The Fog of War

Director: Errol Morris (2003)

Can you be fascinated by someone who says straight into the camera, pointing a finger at you and without any blinking or hesitation: “that day we killed 100000 people in Tokyo – men, women and children.” And you know it's true and he is largely responsible for that. Well it's strange, but you can. At least I was fascinated. In a way.

By the way the middle name of Robert S. McNamara is Strange and he had a strange destiny of being U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. He lived a long and strange life and he will be remembered for the war and for introducing the System analysis into public policy. So it's all about the interactions between the systems and different players, all about the decision making and getting maximum outcome. And the humans of course are just another variable in this scheme. And honestly you can't do it any other way if you want to win the war. Though at the end of the days you must admit that there is a Fog of War which means too many variables and too many uncertainties and you simply can't predict everything. Still you have to try.

Still you remain a human being yourself. When I say I was fascinated I didn't mean that I somehow started to like McNamara. To put it in his own words when he was talking about understanding enemies: “we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding". And I tried to understand him not as an enemy but as a complex and very clever human being and that was fascinating and as I think exactly this fascinated the director Errol Morris also.

Sometimes McNamara becomes meek and sentimental also. He cries like a child when talking about the death of Kennedy and there is tears in his eyes when he speaks about dead American soldiers. And he admits that they would be tried as war criminals for bombing Japanese cities if they wouldn't win the WW2. (He was doing some analysis that shaped the bombing strategies there). So what makes the action of losers immoral and justifies the same actions done by winner, he asks. And from his mouth it's not just some abstract philosophical idea. Somehow he manages to separate his personal life and job (war) and you understand that he needs to do so to stay sane. And after all he says that his years as a Secretary of Defense was the best in his life, he enjoyed the game of war. Still he sometimes asked those questions.
I couldn't really understand how honest McNamara was. I mean he seemed to be honest, but you can't forget that he is old fox. On the other hand he looked like an old person who really had the message, who wanted to be remembered for what he was and what he did. He seemed like a person who thinks about himself as something larger than life, so he doesn't need to be ashamed, not that he wants to. He admits his mistakes, but he says that he had to do everything he did.

I was asking myself what makes Errol Morris such a brilliant filmmaker and after a brief thinking I guess I found the answer that suits me. It's logic. His cold and calm and very logical mind that you can feel behind the moving pictures, behind the decisions in editing room and so on. It's not that he does not empathize with his subjects, he does a lot, but in the same way proposed by McNamara. And he has some sort of magic of being trusted by people whom he interviews, something which is essential for a documentary filmmaker, I guess.

The outcome is something truly fascinating. It's an insight in human history and human nature. Anthropological study in a way. And there is beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass which adds a bit of pure poetry to philosophical, historical and psychological debate on the screen.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Director: Luis Buñuel (1972)

What's the meaning of life if you have everything at least in the material, consumerist sense? Well, dinners apparently and social ritual involved. To eat and to fuck. And you can be as morally corrupted, rotten or stupid as it's possible without any shame as long as you know the right way how to drink martini dry and it is served in a glass of exactly the right size and shape, in other word as long as you exchange with others the right class indicator signals at the table. It's a harsh, absurd satire on upper class made by the great surrealist master Bunuel. One of his best known and most acclaimed movies that won Oscar as a best foreign film also.

It's almost absolutely plotless. A collage of dreams intertwined with reality in a way that you never really can understand where is the dream and where is reality, as both are equally beautiful (or ugly), meaningless and irrational. Their dreamlike life is not entirely perfect and they have their anxieties. They are distracted form time to time by poor peoples terrorists, by police who are on the track of their cocaine business or just by nightmares. However they always have the luxury and the option to walk away or wake up from the bad dream in all possible realities, because they have diplomatic immunities, power and money and all that sort of things. One of the worst dreams is when their social ritual is interrupted, when somebody brakes the rules of conduct of chattering class. You don't discuss with the ambassador of fictional Latin American country called Miranda the real state of affairs in his country. It's a NO-NO, a taboo. You risk to wake up from the dream and end up in a nightmare.

A dream within a dream within a dream and so the life goes and so the movie goes. The surreal adventures and dreams of characters are from time to time interrupted by the scene where all of them are walking down the road somewhere in the countryside seemingly from nowhere to nowhere. There is not a hint of location or whatever, just the road and the fields around. There is some sort of small competition between them (when making this scene Bunuel instructed each actor to try to go just a little bit faster than others) however it's almost unnoticeable. They do not run or struggle. The road is smooth and in general they are doing well as a group (or class).

Ritual, and their never ending dinners is just that, is something that goes from nowhere to nowhere, it's a repetition which main purpose and goal is to maintain the status quo in society. The one peculiar thing about ritual is that it somehow manages to create its own reality. Can it be crushed? Or it's just another dream to wake up form?

There is lot more in the film.

Weird reality, wonderful movie.

Sherlock Holmes

Director: Guy Ritchie (2009)

“The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” famously said Pablo Picasso. However bad taste does not necessarily makes good movies. I watched the movie just because of Guy Ritchie, because I remember his movies to be stylish and so British and certainly made with a taste. I couldn’t imagine anybody better to play with such a cultural cliché as Sherlock Holmes. However I left the movie truly disappointed.

The plot in my opinion is truly disastrous. Even if it is the only hole in this otherwise well crafted film, that hole is so big, that I just couldn’t really appreciate the rest. I mean I enjoyed the actors, I enjoyed the way how the image of Sherlock was created, the accents on his physique, on his egomania, on his weird experiments with substances and his psychopathic lifestyle of a genius in general. I enjoyed the way how London was shown. It is visually very good movie, and it was quiet atmospheric sometimes, but just when it comes to the action scenes it becomes so boring and stupid, that I inevitably felt myself cheated.

The scene in the shipyard, the one with pigs and the big saw, the final scene on the scaffolds of Tower bridge, the big Russian guy. C’mon we’ve seen this hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of good and bad action movies. I’m just not six years old anymore, I’ve seen hundreds of movies in my lifetime and when I go to cinema I want at least a hint of originality. Also the whole idea of including masons (neither good nor bad by itself) but we’ve seen plenty of movies involving masons that are set in 19 century London and I think if you use them, you have to find some sort of original twist to the theme. Making them plotting some sort of apocalypse a la James Bond... Why? It’s just dumb. Cliché + cliché + cliché very rarely makes anything original. But that’s the way how Hollywood mainstream cinema goes. That’s how they are earning those huge sums of money. Apparently.

I found one interesting thing to think about. How the image of Sherlock Holmes undergoes some sort of evolution in our age of superheros. In this movie he is in a way catching up at least with Indiana Jones. I wonder why that didn’t happen earlier. Maybe because of the English conservativeness. Though to be honest I’m not sure if it’s interesting and relevant enough.

So I don’t think that Guy Ritchie ever was an artist of Picasso’s caliber so maybe he better had to stick with the taste.