prairiem Reviews

War Party (1988)

Oh Come On

[30 January 2004]

Probably I've watched this movie half-a-dozen times, once with a white theatre audience close to the rez and the rest on tape with Blackfeet high school students. The student attitude was summed up by a handsome young man who sighed and remarked, "The first time you see it, it seems pretty good, but after about the third time, it just falls apart." The theatre audience just didn't like it, period.

It was fun to see friends and neighbors in a movie. Locals grew fond of the actors while they were in town. But the whole line of argument that drove the plot meant nothing to the people it was supposed to be about. Sure, there's racism -- but it comes to us as job discrimination or court systems or broken families or drug peddlers. Renegade kids are not romantically pursued over the landscape by caricature bad guys. (What the heck was the idea of Rodney Grant's character, anyway?) They just get picked up speeding or something -- by officers who are Indian -- and end up quietly taken to jail.

I hated the faux samurai ending, romanticizing death in a place where suicide is a problem. Plainly this was a movie written by people who didn't want to know anything about reality and didn't care what impact their movie had on the people to whom they were supposed to be sympathetic. It's a projection of themselves, a continuing problem for Native American films and one that has mostly been solved so far by Indians making their own movies.

The End of Violence (1997)

It takes violence to snuff violence

[26 January 2004]

I'm not surprised that a child would not understand this movie. To me it was very meaningful, but only in terms of lived experience in jobs and politics. It's really "Brave New World," where authority figures keep order by putting up cameras everywhere and intervening to eliminate anyone who is disorderly or criminal. Violence is a huge preoccupation, but only tolerated as make-believe -- but the make-believe gets confused with real violence. Control, transgression, power are the pivots of the well-to-do. Ashcroft stuff.

But the Mexican and immigrant families offer a warmer, truer alternative. In the end, they are more powerful because they are free and can think. The Kinko's episode, in which the police are defeated from taking control by their own preconceptions, is a good example. As underlings, laborers, the Mexicans understand what's at stake and they are everywhere, invisible to their employers.

The intellectual technician doesn't catch on until it's too late.

I'm told that what I saw was a re-cut and that the early version was indeed chaotic with a lot of loose ends. All I can say is that now this is one of the videos I rewatch and ponder.

Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

Urban Myths

[22 January 2004]

Two urban myths began to go the rounds a few years ago: one was stories about people who were slipped a mickey in a bar or in a hotel room and woke up in a bathtub without a kidney. The other was about a toilet found to be blocked by a human heart -- but where was the rest of the human? Clearly, the script writers started with these two ideas and wove them together into a movie. They did very well indeed, using ideas that were little more than morbid one-paragraph stories to tell about human beings and how they "lose their hearts."

It interests me that I see a new stock character evolving in films: the large, competent, black man with a strong religious/moral stance. Djimon Hounsou has taken this role in "Amistad," "The Four Feathers," and "In America." He runs the risk of always being type-cast, so I'm sure he's glad to see another actor with the "stature" (literal and psychological) to take these roles convincingly. The return of the Sidney Poitier figure! And this time he's from Africa in the stories, which makes him a little bit like an American Indian -- tribal, you know.

City of God (2002)

The Other

[18 January 2004]

My objection to this movie is political. I believe that these conditions exist, I believe that the movie was well-made, I believe that the intentions of those who made the movie were to break open the situation and ask that it be addressed.

Unfortunately, it also invites a prosperous white audience to sit safely while being pleasantly horrified by dark people. For people living stuck lives in bland surroundings, this is a very spicy meal. It is a kind of porn.

We have a major meth problem here on the idealized prairie. It is worse than cocaine, which few around here can afford anyway. The people who are attracted to meth will love this movie because it glamorizes and mythifies meth behavior, unreasonable violence against even family and friends. The dark ones will say, "Oh, this is us. It's in us wherever we are." The light ones will say, "I've only been experimenting a bit. I'm not as bad as those people."

Anyway, where is the story of the women in this film? The stories of their babies?

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

Plot salvation

[17 January 2004]

Two problems in the plotting of this film are that Francis McDairmid is neglected and Keanu Reeves is impossibly generous and flawless. The moment that would have saved both is at the market when the two of them run into each other. The two should have gone to have coffee and talk over Keaton's character, have stumbled upon some theoretical and highly cerebral topic they shared an intense interest in -- human genome or something -- and become so absorbed in each other that the doctor decides he's not so interested in the playwright after all. THEN Keaton can really weep! AND rethink her feelings about the Jack character.

I did NOT think Nicholson was over-acting or using the same old tricks. There were things on his face (and neck, as one reviewer pointed out) that have never showed up there before.

And though the sets were familiar and probably politically incorrect, I loved looking at them.