Reel Politique: Links of Interest
I was curious to see Vantage Point because it was the first “presidential assassination” film to come out in a long time (I can think of In the Line of Fire in ‘93, though the series Prison Break recently dwelt on the subject), partially because it seemed like an odd time to proffer the subject of a presidential killing, right in the middle of a disputations election campaign. The paranoid in me wonders if the media masters were trying to prime us for some candidate elimination, the way several assassination movies came out prior to the death of JFK. But Vantage Point proved to be more a thriller version of a “web of life” film, with the film (no president is killed) at first following the viewpoints of several witnesses of an incident in a public square in Spain, in serial order before backtracking to the next witness, whose segment adds more complexity, until the film settles into a Bourne-style chase film (it’s directed by Pete Travis, who comes from TV, as does credited writer Barry Levy). Then by coincidence I received the new Atlantic which briefly turned into a fan magazine, with a cover story on Britney Spears and the paparazzi, and a terrific essay by Ross Douthat on Hollywood elites’ obsession with ’70s paranoia films and the failure of the recent spate of Iraq films, a piece that seemed to directly address my worries, before going on to an intriguing explanation for the low box office temperature of Iraq dramas.
“The age of George W. Bush and the Iraq War meshes much more neatly with the industry’s ’70s nostalgia,” he writes. “Just not quite as neatly, perhaps, as Hollywood seems to think. As we’ve seen, the broad-brush similarities between the two decades have been used to impressive cinematic effect. But because the two decades don’t map precisely onto one another, the ’70s revival is more successful, both artistically and at the box office, when it’s intimated than when it’s made explicit. And the closer a movie hews to real-world events, the greater the strain of making the Vietnam-era mood fit the Iraq-era facts.”
Read the story, then hear the author interviewed.