From Sea to Shining Cathode: "Turtles Can Fly"

I'm not exactly sure that our TV still uses cathode ray tube technology, but then again, I don't really care. I've decided, instead of cogitating too deeply on the "black box" nature of the black box in front of me, to kayak all day long, everyday, without cease, ad infinitum.

But first, I'm going to give a live-action play-by-play, work-by-work analysis and response of and to a movie I am watching at this very moment. With my eyeballs and ears and various other sensating bodily orifices. Too numerous to count.

The movie is also too numerous to count, although it is only one (1) discrete artifact. This is a ponderous and pondering observation, surely, but hold tight. Let me explain. No, wait--you'll maybe get it by the end of this spiel.

Okay. The title screen flashes. It's an FBI warning and an animated "Don't steal this copyrighted information, or you'll go to the slammer, like this unshaven punk." That's nice. I'm distracted at this point by the infamous thought-experiment entitled, "What would happen if the first track on every CD was a robotically-intoned 'If you're burning this right now, we'll be burning you in eternity.'"

Ooh. There's a rating. PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, and mature thematic. Not sure what "mature thematic" is. Probably something from Hollywo. Unsurprisingly, this is a foreign-language film.

Is there a title here or not? All I see is a bunch of Arabic script on the screen. Something about Kurdistan. Wish I knew more about the rest of the world.

First image: young girl with wind-swept hair. Scary music! Will she jump off the cliff? Into the water? Who is the scary guy? Ominous clouds. Jumps. Ah!

Cut to title: Turtles can fly. Hope that girl was a turtle. I sense this is the optimism that the movie maker wanted me to see. Well, I can see through their gag, so I'm going to go ahead and believe the worst. Turtles can only fly if they don't have a shell, you know.

Iraq. No televisions.

Wait. There's the beautiful girl again. Must be a flashback. I assume, at least, from her wind-sweptness, that she is "the beautiful girl" touted on the back of the DVD.

Ah. The hero, to foil the heroine. A teenage satellite-installer. To bring the Iraqi villages into
touch with the 21st century, the news, the tales of the war.

Bad subtitles on this thing. It only translates the gist of what they're saying. Right now, for instance, they've all been talking and laughing for five minutes, and the only thing on the bottom of the screen is "Let's go." Pretty distilled, I think.

Back to the girl. Her brother (?) just picked up a landmine with his mouth. I think he's armless. Guess that's what he does these days. Collect mines.

Satellite boy is back. Looks like he's in charge of the landmine-collectors, and looks like he's a meany. Hey. The armless boy just beat him up. Not bad.

Liz says it looks they're kind of angry. I'd concur.

Now Satellite-boy set up a satellite so the village can watch the war. Problem is, they only get Fox and no one speaks English. Even if they could, who knows how much they'd learn? I've got a feeling that pretty much the entire populace is manipulated by politicians. Like putty. Sometimes I wonder what they say about things behind closed doors, into the clouds of their cigar smoke, but then I realize that it's not really worth knowing. Profound, eh?

Wow. All these kids wounded, broken. One blind. One without arms. One lame. One a jerk.

Where the heck are these people living? What's with all the random armored junk around here?

Liz says the DVD back says all these kids are orphans. Sure. But where are they?

Ah. the armless guy is some kind of seer, who can make predictions about the future.

Okay, the Wind-swept Wonder seems to have some depression problems. I think what everyone else calls her "brother" is actually her son. Maybe. Every once in a while there's a montage of her jumping off a cliff thrown into the mix, so I'm curious about the subtle foreshadowing there. I'm gonna go ahead and say she dies by her own hand. Will I, too, be a seer?

Okay, so this is the deal: a bunch of orphan kids are hanging around in a refugee camp, right next to a bunch of minefields. So they're plucking 'em from the dirt and selling them to some middlemen in order to get money to survive.

Awkward. Wind-swept W. just tried to burn herself alive. Doused in kerosene and everything. I think that baby is kind of getting to her guilt complex. Come to think of it, she does carry it around her neck like an albatross. Stands to reason: guess her family was killed, she was raped, and the child is the result. Hard.

Armless boy leaves sister, W-W, on Satellilte boy's bike. He warns everybody that the war will start; the population moves out of the way. Like sheep without a shepherd.

Okay. Leaflet bombs. Wish they'd do that with my blog. Bomb it. Or distribute it wildly. Isn't that the same thing? Every dissemination is a bit of an explosion, rending things apart.

Hey, she didn't jump. Just sat on the edge of the cliff for a while. Who'd have thought? Tied her kid to a tree in the middle of a minefield, though. Satellite, trying to rescue him, loses a leg. Time for redemption through sacrifice? Is that in the Koran somewhere?

Nope. She does. And drowns her son, too. What a wretched movie. Inasmuch as it is inconceivably sad.

Well, this has been a less than enjoyable experience. Probably a terrible movie to comment on "live" like this, since it's too tragic to in any manner mock. This, I suppose, is real life for some--how many? What an eye-opener. See it, if you want to be wounded.