Word: waltz
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...since Walt 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...
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...
...potentially more 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...
...Over the last three years, the most searched for celebrity dancer was Stacy Keibler, with over five times the searches of any other contestant. Searches for the leggy blonde finalist in the show's second season weren't for her samba, waltz or cha-cha; searchers were primarily interested in finding pictures, specifically "hot pictures," of the female wrestler. One thing that can be said for Stacy's searches is that they have sustained after her 2006 appearance on the show, more than doubling the volume of searches she experienced before taking up ballroom dancing and at peak times increasing...
...Shine a Light isn't the record of a unique event, so it's not on the exalted level of The Last Waltz. But it has its own fascination. The film is less about the music than about the dedication of show-biz troupers--about doing your job, year after year, as if it's your joy. Jagger and Keith Richards, no less than Ethel Merman and Henny Youngman, have the veteran performers' love of pleasing an audience with routines that used to be antic but are now antique. By now, surely, they have performed Satisfaction more times than Judy...