Month: March 2006

Political documentaries have been a Bush-era cottage industry, with Michael Moore’s much-kvetched-about Fahrenheit 9/11 sitting atop a heap that has also included Errol Morris’ heady The Fog of War, media doc Control Room, war docs Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, corporate corruption exposé Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and many more.

One of the first films in this stretch of wonky cinema was Eugene Jarecki’s The Trials of Henry Kissinger, based on critic Christopher Hitchens’ book-length condemnation of the former U.S. diplomat. It was a sober, probing, persuasive film, traits it shares with Jarecki’s newest, Why We Fight, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival (the same fest that launched Hustle & Flow and Forty Shades of Blue), but it has taken more than a year to show up on a local screen.

An essay on the past 45 years of American militarism, Why We Fight certainly has the Bush administration’s current misadventures in Iraq in its crosshairs, but it isn’t a polemic. Unlike the messier, more emotional Fahrenheit 9/11, it isn’t a partisan film.

Why We Fight takes as its hero Republican war-hero president Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against the growth of what he famously dubbed the “military-industrial complex” upon leaving office in 1961. And in tracing how Eisenhower’s dark prophecy (“God help us in this country when someone sits in the White House who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” he’s also quoted as saying) has come to fruition, Why We Fight implicates administrations both Democratic and Republican. The villain in Why We Fight, to the extent there is one, isn’t a man but a system that has been corrupted and manipulated over decades.

The sober tone of the film acts as a needed corrective to current national debate. There’s no rational reason why matters of war and peace should be a political football. Unlike tax policy or cultural politics, sending our kids to war shouldn’t be a matter of party loyalty or political philosophy. But that’s what it’s become in an intensely politicized era, and Why We Fight seeks to unpack some of the politics surrounding the use of the American military.

Along the way, Jarecki’s camera focuses patiently and respectfully on thinkers from across the political divide, from hawkish conservatives such as Senator John McCain and neo-cons Richard Perle and William Kristol to skeptical liberals as disparate as Texan Dan Rather and expatriate Gore Vidal. The most compelling “expert witness” may be CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, author of the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Chalmers defines “blowback” as the “unintended consequences of foreign operations kept secret from the American people” and implies that the attacks of 9/11 were an example of blowback despite attempts to dismiss the bombers’ motives by tautologically labeling them “evil-doers.”

But the most compelling figure in the film might be retired New York City cop and Vietnam vet Wilton Sekzer, who lost a son in the 9/11 attacks. His journey from sorrow to vengeance to disillusionment is one that an awful lot of Americans have or are still experiencing.

Any cultural phenomenon has its progeny, and The Matrix is no exception. That trilogy mixed science fiction, kung fu, and water-cooler philosophy into an intoxicating blend spiked with the latest in computer graphics. Fans were hooked, and even as the films tapered off toward dismal, they kept coming. Recently, a rash of movies have come out with clear ancestral links to The Matrix, some of which we could have done without and others, like the recent Russian import Night Watch, we should all be very grateful for.

Night Watch was adapted from a trilogy of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, who also co-wrote the screenplay. It opened in Russia in the summer of 2004 and went on to become the highest-grossing film in post-Soviet history, earning over $15 million at the box office.

The film actually bears more resemblance to the ongoing Underworld series than to The Matrix, more neu-school horror film than science fiction. Both series are also plotted around a war, one that has raged for millennia, in which neither side is necessarily good or evil. This is deep stuff, people!

Night Watch opens looking sort of like a Capitol One commercial — a lot of armor and smashing amid whirling cameras — but it quickly displays wonderful wit and innovative special effects, which are doubly astonishing when you consider the film was done on a $5 million budget by director Timur Bekmambetov. What stands out is the way Bekmambetov mixes low-key interior cinematography with playful and imaginative FX, even turning the subtitles into part of the mise-en-scene.

The plot? Okay, there are these “Others,” which is a catchall for any magical being, from seer to vampire to shape-shifting bear. When you find out you’re one of them, you get to choose between Dark and Light, basically high-stakes kickball with the future of the world. Our hero Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) makes a big mistake early on in the film, which leads to his discovering he is an Other, and while he decides to side with the Light, it quickly becomes clear he is still expected to do dirty work.

While Anton struggles to get his act together, we are introduced to a series of larger-than-life prophecies, but the film always manages to stay in the moment. It has humor and a host of excellent supporting characters, especially the nefarious Zavulon, leader of the Dark Others, who spends his time at home endlessly replaying the film’s final scene on his PlayStation until he gets it right.

Toward the end of the film, there is moment when Night Watch‘s central plot is suddenly and anti-climatically resolved. This momentary letdown is a ruse, however, a reminder that the film knows both scope and attention to detail. Like those nifty Russian dolls, it opens up even as it comes to a close. The sequel, Day Watch, opened in Russia in January and is due in America later, but this movie is so good that I’m hoping to use the magic of eBay to shorten that wait.