Green Zone; White Ribbon. Movie Reviews.

THE GREEN ZONE with Matt Damon: B+

In The Green Zone, there’s plenty of action and it feels convincing. The center of the movie’s plot is the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq and what that question means for the soldiers assigned to finding them.

For me, the center of the movie’s soul is the casual risking of lives—American soldiers, Iraqi citizens, bystanders and patriots—based on unreliable information and political tyranny. It’s hard for me not to see our Texas royalty sipping liquids in comfort, while amazing, awful things are going on daily at a distance that’s safe from D.C. or Texas.

Yes, the movie pushed my political buttons, and it had almost the feel of realism that I found so convincing in The Hurt Locker.

So why only a B+? Matt Damon is a good action hero, but he’s all action and hero, not the complicated character of multiple facets, which we saw him reveal in The Informant. Damon does all the script asks him to do, which makes for a good guy, but not a great, multidimensional character. The white hats and black hats here are sharply delineated, which makes the story less interesting, even to one who agrees with the film's take on what's black and what's white. But if you're calm about your politics (did I say calm about politics??? in America???) and you like constant action, step right up and get your popcorn.



THE WHITE RIBBON: A

Black and White. German with English subtitles.

If I give much attention to The White Ribbon, I’ll be here till Monday, and the pay for this is job is so-so. Also, the movie will probably play only at art theaters, to which many of you don’t have easy access.

And finally, The White Ribbon is work. There are some beautiful scenes in its black and white cinematography, which creates the feel of an insider’s look at real life in Western agrarian culture in the early 20th century. Here is the trailer; I hope you'll click the full screen option.

YouTube - The White Ribbon HD Movie Trailer

Remember, however, that things moved slower then, even mysteries. And this is a group story, several families long.

Still, despite the ambiguity of its conclusion, The White Ribbon is a compelling, disturbing portrait of a German village in 1913. Several weird misfortunes occur and serve as catalysts for a societal study that seems utterly realistic and horrible--at least to this non-historian who likes open spaces, green fields and barns. Here is no pastoral idyll with cute farm animals and nearby copses. (Corpses, maybe; copses, only a little). What’s revealed is a paternalistic, cruel little world, from which anyone's escape seems difficult or impossible.

The narrator is the young schoolmaster. His romance with the baron's nanny is the streak of innocence, the genuine white ribbon, crawling through the narrative. However, even that love story is fraught with conflict and danger.

Some reviewers might have made too much of the setting as the breeding ground for a specifically Nazi mentality; here are Hitler’s henchmen as children, they say or imply. That might be true, but I suspect it’s a valid portrait of small towns anywhere in Europe or America at that time. For example, I think of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, its puritanical voyeurism, paranoia and repression.

This is not a movie for intellectual sissies; you'll need to pay attention. Also, if you normally need to . . . stretch your back? . . . at a movie, do so by the 90th minute; this ugly little beauty lasts over two hours, but the conclusion is important, and the whole film is well worth the trial. I think I'll be seeing some of these images for months or years.

* *

MOVIE REVIEW: THE INFORMANT

Which Way Is Up?


GPA for The Informant: 4.0

WRITER: SCOTT BURNS DIRECTOR: STEVEN SODERBERGH

Based on a true story, Matt Damon’s new movie, The Informant, is a winner. Although any hope for a viable Hero-Nerd turns out to be built on shifting sand, every role is well-acted, and the pacing is perfect.

For this movie, I’m bothered by “comedy” as a label, which seems to be floating around out there. Rightly or wrongly, when I hear comedy, I think fluff, in spite of all the exceptions. In any case, this is no lightweight film; mostly likely, none of the superb comedies are.

Yes, some of protagonist Mark Whitacre’s (Matt Damon’s) quirky or pathological thinking is amusing, along with the twists in plot created by his mental machinations. But The Informant conveys a substantive tension between humor and an important, convincing dark side—in both the character of Whitacre and the corporate culture in which he finds and loses himself.

More importantly, thinking of The Informant as a comedy might lead us to minimize some of the disturbing questions it plops on our plates, in just the right doses. Writer Scott Burns and director Steven Soderbergh skillfully invite us listen to the darkness and well as the humor.

Can a guy as likable as Whitacre be seriously disturbed? Whose darker side is more menacing, his or his corporation’s? What is more dangerous, more frightening: a predictably corrupt (corporate) culture or a brilliant, driven, delusional oddball within it? Isn’t it true that we expect or even accept that large institutions will be driven by greed and corruption--and aren't oddballs innocents, every single one?

When does someone’s imagination bleed into a kind of fantasy life so consuming that it's genuinely worrisome to caring onlookers? Can fantasy become a series of lies so large that they fill and define the character, who's not even sure they are lies? Or is he? Maybe we and the other characters are the only ones unsure about who is deceiving whom about what.

When does a character’s lying become such an automatic part of him that we feel a need for the correct psychiatric diagnosis? Personality disorder? Borderline personality? We're not dealing with psychotic delusions, so what’s the prognosis?

When does a code of ethics become so fanciful that we lose respect for it—and feel sure our hero should know better too? When do we stop pulling for a guy, even if he’s an underdog? Did he stop being the underdog, the Hero-Nerd? At what point? Does that mean we're pulling for bad guys? Or there are no good guys?

Who else has so thoroughly fooled me recently? Was Whitacre that good or was I a simpleton? Don’t we want our eccentric colleagues, neighbors, friends, who seem harmless, to remain . . . harmless? Shouldn’t they stay true to what we thought they were?

There’s a lot of see-sawing and betrayal in The Informant. If you come away thinking it was all for laughs, one more slick Hollywood affair, a safe date, a cake walk for Matt Damon, then you and I didn’t see the same thing and aren’t asking the same questions.