There’s something not quite right with the new World War II action film Greyhound. There are numerous thrilling moments contained in its taught, 91-minute runtime, to be sure. I lost count of the number of times an image, or a sound, or a stunning sequence of battleships in action gave me chills. The problem is, all those individual moments never add up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
I felt what star/screenwriter Tom Hanks – this is the third feature-film screenplay from America’s Dad, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne – and director Aaron Schneider were trying to give me: a tense, non-stop thrill ride of a war film that’s lean on plot and packed with heart-stopping adventure. But it’s a little too flimsy on plot – one inexplicable scene actually highlights this fact – and the action, while quite rousing in brief moments, is too mired in CGI and rain-soaked scenery. The exciting effect is fleeting at best.
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Film number nine in my 100 Essential Films Series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) has been staring me in the face for awhile now. The four-hour run time alone was a little daunting. But, with the current political, social, and cultural climate, I decided it was time to tackle Gone with the Wind. It’s the last movie in a trio of them from 1939, one of the greatest years in movie history. This was a first viewing for me, aside from feeling like I knew almost everything about it via cultural osmosis. I watched it through the streaming service Vudu, and the digital transfer looked gorgeous. Too bad the film’s actual content doesn’t match the visuals.
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“Green is more important than black.” So says one of the villains of Da 5 Bloods in an exchange that leads to the movie’s action-spectacle climax. The green that the character is referring to is money – in the form of hundreds of gold bars. Da 5 Bloods is a Spike Lee joint, so it’s easy to guess what the character means when he says black. Black skin, black pride, black power, black anger. Like almost all of his work, Lee’s film is brimming with unique observations and perspectives about the black experience. This time he’s focusing on the Vietnam War, the conflict in which a disproportionate number of black men were sent to fight and die even as the struggle for black civil rights was raging at home.
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The most visceral cinematic experience of the year has arrived. Director Sam Mendes has used every technical flourish up his sleeve to conjure the astonishing World War I film 1917. If you were at all wowed by the virtuosity of the unbroken opening tracking shot of 2015’s Spectre – Mendes’s second James Bond outing – then 1917 won’t disappoint you. What Mendes achieved with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema in the first five minutes of Spectre, he manages to sustain for the entire 119-minute running time of 1917.
This time out, he’s working with Roger Deakins, master cinematographer and elder-statesperson of the profession. Deakins adds his gorgeous photography from films like No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to lithe, dumbfounding continuous camera movement. The combination makes 1917 an unforgettable piece of art.
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Darkest Hour is the movie that most fits the bill in 2017 for the title of Important Film; it’s tailor made for awards season, in particular for that most coveted prize, Oscar Best Picture nominee. It satisfies many of the requirements that we often think of when we think about an Important Film. Is the movie about a major historical event or a biopic of an important historical figure? Check. Does the movie feature a powerhouse performance by an actor who undergoes a complete physical transformation for the role? Check. Is the movie a crowd-pleaser, ending on a rousing note that sends the viewer out on an emotional high? Check. Darkest Hour is, to its detriment, a box-checker of a movie. It’s so focused on these elements that it never does much else to set itself apart.
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“More than 900 little ships came from Britain [to Dunkirk], evacuated the British and French forces and ferried them across the Channel to safety. They were able to rescue thousands of troops over the course of several days. This is often reported as an example of wartime British bravery and comradeship.
What is rarely talked about is the fact that many troops in the French Army were from Africa, and the little ships refused to take the Black soldiers. They left them on the beaches for the Germans to capture, and many ended up in Auschwitz. Senegalese director Sembene Ousmane mentions this in his film Camp Thioroye, which is based on the true story of a massacre of African soldiers by the French Army during the war.” - From the website ancestralenergies.blogspot.com
The inconvenient facts described above lay the groundwork for the most damning criticism of Christopher Nolan’s otherwise thrilling new film Dunkirk. How much more complex and challenging of an experience could Nolan have presented by simply making a noticeable percentage of the troops desperately trying to get aboard the rescue ships ones of color? Soldiers from India, Senegal, and Morocco (to name but a few) fought in the war to end fascism as part of the British and French empires.
Instead, Nolan and his casting team made the film a 99.9% white affair. That’s not cause enough to junk the picture. On the contrary, there is a lot to praise (which I’ll get to soon) about Dunkirk.
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War for the Planet of the Apes chronicles more than the struggle for species supremacy. This is the latest film in Fox’s popular franchise depicting a world where apes evolved from men. It gives us an internal war, one which rages within our hero, the ape Caesar. In War, we see a very personal loss, plus the ravages of constant battle, take its toll on the weary leader who was willing to go to great lengths for peace. The brutality that he and his kind face sparks a descent into rage and a thirst for vengeance in Caesar that is both uncharacteristic, yet completely understandable. This film is the culmination of a meticulously crafted character arc; it’s at once mournful and dark, but rich and satisfying. One near fatal tonal misstep aside, every aspect of filmmaking comes together in War to conclude the tragedy of Caesar in grand style.
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If all you knew about Hacksaw Ridge was the title, you might think it was a horror movie. That’s what I initially thought before I saw a trailer or even a poster. Hacksaw Ridge sounds like the newest Eli Roth torture-porn entry, or maybe the title of a Rob Zombie film. While it’s not a horror movie per se, director Mel Gibson’s World War II drama does share some of the genre’s iconography. It’s a function of Gibson’s preoccupations with physical suffering. There are plenty more of Gibson’s fixations present here: his hero is a Christ figure, the moral of the story involves being true to your convictions at any and all costs. Hacksaw Ridge is also a deeply flawed film, but one that manages to overcome those flaws through compelling action and a moving conclusion.
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There is a moral ambiguity to Eye in the Sky that acts wonderfully as a test for each person watching it. Depending on your feelings about the importance of maintaining a moral high ground relative to your enemy, it’s possible to have a very different experience with the film than the person sitting right next to you. Even if you agree with that person on how the so-called “war on terror” is prosecuted, it’s easy to read the message the movie is sending in a wildly different way. That is Eye in the Sky’s most powerful strength. It deftly presents opposing sides to the ongoing debate of the best way to stop terrorists, then forces you to think critically about the issue and pick a side. Dramatically speaking, the film is also an incredibly taut thriller; it’s expertly paced for maximum tension. The picture achieves this by taking the overused “ticking time bomb scenario” and adding an element that complicates what is usually presented as an easy call by films and television shows of this nature.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a dramedy that isn’t funny enough to make it memorable as a comedy, and it isn’t moving enough to make it memorable as a drama. It’s muddled, not really sure what it wants to be. The movie suffers immensely from this lack of commitment. It also actively refuses to take any meaningful stance on the issues central to its plot – journalists covering the American invasion of Afghanistan – leaving the picture like a news story that fails to inform or entertain.
The story revolves around real life American journalist Kim Baker and her adventures while covering the war in Afghanistan. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (the military phonetic alphabet translation of the letters WTF, so the title is a joke on the popular shortened version of the expression “What the fuck?”) is based on Baker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shepherded through the book-to-screen process by star Tina Fey’s production company Little Stranger, the movie transforms its war-torn backdrop into a self-discovery tale with a splash of romantic comedy. It’s an unlikely setting for such a story, one the filmmakers would have been wise to avoid.
There is a scene in the middle of WTF when an Afghan woman asks Baker what made her decide to travel half way around the world to cover the war. Fey, as Baker, sums up her need to escape her life using the exercise bike at her gym to illustrate her point. Baker tells the woman that one day she noticed an indentation in the carpet just in front of her regular stationery bike. She realized it was where the bike used to sit before a gym employee moved it for one reason or another. In that moment, Baker says, she understood she had spent countless hours on that bike, only to move backward three feet. “Wow,” her interlocutor observes, “that’s the most American white lady story I’ve ever heard.”
It’s a funny moment to be sure, and it’s a sly attempt at winking at the audience. We know exactly what kind of story we’re telling, the movie says, and our effort at being up front about it will hopefully earn us some points with you, the audience. It doesn’t, though, because despite this self-awareness by the filmmakers, the rest of the movie is as predictable as you would expect. WTF is Eat, Pray, Love goes to war, and that’s just as disappointing of an exercise as you might expect.
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