Democracy's Blooper Reel

Revenge, Globalization and Lesbian Moms at the Movies

In Theaters

Oldboy- Chanwook Park's hallucinatory revenge picture is poised to be the first real crossover hit from the booming South Korean movie industry. 2nd prize winner at Cannes and slated for a Hollywood remake (helmed by the team behind Better Luck Tomorrow) Oldboy will make director Park one of South Korea's most bankable exports. Detractors find the film a shallow genre exercise, designed to make fanboys and manga-readers swoon (as if that were a bad thing.) I'm not sure I saw the same movie Manohla Dargis and Scott Foundas did!

Oldboy may be polarizing, but its also never less than exhilarating to watch. It's full of jaw-dropping set pieces and breathtaking emotional depths. Park traces the dizzying story of Oh Dae-su (the fearless Choi Min-sik) a Korean businessman who is kidnapped one rainy night and inexplicably detained in a private cell for 15 years. When he is finally freed, Oh Dae-su is hell bent on finding out who imprisoned him and why. It's a simple premise which grows more absurdly contrived as the film builds to its Shakespearean climax.

Oldboy is a bit too show-offy, and its dramatic payoff depends on an elaborately schematic plot. It's also perhaps too cruel and pitiless by half. Park nearly reaches the sadistic heights of Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer, but without Miike's manic glee. Despite these faults, Oldboy stands as the most exciting movie import of the year so far.

Finally, I think Oldboy perhaps unwittingly taps a political nerve at the moment. In its depiction of indefinite detention without charge, in prisons beyond the reach of law, the movie unavoidably invokes comparisons to the plight of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine detainees (some of whom are no doubt innocent) being pushed to the kind of blind hatred, and determined revenge that Oh Dae-su develops in the confines of his dank cell. I don't know whether that makes the film a cautionary tale, or just a disturbing reminder that for all of its contrivances, Oldboy's traumas aren't far from our front page.

On DVD

The Terminal AKA Forrest, Full of Grace- In Steven Spielberg's appallingly-bad romantic comedy, Tom Hanks grafts his everyman shtick onto another cliche, that of the lovable, naive Eastern European immigrant (see also Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson.) Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man stuck in bureaucratic limbo in the international terminal of JFK airport, while his country undergoes a military coup. Navorski, forced to live, sleep and eat in the airport, bravely weathers the administrative crackdown of an anal-retentive airport official, played by Stanley Tucci and effortlessly befriends an idealized assortment of oddball airport employees. But it's his romance with a flight attendant, played by Catherine Zeta Jones, that's the biggest embarrassment here. Poor Zeta Jones is forced to play a thankless type: that of the self-sabotaging career woman. She repeatedly demurs nice guy Navorski in favor of her caddish, married flyboy lover. All of the scenes between this mismatched romantic pairing are cringe-inducingly bad.

Also, Spielberg's penchant for using depressing true stories to craft uplifting affirmations of the human spirit (see also Schindler's List) is particularly telling in our post 9/11 paranoia state. The Terminal is actually based on the true story of Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian national who has lived in the Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris for nearly two decades. His true story is ill-suited to the shallow optimism of Spielberg's screwball comedy. When Nasseri was finally granted French residency after a decade of living at Charles De Gaulle, he was psychologically broken and unable to leave. By all accounts he will probably die in the airport.

Despite its considerable flaws, The Terminal is a great-looking film and no small technical achievement. The JFK we see here is actually a massive replica built inside an airplane hangar. Spielberg's command of the medium is extraordinary and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski nimbly moves the camera through the well-oiled buzz of the airport.  For once, the product placement in a Spielberg film (in this case the various franchises contained in the terminal) perfectly suits his frenzied vision of globalization limbo. But the modern American airport and all of its psychic baggage is ill-suited to light comedy. Perhaps only a horror film or a dark comedy will do.

Code 46- Michael Winterbottom's sci-fi romance is a minor-key masterpiece and a worthy counterpoint to The Terminal's chipper take on the modern security state. Winterbottom's chilling dystopia is just about the most convincing vision of the future (rampant globalization, extreme class polarization, severe global warming, polyglot English) I've ever seen. Made on the cheap, but still gorgeously shot on 35 mm in megacities like Shanghai and Dubai, Code 46 has a wonderful look and a spontaneous, almost improvised quality.

Thankfully, Frank Cottrell Boyce's script dispenses with exposition instead focusing on the love story between insurance investigator Tim Robbins and black market passport forger Samantha Morton (one of the best actresses in the English language, and simply amazing here.) The plot elegantly touches on themes found in that other recent sci-fi romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and to a lesser degree, the Korean film Oldboy): amnesia, romantic destiny and the taboo of incest.

She Hate Me- Spike Lee's fantasia about capitalism and American ethics finds the writer/director at his most self-righteous, while simultaneously thinking with his dick. It's not an appealing combination. Corporate whistleblower Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie, stranded) is fired from his high-paying executive post at a shady drug company. In order to make ends meet, he enters the lucrative world of sperm donation for wealthy lesbian couples. The catch here is that the lesbians in question are all femme, gorgeous and dying for dick. Eschewing the turkey basters, these man-hungry dykes insist on inspecting the goods (his big dick- in a scene meant to invoke slavery) before hopping into bed with our virile hero, for some mutually-orgasmic, procreative (and wildly unsafe) sex. It's all totally ludicrous.

But it's not nearly as embarrassing as Lee's attempts to fold everything from the Enron scandal to Watergate to a Mafia subplot into the baby batter. At nearly 2 1/2 hours, She Hate Me is politically-confused, visually-drab and self-indulgently digressive. Supposedly sex columnist Tristan Taormino was Lee's technical consultant on the lesbian characters. Judging from the finished product however, it's hard to believe that Lee consulted with anyone before releasing this mess.

Getting Away with Murder

So, Robert Blake got away with murder. Less than a week after a jury declared him not guilty in the murder of his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, the LA Times reports that Blake is looking to jumpstart his flagging movie career. That's right, he won't be wasting any time or money looking for the "real killer" of his daughter's mother. Instead he'll be using his recent notoriety to get himself into of those edgy independent flicks. Or perhaps even a reality show.

Anyone who saw his last movie role in David Lynch's meta-noir Lost Highway knows how creepy the implications of Blake's exoneration are. In that film, he played a Mephistophelean character who helps jazz musician Bill Pullman kill his cheating wife. Blake's "Mystery Man" also acts as Pullman's conscience, trailing him throughout the film with a video camera and haunting him with the proof of his crimes. The whole moebius-like narrative unfolds in Lynch's gorgeously-lensed vision of an infernal Hollywood. According to the film's co-writer Barry Gifford, Lost Highway grew out of Lynch's obsession with the OJ Simpson murder trial. The film was Lynch's attempt to answer the question: "how can OJ golf?"

So you may very well be asking yourself, how can Blake be reading scripts and shopping for reality shows? Simple, because he'll be largely forgiven. Where Nicole Brown Simpson (young, beautiful, virtuous, rich), was an "innocent" victim, Bakley (older, homely, venal, gold-digging white trash) was "guilty" as hell. Blake himself, asked to theorize on who killed his wife, simply said, she "made a lot of enemies." In other words, she deserved to die. And of course race played a tremendous role in cementing OJ's pariah status among the Hollywood elite. Time will tell whether the Hollywood establishment will allow Blake to bury the memory of his crimes, but it's clear that no tears are being shed over Bakley's unsolved murder.

But Robert Blake isn't the only one getting away with murder this week. The NY Times reports that 17 GIs "implicated" in the deaths of 3 detainees will walk. No one but the ACLU, a handful of human rights groups and a few spleen-venting bloggers will raise a fuss. As in the Blake case, America is ready to forgive. The murder victims? They were no innocents. They too "made a lot of enemies." They "deserved" to die.

Wife Shop til Ya Drop

"...as the increase in fertility technologies and professional commitments for women pushes the average age of marriage back, some men are assuming a take-no-prisoners approach to shopping for a life mate."

- from Rebecca Traister's trendspotting piece on "Wife Shoppers" in Salon.

Traister's glib think piece pushes the notion that the tables have turned in blue state breeder courtship rituals. Now, it's the men who are trying to snare a spouse. Traister's sampling, however, is hopelessly myopic and skewed. The women interviewed for the article include a network news producer, a New York journalist, an advertising brand planner, and a cable executive. Not exactly typical professions for most Americans of either gender. Alternately the clingy, marriage-minded men in her piece are represented by an artist and a secondary school teacher. News Flash: Female TV execs don't want to marry penniless male artists and schoolteachers! And, note to Salon, the whole country is not represented by the glamorous, upwardly mobile women of Sex & the City.

Marriage is for Fags.

After months of spinning my wheels and flirting with ideas, I've finally launched my latest project: The "Marriage is for Fags" t-shirt. Buy one today. Confuse someone tomorrow.

Million Dollar Idiocy

Good to know our Congress has its priorities straight. If the costly, silly steroid inquisitions aren't a big enough waste of our tax dollars, witness the embarrassing spectacle of lawmakers attempting to keep a comatose woman alive by conducting government business in her hospital room! Funny, I thought Congress should have been working on ways to get body armor to our troops. Or conducting investigations into US torture policy. Or passing laws to prohibit state-sponsored propaganda.

Schiavo's predicament may serve as the perfect metaphor for the American body politic. The US has become a Persistent Vegetative State.

Snopes Plays Dope on Torture

Snopes.com has been an invaluable and highly-entertaining resource for debunking frauds, urban myths and fishy-smelling email forwards. I consider it one of the few truly indispensable sites on the Web, though it has an almost embarrassingly bad design. It's a pity then that in an apparent effort to remain politically neutral, they've elided certain key facts about torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This entry, dated February 15, 2005 leaves something to be desired. Here's how lead debunker Barbara Mikkelson sums up the criticisms of US policy at Guantanamo:

The Guantanamo Bay facility (abbreviated as GTMO, hence its "Gitmo" nickname) has been decried as inhumane by a number of human rights associations and been denounced at various times in the American press. As we detail in our article about a Charlie Daniels essay on the situation at Gitmo, the detainees were initially incarcerated at Camp X-Ray, a temporary holding facility near Guantanamo Bay. Inmates were kept in tin-roofed 8x8 cells that resembled dog runs: chain link fencing on a concrete base, open on the sides to the elements. They slept on foam pads placed on concrete floors in cells containing chemical toilets or buckets. At least every two days prisoners would be taken from their cells for all of 15 minutes of exercise. Those being held have since been moved to nearby Camp Delta, a permanent detention center erected for this purpose. The 8x6.66 cells have beds and walls and windows, flush toilets and running water, but can still be described as austere.

Some are outraged by the apparent human rights violations at Gitmo. Others view the method of foreign fighters' detainment at that facility as a necessary evil if those being held are to be prevented from inflicting harm on others. Members of yet another faction regard the matter as one of severe punishment justly earned by foreign fighters not entitled to the protections afforded under the Geneva code to conventional, uniformed prisoners of war.

That's it. No mention of torture, sexual abuse or the fact that detainees have been imprisoned without access to the US legal system for more than three years, despite rulings to the contrary from a body no less authoritative than the US Supreme Court. Mikkelson only mentions "apparent human rights violations" which, we must infer, relates to the cramped conditions of the cells at Camp Delta.

To read the entry at Snopes, you'd have to conclude that Gitmo is nothing more than a very spartan jail for very bad men. Mikkelson may believe she's being neutral- presenting both "sides" of the debate in calm and objective language, but she conveniently leaves out the actual complaints one side (my side) is making.

It's not that the conditions at Guantanamo are bad. It's that people are tortured at Guantanamo. Torture is bad. The other side, Ms. Mikkelson, is pro-torture. But of course, acknowledging that the administration and its supporters are pro-torture wouldn't be seen as "objective" so Mikkelson chooses to omit the actual terms of the debate from her entry.

Since I depend on Snopes.com and would like to keep sending friends to their site, I sent my concerns along to the webmaster. Here is the text of my complaint:

Barbara Mikkelson's entry here

http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/lark.asp

is incomplete. It is not simply the living conditions at Guantanamo which troubles human rights groups, but the actual evidence of torture which violates the Geneva Conventions. If I hadn't kept up on reading the news, and had only Ms. Mikkelson's entry to glean from, I'd likely conclude that human rights groups are angry because the cells at Gitmo are "austere" and not because of the systematic torture and sexual humiliation going on behind its walls.

While I understand your desire to remain politically "neutral" (though I wonder what value that has when discussing torture) this entry clearly begs for more information on just what us "human rights" folks are upset about. I'll happily send you links to fact-checked news articles, or could even refer you to the ACLU's excellent archive of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Best,
MC

If you'd also like to help Snopes debunk its own mythmaking, drop them a comment here.