Just a quick note that I posted a review of Man of Steel on the BC Humanist Association blog. Make sure to follow that blog for the occasional update. Tl;dr Knowing it was Christian propaganda, I should have taken a pass.
Continue readingTag: movies
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Eleven Foot Eight – Truck Crashes for Chuckles
I think this is an opportunity for a film person on the Winnipeg St. overpass in Regina. 11foot8 is a website that highlights ridiculous crash videos at a notorious, low, train bridge. Nice stacks:
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Cycling In Regina Isn’t Always Easy
What’s it like for a Regina cyclist to go see a movie? Besides homicidal/comical drivers (from Alberta), there are flooded Multi Use Pathways, and underpasses that are creeks. Persist past those hazards, and there are gravelly “Shared” bike lanes with parked cars ready to give you the “door-prize”. Can you
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Pulp Renaissance
In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had … Continue reading →
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: A Few Movies
Taking some time on the weekend to waste a little time, I caught up on some movies. “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” [6/10] was extremely uncomfortable at times, and oh so predictable, but still enjoyable enough to get a passing mark. The Spock on TV joke during the movie helped
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Django; The ‘D’eath Is Not Silent
Watched “Django Unchained” [7/10], and realized that bodies were exploding because it was a Tarantino movie. It went about as expected. Some parts should not be watched, or it will cause trauma; Like the dogs ripping someone apart. However, I was pleasantly surprised to hear this Jim Croce song. Before
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: WikiLeaks: Hollywood Hatchet, Swedish Swindle
The problem with how Sweden, the UK, and the United States have been treating Julian Assange of Wikileaks, has dragged on for years. It’s left the foremost journalist in the world stuck in a London apartment building that houses the Ecuadorian Embassy where Assange is trapped as a political prisoner.
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American&nb…
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American perseverance, ingenuity, courage, an inspiring version of U. S. exceptionalism resulting
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar
How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative “true” story from the not too distant U.S. past – a past to which American viewers can easily relate – a feel good story of American perseverance, ingenuity, courage, an inspiring version of U. S. exceptionalism resulting
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Killer Robots From Earth
I grew up thinking that Killer Robots From Venus was a pretty amusing song. Now that we’re living in 2013, the ‘future’, we have to seriously contemplate the implications of building robots that can kill as their intended purpose. Our next-future expectations depend upon what we choose now. I’m not
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Spoiler alert: The U.S. Navy SEALS murder Osama Bin Laden and several others in his Pakistani compound without mercy and with vengeful malice. Most of the controversy swirling round the film revolves around whether the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow – positioned as auteur by most commentators – endorses torture or whether the film’s narrative
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Representations of torture are recessed in the second half of the film, it should be noted, not because of a moral awakening by any given character but only because of a policy decision by a new administration. The Obama TV moment presented in the background in the context of a CIA war or situation room makes this crystal clear. Even Dan’s warning to Maya – relatively early in the film – about the possible repercussions of “enhanced” methods of detainee interrogations comes in the form of a political warning about saving her CIA ass, not moral reprehension.
The devastating loss of American lives on 9/11 is the initiating narrative event that rolls out a straightforward revenge structure ending in the murder of Bin Laden and several of his domestic companions. Before the film proper begins in earnest, however, we are exposed to an introductory screen text informing us that the representations we are about to watch are based on “firsthand accounts of actual event.” There is an implicit moral distancing in this textual strategy – “I’m just showing you the way it was” – but certainly one of its other effects is to suggest that what we are about to see carries the weight of authenticity and is therefore important if not “real.” The now conventional use of handheld cameras is meant to reinforce this effect with a documentary-like style of shooting. In other words, the “realism” of the film is not an allegiance to “truth” or reality,” whatever those may be since neither is a given, but a filmic effect resulting from a well-established set of film conventions creating an illusion, a fiction, of “what really happened.” It seems appropriate to evaluate the film as such.
The film proper opens with a black screen over which we hear the dying voices of only American victims of the twin towers, a restriction thus positioning us emotionally if not ideologically as American viewers. Immediately after this audio text, we are treated to roughly forty-five minutes of extensive torture sequences, including several instances of the infamous water-boarding technique. Juxtaposing the first visual torture scene of al-Qaeda’s No. 3 leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with the voices of the twin tower Americans who are about to die creates a structural effect implying a retaliatory cause-effect relationship – “I am torturing you because of 9/11” – and that effect is sustained throughout the entire 45 minutes of multiple scenes of torture and implied throughout the entire film.
These kind of scenes are gradually recessed as we move in the second half of the film towards interrogations without torture – but nonetheless grounded in bribes or threats – and sequences of CIA group intelligence analysis: the so-called “hard work” some critics want to see as the reason for discovering Bin Laden. But the dialogue reveals on several occasions that the analysis – the “hard work” – really results from information received from interrogated detainees, on screen and off, and those detainees, we know, were abused in some form or other if not overtly tortured. “Does our treatment of detainees work? You bet.”
Inter-cut with these intelligence analysis scenes is a revenge justifying history of major terrorist attacks against westerners since 9/11, but especially against Americans, each successfully gaining more screen time and thus significance until the final, climactic suicide bombing in Afghanistan of one of Maya’s closest colleagues, Jessica, who has been betrayed by her al-Qaeda connections. Now it’s “personal” is the implication as we move towards the final bloody revengeful act of murder in Pakistan.
But, in truth there has been little if anything personal in the film – no character development for anyone let alone Maya who has been merely the driving agent of revenge. We know little more about her by the end of the film than we do at the beginning, and the final scene of Maya in a giant U.S. army transport plane alone, isolated, and small is telling in its ambiguity. “Where do you want to go?” asks a crew member, his question unanswered. And what do we read on her face? Relief? Satisfaction? Sadness? An unwinding? Anxiety now that her obsessive-compulsive revenge narrative has come to its end? Plenty of room for the the viewer’s meaning.
Following that final character scene is another screen text rounding out the ideological thrust of the film in its acknowledgement of the victims of 9/11 once again and all those who serve the American exceptionalist project. Closure is provided by that framing text confirming the essence of the film as an apologia of sorts, a justification of policy, of strategy: “Revenge and all that that entails, including torture, are okay because they drove us to get Bin Laden, and we did that for you.” Whether this is a impaired moral justification is the viewer’s decision.
In the end, it matters little what the filmmaker or commentators say about Zero Dark Thirty. You are the site of meaning: it’s your reading of the film conditioned though it may be by your cultural, moral, and social inscription that matters. Like any text, film texts are unstable, dynamic, their meaning put in motion by your engagement with them. In a sense there is no film without you.Zero Dark Thirty is provocatively open enough – disturbing in so many ways – to allow for a variety of ways to read it, and that makes it a challenging, ideologically complex film well worth viewing – far more exciting than some of its straightforward conventional Oscar challengers.
Politics and Entertainment: Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer’s Moral Judgment
Spoiler alert: The U.S. Navy SEALS murder Osama Bin Laden and several others in his Pakistani compound without mercy and with vengeful malice. Most of the controversy swirling round the film revolves around whether the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow – positioned as auteur by most commentators – endorses torture or whether the film’s narrative
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: CBS bans breasts, buttocks, genitals, this Pink stuff at Grammy Awards
By Obert Madondo | The Canadian Progressive, Feb. 9, 2013: Nearly ten years after Janet Jackson’s famous wardrobe malfunction, the CBS is on high alert concerning nudity. A “Wardrobe Advisory” email the network’s Standards & Practices department sent out to representatives of stars scheduled to perform at Sunday’s 55th Annual Grammy Awards is warning performers
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Flight
I’d suggest people watch “Flight” [9/10] if you like deep movies about alcoholism. You might end up cheering for the drunk and feeling bad for doing so.
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Looper Movie
I rode the bus, ended up at another mall, decided on a movie, found out it was Tuesday and only $2. Win! “Looper” [8/10] bent my brain a little, but wasn’t a time travelling classic I fear. It was trying to be complex, and although I didn’t predict the ending,
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Movies
I caught some movies lately, including “Lincoln” [9/10], and “Perfect Pitch” [6/10]. “Life of Pi” [9/10] was much better than both of them, however. “Lincoln” was an interesting history lesson, it just didn’t feel like it was more than a mini-series condensed. UPDATE Dec. 14 – Watched “Lord of the
Continue readingThe Equivocator: Uranowski’s First Law of Involuntary Suspension of Disbelief
Uranowski’s First Law of Involuntary Suspension of Disbelief Even if you didn’t know that the 1999 masterpiece “Deep Blue Sea” was about super-intelligent sharks before hand, Saffron Burrows’s character (Dr. Susan McCallister) interacts with a 3D computer model 14 minutes into the movie showing us all that the sharks mentioned in
Continue readingThe Equivocator: Giving the Devil the benefit of the law
A Man for All Seasons (1960) —————————————————————————————————- Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law! More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: I’d cut down every law in England … Continue reading →
Continue reading