It feels like superman died!

It has been almost a week now. I still get sad at random moments during the day.

After seeing the deaths of many young or middle-aged people when I was a kid, I remember telling myself that I won’t get upset if a person lived a life full of bitter/sweet memories and died at a reasonably old age (like at least 70) because she/he lived a good life, there are people dying at much younger ages, and we are all going to die anyways.

But I am still upset even though he was 71. Because I feel like superman died. He was a very nontraditional superman but he was my superman. I thought maybe I can feel better if I write as I always do.

Even though I had heard his name before, what really introduced me to Lou Reed was reading Trainspotting in high school. Trainspotting gave me a good list of musicians to be discovered; Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, etc., and shaped some branches of my music taste. From that list, Lou Reed was the one who left the biggest impression on me, because he not only became one of my favorite musicians, but also one of my favorite poets and storytellers. His love for literature was all over his work and he offered me a goldmine for underground literature in addition to his music and poetry.

He was one of the most important figures in my life who made me love and respect people as they are, especially the ones marginalized by the society, because he often wrote about drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes, etc. But more importantly, many times he made me accept who I am whenever I felt like an outcast and hated myself for it.

He was one of the main reasons that during my bachelor’s my first academic paper’s topic was prostitutes or I visited a penitentiary regularly to voluntarily work with female prisoners.

He was sometimes a substitute for my mom and dad at nights I had hard time to go to sleep. When I was lying in bed alone in my 19m² studio in Lausanne last September with a high fever on a Saturday night, his voice put me to sleep making me dream about a beautiful Sunday Morning.

To a girl like me who gets extremely bored while listening to famous love songs like Unchained Melody or I Will Always Love You, he gave her favorite love song, I’m Sticking With You.

He gave me some of my favorite movie scenes; like when Perfect Day plays in Trainspotting or when Venus in Furs plays in Last Days.

I often felt drunk or high by just listening to some of his songs.

He was always there to say everything is going to be alright in various ways when I was broken.

And he will always be there with his songs whenever and wherever I need him. But it still feels like superman died.

Zero Dark Thirty – Good Cinema, Bad Politics

First of all, I have to say that I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow as a director since I watched Strange Days in college. So I might be biased in the below comments.

I want to comment on the movie in two different perspectives:

1. Just ignore this story being on the quest of the USA for catching Osama bin Laden, but rather some country X is searching for some evil guy Y.
2. Focus on the story of USA trying to catch Osama bin Laden.

(1)

This is a great example of high-quality cinema and tells the story at hand very successfully.

I usually don’t like to see people in uniforms, neither in real life nor in movies. I find most of the movies involving modern day soldiers, battles, and CIA agents very boring. I would even ban the money dedicated to them if I had the power. However, in this 2.5 hour film, which is full of CIA and well-uniformed people, I didn’t even realize how the time passed. The story flows very densely from the start; it keeps you tense and awake. This tenseness goes to an extreme level toward the end of the film when the dedicated team is looking for the enemy Y in his possible fortress, even though you know very well how this search would end. The details are well-placed in many scenes, especially the just mentioned search scene. Also, the protagonist’s face is priceless throughout the film; ever-tired and determined convincing us that she is definitely a one-woman-army and she adds herself to the smart, strong, cool, and skilled Kathryn Bigelow female characters list.

(2)

Some parts of the story might seem pointless to you, especially if you are not from the USA and do not have a big national pride.

The long journey to hunt down a single man, all the resources spent on it, and all the people died on the way might look really meaningless knowing that it is not going to solve actual problem of terrorism at all. Nobody in the film aims to look at what lies underneath it all. It’s just a quest looking for a single man, an important man but a very tiny and unimportant piece in the whole picture. Therefore, in the scene where the search team is being shouted at on the fact that they are failing miserably on the quest, you just want to tell them to go get real jobs. When the protagonist says she wants to find and kill Osama bin Laden, you again think “well isn’t it better to keep him alive to get information in order to tear down the whole terrorist organization if he’s the absolute important leader?”. However, this is not a problem related to the film, it’s related to the story and the story itself comes from real life USA pride and glory gibberish. So the film shows us that gibberish wrapped-up in very good cinema that can be used as a lecture on many aspects for directing, if you manage to ignore reality.

Finally, just my take on the torture scenes: I found the discussion around this highly overrated after seeing the film. Torture is used in many parts of the world, when especially political prisoners are involved. The film shows what happens in reality by taking no sides in it. It’s true that the tortured people in the film eventually give some useful information. However, under any circumstances no matter what the outcome is, I personally, do not find it OK when seeing a guy being chained to the ceiling from his arms or kept in a tiny box for hours or almost choked to death. It just disgusts me. The confessions do not even seem all reliable seeing the state of the tortured ones in the end. So I do not think the film praises torture, it just leaves you with your own perception of torture thinking about the possible outcomes. There might always be other ways to get those outcomes.

One of the best scenes of the film is when you see some of the main characters looking with their WTF-faces at Obama on TV saying that they do not use torture because it is wrong. The film just states that torture does happen as a part of this process whether you like it or not or whether it is good or bad. Even how the protagonist evolves on the matter of torture shows that. In the initial torture scenes, she looks very uneasy while later on in the film she’s the one giving orders to punch one of the detainee accepting this as a part of her job in her clan and not questioning it further. It is just the ugly facts.

Tepenin Ardi (Beyond the Hill)

We watch the story of a very male dominant family living in an almost deserted large land that mainly belongs to the grandfather character.

The main question in the film is; who is the enemy that we have to fight with?

“The enemy lives beyond that hill”; keeps saying the grandfather. But he doesn’t really know who the enemy is. He is just very prepared to create the illusion of the enemy in his head and fight it with all the rifles he owns. He is completely unaware, or maybe ignorant, of all the misgoings in his family. His focus is on the enemy beyond the hill that we never see.

The enemy suspected by the very sane grandfather character is actually no different than the enemy delusion his not very sane grandson has, who is going through a severe depression due to the things happened during his mandatory military duty.

The film depicts a great example of a society that creates scapegoats rather than dealing with their own internal problems. It also shows how such a society, in turn, makes their people fight with things that they have no clue what and why they are fighting for and the price paid for this meaningless fight is usually their own blood.

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The grandfather has two sons; Nusret and Mehmet. While the enemy we don’t know keeps living hidden beyond the hill; Nusret’s young son shoots the dog of Mehmet’s son, Nusret rapes Mehmet’s wife, and someone shoots Nusret from his leg. However, nobody has a clear idea of what is actually going on. Except for Nusret’s young son and Mehmet’s son, nobody knows who shoots the dog. Actually, even we as an audience don’t see who shoots the dog, we only guess that it’s Nusret’s son. Nobody knows Nusret raping his brother’s wife except for Nusret, the wife, and us. And nobody knows who shoots Nusret, it’s only suspected by us that Mehmet’s son might have realized the rape and might be the one who shoots his uncle.

The grandfather, though, suspects the enemy beyond the hill of all the shootings. So he goes and shoots some of enemy’s goats. In turn, there happens another shooting that we don’t know from where and by whom again. And as a result, a member of the family is lost.

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While going home right after the film with my very beloved college roommate, she asked me to summarize the film in one sentence, which is like a little game between us that we play after each film we saw together. And below is what I told her for this film.

We keep fighting with things, but we do not really know what they are.