Gutless Under Cliché.

Yes, I know it’s trying to be inspiring and heroic and poignant, but COURAGE UNDER FIRE is one of the most blatantly gutless movies ever made. About a soldier investigating whether a downed female United States helicopter pilot in Desert Storm deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor. So I ask you: in which universe will America ever make a movie where a Medal of Honor is investigated and NOT awarded?

So it’s a foregone conclusion – all the mystery and mayhem and maybes are simply wasting our time more than the actual war this story was set in – as it leads inexorably to the melodramatic military funeral, the flags, saluting, tears of the family, proud shiny buttons and white gloves, the flyover with one plane breaking formation, and that bilious, bleating orchestra swell. And the Medal. The End. Cry me a river; cry me a patently meaningless award, military swine.

Then the coda: the investigating soldier visits pilot’s grave, salutes grave, tiny flag, voiceover of dead pilot to American Pie Mom and Dad, talking of the Big Push and hero hero hero hero hero hero another blithering orchestra swell I’m going to vomit…

Denzel Washington is the investigating soldier, with demons of his own. (Well, they’re not really demons; they’re roiling stabs of conscience he feels for stupidly shooting one of his own tanks during a skirmish, killing his own men in the hilariously black euphemism “friendly fire,” and then having the military cover-up his blunder.) And whenever he has visions of that po’ boy he fricasseed in that tank (Mmm! Soldierboy, the other white meat!), he heads straight for the alcohol… uh, cos he’s a hero, see.

When he’s asked to investigate whether Captain Karen Walden (Meg Ryan) is worthy of receiving the Medal of Honor for “courage under fire,” the story ends right there. Of course she’s deserving of it. She’s the first female officer recommended, she’s regarded as a hero for sacrificing her life for her men–and she’s Meg Ryan. As if the movie would go to all the trouble setting up her heroism and feminism and Ryanism and NOT award her the medal.

And every cliché in the military lexicon is thrown at us like grenades lobbed into foxholes:

• the tragic family that Denzel has to leave behind to “do his duty for his country” and investigate this chick; make that tragic “perfect” family–with four kids, none of them fight or scream or whine, his wife is totally supportive, no one is on drugs or getting pregnant or having affairs… yawn;
• Denzel is damaged goods, investigating soldiers who are damaged goods;
• Meg’s selflessness, the care for her boys, the tough love, the noble leader, the smart tactician–who was she? William Wallace or Jesus Christ?;
• the novice (Matt Damon), the toughguy (Lou Diamond Phillips), the hero-worshipper (Tim Guinee) and all the other bumboys under her command, like the Benetton passengers of SPEED;
• the hospitalized guy (Seth Gilliam) whose seen one battle too many;
• the military cover-up (common practice, we must assume, for all those dolts who lose their heads in firefights, only rarely exposed as public disgrace like Pat Tillman’s incident);
• everyone’s got Movie PTSD.

Denzel wants to find out “what really happened,” so COURAGE is constructed like a RASHOMON for rednecks, as we see all the alternate flashbacks with a coy Walden, an indecisive Walden and a butch Walden barking orders and trying not to look like a sex object. Not one of the scenarios is ambiguous about her Hero status — no matter if she threw Iraqi babies at walls or defunded the G.I. Bill. If we can call football players heroes, and people who jumped from the Twin Towers heroes, then this chopper pilot must be a shoo-in, so I ask again: what compels viewers to spend 120 minutes pretending there’s any doubt?

Denzel visits Walden’s helicopter bumboys, who all give differing accounts of My Night In The Desert With Captain Walden. Diamond Phillips claims he was the toughguy, as he lies and plies himself with alcohol and commits suicide (cos he’s a hero!); Damon claims Walden was a strategic hardnose, as he admits to being a junkie and afraid to go flying again (cos he’s a hero!); Guinee relates how Walden sacrificed herself for them, even as he reveals how she got them shot down by taking another pass at an Iraqi tank when she could have flown away–cognitive dissonance rules!–while constantly telling his wife to shutup for calling Walden butch (cos he’s a hero!); while Seth Gilliam pounds his medication to numb himself out of the running as a reputable eyewitness (cos he’s a hero, see!).

What’s in it for her bumboys to report that she was a coward? Nothing. But saying she was a HERO makes them vicarious heroes alongside her. Ooo-rah!

And here’s a note to all you military wardogs whose first reaction is to Spock-chop me for “disrespecting” you (such heroes, fighting for my right to have a differing opinion in a free country!): When are you going to realize your own government, who pays you hypocritical lip service, regards you with even less respect than I do? I just consider you deluded and egotistical and sometimes uneducated, while they consider you cannon fodder!

It’s the United States government that fools you into getting your asses shot off for them in the first place; it’s the United States government that refuses you and your family financial benefits when you return from war; it’s the United States government that stop-losses you, reneging on your stipulated leave time, over and over and over again; it’s the United States government that cuts your medical funding; it’s the United States government that evicts your family, that lies about friendly fire, that doesn’t provide armor for you or your vehicles; it’s the United States government that kicks you out for being gay after you’ve dedicated your life to them; it’s the United States government that supposedly trains you for PTSD and then all of you return from war with PTSD (Who are the assholes? You, who are either failing your training, or the government who are failing to train you properly?).

Is that what you bitches call “respect”?

Under fire from your own government, it’s about time you showed some real Courage Under Fire and tell them where to shove it next time they want to exploit you for political gain. That is, unless you really are as dumb as they consider you to be.

Ooo-rah!

END

In defiance of stereotypes.

In the movie KNOCKED UP, five Jewish friends trying to score in a night club talk about the credibility of Jews being raised by one man: “If any of us is gonna score tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in MUNICH.”

Soon they’ll be talking the same way about Daniel Craig in DEFIANCE…

1941: during World War II, three Jewish brothers in German-occupied Poland lead a band of Jewish rebels and refugees in fleeing the Holocaust and fighting back against Ze Chermans.

From a book by Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Edward Zwick directs DEFIANCE, following the Bielski brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber), as they lead over 1,000 refugees to safety in the Belarussian forests. Jamie Bell plays their younger brother, Asael.

It’s Based On a True Story. But seriously – who cares? Besides the descendants of those refugees. Haven’t we exhausted the compelling “true stories” from World War II? We’re into a generation of viewers whose knowledge of WWII comes from the History Channel and boring school teachers; they’re more familiar with al Qaeda, Iraq and maybe the 1990 Gulf War. To this younger generation, The Berlin Wall was something that Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down; and Pink Floyd did that concert there after the fact. How uninterested can they possibly be in the tribulations of a few Jews in 1941 Europe?

Well, I guess that’s why Daniel Craig is so hot. To draw in the target audience of 19 year old girls. Who will be followed by 21 year old boys.

Best thing about DEFIANCE is its ruthlessness. Tuvia mercilessly – and very satisfactorily – executes the Germans who killed his parents. Yet he tells brother Zus “We must not become like them.” I guess he means they must not take joy in their killings, as they both seek out and execute all the Jewish traitors to their cause. Revenge is sweet, poison and all.

It is great to see Jews fighting back for once in a war movie. Up to now, the image of the war Jew has been Auschwitz victims, sunken faces, long woolen overcoats, crumpled hats, queuing for gas chambers. DEFIANCE gives us sexyboys with machine guns, muscles and mojo. Not whining about their constant persecution or their bad gout. No lawyers and bignoses and funny hat wearers, but warriors leading a bunch of lawyers and bignoses and funny hat wearers. Not mournfully sitting around for God to deliver them, bellyaching prophecies of a chosen one who would bring balance to the Force (as a large contingent do, cowering hidden in the city, led by Mark Margolis).

The Bielski brothers are movers and shakers who deliver all these stereotypes out of the defeated city, build a forest community, ally with Russian resistance fighters, cut down troublemakers in their midst, and mow down Germans with guns blazing.

DEFIANCE suffers for being too far removed from our sensibilities. I guess a patriotic Jew would find it inspirational, but it is just one basic idea stretched over two hours: furtively hide, shoot Germans, furtively hide, shoot Germans, furtively hide, shoot Germans… okay, two basic ideas.

If Jesus had been this badass, we’d all be speaking Aramaic…

END

Ebony and Ivory. Living together in perfect harmony.

A Rough in the Diamond.

The greed of the human animal is such a compelling thing that even decrying that greed will only feed it. Such is the paradox facing Edward Zwick‘s powerful BLOOD DIAMOND, a movie set in the west African country of Sierra Leone in 1999, when Revolutionary United Front rebels took over the nation’s capital, using diamonds mined by slave labor as their civil war sledgehammer, to finance their war against the government.

Though it is against the horrors perpetrated by the rebels and their leveraging of “blood diamonds,” the movie recreates their atrocities so well that it will rake in millions on the depiction of those atrocities. Audiences have recently given Mel Gibson grief over the gratuitous bloodletting in his movies, yet when BLOOD DIAMOND blasts into a shattering killing euphoria every twenty minutes almost on cue, do those same critics hold their tongues because DIAMOND supposedly portrays a real conflict?

Cucumber carats.

Written by Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell, we are shown boys recruited by the RUF, armed with AK-47s, mindlessly blowing away citizens, we see arms being lopped off, sudden shootings in the head and wild slayings of innocents; knowledge of the Sierra Leone civil conflict might lend a context to the violence, but its acceptance as an ostensible necessary element in this movie says something about our violent species. Is Gibson’s violence gratuitous because it depicts societies far removed from our modern world, and is DIAMOND’s violence “noble” because it is just across the pond? Like Mel’s APOCALYPTO, we are witness to a people destroying themselves from within. Over greed.

Slinking beneath the radar of the turmoil is diamond smuggler, Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio). For this role, Leo does what most women do who want to be taken seriously – women like George Michael, Ashton Kutcher and Joey Fatone – he grows a goatee. It doesn’t help. He’s still as pretty as sunset on the French Riviera. But he’s hard – the hardest he’s ever played: shooting down guerillas in cold blood, breaking necks, facing down gun-toting madmen, all in a shirt so grimy with his back-sweat that it probably brought a lunatic’s price on e-bay from some squealing tweener. In fact, he’s so hard that if they were to remake TITANIC today, he’d play the iceberg.Though his career performances have been consistently stellar, in burying himself in the role of this Rhodesian-born, white African, through a reasonably legit South African accent (and that badass goatee), for the first time, we lose the sense that we are watching a Movie Star; it could be just some guy pretty enough to be Leo DiCaprio.

Djimon Hounsou is Solomon Vandy, a fisherman whose teen son, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), is kidnapped and brainwashed by the rebels, a la Patty Hearst. While Dia is trained to smoke, drink and mow down villagers every bit as mindlessly as a good ole U.S. Marine, Solomon is enslaved by the rebels to dig for diamonds, one day unearthing a pink rock the size of Freedom. He manages to hide it and escape.

In true mercenary style, Archer hooks up with Solomon, promising to help retrieve Solomon’s son in return for a part of the diamond. (In an unintentionally funny scene, skinny whiteboy Leo asserts he will set the pace cross-country – with a mandingo like Djimon at his side.) Archer brings along smart-mouth American journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly – blessed with the scriptwriter’s snappy repartee that no female ever employs in real life), who is also a merc, offering to help them in return for Archer providing her vital black market info that will make her exposé on blood diamonds pop. So she has no call to give Archer a contemptuous look when she discovers why he is helping Solomon – but in true Female Double Standard idiom, we are meant to forgive Maddy her merc intentions for her doe eyes and half-exposed teats.

Still, though both start out as mercs, Maddy and Archer’s characters eventually bow down to the god of Hollywood Character Arcs, both finding their inner Oprahs before the credits roll.

Keeping the lovebirds apart in the final few minutes, the film might have retained even more cred had it not made them so goddammed HONORABLE. We humans are a gruesome, violent species – watch the screaming satisfaction of Solomon smashing a shovel over his slaver’s head. More than a few people enjoyed that scene with their hands down their pants, me included.

During boardroom scenes (populated by suits pretending concern for the blood spilled over illicit diamonds) we learn of The Kimberley Process, a joint government and diamond industry initiative working to staunch the flow of “conflict diamonds.” But who’s buying this lip service? There is greed up and down the ladder, from the CEOs to the governments, to the rebels and precious stone customers. Archer even outlines quite succinctly how the flow of diamonds through the marketplace is controlled by LEGITIMATE sources to retain the perception of rarity and preciousness.

And though the movie is supposedly an indictment against this black market bingo, I doubt Leo’s goatee, Jennifer’s teats or Djimon’s mandingo will influence real world buyers into only purchasing “conflict-free” gems.

Trying to blow the lid off the illicit diamond trade, Maddy asserts, “People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it was gonna cost a hand.” Wrong. The type of people who insist on diamonds as presents, who think nothing of terrorizing a man into surrendering three months’ salary to placate them with trinkets, hail from a sickly society whose voracious greed ensures blindness regarding methods of procurement. Besides their industrial abrasive and conductivity properties, diamonds are non-utilitarian status symbols, in the general community only serving to make her bleary-eyed and open-thighed upon receipt.

Guess that’s all the utility we need.

END

“Okay, okay, I promise: I won’t mention Scientology again!”

Samurai Hei.

I love sushi. I also love Toshiro Mifune. Guess that makes me a prime candidate for a samurai warrior – at least, that’s all it seems to take for a Westerner in this movie to wear kamishimo and wield katana. Despite that conceptual annoyance, this film does craft a sincere portrayal of an outsider undergoing an assimilation into Samurai culture without Western disparagement or cheap stereotype satire. THE LAST SAMURAI is a grandiose film, sweeping, majestic, inspiring – even WITH Tom Cruise in it.

I am always torn on how to approach films of this ilk; as “historical document” or “man-toy blockbuster”? Ultimately, in attempting to fully appreciate the nuances the filmmakers are trying to impart, I ford this conundrum by spending way too much time researching history and not enough time writing punchlines. I hate myself for my thoroughness.

Thusly – so my research informs me – the late 1800’s saw Japanese businessmen (besotted with Western commerce), convince the Imperial rulers of Japan that the shogunate government and its military rule through shogun and samurai (bakufu) was outdated, and hindering Japan’s financial and technological advancement. To transform feudal Japan into a modern nation, it was necessary to hire Westerners to train their dark age armies in the Way of the Gun.

Poffyhiro Cucuzake
The Last Vegetable

As imbecilic as that may sound (bringing haughty Yankees into a milieu where blade technology had attained a zenith in construction and killing prowess in the hands of the samurai millennia before the Americas were a twinkle in Europe’s eye), the gun did historically overrun the sword as the primary weapon of warfare in Imperial Japan. (We recall Leon’s assessment of weaponry in LEON: long-range rifle for amateurs, knife for a professional; illustrated by simply viewing the honor codes, demeanor and discipline of the blade wielders as opposed to the disheveled and dishonorable rabble populating the gun-toting military.)

This flensing of bakufu came to a head during the reign of Emperor Meiji, by all accounts as naïve, indecisive and ignorant of the best political path for his country as he is portrayed by young Shichinosuke Nakamura in this movie. THE LAST SAUMRAI’s plot centers around one last village of renegade samurai, led by Katsumoto (the leviathan Ken Watanabe, out-acting the movie’s titular “star” by acres), obstructing the Way of the New Government, embodied by Meiji.

Katsumoto was once Meiji’s respected tutor, which compromises Meiji’s decisiveness in annihilating the samurai. During one of their meetings, when Katsumoto accuses the Imperial house of being swayed by Western capitalism, Meiji retorts, “If we are whores, the samurai made us this way” – a notion also intimated in Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI when Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) blames the samurai themselves for making the farmers distrustful of warriors, due to the samurai penchant for accruing land and power as payment for their service (samurai means “to serve”), ultimately gaining political and military primacy. To this day it seems the very people we empower to protect us, attain a level of supremacy over us through the very strength that is the essence of their utility.

To combat Katsumoto’s outlaws, Meiji’s CEOs rescue a burned-out lush of a Civil War vet, Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise), from his Dudley Moore ARTHUR impersonations, to train their “modern” soldiery, a conscription of weaselly, panty-wetting nerds, whose ineptitude in battle rivals that of STAR WARS stormtroopers who trip over twigs and knock themselves unconscious when chased by Ewoks.

Ergo, it is no surprise when Algren’s Benny Hill-ian troops are decimated during their first battle, Algren being taken alive as Katsumoto’s prisoner.

Through the winter months, Algren is imprisoned by the natural isolation of the samurai village. Ostensibly to learn of his enemy’s tactics, Katsumoto engages Algren in philosophical conversations, whereby Algren – begrudgingly at first – comes to learn the Way of Bushido, the samurai honor code, embracing it with a passion when he finds it fills the vacuum in his guts that had turned him to the Way of Dudley Moore’s Arthur. In being an American soldier, he found only shame where he thought there was honor (when ordered to kill women and children); now, in this most unlikely place – the village of his enemy – he is startled to find honor once more in Bushido.

It is during this powerfully moving second act that the movie simultaneously excels and fails: excels because of its quietude, its controlled passages defining Algren’s recapturing of his humanity lost – and fails because Algren becomes too adept too quickly as a samurai swordsman. There is foreshadowing that he is a marksman and like most Civil War officers, he is issued a saber, yet all it takes is one ROCKY montage and he is besting his fencing tutor, Ujio (Hiroyuki Sanada, who bears a marked resemblance to Toshiro Mifune, so was aces in my book from the get-go – giving Tom Cruise a beating with a bokken in the rain upon their first meeting only increased his net worth).

It would have been enough that Algren embrace the creed and find “life in every breath,” but in following the Bushido For Dummies handbook and having Algren become a master swordsman in the space of one winter (and mastering the language to boot), the film unconsciously adopts the superior Westerner stance that it fooled us into believing it was trying to avoid, thereby cheapening the lifelong devotion, dedication and discipline of true samurai.

Algren’s expertise is demonstrated as he battles side by side with Katsumoto and his warriors against ninja assassins. In this fiercely-staged, dynamite battle sequence, viewers may spring a lone tear for the level of loyalty that Algren has unwittingly attained for his captors – but are we really buying that he can hold his own against ninjas trained to be assassins from the cradle?

It is Algren’s immersion in samurai culture that begs the question of who the eponymous “last samurai” actually is. In the final battle scene, Katsumoto and Algren are the last two “samurai” lying wounded. Katsumoto asks Algren to give him a good death, leaving Algren as the last warrior alive representing the samurai village. Would it be too easy to assume that Katsumoto was the “last samurai”? Are the filmmakers trying to be too clever-clever in metaphorically bestowing that honor upon the white devil, Algren?

That ain’t right.

Vainglorious Yankee spirit triumphing once again – cross-culturally no less, when in reality, most white Americans cannot even master their mother tongue, let alone a philosophical, physical and linguistic overhaul into a culture far superior to their Way. From a country where any kind of dedication to a discipline is disparaged; where collective bone-laziness has created such “time-saving” devices as the salad shooter, the leaf-blower, the workout video and exercise machines that end up as clothes racks – THIS is the society whom we are meant to believe can send one of its flock into the heart of a millennia-aged culture and assimilate it in one winter?

Turning Japanese I think I’m turning Japanese oh I don’t THINK so.

When Algren is delivered back into “civilization,” he finds he cannot re-assimilate into the shameful dishabille of his own people, so allies with the samurai against his own army.

Thankfully, no computer warriors were killed on the final battlefield, hence, these rambunctious scenes resembled Mel Gibson’s last-of-the-HUMAN battle epics, BRAVEHEART. Gloriously so.

An unnecessary romance blossoms between Algren and the wife of the warrior he killed before being taken prisoner. Though it might be construed as Algren attaining such a level of respect that the warrior’s widow is now considering him fresh meat (when once she considered him as smelly as a pig, bringing disgrace on her house), the real reason why these two are the last characters onscreen giving each other meaningful glances is because this film sports a bankable Hollywood Man-Toy which necessitates a gratuitous romance for the chick demographic.

Director Edward Zwick and writers John Logan, Marshall Herskovitz and Zwick himself might have forged a 10-Cukee movie had they not made Algren such a superlative warrior and then opted for Hollywood Happy Ending protocol. Zwick steers it so close to immortality, then insults us by painting-by-numbers.

With a supporting cast including Masato Harada, Timothy Spall, Billy Connolly and Tony Goldwyn, performances are stellar (yes, including Cruise’s – Zwick must be given due credit in achieving the mission impossible of extending Cruise’s acting range beyond the One Glib Expression method).

Still, watching a samurai film without Toshiro Mifune is like eating sushi without fish.

END