Cynical Cinema

In every movie about soldiers returning from war, there has to be some kind of traumatic war event before they go home. That way, the fact that they’re all messed up makes more sense to us. There have been many amazing movies about soldiers returning from war, the best of which was The Deer Hunter. Of late, the war in Iraq has provided some great films about this, the best one being In The Valley of Elah. And now we get Stop-Loss, another film about soldiers being messed up and freaking out when they get home, and it’s almost as good. And it does start off with that traumatic event, one which we see in more and more flashbacks as the movie continues.

The practice of Stop-Loss is one that has affected almost 100,000 American soldiers since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. Basically, it’s (as Ryan Philippe says in the film) a back-door draft. Soldiers who have completed their tours of duty get stop-lossed, which means that just as they are about to get discharged from the military, they get yanked back in and sent back to the war, whether they want to go or not. In the film, Brandon (Ryan Philippe) is one of those soldiers. A fine sergeant, loved by his friends and his soldiers, respected in the military, he returns from Iraq to his home, a small town in middle-America. The soldiers that fought with him are all, apparently, from the same small town. These include his life-long best friend Steve (Channing Tatum), and their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Instantly, upon their return from the war, they show how messed up they are in ways we’ve all seen before. Tommy starts fights with everybody. Steve gets really drunk and believes he’s still in the war, and digs a big hole in his front yard. And Brandon still has a useful role, as the guy who keeps all his friends together and makes sure they stay alive and reasonably sane. (Think DeNiro in Deer Hunter.) Within days of the guys being back in the States, Tommy’s wife has left him and he’s drinking himself to death. Steve has beaten his girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish), and only Brandon’s intervention has saved any of them. And then Brandon gets stop-lossed.

Faced with the prospect of going back to Iraq, now he starts to lose it too. His resistance at first seems to be based entirely on principle. The practice of stop-lossing soldiers is cruel. Once their tour of duty is complete, they have done exactly what they’ve signed on to do. They’re done. To force them back into action really is nothing but a draft, and his decision to run is basically, at first, a protest against the draft. What they’re doing isn’t right, so he basically refuses to comply. We discover, as the movie goes on, that he has other reasons, of course. Like that Big Traumatic Event that we saw at the beginning of the film. He can’t go back because he can’t shoot people any more. He can’t stay home, because the army will simply arrest him and send him back anyway. So his only option is to go on the run, with some vague idea about how to get out of this.

And his idea, as he goes AWOL, really is vague. Steve’s girlfriend Michele accompanies him on his trip, because she believes in what he’s doing. Basically, however, the stop-loss laws mean that his flight can take him only one place - either Canada or Mexico. And once he goes, he’s basically in witness protection, because he can’t contact his family at all. He can’t ever return home. He will have to get a new identity and new papers, and start his life all over. Which is, of course, a tough decision to make. While he and Michele are on the run though, things at home are starting to turn bad. Steve has re-enlisted for another tour of duty. Like so many characters in these movies, he no longer feels comfortable anywhere but in Iraq, fighting.

Tommy has also tried to re-enlist for the same reason. Everyone hates him at home now, so he has nowhere else to turn. However, the reason they hate him is that he’s a jerk, he’s messed up, he beats people up all the time, and he gets drunk out of his mind before plowing his car into buildings and stores around town. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is developing into one of the great character actors in movies. He is the most magnetic and believable character in Stop-Loss, especially next to Channing Tatum, whose character feels re-hashed and obvious. Tommy could be as cliched as Steve, but Gordon-Levitt rises above. The main problem with the movie is that he isn’t given enough to do. As the most compelling character in the film, it would have been nice to see a lot more of his story, rather than jumping from one mess to another.

The big problem with Steve and Tommy, of course, is that Brandon is no longer around. Brandon’s gone AWOL, and without his calming influence to guide them, they begin to come apart at the seams. This is fairly indicative of their mindsets anyway. They are also two guys who can’t really function without taking orders any more. They have no real minds of their own, and unless their lives are structured for them and planned out, they can’t manage. Which is why Steve re-enlists and Tommy falls to pieces. When Tommy gets dishonourably discharged, and therefore is unable to go back to the war, he really loses it. (Which sort of begs the question - why doesn’t Phillippe do this too? Instead of going on the run, just get really drunk and do stupid stuff and get kicked out of the army!)

In the end, Stop-Loss asks a very tough question. If people are depending on you, and you take off on them for the right reasons, are you really doing the right thing? A political movie with a specific ambition, it resonates with some great performances, mostly from Ryan Philippe, Abbie Cornish, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s not on the level of In The Valley of Elah, but it’s very, very good. Stop-Loss will not end up being a classic, but it’s well worth a rental. It comes out July 8th, Tuesday, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a fascinating, totally new look at the war in Iraq, focused on a heavy metal band named Acrassicauda. The DVD comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and is well worth watching. Not just for heavy metal fans, or political watchers, or documentary afficionados. This movie is great for everyone. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the music of Acrassicauda (whose name, in Arabic, is a type of venomous black scorpion). I just don’t dig that crazy super-heavy, unintelligible, screaming death metal. At the same time, I recognize the skills of their guitar player, and I think that musically these guys are terrific, given their circumstances.

And those circumstances are crazy. They began playing in Iraq, pouring their love of American heavy metal into their music, wearing shirts that, on the right day at the right time, could get them killed. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer. These are not bands that are tolerated by the repressive Islamic fundamentalists over in those parts. In 2005, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, VICE magazine teamed up with Acrassicauda to put on a rock concert. The show was a huge success, a sell out, and a year later Suroosh Alvi, the founder of VICE magazine, teamed up with the head of VICE films, Eddy Moretti, to travel back to Baghdad and see what had happened to the band in the intervening year.

What they find is disturbing and sad. The band doesn’t practice. They didn’t mind practicing under the threat of sniper fire, bombs and murder. But onec their rehearsal space was actually bombed, how much practice were they going to get in anyway? The film becomes more a tale of survival than a tale of heavy metal headbanging awesomeness. One of the only films out there that focuses on the youth culture in Iraq, and how the war is affecting those people. This film started out, really, as a magazine article for VICE, which you get in the booklet that comes along with the DVD. And the film makers are clearly not hugely experienced with this kind of filming. Their love for the band and the guys in it is constantly apparent, and their zeal for their “crazy mission” keeps coming through again and again. It’s a little intrusive, frankly, when we want to hear about Iraq and the band and their story more than anything else.

And in this sense, Heavy Metal In Baghdad succeeds despite itself. The story is so amazing, and the window into this world in Iraq has rarely been seen. Not the heavy metal world as such, but rather the world of teenagers and young adults who love many parts of Western culture, who hated Saddam Hussein, who buy bootlegged Metallica records, and who are unable to stand alone on the streets at night for fear of being killed. This is the world these guys inhabit, and this is the world we get to see through their eyes. The film follows them as they are forced to flee as refugees to Damascus, and the more laid-back interviews with the band members there reveal some seriously thoughtful, intelligent people who just want to make their music. They understand the situation they are in, they don’t want to make political statements with their music (although sometimes they are forced to do so), they just want to bang their heads and rock hard.

The personable, charming nature of these guys is the driving force of the movie, and they prove to be very engaging, interesting documentary subjects. They are not the low-brow, dumb-ass metalheads many of us have come to believe are par for the course. And they are not the West-hating, prayer five times a day, war crying Iraqis that so many of us have seen in the media. Heavy Metal In Baghdad is not about the war, or about heavy metal, or about Iraqis or Americans or religion. It’s about people. And it’s amazing.

There are a lot of problems with Hell Is For Heroes.  It happens to be Bob Newhart’s big-screen debut, and he does his silly, sissy bit very well.  But it’s sort of an odd thing to see him doing a funny phone bit in the Newhart comedic style when one of his buddies is about to be blown to pieces.  The budget on this movie was so low that only the eight or nine soldiers who make up the main story are ever shown.  Which makes it seem like an awful small war effort.  This was World War II, after all.  More than nine soldiers were there to fight the Germans.  And apparently James Coburn, who plays one of the soldiers in the company, was so concerned about the idea that the film was going to suck that he tried to convince the director, Don Siegel, to kill off his character as soon as possible.

But Siegel’s film does not suck.  For a small-budget, small-scope war movie, this one is cool.  And the main reason is Steve McQueen.  Coming off the Magnificent Seven, which brought him international attention, McQueen served notice in this film that he was ready for the superstardom of The Great Escape, Bullitt, and The Cincinnatti Kid.  His performance in this film is mesmerizing.  He plays a bad-ass soldier, a private who has been demoted after many demotions for bad behaviour.  Under fire, he is the best there is, but when he’s off duty he’s kind of a loose cannon maniac.  When his unit is left holding their position opposite a German pillbox on the Siegfried Line with only seven men, they need to figure out a way to make the Germans think their numbers are far greater than they really are.

And this is basically the movie.  When all their attempts to convince the Germans that they have a huge force finally run out, McQueen takes it upon himself to lead an attack on the German pillbox, knowing it’s the only way they can stave off a slaughter.  And it’s him that makes this film worthwhile.  This is the film that started Steve McQueen on the path to becoming the absolute, all-time greatest manly antihero in movie history.  The Great Escape, Pappillon, The Getaway, and countless other movies followed, but Hell Is For Heroes started the run.  And for that reason, this good little movie is worth seeking out.

Blood of My Brother is in many ways an incredibly impressive achievement.  It is a documentary on the Iraqi war that is incredible in terms of the access these film makers were given to shoot in Iraq.  They get behind the scenes at fundamentalist, jihad-fueled rallies.  The manage to come along with an attack on American forces.  They ride along on a tank with American forces.  And no judgements are passed one way or another.  There is no narrator in the film.  The only dialogue is from the interview subjects themselves.  It’s therefore almost all in Arabic, with English subtitles.  It follows one particular family so closely that you feel like not only are you there, but you’re almost a family member.

And it’s this Iraqi family that defines both the film and the plight in the country itself.  One of their sons and brothers has been killed by American forces while guarding a religious building.  His younger brother, Ibrahim, has become the family’s provider.  In his heart, he’s torn between a desire for revenge toward the Americans and the need to provide for his family, which would be destitute if he died.  This is a real insider’s look at the Iraqi insurgency, as the film takes us inside the Mehdi Army, one of the insurgent groups in Iraq.

 All of which makes for some powerful imagery and moving scenes, especially the scenes of mothers weeping over the death and the gravesites of their sons.  And yet, somehow, without a narrator to move the story along, and without any defineable position or purpose, it feels more like we’re eavesdropping on tragedy and militant anger, rather than understanding any of it at all.  Sure, we understand how the rallies and the speeches and the fury toward the Americans creates an insurgency, and makes suicide bombers out of people who would ordinarily abhor such violence.  All of which is an amazing thing to see, in terms of eavesdropping.  But as a movie, there just isn’t enough continuity to make it exciting or to make it very watchable.  An amazing achievement, a movie that ought to be seen, but one that’s an effort to watch.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is one of the most unfortunately-named movies in recent memory.  It conveys some sort of sweeping romantic epic that will likely involve intricate costumes and poems read to a lady from over a hedge of some kind.  And, in a way, it actually is.  But it’s an epic love affair between Irishmen and their country.  It’s actually the story of the beginnings of the IRA, as the British government holds Ireland in a grip of terror.  The British soldiers are beating Irish citizens, enforcing apartheid-type laws against the citizens of the country.  And the Irish have had enough.  They form a group to fight back against the British military. 

Cillian Murphy is terrific as Damien O’Donovan, a doctor who gets caught up in the resistance along with his brother Teddy, the de-facto leader of the resistance movement.  Orla Fitzgerald is wonderful as Damien’s love interest, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.  The movie is long - more than two hours - but it has a lot of story to tell.  The Irish resistance finds guns and weapons to drive out the British, but once they start becoming successful, they begin fighting amongst themselves, over political and territorial issues.  The IRA is split into two basic factions, the one that is willing to accept a compromise with the British and become a free state of the British Empire, and the one that will accept nothing less than total freedom from Great Britain.

The tension between the brothers, the warring factions, the passion of the resistance fighters and the palpable love of their country are all themes and moments that are expertly handled by the director, Ken Loach.  As the movie draws to an end, we see the issues that not only divided the IRA at the beginning, but also divided the country itself.  A fascinating and powerful look at the nascent years of one of the most famous (and infamous) fighting forces in the world, as well as the politics that divided Ireland, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an epic, beautifully filmed tale of struggle, triumph and tragedy.

After watching Samuel L. Jackson half-ass his way through S.W.A.T. and Jumper, I got a hankering for some good Jackson stuff.  And I grabbed a film I picked up a while ago but never got around to watching.  Home of the Brave is a movie with an ambitious concept but a very un-ambitious delivery.  It involves several soldiers who return from Iraq, and have difficulty re-adjusting to regular life.  The type of idea that often leads to some brilliant work, like The Deer Hunter.  The Deer Hunter this is not.  Jackson delivers an excellent performance as a doctor who returns to his practice, but starts to drink heavily and behave erratically as he can’t get over his wartime experiences.  And Brian Presley is good as Tommy Yates, a young man who tries to keep it together after his best friend is killed in front of him in the desert.  But the rest of the cast is weak at best.

Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, is wooden and irritating as a guy who comes back from Iraq unable to control his rage, and unable to deal with the fact that he killed an innocent woman and threw out his back jumping over a wall.  Which pains him more, it’s tough to tell.  Jessica Biel, who’s still not a great actress, loses a hand to a roadside bomb, but discovers that when you’re a female Iraq war veteran, all you need to make things OK is the love of the right man.  Men have it tough - just finding a great woman doesn’t fix their heads, but for a woman, I suppose it’s just that easy.  Or so this movie would have you believe.  And Christina Ricci, a fine actress, has what amounts to a brief, useless cameo appearance in the film.

There is just no depth to what ought to be a very in-depth character study of these four people.  But you have to think that when they were casting the movie, they were looking for names that would bring in money - 50 Cent will bring in the rap fans, they figure.  Jessica Biel will bring in the Maxim readers.  And if that’s the kind of thinking that went into the casting, they can’t really have cared too much about the concept.  What could have been a very heartfelt and engaging movie ends up being a glossy star-fest with a lack of star power.  It’s too bad.

As I wait, with breathless anticipation, for a chance to go see Son of Rambow, I have been forced to make do with regular Rambo in the meantime.  The fourth installment in this moribund franchise came out yesterday, and I begrudgingly rented it, feeling as though it were something of a duty, rather than a pleasure, to watch this re-hashing of the aging Stallone’s one-time moment of glory.  But then, I felt the same about Rocky Balboa, and it was the second-best of the moribund Rocky series.  So pleasant surprises are possible just about anywhere.  Although I hate to call Rambo a pleasant surprise.  In point of fact, Rambo did not surprise me in any way.  Rather, I surprised myself in watching it.  I’ll explain that in a moment.  First, a bit of Rambo history.

When I was a kid, Rambo was more of a punchline than an icon.  You would see someone cutting their sandwich with an unnecessarily large knife, and say “look out, Rambo’s in the kitchen”.  Or some other such clever childish thing.  By the time Rambo III rolled around, even eight-year-olds were making fun of the over-the-top idiocy of the film.  Rambo was in Afghansitan, fighting with the Afghani “freedom fighters” against the Russians.  I put freedom fighters in quotation marks not because these people were not really “freedom fighters” because it is a Rambo buzzword that separates the good guys from the insidiously evil ones.  And he mowed down half the Russian army, muscles bulging, as fifty of them stood on a hill vs. the one guy with the massive machine gun.  This was even more ridiculous than Rambo:  First Blood Part II, where he shot the communist bad guy with the arrow, and the guy exploded.  And even as children, we all understood this.

What gets lost in all this mess is that the first Rambo movie, First Blood, was actually good.  It was actually very good.  Stallone was the vietnam vet, unable to shake the nightmares and the violence that had become a part of his life, and he just wanted to eat a sandwich.  But some small-town backward hick sherrif decided to exert his questionable authority, and the next thing we all knew, everyone was dead.  A very cool, very dark, very gritty film.  But we don’t remember that, for the most part.  We remember the sheer insanity and bonkers mayhem that resulted in those last two abysmal efforts at “movie making”.  Which is why most of the world expected total nonsense and horrible acting and ludicrous pacing and unimaginable explosions with the fourth movie, 20 years after the third became the most expensive movie ever made.  (At the time.)

So I was cringing as I pressed play on the DVD player.  I was cringing through the opening credits.  I was dreading the Rambo cliches and the lousy dialogue and the ridiculous, unnecessary violence and explosions.  But all of a sudden, as the movie began, my opinion started to change.  Rambo is living in the jungles of Thailand - still a damaged man, he catches snakes and sells them for a living.  Yet somehow he can still afford a boat.  Anyway, I know what you’re saying - Vietnam was a long time ago, how can he still be damaged?  Shouldn’t he be over that by now?  But you see, this is Rambo.  He also saw (and caused) horrendous violence in Afghanistan and small-town U.S.A.  He just can’t escape it, and so he becomes a hermit at the beginning of every movie.  But then, of course, something happens to draw him back into the killing game.

In this case, that something is a group of missionaries who are trying to go up-river (it’s always up-river) into Burma (how timely) to deliver medical supplies and medical attention to that impoverished and war-torn country.  They want to rent Rambo and his boat, but he is a wise old soldier, and he knows that they should really not be going up-river.  They will be killed, he knows.  But a sweet, innocent missionary lady named Sarah (Julie Miller from Dexter) convinces him that they have to try, so off they go.  But these missionaries think that he’s John Rambo.  They don’t know that he’s RAMBO.  After he delivers them to their destination, they are of course captured by the crazy-evil Burmese.  And now Rambo is hired, once again, to take a boat up-river.  This time filled with mercenaries, who also don’t know that he’s RAMBO.

But we know he’s RAMBO.  WE have seen the three previous films, or are familiar with this cultural icon.  And it is that knowledge that fills me with anticipation as the crew goes up-river…wait - anticpation?  I find all of a sudden that I am actually anticipating the shunting aside of John Rambo in favour of the emergence of RAMBO!  Not only am I anticipating it eagerly, I am irritated it hasn’t come sooner!  I find myself thinking “when is he going to become RAMBO?” in a very whiny voice inside my head.  All of a sudden, I want ridiculous bloodshed.  I want over-the-top explosions and gigantic machine guns.  Where IS the violence?  Well, I know these mercenaries are loose-cannon and maniac enough to cause some mayhem.  Here we go!  And the violence beings, and the RAMBO emerges, and I am able to revel in the idiocy.

Bodies blasted completely into pieces are de rigeur in this film.  Whether it be by explosions, mines, sniper rifles, or the you-knew-it-had-to-be-there gigantic super-power machine gun, body parts are all over the screen and flying through the air for about half an hour straight.  Explosions which could just as easily have been small ones turn into staggering spectacles of fire and dirt and booming, as the body parts are scattered over many many miles.  It is not enough for Rambo to break a guy’s neck, he must rip his entire throat out with his bare hands.  Yes!  It’s THIS kind of excess that made Rambo II and Rambo III so terrible and so laughable, and as I realized here, so very nostalgic for me!  I found myself cheering for every single Rambo cliche in the book - the shadow that flits past the bad guy just before he dies.  The slow rise of Rambo into view behind the bad guy at the opportune moment, with murder in his eyes, so you KNOW that guy’s gonna buy it next.  And of course, the machine gun that I would assume no single human being could operate alone.

And then there are the nightmares, and the flashbacks.  Just so we don’t forget who John Rambo really is, we get flashbacks - to the previous movies!  Now it is these movies that are giving Rambo himself nightmares, as I am certain they did for many a movie critic in the late 80s.  Scenes from First Blood - “Nothin’ is ovah!”, scenes from the other two, all tormenting this man.  And it is important to know that he is still tormented.  Rambo has never voluntarily, in any of his movies, taken up arms.  He has been forced into a position where he had no choice but to kill everyone he met.  And this movie must fit that mold.  Also, there must be a cause, a noble one, that could be taken up somewhere in the world.  In this case, Burma (or, Myanmar), a horribly violent country with a civil war that has been ongoing for many, many years.  (In fact, bootlegs of this movie were the hottest selling items on the streets in Myanmar until the devastating hurricane that killed thousands.  Now, the hottest selling items are bootlegs of video footage of the hurricane devastation, so people can see what is actually going on, and not the sunny everything’s-OK picture painted by the government.) 

And all of these things add to the greatness of Rambo.  The fun one has when watching.  This is a real country, with a real fight, that really needs help in a big way.  And yet, the people who made Rambo are willing to, on a certain level, trivialize the conflict itself by showing an aging Sylvester Stallone get behind the biggest machine gun in the world and blow the arms and legs and necks off thousands of people.  But they don’t care.  They have a budget, and explosives, and damn it all, they are going to use every single ounce of both!  I am still cheering for the dream sequence, which was absolutely hilarious.  And there are some seriously wicked Rambo-style lines - my personal favourite being “you either live for nothing, or you die for something”.  I think we could all picture Mel Gibson delivering this line in Braveheart, for example, but Stallone?  As Rambo?  LMAO.

Stallone still has what it takes to play John Rambo.  The ability to flex and the inability to articulate.  In the year leading up to the film, he was caught with steroids.  I guess he had to stop taking them, which is why Rambo, for the first time, does not appear shirtless at all in this film.  His arms are still gigantic, and he does flex them a lot, but one would assume that at the age of eighty-four, Stallone’s abs are not what they once were.  So he wisely keeps his shirt on, and we are all the better for it.  And in the end, we are all the better for having seen this movie, knowing that Rambo is still out there, unable to speak his mind but still tortured inside it, unable to persuade people not to fight but still the ultimate fighter.  And the final scene in the movie, which makes it almost inevitable there will be a sequel, is sublimely foolish, powerfully obvious and the cherry on top of this movie.  A movie which is not brilliant by any means, and it probably isn’t even good, but it is Rambo.  John Rambo always finds himself in a situation where he has to do bad to do good.  RAMBO, on the other hand, just has to be bad to be awesome!

My biggest complaint about Grace Is Gone is the very first scene. John Cusack is obviously some manager at some company, and he is leading his co-workers in one of those office cheers. You know - “who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “The customers!” “Who comes first?” “THE CUSTOMERS!” And then everyone runs off to begin their day. I once worked at a place like this. Every morning, before they began, they would put their arms around each other in a circle, close their eyes, and listen to Eye Of The Tiger all the way through. I’m not even joking. They really did this. I’ll tell you, my time at that job before I quit was the longest eleven hours of my life! Well, watching The Postman, twice, on the same overseas plane ride, with Mission To Mars sandwiched in between the two showings, was the longest eleven hours of my life. But this job was a close second.

Thank God the movie is actually decent, because it sure left a bad taste in my mouth when it began. When Cusack gets home from work, we find out that he has two charming little girls, one twelve-year-old and one eight-year-old. The older one seems wise and mature beyond her years, and a little too serious for a normal little girl. The younger one is innocent and vivacious, and seems maybe a little too young for her age. We learn quickly that their mother (and Cusack’s wife) is a soldier in Iraq. The little girl sets her watch to go off at the same time every day, which is when her mom’s watch will go off in Iraq, and they’ll think of each other. And blah blah sentinemtality…blah blah. The older daughter is an insomniac. She falls asleep in school because she can’t sleep at night, because she is thinking about mom fighting a war.

Then two military men show up at the door. Mom (Grace) is dead. And this is where the movie really starts. Cusack, losing his mind just a little, scares the hell out of his older daughter and thrills his youngest when he decides that rather than tell them about their mom, he will spontaneously put them in the car and take them on a road trip across the country to some kind of Dinseyland-type amusement park, the name of which escapes me just now. The whole movie is this road trip, and although that seems boring, enough happens that we are reasonably entertained. Cusack and his daughters, with their support-our-troops ribbon on their car, meet up with his brother, an anti-war jobless bum. I don’t think the movie as a whole is trying to say that those who question the war are shiftless losers, but it sure feels that way during the scenes with the brother, ably played by Alessandro Nivola.

And it really is the performances that hold what could be an awfully thin movie together. Most notably Cusack himself, who appears to have put on a few pounds, and forgoes his usual stutter-bitter-confused delivery for something more sympathetic and damaged. His relationship with the girls, while it starts off as sort of arm’s-length and cautious, improves throughout the trip until, at the end, he tells them their mom is dead. (I’m not ruining anything here - you had to know this movie was going to end that way, right?) It’s a pretty good scene, in the sense that the entire movie has been leading up to that moment, and it would have been very easy to make it maudlin, to contrive a tear-jerking moment, but director James C. Strouse doesn’t do that. Instead the revelatory moment is nicely understated and subtle.

The older daughter Heidi (played very well by Shelan O’Keefe), throughout the movie, knows something is amiss. She puts a lot of clues together, but can’t quite figure out what’s really going on. It seems simple enough to us watching that she should understand completely, but she is unable to conceive something of the magnitude of the death of her mother. After all, she’s just 12 years old. So that option doesn’t really occur to her, or if it does she chooses not to explore the possibility any further. And although Cusack is considerably older than Heidi, he too can’t conceive of this happening either. And the two of them are the glue that holds Grace Is Gone together. Two terrific performances that raise the level of this movie from maudlin to moving. It comes out tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

Alliance Films is on a roll with their epic films. A few months ago, they released a magnificent three-disc Limited Collector’s edition of El Cid to DVD, one of the great but forgotten Charlton Heston epics. It came with cards and comic books and dozens of special features and booklets and all kinds of trinkets. Today, May 27th, Alliance is releasing the next in this epic series, a Limited Collector’s Edition of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. The three-disc set is almost identical to El Cid in terms of the goodies that come inside. And the two films are very similar as well, in that they are massive military epics with casts of thousands, enormous sets, and Sophia Loren. Starring with Loren in The Fall of the Roman Empire is Alec Guinness, one of the most under-rated actors in history, as the reasonable and wise Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He may well be one of the three greatest to ever live, up there with Brando and Olivier and Nicholson and DeNiro and Bogart.

The movie begins with Marcus Aurelius calling together the representatives of all the nations within the Roman Empire in order to secure peace and prosperity for the known world. Of course, this does not take place over the course of the film, and when it ends three hours later, it is with the Fall of the Roman Empire. This disaster comes about when Aurelius’ son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer), gets wind of his father’s decision to turn over the throne to his adopted son Livius instead of him. So Commodus decides to kill his own father in order to take the throne. And that leaves Rome in the hands of a childish, foolish man, who refuses to negotiate with his enemies or listen to other opinions, and thereby dooms the entire empire quite quickly. Well, in three hours.

This movie is famous now more as the movie that caused the fall of Samuel Bronfman’s cinematic empire, moreso than as a film. But as a film, it stands the test of time. The “Battle of the Four Armies” is as impressive a set piece as anything staged in The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia. 8,000 soldiers and 1,200 horses were used for the production, which was shot on a massive plain in Madrid. And the detailed reconstruction of the Roman Forum remains, to this day, the largest ever outdoor film set. With set pieces and sets like these, it’s easy to see how the movie cost a massive amount to produce. And when it became a gargantuan financial failure, it took Bronfman’s empire with it. He had previously been responsible for some of the massive films of the era - El Cid, King of Kings - but after this one he never made another. It was more his business plan than the failure of this film, however, that did him in. He had spent so much creating the sets for these epic movies that he overextended himself, and owed millions of dollars when he became financially destitute and shut down operations.

The Fall of the Roman Empire plays a little fast and loose with actual, factual, history. But the tone, the costumes, the sets and the structure of the armies and the senate are all perfect. The Battle of the Four Armies, while an impressive scene, never actually took place. But the scene toward the end where the senators attempt to bribe the military into making one of them emperor is taken from historical fact. But in the end, you don’t watch a movie like this to learn specific facts about world history. You watch it to be entertained. And The Fall of the Roman Empire IS entertaining. Livius is played by Stephen Boyd, who does a terrific job in a role that was first offered to (of course) his Ben-Hur co-star, Charlton Heston. Sophia Loren is great as always, and of course smoking hot. The role of Commodus was only the third movie role for Christopher Plummer, and it’s the role that propelled him to stardom. And Alec Guinness is simply magnificent as Marcus Aurelius, a role that sadly ends halfway through the movie with his death.

There are many similarities to Gladiator in this film, and indeed a few people have suggested that on many levels Gladiator was actually a remake of The Fall Of The Roman Empire. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that is the case, but the stories certainly approximate one another. They occur at the same epoch in history, they deal with the same characters and the same downward spiral that consumed Rome in all her glory, and certainly the final scene is almost identical in both films. But Gladiator is a little more fanciful, and The Fall of the Roman Empire is way bigger in scale.

Now - while I certainly do recommend picking up this film, and this three-disc edition is wonderfully done, you might want to wait. For true rabid fans of this film, there is another edition coming out later, possibly as much as a year later. This edition features the standard two hour and 52 minute theatrical version that has been around for years. However, there was some lost footage that was discovered, too late to be included in this particular edition, that will be added to a later set. This will, though, likely be the only set with the poster-cards and the booklets that are included here. So perhaps, if you are a hardcore fan of The Fall of the Roman Empire, you could well do both. Like my nerd-buddy Dave, who owns all thirty-four different editions of the Star Wars trilogy. On VHS and DVD and LaserDisc and reel-to-reel and so forth. If only he had a laser disc player.

Holocaust is a now-legendary miniseries that ran on NBC’s Big Event series in the late 70s. Starring Meryl Streep, James Woods, and a ton of other stars, this is a seven-and-a-half hour marathon of remarkable brilliance. Streep and Woods are terrific as a German woman and her Jewish husband. They get married at the beginning of the film, just before the Nazis start rounding up Jews for the ghettos and for executions. The series follows their story, as well as many others. Woods’ family plays a big part too. His father, a doctor, is played by Fritz Weaver, and his mother is Rosemary Harris. We follow them all the way to the Polish ghetto, and then to Auschwitz. Woods’ brother, Joseph Bottoms, witnesses and then escapes from the 1941 Baba Yar massacre, and with his girlfriend joins up with the Russian partisans in their battle against the Nazis.

Also a big story in Holocaust, Michael Moriarty is absolutely great as Erik Dorf, a German lawyer pressured by his ambitious wife to join the Nazi party. Although he is initially conflicted about the inhuman treatment of the Jews, he quickly loses his humanity and rises through the ranks of the SS to become a key architect of Auschwitz and the gas chambers. His story, while initially sympathetic, becomes more and more unpalatable as the film moves on, and eventually Dorf becomes the face of the evil that was the Nazis. He manages to justify his ideas and his involvement in the slaughter of so many innocents by thinking of it as just a job. He’s just following orders. His position is just a job. And his job is to find more efficient ways to slaughter Jews and better methods to explain it to the rest of the world. The Dorf we meet at the beginning of Holocaust would have recoiled in horror at the things done by the Dorf we see at the end.

Throughout, Holocaust is (of course) devastating and horrific. While we can celebrate the love between Bottoms and his girlfriend as they get married, and we can feel a certain amount of satisfaction and inspiration from the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the story is so well-known and so bleak that it’s tough to lose oneself in the nice moments. But that is as it should be. You don’t watch a series like Holocaust expecting comedy and love stories. But it needs some (relatively) light-hearted moments to alleviate that crushing sense of dread and depression one will feel while watching. Of course, the people who really went through this have no respite, but that’s no reason not to give us one as we watch. After all, you want people to actually watch this, if for no other reason than it’s an event we, as people, should never forget.

Holocaust won several Emmy awards, being ineligible for Oscars. One of the most decorated TV miniseries of all time, it won for Outstanding Limited Series, whatever that meant in 1978. Streep, Woods and Moriarty all won acting Emmys, as did Blanche Baker. Five other actors were nominated, without winning. The direction, by Marvin J. Chomsky, won, as did the script by Gerald Green. Morton Gould’s musical score was nominated for an Emmy AND a Grammy, and Moriarty and Rosemary Harris both won acting Golden Globe awards. In short, Holocaust won every award that was available to it at the time, everything short of the Oscars. Which makes it TV’s equivalent of Schindler’s List, an apt comparison in that it stands right up there with that film as the two greatest documents of the most horrific events in modern history. It comes out on DVD for the first time tomorrow, May 27th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.