Purandara's Reviews

Fallen Angels

Wong Kar-Wai is the modern cinema's premier poet of loss and longing. His characteristically enigmatic films capture the erratic rhythms and ephemeral nature of memory and torment: fleeting, fragmented, wandering only to return obsessively to its central foci.

While Wong's debut, As Tears Go By, was a relatively straightforward commercial riff on Scorsese's Mean Streets and the 'heroic bloodshed' style of Hong Kong street opera pioneered by action maestro John Woo, he would establish with Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express a signature style characterized by visual bravura mixed with interwoven and intensely introspective tales of emotionally isolated young people adrift in the shadow kingdom of urban postmodernity. Eschewing more traditional narrative formats for an ellipitical self-referrentiality that mirrors memory itself, Wong's films are rarely instantly accessible, but reward the patient viewer with intoxicating moods and contemplative brilliance.

Fallen Angels was originally conceived as something of a 'nightside' sequal/companion piece to Chungking Express. Structurally and thematically it mirrors the latter with two seperate plotlines, each centering on a pair of twentysomethings (a hitman and his female 'agent' in one and a strange, mute confidence man and the girl he takes a shine to in the other) in search of love but unable or unwilling to find it in each other. Assorted camera tricks, fish eye lenses, slow motion sequences and the strategic use of a gloriously bittersweet pop soundtrack all help to capture a mood of frantic desperation and the distortions of memory and longing.

Wong also invokes the first of his 'art' films, Days of Being Wild, returning to its concern with the loss and meaning of identity in an impersonal world. Leon Lai's hitman and Takeshi Kaneshiro's petty criminal both try - and fail - to remake their lives on ths straight and narrow. One of them manages a peace of sorts with his failure - the other goes out out in a bittersweet blaze of glory. Through them, explores the way in which longing (mis)identifies others: his characters view each other through the distorted lens memory and desire - what they see is not reality, but a projection of their own dreams: when the truth is made manifest, it is always the cruelest blow.

10/10

Here we go again...show me a good Nazi. No, really. Let me see this fabled good Nazi. Anyone responsible for genocide is bad. No, really.

No, if you pay attention to the looks of disgust on other characters faces when inhumane things happen, you see that cheering was NOT the directors intent. The director isn't responsible for how auduiences percieve his work.

The entire film is about the moral ambiguity of war. Tom Hanks' character was racked with guilt from all the killing he'd done that he figured that saving Ryan would absolve his sins and he could face going home. Or did you not pay attention to that part? The Germans in the film were doing exactly what we were doing, which is killing their enemies. It's kill or be killed in war. Were they supposed to go "Gosh, that guy spared us, let's NOT kill him..."?

You criticize the film for being simplistic, but you're guilty of that as well. American films = bad in your book, and somehow, Nazis = good. How in the world did they let you back in here?

The simplification here is that all Germans in the film are equated with Nazis, even though the vast majority of even the Waffen SS formations (which don't make an appearance in the film) by this point in the war were filled with conscripted soldiers with no connection to the Nazi Party or its crimes beyond the accident of the time and place of their birth. The regular army formations had essentially no Nazis in them, and yet, Spielberg consistently conflates "Germans" and "Nazis" throughout the film (and, indeed in much of his earlier filmography as well).

The Germans in film are portrayed as a monolithically evil force: they are cowards who hide unseen in fortifications while the 'manly' Americans advance across an open beach, civilian-killing snipers, and oathbreakers who give their parole only to return to kill more Americans (and in about as slow, sadistic, and brutal fashion as can possibly be managed under combat conditions). The portrayal is calculated to produce hatred for the Germans and indifference to their fate and to provide a justification for any actions the American soldiers might take. It's the sort of device that might have been acceptable in a wartime morale booster, but I think is frankly unconscionable in a film made 54 years after the fact, not to mention that it undermines any claim to moral sophistication the movie might have.



I don't see disgust, only indifference. Obviously, that's a totally subjective judgment, but it's rendered almost totally irrelevant in the face of the structure of the scene and accompanying emotional manipulation.

No, but the director is responsible for the way a film is shot and edited - and if he does these things in such a way as to virtually guarantee that kind of reaction from the audience, it becomes very difficult to seperate the viewer reaction from the director's intent.

In the case of Saving Private Ryan, every element of the opening scenes is carefully constructed to instill in the audience an intense identification with the Americans and an equally intense hostility towards the Germans. The film opens with Matt Damon's character in a military cemetary. This scene is essentially irrelevant to the rest of the film. Its only purpose is to put the audience in a properly patriotic mood before kicking off the action by exposing them to some highly emotionalized iconography: Old Glory waving proudly, the old soldier breaking down in tears, and the rows of crosses and Stars of David (a subtle reminder of the supposedly innate moral superiority of Americans, never mind that it glosses over the fact the US in 1944 was an apartheid state - and one whose very existence rested in part on a genocide far more complete than Hitler managed with the Holocaust).

The opening battle sequence is just as manipulative. It consists almost entirely of POV shots from among the American attackers. Their purpose is to increase our identification with US soldiers. Subjective shots are heavy handed and emotionally manipulative technique, which is why more morally sophisticated films either use them sparingly, as in The Thin Red Line, or create some balance by using POV shots from both sides of the fight, as in the climactic moments of We Were Soldiers. The structure of the landing scene also contributes. We are treated to nearly half an hour of unremitted brutality, with Americans slaughtered by the dozen and essentially unable to fight back. When the audience can take no more, Spielberg provides relief in capture of the forward German positions and and the murder of their defenders (whose fate the US soldiers - and the audience - have been rendered totally indifferent to).

If the entire film is about this, why is it condensed into 5 minute segment amidst nearly three hours of battle scenes? Besides, how can we even think of talking about 'ambiguity' in a film that unequivocally answers the only question it poses? As the film ends, it was all worth it, the good guys won and the American belief in the supreme value of the individual is stirringly validated. A few moments of psychobabble in a barn in no way alters the black and white triumphalism of the rest of the film.

Correct, but the film fails to note the moral equivalency of American and German actions. American actions are presented as justified - they happen in manly, open combat. The Germans kill from hiding, or after violating the parole they've given. For God's sake, one of the scenes features a German sniper shooting at CHILDREN from a church steeple. Far from calling attention to the sameness of German and American actions, Spielberg constantly makes distinctions between the actions of the good Americans and the bad Germans.

In fact, Spielberg's portrayal verges on ethnically motivated bigotry. The American characters (with the exception of the weasely looking REMF translator) are uniformly attractive young men. Their leader is played by the man who was the biggest movie star in the world at the time Saving Private Ryan was released in theaters. The Germans, on the other hand, are notable for their physically unattractive features. The parole breaker, in particular, looks like he just crawled out of one of those "Help Beat Back the Hun" recruiting posters. So not only are Germans evil - they're ugly too! The REMF deserves special mention here. Unlike the other Americans, he sees the Germans as humans, he even speaks German. He is thus portrayed as somehow less American, and inherits as a result the moral taint of Germaness. He is a coward, a weakling, and a fool, and his misplaced mercy leads directly to the sadistic death of one of his comrades.

No, I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the commercial film industry in America works, but I think a lot of individual American films (both major and independent releases) are great. I just find Spielberg to be indicative of larger structural problems in the industry.

No one said "Nazis" are good - I'm just objecting to a morally unsophisticated appraisal that treats Americans as inherently good and Germans as inherently bad, without really investigating the actual dynamics on the ground.

In other news, how can anyone in good conscience give a negative rating to the above post? I welcome disagreement, but at least have the courage to openly say what you take exception to and why you disagree with it.

It was me, actually (unless someone else did, too), and it's not an issue of courage, but of time. And as for my conscience; it's faring a lot better than it would have if I'd elected not to rate it negatively.

I didn't rate it negatively simply because I disagree with it (though I do), but because your arguments just don't make any sense to me. The complaints of Spielberg portraying the storming of the beaches at Normandy as "manly," for example, is downright bizarre. Yes, storming a foritifed area comes across as more manly than defending said area...but that's what happened. What Allied forces did at Normandy was braver than what Nazi forces did there. This is not because the Americans, Canadians, or Britons were inherently braver than their German counterparts, but because their task was simply more dangerous, aggressive, and generally ambitious. This is why their actions deserve such films.

I'm too stunned by your call for "moral ambiguity" to critique the rest of your post, so I'll stop here for now.

This is true to an extent - though it ignores the several local counterattacks launched against the American beacheads on June 6. I don't think I would find this opening scene nearly so manipulative if it weren't constantly reinforced throughout the rest of the film. The Germans never fight in the open. They never come out of hiding and launch counterattacks (when, in fact, German counterattacks were a major factor in slowing down the consolidation and breakout from the landing areas). Their conduct is always treated as reprehensible, while American atrocities are either glossed over or implicitly justified.

The problem with the opening battle sequence is the way it fits into the larger pattern of the film's dehumanization of the German soldiers. By itself, it wouldn't be a problem - but it doesn't exist in a vaccum. Spielberg does nothing to establish the humanity of the Germans in the beach assault. No sympathetic POV shots are used to create the sense that they, too, are human beings fighting for survival in a war over which they have no control. They are treated instead as murderous automatons, subhumans who deserve to be murdered. A responsible filmmaker - one interested in more than having props for his heroes to kill - would have taken an effort to establish the humanity of the Germans and brought attention to the moral confusion of war rather than creating a simplistic US vs. Them dynamic that plays to the baser instincts of the audience.

I fail to see how it is any braver to attack with massively superior forces under the cover of the largest naval and aerial bombardment in history than it is to make a hopeless defensive stand from positions from which there could be no retreat. The situation of the German defenders of the Atlantic Wall was in many ways analogous to the Texans at the Alamo, by your logic, we should celebrate in film the actions of Santa Ana, not Davey Crockett.

Why? I'm merely asking for a supposedly 'realistic' portrayal of battle to reflect the MORAL as well as physical realities of war. There are no 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in war, just human beings trying to survive evil times and faced with an array of evil choices. Spielberg doesn't even address the complicated moral choices his heroes faced, much less does he examine the wider ambiguities and moral conflicts inherent in war. It is my feeling that any movie that stakes its claim to greatness (or even relevance) on its 'realistic' portrayal of war has an obligation to realistically examine the moral dimensions of conflict if that greatness (or relevance) is to be upheld. As it is, Saving Private Ryan is just an indifferently acted and plotted war film with nice production values, and pales in comparison to vastly superior films like The Thin Red Line, Cross of Iron, Full Metal Jacket etc. that avoid making simplistic moral judgments.

I think that if we're honest with ourselves, Saving Private Ryan is a film whose legacy ultimately lies not in its value as a film, but in upping the ante on realistic depictions of battlefield gore. I can see why people like Saving Private Ryan, and the opening sequence is certainly a visceral experience (at least in the theaters). It is not cinematic art in the sense that more sophisticated and subtle films are, but it did change expectations concerning the versimilitude of screen violence. I just don't think that makes up for the underlying flaws of the film itself.

Truthfully, I think that the Band of Brothers miniseries did a much better job of handling rather similar material, and Spielberg's creative input was not insignificant - I know he's capable of a more nuanced approach, so I expect better.

Casino Royale

In recent years, James Bond has become the clunkiest of film franchises. Dragged down by the accumulated weight of gadgets a lack of real wit, it has devolved into little more than the most prominent operation of Her Majesty's Product Placement Service. Likewise, Ian Fleming's signature antihero has fallen far from Sean Connery's iconic turns as the dangerously masculine superspy to the smugly effete portrayals affected by rom com light weight Pierce Brosnan.

Casino Royale sets out to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for the Dark Knight - returning the darkness and ambiguity that made the early films (and the James Bond character) so intriguing, and it succeeds admirably with a back-to-basics approach.

Those 'basics' start with a return to the source material. For the first time in years, the opening credits make use of the magical phrase "Based on the novel by Ian Fleming." Indeed, the source is the original Bond novel - a fitting choice for a film that seeks to reimagine the entire franchise.

The plot centers on a high stakes card game (Texas hold 'em in a nod to the current poker craze) where blood-weeping banker-to-international terrorists Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) is trying to win back millions in clients' money he lost in an investment scheme before his clients can find out and kill him. Newly minted Double-O agent Bond (Daniel Craig), the best poker player in Her Majesty's Secret Service, is sent to the Casino Royale with the backing of the British treasury to make sure Le Chiffre busts out. Bond's mission is complicated by the presence of treasury agent Vesper Lynde (Eva Green) - beautiful, intelligent and seemingly immune to his considerable charms - who is in charge of the purse strings and none too confident in Bond's abilities.

The writing and direction are vastly improved when compared to recent entries. Gone are the excessive gadgetry and most of the smarmy self-referrentiality (and most of the inside jokes here slyly subvert series clichés, rather than reinforcing them) that dragged down recent Bond flicks. The back-to-basics approach includes a return to classic Bond formula of beautifully shot exotic locales, impressive stunt work (the free running chase scene that opens the film is the best action sequence you’ll see this year), and stylish direction with special attention to gesture and detail (even showing the scabs and bruises on Bond’s hands when he returns to the table after brutally beating two would-be assassins to death in a stairwell brawl). The dialogue, too, has a dark and morbid turn not seen since the early Connery films. A pre-credit sequence detailing James Bond’s rise to Double-O status is particularly black – Bond’s quips have a sadistic edge, blurring the line between heroism and villainy. That isn’t to say that Casino Royale is a perfect film. Eye aside, Le Chiffre is a rather bloodless villain who never seems terribly threatening, and Vesper Lynde undergoes a major shift in outlook with little in the film to explain her behavior. Additionally, at a fairly hefty 141 minutes, there’s definitely some narrative fat that could have been edited out.

The biggest improvement is in the development of Bond’s character. He emerges in Casino Royale as a much more primal figure than we are used to seeing. When Daniel Craig was cast for the role, the response was overwhelmingly negative. Too short, too blonde, the naysayers said. The worries were misplaced, however, as Craig turns in a superb performance. His Bond is very much in the mould of Fleming's literary creation – brutal, amoral, predatory and impulsively violent, a sociopath redeemed (or perhaps not) only by the righteousness of his cause. Craig brings an overpowering physicality (bulging muscles more than compensating for the lack of height) that is offset by his emotional vulnerability: he's a decidedly thuggish rake, but not an invincible one. For the first time, the series has given us a new Bond that doesn't need to stand in Sean Connery's shadow, and Casino Royale is easily the best entry in the series since the 60s.

8/10

It has been a long time since I have been around mofo. I haven't seen the posts in this thread, although I always enjoyed the reviews (and found myself agreeing often). I really enjoyed the Casino Royale review. I agree about Saving Private Ryan. A friend turned to me in a film class and said, "The Germans are a lot like stormtroopers in Star Wars." He was right. I appreciate this distinction:
I was actually about to raise that point, but you beat me to it. My question is whether you have the same problem with a film like Enemy at the Gates. Is the hero theme of Enemy an excuse enough to sypmathize with one side? Do you find Major Koning pitiable enough to make up for it? I'm not trying to be difficult, but I am curious.

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"What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present." - T.S. Eliot

Sorry, I've been a little lax in checking in lately. I haven't seen Enemy at the Gates, but my sense is that movies that focus on a single character are a little more forgivable in resulting to caricature for peripheral figures. Still, any movie that downplays the evils of Stalinism while highlighting the crimes of the German National Socialist regime seems a little...suspect.

Can't go a dozen posts without saying something vaguely apologetic (or deflecting away from) the Nazis, eh?

Having actually seen the film in question (though admittedly some years ago), I don't believe it "downplays the evils of Stalinism." It's about a handful of people on either side of the conflict more than the conflict as a whole. That said, I don't suspect we'd agree on what would constitute "downplay[ing] the evils of Stalinism" anyway, as I'd take the stance that even horrible men (and regimes) can do something right once in awhile, and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out when that something is being on the correct side of the most significant war in all of modern history.

But, I digress: Enemy at the Gates is a fine film that takes a few historical liberties about the characters involved (based on real individuals), but at least uses those liberties to paint a fascinating picture of Stalingrad and the battle between snipers Vasily Zaitsev and Erwin König. I might be a tad biased, because I find both WWII and snipers in general fascinating, but the production values are lovely to look at and the growing legend that each side seems to attach to their respective heroes over time conjures some interesting moral questions on war propaganda, and whether buttressing such icons a little is justifiable to support morale.

I'd recommend it to anyone.

It was a bit boring actually...:-/

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I'd ask you to elaborate, but if you had any interest in doing so I suspect you would have already, so I won't.

You know me so well.

The more we learn about the inner workings of the war on both sides, the more it becomes apparent that there was no 'correct' side. The latest revelation is that, at the request of the American government, the Japanese government set up a system of 'comfort women' for the American occupation force similar to the one that had served their own troops during the war. 70,000 women were tricked or forced into what amounted to sexual slavery for more than a year. The system was eventually disbanded, not over moral concerns, but because it became apparent that it was responsible for extraordinary rates of STD transmission (with more than a quarter of the occupation force becoming infected).

The real historical lesson of WWII is that when nation-states fight for global dominance, there are no good guys, and civilians are always the real losers.

That anecdote is very interesting and informative, but does not support the preceding claim that "there was no 'correct' side." It would be more accurate to say that no side was without its trangressions, but the fundamental conflict had a very clear right and wrong side, morally: one side wished to dominate a vast portion of the world through force and exterminate a race of people, and the other side was seeking to stop it. That all of the governments involved did their share of reprehensible things in the face of such a conflict is beside the point, and does not create any sort of moral equivalence.

It depends on how you define "good guys." If you mean pure, sinless nations, then you're right. But I don't think the term is meant to be that extreme. Regardless, I certainly agree that civilians suffer greatly during such conflicts.

How is that different from the ambitions of the Soviet Union under Stalin (with, of course, the meaningless distinction between exterminating a race and merely exterminating all opposition to his personal rule)? Let's not forget that Stalin had already murdered more people by 1939 than the Nazis killed during their entire time in power.

For that matter, the preservation of Britain's hegemonic dominance of much of the globe was an explicit aim of the Churchill government (that the cost of the war ultimately forced Britain to relinquish its colonial possessions in no way changes the fact that the desire to retain them was central to the British war effort). The French spent the first two postwar decades engaging a series of brutal repressions in their own colonies trying to force countries that had effectively become independent during the war back into line The Guomanding regime in China spent as much of the war murdering anyone it suspected of collusion with Mao's communists (it eventally put 10 million people in the grave - equivalent to Hitler's crimes in sheer numbers). And Mao himself, of course, went on to become the greatest mass murderer in human history (as well as a noted despoiler of children).

The US was in a unique position, having already completed and gotten away with it's own imperial wars of genocidal conquest. Even here, astute commentators have rightly pointed out that the conflict in the Pacific theater took on the classic dimensions of a race war, with the US pursuing vengeance with an essentially genocidal fury. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations for terror bombing (which killed tens of millions of innocents, particularly in Japan) represented a crime on the scale of the Holocaust, and one carried out with the same industrialized indifference to human suffering. We now know that the Japanese government had accepted the Allied terms of surrender BEFORE the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and that the decision to go ahead with the attack had nothing to with the war effort and everything to do with jockeying for imperial position in the postwar period.

Bottom line: our perception of the 'moral' status of the WWII combatants is colored largely by the war's outcome, rather than its conduct. Rest assured, had the Axis powers won, we'd be discussing the Gulag Archipelago and the mass murder of civilians in Allied bombing raids rather than Auschwitz and the Rape of Nanking as the greatest crimes in human history.

Understand that I'm not trying to minimize or excuse the horrific crimes of the Hitler cult or its Japanese allies, just trying to place them in a broader historical perspective. I don't think we always appreciate now just how profoundly the sheer carnage and horror of the Second World War altered the moral stance of most Western societies. I understand that you, as a Christian, believe in an absolute and unchanging moral standard upheld by God, and I'm not here to change that view. However, as a historian, my impulse is to say that morality is a mutable thing, and that to hold people of one era to the moral standards of another is in a sense unfair, and I do think we ought to keep that fundamental unfairness in mind when we study the atrocities of WWII. Whether we're talking about the Holocaust or Hiroshima, I think we owe it to ourselves to understand these events in their historical context - including the moral context of the era.

no..I still think that the Holocaust was not seen as acceptable even back then. Morality hasn't changed that much...

It certainly didn't generate the same level of moral handwringing as it does today. The reality, of course, was that it couldn't: Britain, the Soviet Union and the US all made use of concentration camps of their own before or during the war. The Nuremberg trials weren't about moral outrage, they were about seeking revenge on hated foes.

The obsession with the Holocaust is really a much more recent phenomenon, and emerged first as part of the Existentialist critique of 'end state' capitalism (it is in this context that the first - and last - great Holocaust film, Alain Renais's The Night and the Fog was made). The profound impact of Existentialism on post-war European morality has made the Holocaust a linchpin of the European moral psyche.

In the US, of course, the Holocaust has been fronted as a moral issue, but it's continued presence in American social discourse has far more to do with ginning up support for the Apartheid regime in Israel than with the moral consequences of genocide.

Not exactly on topic, but I think it is important to point out that Hitler was not the originator of the eugenic, racist thought which the Final Solution dictated.

Numerous PROGRESSIVE scientists from the mid 19th century (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton) applied Darwin's work to humans. These men believed the races should be segregated, sterilized, and/or killed.

Eugenics was a POPULAR, SCIENTIFIC thought which was not unique to Hitler at all. In fact, if it were not for the brutality of the Holocaust, eugenics would not only still exist, but may even be practiced.