hanabluma-546-540480 Reviews

Frontline: Memory of the Camps (1984) Season 3, Episode 18

Inexcusably inadequate

[2/10 · 14 April 2015]

Who were the victims rounded up and loaded into trains to concentration and extermination camps? If viewers on this "documentary," they would assume they were a virtual United Nations of religions and ethnicities, rather than almost all of Europe's Jews. There is only one religious symbol on any victim. And that's a cross. And only one victim is identified. He's called a "Polish engineer."

Then there's the gratuitous humiliation of the victims by the filmmakers. The Nazis had already deprived them of every semblance of privacy and modesty. So the makers of this documentary piled,on by lingering on the breasts of the women bathing after their liberators provided them with hot water . And each skeletal male had to be shown in full frontal nudity as their liberators dragged them who-knows-where. The filmmakers couldn't be bothered with focusing above their genitals, just as their "saviors" couldn't be bothered with carrying these half-dead creatures on a litter

And then there's Trevor Howard 's eccentric narration delivered in a tone that can best be described as ironic. The wrongheadedness of this entire project perhaps can be summarized when Howard asks about the child captives, "what crime did they commit?" to bring them to this terrible state? The mindless implication is that the millions of adults murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices might somehow not be innocent.

There is now a vast repertory of thoughtful and informative documentaries about the Holocaust. This tasteless and ill-informed project isn't among them.

Fury (2014)

So war is hell?

[5/10 · 31 December 2014]

His face might be dirty, but Brad Pitt's hair keeps its streaks, just as the rest of his tank mates sport coifs evidently emanating from the uninformed imagination of a hair designer who imposed eccentric 2014 cuts on what we're supposed to believe are WW II soldiers. One also sports a goatee, another what appears to be a wedding ring on his right hand, a third a chain on his neck. The dialogue matches: lots of "fucks," but none of the "shits" and "goddamits" much more likely to have been heard in the '40s.

But there are shades of the '40s in FURY. Shades of '40s war movies, that is. There's the mixed crew - an "ethnic," an innocent, a lout, a tough guy, who all ultimately bond together. There's the bittersweet interlude with German women ( even including one whose hairdo is reminiscent of Veronica Lake). And there's the almost futile battle with at least one good guy surviving.

Of course we now have color, more and bigger explosions, and more graphic blood and guts ( or paint and animal entrails). But I'd just as soon save some time and, when I want to watch a "war" movie, download TO HELL AND BACK

Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986)

Poor acting, poor directing, weak writing

[2/10 · 18 October 2014]

If you want to see an almost perfect demonstration of the proposition that film is a directors's medium, BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS is the movie to see. The performances are uniformly dreadful, leading the viewer to conclude that, without decent direction, actors are largely incompetent. And, in addition to his overall ineptness, Gene Saks , the director, has such a tin ear that he allows his actors to speak in accents incomprehensible as the Yiddish-inflected New Yorkese that presumably was intended.

Furthermore, the audience is invited to believe that this story is something of a transcription of Neil Simon's boyhood experiences. We therefore are asked to accept that this tale is a reasonable approximation of the attitudes and values of a first-generation working-class Jewish family of the 1930s. Yet one of the key elements of the narrative presents a situation that is virtually unbelievable, which is that the family accepts and even encourages the prospect of a serious relationship between one of its members and an alcoholic Irish Catholic. It's also doubtful that the suitor's mother would have viewed her son's interest in a Jewish widow with the equanimity her character displays, but that just demonstrates Simon's cluelessness about a world beyond his own. But what's his excuse for such egregious ignorance of the one he purports to be representing? Either he doesn't really understand the culture he's writing about, or he's distorting it to advance his plot. Neither works to the story's advantage, and either option undermines the integrity of the narrative .