Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The week before I saw ‘Charlie Wilson’, I had watched ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four‘ again, only to discover what seemed to be a waterboarding administered to Winston by O’Brien.

The past is prologue.

Imagine then, my synesthetic confusion when 1983′s chart-topper “Let’s Dance” came over the speakers — all of the props were in place — ‘Charlie Wilson’ is the story of an un-person, Democratic Congressman left out of the public record even as the Republican Party has claimed proprietary ownership of Communism’s defeat. Based on the eponymously titled book by former 60 Minutes producer George Crile, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ recounts Mr. Wilson’s effort to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In 1984, I was also a junior in high school, choking down Orwell’s complete body of work and fair measure of dystopian British fiction – Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and a good few Philip K. Dick novels. Even as the year 1984 came and went I wondered if the world that Orwell decribed had, in fact, arrived unbeknownst to everybody alive at that moment.

Lo, and behold, history was re-written before our eyes as it was Ronald Reagan that took credit for ending the Cold War by outspending the Soviet military budget. What has been left out of the ‘official’ history is Charlie Wilson’s role on the front-line of that conflict.

Based on the eponymous George Crile book, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ recounts the political career of the Honorable Charles Nesbitt Wilson (1933- ), who served in the U.S. Congress for 24 years, spanning the Carter, Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations, and served 16 of those years on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, earmarking funds for the CIA’s ‘black bag operations throughout Central America and the Middle East.

No stranger to fast-living, liquor and controvery, Wilson apparently had an epiphany while sitting in a Vegas hot-tub with a pair of showgirls. A consummate public servant, Wilson was distracted from his hot-tub by a 60 Minutes segment , where Dan Rather reported on Russian incursions into Afghanistan. As a fervent anti-Communist, and a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Wilson saw a funding opportunity in the Afghani Mujahideen.

<iframe src=”http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cineblogus-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0802141242&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr” style=”width:120px;height:240px;” scrolling=”no” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ frameborder=”0″ align=”right”></iframe>Of course, the Mujahideen were absorbed by the forces of light, once Ronald Reagan heard of them, but by that time Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) and his CIA attaché, Gust Avrokotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) increased foreign appropriations for the Afghani ‘freedom fighters’ from $5 million to $750 million a year during the ’80′s. Through Wilson and the efforts of his sometime-mistress, Texas Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the US funneled weapons to Afghanistan, creating a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviets on the other side of the Black Sea. The billions of dollars that the Russians sank into Afghanistan invariably helped collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Politics aside, there is actual entertainment to be found in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’. Rather that take the easy route and lampoon the New World Order pontifications of the Republican Administrations that Wilson served, Sorkin uses the opportunity to make art. Between the progress of the Mujahideen and Wilson’s back-room deals, Sorkin and Nichols have fashioned an old-fashioned Capra-esque movie.

Hanks’ Wilson is a fairly serviceable imitation of Jimmy Stewart , while Roberts seems to channel Barbara Stanwyck in either ‘Executive Suite‘ or ‘Meet John Doe‘. And just to make sure you know what kind of movie you’re watching, Sorkin and Nichols have peppered their film with numerous door gags, rapid-fire dialogue and a few trademark Sorkin walk-and-talks.

The productive ingredients here are Hanks’ and Roberts’ willingness to play character roles, rather than the soppy, Libtard heroism stuff that they’ve become accustomed to.

This one gets five stars for the willingness to tell a relevant story and the effort they’ve taken to tell it as an old-fashioned Hollywood yarn. Usually such efforts make me suspicious, but in Sorkin’s hands it’s a marvelous piece of restraint.

It’s not always the guy on the white horse that’s the hero — sometimes it’s just the paper-pusher who makes the funds available for the revolution.

Unfortunately, Universal chose to dump ‘Charlie Wilson’ into release four days before Christmas, denying it the attention of the broadest possible audience. But it *is* on the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe short-lists and remains in theaters 6 weeks after it opened. Try to see it while it’s still in theaters!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Was this worth $10 and my 2 hours?

I confess publicly, now, up-front to a small obsession with Keira Knightley. I’ve seen all but two of her films and regardless of the quality, QED ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,’ I’ve found her to be effective at a bare minimum in all and stunning in some of the roles she’s played. That said, while she acquits herself quite well her role as Cecilia Tallis in ‘Atonement’ isn’t really that much of a role.

Billed as a tragic love story, this film is more an exercise in adaptation for all concerned: Can we take what looks to be a sprawling, detailed book and convey its nuances on screen? Whether or not director Joe Wilson (‘Pride & Prejudice’) and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (‘The Quiet American’) did Ian McEwan’s novel justice, I do not know. What I do know is that this film doesn’t live up to the promise of the trailer.

The film is brilliantly executed and photographed. The early, pastoral scenes of the Tallis estate stand in vivid, lush contrast to the grim desperation of the evacuation at Dunkirk as World War II serves as the back drop for the second two thirds of the film.

The period details, from the bathing costumes worn by Cecilia, her brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy), and Leon’s houseguest Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch), a chocolate magnate who will play a pivotal role in the separation of Cecilia and Robbie Turner (James McEvoy), to the uniforms worn by the soldiers and the ward nurses, ring so utterly true that it hardly matters whether they are authentic or not. They look the way we have come to expect World War II era Britain to look.

Too, this film makes excellent use of sound: storytelling being an inherent part of the story itself the sound designers choose to make the sound of a typewriter an aural cue in moving the story forward.

What is less brilliantly executed is the promise of deep, abiding drama. This is not ‘Romeo & Juliet’ full of star-crossed lovers and high drama. Yes, it is a story about love thwarted, love denied by the selfish act of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, but more it is a story about guilt and forgiveness, just as the title implies, that is told in such a restrained manner that what drama is inherent in the story rings somehow false like the cubic zirconium among lower quality diamonds. The diamonds are truly worth more but the bright, shiny thing simultaneously catches the eye and leaves you unsatisfied.

Does ‘Atonement’ live up to the base indicator of “was this worth my $10 and my 2 hours?” Only if you walk into the film knowing that you will have to derive your pleasures from the execution of the story, the costumes and the brilliant and deliciously restrained performances of Knightley and McEvoy rather than from the story itself. ‘Atonement’ is not a soapy film at all; you can’t turn your brain off here and expect to be moved, but it is an interesting film if the details matter to you at all.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

What’s good about this film?

• Beautiful photography
• Excellent sound design
• Performances that convey emotion through restraint rather than through hammy chewing of the scenery

For fans of:

• Merchant/Ivory (‘A Room With A View,’ ‘Howard’s End’)
• “Brideshead Revisited”
• “A Passage To India”
• Anyone who was surprised by the twist in ‘The Crying Game’

I went to film school for this.

Note: This section contains plot spoilers. Read no further if you don’t wish to have the story revealed.

The reality of ‘Atonement’ is that it is too clever for its own good. The central conceit of the narrative is that you are left at the end of the film feeling betrayed by the very narrative trick that makes the film itself possible.

The grand tragedy of ‘Atonement’ is the forceable separation of new lovers Cecilia and Robbie. Some long simmering attraction, which is not adequately explored or explained – Cecilia responds when queried by her sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) about why she and Robbie never talk that they “move in different circles;” later we’re told in conversation that the entire time Cecilia and Robbie were at university Cecilia never spoke with him – yet we’re to believe that one afternoon of subdued flirting would lead these two incredibly proper people to an unplanned sexual tryst in a public room of the main estate house?

And it is this tryst, beautifully filmed and powerfully erotic in its intensity and understatement, this quasi “primal scene,” that is the crux of the narrative. Young Briony, 13 and not fully in command of either her feelings or the damage she can do with them, interrupts this tryst and it is her budding emotions for Robbie that spark her own feelings of betrayal. The false witness she bears against him in the so-called rape of her cousin Lola Quincey (Juno Temple) irrevocably change the course of not only Cecilia’s and Robbie’s lives but Briony’s as well.

We’re treated to Robbie and Cecilia’s reunion after he is released from prison, but before he’s sent to France to fight, after she has cut ties with her family; we’re given a glimpse into what an 18 year-old Briony (Romola Garai) experiences as a trainee ward nurse; we’re shown the horror that Robbie witnesses at Dunkirk and the love he still feels for Cecilia as is evidenced by the thick stack of letters he carries with him as a talisman; we’re shown Briony’s contrite apology to both Cecilia and Robbie, the measures she’s willing to take to atone for her falsehood.

And then the very foundation of the narrative is ripped from under us: the last 10 minutes of the film reveal that Robbie and Cecilia’s happy recoupling after his return from Dunkirk is a fraud, a fiction as devastating to the viewer as Briony’s original lie was to her sister and Robbie.

This lie about Briony’s contrition to Robbie and Cecilia is revealed in the context of an interview with the aged Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) who is on the brink of publishing her 20th novel. The story within a story aspect of this narrative trick reveals directly Briony’s lie of atonement but it also makes the viewer doubt almost every single pivotal event that preceded it in the narrative.

It’s also quite clear from the way in which the principals in this film have been variously nominated for awards that there is a lot of confusion about the narrative: it’s clearly Briony’s story yet Keira Knightley keeps securing Best Actress nominations and Saoirse Ronan Best Supporting Actress noms. We want this to be Cecilia and Robbie’s story but in very many ways it is Briony and Robbie’s story.

This journey down the rabbit hole turns what could have been a good story into an exercise in storytelling. This film shakes the viewers frame of reference by breaking the implicit contract – the film tells a story and the viewer listens and reacts – by making the viewer part of the story, as confused about events as the people we are ostensibly watching. In that way the film itself is as much a lie as the lie the film is about.

It’s no secret that the democracies of ancient Greece were highly restrictive. ‘Democracy’ as an idea was limited to wealthy landholders and nobles – typically if you weren’t wealthy you weren’t free, but more likely you were somebody’s servant or sharecropper.

Since ’300′ was released, many critics have tried to determine what the analogy of the tale is, considering we, the United States, are currently engaged in a protracted contest with more than one Middle Eastern foe. Certainly, many people argue, that ’300′s invasion of Sparta by the Persian Sultan Xerxes is roughly analogous to the American misadventure in Iraq and Afghanistan. And anyone who would put forth such an argument is certainly a fool.

Of course, on the surface of things, this might make sense East vs. West in a marvelous contest of military derring-do – but of course in the present circumstance, it is the West and the United States that has invaded Persia and not the other way around. So, already the easy analogies have already fallen flat, for those trying to draw some grand historical lesson from big, pulpy historical entertainments. The PNAC’s activity in Iraq and Afghanistan is not, not has it ever been Leonides’ war against Persia.

Leonidas’ conditional freedom can hardly be referred to as Democracy, since there were so few people who were able to cast votes in Greece considering voting was for the landed gentry and back then, not even Spartan soldiers were permitted to own property. Therefore, Leonidas’ evocation of ‘Freedom’ suddenly becomes suspicious – what freedoms is Leonidas asking his soldiers to defend and to what gain as their culture was ultimately a hapless testosterone-worshipping folly that ultimately fell because they were too proud, too exclusive and too stubborn to create a sustainable society. Yet two and a half millennia later America is trying in vain to wrest some constructive lesson from the 300 Thermopylae martyrs.

That said, ’300′ is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of entertainment. Mr. Snyder has done an admirable job of bringing Miller’s pages to life, doing as throrough an adaptation as Miller’s other comic-to-film adaptation, ‘Sin City’. But again, a treastise on Mr. Miller’s well-known right-wing polemic it definitely is not. See it, but see it for the visuals, for the constantly moving backgrounds, the rich visual textures and the soaring violent choreography, as rich as any Hong Kong actioner.

All in all, I suppose this bodes well for ‘R’-rated comic-book movies and Snyder’s next project, Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen‘.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

First, Lesley-Ann Down: has she ever managed to be the romantic lead in a WWII picture that didn’t end up being a piece of made-for-TV garbage? I say this after having tried to watch her in ‘Arch of Triumph‘ (1985) with Anthony Hopkins, a remake of a project with ‘Casablanca’-level ambitions that simply fell flat; this remake hardly improved upon the 1948 version. In ‘Hanover Street’ Ms. Downs’ performance certainly wasn’t enhanced by the flat dialogue and her wholly unsympathetic character: The woman is cheating on her husband, plain and simple, without explanation or cause. A stronger actress would have demanded a better backstory for this character, some ‘Sophie’s Choice’ or ‘Plenty’ content to make her more fathomable, but this round-heeled wife of a British Intelligence officer (Plummer) is nothing but a liability. If she was able to be ‘picked-up’ by Ford as easily as she does in this film, her character would have been victimized by a German Agent, long before she encountered Ford. This film tries hard to be a romantic something-or-other, but this woman’s got a kid and no obvious conflicts of interest with husband Plummer. That’s one raspberry, right there.

As for the schizophrenic element, about 2/3rds the way through, Hyams tries to turn this thing into a War film – Ford and Plummer go behind enemy lines together into Vichy France, but the plotting is sloppy as they are thrown together by chance. Hyams spent some small amount of time setting Plummer up as some sort of spy-chief, training other British Officers to to operate behind enemy lines and Ford is to be the Allied pilot that flies them to their destination. Fortunately, unfortunately in these scenes, Ford and Plummer share the strongest moments in the entire film, and the two male leads have more chemistry with one another than either has with Ms. Down(er).

After doing all this spy-stuff exposition, Hyams promptly kills off all of the German-speaking British Agents and saddles Plummer with an untrained, monolingual Ford to complete a highly specialized intelligence heist in Central France. Plummer parachutes in with a German uniform, Ford with his Hogan’s Heroes flight jacket… as if he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, once he hit the ground.

It’s truly no surprise that this film laid an egg at the box office – it is entirely uneven in terms of both script and story. If you want to see Ford in a better war-movie, see ‘Force 10 from Navarone’ – better yet, go straight to the top, and see his cameo appearance in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

As for this film, I can’t even begin to imagine the market influences that allowed this script to be greenlit. The Americans were making gritty urban dramas – ‘Coming Home’ (1978), ‘Midnight Express’ (1978), ‘The Deer Hunter’ (1978) and the next year saw the release of ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979),’Being There’ (1979) and ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ (1979). I suppose this film had the potential of filling that warm-spot that the British have for soap-operas and patriotic war-stories.

While ‘Hanover Street’ may have had some promise as a script, it really just falls flat in it’s execution. Ford in a pilot’s uniform is simply not enough to save this turkey of a film.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars