OK, so best (and worst) terrorism movies? If ‘Blown Away’ anchors one end of the spectrum, are there good movie treatments? Is it possible to make a good movie on this subject in the current period? I’d certainly put in a plug for ‘Battle of Algiers’ as the simply the best, and probably unrepeatable, because it is impossible to make an intelligent movie on the subject in America today.
But what do people think of ‘The Siege’ which came under sustained attack for its use of stereotypes, but which (I must admit) I found pretty compelling. Fine performances by Denzel Washington, Tony Shalhoub, Annette Bening and even (before his “slide from greatnessâ€) Bruce Willis. And at least some sense of the sources/causes of terrorism and the dangers of Patriot Act-type reaction.
chris, i’ve taken the liberty of splitting your comment into a topic of its own.
i haven’t seen “the siege”. an interesting indian terrorism movie is mani ratnam’s “roja”, which looks at kashmir; also his later “dil se”. but i’m not sure if you’re asking only about contemporary american movies. if not, how about “the crying game”?
more accessible to non-indian audiences is santosh sivan’s “the terrorist”. a loose fictionalization of the assassination of then prime-minister rajiv gandhi by a tamil tiger suicide bomber. come for the cheery theme, stay for the gorgeous cinematography. netflix has it. sivan used to be mani ratnam’s cinematographer, maybe still is.
The best terrorist film I can think of is Volker Schlondorf’s The Legend of Rita (2000), which is loosely based on the Bader-Meinhof Gang. It’s a pretty smart and enthralling piece of filmmaking.
I had forgotten about ‘Legend of Rita’, which I also liked a lot. Arnab has forced me to finally join Netflix, after years of resistance and loyalty to the local video store. So I trawled the blog and my first 10 selections are:
The Terrorist
Oldboy
Haasil
Kontroll
Memories of Murder
Layer Cake
Roja
Taste of Others
Cypher
Off the Map
I’ll do my best not to post on movies that have already been discussed to death.
I have to see “The Terrorist”–and I’m also looking forward to the new Israeli/Palestinian film called… “Paradise”? “Road to Paradise”? A ‘thriller’ of sorts, told from the p.o.v. of a suicide bomber. And I have high hopes for the Tony Kushner-penned Spielberg movie “Munich.”
But the best one I have seen is “Black Sunday”. Straight thriller, but unnerving and effective.
A bit more idiosyncratic is Elias Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention” — not really a ‘terrorist movie,’ it’s a strange absurdist comedy about being Palestinian — as if Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton filmed sought to capture Joe Sacco’s journalism on film. There are some very odd bits with terrorists, including a musical number and karate fighting.
Fiction seems to handle terrorism a lot better. (Maybe?) Last week the NYTimes ran a piece by Benjamin Kunkel, novelist-du-jour, about incarnations of terrorism in contemporary fiction… and his point seemed to be, look there’s some terrorism in fiction. (In other words, bland and seemingly pointless.)
In addition to the big gun DeLillo, I would highly recommend Jennifer Egan’s _Look at Me_, which has among its storylines a terrorist ‘sleeper’ in small-town Iowa. Damn good book.
i watched “the peacemaker” on hbo demand last night and it turned out to be a terrorist movie of sorts. this is pre-9/11, of course, and the terrorist is a serb who is repaying the western powers for arming and indirectly causing the yugoslavian meltdown. there is a brief, dignified soliloquy about the “peacemakers” having to feel the pain they’ve caused around the world in their own frontyards, and later a shot of the terrorist looking out of a window at the new york skyline as his plane comes in to land. the twin towers are visible in the distance. felt slightly disorienting.
this too would be a good airline movie. other than timepass the only interesting feature of this movie is that it features attractive protagonists (kidman and clooney) who don’t take the opportunity of using possible nuclear holocaust as a backdrop for romance. in fact there’s very little sexual tension in the movie at all (until the coda at the end, and not even really there).
Mainstream movies do find it tough to portray the, often legitimate, complaints that lead to terrorism. ‘Peacemaker’ does it very well, not least because the Serb is so restrained, and it helps that we first see him as a piano teacher to young kids. ‘Air Force One’ on the other hand, has a manic Gary Oldman as the Russian nationalist hijacker, and though many of the lines he is given to read are actually pretty good at demonstrating Western hypocrisy, his whole demeanor is designed to make him appear a madman, and hence to de-legitimate the cause he is supposedly fighting for.
chris, only just read your list carefully. if you’re going to rent one of the mani ratnams rent “dil se” before “roja”. it is a flawed movie but to my mind more interesting. plus you’ll get to see some blockbuster song sequences–including an amazing one on top of a train, and another one in ladakh.
‘The Terrorist’ is really extraordinarily good. Told from the perspective of the suicide bomber, it is that rare film that doesn’t treat the terrorist as a black box, incapable of understanding. At one point “the leader” describes her as a “thinking bomb” and that captures nicely the dilemma the film tries to portray. There is also a remarkable scene in which five young women essentially audition to be chosen as the bomber, describing their experience, commitment and so on.
The violence is heavily understated: you see blood splatters but no wound; a car explodes noiselessly after hitting a mine; machine guns quietly chatter at unseen targets.
Most remarkable, as Arnab says, is the cinematography. Beautiful close-ups of faces, rain drops everywhere, on faces, on strands of hair, on leaves. Truly gorgeous. There are some sequences that are a little precious for my taste: unnecessary slow motion, too much playing with the focus. But still a fine movie. I watched the trailer and it had great quotes from all the usual suspects (A.O. Scott, Turan, Ebert) so I’m surprised it passed me by.
I had completely forgotten about ‘Arlington Road’ when I first posted about terrorism movies. It is playing on FX at the moment and it is remarkably good. Jeff Bridges as the anguished ex-terrorism expert who lost his wife in a bombing and now appears obsessed and paranoid, and a very creepy Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack (playing against type) as terrorists who move in next door. The ending is bizarre, but the bottom line is that Bridges and Robbins bring care, professionalism and thoughtfulness to everything they do.
Though I haven’t seen it in a great while I remember Fassbinder’s The Third Generation being an intriguing film about bourgeois folks taking up terrorism in the Red Brigade/Baader-Meinhof fashion.
I would also recommend the documentary on the SLA and Patty Hearst “Guerilla.”
It is not exactly film criticism but the most recent issue of *New Political Science* (28/3 September 2006) has an article by Boggs and Pollard entitled ‘Hollywood and the Spectacle of Terrorism.’ Baudrillard is really just a hook to survey the evolving themes of terrorism movies from Hitchcock to Greengrass. It does pay particular attention to ‘The Siege’ of which, as I noted above, I am very fond.
Huh! The editor teaches here at Hamline; I’ve reviewed a couple manuscripts on film for him. I’m going to go bug him for a copy….
chris, i watched the siege last night on hbo ondemand. i didn’t hate it but i didn’t particularly like it either. i am interested in hearing why you like it–or what about its narrative of terrorism you found compelling.
i’m reading down this old list of comments, and i find that chris says:
“I’ll do my best not to post on movies that have already been discussed to death.”
is this really the spirit with which you guys started this blog??? WHAT HAPPENED?!?
gio, why do you hate our freedoms?
Well, setting politics aside for a moment, I thought The Siege was a well-acted, efficient thriller. The action sequences are nicely crafted, and the bombings (especially the bus and the theater) are quite harrowing. Everyone puts in good performances: Denzel, Tony Shalhoub, Sami Bouajila, even Bruce Willis.
But beyond that, it dealt intelligently with the subject of terrorism. On a whole range of issues — US complicity in causing/producing terrorism, the dilemma and dual identity of muslim immigrants in the US, police versus military responses to terrorism, the utility of torture — you got serious, nuanced, discussion that recognized complexity, that there are at least two sides to every question. I suppose, for me, it seemed prescient for a 1998 film to deal with so many of these issues. And, of course, muslims were not treated en masse as wild-eyed terrorists.
Now, this is all relative. Films like ‘The Terrorist’ (above) are better, but for a Hollywood film, I found it superior. What underwhelmed you about it?