War film fizzles amid beautiful photography

When Roland Joffé’s name gets mentioned by a film studio it always comes immediately before or after his best film, The Killing Fields.

But there are two sides to Joffé: the director that made The Killing Fields, a marvelous picture about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the director who made Super Mario Bros. and the more recent torture-porn Captivity.

His new film seems to have introduced yet another Joffé, one that falls right between the others. In There Be Dragons, he maintains the superb visual style of his best work but with the scatterbrained mediocrity of his worst. The film seems to have so much potential, but it never takes off because it languishes in boring backstory, overlapping narration and flashbacks within flashbacks, no doubt an unintended Inception homage.

Dragons begins with a reporter, his ailing father and a trip to Spain, where flashbacks and narration guide us as we meet the father’s long-buried demons — “There be dragons … in my past,” he tells the son. The father is Manolo, a turncoat in the Spanish revolution. He plays both sides against each other — occasionally over a woman — while periodically encountering a childhood friend, Father Josemaría Escrivá, who has since been sainted for his works, which include the creation of Opus Dei, the Catholic institution.

The film flip-flops between the two contrasting characters as it meanders through the Spanish Civil War, a brutal conflict that turned brother against brother, and everyone against Spain’s many faithful priests. Manolo, who is the film’s catalyst and ultimate villain, is also the main character even though his eternal redemption seems to confound everyone including the priest he so begrudgingly hates. Manolo is played by Wes Bentley, the weed dealer from American Beauty, an actor who seems torn between the Manolo’s despicable and contemplative sides. Escrivá is played warmly by Charlie Cox, though in too much of the film he’s got this babe-in-the-woods “awe shucks” gaze. 

Costars include Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko and Rodrigo Santoro, who aren’t given nearly as many bad lines or as much obnoxious brooding as the Manolo character. Dougray Scott has a minor role as the reporter son and he’s given some heavy-handed dialogue that smacks like overwritten trite: “And that is how I went searching for a saint and found my father instead,” or “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” It never quite surpasses the film’s first spoken line, though: “I was a war baby.”

Some of the scenes are quite good, including one where Escrivá is hiding within an apartment’s walls and the soldiers come knocking. In another a man must execute a woman who was framed for espionage. He fires a gun, but not at the person you expect. This all takes place amid some truly wonderful photography. Cinematographer Gabriel Beristain outdoes himself in every scene. 

  

The acting is sub-par and boring, which only makes the long plot so much longer. Occasionally it loses its focus, which I think is Escrivá, though you can’t quite tell when Manolo’s sneering face dominates every shot. Overall, the film is epic in scope, but never in delivery.

2009: We survived, and so did the cinema

What a glorious year for movies! The good ones found audiences (Hurt Locker) and the bad ones were panned, even by their hardcore fans (Transformers 2). I feel like that’s justice. To finish off 2009, here are the best films of the last year. See you in 2010.

— Michael Clawson

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10. The Blind Side
Sandra Bullock is a talented actress. She so rarely gets to show that off, though. In The Blind Side, John Lee Hancock’s captivating human drama, Bullock presents the beautiful skills she’s been squandering in rom-com garbage. She plays a wealthy and white Tennessee socialite who plucks a poor and black teen off the street and adopts him. Race is a minor theme, as is football, but the movie has more important messages: it’s about the lengths people are willing to go to help those in need. Blind Side is also exceptionally cast with great performances by country singer Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron and child actors Jae Head and Lily Collins. It should also be noted that Blind Side is one of two movies this year — the other being Invictus — that did something I've been asking from sports movies for years: it showed the action on the football field without using omnipresent sports commentators. Audiences don't need voices to narrate sports, yet it's a Hollywood staple that is rarely ever absent from sports movies.

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9. Knowing
Instantly perplexing and feverishly debated earlier this year, Knowing was either loved or hated with no room in between. It stars Nicolas Cage as a college professor who uncovers the fate of the universe in a string of numbers pulled from a time capsule. Besides being a convincing thriller, with some horror-type scares thrown in — not to mention a plane and a subway crash that are so realistic they’re scary — the film has actual dogma woven into its philosophical themes. Are events random, or are they part of a grander, more dreadful scheme? Knowing knows, but director Alex Proyas (Dark City) doesn’t bonk you on the head with the answer.

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8. Coraline/Fantastic Mr. Fox
Stop-motion animation is not going away. In fact, with these two films, it did better in 2009 than hand-drawn animation, which only had one release (The Princess and the Frog). Coraline, about a little girl getting sucked into a fake version of her own world, was creepy and a visual delight. And Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s quirky tale about a thieving squab-eating fox, was hilarious and intoxicatingly brilliant. Both films are based on children’s books, but both work because they don’t speak down to children. They speak up to them.

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7. The Hangover
No comedy from this year can even get close to The Hangover, a rip-roaring comedy powerhouse that sunk its teeth into our funny bone and never let go. Starring a bunch of underrated funnymen — Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper — the Vegas-set movie told a familiar story: men go to bachelor party, party too hard and then wake up with blurry visions of the previous night. As they retrace their steps the next day they come across Mike Tyson, a tiger, taser demonstrations and overacting goofball Ken Jeong. Classic comedies are few and far between, but this one made it look easy.

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6. Avatar
I wrote off director James Cameron for more than a decade. Who didn’t, really? But he proved me wrong with Avatar, his long-awaited, super-expensive sci-fi fantasy. Told using massive amounts of computer animation, as well as motion capture suits, Avatar is about a man who uploads his brain activity into the body of an alien being. And as that alien, called a Na’vi, he falls in love (with the sexiest of alien women), becomes a member of the tribe, rides a dragon and redeems his sins when man tries to mine the beautiful planet all this takes place on. The animation is incredible and awe-inspiring, the world is gorgeous, the characters are fully realized and complete, and the action is everything you’d expect from the guy that gave us Aliens and two Terminator films. James Cameron, you’ve proved me wrong.

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5. (500) Days of Summer
Relationships can get messy. It’s not pessimistic; it’s reality. (500) Days of Summer is the most realistic of romantic comedies, or maybe it’s a romantic drama. Featuring star players Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, Summer is an exploration on how fragile the human heart is, but also how resilient it is. It begins on Day 1 — or is it Day 500 — and jumps around from there to points through the 500 days our stars are in love. But a word of caution: “This is not a love story.” No, it’s so much more.

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4. Up
Pixar films make the world smile. And Up gives one of the biggest smiles. Carefully animated and expertly orchestrated — from characters and plot to music and laugh-out-loud gags — Up will make you look at the world with warmth and a little bit of adventure. Poor Mr. Ferguson, a widower facing an eminent domain fight, just wants to go to Paradise Falls. So he straps balloons to his house and flies it to South America. A little Boy Scout tags along, along with talking dogs and a female bird named Kevin, and the adventure soars. Up is a pure movie, as are all of Pixar’s movies.

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3. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s wordy and violent World War II film is a hilarious catharsis for everything that happened between us and the Nazis. Yes, Hitler is killed at the end, as is most of the German high command, but Inglourious Basterds is not meant to be historically accurate. It’s Tarantino’s version of events. Brad Pitt plays Aldo the Apache, a renegade soldier stomping through France butchering Nazis. There are other characters, too: Hans Landa, the sadistic Jew Hunter; Donny Donowitz, the Bear Jew; and Shosanna Dreyfuss, a theater owner who plans to use film stock to decapitate the head of the Nazi party. Over-the-top and ridiculous, Basterds is Tarantino having a blast.

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2. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman is the next great director. After Juno no one was quite sure what to make of him: one hit wonder or bona fide filmmaker? Here we learn he’s legit, the real deal all the way. In the superbly written Up In the Air, he gives us George Clooney, a man who lives his entire life in airports, rental cars and from his suitcase. He’s hired to fire people for employers who don’t like firing people; and in this economy business is booming. The movie is so much more than that, though: he gets an energetic young apprentice, he falls in love with a female version of himself and he finds his shaky morals thrown off balance by the world that’s changing around him. A movie for our time, Up In the Air is also a terrific portrait of a lonely man.

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1. The Hurt Locker
I knew Kathryn Bigelow’s realistic and emotionally challenging war movie The Hurt Locker was my favorite movie of the year about 10 minutes into it. And that was in June, before so many other great movies would even be seen. Ignoring all the typical Hollywood action-film rules and choosing actors capable of realistic fear and anger, Hurt Locker stormed out of the gate with raw physical power. It knew what it was about, and it understood its characters in every way characters could be understood. It was about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, but it’s also about why men and women fight, how they cope, and why they second guess everything when they’re out there exposed to enemy machine gun nests, roadside bombs and sniper fire. This is an important film, a film we’ll be talking about many years after 2009.

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Honorable Mentions
Here are some films that almost made the list: Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex drama The Girlfriend Experience, the brutally honest Precious, John Hillcoat’s faithful version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the awesome Star Trek reinvention, the timely and appropriate military drama The Messenger, and Spike Jonze’s delightfully strange Where the Wild Things Are.

McNamara, icon of war, bares his soul

This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.

The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.

The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.

McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.

The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.

Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.

Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.

Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.

Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.

Tarantino, that glourious basterd!

World War II has been covered so extensively on film by so many gifted directors — and some hacks — that any true originality in the genre was mined long ago. Quentin Tarantino found a way around all the worn plots with this audacious strategy in his intentionally misspelled Inglourious Basterds: he wrote his own version of the war.

That’s right, he just made stuff up. That should be sacrilege to history, especially since WWII is hallowed ground even 60-plus years after its end. But Tarantino gets away with it — he gets away with everything — because his film provides a catharsis that the war itself could not provide. In his version of events, the war ends after a rag-tag group of Jewish Americans stage a mass execution of German high command in a little French movie theater. Film buffs should have fun with that movie theater part. Only Tarantino, a noted film buff, could stage a gunfight in a projection booth. Only Tarantino could kill Hitler with in an inferno fueled by nitrate film stock. Only Tarantino would have a movie critic parachute into Nazi-occupied Europe to help end the war.

Full of likeable every-guy heroes, menacing German villains, seductive femme fatales, fully-dressed locations and sets, exquisite costumes of square-shouldered Gestapo overcoats and tatty American tank tops and fatigues, and a variety of languages (German, French, Italian, English), Inglourious Basterds is, for the most part, your run-of-the-mill World War II movie. But Tarantino filters the story through his movie-loving brain to produce this mish-mash of cocaine-induced hyper-stylized film homages. The title may refer to its heroes, a troop of vigilante soldiers who have no higher command to answer to, but it also refers to the bastardization of other film genres to tell its story.

It’s been widely reported that Tarantino wanted to merge a classic war movie with an epic Spaghetti Western. At one point the film was going to be called Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France, an allusion to the famous cowboy opera by Sergio Leone, an obvious influence here. Remarkably, almost inexplicably, QT accomplishes this Frankenstein-like assembly and then gives it the juice it needs to stomp through Kraut-occupied France in one of the most daring films of the year. Daring because you must adopt a new WWII history and also because impatient Tarantino fans will likely be challenged as the dialogue proves to be painstakingly, yet pleasantly, prosperous and the violence is shortlived, albeit quite gory when it does finally turn up in a head-smashing homerun derby.

The first scene could easily be right from a Leone film: a French farmer hosts an unannounced SS officer during his search for Jews in the countryside. They talk slowly, carefully. The Nazi is given milk. They smoke from pipes. The tension builds. They’re playing chess with their dialogue. A couple minutes stretches into a dozen. The officer is smart. The farmer is trapped. By the time the Nazi asks, “Are you hiding Jews in this house?” the man has tears streaming down his face. Like Leone, Tarantino allows dialogue to serve as suspense.

Not all of the dialogue is as flowery, though. Consider Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the leader of the Basterds, a group of American troopers sent into France to scalp Nazis first and ask questions … well, never. Raine talks like he learned English from a drill instructor: “You probably heard we ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business. We in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’.” Each word is nearly grunted, but he grunts to an unheard rhythm, and Pitt grins from behind the character, a stone-cold killer reduced to lovable miscreant if only because history has allowed us to hate Nazis as much as him.

Raine’s patrol includes a bat-wielding slugger nicknamed the Bear Jew, and German defector Hugo Stiglitz, who’s introduced in a Blaxploitation style so bold his name should include exclamation marks. The Basterds roam the countryside, tallying up notches on the butts of their Garands, Thompsons and, in the case of the Bear Jew, his bloody Louisville Slugger. A British general eventually concocts a plan to assassinate a number of high-value German officials — we know their names: Goebbels, Bormann, Hitler — as they debut a new propaganda film showing the Third Reich flourishing. The movie, of course, is some kind of Leni Riefenstahl parody involving a German sharpshooter who single-handedly kills upwards of 300 GIs.

I will let you discover where it goes from there, and trust me when I say that Tarantino will not hesitate doing anything. His movies are exciting in that way: they can go in any direction, and they’re bound by no formula. Tarantino movies are also hilarious, and this one is no exception. I will say that there are some wonderful performances by Diane Kruger, as a German double agent Bridget von Hammersmark, and French actress Mélanie Laurent, who has a wonderful scene set to the anachronistic music of David Bowie’s “Cat People.”

German actor Christopher Waltz should be a shoe-in for an acting nomination this year for his role as Col. Hans Landa, the officer from the first scene and many others like it. His dialogue is prepared so meticulously, with reverence to the needs of the movie and of the character, yet he explodes from the pressed Nazi uniform. He’s one of the most demented characters created this year, and somehow also one of the most electric and captivating.

Pipe-smoking Landa, the Basterds, the exploding cinema … the imagery, almost iconic in stature, will likely remind people of Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One, another original WWII film. In one of the more perversely metaphorical scenes from that film, a woman gives birth inside a bombed-out tank, bullet belts serving as stirrups. Basterds attempts another coup on the genre with potent images, punchy dialogue and this punk energy that only Tarantino can produce.

Inglourious Basterds is the most originally entertaining film of the year, and it earns it with every scene.

Beholding the blast and its collision with flesh

I’m certain of several things this summer, mainly these two: First, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the worst film of the decade. And second, The Hurt Locker, which is effective counter-programming for transforming robots, is the best film of the summer.

Talking with Hurt Locker star, and early Oscar contender for best actor, Jeremy Renner, he agrees with me on all these points. Except maybe that Transformers one, to which he simply says, “Hey, to each his own. Nothing against Michael Bay.”

Renner, whose claim to fame before this was playing cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer, plays a hotshot bomb disposal tech in Iraq in this gritty and excruciatingly intense Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days) war movie. I type “war movie” with some trepidation, though, because the movie is so much more: it’s an action movie, a psychological thriller and, ultimately, a character study about men drawn to the flame of what might be their own demise. Why do men go to war? This movie has that answer and many more.

Above all else, though, Renner just nails this nuanced, provocative performance of a man riding the razor’s edge that is bomb disposal in a warzone. In one scene he removes his bomb-proof protective gear so he can lay against a bomb, feel it’s mechanisms, channel its soul. “If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die comfortably,” he says. No movie is half as intense as this one this year.

Renner, who said he is one of five actors being considered for the lead role in a Road Warrior reinvention (by Mad Max creator George Miller, no less), sat down and spoke with Volume/Pick-Up Flix before Hurt Locker opened in the Valley on July 10, and then expanded on July 17. Take mine and his word, and see this movie.

— Michael Clawson

Volume: Is America ready for movies about this war?
Jeremy Renner: I think America’s ready for this film. Without a doubt. If we box it into saying this is a war film, we’re boxing it in unfairly. At that point there have already been preconceived notions put upon it. It’s almost unfair to say that about films, like, “Oh look here, this is a real tearjerker movie.” That’s unfair to the film because it sends viewers into it with expectations; it’s going to limit the experience. So to call this just a war movie is unfair to the viewers, especially since it’s so much more. As far as being “ready” for this film, there’s a big audience for it. This film is an immersion. You go in to experience it, to feel it. That’s how well it’s made.

Volume: War is, for the most part, a boys club. Do you think having a female director brought a fresh perspective to these types of actions scenes and also just the bonding soldiers go through?
JR: Kathryn has always proven to be a phenomenal, detail-oriented action director. She does film male subject matter for the most part …

Volume: There is nothing more male than Point Break.
JR: Exactly. But her gender doesn’t come into play here because her abilities are so focused and her energy is so exact in the details. I wonder if, in her mind, she wasn’t directing a war movie, the way I was thinking I wasn’t acting in a war movie. I can’t fathom how she works, because she’s so intricate. She’s a painter, a voyeur, an artist with a camera … she’s so many things, and I never thought, “Oh and she’s a woman, too.” She’s better than that.

Volume: You’ve said the words voyeur and immersive. They must have been themes because the film was shot with dozens of cameras from dozens of different angles allowing an immersive, almost voyeuristic look at the material.
JR: The idea was to put you in those streets watching these guys diffuse bombs. There were days on set that I never saw a camera. Literally, days. We called them ninja cameras because they were on roofs, on balconies, under cars to get my feet walking past. She put her cameras in the most interesting places.

Volume: What kinds of things did real soldiers tell you before you went into this project?
JR: It was more me asking them questions, because they weren’t volunteering too much because they’ve never worked with actors. They learn how to make bombs and diffuse bombs for real, so dealing with some jackass actor was low on their list of priorities. I knew when I started asking good questions, though, because they told me stuff was top secret. One thing they stressed was that they would never run up to a car bomb that was on fire, which happens in the movie. Unless, of course, the president was in a nearby building or something. They’d send the bot down almost always. Some guys told me they relied on the bots so heavily that they rarely got out of their cars to take care of these roadside bombs. The soldiers I talked to did tell me about one guy who would walk up to IEDs, kick them and say things like, “Well, I guess I won,” and he’d pick the bomb up and drag it back.

Volume: As far fetched as it was, though, I felt like your character’s renegade behavior was always justified, even when he ran up to bombs on fire. He was going against the grain on everything, even his own life.
JR: That’s a testament to how well this film was written. My character is clearly going against what he’s learned is safe, and going against all the instincts that pull people away from a bomb. He goes because he feels like he has to. He’s drawn to the danger out of necessity.

Volume: There are no villains in this movie. No nefarious bomb-making schemers. No ex-Marine Jihadists. Nothing like that. A lesser film would have been you hunting down and killing a bomb maker rather than you and your motivations in war — call it the Hollywood version.
JR: That makes the film more real. I mean, look at Hurt Locker: there isn’t a whole lot of plot, right? It’s just characters. A more Hollywood-type movie would have all the necessary plots and turns and developments. This film is free of all that. It moves on its own, to its own beat. It’s unrelenting.

When a tango just won't do ...

Some movies leave us speechless. Some movies just leave us. They silently float from the screen in pieces until nothing’s left but emptiness.

Ten years ago I was working as a projectionist at a movie theater. After a shift I sat in on the late showing of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, which ends on this contemplative note, silent and soothing. The camera panned up and we were looking at the stars with only our thoughts and nothing else, and then the screen faded to black. Everyone just sat in the theater. No one moved. No one spoke. In the hallway, you could have heard the electrons spinning on the head of a pin as people filed out while reaching into their souls for answers to the film.

I’ve seen many good movies since then, but none that had the same effect. None until Waltz With Bashir, a film that ends with a punch to the gut, a gasping horror. And then silence. Spoiling the ending any further would be criminal, so I’ll zip it up there.

Waltz With Bashir is a war story made even more graphic and — irony be damned — real through its medium of choice: animation. It’s animated in the rotoscope style, which involves drawing or painting over live-action movement captured on film. It also comes from Israel, so the language spoken is primarily Hebrew. All totaled up, this is the best Israeli rotoscoped war movie in Hebrew you will ever see; not to mention, one of the most important foreign films ever made.

Bashir, which is somewhat autobiographical, is written, directed and produced by former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, whose story provides a general outline for the film. He also voices himself, a soldier trying to shed light on a recurring dream that may be his last memory of a massacre in Lebanon.

It begins with a different dream: A man is plagued by 26 savage dogs in his sleep. He shares the dream over a beer with a friend he served with in the military. “How do you know there was 26, and not 30?” the friend asks. The man, recounting a great pain, explains: As a sniper during the 1982 war in Lebanon he was afraid to shoot people, so his commanders ordered him to shoot dogs that gathered on the edges of towns. He remembered each and every dog, all 26 of them. And now they haunt him while he sleeps.

The film is not about the dog sniper, whose story provides the setup for Bashir’s colorful style and tone, but about the friend, Ari, who questions why he doesn’t remember his own war experiences in Beirut. Waltz With Bashir, very much like the culturally significant Slumdog Millionaire in its hyper-stylized construction and use of flashbacks, is Ari’s interviews of those he served with. The interviews are quiet and solemn, almost journalistic, but the flashbacks they spawn are high-energy rock-'n'-rolla, indicitive of the intensity of war and its waging. Ari hopes to find someone who can interpret his own dream, in which he’s on a beach near a city as flares float down from the sky.

Like Apocalypse Now before it, Bashir is war amped up to a surreal level. The images we see could be from dreams — maybe some really are dreams — but the movie presents them as reality: an AK-47 electric guitar, a soldier frying an egg on the hood of a bombed-out car, a convertible with balloon streamers in a column of tanks, a soldier waltzing in a street as he returns machine gun fire. The film also employs trick photography to tell its story: an RPG firing at slow motion, commuters in time-lapse, various color effects, silhouettes, bleached-out landscapes. These things are real, if only in the minds of the people who experienced them.

But an early scene in the movie questions even this logic. We’re told that a researcher showed 10 photos to to people from their childhoods. One of the 10 is fake — fabricated to look like the person was at a carnival. For all 10 photos, including the fake, most people could identify the memory and provide a story to go with it. The conclusion he makes is that memory is not real, just our perception of memory — “Memory is dynamic; it’s alive,” he says. The scene, which tells us to question what we see in a film based entirely on memory, ends deceptively with a man talking in a kitchen and behind him is a window that looks out over, of all things, a carnival. Is the carnival in the background itself a skewed memory? Was it used in the discussion because it was an available example right out the window? The movie holds its secret, including its last big one, very close.

Bashir is also a satire on war, especially war in the Middle East, where innocent life is extinguished more out of carelessness than out of hatred. In an early scene, soldiers are ordered to shoot, so they do … into the darkness at nothing — it’s amazing they had enough ammo for more than about 15 minutes. In another scene, a Mercedes speeds down a road and Israeli soldiers blow up entire neighborhoods around it without so much as denting a fender. A sniper aims for the driver and shoots, but the bullet passes through the front windows and kills a man on a camel who happened to be passing by. Jets strafe and miss, and artillery rounds sail hundreds of yards too far. By the time the car exits the scene, all of Beirut is crumbling. The scene is made more sinister when it’s revealed the commander who gave the order to destroy the car plucked the command from a random scene in a porno he was watching. Suddenly Kurtz doesn’t seem so nutty.

What it all leads up to is a revelation: Ari was witness to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of West Beirut, where Lebanese Christian Phalangists were given access to Palestinian refugee camps to kill thousands of men, women and children. “You have become your own Nazi,” someone tells Ari, whose role was not murderer but casual observer. The film ends as his memories flood over him, washing away his innocence but not his shame. These massacres were real, and Waltz With Bashir is Ari Folman’s admission of his role. And his apology.

Note: Waltz With Bashir was released in other markets in December and is therefore eligible for this March’s Academy Awards. Had it been screened in Arizona in time, it would have ended up very high on my list of best films from 2008.