“Heroes de Otra Patria” is Puerto Rican movie written and
directed by Ivan Daniel Ortiz. It was Puerto Rico’s submission for the Best
Foreign Film Oscar at the Academy Awards, but did not make the cut.The movie follows Carlos (Jorge Castillo) and
Raul (Jimmy Navarro) on a mission in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the film cuts back to
families in Puerto Rico.Carlos’ mother
and sister face eviction. This is meant to be comparable to the buddies being
lost in the jungle after their squad runs into an ambush. There’s a lot of
walking and talking in this movie. I counted 13 dialogue scenes.
The film is
very low budget and it shows. Sincerity can not make up for that handicap.
Ortiz wanted the movie to be a tribute to Puerto Rican soldiers in Vietnam. They
certainly deserve the recognition. Oddly, that tribute is out of sorts with the
overall tone of the film that sends the message that Puerto Rico’s involvement
in the war was amistake. It does seem a
little weird that he chose to describe Puerto Rico as another country. Besides
the low budget, the movie gives the impression that the actors did not rehearse
and every scene was one take. The two leads are fairly decent actors, but the
rest of the cast is amateurish. They look like actors playing soldier. The
movie does not have an authentic feel to it.
The movie
is too talkie. It has a very high percentage of dialogue and very little
combat. That might be a good idea because the action is laughable. The men have
no noise discipline. They are just stumbling in the jungle and the mission is
unclear. The hand-held gets too close to the men. It is clear that they are not
in a jungle environment.
I could be
snarky and say that “Heroes of Another Land” is the best Puerto Rican movie
about the Vietnam War, but I won’t because the film was made for a good reason.
The attempt to mesh the home front problems with those of the men was
well-intentioned. It just doesn’t make for compelling cinema.
“Pressure”
is the heavily promoted new WWII movie. The title has a dual meaning. It refers
to barometric pressure that is used to predict the weather and to the pressure Eisenhower
and his chiefs were under during the last days leading up to D-Day. The movie
was directed by Anthony Maras. The source material is the 2014 play by David
Haig. Haig and Maras wrote the screenplay. Brendan Frazer read several
Eisenhower biographies to prepare for the role and got his head shaved. In a
major coincidence, a grandson of James Stagg was hired as an assistant editor
to help go through 46 hours of archival footage.
The movie covers the last 72 hours before
the planned Operation Overlord landing scheduled for June 5, 1944. It leads
with the aftermath of Exercise Tiger. This was a practice landing involving
American troops landing on a beach in northern Great Britain that was similar
to the Normandy beaches. Hundreds of G.I.s were killed by friendly artillery
fire due to a communications error. The incident highlights the unpredictability
of any military endeavor. SNAFU is not mentioned, but it applies here. Eisenhower
is angered by the disaster, but also is reminded about how stressful future
decisions will be. Into the tension filled Allied headquarters comes James
Stagg (Andrew Scott). He has been sent to take over as chief meteorologist.
Stagg is a brilliant scientist, but he has a dour personality. He immediately
ruffles feathers with the American team which is headed by Irving Krick (Chris
Messina). Krick uses past weather charts to predict future conditions based on
similar situations. Stagg is dismissive of this approach and uses weather information
from weather balloons and other data to determine his forecasts. Krick insists
June 5 will be warm and clear. Stagg believes the opposite. He deflates Eisenhower
and his chiefs (including the very skeptical Montgomery (Damian Lewis)) by recommending
the invasion be postponed to June 19. Ike has a tough decision to make because
the forces are primed for June 5 and maintaining the secret landings for two
more weeks is daunting.
The movie focuses on the relations
between Ike, Stagg, Krick, and Kaye Summersby (Kerry Condon). Summersby is Ike’s
assistant and therapist. The latter role she assumes with Stagg who has the added
pressure of a very pregnant wife who he cannot contact for security reasons. The
actors are great and get their characters right, as well as looking like them.
( Not that that is important.) Credit to the casting director. The plot throws
in Montgomery for added dysfunction. In spite of the film being a joint French/British
production, the movie gives us the obnoxious Monty seen in movies like “Patton”.
He doesn’t care what the weather will be like on June 5 and tells Stagg to get with
the optimists. He accuses Stagg of losing his damned mind. This Monty will surely
be a crowd-pleaser in American theaters.
“Pressure” is based on a play, but it
does not have a stage-bound look. Most of it takes place in Southwicke House,
but it is not claustrophobic. It is, of course, dialogue-driven. This is not a
negative as it crackles. Ike can be volatile, Monty is pompous, Stagg is
uncompromising, Krick is egotistical, and Kaye is empathetic. It’s a nice
mixture.
Is a movie about weather forecasting
entertaining? Surprisingly, yes. In one moment aimed at the viewer, Kaye tells
Stagg that weathermen can be boring. Stagg gives a great defense of his profession.
And this exchange will go well with modern meteorologists, especially since
Stagg is going to become the most famous meteorologist in history because of
this movie. I do envy viewers who need spoiler alerts because they know little
about the role weather played in D-Day. War movie lovers know the basics from “The
Longest Day”, but “Pressure” fleshes out that small part of the movie in a
satisfying way. I have to admit I was skeptical whether a full movie could be
made about it. It turns out there was enough drama to make an entertaining
film.
“Pressure” is the type of war movie
that as I was taking notes I ended up with a number of plot points that I
questioned the veracity of. Upon research, I feel the movie gets a B for
accuracy. The biggest complaint I have is that in order to make Stagg the hero,
the movie writes out the member of his team that actually predicted the poor
weather and the window of acceptable weather. That man was a Norwegian named
Sverre Petterssen. The
conflict was actually between him and Krick with Stagg siding with Petterssen.
Most of the inaccuracies involve acceptable artistic license. For instance, the
relationship between Summersby and Stagg is overblown. However, the antagonism
between Stagg and Krick is spot on until a cinematic reconciliation. Speaking
of which, the last act is weak as the coverage of June 6 goes off the rails too
much. War movie lovers will be perturbed by the use of footage of paratroopers landing
in daylight! The movie leaves the compound for a shaky rendering of Omaha
beach. It was a play after all.
I recommend it and commend it for
being aimed at a diverse audience that includes women and the young who don’t have
any idea of the role weather played in a decisive moment in history. There is a
huge “what if?” covered in this movie. What if Ike had listened to Krick? OMG
The History Channel has returned
to its roots when it was the Hitler Channel. It took Tom Hanks to convince the
bosses to carve out some time between programs like Pawn Stars and Ancient
Aliens. It will be 20 episodes and promises to be all encompassing. Here’s what
the first episode tells us about the series.
The first episode is entitled “The Beginning”.
It starts with a “graphic images” warning, but few people watching it will be traumatized
by what appeared in episode one. The series will undoubtedly show quite a few
dead bodies, but it will be more traumatizing to be reminded how bad some
humans can be to other humans. There is a good short introduction by Hanks and
he serves as the narrator for the series. (He narrates the great film at the WWII Museum in New Orleans.) For those not aware of it, the actor
has history cred. And not just because he has starred in some good to great WWII
movies. But he is not just an actor. He was very hands-on for “Band of Brothers”
and significantly did not take a role. I trust him.
Hanks is not one of the talking
heads. Those consist of mostly college professors, probably because they are
used to lecturing students, as opposed to historians whose main talent is
writing. (I bet the vetting of the experts included what percentage of their
students fall asleep in class.) Not surprisingly, the experts are not just
white males. Please don’t assume this makes the series “woke”. I did not notice
anything in the first episode that would indicate the series has a liberal agenda.
Unless you consider portraying both Hitler and Stalin as evil to be “woke”. (If
so, stop reading this and go f*** yourself.) There are some historians of note,
including Jon Meacham and Anthony Beevor. I have read extensively on the war
and taught it for decades, so I can vouch for the accuracy of what episode 1 covers.
There were only a few things I had never read about, so that’s a credit to it.
The episode begins oddly with the
invasion of Poland. I assume that was to get explosions in early to keep the
audience from leaving. Thankfully, after that taste, it flashes back to the Versailles
Conference and gives background leading to the invasion. However, it is just a
cursory look at events leading to the start of the war. In a series that has 20
episodes, I would think it would have allowed for a whole first episode dedicated
to how we got to Poland. The invasion of Poland should have been episode 2, but
you can’t have a whole first episode with no shots fired. Hitler gets some biographical
coverage, but there is no mention of the Reichstag Fire. The audience is left with
little understanding of how he came to power. Although I assume there will be
an episode on the Holocaust, the series does not wait for that to begin
coverage of the mistreatment of the Jews. The SS and the Einsatzgruppen are
introduced. And so are the NKVD as the series is not going to play nice with
Stalin. The Katyn massacre is mentioned. The episode concludes with the bombing
of Warsaw. Oddly, there is no mention of blitzkrieg. The series is not going to
be a treat for hard core military history buffs.
The obvious comparison would be to
the “World at War” series. Since that was my generations gold standard, “WWII
with Tom Hanks” clearly hopes to be the 21st Century equivalent. It
actually has more in common in format to Ken Burns’ Civil War and American
Revolution series. It compares well to them and benefits from the massive amount
of footage. Any topic the talking heads want to talk about has visuals to match.
Fans of “World at War” might find the colorized pictures jarring, but the History
Channel has prepared us for the colorization of the war. However, for this
series, the decision was made to use colorized photos, but not footage. And the
decision was made to forego the docudrama approach. I just finished watching
the excellent docudrama “Soviet Storm” about the Great Patriotic War and it is
superior to this series, if you want a heavy dose of strategy and tactics. For
your average viewer, the History Channel made the right decision on format.
I am happy to report that my fear of
it being pop history was unfounded. Although the very first expert is a
podcaster (Dan Carlin of Hardcore History, wearing a baseball cap), the series
does not try to sensationalize the war. It does skip boring stuff and
concentrate on the greatest hits. For instance, in the second episode, which
covers the invasion of France and the Battle of Britain, there is a long
segment on Dunkirk and little about Norway. Based on the
first three episodes, it appears the series will have problems with running out
of time to cover the episode’s topic and has no interest in carrying on in the
next episode. It just moves on to Operation Barbarossa in episode 3. Speaking
of which, that episode gets all the way to the Battle of Moscow.
Overall, I recommend the series and
I am looking forward to watching it. None of my red flags were confirmed. I was worried about the lack of maps, but there are seven in the first episode and they are animated. I can’t
be too hard on the History Channel because I don’t want to discourage it from airing
history. I do believe in redemption and I encourage the executives to try to get
into Heaven. Clearly they are concerned because this same week they are starting
a series on the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. You go months of nonstop
reality shows and then two history series in the same week?! I’ll take it. This
is what DVRs were made for.
It took 35 years for
another movie to be made about Inchon.“Inchon” (1981) starring Sir Laurence Olivier is famous as one of the
biggest turkeys of the 1980s.“Operation
Chromite” was the first joint American/South Korean production focusing on the
Korean War since “Inchon”.Continuing a
recent trend that has included Bruce Willis, it stars a big American actor who
clearly loves money and cares little for reputation.In this case, Liam Neeson takes the cash and
saunters as Douglas MacArthur.Ironically,
Douglas MacArthur turned in better acting performances than the actors who have
portrayed him.
“Operation Chromite” is not
among the better Korean war movies.I
don’t think it’s a coincidence that the worst ones have American
involvement.There certainly is a huge
gap between a movie like this and movies like “Tae Guk Gi”.You get the kick-ass combat cinematography
Korean war films are noted for, but unfortunately the script and acting do not
match the fireworks.In this case, the
plot starts off ridiculous and spirals to bonkers quickly.There is very little resemblance to the
actual invasion.You will learn nothing
historical from it.
The acting is wooden, with
Neeson leading the way.It’s an
embarrassing performance, but it gets forgotten in the lunacy that surrounds
it.There is little resemblance to reality
and the poor CGI does not help.The
naval bombardment is straight out of a video game.There is no character development other than
Jang and Lim.Jang is an action hero and
Lim is a cartoonish villain.The movie
becomes a series of confrontations between the two.Lim is one tough dude to kill.It comes down to a tank duel, so try not to
drink yourself into a stupor before the big finish.
