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WW2 - World War II

TM2YC

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Ill Met by Moonlight (1957)
The final film from 'The Archers' Production Company is a dramatisation of the daring abduction of a German General in April 1944 by SOE agents and the Greek Resistance on the island of Crete. I thought the story took a while to really get going but once they have captured the General, the long trek across the mountains to freedom, evading patrols at every turn got really tense. Mikis Theodorakis composes a distinctive dramatic score using Greek folk-music instruments. The two opposing characters, captor and captive (played by Dirk Bogarde and Marius Goring respectively) have an enjoyable gentlemanly respect for each other.

 

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The Man in the High Castle, Season 3 (2018)

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(S1 thoughts here, S2 thoughts here)

Well, this bundle was definitely a step down in intensity...

After a second season devoted to a last-ditch effort to stop a renewed world war, culminating in a visit to Berlin and the deposition of Hitler's first successor, S3 revolved around a plot that was wildly implausible for sheer logistical reasons even if the portal had functioned exactly as the Nazis had hoped. Maybe showing a full-on Second American Revolution would have been way too expensive, but I thought it a bit of a letdown to get back to the relative mundanity of S1.

That said, as slow as the pace is once more, and as inconsequential as Childan and several other characters may seem, the acting is great all around, and I do remain intrigued in seeing where everyone's journey takes them, so I'll be back for S4. I'm just not sorry it'll be the last.
 

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I'd hoped to finish my mega fan edit before the fall semester begins tomorrow, but, despite some progress, I'll need to re-record certain bits of my old man's narration, and do a lot more editing grunt work (I'm pretty much up to 1945, but, given the dozens and dozens of sources involved, fine-tuning the audio into a consistent mix will take some time indeed.) I've been reluctant to work on said project while school is in session, but maybe I'll try to do so during the fall, as my academic responsibilities won't exactly wane in the next year and a half...

Anyhow, last week marked the 80th anniversary of the start of WW2. As I've discussed above, a terrific "real time" documentary YouTube channel started up last year, but the weekly mini-documentaries have the dates in their titles, so, if one likes, one can spend the next few years reliving the disaster, one handful of days at a time:


 

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Babylon Berlin S1/2 (2017)        (US Netflix)

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What's that? The most expensive non-English language TV series yet produced is a 1929-set adventure/thriller/crime drama, with the barest of hints (at least at first) of the Nazi disaster to come? And it's all on Netflix? Stream away, fellow polizei! The first two seasons, which aired back-to-back and are really one big story, comprise 16 big-budget, action-packed episodes that come highly recommended. Grade: A-, and I look forward to the upcoming third season, concentrating on Berlin's thriving film world, newly threatened by the the fragmenting advent of talkies. :D

So, okay, Operation Prangertag, an attempted right-wing coup to restore Germany's monarchy under Wilhelm II is fictional, albeit plausible. I was alarmed to see that Ludwig Beck, the elder statesman hero of Valkyrie (played by Terence Stamp) was one of the conspirators against the state; I had no illusions as to what his sympathies would have been at the time, but I was alarmed to think of him as an assassin and a traitor. Well, maybe the portrayal is fair and maybe it isn't; I'm hardly knowledgeable enough to judge.

And, oh, boy, did I buy that Charlotte was dead as a doornail! I was so engrossed by the scene it didn't occur to me to wonder how they were able to film her drowning so convincingly. Dry for wet with CG enhancement, I guess. (Though apparently Rath's knowledge of CPR is almost certainly anachronistic.)

And what will become of poor Greta?! So cute, so redhead... so manipulable and naive. Sad!
 

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^ Arrrghh. Why haven't they released that ^ on blu-ray with English subtitles yet.
 

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"Worse than Pearl Harbor?" Daaaammn, Dr. Kermode!


(Hey, that other guy in the clip shown is Joe Blake from The Man in the High Castle!)

The AV Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is similarly unimpressed:

Both of these specimens of testosterone-fueled all-American derring-do (played by Brits who periodically struggle with their accents) are real historical figures, as are almost all of the characters in Midway, which attempts to dramatize the most famous naval battle of World War II by drawing equal inspiration from the monotonous historical reenactments of 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, the butt-numbing soap-opera spectacle of 2001’s Pearl Harbor, and the Irwin Allen influences of Emmerich’s own disaster movies.
 

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^ The tone of the thumbnail image selected for that review is enough.
 

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Another day, another fascinating WWII film (not to mention bit of history) to learn about. Today it's I Was Monty's Double, the story of M. E. Clifton James, an actor who pretended to be General Montgomery in the lead-up to D-Day. And who plays this Clifton James, you ask? Why, Clifton James himself, of course!

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Alas, it doesn't look as though the new Region B blu-ray release will be easily found Stateside anytime soon. eBay has some fairly affordable imported DVDs, however.
 

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Overlord (2018) (currently on Amazon Prime)

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I'm all for grindhouse WWIIsploitation flicks, and Overlord is pleasingly gory. Trouble is, if you've seen the preview, there's not much reason to watch the movie proper - it's Band of Brothers' second episode plus three or four zombies, and over twice the run time. Even if one doesn't mind the anachronistically color-blind heroes, the rote script has plenty of stupid - I'm pretty sure there weren't any photographers parachuting into France the night before D-Day, a woman outruns a motorcycle to a comical extent, there's some nonsense about how the whole dang invasion is doomed if one radio tower isn't destroyed, and what educated French person hasn't heard of Louisiana?! It's too schlocky to take seriously, but too small-scale, slow, and long to be a popcorn classic. I guess it gets a point for being the first WW2 movie I've seen to play rap over its credits, though. Grade: B-

 
TM2YC said:
Like Dredd, the filmakers have delivered an expensive looking film for a quarter of the budget of others

Can't say I quite agree with you here - yes, the production values are solid and it looks good, but this no-name flick cost $40m, when nearly half of it takes place in a house? Not sure where a good half the budget went... For $40m, give us a climactic, huge-ass spider monster or something! :blush:
 

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The Man in the High Castle, Season 4/final (2019)

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(S1 thoughts, S2 thoughts, S3 thoughts)

The war is over... the war endures.

The Man in the High Castle is a weird show. It's a series with a schlocky, B-movie premise that it takes deadly seriously - so much so that the first season was perhaps particularly slow and unpleasant specifically to avoid charges of exploitation, though that's just a guess on my part. It's a series that is inherently, fundamentally political, but never quite pulls back and gives us the big picture of what's going on outside the US and Berlin; even when a main character becomes the leader of a territory, we don't get much sense of their day-to-day job. Finally, it's a show that ditches several main characters and plot threads in its fourth and final season, which is likely due in part to onboarding its third showrunner.

But while plot points came and went, the consistent thread throughout the series is a rumination on the daily miseries of life under totalitarianism, where the elites and common people alike are forced to betray their humanity again and again merely to survive. The show premiered in early 2015, months before the current president announced his campaign, and the country has arguably changed since then. What was once a grim but outlandish counterfactual is still that, but its somber tone and dearth of cheap thrills throughout feels dignified and appropriate. As the show reminds us, there are no unvarnished "good guys": when we get a glimpse of our Nazi-free 1960s America, while the Nuremberg Trials are justly celebrated, we also see segregation and the start of the Vietnam War. There are no easy answers or morally pure Captain Americas to unleash the grapes of wrath and wipe the evil in the hearts of men away. (Though former SHIELD Director Jason O'Mara does provide a reasonable substitute!)

The show pulls a nifty fake-out in its penultimate episode: could the creepy-ass young Führer Wilhelm Goertzmann be less psychotic than he appears? Of course not: his promise of autonomy to Smith and the American Reich is a blatant lie. Smith has no desire to perpetrate another holocaust on the West Coast, but, presented with long-prepared plans for the same, doesn't dare change course, lest he be replaced as swiftly and mercilessly as Hitler, Heusmann, Rockwell, Himmler, Hoover, and who knows how many others. Instead of an operatic political climax, there are two emotional, family political climaxes, both featuring first-rate performances by Chelah Horsdal as Helen Smith.

As for that ending: I really liked it. It's random and weird enough to operate on dream logic, and heartening enough to end on a note of hope. Unless the Reich is on the brink of collapse at home in Berlin, which for all we know could be the case, the easy, obvious answer is that even if Whitcroft (who in the 1946 flashback told John Smith they'll join the occupiers for now, but bide their time for rebellion) has secretly remained a halfway-decent American, Goertzmann and the Reich will soon enough give them all fresh hell. So, if that's the alternative, yeah, I'm okay with the conclusion. As I've said before, this series has always felt like a spiritual successor to HBO's Great Depression fantasy drama Carnivàle, exploring what might have happened in a world where Brother Justin triumphed, and this ending felt very much in that vein.

The Man in the High Castle wasn't Amazon's first TV series, but it got a bigger promotional push than any of their shows until the inevitable splash for their upcoming Middle-Earth epic... and yet, as seems to happen with all but the biggest series, its final season has largely landed under the cultural radar. Maybe its vision of a fascist America, even an alternate 1960s one, was just too discomforting in the past few years to reach event status. It seemed to have a decent budget throughout, but maybe its failure to soar curtailed the producers' ability to get more epic than the S2 finale. No, protagonist Juliana Crain's arc never quite reached the heights it seemed the show was nudging her toward; in the end, the central spoke in the gear turned out to be Rufus Sewell's magnificently tormented antihero John Smith. The takeaway? Never forget: as the saying goes, it can happen here.

Season One: B
Season Two: B+
Season Three: B-
Season Four: B+
Series overall: B+
 

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That Lydia's up to no good, I'm sure of it. :p

 

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Jojo Rabbit (2019)

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Sorry, TM2YC, I gotta side with Dr. Kermode on this one: Jojo Rabbit is a completely mediocre flick that isn't funny or smart enough to engage my adult self, but is too goopy and mild to thrill my child self (let alone frighten him about the horrors of Nazi Germany). The one scene of loss is presented so timidly, and with such little effect on the narrative (leading to several plot holes), that I was surprised it wasn't waved off as a case of mistaken identity. I'm not offended by the flick, but I am disappointed. The performances are strong, but the jokes inspire wan smiles at best, and the story goes nowhere. As for the satire... well, to quote The AV Club's Alex Dowd, "true satire challenges and provokes. This one offers free hugs." My recommendation? Skip.

Grade: C
 

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Operation Finale (2018)    (currently on US Amazon Prime and Hulu)

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I've only watched bits and pieces of The House on Garibaldi Street, a 1979 TV movie take on the same subject: the 1960 Israeli capture and extraction of key Holocaust planner Adolf Eichmann from Argentina, which runs 20 minutes shorter. Operation Finale is mainly notable for starring Ben Kingsley in a warped mirror role from his part in Schindler's List, taking over the part of Eichmann from Stanley Tucci in Conspiracy. Oscar Isaac is solid as always in an underwritten role as the team leader, and the movie is handsomely assembled by The Golden Compass director Chris Weitz. The screenplay artificially gooses up some of the drama around the margins, which may irritate historical purists, but I was okay with it. Kingsley's performance makes this worth a watch, and the movie is certainly easier to find than Garibaldi Street, but it's hardly can't-miss viewing.

Grade: B
 

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Midway (2019)

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Alas, Roland Emmerich's Midway is not a knockout victory like... well, the Battle of Midway. The first major sequence is a pointlessly bombastic depiction of the attack on Pearl Harbor, whereas a somber, understated treatment would have been far more dramatically effective. The first half of the movie then becomes a frankly dizzying tour through the next six months of naval warfare, accompanied by half-baked character development for our naval aviator heroes - and is Colonel Doolittle only featured because he winds up in China, and this movie was heavily funded by Chinese investors? After Pearl Harbor, I guess this makes the second time Doolittle's raid has been tacked onto a movie it doesn't really belong in, whereas it definitely deserves a feature to itself.

Anyhow, the second half of the movie is mostly about the battle itself, and unless you're highly allergic to painterly CG mayhem, it's pretty damn impressive. Emmerich does a great job of staging the terrifying dive-bombing attacks, and while I've only seen bits of the 1974 Midway film (which cobbled together stock footage, model work, and shots from other features), I'd imagine this movie is far more immersive. Indeed, it generally looks great, with lots of shots contrasting the size of the planes with the size of the ships. Emmerich also gets credit for sticking with historical characters, whereas the prior movie centered upon two fictional ones, though the screenplay is serviceable at best. British actors Luke Owens and Ed Skrein are both solid performers and largely successful with their American accents; I was only really distracted in one (admittedly key) scene.

As with the earlier film, the movie gives significant time to the Japanese side of the war. It's well-paced and interesting stuff, so I didn't mind, though keeping the enemy largely out of sight and more fully developing the protagonists would probably have made for a sharper film. The ~140-minute runtime sailed by smoothly, but there's definite fan editing potential in trimming out the excess historical prelude and Japanese scenes to focus on the battle itself and its pilot heroes.  As a movie, it's a mixed bag, but I'll give it a few extra points for sticking to history and being a rare modern showcase for naval warfare. WW2 and Navy enthusiasts should definitely give it a watch for spectacle alone.

Grade: B
 

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PSA: all 12 episodes of Babylon Berlin's third season just dropped on US Netflix, mere days after concluding their original run in Germany! How does one say "Laissez les bon temps rouler" in Deutsch? :D

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Mrs. Miniver (1942)
I'd been wanting to see this WW2 drama since it was mentioned in Netflix's 'Five Came Back' Documentary (Director William Wyler being one of the five). It's about the home-front experience of middle-class British housewife Kay Miniver (Greer Garson), her husband Walter Pidgeon and her children. The film is entirely from the perspective of Kay, so whenever her son flies off to fight in the Battle of Britain, or her husband sales away to help with the Dunkirk evacuation, we will share in her days-long worry, without us being shown so much as a frame of the peril they might be facing. The device makes the 2nd-half very tense, although the first hour dragged on a bit for me. To be fair it was spending that time setting up all the characters, which gives the story impact as the war comes closer and closer to Kay's idyllic English village. The sound design during the Air-Raid shelter scene is still pretty scary.

'Mrs. Miniver' was an early WW2 film by Hollywood, so was being written and re-written, shot and re-shot up to the wire as the USA position slowly changed from neutrality, to moving closer to aiding Britain, to Pearl Harbour. Coming out just a few months after the attack, it was the right film at the right time for inspirational propaganda purposes and perhaps a little too "of it's time" in places. It won six of the major Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director.


 
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