What I watched in quarantine

SeriOusly, what are you wearing? The noblemen of Wessex “armed” for battle in Alfred the Great (1969)

As I noted in my previous post, near the end of March I caught COVID and had to spend two weeks in quarantine. Despite the illness and fatigue I got a lot of reading done, which I covered in that post. I was also able to watch or rewatch quite a few movies, documentaries, and TV shows, some of them I’d been hoping to see for a long time, some new to me, and most of them good or great. But not all of them.

Here, for your edification, is what I watched in quarantine:

Milius

This feature-length documentary on the life and career of screenwriter and director John Milius was a delight. It’s brisk, informative, surprisingly moving, and features an amazing stable of interviewees speaking remarkably candidly—Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are two standouts, since they were quite close to Milius for a long time, and Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, Walter Murch, James Earl Jones, Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many, many other big names put in appearances.

Milius does a good job outlining the man’s career, from film school, where he first developed the Milius persona—confident, gun-toting, anarchistic, full of tall tales, dedicated wholly to artistic integrity, and brooking no nonsense about any of the above—through the many ups and downs of his career and personal life. And what a career! Screenwriter for Apocalypse Now, Jeremiah Johnson, Magnum Force, and Clear and Present Danger; creator of HBO’s Rome; director of The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian, and Red Dawn. He penned the lines “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” and Conan’s answer to “What is best in life?” and Quint’s haunting Indianapolis speech in Jaws.

Virtually all of the interviewees comment on Milius’s talent for dialogue, particularly the big speech. One of the producers of The Hunt for Red October reveals that Sean Connery, who had worked with Milius in the 70s, insisted that Milius rewrite all of his dialogue specifically for him; among the results was Connery’s Hernan Cortes speech. Indeed, after the controversy surrounding Red Dawn—a considerably more ironic and tragic movie than the received wisdom portrays it, in my opinion—sent Milius’s career into a tailspin, he developed a sideline in script polishing and dialogue rewrites for his old friends.

It’s that personal dimension that makes Milius surprisingly poignant. Schwarzenegger quite movingly credits Milius with the first big boost of his career; he had been told that because of his body and his accent he would never be a leading man, but Milius saw potential in him and brought that out for the first time in Conan. Spielberg is visibly upset to describe the stroke that nearly killed Milius, a stroke that, even though Milius survived it, robbed him of speech: “The worst thing that has ever happened to a friend of mine,” Spielberg says.

At the time Milius came out he had partially recovered from his stroke and was continuing work on a passion project, a film about Genghis Khan. That project is still in development. Time will tell. But until then, Milius stands as a great tribute to a strange and wonderfully interesting man and filmmaker.

Haywire

All the laboratory-and-focus-group-concocted Strong Female Heroes that Hollywood has thrown at us the last couple years have nothing on Mallory Kane, the heroine of this underrated espionage action thriller from Steven Soderbergh. When the Gina Carano tempest brewed up in the social media teapot a month or so ago—remember it?—I recalled enjoying this movie when it came out and decided to give it a second look.

Carano plays Kane, a former Marine now working as an intelligence contractor for government types that are up to… something. I’m not convinced that the conspiracy that is slowly revealed to us is completely coherent. But that’s not really the point. This is a lean, economical, fast-paced action film that emphasizes tension, practical stuntwork, and startlingly brutal fighting, and Carano’s Mallory plays a genuinely strong female action hero who is, even better, believable. I don’t believe for a minute that Brie Larson, as Captain Marvel, could win a fight with anybody; I believe 100% that Gina Carano, as Mallory Kane, could.

Haywire also has a great cast including Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor. Three standouts: Channing Tatum as another special ops type, who seems like a brutish thug at first but is allowed to have a surprising arc; the late Bill Paxton, showing subtle cleverness as Mallory’s father; and Michael Fassbender as the smooth, handsome contact for an operation that goes wrong. This is the movie that made Fassbender my favorite for the next Bond.

This is not a deep movie, but it’s extremely well crafted, not to mention fun and effective, especially if you like your action rooted in reality. Worth your while.

The Grand Tour

I was a big fan of “Top Gear” some years ago, but stopped following it when Clarkson, Hammond, and May left for Amazon and only occasionally dipped into their new show, “The Grand Tour.” I finally got around to watching a good bit of it while I was sick, concentrating in particular on the multipart specials in which they go on long road trips—a two-part trip through the deserts of Namibia, which has stood in for Iraq in a number of movies if that gives you a sense of the terrain involved; a two-part trip through Colombia; and their most recent feature-length specials, Seamen, in which they pilot boats from Cambodia to the mouth of the Mekong, and A Massive Hunt, which follows them on a ridiculously contrived treasure hunt from Réunion to Madagascar.

It was all a hoot—beautifully shot scenery, interesting locations, a nonstop parade of mechanical troubles, and of course the appeal of hanging around with these three. The show is fun and hilarious and even manages to gin up a real frisson of adventure, and their wry British humor and the merciless ribbing they give each other always hit me exactly right. These were the best laughs I got for two weeks.

Journey’s End

Based on a stage play from the 1920s, Journey’s End is a character-driven war drama about the officers British infantry company during their week on the front line. Rumor has it that the Germans are preparing a big push—the big push—and even fixes a date for the attack. We follow freshly minted Lt. Raleigh through his first days in the combat zone, where he eagerly reunites with an old school friend, Captain Stanhope, now the company commander, and finds him a horribly changed man. Other small dramas play out, and always the rumor of attack hangs over them.

This is really excellent character study and features fine acting by a lot of great British actors. Asa Butterfield is realistically young and babyfaced for a new lieutenant in 1918 (recall that CS Lewis reached the front line as an infantry lieutenant on his nineteenth birthday) and his struggle to cope with his new surroundings and the changed Stanhope is affecting. Stephen Graham is solid in a supporting role as another platoon commander, as are Toby Jones as the cook for the officer’s mess and Sam Claflin as Stanhope, now a tormented alcoholic coming apart at the seams. But my favorite character was the fatherly “Uncle,” an older man offering stability and sobriety at a crucial juncture in the war and played with exactly the right measure of warmth and intelligence by Paul Bettany.

Journey’s End is not without action or suspense—a fatal trench raid scene is particularly tense—but its strengths are its evocation of the weary world of the front lines and its examination of character under stress. A very good movie.

Dillinger

Having watched Milius not long after one of his overlooked films, Farewell to the King, I was interested in checking out a few more of his movies that I hadn’t gotten around to. Dillinger was one of those. Milius’s first directing job, Dillinger stars Warren Oates as the titular bank robber and has a solid supporting cast including Ben Johnson as a way-too-old Melvin Purvis, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer van Meter, and a very young pre-Jaws Richard Dreyfus as Babyface Nelson.

Don’t go to Dillinger looking for accuracy. While it broadly follows the outline of Dillinger’s career of robbery, Milius freely invented or even inverted real events. As in Michael Mann’s more recent Public Enemies, the chronological order of events is out the window. But what Milius captures in Dillinger that makes it worth watching is the spirit of the thing; this movie feels like Dillinger’s career should, unlike the cold and clinical Mann movie, and has a huge personality—fast-paced, boisterous, over-the-top, with some ugly quirks that are neither apologized for nor explained away, and just subtly tongue-in-cheek—not unlike the title character. And Oates looks so much like Dillinger it’s spooky.

I don’t know if we’ll ever get an accurate movie about this particular wave of bank robbery and interstate crime, but Milius’s Dillinger is the one I’d go to for the feel of the period and the man himself.

13 Minutes

A movie I’d looked forward to for a long time, 13 Minutes was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, and tells the story of Georg Elser, a lone-wolf assassin who almost killed Hitler at the very beginning of World War II.

13 Minutes opens with Elser’s attempt on Hitler’s life. An industrial worker with a complicated past, Elser had devised and constructed his own bomb using stolen or homemade parts and explosives smuggled out of the quarry where he worked at the time. He designed the complex timing mechanism himself and planned to fit the bomb inside one of the roof-supporting pillars inside Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, the beer hall where every year Hitler would return to commemorate his first failed attempt to seize power in Germany. Elser snuck into the building after hours for several weeks, slowly hollowing out a space inside the column behind the speaker’s platform. Elser finally planted the bomb, set the complicated clockwork mechanism for a time several days hence and in the middle of Hitler’s scheduled speech, and attempted to flee to Switzerland. The bomb exploded precisely as designed, bringing down a large part of the beer hall’s roof, killing seven people outright and injuring over eighty. Elser was caught at the Swiss border.

During his interrogation he found out that he had failed. Hitler had left the beer hall uncharacteristically early and in the middle of his speech—thirteen minutes before the explosion. Elser had missed his target, and his imprisonment had begun. He would remain there until the very end of World War II, when he was shot in Dachau.

13 Minutes dramatizes all of this very well, though it never quite recovers the excitement of the opening scene. The rest of the film leaps back and forth between Elser’s interrogation—realistically brutal and often hard to watch—and Elser’s past. We learn that Elser was a charmer, a ladies’ man, a man who voted Communist but didn’t want to join the Party, a lapsed Protestant who nevertheless relied upon prayer, and we see as well at least one of his love affairs and how life in his small town was reordered and corrupted by the rise of the Nazis. All of this gives us some glimpse of who this complicated man was and why he might have attempted what he did without trying to explain it fully—a wise choice.

Some of Elser’s background, particularly related to his love life, is fictionalized or simplified for the film, but 13 Minutes hews closely enough to the facts to be worth watching—especially since it’s also a well-acted, suspenseful thriller and procedural. It tells an important and compelling story well and, like another movie I’ll review below, doesn’t flinch from the unpleasant and disturbing truth of its subject matter.

The Lighthouse

An incredible artistic achievement, from its moody and beautiful black and white film cinematography to its eerie and ominous sound design and its authentic 19th century New England dialogue, marvelously acted by both Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, and compulsively, deliberately, quietly creepy, like The Shining. Director Robert Eggers builds an all-pervading, hypnotic gothic atmosphere that draws you in and keeps you there. It’s excellent. It’s also way, way too weird for its own good.

While I love and appreciate gothic settings—and The Lighthouse checks all the boxes: isolated, dark, windy, foggy, rainy, full of tales and secrets, possibly haunted, possibly the regular hangout of supernatural creatures, possibly the site of a hidden murder, &c.—the thick thematic larding of Freud and his simplistic, dirtyminded humbug led the film off in directions that just weren’t interesting. All the psychosexual and homoerotic stuff feels cheap. And the hunt for phallic symbols is the easiest game in the world to play; enlist a middle school boy sometime and you’ll be telling him to shut up inside ten minutes. And while I like and enjoy ambiguity, especially where the uncanny and spooky are concerned, ambiguity for its own sake—in this case, a storyteller introducing, developing, and repeatedly revisiting questions to which there are no answers because he doesn’t have any himself—is a weakness.

So I wanted to love The Lighthouse but could only admire it. It’s a masterpiece of mood and atmosphere that incompletely explores themes unworthy of its execution. But I’m still looking forward to Eggers’s next film, set in Viking Age Iceland—familiar territory for me.

Mr Jones

A beautifully shot, atmospheric, and grippingly told dramatization of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s investigation into Stalin’s manmade famines in the early 1930s. James Norton plays Jones, a former adviser to David Lloyd George, who uses his connections and his clout from once having gained an interview with Hitler to visit Russia in hopes of interviewing Stalin. How, Jones wants to know, has Stalin wrought his miraculous program of modernization? How has he created all the widely ballyhooed progress and prosperity? And where is all of the money for these programs coming from? Jones will be stunned by the answers—or non-answers—that he discovers and dedicate the rest of his life to getting the truth out.

Though streamlined and lightly fictionalized (e.g. Jones visited the Soviet Union three times, not once, was not arrested, and probably never met George Orwell, who appears throughout as a kind of Greek chorus), Mr Jones does a good job presenting the stranglehold Stalin kept not only on his people but even on the Western media during his reign, especially with active collaborators—like New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty, vividly played as an oleaginous pervert by Peter Saarsgard—colluding to cover up the mass starvation of Ukrainians and smear the reputations of journalists like Jones or Malcolm Muggeridge, who very briefly appears. It’s often a hard movie to watch, but a worthwhile one.

This film not only evokes the evil and paranoia of Stalinist Russia and Depression-era leftism but also offers a sustained indictment of would-be revolutionaries’ willingness to turn a blind eye to the damage that they’ve done—and continue to do—in the name of their unrealizable ideals.

Alfred the Great

An incredibly corny late 1960s epic starring David Hemmings as the only English king styled “the Great,” this film may leave you wondering why anyone would call him that. The costumes veer between interesting and terrible—especially the armor and weaponry—and “dark ages” stereotypes abound, but where the film really fails is in finding some way to make Alfred comprehensible to its audience. The filmmakers try some kind of psychologically tormented business—Alfred seems to spend more of the movie (comically) struggling against his own horniness than against the Vikings—but it’s inconsistent, incoherent, and falls flat. (Compare Patton, produced about the same time, which pitched Old Blood and Guts as a rebel to its counterculture audience and succeeded.)

Nevertheless—I found Alfred the Great immensely entertaining. Not always for the reasons the filmmakers intended, but from start to finish nonetheless. It has beautiful landscapes nicely shot, some striking visuals including a large-scale recreation of one of England’s chalk horses, and a few good scenes of medieval Saxon politicking in the king’s hall. Maybe, like John Dillinger, King Alfred is someone Hollywood just can’t get right. But this is a commendable effort, clumsy as it is.

The 12th Man

Den 12. mann is a Norwegian film telling the true story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando who fled the Nazi occupation and, in 1943, tries to infiltrate his home country with eleven other men. The plan fails immediately, leading to the German interception of their fishing boat, its scuttling, and their capture. Only Baalsrud escapes—soaked to the skin, with only one shoe, and, after the Germans shoot at him as he flees, the big toe on his bare foot shot off. The other eleven men, tortured and interrogated, are eventually executed. Only the twelfth man remains to be captured, a task to which SS officer Kurt Stage, whose reputation is on the line, dedicates himself totally.

What follows is an astounding survival story, as Baalsrud swims between islands in below-freezing seawater to escape, makes hesitant contact with sympathetic locals, and, in a scene guaranteed to make stress sweat pop out on your forehead, performs surgery on himself to save his foot from gangrene. He is both sheltered and shuttled along from hiding place to hiding place by the locals, small acts of bravery with very, very high stakes. And the initial failure of Baalsrud’s mission isn’t the only thing that goes horribly wrong—for just one example, if you’ve ever thought surviving an avalanche would be no big deal, prepare for an education. It’s amazing Baalsrud survived everything he went through.

The 12th Man is well-acted, has beautiful location cinematography in the fjords and snowy mountain plateaus of Norway, and exciting and realistic action. It also makes clear how aggressively the Nazis would move to repress resistance, showing what a real resistance movement entails and how badly it can and often does turn out for its scattered and vulnerable members. But The 12th Man also shows what it takes to succeed, especially courage and tenacity—the sheer guts to endure.

This is an excellent movie that I highly recommend, and it was a good movie to end my quarantine on.

Conclusion

With a couple exceptions, this was a good batch of movies. My favorites of the bunch were Haywire, 13 Minutes, and The 12th Man—with a nod of appreciation to The Lighthouse for its craft—but I thoroughly enjoyed all of them and am thankful to have had the chance to watch them while I was out sick. I hope y’all will find something good to watch here, and if you view and enjoy any of these let me know what you thought!

Thanks again for reading. Stay healthy!