Your weekly installment of rental movies to watch this weekend that reflect news around the world. Presented by Ishaan Tharoor and Tony Karon
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Traveling Players
As hundreds of thousands of Greeks took to the streets this week to resist an economic austerity program they believe is being imposed on their country by an alliance of foreign powers and local banker-politicians, it’s worth remembering that the people that invented democracy also have a well-established left-wing revolutionary tradition. Indeed, had it been left to Greek democracy (rather than Western military intervention) to determine Greece’s alignment as the end of World War II heralded the onset of the Cold War, Athens may well have ended up in the Soviet bloc. The impact of the war and the civil war that followed as right-wing royalists and fascists aligned with the British occupation authority against (small r) republican communists over Greece’s future was brilliantly captured in Theo Angelopolous’ Traveling Players. A masterpiece of written-with-the camera cinema, it tells the story through the fortunes of a theater troupe traveling the length and breadth of the country. The film, which won the International Critics Award at Cannes in 1975, is all the more remarkable for the fact that it was filmed in Greece under the watchful eye of a right-wing U.S.-backed military junta, which is no small feat for an unashamedly left-wing movie. Perhaps in keeping with its socialist origins, the whole thing can be watched in segments on YouTube. But as the Guardian’s esteemed Derek Malcolm, who rates Angelopolous as one of the greatest living filmmakers, notes, Traveling Players is “not everyone’s idea of a fun night out.” Nope. It’s a four-hour epic from a cinematic genius who insisted on staging his scenes in real-time rather than via quick-cuts. Still, if you want to understand the roots of the radicalism on display in Greece’s streets today, there’s no richer piece of cinema to reach for than Traveling Players. – T.K.
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The Chess Players
This classic 1977 film made by legendary Indian auteur Satyajit Ray, adapted from an earlier Hindi short story, tells of two hookah-smoking aristocrats enamored with their games of chess. All around them, though, their decadent, complacent world trembles on a knife-edge. Lost to the chessboard, they do not see the larger strategies and plots threatening Lucknow, the majestic city that was the seat of the kingdom of Awadh, a once powerful North Indian state that eventually succumbed to British annexation in the mid-19th century. In a strange setpiece earlier this week, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi played chess with a visiting Russian politician. But the game — an admittedly bizarre diversion —hardly distracted from the ongoing civil war wracking the nation, and the intensifying NATO air campaign designed to claw Gaddafi’s fingers off the reins of power. – I.T.
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Kelly’s Heroes
The news this week that some $7 billion in hard cash flown into Iraq by the U.S. military remains unaccounted for — and Federal investigators believe that some or all of it may have been stolen — reminded Global Spin of Kelly’s Heroes. Of course, it could have reminded us of David O. Russell’s Three Kings, a heist movie actually set in Iraq, but we’d prefer to go to the 1970 film to which Three Kings was an obvious homage. It depicts Clint Eastwood’s Private Kelly leading a gang of U.S. soldiers in France in September 1944 who conspire to steal a bank vault full of gold bullion from behind enemy lines. It’s a smart-assed wartime comedy caper also featuring Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland as an entirely improbable hippie tank commander — and even a cameo by a young Harry Dean Stanton. Of course, they’re committing a crime, but as Kelly sees it, it’s in keeping with American values. “We’re just a private enterprise operation,” he declares. Seems like someone in Iraq was thinking the same way. – T.K.
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Blow
June 17 marks four decades since U.S. President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs. As we’ve pointed out here and here, that whole enterprise is considered to be an abject failure, not least because, as Tim Padgett observes in his post today, “our anti-drug policies are so narrow-mindedly focused on battling supply instead of reducing demand.” The 2001 film Blow tells the real story of George Jung, the man credited with almost single-handedly building the American cocaine market. Starring Johnny Depp in natty 1970s attire, it’s a fitting portrait of the near bottomless American hunger for drugs and the vast amounts of money such a lucrative industry can command. – I.T
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The Hunt for Red October
Tensions in the South China Sea, a body of water contested by six Asian countries, have flared in recent weeks, with the Chinese and the Vietnamese in particular trading diplomatic barbs. On June 13, Vietnam staged live-fire war games in waters off its coast, acts which China deemed provocative. It’s Chinese expansionism, though, that most governments in the region fear. In particular, China has steadily developed its submarine fleet as well as a vital naval base on southern Hainan island — and the Vietnamese, in response, have enlisted Russian and Indian support in modernizing their own navy. Confrontation between the two countries remains unlikely, but the South China Sea will likely tacitly feuded over by small surveillance vessels and stealth craft for years to come. The blockbuster Hunt for Red October isn’t set in Southeast Asia nor does it involve the Vietnamese or Chinese, but it’s a classic yarn of espionage and submarine chases.-I.T.