DVD Review | Women He's Undressed

After a Fashion

by Thomas Delapa

In today’s dressed-down, flip-flops and uber-casual world, we seldom hear that “clothes make the man” anymore. But in classic Hollywood, fashion not only made the man—and the woman—but it made the movies too.

Where would The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy Gale be without her ruby slippers, Joan Crawford sans her shoulder pads, Marilyn Monroe less (ahem) her skin-tight gowns or Cary Grant minus those impeccably tailored suits?

Like other low-profile collaborators, especially in our grandiose age of the director as auteur, motion-picture costume directors rarely grab the spotlight and even less the microphone. Classic film fans may be familiar with the celebrated career of Edith Head, but otherwise public knowledge of Hollywood’s leading costume designers is skimpy if not threadbare.

Despite its odd-fitting title, Women He’s Undressed means to makeover that legacy, taking the measure of Australian-born Orry-Kelly, who for three decades was one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life, A-list designers. His career included a long, tempestuous stint at the Warner Bros. studio, dressing such stars as Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart and Olivia de Havilland, and was crowned by three Oscars for costume design, the last for Some Like It Hot in 1959.

An Australian-made documentary directed by the veteran Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brilliant Career), Undressed won’t win ribbons for opulence, but it does stitch together the life and times of Orry-Kelly, born Orry George Kelly in New South Wales. Armstrong’s style clashes in spots, starting with the fanciful inclusion of her subject (Darren Gilshenan) addressing the camera while paddling in a rowboat. As an allegory of his roiling ups and downs it is, well, a bit out to sea.

As a gay man in Hollywood who rarely hid in the closet—at least among his friends— "Jack" Orry-Kelly was renowned for his talents, tart tongue and artistic tantrums. He could be difficult and demanding, but he managed to navigate the treacherous shores of the studio-system fiefdoms. While most found his boss Jack Warner a tight-fisted, crass (and macho) tyrant, Orry-Kelly formed an uneasy alliance, smoothed over by his long friendship with Warner’s wife, Ann. Undoubtedly his most famous work was with the notoriously prickly Bette Davis, including the brazen “red” ball dress her character flitted about in the 1938’s black-and-white Jezebel. 

Except for that foundering rowboat, Undressed is outfitted in a conventional style, embroidered with interviews (among them, Jane Fonda and Angela Lansbury), newsreel footage and photos. But it’s also spangled with fascinating tidbits about fashion design in Hollywood’s bygone Golden Age. Especially revealing are the sleight-of-hand tricks Orry-Kelly used to transform diva Davis (she of a large but “limp” bosom) that showed off the positive while cloaking the negative.

Glamour, illusion and fantasy were Orry-Kelly’s stock in trade, but his private life was bold as brass, despite begin hemmed in by a homophobic culture that threatened exposure for anyone—especially men—daring to tip-toe out of the closet. Armstrong and her writer Katherine Thomson sew the villain badge on Englishman Cary Grant (né Archibald Leach), who turned his back on Orry-Kelly once he became a matinee idol. While it is now well-known that Grant and Western star Randolph Scott lived together as roommates and more, the film speciously suggests that Grant’s subsequent marriages were strictly a cover for his homosexuality.

What’s most durable in Armstrong’s material is the flamboyant character of Orry-Kelly as both artist and survivor. Fired from Warners in 1944, he hit the bottle hard, successfully chased by rehab (“sanatoriums” back then) and surfacing in a wave of comebacks in the 1950s, culminating in the sparkling triumph of Some Like It Hot. Not only did he outfit Marilyn Monroe in those diaphanous, barely-there gowns that seared the screen, but he also dragged cross-dressing Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis into hilarious movie history.

Orry-Kelly was also a brash and oft-catty wit who was loath to keep his mouth zipped—he famously quipped that “Hell must be filled with beautiful women and no mirrors.” In old Hollywood’s bright firmament, you can still see Orry-Kelly’s twinkling reflection in the timelessly elegant fashions he created. 

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8/5/16

Film Review | Money Monster

Write it off

by Thomas Delapa

Looking for a hot insider tip on Money Monster?

Then save your eight bucks. This George Clooney/Julia Roberts Wall Street suspense satire is flat, warmed-over road kill.

While two-time Best Actress Oscar winner Jodie Foster uneasily returns to the director’s chair for her fourth feature, she strands her under-performing stars in what adds up (or down) to a low-caliber shotgun merger between Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The China Syndrome. Unless Foster has her own hedge fund, she shouldn’t look for career dividends any time soon.

Nobody yells “Attica! Attica!” or “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” out the window, but Foster’s scriptwriters borrow from so many topical 1970s dramas that they must be paying a monster interest rate. For starters, he-e-e-re’s Lee Gates (Clooney) the slick, smarmy host of a cable-TV financials show, a man so vacuously fatuous that you know he’s a sure bet for a coast-to-coast comeuppance. Next up is uninvited surprise guest Kyle Budwell (Jack O’Connell), a Queens palooka who’s, yes, mad as hell at the damn rich since he lost his life savings on one of Gates’ bum stock tips. Standing tall, very tall, behind them is Roberts’ Patty Fenn, the show’s sharp, super-cool, alpha-female producer and Foster’s moral conscience in the vast wasteland of 24-7 tabloid TV.

Reunited from their cash-cow Ocean’s Eleven reboots, Clooney and Roberts slowly sink carrying the star ballast, though they can hardly shoulder all the blame. If Clooney once had promise as a cheeky Hollywood throwback to the likes of Clark Gable, he’s now so annoyingly mannered (cocking his head for every emphatic line), that by now his performances are all reruns. If Foster got a bum tip from her agent before buying into this project, she doesn’t do her leads any favors either, inflating the story with overwrought acting and a manic shooting style that papers over the yawning holes in the story’s junk-bond rated logic.

The net result is a cheap, remote-controlled financial thriller that chews up and spits out every populist cliché this side of Oliver Stone and Bernie Sanders. Not a few minutes into Gates’ “Money Monster” daily show, Budwell crashes the set, armed with handgun, made-for-TV hysteria, and an explosive vest designed with the now-cowering host in mind. With the whole world watching—absurdly, even in distant Iceland and Korea—Budwell shouts his million-dollar hostage demands, profanely punctuated with slogans (“The system is rigged!”) that could be coming from both the left and right in today’s angry, un-moneyed U.S. electorate.

Foster is too busy tossing mud and her camera around to seriously ask why (or even if) a blue-collar bud like Budwell would foolishly blow everything he has on a stock-market whim. Those are the sort of questions she simply runs over, content to feed us clichéd lines like those printed on Gates’ cue cards or whispered in his earpiece by his all-knowing, all-seeing producer. No, it’s enough for us to get that Gates is a boorish show-biz charlatan and behind him lurks an even bigger, villainous one—the uber-greedy CEO (Dominic West) of a shadowy finance company that suspiciously lost $800 million in stock value overnight. This guy isn’t just a capitalist pig but a chauvinist one to boot, treating his leggy staffer and mistress (Caitriona Balfe) with oily “That’s my girl” patriarchal condescension.

Foster wears her gender politics on her rolled-up left sleeve, bluntly separating not the men from the boys, but her sharp, ultra-capable females from their obvious lessers—their clueless, often-monstrous male counterparts. Not only does Roberts serve as Foster’s quietly heroic center, she’s the real power behind Gates’ chintzy Dow Jones throne, feeding him lines and keeping him and everyone else cool under crisis pressure. Her partner in distaff kickass-ness is that model-thin staffer, who instantly evolves from corporate mouthpiece and concubine into crusading detective faster you can say Erin Brockovich, digging up the dirt on her boss’ shady globe-trotting missions in his private jet. Back at the studio, the New York City SWAT cops called to the scene recklessly reach for their guns and insults first; it’s no surprise the only exception is a lowly (black) policewoman whom Foster calls to duty only to blow the whistle on her trigger-happy blue crew.

Hollywood insiders might think that with Foster, Clooney & Roberts in charge, Money Monster would be too big to fail. But that’s what they said about Enron, AIG , Lehman Brothers and Johnny Depp’s Lone Ranger.

In other words, don’t bet on a box-office bail-out. My money is on audiences bailing out.

5/14/16

Film Review | Fifty Shades of Grey

Entertainment Voice

I Am Curious--Grey

by Thomas Delapa

How’s this for a red-hot color scheme? Start with a kinky romance plot as your base, daub in “9 1/2 Weeks”, and a streak of “Secretary,” add on a tony veneer of “Jane Eyre,” and you’ll likely churn out “Fifty Shades of Grey,” a bastardized S&M stew pot that’s equal parts icky, drippy, and sticky.

Birthed from the runaway 2012 erotic best-seller by British author E.L. James (actually 40-something mom Erika Mitchell)“Fifty Shades” was slyly delivered into theaters on Valentine’s Day. It should have been stamped Return to Sender, borne out by the U.S. box-office jilting since its opening week. “Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, boy ties up girl,” isn’t exactly the old-fashioned formula for screen romance, but then you must bear in mind that we live in a luridly blue world in which Internet-delivered porn has metastasized into the mainstream.

Whereas James’ sensationally steamy novel—now trilogy—had readers bound up tightly in all-in-your-head erotic fantasy, this turgid screen version is hung up firstly by a casting palate that’s strikingly bland, if not totally vapid. In light of the controversial sex, nudity, and raunchy talk, it’s no surprise that name actors were shrinking violets when it came time to signing on. Perhaps they haven’t forgotten the case of one Elizabeth Berkeley, whose short-lived “Showgirls” notoriety quickly dropped a curtain on her film career.

From a self-published book hatched from the vampire-fiction “Twilight” saga, it’s no earthly surprise that James’ erotica follows the footsteps of a virginal (but hot) girl who’s romantically captivated by a mysterious, even sinister (but hot) outsider with a terribly big secret. This particular U.S. Northwest lady in waiting is Anastasia (Dakota Johnson), a graduate English student whose small world is instantly lit up with bodice-bursting fireworks upon meeting Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), the inscrutable young tycoon behind Seattle’s Grey Enterprises.

If Ana is searching for love and romance a la any bookish Jane Austen heroine, the enigmatic Mr. Grey harbors desires that merge the Marquis de Sade with Howard Hughes. Christian has not only created a Telecom empire, he’s also set up a high-rise headquarters staffed with so many curvaceous females that even Mad Men would be green with envy.

Despite the supposed Seattle-area settings, Ana’s torridly up-and-down romantic adventures have almost nothing to do with the known world—except perhaps for the sort of folks who fancy “Game of Thrones” as realistically medieval. This is paint-by-numbers hack erotica, crudely drawn with crayons and mascara.

It’s telling then when the gentlemanly Christian escorts Ana to his pulpy-red S&M dungeon he calls it his “playroom.” Though coyishly reluctant and naive, Anna enters and quickly warms to her role as submissive girl-toy because, hey, the sex is awesome. With Mr. Grey in executive control of his armoires of whips, ropes and silk ties, Anna lets herself go. Naturally, this liberates her from the ties that bind her to her fuddy-duddy sexual morals. No longer the mousy grad student in plaids and ponytail, Ana is transformed into a walking G spot.

Ana’s orgasmic liberation is echoed in her high-flying trips aboard Mr. Grey’s fleet of helicopters and gliders, as well as in his chauffeur-driven luxury cars. There’s nothing like being seduced by a hunky, filthy-rich and single CEO to make a girl want to get down and dirty. Jose (Victor Rasuk), Ana’s earthbound classmate and suitor, pales in comparison to the splendidly expensive hues of Christian’s phallic hi-rise world.

James, director Samantha Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Kelly Marcel want their fantasy both ways, serving up kink and ample horizontal nudity—almost all Johnson—on a plate while at the same granting their heroine a girlish willfulness that rebels against Christian cocksure dictates. The burning question is whether Ana will sign his ridiculously explicit, X-rated contract laying out, as it were, their binding relationship in black and white. As she dithers, she toys with him outside the playroom, leaving him on pins and needles. James’ pseudo-feminist ruse is designed strictly to lend a patina of independence to her heroine’s regression into a living, heavy-breathing sex doll.

Will these two live happily ever after, bound together by lust, transgression, and Italian ties? Shades of the interminable “Twilight” and “Hunger Games” series, captive audiences may have to slog through 49 more colorless shades of Grey before they’re let out of this dungeon.
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Fifty Shades of Grey opens nationally Feb. 13

Film Review | Unbroken

To Hell and Back

by Thomas Delapa, Entertainment Voice

While film crowds across the U.S. have practically given “American Sniper ” a ticket-tape parade, the producers of “Unbroken” must be asking themselves why audiences for their valorous World War II drama are in retreat. Cynics might say that trigger-happy screen violence is always a sure shot, while a simple, disarming story of wartime heroism and endurance is likely to miss the box-office bull’s eye. Both pictures recoil from the non-fiction world, but it’s Angelina Jolie‘s directorial breakthrough that merits the longer salute.

What informs Jolie’s deft direction is her obvious passion and empathy for the subject matter—one of the great, if still largely unfamiliar, wartime U.S. survival sagas. Not only did the 26-year-old U.S. track star Louie Zamperini live through 47 dire, shark-infested days clinging to a tiny raft in the Pacific, but his “rescuers” were the Japanese navy, who promptly sailed him off to a succession of some of the most horrific POW camps in the Pacific War. Commendations for bringing Zamperini’s incredible exploits to a new generation’s attention first went to acclaimed author Laura Hillenbrand (“Seabiscuit”) with the 2010 publication of her best-selling biography.

Over the years, a squad of screenwriters made a run at Hillenbrand’s 500-plus page book, the baton ending up with the unlikely team of Oscar winners Joel and Ethan Coen. Serving their source with honor, the Coens zero in on the human drama and jettison their characteristic ironic ballast. Universal also joined up to the tune of a reported $60 million, certainly one of the biggest budgets ever commanded by a female director.

“Unbroken” has taken on some fair flak for echoing a volley of inspirational POW dramas—from “Bridge on the River Kwai” spanning to the uncelebrated “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” However, it rises above the potshots, primarily because Jolie keeps her hand steady as she goes towards the truth. She’s also brave in her casting, ditching Hollywood brass in favor of talented unknowns.

Of course, the critical role is Army Lt. Zamperini himself, and the young Brit Jack O’Connell valiantly executes the arduous physical scenes demanded of him. However, there’s an intangible weapon that Jolie brings in, and that’s a wrenching sense of empathy that Louie displays for his battered brother-in-arms. “Lucky” Louie is no beefy John Wayne—or Clint Eastwood—packing a Spartan detachment from the pain of others. He winces when he sees (and hears) his comrades suffering their injuries and imprisonment, even more so than when his own scrawny body is on the line.

Jolie and company can be forgiven for humanely limiting the atrocities they actually portray, and surely worse were meted out in the camps. However, further turns of the screws might have been warranted to counterattack our own superhuman penchant for burying the atrocious shrapnel of the past. As Louie’s whispering Grand Inquisitor camp commander, the Japanese musician Miyavi strikes a memorably savage note (his sadism has a sexual charge) that ranks with the Oscar-winning Sessue Hayakawa in “River Kwai.”

Broken up by flashbacks to Louie’s checkered past as both Italian-American delinquent and 1936 Olympic star, structurally “Unbroken” is nothing to write home about, and might have been sturdier had the supporting characters been built up. There’s no doubt that this is Louie’s epic story, to a fault, while his band of brothers generally stand at attention in the background.

In a Hollywood so incestuously devoted to over-the-top action and the girls-not-allowed club of blockbuster digital effects, Jolie charts her own course, delivering a heady sense of both realism and humanity, ably served by the veteran Roger Deakins’ pristine photography. That “Unbroken” was only decorated with a few minor Oscar nominations is at least a little heartbreaking.

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Film Review | Food Chains

AlterNet / By Thomas Delapa

No justice, no peas ... or tomatoes?

'Food Chains' Documents the Shameful Exploitation of Migrant Workers

November 25, 2014  |  

 

In H.G. Wells' prescient The Time Machine (1895), the seminal British science-fiction author foretold of a dystopian future in which the indolent, lotus-eating Eloi live off the toils of a race of devolved humans—the Morlocks—who barbarically survive running incessant machines in underground caves. 

Wells’ gloomy future was set in the unfathomably far-off year of 802,701, but don’t tell that to Bangladesh sweatshop workers, Chinese smartphone assemblers—or Florida tomato pickers. His dismal vision of humanity is nearer than you may think. And like the Eloi, we above-ground 2014 dwellers may be the ones running out of time.

Today is no great present for the legions of migrant workers who toil in our fields for what often amounts to a few dollars an hour for backbreaking labor. A new documentary on their plight, Food Chains, plucks out the unsavory links between American agribusiness, grocery behemoths and the voracious U.S. consumer, who continues to labor under the illusion that cheap products don’t come with an insidious hidden cost.

Produced in part by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and actress/advocate Eva Longoria, Food Chains serves up bitter facts and figures about how farm workers have become fodder for corporate food giants like the Florida-based Publix stores. Touched off by the entrance of Walmart into the grocery business in the 1980s, the industry has distilled into a Darwinian handful of top-feeding corporations, including Kroger and Safeway. These multi-billion-dollar chains now have the unprecedented power to drive the hardest of bargains with suppliers, forcing prices way, way down for their products. That may be good for penny-pinching consumers, but inevitably bad for the producers and their workers, especially small-potatoes farmers.

To that witches’ brew, add and stir in NAFTA, the seismic 1992 agreement that mowed down trade barriers between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. One of the main unintended byproducts of the Clinton-engineered pact was that scores of south-of-the-border farms went under, driven out of business by competition from lower-priced American foodstuffs. And here’s the bitter frosting on the funnel cake: As a result, thousands of unemployed and displaced Mexican nationals fled to El Norte—the vast majority undocumented, to find menial work in American fields and factories.

Director Sanjay Rawal’s tract doesn’t always go down easy, and no one will mistake it for such delectable documentary fare as Food, Inc. or Super-Size Me. His 82-minute film is more of a rallying flag, boosting the crusade of a coalition of Immokalee, Florida tomato pickers and sympathizers in their decades-long fight to squeeze out a pittance more in wages (through their “Fair Food Program”) from the highly profitable, employee-owned Publix chain.

Rawal and his producers grasp for, but barely touch the bigger picture of the long history of worker exploitation in U.S. fields and farms. We hear of the seeds of labor agitation planted in the 1960s by Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers, but Rawal could have better forged the deep-rooted connections between the grocery giants, the restaurant industry and the omnivorous American consumer.

To broaden his scope, Rawal ventures far afield from Florida, planting his cameras in California’s lush Napa Valley. Here migrant grape harvesters are priced out of the ritzy housing market and many are forced to live in shantytowns many miles away from the fields. Like so much of post-Reagan America, this is a land of two classes, two divided cultures, existing side by side yet certainly not seen in Alexander Payne’s boisterous wine-country tour Sideways. As for the Napa growers, they surely must feel some sour grapes at Rawal’s claims, since narrator Forest Whitaker omits mention of the public housing the county specifically built for seasonal workers starting in 2002.

Food Chains is most sobering when it doesn’t pick and choose its facts. It takes us back in time to Thanksgiving 1960, when the CBS-TV landmark Harvest of Shame plowed up the pervasive poverty among America’s farm laborers. Back then a Southern farm owner admitted, “We used to own our slaves, and now we just rent them.”

In an American agribusiness dependent on cheap, exploitable labor from newer generations of huddled masses, it’s not only grapes that may ripen with wrath.

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Film Review | Interstellar

The Observer's culture blog

Ann Arbor Observer
Monday, November 10, 2014

2014: SPACE ODDITY

by Tomas David

Earth to Christopher Nolan: "There's no crying in outer space!"

Roger that. Houston would have a real problem with the British director's latest magnum opus, Interstellar, which shoots high to put the science--and big ideas--back into the science-fiction movie.

Unpleasantly earthbound after his Oscar-earning turn in Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey dimly stars as an astronaut given the lofty mission of saving humanity from imminent doom. Yes, In a World ... choked by killer sandstorms and dying agriculture, humanity has no hope but to seek out another home in the cosmos. As a corn farmer and former space pilot, McConaughey's Cooper fatefully lands in the driver's seat, prodded on by his feisty young daughter (Mackenzie Foy).

The helmsman behind a galaxy of pop-corn blockbusters including Inception and the Christian Bale Batman reboots, Nolan and co-writer and brother Christopher Nolan launch their multi-stage, multi-hour vehicle designed to reach the rarefied atmosphere of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and other sci-fi classics. The dramatic payload is heavy, often crushing, and the payoff will leave many gasping for air, and not in a good, Space Mountain way. You might say that Interstellar is the anti-Gravity, if it didn't implode soon after lift-off.

Sketchily post-apocalyptic, Nolan's star-crossed epic theorizes that the truth is out there--or at least a new Earth potentially is on the far side of a mysterious wormhole spinning off Saturn. A brain trust of stealthy NASA scientists drafts Cooper for the mission, along with a small crew that includes a young scientist (the anti-Sally Ride, Anne Hathaway) who's the daughter of the project's weary mission controller (a weary Michael Caine).

A weightless hero, McConaughey delivers his lines in a mumbled, over-naturalistic monotone that's the wrong stuff in a spacey movie that comes equipped with the pace of suspended animation. Nolan overloads the script with so many clunky scientific terms ("singularity," "time-shift," ad infinitum.) that they might even make Stephen Hawking's head spin. When Nolan needs a melodramatic booster, he has his actors jettison Kubrickian coolness and lurch into hyper-crying, including Hathaway, the Les Miz Oscar winner who's miserably cast in a retro female role beamed back from 1950s B-grade sci-fi. Where have you gone, Sigourney Weaver?

For all its modern trappings, yawning length and astronomical pretensions, Interstellar is a dismal, fizzling blast from the past--George Pal's When Worlds Collide bogged down with cornball philosophy and an extra hour of unfunny outtakes and overwrought suspense. Rather than 2001, Nolan should have explored the grim fate of Disney's 1979 The Black Hole, which charted nebulously similar territory and quickly vanished into box-office hell.

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Film Review | The Kill Team

Improvised Explosive Devices  

Documentary 'The Kill Team' Captures Nightmare of War

 

AlterNet /July 30, 2014   By Thomas Delapa

 

In 2009, when Army PFC Andrew Holmes saw his first combat action in Afghanistan, his immediate thought was of the over-the-top, gung-ho heroics of Top Gun, capped with the strains of “Danger Zone” ricocheting in his head.

Dizzying jump cut to six years later: Holmes has no medals, no trophies and not even a kiss from Kelly McGillis. Found guilty in a military court, along with other members of his notorious “Kill Team” platoon in the murders of unarmed Afghan civilians, Holmes is currently serving a seven-year sentence in Leavenworth prison.

How Holmes, Adam Winfield and Jeremy Morlock spiraled down from front-line U.S. warriors to disgraced war criminals is the main mission behind The Kill Team, a brief, choppy but incendiary documentary that registers yet another tragic beat in the American heart of darkness during the post-9/11 era.

With director Dan Krauss doing triple duty as producer and cinematographer (as well as editor and co-writer), The Kill Team is nearly a one-man operation, and the stitches in this postmortem sometimes show. Krauss trains his sights primarily on Specialist Adam Winfield, once a proud member of the Fifth Stryker Brigade, Bravo Company, stationed in Kandahar province from 2009 to 2010. You won’t get the big picture of the decade-long U.S. counter-terrorism war in Afghanistan; rather, Krauss’ closeup cinema-verité campaign is to embed himself into the lives of Winfield and his distraught parents, Chris and Emma, as the military begins its murder trial against their son in Fort Lewis, WA. For background ammunition, Krauss drops in footage captured from the soldiers’ camcorders while on patrol as well as from Winfield’s actual 2010 Army interrogation.

Baby-faced, soft-spoken and slight of frame, Winfield hardly fits the profile of a macho, battle-tested veteran. A patriotic idealist when he joined the Army at age 17 (“I loved being in the military”), while echoing his father’s Marine footsteps he soon discovered that the Army wasn’t at all like those glorified Be All You Can Be commercial come-ons. Winfield and his fellow soldiers experienced firsthand the damning disconnect between the military’s historic search-and-destroy raison d’être and the ambitious, yet perhaps impossible mission of nation-building— this in a desolate tribal country mired in the Middle Ages. Faced with the collateral foes of boredom and frustration, Bravo Company went medieval itself in short order. “This sucks... a lot,” we hear a disgusted Winfield say on patrol.

In a déjà vu flashback to the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam, Bravo Company had to contend with elusive Taliban guerrillas nearly impossible to pin down, nerve-racking daily threats from roadside bombs, as well as indifferent and suspicious, if not outright hostile, villagers. But what really lit the fuse in the squad was the entrance of Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, a burly Iraq veteran who was, by most accounts, a Rambo-esque psycho. In only one of Gibbs’ kick-ass pathologies, his idea of R&R was fashioning a ghastly bone necklace made from the fingers of enemy dead.

You don’t need to be a military (or movie) historian to flashback to Oliver Stone’s 1986 Oscar-winning Vietnam War film Platoon, in which  young Army recruit Charlie Sheen is divided in his loyalties to his two sergeants—a ruthless Tom Berenger and the altruistic, Christ-like Willem Dafoe. But in Krauss’ grimly un-Hollywood war story, there was no casting call for Gibbs’ counterpart. Bravo Company’s soul was lost to the sergeant’s savage scheme and conspiracy to rack up kills, even if it meant planting evidence (using “drop weapons”) on innocent civilians, and then claiming self-defense.

A classic sociopathic bully, Gibbs uniformly cowed his squad into going along and falling in place with his savage schemes. Most got a rush out of the blood lust, especially back at the base, where they were greeted as “heroes” and "made men." But at least one soldier initially disobeyed orders and couldn’t stomach the Kool-Aid. That was SPC Winfield, who in early 2010 began e-mailing his father in distress, pleading, “I want to do something about it.”

The rest of Winfield’s nightmare war story is a long gray line of military screw-ups, treachery and scapegoating. Of all the images in The Kill Team, perhaps none is as tragic or ironic as that of the manacled Winfield in his camouflage fatigues, ruefully telling his account to Krauss’ camera. There are other voices equally as expressive—like that of Morlock, serving a 24-year sentence—but Winfield commands attention, if only because he sounds so earnest, even heartbreaking.

In the interminable war on terrorism filled with such blowback disasters as Abu Ghraib, “enhanced interrogation,” and the Iraq invasion in toto, how can the U.S. government even think about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people when it can’t even win those of its own soldiers?

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Film Review | Night Moves (2013)

 

 

AlterNet June2, 2014  |  

 By Thomas Delapa

Leave it to Beavers

New Film 'Night Moves' Delivers Dangerous Paranoia About Environmentalists

What do you call a drama about three misfit environmentalists who float a plot to blow up an Oregon dam? According to director Kelly Reichardt, her nocturnally somber Night Moves is not a movie about “eco-terrorism.” Rather, she innocuously—and unsustainably—labels it a “character film.

That slippery semantic move is a little like calling Gone With the Wind a weather report instead of a Civil War drama.

I doubt many will need a weatherman to tell which way the box-office winds will blow on Night Moves, which wheezes and gasps for two hours until it finally runs out of hot air.

In a drab, gray Pacific Northwest shaded with sickly green themes, Reichardt and her co-writer Jon Raymond sketch in their scruffy, disgruntled trio: the brooding, tree-hugging farmer Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) growing his anger on a family co-op; his eco-fatalistic teen friend Dena (Dakota Fanning), middle-class drop-out; and Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), resentful ex-Marine, ex-con and budding Unabomber. For the insufferably laconic Josh, destroying the dam will make people, um, “start thinking,” ranting on about how it’s killing “all the salmon just to run your fucking iPads.”

But none of these characters does much thinking at all, except in a soggy, simple-minded way. That their weapon of choice is a massive fertilizer bomb recoils back to Timothy McVeigh’s horrifically rank right-wing terrorism more than anything sprouting from the Greenpeace playbook.

Blanketed with a foggy indie sensibility, Night Moves barely moves, especially after the prelude, creeping along at a pace that would make maple syrup envious. Long, lingering close-ups of the taciturn yet opaque Josh alternate with agonizingly slow pans across empty landscapes that portentously shout out (“Timber!”) the trio’s rootlessness and alienation. In a movie nearly devoid of political or social acuity regarding the global environmental dilemma, Reichardt instead takes potshots at Josh’s co-op kooks, who spend their down time reading each other’s auras.

For all the cascades of natural vistas, Reichardt seems to see neither the forest nor the trees, just this parched, sensationalized plot. In the clearer light of day, we do witness an otherworldly burial ground of barren tree trunks, marooned by the dam’s reservoir, and there’s also a roundhouse jab at tourists watching The Price is Right on TV in their gas-guzzling Winnebago, totally tuning out the glorious nature outside. But despite these sharp barbs, it’s these misguided malcontents the film tosses head-first into the wood chipper.

With story turns that inch from recklessness to paranoia and betrayal, Night Moves itself betrays a shoddy sense of plot and character. It’s a redwood-long stretch to believe that the eco-savvy millennial Josh lives so off the grid he must schlep down to his local library to tap the Internet. Critically, the trio’s neo-Luddite thinking is so muddled that they fail to fathom any collateral damage from their blow against the hydroelectric empire, a clueless blunder that sucks them into a noirish whirlpool of mistrust and isolation.

No, Josh, Dena and Harmon are emotionally and geographically closer to the Unabomber and Patty Hearst than Johnny Appleseed, murderously putting Earth first over their fellow man. Instead of illuminating their psychology or relationships, Reichardt hovers relentlessly on the outside, grafting in long, banal scenes detailing their sinister procedures. Like the old saw says, the audience for Night Moves is treated like mushrooms—fed manure and kept largely in the dark.

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Film Review | Fed Up

AlterNet 5/20/14

The Kids Are Not All Right

Inside the World's Child Obesity Epidemic

by Thomas Delapa 

When the curtain came down on Clifford Odets’ legendary 1935 New York opening of his agit-prop broadside Waiting for Lefty, audience members rose from their seats and stormed out of the theater, shouting “Strike!” in solidarity with the taxi-cab drivers and the Depression-era working class portrayed in the play.

Once the lights go up in theaters following Fed Up, audiences may have the urge to race down to their grocery stores, fast-food outlets and school cafeterias, yelling, “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to eat it anymore!”

An appetizing, bite-sized brand of advocacy documentary, Fed Up is an alarming yet tardy wakeup call on the crisis of U.S. childhood obesity. This is not a syrupy, feel-good story à la My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It is the sad, stomach-churning saga of my big fat American child.

Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig (Tapped), narrator/co-producer Katie Couric, and author Laurie David team up for a 90-minute serving of facts, figures and interviews on how American kids have been increasingly super-sized over the past 30 years, largely the result of a sugar- and fat-heavy diet that is literally to die for.

Fed Up might go down as the Inconvenient Truth of the pediatric health crisis, a plus-size omnivore's dilemma not limited to expanding U.S. waistlines, but globally too. Over the course of two years, Soechtig and her cameras check up on the misfortunes of a small group of corpulent kids, each struggling to battle the bulge with the help of their parents. This is not some cheesy, sensationalized Biggest Loser reality show, but the real story of children who can’t seem to win against a powerful, hydra-headed foe made up of food and beverage industry giants, commercial media and U.S. government policies that have sucker-punched kids square in the gut.

Of course, the plight of overweight kids (and adults) has been on the plate of U.S. news reporting for years, but Soechtig and company slice it up into easily digestible, fact-driven portions. To name a few:

• Over 80% of the products in a typical grocery contain added sugar.
• Two out of three Americans are overweight or obese, costing billions of dollars each year in rising healthcare costs, not to mention the psychological price paid in depression and poor self-esteem, especially in teens.
• A generic 12-ounce can of soda is loaded with a shocking 10 spoonfuls of sugar, which takes an hour or more of brisk bike-riding to burn off.

In one big gulp of not-so-fun facts, we learn that sugar is sugar, metabolically speaking, whether it’s called sucrose, dextrose, cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. The skinny on sugar is that it is fiendishly addictive, and when digested without the fiber normally associated with good diets, simply leaves us hungry and craving more. In one study, sugar was found to be eight times more addictive than cocaine.

It’s bad enough that kids today are targeted by a caloric cornucopia of TV commercials, marketing schemes and insidious product placements, all formulated to prod them into stuffing their faces with junk food. School cafeterias were once a haven for healthy (if bland) balanced lunches. But since the infiltration of the fast-food industry into cash-hungry public schools, they’ve been made over into “7-11s with books.” Pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, fried chicken, cookies, and those nasty nachos are high on the daily McMenu. Now kids have it their way every day, enabled by soda machines they can’t just say no to.

Soechtig persuasively offers that the U.S. government—and specifically the Department of Agriculture— have a place at the table of nutritional shame. On one hand, the government is tasked to protect children through lunch programs and “food pyramid” guidelines; yet it is also asked to serve the food and dairy industries, doling out regulations as well as billion-dollar yearly farm subsidies and loans. And any time politicians place an order for tougher dietary demands (like Sen. George McGovern did in 1977), armed-to-the-teeth agribusiness lobbyists go into a feeding frenzy. Beware, you may gag when a McDonald's spokeswoman earnestly shills, “Ronald McDonald never sells to children...he inspires through magic and fun.”

Even Michelle Obama, first mom and initiator of the ballyhooed “Let’s Move” campaign aimed to push kids into exercise, has had to take the “demonizing” of junk food off the front burner. To experts such as Michael Pollan (Food Rules) and Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat), dietary ditties such as “energy balance” and “eat less, exercise more” cooked up by industry apologists are empty panaceas, essentially laying all the blame on the overweight and obese. Soechtig shows the kids trying their best to run and swim to shed pounds, but her cameras also catch one slouched in an easy chair, gobbling down chips while eating up a TV show. A lower grade for her failure to note that gym classes have also been victims of crash budgetary diets; meanwhile, back at home suburban parents drive their kids everywhere, making walking to school—and play—as old-school as saddle shoes. 

Are soda and other junk foods the “cigarettes of the 21st century,” as one expert warns? Other countries have begun banning junk-food ads expressly aimed at children. In the U.S. those ubiquitous “nutrition facts” labels fatuously omit recommended daily allowances for sugars.

Let’s not sugarcoat it: American children are hugely at risk, and if parents and teachers aren’t sick to their stomachs yet, they’ll never be.
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