FullMetal_Atheist Blog

First time writer/director Charles H. Ferguson‘s documentary concerns the post-2003 US occupation of Iraq.  It covers the toppling of the Saddam-led Ba’ath government, the rise of a Muslim fundamentalist civil war in the country, and the violent insurgencies against coalition forces.  Most specifically No End In Sight tells the story of an ill-prepared American-led occupation that was fueled by incompetence, misinformation and lies.

Ferguson’s approach is to utilize talking head interviews with military personal, local journalists, and (in most cases refreshingly frank) occupation coordinators interspersed with newsreel footage of the increasingly chaotic breakdown of Iraqi society, post-Saddam. While this could have made for a dry, uninvolving piece, it is a cleverly structured story with sharp editing that is truly exceptional.  By letting the facts speak for themselves, Ferguson and his collaborators have made a compelling indictment of the Bush administration's treatment of Iraq; a nation it claims has been delivered from tyranny and bloodshed.

The evidence of US blunders presented within is enough to bring even the staunchest pro-war, Bush lovin’ Republican’s blood to boil (governmental dismissal of expert evidence that Iraq would collapse into anarchy without sufficient policing, a total disregard for civilian welfare, fresh-out-of-Harvard graduates in charge of Baghdad traffic control).  Most disturbing of all is the suggestion that coalition forces squandered the good will of the Iraqi people leading to the rise of extreme fundamentalism in the region. For anyone who wondered what happened to those smiling children waving US flags and screaming ‘Thank you America’ at passing Humvees on CNN after the initial takeover – the heartbreaking answer will be found here.

The documentary’s impartiality extends to its treatment, or lack thereof, of ‘Gulf War II’ itself. This is a picture which firmly concerns itself with events after the overthrow of Saddam, with the exception of a brief Post-9/11 history lesson for anyone who may have been shipwrecked on a desert island for the last six years.  There is no talk of the ethics, morality or hidden agendas of the war itself and no overt politicizing.  It could be suggested that the arguments are a little one-sided but inter-titles make clear that the most well known and culpable figures (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.) declined to be interviewed.

That said, anyone who has remained informed on events in Iraq may not find any new or enlightening information in the film. Ferguson's real achievement, however, is to bring all the facts together into a cohesive history – and to do so in a way that is both riveting and devastating.

This is, of course, a story without conclusion. The real, unanswerable question that the film poses is “What happens now?” but in the meantime this essential, vital piece of reportage will stand as a definitive document, and along with Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, one of the very finest non-fiction films of recent years.

 

Foreign film makers seem awfully adept at coming up with new ways to bring the apocalypse to the British capital these days.  In the course of a few months of each other there was Aussie James McTeigue's silly, but enjoyable, V for Vendetta, Mexican Alfonso Cuarón's majestic Children of Men and Spain's Juan Carlos Fresnadillo with his sequel to Danny Boyle's 2002 pseudo-zombie shocker 28 Days Later.

 

Synopsis:

Seven months after the population of mainland Britain was almost totally wiped out by a manmade 'rage virus' the country is slowly being repopulated. A 'green zone' is set up on London's Isle of Dogs where refugees, under the aegis of the US military, are brought back to the country to rebuild their lives.  Robert Carlyle's Don is one such returnee. Haunted by the memory of his wife, who he abandoned to save himself and whom he believes is dead, he awaits the return of his children who were holidaying in Spain during the initial outbreak. When the virus breaks out again, a US army doctor (Rose Byrne, also seen recently in Boyle's Sunshine) begins to suspect that Don's children might hold the key to a cure for the infection. She realises that protecting them at all costs, from both those that have the virus and the military, is vitally important.

 

The concept of making a follow-up to Boyle's modest, but effective, original might seem a curious one.  It was suggested in the coda of the UK original that the Infected (screenwriter Alex Garland's shorthand for those who had contracted the virus) were dying en masse of starvation.  To work around this dramatic dead end, Fresnadillo and his screenwriting collaborators, had to come up with an ingenious but unwieldy & clunky initial premise. To say more on that particular plot point would ruin some of the best twists in the tale, however.  It's true though that unlike the original film this one doesn't drop the ball in the final quarter. In fact it's refreshing to see such a relentless, unashamedly scary horror movie after seemingly endless remakes and 'torture porns' clogging up the genre in recent years.

 

Fresnadillo does contradict the original in a couple of minor ways.  The Infected are no longer photosensitive – the first time we see them they're happily rampaging across the Essex countryside in broad daylight.  Danny Boyle went to great lengths to point out that 28 Days Later was not a zombie film per se, and yet in the sequel's most celebrated sequence, the helicopter scene (you'll know it when you see it!) we see dismembered torsos kicking about as if they'd just stepped off the set of the Dawn of the Dead remake.  Although there's nothing in 28 Weeks Later to match the terrifying attack on Cillian Murphy's childhood home in the original, it's a much better paced film.  Also, Fresnadillo never makes the mistake of using humor to give the audience room to breathe.

 

There are some obvious parallels with US military incompetence in Iraq of course but the primary focus throughout seems to be continually upping the ante in order to terrify the viewer.  By the time the continually dwindling group of survivors reach an abandoned underground station, your fingernails should be firmly embedded in the arm rests.  A brief but humorous final shot suggests the story is not done yet (28 Months Later?) but this is one horror franchise that has more than earned the right to become a trilogy.

A young immigrant roof tiler in France is witness to a conversation concerning a dubious-sounding ‘game’ in which vast sums of money can be won. When the house owner (a former player of the game) dies, leaving the immigrant’s handiwork unpaid for, destiny seems to hand him the opportunity to take part  himself.

To say much more regarding the storyline of Géla Babluani’s remarkable debut feature would be a huge disservice to both film maker and viewer. At a mean, lean 90 minutes Tzameti cuts pretty much straight to the chase and it’s wonderful to experience a thriller so lacking in the flabby storytelling found in Hollywood equivalents.  If you’re looking for subtext, well it could be argued that the film is a grim satire on the exploitation of a migrant underclass at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. The obnoxious, cabalistic individuals behind the game with their briefcases of cash and clear indifference to human life would certainly support that hypothesis. However, like a precision built machine designed with a sole purpose, here is a film custom built to keep you riveted, desperate to know what’s going to happen next but dreading each impending plot revelation.

Tzameti isn’t a perfect movie. There’s some shaky acting, perhaps a sign of the inexperience of both director and much of the cast, and the motivations of some of the characters seem rather murky. These are minor, forgivable points however. With its blacker-than-black humor and a protagonist who begins as voyeur before, willingly, stepping into the heart of darkness there’s a clear Hitchcockian influence here. Aided immeasurably by beautiful black and white photography, which actually seems to get more noirish as the film progresses, and clever editing (note the use of close-ups), Tzamati is a real white-knuckler. A must-see!

In which Michael Moore dons rubber gloves, lubes up and prepares to give a rectal examination to the Unites States' health care system. For the most part, this is a far better film that either Bowling For Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11 although, ever the polemicist, Moore does rather derail some of his arguments with questionable material.
Like Columbine, which used gun control, or a lack thereof, as the springboard for a discussion of broader topics, Sicko isn't really about the 50 million or so Americans without medical insurance. In fact the writer/director points this out in the opening moments. Moore concentrates on those who are, apparently, lucky enough to be covered by insurance policies and the bureaucracy they face when attempting to claim on them. This material, which takes up the first half of the film, is some of Moore's strongest work since Roger & Me, almost two decades ago. The anger, incredulity and, saddest of all, resignation of those crippled with debt or living in physical and emotional pain due to the greed of their insurance companies make a much stronger case for socialised medicine that the later, already infamous, shenanigans in Cuba.
In one early segment Moore gives us a brief synopsis of the stories of several people whose claims were rejected. The viewer might expect these to be precis of the more in-depth analysis to come. Instead, Moore simply explains that these individuals died before they could get the treatment they needed, treatment their healthcare companies claimed was not urgent.
 Moore's argument - that healthcare run, unashamedly, as a business benefits nobody but the shareholders is a compelling one. At this point I should probably lay my own cards on the table and state that, as a recent migrant to the United States myself, I still find it shocking to see doctors advertising their services on television, or huge billboards plugging some new, space-aged hospital. The stories in Sicko, anecdotal though they may be, offer plenty of ammunition for those claiming that America's healthcare system is both ineffective for those who need it most and just plain unethical.
  The problem with Sicko, the film, however might be rather easier to diagnose. Moore takes off for Canada to look at a near-neigbor of the U.S that has a policy of universal healthcare for everyone. Then Moore's off to London where he stops in on retired MP Tony Benn and the Royal Hammersmith hospital where everything is just fine. Across the channel in Paris it's the same story - Why, in France the goverment even provide new mothers with someone to do the ironing! The problem with these sequences is that, although there is nothing essentially  innaccurate about them, they are very selective in what  is shown. Moore has provided, early in his film, a scene in an American E.R. where people wait 9 hours for treatment but he doesn't so much as mention that things are the same, or worse, in the U.K. - or that waiting lists for non-life threatening operations can be years.
 By the time Moore takes a group of 9/11 volunteer firefighters to Havana (with a short, rather pointless, detour to Guantanamo Bay) even the most liberal minded viewer might suggest the red carpet treatment they receive is nothing more than a Castro-organised publicity stunt. They even get an audience with the paediatrician daughter of 'Che' Guevara!
It's a shame because at the heart of Sicko is a justly angry, yet quietly devastating examination of a system that just doesn't work. If Moore could have kept his more disingenuous impulsions in check Sicko could have been a truly great film. That said, it's the best thing he's done in years.

"I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel. In these dreams,
I'm there, implicated in some kind of ongoing
circumstance. All indications are that I belong to this
dream continuity."
   So wrote the nameless protagonist of Haruki
Murakami's novel Dance, Dance, Dance of his supernatural
encounters in a room of the aforementioned hotel. Words
that could just as easily have come from John Cusack's
paranormal debunker in Mikael Håfström's adaptation of a
Stephen King short.
Cusack is Mike Enslin, skeptical ghosthunter and
remaindered novelist. Haunted by his own ghosts, and the
kind of spirits that come in a bottle, Enslin travels to
Manhattan to spend the night in the, supposedly, haunted
 eponymous room of the Dolphin Hotel - site of over
fifty assorted suicides, murders and deaths attributed
to 'natural causes'.
This, of course, is something of a throwback to those
old 'writer spends a night in a haunted house' movies
that many of us would watch on late night TV as kids - a
subgenre which, surely, reached it's peak with Robert
Wise's original, supreme The Haunting.
Sam Jackson is the hotel manager who tries to talk
Enslin out of it but this is really Cusack's film. Like
other recent horrors (Bug, Vacancy) most of the action
takes place in a single room.
Unfortunately, Cusack's performance alternates between
sonambulism and gurning hysteria. Jackson, in what's
really an extended cameo, phones in his performance from
the hotel reception and, in one bizarre scene, turns up
to enigmatically scold Cusack from the room's minibar.
By the time blood starts leaking from the walls and
plumbing you feel the movie has descended into haunted
house cliche, with only the incessant sound of Karen
Carpenter's 'We've Only Just Begun' providing any real
horror.
The, laughably simplistic, attempt at theological debate
doesn't help matters, either. As if the recent The
Reaping wasn't bad enough, here's another atheistic
skeptic getting their just desserts - this time, with
the added guilt trip of a terminally ill child whose
father denies her the glory of a heavenly life eternal.
It's all rather a shame really. With a decent cast and
it's old skool scenario 1408 could have been a
contender. Sadly, those looking for some creepy Stephen
King haunted hotel thrills had best dig out that old VHS
copy of The Shining.

Brian Flemming (who co-wrote BatBoy: The Musical, for which his soul shall be eternally damned) wrote and directed this funny and irrevelent look at what he considers to be the myth of Jesus Christ.

For sure this is a polemical film, although Flemming does allow a handful of Christians to give their views on what the big J means to them. Various talking heads offer the view that the tale of Christ was, in fact, based on earlier, pagan myths such as those of Mithra and Dionysus. Flemming, clearly working on a small budget, imaginatively uses stock footage and public domain film clips to get his point of view across and noted atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Carrier are on hand to add their opinions.

The 60 minute film ends with Flemming (a lapsed fundamentalist) confronting his old school principle on the nature of his faith-based high schools teaching methods.

The God Who Wasn't There isn't likely to convert anyone who isn't already a disbeliever, but Flemmings personal, likeable style is very watchable, especially given the short running time. Flemming and his interviewees make some extremely potent points about why the Jesus story must, at the very least, be questioned for historical veracity and the film is pretty funny too (at least it is if you're already a hellbound heathen like myself, God botherers may be offended).

Special note should be made of a fantastic score by DJ Madson, which is available - for free!!!  - from the films website.

Korean cinema has been wowing us (well, some of us) for the past few years now. The advent of democracy and generous state handouts to aspiring young film makers have been major benefits for film fans across the globe.
Whether it's the live-squid eating existentialist ultraviolence of Park Chan-wook or the wordless humanism of Kim Ki-duk South Korean cinema is presently the most dynamic and exciting in the world.
And now, lumbering onto the screen like its titular star, comes Joon Ho-bong's The Host (Gwoemul), the most domestically successful film in South Korea's history.
Getting straight to the point, The Host is an unashamed monster movie. A giant monster movie. From Asia. So, if you're thinking 'Godzilla' one could hardly blame you. In fact, Tokyo's favourite radioactive reptile is very much a precursor to The Host's mutated river beastie. Most of us, of a certain age, probably assume we saw the original Godzilla movie, Gojira(1954) on TV as kids. Chances are, however, unless you've sought out the recent, excellent, DVD collectors edition or grew up in Asia, you've not really seen it at all. The 1956 US re-edit loses much of the original political allegory due to missing scenes (replaced with Raymond Burr and assorted 'Yanks in White Coats') and inaccurate dubbing. Although this was partly done to tighten the film up a little for a western audience there must also have been the intent to hide some of the Japanese anger present in the film, aimed squarely at US atomic testing in the Pacific, not to mention the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade before.
Like Gojira, The Host springboards from actual events, in this case the US dumping of formaldehyde into Korea's Han river several years ago. The enviromental effects were considerable and were still fresh in the public consiousness when the film was released last summer.
Of course, in the film the formaldehyde mutates some river-life (a fish? Salamander??) into a large, pissed-off monster with a taste for human flesh. Joon wastes no time in introducing his beast, not for him the slow revelation via scenes of people being mysteriously dragged under water or overturned fishing boats. Ten minutes in and we've already had a long, hard look at his star. This could been disasterous if The Host didn't have so much more going for it. The effects work, by San Francisco-based The Orpanage (who worked on The Phantom Menace) and Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, are excellent and lend a real personality to the monster. However, the real soul of the film belongs to four members of a deeply dysfunctional family who only begin to operate on anything like a normal level when their youngest member (a little girl) gets eaten by the creature in the opening minutes.
The father, played by Song Kang-ho (who seems to make a habit of losing his daughter in rivers, see also Sympathy for Mr Vengeance) is convinced the girl is still alive. Unfortunately the authorities, under the request of the US military have quarantined him, convinced the monster has infected him with a biohazardous virus. Escaping along with his father, his 'intellectual' younger brother and their bronze-medallist-winner-at-archery sister they head for the sewers of Seoul in an attempt to find the child before she either starves to death or ends up as dinner for the mutant fish-thing.

 To say anything more about the plot would be to give the game away. Enough to comment that Joon's mixture of sci-fi staples, high comedy and human pathos works even when it shouldn't. Much has been made of The Host's supposed anti-American sentiment and there's certainly some digs at US imperialism and the myth of WOMD, yet the Korean authorities don't come off much better. The police are portrayed as inhuman and uncaring and the government as unquestioning stooges to American superior knowhow. This could well be a satirical dig at South Korea's 'buffer-zone' status in the continuing US/North Korean cold war. In fact, 'Dearest Leader' Kim Jong-il (a known cinephile) is reported to be a big fan of The Host, extremely unsusual given the anti-south sentiment in his country. Whether he prefers it to, say, Team America: World Police however, we may never know.
Despite all these poitical and social touchstones (which also include references to the SARS scare and governmental media manipulation) The Host never forgets to be, first and foremost, a big, fun, creature-feature. And it's a fantastic one at that. It's tense, it's scary, it's funny, moving and plays with your expectations from the opening minutes. It's also one of the absolute best films of the past year.