Produced and Abandoned: Under Fire

When I pulled Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire off the shelf recently to see how it stood up, it had been 15 years since I'd last seen it. In the interim, I'd owned it on video (which I never watched) and when DVDs came along, I replaced the video with the DVD. Yet, again it sat on my shelf for another nine years until finally this past weekend I rewatched it. Does it still stand up as the thought provoking, well-made political thriller I took it for when I saw it originally in 1983? Yes and no. The problem is that when it came out in 1983, a scant four short years after the film's events - the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 - it was close enough to the events of that violent and bloody tumult to be a perfect example of the first draft of history. And first drafts always need a rewrite.

Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy play American journalists (photo journalist in Nolte's case) who are as rootless as gypsies as they move from crisis to crisis in search of a great story or image. Nolte is crafted very much in the Humphrey Bogart mold from Casablanca: a neutral observer who refuses to take any sides; Hackman is the old veteran who is ready to move behind the news anchor's desk after one more foreign assignment; and Cassidy is the woman in love with both of them. They find themselves in Nicaragua as it blows apart from a revolution that, for all intents and purposes, had begun in the 1930s. As their objectivity drops away, they find themselves starting to take the revolutionaries' side in the chaotic events. Nolte in particular has his journalistic ethics hugely tested when he's asked by the revolutionaries to take a certain photograph that could turn the tide of the revolution.

Dystopian Dreams: Larry Kirwan's Liverpool Fantasy

In my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream, I was trying to answer a question: How did a group like The Beatles, who wrote songs about love and helped to build a popular culture based on pleasure and inclusion, also attract hate and murder. To do so, I realized that I'd have to answer another key question: Was The Beatles' utopian dream worth it?

Given that the state of the world, in the wake of the band's demise, is not the one they sung about - and hoped for - in "All You Need is Love," it was tempting to ask whether or not The Beatles truly mattered. I thought I was going to have to justify the group solely on the strength of their music until I came across, quite by chance, a book by Larry Kirwan called Liverpool Fantasy (2003). In his book, Kirwan (who was the lead singer of a New York-based Irish rock group called Black 47), imagines England without the emergence of The Beatles. Liverpool Fantasy is a dystopian, yet comical, look at the absence of The Beatles from history. It doesn't spare the reader, but it doesn't ridicule the dream the band created either.

In Liverpool Fantasy, Kirwan asks what might have happened had The Beatles broken up before their thunderbolt song "Please Please Me" had not hit the airwaves and broke them in England in 1962. Their manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin believe that their cover of the quiet ballad "Till There Was You" will do better. While Lennon balks at the suggestion, McCartney is happy to go along (after all, he sings on it). At which point, Lennon storms out of the studio taking George and Ringo with him. The Beatles are no more. Kirwan next cuts to 1987 where the picture of England isn't an artistic renaissance, but a fascist state where the National Front, bearing the slogans of the ultraright Enoch Powell, has struck a coalition with the Tory government. Unemployment is high. Racism is pervasive. And The Beatles never happened.

Two Actors, One Man: Albert Finney & Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill has been portrayed hundreds of times in various films and television shows, yet he still remains, in the visual medium anyway, very much an enigma. Here's a man who was not trusted nor respected (he had a tendency to change political parties seemingly on a whim and then change back again), yet it is not overstating it that without him we would not have won World War II. To defeat someone like Hitler you needed somebody as single-minded and stubborn as he was. No one else in England's power elite, except Churchill, could have achieved that. Lord Halifax -- who was considered Neville Chamberlain's replacement when he stepped down -- was passed over in favour of Churchill to become PM. Based on Halifax's desire to offer further accommodations to Hitler, thank God that Churchill was chosen.

The Whaling Blues of Robin Trower: Procol Harum's In Held T'Was In I

Although they became widely known, and defined by their 1967 hit “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum has a long musical history dating back to the days of the British Invasion when they were known as the R&B band The Paramounts. Nevertheless, with a classical baroque sound, they took up the piano/organ combination made popular by Bob Dylan on Blonde on Blonde (1966) and released a succession of albums filled with cryptic tales of sea journeys, death and conquistadors.

On their second album, Shine on Brightly (1968), they attempted an epic cantata called “In Held T’Was In I” (an acronym that uses the first word of each movement's lyrics in order to create the title) that chronicled a descent into madness and its affirmative resolution. While Bach was the presiding spirit here, the wild card in the band (dating back to The Paramounts) was guitarist Robin Trower. In the concluding section, where the narrator affirms his quest for salvation, Trower’s guitar reminds you of salvation’s price. In the cantata's finale, his solo sounding, as critic Paul Williams once accurately described it, like “a banshee trapped in Hell but vainly crying for release,” Trower introduces the whaling blues of Albert King to the stately measure of Bach.

Dead End: Paul Greengrass's Green Zone

In his sane and sobering book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), The New Yorker’s political correspondent George Packer opened up one’s perspective on the Bush Administration’s argument for invading Iraq on the danger of their using weapons of mass destruction:

“[Bush’s] 'axis of evil’ speech, coming just weeks after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, signaled the next stage in the war on terrorism and the basis for further action. The speech dramatically expanded the theatre of war, but it also did so on relatively narrow grounds. As [Paul] Wolfowitz told an interviewer after the fall of Baghdad, WMD was the least common denominator: ‘The truth is that reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.’ Wolfowitz suggested that he himself had bigger ideas – a realignment of American power and influence in the Middle East, away from theocratic Saudi Arabia (home to so many of the 9/11 hijackers), and toward a democratic Iraq, as the beginning of an effort to cleanse the whole region of murderous regimes and ideologues…Resting on a complex and abstract theory, it would also have been much harder to sell to the public.”

It’s a shame that Paul Greengrass in his new film Green Zone also resists such complexity because the movie turns out to be as single-minded in its approach to the Iraq War as the Bush Administration’s.

Produced and Abandoned: The Children of Huang Shi

It’s bad enough when good movies get dumped on DVD without first getting a theatrical release. But it’s even worse when the DVD release also gets ignored. (DVD reviewers often miss these films because they either don’t know they exist, or their editors don’t care enough to HAVE anyone know they exist.) Whatever the reason, The Children of Huang Shi certainly deserves a better fate than its remaindered status in the Blockbuster cut-out bin.

Based on the true story of George Hogg (Jonathan Ryhs-Meyers), a British photo journalist during the early days of the Japanese occupation of China in 1938, The Children of Huang Shi is about how an opportunistic journalist turns into a true humanitarian. After pretending to be a Red Cross aid worker (in order to sneak into Nanjing to get a big story), Hogg confronts horrific Japanese atrocities and gets captured after photographing them. He gets rescued by a Communist resistance fighter (Chow Yun-Fat) who arranges to have him sent to an orphanage in Huanghshi to assist Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), the American nurse who is running it. While he’s initially reluctant to care for the 60 orphan boys living there (and they are alternately not too pleased to have him caring for them), he gains their respect by giving them the kind of attention they’d long given up hope of ever getting again.

Happily Disrespectful: Jamie Cullum at Massey Hall (March 9/10)

You have to have either supreme confidence in your abilities or sport quite a large set to let somebody as amazing as Imelda May and her tight, tight band open for you. Jamie Cullum, the young British jazz pianist and singer did that just this past Tuesday at Massey Hall in one of those concerts that will always be in my memory bank.

Imelda May is an Irish rockabilly singer who's relatively unknown over here, but after her high-energy opening act, she made 2000 new fans. With a voice that is a mix of Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse and a bit of Loretta Lynn, May got Massey Hall humming and did what any opening act should do, warm us up and leave us wanting more. As my wife said after May's brilliant 40-minute set "what the hell was that?" And she meant it as the highest compliment. We were here to see Cullum and we were given an amazing gift for showing up on time. At the mid-point of her set, May told us that the up-coming Cullum would "blow your minds". She was right. He had little choice after her performance.

Big Love: Or the (Sometime) Tyranny of the Cable Networks

Earlier this year I wrote in Critics at Large that HBO’s Big Love, the series about a polygamist family in Utah, was likely the best show currently on television - at least it was when I wrote the piece. But the series’ truncated fourth season, which ended on Sunday, was, regrettably, mostly a bust.

More to the point, the show was reduced to nine episodes this year, after being allotted ten of them last season and twelve each for its first two outings. I don’t know why HBO has taken this tack regarding the slowly shrinking lengths of the series’ seasons – I can’t imagine that its creators Will Scheffer and Mark Olson want fewer episodes to play with – but this season was definitely affected by its shorter run. I also suspect that the network may have tampered with the show, insisting that it move faster, be less subtle and cram more plot points onto its storyline, in order to garner higher ratings by attracting audiences who want a glitzier, more dramatic product. That’s the only conclusion I can come up, without being privy to the behind the scenes machinations of the series, but for whatever reason, Big Love this season was no longer the smooth, flawlessly plotted and carefully laid out series I had come to love.

Thrillington (1977)

It’s been commonly assumed over the years that it was John Lennon who was the true avant-garde performer in The Beatles and Paul McCartney was - literally - the straight man. That view developed mostly out of Lennon’s bold outspokenness in both his personality and music, while McCartney submerged his personality in the craft of writing songs. Lennon possessed a romantic spirit, but it was one that made his art real and intimate to the listener. McCartney however was perceived as whimsical and impersonal (i.e. a light-weight). Of course, this is a rather simplistic perception because Lennon was equally whimsical in “Bungalow Bill”; just as McCartney could rock hard in “I’m Down.” It was McCartney after all who came up with the tape-loop experiments that Lennon incorporated into “Tomorrow Never Knows.” McCartney was also the first to create a sonic collage called “Carnival of Light” (still unreleased) before Lennon and Ono did their own “Revolution #9” on the White Album. During that period, John Lennon stayed home to live a more isolated domestic existence, while Paul McCartney was going to art shows and listening to Stockhausen.

Roland Emmerich's Putrid Popcorn: 2012

A scene from Roland Emmerich's 2012.

Roland Emmerich is a sadist and his film 2012 is reprehensible. Strong words for what is ostensibly a 'popcorn movie', but the words are earned. This is the third time now that he has destroyed the world (Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and this), fourth time if you include his earlier film, Moon 44 (1990), where the world is already basically destroyed and maybe fifth if his first picture, The Noah's Ark Principal (1984), is included, and I doubt whether he's done yet. In one other picture, Godzilla (1998), he only leveled New York City. Emmerich seems to take some sort of twisted glee in watching the world laid waste. In the post 9/11 and 2004 Tsunami world, there's something deeply wrong with someone who repeatedly returns to this material, especially the films that were made after these catastrophes. Isn't it enough that we are witnessing it in the real world? Do we need to be 'entertained' by this?

Emmerich is on record saying that he views these films as a warning. He's even been wrong-headedly embraced by the environmentalist movement for this and his previous destructo-pic, The Day After Tomorrow. In 2012, he essentially steals the premise of the far-superior movie The Core (everybody seems to be stealing from this little-seen picture, James Cameron stole the word 'unobtainium' from it). In 2009, a brave, misunderstood scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers the earth's core is heating up caused by catastrophic sun flares, and the earth will essentially destroy itself in the very near future (The Core's Aaron Eckhart and 2012's Chiwetel Ejiofor are interchangeable). A plan to save as much of humanity as possible is launched. Ejiofor's prediction is off, however. It turns out that centuries before, the ancient Mayans had predicted that the world would end on December 21, 2012, and of course they are right. The mad scramble is then on to get 'the lucky few' to the 21st century equivalent of Noah's Ark, or in this case Arks.

The Day After: Some (More) Thoughts On Oscar

Sometimes, there is indeed justice in the world. Watching The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar for the Best Picture Academy award last night was gratifying, not only because Kathryn Bigelow’s war movie is by far the superior film but also because James Cameron’s dopey science-fiction epic Avatar never deserved anything more than special effects awards and that is just what it got. Interestingly enough, The Hurt Locker’s unlikely win seems to be a direct result of the one of the major changes that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made with this year’s edition of the show, which was increasing the field of Best Picture nominees from five to ten movies. That wasn’t an innovation exactly but a return to the early days of the awards, when eight to twelve nominees were the norm. But the motives for doing it again were slightly different. Stung by complaints that the Best Picture award wasn’t being given out to popular Hollywood movies, going instead to independent or relatively unpopular films like Crash and No Country for Old Men, and strongly criticized last year for omitting the top grossing movie of the year, The Dark Knight, from the Best Picture category, the Oscar folk decided to broaden the field. They allowed box office hits such as The Blind Side and Avatar to compete alongside the artistic likes of The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, as well as lesser known movies like An Education and A Serious Man. The hope was that more viewers, especially younger ones, would start watching the Oscars, which had been declining in the ratings in recent years, and thus make the show more relevant to ordinary moviegoers, instead of appealing solely to cineastes. Early indications are that ratings for the Oscar telecast were up significantly, but I suspect the results, i.e.: The Hurt Locker’s triumph, were not the result the Academy would have wanted them to be.

Reel to Real: Oscar's Docs

Every year at the Oscars, people concentrate primarily on the Best Picture and Acting categories. But I always like focusing on the Best Documentary Feature section because the people who make them – good and bad pictures alike – have something more at stake than the box office results. This is often why their speeches are either the most moving (or the most proselytizing). Of the five nominated films this year, I’ve only seen three of them.

It’s often been said that you are what you eat, but after seeing Robert Kenner’s incendiary documentary Food Inc. — which examines how the fast food industry radically transformed food production in North America into a stomach-churning enterprise — you just might want to redefine those terms. While Food Inc. is thankfully not alarmist in tone, the facts it uncovers are nevertheless alarming. Using as his guides author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal) and UC Berkeley School of Journalism Professor Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Delight), Kenner examines how the mass-produced food we now consume is not only lacking in proper nutrients; it may also contain potentially harmful bacteria.

The story begins with McDonalds, who set the template for cheap assembly-line food production, then shows how American farms have now become equally uniform — and at the horrible price of creating unhealthy working conditions for both workers and livestock. We may end up spending less for the food, but we pay dearly for it with increasing cases of diabetes, obesity and E. coli outbreaks. It’s unfortunate, though, that because many of the corporate industrial heads like Monsanto refused to be interviewed for the film, Food Inc. ends up lacking a larger dimension than its agit-prop intent. (Thankfully, due to the co-operation of Walmart, they come across far more ecologically minded than usually assumed.) Like An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc. lays out its argument clearly, but it’s only one side of the story. To be a truly great documentary, Food Inc. needs a few other conflicting morsels of thought to chew on.

On the other hand, The Cove, a documentary that exposes the slaughter of dolphins in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji, has nothing going for it but its agit-prop intentions. It clobbers the audience so intensely that you may experience caution about raising any objections to the film. It’s as if by questioning the movie’s aesthetic you’ll be found guilty of handing out the spears and harpoons to the killers. But that’s exactly the paradigm The Cove sets up – an Us vs Them dynamic that I believe weakens the story. To quickly transform the movie audience into instant activists (just add melodrama and stir), The Cove by-passes a contemplative investigation of the hunt and instead uses nakedly visceral techniques to outrage its viewers.

Director Louie Psihoyos (who is a former National Geographic photographer) and animal rights activist Ric O’Barry (a former dolphin trainer) are appalled by the cruelty taking place in the cove (where dolphins are rounded up and either killed for food, or sent to a living death in marine parks), but due to government and fishing industry collusion, they can’t prove it. (Apparently, close to 23,000 dolphins are driven into the cove each year.) So Psihoyos and O’Barry decide to organize a team with thermal cameras and night-vision goggles to slip by the secured location and (with hidden cameras) capture the hunt in order to expose the fishermen. Since The Cove borrows the methods of a thriller it has a certain dramatic kick when we watch the team organize their battle plan like a commando team. And the footage they get is as horrifying as you can imagine. But given our anthropomorphic identification with dolphins, it seems crudely manipulative to use that footage to stir those sentiments in the viewer while simultaneously indicting the hunters. (I somehow doubt that footage of the group massacring electric eels would have the same impact on the movie audience.)

As well as directing the film, Louie Psihoyos is also the co-founder of the Ocean Preservation Society. So The Cove has an ecological agenda that it proudly wears on its sleeve. Now I’m not suggesting that because of this the movie traffics in the bad faith that Michael Moore’s pictures do. What I’m saying is that the film is trying to be a recruitment poster as well as a criminal indictment – and the two don’t mix very comfortably. The Cove is powerful and effective and it outrages and disgusts. But it also gets the audience cheering when the bad guys are outted. The one thing The Cove doesn’t do is encourage you to think.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers not only encourages you to think, the picture’s subject – the ethics of political activism – stands in sharp contrast to what passes for activism today. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he wasn’t just staging guerrilla theatre (as were Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies), he set out to show how American foreign policy towards Southeast Asia and Vietnam was built on a series of lies. Ellsberg had originally been part of what became the strategy behind the Vietnam War, as both an analyst for the Defense Department and a marine, who first held that if the country went communist, it would be part of a domino theory that would ultimately plunge the region into Stalinist totalitarianism. While it turned out that the country eventually did plunge into Stalinist oppression after the Americans left in 1975, with more than one million Vietnamese fleeing by boat (half of whom, ironically, would land in the U.S.), Ellsberg’s change of heart towards the war was justified. He spoke out because a series of Presidents, from Truman to Nixon, had cooked the facts to support the need for U.S. involvement. (His first day working for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was the same day of the Gulf of Tonkin incident when North Vietnamese ships were believed to have fired torpedoes at U.S. boats. Although the attack was known to be false, President Johnson decided to use this episode to expand the war.) The Pentagon Papers, which were released to The New York Times and other publications, were essentially the secret history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg went public – risking prison and career – with these documents on the principle that supporting fabrications and brutal dictatorships in order to fight communism was immoral.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (the phrase Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg) is told largely from Daniel Ellsberg’s point of view, along with supporting interviews with the late Howard Zinn and self-damning comments from Richard Nixon’s famous secret tapes, but the film-makers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith have also fashioned another crusade. Besides being a compelling historical saga, it is also a personal story of how a man of conscience was motivated to act on the principle of positive rebellion and how those actions changed him from the man that he once was. It’s a little bracing to recall a time when mainstream journalists were after more than just the careerist desire to be hip and consumer friendly. No doubt that careers got made doing groundbreaking stories like The Pentagon Papers, but the risks were also more dangerous. (The Pentagon Papers inspired Nixon to set up his secret government and led to his downfall with Watergate.) Of course, it would be too easy and too simple today to equate Vietnam with the war in Iraq and how pack journalism (like cliques in high school) prefers to go with the flow, but The Most Dangerous Man in America gives one pause over what was gained by Ellsberg’s actions and what’s been lost since.

--Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

Un prophète: Jacques Audiard’s Thrilling ‘Ride’

Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète (A Prophet) is one of the most strikingly original French movies of recent release and in a country that regularly puts out superb films, that’s saying a lot. It’s also unusual in that its antecedents aren’t the typical art house fare that most current French filmmakers pay homage to and excel at. Un prophète (A Prophet) draws instead from the commercial prison dramas that have long been the staple of Hollywood and independent American cinema.

The film begins with a young fresh faced North African Muslim man, Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim, making his film debut), entering the rough French prison system. He’s been convicted of fomenting violence against the police – a charge which may or may not be true – sentenced to six year of jail and thrown into an environment that will see him used a pawn in a long running internecine and low level war between Arab and Corsican prison inmates. Both those groups have their grievances against the larger French society, within and without the prison walls. The Corsicans, whose country is technically occupied by France but given semi – autonomous status as one of the country’s 26 regions, are agitating for full independence, with the inmates from Corsica demanding to be treated as political prisoners. The Muslim prisoners and the community at large face the brunt of French discrimination and their own inability or refusal to fit into France’s secular culture and society. Malik, who is illiterate, begins in the film as an ‘innocent’ who likely will face a difficult time in the stir, but as the movie ends is revealed as a master manipulator and fixer. How he gets that way is the gist of this complex, ragged and intricate drama, which recently won the César award for Best French film at home and is up for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars on Sunday.

Tripping Down The Rabbit Hole: Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Don't be afraid by the Disney logo preluding Tim Burton's latest film -- be worried knowing that the logo will try to leap off the screen in 3D. Burton isn't a stranger to Disney, nor is he a stranger to family friendly entertainment. After all, he had his start with Disney as an animator on films such as The Fox and the Hound (1982) and has found popularity with contemporary fables like Edward Scissorhands (1990), Big Fish (2003) and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005). On the other hand, grandiose 3D epics are new territory for him. So it comes as a bit of a shock that he would use the technology to neglect the hand-crafted set pieces which have become a more appealing staple of his usual style. Burton may want us to follow Alice through the rabbit hole, but instead of going on a marvelous exploration into the surreal, we find ourselves tripping along a path paved with only green screens. The problem Burton has isn't with Alice, it's in Wonderland.

Book: Stephen King's Under the Dome

There's an old joke about Stephen King: He sits at his typewriter, pounding out reams of pages for his latest book. He freezes for THREE SECONDS and then starts typing like mad again. "I hate writer's block," King mutters. Okay, I didn't say it was funny. Forgetting this joke about his prolific ways for a second (he's written/co-written over 65 novels, short-story collections or works of non-fiction since 1974 - I've read over 30 of them), I think that Stephen King is the Charles Dickens of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.

Both were/are successful populists, both wrote/write about societal ills (Dickens' set in a version of the real world of England; King's generally from within the horror or science fiction genres), both were/are always concerned with writing a good story that would appeal to the largest number of readers. Most of Dickens 20+ books have never been out of print and to date neither has King's. I predict in a century they will still both be widely read and studied. Why? If you want to understand the era these books were written in, I submit you will come away with a better understanding reading Dickens or King than trying to wade through most literary fiction or history books published at the same time.

New Maps for a New Land: Frank R. Rossiter's Charles Ives & His America (1975)

“The quest for identity runs through American music like a leitmotif,” writes music critic Veronica Slater. “Long before musical nationalism became an issue in Europe, native-born composers in the New World were trying to speak with a voice recognizably theirs and theirs alone.” Americans, according to Slater, rebelled against the rules in both politics and music for good reason. They were after an indigenous art rooted in their own experience of the new land, not what they inherited from the Old World. The map of that rebellion and quest is aptly provided in Frank Rossiter’s rare and illuminating study of American composer Charles Ives in his book Charles Ives & His America (1975).

Germs R Us: The Crazies (1973) (Part Two)

A scene from George Romero's The Crazies (1973).

Even someone who’s not exactly keen on the genre is likely to admire George Romero’s brand of horror. Along with the inevitable bloodletting, his work boasts an incisive social conscience. In 1973’s The Crazies, he made ordinary folks homicidal -- or, in some instances, just exceedingly goofy -- when their town water supply is contaminated by mistake with an experimental bio-warfare toxin. Nicknamed Trixie, it comes courtesy of the Army, which establishes a quarantine but never thinks to tell panicky locals to stop drinking from the tap.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: The Crazies (2010) (Part One)

*SPOILER ALERT* IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE CRAZIES, THIS ARTICLE GIVES AWAY THE ENDING.

One thing you can say about The Crazies (2010), it isn't trying to hide the fact that we've already seen our world at the brink of its own destruction many times over. It's also not particularly concerned with presenting a cautionary tale on how to avoid such a catastrophe. While there is definitely a running commentary rampant throughout the narrative, it's the same message we've been getting from many zombie films over the past decade. Films such as Danny Boyle's 28 Days (2002) and the grisly follow-up 28 Weeks Later (2007) both gave us a glimpse at military and government incidents which damn near brought the entire world to its knees. The politics at play have been dealt with more aptly in some of George A. Romero's earlier works from the late 60s and 70s (one of which this is a remake of) and in some of the apocalyptic thrillers churned out during the Bush administration. But once the tired (but timely) message is loose, the politics of the human spirit prove to be far more engrossing and this is where The Crazies finds its legs.

Five Reasons I Like Oscar: An Unfashionable View

Of all the many awards shows currently airing on TV, I only regularly watch one, the Oscars, which are trumpeting their 82nd edition on Sunday March 7. I don’t for a second consider The Academy Awards to be a benchmark for excellence, and all those film critics who regularly cite Oscar worthy performances ought not to be reviewing films. However, after suffering through the recent Grammy awards, which are supposed to honour excellence in music but are as mainstream as can be, I appreciate the virtues of the Oscars more than ever. Here are five reasons why.

Song: Family Snapshot

My colleague Kevin Courrier's analysis of Harry Chapin's "Sniper" put me in mind of Peter Gabriel's assassin song, "Family Snapshot", from his Peter Gabriel 3 LP; also known as the 'Melting Face' album. Where Chapin's song was an examination of sniper Charles Whitman, Gabriel's song, Family Snapshot is loosely based upon Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate, George Wallace in May 1972. Gabriel was inspired to write the song after he read the published version of Bremer's diary, An Assassin's Diary (1973). Starting with a low-key piano and synth line, Gabriel sings:

The streets are lined with camera crews/
Everywhere he goes is news/
Today is different/
Today is not the same