Anyone who glanced at the cover of the New York Times this morning might have noticed an eerie resemblance between the cover photograph and a recent much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan film.

Rohirrim

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Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, The Fountain, according to this interview with Ain’t It Cool News, still has no defined release date. Who is Aronofsky? He’s the young Brooklyn-born Jewish filmmaker behind Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), as well as the screenwriter of Below (2002). His new film stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, and is as he describes it, “a psychedelic fairy tale.”

Anyway, the teaser trailer is out and it’s totally trippy. Go check it out.

Spielberg is back. This time, though, it’s not with aliens or con men, but with the sobering real story of Israeli agents sent to assasinate Palestinian terrorists believed responsible for planning the 1972 murder of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany. If you don’t know much about this, head on over to Wikipedia and read up on it. Also a few years back there was a terrific documentary made of this called One Day in September. Definitely go check that out for the whole story and historical background.

After being rumored to be way behind schedule and potentially unable to meet the awards deadlines this year, the trailer for Munich was released yesterday on the film’s official web site. Unfortunately it is only available in horrible low quality, which, together with the fact that many of the scenes are quite dark, makes for a less than optimal first experience with the film.

The New York Times covered the production of the film back in July, and you can read that here(caution:PDF). The article covers many of the reasons this film will be seen as quite controversial and may pit America’s most well-known Jewish entertainer against the very Jewish organizations he worked with on Schindler’s List and the Shoah Foundation.

So what about his movie will be controversial? Here’s the breakdown:

1. The movie is about the five Israeli Mossad (like CIA or MI-6) agents who were tasked with assasinating a list of Palestinians who were believed to have been involved in the planning and executing of the Munich massacre. Spielberg’s interest is in the conflict within this group over their actions and the internal conflict of the leader (Eric Bana) in particular. Spielberg wants to pose the question of what society justifies doing and why, and make us think about our values and ethics when it comes to responding to terrorist attacks (quite a timely issue for Americans).
2. The first problem people will have is that many will debate the validity of the internal questioning of the agents period. As the Times article discusses, there is a feeling on the right that those actions were undertaken with complete moral clarity and with a clear conscience and that for Spielberg to show otherwise is not only a betrayal, but also a complete falsehood.
3. The second problem is that many more moderate Jews, Israelis, or friends of Israel will be concerned about the effect such a movie will have around the world. As the Anti Defamation League (ADL) concluded about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the film may not be explicitly anti-semitic, but the effect most assuredly will be. After all, this film will be portraying some of the most vile notions about Jews and Israel that exist around the world onscreen. Israel is made to seem all-powerful. The Mossad is evil and travels around the world killing people. All this coming from an “insider,” as Spielberg himself is Jewish. If people were worried that the Passion would spark anti-Jewish riots, they should be concerned about this film as well.

For my own part, I believe this film is important and timely, seeing as where we are in the “War on Terror.” I do worry about the last issue though, and it begs the question: As a liberal democracy, can we question some of the more difficult things we do in the name of our country or does that just lend fuel to the fires of our enemies?

Go check it out.

Erin, my fiancée, had the best reaction to this trailer — "Wow!"

Without any shred of doubt, I agree. Any doubts I had as to whether Peter Jackson could make us care about a huge gorilla vanished as I watched him blink in that first scene. Remarkably, the man who brought Tolkien's classic Gollum character to life to an extent that none had thought possible has done it again. It is absolutely astounding how much emotion they have been able to get out of Kong just in the shots in the trailer (which doesn't even really included much interaction with Naomi Watts). The scope seems just right, and they managed to convey the weight of the various creatures through camera, animation, and sound so we actually believe we are watching something that huge and heavy — and not just the wireframe animated skeleton that really exists behind the image onscreen.

Wow. Really.

Here is an absolutely terrific piece of music.

See if you can place it.

(Windows: Right-click on image and select “Save Target As…” Mac: Option-click on the image)

I just finished watching a terrific film called Birth (2004). It’s directed by Jonathan Glazer, the British filmmaker behind the critically acclaimed Sexy Beast (2000). I really did not like that film, but thought this one was divine.

Glazer crafts this story about a widow (Nicole Kidman) remarrying ten years after her husband dies to a cold but loving man (Danny Huston). A young boy confronts her repeatedly claiming he is her dead husband reborn. The story is a bit fantastic and if you are already scoffing at the premise, you won’t like the film, but as will all modern fantasy, Birth successfully uses fantastic elements to form a narrative framework in which to explore deeply realistic human emotions.

At its core Birth is a film about grief and love and in so many ways I felt as though there was a bit of rebirth going on for the film itself. As a major fan of the late Stanley Kubrick, I could not help but feeling as though this was exactly the film he would have been now, had he lived longer. The lingering shots, slow pans, steadicam use, and the wide lenses really give the film a Kubrickian feel. The acting is cold and removed, as is the camera, and Nicole Kidman is spot on, delivering a very different kind of performance here than she did in her Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

The film is powerful and powerfully made and if your taste in movies is at all like mine, I think you’ll enjoy it very much.

Tonight in my Documentary Film course we discussed and watched films about 1960’s and 1970’s revolutionary movements. Since I go to Columbia University, we watched a film about the 1968 protests and taking of the campus by student revolutionaries. I found the discussion following that film to be unexpectedly fascinating.

Most of the students in the course are 18-21 undergraduates, with some older undergraduates and some Masters students in the mix as well. The discussion basically centered on an argument between the younger and the older as to why we no longer see such protests and radical acts on campus today. The younger students were extremely apologetic and spent most of their time defending themselves with arguments like “we have more of a courseload today;Columbia keeps us busy.” The older students, on the other hand, were basically of the opinion that college youth is self-interested and decadent. The need amongst most of the younger students to justify why they were not storming administration buildings and getting arrested protesting something or other really fascinated me.

The next film we watched was my Haskell Wexler, Emile de Antonio, and Mary Lampson, and it was called Underground (1976). The film chronicles a series of interviews by the three filmmakers of members of the Weather Underground revolutionary group. The revolutionaries have their faces obscured and are in hiding, and the filmmakers cut between their interviews and footage of riots, police brutality, the war in Vietnam, and important related figures (like Malcolm X) speaking. Especially if you find the far left 60’s-70’s revolutionaries abhorrent, I would encourage you to see this film. It is sadly only available on VHS, though, and you might have to search for it a bit (more on that at the end of the post). What I guess I found so interesting in this film was the way that these educated people saw mid-20th century history so differently than I did. Coming from a perspective of those oppressed by the Soviet Union and Castro’s government in Cuba, I have a hard time with people saying that those revolutions freed people and that they were no longer exploited after the Communists took over. If you’re at all interested in this issue, I would encourage the film Before Night Falls (2000) with Javier Bardem, which is about Cuba under the Communists and the struggle of artists and especially of gays and lesbians in that country. It chronicles the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay poet from Cuba. It’s an amazing movie and wonderful performances from Bardem and from Johnny Depp.

So back to Underground. It occurs to me that many of these smaller, sometimes independent, films (like Underground or Columbia Revolt) are probably not in the control of any major studio and are probably not under copyright (if they ever were). These are the sorts of things that really should be digitized and brought to services like the Internet Archive or Google Video. After all, movies that are coming out of copyright (which is not really happening all that often anymore, but that’s for another post), like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) are being put online and are now available for anyone to discover and watch. This really should be done with the documentary and other smaller films from the last 5-6 decades, as those are at this point disappearing with libraries and some boutique video stores carrying old VHS copies.