Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and if you’re like most of us, you’ve already seen Schindler’s List, Escape From Sobibor, and Life is Beautiful. You read Number the Stars and Anne Frank’s diary in middle school, and you know the basics from the Nuremberg laws and the Warsaw ghetto to Bergen-Belsen and Terezin. Here are some books and movies with distinctively different ways of looking at the events of World War II, and the way they still affect us today.

	The Reader by Bernhard Schlink: A German teenager has an affair with an older woman and later realizes she was involved in some of the worst Nazi cruelty. Beautifully and simply written (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) it stays away from the detailed descriptions of Jewish suffering, and instead wonders about the complicity of average Germans, and how to make amends.
	The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman: A fictionalized account of the true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinisky, who hid more than 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the Warsaw Zoo that they ran. I’m only half way through, but the writing is fantastic, and the subtext and commentary about how people, animals, and the way we treat each other is subtle and fascinating.
	The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman: Spiegelman produced what the Wall Street Journal called “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust.” He tells the story of his rocky relationship with his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and intersperses the story of his father’s survival in WW II Europe. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
	The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn: Part Memoir part history, the book is the story of Mendelsohn’s journey to find out as much as he could about the six members of his family who died in the Holocaust. Instead of focusing on big numbers and statistics he uses a microscope to look closely at just a few people, and the results are tender and moving. Listen to a Nextbook podcast interview with David Mendelsohn here.
	Somewhere in Germany by Stefanie Zweig: Zweig’s family escaped the Nazis by moving to Kenya, but they return to Germany once the war is over, and the novel, translated by Marlies Comjean, looks at postwar Germany, the anti-Semitism that remains, the difficulties of returning home, and the pain of exile. Otto Frank has a memorable cameo appearance. A gorgeous sequel to Nowhere in Africa (see below).
	The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen: 12-Year-old Hannah travels back in time from a Passover Seder in 1988 to Poland in World War II. As Chaya she is sent to a concentration camp where she learns about growing up and survival in a harrowing and poignant young adult novel. They made a movie with Kirsten Dunst, but the book is much better, and accessible to middle schoolers and adults alike.
	Bent Directed by Sean Mathias: Max, a gay man in Germany at the start of WW II is sent to Dachau, where he pretends to be Jewish, instead of gay, and then falls in love with an openly gay prisoner. An effective look at the way the Holocaust effected other minorities.
	The Counterfeiters Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzsky: The story of a German man, Sally Sorowitsch, in a concentration camp where he’s forced to help the Nazis produce fake foreign currency in order to weaken the Allies’ economy. When a friend and fellow counterfeiter refuses to help the Nazis Sorowitsch is faced with a dilemma that could mean life or death. Winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign film.
	Nowhere in Africa Directed by Caroline Link: Based on the book by Stefanie Zweig, the movie tells the story of Zweig’s family’s departure from Germany on the eve of the Holocaust, and their strange and difficult lives in Kenya, where they enjoy relative safety from the Nazis, but must wonder constantly about the rest of their families. Winner of the Oscar for best foreign film in 2003.
	Forgiving Dr. Mengele Directed by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh: A documentary about Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, was used as a guinea pig by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. In the 80s, Kor persuaded former Nazi doctor, Hans Mnuch, to return to Auschwitz with her to declare that the Holocaust happened. During a press conference at that event Kor said she forgave Munch, and when she was asked if she could forgive Dr. Megele, she said said yes. The movie looks at the ways we forgive, the meaning of forgiveness, and how we look back on a painful history.
	The Rape of Europa Directed by Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham: A documentary narrated by Joan Allen, this film looks at the devastating effects of Nazi art theft during World War II, and the heroic efforts of American military personnel, and American art historians who try to recover and return as much of the lost art as they can.
	Walk on Water Directed by Eytan Fox: An Israeli film about a contemporary Israeli secret service agent tasked with following around the grandchildren of a Nazi war criminals. A beautiful and provocative movie, it looks at everything from what it means to be an Israeli man, to sexuality, to forgiveness.

Everything that has come out of the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex is a variation on the theme of romantic implausibility. A sexually inexperienced man-child who collects action figures will win the heart of a lissome granny (The 40 Year-Old Virgin). A financially insolvent porn database stoner will impregnate a buxom E! reporter (Knocked Up). Two homoerotically bound high school nerds will win the hearts and loins of two precocious cuties who would almost certainly be fucking college guys, with nary a computer-generated Kelly LeBrock in sight (Superbad).

Hot chicks dig us: Jonah Hill and Jason Segel in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"The premise of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is so shopworn that the movie has no right to be as entertaining as it is. Jason Segel’s Peter Bretter is a soundtrack musician for a silly Law and Order-type crime drama in which his girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) stars. She dumps him while he lolls around naked and confused in their modest L.A. home, and the first fifteen minutes or so of plot development are devoted to Peter’s coping mechanisms: weeping uncontrollably, eating cereal by the cubic meter, and sleeping around with mute-orgasming models and sadomasochistic bar skanks (nice work if you can get it). He decides to take a holiday in Hawaii to get his mind off his recently departed beloved, but, lo and behold, Sarah’s booked the same trip with her new English rock star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), lead singer of my favorite band name in ages, Infant Sorrow. Peter spends about the next fifteen minutes bearing inconsolable witness to their public displays of lewdness. Were it not for an unfathomably kind and unspeakably beautiful hotel concierge, Rachel (Mila Kunis, whose bath water I’d gladly drink), Peter would have likely hanged himself by his lei.

You can pretty much figure out the remaining hour or so from here: Peter discovers new love and confidence in Rachel; Sarah begins to doubt having left him; Peter’s dilemma becomes one of choosing between two girls a man who looks like Judge Reinhold sculpted from porridge and subsists in a mid-level tax bracket would never be given the option to choose from outside of a fratboy screenwriter’s imagination. Not that there’s any real choice in fantasyland, either: I’d have been over the vapid TV twit the minute my moist eyes alighted on Kunis. Any feminist gripe with the earnest, joke-missing feminine dramatis personae of Knocked Up is hereby nullified. Rachel looks like she knows who Doc Brown is, and she’s great fun to be with.

As with most Apatovian fare, there are unexpected turns along the road of male redemption banality. Aldous, played by a Jagger-swaggering Russell Brand, is actually a very likable stage-mincing debauchee, particularly when he calls his groupies “Sorrow Suckers,” thinks genital herpes isn’t a sexual dealbreaker when it isn’t “inflamed,” and swats down an obsequious hotel maître d' (the inexplicably underused Jonah Hill) who proffers a demo tape by saying, “Yeah, I was going to listen to it, but then I decided to carry on with my life.” Gentlehearted laughs are also mined from a frustrated evangelical couple on their honeymoon discovering the joys of beginners’ tantra. Even a throwaway montage of Peter’s late emergence from a cocoon of self-loathing and depression manages to be both touching and real.

Our protagonist’s renascence coincides with the production of a whimsically tragic Dracula musical staged with puppets. Avenue Q with heart might in fact be the best emotional metaphor for this genre of masculine romantic comedy.

Then he put down the gun and warbled his favorite Moldy Peaches song: Can Josh Brolin's tough guy beat the lovable "Juno"?Members of the Academy have already made up their mind about this Sunday’s Oscars—ballots were officially due today. Plebes like the rest of us, however, have another couple days to decide where our allegiance lies, which means that Oscar talk is a surefire way out of any awkward silence this week.

The big issue, according to pretty much every major publication out there: Will the Academy reward a movie with no satisfying moral resolution? The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men was formally brilliant and occasionally terrifying – that scene where killer-for-hire Anton Chigurh torments the clueless gas station attendant still haunts my nightmares – but it didn’t have any clear message, other than “Sometimes killers-for-hire don’t get caught.” (Also: “Karma will never let a mustachioed Josh Brolin get away with shooting a dog” – a moral borne out this year by American Gangster as well.)

New York Magazine’s film critic, David Edelstein, suggests that the Academy might deliberately give No Country the best picture award as a sort of gesture of spiritual compensation for the financial failure of pretty much every war movie that came out this year:

With all the downbeat Iraq movies DOA at the box office (what a lesson was there!), No Country might be the best way for Academy voters to signal that it’s not show business as usual.

It’s a worthy theory, but since when – you might point out – has the Oscars been opposed to “show business as usual”?

Meanwhile, in the New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog, David Carr considers the possibility that Juno will win best picture because it’s so much more accessible that No Country. Like Crash, it aims for the heart and not the, uh, brain. If you’re feeling combative, you might link this up to Patricia Cohen’s Times article on the dumbening of America, but that would be rather anti-social, wouldn’t it? Maybe better just to lead the conversation around to David Denby’s New Yorker essay about the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre (speaking of anti-social, though, don’t say “oeuvre.”)

 

Denby argues that the Coens are just too nihilistic to make genuinely good films – I mean, say what you will about twee faux-indie romantic comedy, but at least it’s an ethos. Ironically, this nihilism is exactly what makes them the perfect people to adapt a Cormac McCarthy book. Denby explains:

Stimulated by McCarthy’s tough little sentences, which record action and thought but not sentiment, the Coens have hardened their style to a point far beyond what they accomplished in “Fargo.”

Hard style isn’t enough for him, though it’s more than enough for me – sure, the film version of No Country doesn’t make too much sense as a crime story, but as an allegory about evil it’s actually better than McCarthy’s novel, which gets kind of bogged down in the crime-story details. Or so you could point out casually by the water cooler. A caveat, though: “better than the novel” is not the same thing as “will win best picture.” Me, I’m putting my money on Juno.

Words I thought I’d never say: The new Adam Sandler movie (trailer below) looks kind of…good. And not totally-competent-romantic-comedy good like The Wedding Singer, or look-at-me-I-can-do-indie good like Punch-Drunk Love. Don’t Mess with the Zohan, about a Mossad agent who fakes his own death so that he can pursue his secret dream of becoming a hairstylist, might actually be funny.

This is probably due in large part to Sandler’s co-writer, Judd (Knocked Up ) Apatow. But I think it’s also because this might be the first time a mainstream comedy has tapped into Israel’s inherent comic potential.

Americans tend to find the hallmarks of Israel’s pop culture—the tight jeans, the Euro-disco music, the machismo—completely hilarious. Then again, we’re equally amused by any country where men wear tight pants. But what makes Israel funnier than, say, Spain, is the lethal military gloss over the entire nation, and the fact that everyone’s Jewish, which in America has become a kind of lazy shorthand for comedy.

Borat has pretty much killed the genre of jokes about how non-American males are more comfortable with their bodies. Years of bad news have made it difficult to say anything truly funny about Israel’s military situation. And Keeping Up with the Steins may have tossed the final scoop of dirt on the coffin of Yiddish shtick (OMG she said "shtick"! FUNNY SOUNDS!) But when you combine those three elements, you get something new. Something fresh-feeling. Even if it stars Adam Sandler.

 

Give me your headless, your poor: The Cloverfield poster No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – we’re here to help you convince those around you that you’re a big ball of erudition.

Start by wondering whether your conversation partner saw the intensely disapproving review of Cloverfield in the Times this weekend, and quote Manohla Dargis’s final line: “Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.” Burn!

Then point out that Anthony Lane in The New Yorker seemed to like the movie, even though he said the film’s gimmick—it’s a monster movie shot entirely on a camcorder held by one of the kids fleeing the monster—was “a bit pre-millennium.”

And, finally, address the real monster in the room—not the film’s 9/11 imagery, because duh -- but a little film everybody was really excited about back in the summer of ’99. “Remember The Blair Witch Project?” you might say, and then, if you’re feeling saucy, “Yeah, me neither.”

Last week: Teen Angst Edition

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hits theaters in May, and the new Vanity Fair has a long, oddly bloggy article about how very rough it's been for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, two of the highest-grossing filmmakers of all time, to make the first Indiana Jones movie since 1989's Last Crusade. Yes, it's been a long, trying process for filmmakers and stars alike -- Harrison Ford, at 65, says he hadIt was 97 degrees in the New Mexico desert that day: Movie stars' jobs are hard! trouble getting back into Indy's psyche, not to mention his uncomfortable outfit. “It’s a very bizarre costume, when you think about it ... It’s this guy sporting a whip, who’s off usually for someplace really hot in his leather jacket.”  Also, they're pretty sure everyone's gonna pan the movie: Lucas says he knows the critics "already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that."

Crystal Skull is set in 1957, so the villians are now Russians instead of Nazis. But -- nerdgasm alert!-- the film might also feature a more exotic breed of bad guy.

  "No one outside of the filmmakers will know for sure until May 22, but it would be pretty cool if it turns out that Emperor Palpatine had dropped a crystal skull on Earth. Or maybe one was left behind by the skinny dudes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Or maybe it’s, like, E.T.’s cell phone. :)"

Star Wars meets Indiana Jones! Also, emoticons meet Vanity Fair! Weirdness.  

 

 

Brandon Walker was a lonely Jew on Christmas with no place to go. Then he discovered Chinese food and movies. He wrote a catchy song about it, and the rest is YouTube history.

 

 

I’ve always said that being the toughest dude in the sphere of letters is like being the best pianist on the oil rig: It isn’t like the competition is especially stiff. I couldn’t help feeling vindicated in this belief when a friend pointed out to me that the pugilist at rest, Norman Mailer, was not only a wife-stabbing lunatic but also a certifiable Lego Maniac:

NOW that Norman Mailer has passed on, the big question is: Who gets his Legos? The incendiary novelist built a 15,000-piece “City of the Future” with two pals in his Brooklyn apartment—but where it will go next, nobody knows. Our source mused, “Imagine what a one-of-a-kind artistic creation by one of last century’s most acclaimed literary figures would be worth at Sotheby’s. But how would you get the damn thing out of his brownstone without breaking it up? You could reassemble it by hand, but that wouldn’t be quite the same thing as something actually assembled by the master, would it?”

Okay, so at least it’s a “City of the Future” and not a “giant house for his American Girl doll collection.” And I’ll grant that while it doesn’t scream “macho man,” it does have the benefit of making my soft spot for Mailer just a touch softer. But I did promise to respond to Abe, so permit me a few words.

Abe writes, “One is far more likely to come up against the idea that Mailer was an overrated buffoon than the notion that he was an unrecognized luminary. . . . The heavy lifting is the lot of the Mailer fan.” It’s a bit confusing, as one is unlikely ever to come up against the idea that Mailer was “unrecognized.” As for the “overrated buffoon” part, even William F. Buckley Jr. allowed that Mailer “was a towering figure in American literary life for sixty years.” Does defending the radical underdog count as heavy lifting if you have a conservative giant spotting you?

I think what Abe means is that it’s easy to trash Mailer, not that many people actually do it. In any case, I’m not out to be a contrarian. I just didn’t enjoy reading Mailer. It’s my instinct that he elicits fascination and respect not in spite of his personal defects but more or less because of them. (I don’t mean that he’s devoid of talent, but that his talents aren’t such that they can be sold without a lot of hype.) One would have to be very naive to think that only great books can salvage the reputation of a man who beats or wounds or kills his wife. It is not by works but by the faith of the fandom that literary bad boys art saved from damnation; if you don’t believe me, try explaining the popularity of William S. Burroughs.

I do, however, have an easier time with Abe’s defense of Mailer than of Cormac McCarthy: “Stefan calls McCarthy’s The Road ‘dreary’ and ‘one-dimensional.’ I’m not trying to be a smartass by pointing out that it’s a novel about post-apocalyptic earth. If it were anything other than one-dimensionally dreary McCarthy would have suffered an insurmountable credibility problem.”

I don’t know about that: Three decades of Mad Max fans can’t be wrong. I mentioned a while back that my negative review of The Road generated a lot of hate mail, and Abe has reiterated some of the major points. My approach is prescriptive. I complain about what the author didn’t write (a Christian allegory) instead of what he did (a scorched-earth nightmare). Well, none of this is exactly true. I wrote that the book lacked a good story and strong characters, which is why I loved the infinitely more nihilistic No Country for Old Men—the movie, at any rate. All the same, I can sympathize with this critic:

Mr. McCarthy has won just about every literary honor while being likened to Ernest Hemingway for his minimalist style, and to Samuel Beckett for his volcanic bleakness of outlook on matters of life and death. I happened to find No Country for Old Men an absorbing read, but it left me all empty inside. I must confess that I couldn’t get very far into Blood Meridian, another of his books that was recommended to me. So, I suppose, I have chosen to live out my life without getting involved with Mr. McCarthy’s literary outlook.

Still, I suspect that his clouded vision of existence is somewhat too grim and dark for even the most noirish movie genre. He makes Elmore Leonard look like a barrel of laughs, and Faulkner a beacon of hope. Nonetheless, some of the pithiest exchanges in the movie were taken almost verbatim from the book. I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn’t. I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.

The trouble with nihilism and its kid cousin, fatalism, is that they’re so often either boring or disingenuous. Without the plot twists, fantastic acting and cinematography, and Javier Bardem’s hair, No Country for Old Men would be the biggest yawn of the season short of Bee Movie. Its anti-message isn’t even a little compelling. The Road is No Country without the fun stuff, so why is everyone springing to its defense? If nostalgie de la boue accounts for the esteem in which figures like Mailer and Burroughs are held, maybe we owe McCarthy-worship to a misguided belief that there’s something noble or even sort of cool in accepting, not to mention tirelessly stumping for, cosmic defeat. As one reader of the above-quoted review commented: “If you feel discomfort, annoyance, or active resistance to McCarthy’s narrative outlines . . . it is because you are afraid of their veracity. That is the most important use of art, and you should praise it, rather than turn, daintily, away from it.”

There’s the answer, hiding in the word daintily. Everyone’s afraid to look squeamish. Isn’t it possible that we turn away from things—books, movies, even people—because what they do or say is at best pointless and at worst odious? If that’s dainty, then I am proud to be one lace-curtain son of a bitch.

There are a host of multi-dimensional links between Kurds and Jews (to say nothing of the many thousands of Kurdish Jews.) It is sometimes claimed that Abraham was Kurdish. Historically, a good number of Kurds felt positively toward Israel and were none too happy with Palestinian support for Saddam. The Kurdish people, being victims of persecution and genocide, looked to Israel as a sort of hopeful model for their own liberation. Furthermore, DNA research shows that Kurds are Jews’ closest genetic relatives. So, perhaps this Kurdish-Jewish romantic comedy was inevitable. From The Seattle Times review of "David & Layla."

Inspired by the real-life marriage between a Kurdish Muslim refugee and a Jewish New Yorker, the movie hits all the requisite plot points, some hopelessly contrived (like a first kiss disguised as the need for CPR) while others earn big, fat, non-Greek belly laughs.

David (David Moscow) is an agnostic Jew who hosts a Brooklyn public-access TV show called "Sex and Happiness," for which he conducts highly personal man-in-the-street interviews. He's got a Jewish fiancée (Callie Thorne) but is truly smitten with Layla (Shiva Rose), a smart, sexy Kurdish refugee for whom marriage is the best defense against imminent deportation

You can pretty much guess the rest. But while writer-director Jay Jonroy (an Iraqi Kurdish exile with a tragic family history under Saddam Hussein's tyranny) fumbles with occasionally forced humor — including a terribly written infidelity scene that's played for slapstick and left unexplained — he's remarkably adept at exploring complex divisions between well-meaning but prejudiced families united by love.

If there is a Hell, I’d have to guess this movie is running on a continuous loop in Saddam’s sulfurous suite.

Apparently the film doesn’t shy away from politics and gets big points for addressing the U.S.’ previous betrayal of the Kurdish people. The movie is being independently released and seems pretty hard to find, but I’ll make sure to see it one way or another. I should add here that I highly recommend the 2004 Kurdish Iranian film “Turtles Can Fly,” in spite of its horrific title. It’s an achingly beautiful movie about the children of a Kurdish refugee camp on the eve of the U.S. attack on Saddam.

One of the fringe benefits of liberation is enjoying the talents of the liberated. With their emerging proficiency in film the Kurds may find they have yet something else in common with Jews.

Here's Gwyneth Paltrow discussing her physical "transformation" in "The Good Night":

...as Dora, the protagonist’s waking-life girlfriend, Gwyneth is barely recognizable: pale, with a cape of dense brown hair, bundled in shapeless cardigans. “It was me physicalizing my New York Jewish half,” jokes Gwyneth. (Her rep as a shiksa goddess notwithstanding, the actress is in fact, as a friend likes to call her, “Gwyneth Paltrow, the descendant of ancient rabbis.”)

I won't get into the absurdity of an actress sans eyeliner being labeled "barely recognizable." And "descendant of ancient rabbis" sounds a lil' nebulous. I mean, shit: aren't we all? But whatever. She's clearly Jewish enough for Hitler, and that, friends, means she's Jewish enough for me.

Question is, does dressing down and attaining moderate fugliness make one feel more Jewish? Or just look more Jewish? I suppose it's a method issue.

Sometimes I feel like criticizing Bill O'Reilly is so easy I must be falling into a trap, like he designs what he says not to actually say anything but to elicit the sort of impassioned immediate rebuttals from the left that can often end up sounding self-righteous, hysterical. That said, this gem written for the Jewish World Review is ridiculous—and not even really because of my politics, but because Bourne was actually an awesome movie. But I refuse to quote him. At Slate, Mickey Kaus defends O’Reilly’s claim that The Bourne Supremacy is a typically anti-American movie:

 I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film, but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics--waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for ... well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. ...

 The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in the hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President so they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. ... P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a self-mocking puppet cartoon).. ... And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a soggy tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. ... Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. ... Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche. …

It being several days later, Christopher Orr has pretty much said what needed to be said in response to the “jingoistic nonsense” claims that the movie’s anti-American, here and here and here. I’d only add that at this point you’d think it was obvious that the conflation between the American government and institutions and America itself is something that should be deconstructed, not perpetrated, by Americans. The “this isn’t Us” line is clearly, and justifiably, anti-CIA, which really is the patriotic position to take. As Orr notes, the movie does put forward an alternate version of America, which is one in which Bourne the individual reclaims morality from bureaucracy—the fact that he only says 15 or 40 words is a nice alternative to shrill empty protest, too.

Also, I would hope that the international market pressures our studios to make self-critical films. World Trade Centert did try to be patriotic, and thought it was responding to American demand, but failed and failed boringly (bring on Any Given Sunday II, Stone!) finding out it wasn’t (so did Greengrass' United 93, I think, which, somewhat understandably, wasn't brave enough to tell any sort of made-up story, hiding in the robes of objectivity, instead). O’Reilly was, however, sort of right about his “impressionable audiences”: movies shape the sentiment as much as (probably more than) they reflect them, which is why 50 years later a movie like The House on 92nd Street, which I saw as part of the NYC Noir series at Film Forum a few weekends ago, has us laughing, and unusually loudly, where our parents seriously hooted and cheered. 

Oh and right: if you  love/hate America, read these. 

The recent screen-to-stage Broadway debut of Legally Blonde: The Musical might pass, to the untrained eye, for just another piece of Times Square popcorn poop. Count a New York Times critic among the naifs; according to Ben Brantley, the musical “approximates the experience of eating a jumbo box of Gummy Bears in one sitting.” And that’s a bad thing? Its lack of intellectual cachet is just one of several factors at work against my campaign to garner Legally Blonde’s fair heroine, Elle Woods, a footnote in the pantheon of great American Jewish thought. Among the more obvious: Elle Woods isn’t Jewish. Less importantly, the film producer’s daughter was in my bunk for one hellish summer at Camp Ramah, which brings back more crappy memories than ...

I want badly to say that this essay almost redeems him for his silliness about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

When I met von Donnersmarck in Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the mid-1990s, I discussed my reservations with him. While fiercely defending the basic historical accuracy of the film, he immediately agreed that some details were deliberately altered for dramatic effect. Thus, he explained, if he had shown the Stasi cadets in uniform, no ordinary cinemagoer would have identified with them. But because he shows them (inaccurately) in student-type civilian dress and has one of them (implausibly) ask a naive question to the effect of "isn't bullying people in interrogations wrong?," the viewer can identify with them and is drawn into the story. He argued that in a movie the reality has always to be verdichtet, a word which means thickened, concentrated, intensified, but carries a verbal association with Dichtung, meaning poetry or, more broadly, fiction. Hence the elevated language ("I beg you, I beseech you"—ich flehe dich an—says the playwright at one point, asking his girlfriend not to submit again to the minister's piggish lechery). Hence the luxuriant palette of rich greens, browns, and subtle grays in which the whole movie is shot, and the frankly operatic staging of Christa's death.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann's harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Anthony Minghella's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley—a thriller involving murder and stolen identity—which he singled out because "it doesn't bore me, and for that I'm very grateful." In The Lives of Others, Shoah meets The Talented Mr. Ripley. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he's even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world.

A brief note about the Stasi agent's quick conversion into a "good man." It wasn't necessary all that quick. Just because the clipped, gray automaton we're introduced to at the beginning of the film indicates Wiesler was still the perfect surveillance agent doesn't mean he hadn't had doubts about his profession or his state before eavesdropping on a charismatic intellectual and his beautiful actress girlfriend.

The point conveyed by the best fictional anatomies of totalitarian societies is that even the oppressors harbor a latent, or incipient, sympathy with those they oppress. When O'Brien tells Winston Smith of the life Winston and Julia will be forced to lead in the underground -- a life that would in all probability end in early death -- is there not a slight vicarious thrill in his forecast of their martyrdom?

The very psychology that enabled regimes of terror in the twentieth century was also responsible for their downfall. A two-hour time window may have required the filmmaker to speed up the process in his characters some, but the essential truth of his film remains in tact.

The Stasi on Our Minds - The New York Review of Books

Every move you makeRight now I'm reading Jonathan Raban's new novel Surveillance and wishing to God I was watching The Conversation instead. That Coppola classic, starring Gene Hackman, had interesting things to say about surveillance: the havoc it can reach in the lives not only of the watched but also of the watcher, how it ingrains suspicion and paranoia so deeply that they can't easily be gotten rid of again. (Hackman even reprised this famous role in the inferior but pretty entertaining Enemy of the State.)

It's an issue on many minds these days, but I don't think Raban does much of a job of addressing it. This movie might, though, and I for one won't be missing it:

The film opens in 1984 in East Berlin, where we see Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) a captain of the East German secret police, teaching a class in extreme interrogation techniques. These include sleep deprivation, the spouting of Orwellian paradoxes (if the prisoner believes the state capable of detaining him for no reason, that belief alone is enough to justify his arrest), and, in a creepy detail, the collection of the prisoner's seat cushion after the interview to be preserved as an odor sample for police dogs. The real intrigue begins when Wiesler is assigned to bug and monitor the apartment of a successful writer, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfriend, a famous stage actress named Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Georg is neither a subversive nor a party loyalist: He's a go-along-to-get-along guy, too comfortable with his success to question the regime closely, even as it closes in on his scruffier and more outspoken fellow artists. But Wiesler's superior, Col. Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), wants to further his career by impressing the party bigwig Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), who is looking to get his swinish mitts on Christa-Maria by any means necessary. And Wiesler himself is a rigid ideologue, a socialist automaton who mistrusts all artists on principle—even if the meticulous care with which he runs his own surveillance operation hints at a thwarted creative desire.

Go ahead and drive 55I've never been able to understand the people who despise Ralph Nader for "handing" Bush the 2000 election. That's not just because I voted for Bush in that election and wanted him to win. It's because there was something distinctly undemocratic, even downright sinister, in regarding Nader voters as a resource to be manipulated—in believing that they could be saved from their stupidity only by being deprived of their choice. Hate them for casting their ballots as they did, but the rage directed at Nader himself gives up the game entirely. We'd all have done things differently had we been presented with different—better—candidates, but what happened is what happened.

Nader, it seems, wishes things had happened differently: Now he believes that Bush is about as awful a president as we could have elected.

Near the end of An Unreasonable Man, a sympathetic but not uncritical documentary portrait of Ralph Nader by a former protégé, Henriette Mantel, and Steve Skrovan, the film’s subject allows himself the bitter pleasure of joining his fellow left-wingers in what has now become the cliché of wondering if George W. Bush is "the worst president ever." Until then, Mr Nader’s stubborn refusal to take responsibility for Mr Bush’s election in 2000 by splitting the progressive vote had made perfect sense. For if you accept the Naderite view that the two major parties are increasingly indistinguishable, then the value of his offering the electorate a real choice must far outweigh any trivial differences there might have been between a Gore and a Bush presidency. But now here was the man himself telling us that, in effect, the barbs of his Democratic critics — whose hatred and vitriol directed at him appear here at times to be even greater than the same directed at the President — were justified all along.

Nader is a ridiculous figure in many ways. As Bowman writes, "This, after all, is the man who went after the meat-packing industry by calling hot dogs 'missiles of death.'" But he'd be less ridiculous if he refused to give credence to the idea that our decisions should be circumscribed and micromanaged into what is "reasonable." Let him be an unreasonable man. The electorate is made up of adults, and adults can learn from their mistakes, wherever and however they find them.

Soup that eats like a mealSilence of the Lambs is one of those movies, like Chinatown or The Exorcist, that I wish I'd never seen—so I could see it for the first time. The close second is seeing it with someone who never has, so I can relive my initial response (in somewhat diluted form) in the inevitable wince of shock-horror. Still, I can't help hoping, each time a sequel or prequel comes out—Hannibal, Red Dragon, and now Hannibal Rising—that lightning will strike twice and I'll be taken back to that night at my grandparents' house when I turned on the TV and found a slightly bowdlerized but nonetheless terrifying movie that I probably wasn't supposed to watch and certainly wasn't about to turn off.

It's probably never to be. Hannibal and Red Dragon were massive letdowns, partly because they lacked Jodie Foster but mostly because they were so desperate to outdo the shock value of the original. Little did they know that shock value had nothing to do with it, as this review from the Telegraph puts so plainly:

Hannibal Rising piles on the crass psychology and torture scenes with a grim cackhandedness that makes it far worse than any of its predecessors - even Ridley Scott's widely derided Hannibal, which I enjoyed for its baroque luxuriation in Lecter's habitat, and the games it played with a cheek-munching aesthete resting on his laurels.

By contrast, this mechanical cash-in fails dismally, because it is impossible to see how Ulliel's creepy, gloating teenager might have grown up to be the great intellectual monster Anthony Hopkins gave us.

Like that census-taker whose liver he famously recalled eating in The Silence of the Lambs, it tries to explain Hannibal Lecter and gets absolutely nowhere.

An origin story is the second-to-last thing we need for a character as weirdly ageless and sui generis as Hannibal Lecter. The last thing we need is pointless gore, which is what movies rely on when they have a story thinner than pudding skin and half as palatable. So I think I'll pass on Hannibal Rising, and just be grateful that it'll supply critics with enough tasty one-liners to make it through the winter without starving.

A moment of silenceLike many of us, I read Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front during my freshman year of high school. Not long before that, we'd seen Kuwait liberated from Iraq with so little fanfare that I had to doubt a war like Remarque described could ever happen again. (Though I remember few particulars from the book, the ugly, portentous phrase "carbolic and pus" somehow sticks in my mind, a distillation of Remarque's dozens of ugly scenes. I could stand to read it again—everything's better when it's not for a class.)

War is different these days, of course, in all but the most important respects. Here is Gary Giddins, in the New York Sun, on the DVD rerelease of the 1930 film of Remarque's novel:

Remarque's short, declarative sentences are a triumph of journalistic precision, packing more images of physical revulsion and mental anguish than the novel's modest length would indicate. Milestone's film also pursues accuracy, but it is more self-conscious in its search for style. His innovative use of cranes and other techniques ensure a mobile camera; the scenes of trench warfare, as soldiers charge into machine gun fire, have lost nothing to time — the battle scenes are visually stunning and emotionally taxing. He uses rapid editing to isolate and satirize members of mobs. His tracking of Kemmerich's boots adumbrates Steven Spielberg's girl in the red coat in "Schindler's List."

Milestone's camera twice passes through gates, from one space to another. It subdivides the screen in the scene where Paul and his friends study a poster, the men reflected in a mirror so that they seem to be standing to its right. It stops all together for 90 long seconds, showing only unmoving shadows as we hear the postcoital conversation of Paul and a woman he has bought with food. Today a filmmaker might not hesitate to shoot the decapitated lance-corporal ("He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain"), but no one could improve on Milestone's indelible image of the soldier whose "body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang on the wires." Milestone's subsequent career was a mixed bag, including racist wartime melodramas in the 1940s ("The Purple Heart"), but in 1930, he was the right man for the job.

War movies made in recent years—with the exception of those that try to capture the spirit of their predecessors—rarely feel like the old stuff we see on Turner Classic Movies. Think of Three Kings or Jarhead, or even documentaries like Gunner Palace. Do they have much in common with All Quiet on the Western Front? There is certainly less violence, but the violence is the same. It's always the same. In his essay "My War," the literary critic Paul Fussell recalled the following of March 15, 1945:

Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier's torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine-gun holding us up: he was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine-gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves.

Among those who support the war in Iraq, there is a tendency to dwell on how different it is in character and scale than earlier ones. Sometimes we hear about the Bulge in these arguments; less frequently, thank God, we hear about the Peloponnesian War. The distinctions aren't much to be grateful for. Most soldiers in Iraq today could describe scenes like the ones above. This alone shouldn't force us to oppose the war, but it should force us to remember what it is.

Bob Dylan Upset With "Factory Girl": Get in line.Adding to the growing laundry list of problems facing the much-hyped, supposedly Oscar-buzzworthy film, "Factory Girl," is the fact that Bob Dylan is doing everything in his power to make sure it never sees the light of day. From ContactMusic.com:

DYLAN is furious at the producers and scriptwriters of FACTORY GIRL, which stars SIENNA MILLER playing EDIE SEDGWICK, an ANDY WARHOL protege who took an overdose in 1971, claiming the singer played a part in her suicide.

DYLAN's lawyer has written a letter to the producers of the film, stating that the screenplay which depicts the end of an alleged relationship between the two, who met while living in Manhattan in the early 1970s, prompted her "tragic decline into heroin addiction and eventual suicide".

The musician now wants the film pulled until the legal side has been determined, with lawyers admitting DYLAN has "deep concerns" he has been defamed.

Wow, so I guess the most annoying thing about this project isn't Sienna Miller as I had originally thought. Seems like there are layers upon layers of annoyance, which this film seems to be heaping upon the public. Now, I kind of want to see it.

DYLAN SLAMS FILMMAKERS OVER SUICIDE SUGGESTION [ContactMusic.com]

While Adam Sandler's cinematic dramatic turn has been more successful than other comedians (er, Jim Carrey), it's still hard for me to watch him be all serious on-screen without yearning for "Billy Madison." Given that his new film, Reign Over Me, slated for release in Marcy 2007, is about 9/11 and I've yet to see a film approach this subject matter in a way also co-starring Don Cheadle and centers around the relationship between Cheadle and Sandler in the aftermath of 9/11 this film might possibly hold some promise.

We'll let you be the judge, tho. The trailer was released today.