The Screengrab : black hawk down

Culture in the Bush Years: A Time of Black Hawks, Battlestars, and Borat

Phil Nugent — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

So Newsweek asked a bunch of folks to select one cultural artifact from the past eight years that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." Nobody picked W., thank God--instead, there were votes for a Jeff Koons knickknack ("Much as the Bush administration has waved off an intimacy with Big Oil and professed down-home empathy for regular "folks," Koons likes to pretend that he's not an avatar of irony for billionaire collectors.") and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, the long-in-the-writing novel that dropped weeks before September 11, 2001, and which "conjures up a nation kept awake at night by nameless dread."--but a few movies did slip by the guy at the door. Specifically, Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's re-staging of the Battle of Mogadishu (based on the nonfiction book by Mark Bowden) and Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's road trip through an America that had just started reconsidering whether this all-hail-the-retarded-boy-king business was really the best defense against national decline.

In this context, they do make for an intriguing double bill. Black Hawk Down, which was made before 9/11 but released some four months later, is about a mission that, at the time, was widely used as Exhibit A by politicians and pundits who wanted to denounce the Clinton administration for its use of military intervention overseas in the name of "nation building." But the movie itself was a hit with many supporters of the Bush administration's plans to spread democracy in the Middle East by kicking ass and taking names. It was also a big success with Somali audiences who turned out in mass numbers to cheer the sight of American soldiers getting blown to pieces. However you want to take the ironies involved, none of these reactions are surprising, nor are the testimonies of soldiers, including those who've been to Iraq, that the movie captures how it feels to be under fire. Scott achieved the movie's visceral effectiveness by eliminating anything that might get in the way of it, including historical and political context and even much in the way of character definition. The movie includes a number of fine actors, but it's all boiled down to the sensory overload of creating how it feels to get shot at, over and over and over, from every direction. So it's no wonder that different audiences would decide who they should be rooting for based on which non-characters look more like them, and also no wonder that the film, which features a predominately white U.S. military, had to endure charges of racism from both Somalis and American writers. For all its technical mastery, the movie goes charging too scarily far in the direction of other Jerry Bruckheimer productions, whose only intent is to make you raise a fist and go, "Whooo!" Five years later, Borat, which was the number one movie in America around the time that the president's party took a battering in the 2006 midterm elections, made that triumphant war whoop sound like a cry for help. It's a candid snapshot of a country that seems populated with people who want to dazzle the world with their indomitable swagger but who reveal the depths of their insecurity with how badly they take being teased. (The movie made headlines while it was in production with stories that Baron Cohen had barely escaped from a Texas rodeo with his life after daring to mangle the National Anthem, and it says a lot that the rodeo organizers seemed, if anything, more eager to brag about how hot-tempered their audience was than the filmmakers.)

Still, a lot of people of a geekish bent will agree with Joshua Alston that no movie released during the war president's time in office quite caught the national mood as well as a small-screen offering, Battlestar Galactica, which Alston hails for presenting "a world that looks nothing like our own, and yet evokes it with chilling accuracy." Alston also scores a direct hit when comparing it to 24, "with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, Battlestar has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society's battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn't flinch from one question that 24 wouldn't dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving? Plus, the guy who looks like John McCain turned out to be a robot. How's that for prophecy!?

Reviews By Request: Zulu (1964, Cy Endfield)

Paul Clark — Fri, 02 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

This review was requested by reader James Frazier. For details on how you can request a review of a film of your choice, see the footnote that follows this review.

For many people, the age of British colonialism has become a controversial period. In our modern ideological climate, imperialism has practically become a dirty word among many historians, who object to the way the United Kingdom and other colonizing countries steamrolled less developed cultures in order to further their own. There are a number of interesting movies that explore this idea, but Cy Endfield’s Zulu is not one of them, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a rousing war picture in the classic tradition, made before the unpopularity of the Vietnam War made it almost impossible to make a war movie that wasn’t in some way or other about ideology.

Zulu is, first and foremost, a painstaking recreation of the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, a skirmish that pitted roughly 100 British soldiers against over 4,000 Zulu warriors. The first few reels of Zulu are devoted to introducing the characters and establishing the context for the battle, but the remainder of the film focuses solely on the progress of the battle itself. Not being a student of military history, I can’t speak to how accurate the film is. I only know that it’s completely convincing and satisfying in a dramatic sense, showing in great detail the way the outnumbered and overmatched British repelled the attacks by the Zulus and held their ground.

Rorke’s Drift was in the African colony of Natal, situated in the middle of what was traditionally Zulu territory. In the film, three men hold some measure of power over the outpost: young Lt. Gonnville Bromhead (played by Michael Caine in his first major role), engineering officer Lt. John Chard (Stanley Baker), and Rev. Otto Witt (Jack Hawkins), a missionary who along with his daughter presides over the church. But rather than simply focusing on these three men and allowing the others to fade into the background, Endfield takes the time to introduce us to many of their subordinates at the outpost: the medical corps, the quartermasters and cooks, and the various regiments, which hail from all over the United Kingdom.

On first glance, the first third of the film feels bogged down with character introductions, but Endfield’s efforts pay off once the battle itself begins. If the pre-battle scenes are leisurely, the battle is a model of efficiency. Having established the characters and their relationships, Zulu is now able to concentrate on the military aspects of the battle without being slowed by the demands of plot resolution. If there film provides any conventional setup-and-payoff, it’s in the small character touches that come as each major character behaves according to his nature. Consider the way Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead decide who is in command- Bromhead, who is of noble birth, resents an engineering officer trying to take command, but once Chard informs him of his greater experience (a matter of months, as it turns out), Bromhead backs down and the issue is never raised again.

As the battle continues, the theme that comes through most clearly is the idea of honor through duty. By most people’s standards, it was crazy for the British not to retreat from Rorke’s Drift when faced with an army of Zulu warriors, especially when a much larger contingent of British soldiers had just been massacred by the Zulus earlier that day. But for Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead, there’s never a question of whether they’ll stay and fight. They’ve sworn their allegiance to the Crown, and if the Crown wants to keep a presence at Rorke’s Drift, then their honor, and that of Britain, rests on them standing their ground. That’s what most of the civilians in the film don’t understand- a band of Boer mercenaries on horseback retreats when they discover what they’re up against, and Rev. Witt is eventually sent away by Chard, both for railing against the battle and simply because his presence isn’t doing any damn good.

Meanwhile, the soldiers have no choice but to fight. As Tennyson wrote, “theirs was not to reason why/ theirs was but to do and die.” Yet in the face of almost certain death, they stand their ground and repel the Zulu attacks again and again. Some of the most fascinating scenes in the film deal with the strategies employed by the British to defend their post, most of which appear to be improvised. I especially liked the way Chard set a trap for the Zulus by pulling soldiers away from the walls to lure them in, only to spring a trap on them once they’re inside. Little wonder than Zulu is one of Ridley Scott’s favorite movies, or that both Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven owe a great deal to Endfield’s film.

After the battle is over, the Zulus appear once more on the hills around Rorke’s Drift, but not for the reason the British think. Rather than attacking again, they chant for their worthy opponents, in celebration for their skill on the battlefield. Yet in the aftermath of their victory, Lt. Chard and Lt. Bromhead are more conflicted. Bromhead, still young and inexperienced, turns to his elder officer and says, “I feel afraid and there's something more- I feel ashamed.” Chard, ever the pragmatist, can only respond, “I came here to build a bridge.”

Previous Reviews by Request:

Baxter (1989, Jérôme Boivin)

Now, it’s your turn. What movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game (except for Fair Game which, alas, I’ve already seen). First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Elite Squad"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I may have dosed off for a few minutes while watching the hammerhead Brazilian police drama Elite Squad. Listening to all that screaming and cursing and the sound of gunshots--it was just so much like being at home in my bed in the Bronx. A scandalous success in its native Brazil, Elite Squad is the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars. Based on a book about Rio's special forces outfit known as BOPE, the movie is narrated by squad Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the hardest of hard men, who is looking for someone tough enough to replace him so that he retire and stop placing his life on the line and raise a proper family with his pregnant wife. Moura thinks there may be potential in a couple of young recruits, who also happen to be bestest buddies: Neto (Caio Junqueira), who seems tough and trigger-happy enough but is maybe just a teensy bit too Cro-Magnon to be trusted with large arsenals of weapons at his disposal, and Matias (Andre' Ramiro), who wears glasses and is smart and stuff, but may be too evolved to keep the savages in line. How to choose!? Faced with this head-scratcher, Moura addresses it the only way a real man can: he yells at everybody who comes within a mile of his office until you expect his throat to hemorrage. Then he takes to the training field to figure out which recruits have what it takes, by the time-tested method of yelling at them. Then, having used his famous leather lungs to keep Rio from cracking apart, he goes home to enjoy a relaxed evening of yelling at his wife. We must remain ever vigilant.

Elite Squad is the first nondocumentary film directed by Jose' Padilha, who made the great Bus 174, and coming from him, it's a shock. That movie used a hostage situation that was covered on Brazilian TV for an amazing, multi-level view of Rio society, and it had a great deal of sympathetic understanding for confused, poverty-stricken young men who resort to the gun. Elite Squad is made from deep inside the viewpoint of the kind of paranoid, killer cop who sees everyone who's not in uniform as a potential threat to his life. Its take on policing the Rio slums and discos is, the drug dealers are too heavily armed to be kept in line by regular means, and all the regular cops are on the take anyway, so blah-blah-blah and let God sort it out. (Roberto Pimental, the former BOPA captain who co-wrote the book on which the movie is based and had a hand in the screenplay, has been quoted as saying that the movie that came closest to capturing his experiences as a policeman is Black Hawk Down.) Padilha has indicated that he thought he was making an expose' about reprehensible behavior among violent cops, and there are times when the captain's narration and behavior are so puerile that it would be very reassuring to think that the filmmakers included them as evidence that their hero is a psychotic asshole. (He brags about the "Elite Squad"'s logo--a skewered skull that a fourteen-year-old would think was rad--and tortures the recruits with abusive games and taunts that would make R. Lee Ermey consider staging an intervention.) The script that Pahilha and Pimental came up with was reshaped and polished by Braulio Mantovani, and Padilha may not have recognized the degree to which Mantovani, the writer of City of God, gave it the structure and devices of a conventional righteous-cop revenge thriller, with the cops doing horrible, omni-destructive things only after the bad guys have made it clear that they're such total monsters that it'll take the worst of which the cops are capable to bring them down. The whiff of mixed motives behind the camera gives Elite Squad whatever fascination it has, but the commercial success it's already enjoyed, and any great success it ultimately has in this country, probably comes down to how much of the audience is happy to take its supercop characters' vicious self-righteousness as real heroism.