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Jan. 8th, 2006 04:41 am"Day off" today, though I ended up spending some time putting out fires in the game finder... which, mind you, I set myself.
I saw "Syriana" and liked it a lot. Not surprised that it's been out for well over a month, maybe two, and is still commanding a full house at the Harvard Square Loew's. Buncha commies. I would recommend this movie to anyone. I want to go back and see "Traffic" now, from the same creators.
Some disconnected thoughts about it:
* Some parts are quite brutal and hard to watch, but was made more uncomfortable by a stranger sitting next to me who was literally whimpering during those scenes, and later started whimpering more as the story's overall tension came to a head and you knew that very large awful things were going to happen. I do not say "whimpering" lightly here. As the whimpering occurred, I thought: oh my gosh, this is real full-scale whimpering. I squirmed to see another adult in such distress, or anyway to hear it, since I never actually looked at her. So this weird discomfort chain going on between me, her, and the movie-people.
* I find it interesting that there are at least three more-or-less mainstream movies in theatres now that feature terrorism not in the more comfortable Tom Clancy/Die Hard way, but as an attempt to take a deeper look at real-life terrorism. There's this movie, "Munich", and the smaller one about Palestinian suicide bombers whose title I cannot recall. "Syriana" isn't primarily about terrorism but one of its sub-threads does look at it dead-on. I think that the path that character took seemed rather rushed, but they may have been trying to tell his story in shorthand... I know enough about the culture portrayed to understand what was being represented there.
I reflected how differently the portrayal of these characters in the film is from their popular portrayal in American conventional wisdom, that these are one and all freedom-haters whose primary drive is lust for their 72 virgins. The rejection of this caricature is probably a central reason why (my own mental caricature of) neo-conservatives probably hate this movie.
* I am not great at recognizing actors, and didn't catch any of the big names in this one, not knowing who they were going in. I must have subconsciously recognized Matt Damon, but totally missed George Clooney, despite his being probably the most interesting character in the picture.
* The people in the movie (both in speech and in subtitles) referred to the primary language of Iran as "Farsi". Never once did a busybody pop up to say Arrggh NOOO in English the language is called "Persian" you ignorant fools, proving that the movie was not the Internet.
I saw "Syriana" and liked it a lot. Not surprised that it's been out for well over a month, maybe two, and is still commanding a full house at the Harvard Square Loew's. Buncha commies. I would recommend this movie to anyone. I want to go back and see "Traffic" now, from the same creators.
Some disconnected thoughts about it:
* Some parts are quite brutal and hard to watch, but was made more uncomfortable by a stranger sitting next to me who was literally whimpering during those scenes, and later started whimpering more as the story's overall tension came to a head and you knew that very large awful things were going to happen. I do not say "whimpering" lightly here. As the whimpering occurred, I thought: oh my gosh, this is real full-scale whimpering. I squirmed to see another adult in such distress, or anyway to hear it, since I never actually looked at her. So this weird discomfort chain going on between me, her, and the movie-people.
* I find it interesting that there are at least three more-or-less mainstream movies in theatres now that feature terrorism not in the more comfortable Tom Clancy/Die Hard way, but as an attempt to take a deeper look at real-life terrorism. There's this movie, "Munich", and the smaller one about Palestinian suicide bombers whose title I cannot recall. "Syriana" isn't primarily about terrorism but one of its sub-threads does look at it dead-on. I think that the path that character took seemed rather rushed, but they may have been trying to tell his story in shorthand... I know enough about the culture portrayed to understand what was being represented there.
I reflected how differently the portrayal of these characters in the film is from their popular portrayal in American conventional wisdom, that these are one and all freedom-haters whose primary drive is lust for their 72 virgins. The rejection of this caricature is probably a central reason why (my own mental caricature of) neo-conservatives probably hate this movie.
* I am not great at recognizing actors, and didn't catch any of the big names in this one, not knowing who they were going in. I must have subconsciously recognized Matt Damon, but totally missed George Clooney, despite his being probably the most interesting character in the picture.
* The people in the movie (both in speech and in subtitles) referred to the primary language of Iran as "Farsi". Never once did a busybody pop up to say Arrggh NOOO in English the language is called "Persian" you ignorant fools, proving that the movie was not the Internet.