On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Louis Proyect<[email protected]> wrote: > Jim Devine wrote: >> >> My impression was that the movie's lack of any substantive references >> to what the war was about or who it was against was central to its >> point. All of these people were totally obsessed with themselves and >> their petty competitions, so that even the Rumsfeldian leader of the >> war camp never mentions the enemy. It's a version of the "banality of >> evil." > > It is just unreal, however. How do you describe the white-hot intensity of > briefing rooms in pre-war situation without a single proper noun ever being > articulated. Like "Iraq" or "Syria" or "Iran" or "uranium" or "Saddam". > Okay, if you want a fictionalized deal, then do what the Marx brothers did > and call the country Freedonia or something. Without a grounding in some > kind of concrete situation, even fictionalized, it turns into nothing but a > comedy of manners--in other words, typical BBC and PBS fare. Except with > profanity.
that's true. The story ends up being _too_ abstract, requiring that the viewer fill in a lot of the details. BTW, wasn't this movie produced by BBC? -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
