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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: september 11

Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”

16 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

al qaeda, jason clarke, jeremy renner, jessica chastain, kathryn bigelow, mark boal, osama bin laden, reda kateb, september 11, the hurt locker, torture, zero dark thirty

zero-dark-thirty-wallpapers-e

“Your Detainee Will See You Now”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

NOW WHAT?  SUCH was the sentiment that snuck up and surprised any viewer of “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s last film on war and soldier psychology.  Recall Jeremy Renner, as the leader of a bomb disposal team in the Iraq war, returning home after his 265924-vlcsnap_176681last rotation. Oh how the mighty have fallen: he’s become a dad dispatched to get groceries.  We watch as a dazed Army Sergeant wanders a sterile-looking supermarket, looking out-of-place and bored by civilian life. The epigraph for that film came from Chris Hedges, a war correspondent at The New York Times: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”  Of course, “The Hurt Locker” ends with its hero back where he belongs, on the battlefield, but it’s hard to root for Army Sergeant William James when his resolution is likened to addiction.  Is this, then, a work of propaganda or pacifistic satire?

With “Zero Dark Thirty,” Bigelow’s first film since the Oscar-winning “Locker,” she stays in the (war) zone and expands her interest in America’s battles abroad and the addictive highs and lows they enable.  A similar air of futility hangs over the action of “ZDT.”  Here, we have a heroine, a CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who vows “I’m gonna smoke everybody involved in this op, and then I’m gonna kill bin Laden.”  That revenge killing, which occupies 40 of the film’s 157 minutes, is certainly its climax, but the road to that now legendary raid on Bin Laden’s compound in the Pakastani city of Abbottabad, is where “ZDT” largely dwells. This is a film, controversially so, that gives us the interrogation rooms, torture chambers, and “black sites” that made the night of May 2nd, 2011 and the heroic efforts of SEAL Team 6, possible.  At the same time, “ZDT” asks whether all of those closed-door procedures were really worth it?  The film may end with a mission accomplished, but there is seemingly nothing but a string of defeats and detonations along the way.

At its core, “ZDT” traces the metamorphosis of a friendless, work-obsessed Maya.  At the start, she’s only an ambivalent participant in the waterboarding of a suspect, Ammar (Reda Kateb), an Arab man with known ties to al-Qaeda bank accounts.  Up until the final scene, she’s as cold as ice.1134604 - Zero Dark Thirty  Bigelow’s writing partner, Mark Boal, is again on hand to pepper the script with intel of a different kind: “Everybody breaks – it’s biology,” says CIA field agent Dan (Jason Clarke) as he systematically destroys the mind and body of his detainee.  Much of “ZDT” is hard to watch – beyond the torture, there’s the suspenseful scene in which a Jordanian with information regarding bin Laden’s whereabouts slowly penetrates the bunkers of an American base – and when it’s all over, the viewer is again faced with the uncertainties that define a potentially un-winnable war against terrorism.  All that we know for certain is what Maya believes must be the case: an electronically cut-off bin Laden must be communicating with a courier named Abu Ahmed.  Catch the courier and catch the killer of 3,000 plus Americans.

If not for the ambiguous final shot of “Zero Dark Thirty,” it would be far easier to allege that Bigelow’s latest is on par with John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” (1968), a pep rally for the Vietnam War.  I, for one, am deeply discomforted by the idea that real-life works of American militarism can be turned immediately into a mainstream movie; this only zero-dark-Thirty-30-entertainment-news-Jessica-Chastain-719462581further blurs the line between war and entertainment in an era of “Call of Duty” and “Six Days in Fallujah.” As Adorno and Horkheimer wrote after World War 2, “real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.”  But Bigelow spares us hawkish politics for something more sly, more cynical. The only time we even hear President Obama speaking is when he’s giving an interview to “60 Minutes” and denouncing torture in a film that unflinchingly puts America’s torture of Muslim prisoners on display.  In the foreground are Maya and her fellow operatives, barely listening to their boss on the boob-tube; the suggestion is that they operate outside the law.  That exposes the official, albeit hypocritical, stance of the White House, and by extension, the nation at large, for what it really is: just noise.

Potentially, the real torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” lies not in those excruciatingly cruel interrogation scenes but in Chastain’s final expression.  What is Maya thinking exactly?  Is it relief or remorse?  With the hunt over, tears fall and if our heroine isn’t thinking “Now what?”, she may have something even more radical, even more un-American, on her mind, which is: What for?

Best Film of the Summer: “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

14 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

beasts of the southern wild, ben richardson, ben zeitlin, bob dylan, dwight henry, lucy alibar, quvenzhane wallis, september 11

“Swamped”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

I’VE GOT BOB DYLAN on the brain this week, what with the release of his 35th studio album, “Tempest,” and upcoming visit to the Mile High City.  The dark prophet, now 71 years old, has been singing of rising sea-levels for some time now.  His 13-minute narration of the Titanic’s sinking (“Tempest”) is just an extension of 1964’s “The Times Are A’Changin’” – “Admit that the waters around you have grown” – and more recently, this forecast: “High water risin’/The shacks are slidin’ down/Folks lose their possessions/Folks are leaving town.”  Dylan peers into the future and sees only diaspora and disaster.

That last lyric of his comes from “High Water,” released on September 11, 2001, and it was eerily appropriate that on the eleventh anniversary of 9-11, I caught Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a sensation at both Sundance and Cannes and deservedly so.  This savage beauty of a film has all the bluesy magic of the late Dylan and shares his sense that humanity, on the brink of being swamped, should go on singin’ and dancin’.  Set in the Gulf of Mexico, “Beasts” is something of an eco-fable; the ragtag residents of a territory known as the Bathtub are bracing themselves for another disastrous storm.  Separated by a levee, they live close to the earth, so close, in fact, that they’re a bit beastly themselves: cinematographer Ben Richardson’s camera plunges us into the vats of writhing crawfish, chicken carcasses, and alligators stuffed with explosives.  “Beasts” is an exercise in magic realism that gets down in the muck and mire.  “Every animal is made of meat,” one of the Bathtub’s residents teaches the children, “It’s the buffet of the universe.”

At the eye of the storm is a motherless six-year-old named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who occupies a filthy shack beside her father Wink (Dwight Henry).  Before she burns it down, her shack is decorated with sports jerseys and jawbones; she keeps a football helmet in the freezer, which she dons when lighting her stove with a blowtorch.  She has a preternatural connection with the animal world around her.  Putting her ear to the heart of a chickadee, she tells us “Sometimes they be talkin’ in codes.”  The little actress beat out 4,000 other girls to win the role and the fourth-grader will likely become the youngest actor ever nominated for an Academy Award.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a survivalist tale: Wink is dying of drink and disease and Hushpuppy must soldier on in the face of poverty and climate change.  She is the embodiment of the human will, but in yellow underpants and rubber boots.  Her father calls her “little man” and the two square off with a brutal sort of love for each other.  Is Hushpuppy the real beast of Zeitlin’s film, which he based on Lucy Alibar’s stage play, “Juicy and Delicious”?  Or is it the herd of prehistoric boars she imagines roaming the bayou and shaking the very earth beneath her feet?   Equally beastly are the governmental workers who try to quarantine the Bathtub residents though they can’t, or won’t, be contained.  At a climactic moment, when Hushpuppy stands fearlessly before these beasts of her imagination, I was brought suddenly to tears.  The film’s raw emotionality is earned; its earthiness induces nausea.  I laughed, cried, and for 90 minutes, wanted to throw up; what more could you want from a film?

“Beasts” wants us to see the abjection of American life up-close and you’ll need an iron gut to stomach Zeitlin’s stroke of genius.  As Dylan once warned, “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.”

Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

26 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

asperger's syndrome, david foster wallace, drama, eric roth, extremely loud & incredibly close, jeffrey, jeffrey wright, john updike, jonathan safran foer, max von sydow, sandra bullock, september 11, stephen daldry, thomas horn, tolkien, tom hanks, viola davis, world war I

“Building a Mystery”

Grade: B (RENT IT)

IT’S BEEN A dark decade for America. Our economy crumbled in the terrifying, twin shadows cast by the events of September 11, 2001, or as it’s remembered in Stephen Daldry’s new drama, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” the “worst day.”  The film begins in the wake of that worst day as Oskar Schell, our 11-year-old protagonist and wunderkind, attends his father’s funeral alongside mother Linda (a muted Sandra Bullock in mournful beige).  The Schells are interring the empty casket of father Thomas (played by Tom Hanks in flashbacks) and, seated apart inside a limousine, strike us as not the closest mother and son.  “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is about the hard work of recovering that interpersonal closeness, of living loudly in the face of seemingly insurmountable loss.  A victim of the 9/11 attacks, Thomas leaves behind a key, and like Chekov’s gun, that key has to open something by the last act.  It comes with the cryptic word “Black,” and soon enough, with the names of 472 New York residents named Black, Oskar sets out to unlock the mystery.  Along the way he meets a fine supporting cast including Viola Davis (“The Help”), Jeffrey Wright (“The Ides of March”), and Max von Sydow (in an Oscar-nominated role as the speechless “Renter” and Oskar’s guardian angel).

In Oskar’s memories of his father, Thomas Schell towers over him like a demigod: a map-maker who builds puzzles for his prodigy son to solve, an intellectual who searches The New York Times each morning for grammatical typos, a jeweler who leaves behind the ultimate treasure-hunt (another cartographic conundrum involving a mythical “Sixth Borough”) for his son to solve.   Mr. Hanks remains one of cinema’s most likeable leading men, and buried, as he is here, by the rubble of Oskar’s grief, his warm presence radiates throughout.  The warmly-lit interior of the Schells’ Upper West Side apartment is a refuge from the senseless world outside and within it, father and son wage a war of oxymorons with Thomas shouting “Now then” and “Found missing” to little Oscar’s retort: “Jumbo shrimp!”

In adapting the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider”) retains much of the high jinks and gimmickry – close-ups of elephants tears, YES and NO written on palms, even the flip-book that concluded the novel and sent the image of a falling man back up into the World Trade Center – that divided readers of the novel, which delivered on David Foster Wallace’s call to construct postmodern narratives with an unironic heart.  Yet the most affecting scene of the film is its sparest: an angry Oskar, confounded by the senselessness of his dad’s death, tells Linda: “I wish it had been you.”  We’re not a little shocked when Linda doesn’t strike him but responds with “So do I.”  If only Roth had preserved the conclusion to Foer’s novel in which Oskar finally understands his mother’s own ordeal, telling us, on the page: “Her looking over me was a complicated as anything ever could be.  But it was also incredibly simple.  In my only life, she was my mom, and I was her son.”

And the page is where Foer’s Oskar Schell belongs because on screen, he comes across as petulant and not a little irritating.  As Oskar, newcomer Thomas Horn over-enunciates his lines and lacks the warm relatability that an actor like Hanks has in spades.  He comes across as that precocious little boy who sidles up to the adults table at family functions to show off his knowledge of Tolkien and trigonometry, the one whose mother has to politely ask him to play with the other children.  There’s a suggestion that Oskar suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, but it’s never developed and it’s a shame because his most puzzling behaviors, like hiding the answering machine on which his father left his final messages and replacing it with a new one to keep his mother in the dark, make no sense on the screen whereas the literary Oskar, as the novel’s narrator, is easier to sympathize with.

Foer’s novel wasn’t to everyone’s liking – described as “overextended and sentimentally watery,” it took a drubbing by the late great John Updike in a 2005 review in The New Yorker ­– but it’s naïve to think that a fictionalization involving September 11th survivors could ever please everyone.

It’s not, as many have alleged, that “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is exploitative.  Rather, it’s manipulative and especially so on screen, stripped of the pacifistic and political dimensions of Foer’s novel, which forced us to bring a brain and heart.  Daldry’s reductive take on that work asks only that we bring our Kleenex.

Poem: “11 Lines for September”

11 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anniversary, attacks, elegy, manhattan, new jersey, new york city, patriotism, rodin, september 11, ten years later, world trade center, WTC

(written one decade ago, dusted off here in memory of the fallen, including a classmate from NJ):

11 Lines for September

 

In Memory of Daniel Gallagher, North Tower

b. July 4, 1978 – d. September 11, 2001

 

Every tongue fell mute that morning

Four jets, an unholy quartet, aimed their noses

At a nation’s market, mansion and military

Poets on their fire escapes, trashmen on their hills

The recital halls and stadiums were mortuary still

A city that raced the sun to its every setting

Stopped.  But once the cameras regained their focus

Once candles cooled on every bench and bumper

Cabbies and curators, theologians and thieves – each and all agreed:

It will take more than fear, and fear’s fierce promoters,

To distract our common cause.

 

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Thinker

 

After the ash had settled over lower Manhattan

Bus stops flaked with photos of the missing

The outer boroughs grew uneasy in the shadow

Of a diminished and defeated looking skyline.

But there, in the still-warm ruins, a rescue team

Discovered the unscathed remains of a Rodin

His Thinker jutting fork-like from rock and wire

Still locked in a pose of private contemplation.

He lay upside down, separated from his stand

From the boardroom where he went largely ignored

From the janitor who, when dusting his head each evening,

Would talk to him as if he was an old friend.

He survived the heat and fury of the fall

The hour when the carpet seemed to drop away

And all the city’s homing pigeons circled above him

Searching in vain for their customary landmarks.

He suffered only the loss of his stature

And the disfigurement of a fist

Still the team hauled him from the rubble

And set him aside where he could stand

In cold remove from man’s distress.

(September 2001)


Tribute to Daniel:

http://www.voicesofseptember11.org/dev/memorial_content.php?idbio=451102069&idcontent=308664590

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