By Joe Bendel. It was the most dangerous duty station on Earth, but for the men of the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battallion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Army Airborne Brigade, Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley was home. For just over a year, the Second Platoon served in harm’s way every day at the isolated Korengal Outpost (KOP) that was unofficially renamed in honor of the Platoon’s fallen medic, PFC. Juan Restrepo. For much of that time journalists (a term used without irony in this case) Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger were embedded with Second Platoon, recording the realities of war without editorial comment for the documentary, Restrepo (trailer above), which opened this past week.
Over the course of ten trips to the Korengal Valley, sometimes together, sometime separately, Hetherington and Junger saw the fifteen men of Restrepo up close and under fire. The mountainous terrain surrounding the outpost could have been tailor-made for guerilla insurgencies. The Platoon built it during the dead of night while simultaneously holding off Taliban attacks. Many soldiers described its mere completion as a turning point in their effort to stem the violence flowing from the Korengal region. However, in early 2009 a decision was made to close Restrepo because its presence was considered provocative.
The audience only meets PFC. Restrepo in crude video shot on a hand-held device just before their deployment to Korengal. In truth, the quality of the footage is hardly distinguishable from that shot by Hetherington and Junger, due to the chaotic combat situations they faced. Certainly it gives viewers a strong impression of Restrepo’s personality and why he was so popular with his comrades. Indeed, despite his brief posthumous appearance, Restrepo emerges as the true protagonist of the film that bears his name.
Despite the greater screen time allotted them, the audience does not come to know the other soldiers particularly well as individuals during the course of Restrepo. However, they do get a keen sense of what day-to-day life was like for the Platoon. Soldiers are indeed wounded and even die in the film, but Hetherington and Junger were sensitive to the men and their families in what they chose to show from these fatal encounters, never letting the proceedings degenerate to the level of “anti-war” snuff films.
More context would probably help some viewers understand how the events documented in Restrepo fit into the overall scheme of the Afghanistan conflict. Yet this was obviously a slippery slope the director-reporters scrupulously sought to avoid, at least for their film. (Based on the first few chapters, Junger’s companion book War seems similarly averse to editorializing, except perhaps with some criticism of the inflexible absurdity of military bureaucracy.) Continue reading LFM Review: With the Second Platoon in Restrepo
By Jason Apuzzo. • Govindini and I were at the LA Film Festival yesterday, where it was a zoo – in large measure because the Twilight world premiere was right across the street. The whole Twilight cast was there along with Stephanie Meyer, Jaden Smith, the NY Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez (in town to get his butt kicked by the Dodgers), Kim Kardashian … and about 20,000 screaming female fans – in what looked like the world’s largest outdoor high school prom. We had a lot of fun, and a good time seemed to be had by all. Meanwhile, the film itself is gearing up for what looks to be a monster opening weekend …
• The Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz pic Knight and Day opened poorly, with the entire industry circling around like there’s blood in the water. Still not sure why Cruise draws such animosity given how much money he’s made for other people. Or is that maybe the reason?
• With sci-fi projects getting hotter and hotter, producer John Davis and Fox have optioned Ray Bradbury’s classic, The Martian Chronicles. By odd coincidence, I just pulled out my autographed copy of Martian Chronicles recently to read. Govindini and I met Ray a few years ago and had a nice chat with him – what an inspiration he remains. Footnote: I recommend the TV adaptation of Martian Chronicles made in the early 80s featuring Rock Hudson. It’s a little longish, but still quite good.
[Editor’s Note: LFM has recently been covering a series of provocative films debuting at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Jason Apuzzo. Chris Morris’ striking new film Four Lions, which showed yesterday at The Los Angeles Film Festival is so wickedly funny, shatters so many taboos, and is so brazen in its satire of Islamic terrorism – and the vacuous political correctness that supports it – that it’s a wonder Morris isn’t in a witness protection program right now. Not that he would need to be protected from jihadis, whom I imagine spend little time watching indie cinema – but from the Western cultural establishment, whose protective covering over the lunacy of Islamic radicalism Morris rips away with comic gusto and flair in this marvelous new film.
Four Lions was a big hit at Sundance earlier this year, and has already done killer business at the indie box office in the UK (it opened the same weekend as Iron Man 2, yet had a better per-screen average), but the film has yet to secure distribution here in the U.S. Seeing the film last night, it’s not hard to understand why. This uproariously funny and sophisticated film, that had the audience in hysterics from the opening scene on, is nonetheless so subversive in its vision of Islamic terrorism – so thoroughly and mercilessly dismissive of any justification for terrorism – that by the end of the film any lingering shred of sympathy that might exist toward the terrorists’ point of view has simply been pulverized. Imagine starting up a heavy-metal band fresh off watching Spinal Tap, or becoming a French police officer after watching Peter Sellars play Inspector Clouseau, and you can imagine the kind of effect Four Lions must have on young Brits thinking of starting up a terror cell.
Total morons.
Four Lions is about a bumbling UK terror cell living in Sheffield. The two key leaders of the cell are Omar (Riz Ahmed) – the only reasonably sane or professional one in the group, around whom most of the film revolves – and Azzam al-Britanni (or ‘Barry’ to his friends, played with Falstaffian flair by Nigel Lindsay), who’s actually just an abrasive, working class white-guy convert to Islam. Nigel Lindsay’s portrayal of Azzam al-Britanni almost steals the show; the combination of belligerence and stupidity he brings to the character is pitch-perfect. Other guys in the terror cell include the sweet but utterly moronic Waj (Kayvan Novak), and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) – a mumbling doofus who for some reason is convinced he can train crows to be suicide bombers. A fifth member of the group, Hassan (Arsher Ali), is a pretentious wanna-be rapper (his music conducts a ‘jihad of the mind’) who is recruited while Omar and Waj are in Pakistan botching their terrorist training.
The film follows the different members of the group as they struggle to conceal their activities, aided only by blind luck – and a kind of inane cunning – with the film climaxing in the terror cell’s effort to bomb the London Marathon. That last sequence in particular is a tour-de-force of action, comic-timing, suspense … and ultimately, great emotional power. Without giving away the film’s ending, let’s say simply that Four Lions does not exist to pull punches about the full tragedy and inhumanity of terrorism.
Trying to light a bomb.
What struck me the most about this film was the intelligence and sophistication Chris Morris and his actors brought to this material. The trailer for the film (see below) captures the opera buffa aspects of Four Lions – but not necessarily the anarchic, Paddy Chayefskyian verve and insight of the film’s satire. Having made a film on this subject matter myself, I can tell you that Morris has accomplished no small feat in bringing out the sheer lunacy of the terrorist worldview – while keeping the tone light, and respecting the earthy humanity of the characters. The inevitable question that films like Four Lions or The Infidel or Living with the Infidels or Kalifornistan always inspire is: is the film ‘humanizing’ terrorists? And the answer is, of course, yes … which is exactly what real-world terrorists, intoxicated with their self-image as divinely inspired warriors, never want. In the real world terrorists do not consider themselves mere human beings … but jihadis inspired by Allah. This is the pompous bubble that Four Lions exists to pop. And pop it the film does, with the force of an atomic blast.
What has happened to American filmmaking that we let the Brits get to this subject matter first? Watching Four Lions I was reminded of how utterly repressed, how politically correct, how tendentious and boring American filmmaking has become of late. How have we become so morally clouded and unsure of ourselves, so confused by our own basic humanity, that we can’t make clear-eyed films like this anymore? As recently as the 1970s, I think a film like Four Lions would’ve still been possible to make in the United States. For now, however, it apparently takes the Brits to make a film like this – and the only way to see it for the moment here in the U.S. will be through bootlegged copies, digitally smuggled-in via the internet. It’s almost like we’re living in the the old Soviet Union, actually. Congratulations to the LA Film Festival for breaking the blockade. Memo to Fox News, talk radio, the blogosphere and related alternative media: you should get behind this film NOW, and bang every pot and pan you’ve got, so that this film gets proper distribution. Or else this film will basically not be seen here in the U.S. – and that would be a genuine tragedy.
One final note: Govindini and I had a nice chat after the screening with actor Kayvan Novak, who plays the clueless ‘Waj’ in the film. He did a wonderful job in Four Lions – there’s nothing tougher than playing dumb on camera, and doing it in an entertaining and engaging way – and we wish him and this scintillating film the very best.
• Twilight fans are gearing up for the film’s opening. While insider-chic has Inception the summer’s hottest film (or maybe Toy Story 3?), this film is probably going to blow them all away. And it will still be reported as a ‘surprise’ as Hollywood slowly figures out that females go to the movies, too.
By Jason Apuzzo. A new Bollywood film called Tere bin Laden (Without You, Laden) that satirizes Osama bin Laden, is apparently set for release next month (on July 16th) according to the AFP.
Tere Bin Laden is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about an ambitious young news reporter from Pakistan who is desperate to migrate to the US in pursuit of the American dream. His repeated attempts to immigrate are shot down as his visa is always rejected. But when things couldn’t look worse he comes across an Osama bin laden look alike. Ali then hatches a scheme to produce a fake Osama video and sell it to news channels as a breakthrough scoop! Unfortunately there are serious ramifications as the White House gets involved and dispatches an overzealous secret agent on Ali Zafar’s trail.
Satire is an extremely potent weapon, and it isn’t really surprising that current Bollywood filmmakers would feel comfortable going into this comedic territory due to the dire, ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism to Indian society (as grimly evidenced by the 2008 Mumbai attacks). As Arun Venugopal wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Bollywood has been cranking out movies of various sorts on the subject of terrorism for the past several years – Kurbaan (2009), Black and White (2008) A Wednesday! (2008), My Name is Khan (2010) and Aamir (2008), just to name a few – while filmmakers in the West have been cowering under dark clouds of political correctness. And as we’ve been covering here at LFM, extremely funny hit indie films like The Infidel (see the LFM review), Four Lions and the award-winning web series Living With the Infidels have recently been ripping away the veil that’s been hovering over this subject … while Hollywood dithers, still trying to figure out what is politically ‘safe’ to say about terrorism.
We wish the filmmakers well with this new project. The film’s trailer is below.
"Burnt by the Sun 2": a troubling sign of resurgent Russian nationalism?
By Govindini Murty. Variety announced on June 22nd that Nikita Mikhalkov, one of Russia’s leading filmmakers, will be honored with a Crystal Globe for “Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema” at the upcoming Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia (taking place July 2-10, 2010). This news item caught my attention because Mikhalkov, the Academy Award-winning director of Burnt By the Sun, has been getting a lot of attention in Europe lately for his strongly Russian nationalist and Slavophilic views. Mikhalkov’s recent film Burnt By the Sun 2: Exodus aroused controversy in Europe this past spring because it was partially financed by the Russian government and received an extensive marketing campaign from them (including a red-carpet premiere with thousands of guests at the Kremlin), and allegedly contains pro-Russian nationalist propaganda. Burnt By the Sun 2 is the most expensive Russian film ever made with a budget of $55 million dollars, and yet it flopped at the Russian box office, making only $2.5 million dollars its opening weekend – in large part due to public controversy over Mikhalkov’s close ties to Vladimir Putin and the current Russian regime.
Nonetheless, the Cannes Film Festival screened Burnt by the Sun 2 this past May, and now the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is giving Mikhalkov its foremost award for his body of work. Nikita Mikhalkov is undeniably a talented actor, director, and producer with an accomplished cinematic oevre. However, given Mikhalkov’s controversial political statements (such as his open letter in 2007 asking Putin not to step down after his term of office expired), and the strongly Russian nationalist content of his recent films, it’s interesting that Karlovy Vary – one of Europe’s premiere film festivals – would be honoring him this year. There has been little discussion in America of Burnt By the Sun 2 or of other Mikhalkov films like 1612 and The Barber of Siberia (in part because they have not been released here), but they are important nonetheless as evidence of a resurgent nationalism in the Russian cinema that may have political repercussions for America and the rest of the world.
Nikita Mikhalkov comes from a noted Russian artistic family. His father wrote the lyrics to both the Soviet and Russian national anthems, his mother was a poetess, and his brother Andrei Konchalovsky is an acclaimed director of such films as Siberiade and The Inner Circle. Mikhalkov has acted in and directed films since the 1960s, with his breakthrough film coming in 1974 with At Home Among Strangers (an ostern, or “eastern” that was the Soviet answer to the popular American westerns). Mikhalkov’s biggest success, though, has been Burnt By the Sun (1994), which won both the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Grand Prize at Cannes. Burnt By the Sun tells the story of a loyal Soviet colonel in the 1930s who was falsely accused of treachery by Stalin and condemned to death. The film received acclaim in the West for being one of the few films made in post-Soviet Russia to criticize the horrors of communism.
Mikhalkov with Putin on the set of "Burnt by the Sun 2."
Mikhalkov followed this courageous defense of democratic freedom, though, by turning toward Russian nationalism. His 1998 film The Barber of Siberia was a patriotic historical epic in which Mikhalkov himself played Tsar Alexander III. Some saw this as preparation for a run by Mikhalkov for political office. His Wikipedia biography notes: “The film received the Russia State Prize and spawned rumours about Mikhalkov’s presidential ambitions.”
In 2007 Mikhalkov produced 1612, a patriotic historical epic commissioned by the Kremlin and partially funded by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg (best known in the West for buying up Russian imperial Faberge eggs so they could be repatriated to Russia). Directed by Vladimir Khotinenko, the film was intended to commemorate the victory in 1612 of Russian forces over Polish-Lithuanian invaders who’d wrought havoc in Russia during a period known as “The Time of Troubles” (that took place in the interregnum between the end of the Rurik dynasty in 1598 and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 under Tsar Michael Romanov). The Kremlin commissioned the historical film in order to mark the creation of a new national holiday on November 4th. (And in the best Russian imperial style, 1612 was celebrated in Moscow with a lavish red-carpet premiere – complete with Russian models in white leather handing out birch-flavored vodka to guests.) However, many saw the film as an obvious allegory of modern Russia’s own “Time of Troubles” in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, which was ended by the tsar-like rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000. As Chris Baldwin reports in this Reuters article: Continue reading A Dangerous New Nationalism in Russian Cinema?
The audience only meets PFC. Restrepo in crude video shot on a hand-held device just before their deployment to Korengal. In truth, the quality of the footage is hardly distinguishable from that shot by Hetherington and Junger, due to the chaotic combat situations they faced. Certainly it gives viewers a strong impression of Restrepo’s personality and why he was so popular with his comrades. Indeed, despite his brief posthumous appearance, Restrepo emerges as the true protagonist of the film that bears his name.
