Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

War, Inc.  (2008)

War, Inc is a debacle. Starring, co-written and produced by John Cusack, it’s an impotent, cheap-looking political satire that longs for relevance, but feels years stale. (It has, in fact, been around for awhile––it was once titled Brand Hauser, it went into production in fall 2006, it was rumored to have been set up for  premiere slots at both Toronto 2007 and Sundance 2008, neither of which, for whatever reason, ever happened.) It’s a sign that Hollywood filmmaking about the current war and its associated politics has fatally passed over from merely irrelevant preaching to the choir, to a kind of solipsistic naivete that should make anyone with an intellectually-rooted anti-war position feel embarrassed to have their politics associated with it. War, Inc personally makes me want to put my head in my hands in shame. The Left deserves to be mocked as much as the Neo-Cons, but nobody deserves to have their reputations sullied by indefensible garbage like this.

Cusack plays Hauser, a hit man in existential crisis who is sent to a fictional, war-torn middle eastern country to lay waste to its leader. As a cover, Hauser pretends to be a conference producer for Tamerlane, a corporation to whom the fighting of war in that zone has been outsourced by the US. Marisa Tomei and Hilary Duff (coated in olive-colored foundation in an attempt to convince that she’s a “Central Asian pop princess”), are the potential love interests. There’s a narrative twist involving the latter actress that the audience figures out about an hour and half before Cusack comes to his own Shocking Realization, which in turn leaves open a gaping plot hole involving that olive-colored foundation. Ultimately, Hauser has a crisis of conscience that prevents him from killing his intended target but mandates the murder of many, many other people, and everyone who remains standing lives happily ever after.

As a brand, John Cuscak is only really saleable when he’s playing a certain kind of romantic anti-hero, and the only thing remotely of interest in War, Inc is the manner in which his persona from countless romantic comedies is recycled into War, Inc’s limp critic of corporatized warfare, virtually without change. The familiar Cusack character is a resolutely single-minded romantic;again and again, this actor has played men for whom nothing is as important as love, who have no goals in life beyond the pursuit and acquisition of a single girl. It’s really bizarre to watch that romantic solipsism transposed into a film that aims to Say Something about a global conflict with potentially apocalyptic implications.

Maybe Cusack’s lefty indignation mandated an attempt at war satire, but for all that this film actually has to say about war profiteering and multi-national relations, it might as well be set in Manhattan. In fact, strip War, Inc of its physical setting and you’ve got an unfunny retread of Grosse Pointe Blank, in which that film’s sexy wink has been swapped out for a thread of family drama that fails to convince. In War Inc’s climax––which is essentially a wholesale replica of the climax of the high school reunion movie, with Ben Kingsley playing Dan Ackroyd and Tomei playing Minnie Driver and 50 or 60 Middle Eastern extras who exist only to be blown away––any sort of political commentary goes out the window. The Cusack character, and the film as a whole, give up on Saying Anything and become chiefly concerned with literally killing off all obstacles in order to abscond with a girl.

With this climax, War, Inc abandons all grounds to claim that its project is truly satirical. As much as something like Zombie Strippers protects itself with the pretense of ironic distance but ultimately offers as much one-dimensional pleasure as a fan of either zombies or strippers could possibly ask for, War, Inc tells us that wanton destruction carried forth in protection of personal interests is bad, and then asks us to indulge in and root for a non-ironic blood bath–and in the B-movie cliches of invincible hitmen and babes toting machine guns–in order to secure the protagonists’ consequence-free escape.

The War, Inc press notes are full of pull quotes from people like Arianna Huffington and Naomi Klein, positioning this star-studded action comedy as a noble work of activism. But like so many contemporary narrative films that intend to grapple with the bungled war in Iraq and the spectre of global terror from a liberal-pacifist perspective, War, Inc has no new point to make, nothing to offer in the way of intellectual insight, no interest in actual ideological dialogue, and it’s certainly not capable of proposing any sort of solution. Films like this and Redacted and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden exist to make their makers feel good about their political correctness and content that their razor-thin world views are accurate and viable, when in fact they represent a tiny fraction of the bigger picture. This is not activism––this is self-congratulation.

In a podcast conversation with Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door, the group blog whose Blogger URL contains his name, Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he’s giving up writing print criticism. This formal declaration comes two weeks after Seitz made some critical comments about the conflict between print and web criticism at the Moving Image Institute; two weeks before that, Seitz writes in the podcast’s comments, he gave notice that he was leaving his post as back-up critic for the New York Times, meaning his piece on the jazz in film series at MoMA will be his last for that publication. In the same comment, Seitz says he’ll be replaced by Nathan Lee, who intimated in last week’s Rotten Tomatoes interview that all those Saturday afternoons devoted to sex and Madame Bovary had paid off in a new position at a major publication.

The House Next Door will carry on under Keith Uhlich’s leadership. Seitz, says he’ll continue to post on the site and is also planning on devoting the summer to making a puppet movie––anyone who will be in Dallas in July and August who wants to get involved with production is invited to send him an email through the site. I’ve excerpted a portion of the transcription of the podcast, in which Seitz succinctly explains his decision to move on from the print world, after the jump.

I certainly wouldn’t mind sticking around and continuing to write pieces, but in all honesty I write a lot more slowly than I used to, and I have a lot less patience with print than I used to. When I’m writing, when I’m doing pieces in print, that are print only, I find my mind starting to wander, and I’m thinking about movies. I’m thinking about watching movies and making movies and I’ll go off and start storyboarding the puppet movie. […]

And I’m also gonna be making some really short apropos-of-nothing documentaries on whatever the hell I feel like doing them on, and I’ll probably post those on The House as well. I mean, I’m certainly not gonna go away. I’m just not gonna be writing straight out print reviews, certainly not very often. I’m just at the point where I feel like I need to try to concentrate my energies, which are not as profuse as they used to be, on things that I think have a reasonable shot at making me happy. Print does not satisfy me in the way that it once did. In fact, it feels too much like work. And I want to do things that feel like play. And maybe turn ‘em into work, you know? The ideal is to have your job be something that doesn’t feel like a job, and that was the case for me for years with print criticism. It’s not the case anymore.

Back in Berlin, Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom, which had something to do with cross dressers and strippers and generally drifted not far beyond Madonna’s expertise in sex and success, garnered some surprisingly positive reviews. But everyone I’ve spoken to who’s covering or attending Tribeca was planning on skipping I Am Because We Are, a documentary about Malawi written, produced and narrated by the star, based on the assumption that diagnosing international crises is just a little bit beyond the capabilities of a singer who has spent the past five years working her way through various Mouseketeers in search of renewed credibility.

I haven’t seen the film (I skipped Friday’s press screening in order to see Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, and I’m glad I did––more on that virtually perfect film later today), but out of curiosity, I went trolling the web this morning for reviews. Surprise, surprise––Madonna’s ethics as a documentary filmmaker are under fire from all sides.

Let’s start with what Jakob Lodwick, internet boy millionaire (he’s the co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo) and sometime blogebrity has to say. I don’t think Lodwick has seen the movie either, but he has read an interview with Madonna at New York Magazine. In this blog post, he isolates the following exchange:

New York Magazine: In the movie, you look at one ritual in which a young woman is told she must have sex with a man three times in a day, in order to “cleanse” her.

Madonna: It’s not my place to judge that tradition.

Lodwick disagrees. He writes: “Madonna, as one of the most influential artists in the world, your failure to apply your faculty of judgment to tribal rape is deplorabe [sic]. For your comments, you are a piece of trash.”

It should be noted first that Lodwick is taking the quote out of context. Immediately after saying that she’s not going to judge that tradition, Madonna essentially judges the tradition, noting that such practices lead to the spread of AIDS and referring to the process of combating such cultural traditions as “mind-bogglingly frustrating.” But more importantly, to suggest that it’s the place of a documentary filmmaker to necessarily judge their subjects is to offer an extremely limited view of documentary film theory. If passing judgment were integral to non-fiction storytelling, wouldn’t Bill O’Reilly qualify as a master of the form?

Slightly more convincing is Roger Friedman’s long screed against the film, published after Thursday’s premiere, in which he accuses Madonna and the film’s director/her former gardener (!) of exploiting Malawi to promote Kabbalah.

Indeed, the film actually shows Malawi’s adults regurgitating Kabbalah propaganda they’ve been inculcated with in order to teach the orphans in their country…It’s kind of shocking — after seeing all the poverty and disease that’s been imposed on them — to hear Malawi’s children then recite back the Kabbalah/SFK dictum that they themselves “are responsible for their choices” and that “their actions can positively influence the quality of their lives.”

Again, to hear that Madonna has done something a bit self-serving isn’t really a surprise. But to me, turning a camera on your own efforts to change a communities system of beliefs is a much grander breach of documentary ethics than telling a interviewer, after the fact, that you’re not going to judge the way to community behaves. Madonna may very well be a piece of trash, but her refusal to say “rape is bad” seems like the tip of the iceberg.