The Soviet Colonel Kurtz

Via Abu Muquwama, a portrait of a deranged Soviet counterinsurgent in the Afghan war. There seems to be a common archetype, whether in film or real life, of the counterinsurgency operative who is radically (and negatively) changed by his environment. Take, for example, Col. Mathieu in the film Battle of Algiers, or the obvious Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (who in some ways a reflection of Vietnam War figures like Lt. William Calley).

Recent Movies

1. Rambo: I didn’t come into the theater with terribly high expectations. The last Rambo film (III) was awful, and I wasn’t sure how an older Rambo taken out of his Cold War context would be any better. However, the film accomplishes Slyvester Stallone’s goal of achieving some measure of closure for the series. We finally do see Rambo coming home (to Arizona, of all places!) If you can stomach the truckloads of genre cliches and exploding bodies, Rambo is worth at least a DVD rental. 
2. There Will Be Blood:  A flawed masterpiece. Very atmospheric, reminding me at times of Antonioni’s The Passenger and L’Avventura.  I felt that critics overrated Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance–the real pleasure is watching newcomer Paul Dano as boy preacher/huckster Eli Sunday. All in all, a great combination of oil, greed, and religious fanaticism–this time in turn of the century California. 
3. Persepolis: Despite the rather depressing subject matter (the coming of age of a young girl in revolutionary Iran), Persepolis never feels like a downer. It is as boisterous, defiant, and scattered as its Abba-listening protagonist. My only complaint is that the black-and-white animation doesn’t really convey the storyline’s full emotional depth. 

Brazil’s Charles Bronson

I want to see this when the subtitled DVD gets stateside. I’m a huge fan of the “hardboiled cop”-type movies, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series in particular. The larger issues raised in the article are also fascinating. Film scholars routinely analyze figures like Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer as throwbacks to the cultural archetype of the cowboy, the anti-hero who walks the thin line between civilization and savagery. Essentially, High Noon with cars and machine guns. But the theme seems to have wide resonance among many foreign audiences. I once read in a Criterion collection essay on Charles Bronson’s Death Watch that the author had seen it screened in Africa, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia–and each the time the audience broke into wild applause when Bronson began to gun down the gutter punks who killed his family. Perhaps the figure of the vigilante who takes the law into his own hands is more of a universal archetype than an American one.