The Wedding Song: Grade A

A
The Wedding Song (2008)

Lizzie Brocheré, Olympe Borval, Najib Oudghiri; Writer-Director Karin Albou. (Arabic and French; subtitled).

The Nazis have occupied Tunisia in the early 1940’s and have begun rounding up the Jews. In Tunis, two young women have formed a deep friendship, one an Arab Muslim (Borval), the other a Sephardic Jew (Brochere). The middle class but economically stressed, French-speaking woman is betrothed to an older, wealthy physician, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Paris, but she hates him. The servant-class Arabic woman carries on a torrid sexual affair with her fiancé, but marriage is forbidden by her father until the young man gets a job, which he finally does, as a Nazi informer on the Jews. Can the girls’ friendship survive the stresses of matrimony, religion, social class, colonialism, and wartime occupation?

In addition to the compelling story of friendship, the movie is highly instructional about Tunisian Arabic and French colonial culture, especially with regard to the tribulations of female sexuality in both cultures. Naked females are starkly exposed on screen but the nudity is neither glamorized nor prurient. Rather it is used to make intimate and disturbing comments on the plight of the women and on the meaning of marriage in general.

Writing and directing (Albou) are both excellent in this zero-budget film, but the cinematography suffers from what is probably low budget technology, so many of the movie’s images are dark and muddy, to the point of being difficult to see. Nevertheless, individual scenes and sets are well-composed and photographed, when you can see them. Acting is very strong by all the players, and overall, the complex, intimate, and emotional story line will keep you glued.

Inglourious Basterds: Grade B

B

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent, Diane Kruger. Writer-Director Quentin Tarantino. (English, German, and French – Subtitled)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this movie is the marketing. The trailer, played endlessly on TV, shows Brad Pitt as a WWII officer barking out his unit’s “mission” to his band of men: to kill, maim, and mutilate Nazis. So we expect an action picture with plenty of death, mayhem, and blood from the director of the blood-soaked Kill Bill.

But the trailer is misleading. The movie is mostly about a Jewish cinema owner (Laurent) in occupied France who is forced to have a special showing of a German war film for all the German bigwigs, including Hitler. It is also about British and American spies among the Nazis. Pitt and his “Basterds” play only a small role in the story. A few Nazis are multilated as promised, but that is a sideshow.

The main story is not strong either. The Nazis watching the special movie are ultimately locked into the theater while it burns, but there is no real suspense or narrative drive. The picture is more like a series of loosely connected scenes that don’t add up to much.

But what scenes they are! They demonstrate Tarantino’s brilliance as a director. The opening scene, in which the nasty, but effusively polite and multilingual Nazi commander (Waltz) interrogates a French farmer about hiding Jews, has nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat tension, created entirely by the director. The German officer is polite and urbane, and there is no violence until the very last moment when machine guns shoot through the floorboards. Yet the precision with which the Captain unscrews his pen, writes in his ominous book, asks his questions, are rife with emotion. The farmer’s reactions are equally calibrated to create a very high tension scene in which nothing is going on but an inane conversation. That scene alone demonstrates Tarantino’s genius. And it is not the only one like that. There are dozens of scenes of equally stunning directorial mastery, including even an excellent barroom gunfight. That’s why you want to see this movie, for the directing.

Acting is very engaging by Pitt and Waltz, and the dialog is snappy, alternating between comedy and tragedy. Production values are first class, photography is faultless. But if a movie is suposed to be a vehicle for telling a story, this one falls flat. The characters are all two-dimensional so we don’t know or care anything about them. The war is way in the background and there are no new insights on that. Nazis are evil, as always. Human relationships are perfunctory. The narrative lacks suspense and forward momentum. The ending is trite. This is a failed exercise in storytelling, but as a director’s showcase, it is a winner.

Defiance: Grade F

F
Defiance (2008)
Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber; Director Edward Zwick

Two Jewish brothers flee the Nazis in Poland to hide the forests of Belarus. Others get the same idea and soon they have a community of several dozens, then hundreds of refugees. Nazis hunt them down, and so do Russians, with whom they form an uneasy alliance to fight Nazis. There are a few gun battles of the type where no Nazi can hit any target but no Jew ever misses, but mostly it is the story of how the community survives and evolves. They are hungry, dirty, sad, and despairing, but they endure with dignity and fortitude. Craig stares off into middle distance quite a bit, supposedly to indicate depth of character, but actually indicating air-head since we know nothing about the character or what he might be thinking. Characters speak English among themselves in the forest but only Russian outside it, for some reason. Finally the time is up and the movie ends without resolution. Supposedly the whole tale is “based” on a true story, but so what? Nothing interesting happens. Dialog is pedestrian, vignettes are mundane, characters are not developed. I think we have already got the picture on this period of history. Nazis: bad. Jews: victims. There is nothing new to learn here. Some nice scenery and sets are shown, but even there, the forest had no underbrush, which seemed unnatural.

Valkyrie: Grade D

D
Valkyrie (2008)
Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branaugh, Tom Wilkinson, Terrence Stamp, Eddie Izzard; Director Bryan Singer.

Cruise is Claus von Stauffenberg, the Nazi colonel who led the 15th and final plot to assassinate Hitler during WWII. The plot fails and he is shot. The movie relies on general historical knowledge, general interest in Nazis, and on some big name stars to keep you interested but it barely does. There is virtually no dramatic tension in the film. The bomb is in a brief case so there are not even any red LED numbers counting down. Most of the movie is taken up with bureaucratic infighting and negotiations among the Nazi officer corps (“Are you with us or not?”). The characters are flat and the acting mediocre, even by Branaugh. Wilkinson gives the best performance but he is swamped by swooping cameras and over-lit sets. Direction looks like made-for-TV. CGI effects are noticeably weak. Sets and costumes are immaculately clean and shiny, and nearly the whole movie is shot on unconvincing sound stages so we do not have a sense of time and place. The war itself is strictly in the background. Dialog is lame. Cruise’s motivation is simply declared in the beginning, but we don’t know where it comes from because we don’t know who he is. He demonstrates non of his natural wit and style; just speaks his lines on cue. Pounding heartbeat music tries to inject some drama. The period vehicles are nice to look at, and the story plods along slowly but steadily. There is just enough color and movement to save the movie from utter disaster.

Letters From Iwo Jima: Grade F

F

Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)

Ken Watanabe. Director Clint Eastwood. (Japanese, subtitled).

This WWII movie does have one redeeming virtue and that is the photography, which is well composed and rendered just on the colored side of B&W. It’s a great look, but I already admired it in Flags of Our Fathers, the immediate predecessor to this movie, and here it is just more of the same, so no points. In fact I recognized several scenes in this movie that look like they had been clipped directly from the earlier one, which is kind of dishonest. The movie shows the invasion of Iwo Jima from the Japanese point of view but there is nothing new. There are flashbacks to pre-war family scenes to make the point that “Japanese are people too.” I think after sixty years, that is not a point that needs to be made for Americans. In the movie, the soldiers bark at each other in stereotypical declarative fashion, obscuring any attempts at real acting. Some soldiers commit suicide, others are killed in battle. They all die, as we know from history. Overall, the movie is dark (though not muddy), since most of it takes place in caves, and the lighting is confusing at times. CGI war effects are crude, especially aircraft, but exothermic chemistry is in plentiful supply for those who enjoy explosions. I think this movie was grossly overrated because we all love Clint.

The Good German: Grade D

D

The Good German (2006)

George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Toby Maguire. Director Steven Soderbergh

Photography is the star of this black-and-white movie set in 1945 Berlin and Potsdam. Clooney is a reporter who “accidentally” encounters his German mistress from years ago (Blanchett). She does a skulking lady of mystery, acting well, but with no character to act around. Her husband, a proxy for Werner von Braun, is dead and now she hangs out with a young American GI (Maguire), hoping to find her way out of Germany. She puts off Clooney’s interest, if it interest is not too strong a word. They show no hint of former or current passion. It’s a clunker of a relationship. Maguire is horribly miscast, his manufactured and anachronistic effervescence grating on the nerves. The role needed a sly and sophisticated wheeler-dealer like James Garner in The Great Escape, or even a dark Peter Lorre type, and someone closer in age to Blanchett’s character. Clooney brings nothing but stone-faced mug shots to the role. The evil Russian is the only standout actor. The plot is not well-told and generates no tension. The only thing keeping your eyes on the screen is the photography, high-contrast, side-lit and bottom-lit stuff as from an old Bogart movie, well-shot and well-composed. The ending is a lame allusion to Casablanca. But even the photography loses its way at times, with bright light coming from the center of someone’s desk so their face can be lit from below. Still, the movie is worth watching with the sound off, just to appreciate the pictures.