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Hopeless
By Shawn Stone
No
End in Sight
Directed
by Charles Ferguson
It would be nice to write something like, “At this late date,
there’s no real point in going over the catastrophic mistakes
made in the prosecution of the Iraq War and its aftermath.”
Unfortunately, with talk of the U.S. military being in Iraq
for the next 10 years, and the usual idiots—more about
them in a minute—agitating for military action against Iran,
taking a look at the reasons why everything fell apart might
be prudent.
Filmmaker Charles Ferguson employs a straightforward approach
to detailing the way a quick and successful military action
to depose Saddam Hussein turned into a nightmarish occupation
almost overnight. You probably know the outline: We invaded,
we liberated, we didn’t police the streets or prevent looting,
and then everything went to hell. We dissolved the Iraqi army,
which threw thousands of armed men out of work, depriving
them and their families of any means of support.
Ferguson takes us into the gritty details, interviewing those
who were on the ground in Iraq early—the people who had some
notion of what was really going on, including the first “viceroy”
of the occupation, Jay Garner, and members of the foreign
service and the military. The shattering thing is, even though
these people had a clue how not to make the situation worse,
one gets the sinking feeling that even if they were allowed
to do all the “right” things, the occupation still would have
failed.
Then there are the aforementioned “usual idiots.” You know
the names; they’re the folks who often received awards when
they left Iraq behind, in ruins. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Ambassador Paul Bremmer. Bernard Kerik, Condoleeza
Rice, Douglas Feith, George Tenet, and George W. Bush. Soberly,
No End in Sight catalogs the very real mistakes made—and
it’s an ugly litany.
Along with using extensive news footage, Ferguson’s film also
greatly benefits from a trio of Iraqi journalists who were
on scene in the country to get interviews and raw footage.
These powerful scenes document and underline the price ordinary
Iraqis pay, every day, for our failure. It’s sobering, first,
because the conditions under which millions live are unspeakable,
and, second, because the eventual blowback from this is going
to be hellish. What’s that cliché, “Karma is a bitch”?
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Nice
racket: Fogler and Walker in Balls of Fury.
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The
Ping of Pong
Balls
of Fury
Directed
by Robert Ben Garant
If you’ve seen the media blitz on Balls of Fury, then
you’re probably assuming that Christopher Walken as Feng,
the Medici version of a Chinatown ganglord, is the center
of the movie. After all, Feng is a ping-pong fanatic, and
Balls of Fury is a satire on ping-pong and other noncontact
sports covered only on late-night cable. Walken certainly
is amusing, doing a high-dudgeon spoof on his own persona
and injecting it with lounge-lizard sleaze and a squib of
homicidal mania via vintage James Bond villains. But though
he’s by table in every scene, Walken doesn’t walk away with
Balls’ comedic trophy—and that’s because almost every
cast member is just as funny, albeit in a more subdued style.
The most subdued dude is Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler), “the
golden boy of table tennis” who experiences a humiliating
defeat at age 12 (charming Brett DelBuono plays the young
Randy), and retires to the supper-club circuit to paddle balls
like a trained chimp. Fogler, a Tony award-winner, is pitch
perfect, playing the pathetic Randy in a super sincere style
that wins over the audience long before he gets to the girl
and the underworld tournament organized by Feng. For at the
nadir of his career—he’s fired from a cheesola gig after beaning
a bystander with a pong cannonball—Randy is recruited by the
FBI, specifically, by Agent Rodriguez (George Lopez), to infiltrate
Feng’s criminal operation by way of Feng’s obsession with
ping-pong. But first, Randy must win enough matches to earn
an invitation to Feng’s tournament.
Mostly, the film is a lampoon of the machismo of high-stakes
poker, TV wrestling, and martial-arts movies. Randy’s opponents
all have a shtick (Thomas Lennon as a sadistic East German
champion is the standout), and though these clichés are, well,
clichéd, most of them are even funnier for being so due to
the zealous acting and director Robert Ben Garant’s finely
honed touch with silliness, absurdity, dead-on satire, and
shifting gears between them. To use slow motion to dramatize
the lack of drama in ping-pong is expected; to use CGI is
inspired.
Randy’s love interest is Maggie (Maggie Q), the daughter of
the grand master of table tennis (James Hong). Q, the martial-actress
head-turner from Live Free or Die Hard, proves herself
a deft comedienne in her scenes of Kill Bill spoofery.
She’s even better after Maggie warms up to Randy’s humility.
Though it drags a little in the middle, Balls of Fury
provides mild-to-raucous chuckles most of the way through,
and does so with a sweet-natured avoidance of grossness, puerility,
or scatology.
—Ann
Morrow
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