Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

Charlie Wilson’s War

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

Charlie Wilson’s War, the new Mike Nichols film based on George Crile’s book of the same name opened last week to decent reviews and pretty good word of mouth – even in liberal crowds. The story outline is pretty well known by now. Charlie Wilson, an early Blue Dog Democrat — a socially liberal and weapons loving Congressman from south eastern Texas, (east of Houston and Galveston Bay, bordering on the Gulf and Louisiana,) teamed up with go-it-alone CIA case officer, Gust Avrakotos, to get millions of secret US dollars to various anti-Soviet mujahideen eventually leading to the withdrawal of the Soviet Army from Afghanistan and setting the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

It’s a good film of course, with Nichols directing, witty script by Aaron Sorkin, Tom Hanks playing Charlie Wilson and the chameleon Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing Avrakotos. Julia Roberts isn’t bad as Wilson’s goad and top sex object, Born Again Joanne Herring. Plus there are lots of boy toys: helicopters bowing up, Soviet jets blowing up — handsome Russians silenced in mid fear: Boom!; enormous tanks lifting off the ground in flames. More boy toys in Wilson’s nubile staff, including one he refers to as “jail bait.” Sex and firepower! What’s not to be liked?

This depends on what you go to movies for.

The acting or the story. Or to think about what is being sent your way, the set of values the story advances.

Some would argue that the acting is paramount. Without good acting and a good script you cannot have a good movie. If that’s your criteria this is a good movie. Aaron Sorkin’s typically crisp dialog (West Wing on TV, A Few Good Men…) with the witty repartee of the old Cary Grant films flowing like the language we’ve come to expect of these larger than life characters, wishing we were as witty and quick as they are. It doesn’t hurt that some of it comes directly from the real Charlie Wilson’s mouth. When asked why all his congressional aids are beautiful young women his answer was “You can teach ‘em to type. You can’t teach ‘em to grow tits.”

If the style and the jewels and the hot tubs are all –in some update of Dallas, the long running series about Texas greed and excess – unrelated to anything in our world, then it is a good movie.

The story is not unrelated to us of course. It is about land mines disguised as toys that maim children. It is about stinger missiles that incinerate and atomize in one glorious show. It is about communists dying. It is about international politics of the most gruesome kind. It is about the United States Congress and how its business gets done. All of this is real and contemporary and none of it is pretty. So how do we get to enjoy a “comedy” about all this? I didn’t.

If the story were about a fictional world in Macondo and Charlie Wilson were decked out in white tropicals with epaulets and the fighting done with muzzle loaders and swords I think I could get in on the fun. It isn’t
(more…)

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The Devil Knows

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

We wound up at “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” Sidney Lumet’s new film, last night because we couldn’t get into “I’m Not There,” the multi-actor Bob Dylan film. We hadn’t done our usual homework on “Dead” so we didn’t have a clue what we were in for, except the class A list of actors: Phillip Seymour Hoffman (most memorably of “Capote”,) Ethan Hawke, Maria Tomei and Albert Finney. Looks like a go, we said.

Imagine our surprise when, without previews, without titles, without warning we were watching an overweight, naked white male plowing — at length, from the rear — what seemed to be a beautiful woman, or at least a woman with lots of beautiful hair. I have to say, it was a long scene. In part because I was trying to figure out how this well lit porn shot fit the movie I thought we’d paid to see. It ended in sweet hilarity, somewhat redeeming the man who, keep in mind we know nothing about yet, reserved half his amorous attention for the figures in the mirror. Somewhat. Their conversation lets us know that this loving, and the following sweetness is unusual in their lives. It throws them back to the “old days,” the days they met. And it clues us to the financial pressures –so central to the rest of the film– that are squeezing “Andy” as he tries to live a life larger than even his sumptuous salary can maintain. The woman’s sudden withdrawal from happy coitus tell of her unhappiness at his day to day absence, emotional and physical.

After a dippy little subtitle –”The Day of the Robbery”– almost indicating we are watching a comedy, we are zipped into a little shopping corner as banal as can be found. The L of stores around mostly deserted asphalt, a UPS truck, an elderly man dropping his elderly wife off, a white sedan with two guys sitting in it, waiting for stores to open. The woman unlocks a door and goes into a store, takes off her coat, begins to settle herself. It’s a jewelry store. And suddenly the filmic dip from high sexual fever into banality explodes into threat and violence. One of the men in the car comes into the store, a mask pulled over his face and a big gun waving at the elderly woman. Lots of shouted orders. Frail responses. The tension is unbearable. And then hell breaks loose.

Lumet is no stranger to hell breaking loose. He’s a master at screwing up the tension between the bad and the good. In doing so he can usually be counted to be on the side of the good. Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Prince of the City, even Dog Day Afternoon –which he has described as showing that even the freaks in our lives are more like us than we can ever know. But something different is going on here. The “Devil” is a fast plunge into hell, with not too much redemption going on. The story is told in overlapping segments. We are moved back in time before the robbery as subtitles tell us “Two Days before the Robbery;” “One Week Before the Robbery.” We see new parts of the larger story connect to parts we’ve already seen, the same sequence of lines and actions repeated, now set into new contexts. Always we see the family — of men, the mother is dead and the sister is barely present — collapsing in on each other, wildly trying to leap over the previous mistake that had brought them to the present precarious position.

Hoffman is the older brother, the one we have seen in the opening scene, successful, aggressive, sure of himself but in trouble. His success is falling short of his needs. The falling short is driving him to drugs, impotence and financial chicanery. Hawke is the younger brother, the baby, the unambitious, the loser as he is called by his angry ex-wife and his disappointed daughter. Both brothers need money and they need it bad. When Hoffman — Andy — proposes a simple robbery to jump start their lives, Hawke — Hank — at first is incredulous, then resistant, then crazed by his need for money, acquiescent. Andy details the plan. Knock over their own parents’ jewelry store. They don’t work on Saturday and the old woman who does can be hustled into the back room. The jewels are covered by insurance. They stolen ones can be fenced. The old man, it turns out later, is no warm and nurturing dad. No harm, no foul. Everybody’s happy.

Hoffman is a genius at becoming the nasty, seductive older brother. Hawke a little less successful at being a chump but pretty damn good. Trouble is, he decides he can’t possibly pull the robbery off himself so he enlists the help of a real thug. A real thug with a real gun juiced by heavy metal music and pumped testosterone leads to certain mayhem. Perhaps he’s the only bad guy from the old Lumet world, to get what’s coming to him. All the rest live in a gray zone, some charm, some evil; men in the modern world caught up in their greed and bad decisions, the women not too helpful either. Maria Tomei, Andy’s thick haired wife we met in the opening scene, acts out her despair at Andy’s lack of emotional/sexual accomplishment –when not on vacation– by meeting Hank once a week for a good long nooner. It’s all a fuckin’ mess, as they say. So far from the sweet Irish toast from which the title comes ” May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead” that one imagines it was deliberately done. Meaning the opposite of what is intended.

So watching it, as I always do, I ask myself: why is this film being made? What is on the director’s mind? The writer’s? What is the story they want to tell and why do they think it important enough to spend several years in its making? Why this film and not another? For some, the only reason to make a film is because it looks like a cash machine. Story, purpose, not important except to draw ticket buyers. Lumet isn’t one of these guys. In most of his earlier films the question of “why this film?” is easy to answer. He is dealing with significant questions in life. He has stories to show us people and how they deal with the messiness and uncertainties of the world. He has hope. Without being simplistic he writes the good over the bad. The “Devil”?

The story spirals into a murderous tiny point –warning, Plot Spoiler — (more…)

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The Rape of Europa

Monday, June 4th, 2007

Here’s a recommendation for a couple of your hours. You won’t think them ill spent. The Rape of Europa is a documentary film that neither by title nor subject matter beckons one in: Rape? Stolen art? Don’t we already know the Nazis were the world’s biggest bastards? I’ll even confess, we went in one of those “obligation” moods: this is a subject we should know more about, but let’s have a good dinner afterwards… Believe me, we came away filled, amazed, ready to talk and learn more. Forget the fine wine and fancy pizza. Most of you will come away similarly, knowing how much you didn’t know about something you thought you knew a good deal about, and you’ll praise the way the film makers got you there. You’ll call your friends, as we are, and tell them: Go see it.

Adele

We all knew that among the crimes of the Nazis, small crimes perhaps, but crimes nevertheless, was the theft of culture. What we didn’t know was the extent of this theft. It was not casual or opportunistic. Enormous resources were spent locating, loading and shipping great works of art and small household goods all over Europe. Hitler himself, and his chief lieutenants spent hundreds of hours evaluating art, having it shipped to their private palaces. Even as Hitler prepared to shoot himself he was talking about his memorial art gallery planned for Linz, Austria, his birth town.

Professionals and volunteers in Paris, Florence, Krakow and elsewhere spend thousands of hours clearing the major museums as the German armies approached, spied on by informers and turncoats; they packed hundreds of thousands of objects, some of them fragile to the point of collapse, and sent them by truck, train and animal carts to distant, hidden sites, before the Nazi looters arrived. The Mona Lisa was sent in a climate controlled truck so effective that her accompanying curator was passed out upon arrival.

German and Allied bombers devastated museums, monasteries, wealthy homes filled with art. The US sent a small corps of what came to be called “The Monuments Men,” along with the Allied push up through Italy, trying to locate, preserve, mark for future recovery monuments, buildings, mosaics, paintings. Train loads of goods filled with Nazi loot were found abandoned on the tracks, cataloged and sent back to the cities of origin.

Following the war and increasing in tempo in recent years efforts have been made to find the original owners, many of them dead or disappeared in the war and concentration camps. One of the key themes of the film was the return of Gustave Klimt’s Portrait of Adele from the Austrian National museum to Maria Altman, a niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, deceased subject of the painting.

The film has an incredible range, from Klimt’s position in pre-war Austria, to the Nazi “purificiation” of art and their greed for the best, to the unbelievable devastation of Europe — incredible newsreel footage from both German and US cameras, long minutes panning over burned out buildings. Yet it doesn’t lag, isn’t simply didactic. Based on Lynn Nichols 1995 book of the same name, the film adds personal interviews, images of the art, history as it was lived. And as importantly we realize that while the real horror was the death of people, the destruction of those things they loved adds, does not distract, from those memories.

This is a film I would show on every Memorial Day: Memory of what was done; Memory of those who emerged, still decent, still able to build new lives and to remember the richness of family and culture.

The Rape of Europa is showing in Marin for as long as people keep going. Get some friends and Go!

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Kicking In The Door

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

The scene was familiar: uniformed soldiers, rifles swinging restlessly, big man at the door, boots, gun butts smashing smashing, male voices screaming orders: Get down! Get down you fuckin’ shit! Where are the guns! Where are the fuckin’ guns! Female and children’s voices screaming in terror. No guns here! No man here! –You fuckin’ liar! Hand grasping clothing, hurling bodies against the wall, against the floor. Gun barrels held inches from skulls, from terrified eyes.

Sitting in a dark theater, watching actors and not threatened at all, understanding that the actors aren’t threatened, still the adrenaline pump is in high overdrive. The throat constricts. The heart hammers.

This is all too familiar stuff.

For the last four years, on TV and in documentaries, in still photos and on the Internet, in Anbar province, in Diyala province, in the back alleys of Baghdad. Yet this is not Iraq. This is a film about Ireland 1919 to 1921. The men in uniform and half-uniform are the Black and Tans, special British forces created, at Winston Churchill’s suggestion, to get the Irish insurgency against British rule under control. The Irish want the British out. 800 years was enough. To the Irish, the Black and Tans, and the fearsome Auxiliaries, were occupiers and to be resisted.

As in Iraq in 2003 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 the insurgency only grew, fed by the efforts to suppress it. It grew in numbers involved. It grew in viciousness — on all sides. It grew to civil war and neighbor fought neighbor. Brother killed brother.

The film we were watching is The Wind that Blows the Barley. Directed by Ken Loach, it won the Cannes 2006 Palm d’Or. In England however, it, and the director, has been excoriated by the setters of opinion and taste. Loach is British and the history he shows is not warm hearted about his country’s behavior. There are those who, after 86 of peace with Ireland, call him treasonous. One prominent critic compares him to the Nazi’s Leni Riefenstahl. It leaves one wondering what has elevated these scribes to the level of serious critics. They seem to have some power though. Loach claims there were only 40 copies of the film in England while there were 400 in France. Even those who aren’t frothing in the gums yip in some alarm.

Loach has a long history of social realist films, beginning in 1965 with a BBC production called Up the Junction about working class life in South London. He has some 26 films to his credit, including Which Side are You On?, Bread and Roses, and Land and Freedom about the Spanish Civil War. Loach knows, in other words, which side he is on.

Yet he is not on a side blindly, and he has no romance in him about the great struggles or that great intentions will hide great evils. He has no uncertainty that the occupation of Ireland by Britain was wrong, or the actions of the Black and Tan. The struggle of the IRA against them is justified by all that men hold dear. And yet, and yet the IRA does terrible things and Loach shows us – brutality traded for brutality, revenge the spark for revenge. This is war. But it is not a war film like those favored by the winners.

The Wind Blows the Barley, like Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad, like Dragojevic’s Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, like Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, take all the romance out of war. Damn such films, anyway! No stirring shots of friendly aircraft wheeling in formation, wings waggling in salute; no sailors standing windswept on the deck, eyes narrowed in pride and recollection; no tearful reunions as Johnny comes home, honored and bemedaled. Instead, we have fingernails being wrenched out; heroes shooting collaborators in the head and then vomiting because they had been boyhood friends; brothers parting over the aims of the fighting, finally coming to blows and to execution, up close and personal.

As the Irish –and the two brothers in the film– against the fog of war and promise of partial success, begin to split into differing, then disputing, then civil-waring camps, Loach is not didactic. He likely feels the militants who rejected the treaty –signed by their own leaders– were the more right. But those who did sign, and then fought their brothers, were no less principled, their perceptions of hold this and advance another day were not dishonorable. Loach lets us see the uneasy, unpredictable and terrible results once the battle has been entered into.

I don’t think he set out to make an anti-war film, but by making a real film about a real war we are wooed away from the propaganda platitudes of martyrs and heroes and certainties of God’s favor. We get the sense of how serious the questions are, how seriously they must be answered, before gaily signing on for war. What else can be done? How else can victory be won?

How right are we to hear the echoes of those screaming from 1920 down to our own day?

In his acceptance speech at Cannes he said, “in no uncertain terms, that his movie wasn’t only about the Irish Problem, but was also meant as a commentary about the Bush and Blair policies in Iraq.” [Review.]

Nothing had to be contrived. The mechanisms are well known.

Eventually the wars in Ireland ceased; the longest running in the northern 6 counties, only recently. Somehow all the reasons to rip fingernails out, to control the lives of others, to shoot people in the head all diminished and life went on. The film doesn’t comment on this of course, though we, sitting in the dark, shaken by the violence, thinking perhaps of our own ancestors’ probable participation in it, cannot help but know. The Irish and the English somehow live as cousins now, despite all of that. The Iraqis will one day know the same peace. And yet today, the occupying army still in place, the civil war exploding on a different street corner every day, there seems to be nothing to be learned to help them skip the carnage yet to come.

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Film: Amazing Grace

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

Darn! I wanted to like it. I wanted to like it real bad.

Amazing Grace is the latest film by that title, and the first to treat the unutterably difficult, and in retrospect stunning, struggle in Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s to put an end to the British slave trade. Caught in the blinding amnesia of modern life it is almost impossible for us to imagine what was taken as a matter of comfortable fact in the life of the British nation, and had been for at least one hundred years — and longer in Portugal and Spain.

So long as the Empire, and material wealth, grew few cared to ask how it happened. “Favored by God” was a popular belief of course. British ships carried cargo to the four corners of the earth. The merchant fleet was the greatest ever seen. Though the Colonies had recently been lost, Great Britain was still the greatest power on earth. Sugar had been flooding the nation for decades, replacing other sweeteners and providing the cheap energy source, in sugared tea and marmalade for noon-time bread (the first “fast food”,) for the growing industrial classes. Where it was coming from, or how, was of no more interest to most British than the source of bacon or roses is to modern Americans. We like ‘em, we want ‘em. We pay (too much!) for ‘em. End of story.

In 1787 a band of 12, mostly Quakers, assembled in a print shop in George Yard in London to begin a quixotic campaign to convince millions of their fellow citizens, and the members of Parliament, that abominable cruelty was responsible for much of this wealth. It was being practiced in their names, on human beings like themselves. It was being done with neck-irons and branding, with flogging and mutilation. It was being done with enslavement and torture and death as its chief implements: death by drowning, death by impalement, death by starvation, death by dogs. If you don’t believe it, they said, look at this evidence. They set irons, and whips, testimony and drawings before disbelieving eyes and described it in exquisite detail. This, they said, is what we are doing, and this, they said, must stop. Regardless of the financial cost to you or to me or the Empire itself, it must stop. They carried their campaign to every ear and eye in Great Britain for 46 years, until the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833. This story is one of the great stories of human history and is scarcely mentioned in textbooks and hardly known except among handfuls of historians.

This is the story I wanted to see. How did this campaign unfold? What were it’s trials, its errrors, it setbacks and successes? I wanted to see Thomas Clarkson barely escape with his life on the docks of Liverpool as a group of slave ship officers tried to end it and his damnable success in attacking their livelihood. I wanted to see him riding the 35,000 miles on horseback going to meetings. I wanted to see James Stephen witnessing the trial in the Barabadoes that changed his life, and his colleague on board a slaver taking notes in Greek so as not to be spied upon and turning them over to the organizers. Oh, what a splendid movie might have been made!

It was not to be. Apparently Michael Apted, the director (also of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas In the Mist, Incident at Oglala, as well as thrillers like Extreme Measures, and The World Is Not Enough (Bond)) was asked to do a film, not about the anti-slavery movement, but about William Wilberforce — and that is what we get. Clarkson, Stephen, John Newton, the repentant slave ship captain who wrote the song “Amazing Grace,” all appear but as peripheral lights to the candelabra of Wilberforce, his friendship with William Pitt, and the long and intricate Parliamentary battles they waged. We see Wilberforce’s loss of faith, his battles through illness, his falling in love and fatherhood, his regaining of strength and faith and the first two victories in the struggle — though we don’t see the final, great victory, the news of which he got on his deathbed. Curiously, we aren’t told the source of his own wealth or if it was threatened by his obsession, nor who is father is — the famous Bishop Wilberforce who battled Darwin’s heretical ideas from pulpit and pamphlet for decades.

As such a film — a period biography — it was good enough. The fine volunteers at rottentomatoes.com give it a 72% favorable. I would be one of those tempted to throw, not hold, my tomato though.

Some liked it well enough. Andrew Sarris is among them. He takes it, and reviews it, as a very well done bio-pic. Fair enough, and perhaps the way to enter people’s hearts. Heck, even the Socialists like it, so maybe I’m missing something. For an aging curmudgeon though, who has seen enough movies about splendid love-affairs in period costume, and stirring speeches to sitting nobles, to last him into a second lifetime, it was a disappointment.

Where is the film we need to see? The Battle of Algiers for the nonviolent? The raw, gripping black and white scenes of clandestine meetings, broadsides hastily posted, meetings fearfully attended in guttering candle light? Where are the close ups of eyes witnessing the dumping out of sacks the terrible instruments of confinement and torture? Where are the gasps as the schematic of a slave ship’s hold is displayed and viscerally understood? Where is the sense of a growing movement, of people refusing to buy sugar, of putting up with privation, with suffering the scorn of their neighbors? Where are those who stopped their work, risked their livelihoods, to join the movement, to gather the evidence, to provide the heaving social earth of a social movement from which the Parliamentary maneuvers came and upon which they depended?

That’s the movie we need. Meanwhile the present Amazing Grace is good enough to spend your time with. It’s long past time for William Wilberforce’s memory to be dusted off and held in the spotlight reserved for our heroes. Though after you see the movie, or in place of it, read deeply and hold dear Adam Hochschild’s marvelous Bury the Chains, the book that should be the source of the movie we all want to see.

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Iraq for Sale

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

I took advantage of a new Tivo feature in which you can download films from the Amazon.com film catalog directly to your own Tivo. If it’s a rental you can keep it until you watch it; once you start watching you have 24 hours to finish –or watch it continuously if you want– then it self destructs.

I downloaded Roger Greenwald’s Iraq for Sale. Great film? Nope. Enough to make your blood boil? Absolutely.

Talking head after talking head talking about the malfeasance of Halliburton, KBR, CACI, Titan.

CACI, one the providers of interrorgators at Abu Ghraib, of course had no representatives. Greenwald had plenty to remind us of the sickening events and that junior soldiers have been courts martialed and are serving time. The civilian guards, if accused, were fired and sent home, where they could get a job with another contractor.

From Halliburton and KBR there were plenty — not from the companies but from the workers who went to drive trucks, build showers, serve meals. Many of them talk about their dual motivation: to make money for their families, and to help rebuild Iraq. And then they began to see: empty trucks run up and down the road in order to bill the DOD; multi-million dollar trucks blown up because extra tires weren’t available; shower water not chlorinated and contaminated with typhus, giardia, all the bad stuff. All these good-old-boys speak in the film about the greed of the corporations, the short cuts taken, the lack of training.

As one said: How are you going to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people if what they see us doing is cheating each other? What kind of recommendation is that?

The US Congress, despite Patrick Leahy’s and others efforts, has not done a damn thing about the contracting. Greenwald kindly posts the votes, and other research backing up the claims of the movie.

If you want something to do, with the new Democratic majorities, here are some place to help you out.

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Letters From Iwo Jima

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

I saw Letters from Iwo Jima last night. I liked it. Is it a great film? No. Is it a brave film? Yes.

In a sort of Nixon-to-China move Eastwood, the great American paragon of celebratory violence, goes to the heart of the Japanese enemy and finds men pretty much like the American men they are fighting: fighting for god and country; writing letters home, getting letters from worried mothers with news about stray dogs; men with memories of wives and infants. The Japanese are not quite elevated to the stature of the Americans: there are no thrilling charges over-running American emplacements; the deaths we see are almost all of Japanese, shot, incinerated, blown up, gruesomely self immolated with their own grenades. The faux black and white of the film shot on the volcanic island, at night, in the dark heat of the caves brings us the grinding, terrible contrary of the glory of war. In his reflective older years Eastwood knows: war is brutal on every side. He has an American soldier shoot at point blank range two prisoners he is guarding. He shows the Japanese taking that in and redoubling their resolve to fight unto death. Though not as fully drawn as his characters in Million Dollar Baby, his Japanese officers and men have range and contradiction, a mixed lot — brave and cowardly, even-handed and vicious, funny and stern. We follow three of them in the time-compressed claustrophobia of the caves, preparing for, and fighting, a battle they knew from the beginning they were almost sure to lose. This sense of doom and the conflicting swirl of human courage and fear is the emotional thematic of the film. Though there are plenty of battle scenes — and fine computer renditions of the US fleet stunning the waiting Japanese with its size and power — they don’t overwhelm the human story Eastwood is interested in. If only more of the trigger-happy crowd could share in his maturing vision. Though given the vicious attacks for being a euthanasiast for the final scenes in Million Dollar Baby, it won’t be long before he is forced through the right wing gauntlet for being a “Jap lover.”

[As you no doubt know the film is an Oscar nominee and pairs with his earlier film, Flag of Our Fathers, about the Americans in the battle. The battle for Iwo Jima was a brutal two month cave to cave fight made particularly famous by the iconic image of US soliders raising a large American flag on Mt Suribachi early in the fighting. Some 18,000 Japanese died, and nearly 7,000 Americans. One third of all US Marine deaths of WW II happend in these few weeks on this small island.]

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Movie: Story of the Weeping Camel

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

In my new zeal to see all the movies I’ve ever missed I saw The Story of the Weeping Camel via Netfix last night.

As most of the reviewers say, it was slow to the point of mesmerization, an anthropology film in many ways, in which the more manic side of the brain pops up from time to time to ask “ok, where are we going here?” From grandmother ladeling out another form of milk to the young mother brushing dust off the yurt after the howling windstorm we are curious and comfortable watching daily lives unfold.

The drama, such as it is, is that a mother camel, after a difficult (and first) birth — assisted by human beings before your very eyes– rejects the brute (literally, a big and white colt.) The camel is wealth, of course, though it’s clear by the human actions that much more and deeper is involved in the care and worry; it will die unless the mother bonds with it. Though the young woman of the film does do some hand milking and feeding through a nipple-ended horn that is not enough –probably not in food, and certainly not in bonding, leading and companionship. As the colt grows weaker and all efforts to bring the two together fail the family turns to an old tradition: a ritual with a two stringed instrument called a morin khuur.

What isn’t commented on much in the reviews I’ve read is the mysterious power of music even as it is so central to the story. The tribes in southern Mongolia apparently have a long tradition of using a certain set of ritual song and music to break the spell of rejection between mother and child, more typically sheep than camels. Initially the morin khuur is slung by a tie over the mother camel’s hump. Either from the wind or from resonance with the camel’s lowing, the strings begin to vibrate. Or perhaps, in response to the strings’ vibration the camel begins to low.

We had seen the mother camel just before snapping, spitting and growling — even to stop the offending instrument from being placed upon her; and then, in the space of minutes, we see her calm down. The morin khuur is removed and the player begins to stroke a familiar tune, to which the young woman of the family begins to sing, sweetly and clearly, her hands stroking the long fur of the camel, soothing with voice and hand. The camel seems to listen, to dwell, and to vocalize in return. The expressive eyes, which according to legend, are always looking at the horizon for the return of the antlers it was due from the gods, are a wonder to watch.

As the music and the human and the camel voices went on, as emotions and connections began to fill, I began to think about the origins of speech, how closely bound such meaning-filled sound was to the later (as I think) syllabetical morphemes of meaning; how song may well have risen as intelligence-driven imitation of the natural world, and how language might have come out of song.

As the camel calmed, the white furred colt was brought closer and finally led to suckle, from which it had been dislodged so often before by a sharp jolt to the jaw of the mother’s thigh bone, or by her simply wandering away in disinterest. And the mother stood still. The colt looked around, and suckled again. The mother encouraged it with her nose pushing at its hindquarters. The watching humans see that it is time to go. They move to the yurt for some milk and more song. The mother and child camel are left, standing and moving together, the mother camel with water spurting from her eye.

It is truly an amazing film, especially, as I understand it, that the film makers did not know what would have at the end when they began. Although I will think about the camels, and recall the temptations of modernity and TV for the youngest boy in the film, it is the power of the music I will recall most often, especially when I hear myself humming, wordlessly, in response to memories of where I’ve been or of the pleasure of friends, of work well done, of love.

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Film: Shut Up and Sing

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

A couple of us went to see Shut Up and Sing over the weekend. The short recommendation is: Go See it. This is another fine Barbara Kopple documentary (Winter Soldier, and Harlan County among many), this time about the country music trio the Dixie Chicks. The Chicks were a hardworking, just-getting-there band when the lead singer, Natalie Maines, let loose with a wisecrack at a London concert in 2003 to the effect that she was ashamed that George Bush was from Texas. The sentence got picked up by London tabloids, then the raging rightwing weblog Powerline in the US and country western radio stations began refusing to play the Chicks’ records (many of the refusals ordered by corporate bosses.) Festive record crushings and death threats followed.

The film gives the whole run-down which alone is worth going to see. But beyond the politics (and there is plenty of that) it’s a great documentary of what goes into a high-powered road show; what is done to drive a group’s career — how many people are involved, what the tasks are. These three young women are the pay-masters for several hundred it seems. There are great sequences of how songs are built, from an idea, or a line, to the complete finished product we hear — and it sure is a product. We see the women with their babies and families, on the road and off. (You think your life is hectic!) Tying all of this together is the sheer, raw energy of the young (just over 30 years old) and very talented musicians. It is amazing to watch, and hear, them perform. Finally, it is a story of growing into a sense of self, of love and mutual aid. The original wisecrack, at first dismissed and tip-toed around, is defended and Maines and the others learn that freedom isn’t always free. Go, even if you are not a country music fan. You could wait for the DVD but you’ll miss out of the fierce anger of the latest album as Maines rips into Not Ready to Make Nice. [ I'm not ready to make nice, I'm not ready to back down, I'm still mad as hell and, I don't have time to go round and round and round ...] I’d go again just to hear her do it.

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Reflections on “Bobby” & Humans Rights Watch

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

In some part as a celebration after the elections, Lexie and I drove down to Santa Barbara to visit cousins who have shared the trials and tribulations, the calls to action, the anger, the financial contributions and growing hope of the past many months. With them we went to two events that brought to me the chill and tingle of that strange cocktail of grief and pleasure that is part of modern American life.

On Saturday we saw a film about the day of Robert F. Kennedy’s death. That day, in Los Angeles, at the Ambassador Hotel, was a day of massing excitement. California was voting in the Presidential primary and election fever was high. It was the fifth of June, 1968. Robert Kennedy died early in the dark hours of the sixth: bullet wounds to the neck and skull, shot at close range in a jubilant crowd after claiming victory in the primary. 6 others were also wounded, lay in their own blood, in the panic and the fear. A bus-boy knelt and cradled the dying man’s head. It was a day many of us will never forget, never, in a year in which the unforgettable was fighting everyday for our memory: the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam and the shattering of US claims to omnipotence; the assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr on April 14; the rage and turmoil in city streets, shootings, rioting, arson fires that consumed acres of homes and businesses.

Did I really want to see a film about this? At a festival? With happy, film-literate people? Should we bring our handkerchiefs is what I wanted to know; could I get an aisle seat so I could bolt?

The name of the film is Bobby and is directed by Emilio Estevez. Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, William Macy, Harry Belafonte and many others all make significant appearances. Without going into detail I’ll tell you to make room to see it when it comes around, though, for all the fine acting, you will likely be left filmically irritated. But the final crush of people in the Ambassador ballroom, the gun shots and Kennedy’s incredible “The Mindless Menace of Violence” playing over the credits will leave you shaken, and I think, further resolved.

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