Couch Potato Briefing: Sex, Power and the Heroic Futility of War

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Global Spin’s weekly guide to the rental movies that explain the week’s big news events

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The Alamo

A small group of brave men find themselves hopelessly outgunned, yet unwilling to surrender their ideals and their freedom, fight to the death against overwhelming odds. It’s a tale at the heart of the American national story, but this week, it’s unfolding not at the Alamo, but many thousands of miles away — in the northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour. The regime of President Bashar al-Assad has moved in his tanks and heavy weaponry, vowing to take back the town from the rebels – whether protesters who have taken up arms, or army conscripts who mutinied rather than fight their kin. The odds are stacked heavily against those who hold the town. Yet, the live free or die attitude captured in John Lee Hancock’s 2004 retelling of the Alamo story may be all that stands between the rebels of Jisr al-Shughour and tyranny.

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Scandal

Perhaps indicative of an early summer news doldrum, the banal sext life of Rep. Anthony Wiener briefly made international headlines this week, as the congressman was forced to admit those really were his bulging briefs and sweaty pecs in pictures sent to various online playmates. Ho-hum. For a really sexy political scandal with geopolitical consequences, better to try the 1963 Profumo Scandal, tartly rendered in Michael Caton-Jones 1989 film Scandal. John Hurt plays Stephen Ward, a politically connected doctor who squires Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley) and Mandy Rice-Davies (Bridget Fonda) around various Conservative Party social circles, setting up an affair between Keeler and then War Minister John Profumo (Ian McKellen), triggering Cold War concerns that brought down the government.

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The Fall of the Roman Empire

An epic spectacle shot on 70mm Ultra Panavision with the proverbial cast of thousands (among them Sophia Loren, Alec Guiness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer and Omar Sharif). It’s your typically rambling Hollywood mangling of history, laced with love, ambition, soap-operatic rivalries — oh, and imperial overreach. Thrilling stuff as the empire shows its first signs of collapse in the face of the Barbarian invasions. But the empire’s collapse is really driven from within. Relevance this week, I hear you ask? Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ scolding valedictory speech to NATO, in which he warned that the alliance faced a “dim if not dismal” future because European allies refused to shoulder their share of the alliance’s military burdens in far-flung Afghanistan and Libya. “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress – and in the American body politic writ large – to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said. Indeed. But the Europeans’ reluctance to make those investments is based on a similarly reduced appetite for expeditionary military adventures. The great gathering of imperial legions that was NATO in the post-World War II era is no more. Indeed, that era itself, like the Roman Empire, may be coming to a close.

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Topkapi

Topkapi is a classic ensemble heist movie — think Ocean’s Eleven on the Bosphorous — with all the familiar elements and a stellar cast including Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximillian Schell and Rober Morley. But the real star of the show is Istanbul (which, of course, was Constantinople, but now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople…), the sublime erstwhile seat of Ottoman imperial power, but captured by director Jules Dassin in the late 1950s when it had been reduced to a latterday satrapy to the great empire of NATO, protecting the realm from the Red Army hordes to the east. Why watch it this weekend? Because on Sunday, Turks go to the polls, where they are expected to reelect Prime Minister Racip Tayyip Erdogan to a third term, affirming their independence from the West and it’s regional agendas. They’re doing remarkably well for it, mind you, with the world’s second fastest growing economy after China. Topkapi, then, a postcard from a distant, more somnambulent Turkey, ripe for the plucking by Western buccaneers. That was then…

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Beaufort

Long before the U.S. military began spinning its wheels in the Hindu Kush, Israel went through a “Vietnam” type experience of its own — a futile occupation of foreign land that became a no-win proposition. Ostensibly to root out the PLO, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982; 18 years and thousands of casualties later, it simply withdrew, having recognized that the occupation itself had become the source of a greater security threat (Hizballah) than the one that the invasion had intended to counter. The U.S. faces a similarly glum reality in Afghanistan, where — the realization is growing  in Washington — it is simply throwing good money after bad and incurring the same steady drip of casualties the Israelis’ experienced in Lebanon, but getting no closer to resolving the situation in its favor. Joseph Cedar’s film Beaufort is a haunting vignette of the lives of soldiers deployed in a pointless war. It depicts the travails of an Israeli unit stationed in an old Crusader castle in southern Lebanon in the final month before the Israelis pull out. And it’s a film that should be seen by every policy maker responsible for keeping young Americans in harm’s way in Afghanistan.