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Hollywood About to Launch Major Anti-US, Anti-War Films
Brace yourselves - the agitprop is hitting movie theaters everywhere this month and next.
A fine crop of politicised films reflecting the post-9/11 world will reach our screens this autumn. We haven't seen their like since the Seventies

After a summer of superheroes, spin-offs and sequels that failed to connect with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, this autumn will usher in a host of more serious movies. Hollywood's inability to portray the real world has been alienating audiences, which partly explains why the US box office has been so disappointing this year. Escapism is one thing, but faced with daily news about war, floods, corruption and terrorism, cinemagoers want more intelligent movies.

There's a parallel to be drawn here with the early Seventies, when America, rocked by Watergate, entrenched in a controversial war waged by an increasingly unpopular right-wing President, produced a number of provocative movies by leading film-makers. They included a number of conspiracy thrillers and anti-Vietnam dramas that had a sense of unease about contemporary society. Now, Bush and Iraq have replaced Nixon and Vietnam to provide the kind of issues that Hollywood can no longer ignore. 'The reticence to take on America, post-11 September, seems to be fading,' wrote New York Times's film critic Manohla Dargis earlier this month.

The surprise box-office success of Crash, the brilliant, Los Angeles-set film that highlights racism and social problems in urban America, proves that there is an audience for serious films. Hollywood appears to be following in the footsteps of international art-house directors.
But strangely, they're not making films to appeal to middle America.
There was a global unease among films in the selection at Cannes in May. Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke's superb Hidden, starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, dealt in some part with France's festering colonial guilt. Canadian David Cronenberg's A History of Violence concerned a legacy of brutality resurfacing in a small American town. Rather less subtly, Dane Lars von Trier's Manderlay attacked America's history of slavery which ended over a century ago.

The trend of disquiet continued at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. The Constant Gardener, by Fernando Meirelles, gripped a few of us with a pharmaceutical scandal that seeped through African soil all the way to Whitehall. George Clooney's drama about Fifties television journalists, Good Night and Good Luck, recreated the political bullying and paranoia of the McCarthy era. Although its critique is veiled in black and white, it doesn't take much to read into it parallels with current concerns about the corporate ownership of US media (Hollywood studios included).

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, the winner of the Golden Lion, perverted subverted the great American genre of the western to make a gay cowboy love story at a time when Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is fighting to restrict gay rights.

New films dealing with the Middle East include Jarhead by Sam Mendes, which is about an American soldier's experiences during Desert Storm; Steven Spielberg is re-examining terrorism from the Arab point of view with Munich, about the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics; American politics, after the satirical drubbing it took from Jonathan Demme's remake of The Manchurian Candidate which few people saw last year, is put under the microscope again in the All the King's Men, about a corrupt Louisiana politician for which George Bush will be blamed .

Critics and audiences alike are eager to find meaning in the most unlikely places. Horror director George A Romero's return to film last week, with Land of the Dead, has brought allegorical readings as his zombies wade through flood waters to haunt the living who would rather block out their existence. The most ferocious bidding war at the recent Toronto Film Festival was for distribution rights to an indie drama about the tobacco industry, Thank You for Smoking.

Fingers are being pointed and brains, it seems, are back on the big screen, quite literally in the case of Lord of War, a new film about international arms dealing by Andrew Niccol, which opens with a startling sequence tracing the journey of a bullet from its manufacture in a Russian factory to its ultimate discharge via the barrel of an AK-47 into the head of an African child.
Hollywood recognizing third world brutality with Russian arms? That twitched the surprise meter.
Starring Nicolas Cage as a monstrous arms trader, the film is a ferocious and funny satire on a diabolical subject. Unusually for a big budget film with an A-list Hollywood star, it blatantly attacks American foreign policy, concluding that 'the President of the USA is the biggest arms dealer in the world'.
Oh. Back to form.
These films are concerned with the actions of individuals when faced with global-scale issues, calling into question collective responsibilities and forcing audiences to deal with their complicity in the chaotic political and social situations wrought by Western governments. Not your usual blockbuster material, then, but healthy early box-office receipts in America suggest audiences are ready to think again.

It's significant, however, that while both films aren't exactly pure Hollywood products, they can certainly be labelled 'leftist' 'mainstream'. So incongruously thoughtful are they that it strikes me that perhaps they slipped under the studios' safety radars. Some critics in America seemed disappointed that Lord of War, contrary to the image conveyed by its trailer, wasn't a typical Nic Cage action movie. The Constant Gardener, on the outside, might have looked like another English Patient, a handsome love story, starring Ralph Fiennes, a nice English girl (Rachel Weisz) and gorgeous scenery.

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, Niccol said: 'No conventional Hollywood studio would touch the script, especially as I sent it in a week before the war on Iraq began. But somehow, they seem to have come around a bit and, although the financing had to come from various sources around the world, the film is being distributed on studio-owned screens.

'Hollywood's only allegiance these days is to money. If they think there's cash to be made by making films with a conscience, then you might see a revival of that kind of film-making. Otherwise, forget it.' In the film, Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show, satirises the profiteering to be had out of provoking war, subtly raising questions about firms such as Halliburton who actually do something for a living.

He added: 'America is certainly starting to look outward at last. The impact of its actions and the world's attitude towards them is being thrown in its face. My film is only based on what I've torn from the newspaper headlines. It's just that maybe I read more closely or widely than most.'

He pointed to the situation whereby it was cheaper for him to buy 3,000 real guns for his film than to get a props department to make them. A line of tanks stretching to the horizon is also real, belonging to a Czech arms dealer. 'We had to warn Nato when we shot the scene,' he said, 'otherwise their satellite photos would make it look like someone was mobilising an army to start a war.'

Lord of War and The Constant Gardener both feature the United Nations in the sidelines, picturing the organisation as involved, yet powerless to pick a way through the insanity of globalisation.
They got the powerless part right at least.
As the poignant footnote at the end of Lord of War says: 'The world's biggest arms suppliers are the US, UK, Russia, France and China. They are also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.'

It's interesting that when the UN finally allowed a film to be made in its hallowed building earlier this year - The Interpreter, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn - the director was Sydney Pollack who made one of those key Seventies conspiracy movies, Three Days of the Condor. Our Your paranoia has shifted over the last 30 years. Conspiracy movies used to be mainly American concerns, focusing on giant, shadowy bodies (corporations, commissions etc) joining forces against the wrong man.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest, which again featured the UN, lead to Alan Pakula's 1974 The Parallax View. But now such films have a global reach. In The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian who made City of God, brings a scathingly satirical eye to the layers of society in Nairobi, from the shanty town of Kibera to the ex-pat mansions and golf courses. One brilliant scene zooms in on the kitchens at the British ambassador's pile, where black hands work furiously preparing food. The camera hovers over the action like a fly, then follows a waiter carrying a tray of drinks through swing doors to where white politicians laugh and strike deals with big business.

The enemy in movies was often the classic Cold War battle between capitalism and communism. Corporate greed is now the enemy, with the 'good guy' being a form of social humanism. And the new generation of film-makers even act on their conscience. Lord of War has struck up an alliance with Amnesty International. 'See the film, sign our petition,' claims its website.

It's clearly no longer a lonely planet and this is reflected in the new breed of global cynicism in the cinema. Cynicism is the dramatic meat of films now, with socially conscious messages offering food for thought and providing rays of hope. Directors such as Meirelles and Niccol, a New Zealander, can bring an outsider's view to Hollywood films, a view borne of their experience of travelling from continent to continent. Audiences are more geographically sophisticated, too, and readily accept films that encompass a downbeat global view. This new generation of films can mine a cynical seam because there's no need to be preachy; that's the domain of documentarists such as Michael Moore and anti-corporate writers like Naomi Klein.

It's interesting to note that George Clooney's film closes the forthcoming London Film Festival; two weeks earlier, The Constant Gardener opens proceedings. Hollywood may not quite be prepared to bite the corporate hand that feeds it, but more film-makers are thinking beyond the next merchandising opportunity. It has been many years since two such overtly political films were available to bookend a major festival; it's some sort of miracle that they're also coming to a multiplex near you soon.
Posted by: lotp 2005-09-25
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=130513