Cross of Iron - A Proper War Film

People who know me - and let's face it, only people who actually know me read this blog - will know that I am avidly interested in Second World War history. I discovered 'Cross of Iron' relatively recently while looking through a list of classic war films somewhere on the internet. It's a curious little film, made in the late 1970s and telling the story of a fictional unit of German soldiers on the Eastern Front at the beginning of the end in late 1943.

From the outset the film is stubbornly anti-war. An opening montage splices footage of the pomp of Nazi rallies against the grim reality of Germany's war against Russia; the promises of glory and conquest dashed by the terrifying truth of mechanised warfare. That's what the film is about. Maximilian Schell plays Captain Stransky, a man whose proud military upbringing forces him to abandon his comfortable post in France to come to the Russian front in search of glory and an aware of the Iron Cross. James Coburn plays Sergant Steiner, a reckless noncom stuck in a war he didn't want. Neither men are Nazis, but each fights for Germany for different reasons; Stransky for honour and his family's approval, Steiner because he's a working class man who happens to be really good at his current job. The men come into conflict after a Russian assault leads to Steiner being hospitalised and a number of men dead. Stransky claims he led a counter-attack against the Russians, but Steiner wont corroborate his story.

I didn't know what to expect from this film. There are a number of very tough scenes of battle and a lot of throw-away moments that pick up on the impersonality of industrial warfare. Particularly well-done is a 20 minute sequence in the middle act where Steiner convalesces in a military hospital before returning to the front. His shell shock is barely understood by the doctors and wilfully ignored by the generals who want him back on the line. Some excellent editing puts us in Steiner's head as his mind flits between various versions of his present reality combined with his nightmare memories of the recent past.

The film ends in a way that is very strange, initially it's unsatisfying as it provides no closure on the outcome of the brewing conflict between Steiner and Stransky. But given the point the film is trying to make, it's a perfect way to end. After all, what is the relevance of this personality clash in the grotesque and uncaring theatre that is the the Eastern Front? The machinery of war cares not which of these characters ends up besting the other, all the war cares about is relentlessly consuming another couple of unfortunate souls.

This is an excellent film that deserves its place on any list of 'great' war movies.

Whip It - (not Whippet)

A young and bright-eyed girl in boring town with dull family yearns to get out. Girl discovers by chance something she loves doing and is good at. After much perceverence and conflict with parental figures, girl learns about life through her newly-found passion and comes of age.

Don't worry dear reader, I'm not talking about 'Dirty Dancing' - although the format for such films is so ingrained that often I barely even realise I'm seeing it these days - I'm talking about Drew Barrymore's directorial debut 'Whip It'. Cards on the table time - I was drawn to this film after I saw a trailer last year that consisted mostly of roller-chicks skating around in fishnets to Weezer's 'Pork and Beans'. Sometimes making an effective trailer isn't rocket science.

'Whip It' stars Ellen Page as Bliss, a young 17 year old with a stuffy mother and a football-obsessed father who yearns desperately to get out of her hometown. After seeing a flyer for a roller derby in the bright lights of Austin Texas she persuades her best friend to take them there. She's suddenly in love with the sport, tries out for a failing team and - well you can probably fill in the rest of the plot for yourself.

Watching the film last week made me feel like I assume many women must feel when watching many Holywood movies of any genre. The standard convention is for most female characters to be foils to the male leads. Films where this isn't the case are notable mainly because of it. The main characters in 'Whip It' are exclusive women, with the male characters interacting with Bliss in a peripheral way (and never with each other). I think I'm a pretty liberal guy, but this made me feel a bit uneasy. Perhaps I'm so liberal that I was uneasy with this inversion of sexism as much as I would be with sexism in the traditional sense? More likely I'm so indoctrinated with film convention that this inversion of it freaked me out. Or possibly I felt subconciously cheated by the film - wasn't this meant to be about girls skating around in slutty clothes rather than being some kind of 'who needs men anyway' coming of age tale?

If it wasn't for the subversion of convention in 'Whip It', the film would be pretty bland. As is it though, it's a kind of alright bit of fun movie that you can enjoy after a long day's work without having to turn your brain on. Ellen Page is solid in the role but needs to break out of the habit of being cast as teenagers. She was good but underused in Inception last year, I don't want to see her getting stuck in an acting rut.

The Eagle

A friend of mine seemed extremely excited about this when she saw the trailer - apparently it's an adaptation of a kids book - so when the opportunity to see an advance screening at the Winnersh Showcase came up last night I thought it sounded like a good use of Orange Wednesdays. 'The Eagle' is based on the teen-fiction novel 'The Eagle of the Ninth' - which in turn is loosely based on the mysterious disappearance of the Ninth Hispanic Legion from Rome's annals in mid-second century Britain. Marcus Aquila is a Roman centurion whose father lead the Ninth and disappeared with the entire legion 20 years prior to the events of the film. He has a one-tracked mind, to recover the golden eagle of the Ninth legion and restore his family's good name.

The film becomes a standard band of heroes tale in which Marcus (Channing Tatum) and his British slave Esca (Jamie Bell) travel to Scotland to search for the Eagle. Esca is honour-bound to serve Marcus, but will his loyalty to his own people undermine each man's confidence in the other? The film is tight-lipped on the subject of who the 'bad guys' are here, though Marcus represents the Roman invasion force, Esca's people are often savage marauders who admit to killing their wives rather than allowing them to become Roman servants. Nice bit of 'grey area' work there - slightly undone by a moment towards the end though, but I wont dwell.

Every time I felt I was getting into 'The Eagle', it started to undermine itself by trying too hard to give the story a context for the modern viewer. A good example of this is when Marcus's uncle (Donald Sutherland) narrates a gladiatorial contest - "Hmm, a slave against a Gladiator, the slave often does badly here". No shit? Also the final scene teeters on the edge of turning into an Adam West Batman episode - always ending with a joke and a smile and a "I wonder where our next adventure will come from Robin...". Is this the kind of thing teenagers need? I thought that the modern teenager was supposed to be a savvy creature?

I was frustrated by the way that Roman Britain was portrayed in the film. There is a lot of historical debate over the level of integration of Roman society into Britain and the impact of rebellious elements like the Brigantes, the historical consensus seems to be that much of Britain was a place that largely embraced Roman rule. The film's suggestion that native Britons lived as slaves under rule by foreigners is almost certainly wrong. And they definitely didn’t have American accents.

Despite much of what I've said here, I recognise that the film isn't intended as a history lesson and that it is based on a novel aimed at a teenage audience. There are some brutally realistic battle scenes (although most of the audience seemed more freaked out by Esca eating a rat then the general carnage) and a huge amount of attention to detail with regard to costume and language. It's a perfectly respectable way to spend 2 hours in a cinema. Especially when it's a preview showing and there aren't any adverts or trailers - genius!

Agora - Maths and Sandals

I don't really know how this one passed me by when it was released way back in 2009, but a film about mathematicians is the kind of thing that's normally on my radar from the moment it's first advertised. Maybe they ran a really low-key marketing campaign after realising that a story about 4th century scientists wouldn't sell too well. As it transpired imdb recommended this to me when I was looking something up bout 'Primer' last year, and yesterday I popped the DVD in the PS3 for a watch.

The story is this: Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is a 4th century philosopher studying and teaching in the Library of Alexandria - a great centre of learning in the Roman world. She is living at a time of change; the Roman Empire has recently legalised Christianity and followers of the young religion are fervently spreading its belief into all aspects of life. With the slow collapse of Rome's influence across its empire, there is a gap in people's beliefs which the Christians are eager to fill. The scientists of Rome and Egypt associate themselves with the gods of old though, and a conflict becomes inevitable.

At its most basic this is a story warning of the dangers of fundamentalist religion. The film depicts the influence of dogma as corrosive to free thinkers and destructive to society and civilisation. You'll get no argument out of me regarding this thesis. We see Hypatia as a woman interested only in her science, but persecuted by the Christians as a 'whore' and a 'witch' for the influence she has over her ex-students - now leaders and clerics in Alexandria. I think that the film can either be taken as a historical epic or a warning about the modern rising tide of Islamic extremism (and how fundamentalist Christianity isn't very different from it).

Importantly the religious sects in the film are not uniformly painted as backward. The fanatical Christians are in one scene shown to be of the belief that the world is round (a common misconception is that everyone thought the world was flat until renaissance times - in fact it was well-known that the world was round in ancient Greek times). This helps the film avoid being labelled as a taking a dogmatic anti-religion viewpoint - the 'Richard Dawkins factor' as I like to call it. Instead it takes a more considered approach, which helps its credibility.

That said though, the film is a little sluggish and takes huge liberties with history. Although Wikipedia agrees with the assertion that Hypatia was perhaps the first woman of note in the history of mathematics and that her death at the hands of a Christian mob is an event that serves quite nicely as a metaphor for the coming dark age in Europe; the film's suggestion that she somehow pre-empted Johannes Kepler's 17th century discovery of the elliptical orbit of planets is totally without basis. In short, 'Agora' is an interesting film that opened my eyes to a little-considered part of history. It's heart is in the right place with regard to its depiction of the influence of religious cults, but despite this (and a great performance from Weisz) it's just too dry. Which is a shame, as I was rather hoping to be able to sing the praises of a little-known modern epic about maths.

The Adjustment Bureau

After being described on Mark Kermode's film reviews show as 'Inception-lite', I was intrigued by 'The Adjustment Bureau'. The film is based on a Phillip K Dick book and stars Matt Damon, who in the Bourne films showed he's very capable of turning in a lead performance worthy of a good script. So there were reasons to be hopeful.

The film starts well. We see Damon - playing a New York congressman running for Senate - losing his senate race after a series of gaffs. He is observed from afar by men in Fedora style hats who seem oddly interested in his movements and actions. This is only 15 minutes into the movie, and at this point I was anticipating a mystery in the Hitchcock style. Strange then that shortly thereafter Damon's character stumbles into a room full of the fedora guys, who capture him and proceed to explain who they are, what they're doing and Damon's significance to them while outlining the rest of the movie. Essentially Damon must never see the girl he met on the bus today (Emily Blunt) or else the 'man upstairs' will be VERY UPSET!

Despite the best efforts of this plot exposition to derail the movie, the next hour is rather entertaining. Damon and Blunt's continuing efforts to flirt with each other before finally getting together are the stuff of romantic comedy fluff, but none-the-less fun to watch. It probably would have ended up scoring a solid 6 out of 10 if it were not for the lame ending, in which the characters get to have their cake and eat it. The fact that this film was ever mentioned in the same breath as 'Inception' surprises me a lot. I assume that the original book poses all sorts of philosophical questions about the nature of free will, these are either missed or ignored here in favour of an easy ending.

Paul - nerd-tastic

The trailer for 'Paul' was very annoying. It opened with a clip of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost telling me to go to the cinema more, then advertising Odeon stuff. Thanks guys, definitely not selling out there. The trailer made the film itself look like a slapstick bromance in which Simon Pegg's credibility as a comedy writer would be further diluted. It also revealed something that happens quite close to the end of the film and would have made for a nice surprise had it remained a secret.

Suffice to say I went into the cinema yesterday with lowered expectations. Everything Simon Pegg has done without Edgar Wright on board as director has been below par at best. It's nice to be proved wrong sometimes though, and it turned out that 'Paul' was a fine comedy that retained a lot of the geeky film-obsessive referential stuff that Pegg and Frost have built a fanbase up by exploiting.

In case you don't know, 'Paul' is about two English nerds (Pegg and Frost) who go on a road trip of discovery in America and stumble across an Alien called Paul. Paul is on the run from the Men in Black and asks them to help him get home. Cue slapstick, comedy wordplay, science fiction, comic book geekiness and a refreshing amount of anti-bible rhetoric. And also film references. You could write an essay of the films referenced in 'Paul', and it were these that kept me laughing loudest. Close Encounters, Aliens, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Titanic and Back to the Future are the ones that come to mind now - with my favourite being the Aliens reference towards the end (no spoilers from me there hopefully).

Seth Rogan is perfectly cast as the voice of the slacker alien Paul (never thought I'd put the words "Seth Rogan" and "perfectly cast" in the same sentence), his semi-stoned drawl keeps the comedy moving along nicely for the whole film. Pegg and Frost are their usual selves, I would literally watch anything that they'd written and starred in.

In conclusion, I was certainly surprised by 'Paul'. Surprised by quite how much I laughed, surprised by the number of science fiction in jokes (not hinted at what-so-ever in the trailers) and most of all surprised by the mainstream appeal the film managed to retain in spite of all the geekiness. It's another win for Pegg and Frost, now when's the last of the Cornetto trilogy coming out?

The Crazies - unimaginative horror

I suppose there was a time when this kind of stuff counted as imaginative or worthy horror. Nowadays it looks a little tired and hackneyed, touching on the kind of themes that were bread and butter for the X-Files nearly 20 years ago (was it really that long - gulp!).

'The Crazies' is a horror / thriller set in a small US town where a downed military plane has released 'something' into the local water supply. People start to go crazy, and as the locals try to cope the federal government responds by instigating a 'containment plan'. Things don't look good for the residents of Ogden Marsh.

Apparently this is a re-envisioning of a George Romero film of the same name. Romero is well-known for using the horror genre to hold a mirror up to society, and I presume that in 1973 his film was at least a little groundbreaking. The makers of this version of 'The Crazies' have come to the party too late though and there's nothing here that I haven't seen before. A lot of standard 'paint-by-numbers' horror genre stuff goes on in the film (a couple on the run, an enemy within, encounter with deranged hillbillies, evil government soldiers in gas masks). It feels just the same as so much else that's out there.

Not that 'The Crazies' is a bad film at all, its just that I was left feeling rather indifferent towards it. There wasn't anything frightening or jumpy in it - not good for a horror film - and although it had good ideas, they're all ideas that have been done better elsewhere. Not one to make an effort to see sadly.