Waiter, Pass the Czech

Hundreds, if not thousands, of films have attempted to address the various horrors of the twentieth century, from fascism and the Holocaust to communism and Stalinism. These movies tend to alternate between the ponderous and the campy, so it's a pleasure to find a production that deals seriously with these matters while remaining charming and even funny. The 2006 Czech film, I Served the King of England, came to American theaters for a few weeks in late 2008. If only it had received more attention here.

I Served the King of England opens with its "hero," the diminutive convict Jan Dite (Oldrich Kaiser), leaving a dreary Prague prison, where he has served fifteen years for an as-yet-undisclosed crime. The communist authorities relocate Dite to the border, where he works at renovating an abandoned and collapsing bar. As Dite works in the bar, he ponders his life and his long history as a waiter – most of the film consists of flashbacks to the life of a younger and more amoral Jan Dite (Ivan Barnev).

The first flashback begins as a faux silent film – young Dite, in black and white, selling frankfurters at a train station and speaking in title cards. Soon, however, the story of Dite's adventures in pre-WWII Czechoslovakia turns to color and sound. Dite gets a job at a bar, meets a fabulously rich industrialist, and manages to charm seemingly dozens of girls into bed. The young man seems to lead a charmed life, even if he can be just a tad unscrupulous, as when he trips up a waiter he despises and then takes his victim's job. Dite seems the classic picaresque rogue, at least until history intervenes.

In most stories of WWII, the hero is a brave foe of the Nazis – a soldier, a guerilla, a simple underground informant. Dite, however, manages to fall in love with a German schoolteacher (the only woman he has ever met shorter than he is), and ends up a collaborator – the sole waiter at a "scientific facility" (an elevated brothel) where the Germans hope to breed a new master race. In practice, this means Dite loiters with drink trays while a bevy of "Aryan" women frolic naked. Around this time, we start to notice just how Hitler-esque Dite's new mustache has grown. It seems our picaro has sold his soul.

After the war, Dite makes all the money he ever dreamed of – albeit in a shockingly nasty way – and founds his own hotel before karma, in the form of the communist authorities, catches up with him. The film returns to the "present" with Dite a poorer, but wiser and better, man. He's survived it all despite himself.

I Served the King of England is one of the funniest films I've seen of late. While most of the humor is sex-related or raunchy, the movie rarely veers into the vulgar. Much of the film parodies the rich and decadent of prewar Czech society, yet the satire is so gentle that we smile instead of clenching fists. There are moments, especially late in the film, of tragedy and horror, but young Dite's joie de vivre so dominates the film that we almost forget about them.

The silent sequence near the opening is hardly the only "unique" touch in, director, Jirí Menzel's film. While the film is rarely outright surreal, everything, from character tics to settings, is exaggerated just enough to seem unreal. The waiters are all perfectly strait-laced, the royalty unbelievably regal, the nudes quintessentially frolicsome, and the soldiers all complete automatons. The result is a highly mannered film, but one that, oddly enough, feels lighter than the sum of its affectations. The small exaggerations and distortions prepare the audience for the larger, more eyebrow-raising ones.

As much as I liked I Served the King of England, there are two technical problems I feel I must address. The first is the frequent use of crummy CGI. Now, I don't expect Weta-level effects from an Eastern European production, but the computer-generated scenes are often shoddy enough to distract the viewer and break the suspension of disbelief. Especially frustrating is the fact that several CG shots could have been done the old-fashioned way, without electronics. My second gripe concerns the subtitles, which no one seems to have proofread. Words are misused and misspelled and too often the syntax tends towards the inscrutable.

I Served the King of England is hardly a masterpiece, and it loses something in translation. Yet it has something to say about history and humanity, and it never loses its message in its persistent levity. I'm glad I saw the film; it's well-made, refreshing, funny, and surprising. What it may not be is enduring.

It's Not Easy Being Green

It is quite natural to assume that Green Zone suffers in comparison to The Hurt Locker. Yet it hardly came to mind while I viewed the film. Paul Greengrass' Iraq War thriller takes a far broader perspective than Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning drama does. Within the first few minutes, Matt Damon is standing up and asking the big questions of his commanders – Are there really any WMDs in Iraq? Who is making these claims? – and any sense of on-the-ground immediacy gives way to concerns of espionage and politics.

This is why a very different film haunted me as I watched Green Zone – the 2007 documentary, No End in Sight. If you wish to save yourself the trouble of reading this entire review, I'll cut to the chase: Go watch No End in Sight instead. Its pragmatic assessment of the invasion of Iraq is infinitely more damning, more revolting and more moving than Green Zone's historical fiction contrivances.

Early on in both films, the post-invasion looting that ravaged Iraq in 2003 is portrayed. In Green Zone, the audience witnesses Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller's (Matt Damon) confusion as he finds a potential WMD storage facility being stripped bare by Iraqi civilians. Then, a minute later, Miller resolves to enter the facility anyway, and completes his mission without considerable incident. The looting is a striking sight that is neither explained nor revisited later in the film.

Focusing the film's narrative on Miller is a perfectly valid choice, but that does not change the fact that what is happening in the background is often far more interesting. Obviously, Miller finds no weapons at this site – a trend that is beginning to bother him. This leads him to question the quality of the intelligence the Army has provided. Intrigue ensues, but with a fatal flaw: We already know that there are no WMDs and, nevertheless, we must watch Miller struggle to uncover this fact for the next hour or so. So, the questions that are far more relevant here, in 2010, go unasked.

No End in Sight starts where Miller's story ends – it knows that the WMDs were a fabrication and it knows that Iraq was a hopeless mess by the time President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003. So, when No End in Sight shows us the looting, it asks the questions we want it to ask: Why was it happening? How was it allowed to happen? Just how much damage did it do? The answers this documentary provides are far more affecting than anything in Green Zone: News footage shows the director of the Iraqi National Museum watching, in tears, as looters tear apart thousands of years of Arab history. He is helpless to stop them because the US military is too wrapped up in red tape to raise a finger.

So, director, Paul Greengrass does hit all of the bullet points for accurately portraying post-invasion Iraq, but these scenes are so divorced from both their causes and their effects that they are meaningless – merely there to up the intensity of Miller's adventure.

This adventure is hardly anything to get excited about, either. Even if one overlooks the fact that the audience knows the big answers already, the plot seems to swerve between being simplistic and being unnecessarily complicated. The antagonist is a dickish Bush Administration official named Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) who, predictably, ignores common sense in favor of small, superficial victories – installing some crony in power and killing an Iraqi ex-general. While Kinnear is talented enough to keep the character from seeming cartoonish, and the script suggests that the corruption goes higher, the audience is still led to believe that this one guy is largely responsible for the disaster that is post-invasion Iraq. It is a bit silly and, after the film adds a few obligatory layers of convolution, it does not become easier to swallow.

Like the directing, Brian Helgeland's script does make a number of nods to the true complexity of the situation. Yet they are constantly steamrolled over by Miller's left-wing Jack Bauer act. Reality seems to scroll by behind him as he breaks rule after rule in some misguided attempt to fix everything. There is one moment where a character seems to catch Miller in the naivety of his mission, but the the movie ends with a scene that leaves little doubt as to his status as Our Hero. It is frustrating because Helgeland clearly has some interesting things to say, perhaps courtesy of the source material, but he prefers to have it boil down to a Good Guy vs. Bad Guy scenario.

Even so, the film's climax manages to be quite confusing. By this point, Miller has been running around, flouting orders for so long that it becomes unclear how his actions will solve anything. Also, the director's frantic visual style has pushed everything over the edge into headache-inducing territory.

Normally, I would say that Paul Greengrass' style is used to great effect. His breakneck editing and jittery camerawork is often the very best in controlled chaos, only conveying the bare minimum of information necessary to pull the viewer through the action. The style's potential for truly thrilling action is on full display in the film's opening sequence – an extremely intense depiction of Iraqi officials evacuating a palace in the middle of the US's "Shock and Awe" campaign. When a character goes into a prolonged action sequence with vague intentions, however, the proceedings can border on incomprehensible. When Miller does just this at the climax of Green Zone, it becomes downright tedious.

It is sad that Green Zone's narrative fails the film because this movie is often quite good looking. I cannot claim to have ever visited Baghdad, but this film employs a very convincing mix of CGI and locations to create a facsimile of the Iraqi capital. Many of the surreal settings convey Saddam's sudden fall from power: His palaces are now ransacked and filled with bunking US soldiers, and many of his vain monuments are now partly destroyed. Cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd does a great job of bringing some beauty to the city, not merely sticking with the same drab palette of colors we usually see in Hollywood's Iraq. Even the climactic nighttime shootout looks more interesting than one would expect, with back streets lit by a nice smattering of colors.

I suppose it may sound like an insult when I claim that a documentary is more involving than this thriller but, on some level, it is a compliment. There is never any doubt that Green Zone is a well-made film, and it must be praised for largely refusing to dumb down its subject matter; Greengrass and company clearly went out of their way to create an authentic Baghdad, both visually and thematically. Yet this film always has one foot in the realm of the Hollywood action flick, blunting its impact with an abundance of action sequences and a bland, ineffectual script. Greengrass prides himself on creating immediacy and urgency but, oddly enough, Green Zone feels like too little, too late.

No End in Sight is currently available on DVD and Netflix Watch Instantly.

Tarantino Is Fighting for the People

My jury seems to be permanently out on this guy. His penchant for giddy mash-ups of obscure genres and insistence on subverting convention makes his movies suit cinephiles quite nicely. Then again, it is hard to argue that they do much else beyond such academic exercises. Then again, Quentin Tarantino's uncanny understanding of what makes movies tick comes with some serious talent to back it up. Then again, the man is downright devoid of taste. I could go on for quite a while, but the bottom line is: Tarantino is what he is, so go with it or go home.

If any premise is going to make Americans choose the former, it is that of "Inglourious Basterds." The titular men are a group of Jewish-American soldiers (led by Brad Pitt) who have decided to go into World War II France before any of their fellow troops do. Their plan is to cut their way through France, engaging any Nazis they find in polite discourse designed to expose the error of their ways... and then scalp them. Perhaps the most surprising thing for most audience members, however, will be just how little screen time the Basterds get.

The film has another protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish refugee, who operates a Paris cinema. She, ironically, finds herself closer to the film's symbolic front lines, as she confronts Joseph Goebbels and is forced to host the premiere of the propagandist's final flourish, a film about a famous Nazi sniper. The Basterds are charged, by the English military, to take advantage of this unprecedented gathering of Nazi officials and blow the theater to hell. Yet, Dreyfus has her own vengeful plans. As the night approaches and the characters converge on the theater, there is a revelation that raises the stakes of the mission far beyond what the Basterds could have imagined and, well, the rest is historical fiction.

The liberties that "Inglourious Basterds" takes with history are what make it as interesting as it is. It portrays a Nazi party in a state of paranoia. Hitler is a caricature and the men around him seem to know it. The Basterds have him flustered and he is looking to make grand gestures in an attempt to quell the fear among his men. The film's primary antagonist is Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the man charged with rounding up the Jews in France. He is shrewd, cool and, often, bizarre – everything history has attributed to Hitler. So, while the film's Hitler is absorbed with increasingly minute efforts at maintaining his empire, Landa is doing the dirty work. It is a good writing choice, as it allows Tarantino to, at once, lampoon history and rewrite it to great dramatic effect.

While the film's primary characters may be a bit surprising, this script is a strikingly conventional one for Tarantino. "Basterds" is largely devoid of the narrative digressions and convolutions for which he is known. (There are two brief, narrated asides. They are quite fun and actually made me want to see more.) He, instead, chooses to tell a straightforward story that is fueled by suspense. That suspense, however, is incredibly effective. The film's first major scene methodically builds extreme tension. There are a number of other, equally effective confrontations that, while they may not be fueled by vibrant characters, utilize the inherent tension of the setting to its utmost.

Tarantino's direction in these scenes is textbook. He never plays his hand too soon, allowing conversation to slowly unfold, revealing the characters' anger and fear with each line. Medium shots only give way to close-ups at the very last moments before the breaking point is reached. When the point does come, the violence is shocking and stylized, obviously, but it has also gained a significant amount of dramatic weight. Unfortunately, there are so many great scenes like this in the film's first four chapters that the climax in incapable of topping them. By the time the inevitable showdown is looming, the desire to see it happen far outweighs any interest in further delay. This final delay also seems to hurt the wonderfully constructed aura that Col. Landa has established, by revealing his motivations as something far pettier than expected. It takes some of the wind out of a climax that otherwise proves to be a potent mix of shocking irony, giddy catharsis and eerie symbolism – you know, grade-A Tarantino stuff.

Col. Landa, by the way, is played wonderfully. Christoph Waltz manages to make ordering cream sound like a death threat. He makes his character's monstrous powers tangible in the film's first standoff, as he calmly lets his victims languish in fear, manipulating the action with such dexterity that he seems to be directing the scene from within the film. Most of the other performances are firmly in the shadow of Waltz's, but there are plenty of solid ones here. Brad Pitt has plenty of fun with Lt. Aldo Raine. His backwater elocution is quite amusing and downright hilarious when Italian is added to the mix. Mélanie Laurent strikes a great balance with her character, displaying understandable fear and unadulterated drive in equal parts. Her application of rouge in the buildup to the climax is one of the film's most memorable visuals; it solidifies her as the film's true warrior. The ranks of the Basterds remain largely anonymous, apart from Eli Roth, who lays it on thick as the team's muscle and Til Schweiger, who is amusing as a psychopathic Nazi defector.

That "Inglourious Basterds" is the first Quentin Tarantino movie to be distributed by a major movie studio in the States is no surprise. This movie is the biggest crowd pleaser he will probably ever make. It is interesting to see the filmmaker take this turn; it suggests that he is finally tiring of his academic obsession with genre and expectation. Nevertheless, "Basterds" is unequivocally his work, painting a picture of a World War II that is fought in the cinemas as much as it is in the streets. Even if the story gets away from him a bit in the end, the film defies expectations in subtler ways than his past films have. It may not rock the boat nearly as much as "Pulp Fiction" did, but this movie's appealing premise allows it to indulge Tarantino's imagination as much as it does that of the audience – something that his other films never really did.

Just in Case You Want to Support a Company Other Than Hasbro This Summer...

I feel like a bit of a sellout. I have seen a number of solid indie movies this summer and I have completely failed to give them any attention here on the blog. So, in an overdue attempt to make up for it, I have written up brief reviews of four small films that are worth your money this summer.

Away We Go

Maya Rudolph is pregnant with boyfriend, John Krasinski's child. Let the self-consciously indie rumination begin! This one is from director, Sam Mendes, but rest assured, it is not "Revolutionary Road." In fact, this far less a portentous Oscar contender than it is a warm, light cup of Alexi Murdoch-flavored tea.

While the film may be far too eager to woo its target audience (people with beards and army surplus jackets, or people who date people with beards and army surplus jackets), it just barely succeeds. Thank the leads. The two performances are not revelations on the level of, say, Bill Murray's rebirth a few years ago, but they are solid. Rudolph, in particular, is incredibly endearing whilst buried behind her giant belly. (Her talents are wasted on SNL. Get out while you still can!) Krasinski still lacks some range, in my opinion, but its hard to lay a great deal of blame on any of the actors in this film, because the script tends to be quite wonky.

The film is composed of four or five chapters, each devoted to a certain city. Our couple, you see, is searching for the best place to raise their little surprise. The chapters, while they are certainly unique, come together to create a rather uneven film. The Phoenix chapter is the biggest offender of all, featuring an annoying appearance from Allison Janney. It, thankfully, comes early on, though. The subsequent chapters consistently improve, as various friends and relatives show us their unique brands of family. The Toronto segment stands out, as the portrayal of a warm, happy family with adopted children develops a strikingly melancholic tone.

Even as each chapter becomes more poignant, however, it's impact on the leads is not well-developed, especially given the inevitable conclusion that they must build their own kind of family in their own town. Still, earnest performances and rustic cinematography glaze over these rough edges enough to make the film go down easy.

Moon

Science fiction has not exactly been doing well lately. "Moon" has come to the rescue, assuring us that there is still some life yet in the the genre. Even the makers of "Away We Go" should take note of this one, as it is a decidedly "indie" film, but it has no interest in flaunting that fact. Sam Rockwell plays a guy named Sam Bell who has been hired to keep an eye on a power company's moon-based mining operation for a period of three years. His stint is almost over and he is looking forward to rejoining his wife and kid at home.

Sam is alone, save for an AI named GERTY (conspicuously voiced by Kevin Spacey). Director, Duncan Jones takes his time developing Sam's daily routine and his relationship with GERTY. The isolation is apparent, but it never becomes tedious. Few actors could pull off the tall order that this film entails, but Rockwell easily conveys Sam's weariness, boredom and loneliness while still being quite likable. Furthermore, GERTY is never quite as menacing as sci-fi filmgoers will expect. It sounds like a car commercial and knows more than it lets on, but its role in the film is more complex than your typical malevolent AI, even beyond the emoticons it sports.

Things do get weird, though. After Sam crashes a truck into a harvesting vehicle and reawakens inside the base, he seems to think there is another version of himself walking around the base. It turns out to be a clone (not a huge spoiler, I swear). The way the Sams' relationship develops is beautifully restrained and surreal. The injured Sam slowly comes to accept the presence of his clone and Jones, once again, knows not to rush this process on screen. Once the two begin to converse and question the situation, the mystery begins to unravel. Rockwell rises to this second major challenge ably, never overplaying the subtly varying personalities of the two Sams. Look for weird split-screen effects all you want; the interaction between the clones almost never feels fabricated – a credit to everyone involved.

"Moon" takes what could have been a weighty epic and makes it an understated, character-driven film. Its small budget does nothing to subtract from the experience (having one main set and one major character probably helped in that area) – in fact, it probably benefitted the film. GERTY chugs around like it has seen a few years' action and the director never gets carried away with the outdoor scenes, allowing the moon's spare drabness to come through. Rockwell will get a lot of attention for this film, and he certainly deserves it, but "Moon" is solid through and through. Sci-fi fans: rejoice.

500 Days of Summer

"500 Days of Summer" will see "Away We Go" its Alexi Murdoch and raise them a Regina Spektor. Even setting aside the indie soundtrack arms race, however, this one is a knockout. As lovable as the cast of "Away We Go" may be, they cannot hold a candle to Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. This one has a great script and some downright lyrical visuals to boot.

I cringed the moment I realized that the movie's title is actually its central means of organizing the narrative. We are treated to a literal, on-screen counter each time the film bounces from one point to another in this couple's 500 day-long romance. While an out-of-sequence narrative is a very easy way to lend some artificial complexity to a film, Marc Webb's sharp directing, along with the witty script, wrings every last ounce of humor and emotion from the idea.

Telling the story from the woefully earnest perspective of Gordon-Levitt's character, Tom, the film is rife with other little gimmicks that (downright confoundingly) work more often than not. A sequence where Tom's expectations for a party play out on one side of the screen while reality does on the other may seem like mere busy work for your eye. Yet, the respective scenes play out with unexpected subtlety and it builds a great deal of tension, leading up to a big revelation. A series of seemingly random images from various scenes in the film repeat throughout the story, each time gaining a bit more meaning. It provides a uniquely skewed perspective on the film's events as we, along with Tom, attempt to make sense of his love interest's apparently confounding behavior.

Even amid all of this conspicuous narrative machinery, there is a genuine soul to the film. Tom's obsession may often be the butt of jokes in the film, but it is still undeniably earnest and tender. The banter Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt share is witty enough to sell its cuteness and there are a few moments where the narrative gives way to passages of romantic bliss that are genuinely beautiful. This really is a good romantic comedy. One does not get to say that very often.

The Hurt Locker

Chalk this one up as another unlikely success. Movies about the war in Iraq are few and far between. Good ones are virtually nonexistent. Good ones directed by a woman... well, you get my point. (It may sound strange to point out the director's gender but this film almost exclusively features male characters. Oh, and when was the last time you saw any movie directed by a woman? Probably not recently... if ever. That's a crime, if Kathryn Bigelow is any indication.)

Jeremy Renner plays Staff Sergeant William James. Staff Sergeant James defuses IEDs (improvised explosive devices). He is also insane. The film opens with the team losing its original bomb technician in a gruesome display of the power of these crude devices. It explains why, throughout the film, James and his men find other soldiers cowering at the sight of the telling garbage piles that tend to hide them. When James joins the team, his reckless approach scares and angers his men. He quickly proves his abilities but consequences do come – in some ways that are less obvious than others.

This is the strength of "The Hurt Locker" – there is hardly a single note of certainty in the film. From the characterizations of the men to each bomb sequence, nothing is clear-cut. Dull tension is pervasive. Even when a bomb is finally defused, the anxiety relents in a way that is so minute it is difficult to perceive. One standoff even ends with a tentative, "I think we're done," after hours of silence. Bigelow's assured directing is to thank. Each bomb scenario James faces builds slowly and surely, without ever resorting to melodramatic performances or heavy handed musical cues. The camerawork has a typically gritty texture, but Bigelow never throws the camera around in order to fabricate drama.

It is easy to want "The Hurt Locker" to have some sort of arc – some sort of progression to the situations James and his team faces. While one could say that each is more stomach-turning than the next (the later events are, indeed, particularly disturbing), writer, Mark Boal knows better than to force any clear meaning onto the film's events. Even when one incident manages to get under James' skin, his attempt to assert some sort of justice is painfully inadequate and, ultimately, pointless. Anything more would have made "The Hurt Locker" a lesser film. As it stands, however, this is the first great war film in years – a striking fact, considering just how long we have been at war.