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01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason
Ref. : Letters to the editor
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries
02.03 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients
01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients
02.04 Err-America
02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired'
Ref. : The Daily Howler
01.25 Thinking About Fictions
01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road
01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy
01.22 Security Fools
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs
02.09 Growing Hunger in America
02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being
02.08 Thinking About Oracles
02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle
02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union
02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism?
02.04 The New War Against Money
02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers
02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts
02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite
02.01 Thinking About Definitives
02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)
01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo
01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual
01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship
01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power
01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform
01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding”
01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand
01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid
01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth
01.21 How Obama Lost His Way
01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts
01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements
01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors
01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power
01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist
02.06 The Free Market Fetish
02.04 The Crisis is Not Over
02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block
02.02 Rule by the Rich
01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs
01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True
01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation
01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It
01.18 Thinking About Accelerants
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic
02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes
02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine
02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti
01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry"
01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning
01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered
01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders
01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs
01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover
01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti
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.
