to give way totally to digital, as Kaminski believes, his work here will remain one of its crowning achievements. The magnificent landscapes of Devon, dwarfing its inhabitants, the shimmer of wind through a grove of trees in an eerie pre-battle silence, are but a few of many memorable shots. And special mention must be made of Spielberg’s initial battle scene, when the English mounted battalion charges a German camp. The visual and aural effects are simply spectacular, the sequence a harrowing reminder that men once rode into battle with sabers unleashed, atop steeds at a thundering gallop, straight into an enemy line, and then drew enemy blood in face-to-face combat. And like the classic films he emulates, Spielberg used thousands of extras and hundreds of horses in the battle scenes: no CGI shortcuts here.
Real battle re-enactments: no CGI shortcuts here.
The actors acquit themselves well, and Jeremy Irvine as Albert is affecting. The horse, though, is the star here. Joey is played by several horses, mostly by an American horse named Finder, who also played Seabiscuit. I hope there is an Oscar category for Finder and his trainer, because the horse’s ability to communicate with Albert and with an Army stallion he bonds with is enchanting.
Steven Spielberg delivers here a masterful coming-of-age story, in which the hero’s mettle is tested by war and privation in a world where character is all that remains and all that matters after everything else has been taken. So this is not a cynical or post-modern film; some people may even call the PG-13 War Horse sentimental. The hipster in your life might insist his sniffles are sniffs of disdain, but in all of history, from the renderings in Chauvet Cave to the little girls (like me once) who sketched profiles of ponies in her notebook in history class, there has always been something about a human that loves a horse. War Horse rightfully earns top tier status in this genre.
So if you or your young adult plans to see War Horse, get thee to the multiplex. This is a film that must be seen in a proper theater, not in a living room, to appreciate its many gifts.
Posted on January 5th, 2011 at 6:53pm.
From "The Descendants."
By Patricia Ducey. Early on in The Descendants, the camera sweeps lovingly over the old family portraits that line the walls of Matt King’s Oahu den. His forebearers, among them a landed Hawaiian princess and her Caucasian husband – along with their many ambitious, high achieving progeny – stare back at us radiating a self-possession and grandness we soon realize is sorely missing from Matt’s present day world.
Matt King (George Clooney) practices law and lives a middle class existence on Oahu with his family, a wife and two daughters, whom he barely relates to. He and his many cousins are heirs to the huge coastline land grant left to them by their royal and self-made ancestors – but the law mandates that they must now dissolve the trust, so they must sell the huge estate to who they decide as a family is the best buyer. The meeting will take place soon. Oh yes, I think hopefully, this will be grand: a large, wealthy family in conflict as they grapple with the meaning of legacy and of the land in this last piece of American wilderness.
But then Payne switches to Matt’s domestic crisis; his wife Elizabeth after a boating accident lies in a coma, and weak, ineffectual Matt must rise to the role of father and husband –because the one parent who made the family work is unconscious. As the family story takes over, Payne, the visual poet of Middle America and middle age, goes a bit sideways; his excursion into the tropical Eden and Matt’s discontent is not as successful as his previous films. In Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways his Midwestern protagonists feel the dissatisfactions of less than fully lived lives out there in flyover country, but they eventually claw their way out of despair through action or love.
Matt King is not so lucky, or perhaps not so brave. He retrieves his wanton teenage daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) from the boarding school that is attempting, unsuccessfully, to reform her. Matt is determined that he and Alexandra, and younger girl Scottie (Amara Miller), will face the end of Elizabeth’s life together as a family. The doctor has informed him her coma is hopeless; they will remove the breathing tube per Elizabeth’s prior instructions. Both girls are bratty and foul mouthed; they humiliate and disobey their father just for the pure sport of it — because in his bumbling immaturity he allows them to, playing the ineffectual father to their faux maturity. In short, they represent the now clichéd American family, Hollywood version.
From "The Descendants."
Alexandra is particularly angry with her mother, and she finally tells her father why: her mother was having an affair — something Matt, in his detachment, never even remotely suspected. Finally, Matt is furious; he confronts Elizabeth’s friends and they reveal his identity. He knows this is his chance to step up as man of action. Instead, he enlists daughter Alexandra’s help to find the man and confront him! This is something a teenager would do — and why would a man involve his daughter in the pathetic exercise of stalking her mother’s lover? Surely all hell will break loose, I surmise, and Matt will see his errors and grow up. Alas, when he and Alexandra find the hapless lover, Matt instead gives him a good talking to and then invites him to visit his dying wife in the hospital, despite the fact that the lover admits that for him the affair was not serious. At this point, I emotionally checked out. Even the plain spoken eloquence of Robert Forster as Elizabeth’s father, and the crackling life force of Woodley’s Alexandra were not enough to sustain this movie. Continue reading »
Southern belle (Julianne Hough) and a GT.
By Patricia Ducey. Director Craig Brewer of Black Snake Moan and Hustle and Flow has proven he can rock a Southern stereotype, but in his remake of Footloose, to my astonishment, he dumps every one of them into the Georgia red clay—and proves his bona fides as a skilled director. Several times in the movie theater I braced myself for that bucket of ice cold cliché to be dumped over my head, but it never happened—and that’s this movie’s triumph.
Bible-thumping preacher? No, good man laid low by grief.
Stupid Southern redneck? Nope, man-to-be who carries his self-esteem lightly, with charm to burn.
Well, surely then, Woody, the African American football captain faces racist teammates? Um, no again. We all get along just fine here in Bomont, Georgia, thank you very much.
The story opens as Boston kid Ren MacCormack (Kenny Wormald) arrives in Bomont, Georgia, taken in by his Aunt Lulu and Uncle Wes (Ray McKinnon and Kim Dickens) after his father abandons the family and his mother passes away. He soon discovers the ban on dancing and music, all due to a horrific fatal car accident three years prior when five teens went joyriding after a kegger, all explained to him by new friend Willard (Miles Teller) . . . wait, Willard? So he must be the big dumb hick then? Au contraire, Teller is the breakout star of the movie and probable new teen heartthrob. His Willard, Pitchford and Brewer’s charming and witty creation, is a delight.
On his first day at the new school, Ren locks eyes with the preacher’s daughter Ariel (Julianne Hough), who is carrying on with a race car driver bad boy, reacting against her own sorrow after brother Bobby’s death in the car crash. Complications, love triangles and spirited dancing ensue; lessons are learned. And Brewer delivers without pandering or disdain for his subject—or audience.
Yes, this movie understands and respects its audience. Brewer deepens the original’s broad caricatures into characters; we come to care about and root for even the grownups. He edits out the derisive edge exhibited in the first. Notably, Ren respects Ariel before she respects herself, like a true man would—and he learned that from his family. Footloose understands that to its teen audience a single kiss can hold greater import in their lives, as in Ren and Ariel’s, than the cynical hooking up in most other Hollywood movies aimed at their demographic.
Big dance numbers.
The supporting characters are well developed as well. Uncle Wes (only a bit less scruffy as his character in Sons of Anarchy), and his wife own and work at a used car dealership, take care of their own kids and even manage to send money to Ren’s mother after his father left. They’re good people, smart and fairly successful; their business is holding fast in the recession. The parents and kids enjoy and care for each other. They take Ren in when the need arises. In short, they are not cartoons. Instead, they embody the best of the American family ethic. The townsfolk are real people: they reluctantly support the curfew and ban on dancing because they fear another horrific accident, like the one that killed the preacher’s son and four other kids. There’s no bannin’ of books or firin’ of uppity teachers as in the earlier version. Ren protests the dancing ban with respect and through proper channels (take note, Occupy Wall Street) because he respects where the town and the reverend are coming from. And yet there is no sugary aftertaste; Ren doesn’t smoke dope, because he’s a gymnast—not because he’s holier than thou. The kids chafe under the restrictions of their elders, and they demand a little freedom— along with the risk. Safety versus security—timely questions. Continue reading »
By Patricia Ducey. The year is 1942; the place, a temporary camp for French Jews just outside Paris. As French gendarmes tear infants away from their hysterical mothers, the children and mothers panic and stampede the police. The officer in charge perceives that the rioting will soon spiral out control. “Cooperate,” he bellows soothingly to the distraught families, “and all will be well.” The crowd calms and a tense order is restored; the women and able-bodied children file away to the waiting train and disappear inside, never again to see the toddlers they left behind.
As I watch this heartbreaking sequence another image comes to mind, perhaps because the ten-year anniversary approaches: the passport image of a 9/11 suicide hijacker. I am struck by the memory of his similar, chilling admonition to “stay quiet and you’ll be okay” as he steered the plane towards the Towers. I now understand why the lies of tyrants and murderers are so simple and so timeless – because they play upon a human nature that rejects the terrible knowledge of such evil. Those simple lies work. This vulnerability resonates throughout the new film Sarah’s Key into the present day, elevating the film from Lifetime bathos to must-see drama.
French director Gilles Paquet-Brenner adapts the best selling novel by Tatiana de Rosnay and brings it successfully to life. His Sarah’s Key whittles down the story to an effective through-line, eliminating some of the novel’s distracting twists and turns – and at the same time fleshing out the characters through a smart and economical script, expert actors and rich cinematography. We feel in the end that this novel had to be a movie, this very movie.
The film begins as Julia Jarmond, an American journalist married and living in Paris, takes on a story assignment about the 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris. She soon discovers a paucity of information: the site of the roundup was torn down years before and only one photograph remains of the incident, buses waiting outside the velodrome. The government has no written records or photos of what went on inside.
The Parisian government willingly collaborated with the Nazis, and prepared well for the morning when they knocked on the doors of thousands of apartments and herded the Jews inside into transports that delivered them to the famous indoor bicycle stadium. These French Jews remained at the Velodrome d’Hiver for days in stifling heat with no sanitary facilities or adequate water; many died there. The rest were eventually transported to camps outside Paris and then to the trains to take them to camps they were told, as usual, were work camps.
Kristin Scott Thomas as Julia Jarmond.
As Julia interviews private individuals still searching for survivors and records, she discovers that her in-laws may have taken over an apartment in the Marais left empty by one such deported Jewish family. The concurrent story of that Jewish family, especially of the daughter Sarah – who hides her little brother in a secret closet in the apartment – intercuts with the present day events until the strands finally come together.
Kristin Scott-Thomas plays Julia, the American living in Paris with her French husband, and handles both the investigative journalist role and her domestic currents with equal skill and heart. The script by Serge Joncour concentrates on her persistence and emotional openness so that we simply cannot imagine anyone else playing her. But young French actress Melusine Mayance as Sarah Starzynski simply amazes; she fills the screen in a pitch perfect performance, full of love and sorrow, courage and intelligence. Wisely, the director allows Sarah’s tragic 1942 story to emerge as the foreground story, while Julia’s present day difficulties provide an echo of the past and a reminder of some eternal truths. Continue reading »
The Whistleblower, which stars Rachel Weisz, Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn and Monica Bellucci and deals with UN corruption in Bosnia, opens in select theaters today. We wanted Libertas readers to know that our own Patricia Ducey reviewed the film during the Newport Beach Film Festival back in May, so be sure to check her review out!
Posted on August 5th, 2011 at 10:09am.
By Patricia Ducey. Horrible Bosses, is not, well, horrible – it’s what I call a Friday Night Movie, one best seen, if at all, after Happy Hour with your work chums in a theater filled with other people who have done the same. Laughter is infectious, and a slight buzz often helps that along. A way-too-serious and gross first half gives way to some real laughs in the second half, and the ingenious script does at times truly surprise and delight. But Bosses never does rise above a grade of ‘C,’ due to its 3-4 rating on the Apatow Scale (zero being no F-bombs or raunchiness; 5 being F-bombs/raunchiness equal to an Apatow movie). Most of the time, the raunchiness here is just a distraction from dumb writing, as becomes apparent.
Hapless, harried office workers Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) work in their own private hells, victims of their unbearable bosses: Kevin Spacey as Nick’s manipulative, Machiavellian boss at a financial firm, Colin Farrell (whose physical transformation from sexy Irishman to cheeseball cokehead is astounding) as Kurt’s bete noir manager at a chemical company, and Jennifer Aniston as Dale’s sex-obsessed, harassing boss/dentist.
After a few beers one night, the trio decides that a well planned murder of these three villains is the answer to their problems, so they head downtown to the nastiest bar they can find to hire a hit man. There they find Jamie Foxx, a “murder consultant” who gives them a general outline of a plan (cribbed from movie plots) in exchange for five grand. Later, after discussion and soul searching, they hit upon a variation of the consultant’s plan and decide to forge ahead. After all, they have watched enough movies and Law & Order episodes to guarantee they can concoct a foolproof crime … or crimes! In other words, they are idiots – and with reasoning like theirs, you can guess that all does not proceed smoothly. Soon the guys are running into and from cops, killers, and overly amorous women. Hilarity occasionally ensues. Continue reading »
By Patricia Ducey. Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s latest film, is a frothy romantic comedy topped with a healthy soupcon of wisdom, a welcome turn from the now 75-year-old filmmaker.
Screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) accompany her well-heeled parents to Paris for a little pre-wedding vacation/shopping trip. Gil adores Paris and longs to leave L.A. behind to write novels there, a la Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in the heady Paris of his imagination; Inez, however, is quite content with the good life in a Malibu manse, financed by Gil’s steady income from what he derides as his B-movie success. (Mon dieu, what present day scribe would complain of steady sales of any scripts?!)
But Gil is an incurable romantic, and his longings create a pebble in the shoe of their relationship. He stalks off one night after a squabble to ponder his future, both literary and romantic. As the bell tower chimes midnight, an antique auto pulls up and the revelers inside drag him inside. As the night and the champagne flow, Gil comes to believe his hosts really are Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, as they insist, and that he has landed somewhere inside his most cherished dream. And so his adventure ensues, with Gil concocting ever greater ruses to escape Inez to return to the ‘20s, where all his literary and artistic idols—and one particularly lovely woman—await him. But I will not spoil the fun by explaining; the story is very clever and surprising.
Some of Allen’s arch improv-style patter falls flat, but more of it produces smiles or laughter. And Paris is a character here, too; Allen and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, weave a Paris of amber glowing streetlamps, sumptuous five-star restaurants and earthy flea markets for our delight. The city (at least the part in frame) looks perfectly lovely. He sets the action against a soundtrack of lively Cole Porter and many of his other jazz favorites perfect for the time. If you can’t afford a plane ticket, Midnight in Paris will do. Continue reading »
By Patricia Ducey. In 1957, a group of eight California engineers, unhappy at their jobs at Shockley Semiconductors, decided to leave en masse for more compatible environs and wrote to a Wall Street banker for help in finding just the right employer. That banker, Arthur Rock, saw other possibilities and flew out West to convince them to start their own company. He would provide the capital, they would provide the scientific know-how. Later dubbed “The Traitorous Eight” by Shockley, they had to ask Rock what venture capital was and why they would want to start their own company, but they acceded. Rock and his investor and engineers then formed their entirely new company, Fairchild Semiconductors—and Silicon Valley was born.
The new documentary Something Ventured tells their story and numerous others; and it’s as sparkling, sweet—and potent—as a champagne cocktail. Something Ventured is also an unapologetic paean to capitalism, dispensing a much needed corrective to the current cries of “Tax the Rich,” “At some point you’ve made enough money” or “Off with their heads!” All right, I made up that last one, but you get my point.
Producers Paul Holland (a partner himself at a venture firm) and Molly Davis chose Emmy-award winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to helm the film. The able duo mix pop music, priceless old footage and facts and figures with interviews of the now octogenarian money men who funded the future. Holland, and many of the people in the film, aim to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs—and, perhaps, to gently encourage our government and media to consider the upside of capitalism for once.
But the filmmakers include the downside of the high risk atmosphere of startups, too. The investors note that about half of the original founders of startups are replaced within 18 months of a new corporate structure. Sandy Lerner, a founder of Cisco, recalls painfully how she was fired from the company she loved by the new owner/managers (and how many times has Steve Jobs been fired?), while Tom Perkins and Pitch Johnson recall a few of the inventions that turned out to be duds and companies (termed “the living dead”) that never took off.
If at times the film feels like a storytelling session with the boys at the coffee shop, that’s because it started out that way. Linda Yates, Holland’s wife, introduced him to the semi-retired investors, and he enjoyed their stories so much he decided to share them. These are men of good humor, optimism and ambition and clearly relish their role as facilitators to the innovators they met along the way. They insist that the entrepreneurs of Apple and Genentech, Cisco and numerous others of their startups, are the real heroes. Their own passion is to create and grow businesses where no business existed before, and they still are spreading the good news today – in their typically larger-than-life fashion. (Pitch Johnson, for one, jumped in his private plane one day in 1970 and flew to Cuba to convince Fidel Castro of the superior benefits of capitalism. No word yet on Castro’s response.) Continue reading »
Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain lead "The Tree of Life."
By Patricia Ducey. Terrence Malick’s latest, The Tree of Life, is a movie of big ideas: the cycle of birth and death, the mystery of suffering, and especially the necessity—and tragic elusiveness—of love. All Malick’s trademark film conventions are present here: the whispered voiceover narration, the elliptical narrative, the preoccupation with what is not said, what cannot be said but only imagined or felt. Malick’s genius has always been how he reveals the ineffable through the most mundane rudiments of everyday life in his characters. As Holly in Badlands seamlessly leaves her murdering boyfriend behind and begins a new life as wife and mother, we realize she is the innocent Malick imagines, never torn from any Eden. Or when Pocahontas at the finale of The New World rises, with a joyous smile of triumph, from her curtsy to the English King, we feel a kindred joy at her discovery of that new world – not as an “other” defined by conventional anti-colonial apologia, but as her own woman.
But in this film, Malick renders explicit, with unmatched visual and aural splendor, his vision of the essential spiritual quest; his characters literally ask God, where are you, why do you make me suffer? Tree of Life is almost an experimental movie, in that it eschews traditional narrative; no alarm bell plot points or expository dialogue here. So the passages of the family’s present life or memories seem more like montage than story; no one is explaining anything or planting clues. Any “real” story thus almost disappears. It is not surprising to read that Malick is an admirer of Kubrick—Tree of Life looks and feels a lot like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps Malick at 67 feels ready to travel these same territories.
A saga of an American family.
We first meet the main character, Jack, as a young boy in Texas in the late ‘50s. Jack’s mother (Jessica Chastain), loving and devout, narrates the opening of the film. She tells us that there are two paths in life, one of nature and one of grace, and that we must choose which one we follow. Nature cares only for itself, while grace relies on a sense of oneness with all of existence. News suddenly arrives that Jack’s younger brother has died at age 19. We are not told how or why, but we see how grief and spiritual panic devour the family—and these questions dog Jack for the rest of his days. He grows up resenting his harsh father (Brad Pitt), longing for the love his father cannot or will not give him. Years later, as a successful architect, Jack lives and works in skyscrapers amid a sterile concrete modernity. He is as cold to his own wife and his own father was to him; this coldness is mirrored in the towering glass cities and rippling freeways that stand in stark opposition to nature. The way of the mother or the way of the father? This is Jack’s lifelong insoluble dilemma.
Malick soon interrupts the story of the family and the death of the brother, and embarks on a depiction of his own genesis story, from a cosmic Big Bang to Earth’s volcanic beginnings, to the kill-or-be-killed era of the dinosaur—all with special effects engineered by renowned veteran Douglas Trumbull. When Jack’s story resumes, we see through Malick’s expert direction, and the amazing camera work of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, a childhood of back yards and sprinklers, running boys and budding sexuality—and, finally, all the furious civilizing that parents, knowing the alternative, try to impose. No American director could have evinced the intensity and naturalness of these childhood scenes any better. Jessica Chastain as Jack’s mother and Brad Pitt as his father illuminate their roles – especially Pitt, who artfully subsumes his soft attractiveness into a more severe toughness befitting his man-of-action character. And ever one of our most skilled actors, Sean Penn excels as the spiritually bereft adult Jack.
As always, Malick captures his audience with a whisper, from the mother’s opening narration—prayer, really—to the otherworldly climax. But Tree of Life is not an easy film. It must be seen on the big screen; no other movie this cartoon summer will look or feel anything like it. The soundtrack of largely religious music reminds us that this is a spiritual cri de coeur from someone who feels the autumn chill. When the lights came up in our theater today, the silence lingered—no chit-chat or phones chirping open. And when I turned onto the freeway, I had to click my radio off. The wind rushing by, the hum of the engine pulling me along—it seemed more fitting to turn down the noise and listen, closely for once, as the world in its magnificence flew by.
Posted on May 28th, 2011 at 7:07pm.
By Patricia Ducey. One day in 1967, a Palo Alto high school student asks his history teacher how the German people could have missed the signs of the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. This innocent question ignites an idea, and teacher Ron Jones launches a classroom “simulation,” or experiment, to illustrate how good Germans -how anyone – could fall prey to totalitarian thinking.
Forty years later, Philip Neel, one of the students who participated in that experiment dubbed The Third Wave, has produced a documentary, The Lesson Plan, featuring interviews with students who participated, and with teacher Ron Jones himself.
Jones reorganized his classroom that week into a simulation of a prototypical fascist youth group. He enforced physical discipline and uniformity in the students’ posture and speech per his first-day dictum, “Strength Through Discipline.” He meant it to end there, he now avers, but students were eager for more. He added more simplistic, effective sloganeering on the following days: strength through community, through action, through unity and finally through pride. Strength through Community meant, for instance, that students were to share grades. Top students helped the lower students. Jones was heartened by the increased level of participation of the weaker students, while he banished to the library for the remainder of the semester some more successful students – who of course resented lowering their grades so students who did not do the work could get higher grades. Similarly, anyone who spoke against The Third Wave faced a mock trial and banishment. At Jones’s urging, students secretly “informed” on other students who spoke against the Third Wave, and the car club guys appointed themselves as Jones’s bodyguards. Jones found out only at the reunion that a few of these guys beat up a student journalist who was writing a non-flattering article on The Third Wave. When an outsider student asked a Third Waver to explain what they stood for, he could not give an answer.
So in just a few days, the atmosphere of the school changed into something tense, charged with anticipation—but anticipation of what? Continue reading »
By Patricia Ducey. If Satan were to come to Earth today, he would need a cover. I would suggest he consider that of a bureaucrat – the stony-eyed glare of the city guy who cites you for running your sprinklers half an hour early, or the DMV clerk who reduces all who cross her path to beaten dogs – those suggest a certain affinity to the Devil. But these small-timers can be fired; after all, their bosses are elected (or un-elected) by the people, and up the chain of command there remains an element of accountability. By contrast, a UN bureaucrat might be just the ticket. No accountability at all, and a steady stream of money from the gullible U.S. government and the myriad side “businesses” of its minions. Potential witnesses may fall down elevator shafts – terrible accident, that – humanitarian aid may be diverted to tyrants and their democratic enablers, but you can’t change the world overnight and think of all the good the UN does!
Larysa Kondracki’s brutal and riveting film, The Whistleblower, tells the true story of Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac, who signed on for six months as a highly paid UN peacekeeper in the 1990s and found herself in the hell on Earth that was Bosnia. Officer Bolkovac soon finds that “monitoring” human rights abuses means something less than actually “investigating” crimes or “arresting” anyone, and “peacekeeping” means mostly keeping a bribe-fed lid on the quiet barbarities that sputter-on well after the big guns stop. Continue reading »
By Patricia Ducey. Miral, the latest from painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel, strives to marry lyricism to polemic; the clumsy union fails.Written by Schnabel’s collaborator and now girlfriend Rula Jebreal from her “fictionalized autobiography,” the resulting, uneven film has been soundly rejected by both critics and audiences alike. Schnabel’s prior efforts–The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls, and Basquiat–chose real artists as their subjects and these unique stories, told with his exquisite painterly vision, proved eminently watchable and thoroughly satisfying as stories. Schnabel knows the territory of artist versus society, artist versus himself, and of the ecstatic vision that can sometimes destroy–he inhabits this milieu himself. He fancies himself a bit of an artistic rebel as well, clad always in his silk pajamas, carrying on his serial marriages in the NY gossip columns, all with a carefully calibrated dash of épater la bourgeoisie. Why then veer away from this successful, tragic-Romantic vein and choose the highly politicized Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead?
It would be too easy to suggest that Schnabel’s love affair with the beauteous Jebreal that began with their collaboration entirely influenced his adaptation. Instead, I attribute this filmic failure to a common psychological characteristic of the left: a veneration of victimhood that surpasses real understanding or compassion.
The Germans call it Leidensneid, or an “envy of suffering.” Based on exaggerated idealism, those who have not suffered much at all feel somewhat guilty for their good fortune (as if freedom and prosperity were mere happy accidents) and almost inexplicably offer support to ideals that they would never countenance in their own life. Communism, radical Islam, fascism; all have been momentary darlings of the left. This envy of suffering propelled the German and Italian activists/terrorists of the ‘60s to identify with the Vietnamese or the PLO against the West, for instance, and culminated in Entebbe – with the end always justifying the means, however murderous. In the leftist moral universe, the losing side is always right. Thus in Miral, if Israelis are prosperous and free thinking, the poverty stricken and devout Palestinians must be their victims. Continue reading »
