BEFORE: I'm done at the theater for the next two weeks, I won't have to work there until December 1. Just two more shifts at the animation studio and four more movies, and I'm on break for Thanksgiving. I feel like I just got back from our vacation down south, but the calendar's telling me that was almost a month ago, I guess time really flies when you're busy and/or having fun.
This film's been on the books for a while, or at least it feels like it - I recorded it off of WNET, the PBS station here in NYC. Most Saturday nights they run movies, one classic film, one short and one "indie", whatever that last term means these days, introduced by a film studies professor from Columbia. I keep an eye on their programming, because sometimes they'll run a film that I haven't seen, or one that I have which I saw on a streaming service or a channel that doesn't allow me to dub a film to DVD (there's a secret signal some channels run that prevents copying). PBS is the PUBLIC Broadcasting System, so their airwaves belong to all of us, you can copy their programming and add it to your library, free of extra charge, because your tax dollars paid for the programming, you already own it, even if you didn't know it. Pro tip.
Cate Blanchett carries over from "Don't Look Up".
THE PLOT: While in post-war Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference, an American military journalist is drawn into a murder investigation that involves his former mistress and his driver.
AFTER: This film was directed by Steven Soderbergh, and while I haven't seen THAT many of his films - beyond "Erin Brockovich" and "Out of Sight", just the "Ocean's Eleven" films, "Contagion", "Haywire", "Logan Lucky" and "The Laundromat" - I expect better than this from him. Just me? I couldn't really get into this film at all, I found it very hard to follow, and yet somehow very thin on plot at the same time. Plus he insisted on making this film using the same techniques as a filmmaker from the 1940's would use - OK, so he's a big fan of "Casablanca", but do you have to limit yourself to the same technology as that film? I found this very distracting.
First off, the film's in black and white. Not a deal-breaker for me, but I know there are younger people today who simply WILL NOT watch a film if it's not in color. I know, I know, so much classic film was made before the common use of color film, it's like they're closing off their minds to some of the best work. But on the other hand, I can kind of see where they're coming from, because we have to keep looking forward, not back, and we not only have color now, but we have digital technology that can be used to make, say, a scene of someone driving a car look very realistic, not that fakey rear-projection stuff that was used in the 40's and 50's to keep actors safe. Jeez, I watched a bit of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" a few weeks ago and the shots of the cast driving when they weren't really driving drove me a bit mad. The cuts to the stunt drivers were just so OBVIOUS, how did I not notice them when I was a kid? Now of course I didn't expect them to send Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney up in a REAL airplane, it's not safe or feasible to do that - so I know that the actors are really in a fake cockpit that's up on gimbels, and some poor studio grunt is shaking the fake plane back and forth to simulate motion. I hope that guy at least got union benefits.
So why make a film in 2006 that LOOKS like it was made in 1945? Well, of course it's set in 1945 so in a way that makes sense. But it doesn't look like the REAL 1945, it looks like the way movies looked in 1945, and there's a big difference. They did have COLOR in the real world in 1945, by the way, so if you're going to make "Dunkirk" or "Saving Private Ryan" in modern times and simulate World War II, those films should be in color, and they are. Preserving the mythical 1945 that was seen on film rather than the real 1945 doesn't seem to make much sense, especially when it then ends up looking so fake.
I also fell asleep several times watching this movie, which yeah, may have had something to do with the Imperial pumpkin stout I drank a few hours before - but it's also not a good sign that the plot didn't hold my attention. The Potsdam Conference was a real thing, in the closing days of World War II the President of the U.S. met with Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam to start drawing up plans for how to divide up Germany's territory and monitor it, following the country's surrender just a few weeks before. Honestly, this sounds like the absolute most boring part of the whole war, why would anybody want to make a movie with this as the backdrop? The fighting's OVER.
But in the midst of this, there's some hubbub that turns out to be about the German rocket scientists, and the fact that both the Americans and the Russians want to get them out of Germany and put them to work. The main character is there to write about the conference, but his attention keeps getting pulled away by an encounter with his ex-mistress, who's currently working as a prostitute but also is involved with his driver. The driver seems to be mixed up in a bunch of shady stuff, like claiming that his girlfriend's late husband, who was the assistant to one of those rocket scientists, is still alive and needs to be smuggled out of the country. Why the driver is doing this is anybody's guess, but when he turns up dead in the river then it's a sign that maybe something else is going on here.
One of the dirty secrets about the German rocket program is that slave laborers from concentration camps were used to dig underground tunnels for storage sites and then those that survived were forced to work in rocket factories. Those camps had a higher mortality rate than most other concentration camps, and that's really saying something. And then some of the scientists who led the German research were recruited by the U.S. government for what became the lunar expedition projects of NASA. And their pasts working for the Nazis were overlooked - yeah, let that one sink in for a bit. Other engineers went to work for the Soviets, who remember got a man (and woman!) into space before the U.S. did - Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, while there hasn't even been ONE American woman on the moon yet.
I think that's the important take-away here, not the murder investigation that goes nowhere or the doomed relationships that Lena has with - well, everybody. The whole film's really a bummer, and part of that is the setting, taking place in post-war Germany where it seems that every woman is a whore and the only people getting rich are the ones smuggling food and everyone's just getting by pawning the items of dead people. Yeah, I suppose it's very important that we remember this period in history, but it still seems like stuff that we'd all rather forget about.
To be fair, I don't remember being all that impressed by "Casablanca" either when I first watched it.
Also starring George Clooney (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Tobey Maguire (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Beau Bridges (last seen in "One Night in Miami..."), Tony Curran (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Leland Orser (last seen in "The Gambler"), Jack Thompson (last seen in "The Light Betwen Oceans"), Robin Weigert (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Ravil Isyanov (last seen in "Defiance"), Dave Power (last seen in "Frailty"), Christian Oliver, Don Pugsley (last seen in "Fat Man and Little Boy"), Dominic Comperatore, John Roeder, Gian Franco Tordi (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), David Willis (last seen in "There WIll Be Blood"), with archive footage of Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Harry S. Truman.
RATING: 4 out of 10 secret journals
No comments:
Post a Comment