Turn or Burn: Tribeca Film Festival 2025
In the ton of archive footage from the Afghan War in Bodyguard of Lies are shots of a playground where US Army soldiers have wrapped the children’s slide in barbed wire, but since that perfect visual summary isn’t in the press kit this one of a plane failing to meet its basic goals will have to do.
The documentary screened at the Tribeca Film Festival just as the US ponders doing Asia War Again, again, but timely can’t be the word. This stuff is ancient. “We think they want to be like us, but they don’t,” says a retired General about the Afghan population, which is probably what the Romans said while giving up on Germany long before the Washington Post could ask them about it. The first half of the General’s sentence seems at least as important as the second. After watching the 2023 Golda Meir film I have Spielberg’s Munich on standby for all Asia War Again moments, just to think for ten seconds that art might offer the way out of this labyrinth, but the theory sounds thinner every time. Many of the Americans interviewed in Bodyguard of Lies about how the war developed seem confused, but you could just as easily say they seem scared. The real topic of the film is a way of thinking that has swallowed the world.
Also seen:
Underland, which I thought was just going to be about caving but goes deeper and wider than that. Squint and you can detect executive producer Darren Aronofsky in Noah mode, at the point where history, myth and the rocks intersect, plus in this case human-made nuclear waste that will still be lethal in 11,000 years.
Sun Ra: Do The Impossible means well but Sun Ra: Do The Usual might also work. The man was a tricky target for analysis by any stretch but this portrait could leave you with the sense that Sun Ra was a jazzman with standard jazzman foibles, rather than a world-class seeker and possibly world-class kidder beaming into the civil rights era from far off in the solar system.