Buck Privates

Private Parts

Buck Privates
USA 1941 
Directed by Arthur Lubin
Universal/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Following on from the box office failure of One Night In The Tropics (reviewed here) but, also marking the success and popularity of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in their joint movie debut in that film (although, it turns out, not quite in Lou's case... more on that in a silent Laurel & Hardy review coming to the blog), they were signed to at least two more pictures and Buck Privates was the first of many where they were the main draw. Having said that, there are a couple of other characters who are also there to provide a kind of romantic rivalry in the film and who share the limelight with the two comedians.

Bud and Lou play two illegal street salesmen who run away from a police sergeant and join the line in a cinema for cover. They’re both too stupid to realise it’s a line for ‘peacetime recruitment’ for a year’s national service, to get people trained up as soldiers ‘just in case’ America entered the war... and so end up recruited themselves. Also recruited is a millionaire playboy portrayed by Lee Bowman and his ex-servant and main romantic competitor, played by Alan Curtis. Both of these mostly loathe each other and are both after the same army gal, played by Jane Frazee and, when the camera isn’t concentrating on various Abbott and Costello routines worked into the story, the rivalry between these two is shown as quite cut throat and nasty, until the rich playboy saves the life of his ex-employee and they both do their company proud in an army game at the finish of the movie.

So, yeah, it’s all the kinds of gags you would expect from this kind of ‘little people joining up for a greater cause’ movie but, of course, in terms of American movies, it would have been one of their earlier ones so, at the time, it wouldn’t have seemed quite to formula. Indeed, the movie was a huge hit, making more money than any other Universal picture had made up until that point. 

The comedy is mostly good stuff... some of the physical stuff is really creaky and there’s a hell of a lot of ad libbing going on (for instance, a drill routine was supposed to last three minutes but went on for over five, because all the ad libs from the boys were kept in) but the fast dialogue shenanigans, many once again based on ways Abbot could con money out of Costello, are all great and very witty. There’s also an early appearance of a boxing match that Costello gets conned into fighting which, if I remember rightly, was revisited in various ways by the duo over the years. 

Interjected among the comedy is the story of the rivalry between the two other male leads and, some really great song and dance numbers including The Andrews Sisters. This was the first of a few collaborations they filmed with Bud and Lou and they got a few big hit singles out of this one, including the tremendous Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B, of course. 

A couple of things to mention here too. Firstly, keep an eye out for the cook who features prominently with Lou in a musical scene in the army kitchen tent... it’s none other than Shemp Howard of The Three Stooges fame. Secondly, that long drill scene (which I have to say, was not exactly a highlight of the picture for me) was something that the Japanese used to show their soldiers during the war, to demonstrate just how stupid the American soldiers were. Hmmm... a somewhat back handed compliment I guess. 

And, like I said, Buck Privates really did the business at the box office and the prints were at a shortage and in demand from cinemas. In fact, it delayed the production of the next Abbott and Costello film, also directed by Lubin (who did a number of these and was given a $5000 bonus by the company after this one proved so successful), because the studio wanted to give it a bigger budget and restyle it to a bigger picture. So I guess that’ll be the third film coming up in this beautifully restored Abbott And Costello - The Universal Collection Blu Ray set so... I’ll get onto that one soon. 

Force 10 From Navarone

May The Force
Be With You

Force 10 From Navarone
UK 1978 Directed by Guy Hamilton
Indicator  Blu Ray Zone B

As a rule, I’m not the biggest fan of war films (at least not terrestrial based ones). I’m not particularly worried that a lot of them make light of the war and are usually fun filled shoot ‘em ups which amount to not much more than Boy’s Own stories. Heck, even the serious and more conscientious ones have a certain degree of that to them. I just don’t like them all that much and can probably count on the fingers of one hand the ones I do enjoy (I even have a few I haven’t seen yet in my ‘to watch’ pile, courtesy of director Sam Fuller). That being said, Force 10 From Navarone is one of those films which I like above and beyond my ability to explain why although, when I first saw it on the television back in the 1980s (I don’t remember catching this one at the cinema... but I might be wrong on that count), the main draw would have been the inclusion of Harrison Ford in the cast, whose star was about to rise to meteoric proportions thanks to films like The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here), Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Blade Runner (reviewed by me here).

The film is actually a sequel to a classic war film made 17 years before, The Guns Of Navarone, which I had seen a couple of times in my childhood but it never really struck a chord with me (although, if I watched it now, I’d probably find it’s a masterpiece). This one did though and... now that the fabulous Indicator label have given us a new Blu Ray transfer of, not just the theatrical cut but also the extended edition, nicely packaged with a bound book about the production, some stills from the film and a gazillion extras all in a nice slip case for a surprisingly low cost (in this day of overpriced limited editions)... I couldn’t wait to re-watch it again after all those years. I wasn’t disappointed although, truth be told, there’s not a heck of a lot that special about the movie either.

After an opening recap of the first film’s ending, with the guns of Navarone being destroyed by explosives (and with the original cast kept out of camera), we hitch up with two of the main characters from that film but, instead of being played by Gregory Peck and David Niven, they are replaced by Robert Shaw and Edward Fox. Now, the original plan was to have the cast back from the first movie, which was to be made soon after but, since there was a large gap as pre-production flailed then failed, they were too old to play the roles again by the time the film finally made its way into production and so we have, in some ways, a poor man’s cast replacement... although Shaw and Fox are obviously great actors in their own right. Here they team up with Harrison Ford’s ‘Force 10 Squad’, to get dropped off enroute on his mission in order to identify and kill a traitorous character from the first movie, who is played here by Franco Nero. The film’s main cast are rounded out by Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel, who were both, presumably, relatively fresh off the set of The Spy Who Loved Me (reviewed here) and who would soon be making the Italian sci-fi film The Humanoid together. So three major Bond actors along with a couple of other minor Bond character actors in the cast, not to mention the film being directed by Guy Hamilton... who directed three of the Bond movies too.

Okay, so, as soon as their plane is shot down and their numbers are thinned out, the film becomes a proper adventure romp, with various shoot outs and explosions, as the main players join forces properly to help complete each other’s missions and save the day... which they do but, not necessarily in the way they thought they would.

If anything, the thing that struck me about watching the movie this time around was the way the suspense sequences were milked for every drop, such as the parachuted Edward Fox being rescued by another main member of the team played by Carl Weathers (that’s Appollo Creed to you) as he gets stuck in a tree and dangles above a German soldiers head... you know the kind of thing. This film is full of it and it’s also weighted with a lot of dramatic moments devised to second guess the audience which, over the years, dates it maybe a little. Such as characters revealed that aren’t dead after all and various ‘deus ex machina’ rescues from an unexpected (ish) source just at the last second. That being said, clichéd as the movie is, it’s all done with a tremendous sense of fun and I couldn’t help but be thoroughly entertained by it once again. Especially when you throw in Ron Goodwin, the composer of such famous military scores as 633 Squadron, The Battle Of Britain and Where Eagles Dare (among others), providing a strong march and incidental music which, as far as I’m concerned, is certainly one of his most whistleable scores. This one’s been heard issuing shrilly from my lips on many occasions over the years, I can tell you that.

Indicator’s new release is amazing and includes a number of extras, one of the highlights of which is a 20 minutes plus look at the huge differences between the Theatrical and Extended cuts... both of which contain various things not in the other version. This valuable extra shows you things like the vast differences in the opening narration, the completely different title sequences, the various lines which have been re-dubbed and added or subtracted in each version (I think the extended version is a little more family friendly, too, when it comes to alternate dialogue), the difference in the sound design in certain scenes (details like the sounds of birds and insects either timed differently or absent in one cut or the other) and even the absence of music in certain places in one of the cuts. One of those extras which really is worth having.

Another extra which is worth the cost of admission, although I’ve only watched the first ten minutes or so at time of writing this, is an hour and a half archival interview with the composer from the 1990s, which absolutely transports you back to his time growing up in the 40s and 50s, from what I’ve heard of it so far.

So, yeah, not much more to add on this except, Force 10 From Navarone has absolutely nothing to do with Navarone (Alistair McLean’s original and much different sequel novel may well have more to do with the first one) but it’s certainly an enjoyable movie and this new limited edition Indicator Blu Ray set is absolutely the best way to see it outside of a cinema presentation. One I’ll no doubt be dipping into again at some point in the next ten years or so and certainly value for money. I’m absolutely delighted to be reacquainted with this old friend again, no matter how corny some of the dialogue and situations are. A welcome return to the home video format.

Overlord

Horrors Of War

Overlord
2018 USA Directed by Julius Avery
UK cinema release print.

Cry havoc... and let slip the dogs of war. Or, in this case, let slip the reanimated corpses of French villagers given a substance which turns them into crazed, mixed up super soldiers.

When I first saw the trailer to Overlord, a month or two ago, I found it interesting that J. J. Abrams was producing what looked to be a new entry into the ‘zombie nazi’ subgenre but I figured, at the very least, that meant there would be some money thrown at it so it might be worth taking a look. It could go either way in terms of quality and the trailer wasn’t really giving a good flavour of what the final product might be. So I went and saw this the opening night of its UK release and... by golly I’m glad I did.

Overlord is one heck of a well made horror movie, directed by Julius Avery and, well, it’s just extremely competently made and is entertaining as you could hope for. As far as it being a zombie Nazi movie... well technically it’s not. Most of the reanimated people in this are not actually German soldiers and the one Nazi officer who does benefit greatly from the effects of the super serum that the typically stereotypical ‘bespectacled German war scientist’ in the movie is developing isn’t... well, he isn’t dead. There are a few reanimated corpses of note though so, while not absolutely a ‘zombie Nazi’ film in its absolute correct definition, the juxtaposition of those two elements certainly throws it into roughly the same kind of area, if genre categorisations are your thing.

The film tells the story of a unit of soldiers flying into France to blow up a communications jamming unit on top of a Nazi controlled church (more like a fortress, truth be told). However, after they are shot down, the few survivors of the incident manage to find each other and regroup to carry on the mission. The main protagonist is Boyce, played absolutely wonderfully and with a fine mix of both confidence, righteousness and vulnerability by Jovan Adepo. Now, the only big problem I had in terms with suspending disbelief in a film about reanimated corpses taking a super serum is that, heck, you would not get that racial mix happening in the US army in the 1940s. The soldiers would have been segregated into different units but... if you can get past that, Adepo really owns the character and gives the audience someone to believe in and care about.

Another member of the troop is Ford, the tough and slightly enigmatic member of the unit. He also brings a nice quality to the film and all the way through I kept thinking how much this character would have been well played by Clint Eastwood back in the 1960s or 1970s. Now I knew it wasn’t Eastwood’s son playing this role (for my thoughts on him, read my review of Pacific Rim - Uprising here) but, once I’d stayed behind for the end credits and found out the actor’s name was Wyatt Russell, it all made sense. Closer investigation showed his full name to be Wyatt Hawn Russell and he is, in fact, the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn... so looking back I must have been picking up on a vaguely Snake Plissken vibe to the character. He does really well in this movie too.

Now, it has to be said, the film is pretty intense and brutal in places, even before the surviving troops befriend one of the local French women, Chloe (again, played quite brilliantly by Mathilde Ollivier) and get embroiled with a triple mission of blowing up the tower, stopping the mad experiments which are taking place in the basement of the fortress and rescuing Chloe’s younger brother. One of the reasons it is so intense and, for once, had me on the edge of my seat, is because the whole ‘war is hell’ angle is played up so well that it more than holds its own against the horror element. Scratch that, I would go as far as to say the way in which the conflict between the Nazis, the American soldiers and the occupied French villagers is handled is absolutely what gives this film its edge over a lot of others where they might not necessarily take up the amount of time to pitch the setting right. In fact, apart from a gooey mess of a body found in the early stages of the film, the horror B-movie (with an A-movie budget) doesn’t even start to emerge until about a third to a half of the way through the story. When it does it’s equally fraught, as Boyce finds himself on his own midst the enemy in the compound for a while... something the director really ramps up by using a lot of hand held camera during these passages. Heck, even Boyce’s parachute jump at the start of the movie is an absolutely drawn out, nerve stretching suspenseful sequence and it just keeps getting more intense from there.

The other thing about this is that the film doesn’t skimp on is showing the brutality of war and what both sides are willing to do in the conflict. There’s one sequence in the middle of the movie, when the German officer who is built up as the main villain of the piece is being ‘interrogated’ by the Americans, where Ford is seen to be almost as brutal as the Nazis in his methods of acquiring the information he needs to know. To be fair, you’re definitely rooting for Ford again by the end of the film but this movie really takes no prisoners when it comes to being fair about what people are capable of doing for their respective side of the conflict. For example...

The film is full of clichés such as the soldier who is perceived as nasty but then turns out to redeem himself and have a heart of gold by stopping a bullet for the child he pretends to hate. The soldier in question is played by John Magaro and, like any of these actors, you could see them holding their own in some of the great war movies such as Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Ditto for the cliché of the war photographer who’s not really a soldier but ends up going through hell (played here by Iain De Caestecker from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD). The thing is, though, because the film is so dark and raw when it needs to be and doesn’t really flinch in the ‘horrors of war’ department, I really didn’t mind the clichés inherent in some of the character types. Indeed it’s kind of comforting that they’re there in a way and, of course, it makes for really useful shorthand in telling the story quickly. And with Jed Kurzel’s wonderful score backing up the visual intensity... sadly unavailable as a commercial stand alone release when I tried to buy a copy of the soundtrack, CD or otherwise... you really do feel it when the action gets going and things get a little insane.

One other thing about this movie I should probably warn you about, if you’re not a die hard horror fan... there’s a lot of blood and viscera in the film. You will see a person, for example, shot in the head and then, with his face half hanging off, dose up on the serum before beating everybody else up. This is war and when the bullets start flying, sometimes when you least expect them to, then the director doesn’t look away when it comes to throwing in the guts and gore. Not necessarily an element which I particularly look for in a film but, if the story atmosphere calls for it then I don’t think you should skimp on it and this seems to be the view shared by the film makers on this one, to be sure.

So that’s my take on Overlord, a movie which I wasn’t too hopeful about but which I’m really glad I saw. This is quality B-movie exploitation shocks done just right and with, for once, a big enough budget to be able to pull it all off credibly. If you are into horror movies, or war movies or, as like this, a thrilling combination of the two, then you should definitely put Overlord near the top of your list because it’s all put together extremely well. Oh... and if you have already seen this and you were in the 8.20pm screening at Enfield Cineworld in Row E on the opening Wednesday... get a life. You don’t need to be texting on your phone all the way through the film. Turn the damned thing off and watch the bloody movie.

Dunkirk

Dun-roamin’

Dunkirk
2017 UK/Netherlands/France/USA
Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK cinema release print.

It might be pertinent, perhaps, to mention at the very start of this review that I am not the biggest fan of war films. That being said, there are a few which I think work really well and I’m sure that if I could just bring myself to see a few more of them, I’d probably embrace the genre as much as I do any other. However, I’m also not the best admirer of the work of director Christopher Nolan either, although I did like the second and third films of his Batman Trilogy quite a lot.

So why did I go and see this movie then?

Well, I’ve mellowed a lot to the music of Hans Zimmer over the years (and seen him twice in two incredible concerts, one of which is reviewed here) and I really wanted to see what he’d do with a score set in the Second World War which, I assumed (rightly, as it happened), would eschew the traditional but quite effective, Ron Goodwin style approach to the onscreen antics of its protagonists and instead deliver something much more... um... Zimmer-like. I wanted to see if this kind of scoring would hold up to the subject matter. It does so admirably, as it turns out but, that being said, it’s not a typical war film either. Even so, Zimmer meets it more than halfway. I’ll get back to the music in just a short while but let me tell you a little more about the film itself.

Well, it’s a bit of a visual treat and that’s good because, as I said, it’s not your typical war film and there’s not a lot of dialogue in it... the main chunks of speaking going to Kenneth Branagh as an officer but even his dialogue is minimal compared to most other movies. It’s also not a film which captures, in any way, the epic scale of war... at least not in the same way that most directors would do it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s more like watching an intense, dramatic thriller than a big patriotic celebration and I think the reason for that is because the film doesn’t focus on big units of men moving around... well it does have that element, obviously but, it doesn’t focus on it...

Instead, it tells a story from the points of view of four main protagonists in different parts of the skirmish. We have a young soldier called Tommy, played really interestingly by a guy called Fionn Whitehead and he is on the beach at Dunkirk. He just wants to get off the beach and onto a boat, somehow, to escape all the killing going on around him. He’s one of those characters who any person would really want to be around because, just like Sandra Bullock in Gravity (reviewed here), wherever his character ends up, that’s where the most trouble and peril is going to hit. Stay away from this guy... he’s incredibly unlucky. We also have Kenneth Branagh as an officer on the same beach, waiting patiently for some kind of help to arrive to get his soldiers off to safety.

Then we have Mark Rylance playing Mr. Dawson... a civilian mobilised to take his boat out on a rescue mission to get the soldiers and who takes his son and another local lad with him plus... we have Tom Hardy as a spitfire pilot who sacrifices his best survival options in order to pitch in when it counts. I thought it was kind of interesting that Tom Hardy played the Batman nemesis Bane in the same director’s The Dark Knight Rises (reviewed here), mostly behind a mask and in this film he also, almost the whole time, plays a character hidden behind the mask of his flying outfit. Interesting that Nolan picked himself an actor who he knew, from previous experience, could deliver a performance with most of his face hidden from the audience. Good call.

As the little storylines unfold, the main dramas leave the Branagh officer part more as an anchor point which is not really going anywhere but which has this important character because you get a sense of ‘establishing info’ from him whenever we cut back to him. So the main dramas are Tommy trying to get away from conflict with every path he chooses seeming to get him closer to it, the noble spitfire pilot who is running out of fuel and needs to figure out when to turn back and we have the drama of Mr. Dawson and his companions after they pick up a shell-shocked soldier filled with the horrors of war, played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy.

However, what’s really interesting... and I didn’t really realise this was happening straight away, is that the linear track of the film is chopped into little bits and we are crosscutting continually to bits of the action which are happening in a totally different part of the timeline. So, for instance, we can be watching an action or suspense scene cross cut with another scene which was occurring a day or so before but without any warning and, I have to admit, it took a little while for me to realise what was going on until I started noticing things like days scenes cut against night and the different characters looking at other scenes from a different point of view. It’s actually very clever in this regard and, as the film progresses, you get the sense of time zones speeding up to meet each other, somewhat, so that by the time you get to the end, you can place all the characters in roughly the same area at more or less the same time and see how the actions of one person in one place has consequences to another character in a slightly different chronological space.

Nolan also has a way of sometimes ‘hanging back’ in a shot and giving the camera POV a certain voyeuristic kind of feel. For instance, he might follow a character only so far into a shot and then stay put so you can see the character from afar interacting with a new environment... almost like using an establishing shot in reverse. Now I have seen this technique used before, most notably in Isabella, Duchessa Dei Diavoli (aka Ms. Stiletto, reviewed by me here) and Nolan does it really well here. It’s a great way to place your main protagonists into a situation while detaching you and letting you see a slightly bigger picture at the same time.

Now, I have to say that I did find some of the editing, even following this deliberate method of structuring the story, a little clumsy in parts. Things occasionally felt disjointed and popped me out of the narrative at some points but... Nolan is lucky in that he’s got Hans Zimmer suturing up all the little visual discrepancies that some of the audience might feel are there. Which, okay, is a standard role of film music anyway... it brings continuity across the cuts... but Zimmer really earns his keep here.

I was thinking about the relationship between composer and director as I left the cinema on this one because the music is a big factor in the success of this film, I feel. If you think about the huge impact made by the partnering of Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann you will perhaps remember the latter’s famous score for the former’s Psycho. A score written entirely for strings but which has a vast impact on the way the film was perceived. Even Hitchcock himself, before that score was written, was contemplating cutting Psycho down to an hour and using it as an episode of a TV show before Herrmann told him to hold on until he’d written something. The result was a score which many people regard as injecting pretty much all of the tension and unease you feel in Psycho when watching it. Without Herrmann’s music, the film would not be the powerful classic it is widely regarded as being today.

And I think, without doing Nolan a dis-service because his visuals and scenarios are quite intense in some places... that this is exactly the same thing happening here. I believe Zimmer’s score for this movie is responsible for, maybe, over 90% of the unbelievable ‘edge-of-your-seat’ moments in the narrative. There’s a really strong set of sequences near the start of the film where Tommy and a French soldier grab a wounded soldier on a stretcher and make a very long, fraught and suspense filled run to get him on the one leaving ship... in the hopes that they can get on it themselves. Even from this section, Zimmer’s music is full on tension filled suspense and it’s, wisely, mixed into the foreground of the audio track so that it can do its job as effectively as it does. And it continues to do it throughout, with a score which uses a recording of Christopher Nolan’s pocket watch ticking transcribed into a synthesiser and used, perhaps in a clichéd way, like a metronome’s heartbeat on the soundtrack which synchs with your own biology and ramps up and down with your emotions once you’ve got it in your head. I’m really looking forward to listening to the CD of this one away from the movie, I can tell you.

So yeah, that’s my take on Nolan’s Dunkirk. There’s excellent acting in a truly visual style... it’s the looks, pauses and reactions, not the words, which make for most of the drama. There’s some beautiful cinematography and some well designed sequences (such as a truly suspenseful part where Tommy is on a boat being slowly riddled with bullet holes... I won’t describe the whole scene and spoil it for you here, though) and there’s Hans Zimmer’s truly phenomenal score (which I was surprised to hear commented on by a random audience member as they were leaving the screening... more people are actually listening than I thought, perhaps). So, yeah, this one counts as my third favourite Christopher Nolan film, I think and, as such, gets a strong recommendation from me. War is hell... but it can also look and sound pretty nice with the right people behind and in front of the camera... so maybe give this one a watch.

Fury

Cantankerous

Fury
2014  UK/China/USA
Directed by David Ayer
UK cinema release print.

Fury is the name of a tank.

This film follows the war time exploits of that tank and it’s crew, commanded by Brad Pitt as Don Collier, during the last year of the Second World War.

As such, it hasn’t got a standard story, or traditional plot line. It’s a very basic, drive your tank here, point it over there and shoot but, of course, that’s a very simple minded appreciation of what we have here which is a very tight and gripping war movie, trying very hard to be as authentic as it can be to what it was like to be in one of those tanks at that point in time. War didn’t have stories as we know them but it also had thousands of stories every day, depending on your view of the term. So in some ways, I guess this does have a story of sorts... the story which is the arc of the personal histories of the men who are driving the tank.

Now with a bunch of actors like Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña and Jon Bernthal... who are all beyond excellent in this and stuck in close proximity in the claustrophobia inducing, cramped conditions of one of these things... you’d expect this to be a character piece and, certainly, you do get a measure of the men these actors are bringing to life in front of you. However, it’s interesting in that it’s not a character piece in terms of the history of any of the men. There are occasional little hints or flourishes which allow you to make shrewd guesses about the back story of some of the main characters but, ultimately, you are in the same position as someone who would be taking Brad Pitt’s advice to his new gunner, Logan Lerman, for the first time... don’t get too close to anyone. So this film is very much a study of the way that men who are none too palatable, in some cases, bond through war and have become a crack fighting team in spite of their differences.

And I have to say the film works really well in this.

For instance, when you are first introduced, pre-credits, to the majority of the crew, they don’t exactly seem to be a well oiled machine in terms of their ability to gel as a team. There are some points in the film where people take a swipe at each other and generally don’t get on with their fellow men, thrust into the mix inside a ticking time bomb of metal carnage... but this film, after deliberately setting up that inconsistency with the way the characters act and react to each other, shows that beneath the surface of these men, there is an overreaching spirit to complete their mission for their country or go down fighting. It’s in this way that the true character of the people involved comes out. The hooligan of the group, who often starts trouble, has a telling scene in which he tells the new recruit that he believes him to be a good man. Everyone has a heart, it seems. They just don’t let it show.

Pitt’s commander is very much a man who is holding together a unit while trying to hold himself together at the same time. There are more than hints that he’s already suffering from some kind of combat fatigue but, unlike a similar condition displayed by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, he keeps it in check with a minimum of fuss and Pitt’s performance here is such that it becomes very easy to see the sympathetic and extremely empathic man underneath the fierce veneer... and it is a very fierce and challenging veneer as he forces his new recruit, quite physically, into shooting a captured nazi, for example.

Logan Lerman plays Norman Ellison, the new boy, and he also has his own journey/story... as he goes from pacificistic Christian to out and out nazi killer over the course of the film... a journey that Brad Pitt facilitates due to the necessity of having to survive in this kind of conflict. There’s a certain irony to Norman’s attitude by the end of the film when he comes face to face with a nazi searching for survivors but, since I don’t want to spoil the ending of the movie for you, I’ll hold off pointing it out in this review and just urge you to go see it and think about it for yourself.

I’ve not seen any other movies by writer/director David Ayer but he does a fine job here and makes some very interesting, almost puzzling choices in the way he shoots certain kinds of scenes. Specifically the battle scenes.

He goes with hand held camera reacting to things, as you might expect for a modern film about conflict, but he tempers that with absolute static shots of whats going on, in terms of camera movement, every two or three shots in the combat sections. It’s actually curious but quite grounding... like a series of mini establishing shots cut into the battle. The editing is quite pacey but it’s not too fast like a fair number of modern action movies and I think it might be due to the static nature of some of those shots which helps the audience not lose sight of the geography of the action a lot of the time. You really feel those fraught and suspenseful battle scenes too so it’s not something which lessens the emotional pull and drain you get when this kind of stuff is going on.

The other really phenomenal thing about this movie is the score by Steven Price. It’s interesting because it’s quite unlike a traditional war score, bringing a very contemporary style of beats and electronica into the mix. At the same time, possibly due to the mixing but probably due to the spotting, because it does have a chance to shine within the mix, it feels very appropriately scored throughout and you never really question the decisions made with the make up of the music... so it’s another good one from him. I have to say, the CD has gone straight to the top of my Christmas list this year.

Not much else to say on this one. The ending has divided some people and I think the irony of it at a certain point is a bit much to swallow, but overall I think it caps things off quite nicely and I’m not going to be too critical of that because, one of the things I know about trying to get by in a chaotic world, is you don’t always make decisions that make sense. It works well enough and, overall, Fury is a movie which pulls no punches and reminds you of the heroes who died for their countries during conflicts ike these. A good, solid war movie if that’s the kind of thing that floats your DUKW or tracks your tank. Take a look at this one on a big screen if you get a chance.

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border

Tunnel Vision

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border
2008 Israel 
Directed by Gennady Kuchuk
Viewed on the internet at the invitation of the director.

You know, one of the perks of writing a movie review blog on the internet is that sometimes, more often than you’d think, you get directors emailing or DMing you on twitter (it’s mostly through twitter) who want you to see their film. It’s a nice compliment because, presumably, it means they’ve read something that you’ve written somewhere (or one of their friends has) and it’s been appreciated by someone at some point. Sometimes it can turn out to be a bit of a bugbear too because, occasionally the films turn out to be not that great and you wonder if you really would be doing them a disservice if you wrote an honest review of the work in question. Then it can get a bit tricky.

However, I’m happy to say that, right from the first, beautifully coloured, 2.35:1 aspect ratio opening shot of Gennady Kuchuk’s The Tunnel - Gaza-Israel War Border, I knew that I was glad this guy had asked me to take a look. To be honest, I found the first few shots of this movie quite astonishing, not just because of the striking clarity of the detail but because of the richness in colour of an opening sequece which is capturing an external location. I could understand it later on, when most of the action takes place in the tunnel of the title, because it must be a lot easier to control the look of interior shots but, seriously, I was really into this movie from the first frame and, anyone who’s read my blog for as long as I’ve been writing it, knows that I’m not that often into viewing shorts (although I’ve seen a fair few good ones over the last few years so I’m really going to have to stop saying stuff like that). Special shout out to cinematographer Asaf Korman for his work here. He also edited this thing and it gets quite inventive in that regard, which I’ll talk about in regards to a montage shot a little later.

Anyway, this movie is essentially a two hander and it follows a patrolling soldier who, after the brief establishing of his character using a couple of props (inhaler, musical photo card of his girlfriend back home), all of which are reused at key moments later in the film, is shown on patrol but then finds himself falling through a hole in the ground and winding up in a tunnel. He can’t go back up and, as he explores his new environment, he finds one of the enemy in there. As they are fighting, an explosion goes off and closes off the rest of the tunnel, trapping the two of them in there.

Have you ever seen Hell In The Pacific. It’s another two hander directed by John Boorman, starring Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin as rival soldiers in World War II who are shot down on a deserted island. At first they play military games with each other, each trying to get the upper hand, and then eventually they start to cooperate to get off the island. I don’t want to say too much about that particular film but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I found out that Kuchuk was a fan of that one because he essentially captures the same kind of values and explorations of the human spirit that Boorman did in his feature... except Kuchuk does it in just under 20 minutes.*

Kuchuk doesn’t have Mifune and Lee but he does have two, very capable young actors playing the two lead soldiers in this one called Artur Marchenco and Joelal Msarva. These two do a wonderful job in playing people who start off as rivals and then, when compassion comes into play, they cooperate to try to dig their way out of the tunnel and back into their respective parts of the conflict. There’s some really nice things going on in the performance as the two grudgingly earn a healthy respect from each other as their confinement continues and the director captures the reddy brown hues of the tunnel’s walls, perfectly creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia almost palpable in its illusory intensity.

There are some good things happening in the edit too, especially with a time montage sequence where shots of the two soldiers digging are rotated around as slow moving, 360 degree inserts on a black frame to indicate the passing of the hours and the progress they have made. That's kinda new to me, I think. I don't remember seeing a film that expresses the passage of time in exactly this manner before... so that was a nice surprise. Especially with Dimitri Lifshitz’ deceptively simple score gluing it all together with a melody that adds weight to the almost hypnotic circular motion of the sequence. This is good stuff.

At last knockings, I don’t want to give too much away about this film because it’s worth you taking a look at it some time. I will say that the ending is a little bit clichéd but, at the same time, if it hadn’t have ended in the way it does, you might have felt a little bit cheated by it and, besides, the final pan shot across the desert sand and the quick glimpse of something else you get is such a nicely understated gesture to the gravitas of what’s just occured that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that final and subtle, visual moment.

The Tunnel: Gaza-Israel War Border is available to rent or buy from Indie Reign here. The film is also available on demand at Distrify  here and if you want some more information about the film, including a trailer for it, it can all be found here. A nice little movie about the nature of conflict and the way in which your personal politics evaporate in light of the chance of survival, the enlightenment of empathising with your enemy... and the ultimate price you pay for your peace. Check it out when you can.

*Between writing this review and publishing it on my blog, the director contacted me again and told me he’s never seen John Boorman’s Hell In The Pacific. Which is great because it means he’s got a great movie to add to his “to watch” list and I think he’ll like it as the two directors both tackle the same kind of themes in a very similar, head on manner. Hope he likes it.