It's been a busy summer- what with the Supreme Court raining down a shitstorm of hate on the Constitution, the President unleashing the latest White House disgrace with the commutation of Scooter Flibby's sentence, TB guy, boredom, and summer movie funk (note double meaning).
A new film is about to open: "Rescue Dawn," by Werner Herzog. The film deals with.... well, go to imdb.com to find out yourself.
Finally, though, Jessica Winter, on slate.com, in her musings on the film, has made the connection that this film has with a certain OTHER film that I could not wait for someone to make in print:
"One of the best scenes in Rescue Dawn is a quiet one, when Christian Bale-as-Dengler remembers that moment when his childhood self locked eyes with the Allied pilot, in much the same words that Dengler-as-Dengler uses in Little Dieter. For some viewers, another movie memory of another aviation-obsessed kid will come to mind: Jim in Empire of the Sun (1987),
exulting in the arrival of Allied planes and making stunned eye contact with a pilot. Jim, of course, was played by 13-year-old Christian Bale, starring in a film that was itself a creative treatment of actuality—an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel about his imprisonment by the Japanese as a boy during World War II. I'm not sure what a cinematic ecstasy of truth looks like, exactly, but it might be found in these echoes and superimpositions of multiple childhoods and memories, both factual and fictionalized. Together, they create something that—like many of Herzog's films—is neither one thing nor the other: both familiar and new, both real and dreamlike."
And so we beat on...
