Those whacky genocidal Serbs.

This morning the BBC is playing many segments about Milosovic’s funeral. Apparently there are 100,000 people there waving banners and generally making a political show for the media. That’s a 100,000 pro-rape, pro-genocide hate mongers. 100,000 people who love “their” president. Think about Germany post WW2 if Hitler had not taken the easy way out and had survived only to die during his trial. The only reason Milosovic didn’t kill 6million people is he didn’t have the military industrial complex to support it. This guy was as close to evil as it gets and 100,000 men and women are out celebrating his life and that he led the campaign against hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. Mass graves everywhere, entire villages slaughtered but only after torture and rape. 100,000 people. I am sick at my stomach.

Some new movies at the homestead

I bought two movies the other day. “Good night and good luck” and “a history of violence.” I have yet to see “Good night” but am really looking forward to seeing it. I think anything that lets more people learn about McCarthyism (sp?) is for sure a good thing. I have seen “A history of violence.” It is a Cronenberg film and so is disturbing as hell. I saw this in the theater and it took me about a week to make up my mind about it. I was so disturbed after it that I couldn’t separate my emotion from the artistry of it. Eventually I decided that it had been a good movie. Not because it was fun or even titillating but because it had been SO very honest in it’s portrayal of physical violence. It’s the same reason that I think “Private Ryan” is a good film. The story becomes secondary to the reality of the stage. Movie violence is almost always shown with flair. The hero makes some snide remark before dispatching the villain in with a gunshot that leads to instant death. He may have received a wound to his arm or leg in the battle but is always standing tall. Violence is not clean. It is not pretty. While the act itself may be very quick the aftermath is very long. People do not say “uuhh” and then fall over and close their eyes. They scream and cry and call out to their mothers. They die gurgling and muttering or cursing. People do no go gently. I think it is the responsibility of movie makers to show violence in a realistic way, to take away the glory of it. There is a bit form a WW2 movie that I always think of. Games Garner (a soldier who has survived some great battle) is being told that they will put up a statue to his heroism in his home town and he gets very mad. He says that is the problem. Boys grow up looking at those statues of heroes and read the names of the dead. It is all glorified and mythologized. He says that if you want to be honest show the men dying and crying out for their families. Then maybe young men won’t be so quick to run off to start a war. My favorite director, Samuel Fuller, wrote some of the great noir and war movies of the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and his masterpiece, “The big red one”, in 1980. When he was asked how moviegoers could be shown what war was like answered with this; “Take them into the theater. Put them in their seats and lower the lights. Then have a squad of soldiers come in and start killing them all.”

Later,

Sam