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RED: Lesser known films. PURPLE: Lee's comments |
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo) (Korea, 2004) I learn that this movie is both the most expensive and the most popular Korean film of all time. $12,000,000 is hardly enough to shoot a one-minute commercial in Hollywood, but apparently Korean won go farther. Actually, that’s about 12 billion won. And they certainly got every won of it up on the screen. Literally a cast of thousands, huge numbers of explosions, lots of blood and dismemberment. And I can see why it would appeal to a Korean audience, as it is about the most honest and thorough account of the entire Korean War that’s ever been made. It is actually even-handed, in that it honestly shows that horrible atrocities were committed by both sides. The South was as fanatical about anti-communism as the North was about their insane version of Stalinism. And another thing: all the movies I’ve seen about the “Korean conflict,” as we call it, focus on Americans. Here, we never see an American. We know the marines have landed at Inchon, and we know they are retreating before the hordes of Red Chinese swarming over the Yalu River, but we never see them.
So I wish I could say it’s a good movie. It’s not. It’s 2 1/2 hours long, and at least 2 of those hours are taken up with horrific combat scenes that always degenerate into prolonged fights with fists and bayonets, like a Kung Fu movie. Emotional scenes are stretched out 5 times as long as they need to be, and usually in an improbable zone of silence while battle rages but the people in the scene are immune to bullets. The story is puerile, and every cliché in the book is used, including the long, long, long run of the family at the train station as two brothers are shanghaied into the army, and a Mexican standoff with about a dozen guns. What it reminds me most of is Pearl Harbor, that bloated raft of movie clichés, with subtitles. IMDb.com
Take Care of My Cat (Goyangileul butaghae) (South Korea, 2001) Five girls get out of high school and face life in the real world. The movie is mostly a character study, not a lot happens plot-wise, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. This is the 3rd Korean movie I’ve seen recently, and all are totally different. You may realize, intellectually, that places like Korea and Japan are very, very hi-tech, but it still comes as a surprise to me how plugged in these kids are. There is very little shown in the way of remnants of old Korean culture; you get the impression that in another generation it will be completely gone, totally westernized. But maybe not. See Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring. IMDb.com
Taking Lives (2004) I didn’t care for Angelina Jolie at first. I try very hard not to let my feelings about an actor as a person affect my feelings about the art. After all, what do I really know? Gossip, that’s all. That’s all you know, too. The impression we get that we know famous people is an illusion, always, unless you have met them in person, and even then you can get blindsided by hero-worship and what you think you know.
But AJ seemed like a real flake, often in the news for the wrong reasons. Her stormy relationship with Billy-Bob, the rumors of incest. Go to the IMDb and check out the list of her tattoos. Weird. And what’s the deal with those lips, anyway? So I didn’t really pay much attention to her, dismissed her as a lightweight.
She’s grown on me. I may even rent one of the Lara Croft movies. She was deliciously cool in Sky Captain, and she’s very good in this. The movie itself is a turkey, no question ... but it’s a well-cooked turkey, the stuffing is exquisite, the cranberry sauce piquant, even the yams and mashed potatoes are piping hot. So the ending sucks. Okay? So don’t say I recommended it to you. But Lee and I both observed something: a creepy scene is made twice as creepy with the music of Philip Glass behind it. That guy is worth the money. IMDb.com
Taking Sides (France/UK/Germany/Austria, 2001) The story of the post-war questioning of Wilhelm Furtwangler, a famous German conductor who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator. He’s not as well-known as Leni Riefenstahl, probably because he died in 1955. The theme is much like Vonnegut’s Mother Night: be careful what you pretend to be. But Vonnegut’s story was much better. I ended up more sympathetic to Furtwangler than to his interrogator, played by Harvey Keitel, who bullied and manipulated like the Gestapo. The whole movie seemed muddled, didn’t come down on one side or the other. That can be good, I don’t need a pat answer, but this seemed simply confused rather than thought-provoking. IMDb.com
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) My first experience of the amoral and oddly sympathetic Ripley. I have the greatest respect for Patricia Highsmith, and intend to read the books very soon. Highly recommended. IMDb.com
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com
Targets (1968) We rented this because we had just seen Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on video, and it was mentioned as Peter Bogdanovich’s first movie. It has an odd history. Roger Corman told Bogdanovich he could make a film but he had to use Boris Karloff because Karloff owed him two days’ work, and he had to use some stock footage from The Terror, an awful grinder from 1963 that starred Karloff and, looking very callow, Jack Nicholson. (Did you know Roger Corman has 353 producer credits at the IMDb? I wonder if anyone has ever produced so many—mostly awful—movies?) They combined it with an inspiration from Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, and came up with Targets. It’s maybe a B+ movie. That means, its low-rent roots certainly show, but it is also clear that Bogdanovich had more going on than most of Corman’s crew. The ending is actually quite well done. IMDb.com
Tarnation (2003) This film goes directly onto my list of scariest films of all time ... and it’s all true, not a drop of blood or an act of violence in it. A gay man named Jonathan Caouette grew up in Texas in a family that you’d need to invent a new word for; dysfunctional just doesn’t cover it. His mother was subjected to years of shock treatment and a lithium overdose, and is now a giggling, bipolar, delusional horror show. His grandparents who raised him are pretty scary, too. By the age of 10 he is acting out amazing psychodramas for his movie camera, and making weekly suicide attempts not much later. Somehow he struggles through all this, and is managing to live an almost normal and very productive life.
The technique here is almost as important as the ghastly story. It is a filmic collage of pictures, film clips, voice recordings, and music. Astonishingly, it was made entirely on a Mac, with free software, for what the director claims was a total of $218. (It took about a hundred grand more to clear the rights on all the music and clips, and make a theatrical release print.) It is a kaleidoscope of images, it employs ALL of the techniques that annoy the hell out of me and Lee when used in other contexts, just to show off, but here it all works. Most directors shake the camera just because they think it’s cool. Caouette does it to indicate disorganization, madness, chaos, which is what his story is about. But it is all under total control. IMDb.com
Taxi (2004) Double feature with Friday Night Lights. IMDb.com
Team America: World Police (2004) Lee was extremely dubious, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the end, it just didn’t quite work. There are basic problems, and the biggest is that the puppet stuff wears pretty thin after about 30 minutes. I got tired of looking at the blank faces. Sure, they’re more expressive than Howdy Doody, but not much, and they all walk exactly like Howdy. There are some very funny moments, and the production design is awesome. A lot of work went into the incredibly detailed sets. I’m happy a lot of puppeteers and model makers got a lot of work, but this is an experiment that’s not worth repeating. It wasn't THAT bad. Maybe it's opposing expectations: Varley expected to like it and didn't, while I expected to HATE it... Anyway, the huge liquidy eyes made up for the lack of expression. The puppet sex was a little stiff. IMDb.com
Tears of the Sun (2003) Tears of the ticket-buyer. IMDb.com
Ten Canoes (Australia, 2006) Here is a movie in the Ganalbingu aboriginal language, with an all-aboriginal cast. It is a simple tale, simply told, though fantastically photographed. Don’t expect great acting, these are all non-professionals. But there is a great deal of humor in it, and the fascination of seeing a way of life so different from ours it might as well be another planet. I was reminded a bit of Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), set in a radically different place, with an all-Inuit cast speaking Inuktitut. What did they have in common? Well, for one thing, these Stone Age people were doing pretty well in an environment that would have killed me in 24 hours. Probably less, in the case of the Inuit, though the Australian bush held dangers we didn’t see much of. For instance while filming it they employed 11 people whose only job was to be on the lookout for crocodiles, which frequently eat humans in this part of Australia. IMDb.com
Ten Days Wonder (La Décade prodigieuse) (France, 1971) Claude Chabrol is often called the French Hitchcock, though his themes are a lot deeper than sheer suspense. He’s made some really good films, but this isn’t one of them. It is stagy, almost operatic, but not in a good sense. Orson Welles mumbles his part, and Lee and I were both distracted by the spectacle of his nose, which seems to be made of gray putty. Tony Perkins gives his standard wacko performance. The story is by Ellery Queen, not my kind of writer. In the end it adds up to very little. But oddly, it is the photography I hated the most. All the colors are wrong, too bright, too saturated, I don’t know the exact term, but it all looks like one of those low-budget Hammer or American-International films of the ‘60s, maybe directed by Roger Corman. And almost every shot was done with a zoom lens! There was a brief period around there when good zoom lenses first became available for Panavision cameras, and some directors couldn’t resist them. Bob Fosse used them entirely too much in Sweet Charity. A zoom shot is not a dolly shot, but directors liked them because you didn’t have to lay a lot of camera track like you do with a dolly shot. Thank god they’re over that now. They make a professional production look exactly like a cheap 8mm home movie. IMDb.com
Ten ‘til Noon (2006) Here’s a no-budget indie that succeeds for most of its 80 minutes by putting most of its creativity into an area so often neglected by its big-budget cousins: The script. It’s the same story told from different viewpoints, and with that sort of tale you always think first of Rashomon. If you’re not that much of a film student, you might be reminded of Pulp Fiction. But while Kurosawa’s masterpiece concerned the differing points of view of the characters and Tarantino’s story wound around a set of events, this one examines just ten minutes in time. Quite a challenge. Every ten minutes the clock is reset, and we learn a little more about what’s really going on. The tension builds wonderfully. We get six of these iterations … and then we go beyond noon, and I’m sorry to say the writer didn’t know how to get out of the box he had built in a satisfactory manner. But he sure had me going up to that point. The acting is very good, from a lot of people you’ve never heard of, but may, someday. I was most impressed by Jenya Lano, as the enigmatic Ms. Milch, of whom the IMDb has almost nothing to say except to list her credits (mostly TV and no-budget indies). I wouldn’t be surprised to see her make it big … or not. It’s a cruel business. IMDb.com
The Tenant (Le Locataire) (1976) Most critics loved this, but there were a few dissenters. Ebert gave it one star. I don't know if I'd go that low, but this isn't one of Roman Polanski's best. It's not Pirates but it's a long way from Rosemary's Baby. One of the problems is that he made a total masterpiece on the same theme: somebody going crazy in a small apartment. That was Repulsion, one of the best psychological thrillers ever, right up with the best of Hitchcock but more modern. Another problem is that it's boring, and too long. And it has one of the lamest endings I've ever seen. Don't bother. IMDb.com
The Terminal (2004) A good, solid piece of what they used to call Capracorn. A decent man is trapped in a no-win situation, makes the best of it, is rescued by the friends he has made along the way. Tom Hanks is as good as he always is.
I almost wish I hadn’t known that the vast terminal of the story was actually one of the larger movie sets ever built. That meant that, because I’m fascinated by the nuts and bolts of how movie magic gets made, the day-to-day hard work that is involved, I was continually looking around in the backgrounds, the ceilings, watching the set and the tides of extras necessary to bring this movie to life.
I found myself thinking like a line producer, which is the guy who is actually there at the front lines making it all happen, as cheaply as possible, as opposed to the names on the screen who are really back in Hollywood writing checks and making more deals. It must have been a real bitch. So much of the set had to be “practical,” that is, actually working, and most of it had to be built in great detail, not just to look realistic from a distance. Many scenes were shot with the vast, teeming terminal in the background, and every time you see that you know there are assistant directors hidden just out of sight, stopwatches in hand, telling the extras when to enter so all the shots will match. Then the director yells “cut!” and “get ready for take seventeen!” and everybody goes back to their places and starts all over again.
One bright spot: companies will gladly build a store for you and stock it, all for free, just to get their trademarks and logos and products in a major motion picture. There were many dozens of shops here, so many that Spielberg had to make the providers agree that they understood there was no guarantee their brand-name would appear in the movie at all, if it edited that way. They were still glad to oblige, and many of the restaurants had actual working kitchens, which must have come in handy when it came time to feed all those extras ... IMDb.com
Thank You for Smoking (2005) This is the smartest, funniest movie I've seen in a long time. I love satire, and I have always liked stories about amoral rogues. This guy isn't in the league of The Talented Mr. Ripley, but he's a lobbyist, flack, and spin doctor for the tobacco industry, and he likes his work. He could sell ice to Eskimos, or convince you that fire is cold or water is dry. It's the debate he loves. Ripley will kill you with guns and knives; Nick Naylor will destroy you with arguments. He'll have you thanking him for your little case of lung cancer. And he'll have fun doing it. The dialogue here is so sharp you can cut yourself listening to it, particularly between Nick and his only two friends: a lobbyist for guns and another for alcohol who call themselves the MOD (Merchants Of Death) Squad. I nearly died when I heard them arguing over just whose product was the deadliest. Nick takes considerable satisfaction that tobacco kills more than alcohol and guns combined.
Of course, a story like this has to have a moral, and I was prepared to groan when Nick saw the light and reformed. And of course it was going to be because of his son, who he loves but tries to instill with his own methods of debating, which essentially boil down to never answering your opponent's arguments, but moving the question to something he can't win. (Therefore, if he didn't win, he lost, and if he lost, you won! QED! Even Karl Rove could learn a thing or two from Nick Naylor.)
... only it didn't happen that way. I was delighted when it didn't get all mushy at the end. Absolutely everybody in the PR game and in the Beltway game and the "journalism" games takes it up the ass here, and Nick walks away happy and unrepentant, still doing what he does best but for a different client.
The book this was based on is by Christopher Buckley, William F.'s son, which is a delicious thing to think about. We all know where he got his debating skills. And throughout a movie which is all about smoking, not a single cigarette is lit. How's that for irony? A funny thing ... the only other movie I can remember that is about smoking is Cold Turkey, starring Dick Van Dyke and directed by Norman Lear. It was hilarious and satiric, too, but in an entirely different way. IMDb.com
This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) Actually, it is, the infamous NC-17, the kiss of death because no studio will distribute it, very few of the enormous chains that run 90% of the screens in America will exhibit it, and few newspapers will advertise it. The process of getting this rating is part of the film, and it's one that would have delighted Stalin or Hitler. You go in knowing nothing, and you come out with a rating. You can challenge it, and your chances of winning range from piss-poor to impossible. Thus ... you cut, and you're often not even sure what to cut, or how much. This scandalous system has been in place with almost no change since the 1960s, headed by that sanctimonious asshole, Jack Valenti, the counter-in-chief of nipples, cocks, and pussy hairs. What a job! Jack never was bothered with rape and mutilation, so long as no tits got bared. I can only find one nice thing to say about Valenti, and it is this: He wasn't quite as bad as Will Hayes or Thomas Bowdler.
The director sets out to expose the sham that is the rating system, and scores some big hits ... none of which will affect anything, but which are nice to know. Using a private detective, he discovers the top-secret names of many of the raters, who are all supposed to be parents of young children. Guess what? Hardly any of them are. If there is a system to their madness, it isn't apparent, except that people who might actually know something about the effect of sex and violence on children are specifically excluded. The Catholic and Episcopalian Churches are not, however.
The whole star chamber system was set up by the producers, distributors, and exhibitors in the first place, and guess what again? They're still in charge. When the director appeals his NC-17, his private detective is out there waiting, jotting down the license plate numbers of his inquisitors as they leave. All of them are high executives in studios and theater chains, representatives of the seven media conglomerates that control 95% of all media in the US. He names names, and he lost his appeal, 10-0.
But I suspect the days of influence of the MPAA are waning. Have you seen some of the commercials circulating on the Internet? They are being produced by some very big companies, and they do things you could never do on the networks, or even on HBO. One shows a man accidentally opening a bottle of beer in his friend's rectum. A classic already: the couple going to the door and he asks her for a blowjob. My favorite: The Norelco Body Shaver, where a smug guy in a bathrobe talks about shaving his kiwis (balls), his peaches (butt cheeks), and his carrot. Advertisers have learned that, by humor, you can get the consumers themselves to spread the word about your product. We've already seen from early examples that small independent producers are learning how to do it, too. Pretty soon I believe that movies, quality movies, with real stars, that take sexuality to lengths we've never been able to see because of Valenti's bluenoses, will become available for downloading, rated by no one, censored by no one. Consumers are buying huge screens, home theaters, soon they will be buying HD-DVDs. Theaters could soon become a small sideline of the movie industry, and (though this doesn't make me happy) the big theatrical release could become a memory, unless the MPAA and others wake up to the fact that they're operating under the rules of the last century. Then the MPAA, the studios, the distributors, and the exhibitors could all find themselves facing an I-Rating ... for Irrelevant. IMDb.com
This is Spinal Tap (1984) Best rockumentary ever, and it’s not even real. The members of Spinal Tap, the band, toured for years on the strength of this movie, and I’m not sure all the audience was in on the joke. IMDb.com
This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss (2003) I love the theater, and movies about backstage at the theater. This is a real backstage movie, in that it follows the rehearsals and re-writes of a play by Shepard called The Late Henry Moss. The cast includes Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, Cheech Marin, and James Gammon. The play is autobiographical, in a metaphoric way, and concerns Shepard’s relationship with his alcoholic father. That’s pretty much it. We don’t see the whole play but fragments of it as they work out the kinks. It’s a fascinating process to watch. Shepard says that a play is never really a play until the actors get their hands on it and make their contributions, and he’s right. And Penn says that writing is much harder than acting. I don’t know about that, but it’s big of him to say it. Recommended. IMDb.com
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) This is the second time Tommy Lee Jones has made a long, difficult journey with a dead body to honor someone's wish. Years ago it was Augustus McCrae; this time it's this guy whose name I can't pronounce. And take it from me, Tommy, that was your only mistake as a director, but it was a big one. Never use something hard to pronounce in a title. People won't talk about something they don't feel sure about pronouncing. This advice is from a man who's first book was titled The Ophiuchi Hotline, and who is still explaining to baffled people how to pronounce it. Would it have been so hard to call the man Jose Estrada? He's fictional, after all.
Other than that, I thought this was a great little movie. An asshole macho rookie border patrol agent, who seems to regard the Mexican border as a marine might regard Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, accidentally shoots a friend of Pete Perkins, a cowboy. It becomes clear that the cops know who did it, but don't want any trouble. He was only a wetback. It's a perfect set-up for a big Death Wish or Dirty Harry doo-dah, full of fisticuffs and shooting and sweet revenge. But Pete isn't interested in that. He has his code, and he won't let things like due process get in the way of justice ... but his idea of justice isn't so simplistic. What he wants is atonement, and he gets it, and it just feels right. In the last line of the movie the rookie utters the first vaguely human words he has uttered in two hours. So maybe he has learned something. IMDb.com
The Three Musketeers: The Queen's Diamonds (1973) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Thunderheart (1992) This is a competent whodunit, and it's directed by Michael Apted, a director we admire for his Up Series, but it didn't quite work for me. It takes place on the Sioux rez in the 1970s, when there was a lot of turmoil with militant Indians and the FBI. Two agents were shot and killed, and Leonard Peltier went to prison for it, a case that is controversial to this day. I thought it was going to be about that, but it's not. It was shot in South Dakota, in and around the actual Wounded Knee memorial.
Val Kilmer is a quarter-Sioux FBI man, sent out there to solve a murder because he's "Indian," and might be accepted. Washington is so clueless that they don't realize he knows nothing of Sioux culture, and in fact—naturally—is quite conflicted about it, practically denying it. You know where this is going to go. He will find sympathy with "his people," even having visions like a tribal elder. I guess this is what bothers me, the whole buying-in to the idea that Indians are somehow more mystical than the rest of us. They may in fact be more "spiritual" than many whites, but that's a whole different thing. Magic happens around Indians, because they are more connected to the Great Spirit and nature. Yeah, right. My favorite scene in Little Big Man is when Old Lodge Skins decides it's time to die, goes up on the mountain, sings his death song, and lies down. Then it starts to rain. He sits up, sighs, and says "Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn't." This is precisely my attitude toward Christian prayer. "Oh, Dad pulled through because we were all praying for him!" Horsepuckey. There's a dude right down the hall who croaked this morning and he had twice as many people praying for him as your Dad. But believers never see that.
The one thing a little different in this movie is that the main tension is between good (traditional) Indians and bad (assimilated) Indians. The good ones want to keep the sacred land, the bad ones want to sell it to the white man and get rich. Naturally, the FBI, who have jurisdiction over murders on tribal land (and that's a giant scandal right there, a century after Wounded Knee; why can't tribal cops and courts handle their own affairs?) bollixes everything up out of greed and ignorance.
So, an okay film, but it had nothing new to say, and I'm tired of seeing white men (Kilmer) be the center of a story about Indians, as in Windtalkers, whose very idea offended me so much I refused to see it. Graham Greene is the best character in this movie, and it would have been a lot better film if it had centered around him, like Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. But nobody has the guts to bring out a movie like this unless there's white star power on the marquee. IMDb.com
Tideland (2005) VarleyYarn. IMDb.com
Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup) (France, 2002) Another pretentious piece of crap that a lot of critics seemed to think was deep. About half of it was too dark to see, and when the lights went on, I didn’t care. Some sort of post-apocalyptic fol-de-rol was going on, the water was bad, nobody had any food. The people start behaving primitively. Hoo-hah. What an insight! What does it take to make some people see that ... there’s nothing there! A total stinker, avoid this one like the plague. I HATE really dark movies with blindingly bright white subtitles, so bailed out halfway through. IMDb.com
Tiptoes (2003) A man comes from a family of dwarves, or little people, and he’s the only normal-sized one. He conceals this from his girlfriend, who becomes pregnant, and may be carrying a dwarf. Sounds interesting and well-intentioned, but I thought this was a disaster. The dialogue is terrible. The incidents are unbelievable. For some reason, Gary Oldman, who likes to play grotesques (he was the man with no face in Hannibal), plays the man’s twin brother, and he’s not a convincing dwarf. His arms are too long, he’s obviously walking around on his knees. And I guess the key word here is “grotesque.” There is nothing grotesque about little people, which seems to be the film’s point ... so why Gary Oldman? The wonderful Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent, and Elf) is wasted as an angry Frenchman; why couldn’t he play the brother? And why is there no picture on the DVD cover of a dwarf? I know one of the points of the film was to portray little people as successful, normal, and sexual, which is fine, but you have to make a good movie while you’re doing it. The whole thing began to remind me uncomfortably of The Terror of Tiny Town. Avoid this one. IMDb.com
To Be and To Have (Être et avoir) (France, 2002) This is about as basic a documentary as you can get. And, to tell the truth, it took me a while to get into it. Without narration, we see the arrival of children at a one-room schoolhouse in rural France. There are big kids and little kids, ages 4 to 11, and one teacher, Georges Lopez. He has been at this for 30 years. He is very, very good with these children. He seems to be surrounded by a warm aura of concern and love, and it’s not fake. We see about a year, during which he imparts the most basic skills of the three Rs. But he’s much more than simply a teacher. The father of one pupil is ill, and he gently questions him about it as the boy cries. Another girl is so deeply withdrawn that I don’t think she says more than “oui” and “non” for the entire movie. She’s moving on to middle school and Lopez has told the teachers there that she may need some special help, and discussing this with her, he fears he may have stigmatized her. We don’t know, because even he, with his incredibly gentle manner, is unable to get her to express her fears. I fear for her in a normal school environment. This is not a film for everyone, even everyone who likes documentaries, but it rewards patience. IMDb.com
To Be or Not To Be (1942) SEE BELOW. Just a few more comments, having seen this one shortly after we saw the remake. The opening montage shows you why a man born Benjamin Kubelsky might want to make a film about the occupation of Poland. Every Pole seems to be a –ski. The whole Jewish angle is underplayed, but then, no one knew the full horror of the Holocaust in 1942. Polish Christians don't have anything to be proud of there, but this was a time for morale-boosting films. And having just seen the musical version of The Producers, I now know where Mel Brooks stole the title for one of the songs: "Heil Myself." That's okay; it was worth stealing. IMDb.com
To Be or Not to Be (1983) This is a re-make by Mel Brooks of a 1942 comedy of the same name. In fact, it uses pretty much the same script, with only a few changes here and there. The original starred Jack Benny, of all people, and Carole Lombard, who died just after filming it. This one stars Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. The original was directed by Ernst Lubitsch ... and Mel, I love ya, pal, but you're no Ernst Lubitsch. And you're certainly no Jack Benny.
Which doesn't mean Mel is bad by any means, or that this film is no good. They're just as different as Benny and Brooks. The story takes place in Poland in 1939, prior to and after the Nazi conquest. It concerns a theater troupe and deals with Nazis in a serio-comic way, much like Chaplin did in The Great Dictator. It was a departure for Jack Benny to play a role where he dressed up as a Nazi, and given the times, the film was not a critical success. In fact, a lot of people were deeply offended, even angry. This was not the light, witty "Lubitsch touch" people had come to expect. This was spoofing the unspoofable. And yet, time and history have been on the director's side, and the film is now viewed as a classic.
Brooks, on the other hand, had already had great success with "Springtime for Hitler," and for him to play a ham actor was typecasting of the highest order. The comedy is broader, as it has to be to accommodate Brook's particular talents. As for myself, it's impossible not to like a film that begins with Mel and Anne singing and dancing to "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Polish. And it's not possible for Anne Bancroft to do anything in a film that I don't like. I'm content to just look at her, and if she acts, and if it's comic acting, so much the better. But if you decide to watch just one of these films, see the Lubitsch. IMDb.com
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Together (China/South Korea, 2000) Chinese director Chen Kaige is best known for Farewell, My Concubine, which I have not seen. But he is very good with this old-fashioned story of a violin prodigy from the boonies come to the big, westernized city with his adoring father to make something of himself. IMDb.com
Tokyo Godfathers (Japan, 2003) I’ve never been a fan of Japanese Anime, but films like this are winning me over. Maybe the problem is the definition. It seems to cover everything from stuff suitable for 3-year-olds where nothing moves but the mouth (like “Speed Racer,” which was endlessly fascinating to my son when he was 3), to masterpieces like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. The Japanese are fond of a cloying visual sentimentality that emphasizes huge round eyes (is it racist to ask why?) and baby-like features. But then, in a Disney semi-realistic movie the men are huge and the women are tiny. Look at their hands! Lots of anime is computer-game dumb, a lot of sound and fury. And the cheapness of the movement animation always disconcerts me at first. I will always prefer the 24 frame/second stuff of the old Disney classics.
But there is another level to anime, where the backgrounds are gorgeous and subtle, and the stories are things you will never see from Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks. This one is rated PG-13, and includes stuff you probably wouldn’t want your 6-year-old to see, including whorehouses and a realistic, brutal beating. We liked it a lot. IMDb.com
Tom Dowd & the Language of Music (2003) In 1946 Tom Dowd faced a career decision. During the war he had been working at Columbia University for the Army Corp of Engineers, Manhattan District. Seemed logical; Columbia is in Manhattan. What he was working for, without knowing it, was the Manhattan Project, studying neutron beams for use in atomic weapons. Later, he was one of the witnesses to one of the Bikini tests. So ... should he continue working in nuclear physics, or should he pursue his other love, music? He went with music, and thus changed history in two ways. Without him in the recording booth, much of the music we all know and love would not sound nearly as good as it does. And ... if he’d stayed in physics, I can guarantee that on that great day when we all kiss our asses goodbye, the bombs would sound terrific!
Dowd is one of those unsung heroes that people like me know nothing about, but who musicians worship. He’s the dude who records and mixes the music. He makes musicians sound better than they ever expected to sound, better than they had any right to expect. In his career until his death in 2002, he worked with ... well, damn near everybody. Ray Charles, Charlie Parker, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tito Puente, Otis Redding ... many, many more. Somebody like me figures the recording engineer is some gnome who squats in front of his 150-channel mixing board and tweaks stuff in ways that no one but a nerd like him will ever notice. Maybe some of them are, but not Dowd. He helped create the sounds, not just mix them, and people like Clapton and Charles enthusiastically endorse this proposition. His contributions were as much artistic as technical.
But that is not to belittle the technical achievements. Sound was originally recorded by analog signals onto cylinders. Then they went to wax disks. When Dowd came along, they were still recording everything with one mike, directly onto disks. One take, record a whole album in an afternoon. He was a pioneer in hi-fi, stereo, tape, multi-tracking. He got the second 8-track recorder Ampex made, right after he found out Les Paul had one and was doing revolutionary things overdubbing tracks, playing all parts himself. It’s hard to remember, in these days when a bass line may be laid down in Eugene, Oregon, uploaded to a Zimbabwean band in London, and then mixed in with other musicians who may be mailing it in from Africa (my son Maurice "the Mofessor" recently did just that) just how totally revolutionary this was. When Ray Charles heard what Dowd was doing to his music he went ballistic ... for about ten minutes, then he listened, and from then on Tom Dowd was Ray’s man, a miracle worker.
This movie shows all that and much, much more. Dowd is an irrepressible presence, a guy you know in an instant that you’d really like. He was working right up to the end of his life, adapting easily to the digital revolution, computers, sound shaping and sampling. He was enthused that people could now do in their garages the sort of thing he couldn’t do at all in the 1950s. People talk about that shameless self-promoting, murdering freak Phil Spector, but it was Tom Dowd and a handful of people like him who are really responsible for the music we’ve heard in the last half of the 20th Century. I couldn’t recommend this flick more highly. IMDb.com
Tom Jones (1963) See Top 25 Favorite Movies. IMDb.com
Topper (1937) I've tried several times to read the comic fantasy and satirical novels of Thorne Smith, without success. The sensibility is so much of another age that I just can't understand. Dressing for dinner, butlers and maids, it just doesn't work on the printed page. But it does in the movies, especially in this one. I first saw it when I was very young, and the story of two ghosts fascinated me. It became a television series with a different cast, and I loved every episode. (Writer of the pilot and some early episodes ... Stephen Sondheim!) But it's been a long time since I saw it. Would it hold up?
It does, but it's in spite of the pedestrian direction by Norman Z McLeod. The comic timing and editing is sometimes off, and it's clearly the director's fault. If this had been made by Howard Hawks it would have been three times as good, which is frightening, as it's already very fine. Funny thing, though. I remember Cary Grant as the star of the show, but he really isn't given much to do. The picture is very much carried by Roland Young. Watch him pretend to be drunk, carried by two invisible ghosts, and marvel at how he carries it off without breaking his neck or ever looking anything but loose and relaxed. Must have been very hard. I was reminded of Steve Martin in All of Me, or Jim Carrey in Liar Liar, except Young is better than either of them. IMDb.com
Topper Returns (1941) Then as now, sequels are usually a bad idea. This is one of those times. Just a pale shadow of the wit of Topper, this movie bumbles along as a strictly by-the-numbers grind. Abbott & Costello or the Three Stooges would have been right at home in this plot and haunted house setting. Joan Blondell is no match for Constance Bennett, and they couldn't persuade Cary Grant to show up at all for this turkey. The only one with some good lines is poor Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, who is forced to play that staple buffoon of the time, the spooked spook, as terrified of ghosts as any Stepin Fetchit. The best bit: Soon after he first sees the results of the invisible woman moving around, he goes to his room and packs. Interrupted by Mrs. Topper, he says he is leaving, "Going back!" "Back where?" Billie Burke squeaks. "Back to Mr. Benny! Nothing like this ever happened with him!" Right on, Eddie. At least with Jack, you always gave as good as you got, and had the last line. IMDb.com
Touch the Sound (2004) Evelyn Glennie, OBE, is a 40-year-old woman, thought by many to be the best solo percussionist in the world. In fact, she pretty much invented the profession of solo percussionist, and was the first to make a living at it. Maybe she still is the only one. And she’s been deaf since the age of 12.
Percussion is surely the earliest music. At its very simplest, it is nothing more than clapping hands and stomping feet. Beyond that, you can start whanging on things. Rocks, hollow logs, coconut shells, anything whose sound pleases you. The beat is the basic component of music. All that other stuff, timbre, tone, texture, pitch, crescendo and sostenuto and adagio, all that came later. Anything, literally anything, can be a percussion instrument. Bobby McFerrin slaps on his chest and cheeks as he sings. I’ve seen nice solos done on cardboard boxes, plastic paint cans, garbage cans, sticks played on the sidewalk. Hell, even a saxophone can be a percussion instrument if you whale on it with a ball-peen hammer (and some may not find that such a bad idea, particularly if the sax is being blown by, say, Bill Clinton).
You can’t help trying to imagine her world. She performs barefoot, feeling the sound through the floor. She also senses it with her body. She explains it as well as she can (and she doesn’t speak like a deaf person), and I came to think I understood a little of it. It really is all about touch. We see her showing a deaf girl how to sense the sound, where a particular sound registers on her hand.
Lee had trouble with the filming technique, specifically the overuse of close-ups. I agree with her, the three most abused things in film are “shaky-cam,” slow motion, and pore-revealing close-ups of faces. But it didn’t bother me as much as it did her. I love watching musicians perform, so those incredibly long shots of small sections of her face while she was performing really pissed me off, especially after I noticed the flesh-colored mole on her nose which I fixated on for the rest of the film.
Glennie’s music, or most of what we hear of it, is avant garde, much of it just sound shapes without a beat of any kind. But she can also play the hell out of her favorite instrument, the snare drum. She jams with traditional Japanese drummers and it is very good. She also can perform on found objects. I have to say that I’m not tempted to buy any of her CDs, because it’s not the sort of music I’d want to listen to over and over. But I’d download it, and be happy to hear it. And I was happy to have seen and heard and touched the sound in this movie. IMDb.com
Touching the Void (UK, 2003) Yikes! This is one of the most harrowing movies I’ve ever seen. I’m not a fan of mountain climbing or of climbers; I feel they deserve whatever they get, as they set out for excitement, didn’t they? So my sympathies are limited. But in this case ... two men set out to climb the highest mountain in the Andes that has never been scaled. This is a semi-documentary, in that the action is re-created by actors, but it must be dead accurate as both the real climbers narrate the film. I won’t even try to tell you what happened, though of course you know they survived it ... but think of the worst things you can imagine on a mountain and then double that. Triple it. Excellent. IMDb.com
Toys (1992) This should have been the excellent Barry Levinson’s take on Willy Wonka, and it was apparently a heartfelt project ... but all the visual splendor and whimsy just doesn’t add up to anything. IMDb.com
(DVD, Canadian television) Julian and Ricky are the focus of a group of losers in a big trailer park in Nova Scotia. A documentary crew are following them around after they get out of jail, I guess hoping to see how they reform themselves. Julian and Ricky are dumb. They are really, really dumb. How dumb are they? Well, there are more than 6 billion people in the world. Eliminate the mentally retarded (they have an excuse) so make it an even 6 billion. Now, list all those people in order from smartest to dumbest and it would go something like this:#1 Marilyn vos Savant (Guinness Book of World Records Highest IQ.)
#3 Cecil Adams
#4 Ken (34-time Jeopardy champion, $1,135,460 and still counting.)
#5 Dr. Science (He has a Masters degree! In science!)
----------skip a few places------------
#5,969,999,997 Beavis
#5,969,999,998 Butthead
#5,969,999,999 Adam Sandler
#5,970,000,000 through #5,999,999,995 Fans of Adam Sandler
#5,999,999,996 A box of rocks
#5,999,999,997 Dirt
#5,999,999,998 Julian
#5,999,999,999 Ricky
#6,000,000,000 George W. Bush.
How dumb are they? When Ricky is getting married and Julian has to provide the wedding feast, he robs a supermarket ... not for money, but for food, carts full of hot dogs and bananas ... and allows the camera crew to follow them, and the tape is later used in evidence to send them back to the slammer. These guys are way beyond redneck jokes. Their sole virtue is loyalty; they have absolutely nothing except each other, so they have to stick together. It’s pretty funny stuff, a big hit in Canada, but don’t bother to watch it on BBC America, because if they bleep the obscenities there would be very little soundtrack left. IMDb.com
Transamerica (2005) Never having seen "Desperate Housewives," I was not familiar with Felicity Huffman. In fact, looking through her credits, I realized I've never seen her in anything, in a part large enough to be noticed. So my first reaction was "Isn't it nice that this pleasant but rather horse-faced woman with the odd voice found the perfect part for herself!" Imagine my surprise when I found her website, and realized she was a babe!
Okay, so the make-up department uglied her up, like they did for Charlize Theron in Monster. That's only Step One. To make this unlikely story of a transsexual man (Bree Osbourne, the former Stanley O.) on the verge of The Operation discovering he has fathered a child, you need to do a lot more than just make yourself look mannish. In fact, the job is so complex that I wonder how a sane actress could take it on. She has to act like a man ... who has schooled himself, rigorously, to a fault, to act like a woman. She has to be ... not quite right, not all the time. She has to be very feminine (and it's been my observation that transsexuals and transvestites are often more feminine—at least by their conception, their ideal, their image, of femininity—than 99% of females), and yet, when the little girl looks at her in the diner and asks "Are you a boy or a girl?" we have to believe the little girl could have spotted it.
And we do. Huffman has got this role down to the last nuance. She richly deserved her Oscar nomination, and I think she was actually better than Reese Witherspoon, though it was never in the cards that she would win. I mean, this picture cost one million dollars. One million! You can't even shout "Action!" in Hollywood for that kind of chump change.
The rest of the film comes up a little short. It's hard to believe the son didn't figure it out sooner than he did. If she's in a hurry to get from NY to CA, it doesn't make sense to drive the back roads as they do. Bree's mother is way over the top.
But these are minor points. The movie rests squarely on Felicity's shoulders, and she makes it all work. She is prissy, but has a dry wit. She is kind and loving, a hard worker, but someone who has never finished anything she has started. She doesn't want any part of this little drug-snorting brat she finds herself saddled with, but she steps up and does the right thing, and even seems to have reached a truce with him, at least. The movie doesn't wrap up neatly with hearts and flowers, but there is hope, and isn't that all we ever have in life? IMDb.com
Transformers (2007) The 2nd Occasional Lee's-in-Oregon Film Festival. IMDb.com
The Trip (1967) Hey, man, groove on this weird groovy shit, man. It's fuckin' groovy! Did we really say "groovy" as often as the people in this movie do? Yes, I'm afraid we did. Forgive us, young folks.
This movie really sucks. Sorry, but there it is. Hollywood—even the bottom of the barrel Hollywood, in the form of Roger Corman—never really understood the '60s until well into the '80s, if then. They got the colors right, but the music was lame. There is no plot here. A film director is bummed out (sorry, we said that a lot, too, still do) and decides to drop acid. He sees pretty colors, he has bad dreams. Every time someone asks him a question he responds, with deep insight, "I don't know." The end.
This ain't the way it was, not even as this silly thing was being made. Trust me, I was there. Much of the action takes place in a gigantic mansion, every inch of which is painted in psychedelic colors. Who would need acid in a place like that? You could break your neck trying to walk down the op-art stairs.
But ... it is true that the deepest insight I retain from a couple dozen trips, in spite of the feeling that I was glimpsing deep inner meanings of the universe, can be summed up as "I don't know." One genuine moment was when Peter Fonda grew fascinated with a washing machine and a dryer. I remember moments like that.
The acting is terrible except for Bruce Dern, who does what he can with the pathetic lines he's given. Dennis Hopper is here. They say it was "written" by Jack Nicholson, but he should have signed it Alan Smithee, or Cordwainer Bird. The visual effects are primitive but sometimes arresting, and recall if you will that a "light show" of the day was guys slopping colored oils and water in dishes set on overhead projectors. But every image is repeated at least a dozen times. Take out the replication and this movie would have run 25 minutes. It's actually 80 minutes, and seems much longer, even when you're FFing through large parts of it.
This review is a bit sloppy and disorganized, but nothing like the movie. IMDb.com
The Trip to Bountiful (1985) Geraldine Page was nominated for an Oscar 8 times, and won with this, her last shot, and died shortly afterwards. The script was adapted by Horton Foote, from his own play. You may know him as one of the finest writers in Hollywood, who got his start on the stage and on TV. He won Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies. So I hoped to like this a lot. And I did like it ... but not a lot. There are some great scenes, and the writing is great, but it's a little slow for my tastes. Did you ever sit next to a dotty old woman on a long bus trip? Well, I haven't either, but it's my idea of hell. Sure, she's a nice dotty old lady, and you feel for her with her nightmare daughter-in-law ... but it's still a long bus ride. IMDb.com
(France and Canada, 2003) We have just seen the best movie we've seen all year. It's The Triplets of Belleville, and it may be the best animated movie ever. I wait a few years to put movies on my "best of all time" list, but this one just crashed into my head. The first five minutes staggered me, left me with my jaw on the fucking floor, and it just got better from there. It is impossible to describe it, only to mention a few of the artists it reminds me of. Try Jacques Tati, Max Fleischer, Salvador Dali, Ronald Searle, and Gary Larsen's Far Side. Among many other geniuses. It has one of my favorite movie characters of all time, Bruno the Wonder Dog, who reminds me of Mighty Manfred, Tom Terrific’s dog on Captain Kangaroo. As always, it's impossible to know if we will laugh at the same things and love the same things, but we could NOT recommend it more highly. IMDb.comTristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) I've never read the book (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) and probably never will. Someone in the movie describes it as "A postmodernist novel from before the time there was any modern to be post about." It was written and published between 1759 and 1769, in nine volumes, and it has been generally agreed that it is unfilmable. Apparently, by the end of the book Tristam is just being born, so he never really gets around to telling his life story.
Which is fine, and Michael Winterbottom certainly hasn't tried. He uses some scenes from the book, mostly of Tristam being born, to make a "Making Of" movie, sort of, though it's hard to pin this movie down as being anything at all ... which I guess is the point. Real actors use their real names ("We can get Gillian Anderson!" "From 'Baywatch'?" "No, Agent Mulder." "No, Scully.") but you have to believe they're jiving, because if they were really as egotistic and vain and massively insecure as they portray themselves to be ... they never would have played themselves that way. If you get my drift.
There's all sorts of things I could ruminate about, from the "fourth wall" to metafiction to deconstruction, lots of comparisons I could make to films like Being John Malkovich, but I'm too tired. It was funny, I had quite a few laughs, but never really felt like I was getting the point. And maybe that was the point. IMDb.com
Troy (2004) Not as bad as I had expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I was forced to read The Iliad, which I think is highly overrated, in college, and this movie is sort of accurate, though it leaves out the gods. Achilles was a pain in the butt in the book, and he’s even more of a pain in the butt in the movie. So Brad Pitt was the perfect casting choice. Orlando Bloom played Paris, the most spoiled twit in history, as a spoiled twit. Agamemnon ... well, what can you say about a guy named Agamemnon? Name like that, he probably got teased a lot on the playground when he was a kid, which explains why he was such a weasel.
We could have used a little humor, too. I spotted one perfect opportunity. This little lad was sent to Achilles’ tent, where the great hero was sleeping it off with two naked ladies when he was supposed to be with the Greek army, fighting the champion of the ... Spartans? I can’t remember. Anyway, as Achilles is getting on his horse the boy asks:
“Aren’t you afraid? I’d be afraid.” And the Great Man says,
“That’s why no one will remember your name.”
And I thought, the line should have been:
“That’s why no one will remember your name ... Homer.”
Why do I have to do all the thinking for these damn screenwriters?
At the end, guess who ducks out the back door when Troy is burning, after he’s just sucker-shot Achilles in the heel? Why, that spoiled twit Paris, of course, with his Greek whore. The asshole who launched a thousand ships.
I’m looking forward to the sequel. Not Troy II, with the further exploits of Paris and Helen. The Odyssey, starring the only smart guy in the picture, the man who thought up the whole horse business. Odysseus rocks! IMDb.com
The Truth About Charlie (2002) It takes balls to remake one of the best romantic-comedy-thrillers of all time. Balls, and a generous helping of idiocy. Jonathan Demme has certainly made some good movies (Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs), but what possessed him to replace Cary Grant with Mark Wahlberg and Audrey Hepburn with ... Thandie Newton??? And to let it all degenerate into a shoot-out in the rain? And to completely lose the bubbly romantic tension ... I can’t go on. The stupidest project since Gus van Sant decided to remake Psycho shot-for-shot in color. But Demme may be trying to top himself; his remake of The Manchurian Candidate is in post-production. What are these idiots thinking of? IMDb.com
Tsotsi (South Africa, 2005) ... means "thug" in the Zulu/Xhosa/Afrikaans/English patois of the streets of Soweto, just outside Johannesburg, and it is also the street name of the small, baby-faced leader of a little gang of born-to-lose thugs. He is played with chilling intensity by Presley Chweneyagae. The film reminds me of A Clockwork Orange without the music, and several shots actually seem to be intended to draw the parallel. But Clockwork is a brilliant, disturbing, colorful exploration of repressive society, mind control, and thuggery itself. Alex is complex, and in the end the film seems to conclude that there is no simple explanation for why some people prey on others; mostly because it's fun, in Alex's case.
Tsotsi's is a much starker story. Being born in Soweto is almost a death sentence to so many who find themselves there. Options are few, and robbing and stealing seems like a reasonable lifestyle choice. Just about all human feeling has been burned out of Tsotsi, until he steals a car and finds an infant in the back seat. This stirs something in him, for the first time since his childhood there is something for him to care for besides himself. He's not good at it, and the enterprise is doomed, but maybe there's a ray of hope.
This film won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it's quite good, but I have to say I don't think it's really Oscar material. IMDb.com
Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) (Finland, 1955) Here's a true rarity. It's not available on DVD in the US; the only way to see it is probably the way we got it, as a gift from Jarmo, our friend in Finland. I get the impression it's sort of like a Finnish Gone With the Wind, the definitive epic of a critical time in the history of the young republic, their greatest threat and their finest hour. (Don't draw too many parallels, though. There's no Rhett and Scarlet, no family saga, hardly any women, and covers only a few years.) It is always shown on Finnish Independence Day, December 6, and most Finns have seen it multiple times. It is based on a novel by Väinö Linna, and Jarmo says, "The book has been called the voice of the nation on the collective war experiences of our troops during 1941-1944."
Finland has existed for a long time as a rather nervous barnacle on the back of the Russian leviathan. Before that, it was the Swedes who dominated them. From 1809 to 1917 it was a Grand Duchy of Russia. Finland saw its chance in the chaos following the Bolsheviks, and declared its independence. For 20 years Russia was too busy to do much about it, but continued to covet the place, chiefly for its mineral wealth, though they may have wanted its reindeer, ski slopes, saunas, and tango dancers, too. Russia invaded in 1939 and expected a walk-over, since their army was 4 times bigger. But the Finns fought the mighty Red Army to a standstill in what would come to be known as the Winter War, and for a short time there was an uneasy truce.
Then came Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's idiotic second front invasion of Russia. The Finns had little choice but to ally with the Germans against the Soviets, since nobody else would give them weapons and they were pretty much tapped out from the Winter War. They sent all the German troops far north to Lapland (where I presume and hope they were miserable). The Finns did not go along with the Nazi genocide against Jews and others. Tuntematon sotilas follows the experiences of a machine-gun platoon in the second phase of the very odd Finnish experience of WWII: The Continuation War. (There was a third phase, the Lapland War, to evict all those goddam Krauts from the north. Typically, the Nazis destroyed everything they could blow up on their way out.) Finland was the only country to fight on both sides of WWII, but I get the impression they didn't give a fuck for the ideology of either side; they just wanted to be left alone and not be invaded, and would do what they had to do to achieve that goal. To this day, their policy toward Russia is something like "Be polite, and keep your powder dry."
I suspect that, not being Finnish, this story not being part of my national heritage, I don't get the full emotional charge from this 50-year-old film. It has the flaws of its time, like American war films from the '40s and '50s. The soldiers are a mixed bag, some veterans of the Winter War, others fairly raw recruits. In America, they'd be named Tex, and Brooklyn, and Peewee, and Dago, and Jose, and the little Jewish kid played by Sal Mineo. There is the cheerful one, the cynic, the socialist, the coward, the stiff-backed lieutenant known as "The Stork." The idea of following one unit through the war was done countless times by Hollywood, my favorite being The Victors, a truly scathing anti-war picture that, oddly, is not available on video. A more recent example was "Band of Brothers."
But there are big differences here. There is none of the Hollywood gloss and glamour that seems to go with even the grittiest American war film, even the B-picture grinders of the '30s and '40s. Maybe glamour isn't the right word, maybe it's slickness, high-tech cameras and meticulous lighting and all the things that go into that Hollywood look so prized around the world. The film is raw and stark in the European manner, and achieves its own beauty in a way that matches with the stock footage that is interposed here and there with staged scenes. It begins with harsh battles, and gets harsher as it goes along, until the violence is almost unbearable. There is a scene near the end of Russian shells landing in the forest, and with each explosion a tree goes down. You know it's because there is dynamite wrapped around each tree, but it evokes what it must feel like to see that much raw power aimed at tearing you to pieces.
There is something else that marks this film as Finnish and not American. In our films, even those made during the war but especially those made in the '50s, as here, there is the sense of our inevitable victory. As Americans we know we're going to take Omaha Beach, plant the flag on Mount Suribachi, march into Berlin, pound the Japanese into surrender. We are winners, or we were until Vietnam, we had no fear of defeat, it was only a question of how long it would take. These Finnish young men have no such assurance; they are fighting for their country's very survival as a political entity, and by golly, they're losing. Only an armistice saves them from being annihilated, as the Soviets concentrate on the race to Berlin and Finland becomes irrelevant to them. And then they still had to root out their allies-of-necessity, the Nazis in the north ... and after the truce they lost about a tenth of their country and had to spend the next decade cleaning out the mines in the forests and harbors left behind by the Germans.
So the film begins with the menacing opening chords of Finlandia, by Sibelius, one of the more dramatic pieces ever composed. The melancholy music continues as soldiers are buried on a bleak, blasted plain. Then at the end of the film, we hear the "hymn" part of the piece, which always moves to me to tears. In an American film, we would then move on to the triumphant final passage ... but not here. There is only the hymn, for all those dead boys ...
There has been much debate about the wisdom of allying with the Germans. I'm not a historian, but from what I can tell it was either do that, or be overrun by the Soviet Union, in which case they might be only now emerging from the blight of being a Soviet slave state, like their Baltic neighbors. But the Finns are still up there, still independent, still beating themselves with birch sticks, and still dancing the tango. That seems like an good outcome to me, except the bit about the birch sticks. IMDb.com
Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha hâm parvaz
mikonand) (Kurdish
language, 2004)
A joint Iran-Iraq production, and the first film produced after the
fall of Saddam Hussein. It takes place in a Kurdish refugee camp
along the Iraqi-Turkish border, in an area hopefully called “Kurdistan”
by the people who live there. Kurds are a people without a homeland,
being unwelcome guests in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Nobody wants them,
but everybody wants their land, because there’s oil under it.
The people in the camp have been tossed around by the tides of war for decades. Now everyone knows the Americans are about to invade Iraq, and their lives are about to change again. For good or bad, who knows? It could hardly be worse. The orphaned children, many of them maimed by land mines, are led by a little hustler called Satellite, because he knows how to hook up satellite dishes. He knows a little of everything, actually, including how to make a profit on land mines. He gets the children to dig them up, and sells them to a middle man who either resells them to people who will bury them again, or to the United Nations, which pays a bounty. These are mines put in place by Saddam in his continuing war with the Kurds. But many of them were made in America. These are seen as the best, the ones most in demand.
Maybe someone can tell me how the people who make these things can sleep at night, knowing that they are more likely to kill civilians than soldiers, and that they will wait patiently for decades after the wars are over, one way or another, waiting to blow the limbs off children. No, don’t bother. God damn you all to hell, all the arms makers.
It is a very bleak story, shot with first-time actors who do a great job of acting. Of course, playing the part of The Boy With No Arms is