WAR MOVIE SHORT - White Feather (2013)

There have been many great books about the Vietnam War.  One of my favorites is Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson.  It is the story of the most famous American sniper in the war -  Carlos Hathcock.  Hathcock had 93 confirmed kills in the war.  The film is about his most famous kill.  The title comes from Hathcock’s trademark white feather.  A man of supreme confidence, he wore a white feather in spite of it being easily seen in the greenery of the jungle.  The film was directed by brothers Fernando and Vincente Cordero.  It runs about 23 minutes.

                    The movie opens with a quote from Ernest Hemingway about how the hunting of men, which is basically what snipers do.  It can become addictive.  The movie is set in Vietnam in 1966.  It covers Hathcock’s (Brett Miller) famous mission to assassinate a North Vietnamese general.  To get in position, he has to crawl hundreds of yards through vegetation that includes snakes and other critters.  He does this successfully because he is an expert in camouflage.  It has to be good because the enemy seems to be looking for him.  The film intercuts to Hathcock at home on leave with his wife (Carolyn Zanelli).  Things are tense because Hathcock is a stereotypical warrior who is more in love with his job than with his family. 

                    “White Feather” is a little gem.  It takes a true story and depicts it as well as could be expected for a small budget film.  The Cordero brothers have some game.  They use time-lapse photography of clouds to imply the passage of time. There are enough sniper films for it to almost be a subgenre, but few depict the non-addictive aspects of the job.  Most of those fictional films play up the adrenalin rush of hunting other human beings.  Although the opening quote posits that the movie is about Hathcock’s love of the kill, it is more about the dedication he had.  He was able to crawl for days with bugs and snakes with complete stoicism.  Sniping is attractive to many teenage boys.  This movie shows the less glamorous aspect of it. 

                   

                    The film does have some flaws.  The home front scenes are clicheish.  They tend to emphasize the low budget nature of the acting.  A bit perplexing is the fact that for the mission depicted in the movie, Hathcock does not wear his white feather.  And the movie makes no reference to it.  Only people familiar with Hathcock would get the title.  The movie does a good job on the mission leading up to the pow, but then there is no coverage of the aftermath.  After all, Hathcock also had to get out of the area.

                    Carlos Hathcock deserves a movie about his whole career in Vietnam.  Heck, this story is not even the one I told in class.  He had an even more amazing duel with an enemy sniper that is worth a short film as well.  Are we going to get a sequel, Cordero brothers?

GRADE  =  B

OVERLOOKED GEM? Sniper: Ghost Shooter (2016)

                “Sniper: Ghost Shooter” is the sixth in the sniper porn Sniper series.  The series goes back to 1993 and had some pop in the early days with the starring of Tom Berenger.  Alas, he is no longer a participant in the series.  This movie could have used him.  It was directed by Don Paul and he brings the same talent that resulted in “Starship Troopers 2”.  Basically, if you enjoyed that direct-to-DVD opus, you will enjoy its kin.  And if you have seen both of them, then you are like me and have an obsession to watch every war movie ever made and/or you do not have much of a life.

                The movie opens with Muslim terrorist music.  Actors wearing Halloween jihadist  costumes have hostages on a beach.  Out in the open to facilitate snipers.  The terrorist leader insists on a boy behead one of the hostages.  A redemption arc begins as Brandon (Chad Michael Collins) can’t bring himself to take the shot.  Someone else has to … and misses!  For cinematic reasons, the multiple sniper teams had not picked targets and all fired at once.  The jihadists run around like chickens with their heads cut off.  The snipers slaughter them and bring in a gun ship for overkill.  Some of the dead revive themselves to be killed again as the body count exceeds the original total of terrorists.  It’s that kind of movie.

                The team is given the mission of security for a pipeline in the country of Georgia.  Their first task is to protect an oil tycoon who is coming to the site.  What genius decided that the best way to protect him is by stationing sniper teams along the route in?  Sure enough, the convoy gets ambushed by an Afghan baddie named Gasakov and they can’t do squat.  In fact, they lose two of their own to a “ghost shooter” who somehow has their coordinates.  Brandon gets exiled to the mountains for questioning the mission.  This gives him the chance to meet a charismatic local named Mashkov (Ravil Isyanov) who has a similar back-story of not being able to shoot a child.  Small world.  Brandon joins Mashkov’s crew in an Alamo style defense against Chechnyens.  Many men will die so Brandon can get off probation and the movie can be longer.

                Brandon goes rogue (is there any other way to go?) to meet Gasakov and find out who the mole is.  He thinks Gasakov will tell him!  Somehow he discovers that the ghost sniper is tapping into their drones to get the coordinates.  Sniper series meets drone warfare.  Now it’s back to the power station for an even more epic Alamo.  Going into the fourth quarter, our snipers are getting their asses whipped.  That is about to change. 

                “Sniper: Ghost Shooter” is typical sniper porn.  The set pieces are just excuses for slaughter.  It is a little unusual that the enemy are doing most of the sniping until the end.  In fact, our guys do not snipe an enemy at the power station until the 1:30 mark of the movie. They make up for this deficiency in the final act.  Hell, the Colonel (Dennis Haystert) gets to kill some hajjis.  Hopefully you like your sniper movies without realistic tactics.  Team leader Maj. Miller (Billy Zane) sure doesn’t care about tactics.  That might explain the high mortality for his personnel.  Speaking of rates, the ratio of deaths to woundings is incredibly high.  No doctor was needed for this movie.  But then that simply makes it a war movie.  The plot tends to be a bit redundant.  There are two last stands.  They fail to get the ghost shooter twice.  Brandon rolls down a hill twice.

                On the nonsnarky side, the movie is actually not a bad time waster.  The acting is fine and the cast is not bad.  Hastert can not appear in an embarrassing movie.  The females have the biggest balls and one of them gets to die.  Some of the other deaths are unpredictable, too.  All the characters are stereotyped, but fortunately underdeveloped.  Brandon sucks all the development out of the script.  He gets to screw up, go rogue, romance the hot blond spook, and find redemption.  The Bin Laden wannabe is lame, but Mashkov is cool.  The Ravil Isyanov fan club (of which I am a member) should be happy with his performance.  It’s his best work since “Defiance”.

                The Sniper series began in 1993.  I can remember that some of my high school boys were really into sniping back then.  Little did I suspect their demographic would spawn a franchise that would get to a sixth installment (with a seventh due this year).  I am not much into these penis enlargement exercises, but “Sniper: Ghost Shooter” is not bad.  It is a time waster that does not leave a bad taste in your mouth. 

GRADE  =  C-

OVERLOOKED GEM? Jarhead 3: The Siege (2016)

       Once upon a time there was a movie about a sniper in Operation Desert Storm.  It was based on a best seller memoir entitled “Jarhead”.  The book and movie were noteworthy for depicting the boredom of modern warfare.  Anthony Swofford did not fire a single shot in the war.  Although totally realistic, the sequels have taken care of that deficiency.  No one wants to see a straight to DVD sniper movie with little sniping.  The two sequels don’t save ammunition.  “Jarhead 3:  The Siege” keeps the Jarhead name, but that is it.  It was directed by William Kaufman with a nod towards Hitchcock.  In that they are both directors.

                Corporal Albright (Charlie Weber) arrives at the U.S. embassy in “the Kingdom”.  It’s a quiet zone, but don’t turn off the movie yet.  Albright is introduced to his new mates and the sexy digital security director Olivia (Sasha Jackson).  He also meets the peacemonger Ambassador Cahill (Stephen Hogan).  Albright does not make a good impression when he goes cowboy on a training mission.  He gets a moderate ass-chewing and then a harsher one when he goes over his gunny’s head about a suspected terrorist.  No one believes him until the embassy comes under extreme attack.  The terrorists are led by a Bin Laden type named Khaled.  He is the leader apparently because while every one of his men is easy to kill, he is very difficult to kill.  He is a mastermind which is proven by the ease with which his men get into the embassy.  Cahill takes refuge in a safe room, but Cahill and the others go out to rip asses.  And there is plenty of ass-ripping.  First there is the initial assault,  then local government forces arrive as cannon fodder, then a technical arrives with more jihadis because the movie is running out of bad guys to kill.  (The director probably sent a truck to the market place to hire more extras midway through the filming.)  When the movie gets tired of the last stand, it morphs into a chase film, returns to a last stand, and concludes with the arrival of the cavalry.  Now that I think about it, this movie is a lot like a Western.

                If you have a craving for dead hajjis, this is the movie for you.  Once the assault commences, there are only a few expository breath-catchers.  Otherwise it is nonstop mayhem.  The violence is generic.  The good guys never miss and the ratio of dead to wounded is typical of combat porn.  At least, some of the deaths are unpredictable.  There is not enough reloading, but there is some. The acting is fine, even though Weber is wooden.  His rogue cowboy grows into leadership in the crucible of combat.  Yawn.  The other characters are a mix of stereotypes and relatively originals.  Cahill is not the usual sniffling bureaucrat.  Olivia turns out to be a warrior.  If she had been wearing a bikini during the chase scene, the movie probably would not have gone straight to DVD.  While Khaled is a stock character, he does get to present his side of the argument.  He is shut up by the end of the movie, however.

                “Jarhead 3” is not a cult classic.  It is a competent actioner and better than could be expected.  It is not in a league with the similarly plotted “13 Hours”, but if you have seen that movie and want more ass-kicking and a happier ending, see this one too.

GRADE  =  C+

NOW SHOWING: American Sniper

                “American Sniper” is based on the best seller by Chris Kyle which is the autobiography of the “most lethal sniper in U.S. Military History”.  Kyle served four tours in Iraq from 2003-2009 and had 160 confirmed kills.  The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood after Steven Spielberg considered doing it.  The Iraq scenes were filmed in Morocco and if you look carefully you will recognize a setting used in “Black Hawk Down”.  The movie is doing well at the box office and has received six Academy Award nominations:  Best Picture (but not director), Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing.  Bradley Cooper gained forty pounds for his role as Kyle by consuming 8,000 calories a day.

                The movie opens with the beefy hunk on sniper overlook from a roof top as a Marine patrol moves through the rubble of an Iraqi town.  He has to make a decision as a mother and her son approach the patrol with what looks like a Russian grenade.  Suddenly we flash back to Kyle as a child being preached to by his father.  Mr. Kyle tells his son there are three types of men:  the sheep, the wolves, and the sheep dogs.  Be a sheep dog and protect the sheep.  It takes a while for this to kick in as Kyle became a rodeo rider until a cuckolding and the embassy bombings in Africa causes him to enlist in the Navy SEALs.  SEAL training montage.  Their drill instructors are as taunt-creative as some of their best cinematic brethren.  Kyle meets his future wife Taya (Sienna Miller) in a bar and they would have lived happily ever after except for 9/11 which gives him the chance to do that sheep dog thing.  The movie now returns to the opening scene and we get to find out whether he shot the kid and mom.

                The rest of the film covers Kyle’s four tours and his awkward interludes at home.  Taya has two kids and would prefer he stay home and take care of his own sheep.  She is the classic whiny military wife who hates her country apparently.  Kyle is the classic war movie husband who lives by the war movie maxim:  bros before hoes.  In the Iraq scenes, we are made aware that Kyle is very good at his craft and soon his comrades are calling him “The Legend”.  Every white hat needs a black hat and Kyle gets his in an Iraqi sniper referred to as “Mustafa”.  Cue the sniper duel as every sniper movie fan knows that two is better than one.  A movie made by an arch-conservative also needs a hissable villain to bring a face to the ‘’savages”, as the Iraqi insurgents are called.  Kyle and his team of not Bradley Coopers are tasked to eliminate Al Zarkawi’s second in command “the Butcher”.  He may be second in command, but he is first in torturing.  The Butcher’s weapon of choice is a power drill!  (And all we did was water-boarding.)   The cat and mouse with the Butcher and the sniper duel coincide.  Along the way, a SEAL with little knowledge of war movie clichés talks about the ring he has bought for his impending proposal.  Guess who gets shot?  The movie builds to an Alamo reenactment in a sand storm.  “The fog of war” becomes “the sand storm of war”.  Credit Eastwood with a unique take on the “last stand” trope. 

                “American Sniper” is well made entertainment for the masses.  Eastwood uses his usual spare story-telling style and the movie has an Old School feel to it.  When the Kyle’s get frisky, they go in the bedroom and close the door behind them.  The movie is also unabashedly patriotic and supportive of the war in Iraq.  Eastwood inserts some support for religion (our religion) although he does not bludgeon us with it.  The cinematography is no frills with none of the hand held frenetics that mark most modern war films.  The sniper kills are visceral, but Eastwood does not indulge in sniper porn like most in the sniper subgenre.  We only see a few of Kyle’s 160 kills.  The movie was not made for 14 year old boys.  But unfortunately, it was made for main stream adults.  This means that it oversimplifies the themes for popular consumption.  Kyle chooses country over family, but eventually gets both.   Every return home develops the PTSD theme, but Kyle’s recovery is much too pat.  This does a disservice to the men who Kyle helped after he gave up the game.

                The movie is very well acted by the cast of Bradley Cooper.  I think there were some other actors in the movie.  There must have been.  To give you an idea of how Cooper dominates the movie and no one else is able to develop, there is an early scene that proposes that Kyle overlook an operation.  When the soldiers are going to go out of sight, Kyle (Cooper) disobeys orders and leads the ingress and personally interrogates the suspect and gets him to collaborate.  And by the way, why waste screen time on Kyle having a spotter to bond with?  The movie has virtually no scenes without Cooper in them.  I wonder why so many women are going see a war movie?

                The movie has given a big boost to the sales of the book.  This is partly I would think due to the fact that people like me come out of the theater wondering whether some of the key plot points are bull shit.  I plan to read the book and do a “History or Hollywood” post on it in the future, but for now I will say that it is fairly accurate.  Some of the things I thought were very likely Hollywood turned out to be artistic license.  For instance, the reason for his enlistment was different.  There was no boy involved in the Russian grenade incident.  There was a Butcher type figure in Iraq, but Kyle was not involved in a hunt for him.  Needless to say, there was no sniper duel.  I questioned the ability of a serviceman in Iraq to call his wife while on a mission and found that he actually did call his wife while waiting for targets and once was interrupted, resulting in her listening to the noises of a fire fight and it was a traumatic experience as depicted in the movie.  However, the call where he tells her he is coming home never occurred.  On a minor note (but symbolic of how hero movies work), the movie ups the insurgent bounty on Kyle to $180,000 compared to the actual unimpressive $20,000 for any sniper.  On the other hand, the movie does get some things right.  This is especially true of the marriage dynamics and the PTSD (but not the resolution).

                I may have come off too harsh on a war movie that is competently done and tells the story of a true American hero.  It advances its themes well and the combat scenes are among the best in recent war films.  They are edge of the seat and nicely unpredictable.  Cooper deserved the Oscar nomination and the movie should be titled “Bradley Cooper’s American Sniper”.  Considering the paucity of war movies, it is a good addition to the genre.  It makes a good companion to “Lone Survivor” and shows that there are some good movies being made about our two most recent wars.  Maybe some people will become aware that we did fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

GRADE  =  B

  

Enemy at the Gates

               Okay, let’s get this over with right now.  For you haters out there, I like this movie.  I can hear all the groans and I don’t care.  And it’s not one of those unexplainable WTFs that you get when you read some critic inexplicably give a positive review to a terrible movie.  In order to positively review a movie like “Battleship”,  you must be watching it while eating a gallon of ice cream to compensate for being dumped by your girlfriend and it has to be that you are not rewatching the movie.  I am quite sane, was not under mental distress, and I have seen the movie several times.

                “Enemy at the Gates” grew from the tiny seed of a few pages in the eponymously entitled non-fiction book by William Craig about the Battle of Stalingrad.  (A book I read in high school.)  Director Jean-Jacques Annaud took that seed involving a sniper’s duel in the rubble of the City of Stalin and grew a movie out of it.  The movie was to be Europe’s answer to “Saving Private Ryan”.  It was, at the time, the most expensive non-American movie ever made.



cannon fodder

                The story opens with Vassili Zaitzev (Jude Law) learning how to hunt from his grandfather.  Hunting wolves is a lot like sniping, so this teaching will serve him well.  Years later, with war raging in Russia, Vassili is shipped with other cannon fodder to Stalingrad.  The film’s equivalent to the opening of SPR has the new recruits crossing the Volga under attack by Stukas and then having to make a suicidal frontal attack on an entrenched German position.    The crossing could be described as “the fog of arrival” as the Stuka attack generates chaos, confusion, and fear.  The CGI is okay and the wounds are graphic.  Very similar to when the ramp goes down in the Higgins boat in SPR.  Upon reaching shore every other soldier is handed a rifle.  “The one with the rifle shoots, the one without the rifle follows him.  When the one with the rifle gets killed, the one who is following picks up the rifle and shoots.”  This is probably inaccurate, but certainly gives a realistic impression of how Soviet soldiers were used by their superiors.  The cinematography for the charge puts the audience in the middle.  There are hand-held and slo-mo.  Blood splatters on the camera lens.  Very intense with non-ridiculous deaths.

Vassili

                Vassili meets his soon to be BFF when Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) takes refuge in the corpse-strewn fountain Vassili is playing dead in.  5 bullets + 5 targets =  a hero is born.  The transition from the mass charge to individual action is cool.  Danilov becomes Vassili’s press agent after he convinces the newly arrived Khruschev (Bob Hoskins) that all the Soviets need is a hero.  Vassili is reluctant about becoming a celebrity, but boy is he damn good at sniping (as a montage of articles about his kills shows). 

                A romantic subplot kicks in as the duo are introduced to the comely Tania (Rachel Weisz) who wants to kill Germans to avenge her Jewish parents.  That’s one triangle.  The other evolves upon the arrival of the Great Nazi Hope.  Col. Konig (Ed Harris) has been sent from his sniper school to shut down this Soviet morale-booster.  He is aristocratic, cocky, and very cunning – in other words, a Hollywood Nazi.  The third leg of this triangle is a twelve year old Russian boy named Sasha who imagines himself a double agent.  It’s an extremely small world in Stalingrad.  He shines Konig’s boots and for chocolate is willing to sell out his idol Vassili. Or is he?  Thus begins the cat and mouse.

Kulikov

                Konig is arguably a better sniper than Vassili.  This being a movie, Vassili has to be the underdog.  He becomes the stalkee and has several well-staged close-calls.  The scenes are your basic “this might have happened to some human at one time on planet Earth”, but surely not to the same person.  Except in a movie.  Still, the scenarios are entertaining.  The death of Vassili’s comrade Kulikov (Ron Perlman) is particularly awesome.  That Nazi dude is good.

Tania

                Meanwhile, romance blooms in the rubble.  Tania becomes a sniper and Vassili teaches her more than how to shoot a gun.  We get the most erotic, nonnudity, sleeping bag tryst in war movie history.  (I fast-forwarded through that scene in my Military History class).  Unfortunately for the BFFs, Danilov has taken a shine to Tania (she being the only beautiful Soviet woman in Stalingrad and possibly the whole country) and is now jealous enough to wish his meal ticket dead.  Women!  But a woman with a gun, screw the bromance.  Konig gets jilted, too – by Sasha.  We are going to lose a leg of both triangles.  Who wants to predict the result of the final duel?  A better question would be: will Vassili and Tania live happily ever after and breed super-snipers?

Konig

                Let’s address the accuracy issue first.  The movie has a legion of detractors.  When it was released, Red Army veterans of WWII demanded that it be banned.  It was also not well-received in Germany.  Historians have come down hard on the duel.  Craig apparently swallowed Soviet hero-creation propaganda hook, line, and sinker.  Anthony Beevors in his book Stalingrad debunked the whole Zaitsev versus Konig (sometimes identified as Thorwald).  There was a Vassili Zaitsev and he did fight at Stalingrad and did score a huge number of kills.  However, the duel with a top notch German sniper was exaggerated at the least by Soviet propagandists (abetted by Zaitsev).  Zaitsev even provided Konig’s rifle scope for a Russian museum.  By the way, the “official” version of the final confrontation was (of course) a lot more mundane than the movie version.  Zaitsev and Konig/Thorwald eyed each other’s potential lairs for days before Kulikov poked up his helmet and then feigned death to get the Nazi to reveal his position for a kill shot by Vassili.

                The most amazing thing about the characters is that there actually was a Tania and even a Sasha.  Before I researched the movie, I would have bet anything that those two were screenwriters inventions.  Tania was an American-born Russian who returned to the home land to be with her grandparents after the invasion.  When they were killed she became a vengeance-minded partisan and ended up in Stalingrad.  She apparently hooked up with Zaitsev although there is debate on whether the hook up got to the sleeping bag stage.  Officially, it did.  She was wounded during the latter stages of the battle, as was Vassili later.  Both thought the other dead, so the Soviet government was not able to stage a royal wedding.  Sasha was basically as depicted sans the relationship with Konig.  His death was by hanging for espionage.

                My loyal followers know that I put a high premium on historical accuracy, especially when the inaccuracies make a mockery of history (as in “Braveheart”, for example).  “Enemy at the Gates” does little harm to history (other than the laughable poster line “A single bullet can change history”).  Craig might have been suckered, but the movie is obviously not a propaganda piece.  The Zaitsev seed may have been fertilized with a ton of Soviet manure, but it makes for good entertainment for war movie lovers and more importantly for civilians (especially women).  Plus, like with most fact based war movies, it can lead to fascinating fact-checking.

                “Enemy at the Gates” is a fine example of a modern war movie.  (I haven’t come up with a name for what I am talking about yet.)  It does retain some of the elements and cliches of old school movies, but adds modern pizzazz and technology.  The movie is surprisingly unpredictable to go along with its predictability.  The action scenes are kinetic and the suspense is palpable.  The acting is good, especially Hoskins (he chews the scenery – just like Khrushchev did) and Harris.  I know Caroline will complain about the accents and I’ll not defend them, but they are not a deal breaker for me.  Weisz is not particularly good (and her hair does not act at all), but her character is a very rare strong female character in a war movie.  Appreciate that.

              The cinematography is excellent as are the sets.  A lot of money went into rubble.  The musical score is memorable and repeats a strong motif for impending suspense.  The sound effects are also top notch.  The theme of a manufactured hero is reminiscent of “Flags of Our Fathers”.  The other theme of conflicting cultures is a bit simplistic with the aristocratic, stoical German versus the proletarian, emotional Russian representing their countries, but not unbelievable.

                The biggest weakness is the romantic subplot, but the trio do have some chemistry and it’s not sappy.  Just highly implausible.  Does anyone seriously think that a producer that expends over $60 million on a film should not try to bring females into the theater?  Besides, if I can stomach it …  (If you liked “Braveheart” and complain about this romance, you have some ‘splainin to do.)

                Is it “Saving Private Ryan”?  Definitely not.  It’s a game try and you can’t seriously expect Europeans to duplicate an American epic.  (Sorry, I didn’t mean that.)  Did it belong on the 100 Greatest list?  Are you kidding me, did you see some of the movies on the list?!  Will it crack my 100 Best?  It’s my list, so yes.

grade =  B+

 

the trailer

 

 

Please offer comments.  I would love to hear what you think.