Word: machos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...movie has torrents of words and goes heavy on macho posturing; at times it suggests a ragged off-off-Broadway play. And De Palma is not going for subtlety here: Flake, the craziest of the squad members, has a Confederate flag for his bedspread - he's a lunatic Reb. But Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11, and his strongest cinematic and political statement at least since Casualties of War, his Vietnam...
...Angeles. Corson spends altogether too much time describing her floundering "battle with fish" (in his view, becoming a sushi chef is only slightly less difficult than becoming a surgeon, and requires a considerably stronger stomach). But his book is also peppered with fascinating diversions into the macho culture of sushi bars, the physiology of octopuses, and the cultivation of wasabi, a plant so rare that sushi restaurants almost always substitute a blend of mustard powder and horseradish...
...film then spends most of its time trying to cure Chuck of his animosity toward gays. He attends a gay ball dressed as Count Dracula and befriends a tough cop who's secretly gay. Finally he convinces his macho pals in the firehouse, who had turned on him and Larry, that gay ain't so bad. The "gay" firemen's presumed crimes against nature matter less than their membership in the anti-arson brotherhood; camaraderie is the straight version of gay pride...
...this "Death to Israel" stuff is of a piece with normal Hizballah propaganda. But what's different about the Spider Web museum as a whole is the macho, bragging tone. Hizballah was once famous for being one of the few Arab organizations that let its actions speak louder than words. The swagger shown since last summer is both a sign of newfound confidence, and of weakness. For though Hizballah may have won the war against Israel, it has not yet won the peace...
...wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That's a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order...