Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2015.2

This is an Italian-Algerian movie about the French-colonial occupation of Algeria and Algiers in particular. The movie covers the time when Muslims were killed indiscriminately and fought back with their own attacks. The French respond by closing the city down, segregating the animals into their own ghettos. This predictably does not work and the retaliatory attacks not only continue but intensify.

This movie should be required viewing for anyone in any military anywhere, but particularly for those in the U.S. and Israeli armies, which are chock-full of people and planners that think that this time it will be different. It is never different. Subjugated people are desperate people, Desperate people eventually have nothing left to lose. And then they are ready to take down anyone one they can.

Even the French treatment of prisoners is reflected in many other instances throughout subsequent history: they torture them, they kill them, prisoners die in custody, allegedly by their own hand. The Colonel denies that they “torture”. Would that Americans knew that they were copying a French playbook. The Colonel is quite analytical and open about what his country is doing. He notes that it can end immediately if France is willing to leave Algeria.

The movie is well-made and fascinating, if boring for anyone who’s a student of history, where the same stupid and horrible and immoral mistakes are repeated over and over, causing everyone but the perpetrators to suffer. The planners never suffer and they never learn. Algerians die. Low-level police officers die. And the fearless colonial leaders continue to turn the screws as if exactly that strategy hadn’t failed every single other time it’s been used since the dawn of time.

“French Newspaper reporter: Isn’t it cowardly to use your women’s baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives?

“Monsieur Ben M’hidi: And you, isn’t it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill thousands more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and we will give you our baskets.”

Saw it in French and Arabic with English subtitles. Recommended.

Tim Robbins stars as a postman broken by his experience in Vietnam. For the duration of the movie, it’s unclear whether he is still with his wife and children and hallucinating a life with a postal coworker (Elizabeth Peña) or the other way around. He seems to be hallucinating a world full of faceless demons—a mania shared by several of his platoon members. Danny Aiello plays his chiropractor, whose angelic aspect is noted and emphasized, again blurring the line between reality and fantasy.

It is unclear what is real and what is imagined; what is clear is that Jacob’s life has been unutterably ruined by his experience in Vietnam. Every day is torture.

Spoiler alert: The first explanation is that his experience turns out to have been that his platoon had been exposed to a particularly powerful psychosis- and paranoia-inducing chemical code-named Jacob’s Ladder that made them turn on each other. It’s so hard to tell which parts are real, which are imagined, where he really lives, who’s still alive: the confusion he feels is reflected ably in the story.

This is a strong anti-war movie and one of the earliest I’ve seen that deals with the paranoia and unbearable pain of PTSD. There is no happy ending, there is no way out…but the inevitable. At the end? We find that the whole movie was the final few seconds’ fevered imagining of Jacob Singer’s dying brain as he lay on a stretcher in a medivac tent in Vietnam. Recommended.

This is a French film starring Catherine Deneuve in the titular role (translated as “trophy wife”). She is the heiress to the Michonneau umbrella factory, which is run for her by her obnoxious husband, Monsieur Pujol. The year is 1977. The local communist/unionist, Babin, is played very well by Gerard Depardieu, a return to his more thespian roots from such terrible roles as Obelix or that Russian gangster from Babylon A.D..

Monsieur Pujol responds badly to the strike brought on by his worker-unfriendly policies. He takes ill and someone must step up. But who? His son doesn’t want it because he’s more of an artist; his daughter doesn’t want it because it sounds a lot like work. Plus she’s a Randian nightmare seemingly modeled on Marie Le Pen. So Madame Pujol-Michonneau steps up and does quite a fantastic job, resolving the labor dispute and propelling the factory to success and stability and profitability without firing a soul.

She gives both her daughter and son jobs. Her son flourishes in his role as designer, for reasons that are only hinted at rather than explicitly stated. Her daughter is much a caricature as her father and is nearly pure ego, thinking only of how to best set up her own life, and to hell with anyone else at the factory. Her husband is even more economically liberal than her and hatches a plan to send production to Tunisia, a plan of which her father heartily approves.

Long story short, the mother is ousted as president in a board meeting in which her daughter unsurprisingly betrays her mother by siding with her father’s bid for president, a position he feels he owns. Instead, mama goes into politics and the film ends with her first victory.

Decent enough if a bit manipulative. I enjoyed it while watching it. Saw it in French with English subtitles.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell star as a couple of guys, Ken and Ray, on holiday in the city of Bruges. They are there to await their next assignment as hit-men. Their background story is revealed in fragments as they tour the city, Ken enjoying himself and Ray sulking throughout. This movie is a master class in show-don’t-tell cinema. Spoilers ahead; do not read further if you want to enjoy this clever, well-written and well-filmed movie as I did, not knowing anything about it going in.

Their boss finally calls to inform Ken of his job: he’s to kill Ray. He agrees but then backs out, saves the younger killer—who’s suicidally depressed about having shot a boy on his first job—and sends him on his way. Harry, the boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, is not pleased when Ken calls to inform him that he’s let his contract go and invites him to “do [his] worst”.

The anger-management–challenged Harry hops on a plane to Bruges to take care of things himself. He meets Ken in a café in a plaza. They slowly drink their beers—this evidenced wonderfully by the sips Harry takes—and talk. The dialogue throughout is really nice. We see Harry wince slightly as he feels the connection to Ken, their long years of camaraderie, the connection you get when in a foreign country among friends, but knowing that it won’t end well for Ken.

There is a possible reprieve, but it is not to be. One must stand by one’s principles, as Harry says, and Ray had killed a young boy, even if by accident. The scales must be balanced. Highly recommended.

This is a languid, slow and eminently predictable—excepting one detail—bank-heist film, starring Al Pacino and directed by Sidney Lumet. It is based on a true story of a robbery on August 22nd in 1972 by a trio of utterly unprepared fools, who are quickly whittled down to two as one of their number chickens out almost before the heist has begun. Because it’s the 70s, they just let him go.

Pacino is good as Sonny, making demands and playing to the crowd by yelling “Attica!” The cops are not particularly adept, although they make up ineptitude with sheer numbers. The guys are really pretty stupid and the FBI quickly pegs the problem as Sonny’s partner Sal, who’s clearly more unstable. Sonny is boisterous—and married to both a woman and a man—but he’s not suicidal. Sal is. At one point, Sonny claims that they were both in Vietnam—and he has an Army pension coming to him—but Sal’s never been on a plane, so the story is only half-true, at best.

Despite the high praise for it, I found it to be kind of slow and not producing very much tension. The scenes of 70s New York were lots of fun for me, but probably aren’t for everybody. Pacino’s Sonny had more meat to him than the usual criminal, but he was by far not a mastermind. He thought he was much smarter than he really was. It was almost sad how naive he and Sal were; when the get their jet, he asks “is there going to be any food on board?” A decent film; hard to recommend. Poignant ending.