Flags of Our Fathers

Posted on October 18, 2006 at 12:22 pm

Clint Eastwood’s first of two films about the WWII battle at Iwo Jima is sincere, competent, and respectful. He powerfully conveys the madness and brutality of battle and the conflicting feelings of thosw who fight — dedication, loyalty, patriotism, fear, courage, compassion, callousness, sacrifice, self-preservation. If these issues are not as well-presented as in other films, especially co-producer Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” they are still important, meaningful, and moving.
The story shifts back and forth in time between the experiences of the men credited with raising the flag in the iconic photo, who were used to inspire support and raise money for the war effort. We see explosions overhead. Sometimes they are gunfire; sometimes they are fireworks. The three men are sometimes not sure themselves what they are doing or why they are doing it. But their orders are to raise that flag again and again, even if it’s at halftime on a football field. Suddenly, the New York Yankees are applauding for them. A replica of the men raising the flag in white chocolate has bright red strawberry sauce poured over it, creating an image that is anything but delicious.
The men were John “Doc” Bradley, a Naval Corpsman (Ryan Phillippe) and two Marines, Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes, Jr., a Pima Indian (Adam Beach). They happened to be the ones who raised the flag the second time (when the cameras were rolling). Americans at home, sick of the war loved the triumphant picture, and loved saluting real heroes. But the men did not feel like heroes. They felt guilty staying in luxury hotels and being the center of attention. The picture was not true. One of the Marines was mis-identified, which made them feel even more hypocritical and guilty, especially Hayes, who begins to crumble with survivor guilt as he remembers those who died and what he did to stay alive. But they knew that without their help, the government would not be able to raise the money it needed to support the war effort. Meanwhile, back at tiny 5-mile-long, 2.5 mile wide Iwo Jima, the battle continued for more than a month, with 6891 Americans killed.
“When the legend becomes the truth, print the legend,” says The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “We like nice and simple, good and evil, heroes and villains,” says this film’s narrator.
War stories always reflect the times of their telling as much as they reflect the times they depict. Compare two films not just about the same battle but with the same script, the jingoistic WWII-era “Henry V” with Laurence Olivier and the peacetime version with Kenneth Branaugh. World War II was the first major conflict to be depicted on film as it was going on. The movies of the early 1940’s were as much propoganda as drama. After the war ended, there were more complex, even cynical stories, some written by men who were there, not just about heroism but about issues that spoke to the struggles of the post-war years (The Caine Mutiny, Stalag 17, Crossfire). A movie about the Korean War (M*A*S*H) reflected the concerns about the then-current Viet Nam war.
This film, or, perhaps we should say, this first half (Eastwood is working on a second film telling the story from the Japanese point of view) raises very contemporary issues about illusion and reality, about what we expect in and from heroes, about how wars are always about politicians sending young men (and now women) to be killed. Yet it fails to meet its own standards, killing off all of the characters who are pure of heart and leaving only the complicated and flawed ones alive. It keeps us curiously remote from its characters, the images more powerful than the story in an unintentionally ironic case of form over content.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely intense, brutal, and graphic battle violence, including torture. Many characters are killed and there are very graphic and disturbing injuries. A character apparently commits suicide. Characters use strong language, drink (one abuses alcohol) and smoke. A strength of the movie is its portrayal of the racism of the era and of some characters who are not bigoted.

Families who see this movie will want to learn more about the battle for Iwo Jima and the men in the famous photo. They should talk about who in the movie were the real heroes and why. Will we be making films about the War in Iraq 60 years from now? What will they say?
Families who enjoy this movie will also appreciate the many superb films about WWII and other famous soldiers and battles, including Saving Private Ryan (very intense violence), The Longest Day, To Hell and Back (with Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of the war, playing himself), and A Bridge Too Far. Movies that raise some of the issues posed by this film include The Americanization of Emily, The Caine Mutiny, The Right Stuff, and Gardens of Stone. John Wayne starred in Sands of Iwo Jima, with Hayes, Bradley, and Gagnon appearing as themselves, and Tony Curtis played Ira Hayes in The Outsider.

Marie Antoinette

Posted on October 15, 2006 at 12:31 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and innuendo.
Profanity:	Some crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, snuff
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril, offscreen violence, offscreen deaths, including a child
Diversity Issues:	Class issues a theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2006
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000M06KJ8

With this third film, we can begin to see the themes emerging in the work of writer/director Sofia Coppola. Again, she has given us the story of a sensitive, vulnerable young woman trying to find a place and some meaning in an incomprehensible environment. In her last film, Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson was a dislocated young American wife and former philosophy major drifting in Tokyo. In the first, The Virgin Suicides, Kirsten Dunst was one of five young sisters lost in the scary world outside their home. In this one, Coppola returns to Dunst as the title character, the Austrian princess married to a French prince at age 14 and executed by guillotine along with her husband and children.

On her first morning in France, she is informed that she will be dressed and attended to every morning by the titled ladies in waiting. As she stands, naked and shivering while they sort out whose rank entitles her to bring her clothes, she laughs nervously, but acquiesces. She has been raised to do as she is told. Everyone stands around and watches as she eats her dinner. There is a constant crowd around her like that cell phone commercial with the enormous network.

As Marie Antoinette is urged, with increasingly less diplomacy, to make sure her shy husband consummates the marriage, she tries to do her best for Austria, for her mother, for everyone. She finds some diversion in what today would be called retail therapy. But she finds her greatest happiness in the smallish Petit Trianon, pretending to be an ordinary mother.

Coppola’s characteristically impeccable sense of detail ensures that every bow on every shoe, every dot of frosting on every bon-bon, every shot of Dunst’s creamy dimples, just right. She courts controversy with glimpses of modernity and a contemporary soundtrack, but it works well — a sort of John Hughes movie, The Breakfast Club Part 2: A Semester at Versailles.

But that’s not a bad take on this story of two teenagers whose response to the death of the king was “We are too young to reign.”

Parents should know that the film has some mature material, including non-sexual nudity, discussions of impotence and (non-explicit) portrayal of an affair. A child dies (off-camera). The executions are not depicted, but it is clear what is going to happen.

Families who see this movie should talk about what Marie Antoinette wanted and why. Given the extensive traditions of the court, what could she and Louis have done to prevent the revolution? Did this film make you sympathetic to them? How?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy the book and Amadeus, as well as a more light-hearted mix of historical epic and modern music, A Knight’s Tale.

Jet Li’s Fearless

Posted on September 20, 2006 at 2:38 pm

C-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for violence and martial arts action throughout.
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, scenes in bar
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and graphic violence, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2006
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000K2UW06

It does not have the ravishing images of Hero but it does not have the cheesy plot of Cradle 2 the Grave, either. For his last action film, Jet Li has decided to give us a reverential biopic about Huo Yuanjia, hero of the Chinese people and founder of a school of martial arts.

Action films need to get us on the side of the hero quickly so they can get to the good stuff — the action. The quickest way is revenge, as Tarantino showed with Kill Bill. It can help to give us a reluctant hero who tries to avoid violence and is drawn into it, a theme brilliantly tweaked in A History of Violence. That gives us the best of both worlds because the violence is forced upon the hero, so we can enjoy it without guilt. And once in a while we get a hero who begins violent and then learns a better way. And then gets violent again, but in the more in sorrow than in anger variety. That way, we get to enjoy the angry violence and the righteous violence, too.

It is this last category that Jet Li has chosen; perhaps he is saying that like the hero he plays, he has decided that there are more important things than fighting. Huo begins as an arrogant, hot-tempered, impetuous man who fights out of pride. But after he causes great tragedy in his own family and another, he learns that martial arts are about honor, discipline, and concentration, and that winning is not what he thought it was.

The movie begins in 1910. Huo (Jet Li) walks into the ring. Everyone in the audience knows that this fight represents more than a contest between two people. It is a fight for the honor of the Chinese culture, under assault from Westerners who think that no one in China has the strength or intelligence to defeat their champions.

Huo is scheduled to take on not one but four champions from the other side. In three thrilling bouts, he defeats the challengers. Then, as he gets ready for the fourth, we go back in time to see what brought him to this place.

The middle section sags, as Huo takes on a bigger entourage than MC Hammer, refusing to acknowledge that they only follow him because he buys them drinks. And then Huo goes off and learns about the Meaning of Life from Simple Country Folk who know enough to stop planting rice and feel the breeze. Yes, the blind girl in the hat is the only one who truly sees, get it?

Without the sweep and scope of the great Chinese films, this rests on the fight scenes, which are beautifully staged but never transcend the kicks and punches to power the story.

Parents should know that this movie has intense and graphic scenes of violence. Characters are injured and killed, including a woman and a child. There is brief strong language. Characters drink and there are scenes in a bar and references to abusing alcohol.

Families who see this movie should talk about what the last fight shows us about the combatants’ ideas about honor. Why was what Huo learned about planting rice important? What did he mean about learning from the best?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Hero and House of Flying Daggers.

Hollywoodland

Posted on September 4, 2006 at 12:00 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language, some violence and sexual content.
Profanity:	Some very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Graphic violence, question of suicide or murder, character gets beat up badly
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	2006
Date Released to DVD:	2007
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000KWZ7JC

Is there a more heartbreakingly unsolveable mystery than a suicide? The only person who really knows what happened is gone. Even if we find out the how, we who are left behind will always wonder why. Those who are still here have made a decision to live. Whether or not we have ever explicitly considered Hamlet’s question, “to be or not to be,” the option is always there, and there is a dreadful fascination with those who made the other choice. Were they braver? Wiser? Were they disturbed? Was there something anyone could have said or done to change their minds?

In 1959, George Reeves, one of the biggest stars of the early days of television, committed suicide. Reeves played Superman and was a hero to the first generation of kids to grow up with television. He was a brand new kind of superstar. But his very ubiquity as Superman made it difficult for casting directors to see him in any other role. Finally, in dispair over his lack of professional prospects, he shot himself.

But like many other Hollywood deaths, from Virginia Rappe to Thomas Ince to Paul Bern to The Black Dahlia, speculation about a possible cover-up has led to one or more movies “inspired by” real events.

It is Hollywood, after all, or Hollywoodland, as the famous sign originally read. The name of a modest housing development has now become a word that means glamour and fantasy. Both make us wonder — could anyone who was famous in Hollywood want to die? And if someone wanted a cover-up, isn’t Hollywood the place where they know how to make us believe whatever they want us to?

There is some symbolism, maybe some irony in Reeves’ famous role being the split character of both Superman and his mild-mannered secret identity, reporter Clark Kent. Anyone in Hollywood can be both Kent and Superman. When we meet Reeves (Ben Affleck, looking beefy), trying to get his picture taken at a glamorous nightclub. Like every other aspiring actor, he thinks that inside him there is a star waiting to be born. He has just appeared in a very small part in the biggest movie ever made, Gone With the Wind. He thinks he is on the brink of having his dream come true.

He begins an affair with an older woman (Diane Lane), the wife of a studio executive. And he gets a job in television. He thinks it is silly, but it becomes enormously successful, and he is so identified with the role that no one else will hire him. His one big break, a part in a very important film, falls apart when a test audience won’t buy him in another part.

Is that a reason to die? Reeves’ mother hires a private detective (Adrien Brody) to find out. But there are those who do not want him asking questions. And he has his own problems.

The film evokes the time beautifully, with meticulously chosen sets, costumes, and music. The re-creations of the old “Superman” television show are especially well handled, both the behind-the scenes moments (a red and blue costume would not photograph properly in black and white) and the cheerfully cheesy show itself. The brief scene with Affleck as Reeves as Superman as Kent is so true to the original that viewers old enough to remember watching it in its original broadcast will expect it to be followed by commercials for Maypo and Pepsodent.

The performances are outstanding. Lane is exquisite at showing conflicting motives and emotions. She is a woman both sure of her beauty and honest that it is on the wane, comfortable being sexually agressive but wanting to be wooed. Affleck, relieved of the burden of being a leading man, is gratefully enigmatic. What does Reeves want? To be an artist? To be a star? To be married? Is he talented? Is he smart? Affleck and the script let us wonder if Reeves himself could have answered those questions.

But that ambiguity is both the movie’s strength and its weakness. The movie fails in trying to make Reeves’ story a big metaphor, and the attempts to find some parallels in the story of the detective’s own troubles is only a distraction. The characters are too remote to make us care about their tawdry problems. Like the audiences he looked down on, we’d rather see Reeves play Superman.

Parents should know that this movie has a great deal of mature material, beginning with its theme of suicide, with graphic and disturbing images. There are explicit sexual references and situations, including adultery. Characters drink and smoke and use very strong language. There are graphic scenes of violence, including a character who is badly injured by thugs.

Families who see this movie should talk about how everyone — not just actors — must learn to find a balance between what we want and what we can get, who we are and who others want us to be.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Sunset Boulevard, L.A. Confidential and Chinatown (the last two with very mature material).

World Trade Center

Posted on August 7, 2006 at 1:16 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense and emotional content, some disturbing images and language.
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extreme, intense, and graphic peril and violence, terrorist attacks, suicide, many deaths
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	2006
Date Released to DVD:	2006
Amazon.com ASIN:	B000JLTRKE

September 11, 2001 was one of those days that cleave history in two, forever separating the Before and the After as irrecovably as it separated those who were lost from those who survived. As we watched it over and over on television, trying to make some sense of the senseless, people said the same thing, over and over, “It’s like a movie.”

And now, it is a movie, or, so far, three movies with certainly more to come.

That is a part of a tradition that goes back to sagas around the campfire and paintings on the walls of caves. We create stories to help us make sense of our past and to think about our hopes for the future. We are still telling stories about courage and loss through the lens of every major conflict in history. In the last few years we’ve seen major, big-budget movies about great tragic conflicts from the Trojan War through Operation Desert Storm. Their stories about about sacrifice and heroism are a part of the way we make sense of the world.

That very tradition, combined with events that still seem surreal to us, make it difficult for this particular take on the events of 9/11 to feel satisfying as a matter of narrative or drama. Unlike the recent United 93, which adopted an intimate, documentary style for the story of the passengers who fought back and overpowered the terrorists, this movie takes the Hollywood approach to its story of the rescue of trapped Port Authority police.

Where United 93 used unfamiliar faces to allow us to feel we were seeing the real story, World Trade Center gives us Oscar-Winner and Hollywood royalty Nicolas Cage. Where United 93 told us nothing more about the characters than was revealed in the real-time unfolding of events onscreen, making everything that happened disorienting and surprising, World Trade Center gives us the traditional Hero introduction to the characters, with flashbacks to show us their family relationships.

The film begins by telling us it is based on “actual” recollections of the people involved. The use of that word exemplifies the kind of underlining that makes it feel clumsy.

The traditional approach to telling this story only comes across as off-register because it makes it seem — like a movie. Instead of making us feel connected to the real-life events of 9/11, its rhythms and cadences recall other movies, disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, or action movies like Die Hard.

There is a disconnect, too. We are set up for heroes, and then the focus of the story is more on the endurance and anxiety of the main characters than on their heroism. And the title leads us to expect something broader and more all-encompassing. There were thousands of stories in the World Trade Center. This movie focuses on one rescue mission, a deeply affecting story but not as transcendent as its title and set-up prepare us for.

Cage and Crash’s Michael Pena play John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, Port Authority cops called in to the World Trade Center without knowing exactly what the emergency was. “We prepared for everything,” McLoughlin says. “But not for this.”

They are first responders. They take a deep breath, leave nighsticks and hats behind and grab some helmets and oxygen tanks to go into the World Trade Center complex to rescue people trapped inside. But very quickly the buildings come down and their group is trapped. And soon, they are the only survivors.

At home, McLoughlin’s wife (Maria Bello) and children and Jimeno’s pregant wife (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and four-year-old daughter wait for news. And in Connecticut, a former Marine named Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) gets a haircut, puts on his fatigues, and goes to the World Trade Center to see if he can find any survivors.

As McLoughlin and Jimeno lie crushed under slabs of rock, with bursts of flame, exploding bullets, and falling debris, they talk to each other. They provide companionship and support and urge each other to stay awake. They talk about their families. They talk about G.I. Jane and how it said pain was your friend because at least you know you’re allive. They talk about Jesus. They don’t know that the rescue team has gone home for the night. And they don’t know that Karnes has come to the site because he believes that is what God wants him to do.

Director Oliver Stone treats the story and the characters with respect, avoiding the consipiracy themes of some of his earlier movies and focusing on the story of the two injured cops and their families. There are powerful moments, the dazed wounded, lurching through the streets like zombies, paper, ash, and debris raining down around them, the collapse of the buildings, a quiet “There’s a lot of guys not with them” from a cop as he sees only a small fraction of those who went out coming back to the station.

And there is one scene of true brilliance and shattering impact as a mother waiting for news of her son (Viola Davis) recalls that the last time she saw him she scolded him for missing dinner.

But as a whole, it is uneven, its very respect for the “actual” stories that it feels out of balance, the personal information about a rescue worker with a history of substance abuse a distraction rather than a contribution to the whole.

There will be dozens of movies about the events of that day, maybe more. This one will fit better as one tile in a larger mosaic. But now, as one of the first, it does not have enough distance to give us a clearer perspective. And it does not have the right balance to make this part of the story resonate in a way that will help to heal or illuminate the events of 9/11/2001. There are times that a small part of the story can help us to understand the whole, through a true story like Schindler’s List or a fictional version like Saving Private Ryan. Davis’ speech reminds us of that, and shows us what this movie could have, should have been.

Parents should know that this movie is about the terrorist attacks and tragic events of September 11, 2001 and it includes material that is not graphic but very disturbing, including the death of thousands of people, suicide, and severe injury and the terror and devastating grief of family members. There are brief sexual references, including a prostitute, and characters use some strong language. Strengths of the movie include the portrayal of diverse people working together, the ideals of honor, courage, and sacrifice displayed, and the role of faith in some of the character’s lives.

Families who see this movie should talk about their own experiences on 9/11. They should also talk about the choices made by the characters and about the regrets they expressed. Someone says they could not have lived with themselves if they had not gone in — that’s who they were. What does that mean? What is it you want to make sure to say to those you care about most? When will you say it?

Families who appreciate this movie will also appreciate Ladder 49, United 93, We Were Soldiers, and Saving Private Ryan.

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