The Great Day is Upon Us

This is jinxing it for sure, but this evening, in nary a few hours, we're going to see Shutter Island - at long last! Goody good hooray hurrah, etc.


Image from thephoenix.com - ta!

Bourne in the Middle E-E-East

See what I did there?

Yep, you guessed it, we went to see Green Zone and it was Bourne in Iraq. Well, to backtrack, we WENT to see Shutter Island, but obviously it's not out til Friday. I seem to have experienced a genuine hallucination when checking the Cineworld website yesterday morning, which resulted in me strolling up to the counter and chirpily asking for "Two for Shutter Island please" only to be met with a confused-but-friendly face and "Oh, dat ain't out til Fri-dy, looks well good tho". So, I felt like a spoon, and we saw Green Zone instead.

So... I can't say I was disappointed, but I wasn't blown away either. Essentially, lots of wobbly camera, and guns, some slightly-confusing-conspiracies and Matt Damon (bless him) yelling "where are the WMDs?!?" over and over again. I enjoyed it, but the most interesting thing about it was how blatantly it waved it's conspiracy theories around... Now as a left-leaning liberal type person, I of course completely believe that the Bush administration (with a little lap-dogging from our side of the pond), fabricated the idea of WMDs in Iraq (or nuclear weapons, as they used to be called before we became the planet of the apes) in order to justify a war, the real motivations of which were probably regime-change, oil, arms-manufacture-based profiteering and a bit of 9/11 scape-goatery. We know this to be true. But to make a mainstream Hollywood film about it, and treat it like a regular conspiracy thriller (as if we're not still there, as if this still isn't going on), well, Greengrass, that's interesting. I'm not sure I can draw a conclusion on that actually, so will leave this paragraph hanging...

Unfortunately, no matter how much I might have enjoyed the film, I'm always left with the same slightly nauseous and confused feeling I get after watching any film that touches on Iraq (the considerably more masterful Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009) included)... the feeling that we nobody's a good guy, nobody's a bad guy and there's nothing anyone can bloody do about it. We've made a dirty great mess of the whole thing, and it just makes me want to cry. Apologies for being such a total girl about it, but it's just the way I feel. So, am I recommending this film? As usual, I'm sure you can't tell, and neither can I. I think probably yes. I'll say, 'not bad'. And 'I wasn't bored', but that's about it.

Image from filmofilia.com (with thanks)