Word: bashir
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...think he owes Clint a favor. It's also the consensus that this session of Cannes, where more than half the competing films have already been shown, is a relatively weak one, and that Eastwood's most acclaimed competitor so far is the Israeli animated documentary Waltz With Bashir. We'll see. Only the rash try to read the minds of the jurors, and every year's awards list brings surprises and disappointments...
...this year's Cannes film festival, the first consensus critical hit was Waltz from Bashir, an animated documentary about middle-aged Israeli men haunted by their wartime Army service. In a few days we'll see a bio-pic on soccer legend Diego Maradonna, from two-time Palme d'Or winner Emir Kusturica. Today brought three docs from three continents: James Toback's Tyson, an extended interview (plus copious fight clips) with the former heavyweight champ; Daniel Leconte's It's Hard Being Loved by Jerks, about a French magazine brought to court for defaming Islam; and Jia Zhangke...
...Disney made Snow White, most animated features have followed the Disney mold: cute and colorful, with talking animals and a coming-of-age plot meant to inspire and amuse. Even a seeming exception like Persepolis found saving humor in its girl-grows-up story. Ari Forman's Waltz With Bashir is a break from all this: an animated documentary about the lingering, subterranean effects of war on the director and some old friends who had served in the Israeli Army during the 1982 incursion into Lebanon. The are still haunted by the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila...
Though the war was decades ago, and the combatants middle-Eastern, the issues the film raises are in no way provincial. Waltz With Bashir should touch all those who see it - both the vast majority who have been raised on gung-ho war movies, and the small minority who find that the truth is the opposite of the fiction. "It's like nothing you've seen in American movies," Forman has said. "No glam, no glory. Just very young men going nowhere, shooting at no one they know, getting shot by no one they know, then going home and trying...
...lasting question is the effect of the Iraq occupation on U.S. soldiers. The dreadful nature of that conflict hasn't touched most Americans. Its troops alone bear the scar of war; they carry it home with them - if they come home - and those nightmares may never end. Waltz With Bashir is about the cold fingers of memory that clutch the heart. Forman's exemplary film says that only by exposing the wounds can they begin to heal. The message of the futility of war has rarely been painted with such bold strokes...