Seen tonight with Jarhead: The trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, with Eric Bana, Geoffrey Rush, and Daniel Craig, on the aftermath of, and Israeli response to, the murders at the 1972 Olympics. From this brief clip, it looks to be a very timely meditation on means and ends in the war on terror.
Tag: The Seventies
The Race Card Shell Game.
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” (And, now that we’ve got all the racist white freakshows definitively in the bag, we’re coming for you…) RNC Chair Ken Mehlman will apparently apologize for the “Southern Strategy” before the NAACP today. Well, I presume there nobody will fall for this ridiculous ruse…Just ask Katharine Harris.
From Mars to Munich.
“‘Viewing Israel’s response to Munich through the eyes of the men who were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific episode that we usually think about only in political or military terms,’ [Spielberg] said. ‘By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today.'” War of the Worlds complete, Steven Spielberg moves on Vengeance.
Walt Nixon World.
“Bringing Kutler to the library was going to be like Nixon going to China.” The Nixon library in Yorba Linda — the only presidential library under private management — incurs the wrath of the historical community by spiking a conference on the Vietnam War that would undoubtedly have been critical of Tricky Dick. Whatsmore, “historians still did not have access to about 800 hours of tapes and 50,000 documents withheld by the Nixon estate on the grounds that they deal with personal or political, rather than presidential, matters.” That represents a significantly larger gap in the historical record than 18 and a half minutes.
All the President’s Men.
Journalism then and now: As Slate writer and Nixon historian David Greenberg reports in from the opening of the Watergate papers, Salon‘s Eric Boehlert surveys the strange case of “Jeff Gannon”, a.k.a. James Guckert, fake newsman for Dubya.
Shambling to the polls.
By way of Quiddity, Film Threat examines the uncanny correlation between Republican administrations and excellent zombie movies. You do the math. (Adding fuel to the fire, the new Romero, Land of the Dead, is set for October 21.)
A Trailblazer’s farewell.
Unbossed and unbought to the end, R.I.P. Shirley Chisholm 1924-2005.
Death of a Salesman.
Then again, Samuel Byck wasn’t like most people either…in fact, that may be the biggest problem with this otherwise haunting film. Played for laughs in the Sondheim Assassins, Byck here is portrayed as a beaten-down American Everyman of the Willy Loman/Travis Bickle school, albeit one with a Pulp Fiction-like problem with authority and a frozen run of luck like you read about. But, while the film’s hold lies in Sean Penn’s powerful portrayal of a down-on-his-heels, borderline-stable guy who gets one too many doors slammed in his face (to Penn’s credit, his performance never really feels like a stunt, as it might have with a lesser actor), the real Samuel Byck was an even stranger bird than this film lets on. For example, there’s no mention of Byck’s protesting outside the White House in a Santa suit here, and the whole tapes-to-Leonard-Bernstein angle is played as straight as it possibly can be.
But, historical veracity aside, The Assassination of Richard Nixon still makes for a grim and compelling 90 minutes of darkening gloom, anchored by Sean Penn’s slow, fidgety burn. (Watts, Don Cheadle, Michael Wincott, and Jack Thompson all do good character work here, but the film is Penn’s, and he’s the only one to leave a mark.) The movie’s unrelenting downward trajectory is clear from the opening titles, and the final scene at BWI airport probably played a few minutes too long, particularly as Byck awaits boarding for his final destination. All in all, though, The Assassination of Richard Nixon is a somber inquiry into a life of quiet desperation, and a sad reminder that, regardless of what our American dream may promise, there are no guarantees in this world, and all too often no respite for the damned.
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.
Lemony Snicket, Sour Byck.
In today’s movie bin, a post-Eternal Sunshine Jim Carrey returns to hamming it up in the full trailer for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Sean Penn (with the aid of 21 Grams co-star Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle) resurrects Samuel Byck (also featured in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins) in the international teaser for The Assassination of Richard Nixon.