BEFORE: OK, enough dicking around, let's clear the James Franco category again. With certain actors, like Franco, Nicole Kidman, let's say Liam Neeson even, it always feels like I'm "done" with them, then another three or four build up over the course of a year. Stupid me, I never thought cumulative stats would be important to me, so even though I've totalled up appearances at the end of each year, I don't know who's in the lead all-time over the course of 10 1/3 years. There's no real way for me to figure that out without searching on EVERY name, and that's an impossible job. For those three actors I mentioned, Franco has 25 appearances, Kidman has 30, and Neeson has 44. I'm just going to maybe try some random names and see if anybody can beat 44. Not now, when I have some more time.
Tyler Labine carries over again from "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil", and I've got five films with James Franco lined up here, including at least one that I've been putting off for a very long time. But hey, this will bring Franco's total up to 30, and he'll be tied with Nicole Kidman. Still, I have no idea who the top ten even are - but De Niro has 47, so let's imagine he's in the lead, at least for the moment.
(But even then, I've got to find a way to remove an actor's producing credits and "Thanks to..." credits, IMDB just lumps them all together in its search function, which doesn't help. So De Niro's 47 is really a 42 when I remove his producing-only/non-starring credits.)
I've probably got to think of some more actors with careers that have spanned decades to figure this out....
THE PLOT: The adventures of the Lafayette Escadrille, young Americans who volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered World War I and became the country's first fighter pilots.
AFTER: So far this year my war films have been sort of concentrated on modern ones, like "13 Hours", "12 Strong" and "Seal Team Six", all set in the Middle East. World War I popped up in the flashbacks within "Goodbye Christopher Robin", though apart from that, I've got a bunch of World War II films on my list, like "Dunkirk", "Churchill" and "Darkest Hour", plus also there's "Defiance", "The Reader" and "The Zookeeper's Wife". But I think maybe this works out, I'll deal with World War I again tonight, and then later this year I'll try to knock off all the WW2 films. Though I don't have specific slots for them all yet, so I'll have to wing it. If I'm unable to get to them in 2019, that's OK too, because 2020 will mark the 80th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the 85th anniversary of the end of that war - so I'm good either way, watching them this year or next.
"Flyboys" was quite exciting and therefore enjoyable, but I think a large part of that came from the amazing aerial footage. The dogfights looked so good I was left questioning whether they were filmed live or if they were mostly special effects, or perhaps some combination of the two. Look, I can't just switch off my curiosity about HOW a film is made, it's just always going to be there, so the best I can do is live with it and try not to let that get in the way of me enjoying the film. And the fact that I couldn't TELL if the airplane footage was real or CGI or something else, I think that should count as a compliment, right?
Unfortunately, it seems the whole film couldn't take place in the sky, the pilots had to come down to earth at some point, and those parts of the film felt somewhat boring by comparison. James Franco played Blaine Rawlings, who I'm assuming was not based on a real person, and it felt to me like Franco had a tough time giving this guy some character. His romance with a French woman seemed very tame - I mean, I know it was a different time with different morals, but COME ON, it took them like three weeks to kiss. Romance during wartime means you don't have to stretch it out, they could all die at any moment, so wouldn't they just skip all the polite courting stuff and, you know, get down to it?
A couple of the other pilots managed to stand out as characters, but not enough. The most interesting was probably the African-American pilot who had been living in France as a boxer, then it's a long way to the guy in second place, who was just a portly rich guy whose parents thought he was a failure. Tied for third was the guy who changed his name to escape a criminal background, and the guy suffering from PTSD, or as it was called back then, "shell shock". Though it seems the treatment for that during WWI was a strong slap in the face and a flask of bourbon, not the psycho-therapy we have in place today.
The worst lack of character was seen in Reed Cassidy, the veteran pilot who'd been in the squadron the longest, and had probably seen all of his mates die in combat. Sure, one could imagine such a person to be solitary and jaded, but this kind of went overboard here, resulting in a character who was really a giant blank. "Oooh, he doesn't want to talk about his past..." - yeah, that's a narrative cop-out if ever there was one. Wait, he drinks AND he goes to brothels? Nope, none of that counts as character development, either. Look, the more the script tells us about these people, their backgrounds, their hopes and dreams, the more we're going to feel it when they die in a dogfight. If I don't know anything about them, then I'm barely going to feel each kill from a German tri-plane.
There was a great build-up here, and I'm down with the first half of the film and the effects throughout, but once the plot turned into "James Franco's character goes rogue and takes on the whole German army to rescue the French girl he likes", that's stretching the bounds of believability to a great degree. What happened to teamwork and following orders? Oh, let's just throw that all out the window so one guy can try to save his girl from the Nazis. The Germans are in the middle of taking over the whole damn country, but let's put all our plans on hold so one guy can do his hero thing. Give me a break.
EDIT: Well, after a little research on IMDB and Wikipedia, I discovered that the writers did research real stories of these World War I pilots, but then they changed all their names for the film, so if you ask me, that's a wash. As for the special effects, the film combines footage of both authentic and replica aircraft, and James Franco took flying lessons and earned a pilot's license before filming. But I'm also seeing notes about computer-generated aircraft, so logically the film contains some mix of live aerial footage and CGI effects. It's visually stunning, so that makes sense.
NITPICK POINT: These pilots are given pistols before they take off, because if their planes are damaged, their options seem to be to burn up in an explosion, jump to their deaths, or (the apparent best solution) blow their brains out with the gun. Really? What year was the parachute invented? I just looked it up, the modern parachute was invented in the 18th century, and the first parachute jump from a plane was in 1911. This was set in 1916, so what gives? Ah, it seems that the airplane cockpits at the time were not large enough to accommodate the parachutes of the day, plus the early models added too much weight to the plane. Fair enough, but to not mention parachutes AT ALL in this film, when they did exist, still seems like a weird omission. But I'm guessing the writers just needed an excuse for why a pilots would have a gun in a cockpit, because that became a plot point.
Also starring James Franco (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "Everest"), Jean Reno (last seen in "The Pink Panther 2"), Jennifer Decker, Abdul Salis (last seen in "Love Actually"), Philip Winchester, David Ellison, Michael Jibson (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Tim Pigott-Smith (last seen in RED 2"), Gunnar Winbergh, Lex Shrapnel (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Pip Pickering, Ian Rose, Augustin Legrand.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Fokkers
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