Nazi Murderer in Repose.

Szpilman’s Liszt.

THE PIANIST follows Jewish concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman as he hides out from Nazis during the invasion of Poland. It’s not a story about heroes, rather, the story of a Polish man who avoided being one. And lived to play another day.

1939. Wladyslaw “Wladek” Szpilman (Adrien Brody), whom many contend was “the most accomplished pianist in Poland, if not all of Europe” during the 1930s, is thrust into WWII fingers first when a German bomb blows up the radio station where he is broadcasting a piano performance.

When he arrives home, his large family, who were just desperately packing to flee, hears Britain on the radio declaring war on Germany, and promising Poland she “is not alone.” However, like every political promise made in the history of politics, it will mean less than the airwaves it was broadcast on. Even whilst they enjoy dinner and drinks to celebrate the end of a war which is actually just beginning, German troops are goose-stepping into their town. There is an authenticity to this ambivalence that is lacking in many war movies: In hindsight, we know what a scourge Hitler’s regime was, but in those more innocent times, when only one “World War” had ravaged humanity, Poland (and the world at large) did not take Hitler’s extremist policies of relocation and extermination seriously.

We see the slow undermining of Poland’s freedoms: “Jews Only” cafés, Star of David armbands forced on Jews to identify them like cattle, laws prohibiting Jews to sit on park benches… it gets real when Wladek’s father is stopped by Nazis and beaten for not bowing to them in the street.

November 1940: 360,000 Jews – Wladek and his family among them – are herded into the Warsaw Ghetto.

During the evacuation of the bombed radio station, Wladek met a blonde fan enamored with his playing, Dorota (Emilia Fox). While the station crumbled around him, Wladek’s mind was not on German raids but on raiding panty. Even during a bombing – men be pigs! He took Dorota on a date, where he lamented, “What’s the use of fighting back?” – which, we presume, caused him to miss out on some fine blond tail that night…

Now, while Wladek drudges alongside a cart with his family, he sees Dorota by the roadside, watching the exodus. Oh, Humiliation, thy snide mistress! And Dorota, tears edging her eyes in disbelief, says what must have been in everyone’s minds as it was happening back then, “It’s too absurd.”

You should see this place on a Friday!

From this point THE PIANIST starts resembling that other great WWII drama, SCHINDLER’S LIST, in its depiction of German soldiers’ brutality and sadism. Scenes of unthinkable misery: a man in a wheelchair thrown off a balcony; a father dead in the street, his head cradled by his crying son; a woman asks a soldier, “Where are you taking us?” – a nonchalant bullet to the head. Like SCHINDLER, the violence is sudden, glaring and shocking; the misery and poverty of the downtrodden Jews almost too much for us to bear even as viewers.

A chance separation; a critical turning point – a friend from the Jewish Ghetto police recognizes Wladek and pulls him deliberately from the line, while his family are being herded into windowless cattle cars. To their knowledge, they were being taken “somewhere” as an enslaved labor force – at the least, they were a commodity, none could conceive of the trip being a journey to their deaths. There was truly no rational reason to simply wipe out people. But there was no reason or logic to the fanatic racism of the Nazis (which they have carried down to their most recent capos like Dumbo Donald, Closet Mike Pence, Ku Jeff Sessions and the whole foreign-bought enslaved American republiKKKan administration).

In a labor camp, Wladek meets an old friend, Marjorek (Daniel Caltagirone, the Andy Garcia of Poland), who helps Wladek escape into the Jewish Underground. And so begins the hiding. From deserted apartments to bombed districts, forever moving and being aided by free, rich Jews sympathetic to the cause. At one point Wladek encamps in the lion’s den – across the road from German Police. With a piano in the room, which he couldn’t play, because the apartment he was hiding in was regarded as empty! Only a musician will know the pain.

When ventriloquial dummies won’t cooperate.

There are two themes at play in THE PIANIST – the first message is simply about the inartful, ungodly luck that separated life from death during the war. In his flight from the Nazis, Wladek would encounter so many chances and coincidences and near-death experiences that the overarching message of the movie is not one of heroism or canniness, but of randomness. Though we may regard Wladek as intrinsically worthy of saving (because he is an artist? the star? a sexyboy?), he did not do anything heroic in his quest to survive; it was not as a “reward” for saving a school of children from bombs, or trying to sacrifice himself for another, no, his existence was what most would regard as “cowardly” – fleeing from hideout to hideout, noiseless, like a mouse, the merest hint of discovery causing him not to take up arms against his aggressors but to flee again and again. He did this until his country was liberated by other people, negating his need to flee. At one point, Wladek helps a young boy crawl under a wall, but the boy dies in his arms – this is not so much a heroic act as another demonstration of randomness, as when Wladek was pulled from the line and saved unintentionally from death.

This randomness would have a part in the second theme of THE PIANIST, which illustrates the true sense of being humane. Wladek is discovered by Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann – no matter how Aryan this guy looks, he’ll always bring our tears to the surface in his touching roles!). Coincidentally looking like Liam Neeson (cough-Schindler!), Hosenfeld is a music lover, and after discovering Wladek is a pianist, starts supplying him with food! In a heart-rending turnaround, Hosenfeld finds himself a Soviet prisoner when the war is over, and beseeches a passing Polish musician, “Do you know Szpilman? I helped him while he was in hiding! Tell him I’m here!” But Hosenfeld would die an unheralded death in that camp in 1952, unapplauded, unforgiven. Yet wasn’t his fate a treatise on Christianity in its purest form? How God entreats Christians not to seek plaudits or reward for their good deeds, nor to shout them from the rooftops, but to perform them in earnest, away from prying eyes? Truly, this is Hosenfeld, who returned a creature of art to the world. And when he asked for reward (in the film at least), none was given. Yet, he never looks regretful of his humane actions…

The Pianist and The Captain – Wladyslaw Szpilman and Wilm Hosenfeld.

BEST DIRECTOR: Ronald Harwood screenplays from Szpilman’s book, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story Of One Man’s Survival In Warsaw, 1939-1945 (Picador, 2000), a story which resonated with director Roman Polanski, who was also a fugitive from Hitler’s regime at a young age. There were many who felt Polanski redeemed himself of his statutory rape crimes with his creation of this touching film– (oooh, don’t say ‘touching’). THE PIANIST also won BAFTAs (including Best Film 2003), and a host of other awards.

BEST ACTOR: There were the “big” aspects of Adrien Brody’s Method: he dropped down to 130 pounds, moved to Europe, got rid of his car and phone, to experience isolation and loss, and wasn’t sure he would make it through the experience entirely sane. Then there were the little things: after he realizes his whole family has been taken from him in one fell swoop, Wladek meets a fellow fugitive and is in such a state of despair he cannot speak coherently (we think he’s going to give the customary exposition about the train taking the Jews to the ovens, for historical context blah blah, but Brody brilliantly, gutturally tries to squeeze out a few words and says nothing; or the amazing visual when Wladek speaks to Germans, where he adopts a cowed manner, and we are taken aback when we see Brody (the obvious star) murmuring with head bowed, until we recall this was the manner of all Jews toward occupying Nazis; or Brody’s pretty convincing piano miming, most of which is Chopin – challenging stuff, even to mime. (Actual closeups show the hands of pianist Janusz Olejniczak – which may also be the last remaining letters in any given Scrabble game.) And one thing Brody didn’t need to work on – that honker! Whatever nationality/religion Adrien Brody is, that nose of his is strictly Jewish. Adrien won the Oscar for Best Actor. His nose won at Cannes.

The one thing that gives us pause and robs the film of a little authenticity is – ironically – the sound of the piano in the bombed house where Wladek is discovered by Hosenfeld. It is beautiful, magnificent, in perfect tune and conditioning, not one key sticking, not one key broken, not one string even slightly flat, its feel and touch perfect. In Holocaust Poland. I’ve played pianos in modern music studios that are in worse condition than this instrument in Holocaust Poland.

Closing titles: “Wladyslaw Szpilman continued to live in Warsaw until his death on 6^th July 2000. He was 88 years old.”

His nose continues to tour with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

END

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

Cleanup on Aisle Dirty.

Classic! Explosive, action-packed, funny and filthy, THE DIRTY DOZEN is the best Boy’s Movie of the millennium! If you’re between 14 and 24, you will be inspired by this movie; it was the HALO 3 of its day.

In World War II, twelve American military convicts, each a different flavor of crazy, are snatched from the jaws of death row by a U.S. Army Major, for a suicide mission behind German enemy lines. Salt away in jail – or die free for your country. They all accept, all with the intent to try an escape at their first opportunity, but under the canny tutelage of the Major, slowly become a team. A ragtag team. That word invented here.

Lee Marvin is stoic Major Reisman, willing to bend orders to get his men in shape for the mission; overjoyed when they rebel against him using the collective “we”: ‘We’ don’t wanna shave; ‘we’ want hot water…

Charles Bronson is Wladislaw, a Polish scrapper with a death wish.

Big Jim Brown (“the greatest player in NFL history”) is Jefferson, who does an explosive endgame run that will live in legend long after his football career.

John Cassavetes is wild-eyed Victor Franko, the actual star of this movie, with the most lines and the definitive character arc.

Towering Clint Walker is gentle giant Posey, the “Lenny” who doesn’t know his own strength.

Telly Savalas is religious zealot Maggot, whose distaste for the wiles of women starts the siege on the German stronghold before schedule.

Donald Sutherland is slow-witted Pinkley, whose impersonation of a general would put the buck’s fizz up Robert Ryan’s knickers.

Robert Ryan is a straight-laced colonel who looks down on Major Reisman’s secret mission and his disheveled methods; in trying to prove his veteran soldiers are more effective than Reisman’s “dirty dozen” he is beaten like a red-headed step child.

Ernest Borgnine is a general who gets a big laugh out of Ryan’s knotted knickers.

Familiar face Richard Jaeckal is a sergeant, basically the same role he would play in the other underdog war movie of this decade, THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE (1968). George Kennedy mopes around as an observer.

And there’s Trini López. Whereas half the actual Dozen faded into obscurity in filmdom (besides those major stars covered), López is worthy of mention here only because he was the subject of the hands-down funniest joke in SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, when Tom Hanks complains about women falling into weepy tears over some romcom, then launching into an improvised tearful sonata on a scene from THE DIRTY DOZEN, unable to contain himself when Trini López “busted his neck while they were parachuting down behind Nazi lines… ”

Directed by Robert Aldrich, THE DIRTY DOZEN was made at a time when being in the military was not a giant wank. It was actually cool once. Seeing Bronson and Marvin and Cassavetes in that army green was inspiring. As Pacino might say in DONNIE BRASCO: “These are men are men.” Nowadays, the military brand has overrun the government and even the police force; military are given all manner of respect that they don’t deserve and simultaneously shown disrespect by the very government that utilizes their intimidation role; they’re hung with all manner of useless riot gear, they advertise their services as if they’re gods, we’re all meant to bow down and thank and worship every time their shadow passes over our pathetic non-military selves. As Rachel Maddow observes in her excellent book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2013), America has become a nation at peace with perpetual war, and with every aspect of civil society accepting the drift towards a military-based society.

So I doubt THE DIRTY DOZEN could be made again with the same efficacy. Movies like the Iraq-based THREE KINGS (1999) and Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) have tried to recapture that ragtag dynamic of a military team on an adventure, but war is not as breezy a topic as it was; these dynamics have been transferred to fantasy films like THE A-TEAM (2010) and THE AVENGERS (2012), where each protagonist has a different power to offer the team; all trying to recapture that DOZEN flavor and missing the mark (while hitting new ones).

They are the Superman trope in camo. And the Superman trope is simply the Jesus symbology. Is it any coincidence that at their last supper, where they recite their game plan over and over, the Dirty Dozen are seated along one side of the table? Lee Marvin as Christ. With the troublemaker Maggot seated in the position of Doubting Thomas; Charles Bronson seated in the position of The Mechanic, Sutherland is the Body Snatcher, Jim Brown in the position of Running Back and Trini Lopez as Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail…

END

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

Training Brahs.

In WWII, prisoner of war Frank Sinatra enters an Italian prison camp and starts doing things His Way.

VON RYAN’S EXPRESS is an audacious prison escape movie, an original trinket amongst the morass of World War II movies culled from supposedly “true events.” British and American prisoners of war hijack their own prison train and outrace Germans to the Swiss border.

Colonel Joseph L Ryan (Sinatra) wants to sit out the war in the prison camp, refusing to cooperate with the British POW Commanding Officer (persnickety Trevor Howard) on escape plans and general mischief against their Italian captors, at one point even traitorously revealing an Allied tunnel to their Italian Captain (Sergio Fantoni). At first it seems like a tactic to make the Italians drop their guard, but no, Ryan is dead serious about his girly attitude – to such an extent that he is dubbed “Von Ryan” by his fellow prisoners. (One wonders why he wasn’t christened with an Italian epithet like Guiseppe Ryan or Goombah Ryan.)

The Italian camp is closed down by the Germans, and the prisoners are loaded onto a prison train to transport them to another camp. Suddenly Ryan takes command like a Chairman of the Board and leads the POWs zealously, in an escape attempt more audacious than any mischievous tunnel. Ryan’s character twist was meant to be a feature of the film – how this disrespected and ostensibly lazy Colonel had to win back the respect of his troops to lead them to freedom, but this actioner moves as fast as the train they jack, and that “redemption” element of the story gets shunted to the background until the film’s blood-pounding climax when we are reminded of the sacrifice and leadership of Ryan, as the men he led to freedom look back on him one last time in tragic respect.

The thrilling chase movie takes us through occupied Italy, through German checkpoints, train depots, air raids; through a daring masquerade as Nazi officers; feverishly past a smoke-blooded temptress that might have served as love interest; onto an Italian engine driver ensconced in Stockholm Syndrome (before it was even invented in 1973!), who helps Frank and friends by diverting the train to Switzerland; to the nail-biting climax, as the train chuffs desperately in and out of tunnels, hugging a mountainside, with a German troop train gaining on it while Messerschmitts dive on it from above.

In the POW contingent, look for Brad Dexter (the unmagnificent one in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN), James Brolin (the future Mr. Streisand) and Edward Mulhare (the Hoff’s liege in KNIGHT RIDER).

Though I prefer modern war movies for their visual grit and nuanced political stances (unlike the sanitized, melodramatic war movies released during the actual war or in that jingoistic, paranoid period shortly after it), full marks must go to the writers of VON RYAN’S EXPRESS (novelist David Westheimer and screenwriters Wendell Mayes and Joseph Landon), who penned a unique, straight-ahead actioner that joins the ranks of STALAG 17 and THE GREAT ESCAPE as entertainment that somehow makes us forget the horrors of war even whilst portraying it. (Would that make HOGAN’S HEROES the pinnacle of war videography?)

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

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

Would you like a little bit of submarine with your waiting?

The Reich Stuff.

Never has nothing happening been such compelling viewing.

No debate, no discussion, no contenders – DAS BOOT is THE submarine movie for the ages.

In autumn 1941, World War II U-Boat 96, crewed by young rowdy Germans, puts to sea with its veteran captain, Henrich Lehmann-Willenbrock (wildly Teutonic Jürgen Prochnow, his eyes the color of eagle and high cheekbones set on stun).

The battle for control of the Atlantic is turning against the Germans, yet Hitler orders more and more U-boats with ever younger crews into battle against the British freighters and their destroyer escorts. This opening pitch and the antsiness of Willenbrock’s young hooligan crew seems to presage a roaring Hitlercoaster of war war war Amerikan style – but director/co-writer Wolfgang Petersen and writers Lothar G. Buchheim and Dean Riesner swerve to port with a counter-intuitive yet singularly entertaining and tension-filled, character-driven non-action action movie. These young punks discover that being at war is much like the waiting room in any doctor’s office.

DAS BOOT is filled with periods of waiting in fear, waiting in boredom, waiting in terror, waiting in anxiety – and sudden action that rips throats and bends steel with its bare hands.

DAS BOOT does something which most commercial war films are too gutless to do – humanizes Germans: they carry photos of their girls, they write home, there are heroes and cowards, there are hard men and those that crack under the strain; they catch crabs and rib each other about it; at one point, a sailor stops a celebration with the announcement of bad news on the radio – into the silence, he declares that back home, their soccer team has lost!

Das Cuke

These men doubt much of the war propaganda they are fed. Even though German tacticians convey Churchill as a “paralyzed guzzler” the officers on U-96 respect the British fleet (“Those aren’t amateurs up there”). Yet they do not fear the British simply because that is the default position of Germans in Westernized film, but because the British had better equipment. These Germans are not one-dimensional haters, not committed blindly to the Führer, not simple villain props as in countless Brit and U.S. movies. They are the heroes. And our hearts are with theirs in their throats every watery step of the way.

Even in its shortest version, DAS BOOT is 2 hours, 29 minutes. The Director’s Cut is 209 minutes, the uncut version is 293 minutes (4 hrs, 53 mins). It’s the most fun you’ll have growing a five o’clock shadow.

DAS BOOT attains such a high level of drama, we forgive director Petersen for the subpar exteriors, with those model subs and little dolls on the tower being foamed in slow motion to emulate a sizable u-boat.

When most movies are ending – at the 1:33 mark – this movie sees its first action. Yet even the action is not what one expects: after U-96 fires torpedoes at a British convoy, they submerge and wait in silence, listening for the muffled far-off explosions and counting the British ships sinking by the groans of steel they hear through the depths. And they know they’re in for repercussions – depth charges. The waiting begins anew – the interminable, unbearable waiting for death to claim you or not – as they “run silent,” all lights out, submerging further, engines at minimum. The sound of sonar pings their only warning that something is closing on them from above. The Captain says into the silence, “Here it comes. The revenge.” And all they can do is hang on through the bucking explosions and bolts bursting on pressurized pipes.

After the terror subsides, Willenbrock simply declares, “That’s the end of that.” Not heroes. Not cowards. Just doing their job.

Don’t pity him: his office is just like yours – dank, miserable and underwater.

When U-96 surfaces to survey their kills, they are outraged to find that one of the flaming ships they torpedoed still has men onboard, jumping off, screaming, aflame. And the focus of the Captain’s outrage will surprise you: “Why weren’t they rescued after all these hours?” One of his officers begins to weep for the dying. It’s a wondrous portrayal of war empathy, of humanity. It makes us question war yet again, and question the supposed intelligence of the species that can create the marvel of submarines and battleships only to use them in such unproductive, moronic fashion against each other.

Imagine the frustration of knowing that on a submarine, humans are the least important cargo – literally stacks of torpedoes, spare parts, tools for repairs (it’s like being in space – there is nowhere you can turn if you need a certain part), food, fuel, ballast, the mechanics of the sub itself, and at the very bottom of the list – as evidenced by the way sleeping bunks are haphazardly squeezed into crawlspaces – people.

Director Petersen instructed the whole crew not to go out into the sun during filming, so they would retain that bloodless pallor. He effectively suffocates us in the ghastly, claustrophobic passageways and “living spaces” of a submarine; he sends his cameras barreling through crawlspaces full tilt, pursuing running men who trip and glide through hatches; we almost feel the cracking of our skulls on jutting iron overhangs; sea water thunders in every time the top hatch is opened, drenching the plastic-coated charts and everyone nearby; everything is wet and damp, dark and cold…

DAS BOOT is a gritty study in patience, tactics, anxiety, tolerance, futility, and brings a whole new meaning to wetting the bed.

END

Gloriously Bastardly.

Quentin Tarantino loves cinema. Even the characters in his movies talk cinema. And the ones who aren’t talking cinema still seem to realize they’re in a damn fine piece of it. And the major plot point of Tarantino’s latest cinematic masterpiece, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, revolves around the screening of a movie!

The Bear Cuke Jew

Tarantino knows cinema so intimately, he smashes a conglomeration of styles together to arrive at BASTERDS; we could trace the lineage of Kurosawa, Woo, Hitchcock and Leone, but unless you’re a film scholar with your hand down your pants, you just wanna get to the Jewish ultra-violence.

That’s where Brad Pitt comes in. As half-breed hillbilly Apache Aldo Raine, he recruits vengeful Jews during Hitler’s Holocaust and takes the fight to the Germans. His mission: “killin’ Natzees.” Ambushing, scalping, mutilating, baseball-batting… terrorizing. These blood-mad Jews become known as “The Basterds.” Their ultimate plan involves strapping bombs to themselves and blowing themselves up in a cinema packed with Nazi high command, including Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and his Minister for Propaganda, Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who was also a real life film producer (leave it to Tarantino to uncover that nugget).

But Pitt is here purely for marquee muscle. His screentime is minimal. And though he puts in a fine performance, impressing us with how long he can hold that constipation face, he does little else, except spouting a few lines of dialogue which are far from Tarantino’s most luscious work, trying to perfect a redneck drawl that sounds like it’s coming from a guy who’s making a constipation face.

This movie belongs to Christoph Waltz.

As SS officer Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter,” Waltz’s chilling performance will make your testicles shrivel. Every foreboding appearance he makes as the death-dealing interrogator makes your sphincter tremble in fear. Landa knows when you’re lying. And even if you’re not, you feel like you are. Because you probably are. It is such a fearsome tour de force of fatal charisma and nerve-wracking trepidation, it’s like Waltz did all his acting training with Goebbels.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is unconventionally structured, in Four Chapters, four tenuously linked storylines eventually intertwining for the payoff. And what a payoff! A catharsis for Jewdom. DEFIANCE (2008) showed us Jews who actually fought back during World War II, in a story Inspired By Fact. But writer-director Tarantino, unbound by facts, rewrites history without any compunction (let’s face it, like every American war movie about Viet Nam, Korea, WWII, only without pretending historical authenticity) and takes his WWII fantasy to a level that can only be described (by producer Lawrence Bender) as “a Jewish wet dream.”

It’s the Nazis who burn now, not the Jews; it’s the Nazis whose flesh is marked by the Jews as a sign of contempt; it’s the Nazis who tremble at the brutality of the Jew “basterds.”

Movie opens like a Leone western, officer Landa inviting himself into a desolate farmhouse of a poor farmer and his trembling daughters. He is looking for Jews that the farmer might be hiding. The tension that follows is like the best of Leone, hard closeups of the two faces and master shots that never budge. We are so gripped by the movie in these opening minutes and into the following Chapters, we never even realize its unconventional structure. Proving that good story wins out every time over a Hollywood system atrophying in its glossy rut.

It’s like four TWILIGHT ZONE vignettes strung together; every time the screen goes to black to end a Chapter, we find ourselves exhaling in relief and needing a neck massage from a nude female provider slash dancer. And as every new Chapter opens, we are thrust spittle-mouthed and unbreathing into the tension-driven second act of something that started before we arrived. It’s Total Tarantino.

In the Chapter “A German Night In Paris” we are introduced to Mélanie Laurent, who plays Shoshanna, doing Clint Eastwood as a sexy French, blond, green-eyed avenger. (This is what Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint, should have become, instead of the C-Movie junkie she ended up as.)

Eli Roth is Donnie Donowitz, “The Bear Jew,” who gets his kicks beating Germans to death with a baseball bat. (Roth is the writer-director of HOSTEL, 2005 – any wonder he loves the ultra-violence? In a German interview, when asked to justify his character’s bloodthirstiness, he was outraged, “This movie is nothing but magic tricks, but your grandparents turned my ancestors into furniture! Into lamp shades!”)

The characterizations are formidable, each actor embodying the French and German and British characters they play. Noteworthy is August Diehl (as Major Hellstrom), another German-born actor, who – like Karl-Otto Alberty and Anton Diffring before him – scares the hell out of us like a real life Gestapo officer.

I think this might be the first time I noticed the power and prowess of German-born Michael Fassbender. (He was Spartan warrior Stelios in 300, but lost amongst the abs, and would soon go on to greater glories in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, SHAME, and beyond.) His British undercover officer Archie Hicox is a tour de force performance, square-jawed and steely-gazed, slipping effortlessly in and out of English and German. Like Fassbender, Diane Kruger is also German-born and also impresses with her effortless bi-lingual German tongue.

Being a Tarantino film, there’s bound to be a Mexican standoff, where everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else. How Tarantino arrives at this situation is the true wonder; how it all makes perfect sense by the time everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else WHY everyone is pointing a gun at everyone else.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is that rara avis – a dialogue-driven war film more intense and exciting than any driven by pretty orange explosions.

nation’s pride

Within the film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is Goebbels’s NATION’S PRIDE, which premieres at Shoshanna’s theater. Daniel Brühl (looking like a young Christopher Reeve) stars as “himself” Fredrick Zoller, a German hero who staved off an American advance singlehandedly by sniping from a bell tower. It’s a blackly hilarious satire on war films. (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN actually has a scene like this – from an American sniper’s point of view.)

It slots neatly with the concept that Tarantino tries to convey: that Germans are heroes too. The German commander who refuses to answer Raine and gets beaten by Bear was awarded his medal for “bravery” – proving it by dying at the bat of Bear. Message may be lost not through Tarantino’s fault, but that of his audience – because American war films and politicians have indoctrinated generations into believing all enemy combatants are quivering cowards – even if they display heroism.

In 2002, Bill Maher’s TV show, POLITICALLY INCORRECT, was cancelled because he expressed the – ahem – politically incorrect view that the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers were anything BUT cowards. Which is true, by all definitions of American bravery. But which was blockheadedly refuted because they were enemy combatants.

the inglorious bastards

There’s a strange paradox with the misspelling of this movie’s title.

Like THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2006), I hate misspelling for the sake of street-cred. Tarantino must know the film QUEL MALEDETTO TRENO BLINDATO (aka THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, 1978), an Italian WWII flick with a completely different plot; also called G.I. BRO, cos of star Fred Williamson’s blackness – I’m not EVEN joking. (Bo Svenson, another star of that film, plays an American colonel in Tarantino’s BASTERDS – which is either a giant coincidence or Tarantino simply flaunting his filmic erudition. Which proves he knows that film.) Is he trying to differentiate his movie from that one? Why not name his film something else? Even THE BASTARDS would have been sufficient.

So here is the paradox: Tarantino acknowledges his audience’s intelligence in many ways, not least by allowing his characters to speak in their native tongues (with subtitles), yet he simultaneously drives the intelligence quotient down by misspelling the title, for a whole generation of youngsters to be confused if this is the first time they are encountering those words. (The same kids who won’t understand the rage of the Jews against Nazi atrocities that are never shown.) Not to mention keeping that swathe of current American adults ignorant who don’t know the difference. You know, the Stoopid Basterds.

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