Suggesting that movie director Woody Allen, who has abandoned the Big Apple and is residing in Europe now, has been transformed from a New York Liberal into a Continental Conservative would certainly sound like a stretch. But after watching his 2005 Match Point, in which the main character is a professional tennis player by the name of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who cheats and murders his way to the top of British High Society, I did consider the possibility that the aging Allen may have become a Social Darwinist of sorts late in his life (in fact, one of that movie’s producers was someone named Lucy Darwin).
But then, if you follow the last scenes of that movie very closely, you have to conclude (at least I did) that Chris the adulterer and the murderer is actually a loser. His violations of society’s main moral (and religious codes) turn him into a man haunted by nightmares who exhibits all the characteristic of a self-destructive personality. We are left with the impression that even if he won’t get caught eventually by the police and get punished for his crime, like in Crime and Punishment, he would be perceived by the rest of us as a wretched human being who for all practical purposes had signed a pact with the Devil.

My guess is that the aging Allen has been reading a lot of books about Evolutionary Psychology, which has become a faith dressed as a science for many secular conservatives, and in particular for libertarians, who despite their sense of determinism about the depressing future of the human condition, have embraced the notion that we are programmed by our genes to act in accordance with certain principles that we call “moral” but that actually help us to survive through our interaction with others. At the end of the day, the nice guy does come in first, if you will.

In his new Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the evolutionary psychological themes have become more apparent (at least for this reviewer). Two young American women, Vicky (the very attractive Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson; not so great in this role) spend an amorous summer in beautiful and romantic Barcelona (a city that looks as inviting as a glass of Sangria in the film, and believe me. I’ve been there. And it is).

Vicky (Irony? That was the name of Queen Victoria’s daughter) is the reserved and responsible type who is loyal to early 21st-Century’s bourgeois values. Studying “Catalan cultural identity” in Spain, she is engaged to a young and successful New York investment banker and is preparing to spend the rest of her life in America’s prosperous and secure Yuppie-Land.

Cristina (Irony? Religious connotations) is the one who doesn’t know what she wants in her life and in a relationship and is willing to “experiment” with a lot sex and drugs. She detests America’s “materialistic” middle-class values and is attracted to the libertine intellectual and artistic milieu of post-Christian Europe where old Churches are nothing more than tourist attractions.
To make a not-very-long story even shorter, Vicky and Cristina encounter “artist” Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem; the “Fredo” character with the bad hair-cut from No Country for Old Men) a romantic and charismatic who exudes sexual magnetism à la Antonio Banderas, you know, the kind of Latin/Mediterranean male that sexually-frustrated Nordic females tired of their asexual husbands are supposed to be attracted to—only to discover later that their object of desire is gay…

Cristina is (of course!) attracted to Juan and decides to spend the rest of the … Summer? Month? Week? …  in his villa and con mucha wine, food, and sex. But then, Cristina finds out that in addition to being a phony and pretentious Miro Wannabe, her Juan remains under the spell of his psychotic ex-wife (Penélope Cruz; fantastic in this role) who out of the Spanish blue shows up at the villa, and before you say “where is my condom?” it’s a manage-a-trois. But, hey, you guys out there, before you start fantasizing about an orgy with Hall and Johansson (or if you’re gay, with Bardem), all of this gets kind of ugly. Even the adventurer Cristina is repulsed and decides that the time has come to leave Juan and abandon Old Europe and return to the New World where she could end-up as—who knows?—the mistress of a promising presidential candidate?

Unlike Cristina, Vicky is initially repulsed by Juan (who proposes sleeping with both of them). But then, well, she is aware that this is the last summer before moving with the boring-and-only-talks-about-money hubby to the house-in-Connecticut and the summers-in-the-Hamptons, and Juan is so different, and so sexy. Well, after too much wine and she ends up in bed with the Bad Boy while her fiancée decides to visit her and finds out how her research on Catalan identity is going on.

But before she ends up making the wrong choice, Juan’s “ex” tries to kill her and forces her to make the right one. It’s going to be marriage and the upper-middle-class American Dream for her. She is probably not in love with her husband. And there is probably not a lot of romance and sex at the end of the Holland Tunnel. But Woody’s film suggests that unlike Cristina who’ll continue to jump from one bed to another, and Juan and his “ex” who’ll destroy each other, Vicky and her future husband, subscribing to more traditional codes of conduct, will survive as the fittest—and the boring—after this summer in Barcelona.

In Transsiberian, the new terrific Hitchcock-style thriller (I loved it!) produced by Brad Anderson, where we join the Trans-Siberian train journey from China to Moscow. The weather is much colder than it is in Barcelona, and the stakes are also much higher, and involve life and death. But once again we encounter two American women with strong libidos, a charming but destructive Spaniard, a straight all-American husband, and the kind of relationships and the struggle for survival that raise painful moral dilemmas.

Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) seem to be the perfect American couple that belongs to a Christian NGO, and after spending a few months helping orphans in China, they are traveling from Beijing to Moscow on the legendary Trans-Siberian express train. The two befriend another couple, an enigmatic Spaniard, Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his young girl-friend, Abby (Kate Mara) who introduce themselves as to them “English teachers” who supposedly work in schools in the Third World.

But not all what it seems to be on the Trans-Siberian. We learn that before she had married Roy and found Jesus, Jessie was traveling with bad company, with prostitutes, drug dealers and other criminals. That explains why she is attracted to, and at the same time repulsed by Carlos, who is apparently (no much surprise here) a drug dealer. Carols tries to seduce Jessie in the remnants of a Russian-Orthodox Church during a stop in a town in Siberia. But just when Jesse seems to be responding to his advances, one of the stone crosses in the church collapses (Heavenly Intervention?). That provides Jesse with a window of opportunity to demonstrate her fidelity to her husband. But then that makes Carlos really, really angry, and Jesse unfortunately ends up violating another of the Ted Commandments: Thus shall not kill. And a nightmarish Siberian chase commences, involving members of the Russian Mafia, police detectives (including an ex-KGB detective Grinko (played by the wonderful Ben Kingsley), and many other interesting contemporary Russian characters.

Although Jesse and Roy turn out to be very complex characters—forget the perfect American couple!—the moral message here is less subtle than in Match Point. The criminal will not escape the punishment. But like in Barcelona, we are left with the understanding that even the Good Guys have no choice but to operate against their own moral principles if they hope to survive.

Which is exactly what Avery Ludlow (depicted by Brian Cox) finds out at the end of another new cinematic morality tale, Red. Avery is a Korean War vet with a tragic past, who lives alone in a small town somewhere in the USA, where he runs the local hardware store. Avery’s only companion is an old ginger-haired dog named Red, given to him by his late wife.

One day when Avery and Red are enjoying a day of fishing, three teenagers come along and steal Avery’s money and kill Red. Determined to find out who the boys are and why they did it, Avery goes on the hunt. He’s helped by a local reporter, but the authorities generally ignore him. One of the boy’s parents, a rich businessman with political connections (Tom Sizemore), actually tries to ruin him. But Avery single-mindedly presses for justice—even when this means Wild West, vigilante justice. Avery wins at the end of the movie while, at the same time, he expresses doubts over the course of his retribution. Red is a simple and moving and very American movie, perhaps the first Western-style film in which the hero is willing to kill and get killed in the name of defending the honor of a dead and helpless dog.

In a way, many of the doomsday scenarios that try to envision what would happen in the Middle East if the U.S. were to decide to withdraw its military troops from and end its diplomatic engagement in the region, assume that being dumped by the powerful American superpower, the region, starting with Iraq, and continuing with Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt, would degenerate into an all-out and never-ending war between nation-states (Iran vs. Saudi Arabia), ethnic groups (Arabs vs. Kurds), religious sects (Sunnis vs. Shiites), and tribal groups (you name them).

In a Middle East sans America, we are being told by the members of Washington’s Foreign Policy Establishment, the pro-U.S. regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan would instantly collapse and Iran and its proxies would emerge as the ultimate winners. Oil would cease to flow from the region which would eventually draw in other global players, like China, Russia and the European Union (EU) that would start fighting over its resources and divide the region between them. Everyone would then recall the good, old days of Pax America in the Middle East and would wonder. What were we thinking when we bashed American interventionism in the region? There was no way that the Middle East would have been able to survive without U.S. wise guidance and effective protection. Right?

Wrong. A counterargument would start by drawing attention to the devastating consequences of American diplomatic and military intervention in the Middle East during the first eight years of the twenty-first century. The ousting of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq that destroyed the balance of power in the Persian Gulf and strengthened the power of Iran and its Shiite proxies in the region, not to mention the humanitarian and economic costs of this American disastrous misadventure, including the death and destruction in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and rising oil prices (and we are mentioning here the huge costs for the American people).

And lest we forget, a somewhat bizarre mix of an American crusade for democracy and an ambitious strive for hegemony brought about the election of Hamas in Palestine followed by an effort to isolate and punish it and the Palestinian people who elected it, and the strengthening of the power of the Hezbollah in Lebanon followed by Washington giving a green light to Israel to bomb Lebanon back to the stone ages.. The result of the American policy has been more bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians, growing instability in Lebanon, and rising tensions between Syria and Israel, and the never-ending chatter about the U.S or Israel strikes against Iran.

If we apply our earlier analogy, we could argue that it is the wife (the Middle East) that has concluded that the time has come to dump the husband (Uncle Sam), and not the other way around. It is from this perspective that we w need evaluate some of the dramatic developments that have been taking place in the Middle East as some of the leading players in the region, operating based on their interests, have decided to disregard U.S. guidance and embrace independent action.

First, the Shiite controlled ruling and opposition parties in Iraq have all strengthened their ties to the Shiite regime in Tehran while raising objections to continuing American military occupation of their country. Indeed, it was Iran, and not the U.S., that played a critical role in mediating a cease fire between the government of Nouri al-Maliki and the forces of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The liberated Iraqis, it seems, are trying to liberate themselves from American rule and get closer to the Iranians (who according to Washington, are trying to destabilize Iran).

At the same time, the Saudis who have been harshly critical the decision to topple Saddam Hussein and recognize the constraints operating on U.S. power in the region are using their economic and diplomatic power to strengthening the Sunni regimes in the region while trying to appease Iran, hoping to create a stable balance of power in the Persian Gulf.

The sidelining of American power in the Middle East has been even more evident in the Levant, where leading American allies–Israel, Egypt and Turkey have been pursuing policies that run contrary to stated American policy.

Hence, while the Bush Administration and its neoconservative ideologues have depicted the secular Ba’ath regime in Damascus as an unofficial member of the Axis of Evil and part of the Islamo-Fascist threat, Turkey and Israel have been raising strong objections to this American dogma by arguing that the Syrian current partnership with Iran is tactical and not strategic and that Damascus is interested in negotiating a peace agreement with Israel and could be co-opted into a moderate pro-western bloc in the region.

Despite strong American opposition, the Israelis have decided to start to negotiate with the Syrians under Turkish auspices—and both sides have expressed satisfaction with the first phase of the talks in Turkey. Filling the vacuum that has been created by the American refusal to support the Israel-Syria talks has been France, with President Nicolas Sarkozy inviting Assad, together with all other Mediterranean heads of states, including that Israel, to attend the inaugural meeting of the “Mediterranean Union” in Paris on July 13. The French leader is hoping that Israel and Syria would become part of a new “Mediterranean Union” to complement the EU.

France could also play a constructive role in dealing with another consequence of the U.S. policy in the Levant. The Americans have been critical of the recent deal, backed by Syria and Iran, that was reached between the Lebanese government headed by Fouad Seniora and the Hezbollah movement that seemed to strengthen the power of the Shiite group. Sarkozy whose government has had maintained historic ties to Lebanon and Syria and could help facilitate a détente between the two countries that reflects the new balance of power in the region.

And finally, after President Bush’s visit to Israel during which he bashed diplomatic negotiations with rogue regimes and terrorist groups as “appeasement,” Israel has agreed to finalize a deal with the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, mediated by Egypt, which could create the basis for a long-term cease-fire between the Israelis and the radical Islamic group which the Bush Administration has refused to engage and vowed to diplomatically isolate.

While some experts in Washington are suggesting that the Americans should support and even take part in the negotiations between Israel and Syria as well as between Israel and Hamas. In fact, one reason that these diplomatic engagements proved to be successful, has to do with the American disengagement from these processes which tend to provide incentives for the Middle Eastern players to take care of their respective interests.

Indeed, one could imagine the noisy opposition that an American involvement in talks with the Hamas and Syria would have ignited on Capitol Hill and other centers of political power during this heated election season and lead to the collapse of those talks. Moreover, the Syrians, the Palestinians and the Israelis would have probably tried to extract diplomatic and financial goodies from the American in exchange for their “painful” concessions that they would have had to make anyway.

There is a certain lesson that the new American president could draw from these recent developments when he considers reassessing American presence in Iraq. A gradual U.S. disengagement from that country – and from the entire Middle East—could actually put pressure on the main political forces in Mesopotamia as well on the other governments in the region to work together to protect their strategic and economic interests by ensuring that Iraq doesn’t disintegrate and the balance of power there remains stable. Indeed, these Middle Eastern players might all surprise Washington by doing better without American military interventions and futile “peace processing”. Indeed, dumping the Middle East – could end up being a great bargain for the both the Middle Easterners and the Americans.

I’m not a great fan of Adam Sandler who always seems to be doing an impersonation of Jerry Lewis, whose shtick as a juvenile retard I had enjoyed until about the age of…mm…six? I saw Sandler last time in “50 First Dates, a movie that I actually liked (it’s a less sophisticated and funnier take on “Memento”), but I do my best to avoid his films. But his new “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” was supposed to have some sort of a political message relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I’m interested in these topics, so I decided to give the guy another chance. And since my expectations from Sandler and “Zohan” had been very, very low, I wasn’t disappointed at all.

First, something about the “plot” of this film which was conceived by Robert Smigel, the guy who is responsible for “Saturday Night Live”’s “ TV Funhouse” and “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” and Judd Apatow, who among other films, has produced “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” The two have never been accused of suffering from a lack of bad taste. “It’s so gross,” is the common reaction of those who watch their productions that are usually populated by oversexed teen-agers between the ages of 12 and 50 (think Bill Clinton in the Oval office) who engage in various forms of sexual activity with men, women, and other living creatures. Their exceptionally lowbrow humor is very mean and crude and consists of a lot of unfunny penis jokes and scatological references, while their politics mirrors the fantasies that are so common among the creative minds in Manhattan’s West Side and Hollywood. Imagine Larry David directing the “The Three Stooges” in a remake of “Deep Throat. You get the idea (and it’s actually worst than you imagine).

Smigel and Apatow are Jewish and that supposedly “permits” them to mock and ridicule Jews, as well as Christian, Muslims, and the rest of humanity, and to use stereotypes of Jews, especially those of Jewish women, in a way that would have led to charges of anti-Semitism if, say,  Mel Gibson had done it (in the same way that seems to be okay if Chris Rock uses the “N” word). In this film, Smigel, Apatow, and Sandler decided to extend the reach of their “hate humor” beyond the East and West Coasts to the Middle East—and zoom for a change on their Israeli brothers and Arab cousins.
There was a time American-Jews were fantasizing about the Israeli soldier Ari Ben Canaan played by Paul Newman, a mythical, super-brave and very blond and Aryan looking King-David-like Sabra who protects his people against the Nazi-like Arabs and gets to seduce the blond Shiksa, Eva Marie Saint. But Ari Ben Canaan doesn’t live there—in Israel—anymore. Instead, Zohan lives here. And he is no Ari Ben Canaan. In fact, Zohan and his Arab adversary seem to be a mirror image of each other, the hero ends up marrying his enemy’s Arab sister. And most important, Zohan is not Zion’s answer to Albert Einstein but to John Holmes. He is the world’s Biggest Erection (Is Smigel projecting some personal insecurities here? Interestingly enough, in Portnoy’s Complaint Philip Roth’s character cannot sustain an erection in Israel.)

We first meet Zohan as the leader of Israeli special operations/commando unit who looks and sounds like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Howard Stern, a brutal killer of Arabs and other human beings, an owner of a very tiny brain, who is apparently blessed with a huge “endowment” (which is quite obvious to any naked eye surveying his crotch) and a well-matched libido, God’s gift to Jewish women everywhere. And perhaps to men also? That’s is at least what his parents suspect when Zohan shocks them with the admission that he is kind of tired fighting Arabs and that he plans to leave the Holy Land and move to the Diaspora in New York where he would be able to finally fulfill his dream–to become a hairdresser at the famous Paul Mitchell hair salon, where he would cut “silky smooth” hair (in fact, he carries a 1977 Paul Mitchell catalogue with him to every commando raid).“You’re faigeleh!” observes a mortified Jewish father. Well, Zohan ego is deflated because he is an ambiguously flaming heterosexual, and after the response from mom and dad, he decides to fake his own death in the hands of his archrival, the terrorist leader called the Phantom, who is played by John Turturro with a Kafiyyeh and a lot of gold teeth (who looks and sounds like a cross between John Turturro and Eminem) and Homeland Security or not, he is JFK and on his way to the Big Apple where he lands a job at a hair salon owned by a so, so cute Palestinian woman, Dalia, (Emmanuelle Chriqui) where he succeeds in attracting a huge clientele consisting mostly of New York’s ugliest female senior citizens who overrun the place with their walkers and wheelchairs, hoping that the Zohan would bang his exploding crotch against their wrinkly faces. Yep. I told you. It’s groooss. (And let’s not forget the scene when Zohan has sex with Lainie Kazan in front of her teenage son).

And the movie that started as a postmodernist/post-Zionist “Exodus” with a touch of “Munich,” continued as “Shampoo,” ends with a Middle Eastern version of “Westside Story”—but with a happy finale. As you probably guessed, Zohan and Dalia—we discover that she is the sister of the Phantom—fall in love. And through their not-very-moving romance (Zohan promises Dalia that his you-know-what would only serve her needs) they help bring peace between Israeli and Arab gangs in the Bronx. The peace-loving Middle Eastern immigrants find out that their wars were incited by a very WASPy real-estate billionaire and his gang of Rednecks (who as Zohan’s nigh goggles warn him hate: Blacks. Jews. Arabs, Moslems. Vegetarians. Whole Food. The New York Times. The Charlie Rose Show.  Gays.)  The despised WASP wants to turn the colorful=dirty neighborhood in the Bronx into an ugly shopping mall, but Zohan working together with the Phantom foil the plot and kill the greedy WASP and stupid Rednecks, and then everyone lives happily ever after, because people, I just want to say, like you know, can we all get along?

That’s the political message à la Sandler, Smigel, and Apatow: Middle East 101 for Morons on Crack. And I know what you are thinking? “Hey, it’s just a stupid movie. Let’s not over-intellectualize it!” But these guys do seem to take themselves a bit too seriously. “The people living in conflict in the Middle East are the same people living in one neighborhood in New York—except that while there may be rivalries in Gaza, they don’t hate each other in Brooklyn,” according to the movie’s director Dennis Dugan, lecturing journalists in a Hollywood news conference. Everybody, like, you know, just gets along. “They treat each other more as people than as rival factions,” explained Hollywood’s Son of Bernard Lewis. And “it not as crazy as it sounds,” Dugan concludes. Duh. It is! And this from Turturro/the Phantom: “Zohan is faking his death, but little does he realize that the Phantom also has his own dreams of not fighting anymore.”

Based on his experience making “Zohan,” Smigel seems to have come up with his own ideas for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Bye, bye, Dr. Kissinger. Hello Dr. Phil. “One of the great things on the set—and we didn’t do this intentionally—was that we had many scenes that involved all the Arab guys and the Israeli guys in the same scene, meaning they were all called to the set together,” Smigel recalled. “Everyone would be eating lunch together. They had a lot of passionate discussions, but it was very friendly, very healthy, very open-minded. It was really cool to see—some of the guys have said to me that it’s the most they’ve every talked to an Arab or an Israeli before.” And toward the end of the shoot, Smigel heard from some of the actors that they’d grown up hating or mistrusting all Israelis or all Arabs until they came to make the film. “They actually said the shoot was a life-altering experience,” added Smigel. Yep. If only Smigel and his liberal American-Jewish buddies would replace our favorite neoconservative cabal And that is actually not such a bad idea. Unlike Wolfowitz, Smigel does have a sense of humor!

And if anything, the McNamara that we—well, I saw—in “The Fog of War” looks like a passionless, if not a heartless technocrat who in the name of national security and political loyalty, continued to follow the orders of his superiors even if that meant that he had to sell his soul to the devil, a classic case-study in The banality of evil. That the film was released a few weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, provided us with an opportunity to examine the mindset of those like McNamara or another Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who were confident in their ability to manipulate human lives through the use of military force.

But it is one thing to use a camera and a microphone to deconstruct an intellectually towering figure like McNamara in a way that exposes his soulless mentality and reduces him to what he probably is a number-crunching Angle of Death. It’s another thing to apply the same media tools and techniques in order to transform someone who can only be described as a “banal character” into a symbol of evil. But that exactly what Morris seems to be trying to do in his new political documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure, where he interviews a bunch of amateur porno stars of the S&M variety, masquerading as American soldiers, including the now so infamous Lynndie England–the one holding thumbs up, with naked, abused, humiliated and even dead Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib–who have succeeded in giving a bad name to such clichés as slut, sadist, and White Trash, and let’s not forget, Bad Apples.

And when you take into consideration that England and some her co-stars, including two other female military police-women, Megan Ambuhl and Sabrina Harman, following in the footsteps of their predecessors, were apparently paid by Morris to appear in the documentary (England’s boy-friend/impregnator Charles Graner, who is still in jail, wasn’t allowed to be interviewed for “SOP”), you might feel that you’ve been a bit abused and in need of a shower.

There is not a lot of new information in this documentary for anyone (which I assume includes all the readers of the post) who has followed the wide media coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal. My guess is that those Americans whose media consumption includes more than just the plight of Paris Hilton and the latest American Idol, have probably concluded by now that England, Graner, and the others who took part in creating such works of art as the Pyramid of the Naked, were not “bad apples” but that their conduct was tolerated and even encouraged by the higher ups in the military.

But anyone who is hoping that “SOP” provides a “60 Minutes”-type investigative work that would provide documentary evidence about who up there in Baghdad or Washington–the Pentagon? the White House?—was really responsible for Abu Ghraib is bound to be disappointed. There are no smoking guns directly tying Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other top officials to the events in Abu Ghraib. There are no diagrams that detail the chain of command or a complete timeline of the abuse scandal. Instead, there are a lot of interviews with the soldiers and civilians who had witnessed the abuse or participated in it (as well as with Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general in charge of Abu Ghraib, who alleges that she was made a “scapegoat” in order to protect her superiors) mixed with somewhat artistic reenactments of several of the instances of abuse.

Unfortunately, those of us who had expected another Fog of War, end up watching something that looks like a cross between “Dumb and Dumber” and a Trailer-Park version of “The Young and the Restless” with a touch of “Surf Nazis Must Die.” We lean how young and innocent England fell under the spell of Graner, the evil commanding officer, who was simultaneously having sex both with England and Ambuhl, and after making England pregnant (she is now a proud mother to a son, both of who are probably provided for by the American taxpayer) he married Ambuhl. Isn’t it romantic? The third female guard, Harman, is a lesbian whose letters to her “wife” are featured in the film, which injects even more perverse sexual energy to the abuse drama (“Join the military, and….”).

In between the scenes from this anti-erotic soap opera, England and her follow torturers explain that much of what they did was considered to be, yes, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which is apparently the alphabet-soup version of “I just followed orders.” They were supposed to soften up the prisoners—and humiliation (like covering a face with a woman underwear) is a SOP—and make them more receptive to interrogation by the CIA and the many private security contractors. And they were quite stupid, to put it mildly. Hence while they had enough time (and permission) to get rid of the incriminating photos before the start of the investigation, many of them just couldn’t dispose of those war trophies (“Here, son, you can see your mom standing next to this Iraqi dude playing with his penis. Isn’t that funny?”).

The Photos. In a way, it seems to me that the thousands of incriminating photos without which we wouldn’t have had this scandal, seemed to have paradoxically emptied the film of any sense of great political drama, of meaning. Morris’s preoccupation, if not obsession, with the medium of the photograph has turned this medium into the message of the movie (with apologies here to Marshall McLuhan). Indeed, it sometimes feels as though Morris is teaching a course on Photography as Art and Propaganda: The Camera Sometimes Lies. He is trying to demonstrate that photos can be manipulated, especially at a time when we have access to so many digital advances, and that we shouldn’t accept what we see through these photos–or we think we see—at face value. Hence, the photos of abuse, humiliation, and death from Abu Ghraib were shocking. But, but, but…here is comes… we need to put each photo into context, to figure out who had taken it and when, to discover what is missing from it, etc. etc. After going through this painstaking process, we may find out that what we considered to be shocking is just, well, banal.

Hence, remember the photo of the hooded prisoner, and standing on a box with his arms supposedly wired to an electric charge? Well, the wire wasn’t actually connected to a power source. We also learn that the prisoner being beaten up by Graner in one of the photos had raped several children (someone printed the word “rapeist” [sic] on his back). Or that Graner scratched out the image of his Ambuhl, his future wife, from a photo, making it look as though poor, poor England was the only one who was having fun watching naked Iraqi men being humiliated (and she really didn’t enjoy all of that, England explains to Morris. And recall that it was all a SOP).

OK. I get it. Photography can distort reality. I recall watching a few years ago a television show in which a former guard from the Soviet-era Gulag explaining that this or that photo makes it look as though prisoners in the camp were mistreated by him, but, hey, he actually saved the lives of three women who were going to be executed. The point is that watching a film on the abuse and killing that had taken place in a Soviet or Nazi concentration camp I would expect to see more than just interviews with stupid low-level guards and a discussion of the misuse of photography.

Forget doing investigative journalism and finding out who was really responsible for Abu Ghraib? How about interviewing some of the former Iraqi prisoners and members of their families? Or visiting the trailer park where England had grown up and trying to find out whether the little monster who we see walking a prisoner on a leash or next to men forced to masturbate while she looks on with a smile and thumbs-up sign is a representative of contemporary American culture. And more important, how and why we allowed all of this horror to happen? Perhaps in a few years from now, when Paul Wolfowitz would be in his 80s, Morris could do “Fog of War II” with him.

And that’s too bad. Just imagine a plot in which Osama bin Laden steals The Ark of the Covenant from Washington, DC—it has been apparently stored in a government warehouse there since 1936 after Indy had recovered it from the Nazis—and our professor is called out of retirement in some assistant living place for old dudes—and is on his way, on a wheel chair, hooked-up to an IV machine, taken care by a young nurse (Scarlett Johansson, please, please…) who is also equipped with several sets of disposable underwear and false teeth—to the Broader Middle East to fight Moslem terrorists.

This first Indiana Jones movie in 19 year could then become the first in The Old/Senile Indiana Jones Chronicles (In the next film, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gets hold of the Holy Grail and old Indy runs over him with his walker). It could also provide for a lot of funny lines about “senior moments” (“Is Dr. Jones sleeping? Or is he dead?”) while Viagra and the McCain election campaign would probably do product placement. But unfortunately, the movie won’t reach the right demographic groups. Geezers  lose in the Box Office (and me hopes also in presidential elections).
So instead of playing a centurian in the new movie, Harrison Ford is a fifty-something kind-of-guy in the latest installment. Not a lot of senior moments yet for him. But the guy “matured,” although poor Karen Allen who plays his former GF and his future wife, Marion, and who is actually younger than Ford by nine years, looks more like his mom. Hollywood is certainly not very kind of aging actresses and female entertainers in general. And instead of the War on Terrorism, we are back in the good-old days of the Cold War, not as good as the Good War, but still, as the Crystal Skull demonstrates, quite a lot of fun.
Remember Greta Garbo as the female Soviet agent in “Ninotchka”? Cate Blanchett plays a similar role in the new Indy as Irina Spalko, a Russian operative who, following the orders of Uncle Joe, is after the Crystal Skull, a ancient artifact that could help the Soviets rule the world. John Hurt plays a professor of something who is actually a 110-year old. And then there is the very irritating Shia LaBeouf  (not relation to these guys) who plays Dr. Jones’ kid, “Mutt,” straight out of “Grease” and on a motorcycle, trying to do a parody of James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The guy really, really sucks, and I hope he doesn’t end up playing Indiana Jones III in the next film. Why didn’t they shoot him?

In any case, to make a long movie sound short, it’s basically a 50’s Retro (it supposed to take place in 1957). We can hear Elvis in the background and there are a lot of allusions to Sci-Fi B movies which were pre-occupied the extraterrestrial menace and with mushroom clouds that would end the world, which are the two major themes in this film that also recalls scenes from “Tarzan,” “Happy Days,” and other stuff that Steven Spielberg (who made the movie) enjoyed watching when he was growing up.

And the Reds/Commies are portrayed as dim-witted brutes whose quest for world domination is foiled by the American-led Coalition of the Willing, that includes also the E.T.’s, one fat Brit, and a group of indigenous people. And Professor Jones is even investigated by some FBI agents (one of whom looks like Roy Cohn) re his loyalty, and is blacklisted for a while. But all’s well that ends well. American Wins and Dr. Jones is reinstated at the university and is–not so good news for him–forced to marry the gal who looks like him mom.

As someone who wasted a few years of his life teaching in undistinguished academic institutions, I could never figure out why Hollywood would bother making movies about college professors and why anyone would want to spend his time or money watching for two hours a disheveled and grumpy middle aged man, portrayed as a misogynist and a misanthropic, trying to overcome his writer’s block while forcing himself on his female (and occasionally, male) students. Like who cares?

But who knows? Perhaps after getting tenured and spending the rest of my life teaching illiterate and apathetic kids about the same esoteric and boring subjects year after year after year, writing articles and books that no one reads, and being surrounded during long faculty meetings (where, as Dr. K. once noted, the fights are so bloody because the stakes are so small) by obnoxious and emasculating feminists and lefty guys with beards and/or pony tales, I would also have probably lost my own lust for life, or my so-called “life.”

After all, most college professors—and I’m talking here about the humanities and social science departments—recognize that unlike janitors, hairdressers and personal trainers, no one really needs their services. Students sign up for classes in political “science” (which is what I was teaching) or Shakespeare, because they tend to be painless and inflated with a lot of “A’s.” If you really wanted to study French lit or American history, all you had to do is pick up a few good books in the library and read them. You certainly didn’t t have to force your divorced father, burdened with a huge alimony and a new wife, to pay $$$ (I’m not sure what’s the cost of a “credit” is these days) and to listen to an unkempt and bearded grump (don’t these guys get paid enough to join a gym or visit the dentist?) read his notes for the thousandth time.

In short, there are Alpha Males—and then there are college professors who wake up late in life in their cluttered office, as they wait for another student to knock on the door and ask them for an extension on their paper, finding out that all they have to show for their efforts is their tenured position. Isn’t that exciting?

Not really, as we have discovered in a several recent movies about, yes, disheveled and grumpy middle aged men, trying to overcome his writer’s block, like the professor played by Jeff Daniels in “The Squid and the Whale” or the one that Philip Seymour Hoffman plays in “The Savages”. And then there was Michael Douglas in the role of the bearded professor who teaches English lit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in “Wonder Boys,” and now there is Dennis Quaid in the role of the bearded professor who teaches English lit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the new film, “Smart People.” (What’s the deal with Carnegie Mellon University? My guess: the relatively low costs of making films in Pittsburgh)

That’s a great title for film critics, like “if you’re smart, don’t go to see ‘Smart People’.” Well, here is mine: A boring film about Boring and Unpleasant People, led by Quaid’s Lawrence Wetherhold, and including his teenage daughter, Vanessa,  played by Ellen Page (straight from Juno; here she his using Yuppie slang instead of teenage lingo); his loser “adopted brother”—as our hero reminds us again and again—“Chuck” (Thomas Haden Church from “Sideways”), who is chaufering his injured brother around (in exchange a roof over his head); and in her worst movie part ever (and she had many), Sarah Jessica Parker (no sex and no city here), as Janet, a bitchy ER physician who once had taken a class with Wetherhold and still has a crush on her not so Mr. Big, who has been widowed for a quite a while. There is also Wetherhold’s metro-sexual son who is sleeping with his dad’s research assistant and some other shallow characters one encounters in academic milieus. And the film was directed by Noam Murro (never heard of the guy) and written by Mark Poirier, the author of the best-seller novel Goats (which I’ve read—not!)

“Smart People” seems to be drowning in beaten-up clichés and sophomoric jokes. First, there is Wetherhold as the cinematic archetype of the college professor who cannot get his book published, And then there is Vanessa, an overachieving Young Republican (she has a big poster of Reagan in her room) who admires, well, Dick Cheney, and who is studying a lot and gets a perfect score on her SAT, which is another way of telling us that she is cold and calculating. A Republican Stratford Daughter, if you will. And–horror of horrors!–she is a virgin, except for her infatuation with the Dick Cheney, that is. We are supposed to buy into the notion that behind the facades of the old and young Wetherhold hide warm and wonderful human beings that are just waiting to come out of their exterior shells, because, you know, deep down, they are good enough, they are smart enough, and, doggonit, people like them!

The media for these remarkable personal and intellectual transformations are “Chuck” and Janet. “Chuck” takes Vanessa to a bar, where she gets drunk, makes a fool of herself, smokes dope, and gets a bit slutty, which are (I suppose) the first steps on the road towards recovery from elitism to the love of humanity. At the same time, “Chuck” encourages his emotionally retarded brother to get a life while Janet teaches him to use a condom during not very arousing sex scenes. But he fails in that exam, and oops… they have twins. And the professor even gets to sell his book, You Can’t Read, to some publisher in New York, while his son’s poem is accepted by the New Yorker.
Where is Liz Taylor and Richard Burton when you need them? Buy or rent “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (which is based on a play by Edward Albee) a great film in which a bunch of professors meet and have a few heated arguments about this and that, and play such “games” as “Humiliate the Host,” “Get the Guests,” “Hump the Hostess” and “Bringing Up Baby.” Compare Burton who plays George, a history professor, and Liz as his wife, Martha, to Dennis Quaid and Sarah Jessica Parker in “Smart People.”

And remember what Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!” “Smart People” demonstrates that the scripts, the actors, and the movies are so small and insignificant these days.

I agree with one of our best screenwriters, David Mamet that part of the problem lies with the writers. Here is what Mamet had to say on the subject in a June 2008 issue of GQ:

Y’know, I grew up in a different generation. I grew up after World War II, and boys did different things in those days. You went camping. You went hunting. You boxed. And the image of a writer, to someone starting off in those days was not some schmuck who went to graduate school. It was Jack London, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway. Especially coming from Chicago—a writer was a knock-around guy. Someone who got a job as a reporter or drove a cab. I think the reason there are a lot of novels about How Mean My Mother Was to Me and all that shit is because the writers may have learned something called ‘technique,’ but they’ve neglected to have a life. What the fuck are they gonna write about?”

Indeed, as Alex Pappademas who conducted the interview with Mamet pointed out, Mamet has “captured the dark side of the modern male mind—a place simmering with misogyny, greed, lust, and violence.” It’s a world where Alpha Males—and not girlie professors—do a lot of fighting in noir urban settings, marking their territory as they jockey for power and wrestle for control over other men and women, which is what they do in his latest film which Mamet—who announced recently that he was “No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’—wrote and directed, “Redbelt.”

In the movie, a cross between “Night and the City” and “The Seven Samurai,” Mike, a Brazilian jujitsu instructor who runs a small martial arts academy in Los Angeles, a role played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a fighter and man of honor, a Knight or a Samurai, who never fights for profit. But he is backed into a corner as a result of a complex con job (a common theme in Mamet’s films) and is forced to violate his personal ethics in order to save his business and marriage and protect his friends while maintaining his integrity and sense of pride. It’s not a movie about the so-called lives of our college professors—which is one reason that I liked it.

In The Global Me, Zachary provided the readers with a tour of the New, New Brave World and introduced us to fascinating characters, ranging from high-tech entrepreneurs to international aid workers, who posses the attractive mix of “roots” and “wings”—that is, hyper-mobile “global hybrids” with “transnational identities,” who won’t stay put in one place, who experience “the breakdown of the unitary self, the rising appetite for diversity, the growing taste for gumbo, the proliferation of voluntary attachments to places, practices and communities.” These individuals with roots in more than one nation and with wings to fly anywhere and anytime were “the fruits of the new patterns in migration and mobility,” Zachary wrote. “They are the future.”

Or perhaps they’ll be recalled one day as historical transient figures, the beneficiaries of the proverbial 15 minutes of fame in the brief pre-9/11 episode of globalization. The are the visitors who may have outstayed their welcome into our vanishing cosmopolitan Zeitgeist, their wings being cut as they are deported into the real world of rising nationalism, ethnic rivalry and religious tensions, returning to their roots, where they like it or not.

In many ways, Tarek Khalil (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian of Lebanese (father) and Palestinian (mother) extraction, who plays the djembe, an African drum, in jazz bands in Manhattan, in Tom McCarthy’s “The Visitor” (2007/I), which has just opened nationwide, is a global hybrid in the making, the ultimate multicultural fantasy-child of your friendly Western liberal intellectual who seem to be confident that if only, if only Tarek wouldn’t have been deported from America and would have been allowed to spread his wings in this country, he wouldn’t have ended-up flying, like some other illegal immigrants into the, say, Twin Towers in New York. Instead, Tarek would have composed a musical fusionist symphony, combing Arab tunes and African melodies that would have helped bridge different civilizations. He wouldn’t have been humiliated in an ugly detention center for illegal immigrants in Queens but would been hailed as a cultural icon at Lincoln Center, as outsider who came in and succeeded in injecting new blood into America’s decaying cultural veins.

After all, unlike Mohammad Atta, Tarek who is so, so cool, adorned with a fashionable three-day stubble of a beard (very non-Osama-like) and wearing Obama’s short haircut, is a “good” secular Moslem. “I’m a bad Moslem,” he explains as he drinks a glass of red wine (not whiskey! And he doesn’t smoke…). Tarek is fluent in several languages, including English, French and Arabic, and knowledgeable of world affairs, including the intricacies of economic globalization. He is married to the sexy and trendy Zainab (Danai Gurira) from Senegal who is also “illegal” and who despite her model-like looks and figure is also very brainy and a “good Moslem” (she doesn’t drink alcohol). And let’s not forget that the peace-loving Tarek is also in a habit of giving a high-five to his Israeli pal Ze’ev (Tzahi Moskovitz) who works with Zainab, selling hand-make trinkets to condescending and globally illiterate Americans (who think that Senegal borders South Africa) in an open market in Manhattan, a mini-model world trade center, if you will.

And then there was Tarek’s late dad, a dissident journalist who had been jailed and tortured by the Assads in Syria, leaving behind Tarek’s mom, Mouna Khalil, played by the Israeli-Palestinian Hiam Abbass, who gives an excellent performance (Oscar?) as a refined Levantine lady who exudes a quite dignity and a certain stoicism coupled with Arab bigotry (“She is so black,” is what she has to say about her new daughter-in-law). Mouna straddles two worlds–East (she misses the smells of the Damascus’ markets) and West (she wants to see “Phantom of the Opera”)—but seems to feel comfortable in neither: she lives as an illegal immigrant in Michigan after the American government had refused to grant her family a political asylum. Tarek, on the other hand, feels secure in New York as the child of the many worlds to which he belongs, that like in the case of other global hybrids help him to be who he is—the creative cosmopolitan. Who gives a damn about a Greed Card? “New York=The World” is Tarek’s home and he hopes that everyone out there will join him in drumming his American-Arab-African version of Kumbaya.

His unlikely student in this movie is Walter Vale, played by Richard Jenkins who is close to perfect in the role of sombre middle aged and widowed economics professor who teaches college in Connecticut. Walter represents the all-too-familiar very educated and very white man, a caricature of your unfriendly, cold, calculating, stuffy and snobby WASP, who is very uncomfortable in his own skin. He is also a member of the nation’s globalizing elite: He is writing a book on globalization, he reads the Financial Times every day, and he is presenting a paper on the integration of developing nations (“Like Syria and Senegal,” Trek points out) at a conference at NYU where he mingles with other Council of Foreign Relations types.

During one of his infrequent visits to an apartment he owns in Manhattan, Walter discovers Tarek and Zainab, who apparently had been scammed by a conman named “Ivan” (Russian mafia?) from whom they thought they were renting the flat. Instead of calling the police, Walter allows the two illegals to stay in his apartment. And while Tarek plays the African drum in the apartment they now share, the rhythm-challenged Walter, who for years has been trying to learn the play the piano, is drawn to the beat of the African instrument, and after a few lesson from Tarek, the two end up playing the drum in Central Park with a bunch of drummers from Third World locations–Latinos, Africans, Arabs, Asians. Hence the real power of cultural globalization seems to be finally having an effect on Walter. His body sways to the African music, and he breaks out of his mental WASPy shell.

Unfortunately, one evening as they return from one of their “concerts” in Central Park on their way home, Tarek is arrested by somewhat thuggish Homeland Security officers. While Tarek is detained, his mom and Walter commute between the detention center in Queens and the flat in Manhattan. The reserved American and the warm Syrian-Palestinian seem to be sharing moments of tender love against the backdrop of Manhattan–we can see the Statue of Liberty and are reminded that the Twin Towers are not there. But then Tarek is deported and Mouna decides to return to join him in Syria. They both seem to be returning to their roots, whether they like it or not. No more flying on wings for them. And Walter is left behind, a bald, white man, sitting in the subway station and banging on the drum, being transformed into his own unique version of the global hybrid, a visitor in his own land.

“The Visitor” is more than just a film about and illegal immigrant facing the pr-9/11 political blowback and a maze of bureaucratic nightmare. The personal journey of Tarek represents a critical facet of the globalization process. It suggests that while this political, economic, and cultural revolution can help make individuals more productive, more prosperous, more mobile, it cannot ensure that these same individuals will abandon their old civilizational identities. If anything, the powerful encounter with the West, which is the main driving force behind globalization, challenges in a very painful way those who absorb the new ideas and who are in constant contact with political, economic cultural centers of the West. Instead of assimilating into the new global civilization, global hybrids like Tarek or for that matter, the members of the Arab and Moslem communities in Europe end up feeling that they are under attack. They respond to the perceived – or real – attacks, by returning to their old roots and by trying to protect them. And if they try using their wings and fly, they sometimes do crash into skyscrapers in Manhattan.