1984 + Funny + Ralph Fiennes = Sweeeeet With Five Es

...is one of those rare films that blends humor and biting, conscience-wringing thought (and political thought, at that) in such a way as to not only not annoy its audience but to actually stimulate among it the kind of conversations that one likes to think lucky people once enjoyed with Edward R. Murrow or Hunter S. Thompson, back in that ever more distant-seeming pre-Fox News era, when progressives did not diminish their progressiveness in order to seem "nice" or "electable." (Don't get me started on the whole "Hillary [who's not even very progressive] should but can't win, so why vote for her?" paradox...) But, to re-begin a film review with another long sentence, constructed similarly to the last one before the parenthetical:

I daresay Land of the Blind is almost irrelevant, for that very reason: The film is so engaging and thorough in the way it addresses purely secular revolutions and counterrevolutions that it inspires a nostalgia for the political landscape that existed pre-Osama-jihad/pre-Bush-anti-jihad-crusade, when government in the United States did not seem a matter of faith (trust me to get them before they get us) but of reason--when, oh, I dunno, words like Joseph Pulitzer's did not strike the ear as impossible, naive idealism, but as the mantra of sanity, of true compassion. Though the film's quotations are almost exclusively poetical in nature, Land of the Blind practically screams out Pulitzer's most famous lines:

"Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy for the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare... never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Anyway, the point is, please give this film serious Netflix gravity. I liken it to Gilliam's Brazil: Funny, but in that fucked up digs-into-your-head way that a previous generation of film snobs associated most fervently with Dr. Strangelove. In short, Land of the Blind follows Joe (Ralph Fiennes) as he rises from prison guard to presidential security chief, all the while falling more and more under the sway of revolutionary, vaguely Castro-esque populist hero Thorne (Donald Sutherland, previously one of my least favorite actors).

The duo eventually off the president, who is a hilarious Napoleon-meets-Dubbya (though also into S&M, so not an entirely bad chap, in my book), but all is not well, of course, in Revolution Land (the country goes unnamed, by the way, the whole time; this is rather more a fable than a Minority Report- or The Island-esque "thriller"), since Thorne's mind has gradually gone to pot over his ten-year stay in prison as a "terrorist leader" (he wrote a play condemning the administration). I won't spoil the madness that follows, but fans of history will note all the juicy French Revolution tableaus/shoutouts, as well as the Stalin ones, the Castro ones, and the fiction of Orwell/English Socialism-gone-horribly-wrong ones.

Much love to the Culture Project for showing the movie. Maybe, in some distant future, good movies that aren't about snakes will get distribution, too (though I did quite like Snakes on a Plane, even if the Paris Hilton character made it through unscathed, minus dog). (And, yes, for me, making it through minus dog is a happy development in a story, not a symptom of tragedy, though I suppose not everyone will agree with my dramatic impulses...)