All posts by Steve Stern

A holiday of Muslim movies

Americana, Politics, Religion

The SiegeFor no particular reason, except that this is the way the Universe works some times, we saw three movies about Muslims over the weekend.

The first one was The Siege, made before 9-11, about a fictional Iraqi terrorist group and the countries over-reaction to the carnage they cause. Denzel Washington plays a New York based FBI agent and Tony Shalhoub is his Arab- American partner. In the movie – and, I believe, in real life – the terrorist are reacting to what we are doing in the Middle East. In this case, we think the chain of events started when a a secrete American “extraction team” kidnapped a Shiite cleric. Annette Bening – the very same, overwhelmingly attractive, Annette Bening that charmed President Andrew Shepherd – plays a CIA agent who set up a Shiite terrorist operation to oppose Saddam Hussein’s regime that set-up the kidnapping. It wasn’t a great movie.

The second movie was much better. It was the The Reluctant Fundamentalist by the Indian director, Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding).  The Reluctant Fundamentalist bridges 9-11 and is about a very smart, very secular, Pakistani who is living in New York as a successful management consultant. When 9-11 hits, he goes from being “king of the world” to pariah. Not so much in terms of his friends but in terms of the America he loves.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The last movie was The Past by Asghar Farhadi – the Iranian who directed A Separation, nominated for an Academy Award – and is playing now. It is directed by an Iranian and stars Ali Mosaffa, another Iranian, who has come back to Paris to be divorced by his French wife, played by Bérénice Bejo,  but it is not about Muslims, it is about people and it is superb.
The Past

A couple of weeks ago, I got in a conversation with a friend about religion. That is not a big surprise, two of my favorite conversation topics are religion and politics and it is two of my friend’s favorites as well. He is – if not a baptised, at least a confirmed – atheist. I knew my friend found all religions troubling, but he surprised me by saying that Islam is the worst by far. That those qualities that make it the worst religion, are built it. As an aside, I would classify myself as pro-religion. I believe in The Wonder, A Divine, Love, but I find it very hard to understand, let alone believe in, an anthropomorphic god.  I find it borderline insane that anybody thinks there is a god who created the Universe with its billions of galaxies, of which we are in a tiny corner of one, and then cares about how we have sex; but I also think religion can comfort and can be a force for compassion and good. If pushed, I would say I am an agnostic with Buddhist leanings. End aside.

The first two of these movies touch on what it is to live in a world in which good people, smart people, even compassionate people, think your religion is one of hate and terror. To live with people’s assumption that you are not the same as them at a very basic level. All three movies deal with the deeper question of not completely belonging. Not belonging in the sense of not being accepted. Not because of anything the characters have done, but of not being accepted because of who they are.

At one point in The Past, a friend of Ahmad’s – the Iranian who came back to Paris to be divorced – says You were not made for this place, you do not belong here. And he doesn’t which is why he left his wife and her two kids to go back to Iran. Changez Khan, the reluctant fundamentalist, wants to stay, he is very good at getting rich the American way, but he is driven out by full body searches at airports, stares in restaurants, and the burden of being the other. Agent Frank Haddad in The Siege, wants to quit the FBI when his son is jailed in a round-up of young Muslim men.

These three movies tell the collective story of Muslims between worlds. In a way, it is the classic immigrant story but it is also the story of a minority that has been identified with the enemy. When I read about Bernie Madoff ripping off investors, my first reaction is Oh shit! not another Jew. I am sure that when most Muslims read about some asshole blowing people up at the Boston Marathon, they say something like, Oh shit! not another Muslim, why can’t it be another Timothy McVeigh?  In their case, in 2014, the consequences can be much more serious and that makes me feel sad.

 

Seeing “her” @ the end of the year

Film

X-mas-

I feel like I have been away for weeks but it is really only been a greatly extended Christmas (away being defined as not making a blog post). Christmas is a get-together-with-friends-and-family day and — it would seem by the movie openings — a Go-to-a-movie Day. One of the things my sister, Paula, and I share is a love for movies, not always the same movies, but pretty close. So one of the things we did while she was here, for a couple of days, after she had Christmas in San Diego, was go to see her. It was our Christmas Celebration together (one of my most memorable Thanksgivings with Paula was seeing Paris is Burning at the Guild in Albuquerque).

I went in to her thinking it would be good and walked out thinking that it is the best movie I have seen this year. her is soft, gently surreal, and visually stunning.  It is, maybe, the best relationship movie since Annie Hall.

I don’t know why I should have been so surprised, it is a Spike Jonze movie, after all. The same Spike Jonze that gave us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., but Charlie Kaufman, the writer of those movies, got most of the credit rather than Jonez. Part of my problem is that  Jonze played the dumb, goofball, Conrad Vig in David Russell’s Three Kings and I still haven’t been able to shake that image even though it has been 14 years now. However, Spike Jonze both wrote and directed her and he is – finally – getting the credit.

The movie takes place in a past-future Los Angeles. What I mean by past-future, is that it seems more like a future imagined in the 60’s rather than imagined today. It is not the Blade Runner future or the Elysium future, it is the 2001 future with a very nice  HAL 9000 that is the OS in a wood and brass thingy that Joaquin Phoenix, as Theodor, carries like a cell phone (although nobody seems to use them as phones). Theodor is listlessly going through life in a limbo period after his wife left him and filed for divorce, but before signing the papers that finalize it. Scarlett Johansson is her – Samantha, the nice HAL 9000 is OS1 – and the perfect, custom-made for him, girlfriend with whom Theodor falls in love.

Amy Adams is also in the movie, as Amy, and is Theodor’s best friend. She is so soft and best friendish that she doesn’t seem like the same actor that played Sydney Prosser in American Hustle. She doesn’t even seem like she is the same height or age. I think that Amy Adams does not get the acting credit she should. Meryl Streep played the good Julia in Julie & Julia and got great reviews while Amy Adams played the bad Julie and got pretty much ignored. I think Julie was the harder part, the less likable part, played better.

Back at her, the conceit of the movie is that the love is played straight by everybody in the movie. My sister was creeped out by that but I got sucked in (although I felt a little bit of the kind of edginess I get when I watch somebody driving – in a movie – and they look away from the road for a time I consider to be too long). her was a great way to end a year of watching movies. It seemed to me to be mostly a mediocre year that ended with a burst of fantastic movies. It started with Side Effects which I really liked, wandered down into the forgettable Star Treck into Darkness and Pacific Rim– although This is the End was a super summer movie – and then came back with Gravity, American Hustle, and her.

“News has to be new” deteriorating into a ramble on the AK-47

Current Affairs

A Syrian military soldier holds his Ak-47 with a sticker of SyriWhen I turned my computer on this morning, to check the news, the headline on my Google News Page was Ever defiant, freed Pussy Riot members slam Putin’s amnesty from The Christian Science Monitor. In the back of my mind, the thought, Almost Christmas, not much is happening, rattled around. Intellectually, I know that stuff is happening all over the world, but lots of people are off for the holidays so stuff like Benghazi suicide bomb kills 14 just sort of disappears.

After I read my morning Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes, I went back to read the morning paper in a little more detail. Now the headline was Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94. I found it a little sad that Pussy Riot got bumped by the death of the guy who invented the most ubiquitous killing machine in history. But the Pussy Riot piece was just a filler , we all knew they would remain defiant, we didn’t know that Kalashnikov was even still alive. As an aside, Why are so many brave people  young women? Shit! we men seem to only get Mr. Duck-breath and Kalashnikov; the women get Malala Yousafzai and Pussy Riot. And as an aside to the aside, Did Putin have any idea he was releasing  Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina, of Pussy Riot, on the anniversary of Andrei Sakharov’s release from the gulag? End asides.

But, the essential ingredient of The News is that it is out of the ordinary and new (although nothing is more fun than reading about news we have witnessed, that is why it is so fun to watch a game our team won and then read about it).  So, last week, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47 is still alive, would be down in human interest somewhere. Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 74 is interesting because it is new, change, a milestone.

The AK-47 was a brilliant idea with a brilliant execution. There had been handheld automatic weapons before but they all used pistol bullets, think of the Tommy Gun – M1921 Thompson Submachine Gun to the military, Tommy gun to Chicago mobsters – or the M3A1 “grease gun” used by American tankers. The problem is, that because they used pistol bullets, they were not very accurate and did not carry enough punching power. Automatic rifles wouldn’t work because the large, rifle, ammunition made them too hard to handle. Kalashnikov came up with the simple – but out of the box – idea of making the ammunition bigger than pistol ammunition but smaller than that used in regular rifles.

Regular rifles are still more accurate, but the AK-47 makes up for that it is easy to carry and has a high rate of fire. The genius of the AK-47 is that because it is not accurate in the first place, it can be made with loose-fitting parts, like the old, cheap, Timex watch that took a beating and kept on ticking. It was designed to be reliable when used by people who were not very well-trained and did not have a history of using and maintaining mechanical devices. That is not a easy thing to do. It is easier to use and cheaper to make, but the AK-47 was harder to design.

The American equivalent assault rifle, the M16A1 is a better weapon but much more complex, takes more maintenance, and is much more expensive (about $150 vs. $670). Ironically enough, when we wanted to arm militias in Afghanistan and Iraq, we ran up against the problem that the militias were not composed of mechanically sophisticated troops, so we supplied them with AK-47’s. Whom we bought them from, I don’t know. As an aside, I am reminded of a story that was going around when we were in the Space Race with the Soviets. NASA spent something like 30 Million dollars developing a ballpoint pen that could write in zero-gravity; the Soviets used a pencil. End aside.

Anyway, Mikhail Kalashnikov is dead and the AK-47 lives on with over 100,000,000 out there.

 

American Hustle

Americana, Film

“Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. “American Hustle” offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. David Denby The New Yorker

american-hustle (1)I want to get the bad news out first, I was disappointed in American Hustle; it was not the greatest movie in the history of mankind. Even walking into the theater, I knew that nothing could match my internalized amping of the critical acclaim I had been reading. All that said, it was masterfully directed and had the best acting I have seen in a long time.

From stage left to right, Jennifer Lawrence was so sexy and looney, it was impossible to take my eyes off of her. Anytime she was on-screen, she stole the show. There was no relation to Katnis Everdeen or Ree. Christian Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld – who, I assume, is cast as Jewish but doesn’t come across as Jewish to my Jewdar – and is so distinctive in the role that, on leaving the theater, I told Michele I couldn’t think of a movie in which I had seen him before. When Michele mentioned the brooding Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, I thought she must be mistaken.

Jeremy Renner is the mayor just trying to do good and he bears no resemblance to any part I have seen him play and certainly not Sergeant James, in the Hurt Locker. To me, he was the most sympathetic character, the one I like the most, but the genius of the film is that they are all likable. Of all the actors, Bradley Cooper’s FBI Agent DiMaso is the closest to his previous characters but he brings a sense of going off the rails that carries much of the film.

And Amy Adams is terrific as a woman trying to fight her way out of going nowhere, when we meet her, in a voice over, she mulls over being a stripper, There’s a boldness to it. But where would that boldness take me? In a way, that sums up the whole movie. For me, a major character – although uncredited – was Miss Adams’ dress. In any world with gravity and/or centrifugal force, her boobs would have popped out in almost every scene.

I want to say that this is a David O. Russell movie because I like him as a director – it started with Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings is still one of my favorite movies – but this is really a star movie like Ocean’s Eleven and it has a similar, light, inconsequential vibe. It got me wondering, What is a Star?  My first thought is that part of it is coming out of nowhere, very fast, very young. But, in American Hustle, Jennifer Lawrence is the only really young actor (although they are all pretty young from my age). But the Stars do come out of nowhere. They have a bit part, maybe a couple, and then get a lucky break in a Winter’s Bone, or Hangover, or Hurt Locker, and we all know them. We probably all over-looked them when they played a bit, deep in a movie, like Robin the Luggage Boy in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V or a minor part like Sack Lodge in Wedding Crashers.

I am not sure that an actor has always had to be a great actor to be a Star, but today, Stars all seem to be great actors. I think that, for an actor to make that jump to Star, they must have something more. They have to attract us, make us fall in love, at least for a couple of hours, even if it is only in the dark. What I like most about Hollywood, is what so many people like the least, the alleged superficiality.

To make it in Hollywood, people have to be attractive – often confused with good-looking, but not really the same, think Danny DeVito – but they also have to be hardworking and talented. It doesn’t matter where somebody is from – from stage left to right –  Louisville, Kentucky; Haverfordwest, Wales;  Modesto, California;  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;   Castle Rock, Colorado. It doesn’t matter who your parents were, children’s camp manager,  a circus performer, bowling alley manager, a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, a semi-professional bodybuilder. It is that meritocracy, the democracy of it all that I like.

In this movie, full of Stars – who weren’t born Stars, who had to hustle to become Stars – playing hustlers, it comes full circle.  It is fun to watch.