matthew’s alibi

Silver City

In an election year, a political satire from John Sayles should be something to get excited about. The guy is so cool he had a guest spot on MathNet, for heaven’s sake. It is particularly tempting to get excited when that film has a terrific trailer and a cast that includes the likes Thora Birch and Richard Dreyfus. But I’m warning you now - do not get excited about this film. It’s the most disappointing thing since your last really bad date.

I would tell you about the plot, but you wouldn’t care, and the strain of trying to make enough sense of it to not sound like a madman would make me tetchy. It’s convoluted and needlessly intricate, needless chiefly because there’s not a single character here engaging enough to care about one way or the other. The writing is remarkable only for its rigorous insistence on a maximum two-dimension per character limit. God bless the actors, who do their best, but even the considerable talent of Richard Dreyfuss can’t make this ordeal of a script any more watchable.

Perhaps what’s most frustrating about the movie is how well it starts: we begin with gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager shooting an asinine political ad, trying to get the hang of a rod and reel in an effort to look down home. When the only thing he manages to catch is a dead body, things take a promising turn, although Sayles manages to kill off any sort of dramatic interest or enjoyment in pretty short order.

Chris Cooper’s character, Dickie Pilager, is surely one of the lowlights of the movie, although that’s a very tight race. He’s an obvious swipe at George Bush - basically, the whole joke is that the politician isn’t very smart, and isn’t very good with words. What small bit of satire exists in the film is not very artfully done, and is, in any case, a joke everyone in the western world has heard relentlessly for the past four years. In a general sense, I think I probably agree with the political message of the film, but I still found myself wishing he had just kept quiet unless he could have come up with something a little more clever and original to say.

The film is not without funny moments, but these mainly come when the writing is so bad the only real option is to laugh out loud. In particular, Sayles has a bad habit of making characters announce their thoughts. My favorite moment was when one of the protagonists, walking away from an interview with the bad guy, announces to no one in particular “I think he’s lying!” as the baddie stands in the background, stroking his goatee. I’m not kidding - it’s that bad. And you can tell he’s the bad guy, because he’s wearing ostrich skin boots.

Aesthetically, the film has all of the visual charm of an old episode of Murder, She Wrote; it looks absolutely stuck in the 1980’s. The addition of Jessica Fletcher could have only helped this film, however - and it would have been a lot less insufferable with a running time of 53 minutes.

Further reading:

• Guardian Unlimited Film | News | Fictional candidate weighs into US election
• “Dickie” Pilager 2004
• IMDB Entry for Silver City

Checkpoint: A Novel
Author: Nicholson Baker
Release Date: 10 August, 2004

There’s very little pussyfooting around in Nicholson Baker’s newest novel, Checkpoint. Weighing in at a thin 115 pages, Baker doesn’t bother with niceties or waste time preparing his readers for the subject at hand. The subject at hand is the assassination of President Bush, and Nicholson’s utter lack of fear in presenting it makes the act of reading this novel feel more than a little subversive.

The tiny tome is a novel really only on Baker’s say-so - since he presents the story in the form of a transcript, it reads a lot more like a stage play than prose. The conversation recorded is between two old friends. Jay, a somewhat delusional down-on-his-luck day laborer has asked his old friend Ben to come to a hotel room in DC, and to bring a tape recorder. Ben obliges, believing that his friend is in some sort of crisis. Thus begins the story - with the click of the tape recorder - Jay wants to explain his reasons for his impending assassination attempt.

The sparse style is reminiscent of David Mamet’s assertion, born of his experience writing radio plays, that a good playwright needs nothing but the spoken lines. No stage directions, no scene-setting, no character backgrounds - Mamet feels that if it can’t be conveyed in the dialogue, it has no business being on a good writer’s page. By this standard, Nicholson Baker is one of the best living American writers.

Baker is also in top form here because he denies us any easy judgments on the characters. Jay, the would-be-assassin is delusional, but some of his arguments are clearly cogent. His personal politics are tricky - he’s not the left-wing nut job you might typecast into such a role. And Ben’s reasons are muddled - does he believe the arguments he’s making against the assassination, or is he chiefly concerned with not becoming an accomplice?

The length and pace of this book makes it a tour de force. By taking on the assassination taboo head-on, Baker is able to craft from it a deft framework to discuss American empire, apathy, and morality.

Read more:

• MSNBC - Target: The President: Nicholson Baker talks about his controversial new novel, ‘Checkpoint’

The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Release Date: 11 May, 2004

There are few living octogenarians who have wielded as much power as Robert McNamara. When a man as influential as this decides it’s time to start summing up his life and sharing the lessons, it makes sense to pull up a chair and listen. Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning documentary is all about this great reckoning.

Fog of War, structured around the subtitle’s 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, is a veritable what’s what of 20th century American history. McNamara was born to an Irish American family during World War I, himself served for three years in the Second World War, then went back to academia at Harvard briefly before becoming the first person outside the Ford family to serve as President of Ford Motor Corporation. But he was not long for the job; he was soon tapped to be the Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy. It was there that he left his deepest marks on American history, advising Kennedy and later Johnson about Vietnam. His position earned him much ire during that tumultuous time from anti-war protestors.

The 11 lessons are simple platitudes - “Empathize with your enemy,” and “belief and seeing are often both wrong.” But these bland moral imperatives are peppered with hair-raising first-person stories about the real life consequences of McNamara’s decisions - such as his involvement in - and rationalization of - killing 100,000 Japanese by firebomb in one single night.

Although the stories he tells are gripping, a viewer might legitimately wonder whether staring at a man in a chair for an hour and a half - even a man with as much to say as McNamara - could conceivably be entertaining. That’s where Morris’ direction comes in. Although the only interview subject is McNamara (indeed, the only person we see on camera outside of archive footage is McNamara), the film is visually stunning.

There are a few filmic tricks Morris employs that make the film a sheer joy. First, at key points in the film, Morris shows time-lapse photography of the cities being discussed - in Japan and Vietnam in particular. This technique lets us view the cities as they exist today, where the destruction shown in the archive footage has seemingly been healed, but at the same time, shows in the places a ghostly mundanity: we see that these cities are populated by average people going about their lives. It does much to humanize the enemies of past wars.

Morris also cleverly juxtaposes official reports and documents - usually with dramatic phrases singled out for attention - with horrific pictures of the atrocities they describe. The sterile text and reports are indicative of the world McNamara inhabited, a world of words and ideas and strategies where collateral damage and civilian and military casualties are just columns on a spreadsheet. But the film, in many ways, is about McNamara coming to terms with the consequences of his decisions, and in several key points of the film, Morris cuts back and forth between the documents and the photographs, building a slow crescendo where ultimately the words and images become one and the same.

These sections are made even more effective by the haunting, note-perfect score by Philip Glass. Glass, an avant-garde composer who has lately done several film scores, has managed to create the perfect score to this film - leaping between tentative and thoughtful, with moments of frenzy. It reflects the film perfectly, and adds much to the film’s overall feel.

Finally, Morris constructed a mirrored device called the “Interrotron” for his sessions with McNamara - so that McNamara was able to look directly at the camera, and see Morris instead. Indeed, the bulk of the film is McNamara looking straight at the audience, creating an intense feeling of candor. But the candor in this film is no trick of mirrors - this is a man who has seen much, and has allowed Morris a front row seat to the lessons he’s learned. It is shocking both how much McNamara knew, and how utterly trapped he was in the fog of war despite that knowledge. This is an important film, one whose lessons are both timely and timeless.

Read More:

• Fog of War - Official Site
• Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The (2003) (IMDB)
• Fog of War Lesson Plan

(Image from thatguy.com)

Prozac was considered something of a wonder drug throughout the 1990’s - prescribed for everything from anxiety and OCD to eating disorders to compulsive shopping - but there is that one pesky side effect - in a tiny percent of cases, it seems to make people suicidal or homicidal. Not a huge deal, since the incidence is relatively small, and with proper monitoring, it can be caught and a different drug can be prescribed.

But the US manufacturers of Prozac wanted a drug that was easy to prescribe for a wide variety of symptoms - one that would require little in the way of follow-up or maintenance - and so they successfully kept the warnings for akathisia off the label. (Some European countries have labeled these side effects since the drug went on the market.)

The story is absolutely compelling. It’s a conspiracy story, to be sure, but like most conspiracies that happen to be true, it came about not because of a secret evil cabal of folks with sinister designs, but because it was in everyone’s interest, financial and otherwise, to keep quiet. The fact that the drug is now being relabeled seems to add a new level of certainty to the already well-documented arguments that Prozac is not quite as safe as we were led to believe. And although clinical trials have always shown the increased tendency for violence among some patients (and a recent study demonstrated that youth on SSRI’s are twice as likely to commit suicide), it’s easy to see why it might not raise eyebrows when a Prozac sufferer goes off the deep end - if the patients were stable and mentally healthy, they wouldn’t need anti-depressants in the first place, goes the conventional wisdom.

The counter culture Bible Adbusters ran with a story on all of this over a year ago, and even devoted a web site to it - prozacspotlight.org, where you can read a lengthy - and totally gripping account of the Lilly Suicides by Richard DeGrandpre. (In a January article in The Nation, he updates readers on the FDA’s re-labeling of another SSRI class drug, Paxil.)

According to the Guardian, last night a panel of FDA advisers agreed 25 to 1 (with one abstention) that SSRIs caused some young people to become suicidal, necessitating every anti-depressant in the SSRI class to carry the strongest possible warning about the youth suicide risk in the US. In the UK, these drugs (excluding Prozac) may not be prescribed for patients under 18 years of age.

The story of Prozac is a cautionary tale about the power of drug companies in the US at the expense of the public interest. It looks like the after more than fifteen years on the market, the scales are finally starting to tip.

Read more: SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Prozac must have suicide warning

Left: The photograph Loyalist killers used to target Pat Finucane. (BBC)It’s a difficult and foolish thing to try to rank tragedies, but in the Northern Irish conflict, there can be no doubt that one of the more horrific episodes was the murder of civil rights attorney Pat Finucane, a case which has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since.

15 years ago, in 1989, Finucane was shot fourteen times in his own home when masked gunmen broke in during the family dinner. His wife and sons saw it all; his wife was even hit in the foot by a stray bullet. Although the hit was claimed by Loyalist paramilitaries, suspicions ran deep that there was support for and collusion on the hit from much higher ranks. For their part, the Loyalists claimed Finucane was a ranking member of the IRA, a claim his family vehemently denies, claiming that his relationship with high ranking IRA members (he represented Bobby Sands, among others) was strictly professional.

Finucane’s assassination, then, has been a core issue in the often messy politics of justice in Northern Ireland ever since. The family has led a popular campaign for an official inquiry, and there have been three official investigations, the most recent in 1999.

But everyone was taken by surprise yesterday when, at the beginning of his trial, Ken Barrett entered a guilty plea in connection with the killing.

Pat’s son Michael, while surprised, is skeptical of the charges, believing that the web of collusion runs very deep. Michael is insistent on the formal inquiry recommended by Judge Peter Cory in his report of findings on the eight high profile political murders he was asked to investigate for the government.

Michael Finucane, 17 at the time of his father’s murder, has since become a solicitor himself. It seems reasonable to demand that the inquiry into his father’s death proceed, as it rightfully should under the terms of the peace agreement. But truth and reconciliation work is rarely straightforward or easy, and there are likely many twists yet to come in this particularly unhappy chapter of the Northern Irish conflict. It’s worth watching how it plays out.

• Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | New inquiry calls after Finucane guilty plea
• Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Loyalist informer admits Finucane murder
• Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | ‘Guilty plea does not lift the lid’
• Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | A tale of cover-up and conspiracy
• Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Don’t dodge the issue of collusion
• BBC NEWS | Northern Ireland | Pat Finucane: A controversial killing