Movies

[whiskeypriest]

I'm having a brain-f*rt
Saving Private Ryan seemed more intended to reassure us that our children serving in Iraq would be as well taken care of a Private Ryan.

1998. 

[MrUtley]

I'm having a brain-f*rt

There are many more Iraqi war movies to come, and, after the war actually ends, we will get more truth ....

The gulf war is showing up in movies on tv.

Seems we struggled with reality during the Vietnam war, and didn't get heroics in Vietnam movies until the vets sprouted gray hairs. I've seen Band of Brother both as a daily segment, and as an all-day run. Band of Brothers was an excellent movie on the reality of WWII. Saving Private Ryan seemed more intended to reassure us that our children serving in Iraq would be as well taken care of a Private Ryan. Recently re-watched Patton ... where the  hero becomes the anti-hero. 

 

Yeah, it's not a real war and no one knows the truth about it until they make a movie of it in Hollywood.

Sheesh!

[madupont]

FURTHERMORE,MrUtley, we had Iraq movies on tv as soon as we went. Seven years ago. TV producers helped convince us what we were doing there and quite often they showed us what the enemy looked like and talked like. The enemy was a terrorist. So, ipso facto, Iraqis were terrorists that we were taking care of the right way. If you had any doubts, a soldier would get up on tv and ask questions of Donald Rumsfield who would answer him with an hang-tough sophistry because we didn't have any money for extraneous stuff but  Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  Then we saw diagrams via tv and  something that looked like aerial shots or were those just spacey substitutes for space shots of hangers that later revealed dusty containers of chemicals and components of weapons of mass destruction, while we had stop-time shots of trucks moving out driven by whom and where exactly?  We saw former General and now Secretary of State  or did I dream it that he used an old time pointer on the diagrams? I must have imagined I saw this war.

While the drugs went somewhere before the  military raided the stash of containers, we were exploding aerial  --what was it, white phosphorus or was it white phosphate? Anybody want to translate yet again what this flesh eating chemical was that had been invented to be labeled as a non-destructive-to-assets weapon that only destroyed "the enemy";  I could go on like this forever but fortunately in those days we had really well-informed  former employees who were not needed in or by the Bush administration and they kept us informed of what these things did and what they were.   It is fading now. Seven years later.

But let no one suppose that just because series were designed on topics that appeared on tv that they were about a just war.

I know we were told in regard to Afghanistan that Democracy made it all, "all right";but, at the time, we were not having democracy in practice within our own government right here in the US.

We were likely to receive phone calls that wanted to ask our opinion on the next phase what would we do if the following situations occurred, outbreaks of plagues, small-pox, etc. etc. etc.

A Sunni from Baghdad clarified that if that non-asset destroying weapon had been used immediately, he didn't know because he had locked down the Baghdad museum of antiquities while the helicopters rattled off rounds between the Tigris and Euphrates; and later we could see the landscape pockmarked not with bombing but by looters looking for buried "antiquities. It was a set up; only certain items disappeared, they had all been inventoried by outsiders who had previously been imperialist administrators of the entire Persian territory.

The hunt was on, the biggest most significant art heist in history since the authorities went tracking the  Nazi contributions to Art Collecting following the Fall of the Third Reich.  But, this one was archeological, as well.

What shocked me was to find out that in Chicago, important material disappeared from the Field Museum of Persian antiquities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago%27s_Persian_heritage_crisis.

TV is what one of the former posters referred to as,"Smoke and Mirrors": to distract you from what is really happening was my additional comment.

[madupont]

Somebody did write, on what I was referring to earlier today. I found it in my mail.

http://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-culture/black-motherhood-lost-oscars/

[luee]

war movies post "the big one"

Korean War


MASH (1970)
Pork Chop Hill (1959)
The Bridge At Toko Ri (1955)



Viet Nam movies

Tops?

!-Platoon
2-Apocalypse Now
3-Born on The Fourth of July
4-Full Metal Jacket
5-The Fog of War
6-Deerhunter

Gulf War

three Kings  


Iraq war(mostly bombs until HL)


In the Valley of Elah (2007) - $6.8 million.
Redacted (2007) - $.06 million.
Rendition (2007) - $9.7 million.
Lions for Lambs (2007) - $15 million.
Home of the Brave (2006) - $.04 million.

[Gintaras]

The oddest thing about Hurt Locker is that there was no significant woman character in this movie.  I would think that Bigelow would have at least shown a woman or two among the US troops, instead we get Evangeline Lilly in a virtually throw-away role in the end, and some shouting Arab woman who hits Sgt. Will over the head with a frying pan when he sneaks into her house looking for any sign of "Beckham."  Bigelow seems content being "one of the boys."

[barton]

I don't know how odd that was -- one can imagine that the women in these guys lives seem pretty remote when they are on the bomb rotation.  The minimal attention to Ms. Lily ("chop up those vegetables for me, will you?") seemed intended to drive that point home, as well as the point stated at the opening, "war is a drug" -- and he just wants to get back to that more vivid life.   As for Bigelow losing control of the second half, I'm thinking the quasi-documentary format may not be the perfect way to go about this kind of war movie.  It was hard to see into several situations and really get at their heart -- e.g. his ignoring Beckham when he turns up alive (turns out not to have been the body-bomb corpse) towards the end. 

[MrUtley]

war movies post "the big one"

Korean War


MASH (1970)
Pork Chop Hill (1959)
The Bridge At Toko Ri (1955)



Viet Nam movies

Tops?

!-Platoon
2-Apocalypse Now
3-Born on The Fourth of July
4-Full Metal Jacket
5-The Fog of War
6-Deerhunter

Gulf War

three Kings  


Iraq war(mostly bombs until HL)


In the Valley of Elah (2007) - $6.8 million.
Redacted (2007) - $.06 million.
Rendition (2007) - $9.7 million.
Lions for Lambs (2007) - $15 million.
Home of the Brave (2006) - $.04 million.

Korea was a "police action". Same with Somalia, and the movie "Black Hawk Down".

Doesn't matter.

History makes movies, and movies sometime make history, but there a only the tiniest fraction of movies that document history.

[luee]

Doing lions for Lambs now, wow a lot of star power.

[luee]

 Nothing to write home about, Terrible blue blurry battle scene, islamos attacking gyrenes like in guadacanal but in the snow, GI you die. A lot of war no war talk, not too uplifting or entertaining.  The Meryl Streep character has a tough decision to make release a big pro-war story or forget about it.

[madupont]

Korea was not a "police action" but an all out old fashioned Chinese coming over the hill in waves like the Boxer Rebellion times 10. My husband would go out on the battlefield in a jeep and pick up the wounded as the Chinese cut them down, to haul them back for surgery in the MASH unit. He'd be literally surrounded by Chinese who wouldn't touch him (or,touch them), leaving the medics alone.

The Vietnamese war was a similar Chinese war with the French retreating with the Germans of the Foreign Legion covering them. The object of the war continued when the Americans retreated and the main Chinese invasion began wiping out the old settlements of Chinese descended Vietnamese.  

We discussed this movie at nytimes.com Film Forum kind of inadvertently discussing Michael Caine's motivations and Brendan Fraser's. My impression was that the viewers seemed not to quite get it.  Was it too Continental and Asian combined?  Americans enthusiasm for war is always gung ho.

Ps. Excellent writers, Graham Greene, and Christopher Hampton, same screenwriter who  gave us WW1 in Atonement.


The current movie of the week is The Green Zone with Matt Damon, the premise of which i already described day before yesterday or last night, whichever, without knowing that was it. I was just delineating how the Iraq war was sold to us.  Put it this way; we always buy the tickets.

Oh, I remember now, Jug-head, I think that was it, the main  movie of the Gulf War. It was just so full of camaraderie. Recruiting depends on movies like this.

[Gintaras]

On a different note, we watched Shampoo last night.  Julie Christie looked ravishing. The movie bears up reasonably well with age, but have to wonder about the ending.  Hal Ashby was having such fun with his story that it seemed a bit of a downer to have it all come crashing down like a "bad trip" in the end.

[Gintaras]

I don't know how odd that was -- one can imagine that the women in these guys lives seem pretty remote when they are on the bomb rotation.  

Maybe so, but I think Bigelow missed a golden opportunity to create a "Bomb Squad" here with a hip black dude, a roguish white dude and a hot chick (Michelle Rodriguez? or maybe even Evangeline Lilly?), with an overlording Colonel who tried to keep his squad in line.

[luee]

I do not think Viet nam was a Chinese war but a war of independence. Fog of war made that clear it was known to everyone but LBJ's yes men.

[madupont]

Went to see A Single Man, and personally do not see anything wrong with the Tom Ford approach to filming this as a fashion shoot or copy (as he has been accused of doing).

Immediately, with the first set-up, I was taken back to Italian Realism of the early 1960s which happens to be the period of this story. So far, I haven't investigated when or if this was the setting  when Christopher Isherwood wrote it.

He does not remain in that vain, however, as he introduces comic elements alternating with Colin Firth's serious angst as George Falconer ( a name meant to imply exactly what Isherwood intended). This is not unusual in Isherwood's writing style; it was certainly obvious in Berlin Stories.

Proof of the comic aspects applied here comes with the moment you discover Ginnifer Goodwin( more often seen as "sisterwife #3 in Big Love on HBO ) happens to be his immediate neighbor on one of those lanes for which California is famous when dealing with hill country.

And, here comes the Big Besides, if you are going to handle the main theme of loss threaded through the Isherwood plot, you have to have some relief, some alternative for the sake of the film; and it is my understanding that Isherwood lived in California to write movies.

Tom Ford deals with it by changing his lighting and color accordingly. A scene will move from brilliant multicolor, suggesting the neighbors relationship to George and how he relates to them, then to a daguerreotype typical brown which is George's brown mood to deal with loss and sorrow which will be remarked upon by several types of the cast members picking up that there is something wrong affecting George.

What George is, of course, is an Englishman with a somewhat stoic attitude known as stiff upper lip.
From here on Spoilers; or maybe I should quit while I'm ahead


He is extremely attractive to women because he habitually flatters them and then often enough rues that he had, as is evident when Ginnifer Goodwin makes it quite obvious that she is concentrating on him. Nevertheless, he does this with every woman within his aura.

There are hints offered at random when you begin to realize there are as many British actors in California, because of "the War"(WW2) as there were German-speaking intellectuals nesting in Santa Monica. We are told this when, in the camera's swift shifts in time, George seems to have more recently arrived and, on a warm and balmy night, goes out for some recreation whereupon he meets Jim, and asks him( having noticed the action on the dark beach of bare-assed swimmer-revelers, all of whom are men) if this always goes on?

Jim replies,that no it hasn't always but it began soon after the war.

This is apparently what brought George Falconer and Charley from London but I am going to lay that theme aside for you to discover for yourself.  Isherwood came to the US prior to the end of the war; but it was my  understanding that he did so with W.H.Auden (who left Chester at home) who latched on to a good thing. Never underestimate the good willingness of Americans to offer assistance and service to the bright lights  of the accomplished literati; and by doing so accomplish the kudos of having attracted these leading literary lights to their faculties.

(Auden taught at Haverford, on the Main Line, for some time  just a few miles at most outside of Philadelphia on the western side.)

The Single Man is a beautifully rendered portrait of one of these diamond-bright serious thinkers on the Humanities faculty, his sensitivity to other people's existence in the scheme of things. I'm now looking forward to reading this, as I might have known I would not be able to readily hear all the dialogue in an ill-appointed theater that is a personal hobby  to the proprietor. Particularly on a day when we are bombarded with incessant downpour that has been building to let go over the last two to three days, (which gave me a chance of a long talk with one of my brothers who phoned me from a K-mart because he had been out on a walk, his daily required constitutional, when the storm swept over the Twin Cities on its way East and he had to take cover).