Popularity: unranked [?]
All right, folks, we’ve got a real doozy to take a look at today, an actual genuine honest to goodness WAR PICTURE from the folks at MTI.
If you’re worried right now, you’re not alone. MTI has, as I’ve said in the past, always been a feast or famine sort of studio. When they’re good they can do amazing things, but when they’re bad, they outright suck. Always the question with an MTI movie will be, is this going to be great, or will it be horrible?
Today’s choice, Brother’s War, proves to be mostly horrible.
Based on a true story, Brother’s War features a British solider attached to the Red Army who discovers that the Russians have been committing war crimes against the Polish government-in-exile. Naturally, the Russians don’t want this getting around, so Stalin’s intelligence service, feared throughout the Soviet Union, is dispatched to capture the British soldier. Naturally, they catch him, and lock him up with a German captain. The Brit and the German both share something important, however–they’re both Freemasons. When they escape, along with a nurse named Anna, they’re pursued by the Russians, in desperate hope of extinguishing the secret that the three now carry with them that could irrevocably alter the world.
So no, these are not actual brothers you’ll be hearing about, but rather the figurative brotherhood of Freemasonry. Say what you will about them–and pretty much everything that can be said has been said–they consider themselves (or at least these two do) to be as thoroughly brothers as any blood relative.
It’s hard to call a movie with regular amounts of gunfire and explosions boring, but somehow, Brother’s War manages to be exactly that. The tension created by the suspenseful scenes was minimal at best, and the action sequences fell flat due to a lack of coherence. The scenes in the Russian prison suffer from a horrendous excess of acting, though sadly, not acting SKILL. Watching the German escape was particularly sad as the interrogator managed to go down just by the German swinging his fist in front of him. I know, it’s supposed to be a punch, but it definitely didn’t look like one. It’s as though someone forgot to include basic stage combat courses in the curriculum for these actors. And the escapes aren’t that much better, really–the whole thing comes off as lacking.
Frankly, there wasn’t much exciting going on here. And that’s a particular insult if this is actually based on a true story, because I’m pretty sure the ACTUAL affair was vastly more exciting and vastly more terrifying than this sad little wreck was.
About the only high point of this misery was the background music. They really went all out with the strange Russian psuedo-hymns–you ever heard the Red Army Choir sing the national anthem? That’s the kind of thing I’m hearing on this one. It’s got a weird kind of eerie grace to it, and that’s what you’ll be hearing in the background throughout Brother’s War, should you actually decide to subject yourself to it. Though I will admit that the second half is somewhat better than the first, it, much like war itself, isn’t really worth what you had to go through to get there.
The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Brother’s War a three out of ten for being only an occasional auditory pleasure, and failing to remember that it’s supposed to be a movie rather than a soundtrack.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Before you start wondering how I get incredible access to all the very latest movies that haven’t even come out yet, you should pay close attention to one thing–the spelling of the above title. This is not Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”, this is the ORIGINAL “Inglorious Bastards”, from 1978.
Yes, the guys at Severin Films have jammed a very large straight pin in the massive gas sack that is Quentin Tarantino’s ego and sent it whizzing all around the room by presenting, clearly, the fact that Tarantino’s version is really a remake, though as we’ll discover, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
This version, the ORIGINAL version, revolves around a group of criminals who would receive the death sentence in a World War II Allied prison camp, but instead break out, with the plan to shoot their way into Switzerland, but instead find themselves neck-deep in a suicide mission.
After only about ten minutes in, I was positively enamored with this movie. Sure, a war movie is generally at least kind of good–there aren’t that many BAD war movies, though they do exist–but this one is a class all by itself. There’s plenty of action, and more than enough comedy to go around. These guys are flat-out great; they may have been examples of the very worst the army had to offer, but they really knew how to get a job done. They’ve got thieves and killers and compulsive gamblers, but when it comes time to do a job, they really know how to get it done.
Even better, there will be a variety of adventures for our inglorious bastards to slog their way through, and they will approach them all with a style all their own. It’s downright amazing what these guys are going to get into, and it’s actually even more amazing how they get out of it. More than once I found myself grinning, chuckling, and muttering at my TV, “Those magnificent, inglorious bastards”.
I think they saw me coming when they titled this thing. I really do.
Despite the fact that this movie is over thirty years old, it’s aged well. Clearly some remastering has been done in the DVD translation, but the effects aren’t half bad, the props are downright authentic and the set designs and background are top-notch and absolutely realistic.
In fact, I’m hard pressed to say anything BAD about this movie. Believe me, I’ve gone over this with a fine-tooth comb and I’m having a hard time finding anything wrong. Oh, sure, by TODAY’S standards, the whole thing’s somewhat lesser-grade, and maybe it was a good idea for Tarantino to go and slap a fresh coat of paint on this one with some modern, updated effects tech and some more explosions. A potato-masher grenade explosion really shouldn’t look like a gust of compressed air firing up from the ground.
Despite this, there’s absolutely no way such a thing will ever get in the way of you enjoying this movie. If you have even the vaguest enjoyment of war movies, then you’re going to go nuts over this one.
Inglorious Bastards is a fantastic war movie that aged well over the years, and is more than deserving of a remake that I personally have high hopes for. And around here, it’s SO good that it’s going to get a clean ten out of ten. There’s just nothing wrong with it worth noticing.
Popularity: unranked [?]
Tom Cruise is a crazy, scary man. If you read the tabloids long enough you’ll find scads of stories about him, his sheer lunacy, and the sheer lunacy that applies to his dealings with Scientology. But one thing is true…he’s a pretty good actor. And when you run to the video store and grab a copy of Valkyrie, well, you’ll probably notice that yourself.
In Valkyrie, we’re introduced to a huge and incredibly convoluted plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler by elements within his own army. The best part is, much of this actually happened. Klaus von Stauffenberg (a real person, here played by Tom Cruise) is part of the military arm of the attempt to kill Hitler, using his own plans against him. See, Hitler had a plan just in case someone should turn against him called Operation Valkyrie, in which a reserve contingent of the German army, dubbed the Reserve Army, was kept around Berlin in the event of an uprising to suppress civil insurrection. So Stauffenberg and his contingent feign an uprising…on the part of Hitler’s own SS. This allows them to enact Operation Valkyrie to seize the SS, and with both the Reserve Army and the SS removed from the equation, the path becomes clear to seize Hitler’s government.
The most amazing part of this entire exercise is that this actually happened, and essentially came within a gnat’s whisker of actually succeeding, which would have brought the war to an end quite a bit sooner than it actually did. Frankly, with stuff like this going on, it’s a wonder Hitler’s regime managed to last as long as it did. Watching this epic story of love of country and betrayal play out is downright amazing—even more so when you consider that Hitler would commit suicide just nine months after the events of Valkyrie. It’s as though something was conceived that day that would be born as real as any man.
History aside, however, this is actually a very riveting movie, made doubly so by the fact that it has an unusually long runtime of a full two hours, in an era where eighty to ninety minutes is standard operating procedure. It’s a stunning, deep and rich epic that makes its viewer sit up and take notice. While most of us who haven’t studied World War II history extensively may not have known about Operation Valkyrie or the other fourteen assassination attempts on Hitler, this one carries an authenticity to it that makes it especially good. These were men so concerned about the direction of their country that they were willing to surrender their status and their very lives to bring about its downfall and rebirth.
And though the Stauffenberg heirs didn’t personally care for Cruise’s portrayal of him, I confess that I liked it just fine. If Tom Cruise would lay off the lunacy and do more acting like this, more people would take him much, MUCH, more seriously.
But that aside, Valkyrie is a great thriller / suspense title and deserves your dollars and your time to watch. It’s downright inspiring in its portrayal of resistance to a madman, and it looks as beautiful as the plot itself is deep.
Popularity: 1% [?]
I have to admit, when I finally managed to lay hands on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I really wasn’t all that sure what to expect from it. Of course, the plot was obvious enough…everyone had been talking about it since its Oscar bid. But what I found when I watched it was unusual enough to make it worth talking about.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about life in its most primal form, reversed—for most, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards. But for Benjamin Button, it’s lived backwards, and strangely, understood forwards. Born in his eighties due to a bizarre condition that ages him in reverse, we follow Benjamin Button throughout his life, his loves, and his own inevitable end.
It’s a strange movie, this one—similar to titles like Forrest Gump, focusing on the unusual life of an unusual person, it’s a deep and rich epic with lots of stories to tell, both heartwarming and horrifying in their ways. It’s told from the perspective of a woman dying in a hospital, her granddaughter reading the diary of the man that meant so much to her over the years—specifically, Benjamin Button. There’s so much to see here that it’s a lot like being with an elderly person. It has all the stories of a lifetime. Not all of them are interesting, and some of them are downright sad, but some of them are beautiful.
And that’s exactly what this movie is, almost three straight hours of stories. Benjamin Button will find love, find loss, find war, find peace, find hope and charity and everything in between. You’ve got to really want a movie like this, because a movie like this is an undertaking. It’s a project. You’ve got to block out nearly three hours if you want to see this one, and three hours is not easy to come by these days.
But if you put the three hours into it, what you’ll get is a story of shocking depth for Hollywood. You’ll get great performances—those who said that this is some of Brad Pitt’s greatest work were not kidding—and you’ll get some beautiful images. Even when Benjamin went to war, they managed to make it look beautiful in a way.
And as I grew to realize, fumbling along through this…this enormous brick edifice of a movie…I began to wonder, maybe this was too much. Maybe there’s too much going on here. Maybe it’s made itself downright inaccessible to just about everybody by requiring so much of its audience. And in a way, I’m happy that they thought enough of me to subject me to this monster, knowing that I could take it or leave it, but if I wanted to take it, I would have to EARN it.
This movie questions my worth to be part of its audience. After years of being underestimated by movies, it’s nice to be challenged so blatantly. The only question that remains is, do you want to take them up on their challenge? Do you want to sit through a three hour movie and watch beauty and loss and pain and joy and everything else that makes up one man’s life? Do you want to care this much about one guy? If you do, then go. Go and get a copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If not, well, there’s plenty else for you out there. You can get two, most of three movies into that same place. But none of them will be quite like what you could have had with Benjamin Button.
Popularity: 1% [?]