Reviews

The story is known: on Yom Kippur 1973, Israel endured a surprise attack from Egypt and Syria. After a few days of often tough fighting, the IDF prevailed and then made its own gains on both states. In the end, it was an even more impressive show of Israel's force that brought Sadat to the table at Camp David in '78 and left Assad only enough room for some side-shows (aka meddling in Lebanon). What the series appears to be doing with this history (judging by the first 2 episodes) is to leave the grand narrative to the side and focus on what was going on on the ground. So, we're invited into the barracks and get to know Israeli soldiers, some of whom are not, in fact, Jewish - and some, too, might be personally opposed to Israel's expansionist policies. In other words, if you know James Jones' "Thin Red Line," you know what to expect. The enemy is treacherous, but easily overpowered - in one of the early scenes of combat, 3 Israeli Centurion tanks survive a bomber attack and decimate a Syrian brigade of Soviet T-55s (I think), suffering exactly 0 losses. The fight is tough, but rarely hopeless - as when the listening post/fortress in the Golan Heights is overrun by a Syrian commando, but the defenders hold out for what looks to be hours, enough to plot an escape. What's admirable about the series is that it makes a genuine effort to tell a complex story. This isn't yet the Israel of today, veering ever further toward right-wing dystopia, but a country that is still reconciling its Enlightenment ideology (of creating a new land with science and effort) with its tenuous hold on a tiny sliver of land lodged between the Arab "wolves." The problem is, the series tends to look as naive as some of the characters. When you shift focus from the macrohistory of the planners and generals to the microhistory of unit leaders and soldiers, you should not only experience the manias and anxieties of individuals caught in the middle of something they can't control, but also get to know the trade-offs that go with being inside a war. The series does show us the inhumanity of this conflict, but it lacks that element of darkness, something that Jones brought into "TRL" by way of irony bordering on satire. It's too painfully straight, even when the characters themselves are dumb or twisted, like the intelligence man with his white rat or the two childish tank commanders who only pretend they're adults. I don't know, it just doesn't feel like a meaningful contribution.

"Hit!" tells the story of an FBI agent who goes rogue to avenge the death of his sister from a drug overdose. The revenge takes him to France with a rag-tag bunch of similarly affected characters - the elderly parents of a dead addict, a call-girl with the heroin habit, a dockyard worker whose wife was killed by a junkie, etc. The agent spirits them all to Canada, narrowly evading the grasp of FBI, which is (somehow) trying to kill him rather than arresting him. From there, following an apparently impromptu training routine, the death squad travels to Marseille to pull off the hit on a group of French businessmen (and perverts) who make their money on heroin peddling. Furie's film begins with a sequence that juxtaposes events in Marseille - where the drug boss fishes out a drug shipment outside the harbor - and the US - where a young Black guy drives a Stingray Corvette to pick up his girlfriend and then get some heroin to have a ball. The cuts are incongruous - when the Stingray first appears on the screen, it is completely unclear what it's doing there; when we're back in France, it's even more puzzling why. This lasts a few good minutes, until the girl (apparently) OD's. When Billy Dee Williams' character appears on the screen, the French sequences take a back seat, which makes it easier to understand their import, but the pace declines so rapidly you can find yourself yawning before the 20th minute. Williams' quest to locate potential co-conspirators begins in good style, but then he herds them onto a dilapidated boat anchored across the lake from Canada and goes after another name, which results in a 20-minute sidenote that fails to push the movie any further. Canada being the peace-loving country that it is, even the escape up north doesn't help. When the group eventually reach Marseille, even the hit itself takes a quite long while to gain momentum, eventually providing the only reasonably good 10 minutes of the entire 2-hour film. Such a waste of time... That said, there are positives. Williams' character enlists the help of a hot-headed 50-ish policeman who reconnoiters the Marseille circles, effectively doing *all* of the FBI guy's dirty work for him. Him, Richard Pryor's sharp-tongued dockworker, and the druggie girl are pretty much the only characters in the film that invite any interest, and Furie indicates that he sees their value. Scenes with the other characters, sadly including Williams', are routinely off-pace. Furthermore, the story itself suffers from lack of consideration. FBI may have been (and may still be) a rather unpleasant entity, but the film depicts the organization as pretty much the equivalent of a drug ring, with the head acting like a drug lord, and his subordinates resembling mob hitmen. Williams himself seems more like a contract killer than an agent - which suggests that this aspect of the main protagonist's backstory was only resolved at the very last stage of script-writing. Finally, the film does not really belong in the "blaxploitation" category - while it does share the premise with the far superior "Gordon's War," it features only a limited number of Black actors and doesn't address the specific cleavages of the Black community, including life in the ghetto. The dead girl and Richard Pryor aside, it's a fairly regular White Hollywood flick, only poorly conceived, executed, and edited.

(No, I'm not going to give this one 10 stars because I liked it...) If you're unfamiliar with Ritchie's previous films - and I mean the Sherlocks in particular - then you're in for quite a ride. I recently tried watching the series on which this film is "based," and this U.N.C.L.E. is on some serious steroids. There's basically anything you want from a Bond-like action flick - a stunning car chase in classy rides (such as a Trabant), an audacious break-in at a secret lab (including a motorboat chase), and a heinous antagonist that just wants to make money off of splitting atoms. And it's even funny. Compared to the series, the film focuses more on what was previously left out: the back story of Napoleon Solo and Iliya Kuryakin. In Solo's case, this back story is suitably glamorous and involves a solid nudge-nudge for Cavill's fans. Kuryakin, on the other hand, is given a properly overblown Soviet background, with a hint of Siberia, some Stalin, and a piece of Lubyanka. So much for what they say - but what they do first is battle. In the series, Solo played a cunning man of the world to Kuryakin's straight-faced romantic; here, Solo is a cultured, self-assured super-thief and his Soviet counterpart a moderately psychotic, well-tempered killing machine. Both characters are very likable and the mutual tensions increasingly betray a hint of communion between them. As for the film itself, it's not spotless, but it's smartly done. It lifts little from the series, but certain moments are obviously inspired by the original. The pace is high and the editing sharp, but not too tiresome. Lots of stunning visuals, partly explaining why they chose Italy in general, and Rome in particular, as the setting. Glitches do appear and some ideas seem pretty ludicrous - but most of them are very much akin to the silly stuff from the Bonds, which is in character for a film set in the 1960s. As a whole, the film tends to make good fun out of a somewhat subversive critique of the genre. Generally speaking, it's just too much fun to be cross with.

There are a few things you need to know about this film before you see it: 1) It includes pretty graphic sex scenes, one of them featuring the director's teenage son Mario (in the first few minutes). 2) It features a lead that barely speaks throughout the film. 3) It will be a nightmare to watch if you're in it for the action. "Sweetback" is a piece of history which talks about the meaning of race in the US. The film is not realistic, but a metaphor - its main character a "man without qualities," its setting a prototypical black ghetto, its story a mixture of fugitive slave narrative, black power pseudo-propaganda, and nightmarish action thriller. The story is pretty simple: a black stud performing in a sex show for white audiences in the black ghetto is routinely stopped by white police officers (to make up the numbers). Witnessing the cops beat a young black power activist, he uses his handcuffs to kill both policemen and elopes with the boy. All this takes about 20 minutes of the film - the rest documents Sweetback's escape. Sweetback's actions will evoke the worst of racism in the white establishment, while at the same time exposing the ideological malaise of the black strivers. The film is a pain to watch, and that's precisely what it should be. And it speaks against a reality that still exists - blatant white racism and unwillingness to address the issue of race, black conformism and political disaffection.

This movie is positively weird. Literally. It begins just like any other grand war movie - little irony, not much social commentary. For instance, there's no talk of the ROK authorities, about Li Sung-man's *slightly* corrupt power wielding and so on. On the other hand, the truth is all there: after all, the protagonists don't represent some imaginary underclass, but exactly the typical South Koreans. One brother works so that the other may learn. Then, the war begins, and the elder brother decides to save his younger kin by joining in the same unit and embarking on a struggle for top distinctions. But he is mistreated - his fiancée is proclaimed communist (because she took part in some communist meetings - "for food"), and when he and his brother stand up against the ruthless anti-communist court, they also become communists in the eyes of the authorities. The elder brother, convinced of his younger brother's death (his girl has already been killed) joins the KPA to fight corrupt ROK (it isn't stated but that's how it can be read). When he recognizes his mistake, it's too late and he pays for it with his life. Now, the problem is that the story itself is very hieratic - big words and all. Yet, there is a curious underpinning to it all. What if we see Jin-tae's death as something that was a given from the beginning? That he was dead already when he joined ROK forces? That his struggle for a medal is supposed to help his brother is good enough, but quite soon it becomes a struggle not for the brother, but for himself. What we see in his actions is an uncommon amount of hatred - where did it come from? Maybe it's the war: that KPA's attack had him leave his fiancée, spend the prescribed day of their wedding on the front line? Or it's him, his powerlessness - he was constantly paying with his life: for his brother's education, his family's well-being... That this tension is unresolved bears on the movie heavily, but without it, it would be utterly worthless, a simple revision of the same old war story. What I liked in the movie was that the communists have no faces. The only communists we see are the officers - or the South Koreans compulsorily enlisted in the KPA after the invasion. This gives the war an unreality: it is not a struggle between men, but between men and an impersonal mass - ideology itself? The war is shown ruthlessly, though I'm afraid the authors of the movie overstepped the actual history quite a few times. I'm not so sure it wasn't the UN forces that took Pyongyang; also, I thought there was no battle for the communist capital, as the KPA has already withdrawn, lacking strength to push the allies back. Although the Chinese and the Americans are in the war already for some time, the final battle is solely between Koreans - is that how it turned out? One of the truths about this war is that most of the significant battles were fought by foreign armies, not by Koreans. This is not to say that there were no Korean soldiers, but they were used to less compelling tasks. Another thing - isn't an F-86 a jet fighter? Because in the final battle, we're told that "F-86 are ready," and the ones that come are propellers. Anyway, this isn't bad, but there are a few things to consider before it's marked as a "masterpiece" - which it (sadly) isn't.

I saw this movie this summer, at a French movies festival centered on the French New Wave. Circumstances allowed me to compare this with another of Robbe-Grillet's films, Trans-Europ Express. While the latter was fairly interesting (as a story set up on-the-spot, with its author, his wife and a friend negotiating what should happen now when Trintignant and the others are already acting), this was pretty much a disaster. A lot of things which worked well in the other ARG movie are hit-and-miss here. There, the fictitious story allowed for a flat, easy read - it's all a trick, there's nothing worth considering. The story of Boris Varissa/Jean Robin, on the other hand, seems to urge the viewer to set up a huge critical apparatus - only to give him back nothing more than a set of more or less unrelated cuts. On a very theoretical plane, The Man Who Lies could be viewed as a very critical essay on the French collaboration during the war and/or on the falsifying effect produced by a memory that wishes to become something else. Varissa could be one of the bad, a traitor, and the movie a sort of dream-like vision of his - maybe a plain nightmare. However, if we dismiss this interpretation - there isn't too much left. As a study in narratology it's too long and boring. As a piece of surrealism, it's unconvincing and irrelevant. I guess what makes this movie less significant than Trans-Europ Express is the fact that while there being artsy-fartsy was actually part of the game, here it's irritating. One note, however: although I find The Man Who Lies to be a trifle less convincing than Trans-Europ Express, it *was* that much more inspiring. Still, Robbe-Grillet's movie-making is boredom-inducing.