Tuesday’s carnival laid bare the strange and changing nature of the Benghazi obsession—the odd way it veers from sincere and mournful to maudlin and kitschy, the way it’s been instrumentalized. It was, in some sense, intended to be a memorial. People filtered into the stadium under giant waving flags on the stadium’s external jumbotrons. But once inside, they were greeted with the giant floating head of John Krasinski, better known as Jim from The Office, who plays the movie’s protagonist, a security contractor named Jack Da Silva.
When Jim was interviewed on the stadium’s immense on-field red carpet, as part of the pre-show, he spoke about working with the real-life Da Silva to develop his character. A man in front of me groaned. “Oh, so now we know that character doesn’t die,” he said. “Great spoiler, dude.” Yes: Jim from The Office spoiled Benghazi.
chickeon posted:
In the last few years, as the wars changed shape and expanded, a strange thing happened. The culture began to focus not on ordinary soldiers, but on extraordinary ones—Navy SEALs, special forces operators, military contractors. The movies changed—Act of Valor, Lone Survivor, American Sniper. They celebrate heroes, they take place in a vacuum of political context, and they’re hugely profitable. Strangely, they cater to people who think Hollywood hates them. Film studios, suddenly, learned to love the wars.
13 Hours fits neatly in this new genre. It’s a story told from the perspective of men of extraordinary martial prowess in a deeply unfamiliar and hostile place, surrounded by faceless and unknowable enemies, desperate to survive. It’s a siege movie, and the major plot points would make just as much sense if they were transposed to a movie about a zombie attack, or an alien invasion.
In fact, the movie begins in space, off-planet. We gradually hone in on Libya. The events that prefaced the 2011 NATO intervention are briefly described. When we finally join our main character, Bay highlights that Jim is descending into enemy territory by showing him sitting across the aisle from a woman in a hijab. That’s it. There’s a woman in a hijab. Jim eyes her, and the camera cuts back to her. The camera lingers. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.
Watch the children. Jim has two beautiful kids and a beautiful wife and a beautiful house back home. It’s scrupulously established that Jim is a good dad. It’s how the movie establishes that his life has worth. In a montage shortly before the attack, many of the warriors call their kids and wives. Jim’s wife tells him that she’s pregnant. These men kill when necessary, Bayghazi tells us, but in truth they love life. They live for life.
Libyans have children too, but their presence on screen means something close to the opposite: The children of Libya appear in gangs, shortly before something dangerous happens. Their appearance is foreboding. They collaborate with the attackers, and set off fireworks to fuck with the Americans. You see them, playing soccer or peering through the walls into the CIA annex, and are meant to feel unease.
The only notable Libyan character, a translator who works with the Americans, is there for comic relief. He loves big tits, and he spends much of his screen time reluctant to fight and fumbling with his gun. When he’s press-ganged into joining the consulate rescue mission, the lead warrior says: “That guy’s not coming back.” For the Arlington audience, it was a laugh line.
But if he is treated with a sense of contempt, so are all the Americans who don’t carry guns. The core group of contractors are peerless models of wisdom, bravery, compassion and perspicacity, which might have something to do with the fact that they told the story 13 Hours is based on. They are never wrong. They correctly assess the danger from the beginning, and they rise to every occasion, despite their dead-weight compatriots, who generally come off as dopes, either blind to danger or incompetent to the point of villainy.
The worst is the nebbishy and callous CIA station chief, played by David Costabile, who serves as a stand-in for the neglect and dishonor exhibited, in Benghazi narratives, by the politicians and bureaucrats, repeatedly giving the warriors cowardly and self-serving orders. In an early scene, he calls the contractors “hired help” who “should act like it.” He’s as sympathetic as a banker in a Capra film. As the bodies mount, he’s repeatedly unmanned by the warriors, to applause from the audience, until he’s left a quaking hulk at the end. Jim has to shame him into evacuating.
There’s also a beautiful blonde European intelligence operative who dislikes the rough men at first but then, amid the river of blood in the third act, learns to be grateful for the Americans.
Even the slain ambassador, Chris Stevens, is given pretty short shrift. He comes to Benghazi with a pretty face and high ideals—a “true believer.” He gives the annex a corny pep talk about bringing Democratic values to Libya, while a warrior nods off in the background. He’s a victim and we mourn his passing, sure, but he just doesn’t get it. As proof of his vanity, his consular residence contains a framed picture of himself being interviewed on TV. We see it shortly before he is killed.
There’s a lot that’s bizarre about the framing of the main events in 13 Hours, but the portrayal of Stevens is possibly the strangest part. The ambassador is, in conservative Benghazi narratives, the foremost martyr, a man to be honored and remembered, betrayed by the administration. If what is honorable about the contractors is their willingness to lay down life for country, you might think Stevens deserves similar recognition: not so, in Bay’s estimation.
When the warriors start to falter toward the end of the movie, their injuries and deaths are shown in excruciating, agonizing detail. Limbs are severed, and splintered bones poke out of dying men. Warriors collapse in pools of blood. This is Bay’s crude way of emphasizing the magnitude of their sacrifices. Stevens dies offscreen and reappears in a memorial reel in the closing credits.
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:The worst is the nebbishy and callous CIA station chief, played by David Costabile, who serves as a stand-in for the neglect and dishonor exhibited, in Benghazi narratives, by the politicians and bureaucrats, repeatedly giving the warriors cowardly and self-serving orders. In an early scene, he calls the contractors “hired help” who “should act like it.”
so this is a movie about humanizing blackwater?
Settler-Colonial prejudice is only knowing how to humanize despised group x by reducing those it comes into conflict with to the level of Wellsian Martians and walking corpses.
http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-winter-fire-oscar-documentary-afineevsky/27490371.html posted:When a friend in Kyiv called Israeli-American filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky in November 2013 and convinced him to drop everything and take his cameras to Ukraine because "something was happening" there, he had no idea what he was getting himself into, let alone that it would lead to an Oscar nomination...
Eventually, Afineevsky had 28 cameramen risking life and limb to record in minute detail those tumultuous days from November 2013 to February 2014, when the Yanukovych regime was toppled. They ended up compiling an incredible 15 terabytes of footage that was then supplemented with material fromnews organizations
He also dismisses claims that he oversimplified the narrative and glossed over some of the Maidan's more unsavory elements, such as the involvement of the nationalist Right Sector movement, which has been
In any event, Afineevsky argues, the presence of Right Sector at the Maidan does not detract from the fact that this genuinely popular movement succeeded in bringing down a corrupt regime and effecting change in Ukraine.
"You know what? Right Sector, they actually fought for everything like everybody else. They were a part of these people," he says. "At the end of the day, it was people who came out, who stood for what they believed in, and who achieved something."
I actually did my best to watch this steaming pile of shit when it came out, figuring I could write something about how it was funded (hint: it the CIA!!!!), but then I was like, nah, this thing is so terrible it's not worth making a fuss over. Clearly the Academy disagrees
camerapeople
i still havent seen the star wars movie and i dont think i will
aerdil posted:
Oh nice, mr show is Hollywood handbook now?
aerdil posted:i still havent seen the star wars movie and i dont think i will
It wasnt terrible but if you dont see it while its in theatred theres prob no reason to see it. I dont think id watch it in full at home
“I think it’s a shame that a movie like this would be used so much as a political football,” he says. “Now, I’d be naïve to say that people weren’t going to take this politically. If that was your agenda, and you wanted to see this movie politically through your own lens, you were going to do that whether we want you to or not. And that’s your right. What I don’t think is fair, and what I think is a shame—and actually I’ll go so far as to say a total dishonor—is to not at least acknowledge what this story is: acknowledging these six guys. These six guys need that acknowledgement, and they represent the men and women who serve all around the world. So by just taking this as a political football of ‘this movie is a total propaganda piece,’ you are robbing people of the ability to see what these men and women are actually going through.”
“I am actually slightly disgusted at the idea that applauding our military has become a political thing rather than universal,” he continues. “It’s universal. That should be an immediate acknowledgment, and then all the political opinions, conversations, and punditry is part of the process. I would never say we shouldn’t talk politically about stuff—as long as step one is acknowledging these guys and what they went through that night.”
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:Wait so they were ICs or something, not enlisted troops?
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