From The Archives: BROTHERS (2009).

BROTHERS is a movie that has kind of slipped through the cracks.  It showed up towards the end of 2009, but not in enough time for me to see it for my Best-Of list.  It’s been nominated for some awards already, but not enough to make people feel like they ought to go out and see it.  It’s got some actors who people like, but it looks like a downer.  It doesn’t look like fun.

Well yeah, it isn’t much fun.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t any good.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t even a little but important.  It sure does have the pedigree:  Jim Sheridan, the Irish director who showed his skill at creating detailed, likable characters in 2002’s IN AMERICA, directed from a script by David Benioff, the big-name Hollywood screenwriter who showed a similar skill in his script for 25^th HOUR. The trio of lead characters, played by Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the astounding-in-this-movie Tobey Maguire, are convincing and heartbreaking.  They’re aided by ace supporting performances by reliable actors such as Sam Shepard and Clifton Collins Jr., and by two of the best performances I’ve seen from little children since, well, IN AMERICA.  The two little girls who play Maguire’s daughters are deeply affecting. Also due for mention is Frederick Elmes, the hall of fame cinematographer who has worked with David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, and Charlie Kaufman, who shot the movie with understatement and grace.  The movie was shot largely in New Mexico, and it shows.  This doesn’t look like L.A.  This looks like elsewhere in America, the parts of America where you find the people who actually have to fight our wars for us.

That’s what this movie did for me, by the way.  It made me think about those people, who need to be thought about.  Whatever else minor flaws keep it from being considered a quote-unquote great film, BROTHERS is expert at detailing the realities of post-traumatic stress disorder. I left BROTHERS crushed and thoroughly sad – this movie is about something that is really happening right now to people our age and younger, who are sent overseas to kill and to take bullets and to watch their fellows die, only to return home without any kind of adequate psychological counseling.

BROTHERS is a wartime movie, and that’s the real reason for its lack of box-office and cultural heat.  People just aren’t interested in seeing this kind of story at the movies.  That’s starting to bother me.  There’s a massive disconnect between the America whose sons and daughters are sent overseas to fight and die, and the other America, which I fully admit to being a part of, whose lives are affected more by the recession or any number of concerns other than the war in the Middle East.  Unless we personally know someone in the military, unless we’re the type of person who follows and cares about the news, some of us are not forced to think much about the fact that we are actually at war.  We might be unemployed and stressed about that, but we don’t have to worry about the physical safety of our friends and family, or just as much at-risk, the psychological toll of their experiences.

So instead we go to see a movie like AVATAR for a fourth or fifth time, which surely isn’t wrong, but then again, if we have that kind of free time, maybe it is somewhat wrong to ignore a movie that might make us think about something that matters.  (I’m only singling AVATAR out here because it’s become the most popular movie of all time as all of this other stuff is happening in the world.)  As I have written already elsewhere, AVATAR is fun but meaningless; it is the ultimate movie of the moment expressly because it is about escaping reality – both in the way that Jake Sully escapes his wheelchair to become a nine-foot-tall forest god, and in the way that literally the act of watching the movie in those 3-D glasses is an escape.  It’s a video game movie.  It’s a luxury.  The very fact that I can post these thoughts on the internet, and any number of AVATAR fans are free to potentially comment on the many reasons why I’m wrong, is a luxury.  We’re very lucky to be able to sit at our computers and argue over and read about escapist movies.  But just recognize that it’s a distraction, ultimately meaningless comparatively.  AVATAR isn’t about anything but coolness.  There’s a place for that, to be sure, especially for those people who actually need a little escape.  But it’s not the only movie out there.  That’s all I’m saying.

BROTHERS forced me to think about something other than my own life.  I haven’t been exactly the same since I saw it.  It somehow changed my thinking, just the tiniest bit. If that isn’t an important movie, I don’t know what is.

You can still see BROTHERS theatrically in many cities, I think.  If you have the time, give it a chance.  Don’t let me make it sound like homework – it’s not in the least bit boring.  When I call BROTHERS a good movie, that doesn’t mean “good for you” – it really means “good movie.”

 

From January 18, 2010.

 

@jonnyabomb

 

Now on @DailyGrindhouse: SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981).

 

Walter Hill has a new movie coming out this week called BULLET TO THE HEAD.  I’m cautiously looking forward to it, since I am a fan of many of Walter Hill’s movies.  This new one can go any of a few different ways, but I’m on board for any movie that gives sizable roles to Sarah Shahi and Sung Kang.  (You’ll know those names better someday soon.)

Here’s what I had to say about 48 HRS.,  STREETS OF FIRE, and TRESPASS.  And as of today, for Daily Grindhouse, I have had some words about SOUTHERN COMFORT:

 

>>>READ IT HERE!!!<<<

 

And I’m always reachable here:  @jonnyabomb

 

 

Overlooked & Underseen: WALTZ WITH BASHIR (2008).

 

 

Waltz With Bashir is an astonishing piece of work – it’s a dreamy reconstruction of one man’s recollection of his experiences in the Israeli military during the Lebanon War in the early 1980s.  The director, Ari Folman, wrote for the original Israeli incarnation of the TV show “In Treatment” and that background in pop psychology shows – this is a searching and introspective story.  It’s not entirely fictional, but it’s certainly not a documentary either.  The harsh world in wartime and the realm of dreams swirl together and co-mingle.

Necessarily then, Waltz With Bashir is an animated movie.  The choice is crucial to the movie’s effect:  It’s colorful and mesmerizing and upsetting.  It is NOT rotoscoped.  All of the animation is meticulously choreographed and depicted, under the art direction of David Polonsky with contributions from, among others, two artists whose work I adore, the brothers Tomer Hanuka and Asaf Hanuka.  (If you’ve picked up a newspaper or a magazine in the past decade, you know their work.)  On a visual basis alone, Waltz With Bashir is a necessity.  Combined with the emotionally conflicted and self-exploratory storytelling method which Folman employs, Waltz With Bashir is a film unlike any other.  It’s not an exaggeration to pronounce that I have very rarely seen a medium so well matched to its message.

I can’t exactly say that I loved this movie – it left me feeling more than a little anguished and sad.  But it is very clearly a work of cinematic art that has made some valuable observations about the real world, and as such, I sincerely recommend that it be seen by as many people as possible as soon as possible.  See it with your deepest friend.

@jonnyabomb

A Tribute: ERNEST BORGNINE (1917-2012).

In THE WILD BUNCH, 1969.

This beautiful portrait was taken by @SethKushner.

Hollywood legend Ernest Borgnine passed away Sunday, July 8th, 2012.  He was 95, which is not young.  But anyone who suggests that his age makes the loss much easier would be mistaken.  There are people who are irreplaceable, and this was most certainly one.  Ernest Borgnine, or Ernie to his fans, had more than sixty years in the movie business — just think of how many stories he must have had left to relay.  Though he gave plenty of great interviews over the years, that probably was only a fraction.  With Ernest Borgnine goes a unique and eternally ingratiating talent, and a pivotal bridge that spans Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, and the modern age we’re currently living in.  For this post I’ve collected a ton of pictures and posters of the many movies I’ve seen Ernest Borgnine in.  I will touch on most of these movies (and maybe more) in the longer appreciative piece I am working on, but in the meantime, please enjoy these movie memories of a true original.

Check out this great interview also.

Find Ernie in the southwestern hemisphere.

@jonnyabomb

From The Archives: THE NEW WORLD (2005).

I did not rush out to see this movie on the largest possible screens when it was released nearly six years ago, and more the fool I for that.  It’s kind of incredible.

In their list of the top fifty films of the past decade, the Onion’s A.V. Club, one of my favorite daily web destinations, rated Terrence Malick’s The New World at number nine.  It was nominated for an Academy Award for Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography.  (Malick’s movies are always visual fireworks.)  Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called Malick “a visionary.”  Despite all this, The New World isn’t as well remembered as it could be.

Why is that?  I’m not the guy to ask.  I mean, I have some answers, but they won’t sound good to everybody.  I guess I’d reluctantly agree that Terrence Malick’s movies aren’t for everyone.  I’d argue that you really have to love movies to love his movies.  Most people apparently don’t love movies that much.  Your friend with the Scarface poster probably doesn’t love movies as much as he thinks he does.  Scarface is cool and all, but the well-rounded person doesn’t watch only one movie over and over again.  Really loving movies means being open to movies that aren’t the most obvious or accessible.

To appreciate what Malick does, you also have to be open to qualities which are too rare to modern movies, such as thoughtfulness and meditation, appreciation of the natural world, even spirituality.  (And not the obvious or accessible kind of spirituality, either.)  Though Malick (The Thin Red Line) has already directed a better World War II movie than Michael Bay(Pearl Harbor) has, guess whose movies are more popular?  I don’t like to be elitist, but we really are talking about sophistication here.  You don’t like it?  Cool.  I don’t either.  Prove me wrong.  Pay to watch these wonderful movies.

And The New World, in my opinion, is pretty wonderful.  It’s where cinematic art and American history meet.  It’s the story of Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), the Native American girl whose life was altered by the arrival of the Jamestown expedition, which introduced her to Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), her first love.  That relationship is battered by the collision of the Native people and the English settlers, and it ultimately doesn’t survive the trip, though consolation arrives in the form of John Rolfe (Christian Bale), a good man who became the father of her son.

A lot of us have heard this story before, in one form or another.  Hell, it was a Disney cartoon.   It’s popular history, but not that currently popular.  Malick’s method is to bring the past lumbering back to life, like a dinosaur rediscovering its bite.  The first time you see those colonial ships, matched with the unusually good score by James Horner (normally cornier), there’s a vivid majesty to the movie that makes it more interesting than Social Studies ever was back in grade school.

In The New World, Malick is specifically addressing the very moment of conception of the United States, beginning, as he posits, with Pocahontas, portrayed here as the first true American, a knowing and canny survivor.   This movie makes you love America all over again, the way you love Pocahontas as she’s conjured here, luminous, sweet, and full of promise.  (She’s a teenager so it’s a very innocent kind of love.)  Colin Farrell is really good at playing the mutinous rogue, a basically violent man, but he’s very tender in his scenes with her.  It doesn’t feel wrong.  Even more is the case with Christian Bale, dropping his usual intensity and playing a genuinely decent man for once.  Internet creeps who talk trash about these two stars probably haven’t seen how good they are in this movie.  Oh, and Christopher Plummer is in it too, as the leader of the expedition, Captain Newport, typically dignified and magnetic and a little bit sinister.  I don’t think we have to debate his greatness at this point in time.

I’m not sure yet how deep into history The New World actually goes (John Smith and John Rolfe were real people, but was Captain Newport? and does it matter?), but to me it’s thoroughly convincing no matter how much of it is actually true.  Does that make sense?  There’s a truly epic sweep to this movie — normally when I describe a movie as “epic”, I’m talking about scope or distance, but in this case the epicness actually feels like it spans a gap of centuries.  Malick, as ever, is able to evoke all the most ancient platitudes of storytelling and moviemaking, and to make them true through his poetic vision.

Yeah, I’d say it’s worth watching.

 

 

 

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Suggested reading:

Badlands.

Days Of Heaven.

In Bruges.

Beginners.

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From The Archives: VALHALLA RISING (2010).

 

In the beginning there was only man and nature. Men came bearing crosses and drove the heathen to the fringes of the earth.

Okay, I have to admit, you got my attention.

Those words are the opening of Valhalla Rising, the title card which pretty directly explains what you’re about to watch.  The movie, orchestrated by Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of Bronson and Drive, is about as direct, sparse, and skeletal a plot as a movie could possibly get away with.  It’s a movie made almost entirely of mood, sporadically punctuated by violence.  It’s like walking through a cool fog and occasionally stubbing your toe on a rock.  It’s a new genre: Viking psychedelia.  It’s also kind of wonderful to watch.

Set in the year 1000 A.D., Valhalla Rising follows a nameless, unknowable drifter known as One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen, best recognized by American audiences as the blood-crying villain from Casino Royale) as he is liberated from a captivity where he was kept as a medieval pit-fighter, and drafted into a much nobler war, less sarcastically known as the Crusades.  He’s called One Eye because he only has one working eye, also because he never speaks and therefore doesn’t mention whether or not he actually has a name.  This dude makes the Man With No Name sound like an Eddie Murphy character.

The fact that the movie’s main character doesn’t speak makes Valhalla Rising practically a silent film, which is totally refreshing in our modern age where everyone seems to be talking, texting, or typing always.  It’s almost entirely sound, picture, and music, a real sensory experience.  The cinematography, by Morten Søborg is crisp and absorbing; the editing, by Refn’s frequent collaborator Mat Newman, is lucid and impeccable; the music by Peter Kyed and Peter Peter (really) is the best kind of shoegaze noise-rock, creating an audio bed of unsettling yet hypnotic atmosphere.

When I mentioned it briefly on my top-twenty list of last year, I described Valhalla Rising as what would happen if Terrence Malick, instead of John McTiernan, made that viking action-movie The Thirteenth Warrior.  Refn seems to be far less disturbed by violence than Malick is — I would guess that Refn is more interested in violence as an end result, as a visceral release of accumulated cinematic tension, whereas Malick usually incorporates violence into his films for more psychological reasons.  But like Malick’s work, Valhalla Rising is lyrical, painterly, even experimental.  Any of Refn’s widescreen compositions in this film would be just as compelling out of context, hanging on a wall for instance.  The visual component is so strong that the story is comparatively threadbare.

In fact, the story is so simple that it is split into six chapter headings, which appear throughout the course of the movie like wooden blocks directing water flow:

Part 1/ Wrath.

Part 2/ Silent Warrior.

Part 3/ Men Of God.

Part 4/ The Holy Land.

Part 5/ Hell.

Part 6/ The Sacrifice.

Sounds just a little like the New Testament, doesn’t it?  Probably not unintentional.  Valhalla Rising could be seen as a couple different kinds of allegory, a couple different kinds of philosphical argument, but they’re pretty clear if you watch the movie and it’d be better for me not to explicate them.  Let’s just say that I’ve read the Bible, and this has better music.  The real reason I hesitate from nailing down the “message” of the movie is that explaining it would take away from its best quality, which is its dreamlike nature.  Like Malick, the broad, dreamy pace and picture of Refn’s movie (aided by some astounding locations, costumes, and production design) somehow makes it weirdly convincing as a period piece.  While those elements set the period, the performances and the droning electronic score are anachronistically contemporary, though even those streaks of modernity help make the period setting more tangible, paradoxically.  Valhalla Rising feels real at times, which is a big reason why it’s so hypnotic.

Really, this is a movie intended for late-night viewing, specifically under intoxicated circumstances (I’m pretty sure Refn has even said as much), but it’s not like you need to be under the influence to find this movie intoxicating.  Valhalla Rising is ominous and serious of purpose yet not pretentious or overly profound; it’s brief and slight of story, yet indelible.  It marks Refn as one of the more compelling stylists working in movies today, and makes the prospect of his next few movies a most exciting one, without a doubt.

Suggested reading:

My 20 Favorite Movies of 2010.

Badlands.

Days Of Heaven.

Thor.

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Movie Review: CAPTAIN AMERICA (2011).

 

 

 

 

In the modern superhero-movie gold rush, Captain America was always going to be one of the hardest comic book characters to adapt to screen.

For one thing, his name is Captain America.

That’s so unsubtle it sounds like a parody, and not a particularly timely one either.  We’re already forty years past that name being ironically referenced in Easy Rider, and nearly ten years past the jingoistic marionette spectacle of Team America: World Police.  It’s also a problem because what happens when Major America and General America show up?  The Captain’s got to stand down.  He might be king shit to guys like Private America and Chief Warrant Officer America, but let’s just say Captain America doesn’t have Batman or Spider-Man’s autonomy.

There’s also the matter of Captain America walking around quite literally dressed in the American flag, which is something even the Team America puppetswere too modest and demure to do.

Those are the superficial issues.  At the core of the character are some even trickier prospects.  Captain America never had the split-personality secret-identity of Clark Kent and Superman — the story of Captain America is the story of Steve Rogers, a 98-pound weakling from New York City who wanted to fight the Nazis so badly that he signed up for a Super-Soldier program which made him bigger, stronger, and tougher than the average GI.

Arguably the two most popular superheroes are inarguably the two most financially successful ones, particularly in movies:  Batman and Spider-Man.  Along with Captain A, these two were always my favorites, but even I have to admit that Batman and Spider-Man are fueled by vengeance fantasies:  Batman is a bipolar, obsessive aristocrat who uses his parents’ murder as a reason to scare the shit out of every criminal he meets, while Spider-Man is a neurotic nerd whose beloved uncle’s murder sets off his compulsion to go after the same target population.  As the two most popular, these two are the most emblematic of the majority of superhero stories:  Most superheroes are aggressors.  Captain America is a little different.  Captain America is primarily a reactor.   Think of it this way:  The Mighty Thor swings a hammer.  Captain America carries a shield.

That’s a bit of a reduction, since the most basic appeal of Captain America has always been that comic cover where he busts Hitler square in his stupid little mustache…

…So it’s not exactly as if Captain America doesn’t have vengeance on the agenda too.  He is an avenger, sure.  It even says so in the title of the new movie.  But unlike Batman or Spider-Man or Wolverine or even Superman, Captain America doesn’t start fights.  He only finishes them.

More than any other character in comics, the core of Captain America is decency.  Patriotism and propaganda were part of his creation, but the reason why Captain A has endured is that he’s the character who always does the right thing, the most noble and the most pure-hearted, the most good of all the good guys.  The storytelling problem that poses is how to keep such a character interesting.

The symbolic approach is a mistake.  After 9/11 in particular, there were some comic images that leaned heavily on Captain America, saluting or standing mournfully or even digging through debris, which, like the Native American with the tear in his eye, is crude and overwrought.  Using a costumed-crimefighter character in such a context is simplistic, inadequate, and in retrospect, laughable.  So you can’t do the Chris Nolan approach, and try to engage with modern issues.  The best way to do it, as I suggested in an earlier piece, is to embrace the escapism.

The first Captain America comics I ever read weren’t the earliest ones by writer Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, nor were they the later comics by Kirby with Stan Lee, or the very influential comics by Jim Steranko.   It was a later storyline by writer Mark Gruenwald and artist Kieron Dwyer, where Captain America gets drawn into a globe-trotting race to track down a long-lost artifact.  Captain A and a pretty female sidekick travel by air and by sea and through jungles, facing obstacles including several different booby-traps, a swarm of angry cannibals, and also snakes.  Any of this sounding a lot like something else to you yet?

 

 

He also fights a shark…

But that’s just about the only thing that didn’t happen in Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to the point that Marvel Studios made this Captain America exactly the way I always imagined it could be, and exactly the way it really should be:  Indiana Jones in a silly costume.

You’re never going to get Spielberg to direct a superhero movie, but what you can do is to get one of his protegees (Joe Johnston) to bring that swashbuckling 1940s serial aesthetic that Spielberg conquered the world with in the Indiana Jones movies, and graft that onto the squarest of the square-jawed Marvel heroes.  It’s the best possible approach.  Even though the World War 2 era had unimaginable but very real horrors, it’s somehow still possible to use that setting for cartoony adventures.  It doesn’t work to shoehorn fantastical elements into a modern wartime setting, but for some reason it’s allowable with World War 2, I would guess because comics, cartoons, and superheroes were such a part of the war effort at the time.  World War 2 was the last war that was a clear case of good versus evil.  By Vietnam and continuing towards Iraq, American motives are more complicated, arguably even more sinister.  You can’t have Captain America become the kind of bullies he chooses to fight.

The exaggerated period setting of Captain America: The First Avenger is part of what makes it so appealing.  I liked Johnston’s previous movie, The Wolfman, and part of that, again, was the atmosphere, the smoky inkiness of the locations and soundstages.  Cinematographer Shelly Johnson returns for his next Joe Johnston movie, using a hazy, washed-out palette, out of which more colorful characters like Captain America and the Red Skull almost literally jump.  The look of the movie is halfway between Saving Private Ryan and Spider-Man 2.  It’s weird but fun.

This movie also happens to be perfectly cast.  Chris Evans has made a steady career out of playing callow, arrogant, bull-headed characters (to very entertaining effect), but here he projects a stolid decency that is absolutely right.  Many writers and critics argue that it’s more fun to root for the bad guy, that it’s nearly impossible to make goodness appealing, but just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean it can’t be done: Evans makes decency utterly compelling.  Even when he’s eerily de-buffed for the early CGI-abetted scenes as the scrawny Steve Rogers, Evans gets you on his side.  Those early scenes are just a tiny bit comical:  There is definitely a side of me that would have liked to see Steve Rogers receive all his super-powers while still retaining that original tiny size, just to watch a little monkey Captain America jumping around for the latter half of the movie, but I think the filmmakers went the right way.

Hugo Weaving, who plays the Red Skull, is something of a genre-film mainstay, between The Matrix and The Lord Of The Rings and The Wolfman, but he’s enough different here that it’s worth it.  And frankly speaking, not many actors can do this kind of work, bringing weight to subject matter which is perilously close to weightless.  Weaving plays the Red Skull with a quasi-Germanic accent reminiscent of, and in fact patterned upon, the voice of director Werner Herzog.  Again, this kind of thing makes me fantasize about a world where Werner Herzog himself gets to play the Red Skull (battling a little monkey Captain America), but again I suggest the filmmakers did the more reasonable thing.

The Red Skull has a toady little assistant named Doctor Zola, who is played by the character actor Toby Jones, who played Karl Rove in Oliver Stone’s W. and so is playing pretty much the same character here.  I remember this character from the comics, where he became a funky cyborg whose head was in his chest.  In a movie already stocked with geeky in-jokes (the Human Torch costume in the World’s Fair scene; the off-hand Raiders reference to Nazis digging in the desert), my favorite was the shot introducing Dr. Zola, where he’s peering into a microscope and the visual effect makes it look like his face is on his chest.  I’m not a fan of in-jokes if they slow the movie down, but these in-jokes didn’t.

Another in-joke is the character of Howard Stark, played byDominic Cooper, who we quickly figure out is meant to be the dashing scientist dad of Robert Downey Jr.’s character from the Iron Man movies.  Stark and Professor Erskine, played by Stanley Tucci, head up the team who turn Steve Rogers into the strapping super-soldier he becomes, and who also perfect his famous shield.  These two are just a part of the wide-ranging and hugely likable supporting cast, which also includes Derek Luke and Band Of Brothers‘ Neal McDonough as two of the Howling Commandos (lesser-known but awesome Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creations.)

Best of all are Tommy Lee Jones, cracking jokes and stealing all the best lines as Steve Rogers’ hardassed superior officer — I guess Tommy Lee would technically be ”Colenol America” in this movie – and Hayley Atwell as the love interest, British officer Peggy Carter, who gets to be a much more active participant than we’ve seen in any superhero movie so far let “the girl” be.   Let’s not get carried away; we’re still a long ways off from a superhero movie where female characters get to drive the plot in any kind of interesting, developed way, but this actress projects a real wit and intelligence, an assertive femininity, that the movie really does need.  It doesn’t help that she’s more voluptuous than the standard Hollywood actress.  Sorry!  I don’t mind admitting that I like a woman with brains and feistiness, but also one who’s demonstrably woman.  See here:

In fact, instead of ending this piece with the classic review structure (“In conclusion…”), I’m just going to end it with a Hayley Atwell photobomb, because when I do this kind of thing I get more visits to my website, which my website deserves, and honestly speaking, it’s not exactly unpleasant for me either.

 

 

   

 

   

 

Any complaints?

Find me on Twitter!: @jonnyabomb

 

Please Watch: MEN IN WAR (1957).

 

Men In War is a 1957 film directed by Anthony Mann, from a script by Philip Yordan which was adapted from a novel by someone named Van Van Praag (awesome).  Even though the majority of movies of the era were being shot in Technicolor, Men In War is in black and white.  I wonder if that was a budgetary issue, an aesthetic decision, or something else.  I’d be projecting, as I haven’t been able to dig up an answer to that question just yet, but there is something to the idea that black and white is a more fitting format for this story.  It’s less Hollywood-idyllic and more stark and unforgiving.  There’s redemption in it, but not in a sweeping, overstated way.  It’s an unabashed tribute to the American military, but an appropriately business-like one.  The score by Elmer Bernstein is typically right on-point to the movie’s aims.  It’s lovely and effective music, and outside of the title song (whose lyrics are a little too on-the-nose to ever play by today’s standards), it’s as relevant still as the rest of the movie is.

Men In War stars Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray, two of the most underrated movie stars of the 1940s and 1950s, and two of my all-time favorites.  Ryan is the dark figure with the world-weary eyes and fighter’s frame who is best known by today’s audiences, if at all, from his small role in The Dirty Dozen.   His career was much longer and more distinguished than that, as described by this tribute that I recently wrote in honor of the man and ten of his best movies.

Ray, for his part, is possibly even less well-remembered today, although the reasons why are hard to understand.  (It may have something to do with the apparently sad later years.)  At his peak, Ray had an appealing, gravel-gargling voice and an every-day tough-guy manner that are enormously charismatic.  I can’t help but think of Michael Chiklis when I think of Aldo Ray, although Quentin Tarantino thought of Brad Pitt.  (Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds, Aldo Raine, is a direct tribute to this iconoclastic actor.)  Ray also didn’t have the broadest filmography, having not appeared in as many memorable films as he probably deserved to have.  Remind me to write up a nifty film noir called Nightfall that Aldo Ray starred in, the same year as Men In War.   Generally Ray played scrappy tough guys, outsiders with big mouths and big attitudes.  That’s what he plays here.

Men In War takes place on a very specific date, September 6th 1950.   It takes place during the Korean War, which is interesting, because in 1957 that wasn’t too far in the past.  Just as historically interesting, both Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray served during World War II, Ray having seen action in Japan.  One has to imagine that this added to the naturalistic performances that this movie displays, something of a hallmark of Anthony Mann’s films.

Ryan plays a beleaguered lieutenant, Benson, whose forces have been diminished and separated from any communication with the rest of the American presence in Korea.  He needs to get his men to safety, and they’re already beginning to fall apart.  Vic Morrow (now best known as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s dad) makes a strong impression as a shell-shocked young soldier.  So does James Edwards as Sergeant Killan, a kind-hearted African-American G.I. who is a friend to Morrow’s character and, unfortunately, due to cinematic conventions, doomed.  The scene where Killan stops in a clearing to decorate his helmet with the wildflowers he finds, ending as it does with his silent murder by encroaching commandos, is one of the movie’s most striking images.

Aldo Ray enters the movie in a Jeep, carrying his commanding officer alongside him, even though the colonel has been rendered mute by minefire and, presumably, having witnessed too much carnage.  Ray’s character identifies himself only as Montana, a rambunctious and headstrong G.I. who is fed up with battle and only cares to get his colonel to safety.  Ryan’s character wants to requisition the Jeep, and Montana’s services, in order to press on with his diminished forces.  Ray’s character, even out-ranked as he is, resists every step of the way.  The movie centers around the conflict between the two men.

It’s a vivid conflict, and it’s profoundly effective, enacted as it is by two such charismatic actors.  The appeal of Ryan and Ray is very different, but equally potent.  Ryan, so often a convincing heavy but in this case allowed to play the kind of role here that his obvious real-life decency fits like a glove, is a quieter, sterner kind of a good guy.  Ray is the more quintessentially American character, brash and arrogant — although you also see his point.  The main question of the movie is about what is the right thing to do in the chaos of war, to look out for self or to fight as part of the unit, even if the latter seems hopeless.  It’s not exactly as if Montana is being selfish — he seems to care about his Colonel as much as, if not more than, himself.  But ultimately, as pro-military as this movie is, Montana must come to understand and embrace Benson’s all-for-one ethos.  That the movie brings us, the audience, to see things the same way, and to appreciate the very real heroism of the men who fight our battles for us overseas, is why it is still a captivating piece of work today, and obviously still just as relevant.  There can be no doubt that Steven Spielberg saw this movie before making Saving Private Ryan.   Men In War is a little more ambiguous than that more recent classic, but it is just as effective at approximating the senses and textures of battle, amazing for a movie fifty years old.  Today being Memorial Day, if you’re looking for an appropriate movie to mark the occasion and spark reflection, let me please recommend this one.

(Credit to all of the great internet sources where I collected these photographs, through Google.  Start here and keep clicking!)

Overlooked By Oscar: THE WAY BACK.

      

I’ve still got plenty of unposted reviews sitting around.  Here’s one worth reading. (They all are, but this one in particular.)

 

The Way Back is going to end up as one of those orphans of history.  This article from the LA Times somewhat explains what happened, as the movie was one of the last to be shown during the 2010 calendar year, in order to qualify for nominations.  Ultimately, it just plain came in too late to register in key circles, and too many other movies had too much juice.  Really, what I’m telling you is that certain other movies benefitted from much deeper pockets for promotion and campaigning.  That’s not to say that those other movies weren’t very good… but they were very much the pretty girl with the rich daddy.  That’s how the Oscars work sometimes.  It’s not only a popularity contest, but sometimes it’s a race between steep investments as well.

So as far as the Academy Awards go, at least, The Way Back was lost in the cracks.  Unjustly, I might add.

The Way Back is the latest movie from Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society, Fearless, The Truman Show, etc.), who is a director who doesn’t work all that often but usually makes it count when he does.  Here is no exception.  Working in part from a book called The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz, and in equal part to his own typical painstaking research, Weir tells the story of an international group of POWs who escape a Siberian gulag during wartime, and who literally walk their way back to freedom.  Not all of them make it.

The day that I saw this movie was a noticeably chilly afternoon.  When I came into the building, I was internally belly-aching about the weather.  After the screening ended, when I stepped out onto the still-windy city streets, I had been taught a valuable lesson.  The movie was a great reminder to quit whining and be grateful for the ease at which I’m able to bundle up and seek refuge when it gets cold in New York.

The Way Back brings a freshness to that most mind-numbing of clichés:  It’s an affirmation of life.  It forces viewers like me to appreciate the benefit of our circumstance, almost to the point of taking your mind out of the movie – you remember that if you’re in a movie theater, then by definition you have it easier than many people have throughout history.

Peter Weir’s work is known for its attention to detail, and for the fierce commitment elicited from his casts.  This film’s production design, by John Stoddart and Kes Bonnet (among others), is tremendous.  At no moment during the movie do you doubt that you’re watching an authentic Soviet prison camp, or the surrounding forests of Siberia, or the stark scenery of the border with Mongolia, or the vast and punishing expanses of the Gobi desert.  Working again with cinematographer Russell Boyd (Master & Commander), Weir knows how to best bring these diverse sceneries, only some of which were filmed on the actual locations, to convincing life.  The cold and the heat look excruciating.

But nowhere do you see the ravages of the elements more clearly than in the characters’ faces; in their burdened brows, their narrowing frames, in their chapped lips, their scorched pallor.  If there’s any flaw in the storytelling (and some of the reviews seem to think so), it’s only due to the enormity of the situation:  You may not feel like you got to know these people as well as you might have, because you’re mostly watching them forced to act and react to the oppressive environments, and just as arduously, to their individual stances of distrust and caginess.

None of these characters, particularly early on, are able to trust each other, or to feel close to one another, and that well-practiced reluctance never entirely dissipates.  Weir is bold enough to commit to the unsentimentality of the cold worldview that these characters are forced to maintain, and allows the actors to shade in all of the subtler shifts and changes in their outlook.

Jim Sturgess, as a young Polish political prisoner and the group’s de facto leader, and Saoirse Ronan, as a much younger girl who they meet along the way, represent innocents who are thrust into a world of savagery and must learn to survive.  The great Ed Harris plays the taciturn and impenetrable Mr. Smith, an American, as a tragically impassive statue who has adopted a seemingly callous demeanor in response to the constant exposure to cruelty and horror that the World War II era had in abundance for Europe.  The deeply underrated Colin Farrell has a much smaller role, but he plays his character as a ferocious caged animal, a ravenously wolfish incarnation of innate violence and circumstantial desperation.  It’s a disturbing portrayal.

There are three stages to the storyline: the iciness of the gulag and of the wilderness the characters escape into, the punishing nowhere of the deserts, and finally (mild spoiler), the glorious verdant greenness of safety, when the few remaining characters crest the Himalayas to arrive in India.  Ultimately, it’s very simple and traditional storytelling, with a very complex and profound morality.  The point of the movie isn’t to surprise or shock you, and it isn’t exactly fun, but it’s a journey worth taking.  There’s a substance, a real tactile weight, to this movie, that even the best films of 2010 couldn’t hope to replicate.

The Way Back is a movie that enlivens consideration of a time too often forgotten, and makes its audience appreciate the moment we are in, no matter how difficult our personal realities may be.  There can be few nobler aims for a feature film to strive towards.

Overlooked By Oscar: RESTREPO (2010).

No one need argue with Inside Job’s well-deserved recognition in the Documentary Feature category last night.  But the fact remains that it was a particularly crowded field.  Aside from those documentaries that there wasn’t room enough to recognize with nominations, there were other documentaries that absolutely must be watched, regardless of temporary awards victory status.  Foremost among those, in my mind, is Restrepo.

Restrepo was one of the best things to appear on movie screens all last year, and by far one of the most important.  Co-directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington have provided a valiant service by documenting this story.  You won’t know the names of any of the stars of this movie, but you should.  And you wouldn’t, if this movie were never filmed and released.  But the men we meet in Restrepo, thanks to the chance the movie provides, are unforgettable.  They are the actual definition of that overused word: heroes.

Firstly, if you’re wondering what the title ‘Restrepo’ means, it’s a guy.  An American soldier.  His name is unfamiliar.  It looks almost imaginary.  But he’s a real person, overlooked by a society that rewards television reality stars and basketball players, and virtually ignores the legitimate heroes who risk everything on a daily basis, just so the rest of us don’t have to.

But this documentary isn’t remotely as political a statement as all of the above; in fact it’s not political at all.  Restrepo the movie was clearly a daring and risky venture for anyone who was present during filming, but that’s due strictly to the events being documented.  It’s an honest, unfiltered, non-biased record of one year spent in the trenches of the Korangal Valley, during the still-raging American adventure in Afghanistan.

Restrepo the movie is first and foremost a tribute to PFC Juan S. Restrepo, who was killed in action during a deployment to Afghanistan.  His death occurs in the course of filming, and its circumstances, and its effects on his brothers-in-arms, are part of the central document of the movie.  So first we know Restrepo the man.  Then Restrepo becomes something else.  Restrepo’s name becomes the title of the military outpost that his comrades capture and defend, deep within enemy territory.  OP Restrepo is the place and the tribute and the legacy.  It’s the main focus of the documentary, a tangible symbol of the platoon’s accomplishments during that year.  (This is what makes the end-credits post-script all the more haunting, and if you choose to look at it in the right light, so damning.)

Again, though, Restrepo as a movie is the best kind of objective journalism.  Outside of the obvious and very understandable respect for the men that these cameras are observing, there’s no agenda here.  The footage speaks for itself.  If the creation and the final fate of OP Restrepo is any kind of metaphor, that interpretation is left up to the viewer.  For me, however, it’s hard not to view it as such.

A post-script tells us that the army pulled out of the valley later that year, abandoning OP Restrepo, not long after the events of this movie.  Rather than receiving a heroes’ welcome on the homefront, the group had few options but to re-enlist.  For Junger & Hetherington and for the capable, determined, unpretentious, selflessly patriotic, and brave soldiers of the regiment, the movie is the tribute.

For the rest of us, it’s something to think about, and to think about very hard.