The Gaza Strip, in a theater near you

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:20:00 +0000

The appeal of any given war movie tends to involve the historical distance it allows from the subject at hand. With few exceptions, such as the unlikely (and delayed) popularity of "The Hurt Locker," mainstream war movies avoid the ambiguities of present-day conflicts. Set some 150 years ago, Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" acknowledges the grave loss of human life that the Civil War created while extolling the titular leader's capacity to end it. While deeply reverential toward the dead, "Lincoln" is defined by the celebration of the capacity for salvation from wartime strife, a key factor driving its stature in the realm of serious popular culture.

Meanwhile, movies grappling with the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- where Hamas continues to trade deadly rockets with Israeli forces at the cost of many lives -- populate a smaller number of theaters this fall. While none may receive nearly the same exposure as "Lincoln," collectively they signal a far more dire situation by analyzing it in real time. They're also exceptional works of art, furious statements about the vanity of conflict and uniformly devoid of potential solutions. This is true cinema of the moment, provocative and devastating but utterly essential to understanding the world.

Films of the decade: “Rejected”

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:55:00 +0000

The past decade of movies included several cosmic explorations of lunacy, from "Punch-Drunk Love" to "Grizzly Man," but none impacted me quite as much as Don Hertzfeldt's mesmerizing animated short film, "Rejected," made in 2000. (You can see it embedded below.) The premise is incredibly simple: An animator continually fails to create consumer-friendly TV commercials as he quickly loses his mind. But there's brilliance coursing through this fundamental strangeness. Hertzfeldt crams riotous absurdity and profound epistemological inquiry into a trippy shot of comedic inspiration. In less than 10 minutes, he hurls through a series of endlessly quotable non sequitur vignettes ("Mah spoon is too big!") as his rudimentary characters grapple with their absurdly untenable existence. It's sheer madness in bite-size chunks of hilarity (with a keen anti-consumerist message to boot), delivered entirely by way of stick figures less complicated than the earliest cave paintings.

Salon.com > Eric Kohn

The Gaza Strip, in a theater near you

Films of the decade: “Rejected”