Avatar Film Group Week 10: |
I personally found this movie to express a disturbing aspect of our society where detached rich Americans use poor people on the other side of the planet as pawns in the game of war against their enemies. Although this covert operation succeeds to drive out the Russians, what this film fails to do is show the aftermath. When funding of the Taliban is cut off, it is Osama Bin Laden who comes in to fill the void. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character recites a Zen Koan that very well sums up the moral ambiguity of victories and losses faced by some of the main characters in this movie. Gust: There’s a little boy. Now on his 14th birthday he gets a horse, and everybody in the village says “How wonderful the boy got a horse,” and the Zen master says “We’ll see.” And what was perceived as a victory ended up becoming a loss. The very person who was once funded by the CIA used his power to strike back at America and trigger one of the longest wars in its history, whose outcome is still yet to be seen. Might American foreign policy be seen by the US government in the same light as the Zen koan? The outcome of unscrupulous and morally questionable activity such as drone strikes, torture and preemptive military invasion is viewed as ambiguous since it is not certain the results will be wonderful or terrible for the nation. The moral ambiguous attitude towards these policies and the danger that they might provoke blowback, seem to be whitewashed over with the ambivolent attitude, "We'll see." Before starting the movie, we all watched the Vimeo short Beauty which unfortunately has now been cut down from its original length. The short is pretty impressive considering that the artist took some of the greatest masterpieces in art history and animated them.
B E A U T Y - dir. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro from Rino Stefano Tagliafierro on Vimeo.
After Charlie Wilson's war, we watched the GoPro Stratos jump which was just recently made available on YouTube.
We also examined the Coke Superbowl ad and talked about the controversy behind it.
We also viewed the trailer to Cosmos 2014 as a preview of what will hopefully be one of our showings in March. Stay tuned for the details.
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