One of the beauties of DVDs is that you can rent a batch of similarly-themed movies and--over a weekend or a week--expand your knowledge and appreciation of our world due to the opportunity to see these films (along with their "Special Feature" extras) as a group in which one enriches the next and/or harks back to its predecessor. A single day in February saw the release of four such movies (Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah and Terror's Advocate) preceded one week earlier by Screamers and followed the week after by Goya's Ghosts , a film that surprised me by unexpectedly bringing many of the themes of the former five together under the panoply of history.

Continue reading "To Iraq. And back." »

Posted by at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Henry Leineweber
Rating (out of 5): ****

The Road to Guantanamo is not what I expected. In a market flush with post-9-11 documentaries, I was expecting more of the same: interviews with experts, former government officials, a brief history lesson, some stock footage, a few classic rock songs, and maybe a stunt or two thrown in to spice things up.

Instead, The Road to Guantanamo presents us with the firsthand accounts of three former detainees from Tipton, England. Asif, Shafiq and Ruhel, along with their cousin, are arrested in war-torn Afghanistan after haphazardly deciding to become fighters. Using reenacted scenes and interviews with the three young men, filmmakers Mat Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom present the viewer with a savage and suspenseful tale of mistaken identity. The film is still timely, too - the three men are tortured (in brutal re-enactments) by American and British intelligence trying to get a false confession out of them.

Continue reading "The Road to Guantanamo" »

Posted by at 12:53 PM | Permalink

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

If you're into movies that really deal with the importance of family--and not in a feel-good, Disney-fied way--give Journey From the Fall a try. I would particularly recommend it to those, like most of us, who felt the Vietnam War was a waste and a mistake, and those who followed the history, who knew that honest elections ought to have been held in that country when they were first promised, no matter that Ho Chi Minh would have easily won. All this may have been true, but it will not prepare you for the degradations experienced by those South Vietnamese left behind to endure "re-education" by the North. The family that is sundered here--dad left behind in a re-education camp, while mom, son and grandma try their escape via boat--is shown with great dignity.

Continue reading "Journey From the Fall: A South Vietnamese family story" »

Posted by at 7:09 AM | Permalink

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****½

The ever-charming, always good for a jest-at-the-expense-of-the-dead Donald Rumsfeld leads off Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, one of the best of the umpteen Iraq documentaries so far. Rummy makes a statement that, if any justice still prevails, should come back to haunt him and his "Decider" for the rest of their wanton lives. The movie--which covers the inane and terrorist-producing lack on the part of the Bush administration of any intelligent plan for what might happen once its fake "Mission Accomplished" occurred--treads relatively new ground among the Iraq docs. It speaks with people from whom we've not heard much: Jay Garner, the man originally in charge of post-invasion Iraq; Ambassador Barbara Bodine; Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State; and many more. What these people tell us, without mincing words but also with more pain, shock and regret than anger (the latter has undoubtedly already been spent), results in a very nearly air-tight case for the war being run about as badly as possible.

Continue reading "No End in Sight: Intellectual "shock doc"" »

Posted by at 9:47 AM | Permalink

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

Summary: A terrifically gripping WWII drama that manages to balance introspection with bursts of battlefield action.

Days of Glory was likened by some critics to Saving Private Ryan, but this is a bit simplistic, as the film deals with a racially oppressed underclass, the Algerian soldiers who fought bravely for France against Germany without getting their due. Like Private Ryan, Glory does end with a modern day tail, but here it's more moving because the subtext is these men were not given any acknowledgment for their heroism, and the ending while equally emotional, is that much more bitter. It took until 2002, and then with this film, for these men to be given the respect they deserved all along, when the French government paid the surviving soldiers and their families the pension they had previously given French citizens for their efforts.

But separate from that history, this film by Rachid Bouchareb (a Frenchman born to Algerian parents) never feels like a polemic. Lead by the remarkable cast of unknowns, who won an ensemble award at Cannes for their collective performances and are heartbreakingly empathetic, Days of Glory does what all great war films should do: have us rooting for the protagonists and praying for their survival, even when knowing in your heart that they won't all make it. They are lead by a staff sergeant (the hollow-faced Bernard Blancan) who is stern, even fascistic at times and yet supportive of his men, too. He hides a secret that reveals him to be a deeply conflicted man. And in a particularly heartbreaking story thread, when one of the soldiers, Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), meets a woman after arriving in France, their brief but deep relationship is doomed by the French army's censoring their correspondence due to the "taboo" nature of their relationship.

The film is terrifying at times - the feeling of being isolated on the battlefield is expertly captured - and climaxes with a harrowing battle with German soldiers in a town in Alsace. By the end, you will be properly moved by their efforts fighting Nazism despite having understandable conflicts over the meaning of patriotism. At least we see the French people appreciating their heroism even if the commanders and government could give a damn.

An assured work.

Posted by at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reviewer: Walt Opie
Rating (out of 5): ***½

One over-riding question that arises while watching Andrew Berends' 2005 Iraq-set documentary The Blood of My Brother is, how did an American filmmaker get access to all of this, short of joining Sayid Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army himself? Several reviewers have already commented that much of the footage here puts Western media coverage to shame, and it certainly does. We see inside a mosque during prayer time with hundreds of men lined up shoulder to shoulder; we watch Shia insurgents get charged up and then battle an American tank and an Apache helicopter (feeling oddly mundane compared to scenes from Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down); and we view badly wounded civilians inside an Iraqi hospital, including young children and elderly men. It seems clear that Berends has a viewpoint he wants to get across, although his goal appears to be more humanitarian than political.

Continue reading "The Blood of My Brother" »

Posted by at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

War is not a subtle subject nor is Joyeux Noel ("Merry Christmas" to us non-Frenchies) a particularly subtle film. But it's a beautiful one: intelligent, heartfelt and perhaps as pure as a relatively mainstream movie on this subject can manage. Writer/director Christian Carion (The Girl from Paris) begins with a shock: nothing bloody, mind you, but something I have not previously encountered in a film. This sets us up nicely for what follows: a worthy addition to the canon of films that are anti-war, anti-government and anti-organized religion. This story of an impromptu "truce" that occurred between battling armies (Germans, French and Scots) on a Christmas Eve during World War I is full of joy, beauty, sadness, irony - and only a little carnage (but what's there does indeed make its point).

Continue reading "Joyeux Noel" »

Posted by at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): **** for both

Both Winter Soldier and The Police Tapes were made cinema verite style by film-making teams (Winter Solider by a 19-person collective, The Police Tapes by husband and wife team Alan and Susan Raymond). When viewed together the films provide a time capsule into the tail-end of a period of social upheaval in America, but also two unique voices about the destruction wrought by moral indifference and national ennui. In the case of Winter Soldier it's a "blank check" approach to a poorly strategized war against a misunderstood enemy; in Police Tapes it's the cycle of unrelenting brutality that flourishes when poverty goes ignored.

Continue reading "Winter Soldier and The Police Tapes" »

Posted by at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **** ½

With Paul Verhoeven's new film, Black Book, also centered around the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and his first film shot in his native country in decades [read David D'Arcy's review of the film which premiered in Toronto], it seemed a good time to revisit Soldier of Orange.

Epic in length and scope, but also a character-driven piece, Verhoeven's masterfully entertaining WWII film Soldier of Orange is the most polished of his early Dutch films (though the more subversive The 4th Man is perhaps his sharpest). It makes it all the more apparent how far he eventually fell in his more recent Hollywood forays (B-movie masterpiece RoboCop notwithstanding). Soldier also catapulted Rutger Hauer to stardom, charismatically playing real life heroic (and, eventually, flying) Dutchman Eric Lanshof, a bit of an anti-hero who was initially apolitical during WWII but eventually found himself figthting in the resistance after Holland was overtaken by the Germans. The recognizable, always solid Jeroen Krabbe plays Lanshof's longtime friend who gets caught up along with him in trying to save the country they love, long after their Queen (whom they eventually meet) has fled to England.

Continue reading "Soldier of Orange" »

Posted by at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)