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nickcw-1
Reviews
Hyena Road (2015)
Excellent movie about Canada's involvement in Afghanistan
Paul Gross took a few risks in making this movie about Canada's military campaign in Afghanistan's Kandahar province--"the birthplace of the Taliban" and pretty much a hornet's nest for the tiny Canadian NATO force that tried to secure the region for five long years.
The movie is thoughtful and subtle, rather than offering beginning-to-end war movie entertainment, and it focuses on people and some of the impossible personal and professional choices they're forced to make in complex and unforgiving situations--on both sides of the cultural divide between occupier and occupied.
In this the movie isn't afraid to show that some of the all-too-human choices turn out to be the wrong ones, or that the protagonists can declare personal guiding principles and then contradict them in their professional response to circumstances.
For the most part, the movie avoids setting up two-dimensional characters in a good guys-bad guys scenario; however, it failed in this respect regarding the Taliban, who were reduced to nonentities worthy only of being killed wholesale--much like the Somalis in Blackhawk Down.
As in Blackhawk Down, and a slew of similar tales about recent Western military action against foreign countries, Hyena Road treats the local resistance to foreign occupation as almost an affront to the well-meaning efforts of "our" noble warriors. But presumably it wasn't made for Afghan audiences.
To fully appreciate the movie, it helps if you know something about Afghanistan's past forty years of foreign military occupation and civil war, and also if you know something about Canada's military--where the personal and the professional are never far apart. I believe this quality is one of the things that makes the Canadian Forces so good in the field: they're not trained to be machines; they're trained to be fully human warriors--which I felt the movie illustrated very well in the relationships between the Canadian protagonists and the veteran Afghan fighter, with admirable understatement by Mr. Gross.
Hyena Road is less entertainment than it is an education about aspects of personal warriorship and about Western nations' activities in foreign realms most of us know nothing about, but about which many of us hold strong opinions nevertheless (oh yes, and the action scenes are pretty riveting and authentic-looking!). I think Paul Gross succeeded very well in what he set out to do with Hyena Road.
The Blacklist (2013)
Good for Spader and action, not for plausibility; but hey, it's TV
(This contains a tiny spoiler for one minor scene in one episode.)
Intriguing concept giving considerable range to the accomplished Mr. Spader, who really carries the series. I don't completely agree with the negative reviews of the lovely Megan Boone's performance. It's a difficult role: she's supposed to be a brand-new profiler, not a hard-bitten, seasoned front-line FBI agent, and her extremely troubled past makes her a very vulnerable person. She's suddenly thrown into high-stakes, intense situations, all the while trying to figure out her past--the reason Spader's character demanded to work with her on his list of bad people. I think she does a reasonable job.
What I dislike is some of the writing. The Mossad agent who came into the second season doesn't fit at all. The camera spends a lot of time on her, but she mostly just listens to other people explaining things. Oh, and her Mossad role was invoked by two very dubious incidents. In one, an episode began with her murdering an innocent Iranian civilian nuclear expert, and her new FBI comrades smirking that it must have been her work and then dropping it. The implications of this scene are just awful. Then--presumably because she's Mossad--the FBI tasks her with physically torturing a suspect to get information, as if that would be a typical Mossad contribution.
My other beef is the preposterous computer tech guy, whose IT wizardry finds impossible information in a matter of seconds from the tiniest clue, and then feeds a street address to our heroes so they can dash off to the next action scene (which are quite well done, by the way).
The series is worth watching for Spader and well-paced action. Just don't expect any plausibility.
Lebanon (2009)
Where sentiment abandons reality
Oy vay! This movie is yet another almost shockingly implausible offering from the school of cinema that keeps trying to portray Israeli soldiers as ultrasensitive conscript victims of an uncaring, brutal and faceless military leadership in Israel's frequent wars, and it's wearing thin. There have been skillful and plausible examples of the Israeli soldier's reality the past, such as the animated, powerful "Waltz with Bashir", but "Lebanon" is so keen to apologize for the ordinary Israeli soldier that it inadvertently makes him into an object of scorn. At least we hope it is inadvertent.
The tank crew appear, unrealistically, to be strangers to each other and to be incongruously devoid of the very necessary tanker's padded headgear (they get their heads banged so much inside their tanks that Canadian tankers call themselves "zipperheads" due to the frequency of receiving stitches in their skulls), and the Israeli tank commander falls apart so fast under fairly basic human relationships with his subordinates--never mind contact with the enemy--that we are forced to question the competence of the IDF in putting such dysfunctional and undisciplined individuals and fighting units into battle. After all, Lebanon was very much a war of choice for Israel in comparison with the choiceless desperation of the Yom Kippur War; you'd think the IDF forces would be both more trained up for the Lebanon incursion and worthier in the eyes of the movie makers of basic appreciation for the military effectiveness of their conquest of south Lebanon--quarrels with the political and humanitarian aspects of the conquest notwithstanding.
What I find most ironical are the favourable comparisons with "Das Boot," the claustrophobic and multilayered epic story of a German U-Boat's harrowing mission late in WWII. The U-Boat crew were never portrayed as anything but trained and disciplined submariners encountering the real tests of war--from endless tedium to the horror of seeing their victims perish to the basic terror of becoming the hunted. But they always conducted themselves as disciplined military folk--not as ideological Nazis--and they met their challenges not as damaged or incompetent people but as challenged military personnel. Therein lies a fundamental difference between "Lebanon" and "Das Boot." Another problem I had was the incongruous use of the tank's periscope to provide the only perspective on what was going on outside the tank. I can understand an independent camera operator focusing and dwelling on the civilian horrors going on in a combat zone--presumably to make an anti-war point, but to ascribe such focus to a tank gunner in a combat situation verges on the ludicrous, and is at the least implausible.
I think the movie fails, ultimately, because it does not do justice to its subjects or its subject. We are left with a feeling of being clumsily manipulated through personality stereotypes and a fanciful interpretation of how soldiers actually behave in war.
Redacted (2007)
An honest attempt to recreate the horror and ambiguity of military occupation
Like so many of us, De Palma has gained some or most of his insights into the Iraq war through the soldiers', the media's and the insurgents' video records available on youtube, liveleak.com and other sites. The quality of these video "diaries" is all over the place--from crudest amateur to fully professional, but when you watch them, it's the story contained in a few seconds or minutes that you're interested in--and it's usually riveting.
Much of such footage is shot live and raw in scenes of combat, on patrol, relaxing or goofing around back at the "hooch", or from ambush in the case of the insurgents' videos. It usually has a jerky, home-movie quality, but that kind of qualification simply doesn't apply to the visuals inside a humvee when it is hit by an IED, or of a patrol suddenly taking fire and all hell is breaking loose. This isn't "art".
De Palma has tried to be faithful to this medium--and to the subject--with as little movie-making artifice as possible. However, the daily horror is easy to see, and the existing video and still photo record of it is huge. What he has done is to try to recreate what one of these amateur video records would have looked like if one had been made of the historical incident that forms the subject of the movie--not just of the incident itself, but of the very ordinary people and the circumstances they found themselves in that led to the incident, and its aftermath. While it is horrifying, I think it is also compassionate, in that it doesn't flinch from the truth.
I think it is brave film-making--definitely outside the wire for an established major director. And I think that's exactly what he intended--both for his art, and for the soldiers and Iraqi people who collide "outside the wire" daily in Iraq.