My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Is there an Oscar for the weirdest film?: The Act of Killing

I think The Act of Killing will win the Oscar for best documentary, at least it should, and would no doubt win if there were a category for weirdest film, perhaps of all time: the Danish filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer sets off to document the killings in Indonesia, in which the right-wing government turned the other way while bands of gangsters murdered perhaps a million people they identified as communists, which seemed to mean anyone opposed to the government in any way - killings that Oppenheimer suggests are on-going though perhaps on a smaller scale (perhaps because no longer necessary - silence has been imposed). He hooks up with two 70ish former gangsters and asks them to tell their story and to re-create the killings for his film in any way that they'd like. These two guys and some of their cronies - including an especially despicable (to me) newspaper publisher - almost gleefully tell of how they killed hundreds of suspected communists - they go to the rooftop where they committed many of these murders and proudly demonstrate the techniques they'd developed to minimize blood spillage - messy and odorous. Then they recruit some people to stage scenes in which they pretend to burn down houses or haul people away for questioning - and the people joining the scenes are really uneasy and disturbed, especially the children - they can't quite separate what's real, what's fake, and why these guys are creating these scenes. And things get even more strange: the gangsters decide to stage what looks like a music video, set against the background song "Born Free," replete with dancing women, a waterfall in the background, and most odd of all one of the toughest of the gangsters dressed up in a pink bunny suit - I'm not kidding - think the Sopranos meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Watching the outtakes, they marvel at how beautiful the video looks. We also see them interact with some government leaders and what is apparently a proto-fascist Indonesian youth group with a million members - very frightening. And it builds toward a dreadful conclusion in which the lead gangster begins to comprehend the horror of what he has done w/ his life. It's amazing that anyone could make a film like this - and we hope there are no repercussions; you've never seen anything like it.

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