SHUTTER ISLAND – martin scorsese – 6.5 / 10

The reason that there are so many films about World War II has, I think, a lot to do with the Holocaust. A filmmaker can easily piggyback on the horror of the death camps as a sort of emotional shorthand. A few shots of emaciated corpses and grief-stricken loved ones and the film gains an instant amount of emotional credibility. Similarly, filmmakers so often give their main characters tragic pasts (dead wives, dead children, both in the case of Shutter Island) because it allows them to easily and without any real effort make the audience care about and feel for their protagonists. This tactic is clumsy and cheap but it’s undeniably effective.

THE BEST FILMS OF THE 00'S

my picks for the fifteen best films of the decade.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE – paul thomas anderson – 10 / 10

Even before the film begins, it’s abundantly clear that Punch-Drunk Love is something different. It’s a relatively short film from Paul Thomas Anderson, a director known for making very lengthy movies. And it’s a drama starring Adam Sandler, an actor known almost exclusively for his sophomoric comedies. Then the film begins and it becomes clear just how different it really is. But in this case, different is wonderful. Punch-Drunk Love bears almost no resemblance to any love story you’ve ever seen. Despite that or, perhaps more accurately, because of it, the film is able to evoke the joy, pain, unpredictability and volatility of love better than just about anything else out there.

IT’S COMPLICATED – nancy meyers – 0.7 / 10

Make no mistake, It’s Complicated is porn for middle-aged woman. Jane Adler (Meryl Streep, in shrill Mamma Mia mode) is the walking talking embodiment of everything a fiftysomething woman could possibly want. She’s the chef / owner of a successful restaurant. She has three grown children who are all beautiful, well adjusted and well on their way to being successful. She has a group of friends who fall all over each other to tell her how great she is. She’s got a fabulous home complete with a huge garden (both of which seem to magically require no upkeep). The architect designing the addition that she’s planning (which will double the size of her house) is head over heels in love with her. And now her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin, happily reveling in his physical shortcomings), even though he’s remarried to a hot thirty-year-old, finds her irresistible. The dialogue in the film is pretty much an unending stream of compliments to her and everyone seems to appreciate and respect her. Who wouldn’t want to be Jane?

THE HURT LOCKER – kathryn bigelow – 7.8 / 10

There are a few pieces of advice you often hear in relation to movies. One of them that’s undoubtedly true is that a good ending forgives a lot. A film that has a solid ending leaves the audience walking out of the theater feeling good about the movie and thus more likely to talk positively about it. You might call this The Sixth Sense effect. The reverse is also true. A great movie that ends poorly cancels out all the good will it’d built up to that point and leaves the audience feeling unsatisfied. You could call it the Unbreakable effect.

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM – paul greengrass – 9.3 / 10

As anyone who’s talked with me (or, more accurately, listened to me talk) about movies for any length of time can tell you, I generally hate movies that employ a shaky handheld camera aesthetic. In fact, I even disliked it pretty severely in The Bourne Supremacy, this film’s immediate predecessor. The look is meant to convey immediacy and a you-are-there sense of documentary realism. But for reasons I’ve detailed elsewhere, that never works for me. It succeeds only in making the film in question seem cheap and slapdash. Mostly it just makes we me want to send the director a gift certificate for a tripod. But then along comes The Bourne Ultimatum, the exception that proves the rule.

AVATAR – james cameron – 4.4 / 10

An awful lot has been made about James Cameron’s first film in twelve years being some kind of game changer that takes cinema to a new level or some such nonsense. To be sure, Avatar is visually very impressive both in its utilization of 3D and in its photorealistic environments that only ever existed in a computer mainframe. Unfortunately, being visually stunning is only enough to occupy the audience’s mind for half an hour or so. At that point there needs to be some kind of story or character development in order to sustain the audience’s interest for the remaining two hours, and Avatar provides none.

UP IN THE AIR – jason reitman – 3.9 / 10

Unlike most movie stars who really only play minor variations of a single character (Will Smith’s everyman good guy, Brad Pitt’s coolest guy in the room, Tom Cruise’s all American hero) George Clooney has a couple default modes. He’s either the witless idiot (O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, The Men Who Stare at Goats) or the suave sophisticate who’d rob you blind and get thanked for the privilege (Ocean’s Eleven, Three Kings, Michael Clayton). Up in the Air sees him earning critical raves for doing a combination of the two. And to be sure, Clooney’s performance is at least half of the (very limited) appeal of this boring, completely obvious ode to normal workaday life. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save what is, at bottom, a very tedious and rock solidly conservative piece of awards-baiting nonsense.

THE BLIND SIDE – john lee hancock – 1.5 / 10

If anything about film can be said to be dangerous it’s that a movie can be simultaneously both horribly offensive and skillfully made. John Lee Hancock’s latest is a case in point. If you’re not paying all that much attention, The Blind Side seems like an enjoyable, if somewhat hackneyed and clichéd, crowd-pleaser. But if you look a little closer, it becomes clear just how horrifyingly racist the film is.

NEW MOON – chris weitz - 1.9 / 10

The experience of watching the second installment in what’s been dubbed, rather grandiosely, The Twilight Saga, is akin to getting kicked in the brain: disorienting and painful. It’s disorienting because there’s just no reason that something like this should have earned the shrieking adoration of millions of people, and painful because nothing in it has been crafted with any tact, subtlety or skill.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU - ken kwapis - 0.1 / 10

Before even sitting down in the theater, I knew this was going to be bad. The signs were all there. Its release date had been pushed at least twice. The studio that made it sold it to another studio before distributing it (something you don't do if you think you have a decent product on your hands). And I'd seen the trailer so many times I could quote most of it (always a bad sign as it means they're trying to get everyone to see it opening day because they know word of mouth will be so awful that it'll soon kill the film). But even knowing it was going to be bad, I didn't expect it to be this bad, and outright offensive besides. He’s Just Not That Into You is one of the most offensive, most odious films I've ever seen, and certainly the most offensive film I've seen this past year (one that included cinematic gems such as Rachel Getting Married and Twilight).

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY – oren peli – 4.0 / 10

I’m not sure if the backlash against Oren Peli’s no budget horror film has already begun, but if it hasn’t, let me start it now. Far from the ‘scariest film ever made,’ Paranormal Activity is little more than long stretches of boring people talking about themselves punctuated by the occasional jump scare that could’ve been rigged up by any fifth grader with a decent imagination and a couple hours to kill.

RATATOUILLE - brad bird - 9.2 / 10

Creating art of any kind and then sending it out into the world to be evaluated, critiqued and judged is a singularly strange experience whether the ‘art’ in question is a book, a movie, a song, a meal or even a letter to the editor. Though the creator of this object-- whatever it may be-- didn’t necessarily create their work to satisfy other people, there’s no doubt that the reward of seeing an audience (even an audience of one) appreciating what you’ve created can be very great indeed. Just as, similarly, the disappointment of failing to connect to your audience can be crippling. Something that you’ve trained for years to do, thought and planned about for days on end, and worked tirelessly to perfect is then sent out into the world to be judged by people who may or may not even give your work their full attention. The artist knows that their opinion shouldn’t matter. And yet, pleasing them is validating in a way that nothing else in life ever really can be. And when that satisfied audience is a knowledgeable one-- a critic, say, or a friend whose opinion you value-- the satisfaction is that much sweeter. That singularly gratifying feeling is what Ratatouille, the story of a rat who becomes a gourmet chef, is really about; and it’s what provides the film’s deeply satisfying climax.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS – david gordon green – 8.6 / 10

It would, of course, be an oversimplification to say that there are only two kinds of film dramas. There are, however, two opposing, polar opposite kinds of dramas with everything else (more or less) falling somewhere in between. On the one side you have the kind of drama that attempts to mimic life as closely as possible. The characters, settings, structure and style are almost indistinguishable from that of a documentary. Scenes can be long and meandering or short and seemingly without purpose. The actors are often not very attractive (or, if they are attractive, they’re dressed in such a way as to de-emphasize that attractiveness). The lighting is often drab. The shots are almost uniformly handheld. And, much like in life, this sort of drama almost never has any real sense of closure. For lack of a better term, let’s refer to this sort of film as ‘realist.’

DISTRICT 9 – neill blomkamp – 7.5 / 10

Compared to the average summer blockbuster, G.I. Joe or Transformers for instance, District 9 is something of a masterpiece. It manages to be entertaining and engrossing while also having something on its mind. That’s a rare and somewhat special accomplishment that should be celebrated. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the film is actually a masterpiece.

The back story and plot of District 9 are actually rather basic. Three decades ago, an alien spacecraft entered our atmosphere and began hovering over Johannesburg. After months with no activity, the South Africans boarded the ship and found about a million aliens (whom they dubbed, rather derisively, ‘prawns’) alive but seemingly stranded. The aliens were moved to a makeshift camp outside Johannesburg, the titular district 9, where they’ve lived as outcasts and second class citizens for the past thirty years. As the film opens, district 9 is in such a state of lawlessness and disrepair that the government has decided to move the aliens into a newly constructed facility 200 miles away from any human population centers. The plot of the film concerns the difficulties encountered during this forced relocation.

That the film is set in a ghetto just outside the South African capital is a deliberate attempt to draw a parallel between the back story of this film and apartheid. And, indeed, the similarities between the treatment of the aliens at the hands of the humans and the treatment of the native African population by the ruling white Afrikaners during Apartheid is a rich one. It’s impossible to listen to the humans talking about the aliens as if they were unwelcome pests over images of the aliens’ terrible living conditions without drawing the shudder-inducing conclusion that we’ve done the same sort of thing to our fellow humans for almost all of our history. It’s a bold and thorny issue to raise in what’s basically just an action picture and is thus all the more effective because of it.

Wikus van der Merwe (a terrific Sharlto Copley, in his first film role) is the bureaucrat charged with relocating the aliens. And as he sets about evicting them from their pathetic hovels, District 9 can be hard to watch. Backed by a team of elite military troops who shoot to kill at the slightest provocation, Wikus forces the aliens to do whatever he wants with no explanation and complete disregard for the havoc he's introducing into their lives. In these sequences, the humans treat the aliens so inhumanely that the audience’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the rather grotesque looking ‘prawns.’ And as the film progresses and Wikus (rather predictably, I’m afraid) finds himself becoming more and more aligned with the aliens, the humans become the villains and the aliens the heroes.

This is a rather bold approach to what is essentially an alien invasion film. In the long history of such films (which dates back at least to the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956), you’d be hard pressed to find more than a few films (ones with any real budget anyway) that attempted to get their audience to root for the destruction of human life in order to preserve the lives of the aliens. That District 9 is able to so thoroughly accomplish this role reversal is a testament to how powerful the film can be.

Unfortunately, as solid as the film is thematically, its execution leaves something to be desired. The first ten or so minutes of District 9 sets the film up to be a sort of documentary from sometime in the future, after the events which are about to unfold have happened. The film begins with what appears to be outtakes from a cable news interview with Wikus as he prepares to begin the alien relocation program. This footage is intercut with other interviews of the various players in the coming drama talking about the events of the film as if they had already happened. In essence, these first minutes set the film up as a something of a video history of the fictional events we are about to see. Thus we get lots of shots of news camera footage, some video shot by surveillance cameras, footage Wikus’s team shot during the forced relocation and even what appears to be video taken by some random bystanders.

But then, out of absolutely nowhere, the style of the film suddenly changes. Director Neill Blomkamp (making his directorial debut) cuts away from all this ‘real’ footage to show a couple of the aliens talking to each other. The film continues in this way for a little while before switching back to the news, surveillance and other ‘found’ footage. But then, a few minutes later, Blomkamp cuts to back to the aliens. Then, a few scenes after that, we start to see Wikus outside of the footage shot by either a news crew or his team. We see him at home, at work, even in the bathroom.

It’s such a radical shift in point of view that it jars the viewer completely out of the movie. Why bother going through all the trouble of establishing the point of view of the film as that of a distant, removed bystander only to suddenly shift to the point of view of Wikus and his alien allies halfway through? Why set up the film to be a faux documentary only to break that format almost as soon as it’s been established? On top of that, the un-sourced footage is shot in the same handheld style as the sourced footage, which blurs the line between the points of view and makes it seem like Blomkamp was aware of what he was doing and trying to hide it so that the audience wouldn’t notice.

Eventually, as the film uses more and more narrative, un-sourced footage and less and less of the news and surveillance camera footage, the shift in point of view becomes slightly less jarring. But it’s always there, on the edges, nagging at you. And it left me wondering, more than once, why the audience was allowed to see what we were seeing. If the filmmakers weren’t going to follow the rules they themselves had established, why go to the trouble of establishing them in the first place?

If, however, you can get past the point of view problems in District 9, there are plenty of little grace notes in the film that play like a breath of fresh air in a genre that had lately become old and tired. Take, for instance, the fact that our human weapons can destroy the alien technology. So conditioned are we, from countless other alien invasion films like Independence Day or The Day the Earth Stood Still, to think that alien technology is impervious to our puny weaponry, that it comes as something of a shock when a human missile is able to severely cripple one of the alien spacecraft.

There’s also the matter of the human names that are given to the aliens. Though it goes largely uncommented upon by the characters in the film, the idea that we would force such mundane names upon these creatures calls to mind the way we forced slaves to adopt the surnames of their masters in the antebellum American south or the way the Australians forced the Aborigines to take on ‘normal’ English names in early twentieth century Australia.

Small moments like those add up to a rich, complex and detailed film that has an awful lot on its mind. That it manages to raise all those questions while also being a genuinely gripping action film is a testament to the filmmaking skill on display here. If they'd just dispensed with the distracting and convoluted faux documentary set up, District 9 might have been truly great without having to tack on the qualifying phrase ‘for an summer action film.’

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – quentin tarantino – 8.8 / 10

The further away from Pulp Fiction you get in Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre, the slower the pace of the films becomes. Jackie Brown, while still of a piece with his earlier criminal underworld films, has more than a few extended digressions. Kill Bill is so overstuffed with meandering subplots that it had to be split into two films to accommodate them (apparently he really needed to include that momentum killing final sequence in Part 2 where the Bride, after finally finding Bill, sits down with him for a half hour discussion of Superman and child rearing). And Death Proof spends its entire first act in a bar as a group of friends slowly get drunk while Eli Roth and Kurt Russell mug for the camera.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER – marc webb – 5.5 / 10

Though it deserves some credit for being one of the funnier romantic comedies out there (although that really isn’t saying all that much) and for telling its story in an appealingly unconventional way, (500) Days of Summer ultimately fails because the relationship at the center of the film just isn’t worth rooting for. Perhaps this owes to the fact that well over half the film is spent either with the central couple already broken up or in the initial throes of their infatuation. And while it might be true that those are the moments a person is most likely to focus on after the relationship has ended, in the film it means that there’s an awful lot of cute banter and agonized heartbreak but precious little evidence that these two people worked well as a couple and deserve the audience’s rooting interest.

Much of the blame for that can be attributed to the fact that Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is a bit of a cipher. After ninety plus minutes of watching Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) obsess over her, the audience still has no idea who she really is. She likes The Smiths, wears quirky clothes, doesn’t particularly believe in love and is prone to all sorts of random behavior (sprinting through Ikea or shouting ‘penis’ at the top of her lungs in a crowded park, for instance). But she has no family, no friends, no ambition to speak of and seemingly no life outside of the moments she spends with Tom. She’s the type of character who only exists in movies (and maybe in the mind of a certain type of twenty-something writer) precisely because there’s nothing to her. She’s a fantasy, all surface and no substance.

If the film had bothered to delve into Summer’s character a little bit more, it might have been an interesting investigation into why this sort of relationship always ends in disaster; namely that the person we think we want to be with almost always turns out to be quite different from the type of person that can really make us happy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to be as smitten with Summer as Tom is. They have no interest in fleshing her out into a real person, confident in the belief that the audience will be as in love with her as they are.

Maybe it’s because Zooey Deschanel has played this role countless times before (in everything from All the Real Girls to Elf to Yes Man) or maybe it’s because I’m a little too old to find that sort of flighty superficiality appealing, but I often found myself wondering what’s so great about this girl that Tom thinks his life is going to end if he can’t be with her. She’s cute and fun and all but she’s really not worth the complete meltdown that Tom suffers after they break up.

But for a certain type of guy at a certain time in his life, a girl like this is pretty much catnip. She likes the music he likes, is (seemingly) completely unself-conscious and spontaneous, sports a cute retro haircut, is just the slightest bit damaged, etc. In short, she fits almost exactly the blueprint this type of guy would draw up if he was designing his perfect girl. ‘She’s better than the girl of my dreams,’ Tom says at one point. But since even children know that a fantasy is, by definition, unattainable, there’s no reason to care about the fact that Summer and Tom’s relationship implodes. She even tells him flat out when they first get together that she isn’t looking for anything serious. So the guy has no one to blame but himself for his heartbreak. And I just don’t see how anyone can muster up even the slightest bit of empathy for a character who gets exactly what he should have known was coming and then spends days and weeks on end completely falling to pieces because of it.

Which is the film’s other major flaw: that Tom spends countless days wallowing in self-pity. We get it, man, having your heart broken sucks. But of the 500 days chronicled in the film, it seems that more than half of them involve Tom either drinking himself into a stupor, failing to show up for work or to do his job because he’s sad or talking some poor bystander’s ear off about how great Summer was. I just wanted someone to tell him to stop being such a little bitch and grow up already. Or just to slap him really really hard.

Eventually, of course, Tom does pull himself back together. He quits his shitty job writing greeting cards (with a big speech about how the whole industry is bullshit, which, for some reason, the film seems to believe is tremendously insightful), gets a job as an architect (what he really wanted to do before getting sidetracked into the greeting card gig) and meets cute a new girl that promises to fulfill all his (now more realistic) fantasies. So, you see, it was all worth it in the end. He may not have ended up with the girl he thought was The One but his life is that much better for it. Hooray.

Bullshit. Worse, it’s just as much bullshit as any big budget Hollywood romantic comedy you’d care to name. (500) Days of Summer (and no, the film doesn’t offer an explanation as to what the parentheses are doing in the title) is a smug, self-satisfied film made by filmmakers who seem to think they deserve some sort of special consideration because they’ve noticed how hollow and ridiculous the Hollywood romantic comedy is. Big fucking deal. Even the people who watch those movies know they’re absurd. (500) Days of Summer might declare itself to be the antidote to that sort of film but it ends up in more or less the exact same place. It just takes a different route to get there. And while that route is occasionally amusing, it certainly doesn’t elevate the film out of the rom-com ghetto.

PUBLIC ENEMIES – michael mann – 5.9 / 10

As great as some of his earlier films undoubtedly are, Michael Mann has of late become about as reliable for delivering solidly middlebrow entertainment as Tony Scott or Ron Howard. A lot of that owes to the devolution of his visual style. His images, once so immaculately composed and carefully choreographed (in films like Heat or The Last of the Mohicans), have become increasingly lackadaisical and haphazard. A straight line can be drawn from The Insider (Mann’s first film to heavily feature the handheld camerawork that has lately become his trademark) through Ali (his first foray into terrible looking digital photography) to Public Enemies (the unholy combination of those twin aesthetic disasters).

I should admit, right up front, that I have a strong distaste for both digital filmmaking and handheld camerawork in general. When applied to the right story and for the right reason, both of those techniques can work brilliantly (digital photography worked wonders for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the handheld aesthetic perfectly suited Quarantine) but I’m hard pressed to find a compelling reason as to why Public Enemies should look this bad. It looks like it was shot on a consumer level video camera from a couple years back by someone who had only recently figured out which end of the camera to point at the actors. There are all kinds of weird smearing effects whenever something moves quickly across the frame (pretty much every shot since the whole film features a shaky handheld style), white areas of the frame are routinely overexposed resulting in that weird (and distinctly digital) ‘popping,’ blues and greens just look wrong both for the time period and real life. And the overall effect is an off putting one that distances the audience from the events on screen simply by constantly making them aware of how terrible the film looks.

For some reason, period gangster films tend to be some of the best looking movies out there (Road to Perdition, Miller’s Crossing, The Godfather, etc.). And given Michael Mann’s reputation as a ruthless taskmaster director who carefully pores over every detail of his films, it’s tempting to think that the terrifically ugly look of Public Enemies was a deliberate artistic choice, a way to differentiate this film from others of its genre, as if Mann was attempting to force the audience to get some distance on the film in order to make them think more critically about it. But when you take into account that Mann has been moving in this aesthetic direction for a decade now, that scenario seems less likely. And anyway, even if the putrid color scheme and blown out lighting was on purpose, that can’t compensate for the fact that it’s still a very ugly film. The trade-off-- assuming there even is one-- just isn’t worth it.

At the heart of pretty much every Michael Mann film is a pair of male antagonists who dance around one another like champion prizefighters before finally destroying one another (either literally or figuratively). In Heat it was Robert De Niro’s Neil MacCauley against Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna. In The Insider it was Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand against Pacino’s Lowell Bergman. In Collateral it was Tom Cruise’s Vincent against Jamie Foxx’s Max. And in Public Enemies it’s Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger against Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis. But this time, unlike in those earlier films, Dillinger and Purvis just aren’t all that compelling. Some of that, I suppose, might owe to the fact that anyone who knows anything about Dillinger knows how this story ends. But even if Public Enemies wasn’t based on a true story, there’s really only one way the film could have ended. By the mid-1930s Dillinger had become an anachronism, a product of an age that no longer existed (as is made very clear in the many scenes featuring Frank Nitti and his Chicago syndicate who make more money in a day than Dillinger does in two months). Besides, this is a big Hollywood blockbuster; the bad guy isn’t going to win.

No, the problem isn’t that the ending is a foregone conclusion but rather that when it finally does come, no one in the audience cares what happens to either Dillinger or Purvis. Nothing that either one of these men has done over the course of the film’s bloated two and a half hour running time (and, in truth, it feels a lot longer than that) is all that interesting. Thinking back on it now, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that Purvis does other than to suck up to J. Edgar Hoover at a press conference. Of course, that might be at least partly due to the fact that Purvis is played by Christian Bale, one of the dullest actors around. But Johnny Depp’s Dillinger doesn’t fare much better. As likeable as Depp is in the role (though isn’t he always likeable?), at the end of the film Dillinger remains a frustrating enigma. His reasons for doing anything are completely inscrutable, which might have worked if the rest of the film (plot, action, etc.) had been compelling; but it isn’t. And so we’re left with a long, meditative film about a man we never really get to know despite having spent a lot of time with him.

Chief among the things about Dillinger that are never adequately explained is his relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). He meets her while out in Chicago one night in 1933 and decides that he wants to spend as much of his (probably limited) remaining time as he can with her. But because he’s an outlaw and constantly on the run, the amount of time the two get to spend together ends up being pretty limited. And when Dillinger executes an elaborate plan to reunite them, it seems like he does so less because he wants to be with her and more because he wants to piss off the FBI. In the end, all their relationship does is provide a (likely fictional) coda to the film that attempts to shoehorn in some unearned pathos right at the very end. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mann, displeased with the relatively low key way in which Dillinger meets his end but unable to change it because it’s so well known, added the coda in an attempt to bring some emotional weight to the end of the film, which, if this were fiction, he would’ve put into some sort of massive shootout or back alley confrontation between the two antagonists.

The coda that ends the film is immediately followed by a title card that reveals that Melvin Purvis left the FBI a year later and eventually took his own life in 1960. The fact that he left the FBI shortly after taking down Dillinger fits neatly into the dominant theme of Mann’s work, that of two antagonists pitted against each who ultimately destroy one other. Dillinger, of course, dies at Purvis’s hand. And the implication of that title card is that without a man like Dillinger to hunt, Purvis found the work hollow and quit. But what to make of the last second (literally) reveal that he killed himself? It seems like a parting shot at the guy for no good reason. He doesn’t kill himself for almost thirty years. By 1960, the man’s circumstances might have changed dramatically. His wife and kids might have been killed in a car accident and he could have felt himself unable to deal with the grief. Or he might have had terminal cancer and killed himself so that he didn’t have to spend the last few months of his life in agonizing pain. There are any number of reasons Purvis might have killed himself and there’s a good chance it had nothing at all to do with what happens in this film. It’s borderline ridiculous that Mann would boil the rest of the man’s life down to those two simple facts; and it colors the audience’s impression of Purvis at the very last second. It’s as if Mann is saying, ‘Look, this guy killed himself. He wasn’t worthy of taking down Dillinger.’ And maybe worst of all, committing suicide doesn’t seem like something the Melvin Purvis we’ve seen over the last two and half hours would do. So either Mann hasn’t been faithful to the character of the real man or something changed in the intervening decades. Either way, it’s a clumsy and ungraceful way to end the film. It feels like a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the character and to the audience. And it makes absolutely no sense as a post script to a film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger.

Make that a very boring film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger. Aside from the dreadful color palette, the downright confusing camerawork and the muddled character motivations, the fatal flaw of Public Enemies is that it’s boring. There are really only one or two moments in the whole two and half hours (the best of which is when Dillinger’s escape from an Indiana jail is momentarily stalled by a red light) that are in any way compelling. Even the massive action set-pieces-- the sort of thing Mann usually excels at-- have no life to them. They’re just a confused mess of loud gunfire and people yelling. There’s no sense of where anyone is at any one time or what’s actually happening from one minute to the next. And while the argument could be made that this is what it would it be like to actually live through something like that, it doesn’t change the fact that these scenes are just too confusing and headache-inducing to be engrossing in any way. And when you have a film centered around two characters who are never clearly defined, doing things that are never quite made clear, all filmed in a (deliberately?) off putting way, what you get is a muddled mess of a film.

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN – michael bay – 0.1 / 10

Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the worst movie ever made? Probably not (though it definitely deserves to be part of the conversation). It is, however, profoundly unsatisfying, deeply stupid and painfully unfunny. It’s as if, when the script was being written, the filmmakers asked themselves, ‘What would be the most obvious, most stereotypical thing to do in this situation?’ and then proceeded to do exactly that. The film makes no sense whatsoever, has no compelling action scenes (none that I could follow for more than a couple seconds at a time, anyway), no believable characters, nothing at all at stake and overstays its welcome by at least half an hour. In other words, Michael Bay’s latest is a complete and total failure on every level.

ROAD TO PERDITION – sam mendes – 9.8 / 10

Given that it was shot by perhaps the greatest cinematographer in the history of the medium (Conrad Hall), it’s no surprise that Road to Perdition is among the best-looking films ever made. That alone would be enough to secure it a place in cinema history, but what makes this film truly remarkable is the assuredness of the direction (which is all the more amazing given that this is only Sam Mendes’s second directorial effort). Every scene-- indeed every shot-- is so perfectly composed, so flawlessly executed, that the film achieves a level of visual sophistication that prompted, in this viewer anyway, cautious use of the M-word after only one viewing ('masterpiece,' that is).

From the opening scenes (wherein Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) rides his bike through town, sells some newspapers and returns home), it’s clear that the viewer is in for something special. What appears to be, on the surface at least, a somewhat subdued title sequence has an ulterior motive. The real purpose of this sequence is to firmly entrench the audience in Michael’s point of view. This is his story. The audience sees what he sees and hears what he hears, experiencing the world as he does. That is, until he hides in the back of the family car so that he can tag along on one of his father’s late night ‘missions.’

In the subsequent scene at the warehouse, everything is shown from Michael’s point of view. The confrontation between Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig) and Finn McGovern is filmed just as Michael sees it, through a hole at the base of a wall. But once the shooting starts and Michael witnesses his father (Tom Hanks) shoot Finn’s henchmen, the perspective suddenly shifts. Seeing his father kill another man is such a profoundly traumatic event that it not only changes Michael’s life forever, it also alters the entire structure of the film. The effect of this shift in perspective, though subtle, heightens the emotional impact of that moment in a way that is only possible because, prior to that, the audience spent every minute of the film firmly in Michael’s point of view.

But, again, the effect is subtle, a trait shared with the rest of the film. Though it involves multiple murders and some very dark twists and turns, Road to Perdition is not a film that wears its emotions on its sleeve. There are no high-speed car chases or knockdown drag-out brawls. It’s a controlled, almost rigid film that relies on much less demonstrative means of eliciting an emotional response. But when every action, word and movement in the film means something, even the smallest gestures carry a lot of weight. Eventually, as these small moments begin to accumulate, the film earns a far greater emotional impact than would be achieved by a fistfight or a shouting match.

The stately precision of the film is only interrupted twice. In both instances, handheld cameras are employed to draw a parallel between the two father-son relationships at the center of the film. In the first such scene, John Rooney chastises and physically assaults his son Connor because he has disobeyed him. In the second scene, Mike Sullivan yells at his son Michael for not immediately doing as he says. Both scenes, obviously, are about the frustration a father feels when his son doesn’t do as he would like. But more than that, these scenes also mark a turning point in these two relationships. Although John Rooney begins the scene by berating Connor, he ends it by hugging him close. Without actually saying it, he’s acknowledging that, if forced to, he would choose Connor over Mike, a decision that ultimately costs him his life. In the other scene, Mike begins the confrontation by commanding Michael to listen to him from now on. But by the end of the scene, Mike has realized that there was much more to Michael’s disobedience than he thought. And from that point on, he makes his son a partner in their endeavors in a way that allows Michael to eventually become the man Mike wanted him to be. These two scenes are where the father-son relationships around which the plot turns are solidified. By using a handheld camera in both instances, Mendes links the scenes together, asking the viewer to compare and contrast them and, through those scenes, the central relationships themselves.

Clearly, Road to Perdition is a film with a lot on its mind. But the pleasure to be had in watching the film has as much to do with the beauty and intricacy of the images as it does with the thematic elements. Take, for instance, the way the film pings off of our collective memory of that period in America. Almost no one now living can personally attest to what life looked like in the early 1930s. A modern audience’s ideas of that period are refracted through the paintings of artists like Edward Hopper and the photographs of people like Weegee. And so Mendes composes shots that look like Hopper paintings and has one of his characters take photos akin to Weegee’s. Whether or not this accurately depicts the period is beside the point. It gets at what we think the period was like, making the film resonant more than it would if it were merely historically accurate.

Mendes also continuously uses the visual frame to comment upon the action and the relationships in the film. For instance, after Michael has witnessed his father kill three men at the warehouse, Mike tries to explain himself as best he can. The scene takes place in the car and is shot in such a way that the column of steel that divides the windshield from the passenger window draws a line directly between them. This is a subtle visual cue pointing out the split that has just formed in their relationship. Later in the film, after Mike has completed his quest for vengeance, he returns to the hotel where his son is waiting for him. During this shot, the frame is neatly divided in half with the entrance hall on one side and the bedroom on the other. On the left stands Mike, representing the life they used to have and the violence upon which that life was built. On the right sits Michael, representing a new start both to their relationship and their lives. By crossing from the left to the right of the frame, Mike is making the choice to finally leave the old life behind and embrace the new life.

Those sorts of directorial flourishes are present throughout the film, deepening and enhancing the viewing experience even if the audience is never consciously aware of them.

Another visual cue used throughout the film to great effect is the way water is equated with death. Established early on in a funeral at the Rooney house where the body is packed in melting ice, the symbol reappears every time a character is killed on screen. Connor murders Finn McGovern while Michael watches in the pouring rain. Mike shoots Tony Calvino in the back of his speakeasy while water drips from a leaky pipe overhead. Connor murders Peter and Annie while she is toweling him off after a bath. Mike shoots John Rooney and his henchmen in a torrential downpour and kills Connor Rooney as he sits in a bath. And Mike is himself killed as he watches his son play with a dog on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Mendes is hardly alone in using water as a metaphor for death (see also: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). But what’s interesting about its use in Road to Perdition is that, by the end of the film, it has been repeated so many times that the audience has unconsciously come to associate water with death. Thus an overwhelming sense of foreboding accompanies the shot of Mike standing in his sister-in-law’s house watching the gently lapping waves on the shore of the lake. There’s nothing in the way this moment is filmed or in the music or even in the look on Mike’s face that would indicate anything bad is about to happen. And yet, because water has been present at every death in the film, the audience can’t help but feel afraid. The real trick of it is that they probably don’t even know why. Through careful and rigorous use of this metaphor, Mendes has provoked a genuine emotional reaction without having to resort to any of the more conventional methods filmmakers usually employ (ominous music, unbalanced compositions, etc.). And because of that, this moment catches the viewer off guard and unprepared, affecting them more than if he had used one of the more traditional methods.

Manipulation of the visual medium in such a complex and multi-faceted way marks Road to Perdition as a uniquely accomplished piece of filmmaking. That Mendes achieves that level of visual sophistication (on only his second outing as director, no less) while also maintaining a sense of forward momentum in the film is remarkable. Add to that Conrad Hall’s breathtaking cinematography and you have a film that deserves consideration for best film of the last decade. It’s the sort of film that alternately enthralls and impresses, both a masterpiece of the craft and a damn fine piece of entertainment. There are any number of films that do one or the other but precious few that manage both. And for that, seven years (and a dozen screenings) after that first viewing, Road to Perdition has unquestionably earned the use of the M-word.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 – tony scott – 2.9 / 10

Tony Scott’s films have a completely unique look, feel and sound, so much so that by this point in his career he could almost trademark his style: sickly green, yellow and red color palette, abrupt (and random) zooms, pans and changes in film speed and stock, and handheld camerawork featuring lots of close-ups. The shame of it is that this extremely distinctive style isn’t very appealing and is employed in the service of some of the most ardently middlebrow films of the last twenty years (e.g. Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, Domino, Enemy of the State, Days of Thunder, etc.). Scott’s remake of 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is no different. If anything, it’s worse. There’s so much wrong with the film, in fact, that cataloguing its failings would probably take longer than actually watching the film.

First and foremost among the film’s many faults is the way it deals with its female characters. There are only four women with speaking roles in the entire film and one of them, the conductor of the subway train hijacked by John Travolta’s Ryder, is gone from the film before giving any indication as to her character. The other three (not counting a couple reporters who yell questions at the mayor) are all reprehensible.

The woman given the most screen time is the wife of Denzel Washington’s Walter Garber who’s given a whopping two scenes, both of which are on the phone (therefore disconnected from every other major character and plotline and thus feeling completely superfluous). She doesn’t care about anyone other than her husband, going so far as to say, when Garber tells her that he’s delivering the ransom money himself because otherwise Ryder will kill a hostage, ‘then someone has to die because you can’t go down there.’ At which point she then goes on and on about how they need milk and Garber should make sure to pick up a gallon before he comes home. She’s keeping him from getting in the helicopter to go save the day because she wants to talk about milk? I can’t imagine that Scott would intend for the audience to hate Denzel’s wife, but if that was the goal, mission accomplished. No wonder the film ends with Garber on his doorstep smiling to himself rather than following him inside to see his wife.

One of the other two female characters is a passenger on the train who, along with her young son, eventually becomes a hostage. She basically does nothing except cower in fear and fail to shield her son from what’s going on around him. That, of course, makes her a terrible mother, and makes me wonder whether or not Scott has kids himself, but it really isn’t reason to indict the film for anti-feminism, just stupidity.

It’s the third ‘major’ female character that really galls. She’s the teenage girlfriend of one of the hostages who, through a video chat that was left open when the gunmen took over the train, gets to watch most of the crisis unfold on her computer. During the occasional stolen moments of conversation between the two of them, this girl harangues her boyfriend into declaring his love for her. She’s so completely self-absorbed and clueless that she uses this most inopportune time to emotionally blackmail her douchebag boyfriend into a (probably false) declaration of love. It’s a moment that, I guess, is supposed to be funny but it’s so crass, tone deaf and insulting that it beggars belief.

Taken together these three characters paint a pretty clear picture of the filmmakers’ attitudes about women. At best, they seem to be saying, women are an annoying distraction and, at worst, they’re clueless, stupid, emotionally needy bitches who have to be placated so that they’ll shut up and leave the men alone.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 doesn’t treat the men of the NYPD much better. The first time they appear on screen, they can’t even park their cars outside the entrance to the subway station without hitting each other. Then, tasked with getting the $10 million ransom from Brooklyn to Midtown in half an hour, they decide to drive it rather than take a helicopter and proceed to crash into enough obstacles that the money is delayed and a hostage is killed as a result. And then, on top of that, one of the ESU snipers accidentally shoots one of the gunmen because a rat in the subway tunnel momentarily startles him. A rat in a New York City subway tunnel? Unheard of.

Eventually, after a lot of back and forth between two guys on microphones (Garber at the MTA headquarters and Ryder in the motorman’s cab of the hijacked train) that Scott heroically tries (and fails) to make interesting by zooming and panning his camera all over the damn place, a couple of supposedly interesting tidbits come to light. See, Garber used to be a bigwig at the MTA and is only working as a dispatcher because he’s under investigation for taking a bribe. (It’s okay, though, because the company that gave him the bribe, a Japanese train manufacturer, really did make the best trains and he was going to recommend the MTA buy them anyway, even if he wasn’t bribed.) And Ryder used to be a stockbroker (before bilking the city pension fund for millions and going to prison) who is using the dramatic stock market drop induced by his terrorist action to make a killing in gold futures (or something).

These pieces of information are supposed to both humanize the adversaries and piggyback on our recent financial troubles in a blatant grab for topicality, but all they really do is muddy the waters. I suppose there are circumstances in which taking a bribe might be acceptable (not that I can imagine any right now) but the one offered here severely taints Garber’s character to the point where the only reason to root for him is because he’s played by Denzel Washington. And the stuff about Ryder being a former stockbroker doesn’t jibe with the only other piece of information we know about him: that he met the rest of his team of gunmen in prison. In what world do white-collar criminals and murderers serve time in the same cellblock? For that matter, I can’t imagine white-collar criminals growing ridiculous facial hair (like Ryder’s Fu Manchu) or giving themselves neck tattoos either.

It should be no surprise by now, after almost three decades of mediocre movies, that the new Tony Scott film isn’t very good. What’s surprising is that there really isn’t anything about it that’s entertaining or interesting. Usually Scott’s films can be counted on to have a bunch of ridiculous stock characters, some borderline racist or misogynist undertones, an annoyingly in your face aesthetic and one or two decent action scenes. If you can get past the silliness of everything else, the action is usually enough to sustain at least one viewing. Not so in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The action scenes are rote and boring, offering few surprises and nothing that hasn’t been done at least a dozen times before. Add that to all of the other failings of the film and there's really no reason at all to see this one. In fact, if you’ve seen another Tony Scott film, you’ve really already seen this one. Save your money and go see Up again.

TAKEN – pierre morel – 4.3 / 10

Considering that it’s well plotted and features a rather compelling lead performance from Liam Neeson, and especially considering the film has such a large female following (giving the lie to the idea, expressed by many a studio and network executive, that women won’t watch movies about men), it’s a shame that Taken is so incredibly misogynistic. Rarely do you come across a mainstream film that hates women this much. It’s tempting to blame at least a little of that on cultural differences (director Pierre Morel and co-screenwriter Luc Besson are French) but there really is no excuse. Every single woman in the film is either a harpy, a cowering damsel in need of saving, a clueless airhead, a spoiled brat or a pawn to be used as leverage. There’s not one female character in the entire film who has more than one dimension or who matters to the story in any real way. Even Kim, the kidnapped daughter Neeson’s Bryan Mills is tearing up Paris to find, is little more than a MacGuffin. She’s the thing that makes the story go and nothing more.

More damning even than not featuring a single strong female character, is the fact that the filmmakers go out of their way to get the audience to dislike many of the women in the film. Bryan’s ex-wife, Lenore, for instance, takes Bryan to task for his hesitancy to let Kim go to Paris with her friend. But since the audience already knows that Kim is going to get kidnapped, and thus that Bryan’s fears are very warranted, it makes Lenore look like a stuck up, ignorant moron. And when Bryan eventually has to tell Lenore that Kim’s been taken, there’s a weird feeling along the lines of ‘serves the bitch right.’

The only other female character of any real note in the film (aside from Kim and Lenore) is Amanda, the friend with whom Kim goes to Paris. Amanda is little more than a stereotype of the stupid American tourist, obnoxious, annoying and anxious to get it on with a Frenchman because ‘they’re good in bed.’ When Bryan eventually finds her dead from an overdose in a rundown apartment complex, the audience’s reaction, if it has one at all, is not one of sadness or sorrow but a shrug, as if to say, ‘She sucked anyway.’

Despite being the object of our hero’s attention, Kim doesn’t fare much better. Played by the twenty-six-year-old Maggie Grace, Kim behaves more like a pre-teen than the seventeen-year-old she's supposed to be. Dressed in incredibly conservative and childish clothes (especially considering that she lives in Beverly Hills), Kim is constantly running everywhere, hopping up and down when she gets her way and declaring her love for her father and stepfather only after they give her gifts. It’s the sort of behavior one would call childish in a fourteen-year-old. I’d be terrified to let someone like that go to Europe unsupervised too.

That European trip is another example of where the film is inexplicably out of touch with reality. Though she tells Bryan that she’s just going to visit museums in Paris, Kim’s secret plan is to follow U2 around the continent for a couple weeks. U2? Really? What year is this, 1987? What teenager in 2009 is that into a bunch of past their prime rockstars from the 80s?

You could say I’m making too much out of what turns out to be a relatively minor plot point (especially considering that Kim and Amanda never actually make it to a single concert) but it’s indicative of the lazy writing all around. Any time one of the characters opens their mouths (as opposed to just bashing each other with their fists, in which case the film usually satisfies), anything that comes out is incredibly banal and nowhere close to how people actually speak. Take, for instance, an early scene where Bryan hangs out with his old CIA buddies. The point of the scene is to establish that Bryan used to be a CIA operative and that he gave it up so he could be closer to his daughter. If that last sentence was an actual line of dialogue, it would have sounded more natural than the clumsy way those two points are inserted into the conversation. And it only gets worse from there.

What then to make of the film’s massive popularity? The action sequences, while directed in that inexplicably popular, shaking-camera, no-sense-of-geography, impossible-to-tell-what’s-going-on sort of way, are effectively suspenseful and brutal. Liam Neeson’s performance is committed and compelling. And the actual plot of the film is pretty smart for a standard genre film. But none of that sufficiently explains why people like the film as much as they do.

I think there are a couple reasons for this. The first is that Neeson is a very unlikely actor for the role. He looks and acts just like any other average middle-aged guy. So it’s something of a thrill to see him being such a bad ass. And since the audience never sees what he was like back when he was in the CIA, they can almost imagine that this quest for his daughter has given him these abilities. After all, we’d all like to think that if we were in his shoes, we’d be capable of doing what he does. And since Neeson looks like an average joe, that feeds into the audience’s delusion just enough so that they get more of a kick out of the film than if, say, Bruce Willis was in the lead role.

The second reason I think the film has connected with audiences is that the steps Neeson takes on his quest to get his daughter back are smarter and more interesting than what you’d expect from a film like this. (Mills’s hiring of a translator to decipher the bugged conversations of a couple of Albanian gangsters is a particularly clever highlight.) Even stupid thrillers tend to be at least a little entertaining because, whatever their faults, they’re suspenseful and action packed. But the fact that Taken’s plot mechanics are smart, allows the audience to unapologetically enjoy the film. And that’s a crucial difference. Thrillers of this sort always have an audience (or else people like Luc Besson, responsible for the abhorrent Transporter films, wouldn’t have a career), but if you can trick people into thinking there’s more to the film than the standard thriller machinations, people turn out in droves. Even the cineastes, who love to abhor most films like this, can support it because it has the illusion of being intelligent.

Unfortunately, when you look a little closer at Taken, you find a film that’s a whole lot uglier than most others of its ilk. In fact, were it not for the effectively rendered thriller aspects, the film would have long since been vilified for its rampant misogyny and promptly forgotten. I guess it just goes to show you that a little bit of intelligence and a couple decent action scenes cover up a multitude of sins.

THE HANGOVER, LAND OF THE LOST & EASY VIRTUE

none of these films warrant spending more than a couple paragraphs on, so i've grouped my thoughts on them together

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – david fincher – 9.7 / 10

More than simply an investigation of what would happen if youth weren't wasted on the young (though it's certainly that as well), David Fincher's technical marvel of a film attempts to deconstruct what we fear about old age and death and what we celebrate about youth and life. We celebrate the promise of youth while simultaneously lamenting that it can't be properly appreciated until it’s been squandered. And we fear death because we have no idea what it holds in store for us until it’s too late to do anything about it.

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.