Movie and Smoke

Some movie reviews from the past week. Also, four hours of secondhand smoke (heavy smoke) exposure has made me sick for two days straight. Pathetic. I hope to kick the cough by tomorrow.

Once is as good as they say. Not even like a movie, like something else entirely. Just watch and enjoy. The music is awesome, but the way it functions as a not-movie is its own kind of brilliant.

Marie Antoinette was also really enjoyable, I was suspicious of it ever since it came out, but the history and the costuming were just fun to watch. On top of that, I actually ended up liking it. It took this figure who clearly profited from excesses in her lifestyle that depended on the deprivation of many others (the degree of excess might be debated, but when other folks are in breadlines, I think excesses is a safe word), made you sympathetic to her and made you enjoy watching the absurdity of the court, and then ended with a nod (not lingered upon too much) to the Revolution and the deposing of the monarchy. I liked that because I think it is a pretty accurate appraisal of how I feel living in this country most of the time. We are all a bunch of Marie Antoinettes running around, consuming in a desperate confusion, profiting from an accident of birthplace, and living excessively by the delegated deprivation of people worldwide. To the point that however nice and charming many of us are, whatever happens to us on a societal scale might go down in history as justice.

The Ground Truth -- wow. This documentary is the best thing I've seen, read, or otherwise been exposed to on the current war. The brutality of some of the cadences these soldiers are trained to (singing about killing kids while they're at prayer), along with their stories told so honestly, and with no sense of entitlement, it's amazing. It ends with a tearful apology to the Iraqi people that is completely self-implicating. And the song they use is Patty Griffin's "Mary," which will make you cry even in a happy setting.

I saw the new Narnia movie. I actually did NOT like the first one, mostly because everything felt so Jesus-related. I know, I know -- it's not like I hadn't read the books as a kid (and loved them) so I had full warning, but somehow twenty years has made me much more jaded about Christ allegories. This one was much less so, with a sassy Narnian dwarf nonbeliever thrown in (another point over the first movie, which had the low-level creepiness of Mr. Tumnus).