Category: Asia

Orange Crush.

A federal judge dismisses a case brought against chemical companies by Vietnamese plaintiffs for the manufacture of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. I’m torn on this one. While the fact that the companies settled a similar lawsuit by American veterans for $180 million makes them seem rather shady, I think their reasoning is probably sound — the decision for the defoliant’s use was ultimately made by the US Government. (If it can be proven that these companies covered up the harmful side effects of Agent Orange to the US, then the government should be bringing the suit against them — either way, though, it seems to me the responsibility for deployment of Agent Orange rests in Washington.)

As Dangerous Meta similarly noted, Judge Weinstein’s argument that Agent Orange wouldn’t be included in the Geneva prohibition against chemical weapons seems like a reach. “‘The prohibition extended only to gases deployed for their asphyxiating or toxic effects on man,’ said the decision…’not to herbicides designed to affect plants that may have unintended harmful side-effects on people.’” Hmmm…so long as side-effects of a given chemical are “unintended” (which itself is an open question regarding Agent Orange), it can be used in the field? That opens the door to a lot of horrible and underhanded trickery in wartime. Despite what some Dubya-appointed freakshows might think, we should be trying to make the international restriction against chemical weapons more, not less, stringent.

The Executioner’s Song.

“Fighting over the ‘evolving standards of decency’ underlying the Eighth Amendment’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ the 5-to-4 opinions reflect an all-out war between the proponents of a living (or at least medium-rare) Constitution and those who want to see it dead (or perhaps well-done, with a nice pinot).” Slate‘s inimitable Dahlia Lithwick explains the Kennedy-Scalia sniping undergirding the Supreme Court’s very welcome 5-4 decision to ban juvenile executions. To keep things in perspective, the only other nations besides us that have put juveniles to death since 2000 are China, Iran, Pakistan, and the Congo…not exactly what you’d call the Axis of Freedom.

In my country, there is no problem.

Somebody tell Tuscon. “The State Department is insisting that, contrary to the impression you might get from all that vitriol spewed by Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev on ‘Da Ali G Show,’ Kazakhstan is not a ‘a wild den of misogynistic dog-shooting Gypsy- and Jew-haters,’ as faux Kazakh journalist Borat once put it, but rather a perfectly nice country with little record of anti-Semitism.”

House of Cards.

Going in to Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, I wasn’t looking for much more than Hero without the scary uber-nationalist politics. Unfortunately, while the movie contains some similarly entrancing art direction and foregos any ruminations on leadership this time around, Daggers also falls behind Hero in the story and action department. Hardcore kung-fu fans will probably love this House, but to be honest I got kinda bored with it.

It’s clear early on in House of Flying Daggers that Zhang isn’t shooting for anything with the ambition and gravitas of Hero…Instead, we’ve got a plot strung together with a number of genre cliches, most notably the “deep” undercover cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro) questioning his motivation and the sixth-sense-laden blind girl (Zhang Zi Yi, lovely as always) who improbably kicks more ass than Rutger Hauer in Blind Fury. Hey, genre exercises are cool…let’s get to the fighting. Alas, there seemed to be a lot of filler between the action setpieces, and I found myself hoping through several unmemorable meet-cute scenes that more low-level flunky guards would show up and be efficiently dispatched.

With that in mind, I know it’s a little late to be complaining about the realism of kung-fu sequences. But the fights in House of Flying Daggers are so stylized and farfetched that I didn’t find them all that engaging — there was no real sense of danger to be had. In Crouching Tiger, Hero and countless lesser kung-fu films, I never found myself thinking so much about the logistics of what’s going on, but Daggers seems to beg questions like, “Where are these tree-flying policemen obtaining their inexhaustible supply of bamboo spears?” and “How straight and true could you throw a dagger if gravity was of absolutely no consequence?” Perhaps it’s unfair to call out this House for its fantastical fight sequences, but for one reason or another my disbelief was suspended less than usual.

At any rate, not to give the whole game away, but the movie does eventually contain some unexpected twists in the middle going. That being said, the denouement of the film also suffers from one of the most egregious dead-“not dead” reverses I’ve seen in recent memory. If martial arts films are your bag, then you’ll probably find House of Flying Daggers an operatic tale of love, passion, and betrayal. But, as for me, I kinda wish these two young lovers had spent less time being smitten and more time smoting.

Holiday Horror.

Obviously, Christmas cheer around the globe has been greatly subdued with the news of the devastating earthquake and ensuing tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, a calamity that has now claimed at least 23,000 lives. (For what it’s worth at this dark hour, neither vacationing actor Jet Li nor long-time Sri Lankan Arthur C. Clarke, despite early reports, are among the missing, although that’s clearly small consolation given the unprecedented loss of life here.) Many condolences to the victims and survivors of this terrible, terrible tragedy. Update: A staggering 150,000 and counting…simply awful.

A Man of Constant Sorrow.

“It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. It was especially important, therefore, to avoid if possible focusing on the dead.”

A quick literary shout-out: Hard to read and harder to put down, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, which I read on my plane ride back from Norfolk, is arguably the best anti/war novel I’ve read in over a decade. (I’ll always have a soft spot for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but the surrealism and absurdity of those two seem a world apart from the brutality of Ninh’s book.) Graphic and harrowing to the last, Sorrow tells the story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier full of youth and promise in the heady days of 1964. Unlike virtually everyone he knows, however, Kien actually manages to survive the Vietnam War to its conclusion in 1975, only to discover that peace remains an elusive ideal, and memory a cruel mistress.

A kindred spirit to All Quiet on the Western Front, Ninh’s book doesn’t pull any punches — There are dark moments and harsh visions herein that will remain with me for some time to come. Still, it’s a very powerful book, and one worth reading if you have the strength for it.

The World on Screen.

Despite harboring one of the more irritating crossword puzzles in recent months (it included characters like %,@,&, and *) and a breathless paean to the wildly overrated Julia Roberts, this week’s special NYT Magazine on film and globalization included a number of interesting reads, including an overview of foreign film trends by A.O. Scott, a disquisition on the problems facing the US industry by Lynn Hirschberg, and an extended interview with Maggie Cheung (late of Hero and In the Mood for Love.)