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.

But Seriously . . . Health Care, Town Meetings. Movie Bits.

Sunset Finch


After yesterday’s shenanigans about town meetings, let me be straightforward about health care for a moment. I always worry when we try to make everyone equally blameworthy or praiseworthy. In a subject or situation as complex as 300 million human bodies, equal responsibility will never happen. There are smokers and speeders and bungee jumpers and late-night revelers and parents who give their babies red meat or refuse to give them red meat . . . and there are plenty, plenty, plenty of the plain old unlucky. I've been there. Have you? Probably so. Maybe it's time we all drop the hysteria, study the material, do the best we can, forgive each other and pay up. Is that kind of thinking Communist or Christian?

And Mr. Gothpunker, I’m not forgetting you. I predict line-by-line analyses of your shenanigans in the near future (though I think I’m getting something of your drift about poetry, general culture, and elitism). I predict a return to highbrow topics over the weekend or early next week.

To lighten up for now, here are some random thoughts on movies.

I should have hated A Perfect Getaway but thoroughly enjoyed it. The plot violates or stretches all kinds of rules about manipulation and plausibility, but dammit, it's fun. And I'm afraid it badly, badly needs the big screen--some great Hawaii scenery that you don't want to squeeze into a TV, even your fancy flat screen. Don't quit on it after the first 15 minutes or so, where the characters are completely unlikable. Things change--maybe not likability, but just . . . things.

Recently, a friend asked what I thought about Judd Apatow’s movies. They sort of blend together for me, but I've enjoyed them all, at least as an excuse to have popcorn. Ditto The Hangover was a working definition of guilty pleasure. Even more so, Funny People, starring Seth Rogen (who else?) and Adam Sandler, who's usually not my favorite actor. Still, that movie had more substance than most Apatow films, though comedy prevailed most of the time.

Another pleasant surprise was 500 Days of Summer , which had a bit of an Apatow feel.

Go see a movie this weekend. Get out of the heat. Have popcorn. Be a minor sinner. Tell your intellect to shut up for two hours--nobody listens to reason anyway. Go to a matinee, so you don't have to tell so many people to shut up. Well, at least your odds improve. Have popcorn. Get butter. Then you're even with the bungee jumpers and NASCAR drivers in the health care game.

Movie Reviews: Public Enemies, Easy Virtue

Above: Mrs. Finch Goes to the Movies, Has Popcorn.
Left: in her absence, Mr. Finch scouts for hotties.

Movie reviews. Ratings from low of 1 to high of 4.

Public Enemies. 2+.

I don’t want my money back, but I’m glad the popcorn was warm. Michael Mann likes to moderate action with long, slow, impressionistic photographs. I didn’t find the characters worth a long, slow study. The long, slow study dulled the action and did little to make Dillinger or Melvin Purvis fully-realized characters to care about.

So the movie is neither fish nor fowl, neither serious psychological portrait nor compelling shoot-em-up.

The action could have been good, but these dozens of intense, flat-bellied, dark-and-greasy-haired white guys running around in 1930s black cars left me wondering who was chasing whom. That was especially the case in a night scene in the Wisconsin woods, which could have been gripping if I’d known what was going on.

Late in the movie we get an imposing black guy, a stout, sadistic redhead, and an ersatz Joseph Cotton copper-agent. They do their jobs well, and they’re a relief from the sameness, but they’re too little, too late.

Easy Virtue. 3+.

Softball player, golfer, former halfback and point guard, a friend of mine followed his wife to this one and liked it, so I decided to do the same, and I'm glad. Excellent acting, directing, and writing add interest and gravitas to a story that could have limited itself to one more Noel Coward comedy of manners. I’m tempted to give it a 4, but the fact is, it’s still English drawing room stuff, muffled chuckles, muffled passion, and shades of grey that are still pretty black and white.