Empire of Light: A Review - Empire Strikes Out

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a cavalcade of top-notch talent working on this film the end result is little more than a muddled mess of a movie.

Empire of Light, written and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes, attempts to tell the story of Hillary, a middle-aged woman struggling with mental illness who works at a seaside British cinema in 1980.

Empire of Light is the fourth, and thankfully final, film in what I call the Masturbatorial Manifesto Movie Quadrilogy of 2022. The other members of this awful foursome who made autobiographical, virtue signaling, ego/nostalgia driven films are Alejandro Inarritu with Bardo, James Gray with Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg with The Fabelmans. All of these films are navel-gazing, self-serving stories about their directors past lives, social justice issues and the magic of cinema.

Of these four films, Empire of Light, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, is the most astounding, but not because it’s good…it certainly isn’t, in fact it’s downright dreadful. No, Empire of Light is astounding because it brought together a remarkable collection of talented individuals and all they could collectively produce was this really, really lousy movie.

For example, the film boasts not only Oscar winner Sam Mendes as writer/director, but also Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins, as well as Oscar winning musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, not to mention Oscar winning actors Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. This very impressive group combined to make a most unimpressive movie.

The problems with Empire of Light are numerous but the most egregious of them is the script by Mendes, which is all over the map. Mendes obviously wanted to make a movie about his real-life mother’s struggle with mental illness, which he did, but, like his predecessors Inarritu, Gray and Spielberg, he also wanted to cram in as much politically-correct social commentary as he could about a variety of topics, the most obvious of which in this case are sexism and racism.

Sexism and racism are perfectly fine and often remarkably compelling topics to feature in a film but in Empire of Light they feel artificially added-on and inorganic and this distracts from what could have been a very interesting character study with the sublime Olivia Colman at its center.

Instead, we get a scattered, paper-thin story about a mentally-ill white woman who is sexually exploited by her boss and who learns that racism exists in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1980. How revelatory.

The racial angle in the film is so vapid and panders so aggressively as to be offensive. This racism narrative was so heavy-handed, so after-school special level unsophisticated, and so lacking in any nuance that it made me roll my eyes on numerous occasions to the point of near seizure.

Equally forced and lifeless is the love story between Hillary and her young black co-worker Stephen (Michael Ward). Ms. Colman is a marvelous actress and quite lovely but Michael Ward is a considerably younger and very handsome man and the pairing is never remotely believable nor well-explained. The two also lack chemistry and their relationship devoid of dynamism and this heightens the sense of their tryst being unbelievable, if not inconceivable.

Mendes, whose famous films include American Beauty, Road to Perdition and 1917, is a filmmaker I’ve never particularly enjoyed as I find him to be a middlebrow moviemaker masquerading as an arthouse auteur. Mendes comes from the theatre world and his movies often reflect that limitation as his scripts are too verbose and his stories too obvious, flat and literal.

On Empire of Light, Mendes gets lost in the throes of a victimhood narrative and social justice fantasy and ends up losing the vitality of what should be, but isn’t, the main thrust of the story, Hillary’s struggles.

Speaking of Hillary, Olivia Colman, who may be the best actress working right now, does excellent work in the role but is time and again undercut by the asinine script. Colman’s finest hour comes when Hillary loses grip on her mental health and dissolves into a raging madness that is visceral and combustible. But beyond that, Colman is too often stuck in an anemic narrative maze of Mendes’ making.

I’m a newcomer to Michael Ward, who plays Stephen, and found him to be a compelling and very pleasant screen presence, but he too is hamstrung by the clunky script and incessantly vapid cultural politics. Too often Stephen feels like little more than a black prop in a white woman’s journey to enlightenment on racial issues.

Colin Firth has a smaller role as the cinema’s manager Donald, and he does all the Colin Firth things you’d expect him to do, but he, like every other character in the film, never feels like a real person.

It must be said that the film is beautifully photographed, not surprising considering Roger Deakins is the cinematographer, but for all of Deakins’s coloring and camera wizardry, the film cannot be elevated.

As for Reznor and Ross’s soundtrack, it’s very reminiscent of their other stellar work but here it surprisingly underwhelms and feels a bit too derivative.

As a whole the film feels stridently antiseptic, allergic to drama, and relentlessly generic. For instance, the movie is set in the 1980’s and yet it never exploits that setting and fails to much look or feel like the 1980’s. It’s also set in a cinema and it fails to exploit that potentially dramatic setting as well as movies are never featured prominently or used effectively as a dramatic device. Truth be told the whole exercise is so devoid of any genuine place, people or purpose that it just feels very weird, dramatically disconnected and like a terrible waste of an opportunity.

Which brings us back again to Mendes’ script, which is also disconnected and disjointed to the point that it seems like nothing but a collection of random scenes and not a fully formed story.

The truth is that making a good movie, never mind a great one, is unconscionably difficult, and the fact that Oscar winning talents like Sam Mendes, Roger Deakins, Trent Reznor, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth all got together and made a piece of junk like Empire of Light, is proof of that. That Alejandro Inarritu, James Gray and Steven Spielberg all tried to make similar movies this past year and all fell flat on their faces too only further reinforces that fact.

Having seen all four of this year’s autobiographical ego/nostalgia movies, the most difficult thing to do is decide which one is the worst as they’re all truly terrible in their own special ways. Deciding which of these insipid movies is best is simply a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

In conclusion, Empire of Light is a messy, middling, misfire of a movie that you should skip entirely, just like Bardo, Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans.

Hopefully these navel-gazing, nostalgia-addicted auteurs have gotten their mindless Masturbatorial Manifesto Movies out of their systems so that we never have to see this type of shamelessly awful garbage again. These filmmakers are simply too good to waste their talents making such dull, derivative, sanctimonious, self-serving detritus as this.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Sicario: Day of the Soldado - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. No need to see this film in the theatres, just wait to see it on Netflix or cable if you are interested.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado, written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by Stefano Sollima, is the sequel to the highly acclaimed Sicario (2015) that tells the story of U.S. black operators fighting drug and human trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. The film stars Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro, with supporting turns from Catherine Keener and Matthew Modine.

When I went to see Sicario: Day of the Soldad in the theatre on the morning of its opening day, something odd happened. After an usher introduced the film and showed patrons where the exits were in case of emergency, sort of like a cinema flight attendant, a crotchety old man sitting by himself in one of the first few rows of the second section of the theatre barked to the female usher to "COME HERE". This boorish old man's antics greatly displeased many patrons, mostly for its rudeness but also because of the racial dynamics at play, as the attendant was a young Black woman and the old man was White. As voices of resistance spoke up against the old man he proclaimed very loudly to everyone in the theatre to "mind your own business".

The theatre attendant gave a dismissive laugh and walked over to see what the man wanted. He then said very loudly... and to my great amusement considering Sicario: Day of the Soldad is about Mexican drug dealers..."get me a Mexican Coke". This old guy was obviously an ultra-asshole, but his "Mexican Coke" demand was even more insulting and bizarre than his order of "come here"...are movie theatre ushers waitresses now too? The attendant gave the guy a cursory answer along the lines of "I have something else to do" and stormed off with a laugh...leaving the tension filled theatre in a hurry.

After this rather strange and unsettling incident, I sat back and tried to enjoy my popcorn and root beer which I had, like the grown man that I am, gotten all by myself at the concession stand. At the concession stand I was, coincidentally enough,  served by a fellow who worked crew on a film I shot years ago. We exchanged pleasantries and caught up with each other while he rang me up for my popcorn and root beer. In hindsight, I wish I had sternly told him to get me a fucking Mexican Coke...but sadly I didn't.

Needless to say my movie going experience up to and including the post-old man Mexican Coke incident had been a roller coaster ride, first the pleasantness of catching up with an old comrade followed up by the ugliness of an old man demanding Mexican Coke...and the feature presentation hadn't even started yet. I could not figure out if all of these strange happenings were good or bad omens for my seeing of Sicario: Day of the Soldad...then the movie started.

In my vast cinema experience I have learned that sometimes you go to the theatre and the popcorn is stale and the root beer is flat and it ruins the whole movie for you. Other times, you go the the theatre and the popcorn is fresh and the root beer fizzy, but it is the movie that is stale and flat. Sicario: Day of the Soldad falls into the latter category and is sadly the cinematic equivalent of stale popcorn and flat root beer and all of the accompanying disappointment that goes along with them.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado has some very big cinematic shoes to fill as its predecessor, Sicario, was one of the best films of recent years that boasted Mickey Award® wins for Best Actress - Emily Blunt, and Best Cinematography - Roger Deakins, and Mickey® nominations for Best Director - Denis Villeneuve, and Best Screenplay- Taylor Sheridan along with a Best Picture nomination.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado does not in any way live up to the high standards of Sicario. The reasons for this are numerous and obvious, the most glaring being the drop in talent among the filmmakers. Day of the Soldado is directed by Stefano Sollima, and he is certainly no Denis Villeneuve. The new film also replaces famed cinematographer Roger Deakins with Dariusz Wolski, and Wolski cannot hold a candle to the grand master Deakins. And finally the movie replaces Emily Blunt with...well...no one.

Day of the Soldado's failure to replace Blunt isn't just a matter of star power or performance, it is a matter of structure. Sicario 2 has no main protagonist and therefore is so structurally unsound as to be useless, like a rudderless ship lost at sea. Blunt's performance in the original was exquisitely sublime, but even more importantly was the fact that the story was propelled forward by her character. Day of the Soldado has multiple narratives, one of an assassin out for revenge, another of a CIA agent who'll do anything to protect America, one about a teenage trafficker and finally one about a cartel princess, but none of them carry any dramatic or emotional resonance or are compelling enough to keep our interest. 

Taylor Sheridan is the best screenwriter working in Hollywood today, his scripts for Hell or High Water, Wind River and the original Sicario are truly fantastic and speak to the crisis of America and the American Male better than any films of the last quarter century. But Sheridan's screenplay for Day of the Soldado suffers from a stark lack of narrative focus and dramatic power, and is extremely poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. I was absolutely shocked at Sheridan for having written such a dilapidated script that lacks a coherent narrative, dramatic impact and cultural insight.

Director Sollima is simply ill-equipped to tackle the unwieldy beast that is Sheridan's script. Unlike his predecessor Villeneuve, Sollima seems more at home making a "cool" action type movie rather than a powerful drama. Day of the Soldado is littered with "cool guy" moments and one liners that feel more like something from a high-end Liam Neeson shoot-em up movie than an Oscar contender.

Benicio del Toro does solid work in reprising his role of assassin Allejandro Gillick...but he too falls into the "cool guy" mode of acting to fit the improbable script he is given. Gillick has morphed into a sort of Mexican Dirty Harry or a Charles Bronson character or something. Del Toro is a captivating screen presence but in Day of the Soldado his invincible Gillick jumps the shark into the incredulous.

Josh Brolin also does solid but unspectacular work in reprising his role of CIA black operator Matt Graver. Brolin has grown into a substantial actor and is having a particularly fruitful year, having co-starred in both Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War. In Day of the Soldado, Brolin is hamstrung by Sheridan's limp script that gives his character an arc that is simply not dramatically believable.

Other actors in the cast do not fair as well as del Toro and Brolin. Catherine Keener is atrocious as government bureaucrat Cynthia Foards. Keener's lack of verbal rhythm combined with her scattered performance, are so clueless as to be uncomfortable to watch.

Matthew Modine plays Secretary of Defense James Riley and is laughably bad. Modine tries as hard as he can to convey gravitas but it is like getting blood from a stone.

Sicario: Day of the Soldad is littered with time and logical inconsistencies as well as a flaccid narrative. None of the motivations of the characters makes sense and none of the conclusions are dramatically satisfying.

Instead of being a taut and tightly wound drama like its predecessor, Sicario 2 is a limp, poorly paced, confusing dark action movie that falls decidedly flat. Even though it has all the trappings of a great movie, it lacks the artistic courage to actually be one, and seems more interested in building a franchise than in telling a compelling story.

In conclusion, I was greatly disappointed by Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and I think you will be too. There is no sense in paying to see this film in the theatres, but if you really want to see it, buy your own root beer (or Mexican coke), make your own popcorn and  watch it when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

©2018

Blade Runner 2049 : A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****

Estimated Reading Time: 6:10:21

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A good but not great film worth seeing in the theatre for the beautiful cinematography alone.

Blade Runner 2049, written by Hampton Fancher and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is the sequel to Ridley Scott's iconic 1982 film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as K, with Ford reprising his role as Sam Deckard along with supporting turns from Robin Wright, Jared Leto and Ana de Armas.

I was very excited to see Blade Runner 2049 because I am such a tremendous fan of Ridley Scott's original Blade Runner. That film, which is required viewing in order to fully understand and appreciate Blade Runner 2049, was a thoroughly unique, neo-noir, apocalyptic take on the science fiction genre which explored what it means to be human, a god and everything in between. Blade Runner 2049 is a good, but not great, sequel to the Blade Runner. 

What makes Blade Runner 2049 worth seeing, and worth the effort of seeing in the theatre in particular, is that it is one of the most cinematically gorgeous films you will ever witness. Ryan Gosling gets top billing for the movie, but cinematographer Roger Deakins is undoubtedly the star of this film. Deakins and director Denis Villeneuve worked together on Sicario in 2015 to spectacular effect, which earned Deakins the much coveted Mickey ©® Award for Best Cinematography. 

Each of Deakins' shots in Blade Runner 2049 are like masterpieces depicted on a futuristic canvas. Deakins paints with a lush and vibrant palette that is striking to behold and alone is well worth the price of admission. His deft use of shadow and moving light is exquisite and effectively reveals the deeper sub-text of the narrative. Deakins is one of the preeminent cinematographers of his day and Blade Runner 2049 will no doubt garner him another much deserved Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography. This expected nomination will be his fourteenth nomination and thus far, as incredible as it is to believe, he has never won the award. 

Director Denis Villeneuve does admirable work on Blade Runner 2049 but he ultimately comes up short in making the most of the complex philosophy, theology and psychology that made the original film so fascinating. The running time of the film is two hours and 45 minutes, which makes it a long movie. I am one of those weird people who actually really likes long movies, but with such a long running time you would expect Villeneuve to thoroughly flesh out all of the intricacies involved in the story, instead he squanders much of his time and in the second half of the film the story loses momentum. The Blade Runner mythology is so vast and so philosophically rich that Villeneuve's cinematic meandering feels like a sin when he loses narrative specificity and falls onto the easy path of generic storytelling. 

For a film that has so much time to use it frustrates by failing to give adequate purpose and meaning to the character's on-screen actions. The story begins to fall apart in the second half of the film because things become much too neat and simple to be intriguing or believable. This is a shame and this fundamental filmmaking error can only be blamed on Villeneuve. 

To Villeneuve's credit, he does undergird the film with subtle and effective nods to Apocalypse Now (in particular in the Wallace scenes with their stark shadow and light contrast) and even A Clockwork Orange (with Las Vegas looking like a colossally overgrown Korova Milk Bar). This is the second big blockbuster sequel to pay homage to Apocalypse Now this year, with War for the Planet of the Apes being the first. This, along with the contrasting red/blue color scheme, certainly gets my attention in regards to the Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory, but that is a discussion for another day.

As for the acting, Ryan Gosling does solid if unspectacular work as K. He is the driving force for the entire film and certainly has the charisma to pull it off. I have always found Gosling to be an interesting actor and he doesn't disappoint in Blade Runner 2049. What may be most appealing about Gosling in the film is his underlying and undying sense of his humanity which is palpable and serves him and the story very well. 

The supporting cast is much less impressive. Regardless of his history of box office returns, Harrison Ford has always been a rather wooden, second rate actor and he proves that once again as the older version of Rick Deckard. Ford seems so detached from his surroundings it feels like he is in a constant state of having just been woken up. 

The more surprising of bad performances in the film belongs to an actress that I absolutely think is fantastic, and that is Robin Wright. I have been a fan of Ms, Wright's work for decades, but in Blade Runner 2049 she turns in a really awful piece of work. It seems to me that Ms. Wright is stuck in the rhythm, voice and posture of her House of Cards character Claire Underwood and it terribly under serves her as Lt. Joshi. This is a common problem for actors who have success in a television show where they must play the same character for months on end, year after year. That said, I was shocked to see it happen to an actress as talented and skilled as Robin Wright, but happen it did. Her character in Blade Runner 2049 is actually very pivotal to the story, so when she fails to deliver a quality performance, the film really suffers for it.

Jared Leto, as always, does very good but strange work as the bizarre and god-like Niander Wallace. Leto is nothing if not committed to his roles, and that approach serves him well as the blind creator Wallace. Much like Woody Harrelson in War for the Planet of the Apes, there is a whiff of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now in Leto's creation, but it is entirely appropriate and always compelling.

I wish Blade Runner 2049 had been better as I ended up being mildly disappointed with it, which may have more to do with my high expectations after a 35 year wait rather than the film's failings. Blade Runner 2049 really is a decent film, but it could have and should have been much better than it was. There is true cinematic greatness lurking beneath the surface of Blade Runner 2049, but director Villeneuve fails to adequately conjure it to the surface and instead delivers a film that passes for good enough but not great. That said, I do recommend you watch the original film first and then go see Blade Runner 2049 in the theatre, if only to meditate on what it means to be human and to marinate in the spectacular genius of the visual masterpiece delivered by cinematographer Roger Deakins.

©2017

Sicario : A Review and Reports From Down the Rabbit Hole of the Drug War

*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!!***

MY RATING : SEE IT IN THE THEATRE!!

Sicario, written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is a taut and tense drama that tells the story of FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Team Agent Kate Macer and her descent into the murky world of the international Drug War. The film stars Emily Blunt as Agent Macer, with supporting turns by Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.

As Sicario opens, we see Blunt's Macer in full tactical gear riding with her team to raid a house. The cookie cutter house is in the Arizona suburbs, but it could be any house, in any suburban neighborhood, in any state in America. The house, like the film, looks like one thing on the surface, but the deeper you look into it, the more shocking, complicated and dangerous realities it reveals. That house, symbolic of the American dream, reveals the violence, the corruption, the peril and the cancer that is the American Drug War. Sicario teaches us that not only won't Macer leave that house the way she went in, but America won't leave the Drug War the same way it went in either.

After the raid on the house, Macer is approached to be a part of a mysterious special task force headed by Matt Garver (Josh Brolin) who wants to find those responsible for the horrors found in that suburban Arizona home. Macer rightly senses that she doesn't know the whole story of the mission or who, exactly, this unkempt, flip-flop wearing Garber guy works for, but she agrees to work with him anyway. She then follows Garber, and his partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro) down into the rabbit hole of the Drug War, where friend is foe and foe is friend, sometimes all at once.

Garber and Gillick lead Macer on a journey into the heart of darkness, with pit stops in Juarez, Tuscon and a honky-tonk bar. By the end of the journey, Macer will have been nearly choked to death, shot and betrayed by friend and enemy alike. Macer learns the hard way that nothing and no one is what they seem to be in the Drug War.

Along with Emily Blunt's very solid acting work, both Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro give quality performances. Del Toro is particularly captivating as the enigmatic Gillick. Del Toro gives Gillick an internally vibrant wound that makes the character pulsate with a subtly menacing righteousness and magnetism. Brolin is terrific as the morally and ethically vacuous CIA agent who doesn't care who wins the drug war, just that there is one.

To go along with the quality acting in Sicario, director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Johan Johansson all do magnificent work. Villenueve deftly creates a heightened and palpable tension throughout the film that is mesmerizing. Even as the first opening credits roll, a faint yet ominously unsettling deep tone from composer Johan Johansson can be heard rumbling just beneath the surface. It sets the tone for the underlying danger that permeates the entire movie, adroitly heightened by Johannson's work. The only other film of director Villeneuve's I have seen is Prisoners which I found to be very disappointing. With Sicario, Villeneuve has made a quantum leap in his filmmaking, showing a depth and level of craft that is striking. 

While Sicario is a drama and not an action film, it's exhilarating action sequences are exquisitely directed and shot.  Master cinematographer Roger Deakins work, is, as always, glorious, and well worth the price of admission alone. From the opening house raid sequence to the later raid of a drug tunnel, Deakins cinematography is sublime. His ability to propel and add depth to the narrative all while creating a masterpiece with every frame, is unparalleled.

What I liked the most about Sicario is that it shows us the reality that the "War on Drugs" has morphed into the "Drug War". This war has nothing to do with the saving of America's soul from the scourge of drug use, instead it has to do with America selling it's soul in order to wage continual war. Like the War on Terror, the Drug War is a war with no end game. Perpetual war is good for business, if your business is the military industrial complex. And if you add the prison/law enforcement industrial complex in with the military industrial complex, you have a lot of people making a lot of money making sure the drug war continues to be waged and is never won…or never declared lost.

A brief glance at the history of America's intelligence services shows us that they have consistently used illicit drugs in order to raise money and weapons for various covert operations. Be it the CIA's opium growing and smuggling business during the Vietnam War, or their cocaine trafficking into U.S. cities from Central America in the 1980's in order to support and supply the Contras and other groups in Central America, or their operations to return opium production to Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion. The key to these CIA drug operations succeeding is that drugs must be kept illegal, so that intelligence services can prosper from their sale and keep the profits off the books and away from prying eyes of oversight committees and journalists. If legalization of all illicit drugs were to happen, the CIA would find itself in quite a bind in terms of paying for all of it's nefarious activities. (I strongly encourage you to read the book, "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" by Alexander Cockburn, for more on this topic)

The U.S. likes to think of itself as the good guys, always with noble intentions. That is the narrative that is sold to us and that we willingly buy and struggle to question. Yet the Drug War is glaring proof that things are not always what we want them to be, or what they seem.

In the 1980's, the CIA was running cocaine from South and Central America into the inner cities of the U.S., which, oddly enough, was when the crack cocaine epidemic started. As Nancy Reagan was telling us to "Just Say No!", her husband Ronald's administration was enabling drug trafficking into the U.S. in order to illegally raise money and arms for the Contras in Nicaragua in their fight against the Sandinistas. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal…well this is the dark shadow of that scandal that no "serious" person wants to talk about. Journalist Gary Webb wrote about it, and that didn't end well for him at all. He was publicly and professionally crucified by the "establishment media" and ended up with two bullet holes in his head for his trouble. In perfect Hegelian dialectic problem-reaction-solution fashion, the CIA was funneling drugs into the heart of the U.S. in order to destroy those inner cities with drugs, weapons and violence, all the while empowering domestic law enforcement with expanded powers and dismantling the Bill of Rights in order to keep the frightened populace "safe" and their political power intact. Then they sent that money to the Contras and right wing groups in El Salvador and Honduras, where they paid for death squads, torture and assassinations, all in the name of fighting "communism" so as to re-open Central America to American business interests. (I highly recommend Gary Webb's book "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", along with Nick Shou's book "Kill the Messenger" which tells the tale of what happened to Gary Webb for writing about the CIA-Contra-Cocaine connection.)

Afghanistan is another perfect example of the U.S. being at cross purposes with itself in the War on Drugs. Most everyone thinks that the Taliban are a horrendous group of people, and that our war on them was righteous. But the closer you look at it, the less clear that becomes. For instance, the reason we invaded was because Bin Laden had been hiding in Afghanistan allegedly under Taliban protection. Before the invasion the Taliban asked the U.S. to show evidence of Bin Laden's guilt in regards to 9-11 and they would turn him over. For some reason, the U.S. refused, and invaded anyway. No one cared much because the Taliban were such loathsome people due to their horrific treatment of woman. 

A closer look at the situation in Afghanistan reveals some surprising things that complicate the narrative we as a country tell ourselves. For instance, during the reign of the Taliban, the opium business which had, with the help of the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war, once been thriving in the Afghanistan, was shut down entirely. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan was a no-go zone for opium growing. But then something strange happened after the U.S. invasion and occupation, the opium business not only came back, it grew to previously unseen heights. Opium production in Afghanistan is now at all time highs (pardon the pun). That is certainly a strange turn of events considering the country that invaded, the U.S., is the main force behind the War on Drugs across the globe. 

The war against Afghanistan, once thought so morally clear and simple, becomes even more complicated when you take into account the practice of "bacha bazi", which literally means, "boy play", in which powerful Afghan men keep pre-pubescent boys as sex slaves. The Taliban outlawed bacha bazi, and executed anyone who practiced it. Since the U.S. invaded, bacha bazi has come roaring back, and U.S. service members have been told by their commanders to not intervene if they come across the practice. There are even stories of young boys being raped on U.S. bases by Afghan warlords, and U.S. soldiers hearing it happen but not being allowed to stop it, and being court martialed if they do intervene. When one hears these sorts of things, the question becomes, what the hell are we doing over there? What sort of twisted moral compass are we working with in that war? (Please read this disturbing NY Times piece on Bacha bazi and the U.S. ignoring it.)

Which brings us back to another war with a twisted moral compass, the Drug War. The Drug War, by every measure, has been an absolute and utter failure. Billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been wasted, and millions of lives lost, in a war that serves no purpose but to assure it's own continuance. Heroin, once the scourge of the inner city, is now epidemic in the once thought safe suburbs of America (please read Sam Quinones book "Dreamland" for more on this topic). America isn't losing it's soul in the Drug War, it has already lost it. We imprison the poor and addicted and enrich and empower the tyrannical impulse at the heart of every police officer, district attorney and politician. We as a populace don't just allow, but demand the dismantling of the rights and liberties this country was founded on. We demand a militarized police force and their "no knock" raids in the middle of the night, illegal searches and seizures, asset forfeiture and mandatory minimums, all in the name of the "War on Drugs" and our own self proclaimed moral purity. This is no "War on Drugs", drugs aren't at war with us, we are at war with ourselves. Until we can be honest about what the Drug War really is, and the powerful people really behind it, playing both sides of it and prospering from it, people will continue to be senselessly killed and die in it's name. And America will continue to sell it's soul and spiral down deeper and deeper into more circles of hell, one more heinous than the next.

When Sicario began my first thoughts were that Emily Blunt may have been miscast as the FBI SWAT team agent. Blunt is an exceedingly beautiful, almost waif-ish actress, especially compared to the monstrous Delta Force brutes she is working alongside. It even looks as if her weapon may be too heavy for her to carry in the opening sequence of the movie. As the film went on though, I came to the realization that Emily Blunt was a superb choice to play Macer. Not only is she a terrific actress, and her work in Sicario is as good as she has ever been, but she is a wonderful representation of the vital yet fragile legal structures that once made America the land of the free. In other words, Emily Blunt's Macer is a representation of the United States Constitution, or to put it in more flowery terms, Macer is Lady Liberty. What Macer is put through in Sicario is the test our rule of law and liberties have gone through in the drug war. And as del Toro's Gillick says to Macer at the end of the film, "now is a time for wolves", and Macer/Lady Liberty is just not big or strong enough to run with the big, bad, lawless wolves, otherwise known as the dogs of war. Gillick finishes by telling her she should "move to a small town somewhere, where the rule of law still exists", but as that quaint suburban Arizona house that ends up being a house of horrors proves, there is no escaping the dogs of war once they are unleashed, even in small town America.

In the first part of Sicario, there is a hauntingly effective sequence where the camera lingers in a close up on the face of a dead person in a see-through plastic bag. We can't make out whether the person is a man or woman, or how they were killed, only that they are dead and are now an anonymous statistic in the Drug War. A few moments later in the film, Macer washes the blood and mire from the Arizona house raid off in her shower, then stands post-shower in front of a steamed up mirror where her face is obscured by the condensation. It is ominously reminiscent of the anonymous Drug War victim we saw only a few shots before and foreshadows what is to come for Macer, Lady Liberty, and the rest of us, at the end of her, and our, Drug War journey.

Do yourself a favor and go see Sicario in the theatre, it is well worth your time and hard-earned money. It is not only a truly terrific film, but it will also give you a much needed glimpse into the reality just below the surface of the Drug War that our nation continues to wage. You may not like what you see in Sicario, being honest with ourselves is seldom easy. But just remember, honesty is the first step on the long journey toward sobriety, and out of our heart of darkness.

©2015

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