The long awaited explosion in tensions in post-war Iraq has finally come. Since the weekend, there has been bitter fighting in Fallujah (Sunni stronghold) and also in the Shi'ite south. Since the end of the war almost one year ago the U.S and its coalition allies have been in a race to restore basic services to the conquered country while keeping a lid on nascent, conflicting groups. I can't think of a good way out of this. Even a Democratic President would still have to keep U.S. troops in Iraq or face the proposition of U.S. failure in the region, a defeat which has even worse consequences than the nearly daily casualties being suffered by Coalition troops.

Currently, I've been quite caught up in several things. I have two scripts that I must be redrafting. Plus I have taken on a very interesting web contract. All of this is occupying lots of my time, even when my thoughts are also distracted by great Vancouver spring weather. Once the hayfever passes, I may be able to enjoy it when I take a break.

I just finished this superb account of the CIA's involvement in the region last night.

It's written by the managing editor of the Washington Post (in which it is excerpted) and is part history, part spy thriller. Written as a preface to the events of September 11th, 2001, Ghost Wars spans the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the eve of attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What this book is, is a fantastic background of the intelligence and sub rosa politics that governed the CIA and the intelligence communities' involvement in Afghanistan and its secret efforts against bin Laden's al Qaeda.

At the height of Soviet involvement, the CIA engaged in concerted effort to ferment resistance against the occupying Soviets and their proxy government through sabotage and assassinations, bombings and even covert strikes inside Soviet territory (!). Coll documents the CIA's partnership with the Pakistani intelligence (ISS) which funded and encouraged the development of Mujahadeen groups, among them bin Laden's nascent movement that would later become al Qaeda. Through interviews and backgrounders with dozens of the principals involved (some of whom are only identified by their cover names) Coll builds a picture of a collection of insiders, analysts, diplomats and spies who were absorbed with toppling the Soviets but then withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving the country in disarray and at the mercy of warlords and bands of Jihadists.

Through the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, Afghanistan became a dead issue while the handful of disparate experts could do little to raise concern over the activities of people like bin Laden who used the fertile ground of the country as a base for training and preaching against the west. Interest in al Qaeda (and other jihadists) began slowly in the national security administration of the Clinton government but then became hot issue with the bombings against the African embassies in 1998. But even as Clinton authorized action against bin Laden, the counter-terrorism apparatus of the U.S. found themselves without the necessary intelligence to ensure targetting of the al Qaeda leader. After abandoning Afghanistan following the Soviet pullout, the CIA maintained few assets in the region, instead relying more and more on Pakistani Intelligence who themselves saw it politically useful to sponsor fundamentalist Wahabi schools that exported freverent volunteers to fight in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.

In the chapters leading up to September 11th, the book returns to the character of the northern alliance warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik who throughout the American withdrawal from Afghanistan railed against bin Laden and his Taliban allies but who was refused substantial help because he was seen as untrustworthy and financed his military through poppy farming. The book ends with the assassination of Massoud by al Qaeda only two days before 9/11, an event that presaged the wider victory of bin Laden over the United States and his CIA opponents.

When the Spirit Rover lay in the Martian desert unresponsive, it was because its onboard email filters had been overwhelmed by torrents of interplanetary spam. Read about it here >>

Japanese monsters made in Origami. See it here >>

This is a great American Express commercial that is more of a short film. It stars Jerry Seinfeld with a Flash-animated Superman as the two of them pal around New York wasting time and helping Jerry get a new DVD player home to his apartment. It's pretty funny. The interesting thing from a technical standpoint is that it was filmed on a Canon Xl1S with the Mini35 adaptor. Charles Papert on DVInfo.net a few months ago related how he filmed it under the direction of Barry Sonnenfeld. See it here >>

A while back I was sent a link to a most unique photo blog. It's from a Ukranian woman who regularly rides a Ninja power cycle through the dead zone of Chernobyl and then documents it with photos and her thoughts (in charming broken English). It really is a sad and wonderful ethnological document. Scary, depressing but also quite funny. It shows Chernobyl as a ghost town, a latter-day Pompeii as all of its residents left almost immediately, leaving behind their lives and possessions. She also notes that now the wildlife populations have exploded in the absence of humanity. This site was updated again recently with more photos. See it here >>

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an acclaimed writing teacher for the Academy of Art college lost her position after she told administrators that a student had written a grisly story about a serial killer for a creative writing class. The student was investigated by police, expelled,and sent home. The teacher, Jan Richman lost her job when administrators questioned her reading list which they claimed influenced the student. It certainly sounds like this is a college that cares more for image than it does for learning. Read more here >>

Bloody update

No one says: braaiinnns here.

There are a few things that won't be touched on in this review. One is to explain the fascination with zombie films. If you don't get what is so scary and entertaining about a small group of humans struggling to survive against masses of cannibalistic undead, then it would take more space than here to explain it. The other thing that won't be done here is to compare and contrast the George Romero original with the update. I don't remember that much of it and frankly, except for the base concept of a small group of humans trapped in a shopping mall, there isn't much similar. There isn't much social criticism on consumerism (we'll have to wait for the Naomi Klein commentary on the DVD) and many of the same social issues touched on in the 1978 film - we're past that.

We are not past loving the spectacle of hordes of decaying corpses clutching and grabbing at desperate humans. We are not past humans taking up whatever weapons are on hand now with a good excuse to open up on their former neighbours with gusto. At least, I'm not past that. 28 Days Later revived that particular appetite for audiences last year, Dawn of the Dead, which cribs slightly from the Danny Boyle film in the similar title sequence, more than revs up the genre.

Tight plotting, thrills and plenty of frights is what moves Dawn of the Dead into classic territory. A great (though muted) cast in Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Mekhi Phfifer seem to have volunteered to be horror targets in a dying cause. Zombie films usually end one of two ways. Either everyone dies, or almost everyone dies. With such a low probability of coming out on top, I assume that most of the cast members liked the idea of dying in gruesome and memorable ways. Will we see Sean Penn in a remake of The Hills Have Eyes? Maybe if it's as fun as this remake.

Director Zack Snyder has the right idea here. Keep the plot moving. And when you come to a rest, keep the audience wondering what is lurking around the corner or hanging from the ceiling. Hit the creepy notes. There is some great balance here between black humour, chills, pathos and exhilarating heart-beating stuff. The wonderful first act that portrays society reeling out of control with as many deaths due to panicked drivers as due to ravenous undead builds slowly. The Sarah Polley character watches the world collapse out of the cracked windshield of her car. This is the scene that 28 Days Later couldn't depict either out of cost or because that hero was conveniently in a coma.

When the living characters begin to collect in the mall, an underlying sense of dread keeps the focus on survival. There are no scenes where the characters revel in having a shopping mall all to themselves. We know now that shopping malls are sterile, uninhabitable environments, not just the source of low-brow consumerism. Writer James Gunn is smart enough to always keep things not quite right, whether it is through inter-group conflict, or through red herrings. There's a silly distraction with a dog but this connects more meaningfully with an attempt to rescue a fellow survivor who is trapped in a gun store within sight of the mall. This also becomes the source for a hilarious scene of black humour that will sort your own friends out.

One of the most memorable shots of this act is the godlike view of the Michigan suburb in flames, following the heroine's car putting along down a straight away and then .. bang... an ambulance takes out the car just ahead. And then, for an added touch, the godlike view is shown to be a helicopter shot as a newscopter hoves into view. Digital effects have always been great at portraying the scale and awe of widespread destruction. It's totally at home here. Later when the humans are trapped in the mall, the new digital effects can pump the scale of the last humans' predicament up quite a bit in a shot showing thousands of zombies teeming in the parking lot. (And in the normal scale the zombie makeup from David Cronenberg's wife Denise is pretty juicy).

Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is a shorthand for the zombie genre. Not much needs to be explained, after all. We can assume the living dead didn't come to the mall to shop, and it's really not important to know what particular sin unleashed the dead on the living. Even the characters are a shorthand, maybe even a cipher for what we want to think of them even though there are the caricatures of the rednecks and the yuppie-scum who cares only about himself. For the others, shared apocalypse is the comforting, redeeming moral feature of disaster films. That is the extent to which there is a moral lesson here. Perhaps, in the post-September 11th world, survival is the only lesson.