Appomattox

Film: Civil War
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to project a new civil war onto the United States. The level of division is maddening and disturbing—there are states I’d rather not drive through right now, and some that I have driven through recently where I wasn’t exactly worried, but where I definitely felt out of place. Alex Garland’s Civil War feels like a worst-case scenario, but also feels unfortunately real.

We don’t actually get a great deal of background on the war that is being fought. We see the unnamed president (Nick Offerman) practicing a speech that feels a bit overblown and hyperbolic, especially since we soon learn that there are multiple successionist movements of varying strength and success, and the group commonly referred to as the Western Forces are rapidly approaching Washington D.C.

Germany's Most Wanted

Film: Nuremberg
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

Every year, there’s an Oscar bait movie or two that fails to secure a single nomination. Sometimes, it’s a good to great film that is simply overlooked, like The Woman King from 2022 or The Iron Claw from the subsequent year. Sometimes, it’s a movie that has gone hilariously bad, like Cats from 2019. And then there are the movies that have big ambitions, but fail to gain any traction. By all rights, Nuremberg was created for a run at the Oscars, and it goose egged.

It had to have had a shot, though. It’s a movie that is clearly relevant, discussing the Nuremberg trials at the end of WWII, making clear comparisons to the rise of fascism in the U.S. today. It’s headlined by two Oscar winners (Russell Crowe and Rami Malek) and a two-time nominee (Michael Shannon) and a one-time nominee (Richard E. Grant). This was clearly a film that wanted to take a swing for the top prize, and probably a few others (Best Actor, Supporting Actor, and Adapted Screenplay for a start).

The Banality of Evil

Film: The Zone of Interest
Format: Streaming video from Max on Fire!

For Christmas this year my kids got me a year of HBO Max, which is honestly the only thing I asked for. I’m hoping to be more current on film in the coming year, and having a Max subscription is a part of this. It also gives me access to a number of shows I want to watch. This is also where The Zone of Interest is streaming, and it’s the last film I needed to complete everything for the last Oscars on my list of categories. Naturally, once I got the subscription up and running, it was the first thing I queued up.

There have been hundreds of movies made about the Holocaust, of course, and there will be hundreds more. An evil this huge and terrible needs to be confronted, both to keep it in the public consciousness (especially since Holocaust denial is a constant issue) and to purge it. In a sense, these films are a sort of therapy, a way of lancing the boil and draining the poison. What The Zone of Interest does is look at this terrible piece of history in a completely new way, something that I thought might well be impossible at this point.

The Dirty Half-Dozen

Film: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

I’ve said before on this blog that I grew up in part on war movies. What I mean specifically is that I watched a lot of World War II movies when I was a kid along with some World War II television like Combat! with Vic Morrow. I didn’t specifically love the war aspects of those movies, but I did like the inherent sense of adventure in them. Propaganda films from the war years were cliched but I loved them, and also the more openly violent films of the 1960s and 1970s. Had something like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare been around when I was 10, it would have been one of my favorite movies.

This movie, which for convenience I’m going to call TMoUW, tells something like a true story of Operation Postmaster, undertaken shortly after the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. The problem at the time was the German U-boat command. Massive shipping losses prevented the Americans from sending troops to Europe by ship, and air travel was not at a stage where it was feasible for large troop movements. Subs needed to be shut down, but the Germans were smart enough to keep their resupply ship in neutral Spanish waters. Desperate and on the verge of surrender, Churchill (Rory Kinnear) rolled the dice on a secret mission that violated the accepted practices of war. Essentially, send in an expert but disposable crew and destroy the ship.

Sub-Mission

Film: Below
Format: DVD from Lena Community District Library throught interlibrary loan on basement television.

Submarine movies are their own particular little subcategory of war films. Most submarine movies have an element of horror to them in the sense that they are almost inherently claustrophobic. So, while “horror” might be a stretch in a lot of cases, at the very least, there’s an element of fear involved in them. That makes a film like Below an interesting proposition, as it is both a war/submarine movie and overtly a horror film. It essentially billed itself as “Poltergiest on a submarine,” and honestly, there’s no way it could live up to that hype, and it frankly doesn’t. There’s a story here, but in large part, this functions like a long episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1943, in the dead middle of World War II, the submarine USS Tiger Shark is patrolling the Atlantic and, due to its position, is ordered to pick up survivors spotted by a British plane. There are three survivors of a British hospital ship recently sunk, and because we need some tension right away, one of the survivors is a woman. The survivors, who have been in the water for a couple of days, are brought on board just as a German destroyer shows up, so we’re going to get a little cat-and-mouse and the sub will take some depth charge damage before escaping. During that attack, the sub gets targeted specifically because a record player starts up out of nowhere. After the encounter, the sub’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood) discovers that one of the rescued people is a German, and he shoots him.

Not Another Nazi Zombie Movie

Film: Overlord
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.

Genre mash-ups are fun when they’re done right. Combine Westerns and science fiction and you can walk out the other side with Serenity. Of course, you can also combine Westerns and science fiction and walk out the other side with Wild Wild West or Cowboys and Aliens. You have to be careful when you’re blending genres. Add in a third genre, and things can get very strange indeed. And that’s where we’re going to pick up Overlord, an alternate universe World War II movie that is going to throw in some weird science and some zombies for a war/sci-fi/zombie horror Neapolitan ice cream of cinema.

If you know even a little World War II history, you’re probably aware that “Overlord” was the codename for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. In this alternate history, we’re showing up on June 5th, the day before the invasion. A group of paratroopers are preparing to drop behind enemy lines with the goal of taking out a radio jamming tower to help with air cover for the following day. We can tell this is an alternate history right away because our paratrooper unit is racially integrated.

Soon, Germany Will Be Empty

Film: All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

There seems to be no end to movies about war. There are, of course, films that depict war as something glorious, as a thing to be, if not encouraged at least welcomed. Certainly, there are those that depict war as something to be sought after as well. And then there are those films that show war as something terrible and a hell unto itself. Films like Come and See, Paths of Glory, and Das Boot depict war as senseless, endless brutality and a desperate hope to avoid death. The original All Quiet on the Western Front remains one of the greatest anti-war statements in history. To that we can add the 2022 German reimagining of the same name, also know by its German title of Im Westen nichts Neues (which means “Nothing new in the west” if my German hasn’t failed me).

This is, in fact, the third version of this story that I have seen. The first I saw was the 1979 made-for-TV re-imagining starring Richard Thomas, which is very much the weakest of the three. The 1930 film won Best Picture, of course, and as mentioned is still an extremely powerful film. And then there is this latest version, which holds nothing back on the true horror of trench warfare.

Return to the Danger Zone

Film: Top Gun: Maverick
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen

I’m not going to lie; Top Gun: Maverick had a real uphill climb for me. I’m not a fan of the original film at all. I don’t care that the original Top Gun is the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, and that includes Brokeback Mountain and Cruising. My problem with Top Gun is that you could not ask for a better advertisement for the military-industrial complex. Want a collection of young kids you can send off to war? Show ‘em Top Gun and get ‘em ramped up on patriotism and the desire to go fast, and you’ve got your lambs for the slaughter.

Top Gun: Maverick picks up multiple decades after the first movie—as the original took place when it was filmed, so too does this sequel. Our boy Peter “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is still flying for the Navy, and still at the rank of captain since his frequent insubordination keeps him from getting further promoted. His old friendly rival Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) now commands the entire Pacific fleet, and is the only thing that keeps Maverick still flying.

Failed as a Species

Film: For Sama
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I honestly don’t know where to start with a film like For Sama. This was evidently a Frontline documentary shown on PBS stations. The film is essentially a compilation of five years of raw footage from the siege of Aleppo in Syria. I don’t really know the politics except to say that this is more or less the attempted genocide of the Kurdish people. The Syrian government, Hezbollah, and Russian military attacked civilians repeatedly, and the civilians held out for half a decade.

During this time, journalist Waad Al-Kateab went to school at Aleppo before the revolution began, became involved, met her husband Hamza, got pregnant, and gave birth to her daughter, Sama, who is named in the title of the film. The film is very much made for Sama, whose early life was spent in a hospital in the middle of a city being subjected to missile attacks and gunfire, while her mother filmed and her father operated what was eventually the only hospital in that part of the city.

Lords and Ladies of the Flies

Film: Monos
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on rockin’ flatscreen.

The last set of additions to the 1001 Movies list felt a little non-English heavy this year, but that’s probably a good thing. For a list of this size, there are a lot of significant gaps. It’s still pretty West-centric in a lot of ways. There are only a couple of Bollywood movies on it, for instance, and it’s still unforgivable that there’s not a single instance of Ray Harryhausen’s work to be seen. Anyway, Monos is a rarity on the List in that it is Colombian. There aren’t a lot of South American movies that made it to canonization (at least this version of canonization), which makes this one particularly interesting.

That said, this is not a happy or fun film. This is a film about child soldiers fighting in an unknown battle for one side or another of a conflict. We are given remarkably little information, which is a part of the point. Monos happens without a great deal of context. We have no idea what the conflict is, although it is likely that it is based on the Colombian conflict. A group of young people, ranging in age from probably 12 to about 16 known exclusively by nicknames are camped in the mountains where they are trained as a paramilitary group by a man referred to as the Messenger (Wilson Salazar).

Done for Now?

Film: Jojo Rabbit
Format: DVD from NetFlix on basement television.

I’ve been saying for some time that I’m about done with my Oscar lists, and I think I’m about as done as I can be. Of the nine movies I haven’t seen, most are missing, fragmentary, or exist only in some cinematic vault on the other side of the country. Oh, I might watch the scraps that remain of those I can, but I think I’m done with full movies on these lists until the next Oscars…whenever that might be. So here I am, essentially done, and just in time for the next update to the 1001 Movies list.

So, I saved Jojo Rabbit for “last” for no reason other than that I didn’t want a complete slog to end this part of this journey. Jojo Rabbit is at least partially a comedy. It’s a pitch black comedy, surely, but a comedy nonetheless. Our hapless hero is Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) a 10-year-old German kid in the last days of World War II. Jojo is a completely indoctrinated member of the Hitler Youth and a fervent Nazi, but doesn’t really have a clear understanding of the party’s doctrines. Jojo’s imaginary friend is a goofy and childlike Hitler stand-in (played by director Taika Waititi) who gives unclear advice to Jojo.

Tied to the Land

Films: Mudbound
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the new internet machine.

I have started to watch Mudbound a couple of times before but have never really gotten anywhere with it. Now, at a point where I have fewer than a dozen movies on my Oscars list, I can’t continue to avoid it. That’s especially the case when of the 11 movies I have left, nine are missing, exist only in archives on the West Coast, or are only partially available at best. I wasn’t looking forward to this. It’s a hard movie to watch in the best of cases, and it’s not one I figured I would enjoy much. This is a movie about racism and evil.

As much as I would love to tell you that Mudbound is a story about a Black sharecropper family living on the land of white farmers, that would only be the basics of the story. This is a story about privilege. How is this so? Because it’s a story about a poor white family on a farm in Mississippi during and after World War II working a hardscrabble farm. There’s nothing about these people that scream privilege, but compared with the sharecroppers on their land, the privilege is real and palpable in every frame.

Super Punch-Out!

Film: The Patent Leather Kid
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

I’ve said in the past that I have difficulty with silent dramas. They don’t hold up nearly as well as silent comedies and silent horror movies. The reason is pretty simple. Silent comedies still work because a guy falling on his butt is funny whether you can hear it or not. Silent horror movies still work because good horror relies on things like atmosphere, and silent movies are loaded with that. Dramas from the silent era tend to involve a great deal of overacting and a great deal of melodrama, though, and so that’s a much harder sell. That said, I didn’t really know anything about The Patent Leather Kid other than it earned Richard Barthelmess one of his two Best Actor nominations for the first Oscars.

The Patent Leather Kid is a movie of three very literal acts. When it begins, the Patent Leather Kid (Barthelmess) is a boxer who has a particular reputation. Most boxing fans aren’t fans of his because of his attitude. Most of them want someone to knock a little humility into him. The second act concerns the Kid dealing with fallout of his own opinion against going to war when the U.S. enters World War I. He’s eventually drafted and deals with boot camp. The third act has him going to war and dealing with his own reticence at being in combat, overcoming that, and (of course) being wounded.

More Like the Stiff and the Stupid

Film: The Bold and the Brave
Format: Internet video on laptop.

War movies are always interesting to me in some respects. They are a way to gauge the particular view of the world of a given time, or at least of the people making the film. Since it seems like we are constantly at war somewhere, the motive for making a war film seems rarely to be about the war itself and more about the attitude of the filmmakers toward war. With a film like The Bold and the Brave, filmed after the Korean War and before American involvement in Vietnam, the purpose is perhaps cloudier, especially with the mission that ends the film. Is this a heroic story or one that wants to put forth the idea the war has no real winners? Sadly, it’s probably the former, especially when there’s a sense of glorifying combat and the film taking place in the Italian campaign of World War II—playing to some of the country’s greatest military hits tends to skew the perspective.

We’re not going to get a lot of war for the first two acts of the movie. Instead, we’re going to be introduced to three soldiers. The first is Fairchild (Wendell Corey), who we learn soon after the film’s opening has serious qualms about pulling the trigger on his weapon. The second is Dooley (Mickey Rooney), quick with the girls despite being married and always up for a game of craps. Third is one nicknamed Preacher (Don Taylor), who sees the world in black and white ways, with anything that isn’t capital-G Good being capital-E Evil.

To End All Wars

Film: 1917
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I grew up watching war movies. My opinion on them has changed a bit over the years. I’m far less interested in the movies that glorify war than I was when I was a kid. These days, I still like war movies depending on the way they depict the conflict. I was interested in seeing 1917 for this reason. There is also some truth to the notion that, in general, Americans don’t make great World War I movies (Kubrick’s Paths of Glory being a notable exception). It takes a people who lost more and were in it longer to really understand the despair of trench warfare.

The selling point of 1917 is not so much the story but the way in which it is filmed. There is a single moment of unconsciousness, but the film is otherwise presented as a single tracking shot, or two shots total—up to the point of unconsciousness and after that point. Movies have been done this way, of course—some like Russian Ark are truly a single shot. Plenty of others, Rope, Birdman are presented as if they happened in a single shot. It’s always impressive. With a film like this one, involving dogfights, a crashing airplane, massive fires, and hundreds of men going over the top from their trenches to attack the enemy.

Funded by Nazi Gold?

Films: Marie-Louise
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I honestly don’t know how much I’m going to be able to say about Marie-Louise. This might well be the shortest review I’ve ever written and ever will write, and that’s saying something in a world where my reviews have dropped by a couple of hundred words apiece in general. In a way, I’m rather shocked that I got to see it at all. I did, though, and with some caveats, I’ll give a review the old college try.

Honestly, there’s only one real caveat here; I couldn’t find this with English subtitles. What I got was a film that was in German and French, with German subtitles for the French parts. What this means is that while I think I got the main gist of the story, I’m going to be very light on details. I can get at least some German when I read it, but speech goes by far too quickly for me to get much from it. So, ultimately, I got something like 40% of the story during the parts that had French dialogue where I could read the subtitles and get at least a portion of them.

Ten Days of Terror!: The War of the Words (1953)

Films: The War of the Worlds (1953)
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

There’s a few things you need to know going into the 1953 The War of the Worlds and my relationship with it. The first is that I know and love the Wells story it’s based on, and I think the Orson Welles radio version is one of the greatest pranks of the last 100 years. Second, it’s important to note that one of the main characters is named Dr. Clayton Forrester. If you understand why that is important, you understand why it’s kind of hard to watch this without a smile every time he says something all science-y.

If you don’t already know, the basic story here is that Earth gets invaded by creatures from Mars that show up initially in ships disguised as meteors. After the ships cool down, three smaller ships emerge from each one and start laying waste to everything with heat rays that can only be described as being the height of 1950s special effects. The intrepid humans do their best to fight back as best they can, learning that the alien machines are impervious to everything, and leaving the humans with no recourse but to find another way to battle the menace.

...If You Want It

Films: La Guerre est Finie (The War is Over)
Format: DVD from Elmhurst Public Library through OCLC WorldCat on The New Portable.

The experiment with OCLC WorldCat continues to turn up movies that I haven’t otherwise been able to get. At this point, my list of unwatched Oscar films falls into three categories: films from last year, films I haven’t wanted to watch yet, and films I can’t find. Until about a week ago, La Guerre est Finie fit into that third category. Now that I have it, it might be more at home in the second box. This isn’t an easy film for a number of reasons. It’s very slow. It’s also directed by Alain Resnais. Resnais made Night and Fog, one of the most brutal and ugly films about the Holocaust in existence. It’s a one-and-done film, the sort of thing that everyone should see once. He also made Last Year at Marienbad, a film so loathsomely moronic that it turned this blog from being rated PG-13 to being rated R.

Diego Mora (Yves Montand) has dedicated much of his life to fighting against Francoist Spain. Now, years after the original revolution, he is still acting as a communist revolutionary despite the implicit death sentence these activities carry with them. Diego actually lives in Paris, but makes his way back into Spain regularly using the passport of another man. After this many years, though, he is no longer as convinced of his position as he was. He is tired of always fighting and tired of always being on the run. More seriously, he is concerned that the new underground is more extremist and is using unfavorable tactics.

The Prime Minister's Speech

Films: Darkest Hour
Format: Blu-ray from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

For the next 800-1200 words I’m going to talk about Darkest Hour, but I’m also going to address what I see as a significant problem with the Oscars and the nominations. The reason for that is that Darkest Hour is one of those movies that serves as an excellent example for what I see as a continuing and continual problem. Oh, there are plenty of other potential examples. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is perhaps the best example I can think of in the last 10 years. Because it’s how my mind is currently working, I think I’m going to address that first.

The problem is that Oscar, or Oscar voters perhaps, don’t seem to know the difference between a movie being good and a movie being important, or at least about an important topic. I fully understand why many people in the film industry seemed to think that Darkest Hour was an important film. Depending on your political persuasion, this could well be seen as an inspiring story of someone standing up to face off against fascism when it appeared that fascism was taking over the world. I get that some will call it rousing. I understand this more or less memoir taken from Churchill’s life is something that people thing demands to be seen. But did it really need to be nominated for Best Picture?

Come on Baby, Light My Fire

Films: Joan of Arc
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

As I get down to the last few dozen movies on my Oscars lists, I’m starting to find more and more movies that I avoided for one reason or another. With Joan of Arc, my avoidance happened because the movie wasn’t available anywhere I looked. Oh, I found a shortened version on YouTube that cut something like 45 minutes out of the theatrical release. I’d have watched that if I got desperate enough. But lo! and behold, suddenly NetFlix is carrying the film once again. I have to say this is one that, had I not had it on a list, I’d have walked away from partway through.

Joan of Arc isn’t a bad film; it’s just not a great one, or even a very good one. It’s long and talky and it doesn’t pull this off that well, which means that it’s also long and boring. It suffers as well from putting a mid-30s Ingrid Bergman in the role of a French teenager. We’ll get to that soon enough.