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rokkitt88
Reviews
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
A great movie about the war, where the war is the star
This is an excellent, gripping, fast moving film about America's war on terror. It's not a movie where the characters are large and the war is some kind of exotic backdrop for their adventures and feelings and romances.
This is not a WWII movie, with the street wise Italian, the Jewish intellectual, the Iowa farm boy, etc. We don't know anything about these fighters; we just watch how they struggle and fight.
It's a film about devotion to duty and endless work, not because the characters tell us so in tearful phone calls home, but because we watch them work, and watch the work lead nowhere or fall apart or blow up in their faces and how they (or their survivors) pick themselves up and start again, in the face of enormous odds against them, in a madrassa-educated country (Pakistan,in this case) that seems to hate them (and the rest of us) about as much as the declared jihadis do, and against pressure from higher-ups in their chain of command and Congressional oversight committees.
This is especially a movie for those who follow the news, read the books (The Looming Tower, Ghost Wars, etc.). We know who the ISI is, we know about the USS Cole, Khobar Towers; we remember Daniel Pearl, we even remember the episode with the Jordanian doctor.
We know the neighborhood; we know how incredibly cruel EVERYBODY is in this area, and to think that some want these bloodthirsty madmen to lawyer up, and further think that if we just stroll along like little Bo Peep, holding high a copy of the US Constitution, and keep our skirts clean, that thereby we'll win friends and influence people... is the saddest laugh of this benighted century so far.
I don't know how much of this story is true, but assuming a lot of it is, I'm enormously proud of these people who can only look forward to an anonymous star on a wall in Virginia.
They give us what security we have everyday as a gift, one that we unconsciously take for granted, which is often bought at the highest cost to these warriors' anonymous lives.
The Twilight Zone: The Long Morrow (1964)
some thoughts rather than a review
While the actors were fine, the episode was poorly written. When the writer tells you the planetary system is 140 light years away and that your ship travels at 70 times the speed of light, the whole voyage should take 4 years, not 40. That's just sloppy, unless I mis-heard.
But what really bothers me, and yet is fascinating at the same time, is not the intended re-rendering of O. Henry's Gift of The Magi, instead it's the total focus of the script on the sacrifice Robert Lansing's character made for "love", with Edward Binns at his side, singing his hosannas.
Stunning.
First of all, the Mariette Hartley character sacrificed equally: losing her world, everyone she ever knew dead or 40 years older; and yet she was just dismissed, and then the script had her walk away without a comment.
And secondly, if he could just dismiss her like that, it wasn't love he felt for her, it was probably just narcissism; she actually wasn't real to him, he showed no empathy for her or her situation, his concerns were all about his precious feelings.
Finally, I know this episode was made in the mid 60s, but the cultural construct revealed is totally a 50's pre-woman's liberation mentality where woman's lives were totally marginalized, and like planetoids they only glowed by reflected light (at least in the 40s women were equal partners in the war effort i.e. Rosie the Riveter).
A fascinating and unconscious cultural artifact.