Emperor

Emperor is a homework assignment.

By 'homework assignment,' I mean that the film faithfully recreates a place and time (Japan in the immediate aftermath of its surrender in WWII), dramatizes the experiences of actual people who lived through events there, and offers its audience an hour and a half of living history.

It even taught me a few things. While I've read many books on the War in the Pacific, I'm not sharp on what happened in its aftermath. Emperor, for example, taught me that MacArthur first landed in Japan at the Atsugi airfield, where I've served in many detachments as a Navy C-130 pilot. “A-ha,” I thought as I saw the film, “That's why there's a statue of MacArthur near the front gate!” It taught me about Brigadier General Bonnner Fellers (Matthew Fox), whom MacArthur ordered to investigate Emperor Hirohito's complicity in the war's commencement. It taught me about many of the members of Japan's ruling class, their relationships, and the power dynamics among them.

More importantly, it depicted the devastation of postwar Tokyo, a devastation that old, still, B&W photos can only suggest.

So, yes, Emperor is a homework assignment, but it's a good homework assignment. Tommy Lee Jones (whom you really should see in TheThree Burials of Melquiades Estrada) makes a fine MacArthur, the production values are top notch, and you're bound to learn something. I'd show it to my class.

Red Tails

Red Tails tells the combat story of the 332^nd Fighter Group, an Army Air Corps unit notable for the fact that its pilots were graduates of the Tuskegee Airmen program.  It was an all-black unit assigned, initially, to undemanding flying well back from the fight in the European theater.  The film dramatizes their commanding officer’s fight to get them in the war, and it lauds their remarkable success once he succeeded.  It’s a great story and one worth reading.  Unfortunately, Red Tails isn’t a particularly good film.

Even though Red Tails looks professional and its air combat sequences are sure to thrill anyone with an interest in that sort of thing, the film simply can’t overcome its leaden screenplay and one-note performances.  Its villains, American and German, are ridiculous stereotypes who induce more groans than fist-shaking.  Its heroes end the film no more heroic than they began it.  Everyone speaks dialogue so clunky that we spend half the running time wondering how much better the film could have been with a first-class screenwriter.  Nobody changes, nobody grows.  A bunch of stuff happens to a bunch of good guys.  At the end of the film, they’re just a bunch of good guys who went through a lot of stuff.

This is a shame, really, because Red Tails is such a labor of love.  Producer George Lucas worked for years to get this film made, finally fronting his own money to pay for its production and distribution.  Some shots in the film are direct recreations of archive photos of the 332^nd.  This film clearly worships them men it depicts but, by presenting them so unidimensionally, it short-serves them.

I wanted to like Red Tails.  I’ll probably show it to my boys and I hope they love it.  But its characters aren’t rich enough, its story not complex enough to do justice to the real-life heroes it lionizes.  Too bad.

They Were Expendable

Gungy [guhnj] (adj) gung'y Navy Slang: To be particularly, perhaps ridiculously, motivated. Filled with love for the Naval Service and afire with patriotic fervor. "I just banged out five miles. I'm feeling gungy."

When I was a plebe at USNA, Saturday morning was "gunge day." After the morning run, we plebes would be permitted to sit on couches in the upperclass wardroom, hear some brief talk about a military subject, and watch a gunge movie. Something like 12 O'CLOCK HIGH or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP or THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA. I was the guy who never really bought it, not really. Maybe it's the German in me, but I have this deep distrust for love of institutions; and rampant, "hail to the heroes" style patriotism makes me uncomfortable.

THEY WERE EXPENDABLE pushed gunge buttons I didn't even know I had. The opening credits include the ranks of people who worked on the film, including CAPT John Ford, USNR; CDR Robert Montgomery, USNR; CDR Frank Wead, USN (Ret); LCDR Joseph August, USN; and CAPTJames Havens, USMCR (Reservists represent!). The score weaves in chanties and traditional Navy songs I learned in Annapolis. The movie's first big action sequence, a Japanese airstrike on Subic Bay, made me want to want to be Robert Montgomery, commanding a squadron of PT boats in a desperate fight (Aside: if a movie can make an aviator want to be a surface warfare officer, it's gotta be something special!).

But THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, while certainly a gunge movie (it's wartime propaganda), doesn't tell the story of victory against impossible odds. It tells a story of loss, of underequipped and undermanned forces losing to a Japanese war machine that, at the time, appeared unstoppable. People sabotage their boats. The love interest is lost in Bataan. The heroes are ordered to flee, leaving their men behind to take their chances with the Japanese. And it's mostly handled in true military fashion. Shut up and do your job, and the best epitaph a man can hope for is that he did his.

Some of the film's elements don't fit, but they make sense when taken in historical context. When the men see MacArthur leave the Philippines, the film tries to sell it as an uplifting, patriotic moment. "There goes the great man," the PT sailors seem to think. While the reality is that line soldiers and sailors saw MacArthur's departure from the Philippines as a betrayal that helped earn him the nickname "Dugout Doug," the fact is that America needed heroes in the latter years of WWII, and there's no way a film of that period was going to show the American fighting man looking at the Great General with anything less than awe. The film also goes out of its way to wave the flag for those left behind. The flag waving doesn't fit in with the businesslike tone of the rest of the proceedings, but we should recall that this film was made in a time of total war, a time when America was preparing to fight its way back into the PI and rescue those whom we'd left behind.

Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, and Donna Reed are all fine here, with Wayne great fun as a fireball junior officer and Reed acting her butt off in pretty stock role. The action sequences are rousing and awesome, particularly when we recall that they were done with practical effects. This is a fine picture, a picture worthy of preservation, a gunge picture.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some pushups to do.

The Great Raid

Poor James Franco. The guy hasn't had a hit in some time, and he must be running out of studio goodwill by now. THE GREAT RAID hasn't helped.

THE GREAT RAID is actually two movies: a Franco - starring "mission" picture a la THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN and a Joseph Fiennes - starring "POW" picture about the tribulations of the guys stuck in WWII's infamous Cabanuatan POW camp. The former is pretty good, while the latter had me looking at my watch. Fortunately, the movie shifted back and forth betweeen the two often enough that I knew the good part would always be coming back.

Had THE GREAT RAID been about only the Great Raid, it could have been a bang-up picture and, perhaps, Franco may have gotten a hit. As it is, the thing's too unfocused and it easily drops into the "forgettable" pile.

Come and See

COME AND SEE is a powerful, disturbing film, but I'm not sure it earns that power more through storytelling or casting.

The film is about the Beylorussian partisans of WWII. The element that makes the film so powerful is its lead character, a boy of about 13 who's played by one of the most gifted child actors I've ever seen. In the early stage of the film, he's eager to join the grownups and begin the adventure this war is sure to be. As horror piles upon horror, his reserves of courage and optimism slowly burn away as he turns into an ancient man, old beyond his years and bereft of hope. Aleksei Kravchenko, the young actor who plays this character, is absolutely extraordinary. Sure, the makeup helps us see him age, but the real drama is in his eyes.

The movie's photography is proficient, but it really shines in the area of sound design and scoring. 'Come and See' isn't afraid of ambient noise, and it isn't afraid of music that fades in and out, varying in appropriateness but never in impact. The movie showed me plenty, but it sold me with what it let me hear.

Would I have responded to COME AND SEE so strongly had its protagonist been 25? I don't know, but I do know that I was moved by what I saw. 'Come and See' took me to another place, a terrible place, and it did so effectively and without bombast. This is a very effective film.