Movie Notes: All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Director: Lewis Milestone

This is a very powerful anti-war film.  The film convincingly immerses the viewer into the terrors of the war, and it feels very raw.  It's obvious that the pain of the war was still felt when the movie was made.  It evokes the pain so obvious in the literature of the period.

The only real draw-back is in the too earnest speeches given periodically by Lew Ayres are out of character with the otherwise authentic feeling of the movie.

Movie Notes: Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow

This was definitely the award season movie I was most looking forward to seeing, and it really didn't disappoint.  This is really difficult story-telling because of all political land mines surrounding the plot, but I thought the filmmakers did a great job.  It didn't seem to me a political film, in an agenda-driven sense, but rather a story about one person's drive and commitment to a cause making sure that cause happens.  Jessica Chastain is very good in the role of catalyst and crusader.

I can't recommend it to everyone because it's a dark bloody movie about dark and bloody things.  However critical the advanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA may have been in finding bin Laden, they're not fun to watch.  They shouldn't be fun to watch: they're terrible and dehumanizing.

Neither is it appropriate to make revenge-fantasy porn about bin Laden's death, and this movie carefully avoids that.  I thought it illustrated the raid pretty fairly, and while I think bin Laden's death was just, it's still terrible to kill people, and the movie shows that.  The sequence with the interpreter walking through the house near the end of the raid contrasted very well with the special forces' machine-like efficiency.  I thought that was very emotionally effective.

Anyway, good movie, even if it looks like it's on the outs this award season.

Movie Notes: Paths of Glory

Paths of Glory (1957)
Director: Stanley Kubrick

The execution scene staged in this movie is intensely powerful.  When artists grip their audience as compellingly as Kubrick does during htat sequence, they've done something special.

While I freely admit to having sentimental taste in movies, I also like a movie that really bites at my moral intuition.  This movie challenges them, and draws its power from them.  I don't think there are many deeper wells from which the artist may pull.

Anyway, a beautifully shot, fascinating film that I highly recommend to everybody; though it's not an easy one to watch.