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You
Are There
By
Ann Morrow
Bloody
Sunday
Directed
by Paul Greengrass
First it was three, then it was six. Then it was 13. Another
man died later, bringing the death toll to 14, with dozens
wounded. The massacre of Irish-Catholic protestors by a British
paratroop regiment on Jan. 30, 1972, lives on in infamy as
Bloody Sunday, a tragedy still mired in controversy, even
after four years of inquiry begun by Prime Minister Tony Blair
in 1998. The searing, cinema-verité film of that day, Bloody
Sunday, written and directed by documentarian Paul Greengrass,
re-creates the event with handheld cameras, capturing the
chaos, misguided intentions, and rising emotions that accompanied
the march, and placing the audience in the midst of the action
to be swept inexorably into a cauldron of anger.
Yet for all its passion, this is a fair-and-square account,
building up to the shootings over a 24-hour span and using
handheld cameras to achieve fly-on-the-wall proximity to a
range of participants. The film is visually based on the footage
of two BBC camera crews present for the march: One was sent
to Bogside, the Catholic ghetto in Derry; the other covered
the British security forces. Told from these two standpoints,
the film exposes the pressures exerted on both sides, including
the unease of the paratroops, who’ve lost several comrades
to IRA snipers in the preceding weeks, and the pent-up frustration
of unemployed Derry youths. The film also manages to show
how even in a war zone, people fall in love, raise children,
and hope for the future.
The march’s organizer, Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt, in one
of the year’s most powerful performances), is a Protestant
MP and a dedicated pacifist. A congenial bloke with a gift
for the common touch, Cooper is enormously popular with the
Catholic locals. Greengrass doesn’t shy away from showing
how the all-too-human organizer, who stayed too long at the
pub the night before, starts the march late, allowing the
marchers to become restless and agitated, and giving the “paras”
more time to put up roadblocks and implement a dragnet of
the Catholic “hooligans.” Greengrass cuts back and forth between
the marchers and the British command post as if he’s following
his instincts instead of a script.
Through the confusion of many voices speaking heatedly at
once, some facts emerge. The Derry peace march is in protest
of the Unionist practice of mass internment without trial.
Maj. Gen. Robert Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) must make a show
of force to placate the Irish Protestants. Cooper wants to
unite the Catholic and Protestant working classes in a stand
against the occupation. The paras are issued tear gas, water
cannons, and rubber bullets to hold off the marchers. There
is no explanation for the live ammunition—“an atrocious amount
of ammo,” as an officer says in the aftermath. And almost
incidentally, there are reminders of how the media once served
as a watchdog—the professionally callous British general loses
his composure only once, when he hears there’s footage of
the Derry Civil Rights banner covered in blood. (Greengrass
avoids the emblematic, although you will see the priest waving
his blood-soaked white kerchief while dashing through the
line of fire to assist the wounded.)
The director is clearly in sympathy with the oppressed Catholic
minority. But through its intense realism and synaptic editing,
Bloody Sunday gets under the intractable ideology of
Northern Ireland to reveal the human story of the tragedy.
And does it an unforgettable justice.
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| Diamonds
are forever: Brosnan and Berry in Die Another Day. |
Stirring,
Not Shaky
Die
Another Day
Directed
by Lee Tamahori
The reports of James Bond’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Sullen neo-action heroes like Vin Diesel have disdained Ian
Fleming’s master spy as an anachronism, but never underestimate
the man in the white tuxedo. This latest edition in the James
Bond franchise is—surprise—entertaining. Pierce Brosnan seems,
finally, at home in the role, with a swagger that makes his
Bond more like Sean Connery’s than Roger Moore’s. Of course,
having Halle Berry around as a fellow agent, kicking mucho
butt, helps take some of the sexist sting out of the Bond
films’ usual macho ethos.
Die
Another Day starts out with a bang. Correction, make that
a series of bangs. From the extreme-sports spectacle of Bond
(Brosnan) surfboarding into North Korea on the icy waters
of the Pacific, through a reckless chase by hovercraft over
a minefield (don’t ask), to Bond’s torture at the hands of
a comically sexy Communist dominatrix, the film is fast and
sly enough to keep the mind from lingering on the absurdities.
Just when things start to get really gritty, the filmmakers
pull back. Bond jets off to Cuba, where he ogles Jinx (Berry)
rising out of the warm waters of the Caribbean in an orange
bikini. This glamorous vision is presented with the reverence
of Venus rising from the sea—a reverence that is classic Bond
kitsch.
Of course, there’s a plot. There’s a snooty, hyperactive villain
named Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), with whom Bond has a
smashing swordfight; Zao, a DNA-damaged assassin and freak
(Rick Yune); and an icy blonde almost as obnoxious as the
villain, burdened with the typically silly name Miranda Frost
(Rosamund Pike). There’s lots of ice and plenty of explosions,
as the film honors the age-old practice of having attractive
people beat the hell out of each other.
Lee Tamahori is the perfect filmmaker for this material. Part
of being a good Bond director is handling the franchise’s
legacy with care. This is more than engineering the ridiculously
overblown action (and staying out of the way of the second-unit
director). It’s making the leaden double entendres seem, if
not exactly witty, at least funny in a you-don’t-mind-hearing-them-again
sort of way. It’s taking characters the audience has seen
18 times before, and finding a way to make them entertaining
one more time. This may sound like a backhanded compliment,
but Tamahori’s unsubtle instincts are well-employed. He clearly
likes the dumb jokes, but doesn’t linger on them—they have
a pleasing lightness. Tamahori’s Achilles’ heel, a tendency
toward grotesque excess—witness his bludgeoning domestic drama
Once Were Warriors, and crude film noir Mulholland
Falls—is appropriately restrained by the necessity of
fitting the film within the confines of a PG-13 rating.
Despite the end of the Cold War and the many pronouncements
of his irrelevance, James Bond refuses to die. And this film
is just deft enough to keep him alive a bit longer.
—Shawn
Stone
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