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Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
worth thinking about
This is the true story of how a young CIA agent worked tirelessly to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, persuading her colleagues and finally getting her man.
Well, not exactly.
This is the story of how our intelligence agencies sifted through mountains of data to find Bin Laden's associates, and then track him down. In the process some people- bad people- were tortured.
Well, sort of.
Zero Dark Thirty is a very smart movie about the hunt for Bin Laden. It features a lovely young redhead named Maya standing in for the faceless agents who did the actual job. Some of it, or all of it, or none of it, is based on actual events.
For most media reviewers, ZDT raised issues about torture- or, as the CIA calls it, enhanced interrogation. There's no denying torture is an integral part of the story here.
Maya's first appearance in Pakistan coincides with the interrogation of Amar, who may be a member of Al Qaida. The interrogator, Dan, tells her 'there's no shame' in watching the torture on a monitor, but she wants to take an active role. As she works with Dan to interview prisoners and follow up leads, she gets a better feel for what's going on in Pakistan and what this assignment will entail.
She catches on quickly. Imbued with an incredible sense of mission, she pushes her more reluctant superiors along Bin Laden's trail. Finally, years of work pay off when a member of her team follows a man to a walled compound that may be the actual hideout. The navy Seals stage a dramatic nighttime attack. One of the casualties is OBL himself.
So, in this version of the story, we tortured the people we had to in order to find Bin Laden.
This is a seductive piece of film making. It doesn't glamorize the tedium of intelligence gathering: trailing suspects, tapping phone calls, reviewing endless blurry videos. There are no cute relationships, no romances; no cartoon violence or action sequences.
It's suspenseful. It pulls out all the stops to create tension in the audience and sympathy for its heroine, who could be blown up at any moment. We're on her side. We want her to succeed in her quest.
And if she uses torture to succeed, are we still with her? We see her doing it; we cheer her on because she doesn't back down, she's as good as the guys.
And it's not like it's really BAD torture. Sure, some Arab guys are beaten, starved, water-boarded, put in a box- but we've all seen more violence in movies.
But these are the good guys we're rooting for. Good guys torture their prisoners?? Are we saying that in a good cause, it's okay?
Are we even claiming it worked? Because half the world is p'd off at us, and it's doubtful that anything of value was learned under torture. One guy even confessed that Sadam Hussein and Bin Laden were plotting together. And we all know how that piece of information worked out.
This is an extremely well-crafted movie. I give it 7 points, plus one more for the portrait of us it leaves to the future. If the rest of the world wants to know how we feel about torturing our enemies, it's all there.
Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011)
A feast for the eye
This is an art history of the twentieth century as seen through fashion, its most glittering art form. Weaving together video footage, magazine layouts, and first-hand accounts, the filmmakers trace the life of DV, one of fashion's all-time most imaginative thinkers.
Born rich ('but ugly', as her mother would have said) in Paris at the turn of the century, she partied her way to New York. When Carmel Snow noticed her chic outfit in a nightclub, she offered her a job at Harper's Bazaar. Thus began a fabulous self-created career, first at HB through the thirties forties and fifties, and then at Vogue in the sixties. There, she launched photographers like Richard Avedon and David Bailey, and put designers like Yves St Laurent on the map. She discovered an endless succession of models like Verushka and Iman, who turned notions of beauty inside out. And she originated idea of celebrities as models, studding Vogue with wonderful shots of Cher, Mick Jagger, and Jacqueline Kennedy. She also spent staggering amounts of Vogue's money pursuing fashionable subjects around the globe; they she fired her in 1972.
She was not idle for long- soon the Metropolitan Museum persuaded her to help launch the Costume Institute. There, she was able to bring her extravagant sense of fashion to a wide audience, and, not incidentally, throw some great parties.
The best thing a documentary can do is pick a fascinating subject, and clearly, DV was a LOT of fun. A Who's Who of actors, artists, writers, and fashion luminaries signed on to supply their recollections, both then and now. Her interviews with George Plimpton, Jack Paar, and Dick Cavett are lavishly excerpted, as well as material from her sons and grandchildren. (Her granddaughter's reading aloud from a vintage issue of Vogue is definitely a high point!)
The wealth of material here is stunning- and the filmmakers' skill in handling it is a triumph.
Eat Pray Love (2010)
Liked the book
I think EPL went wrong at the concept stage, taking an inspirational best-seller as the basis for a big budget romantic comedy. The book was wonderful, funny, truthful, and of course self-indulgent, because you can't do self-help without navel gazing. And it was a huge best-seller, so of course it had to be a huge movie.
But spiritual journeys don't translate naturally to the screen- not even with Julia Roberts pairing a vast wardrobe of cute outfits with her two or three patented facial expressions. She's the living embodiment of The Anguish of Being Gorgeous. And as her search for meaning has to cover three continents in two hours, with the travel porn laid on thick, there's not much time to go deep.
I'm at a loss to say how this might have worked better- lose the Eat? drop the Love? (Pray almost worked, thanks to Richard from Texas). Gilbert's trip was a spiritual journey, not a well-dressed romp through the funner parts of Europe and Asia. It might work better as a dreamy mood piece like Moonrise Kingdom, or an offbeat meditation.
Good book, though