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- First reviewJune 22, 2008
- Last reviewJune 22, 2008
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tangofred's Reviews
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5
The Visitor
PostedJune 22, 2008
tangofred
from Oakland CA
A deeply understated film that achieves its quiet art and message indirectly, linking one man's happenstance awakening of spirit through drumming to a wider awakening of spirit about the political insanities of post-9/11 America. Professor "Walter's" existential aimlessness and melancholy mirror the privileged disorientation and anomie of our wider American liberalism, whose concepts and tools of modernism and progress have been gradually displaced by the institutionalized bureaucracies of fear and militarism of post-9/11 politics. Most of us, I believe, feel a similar, debilitating impotence and "learned helplessness" to Walter's as he faced the privatized prison industry that has been created to manage the chaotic fallout of US immigration, national security, and foreign policy blunders. The traditional “enlightenment” institutions of academia, democratic politics and due process have been steadily degraded as corporate globalization, backed by privatized police forces and US military might, dehumanizes everyone in its path. The movie re-humanizes the world that was fragmented into irrational paranoias by 9/11, and uses drumming as a symbol of the revitalized individual and collective energy we all need to generate, somehow, to repudiate the brutish, dehumanizing powers of the fear-driven police state.
Yes, I recommend this movie.
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