Category Archives: World War Two

Munich – The Edge of War (2021). What a dire experience this waste of a movie is.

I was a bit dubious of this because it’s a British production about WWII, which are typically dull, mannered, mawkish, and entirely made-for-TV fare. It saddens me to report that Munich is all of the above and worse. It’s fucking atrocious. I don’t know where the tendency came from to depict these world-historical events from the POVs of superfluous (and entirely made up) secondary characters, but it’s vexing. Maybe just make a movie involving the actual statesmen, nah? This pointless, drama school-level acted show even has its forgettable range of third-wheels hog the screen time.

The screenplay is annoying to the max, every line of dialogue straight out of an alleged quote stemming from an alleged secondary source. One accidental highlight: I was taken aback by a smug-as-fuck SS character who appeared to be doing a very bad impersonation of the August Diehl bad boy from Inglorious Basterds (2009) – he had his voice and mannerisms and looked like him a decade on. It’s a truly embarrassing copycat acting job. And then I realised it was actually him. It’s the only what-the-hell and almost interesting moment of a placid and pointless excursion into revisionism.

Trash. But even cruddier than your usual sort because the topic is important. I’ve read a few reviews and it’s highly regarded, with a whopping 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What are these critics on?

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This book (and its author) blew my mind.

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.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/748526.Barbarossa

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The English Patient (1996) is just total crap.

I had to slap myself by the end of this because I once, for reasons beyond any understanding of my own psyche, thought it was brilliant. It’s not. It’s fucking dire. It’s SO boring. Everything about it is boring. The characters are boring. The story is boring. It even makes WWII boring. Nothing in it is even worth telling. Almost everyone on display is an imbecile; Juliette Binoche is the only one with a personality.

I don’t get the central romance on display. The Katharine character (if you can call her that) is just so … BORING. There is literally nothing about her worth bothering with because she is a cure for insomnia. And I lost track of how many times the director had to pull out a plane crash or a plane being shot in order to advance the plot. It infuriated me. Is this nonsense in the book? It swept the awards in 1996. The voters must have all been on drugs.

I must have been on drugs when I watched this a decade ago and thought it a cracker. There’s no other explanation.

Pile of shite.

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The Eagle Has Landed (1976) is a middling affair.

You standard old-fashioned wartime thriller which acts as a serviceable but inferior companion piece to The Day of the Jackal (1973), you’re aware of the outcome but the suspense is in getting there. Unfortunately, the exposition in this one is intriguing enough but by the halfway point it’s a snore. And then Larry Hagman appears as an inexperienced American colonel and it descends into silly comedy which I suspect today wouldn’t survive a pre-production script cull; we all know assassination attempts are no laughing matter.

Thank the heavens for Donald Sutherland. This is another case of Donald Sutherland being hired because only he can play a Donald Sutherland type. He’s fabulously nuts in everything and his career appears to be a personal mission in walking off with the movie. His supporting roles always suppose a spin-off picture with him at the fore. He even made the stinker that is Virus (1999) almost bearable.

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World War Two on … YouTube.

This is the best thing on YouTube and exactly what the internet is for.

I’m not here to plug the channel and I don’t know anything about the production or its team at all but the show is so well put together it needs to be shared. The depth of research is up there with your contemporary historians and, rather than a simple retelling, the makers actually dig into everything and ponder the what-ifs. I’d take this form of accessible media over a dry academic piece any day, and it’s the intro for anyone interested in the topic; back in the day, all we ever had was the same old insipid, badly researched and produced textbook material regurgitated on the BBC.

We’re up to winter 1941 now and even to this day it’s utterly shocking how close the Wehrmacht made it to Moscow despite all of the setbacks. It’s the greatest and worst event in history. The age of extremes, aye.

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Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) revisited.

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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.

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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

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Jojo Rabbit (2019) has the lol factor.

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Third Reich satire has at its apex the twin OTT delights of The Great Dictator (1940) and The Producers (1967), two films so unabashedly barmy it’s easy to overlook the human element beside (or within) the bawdy farce. Jojo Rabbit (2019) is made, I presume, in the vein of these crackers.

It is a riot at times, taking the piss out of the ludicrous ideology and its glaring contradictions yet outlining its attractions for subscribers. Among the things most difficult to attain in cinema is the seamless veering between comedy and drama and this is the picture’s most impressive achievement, a mastery of tone.

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And an imaginary der Führer karate-kicked through a window in rather cathartic fashion by a 10-year-old member of his own Hitler Youth is quite the enduring image.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/05/jojo-rabbit-review-taika-waititi-hitler-scarlett-johansson-sam-rockwell

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/jojo-rabbit-review-taika-waititi-nazi-hitler-comedy-cast-director-scarlett-johansson-a9264151.html

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/jojo-rabbit-between-daring-and-bad-taste-in-nazi-germany-1.4115985

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A Hidden Life (2019) – quintessential Malick.

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August Diehl holds one of those physiognomies of the Klaus Kinski variety, instantly recognisable and very creepy, more suited to playing the villain or the unhinged than the innocent. Diehl almost stole Inglorious Basterds (2009) from Christoph Waltz with his tavern-set scariness (in full Hugo Boss clobber). Here he pulls off the Jesus role with aplomb, a performance very much devoid of … dare-I-say-it – pretension. The worst performances by actors are the posturing sort which embarrassingly scream for an Oscar; none of that bombast here. And to give the movie more of a deathly air, Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz both star in their final roles.

22 years after the release of The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick casts his spiritual magic once again on WWII, this time not on the soldiers at Guadalcanal but the German home front. Malick ticks all the Malick boxes = sweeping cinematography, incessant voice over, melancholic score, metaphysical monologues, and lots of nature and all that. It is a long sesh but with reason, and in no way a ‘slog’. The story of Franz Jägerstätter is one worth telling.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/story-austrian-catholic-resister-franz-jagerstatter

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/19/a-hidden-life-terrence-malick-review

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/a-hidden-life/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-hidden-life-movie-review-2019

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Stephen Kotkin on Stalin.

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A third of the way through Stephen Kotkin’s middle chapter (Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941) of his mammoth three-volume study of Stalin, and it’s mind-blowing material. Fuck knows how long these books, with the final instalment still to be published, took to research and write. And it’s not just superlative academia; this chap with his razor-sharp wit can be funny as hell at times, which is most irregular when you consider the horrifying subject matter.

As an accessible compendium into what essentially made the Soviet Union work (Stalin’s own system of design) this is an unrivalled study of personal dictatorship and its geopolitical symbiosis.

As a speaker, Kotkin has been frequently described as ‘Professor Pesci’. Just listen to one of his lectures (posted below). Uncanny. I’d prefer, though, to not picture him in Casino (1995) with a hoodlum’s head in a vice.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821221-stalin

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The Das Boot reboot is awesome.

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What an experience this spin-off was.

I first saw the Wolfgang Peterson stunner (1981) in April 2000, purchasing the VHS tape with The Phantom Menace (1999) in HMV, Princes Street. I had no idea what it was about but the movie was £4.99 and Empire magazine called it scintillating in a retrospective. The writer wasn’t wrong, unlike their four-star review of the Jar Jar Binks fiasco.

The movie works within the most claustrophobic milieu of pre-Nuclear warfare. It was apolitical, much like the Kriegsmarine’s attempts to portray themselves after the conflict, this despite them nonchalantly torpedoing ship after ship.

This reboot more expansively amplifies upon the rampant extremism of the submariners, their appropriation of ideology as an alternative to the Allies’ eventual superior resources and sound tactics. There are also thriller elements, La Rochelle, home of the U-boat pens, the backdrop to French Resistance efforts to disrupt the German occupation. This place also has a special meaning for me: on a French exchange trip the police chased us around the town centre because one of our party set off a firework in a gift shop. Ah, the memories.

That score as well, used in both the film and this masterwork. Oaft.

Further reading:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/nazi-uboat-pens

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-03-06/das-boot-tv-series-uk-sky-atlantic-day-date-time-channel-plot/

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