edited by Jonathan Doyle

Mafioso (The Criterion Collection, 3.18.2008) Nino Badalamenti is a supervisor in a car manufacturing plant who hasn't taken a vacation in over two years. On his way out the door to visit his beloved childhood hometown of Sicily -- with his blonde wife and daughters -- Nino is handed a package by his boss and asked to deliver it to a powerful and influential Sicilian gangster named Don Vincenzo. Once in Sicily, Nino has a hoot seeing friends and family, but his wife has trouble fitting in and is unfairly dismissed as a snob by Nino's family. Even more worrisome, Nino finds himself entangled in an intricate web of secret mafioso dealings and is eventually sent on an unexpectedly... elaborate errand. (continued)

Upcoming

July 2

Hancock

July 3

The Whackness

July 4

Diminished Capacity

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Holding Trevor

Kabluey

We are Together

July 9

Full Battle Rattle

July 11

A Man Named Pearl

August

Eight Miles High

Garden Party

Harold

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Meet Dave

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

The Stone Angel

July 18

A Very British Gangster

Before I Forget

The Dark Knight

The Doorman

Felon

Lou Reed's Berlin

Transsiberian

July 22

Two Tickets to Paradise

July 23

Boy A

A couple of weeks after

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A couple of weeks after I called director-screenwriter John Milius about that issue of seeing parallels between the Wolverines in his classic Red Dawn (1984) and the anti-American resistance in Iraq, he finally called back. I've been speaking to him off and on since the late '80s or early '90s. We danced around the question for a bit, but that's often what talking to Milius is like -- circling, veering in and out. He's one of the greatest guys in the world to talk to about the psychology of war and military history. We eventually sashayed into the subject. "I'm one of the few people who think that the Iraq war is a good thing," he said. "It's not the goal of it [that's bad], but the way it's being conducted...conducted for the beneft of the Halliburton corporation, and the fact that there is no cohesive policy. The resistance in Irag is seen by militants as the Third Great Jihad. The first two happened in the seventh century and in the fifteenth century...but Americans don't pay any attention to Islamic history." We somehow got off Iraq and started in on the movie industry. "The people in Hollywood...I refer to them as the Westside Manchus. The reason kids are so fucked up today is becaus they're prisoners of cool, and Hollywod is the epicenter of that...the ultimate prisoner of cool, prisoner of hip. If you go against the prevailing cool, it's as if you've got bubonic plague." What's Milius working on these days? "A war movie, a Korean war movie for those 2929 guys," he said. "Based on a true story...a couple of guys who get swept up in events...it's War and Peace in Korea, about a couple of common G.I.s." Back to the Wolverines and Iraqi resistance: "You can say they're separated by tactics and they are, but terrible things happen in every war of resistance" he said. "In any rebellion, any resistance by partisans...it will be the same. I took Red Dawn mainly from stories of Russian resistance...the Russians fighting against the Nazi's...all of those images in Red Dawn are out of World War II." We strayed into the prime failing of the Bushies, which is that "they're soft on white-collar crime. There's a much greater danger to this country from white-collar crime than terrorism." Back to Iraq and a thought that pointing out the differences between the tactics of Iraqi fighters and the Wolverines is "probably splitting hairs....look at the Roman occupation of Palestine, and the vicious resistance to the Romans. Desert Storm was a clean war. This is not that. Resistance wars are always costly and brutal and savage."

I'm reluctant to get into<< previous | next >>So Hal the coyote had

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on March 31, 2006 at 03:23 PM

comment #1