I’d been almost entirely out of the movie loop during the years 2006 and 2007, so for this woodshedding month of January 2010 I’ve been madly catching up on films from then. I’m on a tear these past couple of weeks, as I review the following four flicks from this past weekend for your reading pleasure while I deliberately hack my way through the couple hundred or so titles which remain must-sees.

Let’s begin…

The Road to Guantánamo (2006):

It’s no secret I’m a huge Michael Winterbottom aficionado, with particular emphasis on his 2003 mini-major indie masterpiece Code 46, starring — among others — Sandra Morton and Tim Robbins, a flick I’d been obsessing about for several months back in oh-four. While I’m not 100% in lockstep with his, nor contemporaries Michael Moore’s or Banksy’s politics, I am, however, an unrepentant fan of how Winterbottom stages, writes, casts, and refuses to subsequently comment upon his films. Winterbottom remains utterly convinced that one of the more effective means of getting societal buy-in for a political message is through the visual image. Winterbottom certainly exploits this to the hilt.

The Road to Guantánamo tells the story of the ill-fated Tipton Three, allegedly scooped up and subsequently dispatched to the US’ Camp X-Ray on Cuba’s eastern tip as part of its Al-Qaeda dragnet during the aftermath of its October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9-11 attacks. Using a clever combination of fictional and documentary crosscuts, the true-life Tipton Three supply “colour commentary” as we watch the fictional trio being abused and tortured on-screen by the MPs at the island’s makeshift prison for Muslim radicals. The story goes that the three were in Afghanistan to attend the wedding of one of them during the American invasion, only to emerge from the prison four years later under mysterious circumstances after a failed US and British trumped-up campaign to implicate them as key Al-Qaeda operatives through false pretenses.

After watching this film, one quickly learns that you don’t ever want to find yourself on the wrong side of history. Like one of the real-life protagonists, Asif, says during the course of the film, “this experience has taught me that the world is a very evil place.” Understatement indeed, given what he’d been through.

Interspersed throughout the footage you’ll encounter some strangely comical moments. Rest assured these will crack you up, but if you’re watching the film in polite company you’ll strangely find yourself looking around hoping no one notices your laughing because giggling along with a film like this just seems so utterly wrong.

World Trade Center (2006):

In keeping with the 9-11 theme from this weekend – and considering my latest fascination with Oliver Stone’s decidedly unique brand of politics (click here and here) – it was time to watch this excellent turn by Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña as Port Authority Police Department cops John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, respectively, as they portrayed the dramatic true story of two men who were trapped crushed beneath the Twin Towers rubble heap for hours on end, finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. While we ultimately know how this story ends – this is Hollywood, alas, and there’s no way Nick Cage dies on-screen – director Oliver Stone hooked me in, yet again, thanks to some stellar CG manipulations and several clips of unseen stock footage from the attack on the Towers and the Pentagon. I wouldn’t watch this film again, nor would I recommend it to friends and colleagues, but the trailers from back in the day had me very curious about this piece and I was glad to finally get it out the way and in the internal C: drive.

Moving right along…

Thank You for Smoking (2006):

I’ve been a mega fan of Aaron Eckhart’s ever since I saw him play the hard-to-hate sinister Chad in his inaugural indie flick In the Company of Men. Since 1997, the American actor’s shown excellent range and depth, leading man potential, and a facility for acting opposite other A-Listers, always exuding what’s generally referred to in the celluloid press as “all-American” appeal. He even handled the political footballs talk show maven Charlie Rose threw at him (which you can watch in the DVD’s special features section) with kid gloves. Make sure to keep an eye out for how Eckhart recovers like a proper champ when Rose confronts him with an on-the-nose question he’s unable to answer to for legal reasons.

Thank You for Smoking is adapted from the best-selling 1993 Christopher Buckley novel of the same name, produced by eBay co-creator David O. Sacks, and given the huge expectations of this picture, it didn’t disappoint.

The basic premise is that the PC spinmeisters – those high-powered key industry lobbyists and their hip-pocket political lackeys – are the true power brokers of the democratic system in D.C. and that everything – at least by the early 1990s – had become so politically-correct and watered-down that all political commentary teetered to the brink of becoming frustratingly banal. Eckhart plays Nick Naylor (great name!), Big Tobacco’s point man on the Beltway who seems to have an argument and a snide — yet urbane — comeback for practically anything and everything thrown at him. Like Teflon, nothing ever sticks. Naylor never misses a beat and never stutters, that is, until he meets his match in the form of aspiring journalist Heather Holloway, played by Katie Holmes (I find her completely unattractive. I don’t get what Tom Cruise finds so appealing about her). Without giving away spoilers, I’ll just say that the film lurches from one crisis to the next, and an – at the time – then-greenhorn writer-director (and Montreal-born) Jason Reitman does a sensational job in adapting Buckley’s novel for the screen.

American Gun (2005):

Admittedly, I wasn’t crazy about American Gun. Given the star-hype and the number of high-powered Tinseltown players making appearances in this picture – Donald Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, Tony Goldwyn, and Marcia Gay Harden among them – I’d have wanted things to wrap by Act Three a little more cleanly. It wasn’t to be and likely justified the low star-rating this film received at the time.

The basic premise of this picture, shot in the wake of the Columbine High School Massacre, is that the prevalence of guns, gun shops, and strong societal attitudes with respect to gun ownership across the United States leads to unforseen calamity. The filmmaker attempts to demonstrate this through the 51 (!!!) speaking parts in this picture, compressed into a variety of vignettes. Verbal confrontations with near-violent outbreaks between Gay Harden and her son David, played very convincingly by Chris Marquette, are so strikingly authentic that it leaves you staggering as you wonder what sort of preparation they made to achieve that level of sincerity (at least this is the way I watch a picture).

Somehow the ending left me asking for more, though, in a deeply-unsatisfying film.

The weekend roundup. There you have it. More to come this week.

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