You know what the best part is about getting Angel Season 4 Disc 6 in the mail from Netflix?  It means you're done with Angel Season 4 and you never, ever have to watch it again. 

But the great SantaBadger that is Netflix also brought something good to my house, in the form of Warren Beatty's 1981 film, Reds.  This is the true story of two journalists, Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, who became involved in the Russian Revolution.

Beatty directed and produced this film, as well as starring in it (alongside such incomparable actors as Dianne Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Maureen Stapleton), and I was drawn to it because I had such a positive response to another of Beatty's films, Bulworth.  Not to mention the fact that Reds was nominated for a metric crapton of Golden Globes and Oscars (and won a few, too).

The story is historical fiction, augmented by interview clips from people who were actually there (the film was released in 1981) and who knew Jack and Louise.  The two writers begin their relationship in Oregon before Louise goes to New York to join Jack and live the romantic life of a writer.  The problem is that while Jack is already an established professional, Louise is not, and though she has talent she's never really found anything worth writing about.  She becomes obsessed with independence, refusing to be merely Jack's girlfriend (or, after they get married, merely his wife), insisting that she have her own identity.  This becomes the central theme of the film, as Jack and Louise swing between independence and codependency, and the difficulty of being both a solitary human being and a selfless lover.

In New York the two become involved with various radical liberal movements, and both become increasingly infuriated with their status (Louise as a powerless woman who can do nothing but follow her husband, Jack as a mere journalist who reports on the world without changing it).  Louise goes to Paris and eventually becomes a war correspondent (World War I), and after becoming desperately lonely Jack follows her.  He convinces her to go to Moscow, where the Russian people have revolted against the war and declared a revolution.  There, the two rekindle their relationship in an atmosphere of hope and change, and both finally find their roles, Louise as a news correspondent reporting on the revolution, Jack as an active agitator working to bring communist ideals to America.

Upon returning to America, the couple are consumed with reform and revolution.  But then Jack is forced to return to Moscow due to political infighting within the American communist party, and he finds himself trapped there.  The Russian communist party is also falling apart:  dictators have seized control and refuse to hand things over to the people.  Lies and propaganda swirl, and political maneuvering becomes the primary goal of a party that was supposed to represent the antithesis of the American system.  The strong desires of the politically powerful begin to outweigh their need to do good for their own people (so there's that conflict again between individuality and selfless love, and the story of Jack & Louise dovetails nicely with the backdrop of the Revolution).  When Louise sets out to find Jack, the two have to scour the entirety of northeastern Europe to find what they've lost.

It's no surprise to find that the history of the Russian Revolution joins together so perfectly with a tortured love story.  After all, it's been done before with Doctor Zhivago (which was even more idealistic about love and even more cynical about the Revolution.  Russian perspective versus American, I suppose).  It's a fairly perfect narrative theme for storytellers to use, and Beatty uses it to strong effect here.  If the film has one major flaw, it's that he doesn't dig into his narrative symbolism quite enough.  Like most historical fiction, the reportage of facts is absolutely paramount, and speculation about the emotional or intellectual state of the characters is unacceptable.  They never really quite get to feel like real people.  Another flaw is its insistence on ending the story when Jack Reed's own story ends.  There are a ton of other characters in this film, we don't get to know about them?  But of course Warren Beatty is playing Jack Reed, and therefore Jack Reed is of primary interest.  Louise Bryant does appear in a great number of scenes, and her personal life and feminist issues have a strong impact on the film; it's a little bizarre that we don't get to learn more of her life post-1920 (she only lived for 16 more years, adding 15 minutes to a 195-minute film couldn't possibly hurt that much).

Still, I have to say I liked Reds a lot more than most historical fiction I've seen, a genre which is generally very dry and prone to vast leaps through time without providing explanation of what happened in between, a genre that typically offers as little explanation as possible of important history figures and events because that would mean the writers would actually have to do more research (I speak of films only, historical novels are a different animal entirely).  Reds was much easier to follow and much more relateable than the vast majority of its ilk, and though I didn't love it I did really like it.  I've always had an interest in fiction concerned with communist Russia, and this was a thoroughly fascinating portrait of the time, but also a heartfelt treatise on sacrifice and the value of self. 

American Film Badger:  We're up to #13, and on the 1998 list that brings us to... The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Haven't seen it, unfortunately.  Here's how Netflix describes it:  "Director David Lean's sweeping epic is set in a World War II-era Japanese prison camp where British POWs are forced to construct a railway bridge as a morale-building exercise. Yet the real battle of wills is between a "play by the rules" British colonel (Alec Guinness) who's dedicated to the project and his American rival (William Holden), who vows to destroy it."  Won a Best Picture Oscar and six others, and apparently is a superlative character study.  I don't usually get too worked up over WWII films, but I did like the novel King Rat, which was also set in a Japanese prison camp... so I should probably give this one a shot.

#13 on the 2007 list is another war movie... Star Wars, muthafucka!  I do have to say, of the six or seven Star Wars movies out there (do we count Clone Wars?), the original is still the best.  I know this is sacrilegious to most nerds, who consider Empire Strikes Back the best (as a kid, Return of the Jedi was actually my favorite)... but after watching them again, I've got to go with the original.

And why does Star Wars endure so well?  Why is it not only the greatest sci-fi film of all time, but one of the greatest American films period?  The standard explanation is usually something about how it encapsulates other mythologies (knights, princesses, dudes in armor, also movie westerns...), and that might explain why it's likeable but not why it's so loved.  What I loved about Star Wars when I was a kid is that for every thing we saw or heard on the screen, there were nine other things that we only briefly glimpsed, or heard about only in oblique references (remember the magic of wondering what the Clone Wars might be? or what Darth Vader looked like under the mask?).  There was an entire universe behind what we were seeing, and it inflamed our imaginations, sparked fantasies about what might be on other planets, what might have happened in the past.  Unlike the world of Star Trek or Lord of the Rings where everything was fully explained and detailed and elaborated on ad nauseum, Star Wars was a series where so much was left up to speculation, and a play session with Star Wars action figures could be home to wild flights of fancy.

That all died, of course, ten years ago.  I remember the early nineties, when the first licensed Star Wars novels and comics came out, and they were so fucking exciting.  Speculation and fever dreams ripped across the pages, and in some way they were better because they weren't official continuity, because at any point Uncle George could come along and wipe them out.  It was a shared experience of acting out our dreams.  But then the prequels came out, and the lines of history began to be filled in.  The novels became rigidly structured and semi-canonical, now a firm part of an expanding continuity rather than a scattershot sampling of wild possibilities.  The Clone Wars turned out to be infinitely less interesting than anything the fans could have dreamed up, and Anakin Skywalker turned out even worse.  Now various franchises seek to fill in the last remaining gaps of time (Knights of the Old Republic, Force Unleashed, Star Wars: Legacy), all bound by the strictures of Uncle George's playbook.  It's just no damn fun anymore.  It's just become a franchise like anything else, it's like DC Comics, it's like Star Trek.

But even now, even though I have no interest in the Star Wars franchise as it currently exists, when I watch the old movies or play LEGO Star Wars II or look at my old action figures, I still feel like I'm eleven years old.  I feel like a world of possibility is opening up before me, and I can pretend that it's 1993 again, and all I have are three movies and an epic imagination. 

This week's reading:  Still working on Robert Graves's historical novel, Count Belisarius.  Ancient civilization... crazy!