War, Inc is a debacle. Starring, co-written and produced by John Cusack, it’s an impotent, cheap-looking political satire that longs for relevance, but feels years stale. (It has, in fact, been around for awhile––it was once titled Brand Hauser, it went into production in fall 2006, it was rumored to have been set up for premiere slots at both Toronto 2007 and Sundance 2008, neither of which, for whatever reason, ever happened.) It’s a sign that Hollywood filmmaking about the current war and its associated politics has fatally passed over from merely irrelevant preaching to the choir, to a kind of solipsistic naivete that should make anyone with an intellectually-rooted anti-war position feel embarrassed to have their politics associated with it. War, Inc personally makes me want to put my head in my hands in shame. The Left deserves to be mocked as much as the Neo-Cons, but nobody deserves to have their reputations sullied by indefensible garbage like this.
Probably in part thanks to the Tribeca Film Festival’s new pre-fest review embargo, it’s been extremely difficult thus far to get a sense of which of the festivals many, many titles are actually worth seeking out and seeing. I’m sure the embargo has a purpose, but the fact remains that we’re now five days away from opening night, and we’re starring down a festival devoid of buzz. As someone trying to figure out how to cover the thing, I’m in the odd position of reevaluating givens: I don’t know what to do with the rest of the lineup, but I know Tom Hall’s last blog post makes me think Speed Racer looks fucking awesome.
So spelunking the catalog, all I really have to go on is keywords. And, my my, what keywords do we have for the Encounters selection, The Objective: A horror film. Set in Afghanistan, beginning three days after 9/11. About a Special Ops mission in search of an Al Qaeda nukes stash, gone horribly wrong. Directed by Daniel Myrick, best known as the co-director of The Blair Witch Project. Are our jaws dropping in unison?
It’s the kind of film everyone would be talking about, if only Tribeca would let us review it before it premieres. But, they didn’t put an embargo on reviewing the trailer…
There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.
In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day.Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”
But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeuneputs it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?
In this longish but fascinating video companion piece to his Atlantic story on how Hollywood has reverted to 70s-style dialectics in order to talk about current global conflicts, Ross Douthat explains why the recent wave of Iraq movies haven’t connected with critics or audiences. The problem, in part, is that “Hollywood hasn’t found anything new to say about the Iraq War that you wouldn’t expect them to say based on what they had to say about Vietnam.” Via The House Next Door. Also on the topic of the contemporary war film’s unwillingness to telegraph unexpected or unsafe points of view: The NY Times did a profile of Stop-Loss director Kimberley Pierce over the weekend, and though an inordinate amount of space is given over to explanations for why it took Pierce nine years to make a second film, there’s some interesting stuff about the attempts made to “move towards a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.”
Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden, follows a similar gimmick to his first film, Super Size Me: take a controversial topic, put yourself at risk exploring that topic, and make it funny. While not a perfect film, it does work on many levels, especially in humanizing average citizens of the Muslim countries Sprulock explores. The film also turns Mortal Combat style video game fight sequences into biting political satire. Read a full review of the film here.
True/False co-director David Wilson presented recent Oscar winner Alex Gibney with the festival’s True Vision Award on Saturday, before a screening of Gibney’s latest opus, Gonzo. The film takes a comprehensive look at the zeitgeist-defining glory years and post-middle-age decline of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose commitment to truth through fictionalization inspired Wilson to brand him “a man who could well be the patron saint of True/False.” In introducing Gibney, Wilson noted that the festival was proud to host the director on his first stop after last week’s Oscar ceremony. When he reached the mic, Gibney corrected the record. “This is not my first stop after that event in Hollywood,” the filmmaker said. “I looked at that as a warm-up to True/False.”
The True Vision Award is designed to honor mid-career filmmakers who, in the words of Wilson, “are pushing the non-fiction form forward.” It’s a bit of a disappointment, then, that formally, Gonzo swings wildly between stylistic experimentation and rote talking-head traditionalism. Shooting on high def video to appease producers Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who will release the film theatrically under the auspices of Magnolia before broadcasting Gonzo on their HD Net TV, Gibney seems to struggle to transcend the standard visual tropes of the medium. The bulk of the film consists of sit-down interviews with expert witnesses, including Thompson’s son and two ex-wives, Jann Wenner and Pat Buchanan; much of the rest of the footage is culled from fiction films about Thompson and previous documentaries. When Gibney does take chances––such as when he casts actors in a home-video style reenactment set to an actual audio recording of Thompson’s visit to a Nevada taco stand, the transcription of which formed a chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas––the end result is not dissimilar to something one might see on basic cable. There are inspired ideas here, but with its sometimes awkward video effects and general made-for-TV patina, the whole thing looks a little downmarket for a filmmaker of Gibney’s caliber.
Which is not to say that Gonzo doesn’t offer valuable insight into Thompson’s life, work, and, especially, the power of his celebrity. …Read more
Bloggy reactions are starting to float in on that whole MPAA vs. Taxi to the Dark Side thing, and although we’re sill seeing the predictable squabbling over ideology, pretty much everyone seems to be united on one thing: the poster itself is far less offensive than the MPAA’s stance on it.
AJ Schnack spoke with Taxi director Alex Gibney, who characterized the ruling as “a cover-up”:
Removing the hood is the ultimate cover-up. [The U.S.] didn’t use to do that sort of thing. Removing the hood sends the same message as the Bush administration with the CIA tapes. It’s OK to do it, it’s just not OK to show it.
Hammering home roughly the same message, The Cinetrix proposes a protest campaign:
This movie needs to be seen. These images need to be seen. Fuck, I’m willing to run the one-sheet image every day here until the decision is reversed.
Meanwhile, the boys at conservative film blog LIBERTAS think that the very idea of the film is reprehensible…which is why they’re mad at the MPAA for drawing more attention to it by giving the poster an air of snuff. In a post broken by images of the World Trade Center aflame, Dirty Harry writes:
There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s 
