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Cyrus Confronts the Dark Side Reviewing the "Waltz with Bashir" Blu-Ray
Sometimes you know watching a movie that you’re not in the right place in your life to watch it. “Waltz with Bashir” is one of those movies for me. It’s not that I can’t appreciate that it’s a major and distinctive work, spectacularly innovative in its animation style or even that it has some disturbing and important things to say about war. It’s just that I’m personally ignorant as hell about the events of the Lebanese Civil War of which the film speaks. I felt like I was coming in halfway through a lecture, like the dummy everybody in class points and laughs at for not knowing about it already. Now that I’ve looked up more about this awful conflict, it’s become all too clear to me…I am the dummy who deserves to be pointed and laughed at. What can I do? History class was never my strong suit. Which was why I was doomed to repeat it, I guess. Managed to get by with a “C”.
Please forgive me for being the ugly American here, completely oblivious of major events in the rest of the world. If it wasn’t for foreign films I think I’d have no idea what it’s like living even outside of Austin. “Waltz with Bashir” presents a VERY foreign world to me, one where people allow such horrible things to happen that their own brains refuse to acknowledge that they ever happened. However, this isn’t a typical war film. It’s about the perception of war and how it changes in retrospect more so than war itself.
Ari lives in Israel and has realized something disturbing. After talking to a friend from his days in the Israeli army who is experiencing reoccurring nightmares about the Lebanese Civil War in 1982, Ari realizes he remembers nothing about his own wartime experiences. That night he has a surreal dream about the night of the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre but one that poses more questions than it provides answers. He seeks out a psychologist friend who advises him to look for other people he was in Beirut with at the time and find out what they remember in the hopes of stirring his own memories. What follows is a series of interviews that reveal many upsetting and bizarre things, realities mixed with hallucinations and dreams that lead eventually to a confrontation with the truth of what happened there on that horrible day and why Ari won’t let himself remember.
There are so many haunting images and scenarios in “Waltz with Bashir” that the entire experience of watching it becomes somewhat dreamlike itself. You float with the characters through the haze of indistinct memories in a state of calm and passive observance until....until...knowing that the Israeli troops stood by and let the Lebanese Forces massacre Palestinian and Lebanese citizens in a bout of carnage is bad enough…animated it’s tough, but the film switches to video footage towards the end and suddenly and shockingly, anything dreamlike about the experience is all too over. “Waltz with Bashir” won’t let it’s audience hide from the truth any more than it’s main character. This was real, this was apocalyptic, this was humanity at it’s absolute worst. One can’t help but think of the Holocaust (which the film certainly intended) and the irony is not pleasant. How do we make peace with this, the atrocities that even our allies our capable of letting happen, that even we let happen? Who are the bad guys anymore and what do you do when you realize it might be you? It’s not surprising that Ari couldn’t remember. I’d block this out too.
If I’m not talking enough about the animation, I apologize because it merits high praise indeed. “Bashir” is perfectly suited to tell it’s tale in this fashion. The style is unique, similar in appearance at points to rotoscoping, but a completely different process, sort of an extremely high tech 3-d version of Flash animation. Let me tell ya, it looks AMAZING in HD. The oranges and blacks in particular, which dominate one particularly memorable series of memories and dreams, really pop like crazy. The characters and the way the camera's point of view expresses their three dimensions is strangely static yet all too realistic at the same time, like watching a paper doll suddenly expand into our world. It’s hard to describe without seeing it. Suffice it to say, it’s all just so gorgeous that you could even watch this without subtitles or sound and still be drawn into its unique vision.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
-Commentary by director Ari Folman
-Surreal Soldiers: Making “Waltz with Bashir”
-Q&A with Ari Folman
-Building the Scenes: Animatics
All of the special features add up to two things: This is something new and exciting going on in animation and that this guy Ari HAD to make this movie. I still don’t understand exactly what happened over in Beirut in 1982, why it happened, or what the historical repercussions have been since. What I do understand because of watching this, is how easy it is for us to forget or gloss over the darkest sides of ourselves. I grok better than ever that we can look at another human and because they think differently than us, we can divide them off into a sub group not worthy of the same consideration as ourselves and our friends. I totally get that if we don’t watch ourselves we can become the bad guy and not even know it. As was taught in those history classes that I arrogantly doodled pictures of "Space Ghost" through when I should have been paying attention, the story of humanity is this film, over and over again. Can’t we do better? Shouldn't we all be paying more attention? No wonder the aliens haven’t shown up yet. Dammit people, that's my ride you're scaring off there!*
Click Here to Buy Waltz with Bashir [Blu-ray]
Add a Comment
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Comment by randy on July 13, 2009 at 10:17pm - This movie is a masterpiece.
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Comment by samuel chris lois on July 12, 2009 at 2:27pm - i might get this movie
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Comment by Suarga on July 11, 2009 at 9:31pm - I keep checking redboxes for this (not because they are my primary source of movies, I just saw it listed as one of their movies) and can't seem to find it. Sounds like a good movie, though.
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Comment by SJDrummer on July 11, 2009 at 12:14am - I was fortunate enough to see this when it was on the big screen near me, and the scene in the very end was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in any movie. Its a must-see movie. I saw the trailer for this movie on some website after bouncing of one link after another and figured it would be worth the $8 or so to see it on the big screen. The best way to see this movie is in the theatre, but its good they put it out in a HD format, the scenes with rain, water, grass were splendid on the big screen.
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Comment by Dr.D on July 10, 2009 at 6:39am -
I didn't watch the movie but it's sound great, i'm going to try and watch it as soon as i can.
My view on the issues of the movie is this: what has been done was needed to be done. It's a part of war and human nature to kill each other, there is no good side or bad side just your side and that's all to it.It would be nice if there was no war,killing and murder but it's a part of our reality, instead of bitching about it we should embrace it as a part of our nature. I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's the truth.
We should change as a society and as a species, but that's not going to happane any time soon. The truth is that it's thanks to pain,war and suffering that we change. It's thenks to WW2 that peace was brought to Europe and it's going to be WW 3 that will bring peace to the middle east and Africa.
Over time the human race needs a great and horrible war to stabilize our species.
PS: I am very EVIL.
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Comment by sol aka "Cap'n Hates-A-Lot!" on July 9, 2009 at 12:38pm -
I couldn't get into this movie at all. I didn't care about anybody in it and I kept falling asleep. I don't know why the animation is getting so much praise. It's not interesting to look at and it seemed kinda unnecessary( would have told the same story just as well were it live action ), I really hate when animation is wasted. I think animation should be used to tell a story in a way that cant be told with live action. Like characters doing super natural things or something. Or to soften a hard topic like in Persepolis.
I might try watching this movie again but it will be awhile. If there's something good there I don't want to miss out on it.
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Comment by MisterKeitel on July 9, 2009 at 10:17am -
Even in war shouldn't governments of nations act by some kind of set of rules? In the US during this decade we had the Bush Administration who after 9/11 decided that the old rules just did not apply and that they'd fight a war using a new set of rules. So we got Preemptive War (read: attacking other without provocation), Extraordinary Rendition (read: kidnapping), Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (read: torture), spying on American citizens on the most massive scale in history, the use of depleted uranium (read: radioactive) shells and phosphorus (read: flesh burning) bullets , radio controlled drones that commit assassination, and the massive bombing of civilians.
The question is: Even if the people our government says are our enemies don't play by what we see as the rules, does that give us the right to go off the tracks and become as bad at the people we're fighting and considering that for many years that's just what we did, does it make us safer?
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Comment by DeathMetalMike on July 8, 2009 at 10:19pm -
Really great movie, just watched it last week on DVD, although from your description I really wish I had a blu-ray player or PS3 to watch it on.
By the way, after watching the movie and also being rather perplexed about the events that Ari and his fellow ex-soldiers describe, I took some research fromWikipediathe finest reference sources and found out approximately this much about what happened:
The 1982 Lebanon War, also known as the First Lebanon War by both sides or Operation: Peace of the Galilee by Israel, began on June 6th, 1982, when Israeli military forces invaded southern Lebanon in response to the assassination of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, by the Abu Nidal Organization, a mercenary Palestinian organization based in Lebanaon, which split off from the Palestinian Liberation Organzation (PLO). Israeli forces invaded and occupied southern Lebanon, fighting off the PLO, Hezbollah, Syrian and Lebanese Muslim, Communist, Social Nationalist forces, along with the help of the Southern Lebanese Army and the Christian Lebanese Forces Army.
From September 16th to the 18th of that year, the Christian Lebanese Forces, possibly with the direct or indirect help of Israeli soldiers, reacted to the assasination of popular right-wing and Christian Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel (whom the film is named after), which was brought about by an operation by Syrian intelligence and possibly Palestinian militants. Soldiers went into the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, and killed somewhere between 350 and 3,500 people.
Well there you go, hope I didn't screw up the facts too much.
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Comment by OUTLANDER!!! on July 8, 2009 at 10:00pm - i am now going to check this out
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Comment by Dih70 on July 8, 2009 at 4:59pm - I love this movie to death.
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