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...scenarios and lay on comedy or pathos with a trowel. Solondz (who also did Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and Palindromes) creates worlds suppurating with unspeakable domestic horror and lends them the benison of tragicomic sympathy. Whatever domestic crimes the people close to you may have committed, in the end they're family and you have to try to understand them. This sense of connection, despite all, and the pitch-perfect playing of Solondz's large cast, makes Life During Wartime one of the year's best films, in whatever year it ultimately finds theatrical release...
...flowers. Here he trashes half of lower Louisiana and rips the breathing tube out of an old lady's nose. Both narcotized and energized by his drug regimen, he confronts everybody with the intense stare of a man trying desperately to stay awake, like Robert Mitchum at the end of a long night and too many tokes. But whether he's playing it stricken or stuporous, Cage gives an oddly compelling tutorial in Method acting. Note to budding thespians: Don't try this onstage...
...afternoon, a key ally of Berlusconi's, Northern League chief Umberto Bossi, was declaring that "the mission in Afghanistan has reached its end" and calling for Italy's troops to be brought home by Christmas. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, a die-hard Berlusconi loyalist, said Friday there are no immediate plans for a pullout but expressed serious doubts about the situation in Afghanistan. "Much has to change," Frattini told the daily Corriere della Sera. "There needs to be ... more attention on the people who suffer and on reconstruction. The general vision of the mission must be changed." Frattini wants more...
...Italy's role in Afghanistan is outweighed by the reality that the Prime Minister must ultimately stick with Washington. Other European leaders face the same dilemma, especially now that U.S. President Barack Obama has arrived with a new approach to diplomacy that largely jibes with Europe's. "In the end, all you can really do is keep your soldiers there and accompany them until the day that Obama sees it is O.K. for a pullback," says Romano. "It's a very passive diplomacy, but it's not irrational. You can't really undermine American foreign policy, especially now." (Read "Congressional...
...retaliation, the insurgents will rain hellfire down on any representative of the international community [in Somalia], whether it is peacekeepers or humanitarian-aid organizations," says John Prendergast, a Horn of Africa expert and head of the Washington-based Enough! Project, which works to end genocide. "The U.S. got their high-value target, but the price to Somalia and to those trying to stabilize it will be very high. It is a cost-benefit analysis that defies easy assessment...