Islam is at the heart of an emerging global anti-hegemonic culture that combines diasporic and local cultural elements, and blends Arab, Islamic, black and Hispanic factors to generate "a revolutionary black, Asian and Hispanic globalization, with its own dynamic counter-modernity constructed in order to fight global imperialism. (say what!)
Ghost Dog: You know, in ancient cultures...bears were considered equal with men. Hunter: This ain't no ancient culture here, mister. Ghost Dog: Sometimes it is.
The last entry on the Five Percenters got me thinking about RZA (aka Robert Diggs aka Bobby Digital aka Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah aka The Abbott) which got me thinking about the film Ghost Dog where RZA has a cameo.
The film is filled with all sorts of jarring cultural juxtapositions. Forest Whitaker stars as an African-American Samurai who struggles against Italian mobster hip-hop fans. He speaks no French or Creole and yet his best friend in the world is Raymond, a Haitian Ice Cream Vendor who speaks no English. And apparently the unnamed city where the film takes place has a large number of people from different cultural backgrounds who live on apartment building rooftops. My pet theory is that the film is trying to say that we are all like the people on those rooftops, separated by huge gulfs of space. Genuine communication is impossible (unless you are a mind reader) and the best we can hope for is occasionally guessing what another person wants or needs from indirect cues (like Ghost Dog does with Raymond).
I've mentioned the film Mooz-lum before. Now it is finally playing in select cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, DC, Detroit, Elizabeth, Houston, LA, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco and Shttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifeattle. Unfortunately I don't live in any of those cities. Maybe I'll be able to catch it on DVD.
I just saw Anthony Hopkins in The Rite last weekend. It was a halfway decent movie with its high points but after The Exorcist it is difficult for any exorcism-themed supernatural thriller to impress or cover new ground. (Although, Drag Me To Hell wasn't bad and the Angel episode I've Got You Under My Skin had a nice twist.)
It occurs to me that (even apart from the super-obvious examples like The Ten Commandments or The Passion of The Christ) there are plenty of Hollywood movies which assume that Christianity is basically true (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Rapture, The Book of Eli, Left Behind). There are also a number of movies where Hinduism is true (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Love Guru) and movies where Buddhism or other Eastern philosophies are true (The Golden Child, Little Buddha, a number of martial arts films). But I was hard pressed to come up with a movie where Islam was true. Apart from The Message, the only one I could think of was The Jewel of the Nile (which is actually full of your typical Arab stereotypes, but the "Jewel" of the title is an Egyptian Sufi with real powers.) Are there any others?
Planet of the Arabs, was an official selection of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It is a trailer-esque montage of Muslim/Arab stereotypes as portrayed in American film and television. The selection of films strikes me as a bit dated today. They are all pre-9/11. Of course post-9/11 the images which could theoretically go into such a montage is much larger in number and more complex by several orders of magnitude. I wonder if there are any statistical breakdowns available for contemporary representations of Arabs/Muslims.
Interesting. I was already intrigued by the fake trailer in Grindhouse and surprised when I saw the trailer for the real film in the movie theater. I may not wait for the DVD on this one:
I also caught the movie Legion at a midnight opening last week. The film had its interesting moments but overall it wasn't very well made and I definitely could have waited for it to appear in the bargain DVD bin at Blockbuster.
Legion is a dark and twisted Christmas card on film. The premise: God has lost faith in humanity so He orders the angelic hosts to bring on the apocalypse. We see darkness, swarms of insects and other phenomena, but mostly we see angels possess other human beings (e.g. the foul-mouthed, wall-crawling old lady prominently featured in the commercials).
God has created a special child who will possibly be born to a pregnant waitress in a diner and could somehow oppose and counter-act the apocalypse. But then in a spectacular example of logic, He also orders the archangel Michael to kill this self-same child before it is born.
The interesting thing is that Michael ends up being almost a perfect inversion of the Islamic concept of the devil by refusing this command. At one point he even announces that when God made mankind he was the first angel to bow down to the the crowning glory of God's creation (as opposed to Iblis in the Quran who refuses to bow down to Adam). And to add another level to the inversion, just as al-Hallaj suggested that the commandment to bow was more a test of the purity of the devil's monotheism than a straightforward order, in Legion, the commandment to bring on the apocalypse was really a test of compassion (which Michael passes) by holding on to his faith in humanity.
Unfortunately, this one interesting aspect is outweighed by the film's various flaws including: 1) There is way too much violence given that the film is ultimately a fable on compassion. 2) Unlike the film The Prophecy which was able to portray angels with a dark side with the right amount of tension, most of the "angels" in Legion just appear creepy and demonic. 3) More specifically, the angel-possessed crowds basically made Legion reminiscent of a zombie movie. But then the massive crowds clearly could have overwhelmed the heroes in the dinner and it isn't plausible that our heroes would last as long as they do.
And, if you are in a time-and-zombie-killing mood, you might want to check out Sean T. Cooper's simple, but entertaining series of free online Boxhead Games.
Also, you may have seen some of the books in Open Court Publishing Company's series on Popular Culture and Philosophy which brings together a group of authors to philosophically unpack the content behind the Harry Potter novels, South Park and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm in the middle of checking out The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless. (I'll probably do a review in part two of this blog entry once I'm done)
For some reason zombies and zombie movies have been more on my radar these days. Both Shaun of the Dead and the remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead were on tv earlier today. And a few weeks back Land of the Dead (starring John Leguizamo) was on. And during the days in between I've been making ample use of the bargain DVD bins at Walmart and Blockbuster in order to further explore the genre.
To begin with, I would argue that George Romero's 1990 remake of his own Night of the Living Dead is actually one of the all-time greatest films (one of my favorites in any case). It is a well-crafted story centering around seven personalities who arrive at a farmhouse while being threatened by zombies all around them. In spite of the small cast (not counting the zombies of course) and minimal setting, Romero manages to pack a surprisingly rich set of interactions and relationships, invoking issues of race, gender, age, family into a story full of suspense, conflict, social commentary and irony.
Most subsequent zombie films are similar in the sense that they explore zombie outbreaks in the confines of a specific (even if large) area such as a shopping mall (Dawn of the Dead), an army base (Day of the Dead), in and around a graveyard/mortuary/medical warehouse (Return of the Living Dead) and an airplane (Flight of the Living Dead... which could have just as easily been called Zombies on a Plane).
An interesting exception is George Romero's Diary of the Dead. The somewhat self-referential movie follows a group of film students and their professor who were working on a horror picture out in the woods when they get news of the zombie outbreak. But since the group has at their disposal a Winnebago full of gasoline and video equipment, the characters are able to travel to different locations and settings sense of the impacts of the zombie phenomena. (a hospital, a militia headquarters, a middle-class home, an upper-class home, etc.) which gives a more varied and global sense of the scope of the zombie problem. In fact, unlike many zombie films which portray localized outbreaks caused by some mysterious virus or chemical spill, in the Diary of the Dead the cause leans more to the theological. The basic rules of life and death seemed to have changed all over the world simultaneously. As one of the characters in another Romero zombie film explains, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." In any case, Diary... contains a bit more social criticism and philosophical reflection than most of the other films in the genre, and I would argue that after Night... it is the second-best zombie film I've ever seen.
I just finished watching the film Vantage Point last week. The central idea behind the film is how ones perception of reality radically depends on ones point of view. It demonstrates this idea by telling and retelling the story, from different perspectives, of a terrorist attack in Salamanca involving the President of the United States (POTUS).
The movie was good and generally entertaining. I just have a few comments and nits: 1. There was at least one discrepancy between the stories: During the iteration which follows Forrest Whitaker's character (an American tourist with marital problems back home), there are two secret service agents who appear at the end at a crucial moment but are absent from the corresponding scene in the final iteration of the story.
2. A second slight weakness in terms of the construction of the story: At a crucial point, the main terrorist leader who has clearly established his callous disregard for human life during the rest of the film, makes a surprise move actually swerves to avoid hitting a little girl.
3. Finally (and here is the "Grenada-esque" bit) maybe this is just as further example of how everything depends on perspective but the terrorists' motivations aren't made totally clear in the film. In one iteration, a member of the President's staff says that a group called Mujahideen Brigade with connections to Morocco is planning an attack on the President. But when we follow the terrorists, there are few, if any, clues to their ideology and all of them, even the sleeper agent, speak nothing but Spanish.
While we are on the subject of graphic novels, I also recently read Wanted written by Mark Millar and which has also been adapted into a film staring James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie.
I haven't yet seen the movie, but I have the definite impression that a large amount of the original story's significance has been lost in the transition from graphic novel to the film. The graphic novel takes place in a thinly-veiled analogue of the DC comic universe. The premise is that back in 1986 the various super villains came together and formed a unified army to decisively defeat the superheroes. In the present-day, super villains run the world with impunity through a secret society known as the Fraternity. (It is interesting to note that in a very small way, DC Comics moved in this direction when it made Lex Luthor president.) In the film, the secret society is made up of badass assassins who are still basically good but in the graphic novel, the organization is unambiguously evil. The main philosophical difference between the villains in the graphic novel lies in whether they are motivated by ruthless greed or a sadistic nihilism.
Professor Seltzer: Shouldn't that be every one's aspiration Mister Rictus? The loot without the leg breaking?
Mister Rictus: Personally I always saw the loot as just an added bonus, Professor Seltzer.
In addition to this basic moral vacuum, the other major element of the graphic novel which is presumably absent in the film is the rich relationship to the DC Comic Book mythos. One of the most interesting moments along these lines is an exchange between Wesley [the protagonist[ and Professor Seltzer [a clear Lex Luthor stand-in]:
Wesley: I don't understand how come this isn't in the history books? Even if there had been one superhero wouldn't that have been all over the news and stuff?
Professor Seltzer: Ah, but it wasn't enough just to beat them, Wesley. We had to strip them of their memories and make sure that even their greatest fans didn't remember them.
Such science might seem comical in this new world that we molded for you, but believe me when I saw that reality itself can be rewritten if we desire it, boy.
Seven dimensional imps [Mr. Mxyzptik] and alien super-computers [Brainiac] are among our ranks, you know. There's really nothing we can't do if we always stand united.
Now, your father's old nemesis [only referred to as "The Detective" but obviously Batman] is just a camp pudgy joke who signs autographs for money. The Warrior Princess [Wonder Woman] is a menopausal drunk who thinks she was a tv personality. And as for my own arch-foe [Superman]...
Well according to the newspapers, he needs someone to help him defecate now and spends his long dull days staring into space, trying to remember where it all went wrong. [the panel shows a man in a wheelchair sitting by a window, clearly recalling Christopher Reeve]
In other words, there is the strong suggestion (which is incredibly tragic when you stop to think about it) that Adam West, Christopher Reeve and Lynda Carter really are the defeated remnants of the heroes they portrayed on tv and film. (Along similar lines, the Vixen [a Catwoman stand-in] is definitely modelled on Halle Berry) So maybe the novel is meant to describe our own universe and we actually live in a world run by super villains?
In any case, based on the promotional material I've seen, the movie essentially ignores the comic book aspects of the novel. I wonder to what extent that was a freely-made creative decision and to what extent it was motivated by the likely legal hurdles due to copyright issues.
Basically, I expect that the movie will be an entertaining experience full of sci-fi/action candy but will be missing much of the mythological richness of the graphic novel.
An amazing and involved interview of Ishmael Reed by Pakistani-American writer Wajhat Ali. Topics include race and the Clinton dynasty, Obama, Paul Mooney and the Black/Latino pseudo-divide, the economics of misery, Nazi science, Irshad Manji, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Blacks in NASA, Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, the racist uses of feminism and the scapegoating of Black males, Gloria Steinem, Geraldine Ferraro, medical experimentation on Black people, Dinesh D'Souza, Crash, The Wire, American Gangster and the canons of Western Civilization.
