film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Ray Lobo

  • Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché – Review

    Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché – Review

    Identity is a complex matter.  We carry multiple identities externally and internally.  Celeste Bell and Paul Sng co-direct the documentary Poly Styrene:  I am a Cliché as a revealing portrait of Bell’s mother, the punk vocalist Poly Styrene, told by way of Bell’s memories, Poly Styrene’s journal entries, interviews, and stories told by music and punk luminaries such as Kathleen Hanna, Neneh Cherry, and Thurston Moore. 

    Poly Styrene comes through not just as a trailblazer—something already known by those familiar with the history of punk rock—but as a multilayered individual, the very antithesis of a cliché.  

    Bell opens Poly Styrene by narrating, “My mother was a punk rock icon.  People ask me if she was a good mom.  A ‘good mom?’  My mom would ask.  ‘How banal, how mundane.’” The viewer is immediately introduced to just two of the competing identities Poly Styrene wrestled with, famous musician and mother.  Many more identities become apparent in the course of an hour and a half.  Poly was born Marianne (Marion) Elliot to a Somali father and an English mother. 

    As a mixed-race child, she felt like the ultimate outsider—not white, but not black enough.  Growing up in a council estate in Brixton, she had plenty of time for self-invention given that her mother was usually at work and her father mostly absent. She started out as a hippie but then saw the Sex Pistols perform live, and as was the case with many outsiders, found the ideal community within which to express herself artistically and carve out her own identity.  Punk offered possibilities.   

     She took on the persona of Poly Styrene, both as an anti-hippie statement and an anti-consumerist statement: “I had done that whole way of travelling around and living in harmony with nature.  There was so much junk then.  The idea was to send it all up.  Screaming about it, saying: ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of Styrofoam, I am your product.  And this is what you have created:  do you like her?’” (from the Jon Savage book, England’s Dreaming). 

    Poly headed one of the most innovative bands of the English punk scene.  X-Ray Spex featured Poly, a mixed-race woman as vocalist, and Lora Logic, a female saxophone player.  The sound was an exciting hybrid of The Sex Pistols, Roxy Music, and early Stooges.    

    Rock personas, as David Bowie discovered, have a way of overwhelming the creators of those personas.  The commanding power, exhilaration, and adoration gained onstage by the persona often contrasts with a fragile human being trying to find themselves.  Following a record deal, exposure on Top of the Pops, and a New York tour, Poly was never the same. 

    She began to use harder drugs, had a quasi-breakdown in John Lydon’s bathroom, and began feeling the effects of bipolar disorder—illness and rock fame destroyed the careers of Syd Barrett and Ian Curtis, to name just two.  Poly had to kill the persona and break up the band if Marianne were to survive.  She metamorphosed her identity once more.  She crafted a solo music career with a softer sound and became a devoted Hare Krishna.  Her new persona took on a new name, Maharani.

    While Poly Styrene’s life makes for compelling viewing, what puts this documentary over the top is Celeste Bell’s recounting of her own life.  Rarely do we get the perspective of the children of rock stars.  Bell’s honesty shines through when she admits that as a little girl her mother’s outfits embarrassed her, and she often felt jealous when her mother devoted her time to music.  Creative individuals do not make ideal parents.  Bell’s difficult childhood and her mother’s struggle with mental illness led to periods of alienation between the two.  What we gain from Bell’s documentary is a wonderful sense of her own diverse identities—daughter, musician, author, and director. 

    In the song “Identity,” Poly sings: “Identity is the crisis can’t you see?”  Poly’s mixed race along with the presence of the National Front in England made her very aware of her identity from an early age.  There is also something about fame that makes one very aware and insecure about their identity.  The choice of Poly Styrene as a name was both a conscious critique of the disposability of pop stars and the role artificial beauty standards played in the packaging of female musicians by the music industry. 

    Even while critiquing the standards imposed on women, Poly was hit by the insecurity that comes with such standards.  She at times felt uncomfortable by her body type and the corrective braces on her teeth.  Celeste Bell and Paul Sng have gifted us both an intimate narrative of Poly Styrene as mother and a moving tribute of Poly’s musical significance. 

    Poly Styrene was at the forefront of those who challenged suffocating notions of how women could express themselves vocally and in terms of their looks in the rock world.  Poly, at times, felt immense pressure over being the archetypal woman-of-color-pioneer.  There were many Polys—mother, mixed-race, hippie, punk vocalist, poet, social critic, and spiritual seeker.  The one identity that cannot be denied, whether she willingly chose it or not, is inspiration.  As Neneh Cherry succinctly puts it, “I started singing because of Poly.”  Surely, Neneh Cherry was not the only one.                 

  • Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: The BRWC Review

    Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: The BRWC Review

    Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: The BRWC Review. By Ray Lobo.

    Adam Curtis has made a career out of making documentaries that track how systems of power manage masses and how individuals sometimes disrupt the smooth management of those systems.  Whether it is a system of power formed from a fusion of psychoanalysis and consumerism (The Century of the Self) or systems colliding against each other (neoconservatism versus radical Islamic terrorism in The Power of Nightmares), Curtis is masterly in his ability to merge visuals and audio as a way of tracking power’s many metamorphoses.  Curtis’s latest, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, rewards the viewer with over seven hours of the most visually seductive yet intellectually stimulating theses that connect historic events, individuals, and ideologies.   

    Fans of Curtis’s work know what to expect:  a history of ideas told via haunting BBC footage and cleverly selected music pieces that either enhance the old BBC footage or purposefully create dichotomies between sound and image.  For the uninitiated, some disclosure:  Those accustomed to detailed micro-empirical narratives will be dizzied by Curtis’s macroscopic survey of the historical forces operating beneath the surface of our societies.  Can’t Get You Out of My Head finds Curtis equipped with his widest-angle lens. 

    He is interested in the forces that have shaped some of the current superpowers—The US, China, England, and Russia—and how those superpowers maintain their stability in the international stage while managing their domestic fragilities.  Curtis connects dots in The US ranging from The KKK, to The Tulsa Race Massacre, to The John Birch Society, to Project MK-Ultra, to isolation in sterile suburbias, to Valium, to conspiracy theories, to Operation Mindfuck, to The Black Panthers, to police brutality, to neoliberalism, to climate change, to 9/11, to the deterioration of Appalachian coal mining communities, to Oxycontin, to rightwing populism.  Curtis traces a line from English Industrialization, to colonialism in Kenya and Iraq, to anti-immigrant sentiment amongst English whites, to Live Aid, to Brexit.  

    Curtis’s previous narratives gave China and Russia a mere supporting status.  Can’t Get You Out of My Head gives them leading roles.  Curtis launches a crash course in Chinese history ranging from the trauma of The Opium Wars, to the communist victory, to the power maneuverings within Mao’s inner circle, to The Cultural Revolution and The Red Guards, to China’s opening up to capital, to concerns over Chinese citizens becoming one-dimensional consumerists and capitalists.  Curtis unearths gripping footage of Russia’s convulsive recent history.  Curtis’s interweaves events and individuals ranging from Soyuz 1’s doomed space mission, to Soviet dissidents, to the breakdown of Russian society in the Shock Therapy 90s, to the rise of Putin, to a period of non-ideology in a consumerist Russia and the subsequent rise in Russian nationalism.         

    The cast of historical characters is encyclopedic even when compared to Curtis’s previous works.  Entire documentaries can be devoted to each of these historical figures; however, the brilliance in Curtis’s craft lies in the thematic connections running through each of these figures.  Michael X, Jiang Qing, Sandra Paul, George Boole, Kerry Thornley, Arthur Sackler, Eduard Limonov, Julia Grant, B.F. Skinner, Abu Zubaydah, and even Afeni and Tupac Shakur are but a sampling of the components propelling Curtis’s narrative.  Curtis coalesces visual and narrative unlike any other documentarian. He intersperses footage of individuals dancing throughout the narrative.  It is perhaps the perfect metaphor for the message he is trying to convey—if the passage of time is a dance between the individual and historical forces, sometimes the individual takes the lead, sometimes the historical forces dictate the steps in the dance.  

    It is not a fruitful exercise trying to pinpoint a singular theme in Can’t Get You Out of My Head.   What the viewer obtains in over seven hours of footage are crisscrossing themes acting as tributaries and feeding into Curtis’s narrative flow.  In many of his documentaries Curtis notices a tension in the twentieth and twenty-first century between collective managerialism and individualism.  Can’t Get You Out of My Head introduces a regime of isms born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—colonialism, communism, nationalism, fascism.  These isms, however clumsily and brutally, attempted to create compelling stories that would set order for masses of people.  

    Can't Get You Out Of My Head: The BRWC Review

    The violence unleashed by these isms led to worldwide revolutionary movements in the post-World War II era.  Some of these revolutionary movements, in the build-up to and after their victories, pushed their ideologies onto the masses and dispensed violence on dissidents both real and suspected.  The failure of revolutionary and leftist inspired protest movements led many to discard ideology altogether and retreat into individualism.  The thinking was that if utopias, social empowerment movements, and visions of a better future inevitably ended in failure; then freedom could at least be found within the individual, within the individual’s mind, in your “self-actualization.” 

    Individualism and self-actualization morphed into consumerism and political apathy.  Curtis brilliantly chooses the figure of Tupac Shakur to illustrate this descent from idealism to crass individualism.  The social problem shifted.  It was no longer about controlling masses but about controlling a mass of individuals who no longer trusted political systems and were torn apart by neoliberal economics.  Neoliberalism’s answer was allowing majority white factory towns to waste away, and worse, mass incarceration for people of color.  The failures of individualism and neoliberal economics led to scary mutations in the form of more elaborate systems of management and surveillance.  Management of individuals was now in the hands of police forces backed by “algorithmic governance” technologies—facial recognition, behavior predictors, etc.  Added to this witches’ brew was an alarming mass revival of nationalism and neofascism.

    As if all this were not enough, Curtis includes contemporary phenomena that were not given full attention in his previous documentaries.  Climate change and the pains of economic austerity, to mention but two phenomena, aggravated whatever problems were already being felt by the poorest in many societies.  In addition, the death of grand ideological narratives made individual freedom the default anchoring for most people, and that personal freedom became a lonely, anxiety provoking inner cell.  Right on time came a new opium for the masses in the form of Valium and later Oxycontin to dull that anxiety.  In a world without grand narratives, patterns of data without meaning were all that were left.  Again, right on time came ludicrous rightwing conspiracy theories that gave meaning to those patterns.  

    It is all pretty bleak material told in Curtis’s inimitable style—a standout scene beautifully exemplifying Curtis’s craftmanship tells the story of Abu Zubaydah while footage plays of Peshwari Mujahadeen fighters backed by the Chris de Burgh song “Lady in Red.”  Curtis adroitly notes the fork in the road upon which most leaders came upon:  either change economic and political systems to meet the challenges of the future or create global surveillance systems that maintain a fantasy of stability.  Many leaders and unelected technocrats chose the latter. 

    The wonderful world we are left with is one where individuals are seduced into a consumerist and social media fantasy that covers up a violent realism that tramples the unfortunate.  In the US, after four long years of conspiracy theories, Trumpist absurdity, and fantasies of a return to a greatness that never existed for many, some feel relief in the shift away from the horrible Trump years and toward a return to the “normal” bad-old-days of neoliberalism and benign elite leadership in the figure of Biden.  In the end, we all seem trapped in the same neoliberal and capitalist cycle.  The philosopher Fredric Jameson captured this hopelessness when he said, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”  Surprisingly, after more than seven hours describing what seems like an inescapable maze out of The Shining, Curtis does offer some hope for positive change in, of all things, the Covid pandemic.  Historically speaking, it must be said, pandemics have reset societies.                        

    It cannot be stressed enough how exhilarating a ride Can’t Get You Out of My Head is for the viewer, the most exhilarating of Curtis’s career.  After finishing all six episodes, I found myself trying to catch my breath, but ready to get on the ride again.  This intellectual epic deserves to be re-watched.  There is a lingering question, however, that does not dissipate even after hearing Curtis’s hopeful message.  It is a question that may not dissipate even after a re-watch:  Will the pandemic, after all the death and despair it has unleashed, finally be the spark that creates a better vision for the future, or will we continue to mindlessly sing along with Kylie Minogue, “La la la, la la la la la,” as the world burns?   

    Can’t Get You Out Of My Head: The BRWC Review

  • A Thousand Cuts: Review

    A Thousand Cuts: Review

    A Thousand Cuts: Review. Journalist Maria Ressa’s perilous mission to report on the current state of the Philippines. By Ray Lobo.

    The Philippines has had a challenging historical journey: Spanish colonialism, American and Japanese occupations, the Ferdinand Marcos years, spiraling crime and terrorism, and the meteoric rise of President Rodrigo Duterte’s populist cult of personality. Maria Ressa, and the team of brave journalists she assembled for her news network Rappler, are sentinels keeping track of the Duterte regime’s policies.

    Director Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary A Thousand Cuts drops the viewer into the hot stove that is the Philippines. Diaz introduces us to a motley cast of characters ranging from the young reporters on Ressa’s staff facing daily threats of imprisonment or death — journalist Pia Ranada is the very definition of courage in scenes where she resolutely asks Duterte challenging questions — to Duterte’s cronies — Mocha is a former dancer and social media hype-woman for Duterte and Bato Dela Rosa is Duterte’s national police chief head and a senatorial aspirant. When combative authoritarianism runs into dogged journalism, A Thousand Cuts shows us that the odds are heavily stacked in favor of the authoritarian.

    Duterte’s bark matches his bite. When Duterte was still a candidate for the presidency, Ressa got Duterte to openly admit, “It’s going to be bloody…I have already killed three people.” Since becoming president, Duterte’s killings have grown exponentially. Duterte’s war on drugs has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings. Duterte is part Dirty Harry — a nickname given to him while still a mayor — and part Travis Bickle determined to clean up the “scum” of the Philippines.

    What makes him all the more terrifying when compared to those film characters is that he has the executive power and popularity to kill en masse with little opposition. His threatening words to journalists like Ressa require a sangfroid the likes of which many of us are not capable of summoning.

    The most insightful aspect of Diaz’s documentary is the commentary it makes, without naming any names, on the West’s authoritarian leaders. Ressa notes how Duterte and his followers managed to weaponize the internet. The Philippines was a Petri dish on how to mobilize people who exist in radical internet spheres and social media bubbles, and get them to vote, not for substantive change, but on the basis of resentment. A polarized information ecosystem, if tapped into effectively, not only mobilizes voters, but also gets fans of the elected authoritarian to harass truth-seeking journalists.

    While Duterte’s war on drugs is a disguised war on the poor and political opponents, his many supporters living in their media bubbles, don’t see the forest for the online insults and character assassinations. Duterte’s tactic was mimicked by an orange-hued Western authoritarian we all know. Duterte was also able to mobilize an identity politics based on resentment. In one scene Duterte calls out Ressa’s company — Rappler — for being foreign owned and “pierc[ing] Filipino identity.” Calling out foreigners is yet another tactic mimicked by the previously mentioned orange-hued leader. Authoritarian mimicry comes full circle when Duterte accuses Rappler of being “fake news.”

    Duterte also weaponizes gender. In his speeches he makes references to his genitalia and his potency. There is a scene in A Thousand Cuts of a speech in which Duterte jokes about the smell of women’s genitals. His audience heartily laughs. If that were not enough, he calls his journalist enemies “presstitutes.” All the while, Duterte rallies often feature young women dancing provocatively in order to pump up his audience. A Thousand Cuts makes us aware that the total breakdown of political rhetoric is now an international norm.

    It is easy to be seduced into believing that Duterte is a harmless demagogue or that he is at least harmless to high-profile journalists with Western connections — Ressa has worked for CNN, and has received support from Christiane Amanpour and Amal Clooney. We must remember that a high-profile and Western connections were not enough to save journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Even if Duterte does not order the killing of journalists, he can make life miserable for them to the point where the harassment makes them give up. Ressa has been arrested twice on libel charges. Ressa was recently given six years in prison — a punishment she is currently appealing.

    A Thousand Cuts makes it quite clear that Ressa is fully reconciled with the possibility of death or imprisonment. In an intimate scene her sister breaks down and cries over the possible fate that awaits Ressa. We as viewers share her dark foreboding. The existence of serious journalists is as precarious as ever.

  • This Is Not A Movie: Review

    This Is Not A Movie: Review

    This Is Not A Movie: Review. A retrospective on the life and career of journalist extraordinaire Robert Fisk. By Ray Lobo.

    Early in This is Not a Movie Robert Fisk’s Syrian army escorts inform him that they are driving through a road in Idlib province dotted with rebel Al-Nusra Front snipers. Death can be as swift and final as a well-timed bullet through a car window. Fisk casually looks at the passing scenery and continues writing on his notepad. For Fisk, fear is an old pen that ran out of ink a long time ago and was mindlessly discarded; it is of no use. On first appearance, one may be tempted to classify Fisk as yet another cynical war correspondent who has seen endless atrocities and has been made numb by them; however, that classification does not apply to Fisk.

    Canadian director Yung Chang brilliantly captures Fisk’s many layers. We see Fisk’s compassion when interviewing civilians caught in war’s crossfire, we can feel Fisk’s passion for the Middle East and his profession, and we catch a glimpse of Fisk’s anger over complacent leaders that allow human tragedies to recur. If journalistic Truth is Fisk’s goal, it would be disingenuous of him to report on a war, or any human tragedy, in a tone of just-the-facts neutrality. If holistic Truth — which obviously includes empirical facts — is the goal, Fisk attempts to attain it by including moral and emotional shadings in his writing. As he puts it, “I am on the side of those who suffer. I am a nerve ending and not a machine.”

    Courage is a prerequisite for any war correspondent. In Fisk’s case, it is not limited to his unflinching attitude in getting a story even if it requires braving Al-Nusra sniper bullets. Chang covers the full narrative arc of Fisk’s career starting in Belfast, where Fisk reported for The London Times at the peak of The Troubles. Fisk’s reports often ran contrary to the official spin disseminated by British political and military authorities. When Rupert Murdoch bought The Times Fisk gained firsthand experience of corporate meddling in editorial decisions. Murdoch refused to run a column by Fisk which pointed to the deliberate shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by a US cruiser missile. Fisk decided he was not going to risk his life reporting from the front lines of conflict zones for a paper that did not have the courage to print columns that offended the sensibilities of US officials and their allies. He left The Times for The Independent — a paper founded against the Murdochs of the world.

    When your reporting takes you to Belfast, to the Iraqi front lines in the war against Iran, to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, to Bosnia, to Syria; you gain a lot of sources, friends, and readers of your columns. You also gain a lot of enemies — these are after all high stake conflict zones . Fisk has been accused of everything — being too pro-Muslim, being too pro-West, being too pro-Palestinian, being too pro-Israeli, being too pro-Assad, being too pro-Syrian rebel forces.

    Chang’s documentary does not shy away from moments in Fisk’s career in which he faced severe criticism for what he deemed to be the truth. Fisk controversially reported that while there was evidence that in several instances Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, there was no evidence that Assad used sarin in the city of Douma. A fact-finding mission led by The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) issued a report that chlorine gas was in fact used in Douma by Assad’s forces. Did Fisk get this story wrong? Did his sources lead him astray? Were there lapses in his reporting of the Douma incident? We will never entirely know the answer. Chang, to his credit, raises these doubts. Chang is not afraid to show that fallibility is always an occupational hazard in journalism.

    Chang gets Fisk to admit on camera that it was his viewing as a boy of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Foreign Correspondent that glamorized and made him fall in love with the idea of one day becoming a war correspondent. The child that was seduced by movie glamor transformed into the adult driven to truth gathering in grimy war zones. It is this adult Fisk that is driven to report to Western audiences the unfiltered voices of the Middle East, voices too long warped by colonialist fantasies and Western arrogance — this is perhaps why he decided to live in Beirut and not London. One of the most poignant moments in the documentary comes when a soldier asks Fisk if he has ever suffered from PTSD. Fisk answers he has never had a nightmare save for one. He had his only nightmare after having to climb over dead bodies in the aftermath of the butchery in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Indeed, there is no glamor in being a war correspondent, as the documentary’s title indicates, this is not a movie.

    Robert Fisk died in October of 2020. The world lost a journalism giant. The release of Chang’s documentary faced difficulties in its worldwide release because of the Covid outbreak in early 2020. Few saw This is Not a Movie. The question may be asked: who would want to seek out a documentary that deals with war and carnage when so many are struggling physically and psychologically with the Covid pandemic? It is a fair question; however, a question still deserving of a response. This is Not a Movie is worth seeking out because there are overlaps between wars and pandemics — falsification of truth, the suffering of the most vulnerable, etc. One must not forget that Camus’ The Plague was an allegory for the French resistance during Nazi occupation. Just like Camus wrestles with existential themes in The Plague, war coverage made Fisk ponder existential ideas: “You will always find ashes in history…. Something inside us permits this [war]…. War is a total failure of the human spirit…. We do not get the bad guys at the end…. What we [war correspondents] write may make no difference.”

    Doctors trying to treat Covid patients while more line up outside the hospital, and war correspondents covering a war while knowing full well that there is another war waiting in the wings, are engaged in deflating endeavors. Camus and Fisk were both aware of their heavy burdens and the need to continue pushing their boulders. We are continually tested to do the same.

  • Once Upon A Time In Iraq: Review

    Once Upon A Time In Iraq: Review

    Once Upon A Time In Iraq: Review. By Ray Lobo.

    Does Iraq occupy any mental space in the American mind anymore? Covid, Trump’s antics, and our daily whirlwind of concerns and stressors have pushed Iraq out of our minds. The past; however, is never too far behind, its traces usually return. This week revived Iraq back into our consciousness. Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards who were serving jail sentences for the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians including two children. The tragedy of the invasion of Iraq is still there; it is a stain that cannot be washed away.

    The majority of documentaries on Iraq present the typical talking heads — politicians, foreign policy experts, etc. — American soldiers on the front lines, and the perspective of a few Iraqis. Once Upon a Time in Iraq does not simply pepper a few Iraqi voices as contrast against American voices. Once Upon a Time in Iraq is one of the rare documentaries on Iraq made up entirely of Iraqi voices.

    The colorful spectrum of interviewees — male, female, young, old, pro- Saddam Hussein, anti-Saddam Hussein, ISIS member — is a testament to British documentarian James Bluemel’s commitment to allowing Iraqis to tell their story (I should also mention the choice of Andy Serkis — whose father was Armenian-Iraqi — as the English narrator being yet another attempt at grounding the documentary in Iraqi soil).

    The Iraqi tragedy is magnified as interviewees stress the many missed opportunities by the US in the early days of the invasion. A large segment of Iraq’s youth was infatuated with American pop culture. Waleed Nesyif, a huge Metallica fan, learned English from American songs and movies. He felt stifled under Saddam’s regime. Another interviewee, Um Qusay, tells of the crushing poverty in her village in which she had no choice but to eat chicken feed in order to survive. Many Iraqis were tired of Saddam’s thugs killing and torturing their family members. They were also fed up with Saddam’s network of informants — a system reminiscent of the East German Stasi. In short, many Iraqis saw the invasion as a reset. They were willing to work with the invaders.

    Once Upon A Time In Iraq. Image from thetimes.co.uk
    Once Upon A Time In Iraq. Image from thetimes.co.uk

    US bungling in rebuilding Iraq became evident to Iraqis a few months after the first US bombs dropped. Months passed without electricity or water in Baghdad. Baghdad became known as the “city of garbage.” Setting the groundwork for the West’s extraction of natural resources from Iraq, and using Iraq as a geopolitical chess piece, became evident motives for all Iraqis.

    On top of all this, alternating backings of Sunni and Shiite forces by the US, based on the changing fortunes of the campaign, led to a sectarian bloodbath. US support for prime minister Nouri al- Maliki, along with tolerance of his anti-Sunnism and corruption, led to the creation of ISIS. In the ultimate example of what post-invasion Iraq became, Waleed Nesyif tells the story of his difficulty in arranging a get together with high school friends due to sectarian intermingling.

    The invasion’s blowback is something that continuously attempts to shake America out of its amnesia — the region is still unstable, and some have argued that American right-wing domestic militias are heavily composed of soldiers who served in Iraq.

    The past cannot be rewound and remade. Given the clockwork with which the US is involved in the affair of other countries, and the innocent lives in peril in those countries, documentaries like Once Upon a Time in Iraq remind us how dangerous it is to forget.