Jarhead – Inertia In The Desert

Article first published as Movie Review Jarhead – Inertia In The Desert on Blogcritics.

Jarhead (2005) deals with the whole Desert Storm operation. We follow the protagonist Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) through his boot camp military training and on to sniper school and from there to the desert. The Gulf War breaks out and Swofford is sent to Saudi Arabia with Desert Shield. After 174 days Desert Storm begins. It doesn’t last for more than five days and then the whole experience is over.

There are some inherent difficulties to making a war movie without taking all the established war movie clichés into account. What you can do, and what Jarhead does do, is incorporate them, blatantly and obviously. Jarhead uses the Ride of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now! as a sing along scene. It references Full Metal Jacket in the obligatory boot camp scene in a way that makes the viewer feel that the drill instructor has taken his lines straight out of the movie. The Deer Hunter figures in one marine’s public humiliation when his wife has sent him the movie but tapes over it with a home movie porn version of her own adultery. As a matter of fact the movie is saturated with intertextual references to movies, TV-shows and literature – everything from Hemingway to Camus’ The Stranger.

In a way this hyperawareness of the intertextuality creates a kind of saturation that makes it difficult to thread the connections into anything coherent. It becomes the backdrop for the main story, Swofford’s experiences in the desert. Swofford’s voice over offers all kinds of opinions about the abusive behaviour of his superiors, the nature of the soldier’s life and problems at home.

The one thing more prevalent in this movie than any other war movie I have seen, is the frustration of inaction. All the training, all the waiting, it translates into stupid mindless games and drills and penalism and some very messed-up group dynamics when the soldiers are trapped in a holding pattern they can’t do anything about.

Swofford says “For most problems the Marine is issued a solution. If ill, go to sickbay. If wounded, call a Corpsman. If dead, report to graves registration. If losing his mind, however, no standard solution exists.” This sense of frustration and pent up aggression translates well enough to the viewer in the scene where Swofford and his spotter Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) finally get a mission and are interrupted when they literally have their target in the crosshairs. They never get to take the shot and then the campaign is over.

The viewer is given various points of view on what the soldiers are doing and the reasons why they do it, from Staff Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) who quite simply loves his job, a revelation he gives while watching oil towers burning on the horizon, to the surprisingly critical Kruger (Lucas Black) who flat out questions orders and shines a light on the less noble financial purpose of the whole thing, to the requisite psycho misfit Fowler (Evan Jones) and the ill placed Fergus (Brian Geraghty) who seems too meek to be a solider in the first place.

Overall the impression of heat, inertia and waiting is reflected in the bleak washed-out imagery of the heat and the desert. The flashbacks of Swofford’s father and uncle, soldiers from a very different war, highlight how armed conflict has changed, but also how the soldier’s attitude to war has had to change due to the heightened awareness of media, the influx of information and the nature of war itself from a technical point of view. This is a war without any kind of front.

It’s not easy to convey the restless frustration of inaction to the viewer without actually impacting the way you react to the movie as such. I, for one, find myself conflicted by a few things, but chief amongst them is probably the sense that the very pointlessness of the whole thing is still juxtaposed with some kind of justification of the brotherhood of soldiers. That’s is still expressed as inviolable, despite the fact that Swofford snaps in the desert and threatens to shoot Fowler and fantasizes about killing one of his own officers. There is no real sense of Swofford being disillusioned by his experiences, he seems to have very few illusions going in to the army. This is not an overtly political or anti-war movie, but then nothing about this movie is particularly overt.

It’s been stated before that war movies in general always tell two stories. The story of the war itself and the story of the soldiers who fight it. That is no less true here. This war is over fast, the political and financial motives less white hat than WWII and less sticky than Vietnam and perhaps that is why the contextualization of the artifice of the movie itself is so much in effect. The story of the soldiers is a coming of age tale with strong overtones of the macho ethos contradicted by how each word in the letters from home get analyzed and puzzled over. The worst thing that befalls Swofford is a bad hangover and the suspicion that his girlfriend might be cheating on him. That makes it hard to be heroic and it muddies the waters enough that the viewer isn’t given any easy way to position themselves on this. Then again, I for one, am willing to believe that is what the director, Sam Mendez, intended.

Jarhead (2005) directed by Sam Mendes is based on a novel by Anthony Swofford about his experiences in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during Desert Storm. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal (Anthony Swafford), Scott MacDonald (D.I. Fitch), Peter Sarsgaard (Alan Troy), Jamie Foxx (Staff Sgt. Sykes), Lucas Black (Chris Kruger), Brian Geraghty (Fergus O’Donnell), Damion Poitier (Poitier), Brianne Davis (Kristina), Tyler Sedustine (Harris), Jacob Vargas (Juan Cortez), Laz Alonso (Ramon Escobar), Evan Jones (Dave Fowler), Iván Fenyö (Pinko), John Krasinski (Corporal Harrigan), Chris Cooper(Lt. Col. Kazinski) and Marty Papazian (Brian Dettman).

Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You… Sort Of

Article first published as Movie Review Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You…Sort Of on Blogcritics.

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.
Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

All that being said, there is grit in the stew here. The director Scott Charles Stewart started his career in special effect and you can tell. There is a certain emphasis on the effects side of things, a certain love for some of the bad guys, like The Ice Cream Man (Doug Jones), and explosions and weapons and spectacular fight scenes, not that I don’t enjoy that, I do. The problem is, some things feel much too familiar, like the final scene of the movie that any fan of The Terminator will instantly clock on to. You can call that a homage, if you like, it’s certainly too explicit to be incidental. There is also hints and allusions to other general lore, of course, but for some reason the end result is just not more than the sum total of its parts, which is unfortunate. There is a lot of exposition, which allows the actors to shine, each in their own little moment, but which does not add anything to the overall story. It feels disjointed in an odd, rambling way. It also feels like the director/script writer doesn’t trust the audience to believe the motivation driving the characters to act the way they do.

The problem is that too much explanation is just as bad as not enough. The pacing is awkward, to say the least. Building suspense is not an easy thing and you really have to keep your finger on the button to be able to create the kind of unease that the waiting between attacks needs to have in order for the viewer to feel unsettled. That never really works here.

There is also the fine line between horror and splatter, one inducing the kind of creeping dread that has you on the edge of your seat and the latter just making you go “eeew” and there are a few instances of that here too, where horror would have been preferable.

It’s not a bad first effort, but it feels squandered when it could have been so much more considering the cast and the general idea.

Legion (2010) directed by Scott Charles Stewart stars Paul Bettany (Michael), Lucas Black (Jeep Hanson), Tyrese Gibson (Kyle Williams), Adrianne Palicki (Charlie), Charles S. Dutton (Percy Walker), Jon Tenney (Howard Anderson), Kate Walsh (Sandra Anderson), Willa Holland (Audrey Anderson), Dennis Quaid (Bob Hanson), Kevin Durand (Gabriel), Doug Jones (Ice Cream Man) and Jeanette Miller (Gladys).

And on The Topic of the End of the World…

T.S. Eliot put it best in his poem “The Hollow Men”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I feel the need to amend myself for the previous post about the post-apocalyptic world of The Book of Eli. There’s a lot more to that story than I first indicated, such as the plucky young female side-kick Solara and the dirty western frontier feeling of Carnegie’s town and the fact that Eli is the book, embodies it, carries it within himself, cradled close to his heart. And the fact that people eat each other is just icing on the cake. Uhm. Well, maybe not icing. Well, strange icing then.

There are all kinds of post-apocalyptic landscapes. There’s excess and decay in Blade Runner (1984), a world where there is too much of everything but it’s all broken down and at odds with the high level of technological advancement. There’s the same general sense of too much stuff and an increasing level of urban ruins in Split Second (1992) where the futuristic London looks more like Venice, complete with rain and rising water levels. Hardware (1990) is post nuclear in the same way as The Book of Eli (2009), but here there’s an interesting mix of blasted wastelands and excess and changed climate. Technology features heavily in that movie as well, and it’s the same kind of retrofitted architecture in a dying structure where the difference between ghetto and high-end living are slim to none, merely depending on weather the technology works or not.

The future of the whole Terminator-series is blasted landscapes, ruins and dangers and technology gone rogue. It’s mostly a hostile environment, more fitted for machines than humans.
Mad Max (1979) had that same blasted desert feel to it even if it was still basically a revenge tale. And the following movies in that series had their merits and flaws. It’s still a forerunner in its genre, no matter what you might think of the leading actor today.

“If the future isn’t bright at least it’s colorful” Blixa Bargeld sings in one of Einstürzende Neubauten’s songs. That certainly applies to the movies mentioned above.

In Equilibrium (2002) the world still works, but things are not the way they should be. Just like with 1984 (1956 and again in 1984) things are bad, but the pressure is concentrated to the psychological realm in a totalitarian structure where you actually can’t argue that things aren’t what they should be, that the future isn’t a bright, clean and shiny place. These aren’t post-apocalyptic worlds in the same sense, they are dystopias, but there’s more to it than that. Reasons why aren’t always given, but the viewer can infer. And does, at least if they’re constructed like this viewer. You can argue where the line between post-apocalypse and dystopia should be drawn, but sometimes they are one and the same and sometimes they teeter-totter back and forth across that line.

There are plenty of post-apocalyptic scenarios that involve some kind of plague or bio-warfare, touching on our paranoia about diseases. Pandemic outbreaks of vampirism as in Daybreakers (2009) or I Am Legend (2007) or, tangentially, The Omega Man (1971) or any of the droves of zombie-movies, starting with the George Romero movies go at the topic slightly differently. The Last man on Earth (1964) combines vampirism, viruses and what-not. And David Cronenberg’s inimitable Rabid (1977) that creeps in under your skin for more reasons than one.

The premise is basically that everything else is the same, but the people needed to keep society going are the broken part of the machine, with the exception of small pockets of survivors. 28 Days Later… (2002) give us the modern view of the virus spreading in a world where communication and travel have developed to the point where pandemics are moving at epic speeds. Then there’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) of course, which is all of these things, decay and viruses and time travel and a hallucinatory drift in the fabric of reality with a cherry on top.

Planet of the Apes (1984) is of course another time-honoured classic that deserves a mention. Nothing’s really wrong here if you don’t take the fact that the human race managed to bomb themselves into the stone age proving themselves to be nothing more than an interesting footnote in history, reduced to myth at best. It’s that old fear of degeneration, a reversed Darwinian evolutionary curve making us irrelevant, which is something that not even Matrix (1999) took all the way. At least there humans serve some kind of utilitarian purpose, even if it’s not that great from our perspective.

Then there’s a lot of … uhm, let’s call them less successful movies on the same basic topic, like Interzone (1987), the storyline of which is given in haiku-style as “Humans fight mutants in a post-holocaust world.” Hmm… I haven’t seen that one. A Boy and His Dog (1975) I have seen, but I can’t exactly claim to have any interesting memories of it, apart from thinking that the sound quality was really bad and the voice-over of the Dog just felt incredibly wrong.

We bring it on ourselves.
That is surprisingly often the moral lesson in these narratives. It doesn’t matter if we are pawns in the game or victims of chance or just caught in the maelstrom of circumstance that are outside our control.

Our fears are pretty much the usual ones. Things ending badly, for whatever reason, are often brought about by greed and stupidity and all the things connected to excess and any of a variation of combinations of the seven deadly sins. Sometimes the humans in these narratives are like cockroaches, surviving despite of it all. Sometimes they are righteous men in a bleak free-for-all where people who eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

Mule

The Book of Eli (2010) Post Apocalypse Gray

Article first published as Movie Review: The Book of Eli – Post Apocalypse Gray on Blogcritics.

The Book of Eli starts when a man comes walking through a bleak and colorless post-apocalyptic landscape. He has a backpack and a machete and purpose. This is a quest of sorts, where Eli (Denzel Washington) is carrying a book, protecting it and “going West”. It’s not clear at first what the book is, who the wanderer is or where he’s going. The tale is hugely mythological and evoques images from Dante’s Inferno or whatever tale of wanderers you might be most familiar with.
On his travels he encounters good men and bad. Mostly bad.
He finds his way to a budding town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who has spent a long time and a lot of resources looking for a book. It just so happens that Eli is carrying the book Carnegie is looking for. Carnegie tries to manipulate and seduce Eli to stay and share the book, but Eli respectfully declines. This is where the hunt-and-seek part of the story begins. Eli happens to befriend Solara (Mila Kunis), the daughter of Claudia (Jennifer Beals) who is Carnegie’s concubine, for lack of a better word. When Eli leaves the town Solara follows him.
Now, this is all very archetypical, so there is really no point in discussing the presence of certain conventions and clichés since that’s the whole point here. It’s a myth arch and the approach to the story fits.
There’s a great consistency in the visual aspects of the movie. Whatever happened is thirty years in the past and the survivors who remember what the world looked like before are few and far between. Eli and Carnegie are both of that generation and they suffer the unavoidable “paradise lost” emotions that that engenders. They remember, and in part that is what this whole movie is about. The book itself is a symbol of knowledge and pre-apocalypse times.
All vegetation has died, there is nothing green in this world. Whatever canned goods there were have been depleted over time and people are resorting to eating the other white meat, each other. That means this bleak future is a free-for-all and no one is safe.
Eli can handle himself, though. He’s a survivor and a fighter and a true believer who really does think he is on a mission, and that there is someone watching over him.
I like the look and feel of this dystopic future and I am frankly surprised at the stellar quality of the cast. Gary Oldman is suitably villainous, but still manages to inject enough depth into his character to make him interesting. Even bit-parts like The Engineer (Tom Waits), George (Michael Gambon) and Lombardi (Malcolm McDowell) are cast in a way that gives this unexpected weight and substance.
All that being said, I’m afraid this movie is probably not going to stay with you for very long. It ends on an oddly hopeful note, but nothing is really resolved and there are plenty of pitfalls on the way there, where it resorts to simple action-movie clichés. There’s a surprisingly hollow knell at the core of the whole premise that niggles at the viewer and I can’t really put my finger on what it is.
To be fair it’s competing with old favorites in the same genre, like Mad Max (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Hardware (1990) or, more recently The Road (2009).
It is most definitely worth watching, though, and the opening sequence sets the atmosphere of the whole movie. Just keep that in mind and you’ll see what I mean.

The Book of Eli (2010) directed by Albert & Allen Hughes stars Denzel Washington (Eli), Gary Oldman (Carnegie), Mila Kunis (Solara), Ray Stevenson (Redridge), Jennifer Beals (Claudia), Frances de la Tour (Martha), Michael Gambon (George), Tom Waits (Engineer), Malcolm McDowell (Lombardi), Evan Jones (Martz) and Joe Pingue (Hoyt).

Inglourious Basterds – Liquid Modernity and Alternate History

Article first published as Movie review Inglorious Basterds – Liquid Modernity and Alternate History on Blogcritics.

There is always a lot going on Tarantino’s movies, and that is putting it mildly. Not only are they riddled and rife with movie connections and intertextuality, references to more or less obscure movie stars and directors, but in this case there is also the whole of World War II’s history to take into account.

The movie itself is divided into five chapters: “1 – Once Upon a Time In Nazi Occupied France”, “2 – Inglourious Basterds”, “3 – German Nights in Paris”, “4 – Operation Kino”, “5 – Revenge of the Giant Face”. Just looking at the titles of the chapters you know what universe you are in. Without searching too deeply you can see the references to Spaghetti Westerns and sundry other cinematic allusions.

The story follows a few key characters, most importantly Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt). In true Tarantino-tradition each of the separate storylines overlap and tie into each other in complex and intricate ways.

Shosanna survives the massacre of her family by the hand of Col. Landa in the first chapter. Aldo Raine is the leader of a group of Jewish soldiers dropped behind enemy lines in France with the sole express purpose of killing Nazi officials and military as messily as possible. Their cruelty quickly becomes legendary and they are referred to as the “inglorious bastards” giving the movie its title.

Through a series of circumstance the German war hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) takes a shine to Shosanna who is active in Paris as the owner of a movie theatre. Zoller wants the premiere of the movie glorifying his efforts as a sniper portrayed in a movie-within-the-movie called “Stolz der Nation” (“A Nation’s Pride”) to be at her theatre. Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) sees this as an excellent opportunity to boost morale and bring all the higher officials of Nazi military together in one place.

Little does either Zoller or Goebbels know that Shosanna is part of the resistance and she also has a personal stake in staging a large scale assassination of all the top Nazi brass. Another of Tarantino’s prevalent themes comes into play in this, the revenge-movie, characteristically with a female in the lead.

As events unfold Shosanna, Hans Landa and Aldo Raine are going to crash and converge at this red carpet affaire, along with Goebbels, Zoller, Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and other well-known Nazi leaders. Raine is posing as the escort of the actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) who looks and acts like the epitome of every movie star of the period.

As always with Tarantino, it is the performances of the actors and the brilliant casting that elevates what could have been just a glorious mess into something more. Christoph Waltz as the multilinguist and all around bad guy Hans Landa is a thing of beauty to watch. He gets to show off his linguistic skills and plays sweet and charming one moment and a completly cold-hearted killer the next. Brad Pitt is so cartoonishly American that he makes me grin, Mélanie Laurent is quaintly French and at the same time shows a core of iron, playing scenes like the lunch Shosanna has with Zoller and Goebbels with a restraint that accentuates the tension until you can pretty much feel her vibrate from sheer stress. The supporting cast is cleverly chosen and used so well that even random-Nazi-soldier-Nr. 3-in-the-background contributes something to the overall.

The movie walks that same fine line between the serious and the silly that most of Tarantino’s production does and he manages to stay within the parameters well enough that it never becomes pastiche, but stays in the realm of homage and that is not an easy feat.

This is alternate history and it serves up the kind of twist that you hope for with something like that. It is also, sometimes perhaps despite itself, a clever comment on the fact that reality and truth is pretty much inseparable from fiction, fantasy and down right lying, even when we are dealing with our immediate history.

Postmodernism is dead, or so I have been told. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman favours the term “liquid modernity” and talks about how the individual must estimate likely gains and losses of acting under the conditions of endemic uncertainly. Tarantino has always been the poster boy for postmodernism in a way, because of his acute awareness of the very fictionality of the medium. It doesn’t seem wrong that he can use David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” over a the scene where Shosanna gets ready to assassinate an entire movie theatre full of Nazi top brass by setting fire to a huge pile of nitrate film. That’s what I mean when I say there’s a lot going on. You can parse meaning out of that until you have gotten well and truly lost in your own intertextual grid.

Inglorious Basterds is visceral, visual, violent, brash, funny, awkward and feeds off itself and all other movie iconography until it’s saturated. The dialogue is brilliant and multilingual and the performances are really stellar.

And the movie manages to do all that while still being a fun ride.

Inglorious Basterds (2009) directed by Quantin Tarantino stars Mélanie Laurent (Shosanna Dreyfus), Christoph Waltz (Col. Hans Landa), Brad Pitt (Lt.Aldo Raine), Eli Roth (Sgt. Donny Donowitz), Michael Fassbender (Archie Hicox), Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark), Daniel Brühl (Fredrick Zoller), Til Schweiger (Hugo Stiglitz), Sylvester Groth (Joseph Goebbels), Martin Wuttke (Adolph Hitler), Rod Taylor (Winston Churchill) et al.

Mule

Katyn – In war, truth is the first casualty

Article first published as Movie Review: Katyn – In War, Truth is the First Casualty on Blogcritics.

This is not a documentary. It’s not even a docu-drama. Actually it’s more of a study of cause and effect and an exploration in the different attitudes and moral points of view surrounding the situation in Poland during World War II. It focuses on the event that occurred in the Katyn forest in April-May in 1940 where the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed the Polish military officers from the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp.

This is a multi strand chronicle and as such it doesn’t really stay with one set of characters but rather shows several families and their experiences. There is random kindness and random violence, as with any account of war, but the one thing that will stay with the viewer is the very orderly and organized callous violence of the NKVD as they bring out the Polish officers, tie their hands behind their backs and puts a bullet to the back of each soldiers head. The very nature of that kind of violence is so calculated it is actually hard to relate to.

The movie starts with Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and her daughter Nika trying to convince her husband Andrzej (Arthur Zmijewski), who is one of the Polish officers bring held by the Soviet army near the border of Poland, to flee from the Soviet troops. The polish officers are bring held waiting for transport to an unknown destination. Andrzej refuses, stating that he has sworn an oath to the army and he is honour bound to stay. The notion of being honourable in a situation like that is all very archaic. He goes with the other troops and all the officers find themselves in the prison camp Kozelsk in Russia.

In the brief scenes that are shown from the prison camp the viewer gets the abbreviated version of every single attitude that a prisoner of war can experience. The General (Jan Englert) gives a rousing speech to the troops about keeping their faith, displaying a touching belief in the honour of the force keeping them captive. There is an aside about one of the officers who according to one of the protagonists “tried to hang himself again last night”, showing how some succumb to desperation. There a stoic older man who offers a young pilot a crucifix and tells him to take it easy and put his faith in the lord when the young aviator talks of fighting and escaping, giving an example of the attitude that it would be better to struggle. I mention this scene because it is a good example of the way this movie tries to show as much as possible in a short an economic way.

During the early stages of the invasion of Poland the Nazis and the Soviets worked together, but as we all know that fell apart spectacularly after a while. When the massacre at Katyn was discovered they blamed each other with the alarming swiftness of a gigantic propaganda machine. Caught in the middle were the relatives of the victims, women and children, who were at one point or another asked to corroborate whichever version of the truth the dominating force was trying to sell at the time. So, the age-old adage that the first victim of any war is the truth is certainly apt here.

As for the historical quality of the narrative itself there is always a valid point in telling these kinds of stories, no matter who the victim is and who is the victor. Mind you, the victor writes the history, so it’s always good to hear what the price of that was.

One thing struck me as particularly interesting. Much of the story is told through the women, the mother, the wife, the sister and the daughter of the massacre victims. That’s an interesting take on it. Mostly women are conspicuously absent from these kinds of tales. But they are the ones left behind, in every sense of the word, when the invading forces set up shop. They are the ones who have to live in this brave new world and reconcile with their grief and their pain. Again the viewer is given examples of each strategy for survival. The General’s wife falls apart in a very decorous way, Anna flees to her mother-in-law (Maja Komorowska) and stubbornly refuses to believe that her husband might be among the dead until she has irrefutable proof. Anna and Andrzej’s daughter grows up expecting her father every time there is a knock at the door.

This is an intensely personal film for director Andrzej Wajda, who lost his own father at Katyn, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, it isn’t a sentimental film. It keeps a cautious distance and tries to do that most difficult of things, i.e. showing instead of telling. The movie is also based on the novel Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn by Andrzej Mularczyk.

There’s also the incredibly disturbing feeling that Poland during this time was suffering the fate of being like a bloody rag caught between to large dogs, tugging and chewing and pulling it every which way. It doesn’t really matter if it is the Nazi’s or the NKVD who are tearing into it at the moment. Both are equally bad, as is shown when Nazi officers close down the university and arrest the entire faculty, shoving the dignified elder intellectuals out the doors and down the stairs at gunpoint and loading them into trucks. We all know nothing good can possibly happen to these gentlemen after that point.

There are questions here of morality, survival, loyalty – but then again, aren’t there always? Especially in war movies. It does not make them any less acute and universal. It took something like 60 years for the Soviets to acknowledge responsibility for the massacre (this was under Gorbachev). The point isn’t that there was a massacre, or even that there was a cover-up. The point is that every act committed in a war has far reaching ramifications that spread like rings on the water and touch many more lives than you might think at a cursory glance.

The multi strand storytelling does present some inherent problems for the viewer, however. The very ambitious nature of this movie means that it tries to flesh out as many strands of the narrative as possible, showing several of the Polish officers families and how they all deal with the uncertainty of the fates of the officers and, later, when the mass graves have been discovered, how they deal with their deaths and the political implications of what has happened.

Despite the confusion this can create for the viewer, the movie more than makes up for its few shortcomings by being of historical importance, which means you understand the necessity of the telling of all this from a Polish perspective. It has beautiful and poignant music, composed by Krzystof Penderecki, spectacular cinematography by Pawel Edelman and a timeless quality that makes it all the more fascinating to watch.

As you might be able to tell from my review it also spotlights some every interesting moral questions and makes sure that Katyn won’t be forgotten any time soon.

Katyn (2007) directed by Andrzej Wajda stars Andrzej Chyra (Lt. Jerzy), Maja Ostaszewska (Anna), Arthur Zmijewski (Andrzej), Danuta Stanka (Róza), Jan Englert (General), Magdalena Cielecka (Agnieszka), Agnieszka Glinska (Irena), Pawel Malazynski (Lt. Piotr), Maja Komorowska (Andrzej’s Mother), Wladyslaw Kowalski (Professor Jan), Antoni Pawlicki (Tadeusz), Agnieszka Kawiorska (Ewa) and Sergey Garmash (Maj. Popov).

The 2403rd Star – Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) passed away the other day. He made it to 74, who would have thought?

The thing about Hopper for me has always been his ability to hook your attention – even when the quality of the movie might not be … well, you know – stellar.

Hopper’s career was chequered, to say the least. You got the feeling that occasionally he just needed to pay the rent, and I can respect that. There’s no shame in working.

When he was good, on the other hand, he was really good. Some performances stand out by a country mile: Easy Rider (1969) and Blue Velvet (1986) being the ones that pretty much everybody remembers.

But there’s also the very young and clean-faced Goon in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the surprisingly funny Huey Walker in Flashback (1990) opposite Kiefer Sutherland. Hopper’s performance as the father in Rumble Fish (1983) is one of my personal favourites, it seems so effortless. Then again there’s the scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken where they discuss the heredity of being Sicilian in True Romance (1993) which still gives me a big happy. Apocalypse Now (1979) is one of those performances that makes perfect sense too, the crazed gleam in Hopper’s eyes probably not all the way an act.

There’s also Hoosiers (1985), The Indian Runner (1991), Paris Trout (1991), The Osterman Weekend (1983), The American Friend (1977) and Basquiat (1996).

Then, on the other hand … Waterworld (1995), Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Firestarter 2: Rekindled (2002) aren’t exactly shining moments for anyone involved. Like I say – sometimes you just got to pay the rent.

Hopper also directed. Easy Rider (1969), The Last Movie (1971) – which was a spectacular failure. Out of the Blue (1980), Colors (1988), Catchfire (1990), The Hot Spot (1990), Chasers (1994) and the short Homeless (2000).

If you look at his career as an actor, he worked with some of the very best directors, and if you look at what he did as a director he worked with some spectacular actors. Directors include Sam Peckingpah, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Sean Penn, Julian Schnabel, Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Ray, George Romero and Wim Wenders. That’s a whole hell of a lot of talent all around.

Hopper also collected modern art and exhibited his own photography and painting.

Squandered talent always kind of angers me and Hopper was lucky in a way that he didn’t fall from grace completely, succumbing to substance abuse early in his career. He did abuse his fare share of substances there for a while, though, and got a sharp awakening and cleaned up his act.

Some actors have this ability to tap into a real dark streak, mainlining something close to evil, and Hopper is one of them. He has been the good guy too, the tough cop, all that, but he is just more in command of the stage when the darkness bleeds through.

Like with most creative souls there’s a restlessness, a sense that there is never world enough, or time. A feeling that you have to rage against the dying of the light. In his best moments Hopper gave the viewer all that and a feeling that there was an active intelligence at work behind it.

I asked around amongst my less film enthusiastic acquaintances about Hopper when the news of his death became public. I asked what they remembered seeing him in, what they thought of him, and the funny thing to me was that no one seemed to like him much. I just went “huh?” because, man I didn’t get that. I guess it makes sense that you don’t like him if all you’ve seen is Blue Velvet, because Booth is not a very likeable guy. Hopper played bad guys, like Booth or Paris Trout, with so much fire and honesty, that it makes sense.

In Apocalypse Now the Photojournalist dances about like a mad monkey on speed, lost in the jungle in so many ways and he delivers the following lines about Kurtz to Marlow: “What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans, man? That he had wisdom? Bullshit, man!”

And there it is.

There was more to him, though.

Hopper’s character Father in Rumble Fish has this lovely dialogue with Rusty James;

-Every now and then, a person comes along, has a different view of the world than does the usual person. It doesn’t make them crazy. I mean… an acute perception, man… that doesn’t, that doesn’t make you crazy.
-Could you talk normal?
-However sometimes… it can drive you crazy, acute perception.
-I wish you’d talk normal ’cause I don’t understand half the garbage you’re saying. You know? You know what I mean?
-No, your mother… is not crazy. And neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother crazy. He’s merely miscast in a play. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river… with the ability to be able to do anything that he wants to do and finding nothing that he wants to do. I mean nothing.

That is one of my favourite pieces of dialogue for whatever strange and intangible reason. It has to do with the setting, the pitch of Hoppers voice and the earnestness, the slight exasperation and the honesty with which he delivers it. Hopper’s character’s rumpled suit, his greasy hair, the stubble and the signs of neglect, all of it tells the story of a man with a sharp intelligence who has fallen from grace and lost his footing due to heartache and heavy drinking.

Hopper doesn’t so much sell a performance as live it.
And that’s how I will remember him.

Mule

Rescue Dawn – You’ve got to run through the jungle…

Article first published as Movie Review: Rescue Dawn – You’ve Got to Run Through the Jungle on Blogcritics.

This movie is based on Werner Herzog’s documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (1997).

Lt. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is shot down over Laos and taken prisoner, probably by the North Vietnamese, but what with the nebulous character of the jungle and the long strange hike he is first put through, there is no way of knowing for sure where we are as we enter the prison camp. There is a distinctly hallucinatory quality to the whole movie, but the very sense of un-reality actually brings this all closer to home. Dengler is captured in the jungle by irregular soldiers, treated with a random cruelty that seems at times to be only for the captor’s amusement, and then brought to the prison camp where the lion’s part of the action takes place.

The other prisoners have been interred there for upwards of two years. They are Duane (Steve Zahn), Gene (Jeremy Davies), Y.C. (Galen Yuen) and Phisit (Abhijati ‘Meuk’ Jusakul). You can sense the tension and the strange and inevitable coping techniques they have adopted to survive the harsh conditions right from the get go. The guards are in an equally remarkable shape. Here is where things start taking an interesting turn for me and everything acquires a taste of Samuel Beckett. Holding someone captive in these harsh circumstance pretty much means that the captors are equally locked in the situation. When there is no food, there is no food for anyone.

Still, it’s worse for the prisoners. Of course it is. They grow more and more gaunt, and their situation becomes more and more desperate. The prison itself is just a compound made of bamboo and rope, and Dengler starts making plans for his escape almost immediately. But, as Gene (Jeremy Davies) puts it “the jungle is the prison”. The irony of the jungle is that it’s very difficult to find water unless it’s the rainy season.

The prisoners are held in a bamboo hut and at night they are put in shackles which means they can’t even go to the latrine. They stay locked down until day and the only reason they can start working on an escape is because Dengler is clever enough to fashion a lock-pick from an old nail, which enables him to open their handcuffs at night so they can gain a little more mobility, if not freedom.

The struggle to remain sane here is compelling.

To my mind the really good war movies, or anti-war movies, as the case might be, are the ones that manage to portray the arbitrary nature of ones fortune in a situation like this. Random violence, random kindness, random good fortune, the difference the slightest detail can make for your survival and the inherent surrealism of the nature of conflict in general should all be represented in there somewhere. This movie provides all that. And then there is the jungle.

In a movie like this the jungle is a character in its own right and that is hardly surprising considering the director. Herzog has been fighting his way through the jungle for most of his career. He has the ability to show the sheer size of the jungle, how dangerous it is, how hostile and impenetrable and somehow that means the individual struggling through the green is more vulnerable and at the same time shown as persevering.

Dengler’s will to survive seems to be the only thing holding him together as he and Duane (Steve Zahn) struggle to stay alive and escape the prison of the jungle, despite fatigue, starvation and being pursued by hostile natives. Duane doesn’t make it out, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still with Dengler, though whether he is a ghost or a hallucination is anyone’s guess.

There is comedy and misery and struggle and pure absurdist moments that make this immediate and personal and intimate. I have seen enough of Bale’s work to expect a stellar performance, and I was not disappointed, all the way through to his speech patterns which are carefully constructed. I was, however, surprised by Zahn, who has mostly worked in a lighter vein, but who holds his own admirably in this movie.

There has been some grumbling that Herzog sold out with this movie and “went Hollywood” but I seriously doubt that anyone who watches this will think that it is like anything else they’ve seen in the genre and that is a feat in itself.

It isn’t the easiest thing to watch, but it is thought provoking and interesting and heartbreaking in the best possible way. It shows what life is “near the bone, where it is sweetest” to quote Henry David Thoreau and how much the individual can withstand when there is no other choice but to keep struggling.

Rescue Dawn (2006) directed by Werner Herzog stars Christian Bale (Dieter Dengler), Steve Zahn (Duane), Jeremy Davies (Gene), Galen Yuen (Y.C.), Abhijati ‘Meuk’ Jusakul (Phisit), Teerawat Mulvilai (Little Hitler), Yuttana Muenwaja (Crazy Horse), Kriangsak Ming-olo (Jumbo), Somkuan Siroon (Nook the Rook), Chorn Solyda (Walkie Talkie), Toby Huss (Spook), Pat Healy (Norman) and Farkas (GQ).

Mule

The Painted Veil – China and Orientalism

The Painted Veil (2006) directed by John Curran is based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It stars Edward Norton as the ambitious doctor Walter Fane, Naomi Watts as the socialite Kitty Fane, Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend, Toby Jones as Waddington and assorted other actors of Asian decent in various minor parts. I will explain why I put it like that in a little while, so stay with me here.

Now, I’m a fan of Edward Norton. I think he’s done some really first-rate work in his career, and that’s why I will let him get away with the slightly shady English accent here. Naomi Watts, same thing, really, she does a good job – the accent thing shouldn’t pose much of a problem for her. And then we’ve got the show-stealer Tony Jones who is really brilliant in the role of Waddington and the unusually suave performance of Liev Schreiber who I last saw as Sabretooth – so that at least shows that he’s got range.

Maugham’s stories are often quite subtle, they teeter between fine sarcasm and what can loosely be termed romance, though it’s never as simple as that. It’s also about class and appearances and what that does to the human heart. So here we have the passionate and taciturn doctor Fane who falls for a bored socialite and manages to get her to marry him. It’s obviously an infatuation on his part and a social necessity on hers. He takes her to Shanghai where she promptly has an affair with the cad Townsend. She gets caught out and is given an option – which is really no option at all. If she gets Townsend to agree to divorcing his wife and marrying her instead Fane won’t cause a scandal by citing adultery as the cause for the divorce. Townsend has never had any intention of divorcing his wife. Kitty is trapped and caught and forced to accompany her husband to a provincial Chinese town infested with cholera.

So far so good. All this is what you can expect in terms of keeping up appearances, holding on to archaic values and so on and so forth. Walter punishes Kitty by being cold, disinterested and in general acting like a jilted husband. The fact that they are deep into a foreign county surrounded by the dead and dying makes this little chamber drama more acute.

The scenery is stunning. The shooting locations are actually in Shanghai and the Chinese countryside – spectacular, fantastic, beautiful beyond belief. It’s all … awesome, in the original meaning of the word.

The Fanes are forced back on themselves in this desperate and desolate time and finally they break through to some kind of intimacy and Kitty realises she has to do something with herself – make herself useful in some way, so she involves herself with a local convent run by a hardcore old nun played masterfully by Dame Diana Rigg.

So – Where is the sting in all this honey?
Orientalism, in the good old-fashioned intellectual tradition of Edward Said. This is 1920s China, we’re talking communism, the Cultural Revolution. It strikes me as particularly clumsy that this movie makes no concessions, but sticks to the Maugham view – which is fine for Maugham, but not so much for 2006.

The sundry Chinese characters are treated pretty much like scenery – cute little singing orphans and the occasional mildly threatening young man in the street, the contentious, but obviously a bit stupid guard, the Chinese mistress and Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) and all in all they’re really not given much space.

Colonel Yu get at least a few good lines in like “I think China belongs to the Chinese people, but the rest of the world seems to disagree.” Which does a little something, but it really does not go even a third of the way on how much richer the story would have been had we been given even a something more than just the British doctor and his ditzy wife swooping in to save the day when the whole cholera epidemic is the fault of the ignorant Chinese peasants burying their dead too close to the main water source and also superstitiously keeping their dead on lit de parade for three days instead of doing the wholesome thing and dumping their bodies at once.

I want to like this movie. I just can’t, despite the scenery, the acting and the pretty of it.

Mule

Harsh Times

Harsh Times (2005) by writer/director David Ayer stars Christian Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a former Ranger hourably discharged after six years of service. He is currently living in Los Angeles and wants a career in law enforcement. His best friend Mike Alonzo, played by Freddy Rodriguez, just wants a job so his wife Sylvia (Eva Longoria) will get off his back.

Jim has a girlfriend in Mexico, Martha (Tammy Trull) that he wants to marry and bring across the border. That is why he’s so desperate for work.

This is extremely fast paced, skillfully cut and very rough.  It gives an excellent impression of things spinning out of control, which they do for Jim.

While waiting to see if he’s been accepted into the LAPD Jim goes about his business,  which largely consists of petty crime, drinking, smoking pot, waving his gun around and getting his friend Mike into trouble.  Jim has the kind of bad dreams that you wake up from shaking, sweating and screaming, but insists that he’s fine.

Whatever his experiences were in the war they have certainly left him with a bad case of  post traumatic stress but judging from what his friends say about him he’s always been a little wild and this merely seems to add to that.

In comparison to the life Jim’s living in LA, the girlfriend Martha’s place in Mexico is very much a paradise. Low tech, few people, poor, but hopeful.

Watching Bale I am again amazed at how good he really is at this kind of thing. The Spanish is perfect, his accent never slips. He can portray a guy that goes crashing through five emotions in thirty seconds and lands at violence with diabolical accuracy. Jim loses control over small things, but remains disturbingly calm in the face of guns and violence, of which there is plenty.

His friend Mike only wants to get a job and make his wife happy, but you can see how he gets swept up in Jim’s wake. Rodriguez does a good job as well as the “straight man”, not that that’s a completely correct term here. But watching his reactions to Jim you can see how close to the whirlwind he’s standing and how it affects him. He comes close to losing his wife and everything he’s worked for as  a consequence of this friendship.

Right from the get go you get the sense that this is a downward spiral, spinning hard. Jim can’t wait to selfdestruct and the only question is how many he will take with him and that makes it painful to watch.

The brief respite Jim and Mike get in Mexico is as close to idyllic as anything can get, right up to the point where Jim’s demons take over. At that point he has been offered a job by the Feds as a “contact” in Colombia and he refers to himself as “a soldier of the apocalypse”. He has been adviced that he shouldn’t marry, so he’s going to have to forsake the only good thing in his life, Martha, in order to get a job.

His friends tell him that he’s making the wrong choice. It’s obvious to anyone that he’s making the wrong choice.

At the same time there is no way he’s going to be able to hold on to the normal life he thought he wanted, too badly damaged already. He makes the choice most likely to get him killed and even then it can’t seem to happen fast enough.When Martha tells him she’s pregnant, he snaps.

In the end Jim never even makes it to the training facility in Georgia, circumstance eat him alive before then. And it has some very bad ramifications for Mike as well.

All in all, this is a movie for those who don’t have a problem with violence and moral ambiguity, or a lead character who is actually not very likable. The dialogue is rife with derogatory comments on any- and everything, up to and including the law enforcement, which is not portrayed in a very favourable light here.

To me this movie stands and falls with Bale and Rodriguez. Had it not been for these two actors this could have been a total dud.

Mule