The Ones That Got Away (alternate title in Germany?)

He was German, a Nazi, a profiteer of slave labor, a philanderer, an adulterer, a confidence man and a traitor to his country. He was Oskar Schindler, who saved over 1,100 Jews from concentration camps in World War II.

Reminds me of that joke “…but screw just one sheep…” in reverse.

SCHINDLER’S LIST wrenches us from our spoiled rotten present to the harsh winter of 1939 Poland amidst the Nazi invasion. Director Steven Spielberg transports us to the gates of hell by shooting in dire black and white – with one bittersweet glimpse of red – working with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski in their first ever collaboration (which would become a steadfast partnership over the years). Through their visual poetry, we become a verboten race, a forbidden Jew; treated like offal by the German military, manhandled, slave-labored, regarded as un-human, arbitrarily shot and killed as unthinkingly as switching off a light. No homeland, no dignity, no succor. The emotive impact of SCHINDLER’S LIST is beautifully exhausting.

Poffy’s Life-Saving List

Liam Neeson is Schindler, a German businessman making a living amongst the Nazi tempest. Consider him the avaricious Mitt Romney type, only concerned with exploiting the system to feather his nest, so hiring black market Jews (i.e. illegals, cheaper labor) to work in his enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland. Unlike Romney, he develops a conscience. (Note to Mitt: Conscience – noun, the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one’s conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action.)

Schindler recruits as his accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who becomes such a boon to his illegal activities that when Stern one day forgets his work card and is put on a train to the gas chambers, Schindler rushes to save him. “What if I got here five minutes later? Where would I be?!” Read that last question again. Schindler asked, “Where would *I* be?” At that point, he wasn’t saving Stern from death; he was saving his tool that cooked the books for his company.

Ralph Fiennes in a blood-chilling role, as the unbalanced, power-mutated German officer, Amon Goeth, whom we meet as he casually shoots Jews dead in an exercise yard, from his balcony, while having breakfast with a blonde. A friend and admirer of Schindler, Goeth is captain of the Krakow-Płaszow concentration camp.

From a book by Australian Thomas Keneally called Schindler’s Ark (1982), Steven Zaillian (AWAKENINGS) crafts a screenplay gut-wrenching in its candor and livid with moral ambiguity. (They call this type of writing “historical fiction” meaning Real People, Cinematic Events.)

It would be easy to dismiss Goeth as amoral, sociopathic and inhuman – quite unexpectedly, we find a moral compass in this sadistic nihilist, in the best scene of the movie. In the cellar with his Jewish maid Helen (Embeth Davidtz), Goeth rationalizes his lust for her. Keep in mind, the Germans were inculcated to believe Jews were less-than-human, so Goeth excoriates himself just for thinking about raping her, feeling like Rick Santorum’s man-on-dog. While she stands terrified, in a sheer slip, he rants, “I realize you are not a person in the strictest sense of the word” (ironically proving that HE is not a person in the strictest sense of the word). He tries to humanize her, and convince himself she is not an animal – so he can rape her with a clear conscience! It would be hilarious were it not so perverse.

So too, Schindler only develops a conscience after being sent to jail for kissing a little Jewish girl on his birthday. Goeth goes to bat for Schindler in his defense. (We can read so many twisted reasons behind that action now.)

SCHINDLER’S LIST pulls no punches with its brutality, its violence graphic and sudden; scenes that resemble bleak History Channel documentaries, terrifying in their realism. The SS separating the sick from the healthy – the sick sent to die, the healthy being used as slaves; Jews pricking their fingers and rubbing the blood over their cheeks to look healthy, i.e. choosing slavery over death. Like that’s any kind of choice. As in AMISTAD, Spielberg disturbs us with a fearless scene of all the emaciated extras tramping or running naked through the yard, men and women, pasty, pale, humiliated.

Heartbreaking scenes of loading freight carriages with Jews, only tiny openings for air as the carriages stay unmoving at the dock; people dying of heat, exhaustion, hunger. Schindler implores the soldiers to hose down the carriages, while he squeezes them morsels of food, while the guards and Goeth guffaw at him. Even at this stage, Schindler was half-considering the Jews “property” that might be damaged and affect his bottom line, which is why the Germans tolerated his “eccentricities” in helping them.

The terrifying scenes of the liquidation of the Ghetto, forcing all Jews from Krakow out of their homes, SS stormtroopers kicking down doors (the template come to life, for the rhetoric we know so well today when warning against fascism). To retain their jewelry, the Jews fold it into bread – and swallow the bread! Doctors and nurses administering poison to their patients in hospital beds, so they won’t live to be tortured! SS forcing people through dank cobbled streets, those streets strewn with abandoned luggage… A boy runs as his father is grabbed; the father tries to stop the soldier shooting his boy and gets shot himself unceremoniously; the boy dragged back and shot pointblank. Even in black and white, blood is unmistakably horrific.

The amazing part is not how Spielberg captures these realistic scenes – but that they ACTUALLY HAPPENED!

We see amongst the ragged black and white hordes, a little girl in a scarlet coat, walking calmly, dirty, aimlessly. A splotch of red that reminds us we are colorless. Apparently, this was a recount of Schindler, that he once noticed a little girl in a scarlet coat amongst the throng.

Their eyes met across a crowded Holocaust.

Word comes down from high command: Goeth is ordered to exhume and incinerate over 10,000 bodies killed at Plaszow and the Krakow ghetto massacre. Ashes filtering from the sky, once human. The numbing visual of Jews digging up other Jews rotting in the shallow snow. On one of the wheelbarrows is a faded shock of scarlet – the crumpled body of the little girl.

Goeth vexed: “They’re shutting us down and transferring everyone to Auschwitz.” He cannot discern the motivation; destroying all their free labor. One of the Jewish prisoners says to her friend, “We’re important to them. Why would they kill off their workforce?” Is that the measure of the mad chancellor’s mind?

By this time, Schindler had opened another factory, relatively isolated in Brunnlitz, in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and its reputation had grown as a haven for Jews. When the Auschwitz order came down, Schindler’s first instinct was to flee with trunks full of cash, but hits on the idea to buy as many Jews as possible off Goeth.

Thus did Stern type up Schindler’s infamous list.

On it – all the people Schindler could afford. And Goeth sells him the people. Yet Goeth cannot fathom Schindler’s motivation. The concept that someone would buy a person to save their life is completely alien to him and he goes to the grave thinking that Schindler was making out like a bandit with all his Jews. The reality was that it bankrupted Schindler, whose company by that time was just a front that was not really manufacturing anything for the German war effort. Schindler continued to spend millions bribing the German authorities, keeping the factory front and sustaining the people.

All the women get rerouted to Auschwitz. Clerical error. Bureaucracy was a bitch even back then. Schindler has to rush to save them from the ovens. Unlike his first rush to save Stern, now he rushes to save lives other than his own. However, Spielberg does not gussy up this moment: As Schindler’s Jewish women are boarding a train out of Auschwitz, we see another crowd being herded in, throwing their luggage on a growing pile…

This is what drives director Kevin Smith’s infamous pessimistic take on SCHINDLER’S LIST: out of 6 million murdered Jews, 1,100 were saved. Whoop de doo! And how easy is it to make this film manipulative? How hard can it be to sympathize with the downtrodden race? On the other hand – every life counts, dunnit? Even one. And these atrocities DID happen. And these lives WERE saved. And though there are botchy films and cheap films and insincere films made about the same topic, this is definitely one of the greats. So on this one, Kevin Smith… as much as I love and respect you… uuh, shut the fuck up?!

The ending sequence shows the “Schindler Jews” today. (They became known as Schindlerjuden, and many of them that Oskar Schindler saved, took care of him until his death in 1974.) The actual survivor and the actor who portrayed them walk up together to place a stone on Schindler’s gravesite.

SCHINDLER’S LIST will make you feel like becoming a good-hearted Nazi. Modern American Republicans are halfway there – now they just have to add the “good-hearted” part…

END

The Original Road Warrior.

One car. One truck. One highway. One big problem!

DUEL is the zenith of simplicity, effectiveness, suspense: a trucker, on a whim, goes after a lone car in this chase movie of the decade, if not the millennium.

Traffic problems of the ’70’s.

We’ve reached an era in moviemaking history where car chases have become passe; the drum solos of movies. Once, they were magnificent – BULLITT, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, MAD MAX THE ROAD WARRIOR – but degenerated into generic padding, much like fist fights. And back in that era when car chases were finding their wheels, a young Steven Spielberg (yes, that guy), with writer Richard Matheson, crafts a movie that was nothing BUT The Car Chase. And blows back our seventies feathered hair!

Dennis Weaver (whom we knew from his TV series MCCLOUD – hell, I still think of him as McCloud) is David Mann, a businessman driving home cross country on a lonely highway. He passes an eighteen wheeler tanker truck. And the truck gives chase! That’s the pitch, that’s the movie, that’s the pure animal adrenalin that keeps us on the edge of our seventies waterbeds for ninety minutes.

We never see or meet the truck driver; we never know his motivation. The “personality,” the character, is the truck, the angry behemoth trying to run David Mann off the road, kill him if possible. What makes it as terrifying as an animal in the wild is that it cannot be reasoned with – the truck is id, visceral, focused. Pursuer.

At one point, Mann even exits his car and approaches the truck, parked in the distance, aiming to have it out man-to-man with the obviously unbalanced trucker. As he nears the 40-foot semi-trailer, that heady terror rises as if he is approaching an irrational beast. He never gets to face the trucker, as the truck pulls away a few feet every time Mann approaches too close. The trucker remains unseen, aloof, unknown. Driving home the point – it is the TRUCK.

No cellphones, no social media, Mann has to stop at a highway gas station to use the phone booth – and the truck runs down the public booth! The claustrophobic desperation mounts, as Mann cannot outrun the truck on the straightaways, but then comes upon a long incline where he leaves the truck in his wake.

Then his radiator blows…

The sheer sustained excitement, tension and thrills would shake us to our seventies bellbottoms, the disturbing music by Billy Goldenberg adding to the uneasiness (often evocative of Jerry Goldsmith in PLANET OF THE APES, 1968).

After this movie, my younger brother and I would forever refer to those dinosaurian Mack trucks with the “snout” design as a “Duel truck” or just “Look, there’s a Duel!”

Now it’s known as “Steven Spielberg’s DUEL.” Back then, though it was his first feature film, yet we can see this young director flexing his considerable muscle. He’s got all the angles, all the pacing, all the execution that ensures this – ahem – “vehicle” drives over us like a seventies Mack truck.

END

When Republicans bore resemblance to the human species…

A bunch of old, out-of-touch white guys babbling about slavery. The Republican Party hasn’t changed much. Well, back then, as the party of LINCOLN, they were trying to free the slaves; nowadays, they’re working to get them all back.

My main question about this ambitious film is: With all the camera operators, production assistants and director’s assistants and supervisors and costumers, no one in the whole production bothered to tell Tommy Lee Jones that his wig was on crooked?

During the American Civil War, Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the 16th President of the United States and frees the slaves with his beard on straight. With his third Best Actor Oscar on the shelf for this role, it is safe to say this is the most authentic Lincoln we will ever see on film or television. This is not just another stovepipe fakester and cheap platitude knockoff – this is Daniel Day-Lewis once again immersing himself in a role so fiercely, underplaying yet bringing the thunder, that our scrapbook notions of Lincoln from all those tinted photos and decades of milky imitations all cohere into an inspirational reality. This is director Steven Spielberg crafting a film around the writings of Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s book Team Of Rivals, portraying a canny politician, an affectionate father, a legendary hero, a fallible man, and the world’s most famous beard (besides Nicole Kidman).

Modern Republicans love to crow over Lincoln being the abolisher of slavery – as in a Republican bringing about slavery’s demise (only citing that feather in their caps because their modern party has been correctly identified as unsheeted Klansfolk). It is also intimated by modern Republicans that the whole Republican Party of Lincoln’s time went along for the ride. But it didn’t. (Modern Republicans lying and trying to rewrite the past? How rare is that?…) LINCOLN shows how many of Lincoln’s own party would unashamedly block the abolition of slavery (aka the 13th Amendment, aka the Emancipation Proclamation) unless it came with the condition of ending the war with the South. I will repeat that, as the concept is so foreign to modern Repubs: ending slavery was contingent on ending the Civil War. That is, Repubs wanted the war to END. Back then, there were no monetary incentives tied to continuous war. War meant actual war, not corporate profiteering, as it does today. And if the war didn’t end, then they would not abolish slavery. No principles (as usual), just money-saving agenda that would benefit only themselves.

So modern Repubs can stop gloating over their party’s altruistic streak of the 1800s – because they possessed as much altruism as they do today – none. Not to say that the Democrats of Lincoln’s time were any better. Not one would vote for the 13th Amendment. They liked their slaves as much as their white Republican brothers did.

LINCOLN delves deep into how the Emancipation Proclamation impossibly worked and how Lincoln technically “un-legally” confiscated the slaves from the rebels in the south. Because by confiscating the slaves as “property,” it is an admission that he considered them property, but the whole point of acquiring them was to assert that they were NOT property, but people with rights. And “the South” was not a sovereign country, so Lincoln could not declare war on it, “The South are not the people that are rising up – it’s the rebels that are living in the southern states.” Lincoln is well aware of the Emancipation’s contradictions and moral ambiguities, at movie’s end lamenting to his military strongarm Ulysses S. Grant, “We made it possible for one another to do terrible things.” Writer Tony Kushner has compacted all these conundrums into dialogue so cogent that your faux-popcorn is gonna go cold – either because you are riveted by this political drama, or you’ve fallen asleep.

I decided that the Constitution gives me war powers, but no one knows just exactly what those powers are. Some say they don’t exist; I decided I needed them to exist to uphold my oath to protect the Constitution, which, I decided, meant that I could take the Rebel’s slaves from them as property confiscated in war.

That might recommend to suspicion that I agree with the Rebs that their slaves are property in the first place. Of course I don’t, never have. I’m glad to see any man free, and if calling a man property, or war contraband, does the trick… Why I caught at the opportunity.

Now here’s where it gets truly slippery. I use the law allowing for the seizure of property in a war knowing it applies only to the property of governments and citizens of belligerent nations. But the South ain’t a nation, that’s why I can’t negotiate with ’em. So if in fact the Negroes are property according to law, have I the right to take the rebels’ property from them, if I insist they’re rebels only, and not citizens of a belligerent country? And slipperier still: I maintain it ain’t our actual Southern states in rebellion but only the rebels living in those states, the laws of which states remain in force. That means that since it’s states’ laws that determine whether Negroes can be sold as slaves, as property, the Federal government doesn’t have a say in that, least not yet. Then Negroes in those states are slaves, hence property, hence my war powers allow me to confiscate ’em as such. So I confiscated ’em. But if I’m a respecter of states’ laws, how then can I legally free ’em with my Proclamation, as I done, unless I’m cancelling states’ laws? I felt the war demanded it, my oath demanded it. I felt right with myself, and I hoped it was legal to do it. I’m hoping still.

Two years ago I proclaimed these people emancipated – “then, henceforward and forever free.” But let’s say the courts decide I had no authority to do it. They might well decide that. Say there’s no amendment abolishing slavery. Say it’s after the war, and I can no longer use my war powers to just ignore the courts’ decisions, like I sometimes felt I had to do. Might those people I freed be ordered back into slavery? That’s why I’d like to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House, and on its way to ratification by the states, wrap the whole slavery thing up, forever and aye. As soon as I’m able. Now.

— Daniel Day-Lewis, as Abraham Lincoln.

A cavalcade of stars promenades across the congressional floor: David Strathairn, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Bruce McGill, Tim Blake Nelson…

Tommy Lee Jones is Thaddeus Stevens, a strong ally with a weak wig, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Lincoln’s son, and Sally Field is long-suffering Mary Todd Lincoln. In junkets, Field claims, “Mary Todd is a strong woman” – but I think she’s  confusing “strong” with “high maintenance.” Because that’s all Mary does – complain. At one point, she shrikes, “All anyone will remember of me is that I was crazy and ruined your happiness.” Uhm, you’re right! Even in this tribute movie, with five lines of dialogue, you’re right, Mary Todd! Like we didn’t already know that women were dreamkillers…

Touching dialogue between Lincoln and his “slave,” as she asks “Do you want us here?” Like every great diplomat, Lincoln doesn’t say yes or no, but what he does say is the mark of an understanding man – that there is no yes or no answer, stating that he doesn’t know her, but he’s sure that he can get used to her. And, he admits regretfully, he doesn’t know what will happen to the slaves once they are freed.

On the morning of the vote, African-Americans (those that were “free men”) file into the balcony as spectators to congress’s machinations. The rep on the floor welcomes them: “We welcome the people – to your house!” His voice hitches on “your” – anytime someone’s voice hitches, it gets me. Not just the fact that their voice hitched, or the emotion associated with it, but the fact that that actor can find that space. The black people want to be a part of this somber, important process – and all they get to see is how stupid, childish and juvenile old white men in congress actually are.

So the slaves are freed in an ingratiating orchestra swell. Just like in real life, where each court and congressional hearing has an orchestra ‘pon de side just waiting for the uplifting decision.

LINCOLN then does a smart thing – it goes beyond the decision, to the backbiting that follows. For no matter how sensible or altruistic, and no matter the best intentions in the world, any decision in this life is accompanied by dissent, an opposing force irrational and ignorant beyond belief. Jackie Earle Haley leads a delegation from the defeated South, asking Lincoln, “Will we be readmitted to the States in time to block the ratification of this 13th Amendment?” Like modern Republicans, the first thing on the irrational dissenters’ minds is not to adhere to a principled law that they ideologically disagree with, but to block it and repeal it. Nothing’s changed (cough–ObamaCare). I think it has something to do with all Republicans being soulless blood-sucking vampires… or am I thinking of that other, even more serious Lincoln biography ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER?

How ironic that this beard that exhibited such empathy, humanity and principled courage has become the modern Republican Party’s beard.

END

Attack of the Phoning Scrotums.

E.T. can levitate. How then does he get left behind on Earth in the first place?

D’oh! Used to be the greatest movie ever. When we were ten.

From a story by Melissa Matheson, immortalized by director Steven Spielberg (back when he considered aliens benign and wonderful), E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL follows an extra-terrestrial alien named “E.T.” (puppeted by a brigade of effects techs) marooned on Earth, pursued by the American military, who finds sanctuary with a suburban family. He telepathically conveys his needs to the young boy of the family, Elliott (Henry Thomas), while doing silly things to pander to the kiddie demographic.

Opening scenes show a quiet group of extra-terrestrials slowly fanning out from their spaceship parked in the night woods. Military arrive, looking like – ironically – the aliens from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, every high beam and searchlight glowing ethereal red and blue. Aliens scatter for their ship – and again I ask: Why didn’t Our Hero E.T. simply FLY when chased by the humans?

Elliott’s mom is Dee Wallace (who will be known throughout her career by the unfortunate epithet “Elliott’s Mom”); Elliott’s brother was one of those typical ’70’s kids (kinda Leif Garret, kinda Christopher Atkins) whose retro look is the new Now (kinda Jesse Eisenberg, kinda Michael Cera); Elliott’s sister is Gertie (7-year-old Drew Barrymore, in the best performance of her career, back when her lisp made her sound adorable and not a special needs case). Peter Coyote appears as a military guy just to jangle his keys.

C.T. The Cucumber Terrestrial

When Gertie dresses E.T. as a lady, Elliott asserts, “You should give him his dignity!” The filmmakers should heed their own advice. Though the scene is meant to endear E.T. to viewers, he is not some trained chimp or cute baby – he is an interstellar traveler, a botanist apparently, and, we presume, one of the smarter adults of his species, for him to be an astronaut.  On this alien world – Earth – we would expect him to naturally approach everything with trepidation, but he is infantilized by the filmmakers and portrayed as having the wits of a Sarah Palin. And he never seems to understand the concept of keeping a low profile until Elliott’s Mom actually looks for him in the closet.

Dee Wallace’s directorial advice seems to be “act mildly retarded.” In fact, all the grownups are in the same short bus. It says something terrifyingly vapid about your soul when you are out-acted by a puppet.

The movie is supposedly told from E.T.’s point of view, but that is incorrect – the movie is told from a KID’S point of view: only kids will identify with the seeming blindness and callousness of the adults who never seem to notice them, thusly, not “seeing” E.T. either; kids will connect with the Us-versus-Them nature of having a secret and keeping it from the adults; kids will laugh at E.T. trick-or-treating dressed as a ghost and will thrill at Elliott riding around the countryside by himself after his bedtime with his scrotum-creature in his basket; to keep it understandable, government cars are clearly marked “United States Government,” bad guys are faceless and mute, and magic kicks in whenever we need a deus ex machina.

Keeping it simple for kids, E.T.’s spaceship looks like a flying saucer with a ramp down to the ground – in complete opposition to his species’ physical design. You see, if this were E.T.’s point of view, there wouldn’t be a ramp. Why would a species that has the ability to levitate have a ramp? Especially when they find it so difficult to waddle up the ramp, with those six human puppeteers all pulling in the wrong directions?

As he did with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Spielberg uses lighting creatively to heighten mystery and suspense, and once again employs composer John Williams, whose lyrical and epic score lifts this kiddie movie to something beyond the stars.

You might recognize C. Thomas Howell as one of Elliott’s bicycle friends, and Erika Eleniak, BAYWATCH babe and B-movie bimbo, as Elliott’s schoolboy crush, back when she was a virgin. (I still wonder why Spielberg meticulously crafted that shot between her legs, just after Elliott kisses her: at floor level, between her schoolgirl legs, we see frogs spill out of their water-filled jar, yet it could very well be misinterpreted as Erika suddenly becoming so moist it looks like her water has broken. Creepy or what?)

Apparently, that “E.T. phone home” catch phrase worked like a charm, as his spaceship returns to pick him up in a tear-jerking ending that sees him flying off never to return in a sequel (but in so much merchandise it would make Gene Simmons’s marketing gland swell). With a vocabulary of about twenty human words under his belt, any more time on Earth, and Sarah Palin might have backed him for congress.

END

A Spielberg fantasy done horribly right.

What if the United States Military actually possessed a shred of decency and humanity? Shyeh! What if.

In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the people who type the “Sorry Your Son’s Dead” letters for the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die notice that three letters are addressed to the Ryan family of Anytown USA. Seems three brothers have been killed in the name of assuaging the small-penis insecurities of the American government. There is one more Ryan boy presumably still alive, and the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die now send America’s Favorite Son, Tom Hanks, to snatch the last Ryan from the belly of the beast, intending to send him home honorably. Shyeh! What if.

“I’m Ryan and so’s my wife!”

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is the war movie by which all other war movies will be measured – not for its implausible premise (written by Robert Rodat) and typical propagandistic slant, but for its revolutionary depiction of battle scenes, more brutal than any ever committed to film. Visceral. Nightmarish. Incendiary. Words cannot do justice to the ferocious spectacle and gutshock aftertaste of the opening Normandy invasion.

After the surety of hand he displayed with disturbing violence in his Holocaust epic SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993), director Steven Spielberg turns his camera on a very American World War II story.

We meet the Yanks stepping onto the beach at Omaha, the sea more blood than brine, in a frontal assault on the Normandy coast that is going horribly wrong, as the German fortifications on the shoreline mow them down ruthlessly. Steel crossbeam obstacles called “hedgehogs” stick nefariously up from the sand in the low tide; planted to mutilate the undersides of boats as they attain the shore – if the tide had kept the hedgehogs hidden underwater – now they ironically provide the only cover for the American troops in a searing firestorm.

During this blood and bone tempest we meet Captain John Hiller (Tom Hanks) trying to stay alive yet move his troops closer to the German machine gun nests and take them out. We are in the crucified heart of the battle, blood on the camera lens, rain dirt muddying the view, machine gun rounds slamming and pinging past like fireballs, gray-green desaturated filmstock and a lens flare sheen around the film edges; internal body parts, severed limbs, ear-numbing explosions; a grimy, hellish, embracing maelstrom of frenzied death.

Spielberg and longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski capture what has never been captured in depictions of battle – desperation, futility, the overwhelming randomness of slugs whizzing by and claiming lives, medics wasting morphine stabs on dying soldiers; confusion and screaming, bodily fluids and exit wounds, intestines mixing with mud – simply the most authentic Cinematic War we have ever seen.

Battle visuals in RYAN are so disturbing that in 2002 when the call to arms came from the gutless warmongers Bush-Cheney, it’s a wonder anyone answered it at all – which only shows what a bunch of mugs the American armed forces are, or anyone infused with the erroneous attitude that military might is a political problem-solver.

Hiller’s mission to Save Private Ryan is painted as a spark of humanity illuminating the gross inhumanity of war. YET. The high command’s decision to send a son home to his grieving mother can only be for one reason – not moral, ethical or humane – to make a future politician look golden.

Spielberg’s Omaha Beach: if it were any more real, it would be real.

Hiller’s ragtag squad consists of Tom Sizemore (scrappy adjutant) Edward Burns (cynic looker), Giovanni Ribisi (the doc), Barry Pepper (holy sharpshooter), Adam Goldberg (resident Jew), Vin Diesel (goombah muscle), and Jeremy Davies (scaredy cat gopher Upham). And each man is created whole, as we discover whenever characterization sets in during quiet time.

And even that quiet time is starkly disturbing, poignant, heart rending, accompanied by a majestic score by Spielberg longtime composer John Williams. This is not your John Wayne/Richard Widmark grimacing melodramatic characterization; the characters in RYAN are drawn in true blood, every bad decision, every disconsolate look, every unsolvable moral conundrum, scarring straight to our all-too-human guts.

Captain Hiller feels every bladed inch of the Shakespeare axiom, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (Henry IV). He is the victim of one bad decision after another, not all his fault, but for his shoulders alone to bear. Each man who dies under his command takes him “one step farther from home.”

Very cool to see Paul Giamatti, Dennis Farina and even Ted Danson in small key roles. Be sure to watch for Nathan Fillion (soon a cult fave in FIREFLY!) as the tearful wrong Ryan… And when Hiller’s troop does find the real private James Ryan – he is Matt Damon, acting the hell out of the Concerned Face chapter of the Acting for Male Models handbook.

Though Hiller’s men grew to resent Ryan during their search, now they realize he is as confused and human as the rest of them, and though he’s getting a free pass home, his principles don’t allow him to desert his post or his brigade.

To climax the movie – another skin-searing battle sequence. Spielberg is now just having the time of his life: his crew have the formula down and we are once again struck speechless by the construction of the onscreen blitzkrieg that makes all other skirmishes on film look like Monty Python’s Batley Townswomens’ Guild Battle of Pearl Harbor.

Chilling – as Goldberg’s Jew struggles with a German and is stabbed slowly, deliberately; regretful – as Davies’s scaredy-cat Upham could’ve stopped the stabbing if he had just had the guts to run up a stairway instead of tearfully ascending in fear; twisted – as Pepper’s holy sharpshooter prays while he snipes that his lord keep his hand steady and his eye keen, “You are my tower, you are my shield” (which should be a morbid contradiction for Christians, that they will instead find reassuring – that “god” is supposedly on their side); disturbing – when Ribisi’s doc is mortally wounded and he stutters instructions on how to “operate” on him, even as his liver is mutilated and the last of the morphine is stabbed into his leg as he expires; amusing – as Sizemore is shot and is more pissed off at his gun jamming than at being shot; ultimately tragic – as Hiller’s dying words to Ryan convey his confidence in the unproven worth of humankind, and a simultaneous indictment that Ryan could never hope to live up to: “Earn this!… Earn it.”

For a movie that stands helmet and shoulders above all other war movies for battle realism coupled with solid characterization, it is a shame RYAN’S premise is so godawfully maudlin.

For closure, a general narrates a letter written by the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die, to Ryan’s mother on how the army is soooo generous for sending James Ryan home, misusing Lincoln’s words about her other sons being sacrificed on the “altar of freedom,” and generally making our flesh crawl with platitudes, euphemisms and shallow commiserations.

The overarching duplicity and mendacity of America’s involvement in WWII will be missed by everyone who regards these men as heroes (simply for dodging death and causing death, all in the name of a freedom which could have been retained by not entering the war in the first place). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – much like George W. Bush declaring he was uninterested in empire-building – was voted into a second term by declaring he would keep America out of foreign wars. Which means the will of the people was AGAINST involving the United States in Japan’s invasion of China in the late 1930s. Yet as soon as he entered his second term, FDR set in motion schemes for entering the war by any means possible, including antagonizing Japan to force the United States into conflict. FDR’s oil and steel embargoes on Japan were the last straw, and America suffered FDR’s infamous “date which will live in infamy,” December 8, 1941 – Pearl Harbor – the greatest excuse for Warmongers to Send Sons Off To Die. You see, if FDR had actually stuck to his anti-interventionism/anti-war policies (which was the will of the American people) he could have saved not only private Ryan, but also Captain Hiller, adjutant Sizemore, medic Ribisi, private looker, private Jew, private goombah, private holy sharpshooter, and the whole godforsaken American army, navy and air force.

But that would entail America actually possessing a shred of decency and humanity.

Shyeh! What if.

END

Boring Roaring.

Unnecessary.

That’s the word that comes to mind during Steven Spielberg‘s THE LOST WORLD JURASSIC PARK, the insipid followup to his mighty JURASSIC PARK (1993).

In a fit of George Lucas-oid storytelling (i.e. Making It Up As He Goes Along), we are reintroduced to Hammond (Richard Attenborough, usually a paragon of filmic integrity, probably filling this pedestrian cameo to finance GANDHI II: DHOTI MASSACRE), the industrialist behind Jurassic Park (whose character actually dies in the Michael Crichton book, Jurassic Park, therefore is not featured in Crichton’s literary sequel, The Lost World). And Hammond lets fly with exposition piled on rationalization piled on piles of dino dropping…

Been a few years since the incidents at Jurassic Park and Hammond is now a sniveling naturalist trying to preserve his OTHER island of dinosaurs from industrialists who want to cash in on it (like, uh, himself from the previous movie). Cos this other island called Site B is where the dinosaurs were really bred, see, before being transported to Jurassic Park, see; and for the sake of getting people on the island for some Running and Screaming, Hammond has sent a research team comprised of mismatched actors (Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn and Richard Schiff). Jeff Goldblum as chaotician Ian Malcolm, raises the pertinent question to Hammond, as to how there are still dinos running around if he bred them “lysine deficient,” to which Hammond looks up his Hollywood One-Liner Plot Fix Manual and replies, “Yes, but they’re flourishing – that’s one of a thousand questions I want answered by the team.”

Let it be known: JURASSIC PARK II was not made for its story (which departs from the book in the worst ways), nor for art, nor for fans, nor for enjoyment, purely for dirty profit. At the risk of sounding like Eric Cartman, dare we rename Spielberg’s sequel JEW-RASSIC PARK?

So what are you waiting for, Steven – let’s see some dinosaurs. Still committed to some bare vestige of storytelling (maybe because David Koepp wrote the screenplay – sorry, ‘butchered’ is more appropriate), Spielberg gives us even more crammed exposition. There’s Schiff’s “high hide” (a useless piece of elevated cage that serves ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE); there’s Vaughn’s backstory about being in Greenpeace for the chicks; there’s Malcolm’s black daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester), in whom we presume Malcolm’s white genes decided to skip a generation (even in trying to do the right thing – by showing us an interracial child – the filmmakers cast a kid as dark as the offspring of a Namibian princess and Barack Obama Sr.).

Even throwing down his best Jeff Goldblum impressions, Jeff Goldblum still can’t stop this dino mound getting higher by the minute. By the time we actually reach the island, we’re trying to tunnel our way out.

This time, the wonder of the dinosaurs lasts even less time than in JURASSIC PARK, before they are objectified and then turned into villains. During the first fantastic stegosaur encounter (with a very fake baby stego), through everyone’s gasps Malcolm actually remarks, “Oh yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.”

He actually uses my clinical definition of this fallback position for when ideas run dry: Running and Screaming. I oughta trademark that. A million trashy “horror” movies will owe me a big dime.

The Corporate bad guys arrive on the heels of Malcolm’s research team, led by Great White Hunter Roland Tembo (Pete Postlethwaite – eternally 50) and slimy lawyer Arliss Howard. Lots of running dinosaurs. Capturing, mistreating, head-butting, ropes and jeeps and struggling corythosaurs. Oh my.

Postlethwaite’s energetic missing scene is indicative of this film’s problem: the theatrical release does not show Roland coming to the aid of a waitress at a tourist bar, knocking out a guy half his age with one hand tied behind his back. He does this not for honor, but because he’s bored. It is a great insight into his character. And the scene is cut. In favor of Running and Screaming. Doesn’t that tell anyone with a whit of knowledge on story construction where this film derailed? After he bags the tyrannosaur, Roland disappears from the script.

Storyline so contrived, most of it is from JURASSIC PARK. Especially that “trailer-dangling-over-the-precipice” gag. Yawn. This overwrought sequence gives us yet another reason to dislike Mr. Spielberg, as innocuous Mr. Schiff tries valiantly to pull the dangling trailers up onto solid ground and is rewarded for his troubles by being eaten. Pulled apart by two tyrannosaurs! After all its cringey humor and ratcheting tension, the movie pays off this supposedly thrilling sequence by killing the only likeable minor character. Now that was unnecessary.

(The opening scene in this movie is actually the opening scene of the book, Jurassic Park, where a rich family dines on a deserted beach and the little girl stumbles on a compsognathus herd.)

There is much science in Crichton’s didactic book; in the movie, the most science that occurs is watching Julianne Moore try to act.

THE LOST WORLD JURASSIC PARK is centered around plopping a tyrannosaur in the middle of San Diego. Spielberg’s own confession. Which explains the half-baked, hurried and insubstantial dinosaur scenes on the island. More plagiarism, as the tyrannosaur arrives in Los Angeles like Dracula – aboard a ship with all the crew dead. The beast is still locked in the hold, which begs begs begs the question on how it ate everyone and managed to lock itself back in the hold.

After Spielberg satiates his jones on stupid T. rex gags around Diego, it is captured by Goldblum and Moore and put back on the ship. Final scene is a stinker of the highest proportions, as a conga line of herbivores walks beside a conga line of carnivores as if neither can see the other. It is unbelievably incognizant.

The only reason this movie scores at all is the “realism” of its dinos. They’re the best cybertronic and CGI animal whores that money can buy.

END

Re-educating the slaves of perception.

Give us – us salad!

AMISTAD, one of the modern hammers to beat Whitey upside the head for his past, present and future racism. No metaphors, no allegories, no analogies – this is straight up, in-ya-face, naked mea culpa racism for all the world to be ashamed of.

Director Steven Spielberg‘s powerful, insightful AMISTAD suffers from the usual problem associated with “Based On A True Story” movies – it simplifies Story until it is nowhere near the True it is supposedly Based On.

There are many more complications in the actual True Story, but IN THE MOVIE: African slaves overrun their Cuban slave ship, La Amistad, and sail it off course in their attempt to get home. Captured by a United States naval ship, they are taken to an American port and treated like property until politicians and courts figure out their backstory.

It is 1839 and the days of slavery are numbered – as we see many “free-men” (blacks in positions of relative respect). So with none of the Amistad Africans able to speak a word in their defense, the legal fine print demanded the courts discern whether they were descendants of slaves (which would make them guilty of murder onboard Amistad) or kidnapped from Africa (which would justify their attempted escape). Yet they were held in prison – even though they technically stood outside the American legal system.

It takes ex-president John Qunicy Adams to turn the provincial perceptions of American white folks to understanding that no matter their technical definition, in another land, these black folks were a free sovereign people; their detainment was not only moot, it was reprehensible.

Djimon Hounsou is lead slave, Cinque, in the mandingo performance that shot him to international recognition. Matthew McConaughey is Baldwin, a young lawyer who initially treats Cinque’s people as property (which is the right thing to do to win their case, in a blinkered court that cannot see them any other way), but he must relinquish the case to bigger guns. We would think this might be Morgan Freeman as Joadson (an African-American, heh, “free-man”), but Freeman, usually a font of conscience, gravitas and bravura (or at the least, gritty voiceover) seems to do nothing in this movie except wander around in his big Batman coat. He cedes all his usual duties to Anthony Hopkins as John Quincy Adams, who steals every scene (he is, after all, Anthony Hopkins!) and gives the final rousing, epic speech that Morgan Freeman just wished he could’ve done as a gritty voiceover.

When Adams delves into the minds of the Africans, in particular, Cinque’s conquering of a lion terrorizing his village, the audience and cast alike start to realize the fabric and depth of the people they have been holding; simultaneously driving home how dishonorable white law actually is. Cinque cannot disguise his ferocity towards the duplicity of white legalities; he screams in his Mende language, spittle flying, fiery backdrop glazing his naked ebony: “What kind of a place is this where you almost mean what you say? Where laws almost work? How can you live like that?!” (Philosophy for the men, naked ebony for the laydayz…)

In a flashback, we are shown how these kidnapped people were treated onboard La Amistad – shackled in the hold of the ship, naked, fed gruel, adults trying to hold babies above the crush of bodies; when food runs low, twenty men and women shackled together are simply thrown overboard. It is horrifying.

The visuals in AMISTAD are disturbing, the psychology even more so. The irritating orchestra-swell happy ending does not signify only this winning case, it heralds a sea-change in the perception of those people who actually sat on the bench and owned slaves. The morality of denying a fellow human their rights was being realized. Anthony Hopkins makes the conscience bleed (while Morgan Freeman stews).

And the triumph of AMISTAD is not that it portrays the horrors of slavery – a million movies do that – it liberates the modern audience from viewing slaves as one-dimensional peons. It does for our minds what Cinque shouts for his people in court: his shred of repeated English, an anguished, feral cry that shivers our souls:

“Give us, us free!”

END

A Whale of a Tale.

Da… dun…

Da-dun…

Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun – toodle-oooo (those are the French horns)…

When Steven Spielberg first heard John Williams‘s simple, ominous JAWS theme, he apparently thought it was a joke. Now who’s laughing?

They just don’t make ’em like this anymore. Matter of fact, even this film’s director, Mr. Household-Name himself, Steven Spielberg, don’t make ’em like this anymore. JAWS put Spielberg into the A-Plus List. He has been trying to capture the natural ease and gutshock power of JAWS ever since.

Amity Island – a great place to get eaten. A white pointer shark is terrorizing beach vacationers and Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) battles the tourist-minded Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) to keep the beaches closed. Death in the water and death upon land (for the tourist trade) forces the town to employ a grizzled seadog, Quint (Robert Shaw), a funky marine biologist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and aquaphobic Brody to hunt the Great White down.

I still cannot explain why Method acting in the 70s was so much better overall than it is in the late 2000s. Look at Brody interacting with his wife (Lorraine Gary) and kids (the same interaction is masterfully captured by Spielberg in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, 1977); look at the extras, not behaving like they’re one step closer to a SAG card, but behaving like hick islanders without a camera filming them; look at the snide asides between the excitable Dreyfuss, the intolerant Shaw, and the frustrated Scheider, inhabiting their characters like scales on fish.

And JAWS captures The 70’s Wench idiom; defining young women in the 70s, there was a hairstyle, a body style, a clothing style, a breezy attitude that women have somehow lost over all their sexual revolutions of the last decades. The opening scene of JAWS finds a 70’s Wench nude in the moonlit water, the first victim of the great white.

Steven Spielberg, dressed like he has just returned from the Gay Volleyball Finals, is eaten by a homophobic shark.

We do not see the shark. Because the model kept breaking down. (Not the 70’s Wench, the shark.) Nicknamed “Bruce,” the animatronic shark created for the movie was so erratic and unrealistic, Spielberg decided to keep it off camera as much as possible. Yet the few seconds we see Bruce’s dead, dead eyes and razorkill jaws are enough to cast an unworldly chill in our spines. And therein lies one of the great serendipities of movie-making legend. Spielberg has been credited with keeping the shark mysterious and thereby heightening the movie’s tension, when in fact, that decision was nothing more than working around budget and time constraints with a malfunctioning monster.

Movie deviates from Peter Benchley‘s 1974 novel of the same name. In the book, Hooper has an affair with Brody’s wife, the Brodys’ class issues with the upper-class island community are prevalent, Mayor Vaughn is in deep with the Mob, and Quint dies when a rope lashed to his leg drags him under with the shark (Benchley trying for an Ahab moment?).

TV writer Carl Gottlieb was brought in to tighten Benchley’s screenplay (of which many drafts were rejected, according to imdb), restructuring the longwinded book into the compelling movie we love and fear.

In 1975, JAWS was not only the highest grossing film of all time (until STAR WARS would wrench that title from its fins in 1977), the head-game impact it made on the world depleted beach trade in the mid-70s; people stopped swimming for fear of sharks; untold shark television specials and documentaries were greenlighted, not to mention Peter Benchley’s average novel going “superbestseller” (was that before or after JAWS went supernova?).

All on accounta Bruce eating all those 70’s Wenches. And who doesn’t like to eat 70’s Wenches?

END

Crystal Numbskull and the Kingdom of the Buttoned Shirt.

In the movie posters, his shirt isn’t unbuttoned as low as it used to be. Good call. Man-essence might have been replaced by man-boob.

Poffiana Jones

Indiana Jones … is back? Well… 65 year-old Harrison Ford (Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr.) and 62 year-old Steven (I’ve-got-a-golden-ticket) Spielberg and 64 year-old George (Franchise Botcher) Lucas grasp wildly at the golden goose that made them action superstars when they were not worried about social security, in this hackneyed film about that grave-robbing professor of archaeology and the Russians who love to hate him.

Written by mutton-fist Lucas, directed by No-Risk Spielberg, and starring Ford with his shirt buttoned, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL starts off promising, then gets stupider by the stunt.

Nevada 1957. Movie throws Indy in our faces immediately, kidnapped by those Damn Russkies and forced to find some kind of sarcophagus of power for a Russian dominatrix (Cate Blanchett, with a bad Ukraine accent). All pleasantly nostalgic, especially when the Ark of the Covenant makes a cameo. But something is awry immediately: Spielberg and his longtime D.P. (Janusz Kaminski) just don’t trust sunlight any more – the “outdoor” scenes reek of studio fakery, everyone in the open looking like a glazed donut.

We dive into the usual gamut of pulp implausibility (how many rounds can a trained soldier fire at Indy point blank without hitting him?; how many falls can a 65 year-old sustain without seeking medical advice?; how many waterfalls can our heroes go over and stay alive before we have to slap someone for laughing?; how many rocketsleds, complete with Roger Ebert’s Red Digital Readout, are conveniently fueled and operational for a deus ex machina escape from Damn Russkies?)…

Ray Winstone is Indy’s plump sidekick this time ‘round, John Hurt mumbles a lot (tragically, both Winstone and Hurt never get the chance to actually act under all the action and stunts and effects), and Shia LeBeouf does his Brando Wild One to capture the youth market that Indy once cornered simply by unbuttoning his shirt.

Turns out Shia is not a mini-Marlon after all – he’s a mini-Indy (a “Mindy”?); a long-lost bastard son spawned from Karen Allen, who reprises her role as love interest (although the interest from Indy’s public would likely be more nostalgic than romantic; I mean, euuww! We don’t particularly want to see our grandparents playing patticake).

Is that the sound of the grosses going down?

Both Denholm Elliott (R.I.P. 1992) and Sean Connery are absent. That doesn’t stop Indy quoting Connery from THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987) “…brought a knife to a gun fight,” and with this movie tipping so far into magical and silly, I expected Connery to turn up anyway, no explanation or reason, like he did in HIGHLANDER II (1991).

When the titular Crystal Skull is discovered… things get really goofy.

Looking suspiciously like H.R. Giger’s ALIEN (1989), the elongated, transparent artifact causes people to go Communist if they gaze at it, which is why the dominatrix and her Damn Russkie soldiers want to unleash it on the weak-minded public.

Spielberg is still a masterful movie-maker, Ford still Total Action Man, but Lucas starts throwing so many idiot curve balls that it is only a matter of time before the movie strikes out: telepathy, auto-writing, extra-terrestrial aliens spawning ancient Earth civilizations, predestination and prophecies, a Mayan step pyramid as hangar for a spaceship – everything for the weak-minded to curl their little insubstantial brains around… it all ends up very Von Daniken, only missing the zeppelin flashing an ad for CHARIOTS OF THE GODS.

By the time Shia is swinging on liana vines like Tarzan to head off the chase scene, I simply wrote in my notes – like those splash-phrases that marketers sell to the media – “irretrievably silly.”

Yes, we all know it’s pulp and Saturday afternoon serial, but the whole enterprise is too self-aware to be innocently enjoyable. Action is merely action and stunts is jess stunts if the story is less than compelling. Indy and Co. try to return the skull to its rightful resting place, courtesy of John Hurt’s mumbling, which is inside a Mayan pyramid. Turns out the alien skull, when returned to its crystal skeleton, makes thirteen alien skeletons meld into each other to form a Live Scary Alien… who launches his spaceship after burning out the eye sockets of the dominatrix … Well, told you it was stupid!…

And mean-spirited too! Why are Spielberg’s aliens now so hostile? What makes a man with Spielberg’s once-hopeful vision (E.T., CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) flip-flop to portray aliens with such rage? The CLOSE ENCOUNTERS aliens were kind, beneficent, musical; whereas the alien who confronts the dominatrix here is majorly pissed off for some reason.

Cate simply “wanted to know” – she sought knowledge – and the alien fried her brain. In CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, Richard Dreyfuss also “wanted to know” and he was invited aboard the alien spaceship for brunch. Isn’t Cate the smart one here – even WITH the bad Ukraine accent? Isn’t she the only one exhibiting a smidgeon of scientific curiosity? Instead, we get another reference to better times and better movies (to wit: the STAR WARS franchise), when Harrison forebodes, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” just before everything turns pear-shaped and Cate is incinerated for her inquisitiveness. Guess the aliens did that to Dreyfuss after the Director’s Cut wrapped filming inside the mothership…

John Hurt stops mumbling for one second to specify that the spaceship disappears “not into space – into the space between spaces,” which touches on the only cogent scientific theory in the whole movie – membrane theory (aka “brane” theory), but was treated as mystically as the rest of the guff, so that no one – especially not the weak-minded – would accidentally learn anything.

What irks me are the contradictions that the weak-minded simply lap up without even realizing it. Read a book, fer cryin out loud! The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973) or Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov (1979) are two easily-digested tomes that might enlighten the Great Unwashed as to how unutterably asinine the prospect of alien life is AS HOLLYWOOD ENVISIONS IT. Sagan and Asimov are two scientific, intelligent, reasoning beings who hoped with all their hearts that E.T.s did exist – as I do – not only because it would be way cool and open humanity to a universe of possibilities, but also because it would negate the need for religions and gods!

The same people who believe in predestination and precognition are the same nonces who believe in gods, angels and extra-terrestrials. (90% of this movie’s audience.) But predestination and precognition negates Free Will, a central tenet of your precious christian ethos! You can’t have it both ways, hypocrites!…

There are two sensational CGI moments: a ground view closeup of a mushroom cloud, and the spaceship taking off. The rest is lots and lots of by-the-numbers padding masquerading as “action.”

A weak marriage ceremony later (Karen Allen and Ford, limply exchanging vows simply to comply with Romantic Ending Protocol), Shia almost puts on the infamous fedora, as if a torch is about to be passed – but the moment is stolen from him as Ford grabs the hat and exits with his new bride. As if crowning himself.

Even with the buttoned shirt, Indy is still the King of Pulp…

END

Spielberg and Cruise: Reign of the Smugs.

One good thing can be said about the alien attack in WAR OF THE WORLDS – at least it achieved the mission impossible of wiping that insufferable smirk off Tom Cruise’s face.

Tripoffy

Steven Spielberg wields this remake of H.G. Wells‘ 1898 classic tale like Mel Gibson wielded his recounting of the peacenik crucified guy’s passion back in 2004: everyone in the world knows the story, so Spielberg – like Gibson – neglects to put any “story” into the movie. He doesn’t even need junkets to tell the tale prior to the movie (as George Lucas wielded his STAR WARS catastrophes) – he’s got a century’s legacy of societal inculcation holding up his plotholes with Atlas shoulders and tripod-girded loins.

From H.G. Wells’ original 1898 book (with its rank scientific inaccuracies), to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast (which caused nationwide panic), to George Byron’s 1953 film (as melodramatic and goofy as any 1950s B-sci-fi thriller), to Jeff Wayne’s 1978 concept album (whose opening chords were so powerfully reminiscent of Beethoven’s Fifth that I used them on an intro tape for a live rock band), WAR OF THE WORLDS is embedded in what might be called our memetic consciousness (a chunk of societal inculcation, passed down generations). So Spielberg smugly rolls film and lets people Run and Scream until he runs out of budget. The End.

Though Wells’ story of Martians arriving in tripods and using death rays worked gangbusters during a more unsophisticated time (when delusional astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was feverishly sketching canali on Mars and speculating on its intelligent life), our current technology definitively shows there is no “life as we know it” on the red planet, let alone a dying super civilization which might usurp Earth for their next home.

To circumvent the fact that Mars is such an open book today, Spielberg and writers Josh Friedman and David Koepp opt to BURY this movie’s alien invaders under the Earth, presumably for millennia, and presumably so deep that our modern equipment nor our extensive sinking of foundations would detect them. Also, there is never specific mention of “Martians,” that term being out of fad since humans have explored so much deeper into space and envisioned so much more exotic extra-terrestrials in INDEPENDENCE DAY and MEN IN BLACK. (Maybe they’re from the even scarier planet of L-Ron-Hubbard?)

Tom Cruise is Ray Ferrier (which is irrelevant, as you’ll see), a divorcee who cannot connect with his teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and whose daughter (Dakota Fanning) is precocious enough to be either a Hollywood Brat or possessed by the devil. (Where did this convention originate of ten-year-olds smarter than their 40-year-old parents?) After smugly smirking his way through twenty-five minutes of filmstock, Ray witnesses a giant metal monster rise from under Chicago’s concrete and start vaporizing people and buildings with its “death ray” (sounds kooky, but there it is), effectively wiping aforementioned smirk off aforementioned huge-salaried, delusional movie star’s self-satisfied mug.

Cue Running and Screaming. Shortly after this, there is some Running and Screaming, with a cameo by the World’s Ugliest Man (Lenny Venito), who is thankfully vaporized before the nausea starts. Oh, and did I forget to mention the Running and Screaming?

Then it gets interesting. There is some shouting… then Running and Screaming. Through it all, Our Heroes never seem to Get A Clue, taking the obligatory unnecessary risks at every turn (running 200 feet to bushes to take a pee; teen son constantly rebelling against Ray, for the sake of being the rebellious teen son; driving slowly through a pack of crazy people, just asking for their car to be stolen). A plane crashes, Tim Robbins cameos as someone crazier than Tom Cruise, the American military once again get bitch-slapped by foreigners (hey – I wasn’t even thinking about mentioning Dubya); there is the perfunctory “tension-filled” scene where an alien recon arm sniffs around a basement that Ray is hiding in (same old Spielberg – it could have been an axe-murderer or a Velociraptor – the conventions are there, let’s use ’em) and there are lots of big orange explosions; Ray’s son gets killed, then is alive at the end, and Tom Cruise does a lot of driving with his daughter born of Satan.

There is an opening narrative, not a patch on Richard Burton’s Shakespearean locution on Wayne’s concept album: “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space… and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”

Over 20 years ago, Spielberg gave us a message of hope – a Sagan-esque paean that there was intelligent life somewhere else in the galaxy, yearning communication with our idiot species (in fact, these WOTW “tripods” sound suspiciously like the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS aliens with their musical air blasts) – and now he delivers this overblown ode to the guttural nature of that idiot species, showing us formicating, selfish humanity in all its gory.

Is it a sign of the times that one of the greatest filmmakers of our era is so adversely affected by the real-world politics of mass destruction?

Using the same kind of filtering technique he used in 2002’s MINORITY REPORT (that overbright, noisy – as in “grainy” – filmstock), Spielberg knows that even if people don’t know WOTW, his money-is-no-object effects can stand on their own in lieu of story cogency.

When Ray is captured by the tripods, he is carted about in a cage under the machine’s belly. No one looks twice when an extra is sucked into the underbelly of the tripod to fuel the machine with human flesh. But when it grabs Ray, suddenly EVERYONE in the cage piles onto Ray to pull him from the maw. Why? Because he’s TOM CRUISE, dummies!

The opening shots of the film portends the aliens’ downfall, as we see a shot of space, which transforms into microscopic bacteria, which transforms into the Earth as a drop of water on a leaf; after the aliens die of Earth viruses, the closing shot bookends the film by reverting back to the bacteria, which morph into the starry blackness of space. If only this creativity was employed in the rest of the movie…

END