how do your weapons work?

New trailer awesomeness:

away we go boom!

I used to tell people that the best Iraq war movie so far was Neil Burger’s The Lucky Ones, a wacky road trip comedy that subtly explores the alienation of returning vets from the country they’re fighting for. But as much as I love that film for accurately measuring the distance between the experiences of the American people and that of their soldiers, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film The Hurt Locker, which opened last week in Los Angeles and New York and goes wide soon, is even better. Unbelievably good, in fact. Following an EOD team through the final month of a tour in Baghdad, it’s easily the smartest action film of the summer so far, substituting terrifying real-life scenarios for the usual noise and visual chaos of shape-shifting robots fighting guinea pigs for control of Eddie Murphy’s daughter. Or whatever it’s about this season.

Bigelow, a director I’ve always liked, swings for the bleachers here — every setpiece is cleanly structured around a single, solid idea, and while the situation is often unbearably ambiguous, the audience is never lost. Bigelow skilfully suspends the emotional load of each scene between the two poles of a bomb tech’s life: the professional calm of men who know their job, and the confusion and terror of men who must constantly climb into the jaws of death:

Bigelow leans hard on two amazing lead performances by Anthony Mackie as cool, responsible SGT Sanborn and Jeremy Renner as his new team leader, the unbalanced and dangerously confident SFC James. Sanborn is an audience surrogate, a rational guy appalled by James’s erratic and needlessly risky behavior. But by the end of the film, Sanborn’s calculating approach to risk seems to fail him, while James’s constant dance with death seems like it might be the only way to deal honestly with what EOD techs are asked to do.

Renner is the 2009 equivalent of the necessarily-deranged flyers in Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, a comedy/drama about men who willingly throw themselves into danger for the sake of the mission. Which makes The Hurt Locker an interesting change from the typically anti-war, anti-military bent of many Iraq movies, which often drape Vietnam-era politics uncomfortably over the framework of a different war and a different Army. Renner’s SFC James is no Colonel Kurtz; he doesn’t lose his humanity. He simply discovers, in war, a tremendous capacity within himself that he would otherwise perhaps never have been able to use. He’s aware, albeit only dimly at times, that the exercise of this talent is costing him too much. But unlike Sanborn, he is unwilling to do the moral and emotional accounting that might force him to change the way he approaches his job.

I suspect the reason I like The Hurt Locker so much is the same reason I like the World War II films made in the 1950s and 1960s, and also the same reason I like The Wire and Homicide: Life On The Streets: all of them were made by people with some experience of the thing they were portraying. Movie stars and filmmakers of the 40s, 50s, and 60s had almost all been drafted, and many had seen actual combat. Similarly, David Simon’s shows about police in Baltimore in the 1990s were so profoundly successful because Simon and his co-writer Ed Burns had spent two decades following the drug war in that city.

The Hurt Locker’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, fits somewhere between those two types of experiences; Paul Haggis’s In The Valley Of Elah was based on a story Boal had written for Playboy, while Boal’s Hurt Locker script was based on his own experiences in Iraq researching the article “The Man In The Bomb Suit.” Boal isn’t a soldier, but like Evan Wright, he’s gotten close enough to combat and the grimy details of soldiers’ lives to write a script that’s both sympathetic and accurate.

Films across the political spectrum, from Stop Loss to The Marine, tend to treat our combat troops like objects — like political banners, like superheroes, like convenient shorthand for various clusters of associated traits. But it’s rare, far too rare, for filmmakers to simply show us what our soldiers’ lives are like and to let them be the subjects of their own stories.

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Burt and Verona make the mistake of thinking that the right city, the right pushpin on the map, will help ease their anxiety about being what Kurt Vonnegut once called “a terribly vulnerable survival unit.” It won’t, of course, but that mistake makes a pretty good jumping-off point for them to survey various models of parenting and family life in Away We Go, a movie I liked a lot more than I thought I would.

Some of these model families have been criticized for veering into caricature — especially Maggie Gyllenhaal’s godawful hippie mom and her hilariously feminine husband:

You can decide for yourself. I thought it was funny.

I’m not a big fan of Sam Mendes — his Jarhead had all the problems mentioned above, and his other movies seem needlessly stagey and emotive and cute. But Away We Go, anchored by a hip Dave Eggers/Vendela Vida script and subtle, charming performances from John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph (as well as a battalion of stars doing minor turns), ultimately won me over. There are a few things I don’t care for — the script completely glosses over how two freelancers are going to pay for maternity care, and a sequence near the end involving a monologue and some morose stripping brought me abruptly out of the film. But overall, this is a terrific, quiet, funny little road movie about the search for roots and home and family.

Plus — Allison Janney. I love her so much. (I tried to find you a good clip of her on YouTube, but the only one I could find was the scene in the airport, which isn’t the best by a long shot. But trust me — she’s awesome.)

the talented tenth

I know I’ve raved before about Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but now that the Lady Wife and I have succumbed to the warm, gentle content tsunami of basic cable, I’m also really enjoying Ramsay’s more recent show, Gordon Ramsay’s F Word. It’s a show built around a gimmick — each episode, Gordon takes a team of four amateur cooks through the paces of working in a pro kitchen for a night. The kicker is that the diners decide at the end of each course whether they want to pay for it. At the end of the season, the team with the most purchased courses gets to come work at Claridge’s at Mayfair.

But that’s just the anchor concept. Between the courses, Gordon engages in various other food-related activities, including hunting, fishing, and raising his own livestock. He also does a “recipe challenge” each episode, pitting his own recipe against one brought in by a celebrity. (Well, a British celebrity. I didn’t recogize any of them.) Gordon always talks a tremendous amount of smack in the kitchen, presumably in an attempt to rattle his celeb competitors. But he doesn’t always win, and his maitre’d, Jean-Baptiste, is always positively gleeful when Gordon has to take one in the face. (So am I.)

This is sort of the key to the show, actually. Gordon Ramsay is a type-A, bullying personality, but he’s also a high achiever, and what’s fascinating about high-achieving people is watching them apply themselves to things they don’t yet have mastery in. So far, the best, most efficient kitchen team of the first season was a group of lady doctors who moved fast like they were in the emergency room and repeated orders with a martial “Yes, chef!” They were fine home cooks to start with, but they were also the kind of people who, having achieved complete mastery in one area, feel comfortable trying to learn new things and have the discipline and learning skills to be successful. (Another brigade, by contrast, consisted of “Eton Boys” who worked in finance and made me cringe for the future state of the British economy.)

Gordon, of course, has achieved complete mastery in his field, and the chief pleasure of the show is watching him, as well as his amateur cooks, try new things. Mostly he succeeds, but the process humbles him, takes away some of his competitive, ball-busting energy. (It’s particularly fun to watch him shrink down to quite human scale when he gets to ride along with a group of RAF pilots.) And in the process of trying to get closer to his food, he actually finds out some fascinating things, like what the jolt from an electric sheep fence feels like, or what happens to the pigs he’s raised in his backyard when they go to the slaughterhouse. Some of his adventures are clearly impossible to repeat at home — not many of us are going to go spear-fishing for food — but some, like finding and cooking snails from his own garden instead of importing hoity-toity French snails, seem like the kind of thing an ambitious home cook could totally figure out.

Also, he involved his kids, paying them 5p per snail. It was pretty adorable — one boy got something like 1 pound 25p, which is 25 snails! — but it also points to the thing that makes Ramsay such an engaging figure: despite being an asshole in many respects, he’s passionate about educating the public, including small children, about food and where it comes from.

(One recurring segment that seems destined to become the next Ramsay show is about Ramsay’s search for the next Fanny Cradock, a seminal British TV cook who apparently taught millions of middle-class housewives to cook. I.e., Gordon Ramsay’s childhood companion.)

a free market in commercials

So one of the things the Lady Wife brought to our marriage was one of these “Tivo” boxes for watching television. To be honest, I’m a little behind the times on this — largely because I haven’t had a TV in about six years. This doesn’t make me a better person than you — I still watched copious amounts of TV on DVD and Hulu. (The fact that I can actually listen to The Fiery Furnaces’ Rehearsing My Choir all the way through — that makes me a better person than you. Not having a TV was just an accident.)

My wife, on the other hand, has two TVs, a DVD player, and, of course, this Tivo. When we moved into our new apartment, we were so pleased with the amount we were paying in rent that we decided to get basic cable, too, and my wife patiently spent several hours connecting boxes and programming things so that we could record shows. So now I watch TV on a TV, which is nice, because my laptop is now useful again for things like blogging about my home electronics.

When we were dating, I pretty much never saw a commercial, because the Lady Friend was a ruthless and expert skipper of commercials. I’ve worried for a while now that DVR technology would destroy television as a business, because advertisers obvious won’t pay for airtime if everyone’s just going to skip their ads. And my wife’s approach seemed to confirm that problem.

But now that we’re married and her Tivo is my Tivo and because we work opposite shifts I am sometimes alone with the Tivo, I’ve discovered that I, through laziness or passivity or a sort of last-gasp loyalty to commercially sponsored television, often forget to fast forward when the commercials come around. My wife, even if she’s three-fourths asleep next to me on the futon, will instinctively feel around for the remote to avoid being sloganeered by purveyors of car insurance and premium gasoline. But I often forget. For a while. And I’ve noticed two things about my relationship with commercials in this strange new land of ad-optional viewing.

The first is that I don’t generally get impatient right away. I don’t mind sitting and watching one commercial. It’s waiting through the second and third and fourth ads that usually inspires me to press the fast forward button.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes I like to watch ads. Many ads, being basically short films on a single theme, have a terrific punch and cleverness that I sometimes wish TV programs themselves had. So today, for example, I’ve watched an ad for Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, because the ad cleverly replicates the frustration one often feels at the blockheaded stupidity of Google search results.

(By the way, it took me six different searches on Google and YouTube to find that.) I’ve also watched the T-Mobile ad about people chasing economists off their lawns and the Prius ad that shows a car driving through a field of human flowers. (That last one mainly just makes me wonder how they do the special effects.) On the other hand, I’ll promptly skip the Burger King ad that features the Whopper, Jr. on a faux home shopping channel (ugh) or the bland “ecomagination” corporate image-polishing video from GE.

What does all this mean? Well, of course, a certain percentage of viewers will simply skip all commercials, and advertisers will have to live with that fact. But it turns out advertisers can do quite a bit to salvage their viewership. And that means that there might now be a more competitive market in advertising, which would be a good thing for us all. Advertisers might well compete for the first slot in each block of ads, hoping that they can engage our attention before we have a chance to realize that we’re watching a commercial. They may also try to more closely monitor microdemographics of a given show, since Tivo reports that viewers are less likely to skip ads they think are relevant to them. And of course, some products are simply more interesting than others: Tivo also reports that viewers skip movie trailers less than any other kind of ad.

But if we’re lucky, perhaps the ability of consumers to pick and choose between ads will result in better advertising. Up to now, advertisers have had only the clumsiest, most aggragated feedback from viewers about whether their ads were truly eye-catching or interesting. But now they’ll have, essentially, the kind of instantaneous feedback that Nielsen ratings provide to television studios. And we can all see how that’s improved the quality of television shows.

Seriously, though — in this way ads are in a bit better position than TV shows, for two reasons. First, sure, some good, interesting ads will probably tank. But who cares? They’re ads. And second, because ads are more like short movies on YouTube or FunnyOrDie than they are like long-form drama, viewers will invest the minimal time involved if an ad can prove itself engaging and clever.

The real danger, in terms of taste, comes from ads that are compelling but also revolting — whatever the Jerry Springer or A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila of advertising might be. But here, fortunately, we might be spared — advertisers are happy to hawk their products between the acts of such shows, but they seem, so far, to be reticent to actually wade into the jello-pool of debauchery where their brands are on the line. This isn’t because companies are above such things, but because it’s probably not economical for Toyota to create one set of ads for NBC, another set for F/X, another set for MTV after 10 p.m., and so on. On the whole, we benefit from advertisers’ limited resources and their need to make one ad appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Yes, I think the DVR revolution might augur well for, at least, the art of advertising, in much the way that the introduction of cable in the 1980s forced the networks to stop making crap and start producing better TV. And with that, we return you to your show, “Economic Musings On Ten-Year-Old Technology,” already in progress.

finiculi, finicula

Kickassclassical.com features a nicely organized roster of classical hits that show up frequently in movies, along with snarky commentary and samples. If you’re writing a cartoon script or need a public domain cliche for your independent short, this site is gold.

the sweet smell of success

Garrison Keillor, one of my childhood heroes, writes in Salon this week:

An intensely quiet blond girl… with no reluctance, sat down at the piano when I asked her if she played piano, squared her shoulders and played the exquisite Chopin Prelude No. 2 in A minor, the notes of the slow movement like raindrops on birch leaves, smoke drifting by, an anguished old man pacing in the grass, and played it so beautifully it transformed the entire evening….

Playing the Prelude No. 2 in A minor is not a step on a career path. There is only one Emanuel Ax, and he has the Chopin chair for now, and there are plenty of dead pianists around on CDs. I suppose that you could argue for a correlation between mastery of the Prelude No. 2 and scholastic achievement leading to opportunities in computer programming, but meanwhile, it simply is an extravagant gift from the heart of a girl to the hearts of whoever is standing nearby. Life is good, no matter the disappointments — O God the disappointments. Just square your shoulders and give them your utter best. As the late great Marilyn Monroe said, “I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.” Life is insurmountable, but we mount up every morning and ride forward. Thanks for being wonderful, dear heart.

Which is a beautiful sentiment, and one I subscribe to regarding art. But it’s also a difficult one to apply to my particular craft, because filmmaking is ridiculously expensive and my wife has informed me in very clear terms that I will not be spending our retirement or our future children’s college money on making independent movies — should we ever be lucky enough to have retirement or college funds. I have a couple of video cameras, and writing is free, of course, but if I don’t make it in the world of professional filmmaking, well, it’s very hard for an ordinary citizen to make movies as a hobby.

And don’t bring up El Mariachi or the pilot to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelhpia — those guys were taking steps in a career path, which is precisely the point. You can borrow your friends’ houses or build a fake restaurant in somebody’s basement once. You can convince actors, even good actors, to work for free once. You can steal time in an edit bay once. You can quit your job and let your spouse support you… once. The myth of the clever, resourceful no-budget filmmaker remains charming only because most people outside of L.A. aren’t actually friends with a no-budget filmmaker. Or, to be more honest in the nomenclature, a leech. All the things that make no-budget filmmaking possible are essentially favors. And everybody’s willing to help a friend out once, especially if it’s to set that friend on a career path — even one as improbable as becoming a Hollywood filmmaker.

But imagine if you had a piano-playing friend who came to you every couple of months and asked you for a couple hundred dollars to help him rent a piano. You might justifiably wonder aloud why your friend didn’t get a job playing piano at a hotel bar down by the airport — at which point your friend would sigh and shake his head and turn away from you irritably. And you would probably begin to see piano music as less of “an extravagant gift from the heart” and more of a goddamned nuisance and egotistical waste of time. Which is what most independent filmmaking, let’s be honest, probably is.

On the other hand, in the astonishing new era of YouTube, there are millions of hobbyist filmmakers. They make home movies about ninja cats, they dub their voices over screencaps of popular video games, they re-edit classic films to look like something new. They’re all doing great work, and all doing it without expecting or even wanting to make money. They just want to do something wonderful. Maybe it’s only the old dreamers, the people still secretly fantasizing about the Spike Lee or Kevin Smith career path, who have failed to grasp the point — that a movie doesn’t have to be Chopin to be worthwhile.

But I think there’s a sort of “uncanny valley” in popular media, a valley between the safely amateur antics of YouTube auteurs and the recognizably professional stuff we watch on TV and in theaters. We’re comfortable with mediocre but fun home movies because they show us something wacky without pretending to art. But how many of those are really narrative fiction art of the kind we’d actually pay money for? We’re actually uncomfortable with independent narrative films and reluctant to watch them online, not because the digital delivery system is inherently unwatchable — many, many people are now watching all their TV on Hulu — but because we have a strong, often correct intuition that a narrative film some guy makes in his garage isn’t going to be any good. Otherwise, why didn’t someone pay him to do it?

Which is the real reason I probably can’t be a hobbyist filmmaker — because it would embarrass the neighbors. Because it’s cool and charming when a doctor or a mechanic can sit down at the family piano and bang out “Jingle Bells” or “Lush Life” or even some Chopin. But it’s sad and disheartening when a forty-year-old claims adjuster still goes around town trying to recruit community theatre actors to do his single-room film version of Moby-Dick. People avoid talking to him at parties. His wife nods supportively when he’s around and then calls her mother and weeps when he leaves. His kids look at him and learn to disdain art. And when the shooting’s over and the high of victory wears off and the editing drags on and a calendar year rolls by and the festival deadlines pass and he’s forced to come up with vague answers to awkward questions about “What ever happened to that movie you were making…?” — well, this incurable sonofabitch is thinking about doing another one. Jesus H. Christ.

how to lose a gun in 10 days

So the Lady Wife is a professional screenwriter — she’s got a manager and an agent and a spec script and everything. She compares it to being Kevin Costner in Bull Durham — you’re in the minor leagues, so you’ve got talent, and now it’s a waiting game to see who gets to go up to the majors:

Aspiring ball players ride around the country in a crummy bus and play in tiny municipal stadiums. And writers, when they’re in the minors and hoping to go up to “the show,” go around town and meet with development executives. These execs are not really all that empowered — they’re midlevel people who have to go up to someone above them and pitch the movie the writers pitch them. But they are the gatekeepers. They’re the ones who are responsible for scouring Los Angeles for the hot new writers, meeting with them all, and trying to discern which one has the $500 million idea. This is a high-pressure position, and naturally nobody wants to be the person who brought in a dud from an untested writer.

(Though there is a theory that says that since a medium-to-large-budget Hollywood film usually makes half its theatrical revenue in the opening weekend, the success of most of these movies has little to do with the script and a great deal to do with a combination of familiar branding, a hooky premise, and shrewd marketing. Thus the increasing preference in Hollywood for adapting comic books and TV shows.)

(Also, many, many of cinema’s greatest flops came from “proven” moneymakers. Yes, I’m looking at you, George Lucas, the man who tried to foist both Howard The Duck and Radioland Murders on an innocent public.)

Anyway, when a writer goes into these meetings, it’s customary for the development executive to say nice things about his or her script (“but it’s not really right for our company”), and then to lay out exactly what would be right for their company. Which is almost always whatever made money last month. When Mamma Mia! became a surprise hit, everybody was looking for musicals — even though statistically musicals have been probably the worst-performing genre of the last thirty years. And when Taken, a modestly budgeted thriller with a good hook and fairly competent execution, ran away with the box office in February, everybody was looking for the next Taken.

Which is fine and all, and God knows I wouldn’t want to be a development guy and have to sit through hundreds of meetings every month and try to guess, based on the stars and the tea leaves and Liam Neeson’s wrinkled ass, which of the thousands of scripts floating around will become the next breakout hit. But I think there’s a terrible danger in looking for something exactly like Taken, because each time someone does the Taken story, we in the audience see more and more of the strings, and the story becomes less and less convincing. Sure, I’ll buy it once that there’s a highly organized and ruthless gang that sneaks into vacation homes and with devastating efficiency kidnaps virginal young women for nefarious purposes — but every time after that, I’m going to find this story less plausible and less interesting.

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All of which is just by way of saying that I was first dismayed, and then amazingly pleased, when a recent episode of my favorite new drama, Southland, pretended to open with a Taken scenario, only to turn it inside out and flip it backwards over the course of 43 minutes.

The episode starts with a man puttering around in his yard, only to see, through the windows, masked men moving through his house toward his daughter. Of course, like the audience, he assumes abduction and rape will ensue, so he rushes into the house to pull his best protective dad rampage — only to be knocked down and immobilized with duct tape.

Pretty scary, right? Except it turns out that the home invaders just leave the guy and his daughter tied up and rob the house. They’re jewel thieves, not sex slavers, but because the victim is rich and the home is in Bel Air, two homicide detectives are assigned to the case. (In contrast, in the same episode a young girl from a poor neighborhood who’s witness to a gang murder receives inadequate police protection and practically no help from the system.) And then, in what I think is the most ingenious move, as the story progresses it becomes clear that the robbers aren’t even the clever, Hans Gruberesque thieves we at first thought they were. They actually confuse the police, who assume at first that they’re brilliant and organized, by making a series of increasingly ridiculous and amateurish mistakes.

The climax of the episode is a car and foot chase punctuated by helicopter assistance, and it’s one of the most amazing pieces of editing I’ve ever seen on broadcast TV. But while it’s certainly exciting, it also underlines how dumb and aimless the thieves are. In the end, they’re not particularly worthwhile adversaries for the police — and that’s the point. These guys aren’t Professor Moriarty matching wits with the law — they’re a bunch of punks who got lucky for longer than they should have.

I love Southland because, although it at first seems to be a fairly straightforward police procedural, it knocks down our genre expectations at every turn, providing less of the “Justice! Fuck yeah!” feeling Law & Order strives so hard for and instead showing both crime and law enforcement to be pursuits heavily influenced by chance and random opportunity. Every episode makes perfect sense, and the resolution to each is complete and correct, but frequently it feels that story has meandered far, far away from its inciting incident — which is what makes the show so fascinating.

In another recent episode, a cop driving home after a few beers is accidentally run off the road by some drag-racing thugs, who circle back and steal his gun and his wallet while he’s still unconscious. To keep the cop from getting a DUI, which would end his career, his buddies conduct the investigation off the books, putting together a “misdemeanor task force” to sweat the local community until the give up information about the missing gun. This results in public outrage (social commentary always sneaks into the show somehow), but it also leads them to a major gunrunning organization that they hadn’t been aware of before. They take down the guys selling M240Bs on the street, which is a major victory — and the audience feels it as such. But the original missing gun is returned quietly, almost incidentally, in a way that’s completely believable but also completely unsatisfying in terms of traditional narrative construction. And the writers don’t care. The universe is weird and unpredictable, they say, and where you think you’re going has little to do with where you end up.

This philosophy shapes the way character notes are revealed as well — as on Lost, characters who start out as heroic or comic show us their darker sides as time goes on, but whereas Lost’s whole structure is about the inevitability of our sins coming to light, Southland often underplays these moments, suggesting that we’ve just happened along, coming into this bathroom or this gay bar or this living room at an awkward moment.

It’s a strange show, hard to get a grasp on — only now, six episodes in, do I really have a sense of who the regular cast members are — and yet it’s all the more intriguing for its ambiguity and its sense of mystery. And since Kings appears to have died an unjust death, this is probably the only new drama I’ll keep watching.

since this blog is mainly read by my friends and family anyway….

The Lady Friend and I got married today. It was awesome. Three terrifying days of work, with my father, the world’s most proficient amateur caterer, as field marshal, and it all came together amazingly well. There was a moment about two-and-a-half hours before the wedding was supposed to start, when I was single-handedly trying to rig three vast banners of muslin to act as sunbreaks over the back yard while The Lady Friend and her mom were still finishing her dress and her veil and my dad was cooking up a storm and my sister was cutting ribbons for balloons and my mom was off running errands… that I thought, “Man, this is just not gonna happen. People are going to show up at three and we’re gonna be saying, ‘Sorry folks — no show today. Pick up your free passes at the door with the manager’s apologies.’”

But it happened. And it was great. Maybe the best wedding I’ve been to, and not just because I got to marry The Lady Friend and take home a food processor and a stand mixer. It was one of those rare, fortunate events where a bunch of people who don’t know each other all manage to hit it off nicely. Also, because ours was an interfaith marriage, the process of selecting readings and vows turned out to yield a ceremony that was totally and completely ours, reflecting our ideals, worries, and hopes about marriage exactly.

Also, there was pie. So much pie….

I hope to link to the many, many pictures taken by our excellent and low-cost photographer, Jennifer, in a few days. In the meantime, much love to everyone who couldn’t be there — we’re looking forward to visiting you all very soon.

Aerosmith is mildly embarrassed by the hommage

I can’t tell if this is another example of the migration of independent film out of the hands of trained artists and into the hands of ordinary people, or if these guys are actually film students:

This is not particularly good, of course — in fact it’s amusingly bad. The actors, especially the young ladies who appear to have been recruited ad hoc, can’t help looking into the camera or to the director for approval; the lead guy, credibly affable in the early scenes, continues with the goofy surfer-boy grin even when his girlfriend is murdered; the ending is abrupt and terrible; the editing is clunky and slow.

But there’s also obviously something winking and good-natured in this movie — it’s frequently amusing on purpose. The concept of a sexually predatory, murderous elevator is actually pretty funny, and the script doesn’t miss an opportunity to deflate the lead actor’s apparent vanity. And more interestingly, in all the important ways, this looks like a movie. The writer/directors know, more-or-less, how to plan and frame a shot, how to set up a sequence, and how to create a coherent flow of scenes. I’m never confused about space (an enormous problem in independent film — many filmmakers find themselves unable to create a sensible space for their characters to inhabit, even inside a single room), and Kelly’s murder, which consists of a single exterior shot of the building and a scream, is at once cleverly elliptical and impressively economical. (You have to think Hitchcock would nod in appreciation.)

when you don’t know a classic as well as you think you do

I had apparently never seen The Dirty Dozen all the way through. It’s one of those that has slipped through the cracks, somehow. As with The Shining, a movie I finally watched from start to finish only last year, I knew the plot and had seen certain key scenes many times. I knew the characters almost instinctively, probably because they’re epitomes of certain kinds of action movie anti-heroes: John Cassavetes’ loudmouth misfit, Charles Bronson’s quiet tough guy, Lee Marvin’s iron-jawed leader of men, Jim Brown’s dignified black icon. (Only the creepy rapist/religious maniac played by Telly Savalas seems to break out of the box, and even he is purposefully set up as the one member of the group who’s “really” a criminal.) But somehow I had never actually, well, watched the movie.

It’s a pretty good movie, the kind of mid-level, completely watchable entertainment that’s all but evaporated from cineplexes these days. The story of an rebellious officer assigned to train twelve criminals for a suicide mission was fashioned from E.M. Nathanson’s novel by studio technicians Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, The Three Faces of Eve) and Lukas Heller (The Flight of the Phoenix, Damnation Alley) and directed by madman Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly), and it’s got a nice mix of craftsmanlike proficiency and slightly-around-the-bend melodrama. The latter is a particular signature of Aldrich’s — he also directed Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and The Longest Yard, and if there’s a consistent thread in his films, it’s unchecked, extravagant emotion. The same is on display here, as Cassavates screams his lines like a Method ape while Savalas gibbers and clutches his Bible. Even Marvin and Bronson, diamond-hard, can’t help glittering.

But that’s all right. These dudes are cool, cool as cukes, all of them, and despite the fact that it’s about a bunch of murderers, the film bounces along gaily as a you’re-in-the-Army-now comedy through the training montages and a nifty sequence where the convicts prove their worth during wargames by acting as a rogue, undercover unit and capturing the command headquarters. It’s only when they’re finally sent on their real mission — to kill a bunch of German officers vacationing at a chateau just before the D-Day invasion — that the film’s grimmer side becomes apparent, as they herd officers and their girlfriends into an underground shelter and then burn them alive. (You might think this is an appropriate death for Nazis, and of course all’s fair in war, but as the Lady Friend pointed out, a lot of those guys were just German Army regulars, not S.S., not necessarily guilty of war crimes or genocide. Well, so it goes — it doesn’t pay to be on the losing side, I guess.)

Which is all fine, except for one minor detail — Major Reisman is at best a really mediocre mission-planner. Even when you’re watching them rehearse the steps of the plan (there’s a rhyming mnemonic), it seems overly complicated and not that well coordinated. Why don’t they kill more of the guards before starting the raid? Why does Reisman bring an unstable whacko like Maggott into the house during the stealthy part of the mission rather than leaving him outside to watch the road or something? And what was their plan, anyway, before Maggott screwed it up? The mnemonic count-off ends, “Sixteen — we all come out like it’s Halloween,” which is pretty vague but I guess means that the major’s plan was to carefully sneak into the chateau and then cut loose with a lot of random murdering and chaos. Wouldn’t a better plan have been to secure the radio room and then get the drop on everyone and calmly round them up? Or heck, plant a bunch of plastic explosive and blow the place sky-high, and then wait outside to pick off survivors. Or… or…. Really? This was the extent of your plan? “We all come out like it’s Halloween”?

Sigh. Charles Bronson is still pretty damn cool, though.