After dealing with a work crisis, my first movie was The Not Dead, where returned soldiers from the Malay conflict, the Balkans peacekeeping mission and Iraq talk about their experiences and their PSTD (and the difficulties that they had getting help). This was tied together with poems by a guy who had translated their experiences into an anthology.
One of the soldiers, who must be in his seventies (but still can't sleep with his wife because of the nightmares) talked about being a policeman in the 50s, after he came back - an old woman invited him in for a cup of tea, and showed him a picture of her son that she kept in a drawer. She couldn't hang it up, because she cried every time she saw it; he had died in an ambush overseas, and she was wracked with guilt over whether he had suffered terribly before he died. The next day, the ex-soldier came back with pictures; he had been in that ambush, had known her son, and told her that he'd been hit in the head and died instantly (which was a lie, since they'd been shot in the lower half to disable them first). This comforted her, and she was able to hang the picture in pride of place. But what affected the man the most was that she was too poor for carpets, and the contents of the house wouldn't be worth four quid; and the army had taken her son away.
This was a very affecting doco, for all the right reasons. It emphasised to me the need for soldiers to be able to rely on their leaders, not just to put them in harm's way for the right reasons, but to look after them when they come back. I can't imagine what they've gone through and how strong those around them have had to be; we heard about one wife, but actually met the other, and they talked about how traumatic simple things like a child's birthday party could be.
I'm not sure I could watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it then.
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The Orphanage was at the Embassy an hour later, so I grabbed some lunch at Cha, and then headed in. It was basically a ghost story, with a couple and their seven year-old boy coming to set up a small home for special-needs children in a house that was the orphanage that the woman had grown up in. A little gore, but not very much; a number of leap-out scares, and some extended creepiness. I guess whether you believe that it's a happy or sad ending depends on how seriously you take the supernatural elements.
I thought it was quite cool, and given a while I might watch it again.
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I was a bit worried about Waltz With Bashir; I thought there was the distinct potential that I'd either hate it or be bored to tears. As it turned out, it was very good. It echoed some of the themes of The Not Dead in that it dealt with the guilt of surviving soldiers - in this case, Israeli soldiers in the war in Lebanon, with a focus on a massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christians, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader.
It was animated until the very end, which meant that they could blend the contemporary images with the reminisces seamlessly, indicating the transition mainly by colour scheme. The main narrator realises that he can't remember certain events, though he has the image of him and a colleague floating naked in the water, flares going up, and returning to the shore to get dressed. He talks to other people in his unit, journalists, and psychologists, to try and get an idea of what happened, why he can't remember, what memories he's created, and what he forgot.
One of his friends tells him - you don't remember these camps from Beirut, you remember them from Auschwitz. (Or something along those lines; I'm not up to quoting directly. :)
I thought it was a good film. I don't think I'd watch it again.
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Frozen River is a nice "unlikely buddy" movie, between a woman with two kids (five and fifteen) whose gambling-addicted husband has just disappeared with the money they need to pay for their new home, and a Mohawk woman whose husband died smuggling people in from Canada, and had her baby taken away from her by her husband's mother. It was a fairly gritty movie; one of the advantages to seeing stuff in the Festival is that, unlike a Hollywood film, there's a chance that the most horrible thing might actually happen, so there is actual tension while you're watching.
I liked it; it wasn't stupendous, but it was well done, and I'd watch it again.
* * *
I then got the slowest fast-food in the known universe (i.e. Burger King), and then met up with C to go to The Wave. Semi-ironically, given that this is a retelling of a high-school social studies experiment in fascism gone horribly awry, there was a Film Society member telling people that they needed to make sure that there weren't any gaps in seating (which was fine) which progressed to telling people where to sit (to the extent that was kinda unnecessary).
I remember reading the original American book in secondary school, and I believe that it's been made into a film before, so there weren't many surprises. They do a good job of showing a bunch of different responses - the rich kid who leaves, but drifts back when he sees it's an opportunity to control people; the people trapped in social roles that find that they can change how people see them; the bored who find direction, and the outcast who finds people defending them because they're part of the group. And they make it clear how swiftly things can get out of control.
One of the advantages to setting the film in Germany is that they got to compare and contrast them with the Anarchists, who were depicted as basically just another punk gang, happy to use violence against those who appeared weaker and/or challenged them. The film heavily implied that this wasn't a better solution.
I think that one of the interesting things that they touched on, but didn't really answer, is the positive aspects of autocracy/fascism. One of the unfortunate truths is that not only the leaders, but followers get things out of these kind of groups - a sense of unity, mutual support, the joy of being in a group all pointed in the same direction. But the problem with creating an "in" group is you automatically create an "out" group.
But... what about the people who, when they think for themselves, think just of themselves? There's probably no good answer for that.
I guess that fascism gives you fast results - very much like a sugar rush. But just like a sugar rush, it's not something that sustains - you either have to keep on dosing (which leads to a bunch of regrettable side-effects), or you crash. True consensus-building might be slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's much more likely to give you long-term sustained enthusiasm and momentum, even when the "leaders" aren't pushing. Like, er, brown rice? I seem to have lost track of my metaphor.
Anyway, as a movie, it wasn't revelatory, nor as shocking as I was actually expecting. But I think it's a movie that's worth remaking every so often, so that the message of how easy it is to drift into this sort of behaviour gets reiterated.
Posted by svend at August 4, 2008 12:17 AM