Category: Film

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‘Army Issues Warning About Iraq Documentary’

Someone recently told me in passing — someone who should know, since he’s there now — that what’s been happening in Iraq the last 38 months “doesn’t really rate the word ‘war.’ ” I think I understand the sentiment. We shouldn’t raise the significance of a battle with a bunch of murderous thugs (“primitive screwheads” is the term my acquaintance used) with such an important appellation. But to me, even sheltered as I am from the reality of what’s really happening over there, the suggestion this isn’t a war just doesn’t ring true. Call it what you want: People are dying by the thousands — by the tens of thousands — in a sustained siege of organized violence. Call it a picnic or a police action or the latest beachhead for democracy, the dead and wounded and the shattered pile up just the same, whether we’re paying attention or not.

HBO is about to air a documentary on one of the remarkable stories of the war: the work of the frontline U.S. military trauma hospitals in Iraq. It is not an untold story: many big media organizations have dipped their toe into it already. The HBO movie, “Baghdad ER,” is a little different, though, in that it’s the product of a longer-term immersion into the world of combat medicine. The makers spent two months filming in a combat trauma hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone. And the movie’s 63-minute length represents more than the usual gnat’s-attention-span treatment that TV news accords such stories.

“Baghdad ER” is scheduled to air on May 21. It’s graphic. The filmmakers say so, and the Army is backing them up, with the service’s surgeon general issuing a memo advising the film may provoke flashbacks or nightmares among those who have served in Iraq.

(The New York Times had a different spin on the story over the weekend. Quoting Army sources, a Saturday article says the Army is backing away from the documentary over concerns “that its grim medical scenes could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war.”)

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The 11th

Grandlate

Here in the Bay Area, I left work early and went with Kate, who is off school this week, to see a late-afternoon matinee of “Inside Man.” It holds up as an entertainment. The show was at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, recently pictured for its marquee broadside on fascism. It’s one of the Bay Area’s great old movie houses, subdivided, as they all are, a couple decades ago. But still beautiful in a way the old movie palaces are and still impressive for its outsize scale. We caught sight of it in the rain after parking on a hillside a couple short blocks away: its magnificent (and still operational) old sign backwards and stark. Afterwards, we thought about where we might be able to eat dinner and look out on the Bay while the rain fell. Kate came up with a true inspiration: The Dead Fish, a place in Crockett, about 20 miles north of Oakland overlooking the Carquinez Strait, the place where all the water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and all the tributaries and reservoirs and mountains beyond, spills out into the Bay. We couldn’t get a window table in the restaurant, but we found one in the lounge and had dinner gazing out on the channel and on the bridges that carry Interstate 80 across the water. Then we drove back to Berkeley.

In Chicago, I hear it was the kind of April day that belies the lack of greenery on the Wrigley Field vines (saw them on a baseball highlights reel this evening). It was 53 years ago today that Mom and Dad were married down at St. Kilian’s, 87th and May streets, just four blocks from where Mom grew up. Not everyone in the Irish Catholic parish — notably its pastor — was too thrilled at the idea of one of the children who’d grown up coming to his church and school marrying an outsider — that is, a Norwegian Lutheran. But there’s no accounting for affairs of the heart, and everyone got over the mixed marriage they bore witness to that day. Today, Dad drove down from his place on the Northwest Side to Mom’s grave and left a spring bouquet — artificial flowers, but they’ll last (I’ve never seen Mom’s place down there without something, something she would have liked, to mark the spot). He stopped for a couple of White Castle hamburgers on the way back north.

Later, we talked on the phone about the cemetery and White Castle a little and a lot more about old movie houses, which Mom loved. The Cosmo, which I’m guessing was short for Cosmopolitan, in particular. I know it was air-conditioned in the summer and that the double bills changed twice a week. I don’t know whether it had much of a sign, but Dad’s guess is that the its gone now.

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Tom Hanks’s Oscar Dos and Don’ts

Item 1: Hanks Hand Out Oscar Speech Tips

“Tom Hanks has been enlisted to give Oscar nominees expert advice on how to deliver the perfect acceptance speech.

“Hanks, who has made the trip to the Academy Awards podium twice, presents a video that has been given to all 150 of this year’s contenders.

“If they win, they should address the audience with ‘wit, flair, creativity – or at least with brevity,’ he says.”

Item 2: Hanks Drops F-Bomb on Oscars

I’ve looked for posts on Technorati and Google News, and other people saw the same thing Kate and I did: Tom Hanks walked on the stage to present the best director award, his face twisted in anger as he looked in the direction of Jon Stewart. Amateur lip readers, including me, think that among other expletetives, he said “f—ing moron.”

Well, he observed the brevity part of his advice. We’ll probably get the story of his discomposure tomorrow. And Stewart will probably have some fun with it on “The Daily Show” tonight.

Later: The Defamer today links to a video of the moment in question.

And still later: The Defamer appears to be the only media entity stepping up and doing its duty in getting to the bottom of the Tom Hanks Cursing Crisis. The latest story/theory is that Hanks was upset that the orchestra was playing the “Forrest Gump” theme when he walked on stage. Meantime, Defamer commenters engage in a spirited give and take about whether Hanks was play-acting or really P.O.’d. From what I saw on my tee-vee set, he was actually angry.

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‘Citizen King’

After that football game, of which for reasons disclosed elsewhere I saw only the last quarter, Kate came home and our ensuing channel surfing fetched up on “Citizen King,” an episode of “The American Experience” on Martin Luther King, Jr. Probably because you know the way the story is going to come out, or at least his part of it, it has the feeling of a tragedy alongside which the made-up kind pale (sorry, Will). The tragedy resounds the more deeply because of the aftermath of King’s death. One can hardly argue that we’ve reached that moment he talked about the night before he died that his people — the black, the poor, and the oppressed, would reach the promised land. It wasn’t a promised land just for those whose cause he made his own; it was a destination for the United States, too. I wonder, with the pictures of the mid-60s, and 1968 especially, fresh again, whether the nation suffered a blow, a spiritual injury, that was too big to be overcome in our lifetimes. That may be the still-impressionable spectator of the events talking; the sizable portion of the population born since then might ask what’s the big deal. But it’s true, too, that as a nation we’re swept along by the silent currents of events that predate us, predate our families’ arrival in the United States.

And speaking of family connections, there was a moment in the film when my Uncle Bill appeared on the screen. He spent a lot of time in his career as a Catholic priest in Chicago working on movement issues, and joined some of King’s campaigns in the South (the Selma-Montgomery march in 1965, for instance; amazingly, the route of the march is now a National Park Service National Historic Trail). Anyway, Bill: The documentary included an extensive section on King’s campaign in Chicago, including his marches in Cicero and the segregated neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park. Suddenly, there was film of marchers filing down the sidewalk, and for two seconds, maybe, there’s Bill. I went back and looked again (on Tivo — well, there’s one thing about the world you can say is better than the ’60s). No doubt — it was him, caught just for an instant doing what he did.

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Our Daily Dead

Doing some research on RSS readers — applications that let you compile feeds from blogs and news sites and any other online source that cares to one up — I came across a site I had long ago noted and then forgotten about: Our Daily Dead. Wow. It’s a sort of super-blog that traffics in notable obituaries and sometimes the miscellaneous arcana of death.

In looking at the site just now, I came across the following literary obit, published last week in the Los Angeles Times:

Sanora Babb, 98; Writer Whose Masterpiece Rivaled Steinbeck’s

If there were lessons to be learned from Sanora Babb’s hardscrabble years as a child on the Colorado frontier, one of them must have been perseverance.

Babb waited 65 years in the shadow of a literary giant for her first completed novel to be published. Upstaged in 1939 by John Steinbeck’s bestselling “The Grapes of Wrath,” Babb’s tale about the travails of a Depression-era farm family was shelved by the venerable Random House, which feared that the market would not support two novels on the same theme. Bitterly disappointed, Babb stuck her manuscript in a drawer, and there it remained until 2004, when it was rescued by the University of Oklahoma Press.

At 97, Babb earned long-overdue praise for the novel, “Whose Names Are Unknown,” an acutely observed chronicle of one family’s flight from the drought and dust storms of the high plains to the migrant camps of California during the 1930s.

Reviewers called it a “long-forgotten masterpiece” and “an American classic both literary and historical,” as compelling as Steinbeck’s epic work and in some ways more authentic.

The widow of Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, whom she dated in the 1940s in defiance of California’s anti-miscegenation laws, Babb died of natural causes Dec. 31 at her Hollywood Hills home, said Joanne Dearcopp, her longtime agent and literary executor. She was 98.

The obit goes on to note that Babb’s editor at Random House, the legendary Bennett Cerf, both praised “Whose Names Are Unknown” to the heavens and declared it couldn’t be published. “What rotten luck,” the obit quotes him as writing to Babb in reference to “The Grapes of Wrath.” “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”

The obit is a wonderful read. I want the book in my hands right now.

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Whatever It Is

Just because I was thinking about this song in reference to how I feel about our Austrian governor. More on that crucial topic … later.

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It

By Harry Ruby (music) and Bert Kalmar (lyrics)

Performed by Groucho Marx in “Horse Feathers” (1932)

(Sound file here.)

I don’t know what they have to say,

It makes no difference anyway —

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

No matter what it is or who commenced it,

I’m against it.

Your proposition may be good

But let’s have one thing understood —

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,

I’m against it.

I’m opposed to it —

On general principles I’m opposed to it!

Chorus: He’s opposed to it!

In fact, in word, in deed,

He’s opposed to it!

For months before my son was born,

I used to yell from night till morn,

Whatever it is, I’m against it!

And I’ve kept yelling since I commenced it,

I’m against it!

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Memorial Day …

… Is almost over. I whiled away part of the patriotic three-day weekend watching some of the Turner Classic Movies “all war flicks, all the time” marathon. Saw almost all of “A Bridge Too Far,” which is extraordinary for its overuse of big-name actors and big-time pyrotechnics in the service of perhaps the last romantic World War II feature. Saw parts of “M*A*S*H,” which has aged amazingly well. Saw parts of “Patton,” which seems ludicrous to me now. Beyond my personal political leanings, I think the war-themed movies just look different in the post-“Saving Private Ryan”/”Band of Brothers” era, when there’s been an effort to bring something like combat verity into the movies and television.

For a film about such a famously hard-nosed character, “Patton” comes off as little more than a romantic caricature in which one great man spends a couple hours strutting around in front of a bunch of cardboard cutouts. That’s the way it looks now. Then — it came out the same year as “M*A*S*H,” 1970 — it was enormously popular and a big winner at the 1971 Oscars. It’s hard to say why looking at it now, though of course the period is suggestive: Vietnam was unpopular but not yet recorded in the “not-won” column, and the movie features a hero who built a reputation for driving tanks through any opposition, damn subtlety or consequences. “M*A*S*H” spoke a lot more directly to the anti-war audience then, and because of its grim humor, frankness about the business at a combat hospital, and Robert Altman’s handling of a great ensemble of actors, it still seems fresh.

That leaves “A Bridge Too Far,” which is almost embarrassing to watch. The stock upbeat theme music. The star-studded cast. The stiff upper lip in the face of insuperable odds. The impassive, smugly superior Nazis (this time with a reason to be smug and superior). The nobility of defeat and massive casualties. It’s good that Hollywood has almost quit making this movie, or this kind of movie (from the trailers, Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers Once,” looks like an attempt to give Vietnam the same heroic treatment).

But it makes you wonder, a little, how Iraq will be turned into a big-screen treat. (The best clue: Go rent “Three Kings.” More pleasingly flashy entertainment, less reality — but we’re OK with that.)

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Clint

Well, the last thing the world needs is more Academy Awards blather. As usual, I’m ready to fill the need. But just to say this:

I confess I don’t know much about the Life of Clint Eastwood. Maybe a little bit about the arc of his career — TV cowboy (“Rawhide”) to spaghetti western idol (“A Fistful of Dollars,” etc.) to lone-wolf cop (“Dirty Harry,” etc.) to more westerns (“High Plains Drifter”) to odd self-directed semi-comedic turns (“Every Which Way But Loose”) to seriously violent and introspective western (“Unforgiven”), concluding with a couple of modern tragedies: “Mystic River” and the one he one an award for tonight, “Million Dollar Baby.” Then there are a couple harder-to-classify roles in there, too — “The Beguiled” and “Play Misty for Me.”

All of which is to say: Who would’ve thought that the same guy who rode his Dirty Harry one-liners for so long (one per movie: “Feel lucky, punk?”; “A man’s got to know his own limitations”; “Go ahead, make my day”) would turn into what he has — some kind of sensitive Hollywood-type master of cinema (yeah, I know about contradictions in terms)?

Now I need to confess: I haven’t seen “Million Dollar Baby.” Or “Mystic River.” From the reviews I’ve read, they both sound extremely wrenching emotionally, and I actually haven’t been able to bring myself to watch them. Yet. (It’s happened with other movies, too; such as “Saving Private Ryan.” It took me about a year to see that.)