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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries
03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim
03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare!
03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm
02.24 Obama’s New Plan
02.21 Time to Pass the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009
03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion
03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax
03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
03.03 It's Snow News
03.03 The Woeful Washington Post
02.28 The NYT Veers Neocon
02.18 US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco on Iran
Ref. : The Daily Howler
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives"
03.09 Thinking About Countings
03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism
02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium
02.24 The Last Flight of Joe Stack
02.22 Thinking About Sadie
02.18 All Systems Go: No Dysfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise
03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem
03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue
03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children
03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session
03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid
03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda
02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery
02.23 Israeli Unaccountability and Denial: Suppressing the Practice of Torture
02.22 American Genocides: is Haiti Next?
02.18 Israeli Abusive Administrative Detentions
02.16 MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program
03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource
03.05 Is the Recovery Real?
03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You
03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction"
03.01 Thinking About Fees
02.22 Campaigning for State-Owned Banks
02.22 Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do
02.19 Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission
02.19 Selling Out America to Wall Street
03.03 Muslim Disunity
03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation
02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist
02.24 The Dubai Hit
02.22 Holland Has Had Enough: Killing of Innocent Civilians Goes On Apace in Afghanistan
02.19 The Placeman Cometh: New IAEA Chief Stokes Iran War Fever for the Bush-Obama Regime
FILM REVIEW:
Paul Greengrass: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Making more of the same seem new
The Bourne stock is high. Paul Greengrass, who's made the last two, is a good director. He proved his mettle with his documentary-style history film about Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday, and another one last year, United 93.But let's not kid ourselves. With each successive sequel, the series is growing thinner. The Bourne Identity, which was based on a Robert Ludlum novel and directed by the young Doug Liman (Greengrass is ten years older), took the time to establish places and people and had the intense relationship between Bourne and Marie (Franka Potente) -- something approaching a love interest. Potente had an air of recklessness and danger that made her a good match. This was the essential Bourne film. It began with Bourne emerging from the water, like some kind of sea birth. The Bourne Supremacy (the ante is upped in each title, as if screaming to be noticed) also had a long prelude full of tropical atmosphere. It had moments of tragedy and betrayal. The first film had Chris Cooper and Clive Owen and Brian Cox. Cooper and Owen dropped out, and we got Joan Allen and David Strathairn. Albert Finney seems a rumpled version of Cox, who's gone now, and he is underused.
But the spy-chaser machinery brought to bear against Bourne is really meaningless except as a foil. The CIA chase after Bourne is inherently absurd. Tim Wiener's definitive history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, is just out and we know to put it rather crudely that the CIA story is a litany of failures and mistakes. There have been follies, and we'll never know how much money was wasted and on what. But even so, nutty as the CIA is, would all of Langley be marshaled in a giant war room to track down a single man--who only attacks when he's attacked--and whose threat seems to be that he may remember who he is and what he was supposed to do? Doesn't that make us all dangerous? The marvel is that the CIA can track Bourne on TV monitors all over the room that come up with sound and pictures and tap into cell phones at a yelled command from Strathairn. The believable part is that Bourne always dodges or offs the CIA "assets" who're after him and escapes from the net. And Bourne catches them all napping and they lead him directly to the information they seem to want to hide from him. That part is very convincing.
Ultimatum is a post-Abu Ghraib story, showing that hoods and water-boarding and sleep deprivation were used in Bourne's training. But in year seven of Bush II, the arrest of some CIA chiefs for using harsh tactics in their black operations seems unlikely. These are just brief allusions, anyway: the special ops, even though there's a new one revealed, "Blackbriar," were more fully developed in The Bourne Supremacy than here.
Greengrass uses a technique of very rapid editing and very unsteady camera (Liman's camera work did not require Dramamine, but his does). He introduced that in Supremacy, and he continues it in Ultimatum. This in time may date, like the zooms of the Seventies, but for now it makes the visuals seem fresh.
It always seemed Matt Damon was an awfully funny kind of matinee idol, a strange degeneration of the Hero: he looks more than anything like a burly bellhop. But he has proven in various films that he's a good actor-- particularly adept at showing self doubt or emotional disconnection. I prefer Malkovitch's Tom Ripley to his, but his (in Minghella's film) gets best at the core of Patricia Highsmith's antihero -- his lack of affect. Though the Bourne action goes so fast you barely get a chance to appreciate it, Damon's obviously also an athlete. He may be no kung fu star, but better than that, he convinces you Bourne is not a showoff but simply a deadly physical opponent.
Given the increasing dilution of content, it's a bit surprising that the Bourne franchise films are seen as "intelligent" or even that they're seen as "spy" films. Yes, there's something classy about them, and they're not dumb by any means. They're battles of wits and skill as well as brawn and technology. And they are great fun to watch, even though the material is getting diluted and stretched.
David Denby cites Manohla Dargis as saying that "the drama of 'Identity' was existential (Who am I?) and the drama of 'Supremacy' was moral (What did I do?)" and concludes that "the drama of 'Ultimatum' is redemptive: How can I escape what I am?" Very neat, but rather artificial, since all these questions occur in each movie, and yet there is no answer in any of them. It is another kind of stretching, this time by the film critics, to attach profound significance to these three movies and make them into a trilogy. It makes more sense to imagine the filmmakers considering how they can make more of the same and yet make it still seem new. They succeed at that, and that's why the series can go on.
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This story was published on August 8, 2007.
