The fact that Moe Berg’s is the only baseball card displayed at CIA headquarters tells us that he was a candidate for The Most Interesting Man in the World. Berg was a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law who played 15 years in the Major Leagues, one of the few Jews in pre-war baseball. While a pro player in the early 1930s, he visited Japan twice, learned Japanese and surreptitiously photographed Tokyo for US intelligence. During World War II, he performed secret missions in Europe for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.
That’s quite a life. Unfortunately, The Catcher Was a Spy drains the interest out of it by trying to portray that most cerebral of real-life characters, Moe Berg, in kind of an actiony movie. The climax is a will-he-or-won’t-he decision that Berg has to make on a secret mission. If you are still awake by then…
Most of The Catcher Was a Spy is Paul Rudd as Moe Berg being watchful. Berg was an enigma and notoriously closed-mouthed – so we see him being enigmatic and silent. Not very cinematic.
The cast is remarkably talented: Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce and Paul Giamatti, Connie Nielson, and Shea Whigham. Strong has a pivotal role, but we only glimpse the others, and I still can’t place who Connie Nielsen played; it must have been that other female character…
If you’re a history geek like me, you might stream this. But don’t expect an espionage thriller.
Nuno Lopes (left) and Afonso Pimentel in THE LINES OF WELLINGTON
The Lines of Wellington is an epic about Wellington’s repulsion of the French invasion of Portugal during the Napoleonic Wars – but without very much about Wellington or his lines. Because this is an epic – with lots and lots of characters – we do get the flavor of how war affected civilians and troops of all ranks in the early 1800s; hint – as war has been before and since, it has its unpredictable moments, but is predictably harsh for all concerned.
Wellington spent a year-and-a-half secretly building an ingenious series of defensive fortifications just north of Lisbon, scorched the earth in front of them and then lured in the French Army. The scale of the fortifications is mind-boggling – lines of 126 forts with miles of walls – and he even re-directed rivers. When the French arrived, already weakened by the march to get there, they were baited to attack the impregnable defense. The French suffered more heavy losses and completed the fiasco with a painful retreat. Unfortunately, we don’t see the Lines of Wellington until only 26 minutes remain in The Lines of Wellington. And even then we don’t get to appreciate the scale and connectivity of the fortifications – we might as well be watching Fort Apache.
We don’t see much of Wellington either. Played by John Malkovich, Wellington struts around for a few minutes scowling impenetrably and once advises a painter on how to better glorify Wellington in oils. Lots of other big name art house favorites wander through The Lines of Wellington. If you don’t blink, you’ll catch glimpses of Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Amalric, Marisa Paredes and Chiara Mastroianni. But The Lines of Wellington focuses more on the story of two Portuguese soldiers, one of whom is charismatically played by the Portuguese actor Nuno Lopes.
Because The Lines of Wellington aspires to tell the stories of the many affected by this military campaign, it is a series of vignettes. The effect is a disjointed and mildly interesting slog through 1810 Portugal that takes 151 minutes (the miniseries cut). Maybe, the 135 minute theatrical version is tighter, but it would still lack the depth and cohesiveness that I didn’t find here.
I really would only recommend The Lines of Wellington to a military history buff (like my friend Bob). It is available streaming on Amazon Instant Video, Vudu and Xbox Video.
Ariane Labed and Soko in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
This week’s video pick salutes the San Francisco International Film Festival, now underway. From last year’s SFFILMFestival, the topical French drama The Stopover explores the after-effects of combat in contemporary warfare. We also get a female lens on the acceptance of women in combat roles and on sexual assault in the military from the co-writer and co-directors, the sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin.
The Stopover’s title refers to a French combat unit’s three-day stay in a luxurious Cypriot seaside resort. The unit, heading back to France after a tour in Afghanistan, is supposed to decompress at the resort. They are required to engage in group therapy, enhanced by virtual reality goggles. As with any group of gung-ho and mostly macho twenty-somethings, talk therapy is not their thing. But they sure need decompression, because their service included a terrifying engagement in which they lost three comrades.
This combat unit includes women, and The Stopover focuses on Aurore (Ariane Labed) and Marine (Soko). The strong and purposeful Aurore has physically recovered from an emotionally (and literally) scarring experience in Afghanistan. The more impulsive Marine, on the other hand, is not a deep thinker, but has a serious chip on her shoulder.
Everyone in the unit wound very, very tightly. Some are fighting to keep psychotic outbursts from bubbling over. Plopping these guys amidst tourists and locals in such an absurdly and artificially tranquil setting creates a powder keg. From start to finish in The Stopover, we’re waiting for any and every character to snap or erupt.
Ariane Labed in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
Labed is excellent as Ariane, who feels need to suppress her PTSD, to mask it with rowdy fun and, finally, to confront it. Labed won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for a completely different kind of movie in 2010, the absurdly goofy Attenberg, which I also watched at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
I just can’t take my eyes of Soko, who is a French pop music star. Here, as Marine, she has a feral fierceness. Soko is also a force of nature in the excellent period drama Augustine. She brings a simmering intensity to the screen, in contrast to her offbeat, ironic pop music.
The rest of the cast is excellent, too, particularly Karim Leklou as a sergeant with an unresolved issue or two.
The Stopover is available to stream on iTunes. It’s an engrossing and powerful film.
In Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has written and directed a gripping historical thriller, somehow both personal and vast. It’s a remarkable achievement of both storytelling and filmmaking. Nolan chooses to tell us the story through the lenses of a few minor participants without losing any of the epic sweep of the event.
Dunkirk is the story of one of World War II’s most pivotal events. It’s May, 1940 – over a year before Hitler invaded Russia and over a year-and-a-half before the US entered the war. German forces have swept across Europe and now control the entire continent. It’s very thinkable that Germany will invade Britain. Germany is winning, and it’s more plausible than not that Germany will win the war.
The Germans have trapped a British/French army of 400,000 on a beach in France, certain to be captured or annihilated. The British navy has the capacity to evacuate 40,000 of them in the best case. But the best case can’t be operationalized because, when the British load 800 soldiers on a destroyer, German bombers and submarines sink it. So the British resort to a desperate measure by enlisting 700 small civilian boats – fishing boats, pleasure craft, trawlers, ferries and tugs – to cross the English Channel and pick up the soldiers from an active battle zone. Amazingly, it worked and 340,000 of the troops were rescued, saving them to deter a German invasion of Britain.
Nolan shows us every conceivable peril faced by the rescuers and the rescued, from aerial bombardment to submarine attack. He starts us following a couple of ordinary infantrymen (Fionn Whiteheand and Aneurin Barnard). When they find a wounded man on the beach, they look at each other wordlessly, toss him on a stretcher take off at the full run for a waiting naval vessel; it’s not spelled out, but they aren’t being selfless – they are trying to jump the line to the ship and get evacuated before hundreds of thousands of other men. They learn that getting off the beach isn’t that easy. Soon, Nolan weaves in a determined civilian heading his tiny boat across the English Channel (the great actor Mark Rylance) and the RAF fighter pilots (the commander played by Tom Hardy) who try to protect the beaches and the evacuation vessels. It’s a race against time for each of the characters as they navigate hazard after hazard, and the experience throbs with intensity
Dunkirk is very historically accurate, although the story has been compressed to a couple of days, and the actual evacuation took over a week. Nolan jumbles his timelines, and sometimes we are jarred by moving from daytime in one story thread to nighttime in another. But the threads eventually converge.
In particular, the depiction of aerial warfare is extraordinary, including what it must have been like inside a cockpit that is hit by enemy fire. Dunkirk contains probably the best ever movie shot of a plane ditching in the ocean. We see what it must have been like to be on a ship sunk by submarine torpedo (hint: much less romantic than Titanic‘s sinking). The Germans employed a Stuka dive bomber, which was outfitted with sirens to terrify its victims on the ground or sea; Dunkirk actually replicates the scream of the Stuka’s sirens very convincingly.
Rylance is superb and the rest of the cast does very well, including Cillian Murphy as a shell-shocked soldier and Kenneth Branagh as an embattled naval commander.
Near the end of Dunkirk, a fighter plane runs out of fuel and glides across the beachfront in one of the most beautiful series of shots in recent cinema.
Dunkirk is that rare breed – a white knuckler with relateable characters and historical integrity. It’s one of the very best films of 2017.
My video pick for Memorial Day Week is Mel Gibson’s powerful Hacksaw Ridge. Just before the 2017 Oscars, The Wife and I finally got around to watching Hacksaw Ridge, which had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Before you see this movie, you need to know that it’s a true story – otherwise you wouldn’t believe it. It’s the story of American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss who single-handedly rescued 75 fellow soldiers at the Battle of Okinawa and became the first Conscientious Objector in American history to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Hacksaw Ridge shows Doss (Andrew Garfield) growing up in rural Virginia as a devout Seventh Day Adventist. After Pearl Harbor, Doss feels compelled to serve his country but, as a religious pacifist, he can’t sign up for combat. So he enlists as a conscientious objector to become a combat medic. He’s thrown into a combat unit for training and endures bullying from both his officers and his fellow troops.
Doss and his unit are ordered into the Battle of Okinawa. They must climb a 350-foot cliff on cargo netting, The Americans can carry up radios, bazookas, machine guns and flamethrowers but not anything heavier than that. The Japanese are not contesting the climb up because they have set up a killing field on the ridge-top, which they have fortified with concrete pill-boxes. The Japanese have also constructed a network of tunnels, in which they can wait out the US naval artillery bombardments.
It’s a blood bath. Historically, this was an extraordinarily brutal battle – even by War in the Pacific standards. And so director Mel Gibson, who never shies away from violence, graphically depicts that violence. Of course, being Mel, he can’t resist a few completely gratuitous moments, including a hara-kiri and the very cool-looking slo-mo ejection of casings from an automatic weapon. But, generally, the movie violence is proportionate to the real-life violence.
Nevertheless, the real focus is on the bravery of the US troops, of which Doss’ is extraordinary. Their and his courage to climb the cliff a SECOND time – after learning what it is like on top – is unimaginable.
Andrew Garfield is superb as Doss, playing him with a goofy and infectious grin, whose niceness and sweetness masks formidable strong will. I’ve never see him as Spider-Man, but Garfield’s work in Red Riding, The Social Network, 99 Homes and now Hacksaw Ridge has been very impressive.
There isn’t a bad, or even mediocre performance in Hacksaw Ridge. You can’t tell that Aussies Teresa Palmer, Hugo Weaving and Rachel Griffiths (Brenda in Six Feet Under) aren’t from Blue Ridge Virginia. Sam Worthington and Vince Vaughn are especially good as Doss’ commanders.
I’ve been a fan of Hugo Weaving since he so compellingly played a blind man in the 1991 Proof (also our first look at a very young Russell Crowe). Since then, Weaving has earned iconic roles in the Matrix movies and V for Vendetta and is usually the most interesting performer in big budget movies. Here Weaving plays Doss’ father, not just as the mean drunk who terrorizes his family, but as a vet still reeling from the PTSD of his own WWI combat experience.
Hacksaw Ridge deservedly won Oscars for both film editing and sound mixing. Gibson’s directing is excellent, as is the work of cinematographer Simon Duggan (who shot Baz Luhrman’s otherwise dreadful but great-looking The Great Gatsby).
Make sure that you watch through the epilogue and closing credits to see and hear the real life folks portrayed in the film.
You can rent Hacksaw Ridge on DVD from Netflix and Redbox or stream it from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play and DirecTV.
[SPOILER ALERT: I have also read on the Internet about something that is NOT in the movie. Reportedly, when Doss was being evacuated by stretcher after being wounded by the grenade, he ROLLED OFF the stretcher when he passed another wounded soldier and demanded that the stretcher bearers take the other guy. Doss then CRAWLED the final 300 yards to the cargo netting to rescue himself. Again reportedly, Mel Gibson kept this out of the movie because he thought the audience just couldn’t be expected to believe that it really happened.]
Ariane Labed and Soko in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILMFestival) presents the topical French drama The Stopover, which explores the after-effects of combat in contemporary warfare. We also get a female lens on the acceptance of women in combat roles and on sexual assault in the military from the co-writer and co-directors, the sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin.
The Stopover’s title refers to a French combat unit’s three-day stay in a luxurious Cypriot seaside resort. The unit, heading back to France after a tour in Afghanistan, is supposed to decompress at the resort. They are required to engage in group therapy, enhanced by virtual reality goggles. As with any group of gung-ho and mostly macho twenty-somethings, talk therapy is not their thing. But they sure need decompression, because their service included a terrifying engagement in which they lost three comrades.
This combat unit includes women, and The Stopover focuses on Aurore (Ariane Labed and Marine (Soko). The strong and purposeful Aurore has physically recovered from an emotionally (and literally) scarring experience in Afghanistan. The more impulsive Marine, on the other hand, is not a deep thinker, but has a serious chip on her shoulder.
Everyone in the unit wound very, very tightly. Some are fighting to keep psychotic outbursts from bubbling over. Plopping these guys amidst tourists and locals in such an absurdly and artificially tranquil setting creates a powder keg. From start to finish in The Stopover, we’re waiting for any and every character to snap or erupt.
Ariane Labed in THE STOPOVER photo courtesy of SFFILM
Labed is excellent as Ariane feels need to suppress her PTSD, to mask it with rowdy fun and, finally, to confront it. Labed won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for a completely different kind of movie in 2010, the absurdly goofy Attenberg, which I also watched at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
I just can’t take my eyes of Soko, who is a French pop music star. Here, as Marine, she has a feral fierceness. Soko is also a force of nature in the excellent period drama Augustine. She stars in another movie out this year that I’m looking forward to seeing, The Dancer. She brings a simmering intensity to the screen, in contrast to her offbeat, ironic pop music.
The rest of the cast is excellent, too, particularly Karim Leklou as a sergeant with an unresolved issue or two.
The Stopover plays the SFFILMFestival tonight and again this weekend. It’s also programmed in Film Society of Lincoln Center’s sometimes traveling Rendez-vous with French Cinema series. It’s an engrossing and powerful film.
Keira Knightly and Benedict Cumberbatch in THE IMITATION GAME
So – here’s a pretty good true story: the guy who invented the computer and played a key role in defeating the Nazis was hounded for his homosexuality. And The Imitation Gametells that story very well and is a pretty good movie. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who was able to create a proto-computer that could break the codes of the German Enigma cipher machine. To make his character even more interesting, Turing had appalling, almost Asberger-like personal skills and needed to conceal his sexual preference. Cumberbatch nails the role, and will reap an Oscar nomination for his efforts.
It’s a top-to-bottom excellent English cast. Keira Knightley is especially good as Joan Clarke, the real life female codebreaker who overcame sexism and who became, briefly, Turing’s fiance.
The Imitation Game is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
In Clint Eastwood’s real-life story American Sniper, Bradley Cooper plays Chris Kyle, the most effective sniper in US military history. A Navy Seal in the Iraq War, Kyle signed up for a soul-sucking four tours. American Sniper is about how he survived those searing war experiences and how he did/did not cope with the emotional legacy of those experiences back in the USA.
Nobody should have to see and endure what Kyle (and tens of thousands of his comrades) did. Kyle was that recognizable American male who refused to admit that his experience could be taking an emotional toll. As a result, he’s constantly on the verge of being blown up in the war scenes and on the verge of imploding in the scenes back home. Sometimes there’s more danger in the domestic scenes than in the war action scenes.
The war scenes are convincing, brutal and adrenalin-packed. The final battle scene is one of the most harrowing I’ve ever seen in a movie. While Kyle’s unit is under siege, we can see what his headquarters is seeing on the high tech satellite view – and it looks increasingly hopeless. When the situation is at it most desperate, a sand storm hits, and suddenly we’re immersed into the fog (sand?) of war, trying to tell who is who and what is happening.
And here’s an observation on violence in Eastwood movies. Clint used to trade in good old fashioned movie violence as he shot ’em up in westerns, war action films and the Dirty Harry series. But beginning with Unforgiven, all of Eastwood’s films have featured only the most realistic violence. With Unforgiven, a toggle switched inside Clint, and he must have determined to use violence only for STORYTELLING and never for ENTERTAINMENT. This is the case with American Sniper.
This may be Bradley Cooper’s finest performance. He is perfect as the Everyman hero surviving battle, but clinging on by his fingernails in peacetime. It’s a finely modulated performance without a shred of PTSD cliche. The other actors (including Sienna Miller as the wife) are just fine, but their roles are relatively underwritten.
American Sniper is a very strong movie, compelling and thoughtful. It just makes the Top Ten on my Best Movies of 2014.
Keira Knightly and Benedict Cumberbatch in THE IMITATION GAME
So – here’s a pretty good true story: the guy who invented the computer and played a key role in defeating the Nazis was hounded for his homosexuality. And The Imitation Gametells that story very well and is a pretty good movie. Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who was able to create a proto-computer that could break the codes of the German Enigma cipher machine. To make his character even more interesting, Turing had appalling, almost Asberger-like personal skills and needed to conceal his sexual preference. Cumberbatch nails the role, and will reap an Oscar nomination for his efforts.
It’s a top-to-bottom excellent English cast. Keira Knightley is especially good as Joan Clarke, the real life female codebreaker who overcame sexism and who became, briefly, Turing’s fiance.
In the World War II movie Fury, Brad Pitt plays the commander of an American tank crew that has fought together from Africa through Italy and France; against all odds, they have survived and are now in Germany during the final months of the war. An unseasoned clerk typist is thrust upon the tight crew as a replacement; he is seeing the horrors of war for the first time, and we relate to the action through his eyes. His eyes don’t see much except for brutality by both belligerents and a Germany that is physically and emotionally devastated.
Unlike the traditional WW II films of the 20th century, these GIs are not atrocity-free. Battle-hardened, war-weary and staggering to the finish, these guys are very tough and they behave in some very unattractive ways.
Fury superbly depicts WW II tank and anti-tank tactics that I’ve never seen handled as well in a movie. There is a tank and infantry assault on dug in infantry supported with light artillery. And there is a tank-on-tank battle between three American Shermans and a German Tiger tank; the Tiger was far superior to the Sherman and the veteran Sherman crews – who don’t seem to be afraid of anything else – know to be terrified of it.
This is not a feel good or a date movie. Fury works as military history and as an action picture – all the way to the final, grim slaughterfest.
