Time for some fun Holiday stuff.
I've gotten a lot of emails from readers of this blog over the past year (Holy Shit! This blog is a year old already!) requesting articles on 'this war' or 'that world event' which, I must say, I really do appreciate. People requesting articles makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside so thank you all for that. One of the most common questions I get asked is what kind of stuff I watch or read. So I thought I'd do movies since the 'holiday season' is here and there'll be good stuff on TV to sit down and feel fat and satiated over. Ain't First world problems grand?
Naturally, I'm talking war movies here.
The thing about war movies is that you can probably really only enjoy them if you've never actually been in a war. So long as it remains theoretical, war is entertainment. In many ways movies are the lingua franca of our time, the place where ideas get disseminated into the global culture and the Zeitgeist gets measured by box office tickets sold. Movies today are a lot like how the Romans amused themselves in the amphitheaters only today, nobody really dies, they don't give out free bread and instead charge you a day's salary for the popcorn and sugar water at the in house feeding station. Seven bucks for popcorn! What the fuck?
In writing this movie post, I was thinking of scanning my memory and coming up with some default list of war movies that "the critics" would agree with to make myself sound all erudite and intelligent. But then I'd be bullshitting you. So I came up with a novel strategy. You see, I moved house a while back and had no Internet or TV for a whole five days. To entertain myself, all I had were movies I'd stored on my external drives. And I said to myself, these must be the movies I really like and not the ones I should like since those on my drives were the ones I'd deemed worthy of digital storage. So I used that criteria to compile this list...
Sure, I'm probably leaving out a whole bunch of great movies and your favorite war movie but what the hell. Here, in no particular order, are the war movies I re watch when I find myself getting philosophical at 3AM and need to remind myself how fortunate I am not to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time and conscripted as a foot soldier into some general or politician's pocket shooting war.
Sure, I'm probably leaving out a whole bunch of great movies and your favorite war movie but what the hell. Here, in no particular order, are the war movies I re watch when I find myself getting philosophical at 3AM and need to remind myself how fortunate I am not to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time and conscripted as a foot soldier into some general or politician's pocket shooting war.
WATERLOO
Seriously, they don't make them like this anymore. Made in 1970, before today's CGI (where today they hire fifty extras to run around in the foreground while bulking out the background with 50,000 pixelated enemy formations), this is a movie that truly 'spared no expense' and hired real actual men to act out the pew-pew. And it sure does show on screen. You get to see thousands of guys dressed in period costume run around that Belgian field re enacting one of the most decisive battles of all time. It really puts you there. Muskets, line formations, cavalry attacks, infantry squares, the whiff of grapeshot, cannon balls, it's all just brilliantly rendered by actual men. Wide shots reveal huge line infantry ranks while you can almost hear producer Dino De Laurentis shitting bricks in the background wondering if this production was going to pay off. Rod Steiger plays the titular little man with the emperor complex and Orson Welles shows up as "the unavoidable" Louis XVIII, the last French monarch to die without being king. Watch this if you want to see 50,000 extras in full period costume run around on screen for real!
A BRIDGE TOO FAR
This is classic stuff. Made by seventies era logic, a different time when WWII was still fresh in the Zeitgeist's memory. As a kid back then, all the comic books were still WWII based; Victor, Warlord and Commando. The WWII generation were entering their golden years (we survived the war but we're going to die anyway...argh!) So war movies as retrospective were popular. And it was a time when it was still possible to make an epic movie with a shitload of Hollywood stars who took a pay cut to make something huge possible. Check out that cast list! Directed by Richard Attenborough, it was all for a movie about a 'little' operation called Market Garden; Montgomery's 1944 dick waving attempt to end the war fast and prove he had balls and could be as unpredictable and foxy as the great man in the desert himself, Rommel. In the end, Montgomery's gambit failed. Maybe it should have been planned by my favourite British general of WWII, Richard O'Connor. The idea that you could para drop 30,000 men behind German lines, capture bridges and clear the way for an armor thrust into the heart of Nazi Germany to end the war quickly was pure hubris built on the Allied success at Normandy and the capture of Paris. Here, in 1944 on the Western Front, the Wehrmacht proved it still had teeth! The scene with Robert Redford rowing across a Dutch canal under enemy mortar fire stands out. "Holy Mary...mother of God..." Brilliant war movie stuff!
Before you think I only watch '70s war movies, let me throw Spielberg's amazing movie into the mix. I remember watching this in a Santa Monica theater in the '90s and it was like all my stupid fascination with men killing each other got thrown against the fire of visceral reality. War is fucking horrible. And that's why it sells tickets. Because we humans love it. From the nail biting 20 minute Normandy opening sequence, on through the accurate representation of WWII equipment (that Tiger tank looked really real!), you cannot escape this movie if you want to get your war on. It's a total experience. It really does put to rest that movie trope where, after guns get fired, people handily die neatly so the main characters can move on with the rest of the plot. That's the shitty thing about war movies generally. They always leave out the awkward wounded, that sad fact that after an engagement you're left with say 20 dead but 60 more wounded screaming in pain and calling out for their mom. Fucking reality, how does it work? This movie doesn't flinch when it comes to examining the ugly truth of pulling the trigger on a live human. Men die and it's ugly. War is the worst thing about our species. And, worse still, sometimes it's justified.
APOCALYPSE NOW
'Nam. The jungle. Napalm. A soundtrack by The Doors. A script by John Milius based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And directed by Coppola who remortgaged his house to get it finished after the studios pulled funding after the whole production turned into a cluster fuck in the Philippine jungle. This is the Vietnam war movie for me. Hell, they even made a movie about the war zone making the movie became! But how can you not like the end product? One of those rare auteur movies that don't get made anymore because everything that gets green lit in Hollywood these days has to pass through shitloads of corporate fucktards who run market analytics and get back to you on Thursday.
Marlon Brando showed up on set 100lbs overweight after cashing the million dollar check Coppola wrote him, so Coppola had to improvise on the fly, filming the final Col. Kurtz scenes in close ups and shadow. He made it work! It's an artistic vision, a philosophical journey and damn tour de force film making. The newly released Redux version adds a good fortyish minutes to the original and highlights French history of meddling in Indo China by way of a dinner conversation and a sensuous opium smoking lady. If you're partial to the 'herb', there's no better war movie to sink your mind into and become one with the screwed up violent nature of us upright apes.
THE LONGEST DAY
The definitive D-Day movie. Hands down the best. Based on Cornelius Ryan's book (again) with a slew of military consultants on hand who actually participated in the landings, this is the movie to see if you've got three hours to sink into epic war. Again, the cast list is a who's who of Hollywood at the time and all actors took a pay cut so it could get made. One of my favorite aspects of this movie is the accurate rendering of all participants (the Germans are not portrayed as mindless goose stepping Hitler lovers and speak actual German with subtitled English) and so too is the role of the French Resistance (not brain dead frog surrender monkeys with a penchant for wine and running away) like the American Right liked to portray when they came up with "Freedom Fries" in the cafeteria, this movie is detailed and accurate. Sure, there are some hokey bits with John Wayne showing up but we're talking early 60s here so we've got to forgive the iconophry and get with the program.
This is strict by the book narrative and it works. It's pure war movie goodness.
THE THIN RED LINE
Yeah sure, that choice is going to throw some of you. Sure, the hill assault scene is amazing. But you know what? This whole war movie sticks with you. Sure Terence Malick is the kind of director that gets accused of masturbating onto film but I "get it". It's art. It's war. Sometimes they meet like the WWI poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. Who doesn't realize the thin line between life and death more than a soldier in war? That's the question that gets asked here. The philosophical wonderings are sweet. In a way, they capture what soldiers really think (at least in the eyes of an artist). Plenty of people think it's not a great war movie but I re watched it recently, and, as I get older, I really can connect with the life and death philosophy of war that Malick here tries to explore. It's a superior war movie and you should like it.
Not exactly a full on war movie I know. But I'm throwing it into the mix because I love it so much and fuck everything. James Woods as the gonzo journalist in an impossible war zone is my fantasy alter ego. If only I had the balls to sneak into Syria right now. Oliver Stone wrote the script, directed the movie and I suppose it should be mixed up with 'Platoon' and 'JFK' which means I'm tipping my hat to those movies too. But Salvador is my favorite Oliver Stone movie. Gringos meddling in South America has never led to anything good (just ask Cortez) but this gritty movie highlights that in spades. The harrowing scene at the end where border control seizes his newly acquired wife wrecks my head every time I watch it. It's as relevant today for all nationalities where 'small people' get caught up in global chessgame proxy resource wars. After we wreck your country because we don't like your government, don't show up on our border as a refugee. You'll get called an 'illegal alien'.
FULL METAL JACKET
Can you leave Stanley Kubrick out of any favorite movie list? Probably not possible. Sure, who doesn't love Dr Strangelove or Barry Lyndon? But Kubrick knocked it out of the park in this study of how ordinary men get mind fucked into being 'soldiers'. This movie is the ultimate meditation on war. Young kids plucked from adolescence and transported into a reality devised by old men. Old men that run countries and see war as a solution. The hierarchy of human affairs is on display here against the background of the Vietnam War. This movie is ugly, visceral and somehow quiet. It's kind of like war itself.
GALLIPOLI
I love Australia. And I love Peter Weir. This is probably the greatest 'anti war' movie ever made. Seriously. And it was all Churchill's fault when he was 'First Lord of the Admiralty". Chucking the ANZACs against the Turks, hoping to open up a new "Southern Front" versus German allies sounded like a good idea, but in practice, it turned out to be one of the worst ideas in military history. Those guys got bogged down into one of the worst impossible situations in military history. But the Aussies and New Zealanders were thrown against the problem nonetheless. The ANZACs have always been great fighters as far the the British Empire went but this was not their finest hour. Why? Because Churchill fucked up. He wasted divisions in an amphibious assault that got bogged down on a beach and a rocky coastline versus machine guns. This movie not only shows the futility of that operation but also the totality itself. Young men seek adventure. And old men equip them with weapons and point to an enemy and say that is where adventure is.
MASTER AND COMMANDER
Do you have an interest in the Age of Sail? Sure you do. This movie depicts it brilliantly. There was a time before our Facebooky, Twiterized world when shit was really real. That means you getting pressganged onto a Royal Navy ship in the 18th century. That sure was a scary time. (By that logic I suppose, when was there a time in human history that wasn't scary). Still, if you want to know how the British built their empire, this movie approaches it. Sea power. A dominant navy. The world got explored by wooden Euro ships and this movie captures that idea. Rival Euro powers killing each other for golden trinkets stolen from foreign shores? Sure. But this movie has more. It recognizes science too and how warfare and enemies propel us forward as a species. The British gave birth to a Darwin in the wake of conquest. In a way, the US landed on the moon to beat the Russians. We humans are propelled forward by conflict. It's ugly. We're sad. But it is.
Oh yeah, and there are great cannon battles on roiling sea. Do you aim at sail or hull? This movie puts you there and makes you realize how lucky you are not to be a crew member. Your life today is basically the dream of every sailor. Food, clothing and shelter are today things we take for granted. There was a time when your life now was the dream of the ages. Even if you're poor as fuck, these days the life of a poor man is so much better than a poor man's life in the past. These days, the poorest pleb has a better diet than the King of England in 1750. The modern world scares the shit out of me but you know what, the visceral reality of the past and this Royal Navy movie scares me even more. I got born in the perfect zone! A rare 1980s incarnation which will be seen by future historians as the perfect war free zone in comparison to the global proxy resource wars that will come later in the 21st century.
KELLY'S HEROES
I'm throwing this movie into the mix and yeah, I know it has no place here. But you know what, it's probably my favorite war movie. Yeah sure, that's horrible. Why? Because it's war as comedy. War as something other than tragedy. That's so wrong. And yet I love it. I remember watching it as a kid and crying buckets when it ended. The camaraderie. Soldiers in war. The idea that being shot at binds you together as men. Roman legions operated off this principle. All soldiers do. And as a kid, this movie made my child's brain realize that. Sure, there's something wrong with us as humans if we organize ourselves into armies and make it an industry and devise elaborate ways of killing each other. But in my child's brain, there was something in this movie that appealed to that dark side of my brain.
War as comedy. War as binding men together for a common goal. Sure, I'm bullshitting here but tell me you don't love this movie. Oddball coming out of the tunnel in a Sherman tank gunning down Nazis, Don Rickles weighing up the price of gold and that classic scene where Eastwood, Oddball and Telly Savalas confront a Tiger Tank with Sergio Leone music. War is terrible. But for some reason this movie turned war into fun. For whatever reason, my ten your old brain cried when it ended. WW II was probably the last 'good war'. War will never be so simple again. The bad guys will never be so easy to define in our proxy resource war future. This movie, for me, harks back to a time when war was worth it.
Anyway, that's my mind dump on war movies.
