Posts Tagged politics
The Messenger: jmag review
Here’s my apologetic review of The Messenger from the latest issue of triple j magazine. I somehow missed this entirely when it was playing in cinemas, and it turned out to be much more interesting than expected. (Also – just in case it kills you like it did me – hey, that’s Eli from Freaks and Geeks!)
THE MESSENGER
Director: Oren Moverman
Starring: Ben Foster, Samantha Morton, Woody Harrelson
Do you hate your job? Well, suck it up. In The Messenger, injured soldier Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) is assigned to one of the worst jobs on earth: the Casualty Notification Team that informs the next of kin that a loved one has died in combat. They’re tough, tattooed soldiers who stick expressionlessly to a script. (Rule #1: no hugging.)
Will is taught the ropes by an eccentric mentor, played by Woody Harrelson as 50% laid-back charmer, 50% snorting bull. He’s good, but I was more amazed by Ben Foster’s jittery performance as Ben. Even when he sweetly connects with a new widow (Samantha Morton), he never seems less than dangerous. Director Oren Moverman was a writer first (including penning the Bob Dylan kinda-but-not-really biopic I’m Not There) and he doesn’t rely on battle flashbacks for instant drama. He just lets the characters tell their stories in long, painful takes.
If you skipped The Messenger because you were expecting another preachy anti-war weepy – it’s not. It’s unpredictable, moving, often mesmerising.
Other reviews this month: a rave for Aronofsky’s Black Swan, a boo for Romero’s Survival of the Dead, and a suspicious ‘huh?’ for Catfish.
Issue #47 on sale now.
Harry Brown: jmag review
Here’s my short review of UK revenge flick Harry Brown from the latest issue of jmag. One thing I didn’t manage to squeeze into the wordcount was a mention of its killer opening scene – like a low-rent remake of the first moments of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.
HARRY BROWN
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer
Country: UK
Michael Caine has always been a “working actor”, happy to accept a role now rather than wait around for something better. It’s why he’s been in so many great films as well as so many shockers. Harry Brown is somewhere in the middle.
This “vigilante pensioner” flick plays shamelessly into the story currently fuelling newspapers worldwide: KIDS THESE DAYS ARE SOCIOPATHIC MONSTERS WHO’LL KILL YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU, GRANDPA! Caine brings echoes of his legendary 1971 Get Carter hardarse to Harry – an elderly ex-marine who decides enough is enough. The emotional realism of his performance gives the movie a classiness that doesn’t mesh with its grimy, cartoonish thrills. (Especially the ridiculous digitally-added spurting blood.)
Most vigilante films pay at least a little lip-service to the fact that revenge is wrong – fun, sure, but wrong. Harry Brown has no such qualms. You’ll have to balance your desire to see Michael Caine kill teenage thugs with how dirty cheering him on might make you feel afterwards.
Other reviews this month: Fish Tank, Baghead, and True Blood: Season Two on DVD.
Issue #40 on sale now.
Batman Cares
When I was chatting with Dylan Horrocks about his newly reprinted Hicksville collection, I quizzed him about his time writing Batgirl for DC Comics. The following didn’t make it into my Bookslut piece, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“When I was writing stories set in Gotham City, I was very conscious that the whole Batman ethos presents a vision of the modern urban environment that I don’t think is true. I don’t mean that people dress up in tights and capes – people do! It’s that it presents the city as a kind of urban jungle, full of predators preying on innocent citizens. They’re poisonous, they’re corrupt, and so on.
“And the only way to protect innocents in that kind of setting is to be more violent than those predators. You have to become a predator who preys on the predators. That’s what Batman is. He uses violence – really nasty violence – and his stock and trade is torture.
“I was writing Batgirl at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. I felt like this vision of how the world works presented by these comics went perfectly with the one the Bush administration was pushing on us. We’re engaged in a war on terror and, in the comics, Bruce Wayne is engaged in a war on crime. So it’s not just that I rejected Batman’s tactics – I rejected that whole view of the world.”
He’s not wrong. I mean, I love Batman – if pushed, I’ll admit that Batman might be my favourite character in the entirety of fiction – but he’s not wrong. One of the things about these iconic characters, though, is that they’ve been around so long that there can never be one coherent ideology throughout their thousands and thousands of stories. It’s how the Huffington Post can run a piece suggesting Batman would be pro-immigration and anti-jail for drug offenders, while conservative newspapers happily claimed The Dark Knight as a blockbuster with a Bush-friendly subtext.
So allow me to offer up proof that Batman cares, and from an unlikely source: the infamously grim Batman: The Killing Joke one-shot from 1988.
I know, I know. It’s the Batman story where poor Barbara Gordon gets crippled, right? And maybe raped? All in the Joker’s bid to convince Commissioner Gordon that the only thing between sanity and madness is “one bad day”? That’s the one. Even its writer, Alan Moore, doesn’t like it. He says it’s “a terrible book. I mean, it doesn’t say anything. It’s talking about Batman and the Joker, and says that yes, psychologically Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other. So?”
Ignore all that – even Moore – and remember how The Killing Joke begins with Batman visiting the Joker, imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. “Hello,” Batman says. “I came to talk.” And he continues:
“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.”
Sure, it turns out that Batman’s not talking to the Joker at all, but just a stooge in white facepaint who’s taken his place while the Joker organizes the lovingly-drawn horror that follows. That’s not the point. I can enjoy the gritted teeth of near-fascist Batman; I can enjoy the gaudy and ludicrous BIFF! KAPOW! 1960s TV Batman; but my favourite Batman is the one who’ll do anything to avoid more violence and death…
…even sitting down with his psychopathic arch-nemesis in a heartfelt – and inevitably pointless – attempt at conversation.
My favourite Batman is the one who hates goodbyes.
When I heard about the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, I was reading Bruce Sterling’s novel 