I don't see a lot of movies, but this was good....

I bought Apocalypto on iTunes for some long trip. I managed to watch it on my beautiful Mac during my flight to London for some meetings. (I’m in Oslo now and preparing for meetings and a lecture tomorrow.) It was……outstanding. For one thing, the acting was quite good and the story very gripping. For another, it didn’t sugar coat the cruelty of much of Meso-American culture. The scenes of human sacrifice should be (if anything should be, which, in all honesty, it should not be) compulsory viewing for all those who opine about how peaceful non-European cultures are. (I heard a load of that from flakey north Americans on the temple of the sun in Tikal when I witnessed the sunset; I asked them what they thought the temple was used for, or what the gigantic aspirin-like stone with the engraved image of a man stretched on his back and the words “Break Spine Here” was for.)

P.S. I should also add that the movie raises a lot of question about religion; I suspect that perhaps those it raised for me were not the same it raised for Mel Gibson.

The Story of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 Retold

(Budapest, 1956: Note the hole in the flag)
I saw the movie Freedom’s Fury, about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, this evening in the enormous Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. at an event organized by the Hungarian Embassy. I recommend the film, although I found the choice of material and organization worthy of comment.

The film is organized around the story of the Olympics match between the Hungarian and the Soviet Waterpolo teams in Australia in 1956. That contest provides an interesting way to organize the material and served as the occasion for staging and filming a reunion of the surviving Hungarian team members and four of the surviving Soviet team members, a reunion that displayed reconciliation and friendship. When I asked the directors why they chose water polo to organize the story, they said that A) one of the directors was a water polo player in college, and B) organizing it in that way allowed a chance of reconciliation. Despite my hatred of what the Soviets (and Communist traitors to their country such as J�¡nos K�¡d�¡r) did, I found the reconciliatory images touching and an interesting way to close a terrible story. As one of the Hungarian water polo players points out, the Soviet team members were victims of communism, as well.

On the other hand, the film errs in stating that the 1956 revolution was the first uprising against Communist tyranny behind the Iron Curtain, a statement that ignores the 1953 uprisings in East Germany. Moreover, Freedom’s Fury offered a rather skimpy treatment of the political events of 1956. While the evil KÃ?¡dÃ?¡r and the brave Imre Nagy are mentioned, other players are ignored, including such traitors as AndrÃ?¡s HegedÃ?¼s,* who signed the invitation to the Soviets to invade, and such heroes as IstvÃ?¡n BibÃ?³.

Besides the sadness I felt at hearing the story again, the images and the sound of the Hungarian language caused me to feel significant nostalgia for Budapest and the Hungarians. I have to get back there sometime soon. (But Beirut and Tehran are on the menu for the next month. So maybe next year.)

*(I met HegedÃ?¼s before the Yugoslav wars in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia at a meeting of eastern European sociologists. The conversations were interesting. In the years since he had worked to make amends for his criminal culpability in the events of 1956; as he told me, he had gone to Moscow to study sociology after the uprising because “we had forgotten about legitimacy” and he thought that the study of sociology would correct that oversight. At one of our seminars on economic sociology, I suggested to him, as the turnover of Hong Kong to China was then being discussed, that Hungary would benefit by allowing Hong Kong entrepreneurs to move to Hungary, to which he responded that “Hungary would not be Hungary.”)

Russian Fantasy

I’d heard some good things about the Russian film Night Watch, so when I saw the English translation of the novel on which the film is based (also Night Watch, although it contains more stories than are depicted in the film, which is based on the first story), I bought it and found that it made for good escapist literature during boring travel. The depiction of a fantasy world of supernatural powers was entertaining and well done. In addition, the depiction of post-Soviet Russian society was quite interesting, with numerous references to the Soviet past and comparisons to the present, such as,

“We set off along a trampled path, overtaking women with shopping bags rambling home from the supermarket. How strange it is to have supermarkets now, just like the genuine article. But people still walk the same old tired way, as if they’d spent an hour standing in line for little blue corpses called chickens…”

Then I got the DVD of the film. It had its moments, but it was quite a disappointment. For one thing, it’s advertised as being in Russian, with subtitles available in English, French, and Spanish. But in fact it’s dubbed into English and the dubbing was pretty hammy (as was, frankly, the acting), so I missed the slight pleasure of comparing the Russian dialogue with the subtitles. (I also have a strong aversion to dubbing.) Overall, the film was a bit of a let down. Nonetheless, for people who like entertaining escapist literature, the book was pretty good.

A Delightful Comedy

M.O.D.
I just saw the delightful film Thank You For Smoking. It’s excellent. And without a doubt, Rob Lowe’s role as a Hollywood fixer is wonderful. I recommend this film very highly.

UPDATE: My colleague David Boaz had an intelligent discussion of this film and “V for Vendetta” (which I have not seen) in his blog on The Guardian.

A New Cinematic Trend?

Brokeback to the Future?

(If you haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain, it’s worth the trip to the cinema.)

Hat tip to Nick Gillespie at Reason.com.

How Tasteless! Mentioning Historical Truth when Reviewing a Film...

His Biggest Crime? Making It Possible for Totalitarians
to Portray Themselves as Civil Libertarians

I’ve been a fan of Stephen Hunter, film critic at the Washington Post, for some time. I’ve always found his reviews to be helpful guides to films. More than that, however, they’re well crafted essays on interesting subjects. (His review of “Downfall,” the outstanding film starring the incomparable Bruno Ganz that chronicled the last days of the man who plunged Europe into war and genocide, is a good example: “Hitler in the Berlin Bunker: An Eerie, Chilling ‘Downfall’.”)

But now Hunter has gone and mentioned the unmentionable in a review of a movie about the nefarious Joseph McCarthy: “‘Good Night’: A Gray Era In Stark Black And White.” How long can he last as a respected film critic?

(It’s astonishing how the issue of the very real communist threat to liberty over a period of many decades—fortunately now behind us—has been occluded by the reckless behavior of the senator from Wisconsin. I find that when I mention in a talk that so-and-so was or is an outspoken Communist [or communist], I have to mention that I’m not red-baiting, because so-and-so actively called for establishing the dictatorship fo the proletariat and abolishing private ownership of the means of production, or was a membership of the Communist Party. A simple statement of fact is generally considered evidence of vicious “red-baiting.” The propagandists for the cause of communism did a truly brilliant job and the effects are still with us. Let’s hope that, with the USSR now dead and buried, this particular bit of dishonesty can be uncovered for what it was and is: an attempt to mask a movement for mass murder and total dictatorship as a kind of harmless lifestyle that was persecuted by fanatics whose crimes [such as denying work to intellectual thugs like the wealthy Dalton Trumbo] were far worse than anything ever contemplated by the harmless communist intellectuals, who merely wanted to liquidate much of the population and plunge the rest into a long night of tyranny and poverty.)

The Empire Is In Sidious

I just got back from seeing the new Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Siths. Fairly good, although the fact that you could see the tendrils of the story lines inching toward their necessary connections with all the later movies made it at times a bit tedious. I also found the attempts of many commentators (just do a google search; here’s a sample) to read contemporary politics into the film as a bit of a stretch, although the good old defense of republicanism was enjoyable. (There did seem to be bits of Bush-bashing in the film, but they were generally the least plausible political elements. The most obvious case was when Obi Wan tells Darth Vader that “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.” You see, dealing in absolutes, such as good and evil is….evil. That did seem aimed at Bush’s invocation of the idea of evil to describe fanatical suicide bombers, but it also makes no sense and certainly cuts against the image of the Jedi as defenders of the good and the true. And if it was a point of contemporary politics to insinuate that the current administration somehow stage managed the 9-11 attacks, well, that would be on the crazy side; it seems more plausible that at least some of the the machinations of empire really were only plot elements, and not comments on recent events.)

When Justice and Law Diverge

Following the seminar on popular justice in which I had the pleasure to take part, I’m strongly recommending to the participants (and to anyone else interested in issues of justice and law) a very fine movie that got much too little attention: The Jack Bull. It’s combines good acting, good directing, excellent camera work (and beautiful setting), and a brilliant story, which is basically a very faithful transposition of Heinrich von Kleist’s novelette “Michael Kohlhaas” (available in English in this edition of his stories and in German in this edition) to the Wyoming territory just before statehood. In place of the Elector of Brandenburg, for example, you get John Goodman as a frontier judge.

The film is a great conversation starter, as I saw when Randy Barnett brought it to a seminar in Germany of the Institute for Economic Studies — Europe at which we both taught. One session was devoted to watching and then discussing the film and the students, who came from Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, France, Italy, Britain, and a number of other countries, used the occasion well to work out their ideas about the relationship of law to justice.

(As an aside, Kleist’s other short stories are brilliant, as well, and well worth reading.)

Der Untergang (Downfall) -- the Last Days of Hitler and His Regime

I just got back from seeing a really brilliant new film, Der Untergang (Downfall; German with English subtitles). It was an outstanding portrayal of the last days of the Third Reich; in addition to Bruno Ganz’s excellent portrayal of Hitler, a noteworthy element of the film was the portrayal of the idealistic pursuit of evil, especially in the form of the behavior of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. As Goebbels is reported to have remarked elsewhere (and I cannot at the moment verify the remark; so unless you can find a really reliable source, please don’t repeat this….but it does certainly ring true from Goebbels’s other statements), “If the day should ever come when we [the Nazis] must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.” What evil. And how very well portrayed in this film. Watch it….but don’t plan on doing anything light or fun afterward.

Bad Education

I just saw the new film “Bad Education” from Pedro AlmodÃ?³var. It’s a delightfully AlmodÃ?³varish version of film noir. It features plenty to shock some people, which AlmodÃ?³var evidently enjoys doing, but it’s not just about shocking conservative audiences; it’s got mystery, intrigue, love, sex, violence, betrayal, and more.

Alexander

Well, I just got back from seeing Alexander. I guess that reading so many negative reviews lowered my expectations enough that…I thought it wasn’t so bad. There were serious groaners, to be true, and the political messages were a bit preachy, but I thought it was a whole lot better than the reviews. I also wonder whether I might have seen a different movie from the one that the usually quite spot on Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post saw. For example, Hunter wrote,

Alexander’s great love was said to be Hephaistion, who is played in the film by Jared Leto, but unless you know Jared Leto by face, even late in the movie you’ll have no idea which one he was. I thought he was this other guy, equally handsome, equally vapid, equally unmemorable, whom Alexander prongs with a spear in a drunken rage late in the movie. But that was some other guy.

It was obvious from the getgo who Hephaistion was. How could that have been in doubt? (There were a couple of moony scenes between Alexander and his lifelong friend, but Stone insisted that they be all moony and the only sex scenes are heterosexual and pretty rough.)

All in all, Alexander is worth seeing, despite three hours and the rather boring narration by Anthony Hopkins as a rather tediously garrulous Ptolemy of Egypt. (And….what Macedonian warriors wore eye liner? Where did Oliver Stone get that idea?)

Alexander -- the Life, the Book, the Film

Next week a friend will be coming back from Baghdad and we’ve agreed to go and see Oliver Stone’s new movie about Alexander. I’m looking forward to the experience, despite the awful reviews the film’s been getting.

The best bad review is undoubtedly Stephen Hunter’s quite insightful critique in the Washington Post. [Requires simple registration.] Hunter’s not merely a fine film critic; he’s a very sharp student of history and politics. Here’s a sample from the review:

“The movie lacks any convincing ideas about Alexander. Stone advances but one, the notion that Alexander was an early multiculturalist, who wanted to “unify” the globe. He seems not to recognize this as a standard agitprop of the totalitarian mind-set, always repulsive, but more so here in a movie that glosses over the boy-king’s frequent massacres. Conquerors always want “unity,” Stalin a unity of Russia without kulaks, Hitler a Europe without Jews, Mao a China without deviationists and wreckers. All of these boys loved to wax lyrical about unity while they were breaking human eggs in the millions, and so it was with Alexander, who wanted world unity without Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Turks and Indians.”

In the meantime, I’m reading Guy MacLean Rogers’ new book Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness, which is enjoyable and interesting so far. I’m not that far into the book, so I can’t say much about it yet. I bought it on an impulse at the San Francisco Airport, where I noticed that several books have come out timed to the Oliver Stone film, including another interesting looking one that was next to Rogers’, Paul Cartledge’s Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, which I’ve ordered to read later.

Cool Retro Movie

If you want to see a retro movie with a very cool feel, try SkyCaptain and the World of Tomorrow. It wasn’t a “great” movie, but it was a fun movie.

P.S. I was discussing the film with my brother, who coincidentally saw it the same night in Colorado, and we discovered what seems to be an anomaly in the movie’s portrayal of an alternative past future. There is a reference to the “First World War” and overall it seems like the society portrayed in the film did not experience the horrors of National Socialism or a Second World War. There is also a reference to an event that (if my memory serves me right) was in 1918, “30 years ago.” That puts the movie at 1948. How can you have a “First World War” without at least a “Second World War”? Well, whatever. It was a fun film that paid homage to the old Buster Crabb roles as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Team America

Well, I saw Team America: World Police. It’s very good. It effectively skewers the gung-ho advocates of projecting American power, just as it deflates the pompous arrogance of Alec Bladwin, Tim Robbins, and the other actors who presume to know what’s best for the rest of us. (And the caricature of Michael Moore was quite good — almost as good as the film of a marionette drunkenly vomiting.) (See my pre-viewing post below for the indignation of Hollywood at being subjected to ridicule; also see Sean Penn’s tantrum.)

New "Jib Jab" Film: "Good to be in D.C!"

The folks at “Jib Jab” have a new short animated clip on American politics, “Good to be in D.C!” (to the tune of “Dixie”). Very clever.

Troy

I finally saw the movie Troy. It was a mixed experience. I had steeled myself not to consider this a movie version of the Iliad and to think of it as named, say, “Cleveland.” Looked at that way, the movie was….ok. It had a few good moments (the meeting between “Priam” and “Achilles,” some of the battle scenes), but overall it was still not equal to the story line imposed on it by, well, the Iliad. It stripped out all of the things that motivated men to fight: the thirst for immortality through glory, respect for the Gods, eros. Instead, only a few old men believe in the Gods and the rest thirst for geopolitical power or (like “Hector” and “Achilles”) are cynical about such matters and believe that power is what motivates everyone else. (Some of the odd little twists were annoying, such as the scene at the “Port of Sparta,” since Sparta was landlocked, and the turning of Briseis into Hector’s cousin and of Patroklus into Achilles’ cousin.)

My friend Conyers Davis, with whom I saw the film, forwarded to me the link to the best review of the film I’ve seen, by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books. Mendelsohn is obviously well educated in the classics and knows a lot about film. His review is spot on.

P.S. I learned recently from my colleague David Boaz the definition of an interesting word: millihelen. It’s a unit of measurement, to wit, the face necessary to launch one ship.

Goodbye, Lenin!

I was both amused and touched by a delightful film out of Germany, Goodbye, Lenin! (English web site; German web site) that I saw the other night. It’s about the efforts of a family to shelter their mother, who has been in a coma, from learning that the German Democratic Republic (DDR) under which she had lived her life had disappeared.

The film doesn’t sugar coat at all the awfulness of living under a police state or the shabbiness and trashiness of socialism. At the same time, it does show how many people have had a hard time adjusting to the change. (Last November I was in Berlin and took a cab from Potsdam to the Tegelhof Airport. The driver was an older “Ossi” and we talked about the change. He was enthusiastic about the effects on his children, who have been to other countries and who have a much higher standard of living, more opportunities, and — above all — freedom. But he also explained how changing from being an employee of a state taxi firm to the owner of his own taxi was difficult; instead of showing up and being handed keys to a taxi and instructions, he has to be responsible for insurance, maintenance on the car, etc., etc. He said that it was quite hard for people of his generation to make the change, but nonetheless he was very glad that it happened.)

I was reminded by the film of my own visits to the DDR, which was a remarkably creepy and awful place. The omnipresence of the state agents, both uniformed and in plain clothes, the utter colorlessness, and the sense of being watched and hemmed in at all times were extremely oppressive. I remember walking through Checkpoint Charlie as the last visitor to leave East Berlin one evening and feeling such a sense of relief when a boy on a bicycle almost hit me (the streets of the East were, in contrast, almost completely deserted, aside from the huge numbers of police agents) and when I was welcomed back into the world of colorful advertising (in contrast to the weirdly blank streets of the east, with their ghostly flickering neon signs for state-owned Bulgarian firms and the faded painted signs for virtually empty state shops). I remember on one occasion walking near the wall across from an observation platform where visitors to the west could gaze across the no-man’s land of landmines, control towers, vicious dogs, and automatic machine guns; I perched myself on a concrete platform of some sort (my memory is a bit faded; maybe it was the pediment to a statue) and waved to them. I quickly noticed that there was a leisurely but general movement of police officers to my location, so I hopped down and walked back to the east. And, despite having smuggled in large quantities of DDR marks, there was virtually nothing to buy. I ended up on one trip (after buying volumes of Karl Marx’s works for almost nothing) trying to spend my money in the most expensive restaurant I could find, (Unter den Linden, as I recall). The place was filled with Vietnamese and Bulgarian police state types (there was probably some kind of “Torturers and Interrogators” convention in town). I ordered the food, which ended up being tasteless and unappetizing, and when eating a chocolate mousse for dessert I bit into an actual rock. I mentioned it to the waittress, who simply remarked, “Hmmmmm….a rock. Interesting.” and took the plates away.

Goodbye, Lenin! is remarkably comical in its depictions of the efforts of the family to recreate the shabby conditions of German socialism in the mother’s bedroom and to shield her from knowledge of the collapse of all of the institutions of her life. Nonetheless, it was a profoundly sad movie and not simply a comedy. (The sadness is, fortunately, not so much for the collapse of the Evil Empire, but for the loss of youth and of years past; there is some regret at the passing, not of the actual DDR, but of the DDR as the mother saw it, which was not the same thing.)

A Climatologist Reviews a Movie?

Sounds odd, but not when the movie is about global warming. University of Virginia professor of climatology and Cato Institute senior fellow in environmental studies Patrick J. Michaels reviewed The Day After Tomorrow for the Washington Post.

Troy

I suppose that I’ll try to see the new movie based loosely on some old poem by Homer, who starred in The Simpsons. A colleague who saw the film panned it and told me that the whole business of the love between Achilles and Patroclus was taken out, which made it pretty ridiculous when Achilles screams at Hector, “You killed my…..cousin!” Uh, right. That would explain all the rage and the dragging of Hector around the city. I’ll do penance for seeing the movie by re-reading the book.