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Valkyrie (2008)
A fine effort sunk by Tom Cruise
On seeing this film, my first reaction was that Tom Cruise's role was enhanced for the film. Last night I read the portion of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer that covers this period, and it looks like his role was not exaggerated much (beyond the "white knight" uniform). In fact, the movie goes to great lengths to portray all of the major characters in the story accurately. In fact, I'd almost swear the screenplay was lifted pretty much whole from Shirer's book. (It is a very big book, and is a classic. It was published in 1959, 14 years after the end of the war.)
I'm very interested in this period, so I enjoyed the movie immensely. We forget the past very quickly, and we have mostly forgotten how murderous the Nazis really were. As a result of this coup attempt, the Gestapo tracked down, tried, and executed almost 5,000 Germans, both civilians and military officers. Many of these were middle or upper class (like the characters we see in the film). It's still hard to imagine that this happened in a European state that had a democratically elected government before Hitler took over the state.
As for the movie, I think its main fault was using Tom Cruise for the lead. He just leaves me cold, in every way. Although he is very good looking, I think this must have made him a total narcissist, because he never really seems to connect emotionally with any of his fellow actors -- and there were a whole lot of very good actors in this film. Even the shots where he is kissing his wife don't show his face ... which I suspect looks like a dead fish. For such a good looking guy, he has just zero sex appeal.
FAQs (2005)
Pugnacious optimism
A fairy tale really, where love conquers all. Attractive performances, and attractive male actors, frequently with their shirts off. There is some sex, but not as liberated and erotic as might be expected given that the film seeks to cast gay love in the teeth of straight, repressive society. India is a cute boy, new on the scene in West Hollywood, stiffed out of his food money by a straight porn director. He confronts a couple of gay bashers (who figure romantically in the finale) but when things get out of control, he is rescued by a hugely handsome drag queen with a gun, a job, an apartment, and a heart of gold (and rules for living that exclude crystal and mandate condoms -- no self-destruction on his watch). Family is constructed, the straight world is scorned. There is an undercurrent of violence that always gets deflected into statements of love. Nothing bad happens ... perhaps plausibly. I think there is a story here, but it ends up as a one-act soap, with looping individual stories, rather than a three-act drama. As long as we had all these great bodies, a few more images of men "in the heat of passion" (as Destiny puts it) would have been appropriate. There are a lot of annoying continuity and sync-sound problems. On balance though, the writer/director wants to say something worth saying: too many gay personal histories begin in violence -- we only wish that they may end in love.