Miscellany
There's an interesting article over at Salon on Fahrenheit 9/11. The author took a group of infantrymen stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia to see the film and get their feedback. Their response? They hated it. And have some pretty insightful reasons on why. It's worth reading... or rather, page 3 is worth reading. You have my permission to skip pages one and two... nothing much there...
I saw Spiderman 2 last night. I really enjoyed it. Personally, I'd like to see more serials in the world of film. It always mystifies me that ideas as uneven as Star Trek or James Bond manage such serial success, while such a perfect serial genre - the comic book - seems to yield consistently good movies with so much less success. As long as Sam Raimi stays on the job, the promise is high (maybe it's his experience with television serials that gives him such a good ear for it). Let us give thanks that he didn't make the Burton mistake and try to throw the entire kitchen sink into the sequel.
1 Comments:
Just curious... what were the insightful comments?
Actually, the comments regarding the juxtaposition of soldiers as murderers vs. soldiers as poor souls taken advantage of were very insightful, at least on a narrative level.
I wasn't too impressed by F9/11 (some day I'll do a review on my blog); it contained important facts in a relatively muted polemical form hurt most by incoherency (imo). Nevertheless, the fact that soldiers over there were portrayed as thugs and here were portrayed as victims is not entirely inconsistent: Viet Nam has always served as the most visceral example of what happens when we send our children to the inevitably de-humanizing experience of killing others. (This is not a full-fledged Vietnam parallel; any war has the same consequences, but Vietnam showed them too us as never before). The fact that our "sons and daughters" (I guess at my age more my "brothers and sisters") act thuggish in the field of war doesn't mean we think they're thugs; but rather, in the mob-mentality and unquestioning blanket of the military, it's hard for them *not* to be thugs (at least, this is a possible interpretation). Besides that, I think it was also a case of assuming the audience already understood the counterperspective (essentially, the soldiers are basically good kids doing their duty) and showing a contrasting perspective: people talking of this "liberation" as a video game, and (don't remember if this was in the movie or I saw it at a different source) talking about how much they hate Iraqis after the way they've been treated; parallel to some of the Abu Ghraib officers calling prisoners "it".
As for the "not all soldiers are poor", that is of course true but not really the point -- many of them are, but the biggest problem I see is simply the concentration of recruiters in neighborhoods depicted in the film -- it does seem somewhat ethically dubious to tell a kid you'll see what the Army can do about getting him a rap record deal.
In the end is a question I often ponder: how much responsibility does one have to the ideal of "fair" in terms of showing as many opposing viewpoints as possible -- especially if they can be safely assumed to be well known before your polemic?
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