Black Hawk Down: Movie, DVD Review (2001)

In the chaos of war, some characters are lost

Directed by Ridley Scott, written by Ken Nolan, based on the book by Mark Bowden, 143 minutes, rated R.

(Originally published 2001)

Ridley Scott's unflinching war movie, "Black Hawk Down," features one of the best re-enactments of man-to-man land combat ever captured on a movie screen.

The film, which is based on Mark Bowden's 1999 best-selling book of the same name, is technically stunning yet icily detached, a visceral orgy of guns, bombs and carnage that captures the madness of urban combat and the bravery of U.S. forces, but which is so far removed from its characters, too much of its power resonates through its explosions--and not through the men being harmed or killed by them.

Working from a script by Ken Nolan, Scott's film is about the real-life Battle of the Black Sea, the Oct. 3rd, 1993 U.S. mission to remove Gen. Muhammad Farah Aidid's militia from the ravaged city of Mogadishu, Somalia.

As outlined by Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard) to the Army's elite Rangers and Delta Force, the mission should have been relatively simple, taking under an hour to execute. But because of poor planning, arrogance on behalf of the soldiers and a string of bad luck, it turned into a botched, 15-hour nightmare that went horribly wrong.

Indeed, after two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by Somali gunfire, 100 troops became trapped on hostile ground. Suddenly, the mission's focus shifted away from capturing Aidid's men to getting our men out of Mogadishu alive.

For the next two hours, audiences are slammed with the battle as it erupts and blooms. What Scott has captured is ferocious and unrelenting; there's never a false moment, never a time when it feels as if any of this has been staged. It's a brilliant, devastating feat of filmmaking that ends with 73 Americans injured and 18 dead--including two men from Maine, Staff Sgt. Thomas Fields of Lisbon and Master Sgt. Gary Gordon of Lincoln.

Audiences will recognize some of the actors--Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Jason Isaacs, Orlando Bloom and Jeremy Piven, among dozens of others--but because the cast is so large, it's impossible to connect with them individually. Instead, audiences must bond with the group, which is difficult to do given Scott's determination to make a war movie focused purely on battle--and not on the lives being destroyed by it.

Grade: B

Charlie Wilson's War: Movie Review (2007)

Fight on, player

Directed by Mike Nichols, written by Aaron Sorkin, 97 minutes, rated R.

The new Mike Nichols movie, "Charlie Wilson’s War," takes us back to the Middle East, this time Afghanistan, where the mood is light in spite of the blood being spilled by the Soviet Army.

Based on a true story and set in 1980, just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the film follows Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), the Democratic senator from Texas who finds himself being urged to help the Afghani people by one Joanna Herring (Julia Roberts), a right-wing Houston socialite whose claim to fame, at least at the time, is that she was the sixth richest person in Texas.

That’s quite a distinction to have, and Roberts plays her accordingly — her Joanna is all arched eyebrows, cinched suits and blonde hair the size of the National Forest (though one assumes beneath all that hairspray, it would be difficult to find a renewable resource).

Since her character also is Charlie’s part-time lover — he has a lot of those, most of whom he meets in hot tubs filled with cocaine-snorting strippers — Charlie feels the pressure to move forward with her request.

After all, money is money, and since Joanna has plenty of it, the idea that Charlie might one day be without it is unthinkable. Best to do what his major donors demand of him. In this case, it meant raising the funds necessary to supply the Mujahedeen with the guns they needed to eliminate the Russians from Afghanistan.

Of course, history tells us that by doing so, Wilson essentially supported those who formed al-Qaida, but hey — what did he know? He was just working for the woman and, after visiting one of the Afghani outpost camps where he comes face-to-face with the dead, dismembered and dying, it’s also true that he was working to do what he believed was right. The Soviets needed to be stopped. With the help of his assistant Bonnie (Amy Adams) — not to mention CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman, excellent), who had the sort of critical insight and connections Wilson otherwise lacked — Wilson raised more than $1 billion in secret CIA funding to help shut the Soviets down.

The film, which Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing") based on George Crile’s book, is appealingly limber, a war movie with winks. It’s as comfortable darting around the bombs tossed at swank cocktail parties as it is dodging those tossed overseas.

After the dark, biting banter that drove Nichols’ last film, "Closer," "Charlie Wilson’s War" is akin to a playground. The writing is just as intelligent, but nobody is stung by the words.

This is a movie in which Hoffman’s Avrakotos can go berserk in his superior’s office, smashing windows and hurling insults, but the scene plays for comedy — there’s no danger to it. It’s also a movie that has a good sense for the times, but which sees them as less dire than the situation we’re in now. It condescends to the past, true, but the film’s complication is that it also has great affection for it, likely because it views those days as simpler than the worldwide mess we’re in now. The emphasis on this war, after all, is personalized, and what Charlie Wilson learns from it could change the world now.

Grade: B+

Atonement: Movie Review (2007)

Cold touch

Directed by Joe Wright, written by Christopher Hampton, 122 minutes, rated R.

The new Joe Wright movie, "Atonement," has everything you could wish for in a period drama — beautiful cinematography, set design and costumes; exotic locales; and a story designed to rip out your heart and crush it when a rushed, heated romance between two young lovers is poisoned by the lies and deceit of another.

The trouble with the film, which Christopher Hampton based on Ian McEwan’s celebrated 2001 novel, is that you’re always aware that you’re watching a movie. There’s no sinking into "Atonement," no losing yourself to it, no moment when the screen fades away and the story and the characters come to the fore to overcome you. That’s a disappointment because the film’s engrossing sourcebook suggests that the movie also could have been as engrossing.

The film stars Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis, a privileged, brittle beauty who isn’t especially likable, which is a problem since the movie eventually asks us to feel something profound for her. Looking bored and bothered in 1935 England, Cecilia has issues with Robbie (James McAvoy), the handsome son of one of the Tallis’ longtime housekeepers (Brenda Blethyn, excellent). Robbie was put through Cambridge with Tallis money and now he is treated as something of a third-wheel member of the family.

The youngest member of the household is spooky Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a wide-eyed lass with a clipped blonde bob, a mean mouth and a tight-fisted gate who fancies herself as something of a writer.

She favors fiction, which is key, and she also has a crush on Robbie, which is critical to why she does all that she does when Robbie gives her a letter to deliver to Cecilia. Inside that envelope isn’t the love letter Robbie meant to send, but a graphic description of what Robbie would like to do to Cecilia’s genitalia. He wrote it in jest, but there it is in the envelope, which is delivered just as a series of events unspool that lead to Robbie’s arrest and a stint in the big house.

Five years later, when he’s released from prison after agreeing to serve in the war, the movie becomes about his quest to reconnect with Cecilia while Briony, now a nurse played by Romola Garai, has grown up and developed a conscience. With war’s devastation surrounding her and humbling her, she decides to atone for her sins, though in ways best left for the viewer. A final appearance by Vanessa Redgrave as the present-day Briony gives the movie a feeling it otherwise lacks.

"Atonement" isn’t a boring movie — there’s lots of lovely furniture to look at here, nevermind the appealing vision of its romantic leads — but it isn’t a very gripping movie, either, because Cecilia and Robbie aren’t allowed to create a fierce, believable bond onscreen. This is a film you watch from the sidelines, thinking how pretty Knightley looks in this gown, that bathing suit, and how the lighting in a key scene in which Cecilia and Robbie have sex against a wall of books is more interesting than the scene itself.

In the end, the film is an exercise in style over substance, even though it tries like mad to convince you that it has plenty of the latter. It doesn’t. This movie’s heart wants to beat, but the script fails to give it the hammering pulse it desires and deserves.

Grade: C+

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Black Book: Movie Review, DVD Review, Blu-ray disc Review

“Black Book: DVD, Blu-ray”

From Paul Verhoeven, who always will be best known for directing “Basic Instinct” and "Showgirls," poor thing, comes “Black Book,” a tense film set at the end of World War II.

We're in the Netherlands, it's 1944 and the Jewish cabaret singer Rachel Stein (the excellent Carice van Houten) is trying to keep ahead of the Third Reich, which has gunned down her family in a bloody slaughter from which she barely escapes.

Now filled less with mourning than with rage and revenge, she joins the Resistance, dyes her hair blonde and becomes Ellis de Vries. Her job? Get close to Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), the attractive head of the Dutch Gestapo, and survive the harrowing journey that ensues. Since that journey is laced with sex, unexpected love, intrigue, guts and guns--sometimes colliding all at once--none of it proves easy, but just look at how coolly tough Rachel can be.

Some might say inhumanly so, but they’d be overlooking the inhuman times. As for the movie, it seethes with the hot thrust of a soap opera and the momentum it builds clashes to a crescendo.

Rated R. Grade: B+

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Gods and Generals: Movie Review, DVD Review, HD DVD, Blu-ray Review (2003)

A big, bloated bust

Written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, based on the novel by Jeffrey M. Shaara, 225 minutes, rated PG-13.

With its reams of endless speeches, forced emotion, whitewashing of history and interminable length, Ron Maxwell's insufferable Civil War epic, "Gods and Generals," just out on HD DVD and Blu-ray, is a big, bloated bust.

On almost every level, it fails to live up to its 1993 predecessor "Gettysburg," a better movie that wasn't nearly as self-conscious or as self-important as this fresh blast of hot air from producer Ted Turner's furnace.

Based on Jeffrey M. Shaara's novel, “Gods and Generals” is a nearly four-hour prequel to "Gettysburg" and the second in a planned trilogy.

God help us all if the next film, if it even happens, is as dull as this.

Instead of focusing on one major battle, as he did in "Gettysburg," Maxwell focuses on three--the Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Battle of Chancellorsville--while also telling the stories of the three most influential men behind those battles: Confederate Generals Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang) and Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) for the South and Maine's Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) of the 20th Maine Regiment for the North.

The balancing act that ensues is difficult to watch because Maxwell botches it so completely. With his purple script in hand, he sandbags his characters with such florid sentiment, you'd swear that Hallmark got screwed out of a writing credit. And maybe they did, because nobody--nobody--talks as archly as these people.

Jackson, in particular, comes off like a crazed, Bible-thumping madman, which some might say he was. Lang certainly seems to think so, and he gets behind the idea that every moment, small or great, deserves a big, holy-rolling speech to support it, which becomes at once hilarious and nauseating.

Joshua Chamberlain does have a speech toward the end in which he instructs a fellow officer to refrain from using the term "darkie" because "that's a patronizing expression from which we must free ourselves." But there's no passion in his voice, no sense of rage, and the scene ultimately falls flat and feels perfunctory.

Faring better are the battle scenes. Each is given its due with grand re-enactments comprising 7,500 real-life Civil War buffs. But for the most part, Maxwell sabotages a good deal of the combat scenes by not getting behind them. His camera is literally a stick in the mud, panning and shooting the action while only occasionally plunging into the heart of it.

With jarring cameos by Phill Gramm and Ted Turner, "Gods and Generals" is far from heaven, withering beneath the formidable shadow cast by Ken Burns' defining documentary on the Civil War.

Grade: D-

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Hart's War: Movie Review, DVD Review (2002)

The lucrative business of recreating war

(Originally published 2002)

Directed by Gregory Hoblit, written by Billy Ray and Terry George, 125 minutes, rated R.

Gregory Hoblit's World War II drama, "Hart's War," continues the recent rush of war movies marching out of Hollywood, a list that includes "Black Hawk Down," "No Man's Land," "Charlotte Gray" and "Behind Enemy Lines," and which continues next month with the March 1 release of the new Mel Gibson movie, "We Were Soldiers," and later on June 14 with John Woo's "Windtalkers.”

With the exception of "Windtalkers," which MGM has delayed for months, nearly all of the aforementioned movies were originally slated for later release dates. But considering the current mood of the country, Hollywood shrewdly stepped up its production schedules and entrenched itself deep into the lucrative business of recreating war.

Where "Hart's War" is concerned, that turns out to be a reasonably good thing, especially if you’re prepared before going in to the film that it won’t be the movie MGM is selling in its television ads.

Instead of delivering the non-stop action of “Black Hawk Down,” which is how “Hart’s War” is being marketed, it’s more often a leisurely paced, well-acted drama reminiscent of “Stalag 17” and “The Great Escape” crossed with “A Few Good Men” and “A Soldier’s Story.”

The film, from a script Billy Ray and Terry George adapted from John Katzenbach's novel, takes place in December 1944, just months before the Germans surrendered and American troops were sent home.

Colin Farrell (“Tigerland,” “American Outlaws”) is Lt. Tommy Hart, a Yale law student and senator’s son who, in the film’s spectacular opening sequence, falls victim to a bloody German trap that leads to his imprisonment in a crowded Belgium POW camp called Stalag VI.

There, Hart meets Col. William McNamara (Bruce Willis), the highest-ranking American at Stalag VI; the Nazi commandant Col. Werner Visser (Marcel Iures), a fellow Yalie who runs the camp; and a black airman named Lt. Scott (Terrence Howard) whose skin color becomes key in a murder rap that culminates with Hart defending him in an extended court trial that isn’t what it seems.

The standout here is Farrell, whose star should only rise this summer when he appears opposite Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” but Willis and Iures also are solid.

Still, “Hart’s War” is more than its performances. In spite of its occasionally plodding midsection, what gives the film an enormous lift are its twists and turns, all of which are surprising enough to make “Hart’s War” a war movie worth seeing.

Grade: B

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