War

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…

dir: Jonathan Glazer

2023

What is this film?

Whatever it is, it has very little in common with the book by Martin Amis that it’s supposedly based on.

I am pretty sure this is a horror film, one in which you never see the Holocaust itself, but you watch the people ‘enjoying’ its benefits adjacent to it. To be awfully glib, it’s like watching a version of Jaws where you never see the shark, or the shark’s victims, or even go on the water, but you spend all your time with the mayor of Amity Island and his wife, keeping the beaches open for fun and profit, going about their daily routines, looting stuff from the victim’s belongings, living their best lives.

It feels wrong to joke about such things, but all the same, if I’m not too offended, I might just uncancel myself and continue.

I’m not going to go into how the flick starts, because it’s all part of Glazer’s intention to not let us get comfortable at any time, but when there’s actual people on screen, it could be the Von Trapp family on summer holidays from The Sound of Music. The beauty of nature, them with all their super pale Aryan skin, enjoying their time outdoors. Quality family time spent together. No devices whatsoever.

Then they go home. What a nice house, what a happy, comfortable family. Lots of kids, lots of servants to help run the household, keep everything ship shape, gardeners to help in the garden. Nothing out of place, no one goes wanting.

Work / life balance wasn’t a well-known concept during the Third Reich and the Holocaust, but the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps is better placed than most in the messy work of genocide by having his villa located just outside the walls of the death factory. He and his family never have to see the unspeakable, unending, unbelievable horror that is occurring right next door.

But, like us, they hear it, but unlike us, they have to act like they hear nothing at all as they go about their idyllic lives.

(Im Westen nichts Neues)

dir: Edward Berger

2022

It’s not hard to make movies about World War I. It’s hard to make heroic, triumphant movies about World War I. At least, I feel like creative people with brains and working hearts, with any grasp of history or decency shy away from it, based entirely on the films that I’ve seen based on that terrible, stupid war (all wars are terrible, obviously).

The book was written by someone who fought on the German side during the war, survived, and then wrote a book about how terrible fighting in the war was, how senseless, how easily and cheaply lives could end for no benefit or purpose, how much it was the opposite of the patriotic adventure the boys that went off to war thought it would be.

Maybe we can say with some assurance that the writer Erich Maria Remarque hoped his message of the pointlessness of war would prevent further wars in or by Germany. Of course it was one of the first books banned by the Nazis when they came to power.

And then World War II said to World War I: Hold my Oktoberfest stein of beer…

It’s not an uncommon kind of story, being that it doesn’t take much to convince us that War is Hell. But decades of American movies, from a nation that has a very different relationship to the outcomes of global conflicts, have been trying to convince us that War is Hell, But the US of A Still Kicks ASS!!! That kind of mentality, maybe mitigated a bit by war films that came out of the Viet Nam and Iraq Wars which at least have some ambiguity, still predominates and still works with audiences (as Exhibit A, I present to you the staggering success of Top Gun: Maverick).

But this is a German film. Germany still wrestles with its past, with what it did in the last century, as it should and always must in order to prevent what happened happening again. So if this film has a point, it’s that war has no point, and should be avoided at almost all costs.

Tell that to the Russian scum brutalising Ukraine, but I digress.

dir: John Madden

2022

In the long tradition of British films set during World War II, this is yet another prestigious flick pretending that the actions of a plucky group of patriots essentially won the war against Hitler.

No, it’s not The Imitation Game, where Benedict Cumberbatch “invented” computers in order to beat the Nazis’ codes, with the help of a bunch of other people, including Keira Knightley. No, it’s not Enigma, where Kate Winslet and a different group of code breakers at Bletchley Park try to win the war (without the help of Alan Turing or Benedict Cumberbatch) single-handedly.

And it’s not Their Finest, a film from 2016 that conjectured that the actions of a plucky group of screenwriters and filmmakers making patriotic movies during the war changed the nation’s fortunes and turned the tide of the war. Despite ALL of these movies having many of the same people in them.

This is a completely different group of smartarses who take it upon themselves to win the war single-handedly by fabricating British plans to invade Greece, so as to distract the Nazis and make them re-deploy their forces from Sicily, which is the REAL target for the Allies.

The thing is, though, they feel like if they just send a letter to Hitler, with the fake plans, he might not receive it. If they tell his mates they might not give him the message. Plus they might think it’s bullshit, since it is bullshit.

So how best to trick the worst people in human history? Why, put the fake plans in a briefcase and attach it to a corpse, and then drop it off the coast of Spain, of course.

Thank makes perfect sense. No wait, that’s needlessly complicated and would never work.

If there is a villain in this flick, it’s not actually the Nazis, who, despite the fact that Kanye West keeps telling me that Hitler actually had some positive qualities, don’t really factor into it. No, the putative villain is played by Jason Isaacs as Admiral Godfrey. All along, from beginning to end, he is constantly telling the ‘heroes’ that their plan is bullshit and should never work, and will probably get tens of thousands of the Allied forces killed.