BAND OF BROTHERS – 8.1 / 10

Every war has certain elements, plotlines and characters that are nearly universally depicted in the various films, books and television shows about that conflict. After a while, these specific traits begin to take hold of our collective consciousness such that the mere mention of a particular war evokes a certain set of images and characteristics for the audience whether or not they were alive during the time of that conflict. The Vietnam War, for instance, conjures images of draftees, soaked by unending rainstorms, out of their minds on hash, lost in an unforgiving jungle wilderness where the rules no longer apply. World War I evokes images of men huddled in the cold damp mud of the trenches forced to summon the courage to mount the walls and attack the enemy in a futile charge that is sure to take the lives of at least half their number for no discernible gain in territory.

World War II, of course, is no different. But what separates Band of Brothers from other depictions of WWII on film is not that it portrays the war in a way that’s all that different from what we’ve seen countless times before but rather that, because it’s based entirely on the recollections of men who were actually there and goes out of its way to be as historically accurate as possible, it breathes new life into some of the more hoary clichés of the World War II film. Even though we’ve seen the gung ho private hell bent on bringing a German Luger back to the States for his younger brother or the reluctant hero whose quiet strength is ideally suited to leading men into combat, Band of Brothers manages to evoke these clichés in a way that rings truer than most similar films, even ones lauded for their realism such as Saving Private Ryan.

Some of that, of course, is borrowed pathos. World War II so fundamentally shaped twentieth century American life that any audience sitting down to watch this miniseries brings with it at least a cursory understanding of why this war was fought and the toll it took both at home and abroad. For instance, the viewer knows, even if the soldiers don’t yet, that while they were landing at Normandy the Germans were busy trying to exterminate an entire race of people. The viewer knows that the eventual loss of life due to this war was staggeringly high, reaching well into the tens of millions. And that the toll this conflict took on anyone who lived through it, whether they fought in the war or not, was felt for years to come, such that it shaped the character of two generations of the population of the entire world and was the defining moment of the last century. With that sort of backdrop always present somewhere in the back of the audience’s mind, the events of the Band of Brothers miniseries take on an emotional weight that they almost certainly would not otherwise have.

That added pathos, together with the fact that the events depicted on screen are as close to real as they could possibly be (a fact that is cleverly evoked by having the men upon whom these characters were based interviewed at the beginning of each installment), creates in the audience the sense not that they’re watching some filmmaker’s idea of what the war was like but rather that they’re watching the actual war. Because of that, the characters and events of the film become real in way that no other war film can even come close to. The virtuoso D-Day sequence that opens Saving Private Ryan, for instance, might get as close to the experience of war as cinema is capable; but the emotional impact of that admittedly powerful sequence pales in comparison to watching two beloved characters blown in half by artillery fire seven episodes into Band of Brothers.

The emotional impact of the deaths and catastrophic injuries in Band of Brothers owes its weight to a number of factors. Knowing that these men were real and that this really happened is a big part of it. Having been with them through training and D-Day and countless skirmishes and night patrols is part of it. And listening to the men who actually knew and were friends with the soldiers who died is part of it as well. Taken together, these elements add up to an emotional impact far beyond what's usually possible in a war movie. To even attempt to conceive of what that must have been like to live through is almost impossible. And yet these men managed to continue to fight, to pick up and move on despite such debilitating loss.

It’s commonplace to call the soldiers of World War II heroes. Tom Brokaw wrote a book calling them The Greatest Generation, an appellation that has since entered common usage as a way of describing anyone over the age of eighty. Predictably, of course, they all shirk that label, saying instead that though they served in the company of heroes, they themselves were not. To me, the real heroism on display here is not that these were mostly uneducated men— boys, really— who knew little of the world or what was in store for them but chose to go anyway. That’s courageous, of course, but can also be chalked up to a sense of honor or duty, or even just plain naïveté. What I find heroic about these men is that they kept on going. Seeing what they saw on D-Day, they still managed to fight on through France and into Holland, where they suffered unimaginable loss during the long winter in Bastogne. And still they kept on and continued into Germany and then Austria. It’s hard not to imagine giving up and packing it in after even one of those experiences. Hell, even one single day of what they saw would be enough to make anyone want to head for home. But they didn’t. Surrounded and all but engulfed by pain and fear, they kept on.

If there’s one thing that stands out at the end of Band of Brothers it’s the immeasurable sense of loss hanging over these men. More than just the lost friends and fellow soldiers, more than just the loss of innocence, there’s the very real sense that, by the end of 1945, these men had lost something ineffable about being human that they would never quite be able to recover. Though obviously none of us can know what it was like for these men, it certainly appears that much of their idealism died on the battlefields of Europe. Seeing what they saw, the pain and death, the horrible torture one group of people inflicted upon another and the way that a whole country stood by and watched it happen, they lost their faith in mankind. With that faith gone, all they had was each other.

At the close of the tenth and last episode of the miniseries, a voiceover describes the lives of each of the surviving members of Easy Company after they returned home. To a one they lived simple, modest lives, lives that today, in our celebrity obsessed, everyone is special and important culture, might be looked down upon as being normal, ordinary and, well, boring. But maybe those men learned something on the beaches of Normandy and the forests of Bastogne that only the experience of war can teach. When death closes in all around you and is ever present just over the next hill, all you really have to hang on to are the relationships you have with those closest to you. Maybe what you do isn’t nearly as important as how you do it and who you do it with. Maybe that’s the lesson these men took away from the war. It might have cost them their innocence, their youth, their idealism and their faith in their fellow man, but it certainly gave them a clear idea of what was important. It’s a lesson probably unknowable to those who were never there, but the fact that Band of Brothers drives that point home is what elevates it above other films of its kind. There might be nothing in the miniseries we haven’t seen before, but nothing before it has made that point so clearly and so forcefully.

INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL – steven spielberg – 3.8 / 10

Though it begins with a strange prologue where a bunch of kids in a Ford roadster race a group of GIs, once The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gets going, it’s really really good for about fifteen minutes (maybe even twenty) and threatens to actually be about something. Of course, then the plot proper kicks in and everything goes downhill from there.

I had hoped, knowing a little about this film’s backstory and the idea that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had rejected George Lucas’s absurd notion that the fourth Indy film should be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars, that everyone had come to their senses and realized that Indiana Jones hunting alien relics isn’t really the Indiana Jones people wanted to see. Even after the opening sequence that involves some artifacts from the Roswell crash in 1947, I held out hope, thinking that maybe this was a sop to Lucas and the rest of the film would be about something more Indy-esque.

But alas, it was not to be. No, Indiana Jones does indeed go after an alien relic in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only that, he visits a whole alien city and sees a real life alien and its spaceship. And so the whole thing comes off, to my eyes at least, as a blatant cash grab by a bunch of people that really don’t have any need of that cash. Maybe they just like the attention.

And that’s really too bad because the first twenty minutes of the film show what might have been. In those twenty minutes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the Red Scare that swept America in the 50's and how a man like Indiana Jones could get caught up in that. There’s a terrific sequence set in a model town moments before it’s blown apart by a nuclear weapons test. And a wonderfully ominous shot of Indy standing in front of a mushroom cloud as the world as we knew it up until then suddenly changed.

That sequence and that shot are so portentous and so loaded with ideas that it takes a really dedicated hack to squander them. And sure enough, George Lucas is up to the task. Over the next bloated hour and a half, the film is overloaded with nonsense about crystal skulls that control minds, psychic Russians, capital-C crazy academics and flesh-eating ants. And the real flaw is that there is just so much talking about nothing that there’s no way for the film to develop any kind of propulsive energy or momentum. Even Spielberg, the master of the old-school chase sequence, can only do so much when between those chases are twenty minutes of people talking about nothing that ends up mattering in any way.

I can’t really say that I’m disappointed with this film because I didn’t expect all that much going in. But the first half hour so raised my hopes that the complete failure of the last two thirds of the film stings that much more. And as the final (completely ridiculous) scene played out, I started to understand those morons on the internet who yelp about George Lucas having raped their childhood because my hopes for this film had been similarly toyed with and then brutalized. Oh well, there’s always the Shia Lebeouf starring sequel to look forward to. (And anyone who doesn’t think we’ll be seeing that film in a few years is giving Lucas and Spielberg an awful lot of credit they have continually proved they do not warrant.)

INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM – steven spielberg – 1.9 / 10

Leaving aside Kate Capshaw’s howlingly anti-feminist portrayal of Willie Scott (as getting into that would enrage me much more than I feel like being enraged right now), the film has myriad problems from start to finish. First of all, what happens to Lao Che, the person who tried to kill Indiana in Shanghai at the start of the film? We never here from him again. Doesn’t he still want Jones dead? There’s no resolution there.

Then Jones, Willie and Short Round (another ridiculously offensive element of the film I’m not going to get into at the moment) end up in India. And when they meet a tribe of villagers, Jones asks for a guide to Delhi. But since he was asleep on the plane that took them into India, how does he know how close they are to Delhi? Maybe Delhi’s a thousand miles away. And why does the chief of the village speak English? Where did he learn it? (That last question is particularly interesting as the behind the scenes featurettes reveal that the actor that portrayed the village chef didn’t really speak English and was feed his lines off camera by Spielberg.)

Then there’s the nonsense with the blood that turns Indy into a crazed Thuggee warrior and the voodoo doll the Maharajah uses to inflict pain on Indiana. Leaving aside the fact that Hinduism (the Maharajah’s supposed religion) has nothing to do with voodoo, what point does all this mystical nonsense serve? The whole thing’s just really racist and completely tone deaf.

And why is this a (unacknowledged) prequel? The events in this film take place a year earlier than those of Raiders of the Lost Ark but for really no purpose. The Last Crusade takes place in 1938 because it has a major piece of the story set in the Republic of Hatay which only existed from 1937 to 1938. But the events of this film could have taken place any time during the 1930s. It’s just a weird, unexplained thing that this film comes before the first one.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK – steven spielberg – 8.6 / 10

Although it’s been rechristened Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the cover of the DVD, it’ll always be simply Raiders of the Lost Ark to me. I’ve seen this film almost ten times by now but every time I return to it I’m surprised by how good it is. Maybe that’s because of the less than stellar position Spielberg has in my estimation but then I suppose that would still be more my fault than his.

And to be sure it is easy to hate on this film. Because so much of what made it so intoxicating back in 1981 has been imitated and copied so many times since then that it’s easy to forget how unique the picture really was. The most duplicated element of the film must surely be the overall tone, more specifically the hero’s wry sense of humor in the face of life-threatening danger. This flippant manner, basically invented by Harrison Ford in Star Wars and perfected here, provided the template for the eighties action hero. Following in Indiana’s footsteps audiences were soon to be treated to John McClane, Cobra Cobretti, John Rambo, etc. on down to Vin Diesel’s XXX. And mostly because of these lesser imitators, this ironic detachment from the danger the hero faces has come to represent everything that was wrong with the action film in the eighties and nineties. But that’s not the fault of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you as a modern viewer can see past all that extratextual weight, you’ll be treated to a rare cinematic treat,

The most noteworthy plot element in this film is just how often (and consistently) Indiana Jones fails. In the opening sequence Indiana swipes a sacred idol from some South American jungle only to have it swiped by the evil Beloq. Once the plot proper begins, Indiana is responsible for the destruction of Marianne’s bar, loses her to the bad guys in Cairo, finds and loses the Ark in the desert and on a boat. Even at the climax of the film, Indiana fails. His ultimate victory comes when he is tied up to pole. It’s hardly the resounding victory you’d expect.

Although all the failures that have lead us to this final moment were fun and everything, this last “failure” does strike the wrong note. Maybe it's the modern perspective from which I'm writing about this film but the fact that the hero's triumph comes from doing absolutely nothing is pretty anticlimactic. In fact, it's really the only sour note in the whole film. Unfortunately it happens to come at the very end of the movie and thus can leave you thinking it wasn't as good as it really was. Maybe that's the reason I'm surprised by how good this film is every time I put it on.

MUNICH - steven spielberg - 6.7 / 10

There's a moment or three in Steven Spielberg's latest film that recalls the greatness of his earlier pictures and reminds why he's the unquestioned master of the visual medium. Unfortunately, as wonderful as those moments are, they only account for fifteen or so minutes of the film's bloated three hour running time. Most of that time is padded with yet another bombing of a nondescript European house or yet another meal in which the characters discuss nothing much so that the audience may see just how different what they are doing has made these men. It's those scenes, the ones of look-at-me self-importance, that really grate. Perhaps it's that this film was rushed into production and rushed again to release so that it would qualify for the Oscars. Whatever the reason, the magic is just not in those scenes.

But it is there in the extended opening that depicts the capture and murder of the nine Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Told mostly through shots of televisions, reporters and people watching TV around the world, this sequence says more about the way that we perceive the world in the modern age than most films that are expressly about the subject. It's just really impressive filmmaking.

The magic's also there in a scene in which Avner's group of Jews, basically terrorists without a home state at this point in the film, share a safe house with the Palestinian terrorists they are hunting. The idea (discussed by the two groups) that these people could co-exist were it not for the mere fact that the Jews have a place on Earth to call theirs and the Palestinians do not is certainly an interesting one (and not one shared by either of the two sides in their public rhetoric). It's the only scene that really gets at the motivations behind the commitment these people have to a way of life that turns them into animals and makes them look, to the rest of the world, like savages.

Later in the scene Avner, (the Jew, duh) asks Ali (the Arab) why they are so committed to the destruction of Israel. Ali's answers are simultaneously frightening, completely illogical and totally rational. In the scene's best moment, he asks Avner how long it took the Jews to get a homeland. Avner doesn't answer but the unspoken threat here is that the Palestinians might be willing to wait ten thousand years, too.

The old Spielberg magic's also there in the ending of the film (something rare indeed to be saying about a Spielberg film) when Avner and his handler talk about what they've really accomplished with this little war of theirs. They wonder, since every terrorist they kill seems to spawn five new ones in his place, what the net effect of the whole thing was. And as they wander and talk about this in the shadow of Manhattan's skyscrapers, we get a glimpse of the Twin Towers. And finally the characters part, neither feeling too assured by the other, as the camera pans up on those now gone landmarks. It's as loaded and interesting (and, yes, even depressing) an ending as Spielberg has come up with in years and it's the only thing from this film that might really stick with me. Interesting that with this and War of the Worlds, Speilberg, that benchmark of middlebrow conservatism, is really the first mainstream artist to tackle the thorny issue of 9/11 with some amount of grace.

Of course, the film isn't without Spielberg's trademark squeamishness about sex and family issues. In the film's worst scene, Avner, after meeting a beautiful and willing woman in a bar, decides at the last minute to be faithful to his wife. On the way out of the bar, he bumps into a friend. He tells the friend to beware of the woman but sure enough, later that night, unable to sleep, Avner visits his friend, smells the woman's perfume and finds the friend murdered in his bed. The implication being that unfaithfulness gets you killed. Talk about your Hebrew School reactionary impulse towards sex. It's almost as if, when Spielberg isn't paying attention, the most wonderful things leap forth from his mind but when he's trying to make a point, all he can really say is the most reactionary and simple sort of moralistic nonsense. That's a shame really because he could be our greatest artist. Instead he's just one our most interesting.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - steven spielberg - 4.9 / 10

H.G. Wells's 1898 novel on which this film is based basically birthed the modern science fiction genre. A classic it may be but the ending is still one of the worst cop-outs in the history of literature. That being said, I can perhaps forgive Wells seeing as that was 1898 and we didn't really know all that much about the makeup of our bodies or our planet (I mean, we only figured out that the heart was the organ that pumped blood through our bodies fifty years earlier). And maybe I could even forgive Spielberg for recycling that lame ending seeing as how he'd probably not want to enrage the people who want movies based on books to share as many plot points as possible. But nothing can forgive the last two minutes of the film in which Tom Cruise's Ray Ferrier and his daughter walk down the picturesque and completely untouched upper class Boston neighborhood and find his ex-wife, her parents and his estranged son all alive and completely unharmed. No one else is anywhere to be seen. It's like a postcard. It's so ridiculously perfect that it should be a dream. But, unfortunately, it isn't. It's more of the same Spielbergian bullshit. Like John Anderton caressing his pregnant wife's belly at the end of Minority Report and David spending one last day with his mommy in A.I., this last scene takes everything that was beautiful and visually exciting (and there's plenty) that came before and rubs it in shit.

One great scene ruined by this ending (well, more precisely, ruined by the knowledge that this awful ending was imminent) finds Ray and his son fighting over the son's desire to witness the aliens' destructive power firsthand before he's killed and Ray's desire to stop him. The son, understandably, doesn't want to die hiding in a basement without ever having seen the awesome power raining destruction all around. And the father, also quite understandably, doesn't want his son to give up. They square off midway up a hill with the sounds and sights of nuclear catastrophe just over the ridge. It's a great idea for a scene and the execution is visual magic. But, and it's a big but, anyone even remotely familiar with a Spielberg film knows that there's no real danger. It doesn't really matter whether the son stays on the hill or goes with the father, they're both going to be fine because Spielberg doesn't have the balls to kill any main character ever. And frankly that just sucks.

But enough about the last half of the film, let's move on to the brilliant first hour or so. Some reviews have complained about the use of various touchstones from 9/11 and its aftermath that appear in the film (namely the dust that covers Ray after the aliens first appear, the posters of missing loved ones that line the walls of a subway station and the debris that rains down from the sky in the wake of the tripods). And while I suppose I understand being a bit touchy about it, as I watched the film I couldn't help but think that Spielberg had finally brought the events of 9/11 to film the way they should have been. I always felt, watching the actual footage, that it should have been filmed better, that we should have had a better angle on everything. Perhaps it's the long training I've had in the creation of emotion and nuance in film, but the images of 9/11 never resonated with me. Sure they were "real" but I've seen plenty of documentaries that manage to utilize a certain amount of film technique. And besides, I wasn't personally involved in that day's events and so they are no more "real" to me than the events of Hoop Dreams. But here, finally, a filmmaker with skill has tackled the events surrounding the collapse of the Twin Towers and done it in such a way that it gets to even me.

I suppose it's funny that a fictional film that draws its production design from real events would be more powerful than the images of the actual events. But in this case, Spielberg has so exactly portrayed the horror and grief of these events that even a person uninvolved in the whole mess can understand why this was how we dealt with the tragedy. And to those reviewers that are upset about the film's borrowing of 9/11 imagery, well, if youre mad about that you might as well be mad about CSI showing what happens to a body when a bullet passes through it or Law and Order when a woman who's just been made a widow starts sobbing uncontrollably. We learn how people deal with events only by actually witnessing them. Without the events of and around September 11, 2001, how the characters in War of the Worlds would have dealt with the catastrophic alien attack would have been conjecture based on the way people have dealt with catastrophes in the past. Post 9/11 we know how people deal with a massive tragedy. We've seen it. And there's not a decent filmmaker alive who wouldn't incorporate that into their film. But because Spielberg is so expert with these visual touches they resonant more than even the actual real events of 9/11 that were caught on tape. And I think that's where the betrayal these reviewers feel really comes from. Spielberg, at least for me, has, with this film, supplanted the images actually recorded on September 11 and replaced them with his own far superior ones. This is tantamount to sacrilege and cannot be allowed to stand (for some). But for me, I'm glad somebody had the balls to take this national tragedy and use it for some purpose other than misguided calls to patriotism or war. And I'm doubly glad that it was a filmmaker whose consummate visual skills achieved resonance with these images that the real ones never quite attained. If only the projector had broken when the film was an hour old and that goddawful ending had never unspooled and ruined everything that came before.