The movie was directed by Hugo Claus (“The Lion of
Flanders”). It takes place during the Battle of the Bulge. Since I strongly
suggest you don’t watch it, I will summarize what you should avoid. An American
platoon pulls back because of the German offensive, but they forget to wake one
of the men.Harrison hooks up with a boy
named Richard and an old Belgian named Alfonzo. They are making their way to
American lines while trying to avoid the krauts. It is a war road trip picture.
On the way, the meet a mother who Harrison rapes after she flirts with him and
then has a change of mind. Harrison is something of a dick. Richard talks the
daughter into showing her breasts. There are no heroes in this film. There are
some fake German tanks they have to survive. They end up being captured by a
rogue American group led by a woman. At one point, Harrison shoots a dogs and
they eat it. By this time, you won’t care what happens to them.
This is one terrible movie. Its 5.8
rating on IMDB might have been inflated by perverts. Much of the actions by the
characters is ridiculous. It does have a lot of unintentional laughs. The
battle scenes are surprisingly big for such a miniscule budget. There are even
some flamethrowers which would have been used better to incinerate the film.
The characters are all unlikeable and very poorly acted. Rivet counters will
have heart attacks if they take the movie seriously. Insomniacs might like it.
The only thing I can say positive about my experience is that it lasted only 1
hour and 31 minutes. However, I was begging for it to end before the hour mark.
“Lucky Strike” is a caught
behind the lines movie set in the Battle of the Bulge. It was directed and co-written
by Rob Laurie (“The Outpost”).He is a
West Point graduate. It was filmed at a studio in Bulgaria.
The film uses the flashback method
to tell the story. A Captain (now Colonel) Castle arrives at the home of a Mrs.
Caldwell (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Right off the bat, we know the main character
is going to survive. No surprise for a movie like this. (Also, this means
youwon’t have to yell at the screen when
he shows off his wife’s picture.) Caldwell is bitter because the Army has been holding
back her dead husband’s pension. Then its back to the Ardennes Forest for the
Battle of the Bulge. It’s the fourth day. You’ll have to take their word for
it. If you’re expecting hordes of German tanks, think again. A truckload of
black G.I.s is ambushed by a German tank. How is this going to connect to
Castle’s story? Wait. Castle is the commander of an engineer company. He is tasked
with holding a key crossroads to prevent the Germans from getting to an American
fuel depot. He leaves with five men. That’s one small company. And they don’t
go to a crossroads, they just sabotage some trees along the road. Bada bing, bada
boom, now Castle is on his own far from home. Luckily, he has his trusty “walkie-talkie”
which is named “Lassie”. The movie informs the audience that the 1st
SS Panzer Division are a bunch of cold-blooded killers. Do you think Castle
will have some encounters with them? Give yourself a cookie if you answered “yes”.
The rest of the film is an odyssey (ironic
because one of the previews before the movie was for “The Odyssey”). Castle has
a series of vignettes between radio talks to his pessimistic headquarters. Most
of those discussions involve the guy on the other end saying “Look, buddy, it’s
Hitler’s great offensive. We got bigger problems than rescuing one G.I., even
if he is Clint Eastwood’s son.” So, lucky for us, Castle will have to trek to
friendly lines. And with a bullet in his thigh. These vignettes include a tragic
encounter with a friendly Belgian family, stealing a tank, playing dead, a
visit to the truck with the all but one dead black G.I., being chased by artillery,
and meeting a another caught behind the lines victim. And then we return to Mrs.
Caldwell’s apartment for a twist I bet none of you will see coming. (Try not to
laugh, the old people in the theater might be offended.”
“Lucky Strike” is a WWII movie that would
be more comfortable in the 20th Century. Castle is far from an anti-hero.
This is a patriotic film and it finishes with a treacly song written by the
director. However, the patriotism is not overdone. Although, the anti-Nazi
theme is a bit much. Hell, Castle gets peed on by an SS soldier. It’s low
budget, but that mainly applies to the cast. Besides Eastwood, the only actor that
most people would recognize is Colin Hanks and he appears for about two
minutes. Most of the cast do not have Wikipedia pages. However, the acting is
not cringe and Eastwood does fine in a one-dimensional role. He’s stoical and
handles wounds like his father. Actually, the movie is the story of a threesome
– Castle, a Motorola SCR-300, and Lucky Strikes cigarettes. Cigarettes were a
fixture in classic movies, especially WWII movies. It seems anachronistic to
feature them in a 21st Century war movie. And especially odd to
feature a specific brand. I did some research and found out Lucky Strikes were
one of ten brands (the two others I recognized were Camels and Chesterfields). Before
you sniff at this, it turns out the cigarettes play a major role in the plot,
albeit a silly one. The cigarettes are in the plot for a twist. The Motorola
SCR-100 is in it for the adulation. It was a back-pack style radio with a
telephone-style receiver. The movie is meant to give credit to the walkie-talkie
(it was the first radio to be called that), but I did not pick up on that since
all the radio does is tell Castle to make it on his own.
“Lucky Strike” leads with the tried
and truthy “inspired by a true story”. As in, there WAS a Battle of the Bulge
and there WERE soldiers in it. Several of the vignettes are laughable if you
have seen a lot of war movies. I won’t give away those highlights, but you’ll
know them when you see them. It was heavily researched by its technical advisor,
who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He apparently
insisted there be snow. However, he had less success on insisting on realism. Could
an American soldier drive a German tank? Possibly. Would a soldier in a low
budget action film be able to? Of course!
Eastwood was probably paid more than
half the budget, but the movie does not look cheap. The German vehicles will pass
muster for all but the most fanatical rivet-counters. There is a column of
tanks that does not look CGI. The cinematography is fine. The music does not bombast.
And the dialogue is satisfactorily bland. That all spells an average movie. You’ll
enjoy it if you don’t want above average. And you don’t have a reaction to
Lucky Strike cigarettes. I’m not easily influenced, but I did stop at the concession
stand on the way out to ask for a pack of Lucky Strikes. They didn’t have any.
Poor marketing.
GRADE = C-
Spoiler
alert: I researched the crucial plot point that G.I.s would always light their Lucky
Strike from the side with the label. You didn’t want to let the Germans know
the campsite was American. My research found that this was one version of the
Lucky Strike story. G.I.s would open a pack and immediately turn all the butts
around except one. Thus they lit the
label end first to burn it away. They left the last one with the label at the
other end as a “give me the luck to get to this one, oh great god of
cigarettes.” Another version was they did this just to remind themselves when
they got to the last one. If you made it, you had survived for that one pack o
time. And later died in bed of lung cancer.
“The
Wereth Eleven” is a docudrama that tells the story of eleven African-American
soldiers who were murdered by the SS during the Battle of the Bulge. It uses
CGI to recreate some of the incidents and archival footage, including from the
Germans. There are also scenes using actors. One of the unit’s veterans is interviewed as
well as a son of one of the eleven and the son of a Belgian family that tried
to give them refuge. There is extensive narration.
The
Wereth Eleven were eleven members of the 333rd Field Artillery
Battalion which was overrun on the second day of the battle. Unlike the whites
from Battery B of
the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion that were taken prisoner that same day at Malmedy and then
executed, the members of the 333rd were taken prisoner and made it
to German prison camps. There is a clip from a German propaganda film that
includes members of the 333rd being marched to Germany. The Wereth
Eleven members were the exceptions to that because unfortunately they avoided
capture at first. I have recently been researching the Battle of the Bulge and
ran across this story. The fact that I was not familiar with it shows how
unknown the story is. The movie attempts to rectify that and does a good job of
it.
Thankfully, the producers
decided to go a different route than movies like “Miracle at St. Anna”. Sincere
efforts like that are often hurt by poor acting and dialogue. This movie avoids
that by using a minimum of recreations and they are not laughable. For
instance, the deaths are not the hilarious ones associated with low budget
films, and even some big budget ones like “Battle of the Bulge”. The blend of
CGI, footage, and real actors works. The narration is often, but adds to the
story. The film has time and place for some of the scenes, but maps would have
been nice. The interviewees are good and the one veteran of the battalion,
George Shomo, is outstanding.
Docudramas do not get the
love that some of them deserve. I would rather see a CGI Tiger tank then
another tank mocked up as one. It is often the best way to tell a true war
story. A good docudrama avoids the historical fiction that creeps in when you
have a screenplay, actors, and limited authentic gear, weapons, and vehicles. And
it avoids a big problem in low budget WWII films. They often use overage, overweight
reenactors. “The Wereth Eleven” uses a trip to the Ardennes by the son of one of
the Eleven and an executive producer who is an older white man wearing a
uniform. It’s almost as though the movie is asking us, “would you prefer to see
this guy acting in the movie?”
What “The Wereth Eleven” does,
it does well, but it does not tell the whole story. Clocking in at just over an
hour, it could have used more time to flesh out the discrimination the unit
faced starting in boot camp and how it earned respect in France. The film
briefly mentions an incident when the battalion provided very accurate fire to
aid a white unit, but it does not add more depth to their evolution. It also
does not do a good job fleshing out the situation they were in during the first
half of December in 1944. It uses a postscript to explain the lack of an
investigation and the failure to bring anyone to justice for the execution. However,
those caveats aside, it does an admirable job of bringing a forgotten story to
light.
GRADE =B
Here is the story I posted about the real Wereth Eleven, don’t
read on if you want to avoid spoilers. THE WERETH 11 -The
333rd Field Artillery Battalion was an African-American (“colored”)
unit that landed at Utah Beach in July, 1944. It was commanded by Lt. Col.
Harmon Kelsey. Kelsey was not happy with the assignment and was sure the unit
would never see combat because it was incompetent blacks. He was wrong on both
counts. It first saw combat in Normandy when it was tasked with destroying a
church steeple that was being used to snipe at 82nd Airborne
paratroopers and for artillery spotting. The men got to work, chanting their
unit song – “Stand Back! Ready! Rommel count your men! Fire! Rommel, how many
men you got now?”Within minutes the
steeple was destroyed, along with the Germans in it. The unit graduallygained a reputation for being quicker and
more accurate than white artillery units. In the siege of Brest, it fired 1,500
rounds in one day. An article in Yank magazine made the unit famous in the
American army. It ended up being assigned to Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps. In
the Ardennes, it was located near Schonberg in support of the 2nd
and 106th Divisions. When the Battle of the Bulge began, Schonberg
fell on Dec. 17, 1944. Most of the battalion was taken prisoner. 11 men escaped
into the countryside. They tried to make it to American lines. They ended up
knocking on the door of the Langer family. The Langers were anti-German in a
small community that was mainly pro-German. They were hiding two Belgians
escaping German conscription. Unfortunately, one of their neighbors ratted them
out and Germans from the 1st SS Panzer Division arrived and the
Americans were take without a fight. They were led to a field where they were
tortured, mutilated, and murdered. They were treated much worse than the white
soldiers executed at Malmedy.The
culprits were never brought to justice.
“A Midnight Clear” was released in 1992.Its cast consisted of several up and coming
actors like Ethan Hawke, Peter Berg, Kevin Dillon, John McGinley, Frank Whaley,
and Gary Sinise (his film debut).The
ensemble cast is strong and the movie is a little gem that is not
well-known.It cost less than $5 million
to produce and made less than $2 million.It is based on the novel by William Wharton. It follows the novel
closely and includes a lot of dialogue from it.
The movie is set in the Ardennes
Forest before or during the Battle of the Bulge.It is not a big picture movie.You get no idea how the battle is going.There is a “fog of war” surrounding the
intelligence squad that is sent out to observe enemy movements from an
abandoned mansion.The mission is
seemingly suicidal and their ex-mortician Major Griffin (McGinley) has a habit
of putting them in precarious positions. The squad settles in and although they
are away from strict discipline, they are very vulnerable should the Germans
attack. They encounter some Germans who have the drop on them, but don’t open
fire. The Germans come to the chalet to throw snow balls and serenade the
Americans with Christmas carols. “A Midnight Clear” is one of the rare war
movies that references Christmas. It turns out the Germans are a squad of young
soldiers with an aged officer. They know the war is lost and they want to surrender.
They ask the Gis to make it look like they put up a fight.The best laid plans.
ACTING:
A
ACTION: N/A
ACCURACY:
A- it
follows the novel very closely
PLOT:
A
REALISM: B
CINEMATOGRAPHY:
A
SCORE: B
QUOTE:Speaking of a previous patrol, Will (the narrator
Ethan Hawke) makes the following telling remark:“We lost half of our squad attempting one of
[Griffin’s] map-inspired, ill-conceived recon patrols.When I say ‘lost’, I mean ‘killed’.Nobody in the Army ever admits that someone
on our side is killed.They’re either
‘lost’ like Christopher Robin… ‘hit’, as in a batter hit by a pitched ball… or
get ‘it’ like in hide and go seek.Or
maybe they “get it”, as with an ambiguous joke.”
We get to know the squad well.They are typically heterogeneous except there is no country hick because
this is an “intelligence” squad, literally and figuratively. They care about
each other, but there is some dysfunction. There is a flashback scene from boot
camp as several of the boys attempt to lose their virginity with a good girl
down on her luck.It is a sweet scene
and tastefully done. The men are united in their hatred for Major Griffin.
The setting and mood of the movie
could have easily fit a horror movie.On
the way to the mansion, they come upon the corpses of a G.I. and a German in a
death embrace. Their encounter with the Germans is the opposite of that. The chalet is eerie.It is empty except for a deer. This is a very
snowy movie.Watch it with a mug of hot
chocolate by a fire place if you can.It
was shot in Utah and the temperatures at night were frigid.The cinematography is crisp and clear like
the locale.
This is a remarkable movie.It is unlike any other war movie I have
seen.It is spiritual (helped by the New
Age musical score) and has a heart-tugging scene involving the bathing of a
dead comrade that is hard to forget..It
is also overtly religious in spots.Although a Christmas movie, there is also a strong reference to the
Crucifixion.Some will not like this
aspect of the movie, but I found it refreshing.Keep in mind that soldiers tend to be religious for obvious reasons, so
why shouldn’t war movies occasionally have religious themes?
“A Midnight Clear” is a movie that
did not make a big splash when it was released. It has something of a cult
status now. It is a must-see for war movie buffs. Watch it with your wife or
girlfriend. It is one of the rare date war movies. Pair it up with "Joyeux Noel". Both have a Christmas theme and are inspired by the Christmas Truce of WWI.
It’s the holidays so everyone’s thoughts turn
to war Christmas movies.Well, mine
do.There aren’t that many of them and
I’ve reviewed the most significant ones:A Midnight Clear, Joyeux Noel, Silent Night, and Battleground.So, I went on Google to see if there were any
I was missing.It’s a pretty thin list
and most of them are military movies more than war movies.But one is set in the Battle of the Bulge,
which happens to be the setting for all the big four except Joyeux Noel.
The
premise of "A Christmas Truce" is that the German’s have launched the Ardennes
Offensive and a Belgium town is back in German hands.There is a question of whether they should
hold their annual Christmas celebration.Into this, four Allied soldiers fall when their transport plane is shot
down.In the first omen of what the
movie is going to be like, the four land within ten yards of each other!Realism is not going to be a strength of this
movie.Their mission is to blow up a
bridge, but first they need shelter.They find it in the home of Alina (Ali Liebert) and her mother.Not that we need clues, but Alina and Capt.
Myers (Craig Olegnik) are mooning at each other immediately.And then they have a long dialogue scene that
establishes that they are both literary (Myers is writing a book) and both know
the language of love.The title of the
movie comes from an agreement between Myers and the German commander when the
Germans capture two of the Americans, but Myers saves the German’s wife and
child.It is a ludicrous scene and
started my uncontrolled chuckling for the rest of the movie.It’s not a rom-com, it’s a rom-bomb.I won’t spoil what happens, but I don’t have
to because anyone can guess the rest.Including the schmaltzy conclusion that wraps the movie is a nice
Christmas bow.On a box that you don’t
need to shake because you know what’s inside.
Twenty
minutes in, I told my wife that Hallmark must have let this script slip through
its fingers.Twenty minutes later, I
realized why Hallmark passed on it.It looks
like a Hallmark movie, but it is worse.The budget is actually lower.They didn’t have to pay Candace Cameron Bure’s salary.In fact, her salary could probably cover this
entire cast.They are sincere, too
sincere.The best I can say is my wife
thought Olegnik was hot and he did take his shirt off in the trope of the girl
spying her future beau with his shirt off.This comes soon after he chops wood for her.Jeez, get a room.There’s also a local suitor (who looks about
ten years older than Alina).This is one
weak love triangle.Liebert is comely
and she does have some chemistry with Olegnik.Their dialogues, which are frequent, are not going to make you spit out
your egg nog.Instead, you’ll want to
drink more (and add some liquor) because their intelligent discussions of Poe
and Hemingway are swamped by a ridiculous plot that has Myers returning twice
to Alina when he has a crucial mission to blow up a bridge.I guess he expects the German panzers to wait
for love.
So,
I watched it so you don’t have to.You’re welcome.However, I did
enjoy it for its camp value.Sometimes
the unintentionally funny movies can leave you with a smile on your face.It will certainly appeal to your significant
other more than to a war movie fan, so you can get some brownie points.Try to keep your snickering quiet.And then go back to your man cave and watch
“Black Hawk Down”.It’s called
cleansing.
