I deliberately saw September Tapes without reading about it beforehand. When a note on screen announced that these tapes had been "obtained by soldiers at the Pakistani border" and that the film company had acquired the rights to them from Northern Alliance forces, I couldn't help thinking of The Blair Witch Project. The erratic camerawork was also a lot like Blair Witch, the 1999 horror movie playfully posing as a documentary. I reprimanded myself for the irreverence; this was a deadly serious film about the search for Osama bin Laden.
When Don Larson, the young American who has gone into Afghanistan less than a year after Sept. 11, walks out on a card game in Kabul after someone suggests Americans brought the terrorist attacks on themselves, I feared for his mental health. It's dangerous enough for any American to be in Afghanistan; for a hothead with bad judgment, it could be fatal.
Luckily, it soon becomes clear that Don is being played by an actor, George Calil, as is his translator, Wali Zarif (Wali Razaqi). They and Johnston have created a blend of fact and fiction, in which some Afghans (the Kabul police, for instance) know they are working with a script outline and others (people in the street) don't.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The dead giveaway is that most characters speak like US reality-series contestants, improvising attempts at making certain points with believable verbal interaction. "Wali, if I get thrown in with the suspects they're arresting, I may actually learn something," Don says eagerly.
What September Tapes presents is actual film of the streets and countryside of Afghanistan; Afghans acting out arrests, threats and ambushes; a few people reacting genuinely; and no way to tell the difference. Maybe Johnston, who has directed television commercials and music videos, intended this to be a guessing game. But the method robs the real encounters of their power and, even more important, trivializes the subject.
Granted, Don and Wali's encounter with the gun dealers is unnerving. The producers said this was an authentic interaction, but the closing credits list actors' names as the dealers. The bullets and missiles whizzing by are also real, they say. On the other hand, while the harrowing post-curfew checkpoint incident did happen, what appears on screen is a re-creation. This succeeds only in being confusing, and even taken strictly as fiction, the film is unconvincing. At the end, Don's surprise revelation, meant to pack an emotional wallop, falls flat, as do some other revelations.
"Bin Laden and his men went right past the US military into the mountains," says a bounty-hunting commander (C.K. Smith), "right near the Pakistani border." They traveled on horseback, he says, at "nighttime under cloud cover."
Good to know.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated