Q+A PAUL HAGGIS

Text Matt Bochenski

A round-up of the top films, music releases and books heading your way this month

In The Valley of Elah
Director Paul Haggis Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron, Jason Patric, Susan Sarandon

Paul Haggis is the director of the Oscar-winning film Crash whose new picture, In The Valley of Elah, is a brilliant moral mystery set around a soldier returning from the Iraq war. And it could well see him nominated again.

Why did you want to make a film about the Iraq war?

We’ve asked our troops to face horrors that we will never have to face. The decisions that these 18-year-old kids have to make on a daily basis are dehumanising in the extreme. When I found out about it, I asked myself: ‘What would I do?’ I didn’t have a good answer, so I decided to write a film that was political but not partisan.

Do you think Americans are ready to think about this kind of thing?

I don’t think anyone is really interested in who’s responsible. This is a tragedy of huge proportions, but people would much rather see comedies or musicals. That is part of the problem. We just want to get on with our lives.

Do you worry that your film may annoy people?

When I decide to do a movie, I don’t ask myself if the audience is ready for it. With this, I just tried to make it a fulfilling experience. If you ask some disturbing questions, then you’ve done your job.

Lust, Caution
Director Ang Lee Starring Tony Leung, Tang Wei

If you ignore Hulk (and, let’s face it, most people did), there’s a convincing argument to be made that Ang Lee has become the 21st century’s most compelling director. From the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to enlightened cowboy Oscar-winner Brokeback Mountain, he’s forged a unique career that now has a new highlight: the sumptuous and stirringly beautiful Lust, Caution.

The year is 1942 and Shanghai has been occupied by the Japanese, aided and abetted by a collaborationist Chinese government. In the streets, the resistance has mobilised and their target is Mr Yee (Tony Leung), head of the secret police. Assassinating him behind the gates of his walled compound will be no easy matter, so they turn to the beautiful Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), who has a history with Yee. As they fall once again under each other’s spell, they will face the harsh realities of love, betrayal and the price paid by innocence in wartime.

Everything about Lust, Caution is conceived and executed on an epic scale. Under Lee’s sure gaze, the film is a visual marvel and an acting tour de force. It’s also a steamy sexual thriller in the best and most adult sense. Not to be missed.

Book club

Matter
by Iain M. Banks

Sci-fi fans will welcome this new Culture novel from Iain M Banks. Where the likes of Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds embrace hard sci-fi and its emphasis on scientific jargon, Banks holds on to the one essential truth of good sci-fi: space is awesome and don’t forget it. Thus his Culture universe is inhabited by strange aliens, intelligent spaceships, billion-year-old creatures and weapons of terrifying destruction.

This latest, Matter, follows two brothers and a sister and their shifting circumstances against the backdrop of an intergalactic war. The most typically Banksian of the three is the woman, Djan Seriy Anaplian, an agent in the Culture’s Special Circumstances division (Banks has an Orwellian talent for naming government offices) who is charged with shaping the course of alien civilisations through high-level interference – meaning murder and espionage.

Newcomers to Banks’ work may want to familiarise themselves with his other novels before jumping right in. But for fans, this is more essential reading.

Boyz II Men
Motown: A Journey Through Hitsville, USA

You’ve probably never heard of Nathan Morris, Shawn Stockman and Wanya Morris. That’s okay. But if you’ve never heard of Boyz II Men, well, where on earth have you been?

Officially the best-selling R’n’B male vocal group of all time, with 60 million records and counting, the trio (who were originally a quintet before losing a couple of members over the course of a two-decade career) have broken records and enthralled audiences worldwide with hits like End of the Road, I’ll Make Love To You and One Sweet Day.

So you can’t blame them for taking it a bit easy in 2008 and knocking out this Motown covers album alongside producer and American Idol judge Randy Jackson. It’s a real crowd pleaser as the Boyz add their trademark soaring harmonies to classic favourites like Tracks of My Tears, War and Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing.

And although this ain’t nothing like a ground-breaking album, it’s still a hugely entertaining effort from a band that deserve to kick back, look back and celebrate a remarkable career.

Michael Jackson
Thriller 25th Anniversary

Speaking of record breakers… whatever you think of the modern incarnation of Wacko Jacko (Mental Michael we could call him), running around Arab kingdoms dressed in a burkha and looking rather like a high-class beggar, one thing is undeniable: the man had the star wattage of a supernova and Thriller is his crowning glory.

Hard to believe, but it’s been 25 years since something evil was first seen lurking in the dark and that John Landis-directed video changed all the rules for the pop promo format. The track list still reads like an all-time greatest song compilation, from Beat It and Billie Jean to the title track.

This special anniversary edition includes a booklet and double disc with a number of new recordings featuring modern stars like Akon, will.i.am and Kanye West. They’re a nice bonus, but the original work still speaks for itself. No mere mortal can resist the genius of Thriller.

Book club

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
by Margaret Atwood

Ancient Greece, and especially Ancient Greek literature, was a man’s world. How else could a hero like Homer’s Odysseus spend 20 years running around the Aegean having it off with hot goddesses left, right and centre while his wife, Penelope, stayed at home with the kids and dutifully denied herself any action with the 100-plus suitors who wanted to inspect the royal knickers?

That seems to be the question that haunted legendary author Margaret Atwood, especially as Penelope’s reward for her faithfulness was to have her husband come home and string up 12 of her handmaids. Atwood has therefore decided it’s about time someone set the record straight.

So here, some 3,000-odd years after The Odyssey was written, is Penelope’s tale as told by herself. Though it could never hope to compete with the cultural significance of the original (essentially a how-to handbook for Greek guys), it’s still an imaginative and authoritative work of fiction.

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