The Big Red One (1980): written and directed by Samuel Fuller; starring Lee Marvin (The Sergeant), Mark Hamill (Griff), Robert Carradine (Zab), Bobby Di Cicco (Vinci), and Kelly Ward (Johnson): Startling good and refreshingly plotless movie about World War Two and 'the Big Red One' -- the USA First Infantry. The movie basically follows the rubric of Sgt. Rock comic books by having its focal characters -- four callow G.I.'s and career sergeant Lee Marvin -- fight in every major European battle from 1943 Vichy-held North Africa (OK, not technically Europe) to the liberation of a death camp in Czechoslovakia in May 1945.
The movie succeeds to a great extent because of Marvin's world-weary, sardonic, pragmatic, sorrowful sergeant, whom we open with in a B&W sequence at the conclusion of WWI. Mark Hamill gets second billing because of his Star Wars fame and is fine (and very young), but the main GI is narrator Robert Carradine, an aspiring pulp novelist. The youth and inexperience of the younger actors works in the movie's favour.
Long-time director Samuel G. Fuller made a movie that remains a favourite of later directors that include Quentin Tarantino. The difference here is that violence is almost never shown -- its aftermath is, sometimes, and sometimes it's only implied. Nonetheless, there's a startling brutality to some sequences that gets the horrors of war across better than flying giblets, especially Fuller's depiction of the effects of explosions on people (hint: people don't fly through the air and then get up; mostly, they just scream and die). In all, I think this a great movie, war or otherwise, and should have secured Lee Marvin some sort of major acting prize. He's terrific, turning in a career-best performance. Highly recommended.
Per IMDB, "In 2004, film critic Richard Schickel restored this film to a new director's cut length of approximately 160 minutes. Using Samuel Fuller's production notes and the full-length, unexpurgated script, Schickel restored the footage that was forced to be cut by the studio upon its original 1980 release (which runs 116 minutes). The restored version's DVD release date is 3 May 2005. This longer, epic-length version is closer to Fuller's original vision for the film."
Nelvana of the Northern Lights (1940-1947/ This edition 2014): edited by Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey; story and art credited to Adrian Dingle: War-time importation restrictions left Canada without American comic books for six years. In their place rose "the Canadian whites," mostly black-and-white comic books that offered the same sort of superheroes and action heroes seen in the American comics of the time.
The "Whites" would die off quickly once American comics returned to post-war Canada, killed by economies of scale. But Nelvana would live on in the memory of some, to the extent that the Canadian animation studio founded in the late 1970's took its name from her.
Who is Nelvana of the Northern Lights? Well, the daughter of a god of the Inuit, loosely based on actual myth. For an Inuit goddess, she looks a lot like a Caucasian movie star of the 1940's. Her brother looks even more Caucasian, even Aryan, and his ability to transform into a magical Great Dane seems mighty peculiar for the Canadian North. What, no Husky?
Nelvana predates Wonder Woman as a female superhero and post-dates some forgotten American female costume crimefighters. When the series begins, Nelvana protects the interests of the Inuit from a mythical invading nation that seems to be an odd combination of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Change came quickly to all superheroes in the 1940's, Canadian or American. Soon, Nelvana fights the Axis along Canadian soldiers and RCMP officers.
But she also fights lost civilizations hidden beneath the Arctic Ice and, once the war is over, an invasion of Radio-men from the Ether. And there the stories end.
Adrian Dingle was certainly the equal of most American superhero chroniclers of his time, and superior to many. There's a pleasing touch of Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff to his art, and the stories themselves move at breakneck speed. They have to. They're generally less than 10 pages long. Nelvana mostly handles things herself with an ever-changing array of powers, her male companions mostly forgettable.
Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey should be thanked for bringing back the complete adventures of Nelvana in this labour of love. A Table of Contents that cited the specific issues and publication dates for each story would improve the volume, but that's mainly an academic quibble. Kudos. Highly recommended.
Fury: written and directed by David Ayer; starring Brad Pitt (Collier), Shia LaBeouf (Bible), Logan Lerman (Norman), Michael Pena (Gordo), and Jon Bernthal (Coon-Ass) (2014): Enjoyable WWII tank movie with new-school gore but old-fashioned morality: there are good guys and bad guys, and the job of the good guys is to kill the bad guys.
Our American heroes, led by Sergeant Brad Pitt and forced to train new addition Logan Lerman on the fly, staff a Sherman tank dubbed 'Fury' in the last month of WWII, somewhere in Germany. They're town-hopping prior to Victory-Europe Day, and things are bloody as all Hell.
The acting from everyone is solid and sympathetic, though maybe we could have used ten more minutes of characterization and ten fewer minutes of apocalyptic battlefield action. Some of the tactical goofs will make military buffs cringe. This is another version of the old story of Horatius at the Bridge. And that story is dramatically sound no matter what millennium one lives in.
The representation of tracer fire does make some battle sequences look like Star Wars. Especially good is a running battle between four American tanks and one ridiculously (and historically accurately) superior German tank. The final, 20-minute battle at the crossroads is about as apocalyptic as any battle involving only one tank can be. Recommended.
When Harry Met Sally: written by Nora Ephron; directed by Rob Reiner; starring Billy Crystal (Harry), Meg Ryan (Sally), Carrie Fisher (Marie), and Bruno Kirby (Jess) (1989): Nora Ephron penned this romantic comedy and Rob Reiner directed in style and structure as an homage to, or swipe from, a number of Woody Allen movies. It's gentler and less neurotic than a Woody Allen film would have been, however. Can men and women be friends without the sexual element creeping in? The movie actually seems to answer that question 'No.' Recommended.
Stir Crazy: written by Bruce Jay Friedman; directed by Sidney Poitier; starring Gene Wilder (Skip Donahue), Richard Pryor (Harry Monroe), Jo Beth Williams (Meredith), Georg Stanford Brown (Rory), Barry Corbin (Warden Beatty), Craig T. Nelson (Deputy Wilson), Miguel Angel Suarez (Ramirez), and Jonathan Banks (Graham) (1980): Imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit, New Yorkers Wilder and Pryor must escape from a Southern U.S. prison by using... a prison rodeo? OK!
Sloppy, funny, and occasionally thrilling buddy movie teams Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor at a point when Wilder was at his height as a box-office presence. You can tell the latter because he gets to sing the title song and gets the girl in a completely perfunctory romantic sub-plot.
Pryor does what he can, though his massive talents are massively under-served by the script. Sidney Poitier directs (!) in an amiable but occasionally sloppy style. And who doesn't love Grossburger? The great Jonathan 'Mike Ehrmantraut' Banks plays a fairly significant role. Good luck recognizing him, though -- he's 35 years younger and hiding behind a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
A remarkable-for-its-time sympathetic portrayal of a gay inmate gets undercut to some extent by an almost stereotypical confusion of 'gay' and 'transvestite.' I'm pretty sure this movie represents the first time I saw a naked woman's boobies on the big screen. Yay me! Recommended.
Sgt. Rock Archives Volume 2; written by Robert Kanigher and Bob Haney; illustrated by Joe Kubert, Russ Heath, Irv Novick and Jerry Grandinetti (1960-61; collected 2003): Second volume of the adventures of DC's Sgt. Rock and Easy Company in various WWII theatres of war sees Joe Kubert become Rock's primary artist and Robert Kanigher the primary writer.
War stories meant for children and early teens portray war as violent but bloodless, though Kubert's evocative, gritty art nonetheless makes war look pretty hellish. Sgt. Rock's adventures always tended to have a fabulistic quality, in part because like superheroes, Easy Company had far more adventures than could reasonably be accounted for in the chronology of the 'real' world. Instead, the reader gets bracing fables about courage, teamwork, and heroic death.
All of this is narrated by Rock, who sprinkles lessons-learned throughout that narration, explaining why and how he does certain things. Kubert's art is really the star here (ably replaced by Irv Novick, Jerry Grandinetti, and Russ Heath in a few issues).
Kubert was already the comic-book master of suggestion by the time the early 1960's rolled around, the art stripped down to lines and spot blacks, nothing fussy, nothing busy. The faces of the soldiers are distinct, unique, and careworn in places. The backgrounds are detailed when they need to be and suggestive when they don't. The machinery of war looks, for the most part, realistic without drawing attention to itself with too much wanky detail. The overall effect is smooth and memorable, almost soothing -- a textbook example of a comic book meant for children that could be enjoyed by adults, something we see almost nothing of today. Highly recommended.
