i got a lot done for once this weekend. and believe it or not, i even went into work today and managed to avoid blogging the whole time i was there.
on friday night we saw the battle of algiers. the movie was recently re-released after it was allegedly remastered. i wouldn't know if it was. the sound quality in the theater where we saw it was pretty bad. i think one of the speakers was blown. or maybe we just had a bad print. in any event the music (which is supposed to set the mood of many of the scenes) was accompanied with this distortion. it really did take away some of the enjoyment of the film
but putting aside from the crappy sound, it's a remarkably realistic film about a terrorist-based insurgency. i had read that the amazing thing about the film is that by the end you're rooting for the terrorists. but that wasn't my reaction. by the end, i didn't like either side. like i said, it was pretty realistic. it's hard to watch the film without thinking about iraq. apparently the u.s. military does too. last summer the pentagon had its own screening of the film. as much as i liked the movie, it is a little frightening to contemplate just what the military guys watching it would get out of this film. you could argue, for example, that the film teaches that torture and brutal retaliation against civilians is an effective way to stop an insurgency--although you could also argue that the film views such tactics as counter-productive in the long term.
who knows what anyone takes away from a film with as much moral ambiguity as this one.
