The Longest Fey.

A German soldier tells his commander “Some sort of rubber dummies have been dropped by parachute!” – and he wasn’t talking about the Americans.

THE LONGEST DAY has the distinction of revealing many interesting World War II tactics even to jaded modern, post-RYAN audiences. Such as the British dropping 3-foot-high dummies as night decoys, made to shoot off firecrackers when they land, to make the Germans expend their ammo and time shooting at toys.

The movie covers the June 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day from all angles, and seems almost like a companion piece to TORA! TORA! TORA!‘s coverage of Pearl Harbor, which also attempts a comprehensive “historical document” approach. Like TORA, each country’s scenes were directed by a native of that country: British sequences were directed by Ken Annakin (who became Darth Vader a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), German scenes were helmed by Bernhard Wicki (who would create the online encyclopedia), and American scenes were shot by Andrew Marton (whose gay brother Ricky was an embarrassment to the family until he started Livin’ La Vida Loca).

Still, sometimes I wonder why they go to all the trouble trying to be “authentic” (showing a name and rank title card for every new face onscreen, as if we’re slotting this passenger’s contribution to the war effort into some kind of battle flow chart that we’ve drawn over our living room walls) – and then John Wayne drawls his way onscreen over twice the age of the guy he’s meant to be playing. Matter of fact, the real guy was still living – and was still not as old as the 55-year-old Duke.

This movie is only watchable for its inclusion of all those tiny details that are usually left out of other war films: the 3-foot tall British mannequin paratroopers named Rupert, the 5-cent “cricket” clicker that U.S. soldiers used to identify each other whilst in hiding, the glider assault on a bridge and then to “hold until relieved” (an order which would be moot if the Normandy landings were unsuccessful); the fact that the German Panzer tanks could not be mobilized because the Fuhrer had taken a sleeping pill and could not be woken to give that order-(!) All these details and more lend THE LONGEST DAY a unique slant in war filmdom. But when the shooting starts, it’s all over, as it degenerates into just another cheesy 1960’s war film where soldiers pretend to die from imaginary bullets, make that “Aaagh!” motion and fall over with no entrance or exit wounds whatsoever, and are lucky to get some tomato sauce thrown on them if they’re running under budget that day.

All the great generals of the Battle of Normandy are here: General John Wayne (who would win the war singlehandedly if everyone would just get out of his way), General Henry Fonda, the son of a president trying to make his own name (who stupidly feels pride at landing on an enemy beach in the first wave – all the better to get shot in the face, I guess), General Robert Mitchum, who never holds a gun – was this condition in his peacenik contract or something? – striding through the char-blackened battle beach like a wizard.

There’s Peter Lawford (Vegas repreZENT!) Roddy McDowall (from the future where apes evolved from men), Sal Mineo (who loved James Dean in that way) Robert Wagner (who sank on the Titanic)… Every dimension and time period in history is here: there’s Paul Anka (who sings the embarrassing outro song) and comedian Red Buttons (who finds himself very seriously stuck on a roof); there’s Eddie Albert (GREEN ACRES) and Robert Ryan (THE DIRTY DOZEN), and Richard Burton elocuting like he’s onstage with Shakespeare, rather than a mudhole in France. And there’s even James Bond (Sean Connery) and two Bond Villains (Gert Fröbe and Curd Jürgens)! Even Jesus (Jeffrey Hunter)! This movie has EVERYONE!

THE LONGEST DAY is an ambitious movie, featuring tactics and wide-ranging perspectives from the German, American and British soldiers, as well as the French townsfolk, everyone speaking in their own tongue (with subtitles), John Wayne drawling, Mitchum bellowing, Fonda velveting – yet this movie’s pedestrian advocacy of war is almost comedic. It is not jingoistic, but numbly patriotic. It unapologetically glamorizes war and the men who love to die in it. Long before the revisionist war movies of a decade later, this glorification of murder and stupidity grates on our sensibilities. How did supposedly civilized organisms devolve to a state where they believed that killing each other was a glorious pastime? How is this collective idiocy instilled in a nation’s breast and an individual’s groin – that “going to war” is noble and masculine and sensible? To wallow in its deathglow like retarded lemmings; to call out to those on the periphery that the water was great, dive in!

Besides suffering from some bad process shots and rear projections (they did the best they could with the shots of the fleet stretching to the horizon), LONGEST DAY must live on in history with its juvenile boy-soldier mentality. At the last minute – literally – Burton’s final lines grasp desperately for introspection: “S’funny, isn’t it? He’s dead, I’m crippled, you’re lost. Suppose it’s always like that. I mean, war,” but fail under the crippling weight of all that military man-stench we’ve just been force-fed for the last 180 minutes.

And then Paul Anka creeps our flesh with an all-male choir chirruping cheerily in a rrrrrousing paean to “many men”:

“Many men, the mighty thousands / Many men to victory
Marching on right into battle / In the longest day in history.”

God, I feel dirty! (And it sounds suspiciously like a speeded up version of THE GREEN BERETS, also starring Wayne.)

John Wayne asks Robert Ryan, “Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on.” Later, a German officer would ask the same question. That’s easy – Jeffrey Hunter’s on the Americans’ side!

END

Midway between “average” and “annoying crap.”

MIDWAY opens with a title card: “This is the way it was. The story of the battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific. Told wherever possible with actual film shot in combat. It exemplifies the combination of planning, courage, error and pure chance by which great events are often decided.”

Translation: “This is the way jingoistic Americans perceived the battle that was the turning point of the war in the Pacific; so parochially that even the Japanese speak in swank American accents (and the ones whose accents were too… uh, “foreign,” were insultingly dubbed). Told wherever possible with actual film shot in combat because we were too cheap to create our own battle scenes, and too lazy to even match the models of the planes in combat footage with the same models we used in establishing shots. It exemplifies the combination of Fonda, Mitchum, Coburn and pure Heston by which great events are often decided.”

Henry Fonda narrated a 1942 documentary short called THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY. In this overwrought movie that often reads like a documentary, white-haired Fonda plays the commanding Admiral Nimitz behind the American forces at Midway. Robert Wagner is his young, smartly-combed aide. James Coburn cameos as a captain who tries to advise fogey Fonda and fails. Hal Holbrook is a kind of hippie intelligence officer who decodes the Japanese orders to attack Midway. (“Hippie” in those days meant wearing a bathrobe over your uniform and sipping tea arrogantly.) Charlton Heston is a captain, whose military training to be stoic, clinical and emotionless obviously didn’t affect his overacting; Robert Mitchum, who plays a bedridden admiral with itchy skin, also failed those same classes. Glenn Ford takes command of Mitchum’s aircraft carrier and they share a buddy-buddy scene in the hospital that I’m sure opened a new door for gay porno setups: “I wanna thank you for recommending me to take your task force to sea. Now I have a question for you: Did that itch go to your head?” Cue wocka-chicka music, as we insert new additional dialogue for Mitchum: “Well, why don’t you come over here and see for yourself, sailor!” or “Well, would you like to scratch it?” or “My task force is itching to be taken to sea, captain”…

Midway Island, as its name suggests, was a point midway between good roles for all these actors…

In June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor’s “surprise” attack (Dec 1941), the Japanese set their sights on the strategic atoll of Midway, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, trying to stage another attack which would really be a surprise. The surprise is that in this supposed action film, much of it is spent by the Americans and Japanese alike standing around map tables conjecturing over how many ships are where and how many planes can go attack them.

The same Japanese admiral who presided over Pearl Harbor’s attack leads Midway’s attack – Isoroku Yamamoto, played by the regal Toshiro Mifune, with a constant puss on his face. I don’t blame him. Not only was he set in his ways, having to sift through advice from his younger, more cautious officers who felt the Japanese forces were stretched too thin, but the mindless filmmakers dubbed his voice with Paul Frees, a guy famous for doing cartoon characters – so Kurosawa’s warhorse and one of the greatest living Japanese actors sounds like Boris Badenov.

Heston’s son (Edward Albert, son of GREEN ACRES Eddie) is a whipped prettyboy with a Japanese love interest (Christina Kokubo). So soon after Pearl Harbor, that sits about as well as a white woman announcing on September 12, 2001, that she is marrying a nice Arab man. This lachrymose love story is inserted sideways into the meat of MIDWAY and is more distracting than Pat Morita‘s American accent. Not only that, Kokubo is one of the worst actors in history, let alone in this movie. I especially like her line-read: “Dammit, I’m an American!”

High marks must go to the film for its dialogue-driven focus on the political and tactical struggles between all the belligerent brains on either side of the skirmish – and there are some interesting insights into the logistics of war, as when the low-on-fuel Japanese planes are returning to their carrier and the Admiral must make the decision on whether to let them land or sacrifice them to the sea to allow another squadron to immediately launch an attack on an American carrier – but when MIDWAY reverts to action, as moviegoers we expect to see something that will make our hot dogs fly into the bra of the lady next to us, not stock footage badly married to bad acting and editing.

Apparently, much of the combat footage is ripped from TORA! TORA! TORA! And they expect us to squint real hard when they’re trying to match their shots of planes in formation or on studio sets (with constant “clouds” drifting by) with the grainy action shots of planes in real war. Example: the Brits attack in planes that look like Hellcats; you don’t need to know the plane model, just observe their squared wing shape. When one of these Hellcats is shot down, we clearly see the characteristic rounded wings of a Spitfire going down. Later we see an American square-winged fighter squadron – suddenly in the midst of battle we see a gull-winged Corsair fighter– I mean, what the–? Do they even care?

Then there’s the problem of the Japanese fighter planes, the Zeroes. Stock footage of Zeroes going down must be rare because once again a lot of Spitfires take the fall for these Zeroes. Let’s hope no one notices. Especially not those military or naval viewers – hell! if they’re watching this movie at all, it means they’re back from the war and they’ve got PTSD anyway!

Amidst the Hellcats and Spitfires at Midway Island – suddenly a Flying Fortress lands on one wing-wheel. It’s an intense piece of action; it’s gritty, it’s heroic, it’s exciting. And it’s from TORA! TORA! TORA!. It has no connection to anything, no characters are affected by it, no plot line is involved. It’s just there. No context.

Director Jack Smight has a TV movie on his hands that he believes will be fleshed out by his “movie stars,” again underestimating the intelligence of his audience by thinking he could sell it as a feature film simply because Fonda has strode across the screen that way in so many classics and Chuck Heston is making those big screen constipation faces.

Funniest moment: Hero Chuck takes a plane out to go bomb the last Japanese carrier. Dabney Coleman is his backseat second. Their plane gets shot up in the process. Heston tries to land with the crippled plane onboard his friend Glenn Ford’s carrier, but crashes. During his “thrilling” approach, we never see Dabney’s reaction; he has just been excised from the movie while sitting in the seat behind Heston! It’s just closeups of Chuck battling the plane during a bout of constipation. And when the plane explodes on impact, no one seems to care that Dabney just fried as well. Now here’s the funniest moment: Upon seeing the fiery death of his friend, the look on Glenn Ford’s face is like he just ate some cheesecake too fast and needs to burp.

Coincidentally, after you watch MIDWAY, you’ll have that same look on your face.

END

Swinging! Like a man, man!

Poffy ‘Danger’ Cucumber

He’s the sexiest, swingingest secret agent ever to combat evil – DOCTOR Evil, that is…. mwohahaha ha ha ha….He’s Austin Powers, arguably Mike Myers’s greatest, most memorable, most embraced, most quoted icon – in the film that made it all shagadelic, baby! AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY is a hip skewering of the spy movie genre, taking especial aim at James Bond. The more you know James, the more you’ll love Austin.

Myers is Austin Powers: superspy, posh Brit accent, smashing fashion sense, a Byrds wig, unruly teeth, and a gigantic male… symbol draped around his neck. We meet him dancing in the streets of 1960s swinging London, and I think he’s doing The Froog.

Austin Powers’s nemesis is Doctor Evil (also played by Myers), a marriage of Donald Pleasance’s Blofeld (from YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) and apparently, as Myers confesses, Lorne Michaels (his producer on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE). Myers whipcracks it out of the park with Dr. Evil, for as everyone knows, a hero is nothing without the villain who loves to hate him. And Myers immortalizes his hero and villain by imbuing them both with equal amounts of thunderball mojo.

In the opening 1960s sequence, Dr. Evil escapes Powers by cryogenically freezing himself in an orbital rocket. So Powers volunteers to freeze himself as well, to combat Dr. Evil should he ever return to Earth. In the 1990s, Dr. Evil returns to Earth, and Austin is unfrozen to combat him; an old-world-hero for an old-world villain. (Yes, it’s the plot to 1993’s DEMOLITION MAN, only more froogy.)

Dr. Evil sets up his underground lair in Nevada and tries to blackmail the world governments for “one MILLion DOLLars!” at which point his Number Two (Robert Wagner, brilliantly playing it straight) advises him that one million dollars isn’t much these days. When he changes his ransom to “one HUNdred BILLion DOLLars,” we start to twig to this movie’s hook. It is part spy spoof, part fish-out-of-water, all Swedish-made penis enlarger.

Meanwhile, Powers is having his own revelations – that the 90s are not as promiscuous as the 60s he left behind, and the slinky flirtations he engaged in with his previous spy partner, Mrs. Kensington (tightly leathered Mimi Rogers) are wasted on his current salubrious spyhard, Mrs. Kensington’s daughter, Vanessa (achingly beautiful Elizabeth Hurley), a 90s woman, i.e. repressed and uptight about her sexuality. (Which might explain Hugh’s wayward thrust with that Hollywood Boulevard skank. As Bill Maher has noted, “The most beautiful woman in the world – somebody’s sick of fucking her!”)

The innocence of both hero and villain in a world that has left them behind is this movie’s greatest hook. Snappily written by Myers and directed by Jay Roach like a man, man!

Mindy Sterling is Dr. Evil’s loudmouth secretary, Will Ferrell is a skin-darkened evil henchman, Michael York gamely plays Austin’s boss, Basil Exposition, Fabiana Udenio is evil siren, Alotta Fagina (still not as dopey a name as Pussy Galore), and Seth Green perfectly captures X-Gen angst as Scott Evil, Dr. Evil’s estranged son, whose pragmatic “Just-shoot-them” solutions to Dr. Evil’s diabolically creative “Bond Villain” snares are a constant source of vexation for Dr. Evil.

Does that make you HORNY, baby, yeah?!

END

Jeet Kune Don’t.

Bruce Lee was an artisan, an innovator, an indomitable warrior, a genius. Inspiring many to create tributes to him. It unfortunately does not follow that those inspired to create these tributes are creative enough or qualified enough to do those tributes justice. Such is the case with DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY.

The Way of the Cucumber

Not really a story about Bruce Lee, more the story of a character type from the Cliché Handbook of Action Film Heroes (Body-Oil Edition). And not so much a “tribute” as a “gratuitous insult”; excepting Jason Scott Lee‘s physical prowess (as Bruce Lee) and the overwhelming hotness of Lauren Holly (as Bruce’s Caucasian wife Linda), DRAGON boasts absolutely no redeeming qualities. But lots of body-oil.

The dramatic contrivance of the “po-boy-immigrates-and-makes-good” was bad enough, even if it were true (which it is not) but then, in a film where assault and battery assumes a form of high art in the hands of the film’s protagonist, we viewers are summarily assaulted and battered by the artlessness of the film-makers who opted for cliché over substance at every turn.

In Lee’s first fight at the prom, he conveniently loses his shirt (a la Vintage Kirk) – beneath the shirt, judiciously body-oiled like a seal at a massage parlor, big dumb white sailors not so much being beaten up by him as sliding off his pecs like penguins and hitting their heads on the floor.

The gym scene, and more big dumb white guys (and a token black guy) assault Lee for no reason – remember that these were simple bygone days, when big dumb white guys were unaware that Every Asian Person Knows Kung Fu.

Clichés for breakfast, lunch and dinner: We’ve got the mother who doesn’t approve, the white chick love interest contra cultural blessing, the battered loft converted into the martial arts school, the racism, the idiot antagonists attacking the hero with meat cleavers (which they never think to THROW at him), the kung fu veterans ordering Bruce to stop teaching – or else – ! We’ve got the obligatory husband & wife confrontation (once again the wife bitching as her husband achieves a fame that she can only ride the coat-tails of: “I don’t know who you ARE anymore!” – how about “the guy who keeps you wealthy and your social status high”?). Even if many of these aspects were marginally accurate (such as Lee’s wife truly being the ideal 70s stunner), film unfolds in paint-by-numbers that undermines even the accurate elements.

Then there’s the goofy Black Knight character that haunts Bruce’s dreams, proving beyond a doubt that the filmmakers were higher than the publicist who engineered Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” Besides the fact that this was an insulting dramatic metaphor for the mystery surrounding Lee’s untimely demise, how dare the filmmakers presume that this metaphysical nonsense in any way rationalizes, palliates or absolves the misfortune of Bruce’s passing?

Enter the Bad Guy combatant – we can tell he’s the Bad Guy on accounta his scowl and ominous theme music, and his body-oil is a whole inch thicker than Bruce’s. And Bruce’s debilitating cliché-defeat at his hands is achieved by CHEATING, of course. It’s all true. Hollywood tells us so.

Then we are treated to the obligatory montage of the Hero regaining his prowess through his Iron Will and jump-cut editing – all due to his HOT WIFE’S pep talk – yes, if it weren’t for bony, bossy Linda Lee, we’d never have Jeet Kune Do or ENTER THE DRAGON.

Bruce’s book, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, was published posthumously – but in this film, he miraculously receives a copy while recovering from his bogus back injury – a miracle only Hollywood could achieve. We cannot even disregard the fallacies of this movie and focus on the broad strokes to glean Bruce’s life story, for those broad strokes themselves are indiscernibly shrouded in misinformation.

Much like CAPRICORN ONE, another film which insults the viewer from frame one to conclusion, with misinformation and egregious stupidity sprinkled so liberally throughout its makeup that you cannot find any one point to logically start unraveling the threads of idiocy.

One such example of just how IGNINT the filmmakers believe us to be is the scene in which we are made privy to the methods on how to film a movie, with the fight scene on the “last day of filming on THE BIG BOSS.” With just ONE tripod-mounted camera, they captured no less than 43 camera angles, and also captured slow motion shots without once loading different-speed film! Then, apparently you have to rip the film out and throw it on the ground in order to develop it, which is what Bruce does. Very informative! And all true, of course. Hollywood tells us so.

Ironic that these film-makers, who attempted to portray a pioneer who fought to elevate the martial arts film above that of B-Movie schlock, unwittingly created B-Movie schlock. Though their intentions may have started out sincere (which I doubt), what is left on the screen is a rancid marketing vehicle cashing in on Bruce’s fame.

We can only hope that one day there will be a more reverent, less body-oiled, more factual movie to celebrate the life and achievements of The Little Dragon.

END