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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
06.24 Mr. Holder, You Must Hold Torturers Accountable
06.29 Thinking about Climate
06.26 False Health-Scare Ad on CNN
06.25 Louella Learns the Limits of Medicare
06.23 The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All
06.23 Tell ABC: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate
06.23 Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex
06.22 Thinking about Recoveries
06.20 Obama's Health Care Waterloo
06.15 Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform
06.11 Two Key Health-Care Numbers
06.10 Big Breakthroughs for Single Payer Health Care
06.10 Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
06.29 WP's Connolly Back, on Health Reform
06.17 Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage
06.15 Excusing Outrages of the Right
06.11 Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess
06.30 Obama's Torture Hypocrisy
06.30 Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity
06.29 Obama, They Want You to Fail
06.26 Who to Trust on a Truth Commission?
06.26 Tarnished Shields: The Morally Bankrupt 'Family Values' Republican Leadership
06.25 America's "Bases of Empire"
06.24 Twelve Angry White People: Jury Nullification in a Pennsylvania Coal Town
06.24 Touring Empire's Ruins
06.23 Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program
06.19 Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black
06.17 Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix
06.16 Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?
06.13 Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program?
06.10 Waiving the Rules for Old Glory
06.10 Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed
07.03 Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement"
07.01 Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure
06.25 It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq
06.22 Obama Opposes Plame-gate Release
06.21 Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War
06.18 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future
06.15 New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record
06.14 Fear Rules
07.01 Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism:" The Economic Strategy of Imperial America
06.23 Obama's Financial Reform Proposal - A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control
06.10 Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney
07.01 Pirates of the Mediterranean
06.29 Color Revolutions, Old and New
06.25 Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise'
06.23 Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil
06.20 Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?”
06.20 Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran
06.19 Iran's Election and US - Iranian Elections
06.16 The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters
06.12 Israeli War Crimes Against Children During Operation Cast Lead
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.
