Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I found this documentary film while flicking through Netflix. The film is directed by Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by Josh Brolin. The story, when it broke in 2007, passed me by completely. One more bullet into the corpse of belief in the integrity of governments. Pat Tillman, an American football player, enlisted in the army after the September 11 attacks. When he was killed in Afghanistan, the military lied to his family that he died from a firefight with the Taliban. Apparently they did not want to make an unpopular war even more unpopular by reporting the death by friendly fire of an All-American athletic icon. The family, in particular, the mother Mary 'Dannie' Tillman, pursued the truth of what had happened, and found the cover-up extending all the way up into the Bush White House. It was infuriating to watch in the film Donald Rumsfeld and military top brass claim forgetfulness regarding a confidential memo sent to them about the friendly fire. Led by Democrats, the Cong...

Less than impressed by this re-make of a John Wayne classic, both adapted from a Charles Portis novel of the same name. Good acting from Jeff Bridges (Rooster Cogburn), Hailee Steinfeld (Mattie Ross), Matt Damon (LaBouef), and Josh Brolin (Tom Chaney). Beautiful cinematography by Roger Deakins. Sympathetic score by Carter Burwell. But the story is just so-so. Young girl hunts for her father's killer with the reluctant help of a drunken U.S. Marshal and an insecure Texas Ranger. As was expected of me, I admired Mattie's gumption, appreciated Rooster's dishonorable honor, and liked LaBouef's show-off. And I was mildly bored, because these characters did not surprise me or themselves. If this is a Western classic, no wonder the genre has never had much appeal for me. I have read reviews that try to see the film as a postmodernist take on the genre, but that interpretation does not persuade me. What is left in me is a couple of surrealistic, non-essential scenes. The man ha...

Milk is Harvey Milk, California's first openly gay elected official who was assassinated in 1978 by fellow San Francisco supervisor, Dan White. A well-made biopic, the film does not try to go beyond the conventions of the genre. At 128 minutes, it also feels on the long side.  Part of the problem is that the Harvey Milk character is not fully fleshed out, and so he appears in the film something of a saint. There are allusions to shadows--he has not come out to his own parents, he likes to help vulnerable young men--but they remain oblique to the main action. The struggle between social activism and personal losses--one lover leaves him, another lover hangs himself--is depicted, but in dramatically predictable manner.  The real conflict in the film takes place between the Castro Street activists and the bigoted Christian campaigners, Anita Bryant and State Senator John Briggs (Denis O'Hare), over Prop 6 that sought to fire gay teachers and their supporters. But since the homopho...