Lone Survivor Movie Review

I think when Marcus Luttrell complains that he doesn’t understand how people could possibly say Lone Survivor, the movie based on his memoir, glorifies war because “there is nothing glorious about war,” he is missing the point. Due respect to Luttrell – he’s been to Afghanistan, watched his friends die, and was incredibly lucky to come out alive, but saying that a Hollywood movie glorifies something is not the same as saying that that something is glorious. No doubt being in war is terrible beyond words. That’s why veterans tend not to talk about the experience of war outside the context of the buddies they made and the stories they told and created. But a movie can make that experience seem, to the uninitiated, sexy, desirable, exciting, fulfilling, and yes, glorious. There’s an extent to which all films that depict war are inherently pro-war. You can’t show an image of something without tacitly endorsing what it represents. Whether or not Lone Survivor goes out of its way to glorify war or whether it is a form of war porn I’m not sure. Does the level of realism make it more or less responsible?

Killer Joe Movie Review

I can’t remember seeing a film so depraved, immoral, and pointless as William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, based on the play by Tracy Letts. Of course, I’ve never seen The Human Centipede, so there may be hope yet. I’ve seen it described as a dark comedy and yet I found no humor in it. It is full of characters so stupid, who make such bad decisions – life-changing decisions – without much thought, that it’s almost impossible to side with anyone. There is perhaps one exception in the form of a pure innocent young woman, but she is such an odd portrait of a human being that her entire character has no credibility.