Waltz With Bashir movie review War

Two movies on Monday night:

Waltz for Bashir is movie with innovative animation. Resembling Rotoscoping, it complements the narrative by showing reality in slightly unreal pictures, separating the audience from the impending horror enough for us to watch without freaking out. Well, mostly anyway.

Neither I nor my GF were certain of the culpability of actions of the narrator … maybe that was the point, maybe we didn’t pay attention enough. It’s a documentary … a memoir. Notions of memory, reality, imagined facts, and historical revision all figure into the action, and whatever the who what when where how or why, the only fact which matters is the atrocities of war.

Something that people don’t realize: WAR means all of it; torture and atrocities are part of war, any war, every war. That’s what war means. A fight is a fight, but a war is fighting plus murder plus + +. I don’t think people realize torture and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and car bombs and IEDs are the logical result of ‘War’. That’s what it means. That’s what it is. That’s what war always has been. That’s why there isn’t a Just War, or a Righteous War, or a Holy War. War is War.

Maybe George W Bush and his cronies bought into the idea of a Clean War or Quick War or whatever. Maybe they were deluded by thinking the invasion of Grenada was a War. It wasn’t. For their critics: of course all the bad things have happened. That’s War. Be outraged, but don’t be surprised.

War.

So make sure you plan something fun for after the movie, because the movie is about War.

~ by 4paul on 2009/02/04.