Good (as distinguished from mediocre) movies on DVD are remarkably satisfying because you can replay scenes and pick up tiny details. This advantage is particularly helpful in the case of the 2005 Syriana, highly praised by almost all the better critics, but extremely difficult to follow with its multiple locations, its intricate narrative twists, its stop-and-go scenes, and its enormous cast (that's why we hadn't gone to see it sooner). Having watched it once at a normal speed and then again with many stops and replays, I would call it one of the most morally challenging, most grown-up movies of recent years. George Clooney--what a perpetually interesting man--produced and acted. He won an Oscar for his role, but the film did not do well at the box office, largely because its subject is so dark and its plot so difficult to follow. Now is the perfect time to see it--it is ten times more relevant now, with the price of gasoline as it is and the problem of Iran growing ever more pressing.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gives the general idea: "Global oil corruption has seeped into every facet of our lives, from the collusion of White House and business interests in the Persian Gulf to the financial squeeze we all feel just pumping gas. No dry civics lesson, this fighting-mad film isn't just hot, it’s incendiary. And no one gets off the hook. You see it with the exhilarating feeling that a movie can make a difference." It hasn't and won't make a difference, given the principalities and powers that be, but at least, as Stephen Gaghan (same screenwriter as Traffic), Clooney, and their team say hopefully in an interview, it might make us reflect about what it takes to get our cars filled up--namely, "the brutality of the strategic [oil] game played on the global stage."

When I first thought of writing about this movie I had one idea, then I developed others. The first idea has to do with the scene in which Clooney (who gained 30 pounds and grew a graying beard for his role as a CIA field agent nearing the end of his career) is gruesomely tortured by a sadistic Middle Eastern operative. I had the idea that perhaps the sight of George Clooney, instead of some sinister terrorist, being tortured might jog our collective consciences. Lack of imagination is what prevents us from rising up against state-sponsored torture: we can't imagine that we ourselves, or any of our friends, or any good American, could ever be tortured. It's the bad guys who get tortured.

But then I thought no, this act of imagination won't happen, even though it should.

Another feature of the film is the fact that there aren't any "bad guys" or "good guys." Almost all the Americans are varying degrees of bad, actually, and the most attractive characters, two young Pakistanis who are living in a squalid compound for foreign oilfield workers, end up—convincingly--in a radical group training to be suicide bombers. Still, Clooney and Matt Damon are so well known to us, so American, that we can hardly imagine them involved in the sinister activities depicted here. "US interests in the region" sounds like an innocuous phrase, but we soon come to see how these "interests" rapidly devolve into callousness, mendacity, lies, betrayal, and murder as the oilmen throw parties for one another and praise their executives and middle managers as "the best people in the world" producing the "best possible product at the best possible prices." Joseph Conrad's narrator, Marlow (in Heart of Darkness) called it with high sarcasm "the merry dance of death and trade."

The movie has a huge range. We move from Washington and Houston to Teheran and the Arab emirate called "Syriana." We get a good look at Hezbollah ensconced in Beirut, students and teachers in a madrasa, and a very large cast of Arabs and Iranians. The subtly haunting, percussive score is unusually effective. The movie is mesmerizing even if one can't follow it all; the general idea comes through well enough

Indeed, the relevance of Syriana grows by the day, with Sy Hersh's article about appalling Bush administration policies re Iran in The New Yorker this very month, and Countdown (MSNBC) reporting a couple of days ago that Arabic and Farsi speakers continue to be fired for speaking up about these policies—very much like the Clooney character who also speaks these languages and is callously dumped off the CIA train. And how about this: on July 3, The New York Times reports a possibly shady deal between the Kurds and Hunt Oil of Dallas contrary to American policy in Iraq. Link to story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/middleeast/03kurdistan.html?oref=login#

I highly recommend Syriana. (It might help to read a few reviews first.)
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We recently had the rare privilege of attending a private screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous but seldom-seen film Olympia, made to celebrate the 1936 “Nazi Olympics” in Berlin. The powerful artistry and technical mastery of “Hitler’s moviemaker” left everyone stunned.

Naturally, the number one question asked afterward was about the relation of art to morality. There has been no clear answer to this question, but here are two sets of reactions that some of us shared:

Overall, the movie is apolitical. The overwhelming effect at the end of the very long movie is of the beauty of the human body in action. Riefenstahl’s amazing camera angles, often catching the athletes from below in motion against a sky filled with fair-weather clouds, are indeed “Olympian” in more ways than one. The astonishment of the second half, which covers the athletic events themselves, tends to cancel out the creepiness of the first half.

The first half of the film is deeply disturbing. It depicts the carrying of the Olympic torch by fleet, proud runners (looking for all the world like the old Modern Library logo) and then the opening procession with numerous shots of a beaming Adolf Hitler taking the salutes of the various teams as they pass. It is impossible to resist the powerful emotional effect of this pageantry. As the team members from the various countries (including the USA) pass in review, many give the Nazi salute with Rockette-like precision, all others turn their heads toward the Führer with perfect symmetry as they march by. What did they know? (By 1936, they should have known plenty.) Did it matter to them? I found myself choking on tears and fury. Here were the principalities and powers on review. Human nature is irresistibly drawn to spectacle, and can be manipulated in almost any direction through pageantry when it is harnessed to nationalism and the will to power. We should beware of our own proclivities when we watch the Olympics this summer.
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This article will give preachers enough material for ten stewardship sermons. Be sure to read through to the very end--the best (worst) stuff is there.
Combine with II Corinthians 8!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/nyregion/07therapists.html?em&ex=1215576000&en=f3c64fc677840da0&ei=5087%0A
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I am not ignoring the crisis in the Anglican Communion, though I would like to. Here is a depressing example of what the English newspapers are writing:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2249402/Will-Anglican-debate-end-in-fudge-or-schism.html?pageNum=2

It has been my position for a very long time that those of us who are evangelicals within the Anglican Communion should stay in and fight for a more biblical, more doctrinal, more apostolic theology while at the same time holding varying views on the hot-button issues at hand.

Easier said than done, as "generously orthodox" anti-schismatic bishops like Ed Little of Northern Indiana and John Howe of Central Florida have discovered. This group, especially, needs our support.
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An article in today's NYTimes "News of the Week in Review" reviews the intense anxiety in the US during the Korean war when many believed that our POWs were being "brainwashed." It turned out not to be the case, but in the meantime the fear had been bolstered even by The Times itself, back in 1954.

Today's article by Tim Weiner says:

The technique was called "brainwashing." And suddenly it’s worth recalling what brainwashing was about. Because now we know...that in a new time of anxiety [post-9/11], America’s own interrogators drew lessons from China’s treatment of American prisoners of war for their treatment of prisoners in the war on terror.

Weiner then writes:

Flash forward to 2002. American military and intelligence officers, looking for better ways to interrogate prisoners in the war on terror, went combing through government files. They found that the best institutional memory lay in the interrogation experiences of American POWs in Korea. They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation — and worse — inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo.

The irony is that the original author of that 1957 chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists' techniques mainly served to "extort false confessions." And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries"...

Brainwashing was bunk: no secret weapon to control the human mind existed, America’s best experts concluded in the 1960s. Yes, the Communists used time-honored and terrifying interrogation tactics during the cold war. Some, like waterboarding, had been perfected during the Spanish Inquisition. But Mr. Biderman concluded that "inflicting physical pain is not a necessary nor particularly effective method" to persuade prisoners of war.

Some veterans of the war on terror say that lesson should have been relearned, despite the urgent need to uncover whatever possible about terrorist planning — the administration’s principal justification of its harsh interrogation policies.

Alberto J. Mora, the Navy's general counsel from 2001 to 2006, told a recent Congressional hearing, where the Biderman chart resurfaced: "Our nation’s policy decision to use so-called 'harsh' interrogation techniques during the war on terror was a mistake of massive proportions."
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