Cinecult: Blade Runner

Originally run on May 10, 2010 in the Union Weekly.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

About a year back, BBC film critic, Mark Kermode saying about Moon that “Good science fiction isn’t about technology or special effects, it’s about ideas.” Blade Runner isn’t just good science fiction, it’s great science fiction, and it’s one of the better movies about ideas that I can think of. While many treat Blade Runner as a meditation on life and all that, I see it as a movie about our society and just how screwed up we are. Beyond all of that is a film so wonderful, so iconic, that it is hard to imagine what a world without Blade Runner would look like.

Most of what is memorable about Blade Runner is probably down to the art design. Blade Runner was the third film of Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator, Robin Hood), who holds a BA in graphic design, and even then he demonstrates an eye for both designing a world and filming it. Much of the Los Angeles of 2019 was designed by legendary concept artist Syd Mead, who worked on films ranging from Star Trek to Tron. Both of these men’s visions (as well as an army of draftsmen, artists, and journeymen) combine to make a vision of the future that, at the time, was utterly unique.

Read the rest on page seven of the Union Weekly!

Cinecult: The Proposition

Originally run on 30 November 2009 in the Union Weekly.

The Proposition (2005)

"Australia, what fresh hell is this?"

It’s probably telling that The Proposition is one of my favorite films, since it’s one of the most stark and depressing films that’s come out in the past decade. It’s also the single best western to come out since Unforgiven, which is strange considering the film was written and directed by Australians and takes place on the same continent. It is an unusual place for a setting, but like Sergio Leone’s comic book melodramas or Akira Kurosawa’s samurai-filled iterations, taking the western down under breathes life into the genre. It’s an odd choice, but it’s the kind of choice that keeps the western alive.

The director of the film is John Hillcoat, an Australian who recently released the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. He’s clearly a man who knows how to put together a good movie, but what elevates The Proposition above most other films is the screenplay written by musician-cum-novelist-cum-former-heroin-addict Nick Cave, who also handles the score with bandmate Warren Ellis (not to be confused with the comic writer of the same name). Cave, though an Australian exile living in England, has an excellent handle on the western and American writing, an influence that’s quite clear in both his lyrics and in his debut Southern gothic novel, And The Ass Saw an Angel.

The film takes place in the year 1880, back before Australian independence, racial tolerance, and dental hygiene. The Australia of The Proposition isn’t the place we laughed at in that one episode of The Simpsons. Instead of koalas and lame jokes about knives, this Australia is one that’s basically unknown to us and, as I understand it, unknown to even the Aussies. This land is a fly-filled hellhole rife with delusional government officials, psychopaths, wars with the natives, and miles and miles of dirt. If the entirety of the United Kingdom was shaken up, all of the loose pieces of trash and deritus would wind up in Hillcoat and Cave’s vision the Land Down Under. It’s in this topsy-turvy terminal that our protagonist, Irish immigrant Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) finds himself caught up.

The opening of the film is rather telling. It begins with the police ambushing Charlie and his youngest brother, Mike, at a brothel in the middle of the desert stocked solely with Chinese prostitutes. It’s a loud, brutal fight and ends with the two Burns brothers captured by police. But they aren’t executed or sent to prison. Instead, police Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers them a proposition: If Charlie Burns kills his eldest brother, Arthur who is “an abomination,” by Christmas Day, Stanley will let Charlie and his younger brother go free, absolved of all of their crimes. If not, Mike will be put to death for the crimes of the two older brothers. From there, the movie unspools into an anarchic, bloody race against time across the sun scorched wilderness of Australia.

The eponymous proposition is about as Biblical (or maybe Faustian) of a pact as could ever be made, but unlike the Bible, there’s no moral to be found, there’s no lesson to be learned, and nothing seems to occur according to any divine purpose. Things just happen and they’re incredibly ugly when they do. The world of The Proposition is deeply flawed and demonstrates just how messy things can be when humans try to do the right thing. It’s an interesting inversion on the typical representation of the western as the forces of good battle the forces of evil, and it’s what makes this movie more than just a simple piece of genre.

The film is also chock-full of wonderful acting, including a performance by one of my favorite character actors of all time: John Hurt. Hurt plays Jellon Lamb, a verbose and sadistic bounty hunter, adventurer, and “man of no little education.” Hurt’s career has spanned about 50 years and he’s acted in projects ranging from fantastic fare like Hellboy and Alien to more serious dramas such as Midnight Express and The Elephant Man, as well as the other great western of the past two decades, Dead Man. With all of these films in mind, I’d be hard-pressed to find a movie where he’s more engaging than here. He’s creepy, threatening, and hilarious all wrapped into one man.

Now, while he is my favorite actor in the film, he’s really a part of a much larger ensemble of great actors. There’s the beautiful Emily Watson (Punch Drunk Love; Synecdoche, New York), as the delicate, but frustrated wife of Captain Stanley, as well as David Wenham (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 300) as the wonderfully named Eden Fletcher, the dandiest authoritarian that ever drifted into the Victorian Outback. Danny Huston (son of the great actor/director John Huston) is also great as the villainous older brother, Arthur, who is as vicious and frightening as he is charming, a difficult combination to pull off and is entirely appropriate for this film.

It’s a shame to know that The Proposition’s unrelenting grimness will keep a lot of people from seeing it and just as many from finishing it. Their loss, I suppose, because despite the film’s bleak treatment of humanity (and of Australia), there’s still a beauty to be found in all this. Hillcoat’s film shows that as wicked as we might become, there’s still redemption to be had, if only we can find it. There’s plenty more to be sussed out of the film, but if there’s anything more significant, I’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Cinecult: The Thin Red Line

Originally published on the Entertainment page on 28 September 2009.

If you’ve never heard the name Terrance Malick before, there’s probably a good reason. In the past forty years, directors like Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola, have been involved in dozens of movies, while Malick has only directed a grand total of four. Despite this, among critics and terminal film nerds (like myself), he’s regarded as one of the great auteurs of the age. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven are regarded as some of the best films ever made. Considering this pedigree, if you watch The Thin Red Line, it shouldn’t be hard to understand why he’s so well respected despite his slow gestation time.

The Thin Red Line, despite being nominated for Best Picture has since fallen by the way side. There’s some pretty good reasons for this. First off, this slow-paced, but elegant war film had the misfortune of coming out the same year as one of the biggest action movies of all time: Steven Spielburg’s Saving Private Ryan. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it’s a sprawling, self-indulgent mess. It’s often plodding and it’s covered in scars from being cut and re-cut (and despite this it’s still probably too long). It also doesn’t have one main character—or even a handful of main characters-- that the audience can hold on to. The James Jones novel that the movie is based off of has the same massive cast of characters, but at least the book gives names to the people in it. Roger Ebert describes the movie as “hallucinatory” and that’s about as good of a one word summation of this film as there could be. As we should all know, hallucinations aren’t for everybody.

Despite the rough spots in the movie, there’s still plenty of beauty to be gleaned from this film. The Thin Red Line follows one of the bloodiest battles in American history, which takes place on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal. Malick pays just as much attention to the horrors of war as he does the beauty that these battles take place in, and that alone makes this movie an interesting anomolly in the genre.

The dialogue is also fairly wonderful. Admittedly, most of it has no place in a war film (Would a character being shot at really consider the morality of nature? Probably not.), but it can’t be denied that, in and of itself, the writing is beautiful. That’s what most of the film is like and that’s what makes me love it so much. It isn’t quite a visceral war film and it isn’t quite a poem. It doesn’t do either of these things perfectly, but the failure that results is probably more interesting than most movies.

The Thin Red Line isn’t all poetry, though. The action scenes are among the best I’ve ever seen. Unlike the rest of the film, which moves with the swiftness of dream, the action scenes are as tightly plotted and assembled. Combat has a frightening weight that few other movies ever seem to execute. Part of this is because the Japanese aren’t just enemy soldiers, they’re ghosts. They slink out of the forest without a sound, kill something and leave just as quietly. In Saving Private Ryan, the Germans were something we could understand, they were in tanks or behind machine guns. In this case, the enemy is a mystery. How are these men supposed to defeat the enemy if he’s nothing more than a muzzle flash two hundred yards away?

The Thin Red Line isn’t for everyone. As I’ve said, it isn’t perfect and it’s probably the one of the spottiest movies that I would consider “great.” But in between the rough spots are some truly beautiful pieces of film making. If only for these quiet moment Malick’s movie is worth giving a shot. Plus, the loud ones are pretty goddamn good, too.

Image via Google. As usual.

Cinecult: Miller's Crossing

Originally run on 31 August 2009.

The Coen brothers have been around for almost twenty-five years in the movie business, something that even as a fan, I can’t quite get my mind around. Twenty-five years. That’s practically an institution. They’ve written, directed, produced, and edited some great films in that span of time, from the award winning No Country For Old Men to the cult comedy, Raising Arizona. Over the years though, some of their movies have been overlooked. Just about everyone (at least everyone reading this paper) has seen The Big Lebowski and they they’ve at least heard of Fargo, but because they’ve been around for so long and produced such note-worthy films occasionally one of their movies will be fall between the cracks. Miller’s Crossing is one of those movies.

The Coen brothers’ films have always been about pining for the past. If it isn’t in the actual plot (like No Country For Old Men, which revolves around the sentiment that things aren’t what they used to be), then it’s in the style of the film (like with The Hudsucker Proxy, which is a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1950’s). Miller’s Crossing is no exception, it’s a 1920’s gangster picture in the tradition of Howard Hawkes. If you don’t know or care who that is, I can assure you that it’s a movie chock full of punch throwing, double-crosses, and quaint accents of the quality that our modern, law-abiding society lacks. It’s also got some of the sharpest written dialogue that the two brothers have put to screen. It also doesn’t hurt that Miller’s Crossing has one of the best scenes of submachine-gunning in all of cinema history.

The actors are also worthy of the script, as well. From Gabriel Bryne (Satan from End of Days) as Tom, as the wise-cracking advisor of the Irish mob to Albert Finney as the distinguished, if impetuous Irish mob boss, the cast is dead-on perfect for their roles. Even John Turturro, who is at his most rat-like as a grifter, is still a guy you want to get out of this movie in one piece (almost). Admittedly, you wouldn’t want to hang out with any of these characters, but they’re exciting to watch.

Miller’s Crossing, despite being a movie about masculinity and crime, is also one of their most emotional movies. The last shot of the movie feels like being hit with a Mack truck three or four times. It’s devastating. Where characters like Scarface don’t have to live with their terrible decisions, Tom and his friends do. Even though, in the end, everyone gets what they want or what they deserve, nobody is any better off for it. You want all of the characters to be do make the right choices because they’re interesting, intelligent people, but they can’t ever be anything but miserable because then they’d stop being the person you fell in love with for ninety minutes.

The future is looking pretty bright for the brothers. They’ve got a low-key comedy coming out called A Serious Man and, even better, a new adaptation of the brutal western, True Grit, which I am preemptively declaring as my new favorite Coen brothers film. The past shows that they’ve always been top-notch filmmakers and Miller’s Crossing stands up as one of their best. Not bad for a third feature.

Image via the Googles.

Cinecult: Princess Mononoke

Originally run on 11 May 2009. Image by Google, clearly.

Japanese anime is a mixed bag, and for the most part it sits on the side of Japanese culture that’s full of methamphetamines and tentacle rape. There’s a lot of hay in that pile and very few needles. Cowboy Bebop is one of them, Ghost in the Shell is one of them, and the work of Studio Ghibli is one of them. Studio Ghibli is run by Hayao Miyazaki, the “Walt Disney of Japan.” In the past thirty years, he’s consistently produced and directed some of the best animation the island has to offer. The crown jewel of the studio is Princess Mononoke, which it’s safe to say is not only one of the best animated movies ever made, but it might just be one of the best films ever made.

The story of Princess Mononoke follows an exiled prince named Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup in the dubbed version) who, after saving his village from a demon, contracts the same curse that drove the monster insane and, in time, will kill him as well. From there he encounters all of the shortcomings of the outside world: Samurai bandits, famine, disease, and human greed, incarnated in the form of Lady Eboshi (voiced by Minnie Driver) of Iron Town, a weapons manufacturer who will not stop until the entire forest is clear of the ancient gods that rule it. He also encounters the princess which gives the film its name (voiced by Claire Danes), who was raised by wolves and will stop at nothing to put an end to Lady Eboshi.

There’s a lot of room for Princess Mononoke to be a heavy-handed story about environmentalism, but Miyazaki doesn’t take the easy way out. Instead of casting judgment, he fleshes out his characters better than many live action films. At first appearance, Lady Eboshi comes off as callous and ignorant, but as the plot progresses it’s revealed that her ironworks contribute more to the world than burnt earth. Even the titular character isn’t guided by morally pure reasons, and is just as capable of savagery as her nemesis is.

At its core, Princess Mononoke is a fantasy adventure (without all the lame elf bullshit) and the top-notch animation makes the action sequences as well executed as the plot. It’s safe to say that Princess Mononoke has the single raddest use of a bow and arrow in film. The understated voice work of the English version doesn’t suffer from the problems that many dubbed animes are afflicted with. The dubbing goes hand-in-hand with the top-notch translation by the venerable Neil Gaiman (The Sandman). Princess Mononoke is the perfect example of why across the board hatred of a medium is stupid, because the only thing you’re succeeding in doing is keeping amazing films like this away from you.

Cinecult: Aguirre: The Wrath of God

Originally run on 28 April 2009. Image via Google.

Aguirre: The Wrath of God was the sixth film directed by German auteur Werner Herzog and despite thirty years and three dozen more films, it might be his best. Aguirre could be seen as a thesis statement for the entirety of Herzog’s career, it’s the story about a single man driven to insanity and destruction by his power of will. What results is that despite its brooding, art-house posturing, Aguiree still manages to be a captivating adventure story.

The film begins in the Andes Mountains with the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro’s quest for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. After running short on supplies, manpower and morale, Pizarro sends one of his lieutenants, Pedro de Ursúa, along with an unbalanced soldier, Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), to try and scout the Amazon river. The foray into the Amazon is doomed from the start, and as time goes on the crew begins to succumb to the rigors of the Amazon forest. The axis of their demise isn’t the vicious, unseen natives, but rather, their comrade Aguirre, whose ambition eventually strips away his humanity.

Klaus Kinski is to Werner Herzog as Toshiro Mifune is to Akira Kurosawa, or as Ben Affleck is to Kevin Smith, I guess. Kinski is suited perfectly as the megalomaniacal conquistador, because like the character, he’s as bat-shit insane as the man he plays. The thespian’s raging tantrums are the things of legend (and the subject of at least two documentaries). His capriciousness eventually led to him threaten to leave the production, forcing Herzog (allegedly) to pull a gun on the star to keep him from departing (Herzog claims that this account is false—he claims that he only threatened to have Kinski shot and that he never pulled a piece himself). Wherever the truth lies, the actor isn’t in any position to judge, having shot the finger off of a crewmember during one of his tirades. Oddly enough, the two men worked together on another four movies, resulting in some of their most memorable work, Aguirre being the crown jewel of these endeavors.

Kinski aside, the story of Aguirre’s production was as plagued as that other great river-based epic, Apocalypse Now. The movie was shot on location in South America on a scant $370,000 budget and with a camera stolen from the University of Munich. On the DVD’s director commentary, Herzog details his trials on set with his signature brooding Teutonic monotone, and delivers one of the more edifying special features that I can recall (just You Tube his opinions on nature or the interview with Mark Kermode where he gets shot and carries on as though nothing happened).

Werner Herzog has been criticized for plenty of things, such as letting his obsessions get the better of him (not unlike many of his subjects in his fiction and non-fiction films), but he can never be accused of being a boring filmmaker. He is one of the great names of art house cinema and belongs alongside other artsy luminaries such as Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch (who produced the German’s latest film). Aguirre is the perfect example of the raw enthusiasm that he has for creating films. For those who aren’t familiar with the more esoteric side of cinema, Aguirre: The Wrath of God is a great place to start.

Cinecult: COBRA

Originally run on 2 March 2009. Image via Google.

Cinema is a wonderful thing. There’s such an incredible array of meaningful and exquisite films to watch. There’s the body of work of Akira Kurosawa and American titans like Orson Wells or Martin Scorsese and then there’s my favorite living directors, the Coen Brothers. And even though I like to play the cynic, I know that as many terrible fat-suit comedies or Michael Bay movies come out, I can always fall back on the past and draw a new experience from a great film by a great director. Cobra is not one of these films.

Cobra began as a failed pitch for Beverly Hills Cop and it only takes about thirty seconds of watching the film to figure out why a studio would pass on it. It’s an incoherent, hyper-macho mess of a movie. The world of Cobra is one where no two lines of dialogue ever relate to the other and where good police work means machine-gunning bikers from a truck.

What keeps Cobra from being just another campy action film is that it was very clearly the product of a lot of thought, effort and money. Despite this professional, sincere effort what results is a low-rent, madcap version of To Live In Die in LA. This might sound like a reason to not see the film, and it sort of is. While it’s true that Cobra won’t teach you about the human condition or the terrors of the modern world, it also won’t bore you. It’s a psychotically perfect action movie and there isn’t a single minute of it that isn’t a wonder to behold.

The film stars Sylvester Stallone (Rhinetone, Over the Top), who also penned the movie, as Detective Marion “Cobra” Cobretti who isn’t so much a character as a collection of tough guy clichés packed into a single Mary Sue and has no personality beyond his love for shooting scumbags. Opposite the Cobra is the “Nightslasher,” the world’s most unimaginatively named serial killer, who is played by Brian Thompson, better known as “The Scary Guy From the X-Files” and “The One Scary Punk That Terminator Kills (That Isn’t Bill Paxton).” If I follow the plot correctly the Nightslasher is some kind of an axe murderer, cultist, biker, terrorist person—maybe. The script never makes it clear just what the bad guys are about other than a few rambling speeches that sound like they were cribbed from Charles Manson’s grocery list. Brigette Nielson plays Ingrid, a model who witnesses a murder (in the middle of the street, no less). Action ensues as Cobra protects her from the Nightslasher’s army of Mötorhead aficionados.

From there on the narrative jumps from one ridiculous action scene to the next with no real story other than a few scenes where a nebbish bureaucrat who harangues Cobra about “law” and “order” and “fair trials” (boooooooring) and where Cobra proclaims his theories about the Nightslasher that seem to come out of a completely different movie. What makes this senseless garbage worth watching is when Cobra espouses his beliefs about cops having to circumvent the law in order to protect it or when he lists off meaningless statistics about crime in America, we’re actually supposed to sympathize with him. The film’s philosophy is the only thing crazier than Cobra’s ability to hit a criminal with every single bullet he fires.

Cobra is the perfect example of style outstripping substance and what an unrestrained ego with too much money looks like. Sure, you could watch The Seventh Seal or 4 Months, 3 Weeks or 2 Days, and you’d probably leave the experience a little wiser, but then again, sometimes you need a man like Stallone to come by and remind you just how spectacular cinema can be.

Cinecult: Repo Man

Originally run on 9 February 2009. Image from Google.

What I like most about this column is that I can go from praising a bona fide classic film like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to smaller, stranger cult movies like Death Race 2000. Repo Man is definitely one of those cult movies and it is just as worthy of your time as on the Criterion Collection.

Repo Man is the first feature length film of the writer/director Alex Cox (Syd & Nancy) and focuses on commissar of the capitalist world: The repossession agent. If you filch on your car payments, the repo man is the guy who, through a number of legally gray means, will steal your car away from you. The mad world of the repo man is perfect comedic fodder for Cox who turns out a film that’s as funny as it is crazy—and in a world where traffic cops are vaporized and men in biohazard suits routinely walk around downtown LA collecting dead homeless people.

The bulk of the plot follows punk rocker and amateur repo man Otto (Emilio Estevez), who, alongside his sleazeballs-in-arms, as he searches for a mysterious Chevy Malibu which is also being tracked down by the CIA, a bunch of alien cultists and a couple of “gypsy dildo punks” by the name of the Rodriguez Brothers. Estevez is serviceable in the lead role, but the supporting characters and their semi-coherent monologues are the heart of the film.

The most memorable of the repo men is the crank-addled sensei, Bud, played by the venerable Harry Dean Stanton (Alien, Escape From New York, Kelly’s Heroes, among a dozen other worthwhile films). Stanton is one of the great character actors of the past forty years, and when you look at him its something of a surprise that the man isn’t dead. In the words of director Alex Cox, Stanton has a unique face that inhabits the area somewhere between a cowboy and a cadaver. He’s always worth watching, regardless of the actual quality of the film. He carries large segments of the film with his twisting, violent diatribes about the code of the repo man.

For good reason, Repo Man is among the most quotable movies ever made (right next to Predator and The Big Lebowski). There isn’t a scene in the movie that doesn’t deliver either a laugh or something profound (or maybe just crazy). The film also weaves gritty violence with surreal coincidences together extremely well, in a way that I can only compare with Cox’s revisionist western, Walker. Repo Man is a wonderfully crass comedy that you and your buddies in good time should be able to quote right into the grave.

Battle of Algiers

Originally run on 1 December 2008, under my column "Cinecult."

Everyone loves The Battle of Algiers—the Black Panthers, the Red Army, the IRA, Donald Rumsfeld— and for good reason. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is one of the best-made movies about the West clashing with the Middle East and of occupation forces clashing with an indigenous people fighting for independence. It’s a complex movie that’s as relevant today as it was in 1966—perhaps even more so.

The film begins in 1957, with a recently tortured Arab man being forced to lead French paratroopers to the hideout of several key revolutionaries. The soldiers surround the hideout and threaten four revolutionaries—a man, a teenage boy, a woman and a child—that they have a choice between surrendering or being blown off the face of the other. From there the movie shifts backwards to 1954 and chronicles the eponymous battle for Algeria’s independence and the French government’s attempts to quash the rebellion.

When I was watching the film, a friend of mine passed by and asked, “Is that real?” Pontecorvo’s film is shot in the style of a documentary or a newsreel, as a grainy, handheld affair almost completely devoid of romance or theatricality. Everything is filmed with the idea that the following events just happened to pass in front of the camera (the trailer to the film has a disclaimer explicitly telling the audience that, in fact, not a single frame of newsreel footage was used in the film). Not only do shots of the city streets and rooftops look realistic, so do the frequent scenes of torture and explosions. Pontecorvo knew that these kinds of things shouldn’t be cleaned up and sanitizing them completely would compromise the film’s integrity. If you can watch a scene where a man gets a car battery attached to his ears without feeling a tad bit squeamish, then the point is entirely lost. The Battle of Algiers doesn’t shy away from harrowing violence, even when you might like it to.

The film benefits greatly from the score by legendary composer Ennio Morricone (who is probably best known for the “Waa-Waa-Waaaaa” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). While Morricone does a solid job throughout the film, his talent really shines in a sequence where three Arab women prepare themselves to place time bombs in the city’s crowded French District. The score gallops along as they dye and straighten their hair, bluff their way through military checkpoints and place their deadly cargo inside of a café, an airport and a bar full of Europeans of every age and gender. His score intensifies the seconds as they tick along towards an inevitable carnage.

The bombing in turn escalates the conflict from a band of idealists taking on the government to a full-blown war against every European that calls this corner of North Africa home. The women’s three bombs rip through the crowded buildings, throwing bodies. It shows that this fight to liberate Algiers, while a righteous cause, can at the same time be a cruel and terrible thing. On the other side of the conflict are the French paratroopers, who wish to pacify Algiers by any and all means, including assassinations and enhanced interrogations (i.e., Torture). Though, in their attempt to bring order and civility to Algeria, they ironically anger the population into resisting their increasingly tenuous authority. In this world, war is portrayed as both more inhuman and less inhuman than we typically view it as. War in the world of The Battle of Algiers is a horrific and fanatical affair and it is often justified as such, but it can also simply become a mundane job with fallout and consequences.

To label The Battle of Algiers as a political film is to sell it short. Doing so would mean that half of its audience would be lost. And, while it very clearly is a movie about a political situation, it’s far more than that and it doesn’t suffer to the same sanctimonious trumpeting that Michael Moore (Farenheit 9/11, Sicko) and Oliver Stone (Platoon, W.) are known for. Even though history did side with the Algerian people, the film doesn’t take either side and leaves it to the audience to decide the exact meaning of what they just watched, like a moving Rorschach test. Regardless of where you fall on the aisle, you should be able to recognize a great story that’s well constructed on every level. The Battle of Algiers is, at its most simple, a film about the trials that a people go through for the sake of independence and self-determinism—something all Americans should be able to empathize with.

Image via Google. Naturally.

Hell in the Pacific

Originally run on 10 November 2008 for my column "Cinecult.
Deep down in the heart of every urbane, liberal, too hip for westerns or war movies is a simple man who loves survival films. Everyone loves watching them, which would explain why zombie flicks have had such a renaissance as of late or why Survivor, after forty-million seasons, is still one of the biggest game shows on TV or why each of us is willing to shell out ten dollars to see Tom Hanks talk to a volleyball. We love survival stories and Hell in the Pacific is one of those great tales.

Hell in the Pacific takes place during WWII and centers around a shipwrecked American airman who washes up on a deserted island only to find that the island is already occupied by another stranded soldier—a Japanese one. Though, the main draw of the film isn’t the two men trying to survive or their clever plans to beat each other, the real reason to check it out is for Lee Marvin, (The Dirty Dozen, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Toshiro Mifune (The Seven Samurai, Grand Prix), and their respective beards.

Marvin is definitely one of the great faces in acting. He could tell you more about his character with one look from his grey, dog-tired face than most actors probably have in their entire oeuvre. Everything about the man is 100%, grade-A badass. If there ever were a man you wouldn’t want to fight a war against, it’d be him. Then, of course, there’s his rival, Mifune, who is always a delight. He’s a strong enough presence to convey what he’s saying despite his total lack of subtitling.

Hell in the Pacific is a rather brave movie in a few ways. It’s certainly entertaining to watch, but it’s a long way away from the spectacle that accompanies most other war films. Rather than the standard set pieces, their encounters resemble school boys bickering rather than a full-blown, drag-out fight. Though this isn’t a regular action movie, it’s a drama about two great actors—two of the manliest men ever to grace the screen—combating each other not for valor or country, but for a sack full of fresh water.

I’ve heard about movies starting without a finished script (Apocalypse Now, for example, went into production without one), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a film finishing without a finalized script. In this film, the whole narrative concludes suddenly with no reasoning as to why or how it ends. It would be like at the end of Star Wars, if some rebel walked in and said, “Oh yeah, the Death Star thing? It got blown up.” The End. Roll credits. It’s a black mark on an otherwise engrossing movie.

Beyond the questionable ending, Hell in the Pacific is a simple, but gripping drama. There’s no big fight scene, only a battle of wits and of attrition over a jungle-infested rock. From the acting to the score to the cinematography, it still delivers a solid, enjoyable experience and serves as an example of how a film can do so much with so little.