A very weak Costner performance, especially when you consider that the real-life Kenny O’Donnell had little bearing on these events. The role stinks of ego and the movie is better when he doesn’t feature. Sadly, he’s never off the screen.
The actors playing the Kennedy brothers are also fucking dire.
Actually, fuck this film. It was pish.
No revelations but the footage is immense.
It’s not The World at War (1973); it’s you experiencing the war as much as is possible from your sofa.
And the voice of Orson Welles makes an appearance.
The incredible archive footage, the level of research, the interviews, the music, the sound of Laurence Olivier.
Sublime and unrivalled.
This channel is what the Internet was made for (aside from cat videos and staged pranks). The wealth and detail of info in these vids, the animation, the music, the narrator and his redoubtable voice.
What a tragedy this Revolution was.
A mentally unhinged cluster of psychopaths managed to hijack a state and proceed to massacre hundreds of millions beyond their own country, putting their own in Gulags. An ideology which doesn’t even acknowledge its own nonsensical dialectic should be looked at. It’s a religion for the worst.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the movie.
I have a lot of time for Warren Beatty. He’s a one-man show with proper acting ability. Quite the handsome lad, I would say.
The film:
I fell asleep around the 15-minute mark. Seemed rubbish. Wikipedia informed me how it ends.
Next.
This really was a wasted opportunity, the gift of a premise – two snipers in a dance of death amidst the backdrop of the bloodiest battle in history – compromised by a pointless romance, daft politics, dodgy accents, and a complete misunderstanding of the time and place depicted.
It would have been better to not tackle the complexity of it all and just show the antagonists facing off, with allusions to the wider ideological foes.
The first 10 mins, though. Watch those and then turn it off. Here you go:
The pull of this being a true story is enough for one to recommend it, but it does have more than that, capturing the fear and suspicion of the time in impressive ways, the claustrophobia seeping from every room. The casting and performances also elevated it above your standard spy fare. The premise appeared ripe for the pedestrian BBC-style treatment, but it was a surprise to see a riskier exercise in the spycraft genre.
The actor Merab Ninidze who plays Oleg Penkovsky. He needs to be in more movies. He’s simply excellent here.
Firstly, let’s get this out of the way: Angelina Jolie should not be in movies. She has no acting ability that has ever been evidenced in anything she has featured in. I mind that Sony Pictures hack years ago when a producer referred to her as a “minimally talented spoiled brat”. Sums the situation up. For some reason she is in movies, and was cast in this to put bums on seats, though I do question the sanity of folks who’d watch it for the delights of Jolie. She’s awful.
Now that’s cleared up, some positives. Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2001), this was gripping without ever seeming to be about anything; it’s the little details and the intricacies and the things that are easily missed. It’s less a depiction of Cold War espionage and more a portrayal of a bloke operating within a system of double entendres, maintaining the poker face at all times (Damon is a cold fish here but we can see why).
De Niro hasn’t made many films and this one is curious subject matter. Of all the topics and milieus, I’d never imagined he’d be interested in something like this. It’s very well made, a bit of the Michael Mann about it.
Bobby should make more spy flicks.
A good lad I know found this in the public library box … thing next to Harrison Park.
I thought Alan Clark was just a funny-as-fuck semi-cabinet minister who wanked to Maggie Thatcher. But fucking hell, this work was so fluid, shocking, actually intense (even if you know most of what he’s banging on about). It’s the measure of the characters which impressed me the most. The bloke’s ability to sum things up without waffling away like most writers.
This is how it ends:
I’m taking it back to the library next week with a wee appraisal on the inside sleeve.
I saw this movie many years ago and thought it rather great, but time distorts things. Goodbye Lenin! (2003) is an occasionally semi-funny insight into global changes impacting on the small scale; here, day-to-day life as experienced by an East German family going to increasingly elaborate lengths in maintaining the illusion of the GDR’s omniscience. The director’s stance as to reunification is a bit too ambiguous for me, the movie more concerned with a broad view of how the personal and political interweave, assessing the extent to which the society we live within affects us.
Why bother with such a contentious subject if you sit on the fence? This happens again and again.
It is at times a nauseating watch, almost an apologia for state tyranny. The film’s premise, pure Ostalgie, is that the economic and social constructs of the GDR, because of its restrictions on private wealth and public expression, harnessed a deep sense of togetherness felt by families. Wow. I won’t be watching it again. And all the Kubrick stylistic homages in it irritated me immensely.
If Lenin! refrains from showing the horror of life in East Germany in vivid detail by opting to examine why in recent years it has been de-emphasised, it has paved the way for a more meticulous and exacting probing of the Stasi state in contemporary cinema through devastating films such as The Lives of Others (2007), with all the GDR’s greed, hypocrisy, paranoia, and corruption laid bare.
It is 2020 and some folk (I call them “social spastics”) identify as communists.
They are the walking demonstration of why society is forever crumbling.
Anyway, I fucking despised this movie. HATED it. Stay away.
Further reading/viewing:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/jul/25/artsfeatures.dvdreviews
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/goodbye-lenin-2004
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/apr/13/worldcinema.drama
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 