Waltz with Bashir (**3/4)

This movie that its creator, Ari Folman, calls an animated documentary, is nominated for an Academy Award, but not in the animation or documentary categories, but as foreign-language film. Folman is an Israeli who, spurred by a conversation with a friend, realizes that he’s almost completely forgotten the details of his service in the military during the country’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Interviews with men he knew on the battlefield are the basis for the film.

Animation frees Folman to use “footage” and “camera angles” that would not otherwise be available. (The animation, partly based on live footage, utilizes a realistic, but simplified, style). Flashbacks, dream sequences, and the creative use of music, too, make this seem more like a narrative film, although it’s organized around interview segments (mostly using the actual voices of Folman’s old comrades). Folman provides few details about his life before or after the war, and no geopolitical details about the war. It is possible to see the movie as anti-Israel, I suppose, in that Israelis are shown killing civilians. However, the clear point is that such atrocities are the natural by-product of war and the fear and confusion that it produces. The director is Everyman.

Even while realizing that Folman’s choices were deliberate, for me they made the film a little too abstract. Some sequences are quite striking, like the one in which a solider is separated from his unit and has to swim to avoid running into his enemy. But it if a movie is not going to provide a storyline in terms of why the war was being fought, then it should have given a more significant one in terms of its central character.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/1/09

No Country for Old Men (***1/2)

Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

September Dawn (*3/4)

This is causing some controversy among Mormons because of its implication that Brigham Young, who first led members of the Church of Latter Day Saints to Utah, bore ultimate responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, an 1857 event in which 120 men, women, and children perished.

As Young, Terence Stamp probably gives the most forceful performance, but he’s actually a minor character in a soapy romance set against the backdrop of the events leading up to the massacre. The main heavy, the bishop of the Mormon community in the story, is played by Jon Voight. The other two stars are Trent Ford, as the bishop’s son, and Tamara Hope as the proto-feminist daughter of a wagon-train pastor bound for California. The pastor’s flock had sought refuge on Mormon land because they were nearly out of food and water, though, by the looks of things, their supply of hair-care products remained bountiful.

Ford, looking fit and ready for the cover of Teen People, meets the virginal-looking Hope, and the sparks fly. The Hallmark-card dialogue, on the other hand, lands with a thud. “I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you,” says he. The movie Pearl Harbor looks like social realism compared to this. Voight, meanwhile, lends presence to a one-dimensional villain, but gets saddled with lines like “You don’t belong here. You’re not one of us.”

Part of the context of the massacre was the deep suspicion with which the church was regarded, which we can see even today if recent polls are to be believed. In other words, the church elders may have been paranoid, but that didn’t mean there weren’t people out to get them. (The church had clashed with the United States government over polygamy and other issues.) This early history of persecution is represented by giving Voight some ephemeral flashbacks, amounting to perhaps 30 seconds of footage.

Director Christopher Cain (Gone Fishin’, The Next Karate Kid) sees a parallel in the story with current religious extremism, and while that may exist, this sheds little light into the mindset of people who would use God to justify their atrocities. While the particulars of the massacre itself appear to have been rendered accurately (as far as is known), the movie overall is shallow.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/23/07