By Patricia Ducey. If Satan were to come to Earth today, he would need a cover. I would suggest he consider that of a bureaucrat – the stony-eyed glare of the city guy who cites you for running your sprinklers half an hour early, or the DMV clerk who reduces all who cross her path to beaten dogs – those suggest a certain affinity to the Devil. But these small-timers can be fired; after all, their bosses are elected (or un-elected) by the people, and up the chain of command there remains an element of accountability. By contrast, a UN bureaucrat might be just the ticket. No accountability at all, and a steady stream of money from the gullible U.S. government and the myriad side “businesses” of its minions. Potential witnesses may fall down elevator shafts – terrible accident, that – humanitarian aid may be diverted to tyrants and their democratic enablers, but you can’t change the world overnight and think of all the good the UN does!
Larysa Kondracki’s brutal and riveting film, The Whistleblower, tells the true story of Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac, who signed on for six months as a highly paid UN peacekeeper in the 1990s and found herself in the hell on Earth that was Bosnia. Officer Bolkovac soon finds that “monitoring” human rights abuses means something less than actually “investigating” crimes or “arresting” anyone, and “peacekeeping” means mostly keeping a bribe-fed lid on the quiet barbarities that sputter-on well after the big guns stop. Continue reading Exposing UN Abuse: LFM Reviews The Whistleblower @ The Newport Beach Film Festival
By Joe Bendel. The platoon of rejects undergoing bootcamp at IDF Training Base 4 cannot be called a Dirty Dozen. Frankly, they are not even dirty. Each should have been disqualified on the basis of physical or mental grounds. Instead, they are botching basic training together as a misfit unit in Dover Kosashvili’s Infiltration (trailer here), which screens during the 2011 Israel Film Festival in New York.
Miller is an epileptic. Peretz has anger management issues. Poor Rachamim Ben Hamo is a wreck, both physically and mentally. It is not exactly clear why self-styled ladies’ man Gabay is there, but it is quickly obvious he is the sort of person who makes every situation more difficult than necessary. Nearly everyone in the platoon expects a menial assignment when their course is completed, except Alon Harel. As a strapping young kibbutznik, he refuses to consider anything less than the paratroopers, not that he has any say in the matter. Unfortunately his resentment will not dissipate, despite the (mostly) helpful suggestions of Commander Benny, their NCO drill instructor.
Based the 1986 novel by Yehoshua Kenaz, Infiltration (so titled for a war game exercise) obviously inspires comparisons to Full Metal Jacket. However, Commander Benny is no R. Lee Ermey. Granted, he can be cruel, but it is rather hard to blame him. After five minutes, you will want to haze the holy terror out of his recruits too. Continue reading LFM Review: Infiltration @ The Israel Film Festival in New York
By Jason Apuzzo.THE PITCH: Muscular Aussie newcommer Chris Hemsworth swings the heavy hammer in Thor, a big-budget adaptation of Stan Lee’s superhero comic series – featuring an expensive, A-list cast (Anthony Hopkins, Natalie Portman) and operatic direction from Kenneth Branagh.
THE SKINNY:Thor brings muscle, pomp and even Marlovian court intrigue to this revered Marvel Comics property – while never losing its sense of humor. In a genre that sometimes takes itself too seriously, Thor strikes a nice balance between campy light humor and mythic/fantasy storytelling.
WHAT WORKS:
• Chris Hemsworth, who between Thor and Red Dawn (which I’ve already reviewed, in its original, non-castrated form) is about to become a major star. Physically, Hemsworth reminds me of the linebackers who played for Pete Carroll at USC – big, wild, ripped dudes with long hair, like Clay Mathews or Brian Cushing. As an actor, though, Hemsworth excels in moments when he needs to project warmth, sensitivity or shrewdness. He’s the complete on-screen package, and should have a strong career ahead of him. The rest of the film’s pricey cast is similarly solid – especially Anthony Hopkins as Odin, and Tom Hiddleston as Loki.
• Thor’s boffo set pieces and art direction from Maya Shimoguchi and her team make Asgard look like something out of Wagner’s Ring-cycle as performed by The Met. Shimoguchi and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos also elevate the film’s New Mexico desert town into a cozy, archetypal burg out of classic 1950s sci-fi. I wanted to move right in and hunt aliens.
• Strong, humanistic values. Thor is a lover and a fighter, you might say. Banished to Earth by his father Odin (a highly grizzled Anthony Hopkins, complete with eyepatch), and having lost his super-powers, angry young man Thor matures and comes to enjoy Earth and all its human pleasures (coffee, beer, cute astrophysicists). Plus, although our government doesn’t know who he is – after he weirdly drops out of the sky into the New Mexico desert, and cheerfully clobbers everyone in sight – and although government agents quasi-threaten him with ‘enhanced interrogation,’ Thor eventually comes around to the government’s side, pledging himself to defend Earth’s security. Thor’s very much a team-player, a good egg who digs small town America, and you basically get the sense he would fit in well on SEAL Team 6.
A ripped Chris Hemsworth tries to lift Asgard's hammer.
A Soviet warship approaches Cuba in "X-Men: First Class."
By Jason Apuzzo. • A series of new trailers for X-Men: First Class have been released, the key one (for story purposes) being the international trailer. This trailer really sets the tone for this film being situated in the Kennedy-era of the Cold War, right at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The X-Men mutants are sent on a top-secret mission related to Cuba, and seem to be depicted as expendable pawns of the CIA in an effort to defeat the Russians, with the X-Men brooding over the general ingratitude of humanity – and, one senses, the American military establishment – toward their contributions.
Boo-hoo.
This type of storyline, which would be annoying under any circumstances, is seeming even more irritating to me after the events of this past weekend, when the CIA proved its tremendous value to America and the entire free world by helping to take out bin Laden. You’d think we could now take a breather from soft-pedaling our intelligence services and military operations … but no. Note the conspiratorial tone taken in the trailer toward the X-Men, as our military people refer to them as “collateral damage” and contemplate the extra-legal measures the government will take in controlling them. It’s the usual anti-military stereotype in play here, with distant cinematic relatives of Colonel Jack D. Ripper contemplating ways to eliminate the Soviet threat and mutant threat in one fell swoop. I was expecting to see Dick Cheney show up and water-board Jennifer Lawrence (preferably in a bikini).
The confluence of events here – between this film, and real-life events in the War on Terror – is quite telling. You really get a sense of how backward and behind the times contemporary Hollywood always is, constantly following yesterday’s Baby Boomer narratives, especially when they concern America’s place in the world. Why make a snarky now movie about the last war – which we won – just as we’re finally gaining ground in the new one?
I have to tell you: although the new X-Men trailers have a smooth, stylish look to them – a Cold War retro-chic that’s quite appealing – I’ve never really liked the X-Men films, and I’m approaching this new one skeptically. Basically I’ve never liked the whiny victimology the X-Men films peddle. The characters in these films are always a little too precious and narcissistic, and not especially heroic. And despite the filmmakers’ intentions, these films never strike me as adequate metaphors for the civil rights struggles of the 1960s – which were very much crusades of the powerless rather than of glamorous, power-enabled superheroes. (Incidentally, star Michael Fassbender – who looks compelling in the trailer – recently told The LA Times that the Magneto-Professor X relationship of the film is based in part on the Malcolm X-Martin Luther King relationship, underlining the film’s civil rights-era subtext.)
January Jones in "X-Men: First Class."
We just saw how real military heroes (not the comic book kind) acted in Abbottabad, Pakistan on Sunday: they went in, completed their mission, and moved on to their next task with a maximum of anonymity and a minimum of drama. Had our Navy SEALS completed the bin Laden mission, and then returned to Washington to conduct a rage-filled raid on the Pentagon, followed by a tear-filled recounting of their sad childhood on The View … you’d essentially have this new X-Men trailer. [Sigh.] What a bummer. The people who really fought the Cold War were so much cooler than this.
Btw, in other X-Men: First Class news, Michael Fassbender talks to The New York Times about the film here, and here are some new promo shots of the film.
• Thor is about to open, starring Chris Hemsworth, and based on what I’m hearing the film is likely to make Hemsworth a major star. This is also likely to have major ramifications for MGM’s Red Dawn, which still doesn’t have a distributor.
My sense is that distributors will be very eager to grab Red Dawn post-Thor, and that MGM will have significant leverage at that point … which makes the scrubbing of the Chinese threat from that film seem all the more cowardly now.
• Speaking of MGM and craven market pandering, the studio is apparently raising about $45 million toward the next Bond film – a full third of the film’s budget – by way of product placement. The Bond films have always done a lot of product placement – but that figure is nonetheless raising eyebrows for the epic scale of its cupidity. My personal recommendation is that when Bond is chasing the new villain, he should wear the new Nike Zoom Kobe VI, with its “Black mamba-inspired rubber outsole for excellent traction.” Just a thought. Continue reading Cold War Update!: More on The X-Men, Bond, J. Edgar Hoover, The Iron Lady and Olga Kurylenko as a CIA Agent!
By Joe Bendel. When watching a mongoose take out his hissing foe in Israel’s first nature documentary, the allegory is almost too easy to draw. Fortunately, Israel has been the scrappy mongoose, not only defending the only civilized corner of the Middle East but also preserving considerable areas of pristine nature. Moshe Alpert documents three species of mammals raising their young in the wild habitats of Israel most people never knew existed in Land of Genesis, which screens during the upcoming 2011 Israel Film Festival in New York.
Genesis will radically change how many people think of Israel, particularly the Golan Heights, where two wolves are starting their own pack. Likewise, the Sea of Galilee probably has much different associations for viewers than as the habitat for swamp cats. At least the desert might seem like a fitting environment for exotic species, like the ibexes Alpert follows. Continue reading LFM Review: Land of Genesis @ The 2011 Israel Film Festival in New York
By Jason Apuzzo. I wanted to put up a movie clip today that would capture my feelings about what happened yesterday in Pakistan. The selection of the clip turned out to be an easy one.
Well done, Mr. President, and bravo to the many American heroes who made this historic victory possible.
