by
A S Hamrah
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These are the tropes of war-on-terror movies: fake Middle Eastern music, constant TV news and radio commentary, scenes of combat shot in Morocco instead of Iraq, actors we don’t recognize speaking Arabic with subtitles, videos of men in ski masks proclaiming in Arabic while they hold a Westerner hostage, American soldiers accidentally killing an Iraqi woman or child, vets losing their shit in their hometowns, a constant resort to cell phones, a scorpion fight, titles identifying every location change, a cut to black to avoid showing something horrible, a precredits wrap-up crawl that tells us what happened later, blonde wives back home. It’s amazing how everyone has a blonde wife back home. You’d think al Qaeda made these movies.
United 93 is an exploitation film in the form of a safety-instruction manual. It manipulates us mercilessly but blandly. When Flight 93 crashes the screen cuts to black. The only decent thing to do at that point would have been to end the film right there and flip on the lights in the theater. But miles of credits roll like they always do.
I saw the documentary The War Tapes on DVD and made the mistake of watching the bonus features first. One of the bonus features turned out to be résumés for director Deborah Scranton and producer Chuck Lacy. Scranton is a former director of network-TV sports who graduated from Brown with a degree in semiotics. She’s also a former member of the US Ski Team who lives on a farm in the mountains of New Hampshire. Lacy, the former president of Ben & Jerry’s, runs a venture capital fund and in his spare time breeds grass-fed cattle and imports yerba maté from Paraguay. After I read that I had to take a day off before I watched the film so I could evaluate it without prejudice. Also to reassess my life.
Reader, it was not to be. Right when I got into town a headline blared at me from a newspaper box on a street corner. “Alameda Labor Dispute Hinges on Skills of Projectionists,” read the front page of the East Bay Express, the area’s alt-weekly. The projectionists at the Alameda Theatre were on strike. The theater’s owner refused to hire union operators. Shows were starting late and breaking down, prints were scratched and dirty. Audiences were leaving with black clouds over their heads. Incompetents were manning the equipment and the owner didn’t care. He offered no excuses. Digital projection would replace film projection any day now, any second, he said, and “when I convert to digital there is no projectionist. There’s no projectionist anymore. I am trying to make them understand that.”
He was dreaming about a day when the machines would run themselves at the same time as he was talking out his ass. I walked by the theater to make sure the strike was on. It was, in a California way. Some guy was sitting in a folding chair with flyers in his lap. There was no blow-up rat, no pickets that night, nobody chanting slogans. Still, I couldn’t go in. I used to be a movie theater projectionist. I couldn’t cross the line.
Twice each month on Friday nights, the leaflet said, the Harmony Center for the Joyful Spirit hosts movies at the “Home of Gwendolyn and Daniel.” The mission of Oakland’s Harmony Center is to bring “Joy and Inspiration into our lives.” “What better way to do that than to get together with friendly people for an informal meal, enjoy a great film, and then have a lively discussion of the ethical and spiritual lessons of the film?” the leaflet asked. It described Gwendolyn and Daniel’s “24th floor penthouse apartment with a ‘top of the world’ view” where “movies are shown on our 58-inch plasma HDTV with Dolby Digital Surround Sound.” Instructions followed: “If possible, please call or email with your choice of pizza, meat or veggie. Please note that we maintain a shoeless household.” Now I knew I was in California. And I knew what being in California meant: no matter how spiritual the discussion, the pizza would suck.
kill me
California is death haunted compared to New York. Everything is still and spooky, the grass along the highways north of Oakland is dry and brown. New York moves in the frame-skip fast-forward of digital video. One thing replaces another, they build an IKEA in no time by paving over cobblestone streets in Brooklyn, and they demolish buildings from the 1850s to do it. In New York, even the ghosts get priced out. In the quiet counties of Marin and Contra Costa, they linger.
It never occurred to me that I’d rather see Lynndie England in a movie than Norah Jones. Nothing works in My Blueberry Nights. Even Wong Kar-wai’s famous ability to pick music deserts him. Regardless of what’s playing on the sound track, it’s “After Midnight” you hear — the film looks like a ten-year-old beer commercial starring Eric Clapton.
What has Wong Kar-wai been doing for the last eight years? None of it makes sense. He seems more lost than any of his characters. Today we live off revivals of Days of Being Wild or As Tears Go By, but when In the Mood for Love came out in 2001 it was a film you pressed close, you looked into its eyes, it was tragic, true, and hot. Its sound track got us through many nights or car rides home — “Quizás, quizás, quizás.” Seven years later, it’s over. The thrill is gone, the nights are cold.
ouch
I can’t say anything about Juno because I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it because I hated Little Miss Sunshine so much. After I saw Little Miss Sunshine I really wished I hadn’t. I refuse to make that mistake again. If that’s what a feel-good movie is, I can’t stand to feel that good. It’s physically painful for me to feel that good.
Before and during the festival, about fifty films are screened during the day for the press. I saw forty of them. I missed one because of a therapy appointment. (Even though I am a film critic, I hope to be able to have normal relationships someday.) I missed another because I had a hangover and couldn’t face the hour-long trip to Lincoln Center from my apartment in Brooklyn. Two I paid to see, and went on Sunday afternoons after buying tickets using the festival’s complicated and anxiety-inducing website, with its countdown clock.
i love him
Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still on. Car commercials are particularly satisfying these days. Thirty-second-long one-acts with movie-level production design and cinematography, each one is a humanist masterpiece featuring quality acting that fits right in with streaming drama. In one, a wedding party gets caught in the rain and they can’t walk to the outdoor altar so they have to jump in their mini-SUV to get there. You really get a feel for the relationships between these four people in that thirty seconds. Car manufacturers know our little victories are hard-won. Automakers just get us. In other ads, the family drama of auto insurance plays out just as insightfully.