Category Archives: war

Spartacus

Posted on March 30, 2008

This 1960 movie is one of those classics I’m willing to bet most people under the age of 60 have never watched but still feel they know all about. I admit I was one of them until the other day. Let me say upfront, I don’t really see the whole Spartacus as Christ thing, any more than I do for Neo in The Matrix trilogy; if this were so than the same would be true of the hero of nearly any straightforward epic story. But some people want to see such things anywhere they can.

Spartacus is a slave born a few decades before the aforementioned Christian savior in a north African Roman colony, where he’s spotted by gladiator trainer (Peter Ustinov, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and taken to Italy. Life is easier in Capua than in a Libyan mine but he still chafes under the rules and constraints imposed by his masters.

Then one day two leading Roman senators (Lawrence Oliver as the patrician Crassus and John Gavin as a young Juius Caesar) and their lady friends turn up at the school unexpectedly and want a show. The sniveling master is happy to oblige until the women insist the gladiators fight to the death, as is custom in Rome; he tries to convince them that doing so in the school would be a really bad idea but the arrogant women want what they want.

One shortcoming of Dalton Trumbo’s script for me is that Crassus never really understands that what he and his friends did that afternoon was the inciting incident of everything that came after, including his own downfall, the death of tens of thousands and the rise of Caesar. Even at the very end, when Crassus realizes who Spartacus is (since all the men captured with him famously stand up and say “I am Spartacus”), there’s no light of recognition.

Still, this is one of the best performances Kirk Douglas gave, Olivier is as terrific as ever, Ustinov is a very good shifty, sniveling, out for his own good Roman plebe, Jean Simmons is wonderful as Varinia, the Brittanic slave who immediately falls for Spartacus (and vice versa, to be sure), Charles Laughton punches his weight as Crassus’s populist political opponent and John Ireland a strong right arm to Douglas.

The movie was also a triumph for writer Dalton Trumbo. He was nearly destroyed by the McCarthy blacklist, the most prominent member of the Hollywood 10, and Spartacus was the first credit he got after that dark era ended. He worked for another decade after this, giving us the scripts for Exodus and Papillon before passing away in 1976.

This film was also the first really big hit directed by Stanley Kubrick, whose next four pictures were the phenomal Lolita, Doctor Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick realized the epic scope of his story required grandiose outdoor settings but he skillfully navigated the line between tasteful and the campiness embraced by contemporaries like Cecille DeMille. He didn’t shy away from visuals that studio execs probably objected to, such as the crucifixions of the captured rebels which lined the army’s road back to Rome.

recommended

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The Good German

Posted on February 24, 2008

Another quality collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and star George Clooney following the Oceans Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen flicks plus Out of Sight and the less than stellar scifi outing Solaris. This 2006 movie was a very high profile ‘quality’ production shot in black and white with archival footage providing very realistic sets into which the cast were green screened but it only got one Oscar nomination, Thomas Newman for original score. Though Newman did win, so there’s that.

The Good German is set at the time of the Potsdam Conference, between the German and Japanese surrenders at the end of WWII, where Truman, Churchill and Stalin met to divvy up the post-war map. Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a military journalist, in fractionated Berlin to cover the conference; pre-war he’d been the Berlin office head for Associated Press.

Lena Brandt, played by a very dark-haired Cate Blanchett, was Geismer’s stringer and lover in those days, despite being married. Now she lives with a real American army rat called Tully (Tobey Maguire), allowing him to pimp her out and treat her like shite in order to survive. And in a strange coincidence Tully, who nominally works in the motor pool when he isn’t profiteering in the black market, is assigned as Geismer’s driver.

Brandt’s husband Emil (Christian Oliver) supposedly dies a year or two before though other than Jake no one seems to believe it. And everybody in positions of power want to get their hands on Emil. Even his wife wants little more than to get out of Germany as long as she can get Emil to safe (i.e., American) hands as part of the trade. TPTB don’t care about her but for sure are not willing to see the husband, who was the right hand of the scientist at the heart of the Nazi rocket program, captured by another power. This puts Geismer into danger since he, of course, cannot resist trying to save the one woman he apparently ever loved.

For me Good German was Soderbergh and Clooney making another throwback flick. Where the Oceans trilogy recaptured the Rat Pack magic and formalized Clooney as the (non-singing) Sinatra of the new millenium, here they went, reasonably  successfully, for the Howard Hawks and Cary Grant mantles.

The script by Paul Attanasio, from Joseph Kanon’s novel, was also quality stuff, not surprising since Attanasio also wrote Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show and was showrunner of one of my favorite TV series, Homicide: Life on the Streets. Although the politics were surely revisionist, the plot, pacing and dialog were reminiscent of some of the best ’40s war noir efforts like The 39 Steps and Notorious.

recommended

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The Caine Mutiny

Posted on January 28, 2008

I really love having video on demand on my cable service. Not only does it give me new episodes of The Wire six days early, I can also find something to watch no matter what my mood. The other night I flipped through the free movie listing and found this 1954 classic tale of men at war and more in conflict with each other than the enemy–there’s only one battle scene and even that shows the Japanese only through the arrival of shots from their shore-based batteries.

The Caine Mutiny is primarily set on the minesweeper Caine in the Pacific Theater during the second half of WWII. Made from Herman Wouk’s bestselling novel, the movie was written by Stanley Roberts (who also adapted Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for the big screen) and directed by Edward Dmytryk, in his first job after spending several months in prison as one of the Hollywood 10 who refused to cooperate with the DC McCarthyism witchhunts of the early ’50s.

Producer Stanley Kramer (yes, the one who not longer after this became a very successful director) gave Dmytryk a first class cast. Toplining are Humphrey Bogart as the martinet Queeg, Van Johnson as the mutineer Maryk, Fred MacMurray (still a serious actor who had not yet turned to Disney tripe nor the father of My Three Sons) as the creepy comms officer Keefer and Jose Ferrer as Maryk’s Navy attorney plus Robert Francis in a very good performance as naive, audience POV character Ensign Willie Keith. Sadly Francis died in a plane crash the year after this was released.

The Caine is a slack ship, the crew just as sloppy and worn down, as Keith arrives fresh from training for his first posting. Shortly thereafter Queeg takes command and he’s unwilling to permit such unbecoming behavior and state of repair. We see him in a series of questionably petty decisions and confrontations, none truly favorable to him, climaxing in a ship-wide hunt for a purported food locker key used to abscond with a quart of strawberry ice cream.

Maryk, Keefer and Keith surreptitiously ride over to the newly-arrived fleet commander’s carrier, armed with Maryk’s diary of Queeg’s behaviors, to see if Admiral Halsey will  relieve their captain. They back out at the last minute, on Halsey’s doorstep, after Keener points out that much of what the three know is actionable Queeg can likely explain away as imposing discipline and the trio’s action as mutiny.

Finally the ship (and the bigger fleet to which it belongs) runs into a terrible storm that goes on for hours, causing them severe damage. Queeg refuses to deviate in the least from their ordered course despite the fact that doing so will alleviate the threat of capsizing.

The storm goes on and on and Maryk’s requests and suggestions to alter heading become more and more strident; finally Queeg retreats into himself, though physically remaining on the bridge, and Maryk assumes command, with the complicity of Keith, who is officer of the deck during this time. They return to San Francisco, the Caine‘s home port, for the climactic trial of Lt. Maryk on chargs of mutiny.

While watching I came to really wonder how much of the story came from Herman Wouk’s own experience on the same kind of ship during the war. The performances are generally strong, with interesting small parts by very young Lee Marvin, Claude Akins and E.G. Marshall; I’m less clear on why Roberts and Dmytryk kept Ensign Keith’s subplot other than as a sop to the female audience.

recommended

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Notorious

Posted on October 6, 2007

Released just months after V-E day and the end of World War II, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is fixed clearly on the post-Hitler Nazi threat, among the earliest manifestations of a pop culture meme that continued for decades in movies like the Dustin Hoffman/Lawrence Olivier thriller Marathon Man and Robert Harris’s classic ‘what if England lost’ novel Fatherland.

John Huberman is convicted of treason for being a German spy in early 1946 and his daughter Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) attempts to drown her sorrow in liquor and men in Miami. One night T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) shows up at one of those parties at her bungalow and, in the morning when she wakes with a nasty hangover, suggests that a better way to get past her dad’s disgrace is to work for him to infiltrate a Nazi gang in Rio de Janeiro; Devlin wants her because one of the conspiracy’s leaders has held a crush on Alicia for years and is himself getting old enough to feel real pressure to marry and settle down.

The two fly to Brazil where a chance encounter with Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) is arranged; a few lunches and dinner later, after Momma Sebastian (played with a delightfully nasty edge by Leopoldine Konstantin) can meet and give her blessing, he pops the question. Neither Alicia nor Devlin are happy about this since by now they are in love but the bosses don’t know that, nor would they care even so, and instruct her to accept.

While the conspiracy is disposed of by the end–could you imagine some other outcome?–the survival of the two lovebirds and their romance is far less certain. Hitchcock is the master of suspense and Notorious is considered one of his best films, Ben Hecht wrote a very strong script (he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar) and Grant, Bergman and Rains all give terrific performances (Rains was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, losing to Harrold Russell’s outstanding effort in The Best Years of Our Lives) so this is a movie you really ought to see when the chance comes around again on DVD or cable.

recommended

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Tobruk

Posted on September 4, 2007

In 1942 the German army in North Africa led by Field Marshall Rommel was kicking Allied booty, to say the least, and so the Western powers decided to try a sleight of hand approach to cutting Rommel’s attack capability by destroying his fuel depot. The storage tanks were deep in German territory, in the heavily defended Libyan port city of Tobruk, and so previous direct assaults failed.

Tobruck is the story of the mission that worked. A force that combined British ground troops with a special squad of German Jews who escaped Hitler, along with an American oil engineer with deep knowledge of the territory, were tasked with driving overland across the desert and bluffing through to the heavy guns defending the coast. The Jewish troops were all native German speakers, of course, and by wearing Nazi uniforms expected little interference.

If the mission went strictly as planned there’d hardly be material for a movie and there are several episodes that come up. Bunkering down for the first or second night in a wadi, they’re able to hide from an Italian patrol and then trick the Italians into thinking they’ve been attacked by a German squad coming from the other direction. And vice versa and so on.

Then the company takes possession of two German spies, an apparently English father and daughter, who think they’ve found safety as the Jewish troops play their parts as real German troops in their presence. Those heroes harbor a double agent, who sends the spies off to a hidden phone, though the ruse is uncovered and the pair found before any harm’s done to the mission.

Finally, after nearly an hour of screen time, the surviving troops reach Tobruk and make their way to the big guns. The mole has done the necessary, unfortunately, and the Germans inflict heavy casualties, averting the ground invasion planned to coincide with their effort. The Jews die valiantly and the American destroys the fuel dumps, and is the only one (along with his two Brit support troops) to get out alive.

Rock Hudson is the American, George Peppard, affecting a ridiculous accent, is the leader of the Jewish squad and the two key English soliders are played by stereotypical Brit actors, Nigel Green and Jack Watson. I don’t use the term derogatively but that if you thought of a WWII British colonel and sergeant major these two are exactly who you’d picture.

Arthur Hiller directed from Leo Gordon’s script (Gordon also plays Peppard’s sergeant) and mainly I’d say Tobruk is a serviceable war picture. Good, keeps the tension increasing, okay acting yet never gets all that exciting. As one of the IMDB commentors wrote, the movie seems to be stuck trying to create a parallel theme comparing the explicit antisemitism of the British officers with the Nazi’s extermination program.

recommended

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Why We Fight

Posted on July 21, 2007

A powerful, award-winning exploration of the American involvement in Iraq by Eugene Jarecki, Why We Fight (2005) applies inspiration from Frank Capra’s World War II motivational films and President Eisenhower’s farewell address that gave us the term military-industrial complex to explain where the thinking behind this adventure originated.

Too frequently documentaries are bland melanges of talking heads, even when the subject matter is compelling an important. 100 straight minutes of talking about almost any subject can just turn into too much yada yada yada and dramatic yet empty images do little to correct things; repetitive shots gliding down overly similar stretches of whatever are just as snore-inducing. Jarecki avoids this by integrating clips from Eisenhower and other important historical figures.

Mainly though, we see the rationale for the Iraq War through interviews with a few relevant, insightful folks:

Karen Kwiatkowski: A career military officer who was actually in the Pentagon working on the morning of 9/11, and had also spent time on assignment to the National Security Agency, she was assigned to the DoD’s policy development office but resigned in disgust after Cheney associates hijacked her bureau’s function.

Richard Perle: One of the original Neocons, Perle is also one of the heavy lifters in the Project for the New American Century, a thinktank which provided analytical firepower for the attack on Iraq and the use of pre-emptive strikes that are the core of the Bush Doctrine. Perle fervently believes, if we are to take him at his word, that bringing down Saddam Hussein was massively important in reducing the threat to America’s national security.

Wilton Sezker: A retired New York City police officer, Wilton’s son died in the World Trade Center’s collapse. Searching for a way to memorialize him, and thinking back to his own service in Vietnam, Sezker wrote to the military to ask that the son’s name be painted on a missile before it got dropped in Iraq. His request was granted and they even sent him photos of the adorned bomb. Shortly thereafter, though, the former cop saw through the Bush Crew lies about Iraq and now spends his days wondering why he let himself be duped.

Susan Eisenhower: The former general’s granddaughter weighs in, pointing out that exactly what he warned of in that historic speech came to pass nearly immediately, to his great chagrin, and the relationship has become so enmeshed in the system that its invisible.

Chalmers Johnson: A professor specializing in Asian politics who was also a CIA consultant in the Vietnam era, Johnson became disillusioned with American government tactics during the scandals of the ’70s and has since been trying to use his insight and contacts to bring wrongheaded policy into public view, including the publication of three books on what he calls the American Empire. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Johnson wrote an article for The Nation called Blowback, which is a CIA term referring to unforeseen responses to secret government actions, because in his view this is exactly what caused the terrorist horror in Manhattan and DC; in fact he published a prophetic book with that title in 2000 which received little notice until that sad September day, at which time it jumped onto the bestseller lists.

recommended

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Starship Troopers

Posted on June 27, 2007

Based on, but very different from, Robert Heinlein’s classic science fiction novel, Starship Troopers (1997) takes place a few centuries from now with Earth threatened with destruction by an alien arachnoid race. Four high school friends (Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris and Dina Meyer) join the military to see the universe and squash some bugs.

Heinlein’s politics were extremely right wing, at least in the ’50s when he wrote this, and the novel nearly comes out and says that perhaps America made a mistake defeating the fascists the decades before as that organizing principal could offer a better way of dealing with the issues confronting a technical society. Director Paul Verhoeven, though, turns that sentiment on its head and plays the politics for fun in the movie through a framing device of martial broadcast news clips interspersed thoughout.

The script by Ed Neumeier, who’s made a career on sequels and spinoffs from this and RoboCop (which he also wrote, and Verhoeven directed), is not the strong point though. The dialog and set pieces are thin, though overcome. The effects are decent, especially the bugs’ biological heavy weaponry, infantry training camp and starship interiors, and the happy, shiny people really drive home the political satire.

recommended

Note: The first sequel was nowhere near as good on any level.

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Lord of War

Posted on May 28, 2007

Nicholas Cage has an uneven track record with me, to say the least, but in this 2005 Andrew Niccol picture he gets one for the plus column. Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukranian immigrant whose family escaped when his father pretended to be Jewish. Unsatisfied with the family restaurant as a career prospect and captivated by the guns used by neighborhood mobsters, Yuri rides his ambition to the top ranks in the global arms business.

Of course, that means constantly dealing with unsavory characters and living with an intense feeling of insecurity and in this Lord of War plays to Cage’s strength as an actor. He’s hemmed in by family (first brother Jared Leto and then wife Bridget Moynahan and their son), the cops in the form of Ethan Hawke’s Interpol agent, competition from Ian Holm and even nasty customers like Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker, very different from his spiritual character in HBO’s series Oz) and his insanely violent son Andre Jr.

On the plus side are Yuri’s salesmanship, ability to partition the aspects of his life and an uncle who remained in the Ukraine and rose to become a general at the time the old Soviet Union collapsed, providing him with an amazing inventory source. The title comes from the elder Baptiste and his Norm Crosby-ish word jumbling: Orlov, in one conversation, calls him a warlord but Andre tells Yuri he is the real “lord of war.”

Niccol previously wrote and directed Gattaca and S1m0ne and wrote The Truman Show. I thoroughly enjoyed the latter two but never saw the first so let’s give the Kiwi three for three as he keeps the action flowing, generally avoids getting sidetracked in the obviously tragic uses of the product and provides Cage with a realistic, flawed lead character, allowing his brother (mainly) to suffer the emotional consequences.

recommended

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300

Posted on April 27, 2007

There’s a reason this film disappointed me: Despite the amazing visuals from start to end and near non-stop action, it is essentially one battle scene stretched to fill a two hour movie. I initially thought it was a box office disappointment too, but Box Office Mojo reports it’s taken in over $200M in the US and $217M elsewhere as of last weekend. Even with a production budget of $65M and plenty of marketing support, that’s surely sufficient for a good profit despite Hollywood studio’s arcane accounting methodology.

300 is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel retelling of the battle between the Spartans of ancient Greece and Xerxes, greatest leader of the Persian Empire. Directed and co-written by Zack Snyder (whose only major previous effort was the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead), the film is unsurprisingly similar to Sin City. Unsurprising because that was also based on a Miller graphic novel but not near as good, probably because the underlying material was meatier and the significantly greater participation by Miller.

If one can ignore that much of the stunning imagery is from blood spurting and body parts flying, which in the end I could not, then one might enjoy 300 more than I did. Gerard Butler is a mighty King Leonidas, Lena Headey is a match for Butler’s iron will and pure hardbodied sexiness as his queen, David Wenham (Faramir from The Lord of the Rings) and Vincent Regan are both quite good–especially Wenham’s storytelling, which Snyder uses to frame the entire film–as Leonidas’s captains, even props to my boy from The Wire, Dominic West, as a slimy politician and Rodrigo Santoro as a majestic Xerxes.

But in the end, there was far too much killing and nowhere near enough storytelling to justify spending $65 million making this movie.

not recommended

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Munich

Posted on January 7, 2007

The massacre of nine Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics was both a tragedy and turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; whatever else it generated, the world’s perception of the war against israel began to move the country’s enemy from Arabs generally, and the surrounding Arab nations specifically, to the refugees dispossessed in May 1948 and their descendants. Eleven at the time, I have only the barest memories of the TV coverage by ABC and saw little of its effects during my visit in two summers later.

Steven Spielberg is a master moviemaker (consider how well he overcame generic performances by Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and Minority Report) and realized that a simple retelling of the tense hours at the Olympic Village and the denoument at a nearby airport was not the movie to make in 2005. Instead he focused on the Israeli response–the Golda Meir government dispatched a deniable team to track down and kill the eleven men deemed responsible for the massacre–with the events in Munich shown as a prelude and then occasionally mixed in to remind us why.

Eric Bana plays Avner, the Mossad agent picked to lead the team of Ciaran Hinds (Julius Ceasar in HBO’s Rome), Daniel Craig (derr, the new Bond), Mathieu Kassovitz and Hans Zischler. The movie is nearly three hours long so I can understand Spielberg’s choice to focus all the non-assassination screen time on Bana’s personal life and emotions but it does make the other four, with the possible exception of Hinds’ Carl, just a bit above cardboard level.

The men are supplied with little more than a Swiss safety deposit box filled (and refilled) with untraceable dollars but quickly connect with an anarchistic French clan who specialize in supplying information to all comers, as long as the customer is not working for or with a government. The clan is headed by Papa, the excellent French character actor Michael Lonsdale (Ronin), who takes a liking to Avner despite eventually piercing the wall of deniability.

The problem is that Avner, like most humans not suffering from psychopathy or sociopathy, finally becomes unhinged by the death he’s dealt out and no longer has the coin to continue. Frankly, that he was able to take care of six targets, plus one’s replacement and a contract killer who ended one of his team members, seems huge to me. No matter how greatly I value Israel and the United States I could never do anything like it.

Bana was a great choice for the lead role, which I simply could not imagine, say, Tom Cruise handling. Hinds is very good as are Geoffrey Rush as the team’s Mossad handler, Mathieu Amalric as the information clan’s point person and Gila Almagor as Avner’s Holocaust survivor mother. Guri Weinberg, interestingly, portrays his own father Moshe, one of the Israelis massacred.

Spielberg does not give us a one-sided view, despite the fact that he as well as scriptwriters Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Ali, The Good Shepherd) and Tony Kushner (Angels in America) are all Jewish. The Palestinians are, mostly, portrayed in their own words and actions, the events in the Olympic Village use lots of actual footage from ABC’s coverage, the Israelis are not perfect nor unemotional in their decisionmaking.

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