military

The Passage

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Trying to explain The Passage is like explaining Lost or the Harry Potter series to an outsider. You end up having to sum it up in the simplest terms: Lost is about people stuck on a really weird island, Harry Potter is about a boy defeating evil wizards, and The Passage is about a little girl trying to save the world. Since this is a review, I’ll go a bit deeper than that, but it might sound ridiculous, so bear with me.

The Passage starts with a military experiment gone wrong. This experiment created beings that resemble vampires (don’t go out during the day, don’t age, feed on humans, etc.), and they have escaped. There’s a little girl, Amy, who was also a subject in the experiment, but who fared better than the others because she retained some of her humanity. The creatures are killing most of the U.S. population, and a man helps Amy escape. We jump forward a hundred years to a small settlement of survivors still trying to protect themselves against these creatures. It’s up to them and Amy to save what’s left of the country, perhaps the world.

No pat description can really do this book justice. The first part could have been a novel all on its own, and it probably would have been one of my favorites if it ended there. But as I kept reading, the storyline, character development, suspense, and surprises made the book unforgettable. Beyond that, there was the strength of the female characters, the significance of race—or lack thereof—in a society that believes they’re the last humans left, and the contemplation of how we pass down our history and what it means to future generations. All of this took me away from any traditional idea of sci-fi, fantasy, or trendy vampire lit to a look at what our culture is and what it could be.

I’ve read through negative reviews of this book, and while I can understand where others are coming from, I don’t agree. The biggest complaint I’ve read is that the book ends abruptly. That’s because this is the first book of three, and there’s more of this story to tell. Even then, The Passage easily stands alone because the first journey is complete by the end.

Another complaint is that while the first part of the book is beautifully written, it stumbles a bit after that. I agree that the first part is written much better than the rest, but it’s something I didn’t worry about as I let myself get into the story rather than focusing on the writing. After a hundred pages or so (a drop in the bucket for a book over 700 pages long), the story and the suspense carried me through to the end.

The best way I can sell this book is to admit that I could not put it down. Even when the story started to slow, even when I found myself awake at three o'clock in the morning with my fiancé groaning that I wasn’t asleep, even when I should have been eating food rather than words during my lunch break, I kept reading. It was hard to leave that world, even for a few hours. I finished all 700+ pages of The Passage in a week, and my only regret is not savoring it more.

I hope you aren’t intimidated by the page count, and I hope you’re not put off by the negative reviews, because this may end up being one of the best books you’ve read in a long time.

Written by: frau sally benz, August 14th 2010

Survival of the Dead

admin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Directed by George Romero

Magnolia Pictures

Pop films that take on politics tend to do so as an add-on and go all over the place. Since I have come late to zombie films and director George Romero, perhaps I am being unfair to Romero and his Survival of the Dead, the latest of his zombie films, in expecting consistent politics from a gore fest, but perhaps dystopia deserves its due.

The only zombie film I have ever seen—if “seen” can mean glimpsed out of the corner of a fearful child’s eye—was a production rerun on afternoon television sometime in the 1950s, in my case, to keep children content while they waited for a school bus. However, like Romero, I was a fan of pre-code horror comic books. A gloomy disposition predisposes me to dystopia. With this risk factor, perhaps I was slated to become zombie food.

The movie takes place in the near future in which a disease has conferred a horrid form of immortality on the dead. National Guardsman Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) is on killing duty in the morgue, where bodies spring to murderous life. A fellow Guardsman who refuses to shoot a buddy-turned-zombie is summarily executed; Sarge and a few comrades say enough already—actually, “I didn’t sign up for this”—and go AWOL into a lawless United States, where the only protection is individual armed self-protection, but nighttime comics telling zombie jokes can still be downloaded on a PC. Surviving as thieves, Sarge and his band are busy not only killing zombies coming back to life, but also dealing with the generalized violent breakdown of society.

After a confrontation with another band of renegades, a young man (Devon Bostick) who survives the encounter (and provides some additional snarky, intergenerational conflict) joins up with them to take off in an armored van with a safe full of money. The posse ends up heading for Plum Island (ostensibly off the coast of Delaware, though the film was shot in Canada) because an Internet huckster, Patrick O’Flynn, is luring social outcasts, now much of the population, there to rob them. O’Flynn has been exiled from the island as a result of a long-standing family feud with another clan. (How two Irish clans got on this island in the first place is left unexplained, but there are hints of religious fundamentalism and right-wing survivalism.) A great subplot is the hopeless courting of the lesbian tomboy by her would-be Latin lover/comrade in arms and the genuine nonsexual affection between them.

Romero is quoted as saying the movie is about war, but it could as easily be about too permissive gun laws justified by the Second Amendment. Or out-of-control conflicts over different strategies for dealing with a serious threat—the overlay of the feud. Or it could just be a corkboard for any one-off social commentary—about professional salaries or the narrow perspectives of small towns—that can be stuck in a spot in the plot.

The real Plum Island, off the coast of Long Island, is the site of the federal Animal Disease Center run by the Department of Homeland Security, and at one time a secret bio-weapons research facility. There, any wild mammal is said to be shot on sight. This is O’Flynn’s solution to the zombie problem, while his rival, Muldoon, wants to rehabilitate them.

“Zombie”—as in banks—is fast becoming an overused metaphor. In the book Imaginal Machines, cultural theorist Stevphen Shukaitis presents an analysis of the capitalist transformation of human workers into labor power, living into dead labor; cooptation/recuperation of social movements into nightmare versions of themselves; and the question of whether such altered movements could be truly revitalized or need to be put out of their misery—all strung, along with their sources, on the extended metaphor of zombification.

Personally, I like zombies better as the main attraction, when they are actors in heavy makeup “getting their brains” blown out in movies; and when social commentary, however scattershot, is the sideshow.

Written by: Frances Chapman, June 10th 2010

Iron Man 2

admin — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Directed by Jon Favreau

Paramount Pictures

Before Iron Man hit theatres in 2008, most of us thought of Jon Favreau as the guy who was so money, baby—and he didn't even know it. Critics and audiences expected little from yet another Marvel Comic-inspired film. So when director Favreau delivered an entertaining film with tons of personality (mostly in the form of the amazing Robert Downey Jr.), it was an underdog smash. And what should logically follow an over-performing film (or an under-performing one, for that matter) but a sequel?

Iron Man 2 reintroduces weapons contractor and physicist extraordinaire Tony Stark as the unmasked Iron Man, combating politicians who want Stark to share his Iron Man technology with the U.S. government for security. There's plenty to glean about private property rights and government corruption in this conflict, but you'll have to visit some other blog to satisfy your government paranoia.

While Stark tries to keep his intellectual property out of U.S. government's and the military's hands, he's also contending with an old, Russian grudge-holder (Mickey Rourke), a suspicious but ogle-worthy new executive assistant (Scarlett Johansson), and his ever-nagging, inexplicable love interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). All the while, he's scrambling to find the combination of elements that will power his suit and his heart without slowly poisoning his blood.

There are plenty of feminist elements at play here. First, we deal with the Pepper problem. The original film featured the frigid and nagging yet doggedly loyal Pepper Pots in a supportive role to the womanizing and sarcastic Tony. The only thing that really distinguished her was that she slut-shames the women Tony sleeps with, and Paltrow looks bad in bangs. In the sequel, Tony promotes her to CEO of his company on a whim. Although she faces major scrutiny for her complete lack of experience, she deftly handles the company's affairs in a turbulent time. Unfortunately, Pepper's main purpose here is still to hurl more insults at the reporter Tony slept with in the first film (Leslie Bibb), whose investigation played a key role in the plot, and glare at the new women Tony wants to sleep with: Natalie Rushman. After Tony meets Natalie for the first time, he declares, "I want one."

For her part, Natalie could have been the classic femme fatale. Her character is smart, accomplished, all business, and completely badass. She's an excellent employee, and although Tony attempts to play Pepper and Natalie off each other in a competition of feminine wiles, Natalie doesn't seem interested in anything but getting the job done, even in spite of Tony's constant sexual harassment. The two women do briefly talk to each other about something other than a man a time or two, so Iron Man 2 does (barely) pass the Bechdel Test.

However, these two female characters face some sexism individually, in addition to some more general woman-hating. At one point, the leader of the secret 'good guys club' (Samuel L. Jackson) uses the fact that Tony "made a girl your CEO" to prove that he is going off the deep end. (The other reason was that he got drunk, and basically destroyed his house with his Iron Man suit.) The problem isn't that Pepper has no experience leading a multi-billion dollar company or that she doesn't have the necessary leadership style, it's that she's a "girl." (Although Pepper's age isn't specified, Paltrow is 38-years-old, by the way; she is hardly a girl.) Apparently it's just as stupid to hire a 'girl' to be a CEO as it is to basically drunk-drive a weaponized suit around dozens of party guests.

In another scene, creepy contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) asks his colleagues to get "these bitches out of here" when Pepper and Natalie take over the reins of Hammer's weapons demonstration that turned deadly. Luckily for my temper, Natalie puts him in a headlock moments later, and the two women clean up his mess before Pepper has him arrested.

Finally, in a well-trodden cheap shot at married women (oh, what ballbusting harpies we are), Hammer describes the potential for utter devastation held by a missile he's selling to the U.S. Air Force. What does he dub this harbinger of death? The Ex-Wife.

There's more to say, especially about Pepper and Tony's fraught and completely uninteresting flirtation (I know how to shut her up: I'll kiss her), but I've hit on the main points: slut-shaming, sexual harassment, girls are stupid, girls are bitches, and marriage sucks the life out of men. Thanks for making analysis so simple, Iron Man 2.

Yes, it's possible to like a movie and still deplore its messaging on women. But be aware of what you're watching.

Written by: Hannah Moulton Belec, May 13th 2010

The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:45:00 +0000

By Barry Sanders

AK Press

The Green Zone takes two very big issues of the moment—global warming and the wars in the Middle East—and seeks to illustrate the correlations between the two. Everyone knows something about the horribleness of both topics individually, but most people, including myself, never really put the two together, so I was excited to learn what this book had to offer.

Right off the bat, one of the weaknesses is that the book spends an awful lot of time on what seems to be exposition: there is a preface, a foreword, and finally, an introduction—all of which spell out the gist of the book—before we get to the actual content. The Green Zone presents heavy questions that (according to Sanders) even the Pentagon has no answers for, such as how many military bases America has all over the world, how many Iraqi and Afghani civilians lost their lives since America’s occupation, and how many people will continue to suffer long after America pulls out of the two countries because of the various ways their environment has been polluted since the first Gulf War.

As compelling Sander's case is, he unfortunately goes off on tangents throughout the book, which detract from the point he is attempting to make. One minute he’ll be discussing the Gulf War, then the modern day ice caps, and then off to some other topic with little to no transition between them all. This gets confusing, especially when so many numbers and new terms are introduced.

The middle of the book is the most coherent, and seems to be where Sanders has the most passion in discussing the different ways the American military pollutes and endangers Iraq, Afghanistan, and even its own people. This was a hard book to read, in terms of both subject matter and delivery; however I still consider it a must read.

Written by: Jen Klee, September 14th 2009

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles Over Gay Rights

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:25:00 +0000

By Gary Mucciaroni

University of Chicago Press

Gary Mucciaroni’s Same Sex, Different Politics offers a useful, though ultimately limited, account of the LGBT rights movement. Trained as a political scientist, Mucciaroni’s interests lie in the varying degrees of success and failure over LGBT public policy issues. He questions why certain policy issues (such as adoption) fare better than others (most notably marriage equality). Unlike studies that focus on individual policy areas, Mucciaroni’s text is an attempt to comparatively analyze multiple policy struggles in order to arrive at broad conclusions about the current state of the LGBT movement, as well as to identify new directions/methods with which to approach LGBT activism. As such, Mucciaroni charts six individual policy issues alongside and in relation to each other: military service, homosexual conduct and sodomy laws, adoption, marriage and partnership, hate crime legislation, and civil rights.

Using a variety of social science resources and extensive quantitative data, Mucciaroni deftly charts the contradictions that emerge through the comparative analysis of individual policy concerns. For example, he identifies an inherent disconnect in (seemingly) widespread public support for anti-discrimination legislation in venues like employment and housing, but stronger opposition to marriage equality and military service.

While Mucciaroni’s text is definitely groundbreaking in terms of its comparative methodological approach, its circumscribed focus on public policy, juridical process, and legislation disallows any discussion of the larger cultural, social, and ideological controversies that underlie public policy initiatives. What emerges is an argument that continually and uncritically reifies the legal system as the primary venue for bringing about social change, with little acknowledgement of the cultural work that necessarily needs to occur alongside policy struggles. Indeed, for a book that claims to concern itself with the material realities of family, discrimination, sex, and relationships, Same Sex, Different Politics remains utterly disconnected from the communities it seeks to represent.

Written by: Ashvin R. Kini, May 1st 2009

Shattered Innocence: The Error of Revenge

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:47:00 +0000

By Kimberly Whitner-Hill

Outskirts Press

I was less than impressed with Kimberly Whitner-Hill’s Shattered Innocence: The Error of Revenge. I found this book to be not very well thought out and poorly executed.

The first chapter begins with a scene in the life of the main character, Kayla. That scene is never revisited, however, and within two pages the clock is turned back to her father’s childhood. For the next nineteen pages, the narrative focuses exclusively on him, which wouldn’t be such a big deal—after all, every good story needs a decent back story—but the entire book is only fifty-five pages long.

After the main character’s birth on page twenty, the story skips forward six months in just one paragraph, and then four more years in the span of a few pages. Kayla only manages to take hold of the narrative on her own merits on page thirty-six after she turns eighteen and her father dies of a brain aneurysm. After her father’s death, the story revolves around Kayla trying to find a man good enough to deal with her immaturity, although I question whether it actually is her immaturity and not just the author doing a poor job of developing the characters.

The characters in this story are flat and uninteresting and a lot of details are glossed over: Kayla’s childhood abuse, her mother’s emotional breakdown, her father’s death, her military career, the birth of her son, and marriage to a man she doesn’t love. Whitner-Hill writes, “After [Daryl] broke off the wedding, she left. They were separated for a short time when he realized that he could not stand being without her, but he was still not ready for the ultimate commitment: marriage.” A few pages before that, Kayla and Daryl learn that Kayla is pregnant. It is only after their son is born that they start thinking about getting married. (Their son is only mentioned for a few pages.) I have a sensible view of marriage, but it seems to me that having a child is a much bigger commitment than marriage.

Some of the issues that Whitner-Hill needs to address to make _Shattered Innocence _a feasibly interesting read are spelling and grammatical errors, unexplained characters popping up for just a few pages, and illogical jumps in time. If a story is actually there, it’s buried under really bad writing, and that’s regrettable. As it is right now, this is not even a good first draft.

Written by: Viannah Duncan, March 25th 2009

A Journal for Jordan: A Story of Love and Honor

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:22:00 +0000

By Dana Canedy

Crown Publishers

I can’t remember the last time I cried after reading a book. After reading the last page of A Journal for Jordan I suddenly found myself bawling my eyes out. But enough about me—this is a book review after all.

Based on the title of this book, I expected it to be a journal written by a loved one for a loved one. I was aware that the fiancée of a fallen soldier, who also happens to be a New York Times senior editor and Pulitzer Prize winner, had encouraged her fiancée to start a journal for his infant son after learning about his impending deployment to Iraq. I expected a touching book filled with words of wisdom about life lessons learned. This book is that and much more. In it, Canedy tells the story of an unlikely romance between herself, an independent NYT reporter, and First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a decorated military officer and gentle soul. The book also includes life lessons and inspiration in the form of King’s journal entries and letters.

Canedy came to the writing of this book from her own improbable journey. An army brat who had seen the toll that military life took on her parents’ marriage, she was determined not to marry a military man as her mother had, and worked her way up the ranks from cub reporter to New York Times editor. While nursing a broken heart and a wounded ego after a demoralizing breakup, Canedy finds herself at her parents house on Father’s Day trying to patch up her tenuous relationship with her father, and meets the man who will be the love of her life.

This is a love story of two individuals who couldn’t be more dissimilar and Canedy charts the up and down course of their relationship with humor and honesty. I especially found her anecdotes about King’s old-fashioned courtliness endearing such as his first visit to New York City:

"It occurred to me that perhaps he was the sort of man who still believed in the dating rituals of a bygone era. I was right. The entire weekend, Charles insisted on being on the curbside of the sidewalk to put distance between me and the traffic. It was a sweet throwback gesture that in any other city I would have appreciated, but it drove me crazy as we tried to keep pace with the pedestrian traffic on New York’s one-way streets…"

By the end of the book, Canedy is a single mother raising a small child and struggling with the reality of a life and a future without King. We travel with her as she navigates her new life as an army widow and mother. She tells in wrenching detail about meeting other military families of fallen soldiers at a memorial service, and her commitment to giving her son a sense of the father that he never knew. It seems fitting to end this review with a passage from a letter that King wrote to Canedy on the plane back to Iraq:

"It takes a special kind of woman to be married to a soldier. He’s always going on deployment or training, missing births, birthdays, and any kind of special occasion you can imagine. You really have to be a self-motivated and strong-willed person. You spend a lot of time alone because he’s gone. It’s a tough job being a military spouse. Though we’ve had our difference, you have always been there for me. Thank you."

Written by: Gita Tewari, March 11th 2009

Letters From Black America

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:51:00 +0000

Edited by Pamela Newkirk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

While it would help to appreciate and admire the historical importance of preserved letters, you don’t have to be history buff or correspondence enthusiast to delight in Letters From Black America. In a time of quickly typed emails and SMS, tangible letters hold weight for many who value thoughtful, deliberate communication. In this compendium, Pamela Newkirk skillfully compiles an assortment of missives from the past three centuries that shine a light on the humanity and continued struggles of ordinary and exceptional African American men and women.

Divided into seven sections, the collection of 200-plus letters examines family dynamics during and after slavery, education as a locus for social activism, and Black military service from the Civil War to Iraq. In everyday yet often poetic language, details are revealed about married couples separated by the slave trade and babies born without the presence of their fathers. Open letters previously published in newspapers are included to showcase a wide range of letter writing and how it can be used as a tool to promote public discourse. Prominent Black artists and academics correspond and share visions of hope. One man proposes marriage and later asks to set a date, confirming his lady’s affirmative answer, though the reader never knows what else was actually said.

While the collection does include an interesting cross-section of letter writers and receivers, many are notable figures in Black history, and many—like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Derrick Bell Jr., and Booker T. Washington—have letters included in several sections. This is not without merit, but letters to and from prominent, highly educated Black leaders are more common than those passed between ordinary citizens. This does not diminish the significance of the selections. At times, it is rather helpful—if not necessary. The often-lengthy writings of Frederick Douglass, for example, comprise a significant part of the letters about politics and social justice. This is not a burden, but an opportunity. Many of these letters are not easily found, even in a time of ubiquitous technology and information. Each letter is introduced with background about the writer and recipient, and these small but critical details make Letters From Black America an incredible reference guide.

While many of the book’s sections are enthralling—love letters from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Coretta Scott (King) and a coming out letter from Joseph Beam to his parents are particularly noteworthy—the climax of the compilation is the third section, “Politics and Social Change.” Some of the most formative communication of our time is found here, including letters between Shirley Du Bois and Langston Hughes, Bayard Rustin and Eldridge Cleaver, and Toni Morrison to then-Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

To address the changes in communication over time, the book ends with letters from “Across the Diaspora.” Communiqués between Pan-African leaders of the last hundred years, across oceans and decades, remind us that even as we move into a time when travel and the Internet make our work easier, we have come very far and yet have so very far to go.

This review is cross-posted on Girl w/ Pen.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 7th 2009

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation?

admin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:12:00 +0000

By Craig A. Rimmerman

Westview Press

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? is a history of post-Stonewall GLBTQ activism as seen through three focused battles: the AIDS crisis, the ban on gays in the military, and the conflict over gay marriage. Craig Rimmerman presents a detailed breakdown of each, assembling them into a supposed study of the differences and relative importance of assimilationist and liberationist strategies. The result of his work here is a book deeply limited as a piece of writing and as an argument, but deeply compelling as a piece of history.

In aesthetic terms, Rimmerman is not much of a writer. His sentence structure is clunky, his rigid adherence to the classic “tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them” structure almost laughable. In terms of structure and argument, his insistence on a thesis overly simplistic and overly focused—that both assimilationist and liberationist movements are needed for political progress—limits the energy and momentum of his book, and the book’s surveying take on its subjects makes many of the chapters and segments feel rushed. He fails to define terms key to making a leftist book accessible to a broader public, such as “the Christian Right,” while defining basic terms about the lesbian and gay movements that any leftist audience would understand. As such, _The Lesbian and Gay Movements _can be a frustrating book to read.

However, the facts in the book are indubitably fascinating and well-assembled. Rimmerman is a professor of political science and public policy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and his skill as a teacher is clear in his work here. He presents shocking facts as part of a collection. He casually and gracefully introduces elements of the pre-Stonewall gay liberation (“homophile”) movements that are rarely seen in mainstream press or history. He breaks down the historical steps of each of his topics in a clear and accessible manner. A few days after reading The Lesbian and Gay Movements, I found myself using information I had gained directly from the book in a discussion with my students about Ronald Reagan, and the details of Bill Clinton’s disappointing performance with regard to gay and lesbian rights—particularly with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—were new and deeply informative.

The Lesbian and Gay Movements is not, in the end, a very good book. It is, however, a marvelous teaching tool. I’ve been privileged to use it as such already and hope that many other educators will find the same use for it. I also hope that students at Hobart and William Smith Colleges will take any opportunity available to take a class with Craig Rimmerman. His skills as a teacher shine through every part of this book.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, April 17th 2008

One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers

admin — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:14:00 +0000

Edited by Tara McKelvey

Seal Press

Are there lessons to be learned from the interminable nightmare in Iraq? Was more heartbreaking instruction needed, even after My Lai and William Calley and Zippo raids? The media, with its relentless blather about heroism, simply can’t accommodate the postmodern ambiguity in the story of Private Jessica Lynch or the fragging death of Pat Tillman. And then there’s Abu Ghraib.

Tara McKelvey brings together a fine collection of essays in One of the Guys, contributed by the likes of Eve Ensler and Angela Davis, mostly responding to a single horrible image from that episode of torture: Private First Class Lynndie England and two of her fellow soldiers holding a naked Iraqi man on a leash. Some of the writers in the collection, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, are struggling to accept “a tough new kind of feminism” that recognizes that atrocity knows no gender. It is not women who are the heroes and men who are the enemies, but rather feminism as an idea and spirit that holds out the promise of human liberation—and patriarchy as a system that has kept us in chains.

Ensler makes what should be an obvious point: “having a vagina is not a prerequisite for being a good leader.” Women who submit themselves to a system that encourages torture, killing and destruction are perfectly capable of the same malevolent behavior more typically associated with men. Some of the writers in this collection note the mixed emotions they experience after having advocated for women’s equal access to the military, an opportunity, many felt, that entails the possibility of social mobility for many poor or working class people.

Davis points out, however, that being assimilated into an “ideology of male dominance”—a culture of violence wherein women are given “equal opportunity to torture”—is antithetical to what feminism can and should be. The fact that women soldiers (along with uncounted female “noncombatants”) are being injured and killed in record numbers is a dubious mark of progress, to say the least. Some try to defend Lynndie England by pointing out that her relationship with a male supervisor played a role in the torture—or that she is more victim than persecutor. The larger point is that there can be no heroes in war, postmodern or otherwise, and the sooner we accept that principle, the sooner we can move on to the next stages of feminist critique and social justice.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2007

My Country, My Country

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:16:00 +0000

Directed by Laura Poitras

Zeitgeist Films

I admit that I popped My Country, My Country into my DVD player with genuine trepidation. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this film and had prepared myself for the agonizing boredom that is inflicted by a truly awful movie. Fortunately, My Country, My Country was a captivating and heart wrenching tale that exposes the truth behind war. When we watch the evening news, we see images of soldiers, tanks and insurgents, but what we seldom see is the toll that is levied on the people living under these conditions on a daily basis. These are regular people who are forced to survive in an unimaginable situation. After watching My Country, My Country, I have a deeper understanding of the hardships that the people of Iraq face every day.

Although I enjoyed this movie immensely, I must admit that there were elements that made my blood boil. Before I elaborate, I would like to state for the record that I was never in favor of George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. However, my respect for the men and women of the armed forces is unwavering. The various scenes that portrayed U.S. servicemen and women as bloodthirsty warmongers left a very bad taste in my mouth. I don’t doubt that there are a few bad apples among our military personnel, but I believe that the majority are descent individuals serving their country.

If you can keep an open mind and understand the political intent behind the negative portrayal of our military, you will find a deeper empathy for the Iraqi people after watching My Country, My Country. Regardless of your feelings about this war, you will be mesmerized by the exquisite cinematography that highlights the beautiful landscapes in Iraq. At the same time, you will be horrified by sights of a war torn country, as well as some of the apparent injustices being levied on the Iraqi people. My Country, My Country left me with many questions needing to be answered by U.S. officials. In the end, it is a movie well worth watching, but be prepared to have your feathers ruffled.

Written by: Becky Barry, April 5th 2007