Beyond Outrage

It goes without saying that the Sony hack — in all likelihood North Korea’s response to the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy The Interview — and the Charlie Hebdo massacre vary in the severity of their crimes. But in both cases, strong and articulate progressive voices have countered all the calls to defend “freedom of expression” and #JeSuisCharlie’s by criticizing the content of the debateably satirical works themselves. Adrian Hong wrote a popular piece for The Atlantic titled, “North Korea: Not Funny,” while many on the left, in publications like Vox, Slate and Jacobin, criticized the content and motives of Charlie Hebdo. For The Hooded Utilitarian, Jacob Canfield said Charlie Hebdo’s “cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.” These are well-meaning, well-informed lines of argument that raise issues we should be considering in 2015.

While in theory I should consign these critiques, I do not, because theory has no claim on comedy. While watching The Interview, I laughed a good many times, even as the critic in me groaned this has got to be Franco’s worst performance to date. While decoding the seemingly offensive cartoons via the blog Understanding Charlie Hebdo, which provides translation and context, I did not laugh, necessarily, but I understood how the caricaturists effectively put air quotes around their most egregious creations, often lampooning the perspective of their country’s serious and seriously racist National Front party. The politically engaged French citizen, knowing the context, could find these cartoons humorous, because their inherent shock value can catalyze in said person a needed second or two of reflection during his or her average, busy day.

Because if there is one thing art does that political criticisms of it too often forget, it provokes a response from the viewer — an emotional, physical, automatic response that imbues that art, no matter its quality, with an individual significance. So I may laugh at The Interview, a stupid film, and not be considered callous to the suffering of North Koreans or — worse of all! — a bad critic. It is a superficial, irresponsible movie with many many flaws, but it succeeded, for me, as passable entertainment. To judge The Interview as a failure because it does not convince its viewers to “do something to help change this odious regime and bring about human rights for North Koreans,” as Hong does, is to freight it with an Oscar-baiting importance that would induce fatal cases of eye-rolling in its target audience.

But I am grateful Hong wrote that Atlantic piece. While I may disagree with the parameters he chose for critiquing a particular film, he brings a far more significant issue — the plight of innocent North Koreans — to the attention of many. For every thousand Facebook shares fueled by schadenfreude, there has got to be one person who read Hong’s story and felt a pang of profound moral outrage, worth exploring more and taking action against. That positive outcome is something only the popularity, and stupidity, of The Interview made possible. Whether Franco and Rogen respected or trashed their film’s sensitive subject matter, the media will be there, assuming its post-Twitter role as a spontaneous and widely visible corrective to the sins of popular culture.

For better or worse, this chatter only crescendos when the object of passion is a challenging, thrilling piece of bona fide art. It is for this reason that no one is talking about The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game, with their spectacularly unearned denouements,and why we cannot stop arguing over Selma and American Sniper. Pitted by opportunists as ideological enemies, the latter two films both complicate their heroic narratives through changes of perspective (in Selma, Coretta Scott King rightly accuses her husband of something he does not fess up to) and uncomfortable pauses (as a V.A. psychiatrist questions the historically efficient sniper Chris Kyle, the camera lingers on the soldier’s face as he conclusively denies any feeling of regret). Neither film is totally devoid of sentimentality, but both provoke thought through emotion, ensuring that any moral misgivings will fester and leech.

I know there are some fine, smart people out there who will disagree with my praise for Selma and American Sniper especially, and that they could pursue more productive routes of attack than “Selma gets LBJ wrong!” or “That Chris Kyle was a liar.” That is how these things go, as they should. But it does us little good to go on about what A gets wrong about X or Y, because a great film’s politics should be difficult to reduce to binaries and viral polemic. Find a recruitment poster if you’re looking for a call to action, and go outside if you’re looking for facts. Emotion remains the only barometer of truth, so long as that emotion stubbornly resists translation.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun.

Loving and Hating, But on Whose Terms?

In all worthwhile criticism, two inclinations are always at war, and they are humility and vigilance. Too much humility precludes the ability to say anything at all, while excessive vigilance almost always reads as petty after the blood has cooled. Being discerning but fair and above all curious demands a balance, which seems feasible until you’re faced with the question: Do you judge a movie on your terms or its own?

In other words: Do you evaluate a movie for what it does do or for what, in your lowly opinion, it should do? Do you place it against the exemplary works of its own genre and judge accordingly, or do you have the right to rebuke a whole genre, a whole mode of filmmaking, for violating principles you yourself set? These are questions with answers that vary on a case-by-case basis, but like Ready to Die versus Illmatic and sexual preference, you tend to lean one way or the other.

I’ve gotten to the point where I embrace my power to set the terms of engagement. By that, I mean I don’t watch a movie now and give it a thumbs-up or down depending on how successfully and seamlessly it “does its job.” Instead, I see my job, when writing a review, to track down missed opportunities in a movie, moments of shallowness or cheapness that are often reinforced by the codes of genre and narrative. And when a movie connects, the priority is not to judge it against its generic peers but rather for the revelations it touches upon by breaking expectations, by doing what it should not do.

Let me clarify with an example. Over the weekend, I saw that other Brad Pitt World War II movie, Fury. It’s brutal, draining and unequivocally “well-done,” my friend and fellow Sun columnist, Julia Moser ’15, and I agreed. About halfway through, the battlefield carnage halts for a 20-minute interlude in an apartment that two soldiers, played by Pitt and Logan Lerman, have entered with the intent of raping the female occupants. Things complicate from there, and through facial expressions, pregnant pauses and the use of space, the scene vivisects a much less gory, but more entrenched form of male violence.

The movie surprised me there, for its commitment to exploring sexual violence at the expense of on-screen action or spectacle. That’s something not many war movies dare to do, and I give Fury credit for trying. It’s too bad the movie ends with one of those airheaded stand-offs that glorifies the valor in mowing down as many Nazis as possible. It shoots itself in the foot by obeying and so ferociously embracing the “last stand” scene intrinsic to so many war movies instead of subverting that trope in some way. The ending was “well-done,” no doubt, but far and away the stupidest part of the film.

So I reject Fury’s reality and substitute it with my own — or something like that. I don’t care for the “the acting was good, that plot twist was dumb” kind of pseudo-criticism that stays within a movie’s world and makes no effort to bridge it with our own. That line of thinking, or lack thereof, assumes that no film exploits, cash-grabs or, worst of all, panders. Lord, to think of all the pandering we’ll soon slog through with Oscar season now upon us. Time to flex that vigilance I mentioned before, for no matter how polished every Blackfish or Philomena may be, we all have the right, and distinct pleasure, to call bullshit.

This disparity between what is “well-done” and what is actually interesting to each of us, on a personal level, has been reinforced by the illusion that there is any difference between “favorite” and “best.” We lie when we say, “That is the best movie of the year,” yet we feel no personal connection to it, no urge to think it over or watch it again. “Best” most often esteems the “white elephants” in the room, Manny Farber’s term for those lumbering films with loud artistic or thematic aspirations, which are often unpleasing, unimaginative and overlong. The idea that we can objectively judge works of art, as so many gamers insist when a critic entertains a feminist reading instead of just sticking to the “gameplay,” perpetuates a borderline fascistic, anti-intellectual and above all boring culture.

Let your taste carry you, through all the cultures and all the genres. It’s really the only way to open yourself up to surprise after watching hundreds and thousands of movies. I’m guilty of not rushing to see Frances Ha last year because I anticipated just another ditzy indie comedy. When I finally saw it at Cornell Cinema, I couldn’t shake it, and my instincts urged me to keep that opinion to myself because this was, after all, just another ditzy indie comedy and not worth serious attention.

But no, Frances Ha is a masterpiece, and I have no qualms saying it because it is a judgment forged in my soul. It is in turns the funniest and saddest movie of last year, for its depiction of melancholia is all but unspoken, maybe even unrecognized by Greta Gerwig’s protagonist. I ranked it alongside heavyweights like The Act of Killing and 12 Years a Slave in my “Best of 2013” list, and if I could do it again I’d rank it higher. Frances Ha obliterates any expectations of its genre through its command of cinema and its intimate understanding of what it is to be human, and for doing all that in a way that speaks to me, it’s simply my job to meet it with awe.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Last Days in Vietnam Review

Last Days in Vietnam

Directed by Rory Kennedy

Released in 2014

There is no such thing as a good war, but good people fight in the worst of them. The Vietnam War has never been mistaken for one of the good ones — not then and not now. Yet it is easy to conflate the war’s negative legacies, which include My Lai, Agent Orange and, of course, our country’s defeat, with the worth, or lack thereof, of those who served. Last Days in Vietnam, a clear-eyed and unusually gripping documentary opening at Cinemapolis today, makes the case for the American forces who risked tribunals, not to mention their own lives, in order to evacuate as many South Vietnamese civilians as possible on those last two chaotic days of April 1975.

The film, directed and produced by Rory Kennedy, is a rather straightforward talking heads affair, where you don’t even have time to fumble with a stopwatch before, blah, there’s Kissinger grumbling before his millionth camera. Good thing the film gets him out of the way early on so it can spend the rest of the time with the boots who were on the ground of Saigon when it fell. These men, like Army Colonel Stuart Herrington and Republic of Vietnam Navy Captain Kiem Do, recount the events of the evacuation and little more, which is all it takes for an enlightening narrative of morality during those most liminal hours between war and peace.

Over 16mm footage of the frantic city and maps animating the North Vietnamese Army’s push through Da Nang and toward Saigon, voices of the veterans interviewed frame their “terrible moral dilemma” in stark terms. Would Nixon boost U.S. air power to save them? Could Americans save anyone other than their own? Could they even do that? A target of derision for the first third of this 98-minute film is Graham Martin, the last U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, who was seen as “skittish” and aloof of the imminent defeat, and very real physical peril, his people would soon suffer.

As a sign of Last Days in Vietnam’s disinterest in demonizing, with-us-or-against-us rhetoric, especially against those dead and not present to defend themselves, Ambassador Martin develops a dimension or two. We learn that he lost his only son in the war, which is cause for one acquaintance to observe, “One becomes pretty invested in the country.”

Right before Operation Frequent Wind — the airlift of 7700 Americans and South Vietnamese from the U.S. embassy and other points in Saigon, and the specific focus of this film — commenced, Martin pointed to an old tamarind tree in the embassy’s parking lot and said it was “as steadfast as America’s commitment to Vietnam.” The irony that the tree had to be razed to allow helicopters to land and Americans to flee was not lost on him, since he at first stubbornly refused. But obviously he changed his mind, and not just about one tree: One colleague says, “The evacuation of Vietnamese [as opposed to only Americans] happened because Graham Martin wanted it to happen.”

Ambassador Martin bucked orders from the White House in order to see that those who aided America would escape persecution, and he did so with a valiant and orderly cache of soldiers, pilots and sailors committed to this humanitarian cause. The film tells the oral history with more punch than words here might, but it is imperative to mention the wound Colonel Herrington reopens when arriving at the part of the story where they left behind 420 civilians at the embassy without so much as a goodbye. Like Oskar’s final words in Schindler’s List, Herrington’s remorse for “so serious and deep a betrayal” cuts deep and contrasts the film’s narrative of success against all the loss and failure surrounding.

Last Days in Vietnam demands little from the viewer aside from a willingness to learn. If that sounds in the least bit like eating your vegetables, consider the entertainment value of Argo, apply almost all of that to this film, and then remember that this one is a documentary produced for PBS. So, basically: It’s better than you might think. It unfolds a complicated story in chronological order without much effort figuring out what it all ‘meant,’ and so makes it simple. But that simplicity suits these events well, since unthinking heroism is the only genuine kind.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Ida Review

I wrote my first piece for The Ithaca Voice, a new online venture founded by my good friend and former Sun colleague Jeff Stein. I am not going to copy-paste what I write there to my blog, for reasons of traffic and professionalism. But I'll provide a link of course - RIGHT HERE - and I hope you all will read it. This is a great film - 4.5/5 star material.

Talkin' World War III Blues in Kurosawa's Ran

This is an essay I wrote for a class I took on Shakespeare adaptations. I talk about Akira Kurosawa's unlikely modernization of King Lear via Ran.

Like any non-English adaptation of Shakespeare, Ran has both the privilege and the heavy burden to use the original text as a chassis, not a blueprint. Instead of translating King Lear’s verse to Japanese or condensing the plot to CliffNotes, Akira Kurosawa’s film reimagines the story in a country that has taken part in and suffered the most horrific practices of warfare. While the medieval setting may lend credence to Ben Jonson’s oft-mentioned praise of Shakespeare, that “He was not of an age, but for all time,” Ran derives much of its import from its context. Looking back on the Second World War that Kurosawa lived through, the film condemns the violence of the modern world through advanced, often overwhelming filmmaking techniques.

If King Lear can be boiled down to the idea that the will to power usurps family commitment and basic decency, then Ran goes so far to say that the will to power, and the entrenched systems of power built atop it, breed pure chaos. This theme comes to the fore when Tango, the Kent equivalent, offers provisions to Hidetora, the Lear figure, and his men. In a medium shot, Tango bows before him, hoping to make peace, and raises his eyes after enduring an awkward silence. Instead of cutting to a medium shot of Hidetora, via a typical shot reverse shot sequence, the film frustrates us with an extreme long shot. On the far right of the widescreen frame, Tango continues to raise his head while on the far left, Hidetora stares down the hill, his body frozen like a statue. He does not seem to be processing Tango’s charity. Two umbrellas in the foreground roughly split the frame into thirds, and their presence brings to mind the heat punishing Hidetora’s bald scalp at the moment. The delirious, desiccated Hidetora holds the most tenuous nominal authority over this gathering, and this extreme long shot shrinks him to actual scale. 

Yet Hidetora still has power, for a little longer, on this otherwise beautiful, cloudless day. Those subordinates kneeling on the brittle white gravel look to him, worried by his silence, while miles of forest stretch across the background. Kurosawa’s meticulous framing does not hide the natural splendor of this setting, a huge contrast from Peter Brook’s austere adaptation, but it also stresses the heat and void and lifelessness of this anti-oasis where the humans reside. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informs this composition and the greater film, where death can be felt before the armies, with their arquebuses and cannons, enter the scene. In the famous sequence of painterly carnage soon after this scene, these forces destroy not only Hidetora’s men but each other, along with their codes of honor. When Hidetora, here on the gravel, waves his hand and rashly orders the destruction of a peasant village, and the blurs of soldier bodies whiz by in front of his face, he perpetuates this chaos, even if, and especially because, he is too oblivious and senile to grasp the consequences of such action. He bombs his own people when one gifts him food, practically razing all circles of life to the ground. This is a film sadly indebted to World War II and its paranoid Cold War legacy. 

The weight of war only hits Hidetora after Tango breaks the news that his son, Taro, decreed that anyone who assists him will be executed. Hidetora collapses onto his seat, and even in a medium shot, we can feel the unbearable anguish that fills his face. He sits there for over thirty seconds processing this information, that his child has sentenced him to death, and instead of asking us to “make sense” of this revelation and Hidetora’s reaction to it, the film floods its soundtrack with the shrill calls of birds. The film calls this what it is: chaos. The sonic dissonance speaks to the cognitive dissonance in Hidetora’s mind, at this moment, and the sheer volume of these clashing noises attempts to give voice to entropy, the most ineffable of phenomena. Kurosawa’s sound design graduates from monaural, 1950s art house minimums to overpowering, crippling stereo. It is fitting that the film uses this modern technology to assault its audience’s ears, to commit violence against them. In Ran, everything that can be used as a weapon is, from arrows to words to gestures to recording microphones. 

This scene leads into the film’s centerpiece, the Third Castle massacre, where sound cannot do justice to the bloodshed on-screen and, so, the film dives into abstraction. Toru Takemitsu’s score pairs corpses and soon-to-be corpses with elegiac accompaniment. The spattering blood resembles that of a Goya painting, especially under the hazy, somber quality of the lighting. No one enjoys a dignified death: soldiers splay their arms, fall on the arrows piercing their backs and get trampled by horses. The film does not center its violence in one location but emphasizes its omnipresence. For instance, a centered shot of a tower burning, with a corpse hanging over the bannister, cuts to a long shot of enemy forces galloping past the tower, which is now only visible in the background. From here, an extreme long shot of the fortress’ destruction shows a glimpse of the burning tower, obscured by haze, in the far distance. Finally, the film cuts to a shot of another tower, where Hidetora’s few remaining soldiers are fired upon, with their backs to the camera, by a line of enemy infantryman in the background. The scale of this massacre is massive. Hidetora’s men and women, implicit in their leader’s savage colonialist past, cannot hide from the agents of mass destruction now raining down on them.

Neither this scene nor the other is analogous to any scene from the King Lear text. Ran stakes out its own artistic territory by building off and tweaking the themes of that play. It is a film fearful of a world obsessed with destruction, where the will to power carries with it a drive toward death. It is a film that judges Lear’s famous plea, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning,” with the derisive laughs it deserves (III.2.57-8).

The Unknown Known Review

The Unknown Known

Directed by Errol Morris

Released in 2014

Donald Rumsfeld is a genius who found his calling in politics, which explains why he is utterly empty inside. Such is the infuriating thesis at the heart of Errol Morris’ new documentary on the former Secretary of Defense, and Rummy does not break once while staring down the barrel of Morris’ Interrotron. A bunch of times, he does this terrible grin, resembling a skeleton or, as Morris sees it, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. In a four-part, must-read New York Times series on his research on and time with Rumsfeld, Morris concludes, “I was left with the frightening suspicion that the grin might not be hiding anything. It was a grin of supreme self-satisfaction and behind the grin might be nothing at all.”

The Unknown Known will madden those who think Morris lobbed softballs at his subject. As far as Rumsfeld goes, what you see is what you get. We get a sense of his intelligence and to what shameful ends he put it to use, but not much more. In place of the catharsis Vietnam SecDef Robert McNamara croaked through in Morris’ similar, Oscar-winning The Fog of War, we get an essay on the weaponization of words and the tenuous justifications for modern warfare. To appreciate this film is to unpack it. For that reason it is a far more intellectually demanding film than The Fog of War, and thus a superior one in my view.

Save for an early recounting of the events of 9/11, Morris structures his film around a chronological run-through of Rumsfeld’s career. Set against a black backdrop, Rumsfeld addresses Morris’ camera in his self-described “cool, measured” way. While Morris smothers a photo montage of Rumsfeld and his wife in sappy music, Rummy retells his marriage proposal in laughably clinical terms: “I was correct. It was a good decision. It just wasn’t part of my plan.” He lights up when talking about himself, such as his behind-the-scenes machinations in the Nixon and Ford administrations. In the former’s case, he ducked out soon enough to avoid Watergate while in the latter’s, Rumsfeld criticizes his old boss’ weaknesses in leadership. In tandem with a fellow named Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld resigned in protest as Chief of Staff, spurring the ensuing “Halloween Massacre” where Ford reshuffled his Cabinet. Rumsfeld got a promotion, to Secretary of Defense, out of it all.

The way Morris cuts together the Halloween Massacre sequence clues us into his complex take on his subject. Superimposed over footage of Rumsfeld’s swearing-in ceremony, newspaper headlines whiz by, all praising, through so-called objective language, Rumsfeld’s ruthlessness in getting what he coveted. They all ostensibly fuel his ego as he strides down the red carpet, with honor guard in tow. The media’s love affair with political drama can be held accountable for incubating a man like Rumsfeld, whose indisputable intelligence benefitted only himself, when all is said and done. The jokes he cracks with the press on the lead-up to the Iraq War humanize him, to an extent, but they disturb more than anything else for we notice a collusion between interviewee and interviewer, as frustration with Rumsfeld’s nonsense evasions cools into inappropriate comradery. If this reading needs further evidence, consider that the other time Morris uses this flying newsprint-over-archive footage approach is with Osama bin Laden, when he descends a mountain with his walking stick and headlines express confusion over his whereabouts. They are both boogeymen made stronger by the noise they leave in their wake.

Throughout the film, Rumsfeld reads aloud a handful of the thousands upon thousands of memos, called “snowflakes,” he wrote during his tenure at the Pentagon. “Subject: Terminology,” he begins, before boring into three terms — “unconventional warfare,” “guerrilla,” “insurgency” — with which he sought to define the Iraq War, precisely because they are vague euphemisms. He boasts how he got rid of unwanted words from the conversation, oblivious to how that approaches Orwell’s Newspeak. He clings to his infamous “unknown unknowns” — things “we don’t know we don’t know,” “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” et al — as grounds for invading Iraq, sounding like Fred Leuchter, the Holocaust denier Morris interviewed for Mr. Death. He said, after a trip to Auschwitz, “It’s not what I found that convinced me. It was what I didn’t find.”

Rumsfeld gets it right, once. He reminds Morris how, back in 2008, Obama opposed the Patriot Act, indefinite detention and Guantanamo, yet they remain with us to this day. “That validates the decisions made by George W. Bush,” he says in what may be his most humble statement. The bigger and more connected our world becomes, the more grounds there are for suspicion, for actionable “intelligence.” Rumsfeld may be loathed more than most, but his breed will continue to occupy the highest offices. Morris cannot shake the moral void behind those eyes, like when he exclaims, “Wouldn’t it have been better not to go there [Iraq] at all?” and all he gets back is a smile and “I guess time will tell.” But this film comes short of excoriating Rummy for 106 minutes and that is a wise choice, since such polemics are easy and self-evident at this point. What Morris does do is open up this focused but failed probe of a man to capture the rest of America in silent consent. Rumsfeld acts on our country’s worst tendencies, with more intellectual arrogance than anyone else, but he does so because such violence is kind of part of our deal.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

The Wind Rises Review

The Wind Rises
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Released in 2013

Any aspiring screenwriter has read Pixar’s “22 Rules of Storytelling” by now. Rule Six reads, “What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?” Pixar enjoys a sterling reputation because it tells tight, satisfying stories, wherein an unlikely protagonist braves a mountain of intensifying conflict and emerges victorious. Up fits all it’s got into a three-act structure, the Hollywood standard, and somehow makes it unforced, even sparse.

Only Hayao Miyazaki and the powerhouse he co-founded, Studio Ghibli, rival Pixar in the international market for acclaimed animated films. Yet Miyazaki tells stories that do not conform to Hollywood structure. It explains why the meandering Spirited Away proved so jarring to my nine-year-old brain, in addition to all its weird ghosts and pigs. His films use ma, the Japanese word for “space” or “pause,” to contemplative, disarming effect. The best of them are flat-out art films. So it is awkward to critique The Wind Rises,Miyazaki’s latest and potentially last film, for it conforms to a straightforward biopic formula that plays against Miyazaki’s strengths. Of course, everything on screen still brims with beauty and rewards symbolic reading.

For the first time, Miyazaki dramatizes the life of a historical figure, with the same name, look and all. We meet the young Jiro Horikoshi in his dream, in which he flies a plane of his own invention high in the sky until a monolithic flying fortress emerges from the clouds and sends Jiro and shrapnel plummeting to the ground. The Icarus myth recurs throughout the film, for while Jiro’s poor eyesight precludes a piloting career, he instead dedicates his life to designing the world’s sleekest and fastest airplanes, just as World War II beckons. That most prototypes snap and set aflame on test runs only motivates Jiro to try harder, yet he must balance his perfectionism within a military sphere willing to sacrifice speed and safety if it means bolting a machine gun onto a wing, with compassionate, grounding human relationships.

Unfortunately, this conflict — between career and life, war and grace, male superiors and female loved ones — fails to reach us with Jiro at its center. From the start, Jiro is perfect: He saves a woman and child from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, fastens a splint on the former’s broken leg like a Boy Scout, carries them to their families and ducks out before they can ask his name. Voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the only occasionally awkward English dub, Jiro could not be sweeter, what with his command of etiquette and mastery of kenjōgo (“polite language”). His romance with Naoko (Emily Blunt), a sickly girl with a mature outlook on life, offers only overwhelming sentiment, effective as it may be. Their love colors the second half of the film, and Miyazaki strains to connect them with his larger questions. Naoko can only whisper into Jiro’s ear how great he is so many times until they both flatten into cardboard. To quote Reverse Shot critic Eric Hynes on Dallas Buyers Club, “Never trust a film that applauds its own protagonist.”

The undisciplined narrative disappoints, since Miyazaki works best in looser, more radical genres than the standard biopic. But count on Miyazaki to trot out the weird and fantastic, in spite of all else. Werner Herzog lends his Bavarian tenor to a watercress-loving German whose quivering pupils resemble black, cartoon suns. Out of his mouth slither omens of impending war or wishes of health and happiness, and nothing in between. He haunts a resort in midland Japan more like an apparition than a human, as does the Felliniesque inventor Giovanni Caproni (Stanley Tucci), who Jiro encounters multiple times in high-flying dreamscapes. In both Jiro’s dreams and reality, struggling aircrafts emit moaning, guttural sounds. Miyazaki refrains from flooding the soundtrack with ambient particulars (think of all you hear during one establishing crane shot from, say, Pirates of the Caribbean), so this aural motif stands out as it humanizes machines that, to Jiro, serve a higher purpose than as weapons to kill.

Miyazaki has sustained attacks from his homeland that The Wind Rises communicates an “anti-Japanese” message in its depiction of the military as droning thugs and the war effort as misguided, at best, and sinful, at worst. I admire the film’s stance, even though it could have gone further by maybe mentioning the anti-Korean violence following the Kanto earthquake. But now and then the film looks out from its bubble. When Jiro and his best friend Honjo (John Krasinski) visit Berlin, they catch a glimpse of Gestapo agents chasing renegade Jews through streets bathed in German Expressionist shadows. The Nazis stop to shove their flashlights in Jiro and Honjo’s faces, gritting their teeth to round them up too. Jiro saves them both, of course, but the uneasy alliance amongst Axis nations casts a more permeating spall over the film than any material gains Japanese engineers enjoy in their collaboration with the Nazis. That is a good thing.

Obviously, there is a whole lot I like about The Wind Rises. Miyazaki mulls over the outrageous paradox that only in times of war do governments support artists, provided they sacrifice all humane values they hold dear. Yet as pretty as every frame is, the film proves far more stimulating after you watch it, as you try and fish out significance from Miyazaki’s sincere intentions. Jiro is simply too good and thus boring a protagonist for a film so concerned about mortality, compromise and geopolitical tension. He stands aloft the breakers of global tumult, undampened by its waves of red as he floats away on a raft of saccharine fantasy, one that he sees as the world entire.

Final Verdict:

3 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

The Last of the Unjust Review

The Last of the Unjust

Directed by Claude Lanzmann

Released in 2013

In 1944, the Third Reich released Theresienstadt, a propaganda film billed as “A Documentary from the Jewish Settlement Area.” S.S. Major Hans Günther coerced Kurt Gerron, a successful German-Jewish actor, into directing a beautified look at the Theresienstadt concentration camp and promised him his life in return. The resulting film showed the outside world a hamlet of happy Jews reading, eating toast, running in the sun and playing chess. It is a typical propaganda film edited in a cut-cut-cut fashion, where any given shot lasts no longer than a couple seconds and truth lies outside of the frame. Before a final cut was complete, the Nazis deported Gerron, his wife and the film’s cast to Auschwitz, where they died on Oct. 28. It should be noted that the gas chambers closed the next day.

Claude Lanzmann includes a clip from the film Theresienstadt in The Last of the Unjust, a new documentary that screened at Cornell Cinema last Wednesday. Watching Nazi propaganda today exposes obvious lies, for we all know what the European-Jewish experience at the time was really like. But Lanzmann screens this clip in the opening section of his film to call attention to his own cinematic style. The Last of the Unjust unfolds over three hours and 40 minutes, a span of time ruled by long takes, wide-angle shots and general quietude. Lanzmann encourages — nay, forces — you to consider what you are watching, to annotate an open document rather than accept what is on-screen as just there.

There is no way you will leave The Last of the Unjust and see Benjamin Murmelstein, the film’s subject, as anything less than a complicated and compelling human being. When Lanzmann interviewed him in 1975, Murmelstein lived in Rome in self-imposed exile because some prominent fellow Israelites believed that he should be hanged. From December 1944 to the war’s end, Murmelstein served as Theresienstadt’s “Elder of the Jews,” the man tasked with talking to, and from some Jewish perspectives, “collaborating” with the Nazis in charge, most notably Adolf Eichmann. Somehow, he was the only Elder, anywhere, to survive the war. After seizing the camp in 1945, Allies in Prague grilled him, “How are you still alive?” “How come you’re alive?” he said in reply, likely leaning forward and peering into their eyes as he does to Lanzmann here.

With his beady eyes and Hitchcockian jowls, Murmelstein makes a fascinating presence to fill a screen for over three hours. Lanzmann does not attack a man some have accused of negligence, at best, and genocide, at worst, so the portrait you will take of Murmelstein is mostly sympathetic. An Elder of the Jews “must be condemned, but he cannot be judged,” Murmelstein says near the end, with his hands behind his back and looking most wise. His predecessors, Jakob Edelstein and Paul Eppstein, were executed, the former forced to watch his wife and son die before receiving a bullet himself. You can say Murmelstein, faced with the challenge to “accomplish something without having any power,” was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Among the historical episodes Lanzmann prompts Murmelstein to retell, two words stand out: embellishment and emigration. Embellishment relates to the aforementioned Nazi documentary and how Murmelstein coordinated efforts to make Theresienstadt look clean and pretty for a Red Cross visit. After comparing himself to the “pragmatic and calculating” Sancho Panza, Murmelstein tells Lanzmann, who is on camera for most of the film as well, “If they hid us, they could kill us. If they showed us, they couldn’t.” While this embellishment occurred near the end of the Holocaust and thus did not have much diplomatic impact, this reasoning is inherently paradoxical: If you lie about your conditions to save your own skin, don’t you risk warping a systematic atrocity into a non-issue?

Murmelstein strikes me as the antithesis to Anwar Congo, the self-proclaimed star of Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing. In the mid-’60s, Congo killed over a thousand innocent people in the Indonesian government’s anti-communist purge, and Oppenheimer spoke with him 50 years later to find a lackadaisical and honest man oblivious to his monstrous actions. Whereas Congo enjoys impunity in the corrupt Indonesian government, Murmelstein hides in Rome, in fear of retribution that he stresses again and again he does not deserve. 

Yet even while Murmelstein offers eloquence and reason in his defense, he comes across as unapologetically callous and political. His motto, “Survival through work,” echoes, to a disturbing degree, the sign, “Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free),” that welcomed prisoners to Terezin, Auschwitz and other camps. By working within the Nazi bureaucracy to help his people, Murmelstein had to adopt somewhat of a Nazi mindset, emphasizing numbers and paperwork over empathy. One of his truest conclusions is the following: “I did things that others didn’t do, but I’m not a hero. I’m not mad.”

The Last of the Unjust also digs into the bizarre Murmelstein-Eichmann dynamic, flirts with blacker-than-black humor involving misplaced cyanide and spends a lot of time with Lanzmann, in the present day, as he tours Theresienstadt and reads from the Elder’s writing. But the most powerful moment includes neither him nor Murmelstein in the frame. The camera first stares at a wall of names, illegible at such a distance, and pans 360 degrees across Prague’s Pinkas synagogue, where 80,000 such names cover the walls in tribute to the local Holocaust victims. They bleed across the screen, unable to be read and thus, again, willingly ignored. Then without zooming in, the camera finds a crop of names in close-up and Lanzmann gasps, “Then all of a sudden, they become legible.”

To see the Holocaust, nearly 70 years later, for what it was demands not scope but focus. Hone your eyes in on the individual and you will uncover a bundle of paradoxes that amount to one human life. Most did not make it, but Benjamin Murmelstein did. He tells Lanzmann his life for him to make sense of it, and Lanzmann, in turn, passes the burden onto us.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Zero Dark Thirty Review

Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Released in 2012

9/11 introduced the world and the 21st century to a new kind of evil. Al-Qaeda struck unannounced and nearly unseen, inspiring fear and a gnawing sense of helplessness that no one has been able to fully shake since. The rules of war changed once again, and the U.S. government adapted with wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. If there was one boogeyman behind the madness, it was Osama bin Laden, though it would be an oversimplification, of course, to blame it on any one individual.

The triumph of Zero Dark Thirty is that it takes what could have been jingoistic genre fare — the pursuit and killing of bin Laden — and tangles it in the global turmoil we have lived through over the past 11 years. Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the Oscar-winning pair behind The Hurt Locker, open the film with a traumatic audio montage of 9/11 distress calls and dot the background and, in a couple of startling moments, the foreground of the plot with other al-Qaeda attacks, like the 2005 London and the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombings. The result is an epic of incredible focus, a 157-minute film that earns every second. Zero Dark Thirty belongs to us, now, as a candid document of the anxiety and dislocation of our time. The filmmakers closely follow historical record while creating a piece of art, a riveting cinematic experience and the best American film of the year.

Like Argo and Lincoln, spoiler warnings are unnecessary. The foreknowledge of the main plot puts added pressure on the filmmakers to find other ways to generate suspense. Bigelow, cinematographer Greig Fraser and editors Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg respond with a look and feel more polished and artful than a BBC news feed, though not by much. That is a compliment, as the film never brings attention to itself. Sure, Fraser composes beautiful images — Arab fruit markets never cease to dazzle — and Bigelow packs some profound juxtapositions into single frames — a North American map reflecting a white, Muslim CIA official (Fredric Lehne) practicing Salah in his office must mean something. But there is a spontaneity to the film that keeps you constantly on edge, in constant fear that innocent people will die yet again. And when a few dozen of them inevitably do, the film cuts to actual news coverage of the attack, and the line between reenactment and reality stays blurred.

CIA agent Maya (Jessica Chastain) is, in her own words, “the motherfucker who found” bin Laden. She truly is, but the film — in one of the its boldest choices — shies from granting its protagonist too much sympathy. She often loses it with bureaucrats, from her Station Chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) to the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini, here for comic relief), and not in a sassy, Sandra Bullock kind of way. She is unhinged, bordering on insanity. Multiple characters at multiple times stress the impossibility of her goal or the incompetence of her colleagues; most memorable is a tirade by Mark Strong, reminiscent of Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech from Glengarry Glen Ross but with, you know, actual stakes. While you may admire her resilience, Maya comes off as cold, internal and sexless, the opposite of the giddy Southern housewife she played in The Help. She finds a friend in rival-turned-BFF Jessica (Jennifer Ehle, unjustly shut out from supporting actress awards so far), but even when they trade texts with “brb” and “u” in them, Maya always bends the conversation back to bin Laden. Chastain keeps Maya at arm’s length, which is incredible to think about — somehow, the mastermind behind bin Laden’s death is just not very likable.

Parallel to the film’s treatment of Maya lies the big rhetorical question of Zero Dark Thirty: We killed bin Laden, but at what cost? This core, and obviously unanswered, question has gone over the heads of all the senators and columnists manufacturing a baseless controversy over the film’s alleged “pro-torture” stance. Indeed, the first half-hour consists of graphic sequences where agent Dan (Jason Clarke) and eventually Maya waterboard and emasculate an al-Qaeda suspect (Reda Kateb, in a thankless role), not to mention confine him to an awfully small box. For one, the prisoner never seems to disclose any actionable intelligence, though that plot point is up for debate. The larger issue remains Maya’s, and in turn the U.S. government’s, own morality in executing this mission. Regardless if torture was necessary to locate bin Laden or to win this war, Zero Dark Thirty wants you to consider whether these two goals were morally bankrupt from the start. Far from lionizing President Obama or excusing Dick Cheney, the film sees past partisan politics and quietly contemplates whether justice during wartime can be called justice at all. The final shot grants credence to this reading, and it is not heretical to consider the cost of a 10-year quest for vengeance. In this way, Zero Dark Thirty approaches something akin to Direct Cinema (a documentary film genre that aims to record objective truth) by staging some version of the truth, refusing a didactic little bow and letting the audience think for itself. That last part may be the problem.

I had conflicting emotions during the final 30 minutes, when SEAL Team Six flies to, invades and clears bin Laden’s compound. Viewed on a big screen with surround sound, the experience will render you immobile (a special shout-out to sound designer Paul Ottosson, who engineers the mesmerizing stealth helicopter sound effect, and sound mixer Ray Beckett, who keeps the gunfights startling and realistic). The deliberate pacing and night-vision lighting immerse you to an almost unbearable extent, like a fly on the soldiers’ helmets. The sequence inspires fear, angst and awe, the latter of which stuns the soldier who took the final and fateful shots — all he can say is “I shot the third floor guy,” as his comrades scramble to vacate the premises. Around this moment, I was on the verge of tears as a Navy SEAL handed one of Osama’s children a glowstick to quiet her down and coax out her father’s name for confirmation. I don’t know how to explain this emotional impact or why it struck me then. The mastery of Zero Dark Thirty is that it operates on an ineffable register, free to collide feelings and abstain from easy answers. Call it relativistic or postmodern or any viable, theoretical tag. All I know is that the world post-9/11 has been one of confusion and contradiction. Zero Dark Thirty also knows this, and by draping America’s triumphant moment of victory under the same ambiguity, it has rewritten history while staking a spot in it, too.

Final Verdict:

5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.