A good but flawed series on 9/11

The Hulu 10-part series The Looming Tower will hold everyone's interest because of our unending fascination with the horror of the attacks of 9/11. This series focuses on the back story from the POV of American intelligence, beginning w/ the attack on the embassy in Nairobi, then onto the attack on the Cole in Yemen, finally to the 9/11 attacks. The film avoids the gruesome, to its credit - this is a story about the malfunction of government at the apex. The premise - based on a nonfiction book by Lawrence Wright - is that the CIA had a lot of intelligence that could possibly have stopped the 9/11 attacks but the agency kept the information secret, in particular from the FBI, which was working the same materials. The assumption is that if the 2 agencies had worked together instead of becoming snarled in personal rivalries and ego trips, they could have found the terrorists in th US before the attacks. That's all possibly true, but the series is told entirely from the FBI perspective - presumably, because the feds were willing to speak at length w/ Wright and the spooks were not. If the lack of cooperation is the theme, nobody will miss it: The writers hammer home these points repeatedly. They also make John O'Neill, head of the FBI counter-terrorism unit, a hero (if not a saint - he is deeply flawed) - the only one who's right, all the time. The writers/producers try to build in a human element to the story as we follow the love lives of O'neill and of his top field agent, a Lebanese-American fluent in Arabic. The writing in these back stories is so bad that at one point M and I looked at each other thinking: Who writes this shit? So, yes, this series is good, despite some really lame dialog (hint: repeated use of the variants on the word "fucking" does not make for good tough-guy dialog), but it could have been better at 5 or 6 episodes with less back story and with more faith in viewers: The CIA isn't cooperating. They're bad guys. We get it. Let's move on.

A completely strange film that's worth watching - once

To put it mildly, Sergei Parajanov's 1969 film, The Color of Pomegranate, ostensibly a cinematic protrayal of the life of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova (I'd never heard of him, either) is an acquired taste and is not a film for all viewers. That said, there is no other film like it before or since, so for viewers interested in the extremes of cinema this is worth a look at least. Parajanov, a Soviet director, says at the outset that this is not a conventional biopic about the events in the life of a poet; rather, it's an attempt to examine the mind and the emotions of the writer in a completely unconventional manner. Every shot in the film is a like a small tableaux staged in front of a stable camera; the camera, in fact, never moves during any shot and most of the scenes consist of a single shot with a duration of about 30 seconds to a minute. The characters posed in each shot move slowly and ritualistically, as in Noh theater or Balinese dance, and there's often a musical accompaniment of monkish chanting and the tuning of ancient instruments. Loosely, we follow the life of the poet, who ages over the course of the film, from childhood interest in the beautiful colors of dyed fabrics (hence the title), to fascination w/ books, to falling in love, the some kind of religious immersion in a monastery, to bringing his work and ideas to the world, to tiredness and death. Each of the many tableaux scenes in the film is visually interesting; more are entirely weird - somewhat in the tradition of Dada and the Surreal: the poet digging a grave inside the nave of a church as the church gradually fills with a massive herd of sheep; a woman dancing holding a live chicken on an outstretched arm; a row of hooded monks in silhouette bowing before a black horse and rider; the slaughter of three lambs; and so on. Clearly this film is a gift to graduate students and scholars, who can debate and dissect forever the system of imagery that drives the film. I'm not sure I'd ever watch it again, but the amazing thing is that it was made at all, especially in the USSR: There is nothing that I can see in this film that would remotely support the Soviet ideologies, nothing about workers or the working classes, and it's about as far from realism as cinema can get - and about as far from comprehensible as well.

Fauda Season 2 maintains its exciting pace right through to the conclusion

Right up to the last moments of the last (12th) episode in Season 2, the Israeli Netflix series Fauda maintains its tension, excitement, and complexity, holding us from start to finish. This series has been criticized by all sides and Israel-Arab conflict, which probably means it's doing something right: Many Israelis apparently see it as too sympathetic to the Palestinian families, showing their family life and making them modern and human (imagine that!), while Palestinians see it as a glorification of the Israeli special forces, always depicting the Israelis as on the side of peace and justice while the Palestinian are radical, fanatic killers. Well, yes, it is an Israeli production after all - and we do see terrorism at its worst - beheading a civilian and thinking nothing of putting children in mortal danger. Yet you also have to give the series props for depicting Israeli interrogations as nauseatingly brutal, for showing schisms within the Palestinian cause (much of Season 2 is about rivalry between Hamas and the far more radical ISIS), and for giving some sense of the daily family life on both sides of the divide. The Palestinian characters, however, are rarely if ever sympathetic: Compar w/ the Sopranos and The Wire, both of which made the traditional "bad guys" into Attractive, likable, sympathetic lead characters, without turning a blind eye to their violence, corruption, and contempt for the law. Fauda is headed for Season 3, which reports say will be more for an international audience (good idea, as this series could be more popular were it more accessible - some of the internecine warfare of the first two seasons can be a challenge to keep straight), and I hope it continues w/ the great production values: Few series have been so successful in depicting chases, arrests, interrogations, ambushes, and small-scale military action.