TFT 140 running time: 1 hours 1 minute 10 seconds – 28.1mb mp3

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Covering the war in Afghanistan from the frontlines, Restrepo (2010) is an eye-opening piece of journalism that makes CNN’s Persian Gulf coverage look like a puff piece.  Directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger deliver verite naturalism as they embed with the US Army for fifteen months in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan, the Korengal valley. The film’s intimate perspective compensates for a lack of omniscience with an observant eyes-on-the-ground approach similar to that of Generation Kill. The major divergence, though, is in the acknowledgment, or glaring lack thereof in the case of Restrepo, of the reporters. They ask questions on a couple occasions, and the entire campaign is interspersed with later confessional sequences in typical doc style, but you wonder why nobody’s rushing to cover the directors during any of the combat they wind up in.

Still, it’s hard to focus on the crew when you’re in the midst of a real-life battle between US Army soldiers and invisible Taliban insurgents. The power of the film’s battlefield access cannot be overstated. No news report or fiction film comes as close to conveying what fighting in Afghanistan is really like, and the talking heads (“felt like fish in a barrel,” “ my mindset was like ‘I’m gonna die here’”) only augment the horror. You’re on edge hiking through the forests. You feel betrayed when you hear reports that the recurring valley elders have called for jihad. You’re dumbstruck at the chaos of the two major skirmishes, the dig-shoot-dig fortification of a new base (the titular O.P. Restrepo) and the so-bad-they-warn-us Operation Rock Avalanche. You’re exhausted when you read that ending title card, the filmmakers’ final, ironic killshot.

Restrepo isn’t nearly as depressing as it sounds, though, precisely because it doesn’t have much perspective beyond that of its creative, energetic, young soldiers. The greatest scene in the film is a humorous walkie-talkie conversation so absurdly detailed and expertly timed that no screenwriter could have concocted it. Through their talking heads and spontaneous dance parties and artistic outlets we come to know the individual soldiers, especially platoon leader Capt. Kearney, who desperately clings to the notion that OP Restrepo is a success. It’s more than a strategic victory and more than a memorial for the soldier, glimpsed in poetic low-angle flashback, it’s named after. It’s a symbol that their campaign, however costly, produced some concrete result.

Restrepo the film is more opaque, but the film’s multivalent attack crystallizes in the weekly meetings with the valley elders. These sequences hearten the less gung ho among us, they provide an interesting if limited anthropological insight, especially the meeting about the aptly named Cow Incident, and they demonstrate the documentary’s limitations as the weekly impasse is resolved without explanation. But more than any other scene, these episodes reveal both the film’s worldview and its cunning. As the appearance of diplomacy occurs on hardly neutral ground, the camera silently, selectively clarifies that each side talks past the other and walks away feeling accomplished. It’s the illusion of progress, but next week you’re back where you started. Welcome to Afghanistan.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Hit Girl, the littlest killer (Painting by Adonihs)

Yes, I know it’s been a while since Kick-Ass played the theaters. But I only just caught it on Blu-Ray, and it lead me to think long and hard about superhero movies — thoughts which I felt worth sharing with you. Here’s why I didn’t like Kick-Ass and why I generally don’t like superhero movies:

As you probably already know, Kick-Ass is a film about a ragtag group of would-be superheroes who circumvent the legal system and dish out just-rewards. Roger Ebert called the film, “morally reprehensible.” Peter Travers dismissed Ebert and others who were bothered by the film’s tone as “prudes” and “moralists,” strangely blaming its failure on their criticism.

The depiction of violence in film doesn’t really bother me. When I was 11 years old, I sculpted various dismembered body parts out of Sculpey clay, complete with blood and jutting bones. I entered them in a local “everyone gets accepted” art show and got rejected, disturbing the judge so much that he met with me and my mother to vent his “concerns.” I couldn’t understand where he was coming from. I thought the pieces just looked cool.

What does bother me is tone — how the elements of sound, editing, lighting, and acting can come together to infuse violence (or anything) with a hardy stamp of approval. And the message that Kick-Ass delivered to me is that it’s ok to deal with your problems with a sharp sword. Don’t be afraid. Don’t take shit. Administer punishment. Regret nothing. Escape consequences.

11 year old Hit Girl slices through a band of drug dealers with gleeful abandon, apparently smug in her own authority as judge, jury, and executioner. Never mind that the drug dealers were mostly inner city African Americans and that Hit Girl was a white, middle-class, heavily-sheltered little girl. That’s an entire book of essays in itself. More to the point is her complete lack of empathy, her immense feelings of superiority, her profound sense of injustice, and her compulsion to make things right by any means necessary. Folks, that’s the description of a psychopath. You could say the same of Eric Harris, Idi Amin, and Chairman Mao. The difference is that we’re meant to root for Hit Girl, hang her poster on our wall.

Well, it’s satire, isn’t it?  But what exactly is it satirizing? Is the meta-within-meta-within-meta flying straight over my head? Travers says the filmmakers were, “neatly subverting the comic book genre, letting fantasy bleed into reality.” If that was their intentions, then they failed miserably. Fantasy bled into fantasy. The filmmakers got quite a lot right about reality (enough to counter any “this is cartoon violence” arguments), but they got a few details glaringly wrong: guilt, remorse, consequences. Death has weight.*

I wonder if the filmmakers have ever had a brush with death. Roger Ebert definitely has. There was a moment just a few years ago when I was sure I was experiencing my last few moments of life, that I wouldn’t be alive when the ambulance arrived. And the experience completely altered the way I view everything. It isn’t prudishness that informs Ebert’s appraisal of Kick-Ass; it’s his first-hand experience that life is fragile, impermanent, and precious.**

Excessive violence can work in a film when the violence serves something. Battle Royale is a book and film about high school students who are forced to kill each other for national sport. It’s every bit as gory as Kick-Ass, but Battle Royale works because the satire is dead-on point and we’re never meant to believe the killing is an easy moral choice for the protaganists. (The book was even better than the film, and I can’t help but feel there’s a better adaptation waiting to be made.)

But Kick-Ass‘s amoral tone is hardly the only rip in its hull. The film is clunky and sophomoric. The script (which Travers calls intelligent) begins with the favorite technique of the amateur scriptwriter: an opening narration by the main character, the gist of which is always: “Hi, my name is (insert name of unpopular schmo). That’s (spoken wistfully, insert name of impossibly beautiful girl with no other qualities). She doesn’t know I exist!”

But I’m drifting away from my provocative title. Why don’t I like most superhero movies? Watching Kick-Ass crystallized it for me. Superhero movies (with some exceptions) glorify and pedestal-ize the heroes, who are by their very nature morally-suspect. In the case of movies like Kick-Ass, the heroes circumvent the system, chucking the long, hard, and boring path to justice for a dash of danger and blind eye to pesky repercussions. One terrible act should be punished with another, and by God, by virtue of freakish super power, scientific genius, or monumental ego, I’m just the man for the job! These heroes are the cinematic equivalent of that douchebag who cut you off on the highway going 100 miles an hour.

On the other extreme, there are the superhero movies which tell us we are helpless, huddled masses who can’t function without a sleepless sentinel. We are incapable of coming together and solving our own problems. Theses heroes are our methadone, and woe be to us when the supply runs out. (I’m starting to sound like the supporting villain — a political candidate or high-powered executive perhaps –  in the very super hero movies I’m criticizing.)

There there are the ones which mask a societal problem through metaphor. Perhaps they are based on 60s comics which, because of prevailing opinion or censorship, had to deal with such issues in code. That may have been necessary at the time, but not today. It’s far braver to make a commentary that puts a mirror to our faces. Tell the African American actor that you’re passing him up for the lead in your sweeping criticism on racism in America in favor of a quirky, rich white guy in one-piece leotard.

Most superhero films are guilty of one, two, or all three of these. The Dark Knight is the exception I can think of at the moment. Bale’s Batman is certainly guilty of my first two criticisms, but director Christopher Nolan doesn’t ask us to ride shotgun. I don’t feel the lighting, editing, and musical score are cloying at me to actually like the hero. We are mere observers who watch the protagonist struggle (and nearly drown) in his own set of moral codes.

So again, I suppose it comes down to tone. Is the message one of propaganda, fetishism, or something deeper? Or is any given popcorn flick just that — a popcorn flick — so obvious in its fantasy world that only a hoity-toity art critic would takes offense from something that really, “just looks cool.”

*Here are some examples of how fantasy meets actual reality. To the drug dealer he approaches in the clip, Dark Guardian is about as intimidating as a circus clown. (Ok, circus clowns ARE intimidating. Bad example.)

**Don’t get me wrong: Having a near-death experience gives one  no special authority. Nor am I suggestion that everyone who has one will necessarily agree with me. I am merely trying to describe something that informs my perspective.

Tony Youngblood is the current Foursquare Mayor of the Belcourt Theatre, a film and music snob, and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

TFT 139 running time: 49 minutes 11 seconds – 23.7mb mp3

THE OTHER GUYS starts at 1 minute 2 seconds

The Perfect Cinema starts at 24 minutes 16 seconds

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HELP JETT FIND WORK IN LA – CLICK HERE FOR HIS RESUME

Hi Folks – Jett here.  It gives me great pleasure to introduce a new guest blogger on TFT: Brandon Nowalk.  I’ve been enjoying his blog But What She Said for some time – it’s a great fast, pithy read with real insight into film coupled with genuine warmth, (and plenty of Fuller – I mean ya can’t go wrong with STEEL HELMET . . . STEEL HELMET people!).

Anyhew, I trust you’ll enjoy his weekly posts on TFT as much as I have on his site – with an infinite amount of content online it can be hard to find the good stuff – so I’m really very pleased that not only is Brandon is out there in the world blogging but that he’s agreed to visit us from time to time as well.  Please join Gareth and myself in welcoming him – and now over to Brandon…

My biggest problem with Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right is the title. But instead of ferociously demanding a refund after discovering Annette Bening’s abominable English accent is in service of a fictional story that has nothing to do with The Who, I found myself chugging the kool-aid of one of the most lauded films of the summer.

You probably know the story: Bening and wife Julianne Moore are fearlessly flawed parents raising a boy and a girl in the SoCal milieu of smelly composted hippiedom, and one day the boy (Josh Hutcherson) asks the girl (Mia Wasikowska) to use her age-of-consent for good, the tracking down of their biological father. When sperm donor Mark Ruffalo accepts, hijinks abound and complications ensue. It’s a heartwarming tale of love and—okay, no it’s not. It’s a singular picture unlike any family dramedy I’ve seen for reasons that have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with its portrayal of real life.

Now, it’s not without its clichés—a child prompting an irresponsible adult to grow up, the inevitable twist you already expect just from the premise—but The Kids are All Right absolutely transcends them thanks to its finely detailed, lived-in universe. Huge dramatic stories are told in pieces, seeds disguised as comedy planted for later harvest, and the whole plot breaks down into a graceful shifting of roles and needs among the players. These people were around long before Cholodenko dropped by with co-writer Stuart Blumberg. Cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo captures rather than stylizes the natural lighting and tastefully restrained palette of their home (as well as the spicy colors of Ruffalo’s environs). Life happens as it happens in all its awkward glory. In the mean time, Bening and Moore are free to bicker and make up, watch nature docs, and worry about their son’s choice of friends. Like the year’s other casual LA excursion Greenberg, only at the end do you realize how these details add up to a full portrait.

But this is no mere character study, though Bening’s tour de force as the breadwinner, wino, and (well, that would be a spoiler) leads a magnificent collection of naturalistic, textured performances right down to the kids, whose complexities have rendered Ruffalo’s first impressions shallow before the words escape his lips. And it’s not just a political appeal showing how gay families are “just like us,” though the situations and relationships are naturally relatable. Cholodenko’s acuity draws from the knowledge that lesbian families largely resemble the Norman Rockwell nuclear but also have their own joys and frustrations, with kids curious about their lineage and deeply burdened by an alienating sociopolitical climate. Ultimately, The Kids Are All Right is an exploration of progressivism by way of such a family in 2010, catching, mocking, and celebrating people who know they’re imperfect but strive to change for the better.

It all comes down to Julianne Moore: “The bottom line is marriage is hard.” Marriage, not gay marriage, just plain, old, sweaty, saggy, naggy, naked marriage. It’s a sitcom lesson animated by precision and topicality, building to this pensive shot as we think about what’s happened and wonder about the future for this family, mindful of the recent real-world headlines. It’s not tidy, the resolution, but it’s complete, leaving you with the unmistakable impression that the kids are indeed all right. It’s a true slice of life, quietly groundbreaking, making a difference simply by being itself.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.