Cynical Cinema

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.

I just picked up a show I never know existed. Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., season 4. It came out May 13th, courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Oh, I’ve heard of Gomer Pyle. The Andy Griffith Show and all that. And I knew he was played by Jim Nabors, and I knew he was goofy and as dumb as a bag of hair. I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup of 1960s TV characters, if he stood beside Dick Van Dyke and Carol Burnett and Chester from Gunsmoke. Gomer Pyle is an American institution, just like Jerry Lee Lewis is a French one. But somehow the existence of the show completely eluded me. And I should have known – I always thought, in Full Metal Jacket, that R. Lee Ermey was referring to the Andy Griffith character when he calls Vincent D’Onofrio “Private Pyle”. But now I know better - He’s referring to this, actual “Private Pyle”. Which makes that bathroom scene all the creepier.

Especially now that I watched Season 4 of Gomer Pyle. I couldn’t help but think about Vincent D’Onofrio and that maniac smile that spreads over his face while he sits on the floor of the bathroom. Seven-six-two millimetre. Full. Metal. Jacket. And so every time I see even a shadow cross the permanently-happy, blissfully stupid face of Gomer Pyle in this series, I expect the next thing he’ll do will be to bust into the weapons depot, load up a Rambo rifle, and go on a killing spree. (Which, as I understand it, is the alternate ending to Episode 91, “A Visit From Aunt Bee”. Or, at least, the director’s cut.) There are very few killing sprees in Gomer Pyle, USMC. And I wasn’t counting, but I think there are more laughs than murders. I think. I believe the final score is 1-0. One laugh, zero kills.

Not that I expect a military-themed show to have actual soldiers doing actual fighting. Remember Major Dad? No, neither do I. But I DO expect a “comedy” to make me laugh. And I have rarely seen a comedy that feels more dated than Gomer Pyle. The premise here is that a garage station attendant of sub-par intelligence has left Mayberry to enlist in the Marine corps. While there, he has to deal with his angry, yelling, order-barking platoon sergeant, but because he’s a “knucklehead”, he can’t do anything right ever. Which makes the sergeant yell more. And that makes Pyle screw up more. And hilarity, one would suppose, would ensue. But somehow, it just doesn’t. There is something just so painfully sit-com-ish about Gomer Pyle USMC. And perhaps in it’s day, it felt new, but there are few shows on DVD today that feel as dated as this. And that includes the A-Team.

Watching The Kingdom confirmed a few suspicions for me. I have always suspected that everyone the United States trains for any kind of gun-related activity has the capacity to be Rambo. (The CIA, the FBI, the military, mall security guards.) No, more than that, my suspicion has been that not only are they all trained to be Rambo should the need arise, but also that they are all waiting. Just waiting for a chance to break out the headband and the M-16 and take out all their enemies in a hail of gunfire. I have also suspected that the FBI was the only agency in the U.S. with balls, and that they are held back from doing the real work by namby-pamby pansies in the upper echelons of government. No, more than that, I have always thought that were they given the chance, rather than being blocked at every turn, the FBI could have just shown up in Afghanistan and caught Osama Bin Laden within a week.

And now, here comes The Kingdom, to not only confirm my suspicions, but to hammer me over the head with these incontrovertable facts. Which is not to say The Kingdom is a bad movie. It isn’t. But it’s not a good one either. The thing is, it’s two different movies. It starts out as smart as Syriana, and ends as dumb as well…Rambo. The beginning of the film makes you think you’re in for an intense, political, smart movie about terrorism and the relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It opens with a bang, so to speak, as a suicide bomb attack blows up an American softball game in Saudi Arabia. This is truly shocking, with men, women and children all being slaughtered. It’s an upsetting scene and a reminder of what terrorism is the world over. Also shocking and captivating is the subsequent torture scene, where the Suadi guard who saved the day by killing the terrorists gets interrogated by his own army. He shot the terrorists, and therefore they could not be questioned. Maybe he is in league with them - making sure they are dead so they can’t talk. It is very effective, and promises an interesting subplot. Since American citizens (and one FBI guy) were killed over there, the FBI wants to send a small team of elite agents into Saudi Arabia to investigate the crime.

This takes place in movie world, where the people who are going to be sent in like elite FBI commandos are the same people who make their case during top-level government discussions. Either they are extremely high-ranking FBI officials who still somehow see active firefight duty, or they are elite commando FBI operatives who somehow have access to the brass at the Pentagon and the White House. Either way, it doesn’t matter, it’s a movie. So Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman and the bizarrely cast Jennifer Garner show up in Saudi Arabia. There is a power struggle going on with the colonel in charge of the barracks that were attacked, the general of the Saudi Army who has assumed control over the investigation, and the newly arrived Americans. This could be interesting also. But it does not last long. Quickly, Jamie Foxx is able to convince the Saudi royal family that the colonel is the man for the job, and that they should be given access to the whole city.

From then on, all subplots are abandoned. That guy who was unjustly tortured? He comes along for the ride. He drives. The power struggle between the general and the colonel? The general just disappears. Now it’s just American commando rah-rah guns blazing through Riyadh. All four Americans are Rambo, especially Jennifer Garner, who rescues Jason Bateman from a particularly unpleasant fate in a very commando sort of way. Picture Jennifer Garner, the chick from Alias, cauterizing her wound by lighting gunpowder and then mowing down half of Afghanistan, a la Rambo 3. Are you smiling? Yeah, you should be. It’s asinine. So these Americans have been in Riyadh for five days. And they have solved the crime, located the terrorist cell responsible, and killed everyone involved. And America can’t find Osama? Geez. I hope they do, because capturing him would obviously involve car chases, rocket launchers, snipers, machine guns, machetes and would make for terrific TV.

The main problem with The Kingdom is that the cartoonish last half completely devalues the otherwise excellent buildup in the first half. The movie promises so much more than it delivers. A better movie of this nature is Collateral Damage, with Arnold Schwarzennegger. Now, I know what you’re saying. Really? You’re saying. But Collateral Damage was by no means a classic. In fact, I found it awful, you say. That is fine. But at least it delivered exactly what it promised. Terrorists blew up a family. The father of that family went after the terrorists. There was lots of action. The terrorists died. In the Kingdom, we think we are going to get something so much smarter and so much more interesting than Collateral Damage, that when all we get IS Collateral Damage, it’s that much more of a disappointment. It’s worth renting just for that first half, but prepare for disappointment in the second.

I hate to call something a must-watch, because people send me emails, angry that I said Hot Fuzz is a must-watch, and they hate British people. Or that A History of Violence is a must-watch, but they hate violence! (I really did get both of these emails. I liked the violence one best.) But this is one. The Hunting Party is a movie that asks the question - how hard are the agencies of the world really looking for the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? Specifically, this movie deals with the CIA and their “efforts” to track down the war criminals of the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. As it stands right now, most of the war criminals - murderers, genocidaires, rapists and worse - from the former Yugoslavia are still on the loose, (many believe some are sheltered in Russia) despite agencies like the CIA having vowed to track them down and find them half a decade ago.

The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a reporter and a cameraman who have been through many wars together. The film is inspired by the true story of a disgraced reporter, played by Gere, and his cameraman (Howard) and a wet-behind-the-ears young journalist who has to prove his merit because he is the big boss’s son. The three of them take off into the former Yugoslavia, searching for the region’s most notorious and dangerous war criminal, the butcher known as “The Fox”. How much of what transpires after that is true and how much is fiction, I don’t know. But I do know that the movie is enthralling. Three things make The Hunting Party tremendous. First, the social conscience and the real-world political questions raised by the film. Secondly, it’s pacing. The first time you see Richard Gere’s live, on-air meltdown on national TV, it’s almost comical, in a way. Later, you learn the circumstances behind that meltdown, and when you look back on it, you can no longer remember why you found anything funny in it at all, it just looks tragic. There is enough subtle humour throughout the film, at just the right places, to break up what would otherwise be overwhelmingly tragic and bleak subject matter. And third, the realism. These characters behave the way three real people, in the real world, would behave. Yes, they are foolhardy, yes, they are reckless, and yes, they are probably very lucky to be alive at certain points in the movie, but they never seem anything less than human at any point.

The Hunting Party is both a fascinating character study of a man who does not know how to stop being a reporter, and an eye-opening look at the way the CIA, the UN and other world agencies pay lip service to war criminals and the architects of genocide without ever really doing anything about them. It is, indeed, a must-watch. So watch it!

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.

Lust, Caution is the newest movie from the man who may well be the most over-rated director this side of M. Night Shyamalan. Ang Lee, the celebrated director of the magnificent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has followed up that triumph with three movies which, while decent, were decidedly over-rated. The Hulk, in which Eric Bana rips off his shirt and becomes giant and green, was a nice new take on the comic book genre, but it was far from revolutionary. Lee followed that one up with Brokeback Mountain, which scored far more points for it’s subject matter and for the guts it took to make the project a major Hollywood film, than it did for actual quality. A good film, but not as great as people seem to think. And now we get Lust, Caution. Another film that took guts, another film that pushes boundaries, but not exactly Earth-shattering. (I say he is less over-rated than M. Night Shyamalan, because Lee continues to at the very least make good movies. Shyamalan, since the Sixth Sense and maybe Unbreakable, has blown chunks. His movies have been downright rotten.)

The premise of Lust, Caution is that it is 1942, in the middle of World War II. The Japanese have occupied China since the late 30s, and the story takes place in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. Tang Wei plays a woman who used to be a college student, and is a part of the resistance fighting the occupation. This is now a collaborative occupation, with both Japanese and Chinese officials cracking down on the populace. Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) is an official in this oppressive government, a man who has risen through the ranks by being brutal and sadistic, torturing people and smoking out the reactionaries. One of those reactionaries is Tang Wei. Her assignment is to infiltrate the collaborationist government by becoming Mr. Lee’s lover. And she achieves that goal with considerable success. She is young and beautiful, and quickly catches his eye. Tang Wei is expected to be able to bring about a situation where Mr. Lee can be assassinated by the reactionaries, she is not expected to do it herself.

We do not see the atrocities being committed by Mr. Lee in the movie. Therefore, the only way Ang Lee chooses to show his sadism is through sex. And there is a lot of sex. Dirty, GRAPHIC sex. This film famously got an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, and while I almost never agree with the MPAA, this is one of the few times I actually understand them. The sex becomes the central character in the story, as Tang Wei begins the relationship reluctant to give up her virginity, and then the two graduate to more and more S&M flavoured relations. Mr. Lee begins to show more and more of his true nature, and as he does so, Wei begins to become more and more intertwined with him. She still hates him, but like the Brokeback Mountain cowboys, she can’t quit him. By the way, although the sex is graphic, and could possibly be titillating to some, it was not the sadistic quality of it that put me off, it was the bushy armpit hair. Tough to enjoy a sex scene when all you’re looking at is armpits.

At any rate, the film is, once again, quite good. But not great, not classic, not wonderful. As always, Ang Lee shows he is terrific with the camera. The shots he uses are breathtaking, and he has an eye for photographing sex with the best of them. But this movie is LONG. And by the time it is over, any connection we have built up with the characters has turned into something of a disconnect simply because of the length. And because there are so many sex scenes, and the sex is really what drives the movie, those are the main basis we have for even knowing the Mr. Lee character at all, and in large part knowing his mistress as well. And by the end, we really don’t know how to feel about Mr. Lee at all - we feel like we should hate him, that he is a sadist, but the only way we see that sadism is through sex. However, his mistress likes that bondage type sex. So if she likes it, how can we really be upset with him for it? Perhaps this is what Ang Lee is going for - this is exactly how Tang Wei sees Mr. Lee as well. But it means that there is very little emotional resonance in the final scenes, which ought to be far more powerful than they are. I like this movie, but it is no Crouching Tiger.

In The Valley of Elah did poorly at the box office. It turns out people just don’t want to be challenged these days. This is why movies like “Meet The Spartans” debut at #1. I was almost ready to write a review of Meet The Spartans, sight unseen, simply to convince people to avoid it. The same guys who made Epic Movie and Date Movie, which were two incredibly bad films, were clearly going to make one just as bad. And I felt that people going to see this film at all would just encourage them to make more. And so next year we will likely get Pirates Of The Beowulf or some such garbage. But even had I done so, it would not have mattered much. People would still have gone out to Meet The Spartans in droves, and the dumbest two percent of those people would have recommended it glowingly to their friends. “They have a pit! Like the one in 300. Like, EXACTLY the SAME. And they kick Britney Spears into it! I have never laughed so hard in my life! Except for the time I took that IQ test and got a result lower than ‘celery”". Meet The Spartans earned 18.7 million dollars in it’s first weekend at the box office, narrowly beating Rambo for top spot. In The Valley Of Elah made 1.5 million dollars on opening weekend, and left theatres having earned 6.7 million overall.

I don’t know why I’m mentioning Meet The Spartans and In The Valley Of Elah in the same sentence. I think it’s merely a method of illustrating the general idiocy and apathy of movie audiences today. Because people do not want to be challenged. They don’t want to think at the movies. And they certainly don’t want a movie that will make them think once they have left the theatre. That’s like bringing your work home with you! Imagine going to that movie with your wife, and then in the car on the way home, she wants to TALK about it! That certainly seems like more effort than it’s worth, doesn’t it? And, I’m sorry to say, for all you movie-watchers, that In The Valley Of Elah will spark discussion, and make you think, and might just lead to other topics of discussion as well. Topics like…Iraq. How this war is different. This war is not World War II. It is not even Vietnam. This is something that we haven’t seen before, and in this film we see that perfectly through the eyes of Tommy Lee Jones, who has deservedly earned a Best Actor nomination for this Sunday’s Oscars.

Jones plays the father of a missing boy. His son returned from the war in Iraq, and then disappeared completely. And Jones goes after him with the single-minded determination of a war veteran. A vet himself, Jones is that uber-American army guy who, after his many years of service, is still completely invested in the army. Not that he still works with them and does army-related things, but he is emotionally invested. He believes strongly in the bonds that connect soldiers, in the military code of discipline and in the army. Which means he believes the war in Iraq is important, that it is American and that it is just another proving ground for young men who love their country and are bringing democracy and peace to a backward nation. But his search for his son challenges those beliefs, and he will not be the same man when the search is over. In The Valley of Elah was in the top 200 movies at the box-office in 2007. It was in the top 100 R-rated movies. (Although I really don’t know why this was rated R. We don’t see that much of the blood and gore that is insinuated throughout the film.) And it had the 233rd biggest opening weekend of the year. But it is one of the 20 best movies made in 2007.

Charlize Theron co-stars as a police officer who aids Jones in his quest for his sone, and provides one of the few problems I have with the movie. We know who Charlize Theron is. We have seen her in dozens of movies where we are fully aware that she is one of the hottest women alive. And yet, in this movie as in others, she seems to be intentionally dialing down her looks. She is just not that hot here. And we have to think to ourselves - we know how gorgeous this woman is. Why wouldn’t she want to look good? Sure she’s a police officer, but would she, as a police officer, go out of her way to look as plain as possible? Well, maybe. Susan Sarandon shows up in what turns out to be a bit part as Jones’ wife and the boy’s mother. And a stellar cast make up the military unit with whom the boy was serving. In The Valley of Elah is a terrific achievement. It’s slow, it’s deliberate, and it’s very political. It will challenge your assumptions - even if you are already against the war in Iraq, there are still other questions posed by the movie that will make you think. This may be the most accurate representation of soldiers in Iraq yet put on film in a feature film. It should really be seen. By everyone. Let’s at the very least make it a success on DVD!