"Because I have a gun and you don't."


46. No Man's Land (2001) (IMDB238)

All right, I am going to watch a Netflix video every day this week. Weekends are off, because that's about 100% rehearsals, and it doesn't always mean that I'll be doing a 482movies movie, because I'm also watching Farscape and I have some Christmas movies at the top of my queue, what with the best version of A Christmas Carol not appearing on ANY channel this year, so what else am I gonna do, also I've never seen Scrooged so I might as well just have a big Christmas movie love-fest, but my point is that I will watch and return something from Netflix every weekday until New Year's. Not Christmas. And...go!

Just kind of generally, I don't want to see a movie about a Bosnian and a Serb in a trench. Seriously, I don't. I don't want to see Hitch, either, but if I had it (it's coming in the mail), I'd watch it so fast before this one, your heard would spin. It's not that I don't like foreign films, and it's not like I don't like films about war, I just don't like foreign films about war. Tell a lie, I really don't like films about war. But if they're in a foreign language, then I really really don't want to watch them.

It starts out with some soldiers, I don't know if they are Bosnian or Serbian, trying to find the front lines, but getting lost in the fog. Frankly, this is a promising sign, soldiers who can't find the war, that's original and funny. When they wake in the morning, they find that they are in the middle of no man's land and they all get shot by the Serbs, all but one, who falls into a trench, wounded in the shoulder. I've narrowed it down, those guys were Bosnian.

The Serbs send two men to check that the Bosnians are all dead, an old-timer, and a recruit so new that his uniform is still spanking clean. They check the trench and don't manage to find the living Bosnian (Ciki), and the older one booby-traps the body of one of the Bosnians. The living Bosnian (obviously) kills the old-timer but only wounds the young one. And they are both stuck in the trench, which, I think, is the point.

They argue about who started the war, they get shelled, and then the booby-trapped dead body (Cera) turns out to be alive, but he can't move because of the mine underneath him. Then the Serb (Nino) gets the gun and the power shifts. Nino keeps trying to introduce himself to everyone in this picture, and everyone acts as though he is crazy. I hope someone shakes his hand before the film is over.

The UN is notified about the issue and doesn't really want to do anything about it, but some French UN soldiers jump into a tank to find out what's the what, but when they get there, they aren't allowed to do anything and are ordered to go back, but then they run into a British new reporter.

This is a marvelous movie, thank you OCD for making me watch it! You have the soldiers in the trench with immediate needs, a war that, in this film at least, only exists to sit still on both sides of a field for no reason, people in charge who want nothing to do with any responsibility of making decisions, people who want to get things done, but must disobey direct orders and go around the edges in order to do so, and everyone keeps declaring that very simple situations are incredibly complicated. It's about what everyone already knows, that war is asinine, that idiots are in charge, and it's all for nothing.

This is a funny, absurd, smart, horrifying, really well made, not even remotely maudlin movie, highly recommended.

No Man's Land (2001) (dir. Danis Tanovic)
watched 12/17/07
Rating: ****
Does this belong on this list? Absolutely