Posts tagged war
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” Surrealist Insanity
Nov 12th
Surrealist Insanity
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is based on the 2005 nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, and it is a comedic look at real-life events about a top-secret branch of an experimental U.S. Army unit called the New Earth Battalion, which was created to change the way that wars are fought.
As the film says at one point, the Army was investigating how love and gentleness could win wars, and a notice at the beginning of the film says, “More of this is true than you would believe.”
Full disclosure: You might need to have served in the military in order to appreciate the full impact of this film. Otherwise, you might dismiss it as a fantasy instead of an honest account of just how cockeyed and wacky life can be in the military, even in the midst of a war.
In other words, young audiences today will probably not enjoy this film as much as older people who actually spent time in the military, as I did for three years back in the Sixties.
Most of the film takes place in 2003 in Iraq, but we also get flashbacks that show how the New Earth Battalion came to be and some of the training and experiences of recurring characters.
George Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, one of the Jedi Warriors, as they called themselves, and the most gifted psychic that another character who had served with Cassady had ever met.
That character tells Bob Wilton, a reporter played by Ewan McGregor, about the New Earth Battalion and says, “We were trying to kill animals with just our minds.”
That is where the title comes from, because in the early days the unit had a secret goat lab, and the men would try to kill a goat just by staring at it.
Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey also star in the film, and Wilton meets them all after he first meets Cassady in Kuwait and they travel into Iraq to accomplish Cassady’s secret mission.
CATCH-22, the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller that was made into a 1970 film, captured the surrealist insanity of World War II Army life during that war.
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is the CATCH-22 of the war in Iraq, and as the film says, more of it is true than you would believe.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“Inglourious Basterds” Ostentatious Self-Indulgence
Aug 27th
Ostentatious Self-Indulgence
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is intentionally misspelled, because writer-director Quentin Tarantino wanted that title for his latest movie, but also wanted to differentiate it from the 1978 Italian movie of the same name, which just shows how easily he could have given it a unique title.
I’ll tell you what that unique title could have been later on.
The film is divided into five chapters, which are identified at the beginning of each section, and Chapter 1 takes place in 1941 in Nazi-occupied France.
Col. Hans Landa, a German SS officer played brilliantly by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, shows up with his men at a small dairy farm to question the owner in private.
Waltz has already won the Best Actor award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and he is sure to be nominated for and to win many more similar awards for this role.
Col. Landa is charged with finding and killing Jews in France, and he suspects that the farm owner he is questioning can provide him with information about the last Jewish family unaccounted for in the neighborhood.
Chapter 2 then shows the title characters, who are a squad of Jewish- American soldiers who have been dropped behind enemy lines in France and are led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt in a surprisingly comic role.
Lt. Raine tells his men, “We’re here to do one thing and one thing only: Killing Nazis.”
Well, that’s not entirely true, because they also scalp the German soldiers that they kill in order to send a message to whoever finds the soldiers’ bodies.
Chapter 3 then jumps to 1944 in Paris, and we meet Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman who owns a movie theater, and here is where Tarantino really starts to show off his cinematic knowledge, so much so that the audience can get the impression that this is a lecture on the history of cinema instead of a movie itself.
Col. Landa shows up again, and then later Lt. Raine and the Inglourious Basterds show up, too, but by now this is no longer a war movie, but an elaborate hoax on the audience because of Tarantino’s rewriting of well-known history.
And remember how I said that Tarantino could have given it a unique title?
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS could easily have been called OSTENTATIOUS SELF-INDULGENCE.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
“The Hurt Locker” A Film of Ultimate Reward
Jul 30th
A Film of Ultimate Reward
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
THE HURT LOCKER is perhaps the best film on the war in Iraq you will ever see, if not the best film on war itself.
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the story is about the day-to-day experiences of an Army three-man detonation team whose job is to defuse any improvised explosive devices that are found before they can be detonated.
This is more than tricky, because an IED can be exploded on contact, exploded by a timer, or exploded by someone watching from safety who can set it off by using a cell phone.
So, a team consists of two men with rifles who scan the area on the lookout for anything suspicious while the team leader dons a heavy bomb suit and walks up to the bomb, which is usually hidden or covered, and tries to defuse it.
The story begins in 2004 in Baghdad, and one such team has just lost their leader in an explosion, when their company has only 38 days left in their rotation before they can be shipped back to the United States.
Staff Sergeant James, played superbly by Jeremy Renner, joins the team, and he is a “cowboy,” a “wild man” as one colonel calls him out of admiration, and he doesn’t always work by the rules. When he comes across a trunkfull of bombs in a car, he takes off his bomb suit, telling his team, “There’s enough bang in there to blow us all to Jesus. If I’m going to die, I want to die comfortable.”
You have heard of “black humor”? Sgt. James has a sense of humor that could be called “black-hole humor.”
When asked by an officer what the best way is to defuse a bomb, Sgt. James tells him “the way you won’t die.”
As the days and the defused bombs go by, we get a countdown to the number of days left in rotation, and a sense of foreboding envelopes the team and the audience.
The action is not just bombs and defusings and explosions, however, We see the team at work and at play, plus their interaction with other soldiers and civilians, and the music is haunting.
The title of the film is a phrase that refers to “a place of ultimate pain.”
THE HURT LOCKER is a film of ultimate pleasure and reward.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
