Brandon’s movie memory

“Popular unity against the criminal bourgeoisie!”

Other street protest chants:
“Bourgeois shit, the street belongs to the left!”
“We need an iron hand!” (?!)

I alternately see this referred to as an epic 1979 movie, a long two-parter with a third-part postscript, or three separate movies. I guess they were presented theatrically in different ways in different countries. The 2/1 split seems right to me, as I’ll explain.

Part one drops me into the middle of an election in March 1973, which I didn’t understand until towards the end of the movie. I wondered why nobody was saying Salvador Allende’s name - turns out it was a senate election, and either the pro-Allende party lost, or they just did not gain enough seats in congress to prevent the opposition from holding a majority. So for the rest of Allende’s short reign as president, the country’s senate is mostly against him, undermining his authority. Movie is on the street, taking opinions from everyone, kind of slow at the start since I don’t know what’s happening, but excitement is in the air, and things straighten out soon enough. Cameraman is terrific, patient but curious, always looking for the best thing to shoot even if it means wandering off the person talking. I can’t believe the sound guy can keep up with him, but he does.

Salvador Allende:

A politician:

Part two picks up right where the first one ends, with an attempted military coup on June 29 1973, and part two ends Sept. 11 1973 with the successful coup that killed Allende and instated General Pinochet as ruler. In between those dates, Guzmán covers everything that happens in the whole country, it seems, with access to the marches, the debates, worker meetings, everything but the secretive military that turns against its country (with help and provocation, it turns out, from the U.S. government). This is by far my favorite of the three parts, and could easily work as a standalone movie… I see the Film Forum in NYC thought so as well. The events themselves, a democratic country swerving communist then falling military-dictatorship, is the best movie material you could hope for and Guzmán and his crew make the best of it, watching from ground zero as history is made, producing one of the best docs I’ve ever seen.

Military man who shot and killed Argentine cameraman Leonard Hendrickson at the end of part one:

Salvador Allende, file photo:

Bombing of the presidential palace:

Pinochet addressing the nation on TV:

Military rule:

Pinochet: “After three years of support for the Marxist cancer we have been given a disaster that is economic, moral and social, that could not continue to be tolerated by the sacred interests of the mother country.” (or something like that - I think it’s all amateur-translated)

Guzmán: “From the 11th of September, all resources of the Chilean army are mobilized to repress the popular movement with the compacency of the North American government. The first armed resistance offered by some industrial cords, agricultural populations and student centers are squashed quickly in unequal fight. Thousands of people are killed and the main sport fields become concentration camps. The longest democracy in the history of Latin America ceases to exist.”

I don’t exactly wish I’d skipped part 3, but it would’ve made a nice recap six months later instead of watching it right after 1 and 2. Filmmaking in Chile wasn’t easy during Pinochet’s rule, since Pinochet was killing and imprisoning everyone who disagreed with him, including the cameraman of Battle of Chile (to whom the completed work was dedicated), so Guzmán backs up and shows further details of the workers’ movements during Allende’s presidency, not again mentioning Pinochet or the violence. The many worker meetings and the creation of multi-factory blocs and the attempted attack on Allende’s credibility by the “Christian Democrats” (his primary opposition) via a U.S.-funded transportation strike had all been covered in the previous films, but now we see them in greater depth… “depth” meaning lots of guys with sideburns talking into microphones at meetings. Since I’m not personally interested in creating a communist worker’s paradise in my own neighborhood, part three wasn’t of much use to me, but I’ll bet it’s exactly what Chris Marker was hoping for when he helped fund Guzmán’s efforts to document what was happening in the country. Marker’s own angry reaction to the coup is documented in his short Embassy, which I’ll have to watch again now that it’s on a new, clean DVD.

The transportation strike:

The people:

The sideburns:

The revolution:

What a wonderful coincidence that I watch You’re Never Too Young, and then find out the next day that the film it remade is on Turner Classic.

Robert Osbourne introduced as a screwball comedy, but the only thing screwball here is the premise. Movie is played as a straight, semi-romantic comedy. Same story as the Lewis flick but minus the jewel thief and with a sex reversal (and predictably there’s no equivalent to the Dean Martin character). So Ginger Rogers is the scalp-massager lured to an apartment under a false premise which gets her to leave town and have to pose as a kid to afford a ticket. She hides out in Ray Milland’s room, same thunderstorm and morning discovery scene, then has to keep up the ruse so Ray won’t get in trouble and kicked out of the military. Again, a happy ending with Ray getting his wish to be sent on active duty (makes more sense in the nationalistic war-ragin’ 40’s than in the 1955 remake) and happening to meet a finally-acting-her-own-age Ginger on the train platform (where she gives him a Katy-disapproved line about how all some girls want is a letter from their husbands-abroad every couple weeks).

Cute movie, with some major Creepiness Issues (Ginger cuddling up to Ray, wanting him while pretending to be a little girl and calling him “uncle”). Not the madcap funhouse of the remake, though… no Dean songs (they’re not missed) or speedboat chases, choral performances or marching band shenanigans. Turning the all-girls school into a military academy surprisingly doesn’t change much. Some scenes are very similar, like the long-distance call at the phone switchboard (though Jerry ups the humor with his nutty dancing and a voice-dubbing stunt). I’m sure there’s some auteurist reason why I should prefer the original to the remake, but sorry, I sorta don’t.

This came out a full decade before Ginger Rogers had a lot more fun playing a little girl in Monkey Business (another movie comparison which does this film no favors), and TWO decades before Ray Milland acquired his X-RAY EYES. Back in the 40’s he was cast not for the x-ray eyes but because he is an effective leading man, and an exact cross between Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. Wilder sez: “I wrote the part of the major for Cary Grant. I always wanted him in one of my pictures, but it never worked out.”

15-year-old little Lucy would grow up to play the love interest in the remake. Ray’s meddling fiancee (and Lucy’s big sister) was Rita Johnson (The Big Clock, Here Comes Mr. Jordan). The strict colonel (Lucy’s father) was Edward Fielding, who managed to portray military men, doctors, ministers and shopkeepers in over 70 films in the 1940’s despite a fatal heart attack halfway through the decade. Ginger Rogers’ mom, in her only screen appearance, played Ginger Rogers’ mom. Guy who gets a scalp massage at the beginning was Robert Benchley, the Jaws author’s grandfather. The young high-school age kids were actually 22, 21 and 16 (x2). That’s more accurate casting than the remake managed to get. The one familiar-looking boy had played Rudy in Shop Around The Corner, the kid the shop owner takes out for Christmas dinner in the final scene.

And what do I know about Billy Wilder? Not very much! Just enough to see plot parallels between this and Some Like It Hot. Saw none of the cynicism for which he’s known, but Wilder explains: “I was very careful. I set out to make a commercial picture I wouldn’t be ashamed of, so my first picture as a director wouldn’t be my last.”

Internet says the screenwriter invented the bad pickup line “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”.

An ugly, gray horrors-of-war movie. The twist here is that instead of simply running through all the reasons why war is hell, this one brings sex into the picture - not just the usual love and desire stuff, but a variety of situations dealing with sexual need during wartime.

Our titular heroine (Nishi) is a nurse in an army hospital in 1939 during Japan’s war with China. She spends some of her time at a base hospital where men with illnesses and minor injuries rest up before they are sent home or back into combat, and the rest of her time at an understaffed camp hospital at the front dealing with a constant flow of critically wounded men, fatalities and amputations. She is raped by a soldier who is sent back into combat to his death as punishment. She sexually services a man who lost both arms and can’t take care of himself anymore (but he commits suicide soon afterwards). Then she ends up at the front in love with a morphine-addicted surgeon, in a platoon where the local “comfort women” are spreading cholera to the troops, but the troops keep visiting them anyway. Mishi manages to get Dr. Okagi off the morphine so he can make love to her, but the place is destroyed in a Chinese raid a few hours later, everyone killed but Nishi. She finds Okagi’s body on the ground. The end!

A pretty interesting movie, definitely not the kind of war film I’ve seen before. Compassionate, but also somewhat hopeless given the surroundings and situations. I liked it, but can’t say I’m itching to watch it again.

Nishi is played by Ayako Wakao, who starred in a bunch of Masumura’s films (Seisaku’s Wife, Manji, A Wife Confesses, A False Student, Afraid To Die) as well as Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (played the money-lending girl who opens her own shop at the end) and A Geisha, Ozu’s Floating Weeds, and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Dr. Okagi appeared in Suzuki’s Underworld Beauty. And the armless guy starred in Oshima’s Naked Youth.

J. Rosenbaum:
“Roughly contemporary with M*A*S*H (as in Altman’s film, scenes of war-front surgery provide a corollary to Vietnam), it sometimes suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme–how to preserve one’s humanity amid impossible circumstances–but its ethics are considerably more developed.”

J. Sharp for Midnight Eye:

Made for Daiei Studios, Masumura’s stark wartime drama, an adaptation of a novel by Arima Yorichika, is one of the handful of films made in the mid 60s dealing with the personal experiences of those involved in the war, including the same director’s previous Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai Yakuza, 1965) and Seijun Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute (Shunpuden, 1966). Both Masumura and Suzuki had been active towards the end of the war, and both used their experience to examine the conflicts and interpersonal dramas that arose on the frontline in order to question such concepts as duty and loyalty to their country. To this end both directors approach their subject using strong female protagonists whose role in the war is often forgotten, with Story of a Prostitute focusing on a group of prostitutes sent out to the frontline to service the soldiers, and Red Angel almost making analogous use of the nurses (although Masumura’s film does feature a group of prostitutes and takes pains to point out that the nurses duty is not the same as theirs!) In a world gone mad it is these female characters who provide the only source of stability and comfort, even morality, whilst the shell-shocked, emasculated walking wounded dream of returning home to their families.

This will be one to watch again when I know more French, or just when I’ve lived longer.

-
Chapter 1(a), “Toutes les histoires” (”All the (Hi)stories”)

Dedicated to Mary Meerson (Langlois’s companion who helped run the Cinematheque) and Monica Tegelaar (producer of Raoul Ruiz’s On Top of the Whale).

IMDB says parts one and two came out in the late 80’s, and the rest followed in the late 90’s. This one seemed more like a 50-minute trailer than an episode. Montage of archive footage, still and moving, edited and faded and superimposed and blended together. The footage includes scenes from films of course (rules of the game, great dictator, day of wrath, germany year zero) but lots of stills (producers, directors, Thalberg, Hughes) and paintings. Lots of focus on World War II, and ending with that Germany Year Zero segment, the whole thing came off as vaguely depressing. Maybe that’s why it took ten years to get the rest of the episodes made?

Three images overlapped: (1) Rita Hayworth dancing, (2) a drawing of Howard Hughes in his final days, (3) the witch-burning scene in Day of Wrath.

-
Chapter 1(b), “Une Histoire seule” (”A Single (Hi)story”)

Dedicated to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha (Brazilian director of Black God, White Devil).

Surprising number of references to Godard’s own films. Tons and tons of stuff I am not getting because I don’t know much French (I pick up half the film titles and some of the short sayings printed onscreen) or art history, and haven’t seen most of the films. Should’ve known better than to think part two would be more straightforward or make more sense. Even if I don’t know what it’s saying, I still get interesting juxtapositions of images and nice shots from great films seen and unseen, which is enough to keep me watching. Sounded like I heard some Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond.

-
Chapter 2(a), “Seule le cinema” (”Only Cinema”)

Dedicated to Armand J. Cauliez (a writer, published a book on Jacques Tati) and Santiago Alvarez (Cuban filmmaker).

Fast-forward a decade. Same ol’ thing here, but two big changes:

(1) Not just montage of pre-existing footage edited with Godard in his study anymore. An actual actor, Julie Delpy, reading poetry. Also an interview with Godard by another guy (couldn’t be Serge Daney - he died in ‘92), 90% untranslated.

(2) Me getting a little tired and pondering making my own historie(s) of cinema instead

-
Chapter 2(b), “Fatale beauté” (”Deadly Beauty”)

Dedicated to Michele Firk (film writer turned militant radical, killed herself in Guatemala to escape arrest) and Nicole Ladmiral (actress in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest).

Sabine Azema (above) recits some poetry, much of it untranslated. Godard types at his typewriter some more. I listened in the headphones and a background noise (JLG’s pet bird?) frightened me. Something about photography being invented in black and white as the colors of mourning to note the death of reality. And something about women, and murder, and Band of Outsiders and Rancho Notorious and Gone With The Wind. Good to see that Godard appreciates Tom Waits.

-
Chapter 3(a), “La Monnaie de l’absolu” (”The Coin of the Absolute”)

Dedicated to Gianni Amico (Italian filmmaker, assistant director on Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution and Godard’s Le Vent d’est & James Agee (film writer, champion of Chaplin’s Monseiur Verdoux, writer of Night of the Hunter and The African Queen)

or part 3A, the war and futility episode. WWII talk leads into an appreciation of Italian Neorealism and the most clearly presented introduction to a certain aspect of cinema and history thus far in the series. Says that Italian cinema in the 40’s and 50’s changed film like Manet (the godfather of modern art) changed painting. Closes with a nice montage of Italian film (minus too much onscreen block text and crazed fade transitions) set to a Richard Cocciante song. This episode has a clear point and meaning and narrative arc and supporting arguments… I don’t understand. Maybe the others have too, and I’ve been missing it. Juliette Binoche appears with Alain Cuny (of Les Amants and La Dolce Vita), who died in 1994, four years before this episode aired. Julie Delpy looked mighty young in her segment too - maybe all this footage was shot in the 80’s and not finished editing until ten years later.

-
Chapter 3(b), “Une Vague Nouvelle” (”A New Wave”)

Dedicated to Frederic C. Froeschel (head of a cine-club in Paris, 1950) and Naum Kleiman (Russian film critic, director of the Moscow Film Museum).

“Becker, Rossellini, Melville, Franju, Jacques Demy, Truffaut. You knew them.”
“Yes, they were my friends.”

A personal episode, sometimes celebratory but more usually melancholy. Godard himself is the guest speaker this time, but he’s actually into it, not just distractedly reciting behind his typewriter. These things never quite seem to begin, the opening titles still playing when the episode is half over. Some 400 Blows, some Henri Langlois, more goings-on about the death of cinema. What, is video the new art form?

-
Chapter 4(a), “Le Côntrole de l’univers” (”The Control of the Universe”)

Dedicated to Michel Delahaye (actor in Out 1, Alphaville, plenty more) and Jean Domarchi (1950’s, 60’s Cahiers critic, had a bit part in Breathless).

Another really good one. Probably not coincidentally, all the voiceover on this one is translated, so I was able to understand it. Lots of voiceover - it’s getting to be more of an essay lately and less of a purely visual slideshow. Still plenty of that dull video text, white-on-black block lettering. The thing always drags a little when JLG decides to move those words around the screen for thirty seconds before returning to the film clips. When there were clips, it seems half of them were by Hitchcock, “our century’s greatest creator of forms.”

-
Chapter 4(b), “Les Signes parmi nous” (”The Signs Among Us”)

Dedicated to Anne-Marie Miéville (one of Godard’s collaborators since 1976) and to Godard himself.

I hope nobody stumbles across this entry hoping to learn about the film, because I really doubt I understood most of it. More more more war images in this section (have I mentioned that the film is obsessed with WWII?) and more ponderings on love, death, art, history, man, the state, and Charlie Chaplin. And it seems to me that Godard is terribly depressed. Anyway, here’s a good bit of the voiceover from the last eight minutes:

I need a day to tell the history of a second…
I need an eternity to tell the history of a day.

We can do everything except the history of what we are doing. It is my privilege to film and live in France as an artist. Nothing like a country that every day walks further down the path of its own inexorable decline.

I am the fugitive enemy of our times. The totalitarianism of the present as applied mechanically every day more oppressive on a planetary scale. This faceless tyranny that effaces all faces for the systematic organization of the unified time of the moment. This global, abstract tyranny which I try to oppose from my fleeting point of view. Because I try, because I try in my compositions to show an ear that listens to time. And try to make it heard and to surge into the future.

The only thing that survives from one epoch is the art from it created. No activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended. Then, this art will disappear. Thus, the art of the 19th century - cinema - made the 20th century exist, which barely existed.

Cinema feared nothing of others or of itself. It wasn’t sheltered from time. It was the shelter of time. Yes, image is happiness. But beside it dwells nothingness. The power of the image is expressed only by invoking nothingness. It is perhaps worth adding: The image, able to negate nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. The image is light. Nothingness, immensely heavy. The image gleams. Nothingness is that thickness where all is veiled. The most fleeting moments possess an illustrious past. If a man passed through paradise in his dreams and received a flower as proof of passage, and on waking, found this flower in his hand… What is there to say? I was that man.

Thought I’d watch the Cannes 1988 press conference, but after the first three minutes (”video artist” Godard passionately attacking television) it all turns French.

From a belatedly-discovered interview between JLG and J. Rosenbaum:

JR: Yes, but it also isn’t legally acknowledged that films and videos can be criticism.
JLG: It’s the only thing video can be — and should be.

With that strong distinction between film and video, it occurs to me that JLG considers Histoire(s) as being about cinema but not being a work of cinema itself. I watch Breathless on my TV and say I’ve seen one Godard movie, then I watch Histoire(s) on my TV and say I’ve seen two Godard movies. JLG should like to smack me for such a thought.

Wow, this was a lot better than I thought it’d be. Why did nobody like it… because it was fakey or obvious? Aren’t all B. De P. films fakey and obvious? But they way he puts those fakey pieces together, and their very in-your-face obviousness (or audacity) make for compelling pictures. This seems like an angry, hastily-assembled statement against the war, but at least it is an angry statement against the war, and against injustice, and one which is interestingly different from anything else out there - attention-grabbing, appealingly watchable, and truthful even as it makes stuff up.

Firstly, it does not seem documentary-like, even when the camera work is handheld. Very purposeful movements, good framing, not pretending like this is Really Happening To Real People, and this style is a great success. It’s a nice blend of the Blair Witch / Diary of the Dead aesthetic with some actual professional photography. I guess after YouTube, studios think people want to see crappy handheld home-movies a la Cloverfield, but De Palma, in not making his camera work “realistic,” has made a fakey movie, but an improved one. Also by using this documentary approach, he has a built-in excuse to employ his signature long takes, a stylistic bit that nobody seems to be commenting on.

Angel Salazar unwittingly filming his own kidnapping:

At most half of the movie is this soldier’s handheld “doc” of his war experiences… the rest is made of leisurely intercut segments from similarly visually-enhanced sources: a French-made documentary on a checkpoint, a security camera, a legal video deposition, news footage, and websites with streaming video (!). It’s an interesting new way of incorporating the scary internet into a feature film… really just a website cut-and-pasted into the middle of the movie. The point being that each of these sources either progresses the story by giving us more information than a single source could provide, or gives us a new view or perspective on events we’ve seen.

Movie ends with “real” photos from the war, which have been censored by order of the cowardly film studio (HDNet/Magnolia)’s legal department, closes with a staged photo by B de P, I don’t know why exactly.

from the French doc:

BdP: “The US government has co-opted the Fourth Estate. It made the networks buy its spun, whitewashed version of the facts. The government has made sure there are no images that are too upsetting. We don’t see the soldiers being hurt or killed. And we don’t see Iraqi civilians being hurt or killed. I’ve been watching this incursion into the Middle East and, being a director, I naturally wonder: Why are they leaving certain things out, and where are they? Even in the case of my movie, where I tried to get these images in, I got redacted.”

A redacted photo:

I see nothing to complain about here. This movie shouldn’t have died like it did at the box office (I definitely would’ve gone if it hadn’t disappeared so quickly) and it shouldn’t be getting so many anti-American accusations by people who haven’t watched it. It’s specifically a film by an American about American troops killing the people they are supposed to protect, and that’s dangerous idealogical territory to be treading, so who we needed to tell the story was a filmmaker who walks hard like De Palma, who can’t (judging from an interview I just read) seem to tell when he’s being provocative or embellishing the truth, and who is well used to backlash. Not being an actual documentary, I didn’t find it as heartbreaking as The War Tapes (though they have similar endings), watched it with a more artistic remove, but from what little I’ve read in the media and Redacted-related articles and interviews, the story is real and is worth telling. Better to tell it now while it’s still happening (the soldiers were actually just acquitted, no surprise there) than to wait 60 years when it’s safe enough to make a Flags of Our Fathers prestige-pic out of it. It’s too bad the people who haven’t heard the story aren’t gonna see it here. Better luck next time, Mr. De Palma.

Angel’s helmet-mounted night-cam shoots conflicted compadre McCoy:

Great films and presentation, a great time. I’ll let the pamphlet say the rest:

Co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. Tied with “Silent Light” for the jury prize at Cannes.

Beautifully illustrated and well-animated story, alternately light and heavy, following author/director Marjane’s life from the mid-late 70’s to the mid 90’s. I have to grudgingly admit that the people who say the second half of the film isn’t as good are kinda right, but overall it’s such a wonderful movie, the kind that I wish I could make everybody watch: an artistic movie promoting peace, cross-cultural understanding and individual integrity. I love that the phrase “the price of freedom” is invoked not to justify the loss of lives in a “freedom fighting” war, but as a personal cost, that Marjane’s final flight from Iran to France for the sake of her personal freedom will mean never seeing her grandmother again.

Since I don’t know anything about Iranian history or politics, here’s a timeline combining this movie’s events with stuff from wikipedia and IMDB:

1921 - Qajar Dynasty ends, the “good” Shah is in poweru
1941 - Shah’s son takes control
1950s- new Shah becomes “increasingly autocratic”
1963 - “The House Is Black”
1969 - “The Cow”
1969 - Marjane Satrapi born
1970 - Kiarostami’s first short film
1974 - “The Traveler”
1977 - “The Report”
1979 - Shah leaves the country, Iran becomes an Islamic Republic under supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini
1980 - Iraq invades Iran
1984 - Marjane goes to Vienna
1987 - “Where Is The Friend’s Home?”
1987 - “The Cyclist”
1988 - Iraq/Iran war ends
1989 - Khomeini issues fatwa against Salman Rushdie
1989 - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei becomes supreme leader
1989 - Marjane gets married in Tehran
1990 - “Close-Up”
1994 - Marjane gets divorced
1995 - “The White Balloon”
1997 - “Taste of Cherry”
1998 - “The Apple”
1999 - “The Wind Will Carry Us”
2000 - “The Circle”
2000 - “Persepolis” book published
2001 - “Kandahar”
2002 - “Ten”
2005 - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is president (still under Khamenei)
2006 - “Offside”

I hate to be so down on the movies Katy picks, but I can’t help myself any more than she can pretend to enjoy watching “ace in the hole” or “pennies from heaven”.

This felt like an obvious and uninteresting adaptation of an alright story about the partitioning of India and creation of Pakistan as symbolized by a conveniently diverse group of friends in Lahore and as seen through the eyes of a young innocent.

The young innocent is rich-girl Lenny-baby (of a neutral parsee family) whose hindu caretaker Ayah (a cover girl from Fire) is one of the friends. Also in there are muslims Hassan The Masseur (guy from Bollywood/Hollywood) and Dil The Ice Candy Man (Lagaan), a sympathetic sikh whose name I can’t find right now, and Lenny’s cousin Adi who has an arranged marriage to a short old man.

I took it as a history/culture lesson, though I had to ask Katy lots of questions because this movie doesn’t spell out as much as Water did for the uninitiated. Had the feeling of a postcard yearning for old peaceful times, so I didn’t see the violent atrocities of the second half coming… turns into a giant bummer.

peaceful days:

friendly chat:

an ice-candy betrayal, baby:

Movie is set on Sunday Nov. 16, 1981.

The President: “Screw church.”

The Vietnam War was a show for the Russians, which we intended to lose, just to prove that we had the will to sacrifice troops for no good reason. General Burt Lancaster knows this and is going to force the President of the United States to publically admit it on the air. This is our premise.

Wait, it gets better. Burt will achieve this goal by taking over a nuclear missile station and threatening to launch nukes at Russia unless the President obeys.

Burt breaks in:

What goes wrong: Burt doesn’t count on the very evil military (who stay in power because of their legacy of secrets) being willing to kill his hostage, the President (who hadn’t even known about the vietnam conspiracy).

President Charles Durning (Waring Hudsucker, also in The Sting and Hi Mom):

Lancaster’s buds are Burt Young & Paul Winfield. Young gets shot in an almost-successful anti-Burt operation towards the end, and Winfield is mostly on Burt’s side but manages to reason with him a little, convince him of the futility of launching the missiles.

Winfield, of White Dog:

I don’t know a whole lot about Aldrich. This seemed a kinda low-budget effort, with a 70’s TV-movie look to it, except in the hugely stylish split-screens which sometimes divided into three or four simultaneous actions or angles.

But wait, have I mentioned that Thee Great Richard Widmark plays Burt’s nemesis General MacKenzie?

Widmark does go to church, seen below with his wife, one of the only appearances of a woman in the film.

This was the final film of Charles McGraw (below), star of “The Narrow Margin”, appeared in “The Birds” and “The Defiant Ones” and “A Boy and His Dog”, and previously appeared with Burt Lancaster over thirty years earlier in “The Killers”.

Other things:

Paul Winfield: “Jive-ass honky!”

Widmark’s pager goes off in church, back when that was socially awkward rather than business as usual.

Multiple product-placements for Coke.

Burt: “Gentlemen, we are now a superpower.”

Starts with the ending, no opening credits.

Written by Aaron Sorkin, dude who made “West Wing” and “A Few Good Men”. Director of “Closer”. Where have Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts been? Only in one movie each for the past three years. Phil S. Hoffman stole the show just like everyone said. I watched all three of his 2007 movies in a two-week period, and would say he was the most likeable in this one. Tom’s assistant Amy Adams was the princess in “Enchanted” and a naked girl he almost has sex with was Emily Blunt from that fashion comedy.

Story of senator Charlie Hanks Wilson who, with the support of FBI nerd Hoffman and crush christian society woman Roberts, gets congress to eventually funnel a half billion dollars into arms and training for afghani forces to fight back soviet forces and thus turn the tide in the cold war towards the defeat of communism. It’s an engrossing and exciting story even though it’s just a buncha guys talking fast at each other and making phone calls, and the movie gets its reason to exist in the last few minutes. Half a billion for arms, then a year later Charlie can’t get one million approved for rebuilding schools in Afghanistan.

“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… And then we fucked up the end game.”

Another movie with a killer ending. There were a bunch of those this year. Throws a ton of information your way but doesn’t quite connect all the dots for you, and avoids mentioning in postscript anything about our current Iraq/Afghan situation. Okay, so you’d have to be some kinda “August Rush” loving moron to not draw those connections immediately by yourself, but still Katy appreciated its restraint. I think Paul is complaining that it didn’t go far enough in criticizing the American war-waging machine, but I think it’s pretty awesome to drop this movie right before the presidential caucuses, in the middle of award season, starring three huge oscar winners, with an extremely relevant message to our wars in the middle east, and besides I’m not sure that Paul even saw it. I guess “Lions For Lambs” tried the exact same thing, but I hear it sucked. And I know the western union quote about message movies, but this week I’m into the idea that a mass-market movie should have something to say besides “look at all the pretty killing”, which is why I’m starting to think I like “Juno” better than “No Country For Old Men”.

This and “Enchanted” were the first movies I saw in ‘08, but I’m behind on my journal entries so stuff like “The Savages” is showing up in January.

Katy liked it too.

BIG UPDATE: I got harshly corrected by the film group on this one, and now have to add that Charlie Wilson’s War (and everyone involved in its making) is fascist. And I’m not so sure that I like Juno anymore either. Bleah.

Less of a feel-good-about-war movie than a salute to war veterans, with Bing Crosby and his partner Danny Kaye (of Secret Life of Walter Mitty) coming across their old general by chance and staging a christmastime salute to him with all the old guys. Movie was pretty okay with good enough music, didn’t feel as lightweight as most of the musicals we’ve seen but also not as exciting / high-quality. Paramount’s first widescreen movie, funny since so much of it takes place indoors on stages.

The guys fall for a sister act that sings about being sisters (like in Young Girls of Rochefort, but the American sister song isn’t half as good as the French) played by glorious Rosemary Clooney (one of her only other film roles besides Red Garters) and Vera-Ellen (of some other Danny Kaye movies, not much else). V-E had to wear high collars in the movie to cover her neck which was gross-looking from anorexia. The ol’ general Dean Jagger played the sheriff in Fuller’s Forty Guns.

Kaye’s part was written for Sinatra to reunite the duo from “Holiday Inn”, the movie that premiered the Irving Berlin song “White Christmas” 12 years earlier. They even used sets from “Holiday Inn”, which I’m starting to suspect might be a better movie. Highest-grossing film of 1954, oscar-nom for Berlin’s new “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”. I preferred “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” This was Michael Curtiz’s 25th movie since Casablanca - he doesn’t seem a very distinctive or celebrated director. Shot by a guy named Loyal, written by a guy named Melvin and two guys named Norman.

Beautiful Keira K. (domino) lives in a fancy house with her writer kid-sister Briony (globe-nom Saoirse Ronan, appearing in the next Peter Jackson movie) and mom Harriet Walter (from Katy’s Pride & Prejudice, not Wright’s) and older brother (?) Patrick Kennedy from Bleak House. College hottie James McAvoy lives in a little house on their property with mom Brenda Blethyn (Wright’s P&P, Little Voice). The two are in love but (gasp) from different social classes. Will they defy society and marry anyway? Of course.

Wait, no. They’ve long been infatuated with each other, and during the summer when they are completely exploding for each other, a visitor to the estate rapes another visitor, and young peeping Briony tells the cops it was McAvoy, leading to his arrest and getting sent to war to die instead of going back to college and marrying his true love, who also went to war and died, but as a nurse. Briony also becomes a nurse (now played by spooky Romola Garai, Wilbur’s love interest in “Amazing Grace”) then an author. Fifty years later (now Vanessa Redgrave of “Cradle Will Rock” and “The Devils”) she’s on a TV interview show explaining that her new book is an attempt at atonement, the story of the long life the two lovers could have had together if not for her young meddling.

I loved the movie, beautiful and sad. I might just think it’s pretty good if I see it a second time, since my expectations were pretty low before the first time (period literary adaptation starring McAvoy, who was not good at all in Last King of Scotland), but this time I was enthralled. Sound design / music used typewriter key effects as percussion, my favorite part.

Guy from Slate says the epic single-shot at the beach is unnecessary and showoffy. Robbie on Reverse Shot calls it “tonally awkward” and says: “Wright’s grandstanding in this sequence bespeaks of a decidedly disjointed approach, as well as disappoints after his gloriously measured 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which smartly employed the long take as a coherent, unifying device.” Elsewhere I’d read that the shot is there to show off (even Wright admits he was showing off) the enormity of war, to take it beyond our doomed male protagonist, open up the world of the film beyond the intensely personal closed-off world of the first half. Some part of that latter explanation clicked for me, because towards the end of the shot I’d decided that McAvoy wouldn’t make it out alive. Tonally consistent or not, the shot is terrific on its own.

“Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other… I guess they can’t own up to what they usually are: a federation of worse oppressors than the last bunch of oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves freedom-fighters.”

Funny, a riot of a movie, and the most I’ve enjoyed watching Nic Cage since “The Rock” (though I hear he was awesome in Wicker Man remake).

Nic has no morals and neither does the film. Rather than preaching all Hotel Rwanda and Last King Of Scotland on us, the movie takes Nic’s side, making its violence funny and nihilistic, just an unfortunate side effect of business as usual. The downfall comes as expected… Nic loses his uncle (blown to bits), then his brother (shot down trying to destroy some weapons) and his wife (leaves him, takes the kid) and finally gets arrested for illegal arms dealing. But the movie subverts expectation one last time by having a powerful general (based on Ollie North) set Nic free, because the U.S. armed forces need people like him to do things that they can’t be caught doing themselves.

Funny I was thinking how it’s an all-male movie with a token part for the wife when she comes out with this dialogue: “I feel like all I’ve done my whole life is be pretty. I mean, all I’ve done is be born! I’m a failed actress, a failed artist… I’m not much good as a mother. Come to think of it, I’m not even that pretty anymore.”

Pretty stylin’ movie, nice CG-assisted intro following a bullet from factory to a shocking war-zone head-shot. The movie is amoral to make its point, but it doesn’t expect its viewers to be.

You hear about “cult films” and films with “a cult following” a lot, but where are these cults? Is there a basement in Des Moines where ten or twelve people get together monthly to watch Richard Elfman’s “Forbidden Zone”? Maybe a club in Montreal that meets at a different member’s living room every wednesday night to watch a different Mario Bava movie from one guy’s prize collection of DVDs and bootleg cassettes? An Alejandro Jororowsky society in Mexico City that watches a 16mm print of El Topo once a year followed by a ritual sacrifice of farm animals?

If these movie cults literally exist, I just hope there’s one for Werner Herzog.

“Little” Dieter Dengler was about seven when WWII ended. He lived through the rebuilding of Germany, when people were boiling and eating wallpaper to get the nutrients that were supposed to be in the glue. Later became a blacksmith’s apprentice and worked at a machine shop. Got toughened the hell up by all these experiences and finally left town for the first time ever to head to America and become a pilot at age 18. Joined the air force, worked shit jobs for a few years, then quit to get a college degree, become a citizen and join the navy where he finally started flying, which is all he ever wanted to do. Got sent right away to Vietnam, and first mission he’s shot down and captured over Laos. It gets hairier from there, with deadly escapes and all the adventures that Herzog’s upcoming “Rescue Dawn” will be recreating. Died in Feb 2001, and there’s a “postscript” scene of his funeral on the DVD.

Dieter lived an exceptional life, went through very extreme ordeals, and had a single driving obsession (to fly), all making him such an obvious Werner Herzog protagonist that, a decade after shooting this documentary, Herzog is returning to the same story with Rescue Dawn.

Never one to make a “straight” documentary, interviewing Dieter and his war buddies at a neutral location, zooming in slowly on old photos and showing stock footage… no, Herzog does all that, but he also takes Dieter back to Laos. Herzog “helps” Dieter re-enact his own capture and imprisonment with props, locations and some willing Laotian men. What a terrible, wonderful idea. Dieter seems totally up for it, never breaks down into post-trauma sobbing sessions, just reports his history matter-of-factly, with Herzog’s voice occasionally coming in to ask questions or observe in his godlike way.

(Grizzly Man connection) Dieter: “Duane, my friend, he was gone, and from then on my motions, my progress, became mechanical. In fact, I couldn’t care less if I would live or die. But then later on, there was this bear, this beautiful bear that was following me. It was circling me in fact sometimes. It was gone and I missed it. It was just like a dog, it was just like a pet. Of course I knew this bear was there, he was waiting to eat me. When I think about it, this bear meant death to me. And it is really ironic. That’s the only friend I had at the end, was death.”

But… Herzog: “Dieter took an early retirement from the armed forces and became a civilian test pilot. He survived four more crashes and flies to this day. Death did not want him.”

Completely awesome movie, short and gripping and moving. I might not join the Herzog cult (they’d never stop talking about the relationship between man and nature, and they probably all have dangerous and bizarre obsessions) but I’ll sure watch more of his films.

Sooooo bleak. Not the normal kind of resistance movie. Their struggle is necessary but hopeless. Movie opens with our main guy escaping from a camp, then having the guy who ratted on him killed. Many small triumphs and large defeats later, we end with the gang shooting one of their own then driving away as the titles tell us how each of them later got killed in the struggle.

Hardly any non-diegetic music, superbly shot, dark and dreary but not in a tiring way, more of a matter-of-fact “this is how things are” straightforward way.

These are not heroes in the regular movie sense of the word. Theirs is not a glorious fight… it’s hardly a fight at all, more a struggle for survival. The problem is that it would be easier to survive by living ordinary lives, by cooperating with the nazi regime, by ratting on their fellows, by doing any of a number of things they refuse to do, by giving in. The movie is about how much it can suck to be moral, to stick to your convictions. While those in the resistance who survived the war can’t have much to be proud of… unlike most residents of their country, they also can’t have much to be ashamed of. A great, great movie. Nice contrast to the portrait of resistance to nazi occupation in “Black Book” this year.