The rub of it

With The Hurt Locker the Western public and specifically the United States of America has a pared down examination of the situation on the ground in Iraq. For ease of viewing The Hurt Locker is ostensibly an apolitical representation of the Iraq war: a paradigm that suits the complicit sensibilities of Western audiences. The character study aspires to being guilt and complicit free but ends up as diet analysis. To take The Hurt Locker at face value is to overlook the film as an agent of United States hegemony in the field of popular consciousness.

The film opens with a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit in the heat of their task defusing bombs and comes complete with requisite war movie banter. However the dialogue, short and lean as it is, is laced with signs that suggest Hollywood war movie motifs that push American hegemony. When Sargent Thompson bemoans how if the Iraqi’s are going to leave bombs on the road side then they will blow up the neighbourhood, neutralise the situation and in the process give the locals something to think about. This line is delivered in an exasperated tone and is so fleeting it is almost forgettable. But it does slip in and the ideologies that the line mask are being played out

This shock and awe gung-ho approach is reductive and toes the line of a post Cold-War mono-power world. We are presented with the silent push of United State hegemony; the soldier believes in what he is saying, and we the audience are coerced into taking the side of the soldiers. The uses of some subtle set up shots frame the Iraqi civilians, who are standing around the bomb site, with silent hostility and potential menace. As the soldiers take shrewd glances around the bomb site the camera follows their gaze and with quick shoots that root out potential threats, we the viewer are given the impression that all Iraqi’s are a threat and there is need for this EOD unit to teach Iraq a lesson in tough love, bring freedom to their neighbourhoods and wrestle then from the grips of insurgency.

Sargent Thompson immediately goes on to wonder if it is strange that right then he craves a Hamburger. The message, it would appear is that these U.S. troops would rather be home in their own neighbourhoods than disposing bombs in a foreign land. And this suggests an early war film motif of reluctance in going to war but all-the-same fighting the good fight. During World War II the United States was forced into entering the war and Hollywood positioned the United States as heroic and reluctant fighter, see Sargent York. Now in the early 21st Century Sergeant Thompson speaks with the belief that fighting in Iraq is a good and just thing. It would appear that history rhymes.

Much like how the EOD unit explores and digs around a potential IED, when the composition of the opening scene of The Hurt Locker is explored it becomes apparent that a silent hegemony is guiding the narrative of the scene, one that presents the United States and it’s actors as reluctantly and justly bringing good to a foreign land. And this is a silent method of validating the war and gaining public complicity.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Back just before the turn of the millennium we were given, with Fight Club, an example of the disorientating and debilitating effects of air travel, for Edward Norton’s character it was the medium that took him further into his isolation. Then with the 9/11 attacks air travel tucked terror under its wings and we were presented with the plane as potential coffin, see Snakes on a Plane and United 93.Verily the care free days of air travel are a faded contrail in Hollywood’s skies and Frank Sinatra does really sound dated when he crops up on the iPod play list.

So, no surprise that Jason Reitman’s latest Up in the Air a film about a travelling ‘axe-man’ deals with the isolation and alienation of frequent flyers. Up in the Air starts of upbeat enough with the opening credits taking in super crisp aerial shots of the American city and landscape and this is coupled with a cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Yes from a distance all looks fine and dandy. But the credits end with a plane touching down. Upon arrival in the film proper we meet Ryan Bingham, played by the ever suave George Clooney and as per usual on face value everything couldn’t be better in the world of a Cooney character. It’s by getting to know these characters that we learn of their emotional delicacies that is lie behind that winning smile with perfectly formed white teeth. Yet Reitman and Clooney, with the help of some swift editing that captures a poetic flow of calculated movements, introduce us to a character who seems to have their life so organised and controlled that they can moonwalk through it.

Bingham is a T-Rex of his chosen profession, he flies around the country arriving at some company or another in one location or another that’s outsourced the wielding axe of downsizing to his Omaha based company. Job done and off to the next company in the next city and so on. This is how Bingham lives: an itinerant staying in traveller hotels, clocking up air miles and of course with the present economic depression its boom time for those that make a living out of firing people. But flying is a huge overhead and a new age seems to be dawning in Bingham’s world where web cams and Skype enable the wielding of the redundancy axe from one fixed location. Bingham’s chosen lifestyle is in danger of extinction and that spells the demise of the personal touch that Bingham has mastered of ‘easing’ a person into the dark waters of redundancy. Not to mention that Bingham would be fixed to one location and with one foal swoop the lightness in his life would be gone: grounded.

But this sudden prospect of job transformation and the coincidental on the road romance that appears to be bearing fruit of deeper attraction and a yearning for loyalty brings about a self reappraisal of Bingham’s life. And this, it would seem is the real object of the film in highlighting a latent desire in a physically removed individual for companionship and some place to call home.

Mid-way through the film Bingham propositions that we are not ‘monogamous swans’ – meaning that we are destined to live and die alone. Too which we may ask ourselves, have we as western individuals evolved to a hyper state of individualisation and its downstream effects of isolation and lack of permanent emotional relationships? Guru Bingham believes this detached and visceral assessment of existence, but one gets the impression that his heart isn’t in this proposition.

The flight path of the second part of the film courses Bingham’s existential dilemma, how does one remain physically up in the air yet able to be emotionally grounded with a home that one looks forward to returning to. And the film answers this by suggesting that the choices are ours to make and formulate.

Another round of laughs

Form the get go Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath A.K.A. agent OSS 117 takes centre stage; he descends kitsch open plan stairs with a thick pile of carpet onto a warmly lit sunken dance floor with an assumed gravitation that suggests that any woman that he deems fit will soon be swept of her feet and into bed. And this is pretty much how the open of the latest OSS 117 film Lost in Rio plays out. Although before OSS 117 can claim the girl first he must save the night from near disaster, which of course is done with the ease of a consummate magician conjuring up his latest spellbinding trick. Suspend that belief for this is most definitely over the top.

The latest OSS film is set in a super retro Rio de Janeiro, where OSS 117 must hunt down Nazis and along his slapstick way unwittingly offend nearly everyone he meets with his arrogance, misogyny, idiocy, tackless bumbling, colonial and near racist ways that somehow win the day. Any further plot details really are superfluous as we all know how these spy spoofs go; it’s just a question whether or not the film is any good. And with its great period set design, pace, location shots, editing, score, enthusiastic acting (again Jean Dujardin is on over-the-top form) and untiring set pieces OSS 177: Lost in Rio is another ridiculously intoxicating flick directed by Michel Hazanavicius. The film may lack some of the first’s freshness but this is a minor asides. The mere sight of OSS 117’s raised and confounded eyebrows and the lingering shot of the aforementioned eyebrows is alone worth viewing OSS 117: Lost in Rio.

Adolecent exposure

Cinema is no stranger to stories about heart wrangling ‘journeys to the end of the night’ a classic example is Fellini’s Satyricon. And in this instance to a lesser extent cinema also has classics related to photograph and the hyper-reality of the simulacrum, such as Blow-Up. If we add into this thematic mix perversion, eroticism, religion, adolescence, cults and the search for a true love then we end up with Shion Sono’s Love Exposure.

Love Exposure’s narrative centres around Yu Honda and a few other associated characters and the tangled web and course that their lives take. Adolescence and that drawn out period of discontent can be a testing time in anyone’s life and for Yu Honda especially so. He is a devout Catholic boy committed to his late mothers parting words and add to this his father is newly ordained priest. Thing start off alright in their new life in the church but the appearance one day of a lost soul of a woman in need of a good Shepard turns things upside down and inside out. Yu’s father embarks on an illicit liaison with the woman, who, soon enough elopes with a younger man leaving Yu’s father broken and emotionally distant from the narrating Yu. And he earnestly yearns for love and an erection.

It is from this point that this 4 hour film starts to kick up a dust storm of desperate emotions. Yu is forced by his father to confess his sins each day. But Yu being the devout boy he is has no sins which to confess. Which poses an existential problem for Yu: how to act when the devout and good life only serves to hinder love? So when push comes to hug Yu forces himself to sin so as to illicit some emotion from his withdrawn father and so begins Yu’s spiralling odyssey through perversion with the manifold aims of attracting his father’s attention and finding his Maria (read true love).

Sion directs with a light touch and a compassion for all his character and their respective back stories and just may have made the longest opening sequence of any film one is likely to see, clocking in at around an hour long. Nothing comes easy for the characters and Yu must learn the hard way and just when it would appear he has reached his destination along comes another obstacle that must be confronted and overcome. But fortunately for us the laughs come easy as this film makes its way with some superbly executed comic scenes. Early on as Yu learns the art of surreptitious panty photography and what it philosophically aspires to there is shot after shot that references other films – this montage becomes something of a Kata of cartoon comedy. It is a mark of a strong story, good direction and dedicated acting that a film of this length can be entertaining for its duration.

Love Exposure goes through many twists and turns and new obstacles are presented before each of the central characters, these all are thrown into the mix of the central narrative that revolves around the search for love and the journey that a good heart must undertake that traverses less than good places. And at four hours this film is very much a journey in itself, but one that reaps a reward of good entertainment.

'More than a feeling'

It may well be the case that now that the main front of the ‘war on terror’ has shifted back to Afghanistan and the spill over AfPak theatre of operation and also a change of White House administration has occurred, a somewhat objective varied look back at the Iraq situation can be taken. Of late we have been offered the intense and exceptional ‘The Hurt Locker’ and now we have the farcical ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’. This latest review of the Iraq situation is a goofy slapstick comical farce with enough suggestive gestures to drive a heard of goats with: nearly always the humour is deployed at the absurdness of the situation.

The film is based on the journalistic work of the same name written by Jon Ronson and it follows the journey of the journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as he tries to find a story in Iraq. After a chance meeting with Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) a story starts to materialise out of the cosmos of chance that is tinged with flowers, peace and jealousy.

Through a series of well timed and charming flashbacks the story of the New Earth Army is told and its quest for mental war that doesn’t resemble any form of war that we have previously known. The guru at the centre of these flashbacks is Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) whose lovey-dovey eyes and words are the platform that inspires a small wave of young officers to embrace counter-culture ways of life that were sweeping the U.S post Vietnam. These flashbacks capture the clichéd zeitgeist of that time with its good will and optimism but bring in a new twist of a military training and industrial complex setting: which makes for a good mash-up. These flashback scenes are the films most captivating and swirl with tweaked nostalgia.

But back to the present, where we are lead through a war ravaged Iraq, with side long glances cast at the politics of hostage taking, mercenaries, methods of information retrieval and the dark turn that The New Earth army has taken. An obscure momentum drives these scenes that give the impression that we are on a road to ruin. In the films final throws an insurrection of old ideals is grasped but is ultimately lack lustre and this film in the end seems to putter out like a car that’s air filter has consume too much sand. And the film seems stranded in the desert, much like the allied efforts in Iraq, with no real exit strategy.

What the film leaves us with apart from a disappointing ending is the message that resilience in the midst of any system that has evil elements is a must if one is to realise their ideals and hopes. It’s just a shame that the coup-de-grace of this message didn’t have the incision of its opening forays.

Dr. Parnasuss and the slippery slope

This is a confusing and senile film that is littered with ideas but none of which seem to get investigate and explored to a satisfying conclusion. Ideas are just thrown out as if discarded, left for the viewer to wonder what could have been – if only – and then the film continues to clumps along aimlessly. In short this is a film that is not fully realised, it hints at many things, it seems to have a wide scope – good versus evil, creativity, death and volition – but unfortunately the story doesn’t come together to form any cohesive unity and story. It would appear that Gilliam’s flight of imagination has with this film, failed to touch back down to earth. A strong editing hand is what seems to be missing. And this makes for disappointing experience

Was it a good choice for this film to be concluded and released after the untimely death of rising star Heath Ledger, was there a story there that was worthy as something of an epitaph – as this film will invariably be used – to his legacy and potential, should this film have move time spent on post-production? These sorts of questions were always going to be levelled at this film and it is noble of Gilliam to push on through with the film’s production despite the major loss of Ledger. But an epitaph does not make a film and the parts of this film don’t add up to a worthy memorial.

Yes, themes of mortality, imagination, a bleak inevitability and pure love inhabit this film as they do in many Gilliam films but here they are strands that are not tied together and are confusingly deployed thorough out the film to no end. Are we supposed to take sympathy on Dr. Parnassus and his idiotic determination to carve out a life as a poet-storyteller? Or should we take sympathy on ourselves that we fail to appreciate the gifts that Dr. Parnassus has to offer and the general decline in our civilisations ability to appreciate storytelling and the art of imagining? And just where is Gilliam laying the blame for his despondency: a particular demographic, a political-economic cabal, the choices that consenting individuals make or somebody-or-other? It’s a nigh on impenetrable veil that Gilliam casts.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus starts off promisingly with a strong opening gambit of the general decline of modern western civilisation that is wallowing in drunken stupor and clipped wings of creativity. And as we see Dr. Parnassus sit lonely on his mountain outcrop we can feel his despair at what he sees, but then as the film begins to unfolds we see that Dr. Parnassus, despite his lofty prelapsarian ideals, is himself a fallen man who has recklessly gambled the lives of those dear to him and has dug his own hole.

And a hole is what Gilliam digs for himself he is never able to get a cohesive story together and get out beyond a promising beginning. As a result this film lack focus; too many ideas and not enough segues. The production design is filled with fascination and trinkets of wonder. Alone they are well crafted elements but they can’t distract from the general lack of focus and continuity this film exhibits. One must wonder about what muse was leading Gilliam’s choices in the realisation of this film.

And so finally, what of the choices that one has to make in their life? This idea is signposted at the conclusion of the film but it’s a little late for any investigation; and it’s an idea that lingers with a morbid tint. Perhaps what Gilliam is alluding to is that through the act of making a choice, sticking to it and acting upon it, one can attain a moral high ground of productivity and worthiness. Throughout the film Dr. Parnassus has given over to many a temptation presented to him – be it by a dapper and cigarette chomping devil or the reading of a fortune card – he has seemed to lack any volition of his own, so to see him make a choice at the conclusion of the film and then improve his life in the process of resolutely sticking to the choice concludes the film on a positive note.

And this review so far has said nothing of the role that the late Ledger plays, which seem to be something of a Mephisto type role. But it’s unclear just what this film, characters and director desire to tell, too much seems to fall by the wayside in this bloated meta-narrative. As it is, this film along with life and death remain clear like the water of the Thames. But a lingering thought remains, does this film need repeated viewing for its fruits to ripen

Space is the place: Space Station 3D

If the representation of life aboard the International Space Station presented in Space Station - directed by Toni Myers, presented in the IMAX format and produced by the Lockheed Martin Corporation along with NASA - is to be believed then it's a place where all of mankind’s divisions and conflicts are left far behind and a floating clowning around is the international code of conduct. Now it is presumable that any adult will realise that this is a preposterous proposition to put forward but perhaps the kids might just believe this. So beware, have your wits about you when taking off on this voyage.

The title credits of this short 47 minute documentary promise much; from the dark nebulas of the theatre, free-form parts materialise, merge and construct each credit right there, appearing tantalisingly within grasp of the viewer, then the next credit. This is an immersive spectacle and the motif of parts coming together to construct something with meaning is an excellent and exciting departure point. From here on we are guided by the overstated and cock-sure narration of Tom Cruise around some of the launch sites on Earth, the International Space Station itself and are presented a glimpse of life aboard the space station. Everything is presented with a child like glee and wonder, where there seems to be an echo of ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ in most scenes.

We are shown some of the complexities of the construction process and space walking, that all go off without a hitch and are given the impression that this is the life of childhood dreams realised, where the world is a calm spec of awe floating in the vastness of space. All this seems to belie the politics of the situation of what life in space and in small confined environments is like – next to nothing is made of the contrast between the cramped space station and the perceivable openness of space and the psychological impact this may have on the inhabitants of the space station or of the loneliness of being away from earth. As well, none of the criticisms levelled at the International Space Station programme are addressed: primarily any controlled experiment done in space can be done cheaper on Earth. This documentary come out of the top draw of propaganda and seems to services the interests of those who have economic interests in the continuation of the International Space Station programme; namely NASA and its sub contractors.

Although 15 countries participate in the International Space Station programme this is an American show with Russia playing a supporting role in this post Cold War reach for the stars. It’s the Star Spangled Banner that has centre stage. In one scene where the first of the compartments that will eventually comprise the space station are joined, Mr. Cruise makes much ado about how the American astronauts ware Star Spangled Banner socks for the occasion of the virgin journey between joined compartments. This whiff of the nationalisation of space is conveyed with such cute matter-of-factness that it becomes disturbing to watch; an assumed ownership that reeks of toe-jam.

If the spectacles of suspended disbelief are worn for the duration of this documentary, what is presented, politics aside, are some of the steadiest and crispest actual shoots of space, Earth and the habitation of space to date. But no matter how awe inspiring these images may be, this is an unsettling document about assumed ownership, bias, corporate interest and manipulation of childhood wonder.