"A real blast."

I love a good bit of controversy, and I love a controversial film even more. So it brings me a great deal of joy to give y'all an advance warning of a pretty staggering film that is coming your way that will fuck some people up. The film is an animated Israeli documentary called Waltz with Bashir, and it details a man's efforts to reconnect with other members of his army division during Israel's Lebanon War in the early 80s, specifically in relation to two massacres that occurred in two refugee camps during that time.

The film is remarkable, using the smae sort of psychogenic fugue-narrative that David Lynch worked so well in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but applying it to real-life trauma and shock. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, but you could almost call it a head-on collision between A Scanner Darkly and Redacted, except much much better than the latter and on par with the former.

So there are a couple of reasons why people are going to lose their shit about this film- one is that it deals with the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but what's going to cause the big freak-outs left and right is that the massacring in those refugee camps was done by Christians. Since contemporary evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has taken to walking a hard pro-Israel line (basically in order to force the hand of the divine, which is stupid, ignorant, and blasphemous all at the same time and perfectly illustrative of what's achingly wrong with the current theological mindset of U.S. Christianity), I don't imagine that they're going to take too well to this, and I can't wait.

So when Pat Robertson and Rexella van Impe or whoever is trying to exploit faith for power starts decrying this film in the near future, you can remember you got your heads up from me.

Today I saw:
I DON'T FEEL LIKE DANCING (d. Joachim DOLLHOPF and Evi GOLDBRUNNER) ***
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (d. Ari FOLMAN) *** 1/2

Yesterday I saw:
C.R.A.Z.Y. (d. Jean-Marc VALLEE) ***
SHROOMS (d. Paddy BREADNACH) * 1/2