The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together; I could only re-arrange the order.

So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But it has films that all meant something to me, personally. Call them my Signature Films of the First Decade of the Second Millennium. Or something snappier.

Part Three: Growing Up: 2006-09

My hatred for musicals began in high school, when RENT came out and everyone I did theater with started playing it at high volume. If I had to pick one thing I hate about this perversely popular show, it’d be the theme, and the characters, and the story, and the CTRL-H substitution from La Boheme, and the song about how many minutes there are in a year (Q: “How many minutes are there in a year?” A: “Love!”). It bothers me that this musical made people famous, and that mawkish sentimentality trumps clever lyricism in this new century.

(This hatred morphed from an informed and unyielding criticism into outright pathology in the summer of 2003, when my car was jacked from outside my apartment in Allston. Eight weeks later, when the Boston PD sent me a letter asking me to pay parking tickets the car had acquired during the time I reported it stolen, I called them and got the tickets removed. Then I realized a bunch of the tickets were assigned at the same address. Grabbing my roommate Hawver, we pulled up Mapquest, punched in some street names, and found that my car had been abandoned less than a mile from where it had been stolen, and three blocks from our current apartment. The rear passenger window panel had been smashed in and the stereo had been stolen. The scumbags had also taken a CD wallet with about forty discs in it, and replaced it with the original cast recording of RENT.

“So they thought RENT wasn’t even worth stealing?” people ask.
“No,” I explain. “I didn’t own RENT.”
“Oh.” Then: “Ohhhh.”)

So when everyone I knew waxed enthusiastic about Once, I remained skeptical. But there was a recurring tone to their endorsements: glowing language, stern admonishments to see it, but a lack of explicit detail. They couldn’t put into words just why it was so great, but they all agreed it was. Seeing it on the big screen, I agreed with them: Once is a hell of an experience. I don’t know why a grainy indie movie about a guy and a girl, both getting over heartbreaks of their own and tentatively discovering each other, floored me when set to folksy music. But it did. Sure, it’s sentimental, but it’s powerful sentiment, shot straight into the vein. It’s the last movie I saw with my friend Josh before he moved to the West Coast, so that might also grant it some significance.

I spent Thanksgiving 2006 in Boston, my first Thanksgiving outside of Maryland in all my life, due to work. Since I still had the day off, I resolved to put it to some use by going to the Loews Boston Common and theater-hopping. Hopping in the Loews poses no challenge: the second floor boasts a dozen theaters and the minimum-wage ushers can barely handle the holiday crowds. So I was able to see Casino Royale and The Departed with little difficulty. The one-two punch of gritty crime and action left me wandering, shell-shocked, for the rest of the day.

In the fall of 2007, I helped out with one of the most ambitious and rewarding theater projects of my life: The Waste Land Comedy Hour starring T.S. Eliot. Some of the most talented people at ImprovBoston pitched in to produce 7 original shows in 7 weeks, mixing live and video elements, and we all still agree it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. It had a raw and crazy energy that I hope to one day duplicate.

One evening after rehearsing some new material, Matt T., Eric P., Eric’s wife Hannah and myself all trucked to Kendall Square Cinemas to see No Country for Old Men. I warned them we’d have to get there early, as I’d tried to see the show last week but had been turned away once it sold out. The Waste Land had also been selling out early and turning people away. And like The Waste Land, the Coen Bros. hit on some untapped vein of creative juice. It took me several tries to get The Big Lebowski and Fargo. While I love Miller’s Crossing and O Brother, Where Art Thou? to pieces, I recognize them more as homages and pastiches then as some compelling new works. But No Country for Old Men clicked with me. Maybe it was the unity of the Coens’ nihilism with McCarthy’s existentialism. Maybe it was getting a really good cast. Regardless, I took to it like I’ve taken to no other Coen film.

Finally, I saw The Dark Knight the day it opened, having taken the day off to fly to Baltimore in the afternoon. This breaks a long-standing rule of mine about seeing a genre movie on the day it opens, but nobody goes to the theaters in Batman costumes anyway. And it was worth it for me. Not just because I love the Batman mythos and what Nolan has done with it. But because, like I said on Wednesday, someone’s using Serious Art techniques to tell an action film. That’s important to me.

As I said, not necessarily the best of the decade, but the most memorable for me.

On vacation this week. This post was scheduled long ago.

The end of a decade brings out the End Of Decade lists. I have little qualification to talk about the Best Movies of the Decade. Better critics than I have already put their lists together (see Leonard Pierce’s 20 best of the decade, for instance); I could only re-arrange the order.

So the following list does not contain the Best Films of the Decade. But it has films that all meant something to me, personally. Call them my Signature Films of the First Decade of the Second Millennium. Or something snappier.

Part One: The College Years: 2000-03

In 2000, after Boston College’s alt-tabloid Naked Singularity grew too liberal for me – also, we never managed to put out more than one issue every semester, if that; add to that the fact that, like any random sampling of college progressives we could never agree on what was the most pressing issue that BC needed to take a stand against, Israeli mobilization on the West Bank or the lack of organic food in the Rathskellar; publishing burdens to which none of us really objected, because the paper was a great excuse to get together once every two weeks and drink in a cool off-campus apartment, opportunities which, as a shy freshman, I harvested like diamonds in a Jwaneng mine, plus I had a crush on two of the editors; and somehow they put me in charge of budgeting, a process I botched terribly, which probably led to the fact that they didn’t publish a lot of papers in subsequent years, but if we hadn’t canceled a meeting to all go listen to this visiting professor rant about the WTO I would have put in more of an effort – I started reviewing movies for the regular student paper, The Heights.

The weekly Arts and Entertainment staff meeting consisted of the editor sitting at the head of a table in BC’s upper campus dining hall, waiting for enough writers to show up to constitute a quorum. He would then divvy up assignments for the coming week. The divvyables were a pile of promo CDs, concert tickets and passes to free screenings for shows and movies around town. Unless a more senior writer had already spoken for one, the pile was first-come, first-served. I made my bones by showing up regularly, turning in decent if not astounding work, and volunteering to see movies no one should have been forced to see (Saving Silverman; Sugar and Spice; Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, etc).

Late in the year, Jeremy (the A&E editor) sat at the head of a largely empty table. Just a few of the regulars had shown up with me. Sifting to the bottom of the screenings pile, he pulled up a folded letter with an embossed sticker on the bottom. The sticker was a common studio tactic to keep reviewers from photocopying passes for friends. “Anyone free on Tuesday at 11:00 AM?”, he asked. “I have one here for a ‘martial arts romance’ from Ang Lee, called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Thus began a ten-year love affair with martial arts cinema. I’d seen Yuen Wo-Ping’s work before (The Matrix, naturally), but nobody had told me kung fu films could be such stirring spectacles. Of course, they wouldn’t have thought to tell me: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a very atypical kung fu film. It uses none of the jump cuts or sudden zooms that are common in Shaw Brothers pictures but which would jar a Western audience. Its pacing and scope call to mind Sense and Sensibility more than an action flick.

Seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with a theater full of critics also tuned me into the delicious high of being an insider. I saw the movie months before it debuted in the States. I felt like quite the connected little mastermind as the buzz surrounding the film began to trickle out. This insufferable snottiness has been hard to shake.

I had a similar reaction to Memento, which I saw in limited release with a few members of the Boston Objectivist Network. Can’t recall everyone who was in attendance, but it was a sizable turnout. Give a group of people who talk philosophy every month a movie like Memento, with its epistemological and ethical implications, and they’ll have discussion fodder for weeks. Following the movie, we retired to S&S in Inman Square, the sprawling deli which would become a haunt of mine years later. We debated until the staff were stacking chairs on the tables around us.

Today if I want gripping suspense thrillers that challenge my notions of causality, I have a wider palate to search through. But at the time Memento broke ground for me. It challenged my conventional notions of storytelling, editing and pacing. But it also introduced some interesting ethical quandaries: what’s the difference between justice and revenge? is justice worthwhile if you never remember getting it? if so, to whom and for what end? and is a goal-oriented life worth living if all your goals are artificially manufactured? and do we have any choice in the matter?

I had a long analogy here about how The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was the first movie I saw in theaters after the September 11th razing of the World Trade Center. It’s the sort of anecdote that’s rife with significance: I saw it with my family; I saw it in a packed theater; I saw it on Christmas Day, etc. In the end, I deleted that paragraph, so you don’t get to read it. It would have been too forced, and more than a little trite.

But if the first decade of the Twenty-First Century was the decade of Good vs. Evil, then starting it with The Fellowship of the Ring is apropos. Though it wasn’t as crypto-Christian as Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien invested the Lord of the Rings series with Catholic flavor, especially the love of the traditional English countryside. Peter Jackson reproduced the epic scope of the Fellowship’s march not just faithfully, but better than faithfully, evicting Tolkien’s most boring and odd segments in favor of desperate chases, exciting battles and wondrous landscapes. It gave birth to a host of imitators, but it also proved that epic fantasy and sci-fi wasn’t dead yet in film.

Finally, I have Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl to thank for several things. Black Pearl was a surprise to everyone: I don’t think anyone expected a Jerry Bruckheimer picture based on a Walt Disney World ride to be any good at all, much less an entertaining adventure. But the writers took Disney’s budget, invented their own mythology, and had fun with it.

Black Pearl got me back into gaming after a long absence: while I’d been playing for a while, I wouldn’t have run anything if Depp, Bloom and Knightley hadn’t inspired me. And since the first game I ran introduced two of my dearest friends – John Fraley and Melissa Carubia – whom I would end up marrying eight years later, the movie has a deep, personal significance as well. They entered the wedding reception to Klaus Badelt’s boisterous theme and, of course, applause.

On Wednesday: the Post-College Years (2003-06).

While Boston didn’t get it as bad as the rest of the East Coast, nine inches of snow fell on us from late Saturday night into early Sunday afternoon. This wouldn’t have been enough to dissuade us from jiu-jitsu (grr! we’re tough!), but since Watertown declared a snow emergency, we couldn’t have parked on the street our dojo sits on (we obey the law!).

That sounds like a mis-translated Shaw Brothers movie, actually: Tough Guys Who Obey All Laws. Starring Gordon Liu and Sun Chien; directed by Chang Cheh.

So I stayed inside all day Sunday and watched movies. Including and limited to:

Get Carter: Brutal and compelling, of a style that found frequent imitators through the 70s and 80s but retained little of the source’s art. A young Michael Caine (whom Matt W. told me I resembled once, back when my hair was curlier and my sideburns longer, plus I was carrying a shotgun and slapping around the proprietor of a Newcastle B&B; only now do I get it) plays Jack Carter, a London mob enforcer who goes north to investigate his brother’s death. He sinks waist-deep into a genuine mystery, popping pills and assembling clues until he uncovers the predictable, yet still galling, truth.

What puts Get Carter a head and shoulders above its imitators (including Tarantino) is its art. The cinematography is excellent: from the opening shot of Carter, backlit in an apartment window and staring over London with a drink in his hand, to the crane shot that follows him as he flees pursuers on foot and jumps into a waiting car, to the film’s tense climax. Midway through the film, a local youth group parades down a main street in full mufti. They play some stirring march in a kazoo chorus. The cookie-cutter rowhomes of the street they march on frame a massive factory and burbling smoke stacks at the bottom of a hill. ThinK Pittsburgh without the charm: it’s a beautiful juxtaposition.

Jack Carter is a psychopath. He lets the people who help him get beat up, robbed or even killed without much in the way of tears. He holds nothing sacred except family. And even that, we feel, is not out of some duty to the hearth but as a way of redeeming his past. “Frank wasn’t like that,” he yells at one point, shaking his listener by the shoulder. “I’m the villain in the family, remember?” Carter wants proof that the sadism he engages in is a choice, not in his blood. The fear that his family – his brother Frank and Frank’s daughter Doreen – might have fallen as far terrifies him. And like a terrified dog, he bites and never lets go.

Strangers on a Train: One of Hitchcock’s sharpest. Two men meet on a train ride from New York to D.C.: a handsome young tennis player, Guy Haines, and a rich, idle bachelor, Bruno Anthony. The two get to talking – Haines reluctantly – until it comes out that Guy wants to divorce his unfaithful wife, while Bruno chafes under his father’s thumb. Bruno suggests that two people who’d met by accident – like he and Guy – could swap murders and solve each other’s problems. Guy patronizingly agrees in order to get away from Bruno. But when he arrives in D.C. a day later, he discovers that his wife has been murdered …

All the usual elements are here: a man falsely accused. A woman uncovering a mystery. A maniac with a twisted relationship with his mother. Odd psychological contrivances. Races against the clock. Climactic battles in odd locales.

Example: In the film’s climax, Guy must win a tennis match as quickly as possible in order to hop a train to Connecticut. While avoiding the police who are tailing him. So he can catch Bruno planting evidence. But at the same time, through Hitchcock’s genius we find ourselves rooting for Bruno as well. We hope that nobody spots him, or that he doesn’t lose the crucial piece of evidence – because that would deflate Hitchcock’s meticulous ending into an anti-climax. Compare this to J.J. Abrams, whose idea of cranking up tension involves making everyone run (q.v. Star Trek, Mission Impossible 3).

Robert Walker as mama’s boy Bruno Anthony is the real gem here. He wavers between harmless eccentricity and casual brutality in a way that Anthony Perkins – to say nothing of Anthony Hopkins – must have mirrored. We find him fascinating in the way that a snake fascinates a rat. Sadly, Strangers on a Train was his last film. In August 1951, he suffered an acute allergic reaction to a dose of sodium amytal, administed by his psychiatrist for nerves. He died (like Brittany Murphy, who just passed this Sunday) at age 32.

Media blow:

Talk To Me: Uneven biopic. Don Cheadle plays Ralph “Petey” Greene, a fast-talking ex-convict who becomes a DJ in the D.C. area in the Sixties. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Dewey Hughes, the radio producer who takes a chance on the street-smart jiver who talks to The People! And so forth. While the details of Petey Greene’s broadcasting career are pretty entertaining, the movie suffers from flat dialogue and stilted pacing.

For instance: when Greene’s agitating for a radio job proves too disruptive for Hughes’ station to ignore, Hughes proposes to meet Greene at a nearby pool hall. Greene suggests that they shoot a game of nine-ball, with a disc jockey job as the stakes. Hughes agrees. As soon as this happens, we know that it’s going to be a close game – because Hughes (the producer) would not agree to offer Greene (the ex-con) a job on the air if he had any doubts in his own abilities at shooting pool. Hughes then proceeds to take off his jacket, unbutton his sleeves and lay a side bet that Greene won’t drop a single ball off the break. Not ten seconds have passed, and we know that Hughes is going to run the table. The language of film – dialogue, shot placement, pacing, music – all tell us this for certain.

So this whole scene takes about six minutes. Greene’s rise to local stardom, once he finally has a radio job, takes about four minutes.

Add to this the most frequent problem with any biopic – characters commenting on how important they are at This Moment In History, rather than doing important things – and the resulting picture drags. Don Cheadle playing a hustling ex-con soul DJ who talked smack about Berry Gordy, broadcasting from the heart of D.C. during the race riots of ‘68, should have been captivating, moving and hilarious. Instead I found myself checking the DVD sleeve at the 80-minute mark: “God damn! There’s still half an hour left?”

The Slutcracker: at long last, a burlesque adaptation of The Nutracker Suite. In this high-spectacle, high-energy production, Clara and Fritz are boyfriend and girlfriend, inviting friends over for Christmas dinner. When Clara’s grandmother tries to give her a large pink dildo as a Christmas gift, Clara is horrified and Fritz (feeling a little inadequate) jealously kicks the grandmother out. But she sneaks back in that evening and demonstrates the dildo’s magical powers to Clara: it transforms into the handsome and athletic Slutcracker Prince. The two of them dance away to a fairy wonderland, where dominatrices dance en pointe and male pole dancers vault to Arabesque strains.

The Nutcracker is a natural fit for this sort of story (“moreso than Macbeth”, I commented to Liz and Hugh, with whom I saw it). A postmodern audience could read the entire ballet, with little difficulty, as the story of a girl’s sexual awakening. Adolescent girl becomes fascinated with virile man (the Nutcracker) who takes her on a tour of exotic lands – Spain, Arabia, China – and epicurean delights. It’s a natural fit. Maybe they could tackle Swan Lake in the spring?

Black Book (Zwartboek): One of those movies that the DVD case doesn’t do justice to. The plot feels like a cliche: Jewish girl in the Netherlands, separated from her family during World War 2, dyes her hair blonde and seduces a German officer to aid the Resistance. She finds herself torn between her affection for the officer and her desire to avenge her parents. The “seduction-and-betrayal” story has been told before.

What makes Black Book different is Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers) behind the camera. Verhoeven moves the film along at a breathless pace, catapulting our heroine from placidity to tension to danger to a temporary respite with little pause between. He doesn’t skimp on the gore, either, shredding civilians, partisans and Nazis with blizzards of automatic fire. Sex is frequent and graphic. These are bleeding, sweating, fucking human beings.

Verhoeven also assembled a hell of a cast. When telling a seduction-and-betrayal story, directors have to take special care to keep their heroines from looking like prostitutes or victims. Carice van Houten, as Rachel, has no such problem. Rachel is confident, opportunistic and, while capable of deep tenderness, also frank in her sexuality. When Mr. Kuipers, a resistance leader in Amsterdam, asks her how close she’d be willing to get to an S.S. officer, she asks, “You mean, am I willing to screw him?” After a pause: “I’ll go as far as he’s willing to go. Okay?”

The S.S. officer in question, Captain Ludwig Muntze, is played by Sebastian Koch (who was equally excellent in The Lives of Others a few years earlier). He’s not a reluctant Nazi: when he brings Rachel back to his apartment, he brags about having seized it from “the capitalists” (for which read “the Jews”). But it’s clear he believes in fighting a more civilized war than his comrades in the Gestapo do and has a touch of poetry in his soul. And the mercy and tenderness he shows Rachel leads the audience to, if not cheer for him, at least hold their breath when things get tense.

War makes monsters of us all, Black Book tells us; even the Resistance is full of betrayals and cruelty. The movie doesn’t end with the surrender of Germany. In fact, it’s the genius of Verhoeven’s tight, suspense-thriller plotting that the liberation of Amsterdam makes things worse for our heroine: once a Jew hiding among Nazis, she’s now an S.S. sympathizer hiding from vengeful Dutchmen. Verhoeven goes to deliberate excess here, as he is wont to do, subjecting our heroine to pornographic levels of melodrama. A world of shit rains on her head.

Spiritual and physical brutality aside, Verhoeven turns what could have been a cliched tale of victimhood and prostitution into a tense, compelling and innately real story of heroism. The heroes and villains keep surprising you and the plot twists unload like a Sten gun. The movie keeps you on edge until the very end, when the titular black book that one character has used to document all the others is finally revealed.

(Postscript: I wonder if the subtitlers were having a bit of fun with the English-speaking audience. The German officers refer to the Dutch resistance as “terrorists” instead of a more contemporary term like partisans or guerillas. This leads to a few ironic scenes, like one German officer accusing Muntze of “negotiating with terrorists” when Muntze secures a cease-fire with the resistance. Muntze defends his actions as sparing German soldiers from danger behind the lines; his comrade accuses him of “defeatism.”

I don’t believe Verhoeven intended to compare the 21st century West to the Nazis; that’s a blunt, extreme analogy and the rest of the film doesn’t bear it out. And it may just be the choice of the subtitle editors. But if Verhoeven were making the point that monsters exist on both sides of a war, the film succeeds there)

(Note: as soon as I opened up IMDB on Monday evening to confirm some details about the movie below, I saw that its star, Edward Woodward, had died. A hell of a loss, though he left a full career behind him, including Becket, the TV series Callan, the original The Wicker Man and, of course, the following)

Breaker Morant: A Few Good Blokes. Unpolished but still fiery.

Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant (Edward Woodward) begins the movie in a full court-martial in the last days of the Boer War. He led a small company of irregular colonial soldiers, fighting against the Afrikaaner guerillas (known as commandos) by adopting their tactics. Such tactics have ended with Lieutenant Morant and his fellow officers, Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown, whom audiences will recognize from Cocktail or F/X) and George Wittow, to be charged with six counts of murder.

Major J.F. Thomas, an officer with experience executing wills back in New South Wales but little more law training, is assigned to the case one day before the trial begins. Though he fumbles initially, his insightful questioning ferrets out the truth: that the unorthodox methods the Bushveldt Carbineers used were not only endorsed, but ordered, by the highest levels of British command in the field. When Morant, Handcock and Wittow executed prisoners without trial, they did so under orders.

The movie does not paint Morant as entirely heroic. He and Handcock conduct the war with a casual brutality. They both demonstrate a fiery temper, Handcock peppering the court-martial with sarcastic remarks and Morant being provoked into a tirade: “We shot them under Rule 303!” But these touches merely make the men darkly romantic, not outright villains. Breaker Morant still couches its stars in cloth of gold, depicting Morant as a poet, a singer, a leader and stalwart in the face of death.

Instead, the movie reserves its harshest condemnation for the British Empire itself. Taking its screenplay largely from George Wittow’s 1907 account of the trial, Scapegoats of the Empire (did I mention this was based on a true story?), Breaker Morant casts the British command as aristocrats, shielded from the horrors of war by the gentility of their sitting rooms. It’s not only implied but stated outright that Lord Kitchener and the Prime Minister would have no problem sacrificing three “colonials” to appease the Boers, thus ending the war sooner and keeping Germany out of it. And the film also depicts how, in sinking to the level of the Dutch commandos, the British Army may have lost its way.

Breaker Morant heralded the start of the Australian “New Wave” of cinema, preceding such films as Gallipoli, Mad Max 2 and The Year of Living Dangerously. The film feels like the early work of a film student, experimenting in camera angles for their own sake. The initial statement of Lieutenant Morant is shot in extreme left profile, dead on and extreme right profile for no obvious reason. At some points in the courtroom the frame holds both the witness and the attorney questioning him, eight feet away, in the same focus – not uncommon in the 80s, but still awful looking today. And while most of the flashbacks are timely and well-staged, some cut in and out of the present moment like misplaced stills.

But, these bits of amateur work aside, the movie’s still good. Burra in South Australia stands in admirably for the Transvaal: a green, sweeping country that almost begs to be ridden with rifle in hand. And the dialogue itself is sharp enough, full of rough Australian wit, outrage at injustice and warm poetic sentiment. It’s a timeless story and well-told.

But, Johnny, ere we “go to grass” -
Ere angel wings are fledged to fly -
With wine we’ll fill a bumper glass,
And drink to those good times gone by.

We’ve had our day – ’twill not come back!
But, comrade mine, this much you’ll own,
‘Tis something to have had it, Jack-
That time when we could ride ten stone!

- Harry “Breaker” Morant, “The Day That is Dead”, 1893

The Dispossessed: One of those novels I wish I’d found sooner. Le Guin has a beautiful economy of language not often found in fantasy writers: making the terse but poetic choice, rather than bombarding a scene. The Dispossessed feels like an epic, though it comes out fairly slim.

And like all good science-fiction, the story focuses less on a naturalistic depiction of how a What-If would come to pass than what such a What-If would mean. Le Guin rejects the notion of a true utopia, depicting the lunar colony of Anarres as an anarchist state slowly ossifying into a socialist oligarchy. Anarres is poor, while its neighbor Urras is rich. But it’s the richness of cloying food and it makes the protagonist – Shevek, an Anarrean physicist visiting Urras, the first person to do so in over a century – literally ill.

Le Guin has always excelled at making the alien seem truly alien, and her depiction of how a true anarchist would react to a capitalist society reads very true. She doesn’t use Shevek as a platform for anti-capitalist polemics: people on Urras are wealthy, happy and comfortable with their station in life. But to someone who doesn’t want property, life on Urras is mystifying and weird. Adequately conveying the stilted weirdness of a capitalist society is no mean feat – considering that Le Guin, her audience, and the publishers who made such a novel possible spent their whole lives in one.

(As an economist, I always read anarchist fables looking for solutions to the calculation problem. The Dispossessed doesn’t provide one, although a good portion of the book deals with a famine on Anarres. Maybe it’s implied)

Why We Fight: A meticulous recounting of the history of American presence in the Middle East would be enough. Start with the Iranian coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953; continue through the U.S.’s efforts in training, arming and bankrolling the Taliban in the 70s, our installation of Saddam Hussein in the 80s and the troops in Saudi Arabia in the 90s. Why We Fight accomplishes all that.

Documenting the growth of the defense industry in the United States since the Eisenhower era would be enough. Begin at the end of the second World War; continue through Korea, the Philippines, Okinawa, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, etc. Add the nature of American representative politics and the inextricable link between defense contracts, jobs and votes which guarantees escalations in defense spending.

Taking a look at the aftermath of the September 11th attacks would be enough. The world went from universally supporting America (there were marches of solidarity with the U.S. in Tehran and Pakistan in the days after the attacks) to distrusting and fearing America. What changed in that time?

A movie that did all that would be enough.

Where Why We Fight triumphs is twofold. First, the documentarians interview several prominent conservative voices to answer these questions. And not in an attempt to bait them. And not cherry-picked fringe cases either: William Kristol, Richard Perle and John McCain are among them, as well as several Naval pilots. The movie’s prejudices are obvious, but these speakers don’t get the sneering dismissal that (say) Michael Moore would give them.

Second, the way the movie manages to weave together disparate threads into a single story. The narrative begins with a retired NYPD cop who lost his son in the September 11th attacks. A Vietnam veteran, he decides that an appropriate tribute might be to get his son’s name written on a piece of munition – like an aerial bomb – to be used in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This story weaves in and out with several others, like the story of a Boeing weapons technician who helped invent the “bunker buster.” Only later in the film do we hear that this technician, Anh Duong, fled Saigon near the end of the Vietnam War – a war that the retired NYPD Officer fought in. And only much later do we learn that the bomb with his son’s name on it – like all bombs dropped in the first 60 days of OIF – missed its primary target.

Why We Fight was the name of a series of propaganda films made by Frank Capra during World War II. The U.S. has established a military presence in over 130 countries around the globe since that time, and fought a variety of police actions, covert operations and wars in that time. This documentary seeks to answer the same question Capra’s films did, albeit with a more critical tone. And it finds no definitive answer. The documentarians interview an eager young recruit, two Naval stealth bomber pilots, a retired Lt. Colonel from Pentagon intelligence, Dwight Eisenhower’s son, Gore Vidal, a few military historians and a CIA consultant to get an answer and finds nothing. It’s no one person’s fault – certainly not President Bush’s. But when you combine a perpetually growing defense industry, a global military presence, a first-in-class hunger for resources and a doctrine of pre-emptive warfare, the question becomes not why we fight, but why wouldn’t we.

“It is nowhere written that the American Empire goes on forever.” – Chalmers Johnson

You’re A Very Nosy Fellow, Kitty Cat
These three things are true:

(1) Roman Polanski deserves to go to jail for raping a thirteen-year-old girl – not merely statutory rape, but coerced, drug-induced sex with a thirteen-year-old. The years he spent outside of the United States do not count as “time served” for his crime, since they clearly did not limit his freedom in any meaningful way: he was still able to make an Academy Award-winning film. Whether there was judicial misconduct in the 1977 case is irrelevant. The lightest that Polanski could likely get off with in this case is a new judge at the sentencing hearing – which he’d get anyway, as the original judge has died – so Polanski still ought to appear.

(2) Were one of you guilty of an unspeakable crime – not just accused, but actually guilty – and had the option of fleeing to a country which would not extradite you to the U.S., where you could live and work surrounded by friends, would you be so noble as to say, “No, thanks, I’ll stay here and take my medicine”? Especially if that “medicine” were ten to fifteen years in a California prison? I can’t peer into your souls and say you’re lying if you say, “Sure, I’d go to jail,” but I have my suspicions. That being said, point #1 still stands.

(3) Chinatown and The Pianist are still great movies. Polanski being a rapist doesn’t change that, even if it makes everyone curl their lips back from their teeth, draw in a sharp breath, and nod sadly.

I bring this up only because I used to be ambivalent – that is to say, wrong – on the subject of whether or not Polanski deserved to be brought to justice. The new media attention coming from his extradition illuminated more facts on the case, and those facts changed my mind. But beyond that, Polanski’s extra-legal status had a sort of Schrodinger’s Cat uncertainty to it before this week. You could debate whether or not he should return and face justice, but everyone knew he wouldn’t of his own volition. Now that he’s in U.S. hands once again, the question should be moot.

Like A Bird On The Wireless
In a fit of frustration, I yanked the Internet cable out of my ancient Linksys router on Sunday and plugged it back into my desktop. This router (which was too old for Linksys to provide tech support for in summer 2007) has the habit of freezing once every few months, forcing a hard reset – jiggling a pen in the back of the unit until everything flashed, logging into the router interface to create a new admin password, then to create a new wireless password, then to rename the network to something other than “linksys,” etc.

But the problem is as much with the iMac as with the router. I would use Firefox to log on to the router and (say) change its name. I would click “OK” to confirm my changes. Airport would then flip out, since it could no longer find the router it was just on (“Where’s ‘Linksys’? What’s this thing called ‘Professor Coldheart’s Apartment’? I don’t understand!”), and give me a “Page Not Found” in Firefox. So then I’d have to open up Airport, find what I’d just renamed the router to, click on that, make sure it took, and then reload the router log-on.

Then I’d change the wireless password. Repeat the above.

All of the above is understandable: using the wireless Internet to change my wireless router settings should be fraught with peril. But when the router itself is so old that it tends to freeze if you give it too much to do at once, the process becomes too frustrating to bear. So no more wireless at the Fortress of Solitude, until I get a slightly newer router.

In Soviet Russia, Car Drives You
I sifted through my car’s glove compartment night before last to find some paperwork that might suggest what my mileage was a year ago (car insurance thing). In this search, I pulled out vehicle inspection reports, oil change receipts and maintenance documentation going back three years and more. I also pulled out a registration sticker.

Huh, I thought. How long have I been driving with an expired registration sticker? Answer: one month. This puts me in mind of another Tale from the Brain Trust:

Fraley, Hawver and I sat in the living room one evening, lamenting our inability to manage even the simplest financial details of our lives.

“You know,” Hawver declared, “maybe the welfare state is the way to go.”

“Have the government make every decision for us!” Fraley chimed in. “Because clearly we can’t manage.”

” ‘What would you like to spend your monthly $20 allowance on, Citizen Fraley?’ “

” ‘Pudding!’ “

” ‘Now, now. You really ought to have a more diverse diet than …’ “

” ‘All on pudding! All on pudding!‘ “

Of course, all three of us got our acts together and are now upstanding members of our respective urban communities.

Le Samourai: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) isn’t quite a samurai film, and it isn’t quite a gangster film. It tells a story that touches on both – three days in the life of Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a syndicate hit man who has no life outside of the job he’s hired to do. But the characters are all ciphers, and the city, anonymous. The movie is not about the people in it.

Le Samourai is about procedure. France in 1967 was a much more bureaucratic country than American audiences might recognize, and the movie tells the tale of two warring bureaucracies. Costello has his procedure, and we follow him as he executes it: lying fully dressed on his bed until it’s time to act, then rising to steal a car outside his apartment, switch the plates at a suburban garage, acquire a gun, visit a girlfriend and some poker-playing comrades to obtain an alibi, and then slip into a nightclub (through the restroom) to assassinate the owner. The police have their procedure as well. The superintendent (François Périer) orders 20 men arrested in each of Paris’s twenty precincts (“what’s 400 men in a city of ten million?”). He files them onto a stage, four at a time, for the nightclub employees to identify. When Costello is on stage, he produces an airtight alibi: his girlfriend’s apartment, between 7:00 and 1:45. He gives the Superintendent his girlfriend’s number; the Superintendent lifts his finger just so; a subordinate dials the number at a phone on the wall. Always, the emphasis on procedure.

It’s not merely enough to know that Costello’s syndicate and the police are at odds, but how they go about waging their battle. We see a two-man detective team break into Costello’s home to bug his apartment. One man jimmies his lock (using a ring of keys identical to the one Costello uses to steal a car), while the other pads from door to door in the building, listening in on Costello’s neighbors. Inside, the older detective mounts one bug, rejects it, then plants another. The two are about to leave when a neighbor comes down the stairs; the cops withdraw and hide. Why are they hiding? They’re the police, aren’t they? Yes, but they are intruders just as much as Costello is – interlopers in foreign territory.

This parallel focus on procedure, for both Costello and the cops, sets the two on equal ground. This illustrates the second theme: Le Samourai is about war. Costello displays such care in establishing an alibi and concealing his identity, yet he does not discard his most distinguishing feature: the tan trenchcoat he wears when he leaves the nightclub. In fact he wears it fully buttoned up the entire time the police have him in custody, removing it only when he gets home. Why? Because it is his armor, as essential a part of his identity as the heavy lamellar of a Japanese samurai. The Superintendent knows, with the mythical certainty of a fictional detective, that Costello is his man. So why not just take him? Because the rules of engagement do not allow that. The Superintendent must catch Costello – nailing him in the act with evidence of his crime.

Combine these two: Le Samourai is about a war carried out by procedure. Two bureaucracies – the syndicate that employs Costello and the police – butt heads over the death of a nightclub owner. Between the two of them, they grind up several lives and leave disillusionment in their wake. Costello recognizes the futility of the war he wages – the penultimate image of the film indicates that – but he chooses to fight anyway. Possibly because the code of le samourai gives his life meaning, while the two great powers (law and crime) discard the people they’re supposed to protect. That’s speculation; the movie’s four decades old, and foreign, so my attempts at critiquing it are largely guesses. But I think the text bears it out.

The Lion in Winter: yes, yes; a classic for generations; brilliant performances, pristine dialogue, etc. It’s a phenomenal movie. We know that. Rather than give it a review, which would be silly, I’ll attempt some critical analysis in the style of Todd Alcott (albeit not as well).

Here we go:

The Lion in Winter is about the faces we present to the world: both the literal composure of our face, and the facade that we present. The movie starts tight on Henry II’s face (Peter O’Toole) – “Come for me!”, he challenges: fifty years old but still hale enough to practice swordfighting with his youngest son, John. We see these same wild eyes and hear this same challenge in the climax of the film, when Henry faces off against three opponents at once. In that fight, as well, the camera stays tight on their faces rather than backing up to take in the footwork: Henry’s snarl; his opponents alternately terrified or stoic.

Richard, Henry’s eldest son, rides a joust in full armor when we first meet him; only after unhorsing his opponent does he remove his helmet, showing us his sweaty and driven face as he contemplates killing his fallen foe. Jeffrey (the schemer, the middle child) sits atop a beachside cliff, conducting war games. His face isn’t obscured, but it’s not his face that indicates his actions: it’s the men below, charging and wheeling and dying on his nod. These pawns are his body; the mailed form attached to his neck is just a vehicle.

(Also note: each of his sons is summoned in the same way: Henry’s steward has to call their name at least two or three times to break them from some reverie, signified by a crown-to-chin closeup. These men constantly scheme behind the masks that are their faces; when called to interact with the real world, it takes them a second to break free)

When we first meet Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn), Henry’s wife, it is at a great remove: she sits by a window in her sumptuous prison cell as a herald near the door announces the Christmas court in Chinon that starts the story. She arrives via river longboat, a grand slow shot that starts with the boat distant and ends with it passing right by us. We do not have many close shots of Eleanor’s face until she and Henry have begun to spar, and even then no extreme close-ups (as Henry had) until her plots have fallen apart at the end of the first act. She regards herself in a hand-held mirror, her coiffed hair pulled out of its pins, and despairs. She is eleven years his senior; age has been worse to her than to Henry.

Age is another recurring theme of the movie, though that’s not much of a stretch. People refer to their ages multiple times. “I’m the oldest man I know,” Henry laments at one point. “I’ve got a decade on the pope!” Age in The Lion in Winter is a currency, a system of accounts for a pre-banking economy. Henry’s the oldest male, so he schemes and maneuvers with great success. But Eleanor is older than he is and frequently puts him on the wrong footing with one clever word. The sons triumph in proportion to their age – Richard, the “constant soldier” and great conqueror; Jeffrey, the schemer; John, the sniveling weakling.

And yet Philip II, King of France (Timothy Dalton)^*, is younger than all of them save John, and he’s able to turn the tables on the entire family with little effort. Why? Because while the whole family craves the respect of age, they want the vigor of youth. Jeffrey wants Philip’s armies. Richard wants Philip in the carnal sense. And Henry wants peace with Philip: he (at 50) knows that Philip (at 18) can afford to start a war that France will take ten years to lose. In accounting terms, Philip’s youth gives him a great deal of credit and modest assets. Henry has substantial assets, but has leveraged himself into tremendous debt to get them.

(And don’t underestimate that debt. When Henry threatens to father another heir and disown his sons entirely, Eleanor invokes as strict a margin call as you’d ever find on the NYSE. “Suppose I hold you back for one [year]. I can; it’s possible. Suppose your first son dies? Ours did; it’s possible. Suppose you’re daughtered next? We were; that too is possible. How old is daddy then? What kind of spindly, ricket-ridden, milky, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limpy line of things will you beget?” Henry has borrowed too much time; he’s now in too great a debt to build any further)

One last theme to touch on: the recurring presence of animals. Chinon is a Christmas court. The massive feast that Henry holds there to welcome his family and Philip requires peasant infrastructure to support. Livestock and domestic animals are always underfoot. When Henry and Eleanor emerge to greet Philip, they have to step around dogs and chickens to do so, while the trumpets sound their procession. Entering for dinner, the King and Queen pass through a pack of dogs lounging by the fire. As Henry lurches down the stairs from a confrontation with his sons, a lone dog scampers out of his way.

No one pauses or complains about, or even acknowledges, the animal presence in the castle. The animals belong there as much as the humans do. But it’s not that the animals are human (none of them have personalities); it’s that the humans themselves are animals. Eleanor calls her children “piglets.” She evaluates people like animals, examining their parts like a haggler (Richard’s eyes look “small and piggy”; Henry’s first mistress, Rosamund, had “fine teeth”). Everyone in the royal family is a wolf, constantly circling. There’s no scene which does not see the balance of power shift at least twice, if not four or six times.

And all that’s communicated through dialogue – some of the finest I’ve ever heard. Every single spoken line in the play, without exception, is an arrow pointing to the heart of the speaker or another character. There’s not a word that could be taken away. This is one to watch.

Ultimately, The Lion in Winter is about the continued evolution of humanity. Human beings share common ancestry with other mammals, yet it’s galling how little distance we’ve made from the pack and the struggle. “Of course he has a knife,” Eleanor says of her bloodthirsty son Richard. “We all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!” She means it as an invocation of distance – it’s eleven centuries since the time of Jesus and we’re little more than animals. Animals with human faces that we wear like masks, but animals nonetheless. And that statement creates a paradoxical reflection to the audience – it’s eleven centuries into the “Christian” era then, but it’s twenty centuries now. What progress has the species made?

______________________________
^* A James Bond, reviving a role originated on stage by a Bond villain (Christopher Walken)